monitoring

Smack in the face with numbers

Amazon tested a form with two fields, two buttons and one link. Couldn’t be simpler could it? The form was preventing customers from buying. After investigation the designers changed one button from ‘register’ to ‘continue’. 

The results: the number of customers purchasing went up by 45%, in 12 months this generated an additional $300m. Yes I said $300m. Don’t believe me, read Jared Spool’s article on User Interface Engineering.

Why should I test?

How does anybody know the best possible page layout and design to cater for the needs of thousands of different visitors? Unless you have a zero bounce rate and 100% click through, your page can be further optimised.

Plus personal opinion and politics always rear their ugly heads. With the best intentions, people often second guess what customers want because they “know the business”.

If your finance bods are tightening the purse strings (after all it’s still not rosy out there in the economy) then give them the basic equation. Take your worst performing page that has high visitor numbers then project the revenue uplift of conversion increases of 10%, 20%, 30% etc. Show them the numbers.

How should I test?

Knowing what to test requires analysis and the understanding of relevance. You might have a page with 100% bounce, should you automatically invest in testing to improve? Not necessarily. What if that page has only two visitors per month? Even with 100% conversion the revenue return is minimal. What if that page is a static store information page with contact phone number? Bounce could be a good thing as you are directing people to the store.

So you need to find relevant pages. Build an engagement matrix for all site pages – look at visits, time on page, bounce rate, click through, conversion, revenue, average order value etc. Then filter with a relevancy formula:

Traffic * Bounce * Conversion * Average order value

Pick the pages that are losing you the most customers/money. Put these at the top of your testing plan.

If you haven’t already got a customer survey running, add it quickly. Surveygizmo is an excellent low cost solution with a Pro license at $49 per month. You can create sophisticated surveys with inbuilt logic and add them to your website as well as emailing your database. There are other tools out there but this has the best recommendations (endorsed by @OptimiseOrDie at the Econsultancy Online Marketing Masterclass event in London). I’ve used it myself – it’s intuitive and easy to publish surveys quickly.

Where do I start and what do I use?

Start with simple A/B testing. Your data analysis has told you which pages are losing you the most business. Your customer survey will highlight some of the potential reasons. Now create some hypotheses for testing.

e.g. customers said they don’t like the registration form on the checkout, it’s too complicated and the bounce rate from this page is 60%

• Create two new versions and test against the current version:
• Version one: clearer signposting & help information.
• Version two: data capture fields in two columns instead of a scrolling page.

You don’t have to spend thousands doing this. Follow these six Simple steps (even I’ve managed this!):

1. Set-up a Google Website Optimizer account for free.
2. Generate the testing code yourself.
3. Give this to your developers to add to the page.
4. Get your designer to create the test versions of the page.
5. Tell Optimizer what the URLs are.
6. Let the testing begin.

As you learn more, you can increase the sophistication of testing and embrace MVT (multivariate testing). A/B tests different versions of a page against each other, MVT tests multiple variations of elements within a page. MVT is ideal for pages with multiple elements such as text links, buttons, images, javascript functions etc.

Reports will show you which page is performing the best. You can then implement the winning page. The testing doesn’t stop there, you can then create a new test for the same page and re-run the fun.

Summary

• Testing is a simple concept – you don’t have to rely on an analytics specialist or agency
• With simple steps you can do this in-house to prove the business case
• Testing is an ongoing process – unless you’ve got 100% conversion, there is room for improvement
• Focus on pages that can deliver the greatest financial uplift – that will keep the finance bods content
• Use online forums, Google help centre & official Google Website Optimizer blog to get the basic facts and learn from others.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew

Analytics and testing experts are worth their weight in gold. However, many businesses struggle to take the first steps because they can’t afford to pay a specialist, you can implement simple A/B and MVT testing yourself to prove the business case.

Once the business case is established and your Board is behind you, it then often pays to bring in the specialists to manage a more complex MVT program, integrating this with your analytics tools to drive customer insight and commercial value.

Good luck!

Because of its runaway success and the ease with which clever developers can leverage its API, Twitter has become an industry unto itself. Every day, it seems there’s a new start-up that is incorporating an aspect of Twitter into their new product.

A lot of them aren’t all that useful. But every once in a while, one comes along that stands a real chance of surviving. My latest find that I put in that category is Trendsmap.com. 

What TrendsMap.com does is display hyperlocal trending topics geographically. In the above screen shot, you can see what the major topics are that Twitter users in the United States are talking about. Go there now and it will be different. 

This snap-shot into what is captivating a nation is an incredible tool that has applications in marketing, advertising and journalism. 

Since the United States is in the midst of college football, it’s not surprising that major players are trending regionally. Let’s look at where Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow is trending:

If you’re interesting in buying ads online, you now know what regions are probably good investments for anything Tebow-related. For journalists, this tool gives you an understanding of where a Tebow-related story might resonate. It could inform your SEO strategy for Tebow stories that go online. 

Now let’s go even deeper. Say you’re interested only in what is being said in Orlando, Florida about Tim Tebow:

At the top of the Tebow topic is a description of why that topic is important by giving some background. Under that are links to relevant news articles. And below that are most recent Tweets about Tim Tebow from users in Orlando, Florida. At the side you see a map of where Orlando is, the top trending links by Orlando users, and the top trending photos and videos by Orlando users.

The tracking aspect is dependent upon the location that users input into their profiles. However that may not be the case for long. Twitter is nearly ready to launch a geolocation feature for Tweets. That would give a service like Trendsmap a huge boost and make it more useful than it already is.

You’ve just published a study on how tag placement affects websites. What were the key findings?


The takeaway is that the standard way to include conversion pixels in iframe container tags can cause a serious loss of conversion data. 

People have assumed that third party cookies were the main reason for the discrepancies between third parties and the client’s own data, but it actually depends more on page download speed and how the tags are included in the page. 

As well as losing conversion data, this means behavioural targeting pixels are not fired which further hinders the marketing optimisation process.

The second surprise was just how impatient people are. We found that on the publisher sites that took part (www.hecklerspray.com and www.askaprice.com) they appeared to lose around 10% of their traffic for every second the page took to load. If tags typically take 1/10th of a second to load then each tag would lose you around 1% of your traffic (if they are found at the top of the page).

How are tags typically added to web pages? 


Where the client owns the relationship they are generally coded directly into the page at the bottom. 

Some web analytics vendors suggest putting tags at the top of the page, so as to be able to measure the page download / abandonment times but this needs to be thought about because it could have a negative effect on user experience, losing traffic as a result. It’s a good demonstration of Heisenberg’s uncertainly principle, by measuring these things you are changing the result.

Where agencies own the relationship, ad serving container tag solutions from the main ad serving solutions are used. The most popular of these – Doubleclick Floodlight – writes out tags within an iframe. This method came out worst in our tests if placed at the bottom of the page.

What are the main problem areas?


Well the proliferation of tags in general and the inability of traditional content management systems to manage them is the root cause of the problem. Added to this there has been a lack of evidence as to what best practice is, so people either rely on speculation or hearsay or just don’t think about how tags should be deployed at all.

Both of the sites that took part had tags from solutions that were no longer being used. On one of the sites, tags for a free analytics tool that was no longer being used were adding 10% to the page download times.

Tag requests tend to be rushed through at the last minute, this leads to a whole host of issues and most marketers are just happy to get them on the page. The whole issues sits on the line between marketing and IT, although most of the IT people I’ve spoken to are well aware of the issues and put the tags at the bottom of the page.

How big of an issue is this? Is it a widespread problem?

It’s something that just about everyone needs to think about and it’s certainly an issue for the companies we come across. 

Certainly the free container tag solutions have become prolific amongst display advertisers but how big of a problem will vary depending on their brand, value proposition and page load speed.

What are the threats to publishers and website owners, who fail to optimise tag deployment?


As data is becoming an ever more important part of the online marketing ecosystem, leaking data is leaking money.

The threats to publishers are that they are losing traffic if tags block content that users perceive they can get from elsewhere, and for those publishers who are paid for their data by behavioural targeting companies there is an even more direct loss of revenue.

Similar problems apply for clients regarding losing traffic by having too many tags in the page or tags that load slowly. Furthermore, poor data can cloud the picture of online marketing effectiveness and take the edge off their online marketing optimisation.

How do you think media buyers / advertisers will react to this? What do they need to be aware of in future?


One senior agency technology person I’ve spoken to said that they were hardly surprised and that the study explains an awful lot about discrepancies they were already aware off. 

It is something of a double-edged sword for them because on the one hand it could help resolve discrepancy issues that can waste a lot of time, but on the other hand it challenges the free and easy approach.

My main recommendation is to be aware of how performance issues with client websites can affect data loss. Where appropriate they should suggest the client considers putting the tags at the top of the page body. The case study provides a good business case to start the conversation.

What is the recommended best practice in this area? 


As the study was only on two sites my first recommendation would be to conduct a controlled test. For companies wanting to do this themselves then they should email us for the full report. This includes the code and methodology we used.

One of the global authorities on web analytics told me: “Every responsible web analytics vendor recommends adding the JavaScript tag at the bottom of the page. The reason is simple: data comes second, the customer experience comes first.” In general I agree with this statement but it’s a question of percentages. If adding the tags higher up has little relative impact then it might provide valuable information that could be used to build a business case, to secure investment towards optimising the pages or new hardware.

I would move my container tag solution to the top of the page body and put my web analytics code at the bottom. I would also set up monitoring on the container tag provider to ensure that response times are acceptable and replace it with another provider if the answer comes back negative. 

Additionally, I would move any tags that are in the page currently – and which can be served within an iframe – into the container tag solution. Tags served within an iframe will not block the rest of the page from loading, so I would only need to monitor the container tag solution to ensure user experience is not being affected.

Obviously I’d just avoid all these problems by whipping all the tags off the page, putting them inside TagMan and having just one tag on the page!

Did you learn anything else from the study?

The implications of latency on page abandonment came as real surprise to me. Traffic loss per second is a key metric that every site owner needs to know as well as how likely visitors are to return subsequently. This information makes it is possible to create a sound business case for investment in the wide variety of solutions that can improve page load times (and therefore the user experience). 

Marketers need access to good quality site monitoring data, not just so the traffic they are driving to the site converts but also so they know about it.

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You can grab a copy of the two-page summary (PDF) from the TagMan website. A full copy of the research is available on request.

Whereabouts you are at as a multichannel retailer, and how long have you been working on this joined up approach?

Jessops has successfully sold through a variety of channels for a number of years. More recently we are enjoying a period of refocus by pulling retail, direct and e-commerce together under an integrated message and approach. This will hopefully ensure that customer experiences a seamless transaction regardless of route.

Examples of the strategic join behind this include ‘www.jessops.com’ branding, debuting across our recently refurbished store on New Oxford Street.

We have also re-aligned the ecommerce team to have closer cross functional integration throughout the business and all channel stakeholders feed into a steering group who drive multi-channel objectives.

Is the adoption of a multichannel approach determined by consumers, as opposed to positioning Jessops strategically as a business? Is it something you simply had to do?

There is inevitably both push and pull on this. However, purely from an ecommerce and direct view, consumer electronics were one of the first categories to emerge for sale via ecommerce channels over a decade ago. This in part explains why they participate so highly within categories of web sales.

An additional factor therefore includes the space in which Jessops operate being highly populated. As pure-play entrants emerged Jessops repositioned itself accordingly. Customers remain the principal driver of our approach and we therefore position ourselves to be where our customers are.

Our Photo category, which comprises digital prints, photobooks and photo gifts is a superb ‘internet’ category. Digital customers gravitate to our online store and certainly growth in this area fuels ongoing investment in development.  

Are multichannel businesses more efficient? How does a cross-platform business impact on team structure?

My experience in pure-play and multichannel tells me that if it’s executed well then absolutely yes. However, scale is vital to achieve this and a straightforward example would be our ‘collect at store’ proposition. This saves us the shipping fee when customer collects. It works as we give the customer 211 places where they can collect, whereas if we only provided 5 or 10 they likely wouldn’t.

At Jessops we moved our development team out of e-commerce and into Business Systems in an effort to align projects into achieving unified objectives, principally because of our back-end configuration. Similarly when scoping initiatives we are able to split test across all channels before committing to implementation. The benefits of split testing are far reaching as key success criteria can be reliably forecast.

Naturally, cross-platform challenges exist, however operating a solus team structure for design and marketing – plus merchandising and content – allows the implementation of a web focused and optimised approach, which can often run perpendicular to traditional methods in their application.

Do you price goods differently online, where price seems to matter more for electronic products, versus offline, where there tends to be a premium? What’s your thinking in this area?

Jessops position as the UK’s largest specialist multichannel retailer of photographic equipment has been established through consistently delivering a superb customer experience. We achieve this by employing passionate photographic enthusiasts, stocking a broad range of products and offering competitive pricing. Where we don’t win on price we’ll be close enough for the customer to feel value in the transaction given our focus on great service, as well as the availability that our supplier relationships allow.  

Owing to the development of the multichannel approach we do offer parity between most on/offline pricing, however we do operate price differentials on selected lines at selected times as we recognise that we don’t simply have one customer.

This can also work in reverse where we offer exclusive pricing in-store and we work hard to ensure the right products reach the right customer channel. Given the margins on consumer electronics we have to look to more creative ways to differentiate than on price alone.

Bundles of products are one such way to differentiate the offering. By constructing new SKUs comprising tactical lines we are able to drive different offers to different customers. This allows us to flex the margins we are able to achieve without compromising on brand promise.

Which channel would you prefer a customer to buy from and why? Is it a straight trade-off between profit and data?

Each channel present commercial benefits and challenges. For example retail customers turn inventory faster and settle immediately, however the cost of a sale is typically higher. Online orders are naturally less involved however the fraud rates are higher.

As such I am more interested in where we can build incremental customers, and – since e-commerce is expected to account for a bigger slice of group sales in the next three years – I am positioning to find them online.

Channel migration is interesting for us given our huge volume of retail customers. Our challenge is to ‘communitise’ them and using online tools is an efficient and personalised way to achieve this.

Similarly, collect at store, returns and repairs drive online customers into store where the experience builds their value perception and develops the multi-channel awareness further.

To what degree does offline drive online sales, and vice versa? E.g. catalogues to web sales. PPC to shop visits. Print ads to telephone enquiries. Do you measure your marketing efforts to this level of detail?

As a brand with high recognition, jessops.com significantly benefits from natural traffic, a significant driver of which comes from stores. Owing to this – as well as the nature and extent of our traditional marketing – it means that accurate measurement is eminently difficult.

We are able to measure with far greater levels of accuracy what proportion of customers use the web. We believe the photographic market use the web for about two thirds of research before going into a store. At Jessops our research tells us that about half of all instore customers use jessops.com.

How do you measure customer satisfaction? Do you measure it across all channels? How do the various channels measure up?

Yes, all channels are monitored and measured and I am currently implementing a revised CRM module as part of our multi-channel development. This will ensure that we measure every customer touchpoint with the same metric.

Stores have earned their reputation for personal service and we therefore receive extremely few issues from this channel. When they do occur they are typically fed into the store by customer, allowing a very high first time fix rate.

Online and Direct also receive relatively low incidences of customer dissatisfaction. Occurrences usually relate to a web bug or user journey feedback. Interestingly, we witness different approaches from customers depending on their purchase channel reflecting market research results on the variance of our customer.

How do you manage returns? Can customers who buy online process refunds in their local store? Any observations?

A principal value of our multi-channel approach is convenience so online customers can have a seamless relationship with a store. We can either collect the goods, swap them or invite the customer to visit any store to return or exchange an item. With 211 stores this is a compelling offer. It naturally requires a critical mass of stores to be able to achieve this with any meaning to a customer.

In reality, we find that an informed purchase yields far fewer returns and are therefore confident of our relaxed exchange policy.
Future developments will include the ability for customers to process their return online, regardless of purchase channel, and receive live updates on repairs.

Has mobile excited you yet? Is Jessops employing mobile as a sales / marketing / communication / retention channel? What are your thoughts in this area?

Mobile generates huge excitement for me however Jessops only currently use it to tell customers that goods are ready for store collection, and to confirm order dispatch, though I know that’s more than many other retailers offer.

Having worked in telecoms I’m intimately aware both of the emerging technology, penetration and the likely returns on mCommerce. I totally agree with Graham Charlton’s Econsultancy blog post on this subject. Despite the talk about mobile, I’ve not yet seen anyone deliver it particularly well though a recent personal experience saw my courier inviting me to text back to re-schedule my delivery which was surprisingly welcomed.

With the increased penetration of Winmo and RIM smart-phones and most recently iPhone and Android it is a priority to optimise the site for mobile traffic.
I’m particularly keen to implement a mobile store locator and an order update application given the typically remote application for these queries.