Surround yourself with smart people, and you can’t help but get a little smarter yourself.  I participated in a conference call between a couple of Web marketing experts – Shell Harris and Alyssa Duvall (President and VP of Strategy for Virginia SEO firm, Big Oak) and Howard Kaplan, one of the big wigs at Future Now (the thought leaders in online conversion).

It was a simple revelation, but one well worth sharing here. The problem that most of refer to simply as Web conversion, “I want to increase my site’s conversion rate,” is actually a symptom of two separate and distinct issues. What are those issues you ask???

Usability and persuasion. As you’ll see, this is actually a worthwhile distinction.

This post primarily addresses usability.  Consider the elements of conversion that relate to enabling site visitors to overcome hurdles in the process of taking action… finding a product, putting it into a shopping cart, checking out….

An equally important but very different matter to be considered when optimizing a site’s ability to convert visitors into customers (or people who take action) is that of persuasion.  I may understand perfectly well how to use your site, but I’m simply not moved to action by what I see.  Let’s view “persuasion” for the purpose of this discussion as a matter of addressing gaps… in understanding, believability, and selling momentum. I have and will continue to address persuasion in other posts.

Shop.org research indicates that shopping cart abandonment rates are as high as 75%. I would argue that this phenomenon is more an issue of usability than persuasion.  The top issues that irritate online customers continue to be problems with the checkout process and difficulty finding products on the site.

The root of this problem is often our natural tendency to design our sites as though WE are the users. In fact, our customers generally behave (and interact with our sites) in ways that are entirely dissimilar to our own behavior. What is intuitive to you after hours of hard work in fashioning your site’s purchase process may very well be confusing to your visitors.

So what are we to do?

In a perfect world, we would all conduct usability tests and actually observe users as they interact with our sites.  Web analytics tools offer a little bit of help, but you just can’t beat the experience of actually watching your users. So, if your budget is tight, use friends and family members.  Feed them well one evening and watch as they complete certain tasks on your site.  Where do they get stumped? Make a list, and eliminate these hurdles.

Here are 15 helpful tips:

1. In the checkout process, offer a progress indicator to show where the user is in the process and how much further they have to go.
2. Show a final receipt BEFORE the order is placed and allow users to change their order quickly and easily from there.
3. Keep your shipping and return policies in plain view (or easily accessible) throughout the checkout process.
4. Label your action buttons clearly.  Don’t say “submit” if what you mean is “place my order.”
5. NEVER require customers to register in order to checkout. If you must, offer registration as an option AFTER the order is placed.
6. Use clear and simple language.  The price of confusion is lost sales.
7. Use familiar standards in designing your checkout process. This is no place to get creative.
8. Be sure people can get ALL of the information they need without placing an item in the shopping cart.  Can your users find shipping costs and return policies without embarking on the checkout process?  If not, expect astronomical cart abandon rates as you are using the checkout process to answer pre-purchase decision questions.
9. Break the purchase process into manageable pieces that are not individually overwhelming.
10. Clearly present sub totals and totals so that customers are not surprised in the end by hidden costs.
11. Guarantee your site’s security.  People still have security concerns, so address them. And if you ask for atypical information in order to checkout, explain why you need it. Displaying security related logos (i.e. Verisign and Hacker Safe) has been shown to yield 5-10% improvements in conversion rates.
12. The display of products in your shopping cart should leave NO DOUBT that the customer is ordering what she actually wants.
13. Count the clicks between product selection and final checkout. If the number of clicks is greater than three, take a close look to be sure your process is as efficient as it can be.
14. Display your physical address and phone number – and even photos of your staff to remind your customers that they are dealing with real people who have a physical presence.
15. PROOF YOUR SITE for typos, broken links and other lazy errors.  These kill your credibility.

Put these tips into practice, and half of your conversion problems will be well on their way to resolution. Unfortunately, the other half of the problem is tougher to solve – persuading your visitors to take action in the first place.  More on this in future posts.

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.