Scientific research papers on how to increase sales or conversions are rare.  Most of the articles you read on the Internet (admittedly, including a lot of posts on this blog as well) are based on what the writer thinks and what makes logical sense. But scientific research works in a different way. Authors of research papers must produce accurate, reproducible results.  And their articles are reviewed by peers before getting published. Hence in most cases you can always trust results of a scientific paper.

So I fished out research papers on the internet which tell you how to increase your revenues online. Here is the list for your reading pleasure:

Usability

• Web site usability, design, and performance metrics [PDF, good paper with lots of information]
• Influencing the online consumer’s behavior: the Web experience [Good, detailed paper]
• The impact of initial consumer trust on intentions to transact with a website: a trust building model [PDF]
• The role played by perceived usability, satisfaction and consumer trust on website loyalty [needs subscription for fulltext]
• An empirical study of Web browsing behaviour: Towards an effective Website design [PDF]

Miscellaneous

• Practical Guide to Controlled Experiments on the Web: Listen to Your Customers not to the HiPPO by Microsoft Research [PDF, Good paper for A/B split testing internals]
• Predicting bounce rates in sponsored search advertisements by Google [PDF]
• How well does result relevance predict session satisfaction? by Yahoo Research [PDF]
• Generating Web Site Traffic:  An Empirical Analysis of Web Site Visitation Behavior by UC Berkley [PDF]
• Predicting online-purchasing behaviour [needs subscription for fulltext]

After compiling this list and reading most of the articles, I realized there is a large disconnect between what happens in research and what is actually applied in the market. Do you agree? Did you even know such kind of research happens at all?

Posted in Conversion Optimization on January 29th, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Like everyone else, you want to rank high on Google and you want to extract maximum ROI out of your Adwords PPC campaigns. Your website deals with a particular topic area, say Conversion Optimization (which is the case for this blog).  But then the topic is so vast that optimizing (or positioning) website and content on a single broad topic becomes very challenging. A whole gamut of websites deal with Conversion Optimization, so how does this blog have even a minute chance of getting seen on search engines?

The answer is to write website content including keywords and phrases that people search for at prominent places. This is such a no brainer advice that it borders on being completely useless.  The real challenge is to know what people search for. You can (and should) bring process to researching what exactly people search and how to rank on it:

Step 1: Go to Google’s Keyword Tool

This tool displays a lot of juicy information on the keywords we enter and other automatically generated related keywords list. Mainly, what we are looking for is:

1. A list of keywords in conversion optimization domain (or your area) where we can rank
2. Particularly, we are interested in keywords that get most searches on Google (and similarly on other search engines)
3. If you want to do paid advertisements on Google (Adwords), we are looking for keywords with minimum competition, maximum search traffic and minimum cost

Enter your main keyword in tool. For example, I enter “conversion rate optimization” as the keyword and get a long list of related keywords. To derive maximum information on these keywords select ‘Show All Columns’ from the drop down (‘Choose columns to display’) towards top right.

After you click on show all columns, you will see an image like the one above. You can note we have multiple data points here:

1. Local monthly search volume. Number of monthly searches from the region you have chosen (US, India or any other region)
2. Global monthly search volume. Number of monthly searches from the whole world for that particular keyword.
3. Advertiser Competition. An indication of how popular is this keyword from sales perspective (since advertiser competition will be greatest on the keywords which generate most sales). But then you want to avoid heavy competition as it will decrease your visibility.
4. Estimated Cost Per Click. If you bid for this keyword on Google, what should you expect to pay. In this case the bid is in Indian National Rupee (INR), so don’t get alarmed

Let’s download all this information in MS Excel format to crunch some numbers. Click on Download all keywords (.csv for excel) towards the center right.

Step 2: Delete irrelevant keywords

Open the freshly downloaded list of keywords and pour through it. You will notice that it may have many irrelevant keywords. In my case, I found a lot of keywords related to currency conversion. Delete all such keywords. Aim  to have a short list of keywords which closely relate to your area of operation.

Step 3: See competition on Google for remaining keywords

In the list we have a field called advertiser competition. But that related to PPC campaigns on AdWords. For organic, natural search results (from SEO perspective) we want to know the competition on Google search. Ideally, it will be easy to rank on the keywords which have low competition.

A good proxy of competition on Google is the number of search results. So fire up Google.com and take each keyword, enter it into the search engine (you can try including the keyword inside double quotes to get finer results but searchers seldom use double quotes so best to enter keyword as it is) and note the number of search results. For example, the keyword “optimizing conversion” (without quotes) gets us 1,650,000 results while “improving conversion rates” gets us 3,930,000 results. This tells us that there is more competition for the latter keyword than the former. Make a new column in excel and for each keyword add number of search results into it. It may be bit tiring to repeat it for 30-40 odd keywords but trust me, it will be worth it.

Step 4: Do the magic!

This is the step where we define our new metrics for each keyword (using the existing columns in the excel):

Idea is that those keywords are most attractive for SEO which get  most searches on Google but have least competition.

This ranks keywords on bringing most traffic through AdWords CPC campaigns.

This ranks keywords in your area which will be most pocket friendly.

This ranks keywords in your area which will be most pocket friendly and which bring in most traffic.

So, you simply add these four new columns and do simple calculations in Excel to get values for these four new metrics. (Tip: only do the calculation for the first keyword, drag the results down to all the rows to get values for all keywords automatically).

Step 5: Sort the columns to get most important keywords

Now all you have to do is sort the columns for Organic Attractiveness and PPC Attractiveness to know which keywords are best for SEO and PPC Campaigns respectively. In my case, for SEO (Organic Attractiveness) I get following keywords at the top:

Click here to download the excel file.

I marked some keywords in green to indicate the keywords which I think will turn out to be most useful. Red keyword (“conversion rate”) is too broad to be useful. And I left topmost keyword (“conversion tracking”) uncolored because Wingify doesn’t only concentrate in this to justify maximum effort into optimizing the website for it.

In the end I get keywords “landing page optimization”, “conversion rate optimization” and “conversion optimization” which will yield maximum benefit from SEO perspective. If I choose to advertise on Google through Adwords, all I have to do is to sort the column PPC Attractiveness (Volume or Budget or Overall) to get list of keywords on which I will be bidding first.

Let me know if you find this strategy useful by leaving a comment below.

Posted in SEO on December 30th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

All right, let’s admit it: increasing conversion rate on a website is still a voodoo science for many. With new technologies and terminology being thrown around (on Twitter, blogs, etc.) every other day, it doesn’t get any easier for people just starting to understand conversion optimization. In this post, I will try to briefly talk about all technologies and methodologies being used today for extracting more juice out of existing traffic:

• Web Analytics – the first step is to actually measure conversion rate of your website. Tools like Google Analytics,  Clicky and Woopra make is quite simple to define your website goals and then measure the goal completion rate. Different tools may have different terminology but essentially every web analytics tool worth its salt with have ability to track conversions, knowledge of which is an absolute must. Think of it in this way: how can you optimize a metric if you don’t know what the metric’s value is. So if you are not measuring your conversion rate, you should forget about improving it.
• A/B Split Testing – these tools allow you to make different versions of your website in order to test which of it leads to maximum downloads, sales, signups or conversions. Main idea is to keep testing your ideas of what works and what doesn’t, instead of relying on intuition.  With introduction of easy to use tools such as (our very own) Visual Website Optimizer, split testing has become a very simple, yet extremely effective methodology. Nothing beats increasing conversions than testing your ideas against hard, cold facts of your visitor clicks. Google Website Optimizer is another tool for split testing which is available free of cost, though it does require technical understanding of HTML, page tagging, etc.
• Behavioral Targeting – this methodology requires extensive planning and segmenting of visitors into different groups to show customized offers/pricing/promotions. Ultimate idea of BT is that you  tailor  your website according to behavior of the visitor (e.g. number of pageviews, entry page, etc.). BTBuckets and our labs tools are the ones which let you try and use behavioral targeting for conversion optimization.
• Clickmaps and heatmaps – these tools let you visualize which parts of your website get most clicks and which parts don’t get even a single click. Such tools come handy when you have doubt that perhaps your call-to-action is not very visible on the page. What these tools will tell you that while your button isn’t getting any click, people are clicking onto your bullet points (which are not hyperlinked) in search of more information. So perhaps it is a good idea to hyperlink those bullet points. Crazyegg and Clickdensity are some of the most affordable tools  that let you generate a clickmap of your website.
• Visitor movies – tools such as Clicktale and Userfly give you a magical power of peering over your visitor’s shoulder to see what exactly they are doing on your site. What these tools enable you to do is to see each and every action by your website visitors. The tools will literally replay all mouse moves, clicks, keypresses that a visitor does.  Though it ultimately becomes cumbersome and tiring to watch 100s of visitor movies, this method is still a fantastic way to gain qualitative insights.
• Voice of customer – when every other method fails, you should resort to surveying your visitors:  why exactly they didn’t make the purchase, was your pitch clear, did they understand what you are offering. All other tools tell you what is happening on your website, customer feedback tools such as Kampyle or GetSatisfation tell you why it is happening.
• Live Chat – taking surveying users idea to next level, live chat tools (Olark and  numerous other tools) actually let you chat with your live website visitors. They can ask you questions or you can initiate the conversation. Having a live chat feature on your landing page and sales page can help boost conversions because visitors may have N number of doubts which your page may not be clearing; chatting with you can answer most of their concerns.

Apart from these categories, numerous other tools in search analytics, PPC analytics, affiliate management, etc. are available but the  above ones are the most useful ones. Even amongst the above, I will argue web analytics and split testing tools should be an absolute must for anybody serious about improving his/her website conversions.

Leave a comment here if you think you have additional toolssuggestions for conversion rate optimization which I missed here.

Posted in Conversion Optimization on December 18th, 2009 | No Comments »

Sick of tearing your hair for doing a simple A/B test?  Do you seek help of highly paid consultants simply for testing whether a red button would increase conversions? Do you continuously churn ideas for improving your website but your developers are sick and tired of your regular code changes to the site? Do the terms page tagging, HTML and Javascript give you nightmares?

Despair no more, Ta-da! Introducing Visual Website Optimizer – a hassle-free A/B, split and multivariate testing tool that you can use with your eyes closed. Okay, a bit of exaggeration there but honestly VWO makes split testing super fun and dead simple.  Some of the VWO features which promise to make your life much, much easier:

• Visually design website versions – you simply type in the URL of the site you want to optimize and your website loads into a visual designer where you can pick different elements (such as ad copy, headline, buy now button, etc.)
• Word-like WYSIWYG editor for making variations – once you are done picking important website elements, you use a WYSIWYG editor for making variations for it. Change text, upload images, change text color or do any other change you would like to test
• Choose a goal for your website – want to increase sales? increase downloads or signups? reduce bounce rate? Simply specify what goal you would like to optimize on the website for and you are done
• Add two simple snippets of code to your website – no page tagging, no code fiddling. Simple code needs to be added to the website and that too just for the first time. After that you can create unlimited number of tests from the interface without ever having to touch the code again. Hows that for simplicity?

We won’t do self-praise here (even though we would love to), so here is what one of the initial beta testers has to say:

“[Visual Website Optimizer] does it so disruptively, embarrassingly better than Google does, that it puts a smile on my face” – Patrick McKenzie

Of course, he is referring to a Google optimizer product you probably know about. Ask me privately on email if you don’t

Now for some Good News.

I’ve got 50 free invites for this blog’s readers. Use the invite code “wingify-blog” (without quotes) while signing up for a free account here: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com Use it or share it, but do it fast as they won’t last long.

Also, you shouldn’t miss watching a quick (4 minute) video below which shows just how simple it really is to start increasing your conversion rates using Visual Website Optimizer:

Let me know your feedback on the new tool! Did you like it? Bugs, comments or praises – all sorts of feedback is welcome. Leave a comment here or email me at paras@wingify.com

Posted in Wingify News on December 14th, 2009 | No Comments »

Just a quick post. We are too glad to be shortlisted for most innovative company in the domain of web analytics and optimization. You can see the whole shortlist here.

Posted in Uncategorized on December 12th, 2009 | No Comments »

There are number of metrics that startups and websites obsess on. Some of the most overanalyzed yet non-useful metrics are number of visitors or pageviews on a website. The reason startups get obsessive about them is that these metrics are easy to use and are no brainer. Just slap some code on the website and you are ready to get insights on your startup’s progress, supposedly.

In fact, there are three metrics that a startup (or for that matter, any website or online business) should single mindedly obsess on accurately measuring and hence optimizing for:

1. Monthly growth in number of paid users – what is the number of paid users you have this month v/s you had last month? Is the difference positive month after month? Focusing on growing number of paid users month after month should be top priority because it is what ultimately brings more revenue and gives you confidence to achieve even more success. Any growth less than 50% should be a cause of worry for startups because during a startup’s early days you are looking for hyper-growth. Eventually the number would stabilize as the business stabilizes but during the first year or so target for more than 50% growth for sure. And if by chance, growth starts going towards the negative territory, you should get alarmed and act accordingly.
2. Retention rate of existing paid users – how many of your existing paid users canceled your product/service this month? Is that figure decreasing month after month? This metric is complementary to the metric above (growth in paid users) because while the above metric helps you focus on acquiring new customers, this one helps you focus on retaining existing customers. If customer growth rate is high but retention rate is low, then no matter how many new customers you get this month, next month you are back to square one. If, on the other hand, you have good retention rate, you will build great momentum month after month. You should definitely go out of your way to retain existing customers. If they leave, do (polite) exit interviews. Ask them why they leave and fix it in your offering. A good retention rate that you should be targeting at would be 75-100%. This means no more than one fourth of your existing customers should cancel your product or service in a month.
3. Monthly Revenue – the amount of revenue you are bringing in month after month. This is a n obviously important metric but a lot of startups just don’t focus on it as much as they would like to. Instead they start focusing on number of visitors or other such proxies. Monthly revenue ties together the above two metrics plus one more important ingredient: cross-selling or up-selling. If you are acquiring new customers and your existing customers are getting retained, are they purchasing more stuff from you than they currently do?  As your startup evolves, you and your customers should move up the value chain and you should continually find new avenues to provide value to your existing retained customers.  And in the process, make more revenue per customer.

The three strategies of: a) getting new customers, b) retaining existing ones and c) up-selling and cross selling new offerings are not new. Management gurus have been discussing them for ages. Even then startups and websites get drowned in a flood of metrics and forget that they are there to make money.  They should better be optimizing how to make more money. And only way to optimize that is to focus on the right metrics. Do you agree?

Posted in Conversion Optimization on December 2nd, 2009 | 3 Comments »

Let’s face the truth; Alexa is not the best source of traffic data out there on the Internet. Plus, it does not have statistics on conversion rates. But, hey, Alexa is free and we are going to use it to benchmark (approximately) the conversion rates for your competition. Here is how to do it two simple steps:

Step 1. Establish industry norms using your actual conversion rate data

Suppose you are SEOMoz (I am using this website as an example and have no real data for them) and you sell paid tools for SEO. Let’s suppose your current conversion rate is a conservative 4% (again, hypothetical data) and you want to estimate how your competitor SEO Book is doing.

You and your competitors (since it is the same industry after all) follow a similar trend when it comes to relationship between conversion rates and other site metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, and page views per user. In this step, we try to calculate values for parameters which relate conversion rate to all these metrics. Using your actual conversion rate data and the stats that Alexa shows about your website, calculate X, Y and Z as the following:

• Your Conversion Rate = X * (1 / Bounce Rate as shown by Alexa )
• Your Conversion Rate = Y * Time Spent on Site as shown by Alexa (in seconds)
• Your Conversion Rate = Z * Page views / user as shown by Alexa

The reason we don’t use your actual bounce rate, time spent and page views data is because you don’t have that data for your competitors. You only know what Alexa says about your website and what Alexa says about your competitors. So it is better to work on the Alexa data that is freely available and uses the same methodology all across.

As an example of SEOMoz, Alexa tells the bounce rate, time spent on site and page views / user is 50.7%, 219.7 seconds and 3.2 respectively. Using this data, we get the values of X, Y and Z as:

• X = 4% / (1 / 50.7 %) = 201.6
• Y = 4% / 219.7 = 0.018
• Z = 4% / 3.2 = 1.25

Step 2.  Use the parameters to estimate competitor’s conversion rate

Now we have obtained the parameters which relate your actual conversion rate to the data that Alexa shows about your website. Next step is to simply use those parameters on your competitor’s data (as shown by Alexa) to get estimates of their conversion rate.

Competitor Conversion Rate:

• Estimate 1 = X * (1 / Competitor Bounce Rate as shown by Alexa)
• Estimate 2 = Y * Competitor Time spent on Site as shown by Alexa
• Estimate 3 = Z * Competitor Page views / user as shown by Alexa

Finally, to get an idea of what their real conversion rate, we simply average the estimates.

Competitor Conversion Rate = (Estimate 1 + Estimate 2 + Estimate 3) / 3

Continuing the SEOMoz example, if we were to estimate the conversion rates for SEOBook, we calculate 3 estimates of conversion rate (based on the data shown by Alexa for SEOBook):

• Estimate 1 = 201.6 * (1/69.4) = 2.90%
• Estimate 2 = 0.018 * 135 = 2.43%
• Estimate 3 = 1.25 * 2.43 = 3.0%

As you can observe, the estimates are quite close. Hence, we can be pretty confident that the actual conversion rate is close to the average of these three estimates, which is:

Estimated conversion rate = 2.77%

Of course, the above estimated value is only valid if the real conversion rate for SEOMoz that I assumed (4%) is true, which may or may not be the case as I don’t have access to their real web analytic data.

Summary

Simply plug in your conversion rates in the above methodology and you should have pretty good estimate on how you are doing as compared to your competitors. You can also try to triangulate your estimates by using other data sources (apart from Alexa) such as Compete.com or Quantcast.

Do let me know if you find this approach helpful.  As always, feedback and comments appreciated. Want a tool to automate all this analysis for you?

PS: The way I define Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate, they are not related.  But the way Alexa defines, the two metrics are definitely related.

Posted in Conversion Optimization on November 24th, 2009 | No Comments »

Lately, I have got quite a few requests for how effective call to action buttons are created in Photoshop. Though having persuasive text as call to action is important, button shape, size, color and style can also make a tremendous difference in conversion rates. So, here goes the list of free resources on creating buttons that convert and examples to get you started:

Photoshop Resources

• Make A Big, Beautiful Call-To-Action Button In Photoshop [Sitepoint.com]
• Create Clean and Fresh Call-to-Action Button + Embossing Text Effect in Photoshop [PSDVault.com]
• How to Design Call-to-Action Buttons with Photoshop [Woorkup.com]
• How to Create a Slick and Clean Button in Photoshop [SixRevisions.com]
• 30 Useful Photoshop Buttons and Badges Tutorials [SpeckyBoy.com]

Ideas for Buttons

• Call to Action Buttons: Examples and Best Practices [SmashingMagazine.com]
• Good Call to Action Buttons [UXBooth.com]
• 10 Techniques For An Effective ‘Call To Action’ [BoagWorld.com]
• 5 Tips For Creating An Effective Call To Action Button [SitePoint.com]
• 57 Strong Call to Action Buttons [xdxy.com]

This list is an ever expanding list, so feel free to suggest more (free) resources for call to action buttons. Leave a comment and I will add it in the list.

Posted in Conversion Optimization on November 18th, 2009 | No Comments »

Lot of people inquire about what an ideal bounce rate or conversion rate is and if their website metrics are in the right range. One size doesn’t fit all. In this post, I fish out industry standard conversion rates and bounce rates. Though your only competition should be you, having an idea of  industry metrics might help some.

Sources for these figures:

• Fireclick Index
• Anil Batra’s survey of Typical Bounce Rates [PDF]
• Coremetrics Monthly Industry Reports [PDF]

What is your bounce rate or conversion rate? Does it match with your industry average?

Posted in Conversion Optimization on November 17th, 2009 | No Comments »

To set the definitions right, it is generally agreed that bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who exit the website immediately after arrival. Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete website goal, which may be a signup, subscription, purchase, download, etc.

Most people believe that bounce rate and conversion rate is inversely proportional. That is, if bounce rate goes up, conversion rate would go down and if bounce rate goes down, your conversion rate will go up (because apparently you will have more interested visitors). On the face of it, this seems to be true and hence the proposition that fixing the bounce rate OR the conversion rate alone will achieve business goals seems to be true.

Sadly, this relationship between bounce rate and conversion rate is an illusion. To understand that there is NO relationship between these two metrics, you need to know what bounce rate really is. Does the bounce rate talk about visitors who viewed just one page on your website? Or should it capture more nuanced idea of visitors who stumbled across your website by chance? Most web analytics tools define bounce rate as the former: that is, a single visit is considered a bounce. Bounce rate, defined in such a manner, conveys completely wrong information.

Increasingly, visitors are becoming goal oriented.  For example, if they need to see your shipping policy, they will Google it, read about it and leave your website.  That visit is not a bounce: visitor got what he was looking for. Similarly, most of you will exit after reading this post for say 3-5 minutes. Do I consider you a bounced visitor? No, not at all.  You were engaged for a long time, how could you be classified as a bounced visitor. However, the web analytic tool I use will classify you as a bounce because you just read one page on the website. Realize that bounce rate which you are reading out from your tool is not what it says. Scrutinize definitions and understand what the metric is saying to put it in the right context.

So, what is the best way to represent bounce rate? I think bounce rate is best captured by measuring what percentage of visitors spent less than 30 seconds on your website. Any time  spent which is less will signal that visitors arrived on your website by chance and is NOT at all interested in what you are offering, hence quickly went back to what he was doing. All other visitors spending >30 seconds, even if they just see one page, should be classified as non-bounced visitors. To summarize:

Bounce rate = Number of visitors who spent < 30 seconds on the website /
Total number of visitors

Unfortunately, measuring exact time spent by a visitor by web analytics tools is difficult and most of them will approximate this number. That said, I think bounce rate should be defined by time spent on website and not by pageviews.

Coming back to conversion rate, how is it related to bounce rate? As traditional thinking goes, the visitors who bounced bring the conversion rate down as they have no chance of completing the website goal. I fully agree that bounced visitors (by definition) have no chance of completing the conversion goal. Then, I ask, why to include bounced visitors in conversion calculations at all? To truly reflect the progress you have been making on your website, conversion rate calculations should NOT include bounced visitors. Bounced visitors never really cared about your website, non-bounced are the ones who engaged and spent time going through what you are offering. Conversion rate should capture how good a job your website is doing for getting those visitors (who care about your website) to complete the goals. Conversion rate, ideally, should be calculated as following:

Conversion rate = Number of non-bounced visitors who completed the goal  /
Total number of non-bounced visitors

So, now we have two metrics which are not at all related to each other: bounce rate and conversion rate. Both of these metrics convey different information regarding how you are performing. Hence, both of these metrics should be separately optimized. Optimizing bounce rate is for convincing more number of people to engage with your website. Optimizing conversion rate is for convincing the visitors who are already engaged to complete your website goals. Reducing bounce rate AND increasing conversion rate are two different activities.  Remember that.

What are your views on relation between conversion rate and bounce rate? How do you and your web analytics tool measures bounce rate?

Posted in Conversion Optimization on November 12th, 2009 | 5 Comments »