I read an article recently about creating forward sales momentum with web site visitors. I love the concept.

The idea is to create site copy that leads users down a prescribed path toward a purchase. I was nodding my head in affirmation until the author stated that the path to a purchase is linear.

This is where the marketer who lives in the trenches of real life tells the marketing academic that he’s just wrong.

Momentum is great, and we should all strive to create forward momentum through our site navigation and copy.  The idea that users will follow a linear path to a purchase is just wishful thinking – nothing more.

This is an unfortunate reality that folks are only now starting to recognize.  In real life (think of yourself as an example), you enter a site. Maybe you find something that interests you.  You think it might be worth purchasing….

Then a random onslaught of questions and issues raid your mind. What if I don’t like it?  What is the return policy?  Who are these people?  How long have I been in business?  Who else has used this product successfully?  What do they have to say about it? Is it really better than this other thing? Do they offer live customer support? Is it going to break the first time I use it?

You know what I’m talking about. We’ve all experienced it. You think you may want to buy something, but you need to resolve some things first. Unfortunately for us marketers, while we CAN predict many of these issues, the order in which our users address them is not completely predictable and NOT linear.

Anyone who has spent any time with a web analytics tool watching the progression of users through a site knows this to be true. For that matter, anyone who has ever bought anything online knows it to be true. So what do we do?  How do we create forward momentum?

Here are a few thoughts.

1. There are two stages at which the user progression is generally linear: the first click or two on the way into the site and the last few clicks to consummate a purchase. Make sure these pathways are obvious, simple, streamlined, and don’t compromise trust.
2. Recognize that there is no “average” or “typical” customer.  When we attempt to speak to everyone at once, we persuade no one.
3. Develop profiles of the types of customers you serve.  The best work that I have ever seen in this regard is done by a brilliant company called Future Now. In their experience, there are typically 4-6 personas that a company must effectively address in order to maximize conversion rates online. What kinds of issues would each persona need to resolve in order to make a purchase?
4. Take this list of issues, and be sure that resolutions are well within reach on your site – and not just in your global navigation, but through text links in your copy.
5. Purchase a web analytics tool (I like Click Tracks) and watch how users progress through your site.  Which pages have the highest abandon rates? Why? Make educated guesses and refine these pages. Then watch some more. It’s fascinating.

A book could easily be written on this subject – and in fact it has.  For the best thinking available on this subject, get a copy of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.

I have just completed a three-month study testing the effectiveness of SEO and Google Adwords against radio advertising in generating quote requests for a consumer insurance product.  The test was contained to a market area of one city and surrounding areas.

The local radio budget was $13,000/month, and the campaign ran for approximately three months on three stations selected by the company’s ad agency as being representative of the target demographic. To allow the radio a fair chance to establish frequency, I began tracking the search marketing comparison at the start of the second month of radio advertising and am reporting on exactly two months of radio results data ($26,000 invested over the two months – not counting the cost of producing the ad).

The Adwords budget for the same local market increased over the period of the study from approximately $400/month to approximately $750/month. And the total SEO budget was approximately $2,000/month.

The SEO began approximately two months prior to the commencement of the study and was geared to a two state market area. I have presented only the results produced within the local market area being studied. Reach your own conclusions about how to apportion the SEO budget to this market area.  I made a liberal estimate in calculating cost-per-lead (CPL) and assigned 50% of the SEO budget ($1,000/month).

I must disclose that SEO was managed by pros from Virginia SEO firm, Big Oak. In my estimation, they are one of the top SEO firms in the country, so don’t expect to match their results on your own.

To be counted a quote request, a prospect had to complete a fairly onerous form online providing enough personal information to generate an insurance quote.  This information included social security number, driver’s license number, birth date, vehicle ID number (VIN) among other information.

Quote requests were assigned to radio based on self reporting from prospects on the quote request form. Those generated by Adwords were tracked using Google Analytics. And quote requests originating from SEO were calculated by applying an adjusted site conversion rate (removing Adwords traffic and conversions) to natural search traffic.

I call this a 3-month study because I included statistics for an additional month after radio stopped to further validate the conclusions.

Here are the statistics on the number of quote requests generated by source. (Keep in mind these results relate only to one local market area.):

Radio Results

Month 1: 62

Month 2: 46

Month 3: 0 (stopped radio after two months)

Average CPL:  $240.74

Adwords Results

Month 1: 37

Month 2: 47

Month 3: 62

Average CPL: $17.98

SEO Results

Month 1: 29

Month 2: 44

Month 3: 60

Average CPL: $22.55

These are certainly dramatic results. Search engine marketing (SEO and Adwords) outperformed radio by more than 10x in terms of marketing efficiency and together, doubled the lead volume produced by radio. And as you can see, the SEO results are climbing.  I would expect that it will take a year before SEO begins to level off, so in that regard, the best is yet to come.

What happened to the site’s traffic and gross conversion rate (total visitors to total quote requests) in the month following the end of radio was particularly interesting.  Traffic went down by approximately 16%, and the conversion rate went up by roughly 21%. This indicates to me that the radio drove a fair amount of traffic, but for whatever reason, it was low quality traffic.

One other meaningful side-note – the company elected to place advertising on the radio stations’ web sites.  Total click-throughs from those ads during the three-month life of the campaign were 108. The conversion rate was 1.85% (a whopping two quote requests).

Despite plenty of sales claims to the contrary, with almost no exceptions, I consider incremental marketing dollars invested in placing ads on either a radio or television station’s web site to be wasted. If you have ever had success with the online advertising component sold as a part of a television, radio, or even yellow pages ad, I would love to hear about it.

You know when a web site isn’t working for you. The beauty of the web is that you don’t have to tolerate it for more than a second before you’re gone… on to another site that better meets your needs.

But what actually happened on that site you abandoned?  Maybe it just didn’t offer what you were looking for… or maybe it did, but failed to let you know.

We can quickly sense when we are on track to finding the content we’re looking for by detecting what some experts call the “scent” of information. As it turns out, people behave on web sites in a manner very similar to dogs sniffing around for food – or whatever else they’re looking for. We get on a particular scent trail and follow it.

So designing and writing the content of your web site around the idea of creating easy-to-follow scent trails is vital to your success online.

Where are the critical scent markers on a web site?

Far more important than your site’s main navigation are the text links that you build into your copy. Each one emits a scent that your visitors can follow. As the scent grows stronger, your visitor’s confidence level increases that he’s progressing in the right direction.

According to the renown studies of User Interface Engineering (UIE) and its founder, Jared Spool, when a link is comprised of 7 to 12 words, people will successfully follow it 50-60% of the time. The optimal length… 9 to 10 words – provided that the copy contains what Spool calls a “trigger word.”

Imagine the language that one of your visitors might type into a search engine to find what they’re looking for on your site.  These are trigger words. Not industry jargon… but the words that a customer would actually use. These words grab their attention.

Having grown so accustomed to “click here” as the only text link on most web pages, 9 to 10 blue, underlined words may feel awfully verbose. But as it turns out, one of the great scent killers is short copy. The most successful sites have surprising long pages and reveal that users are quite willing to scroll.

How many links are too many? The researchers at UIE have yet to discover an upper limit to the number of links on a site’s home page. Users are quite willing to process them and, like your dog, just want the scent to grow stronger with every click.

How do you know if you’re providing your visitors with the scent trails they need to graduate from visitor to customer?

There are a handful of scent killers of which you must be mindful.  First and foremost, if your users resort to the “back” button, you have a problem. When a site’s design forces the use of the “back” button even a single time, only 18% of users will find what they’re looking for. When your users never touch the “back” button, 45% will succeed in finding what they want.

Another sign of failure is what some refer to as “pogosticking,” a navigation path characterized by bouncing between levels of the information hierarchy (and back to the home page over and over).  This is a clear sign that your links are either too vague (to short or too cute), or are simply misleading.

When users pogostick through your site, only 11% will find what they need.  When they navigate without pogosticking, 55% succeed.

Finally, when users resort to using the search feature on your site to find products or content rather than navigating directly to their destination from the home page or category listings, they have failed to pick up a scent. With few exceptions, search features ultimately yield a 30% average success rate for visitors compared to 53% for users who don’t search.

How do you design your site for scent?

Contrary to popular practice, start with your content pages, and end with the home page. Content pages house what your visitors want. Your job is to sprinkle their scent in the appropriate places to enable visitors to find them easily.

Depending on the complexity and scale of your content and/or product offerings, you may need to create an information hierarchy to allow users to drill down to what they’re looking for… home page… product category page (product gallery)… product page.

UIE has learned that on gallery pages, link order is important. And alphabetically is the worst way to organize content. Recognizing that 50% of searchers give up after viewing only one page of search results, longer gallery pages work better than short ones. Certainly there is an upper limit to how many products you put on a single page, but err on the side of long rather than short as long pages beat short ones almost every time.

And as important as anything else, watch your site usage statistics and click paths to find and correct the problem spots.

What do your customers really want from you? I’d classify this as an important question for any business. And today, I got a glimpse of something from which most of us can probably extract a valuable lesson.

A friend of mine who runs a thriving angel investor group in Virginia recently set up an account on the business networking site, LinkedIn. (If you don’t have one, you should probably think about it.) The other day, she challenged me to a race to see who could build a bigger network. She’s killing me.

One of the features that LinkedIn now offers is the ability to post a question to the community.  People answer publicly to establish credibility and domain expertise. So, as you might imagine, the answers tend to be thoughtful, well-articulated, and generally correct (or at least defensible).

Today someone asked the question, “what is your expectation of a Realtor?”

The question caught my attention, because I’ve been dealing with that topic today, and I happen to know the answer.  Oddly enough, this is a very well researched question, and the answer is surprisingly clear.

So I was intrigued to peruse the musings of the consultants, sales gurus, and marketing geniuses. They included the following:

“Do what it takes to sell the home.”

“Use internet tools for marketing.”

“Price the house correctly.”

“Well advertised open houses.”

“Listen to my needs.”

“Drive me around. Unlock the door. And shut up.”

“Show me homes within my budget.”

“Help solve contract/inspection issues.”

“Price it right. Sell it fast.”

I’m sure most of us would agree with these. But interestingly enough, none of the answer people on LinkedIn got it right.

When choosing a Realtor, the number one variable that dictates the selection is response time (how quickly did the Realtor respond to my inquiry?). A close second is the prospective client’s perception of how responsive the Realtor would be through the life of the transaction.

As simple as this sounds, it turns out that the number one driver of client satisfaction with a Realtor at the end of the transaction is communication and responsiveness (how responsive was my Realtor to my communication needs through the course of the transaction?).

In residential real estate, timely, relevant, value-added communication is THE KEY to satisfying clients. This is what the customer really wants. And the research is very clear that EVERYTHING else is a distant second. As a Realtor, you can score perfectly on the LinkedIn list, but if you fail to communicate well (and responsively) with your clients, you have an unhappy customer that won’t use you again and certainly won’t refer you to others.

What an amazingly fundamental need we as home buyers have when it comes to our selection and satisfaction with a Realtor.  And my strong suspicion is that this is in no way unique to home purchases – or even consumer transactions.

In medicine, it is well documented that malpractice suits have little to do with a doctor’s skills as a physician and mostly to do with his/her style of communication with patients. As patients, we want compassion and empathy.  We want to be heard by our doctors, and how they communicate with us will determine our propensity to sue them if they screw something up.

I’ll bet that most of us would be shocked to discover how basic our customers’ greatest needs are.  I’ll also bet that timely, relevant, value-added, compassionate, empathic communication is at (or darn near) the top of the list in most industries.

We marketers tend to over-think things at times.  When it comes to the question of what your customers REALLY want.  Start with the most basic needs related to communication.