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Without Conversion Rates You Don't Know If You're Mickey Mouse Or Mickey Mantle

I couldn't agree more with the headline of this article and it's one I'm afraid I can't take credit for. Conversion rate on a website is easy to measure and is most often overlooked by businesses too busy concentrating on the bottom line.


I found this line in Paco Underhill's book, Why We Buy - The Science Of Shopping and found myself comparing many of the things he has measured in the retail world to the tests I've done with online visitor based activity. The point of this article is to show you how you can begin to start improving your own conversion rate (and therefore your bottom line), on your website whilst relating my observations to the offline retailing ones that Paco talks about.

In Cyberspace No-One Can Hear You Shop

The main problem with websites is that owing to media attention and the love of technology retailers went online without knowing why, according to Paco. It's true that in the late 90's businesses were going online because their competition had, or they feared that they would be left behind by not embracing the new technology. Not really a great reason to spend time, money and resources on a website. The painful thing is that most of these websites have not changed much for the better. Yes they look nicer now but the amount of glorified posters I still see never ceases to amaze me. In order to combat this lack of purpose I propose you look at four goal areas that all business websites should adapt to their own requirements. One of these goals should be the primary focus of the entire website design in the early stages.

1) Prospect Acquisition
Prospect acquisition is when the website goal is to deliver qualified leads and prospects through the website.

2) Sales/E-commerce
The goal is to sell products and services online directly through an e-store.

3) In House Cost Saving
The goal being to cut costs, usually in the form of resources such as printed material, or saving time by automating in house processes online such as timekeeping systems and human resource procedures.

4) Customer Service
The goal being to improve the customer service options by providing answers to queries and complaints online automatically where possible.

Conversion is easy to measure against each one of those goals, provided you know what to look for. So measure prospect acquisition as the percentage of visitors who give you their details against the amount of total visitors to your website. Measure conversion on sales and the percentage of people buying a product against the number of total website visitors. Conversion on in house cost saving is simply the amount of people using the system as a percentage of the amount of people supposed to be using the system. A good internal policy here will mean this is a 100% conversion rate. The number of people using the resources and systems you have put in place, as a percentage of total visitors to the support web pages can calculate customer service conversion.

So why measure Conversion? Because it allows you to accurately measure the performance of the website over time and make adjustments accordingly.

The Butt Brush Factor

In many instances in his book Paco refers to 'The Butt Brush Factor' in which he talked about the way people, women in particular don't like enclosed spaces where other people constantly bump into them from behind. It usually led to the prospective shopper feeling frustrated or feeling uncomfortable and leaving the store or going somewhere else. You might be thinking well how does that relate to an online experience? No-one usually bumps into you from behind sitting in front of a computer, this is true, but how many times are you made to feel irritated, uncomfortable or just downright frustrated? How often do you leave one website and look at another because the first one didn't have what you're looking for? This 'Butt Brush Factor' is incredibly relevant, more so I think than in ordinary retail. Here are some examples of common online 'Butt Brush Factors' that you will see in many business websites.

1) Latest News.
The landing page has latest news about the company links. What exactly is the point of having a bunch of latest news links on your landing page? What good is that to browser arriving at your landing page knowing and caring little about your company? He wants to know what you can do for him right there and then, not how your company stock is doing. An 'About Us' section is a much more reasonable place to put these links.

2) Awards.
A landing page with awards screams, look at us, look what we've achieved, aren't we clever? It also completely wastes space on the most important page of your website. It can be compared to what Paco said when he talked about going into a car showroom and seeing manufacturer awards. That is unlikely to make much of an impression on the average shopper.

3) Poor Headlines.
'Welcome to Company Name' is the most common waste of a headline I ever see. Probably the company is unknown to the visitor so you're wasting his time. A headline, which communicates the need of the target audience and how you can solve that need, improves reading and click through by up to 35% in recent tests we made.

4) Submit Buttons.
Why tell the visitor to 'submit?'. Submit actually means 'To yield or surrender (oneself) to the will or authority of another' according to dictionary.com, so why ask innocent web browsers to do that in order to read your monthly newsletter? Subscribe to our newsletter is much more friendly I would say.

5) Bad Use Of Flash.
A common problem with media companies in particular. I understand why they do these all singing all dancing interactive flash websites which often are works of art and showcase their ability. However 'skip intro' is a common link on the majority of these websites. That is because some people find them a waste of time. Why have an intro at all? Why not just have a showcase of what you can do on a normal fast, efficient website which tells me what I need to know quickly? If I decide I have the time to look at flash animations I will.

6) Poor Use Of Imagery.
 I'm guilty of this myself. We used to have a picture of a squirrel flying through the air with 'what's your objective' on our landing page. It might have worked had we been selling nuts or seed, but a company improving website conversion? Not really relevant, it was more down to my ego, pride and photographic luck in capturing said squirrel with my digital camera, then thinking of a way I could use the picture. Rather than thinking of a good picture which was relevant to what we were trying to say and using that. This kind of thing is repeated on many websites, people with briefcases, bridges, animals and other general graphics, which can be turned with words into anything you want the image to say. But on first glance it doesn't really show any relevance. All communication should be relevant and ideally persuade the user to do something.

Again conversion is an important measurement here. It can be applied to all of the changes you make. You may want to experiment with these variable items on your website which I'll come to later in the article.

Attention all shoppers

'For the next fifteen minutes, in the frozen food section, free passion fruit sorbet for everyone' is a perfect way to instill urgency in the shopper to go to that section of the store and get the freebie. They know they only have 15 minutes, and they know after that time they won't get the lovely sorbet. This was Paco's way of showing how stores could be more imaginative. The store then know that that section of the store is going to be jammed with people for that 15 minutes and can capitalize on impulse sales. That's how it works in the retailing world, but what about online. Instilling urgency online is one big factor overlooked by many business websites. Some examples of how you might want to start employing this technique online are listed below.

1) Time Expiry Offer.
Just like the above example, you could let your reader know they will miss out if they haven't subscribed or bought your product by a certain time.

2) The First Number.
The first 50 subscribers are sent a free e-book. The first 50 items are at a 30% discount. This could be combined with the number of places/items left being on the website so that the browser thinks 'I have to subscribe before those 10 places are taken up'.

3) The Nth Number Competition.
By this I mean if you are subscriber number 1000 you get a free website makeover, again combined with the number of subscriptions being displayed on the website. It could be tied into a referral deal if you aren't that lucky number, so if you don't get the deal, at least your friend might and you get something for doing it.

So how does conversion relate to all these changes? Conversion rate should be measured in every instance, see below.

The Science Of Online Marketing

There are two incredible poignant lines written in Why We Buy.

Science is by and large the study of very small differences andWhen you change one thing, everything changes.

The first 'very small difference' and 'changing one thing' situation I came across in my online marketing career was a complete mistake. I was working for a large press organization and one thing I had to do one day was to change the code on a sales form. I mistakenly removed a voucher entry field from the form. So people no longer could enter their voucher number to get a cheaper deal. Conversion improved by three times. I told our editor who was amazed but instructed me to put the voucher form field back while they figured out what to do. There was a good reason for the voucher; in fact it was the entire reason the page was there. However making the change back resulted in the same drop off. Almost identical sales to what we had been getting before my mistake. The voucher idea was eventually scrapped on that page and sales sky rocketed again. The reason we ascertained was because visitors figured that they could get a cheaper deal with a voucher. The voucher could only be gotten by physically buying a newspaper and that limited us to around 10% of the audience. Nine out of ten people visiting the website did so from a place where they couldn't buy the newspaper at that time, so it was obvious that the voucher idea could only be good for the local readers. This was a catalyst for me personally and from then on I began to understand the importance of measurement online. In particular the measurement of conversion.

So in order to turn the online changes you make into a science follow three simple rules.

1) Measure Conversion.
Conversion is a percentage. A figure taken from how many people do the action you desire as a percentage of total visitors to the page. This means it's irrelevant how many people arrive at the page and therefore is constant.

2) Change one thing at a time.
An average page has lots of variable graphics, headlines, paragraphs, sentences, links, testimonials and probably a lot more. In only changing one thing and measuring for the same period of time (30 days is good) you will get a fair result. So for instance if you change a headline, look at the page click-through and if possible the length of time an average visitor stayed on the page for 30 days prior to the change. Make the change and measure the results for the next 30 days. Then if conversion is higher (more people reading or more people clicking through) keep the change. If it's lower, revert to what you had before.

3) Experiment.
Don't limit yourself to headlines. Copy, content, graphics, adding competitions etc. try them all. But remember the rule only change one variable at any one time.


Summary
I've desperately been trying to keep this article short; I think I could have written an epic on this subject. If I were in the same room as Paco Underhill, we would have an awful lot to talk about. However what I'm trying to say is that businesses should start waking up to the fact that online marketing is as much a science as Paco demonstrates the retailing world is. Measuring conversion rates online is the beginning of that process.

Author: Steve Jackson, editor of The Conversion Chronicles, a respected writer and  author of the e-book Learn Before You Spend  - 6 Ways to measure web traffic costing $30. You can get a free copy by subscribing to http://www.conversionchronicles.com

2002-02-12Steve Jackson, ConversionChronicles.com