After recently attending the SES 2010 conference I have finally found the time to upload my blogpost on Brian Eisenberg session on How to Increase Conversion Rates. It was a great session by Brian and I hope you take as much from the tips as I did.

Everyone loves a secret. Some people keep secrets, others like to gossip. Similar to the latter I couldn’t hold this one in any longer, so unlike most secrets here is one that can really benefit you. You ready? Ok, come closer…

Did you know the average conversion rate of a website is 3%

Even after all the vast increased capabilities of technology, design and analytics in the last 10 years it still hasn’t improved. Why? Read below and see.

1.    Communicate UVPs/UCPs (unique value propositions & unique campaign propositions)
Online users on average decide whether they want to purchase your product or service within 7 seconds so ensure you communicate your UVP/UCP simply and effectively

2.    Persuasive and Relevant Offers
In the B2C environment messages like ‘Free Shipping’ has a very small cost but a massive impact on conversion rates, surprisingly even scrapping a few £’s. For the B2B environment, consider ‘Free Trials’ as a persuasive offer.

3.    Reinforce Offers Sitewide
Surprising how many websites reinforce offers across the website except for the most important page – the checkout. Jacob Nielson said “Don’t make them think”, if you make them question whether they missed a stage and do not qualify for the offer then you are going to lose a sale. Customers make a decision on every click.

4.    They Maintain Scent
The term and concept ‘scent’ was discovered by Xerox in the late 90s. It essentially details the clues that a website can give to ensure users follow the right path. This includes imagery and colours as they can be visual clues that separate ages are connected. It is important not to focus on one page but the whole journey.

5.    Strong First Impression
Every type of advertising needs to create a human connection. It is widely believed that advertising mediums and even human interaction has 8 seconds before you form an opinion.

6.    Appeal to multiple personas/segments
Online users can be placed within 4 individual character types; competitive, spontaneous, methodical, humanistic.

Competitive
-    Price orientated
-    Know what they are looking for

Spontaneous
-    Make quick decisions
-    Look for clickable features

Methodical
-    Most time spent on pages
-    Analyse every detail

Humanistic
-    Look for human elements (reviews)
-    Like images of product/service

7.    They don’t do Slice/Dice Optimisation
The issue is time and resources; you need to look at the opportunity cost of implementing multi variations. The best way to test is for impact not variation and this is best suited to creating hypothesis such as ‘if A changes then would affect will this have on B’.

8.    Leverage Social Commerce
It is important to not only listen but to utilise the voice of the customer. Reviews make HUGE impacts on the conversion rate of websites.

9.    Using Social Voices in Navigation
By adding features such as ‘rating’ in the navigation it allows customers to view honest and peer opinions which is great since 78% of users trust peer reviews.

10.   Use Social Voices in Promotions
Let customer voices shape the content you write. By analysing customer conversations you can review strengths and weaknesses of your brand/product and address these issues in promotional content. Additionally, utilising user generated content in emails works well to increase conversions.

11.    Use Social Voices to Build Credibility
By implementing user generated content you increase your authenticity which will have a direct effect on decreasing bounce rate.

12.    Use Social Voices for Feedback and Research
Jacob Nielson states that “5 people can identify 80% of problems on a website” Ensure you use the free tools or undertake studies to highlight usability issues within your site. If you search Google for “69 free tools” you can find great resources.

13.    Use Persuasive Principles like Scarcity
Utilising persuasive statements such as “until stocks last”, or “for a limited time” can help drive conversions. This is especially important for spontaneous buyer types.

14.    Make Forms Engaging
Just because you managed to get users this far it doesn’t mean you should stop paying attention to the little details. The brand colours and design should be kept consistent so users know they are on the right path.
It is also a strong recommendation that you should you the thank you page as an opportunity to up sell your product or service.

15.    Provide Point of Action Assurances
Ensure that when users enquire they receive an assurance of a time when they will be contacted. Leads are shown to lose effectiveness by 6% after 1 hour delayed response time.

16.   Keep You in the Process
Don’t necessarily take people to the basket once clicked.

17.    Consider Email Preview
Ensure that the message you are trying to portray in emails can be read without downloading images. A large percentage of people with email will disregard emails if they have to download images.

18.    Budget for Experience
Clients will often spend budget on methods which aim to drive traffic to websites yet will debate whether to spend the same amount of time on website testing. Prioritise what is more important, increasing traffic by % or increasing conversions by %

You should build a better customer experience. Amazon run over 400 tests at any given time and are constantly monitoring what changes could positively affect their business.

19.    Utilise a system for Prioritization
When making changes to your website use a simple methods which highlights the ‘impact’ over ‘resources needed’. This will let you assess what changes can be made with relatively small effort and can let you plan further changes with your resources.

20.    They make data driven design decisions
Make educated and informed decisions based on data.

21.    How to execute Rapidly
The key to online is change. Websites need to be flexible and react to changes in the online environment.

5 steps which would help you move forward and see real progress:
1)     Identify problems, identify high bounce and exit rate
2)     Create a to do list
3)     Document your hypothesis
4)     Prioritise your to do list
5)     Start testing

This month, I was profiled in Sage Pay’s Moving Money magazine, which is quite exciting in itself. But in addition to interviewing me they also sent a Photographer; Will Amlot to do the photography to go with the profile.  To be honest, I thought this would be a guy with his camera just quickly snapping a few photos, boy was I wrong, Will and his assistant rocked up with two crates of photography equipment and rigged up in the communal area of our offices. I must admit I quite enjoyed the photo session, and I loved the “oh so forgiving” camera lenses even more. Will was fabulous and made me feel quite at ease. In addition to all the photographs he also did this video interview with me; about setting up my own business and general chat about the search industry. As usual it didn’t take me long to get me ranting about Search and business.

So for anyone that is remotely intrested in my ramblings, here’s the video:

A quick post to welcome our new Verve Search employee; Freya Jones. Freya has been working in Search for 2 years, mostly within Pay Per Click adverising. At Verve Search she will be doing both PPC and SEO and of course also some Social Media. When I interviewed Freya it was clear from the start that she was going to fit in well with the Verve Search team. She has bundles of passion and drive and most importantly; she’s excited about search. In fact, she wrote her first “paper” on Search Engines when she was only 10 years old, how cool is that??!

So from everyone at Verve Search; Welcome Freya, let’s kick some traffic butt!

Follow Freya on Twitter!

We are turning 1 year on the 28th January, and to celebrate we are giving away 2 places to our SEO Training Course.  Worth £499 per place!

Interested in the chance of WINNING a place at the SEO Training Course on the 28th Jan, 2010? ALL you need to do is FOLLOW us on Twitter AND retweet the following:

RT @VerveSearch We are giving away 2 places to a 1 Day SEO Training Course on the 28th Jan, to enter visit http://is.gd/644WV

We will pick 2 winners on Friday (15th January) and contact you via DM on twitter.

NB! The place is not transferable and you must be available on the 28th January 2010. The prize does not include transport to the Verve Search offices, which is in Kingston Upon Thames (20 min from Waterloo station, London)

Click Here to view full details on the 1 Day SEO Training Course

Are you running your own PPC campaign? Has Google told you it’s as easy as 1 2 3? Even gave you £50 to start spending?

I’m shocked at how many advertisers take the bait, it really isn’t as easy as 1 2 3. I’m not saying PPC advertising is ‘rocket science’, but what I AM saying is that Google makes it look too easy. I believe businesses are wasting bucket loads of cash on Google AdWords for traffic that is NOT relevant.

The misconception that Google AdWords is still based on an auction model is blinding people. You might think when bidding for the keyword “office furniture” your ad will only show up when someone types this keyword? WRONG. The default setting within your AdWords account can also make your ad appear when someone searches for: “office design”, “cheap furniture”, “office furniture designers”, possibly even appearing for “Ricky Gervais” due to association.

Google AdWords have advanced settings to determine how accurate the connection is between; what you are bidding for and the key phrase the searcher uses, called “keyword match types”. A keyword match type is the rules the search engines use for controlling when and which ads are displayed, dependent on the search query entered by the user. The most common match types are: broad match, phrase match, exact match and negative match. The default match type is broad match.

Having all your keywords default to Broad Match means your ad can be displayed for keywords/phrases in any order or combination, with additional words. In fact, it can even be just one of the words you are bidding for and another word that is Google “associates” with the keyword you are bidding for. The real issue is the association Google makes with words, I have seen ads displayed for “Mac Air” when searching for “flights” as the words “flights” and “air” are associated. You could argue that if someone searches for “Ricky Gervais” it’s unlikely that they will click on an ad that mentions “Office Furniture” but would you like to bet money on it? That is what you are doing.

I’m not saying that “broad match” shouldn’t be used as a match type, but you should be aware of the consequences. And if doing so you should be monitoring carefully using the “Search Query Report” within AdWords to see what actual queries your ads show up for. In fact, I urge you to check your Search Query Report, right now! Go to your AdWords campaign => Reporting => Reports =>Create a New Report and then chose “Search Query Performance”. This will give you a list of all the words your ads showed up for in the previous month!

Further reading about Google AdWords advertising Pitfalls