Marketing Headhunter

Web Usability: "Keeping an Eye on the Competition"

DETROIT, MI - My friend, Kevin Ertell over at RetailShakenNotStirred has a great post on web usability titled "Is elitism the source of poor usability?"

According to Kevin, "Most sites are still achieving single digit conversion rates even though customer intent-to-purchase rates are 20% or higher in most cases."  Kevin suspects that this problem stems from sites being too complicated for the average user.

I'm sure he's right.  And it's not that users are stupid; it's that the average consumer gets hit with +5000 commercial messages a day and they just don't have the time or patience for any site that doesn't conform to the Golden Rules of User Interface Design.

The result?  A site's passersby intend to purchase something +20% of the time, but more than half of the time, they are prevented from doing so by poor usability.  So mathematically, a site's owner could more than DOUBLE his revenues by simply improving his site's usability.  >Forehead smack!<

Friends, this ain't about traffic.  It's about optimizing the user's experience, and according to Kevin the best way to do that is to simplify one's approach to web design.  Hence Kevin's question, ...

"Is elitism the source of poor usability?"

As an ecommerce recruiter, I see this all the time.  Web designers fail to see their work as a means to greater customer intimacy and instead get caught up the latest widgets and gadgets that will give them bragging rights among their friends.  Crazy.

Keeping an Eye on the Competition

Smart usability is often a byproduct of smart competitive intelligence, and sometimes the best way to "keep it real" in web design is to see what your competitors are doing.  Don't forget that if a customer intends to purchase something 20% of the time and you lose his interest more than half the time, he's likely going to buy from your competitor.  Therefore, "good" usability is relative to your competition.  You're not trying to change the world.  Your simply trying to convert a sale.  Period.

Here's a tip:  Run a Google search for just the relevant product pages of specific competitors.

For example, if I worked for AJMadison.com and wanted to know what my competitors were doing, I might follow these steps:

1.) Use the "related" operator to see who Google thinks my competitors are based on the competitors' meta data, like so: http://tinyurl.com/m5s4hl

2.) Looking at my own homapage's source code, I would know that my own categories are: "Gas Ranges, Ovens, Stoves, Washers, Dryers, Dishwashers, bosch, ranges, refrigerator, oven, appliances, refrigerators, Air Conditioners, microwave, washer dryer combo, whirlpool"

3.) To get a basic feel for how a specific competitor merchandises their whole site, use the Google "site" operator, like this: http://tinyurl.com/mfraxn. It's often a good idea to run this search for every competitor (see step 1).  Used with a Google toolbar and a highlighter key, you can see where and how the keywords appear on any product page -- and in my opinion this is a usability issue.

4.) Finally, to see how a specific competitor merchandises a particular product category, such as "gas ranges," you can use a modified version of the Google "site" operator from Step 3. See http://tinyurl.com/nggdzb.  (Check out the Adwords results on the right.)

It often helps to run this last search for every keyword in the homepage's source code.  It's a pain, but this is a great way to see what navigational elements your competitors may be trying out.

Finally, two great browser plugins to complement this quick-n-dirty process are Chris Pederick's web developer toolbar for Firefox and of course, the almighty SEO toolbar by Aaron Wall.  Both are free.

The SEO Toolbar can show you how well optimized any product page is in a given search result, which will tell you a lot about how important that product is to the success of a particular competitor's business.  On a deeper level, it will automatically tell you the number of del.icio.us bookmarks a page has, the number of Diggs; the number of Stumbles; the number of Twitter mentions; and MUCH more.

As a rule, shoppers don't bookmark and Tweet and Stumble crappy pages.  Sometimes the companies do these things themselves, but only for pages they feel proud.  And in my experience, "important" pages are tested and tweaked more frequently than unimportant pages -- and those are the ones you really want to monitor for changes.
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Twitter and B2B marketing: A simplification.

ATLANTA, GA - I read somewhere that a great blogger will never start a post by making excuses for why he hasn't been blogging.  Good thing I'm not a great blogger.

As discussed last month, I have started devoting considerable time and attention to Twitter.  My reasoning is basically this:  Nearly 90% of my blog's traffic comes from Google, so once you have arrived at this page, statistically speaking, you are most likely to read one post and then call me, email me, or subscribe to my newsletter.

I'm simplifying things, but that's what happens 90% of the time.

And usually, once that happens, you become a "fan."  At that point you usually subscribe to my Twitter feed.  All of this is part of a marketing process designed to escort each new candidate or client (I can never tell which) though the process of Awareness ... to Interest ... to Desire ... to Action.  Like so:

The old AIDA model.  Works every time, especially in B2B.

Now clearly, not every visitor becomes a fan.  But that doesn't matter very much, because I'm only concerned with those who do.  No one is universally loved.  What's pop to some is soda to others, and there's no accounting for taste.  At the end of the day, I'm in the emotional bond business.  That's what personal branding is all about.

But I digress.

My point is that I have discovered that it is FAR more productive for me to use Twitter to stoke my fans' Interest, Desire, and Action than it is to blog in an attempt to raise Awareness.  I mean, once you have found me on Google, the work of my blog is done.  Sure, you can read more than one post if you need convincing of my "thought leadership" before you subscribe to my searches.  But statistically speaking, you won't.  My analytics package says you won't, and there's nothing as devastating to an opinion as a number.  Besides, my fans pay my bills.

No offense to you newcomers.

Think of it this way:  Assume that you could financially afford to only make 10,000 impressions on your market this year.  Would you rather make one impression on 10,000 strangers, or 10 impressions on 1,000 friends?  Exactly.  And since I'm self employed and time is money, there's no point spending a ton of time on a low payoff activity.  My blog is about raising Awareness through SERPs.  It's about being ... found.  Twitter is about contributing something meaningful to the market's conversation.

It took me a while to understand that.
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