Lance shares our “No Bull” approach to marketing his services and I’m glad to share this Q & A with our readers.

George: How do you know when your site isn’t converting as well as it could?

Lance Loveday

Lance: One potential sign that your conversion rate is putting you at a competitive disadvantage is if competitors are always showing up in the first 2-3 spots in the paid search results, but your ROI goals require you to show up lower on the page. While they could be spending blindly, it could also be a sign that competitors are seeing higher conversion rates. Because higher conversion = lower CPA = higher margin = higher CPA tolerance = higher bids = you get outranked.

But regardless of where you’re starting from, our approach is to never be satisfied, and always seek incremental improvement. Why settle for an average conversion rate when you could have an above average one – or an above average conversion rate when you could have an industry-leading one? The beauty of conversion optimization is that it’s a one-time cost with an ongoing benefit, so you don’t have to move the needle much on a conversion engagement to have a positive ROI when you have the benefit of time on your side.

We try to realistically model the projected outcomes of projects for clients to set expectations on the range of results they could expect to see. Although we try to be conservative with our estimates (better to under promise and over deliver) it can be a bit scary for us to put those numbers out there because that’s usually what becomes the benchmark for success for the project. But we like a challenge, and there’s nothing like the concreteness of a defined target to help bring focus to a project.

George: In assessing a site how should we think about the roles of KPIs vs competitive benchmarks vs user studies?

Lance: We like to use a combination of metrics to calculate success, as relying on too few metrics can lead to unintended consequences. Enron’s earnings, for example, looked great right up until they went under. So an effective dashboard should contain a balance of business metrics (revenue, transactions, margins), site metrics (conversion rate, bounce rate - by source), and user metrics (usability testing results, long-term survey response trends). We don’t put much stock in competitive conversion rate benchmarks, as variances in business models, traffic mix, and site strategy between sites almost always results in an apples-to-oranges comparison. A low-converting site can be very profitable, which is ultimately the most important competitive metric.
We also like to take a funnel view of the site as whole and measure throughput at various levels. Not all sites lend themselves to that kind of analysis, but it’s an incredibly powerful way of looking at your site if you have the capability. Taking that view allows us to model out the impact that small changes to a given page template can have on overall results.

George: If my website isn’t converting well am I better served by doing a complete re-design, or by taking an incremental test-driven approach to improve each template?

Lance: In a majority of cases it makes sense to take the more incremental approach. There’s almost always some upside to be found in every site. But we have worked with a few sites where the problems have been so structural that we’ve recommended a full-scale redesign.

George: How much can one raise the bar by moving the pixels around on the page? I know when we were in the design consulting business we often found it a challenge to measurably improve conversion rates unless the old design was really bad.

Lance: You’re touching on the core stumbling block we face as conversion consultants: Most people don’t believe that small interface tweaks (pushing pixels) can have a material impact on business results (more money). But a whole host of studies including this one and our own experience has shown otherwise.

For example, we just doubled conversion for a long-time lead generation client of ours, for whom we’d previously tripled conversion. So ultimately they increased lead volume by 6X with no loss of lead quality. Granted that didn’t happen overnight. But it’s a good example of the kind of game-changing impact you can have with a well-executed conversion optimization initiative. The average e-commerce site may not have that kind of upside potential, but it’s not uncommon for us to increase conversion by 30-50% on e-commerce sites.

George: Wow! 30% is a big lift!

Lance: One problem we’re seeing is that people are focusing so much on the sexiness of the new testing technologies that they are rushing to conduct some tests without ensuring they’re doing it properly – and then when they get mediocre results concluding that either a) there’s no room for improvement, or b) testing doesn’t work. But like anything, tests can be done poorly or done well. Doing it right means clearly identifying objectives, developing good testing plans, deploying the right kind of test method, testing user experiences (not just design tweaks) that have a high probability of success, ensuring statistically significant results and so on. It takes a lot of different skill sets all working together to do testing well – strategic, technical, creative, analytic and more. Sorry, I’ll get off the soapbox now.

Also, I prefer to be called a Site Whisperer. Pixel Pusher is just so demeaning.

George: Got it, “Site Whisperer” it is! :-)

George: Is there a particular piece of a website that is most often the stumbling block for conversion? Search results? Category pages? Product pages? Navigation? Shopping tools? The checkout process?

Lance: It can vary by site, but the checkout process is a common place to find very high dropoff rates. Depending on which stats you want to believe, the average shopping cart abandonment rate (across all industries) is 50-60%. My eyes get big any time I see a cart abandonment rate of 50% or higher, as that’s usually an indicator that we’re going to be able to make a huge difference for that client.

But we’ve seen plenty of examples where the category pages and/or product pages were the primary bottleneck as well.

George: What design flaw do you run across most often?

Lance: This is more of a strategy flaw than a design flaw, but I’ll go with requiring a separate login/registration step. It’s a real conversion killer from a user experience standpoint, and usually has such limited value to the site owner since users generally provide their email address anyhow later in the checkout/registration process.

George: How often do you find that platform constraints are ultimately the root of design problems?

Lance: More often than I’d like. But I’m really encouraged by some of the new testing platforms that enable us to bypass platform constraints. There are now some really elegant way to run tests on your site and increase conversion regardless of what platform you’re on. We’re running a test on a client’s shopping cart now that has required zero IT support or back-end changes.

George: How important is speed these days, and in your view is this mostly a “solved problem?”

Lance: NO WAY is this a solved problem. Load time is still a major conversion inhibitor for a number of sites – and its impact on conversion is growing as user expectations continue to evolve. This release from Akamai is about the link between site performance and customer satisfaction for financial services firms, but the lessons apply to all types of sites.

George: Any other general advice you can give?

Lance: Here’s my attempt at a Top 10 list:

1. Start small. But start.
2. Don’t test for the sake of testing. Test for impact and learning.
3. Test hypotheses, not opinions.
4. Don’t underestimate the power of persuasive design.
5. Spend 90% of your time in planning/strategy/test design/crafting great designs, and then 10% of your time running the test.
6. Test among good options.
7. Don’t settle for the 5% gain if a 50% gain is possible.
8. Be willing to be wrong.
9. Get out of your comfort zone.
10. Make testing an everyday thing.

George: Thanks so much for taking the time, Lance! Lance’s very well received book: Web Design for ROI is available at Amazon and other fine book stores!

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When you consider landing pages in the context of advertising, the banana is even more important. After clicking on an ad, customers are landing on your site in a state of half-blindness, they don’t know what to expect or what they’re getting themselves into and they’re trusting the internet Gods to take them to a helpful place. For that reason, a retailer’s landing page has to be able to efficiently answer three general questions that go through an arriving customer’s mind:

1. What can I do here?
2. Why should I do it here and not someplace else?
3. Where do I start?

By addressing those three questions upfront you’ll save your customers a lot of confusion, and you’ll be better able to present them with a banana. If I’m a customer looking to comparison shop for polo shirts, a good landing page will show that I can buy polo shirts here, suggest that this website is the be all and end all of locations to purchase polo shirts, and use an interface for sorting through styles, price points, and brands of polo shirts that is recognizable and intuitive. This would likely be a well designed sub-category page.

I spend a lot of time evaluating landing pages for our clients, and over the past few months I’ve seen landing pages that fall over the spectrum between good and bad. But the other day I saw one of the worst landing pages yet, and thankfully it wasn’t from one of our clients and it wasn’t the end result of a paid search advertisement. Recently, the bank HSBC has been advertising all over the New York Times website. They’re paying for the top two ads on the page, and though display ads online don’t cost nearly as much as they do in print, I’m guessing that the ad spots pictured below probably aren’t cheap.

The term “private banking” caught my eye, and I was curious to find out more about private banking and HSBC in general, so I bit my lip, furrowed by brow, clicked the ad, and landed on the following page.

The first red flag on this page is the pre-loader for a Flash based interface. Generally speaking, entire websites built with flash are a usability nightmare. For one thing Flash is a browser plug-in and there’s a chance customers won’t have it installed. Secondly, one of the key reasons designers use flash is to build a custom, non-standard, user interface for a website; and it’s in this second instance where a usability issue becomes dead weight on a landing page’s conversion rate. As a customer, if I land on a page and I’m trying to get my bearings, the last thing I need is a brand new navigation scheme and interface to try and figure out.

Need an example? Take a quick look at the HSBC interface (the picture below may not do it justice, try interacting with the HSBC site:

While I first clicked on the ad hoping to get more information about private banking and HSBC, I’m now stuck trying to figure out the spinning globe/incomplete puzzle motif and how it helps me navigate the site. The landing page doesn’t address those three general questions we mentioned earlier. There’s no banana, and as a monkey, I’m thinking “well what’s in it for me?”

The strange thing is that if you were to search Google for “Private Banking” and click on the first sponsored link, you’d be taken to a much more reasonable landing page: a map with the locations of all the HSBC private banking offices in North America. This page is built in a more traditional way, with top and left navigation, and interface that seems intuitive enough. It’s by no means perfect, but it’s certainly better than the alternative.

Some may contend that banner ads or display ads are more about branding than straight ROI. I’ve never entirely bought that argument, and I’m not sure it pertinent’s to this conversation. Regardless of whether we’re talking about display ads or search ads it’s important to remember that the beauty about advertising on the web is that we can get immediate results from our advertisements. As a consumer, if a banner ad, or a search ad, catches my eye, why wouldn’t I click on it? The key is that in either case just getting me to click isn’t a win. It’s a two part process:

1. Get my attention
2. Sell to me

As such, it doesn’t matter how many eyeballs or clicks an ad garners, because in the end, the most important thing is that the landing page it points to has plenty of bananas for the monkeys.

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OK, what is Chrome “destination search”? Here’s an example. If I start typing “cnn.com”, Chrome suggests “Search cnn.com for <enter query>”:

If I select that option, or if I finish typing out “cnn.com”, Chrome presents what I’ll call a destination-search box in the address bar or the browser:

See the light blue search button for the specific site in the address bar? If I enter a query there, Chrome searches CNN for “obama” (or whatever), using CNN’s own site search.

(Note this is different from Google’s Search-Within-A-Site feature, which uses Google Search, and of which I’m not a fan.)

Chrome can do this because it “understands” the site search box on the destination site.

I noticed Chrome Destination Search works for some retailers (Crutchfield, Zales) but not others (Overstock, PetCo), and wondered why.

After some poking around, I think that using non-conventional HTML forms (eg using Javacript submits) in your site search confuses Chrome. I’m not 100% certain, but this held for the sites I checked. If Chrome can’t figure out your site search, Chrome doesn’t give your site the desirable Destination-Search presentation.

Now, Chrome has under 5% browser share, so who cares about any of this? Valid point. Four thoughts:

• As much as possible, urge your web developers to favor “semantic” HTML. Simple well-formed HTML helps ‘bots better understand meaning from markup. Spiders typically ignore Javascript. If your forms aren’t constructed conventionally (that is, input fields with an input type=”submit” button), spiders won’t understand them. Semantic HTML helps not just Google, but the entire web.
• If you need fancy Javascripty actions, go ahead and use them, but add them clientside using progressive enhancement. Few retailers use progressive enhancement. More should. The idea is simple: send simple lean standards-compliant pages, and add all the bells-and-whistles to the page after it loads before it renders. Your human visitors won’t even notice, and your site becomes much friendlier to ‘bots (and visually impaired humans, and mobile devices, too).
• I’d wager that Google drives Chrome marketshare during 2009, perhaps reaching 15% by 2010.
• If better markup leads to better presentation in Google Chrome, might not the same hold for Google natural search results too?

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GA is a great piece of free software, and it covers all the important metrics. Nonetheless…

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• Open source.
• Each tab is a process. More speed, better multi-processing, one tab crash doesn’t kill browser, just that tab.
• Heavy testing. “ChromeBot” screens browser builds against 10k+ popular sample pages for both crashes and render appearance.
• Chrome currently passes 99% of webkit’s layout tests
• Uses virtual Javascript machine, “V8″ (written by Google?) V8 is also open source
• V8 compiles javascript to local machine code for more speed
• Improved garbage collection
• Tabs have their own UI
• Drag and drop tabs
• Improved smart autocomplete
• Home page defaults to a grid of 9 most commonly used pages, plus search boxes from (multiple?) engines
• “Privacy mode” tabs
• Popups stay w/in tab, don’t pollute desktop (unless you pull them off to desktop)
• Sandboxing of tabs for security — simpler security model than Vista (and gets in a dig to MS on that)
• Malware and phishing blacklists, continually maintained, and available to others via API
• Google gears — enables persistence of apps
• Open source, repeated at length.

Here are some initial thoughts. Opinions, not facts.

• Chrome will initially steal share from FFox, as early adopters embrace speed and features. By 2009, Chrome will begin eating significantly into IE share. Some computer manufacturers start offering Chrome as default browser in late 2009, citing speed, security, stability.
• Chrome will take share based on speed and UI. Each tab running as its own process will make the browser seem far more nimble than IE or FFx or Opera.
• If the comic is any indication, the first target market for Chrome are technical thought-leaders. For example, this isn’t your typical comic book dialogue: …but the ones that sort of look like pointers could also be integers that just happen to have the same address as an object on the object heap…
• Given heavy test suite they’ve described, Chrome shouldn’t impose significant burden on designers.
• Given the heavy test suite, Chrome will be the most stable and consistent browser out there. (We at RKG are big fans of testing, btw.)
• Integration with Gears will enable powerful offline apps. This is a Microsoft threat.
• Yegge’s next big language is Javascript.
• People will express fear that Google will use Chrome to spy on users. This is unfounded, imho, because (a) the opensource community will ensure there are no malevolent features built in, and (b) Google is already tracking most of us more than we realize, through search and Gmail and Docs
• Ironic: they put a great deal of thought into UI, but the comic itself used an oversized screen and required (on my FFox at least) an annoying scroll
• We’ve written on the myth of the search query funnel in paid search; Chrome’s autocompletion-on-steroids will make the very small funnel effect even smaller.
• Expect to see dedicated shopping bots built as Gear apps. As Adwords Editor (desk app) is 100 times more convenient than Adwords web, so will a Gears shopping comparison engine be 100 times more convenient than current web based comparison shopping sites.
• The malware and phishing blacklists will get adopted widely through their APIs, leading to a safer web for all. Woe to any retailer who intentionally or accidentally gets on the Google blacklists.
• Microsoft should view Chrome as a significant threat. (Indeed, a few comic panels seem obliquely reference IE and Office.) This is much larger than a browser war — this is the new OS.
• I think Chrome will be great for users. I’m eagerly looking forward to downloading it and trying it out.

In the background of one panel of the comic there’s a speed limit sign, indicating a top speed of 10^100.

The sign is right: Google is setting the laws of today’s web.

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Last Thursday and Friday 30 people from 18 of our client companies joined us for networking and deep conversation about online marketing.

The main event on Friday included my take on Search Marketing in 2008 and some great tips from Larry Becker on website effectiveness strategies.

We then branched out to discuss:

• Setting efficiency targets for marketing programs and how the incremental view plays into that,
• How clients addressed Multichannel Credit Allocation and where they see that going,
• Catalog circulation strategies and prospecting in 2008,
• Social Media. From video and blogging to Facebook, Twitter, etc. What was worth doing, what seemed to be a waste of time at this point.
• Email frequency, open-rate benchmarks and strategy,
• SEO strategies and the merits of outsourcing some or all of those efforts,
• Affiliates and strategies for controlling the bad actors without dismantling the program entirely,
• The power of purls — personal urls — as a marketing tool,
• and much much more.

The Summit showed that many folks were wrestling with the same complex issues, and that most retailers were struggling to meet “plan” this year, particularly since July.

The event also confirmed for all attendees what we had always known: RKG has really smart clients. Many great insights shared both in the public forum and in more private networking contexts throughout the event.

As we plan for future events, clients: please let us know what you’d like to see in terms of content, format and locations so we can make what was a great event even better! And, if you’re not currently a client, but would like to be… :-)

Thanks again to all who participated!

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Contact:
Ryan Gibson
The Rimm-Kaufman Group
434-970-1010, ext. 110
ryan@rimmkaufman.com
www.rimmkaufman.com

Charlottesville company named one of Inc. Magazine’s fastest growing companies

Charlottesville, Virginia, Wednesday, August 20, 2008. The Rimm-Kaufman Group, a Charlottesville-based search marketing agency, has been named to Inc. Magazine’s list of the Top 500 Fastest Growing Private Companies in America. This prestigious list, which has been published annually since 1982, is a leading index of the manufacturers, service providers, and entrepreneurs that fuel our nation’s economy. RKG appears on the list at #315, and is ranked 24th in the Advertising & Marketing segment.

“We’re beaming that RKG made the Inc500, though I am still a little surprised,” said Alan Rimm-Kaufman, RKG founder and president. “We’ve bootstrapped the company, placing our emphasis on creating a great place to work and on providing great value to our clients. Rapid growth wasn’t our objective. Online advertising has boomed, and we’ve grown along with the channel. I am tremendously proud of what our team has accomplished.”

Inc. Magazine based its rankings on percentage revenue growth over the 2004-2007 time periods. The list is comprised exclusively of privately held, independent companies headquartered in the U.S.

Pay-per-click search marketing — sponsored links on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other engines — has grown into a $10 billion a year industry. Many large advertisers rely on specialized search marketing agencies like RKG to manage their search campaigns.

Over the past three years RKG has grown nearly 900% and currently manages search advertising programs for more than 100 clients, from internet start-ups to online retail titans.

“To me, the greatest joy has been in the manner of growth, not the amount of growth,” said George Michie, RKG co-founder and current Principal of Search Marketing. “We’ve grown on revenues; not VC funding, not loans, not acquisitions, but rather from providing great service to a growing pool of clients. Moreover, we’re doing it in a way that generates quality jobs and career options in my home town without grinding our employees into the ground. People work hard here, but its 40 hours a week, not 60. That’s important to us.”

“We’re looking ahead to continued steady growth,” Rimm-Kaufman added. “We’re actively hiring, especially software developers.”

# # #

About The Rimm-Kaufman Group (RKG)

Based in Charlottesville, Virginia RKG was founded in 2003 by Alan Rimm-Kaufman and George Michie. RKG manages nearly $100 million in online search advertising and employs more than 40 people.

For more on The Rimm-Kaufman Group please see www.rimmkaufman.com

For more on the Inc. 500 please see www.inc.com

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At the conference, I’ll be one of several consultants providing 1:1 website critiques at “The Doctor Is In” sessions. I’ll be focusing my appointments on improving website usability and conversion. Other specialists will be covering topics including the multichannel experience, Web 2.0 and site merchandising. It’s great to see Shop.org giving this 1:1 format a go; it’s surprising how much useful information can be exchanged during a highly-focused 30 minutes.

Joining me at the Summit will be fellow RKG-ers, George Michie and Ryan Gibson. George, our Principal, Search Marketing will be leading a roundtable: the topic is TBD but I can guarantee that with George at the helm, the discussion will not be tepid.

In my past life as a retailer, and now at RKG, I’ve always found Shop.org events to present great opportunities to swap learnings with other folks in the space. If you’d like to meet up with us at the show to talk paid search or website effectiveness, just drop us a line. See you in Vegas!

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(click to enlarge)

This is a subtle language issue, and is likely too small to prove via formal A/B testing, but I think CustomInk is on to something important.

As a consumer, when I see “coupon code” smack dab in the middle of checkout, I feel obligated to break flow and open a new Firefox tab to google “retailer.com coupon” to see if I can save some money.

About 20% of the time this works, making it worth my time on average. Regardless of the cost-to-benefit ratio, I’d feel guilty that I was wasting money if I didn’t spend 10 seconds looking for the discount after the site so loudly told me discounts were available.

CustomInk even reassures that having a voucher is rare. The screen says, “Enter a voucher code (if any):” Those eight characters — the parenthetical “if any” — are brilliant.

Because nobody wants to feel like a sucker. Nobody wants to feel they overpaid.

Here’s example going the other way. The e text editor is an excellent product, but their checkout screen presents the coupon option right in the flow of checkout, as if having a discount coupon was mandatory. Recalculate, or you’re probably overpaying!



(click to enlarge)

Ouch.

Their coupon code is marked “optional”, but “optional” strikes me as more prevalent and commonplace than “(if any)”.

Anything that distracts a shopper from finishing checkout isn’t good for the retailer. Indeed, an increasing number of online retailers are intentionally removing as many links as they can from their checkout funnel, even dropping left site nav to remove distractions.

While the savvy shopper recognizes “voucher” as a polite synonym for “coupon”, perhaps “voucher” avoids the flow-destroying, avoid-being-a-sucker obligatory google coupon search.

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As Scott puts it:

With the prices as high as they are right now, I think we’ve reached the tipping point. The question then, for online retailers, is whether you make “buy online, free shipping, save money on gas” part of your marketing message. Is it helpful to remind people that they are spending so much money on gas?”

Commenting on the post, one pureplay retailer reported modest success with a pain-at-the-pump email campaign. Other reactions ranged from enthusiastic embraces of this tactic to concern that that such messaging could hurt the bricks-and mortar arms of multichannel retailers, or simply serve as an unintended reminder that purse strings should be tightened due to the rising cost of fuel.

I think the “reminder” piece is the crux of the biscuit. There’s already some early research suggesting that rising gas prices could be good for e-commerce. And if you’ve done any direct selling, you’ve probably learned that expressing empathy for your prospect’s misfortune can build rapport that leads to the sale.

But there’s a difference between echoing bad news as you make your pitch (”You’re broken? Bummer, dude. Can I help?”) and being the one to bring up the sore subject (”Dude, You Are Broken. Can I help?)

So are marketers wise to introduce (or re-introduce) unpleasant topics? I read the Shop.org post the same day I was thumbing through a new book co-authored by Robert Cialdini. Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive is a bit lightweight when compared to Cialdini’s classic Influence, but still offers several useful nuggets.

Here’s what “Yes!” has to say about the ability of fear to persuade:

For the most part, research has demonstrated that fear-arousing communications usually stimulate the audience to take action to reduce the threat. However this general rule has one important exception: When the fear-producing message describes danger but the audience is not told of clear specific, effective means of reducing the danger, they may deal with the fear by blocking out the message or denying that it applies to them.”

If a retailer reminds a prospect about soaring gas prices and the economic crunch, will “no driving and free shipping” (plus desired product, plus other components of the retailer’s value prop) serve as sufficient means of “reducing the danger” or will the shopper simply block out the entire pitch, the prescribed remedy as well as the irritant?

As one marketer pointed out in the Shop.org thread, this is all certainly worth a test. Outcomes of such experiments will no doubt vary by product category and site, and I’d predict that dramatic results are likely to occur sooner, not later: if images of gas pumps become ubiquitous in homepage banners and email leads, shoppers may ultimately become desensitized and the fuel crunch could become just another themed promo opportunity, like “Memorial Day Savings” and “Back to School.”

Does that make me sound a bit jaded? I’m not, but I guess I am biased: beyond groceries, I already do just about all my shopping online.

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