I had a talk at searchmeet about the foundation of conversion theory a couple of weeks ago. Basically I say that we need to meet the user where they enter the website, not only based on what page they enter but through what source they enter. Then we need to take into consideration in what mindset the users are entering the website with.

Finally my talk at the search meet conference was published on YouTube. Sadly, the last part of the talk was not posted and I will update this post if it is. I would however like to put this out here in the blog as it was a very fun talk to do and it has some strong points although the final remarks and conclusion isn’t in there.

//Jesper

Possibly related posts:

• Related posts on Conversion
• Electric Conversion Made Easy – Building Electric Cars — Hybrid …
• Electric Car Conversion Kits – Learn the New Electric Car …

• Related posts on Searchmeet
• Naughty Dog Updates Uncharted 2 Version 1.3 | TIRMINYL REGULATION
• Talk at the Searchmeet conference

• Related posts on Social Media Metrics
• It is the End of the Year as We Know It « Jim Sterne on eMetrics
• Social Media ROI – The Believers and Non-Believers | Brian Roy's Blog

This list is aimed towards you who work with conversion or eCommerce and need help with troubleshooting why your pages aren’t converting. These are some of the obvious reasons you might want to check out first before moving onto more advanced test and targeting.

Conversion of online traffic is and has always been a hot topic. This list aims at giving you some advice along the way.

1. You promise more on the source page than you deliver on the landing page

Regardless if you are attracting traffic through Social media or Search engines or Banners, you are in a hole world of mess if you offer something in your link or banner that is not available on the landing page you are directing your traffic to. If you write “compare your alternatives” then the alternatives should be comparable on the landing page. If you say you have the world’s best offers, then they should really be the world’s best offers. At least your page has to give the impression that they are. If you do not manage to deliver on your promise you will not convert regardless of how optimized your page is otherwise.

2. Your load time is horrible

This is not only a bounce rate inflator, but also a real conversion killer. If the load time is long, then it is quite natural to see that extreme amounts of traffic falls off at that time in the conversion process. If you want to enable people to buy stuff from you, then you shouldn’t keep them waiting. Patience is not a trait seen too often in Internet users.

3. Your haven’t optimized based on referring domain

You really have to pay notice the referrer of the traffic to your website. If your traffic comes from the search engines you can generally assume they are more purpose oriented than the research oriented traffic coming from social media. In order to convert a purpose driven visitor you have to give them exactly what they searched for and right away. In order to convert a research driven visitor you need to give them all the information available on the topic. Then they will book mark you until they want to buy what you offer. In order to be successful you need two parts in your website that takes aim at satisfying both of these needs. A good example here is Amazon.com. Easy to convert, and easy to read more about the product. Researchers scroll you you don’t have to put all the links to “read more about…” in the top of the page.

4. You run the same design and features regardless of market

If you are running the same business across several different markets, cultures and TLDs you cannot rely on tests done on one market. You cannot even rely on tests done to a sufficient significance for all markets. You have to test every market individually. This is because culture, trends and opinions differ from market to market, and although there are patterns in the way users interact with a website, regardless of culture, there will be huge gains to optimize your pages with this in mind.

5. You use distracting colors and images just cause “they look good”

I know you have them in your organization. The people who do not care how things work as long as they look good. These people should be terminated as they will cost you LOADS of money. They might be lucky a couple of times or a lot of times, but in the long run they will cost you a shit load of money. If you put something blinking on your page, it should sure as hell have a purpose.

Taste is something you cannot base your decisions on when it comes to converting traffic. Taste is highly individual and even though you take a vote in your group you are tainted by internal organizational sicknesses that makes you blind. THIS cost you money. If you want to sell more, you need to test, target and then let the data make the decisions for you.

6. You don’t take season into consideration

If it is xmas, people want to buy gifts, when it is spring people want to fall in love, in fall people want comfort and in summer people want freedom. Just generalizing, but it is important to meet the buyer where their mind is set. Prepare seasonal changes in the design of your website. Then execute them depending upon weather. You will definitively see effects in your conversion rates. Don’t try to sell sun in the desert.

7. The one mile one page one form

I have seen to many examples of long registration forms. PLEASE put your registration forms into a process of at least three steps. Write a 1 – 2- 3 in top of the registration form page. Then use Ajax to load the next section as a user completes the previous one. This way you’ll reach two extremely converting principles. First of all you will get the most important data such as e-mail address and nationality in the first stage of the sign-up. Secondly you will have nicked the user completely as they feel a sense of satisfaction from completing step one, then step two… woops they are almost done… so they better fill out the difficult stage number three. You see. When they have filled out so much info, they might as well take the extra 5 to do the last page.

If they don’t, then you can still save everything they have done up until this stage and then send them an e-mail in the evening saying, “you only have one step left to complete your order” or you can send them an e-mail saying “your super savings offer will expire in 60 minutes, return to the stage in your registration where you logged off the last time”. You will convert MAAAAD times doing the latter

8. You’ve optimized for the wrong keywords

You might be number one for a single word in a highly competitive vertical, but you still don’t convert. You ask yourself why?? Well, most commonly you have optimized your website for a word that is not a converting keyword. This happens all the time and it is generally not the words with the highest traffic volumes or the fiercest competition that converts the best. It is the action driven keywords that do. So if you are optimizing your website for the keyword “make-up” then you are probably in the wrong place. But add a brand name and a buy into that mix and perhaps you are in a better place. This one is a no brainer but sometimes corporations optimize with link spam towards words that are completely useless when it comes to sales. Think first, test some, do research, start where it is easy to end up no 1 and then move to the more narrow words.

Ok That’s it… won’t share more, but please e-mail me or add me on LinkedIn and I’m sure I’ll give you another 35 quick hints on why your page might not be converting

I listened to a session today by Wolfgang Allisat from Omniture. It was an ok talk, most of which I’ve heard before. He said a couple of truths however, that my mood really felt like hearing. You all reading this blog post probably know this already, but I feel like I need to say it.

I am unsure of the nature of the relation, but supposedly there is a 80:1 relationship on how much money companies spend on marketing for people to visit their website and how much they spend on actually converting them when they get there. That’s a sick relationship right? That’s like going to the pub, putting on the best behavior, being generous, hitting on the most beautiful girl at the place and getting her to come with you home, only for you to live in a dirty shack where your skidding tracked boxers are laying there in the hallway, there is hair all over the toilet and long hairs in different color all over the bed. IDIOTIC if you want to get laid right? So why do we behave exactly like that when it comes to money spend and the web?

We spend millions to get the users to come over, and when they do, we just don’t give a crap what they do. We’re acting like we don’t care if we get closure or not. We got them there! YEY… let’s report an increase in visitors to top management and smile. Is the traffic qualified? Well, that’s not the point… right? eehh… 80:1.. my god.. the business really needs a proper bump on its perspective.

What we buy is what we get

We buy banners or engage in viral word-of-mouth activities. We’re displaying ads that cover the entire white house or land a jumbo jet in a gigantic bowl of pop corn just to get the attention of the people around us. We make friends with them through the best kind of chit chat and evolve together with our customers. We listen and take care of them. BUT, when they are ready to buy –> we just don’t give a f**k.

That is what this relationship is telling us. 80 dollars on advertising, 1 dollar on conversion. We should be ashamed. I say We as I am in the middle of all of that. I want people to spend money on social media, SEO and other activities to draw people to buying their stuff. After seeing these numbers in front of me I am considering dropping the social media and SEO completely to focus my activities on what I am really the best at, namely making engaged people buy stuff.

Stop selling people, that’s not where your focus should be

Another of the speakers, Steen Rasmussen, put words to where corporations go wrong these days. “They try to sell stuff online.” That is soooooo true. Why are we trying to sell stuff online? We all know it doesn’t work. The only thing that works is “enabling people to buy stuff” online, which was Steen’s punch line. However cheesy those two phrases are when put together, they are surely clear enough for a kid to grasp them.

SEO, a perfect way to meet the searcher in the search engine result page. Engagement in social media is absolutely crucial if you want some check on what people expect of your company. But to go from that to not care about what they do when they get to the website. Well that’s just plain stupid. Are you stupid? I guess you are, cause most of us are.

And I already know this, why do I react?

Now, today’s news was really no news to me. It fit my mood, and so I got pissed off enough to get inspired to write this blog post. So many companies not knowing anything about this and even fewer doing anything about it. By sharing today’s impressions I hope that I inspire someone out there to pick up what’s around you and say that you have had enough and start the long process towards change. I am a restless individual, and I want change when I see flaws. I don’t wait, and I am not resilient. But why should I be? Customers aren’t!

//Jesper

Have you ever wondered why your digg or stumble traffic does not buy your stuff when on your website? Here is the foundation to my view on how you should go about converting social media users into buyers in theory. In later posts I will talk about how you should do this practically.

Previously I have been talking about The Mindset of an Online Consumer in Social Media in a previous entry. This entry however will take a deeper look into how you make your social media user become a returning customer just as you are converting your SEO-traffic today. If you are not converting your SEO-traffic today, well, then perhaps this will give you some insight too.

The Value Staircase of Online Business
The Suspect
As a user enters your website, regardless of source and your aim is to convert this user into a buyer, that user for you is a Suspect. You have no idea of who it is more than what you can tell from your analytics tool. Sometimes that is a lot, but most of the time not enough to know what kind of offer this person is out to get.

The Prospect
If the user entered from the search engine, you might know what keywords they used. Are those keywords “buyer” keywords such as “wanna buy your stuff right now” it would be an indication that a user wants to buy your stuff. That user has then taken a step in the ladder and has become a Prospect. Similarly, if your user enters from some other website or via direct referral, but starts klicking buttons such as “products” or “payment details” or perhaps even “terms of service”, that user indicates some kind of interest in buying your stuff.

The Lead
The next step in the staircase is the Lead. A user converts into a Lead whenever they leave some kind of personal information to you that can identify them and enables you to contact them again at a later stage. Ie. a Lead can be an e-mail address, a name and a phonenumber, a license plate or basically anything that gives you access to contact data of that person.

The Conversion
Bonus and Jackpot! We’ve now reached the phase where you start making money. As soon as a user makes a transaction, a buy or any kind of final goal you set out for your site users, they have become a Conversion.

The Returning
If you have a user that has converted once and then come back to convert again, you also have a Returning customer. These are the highest valued users in all of your traffic. Returning customers are often satisfied users. Satisfied users are generally net promotors of your business.

The Buyer and The Information Seeker
Enough about the value staircase of online business. It is time to take a look at two types of traffic that you get to your website. There are several other types of traffic, but we’ll only handle these two big groups in this post.

The Buyer
Generally entering your website from the search engine on keywords that are related to your products. Either general product categories or even stronger -> specific brands. If in combination with a “support keyword” such as “online store + brand name”, then you sure as hell got a buyer on your website.

A buyer can also be identified based on how they click on the website. If they enter and the first thing they do is to click – “Offers” – then you can be pretty sure you have got a buyer. It is not as rock solid as the keyword indication, but is definitively strong enough to bulk that person with the buyer group.

Buyers are there to buy stuf if you’ll just let them do so swiftly and easily. The buyer has a ME perspective, ie. they have a problem that they need to solve -> they need to buy something and get out of there. They are in other words highly pupose driven users.

The Information Seeker
In contrast to the buyer, the information seeker behaves completely differently on your website. Usually an information seeker enters your website through a referring domain or through keywords with word combinations such as “where to..” or “how to..” or perhaps even “compare ..”.

When you recieve traffic from a social media website it is generally, or most absolutely information seekers. Why you might ask? Well they came to your website when clicking a link posted by another user telling a story of some sort interesting enough for the now visiting user to click on it. I can say this complies to 99% of the traffic you recieve from social media websites except for one type of traffic and that is the SPAM traffic.

[Regardless of what anyone says. If your company has adopted a SPAM strategy for your social media activities you will sell stuff. Sometimes even a lot of stuff will be sold depending on if your product is a elastic or an inelastic product. But your SPAM tactics will hurt your brand. So, if your products value lies within its brand, then I wouldn't recommend this strategy. Your choice however lies within calculating what tactic will meet your short term and long term goals.]

Back to the issue at hand. Information seekers are not your website to buy. Actually, they might not even know why they are on your website else than that they clicked an interesting link and ended up there. What you will find however is that this target group of people will link, bookmark, share, comment and go bananas with your content if they like it.

Simply put, they are there to find out cool stuff, and if they do find this out, they will scare the living crap out of you as they share your content with others in their own personal way. They are on your website with a WE perspective and thus think about everyone else and how your content can be shared whilst on your website. They are in other words research driven users.

How to Convert the Buyer and the Information seeker
This is when this post starts becoming interesting as this is the question everyone asks me and I seem to be the only one bold enough to give a straight answer about it.

First of all you need to split your conversion process into several pieces and really think about how to make your user climb the ladder. Here is what I have found works for the different groups. I have displayed this with words in the “arrow blocks” above.

The Buyer Buys when:

1. They come to your website as suspects because you had good SEO or Social Media Optimization (SMO)
2. They become prospects because your design, features, information architecture complies with their liking
3. They become a lead because they seem to like what you offer to solve their problem or purpose for being on the website
4. They convert if it is easy enough to convert -> CRUCIAL try to take away all hurdles for a lead converting. It should be like a walk in the park or even less of an effort…
5. They become a returning customer if they like the stuff you sold them the last time

The Information seeker buys when:

1. They come to your website as a suspect because you or someone else has provided them with an interesting link -> good SEO or SMO
2. They become prospects the second they enter the website and starts clicking around, if they bookmark your website, if they write a blog post about it or…
3. The thing that will convert them into leads however is whether or not you spark their curiosity. In contrast to the buyer information seekers are boosted by curiosity and being updated on good content and stories. Example: If you try converting a buyer they want the best offer -> a bonus or a discount. The kind of phrasing you should use are such as “Register to get super bling bling for FREEEEEE”. If you try converting an information seeker on the other hand you should want to try with the approach “Enroll to our e-mail updates to know what happens when it happens”. (perhaps not the best copy, but I think you see the difference)
4. Then it is all about reliability. KEEP YOUR PROMISES no matter how small. If you say you’ll keep people updated -> keep people updated. DO NOT try to sell stuff through this e-mail subscription. Cause I tell you, as soon as you break a promise, they will be ruthless towards you. They will give you as much shit as they gave you praise and as we all know, bad smell travels fast. As your users are able to rely on you. When they see you live up to your transparent intentions. THEN they will buy from you. And they will not buy the cheapest stuff in the shelves. They will buy whatever you tell them to buy. They trust you, and as long as you are up front with your offer, they will buy from you as they know you know your stuff. And I know you have all felt this once or twice. You see value in stuff that isn’t actually practical value, but artificial or social value. A shoe is a shoe, but a shoe with a swoosh is just a little bit better and so I’ll pay more for it.
5. Now to the easy part. Now you’ll just have to nurture your relationship with this individual. This means admiting to mistakes, not bragging to much, keeping in touch on a regular basis and just being that soulful and trustworthy dude you’d ask to babysit your kids. Maybe not that much of a trust, but at least the kind of trust that makes you belive in the “Gates” or the “Jobs” religion.

Conclusion
Well, the main point I want to put across is that you will have to know the difference of the kinds of traffic you get to your website and then treat this traffic dependently on what kind of visitor they are. People say it is impossible to make diggers into buyers. I strongly disagree. It might take a bit more time to have them buy your stuff. But when they do start, my god, they will buy whatever you recommend as long as you tell them what they get.

Trust me. They will even buy from you if you tell them “This is the worst deal around and it is a huge freakin’ hassle. But it is sooo totally worth it.”

[I recognize this post has some holes every here and there. Please help me fill them in.]

//Jesper

If you are looking to convert through social media, you have to recognize that it is a completely different task than converting traffic from a search engine.

In this post I will quickly run through two situations where the mindset of a person will enable you to make a sale through social media.

• The must have buy
• The viral buy

The mindset
First of all you have to take the mindset of people engaged in social media into consideration. Imagine the off line activity when you sit with your loved one in a restaurant and all of a sudden one of those flower guys shows up to harrass you.

In any circumstance other than this one you would probably flick him off and hope he/she goes to hell for intruding with a sales proposal whilst you are trying to engage in some quality time with your babe. However, you see your loved ones face, how desparately he/she wants a flower, whether or not he/she admits it, and so you have to bow to the intrusion and buy a flower. (Don’t try to tell me that you buy flowers cause you want to…)

Secondly, imagine if the flower sales man would come up to you, but instead try to sell you a car. Even though your loved ones desparate eyes might have some effect upon you, I am sure most of the worlds population would be able to resist.

The must have buy
The example above illustrates one of the strongest driving forces behind a buy in social media. The “have to” buy is the best situation you can find yourself in as a marketer. Many social networks have been successful in launching “have to” buys through introducing artificial value artifacts such as icons that you can buy to another person to show them that you like them. Generally these gifts are placed on your profile page of the social network and thus shows your status amongst friends.

Thus, when ever you can find a situation where your potential consumers can earn status from buying your product, you should try to use this in your marketing technique.

The viral buy
Another way of successfully working with marketing through social media is to work with “word-of-mouth” or viral marketing. Taking the example of the loved one again. Imagine if you are currently choosing between two different car models and your loved one says she perfer the one or the other. This will make you more likely to buy the car. Also, if your best friend recommends it, or if some kind of expert recommends it, it is not that drastic to assume that you will buy the car.

Now, there are two VERY important pieces of information in the pharagraph above. Firstly, the person you will be able to sell a car to through social media will have to be in a choice situation. Secondly, the recommendation has to come from a trusted source.

In this post I will not go through how to find people who are in a choice situation or how you become a trusted source, but I will cover this in later posts.