Jan 22

I do love the way the web is moving - I’m now a full-time convert to Mahalo, why not add me if you sign up to the social bit of it (you can find me here). It does nicely show how the world is moving on and our measurement of trust is changing. I wrote back in September about trusting your Pod, or group of “knowns” (you can read my original post here) and with the emergence of social bookmarking we can see that take another step. I recently joined Diigo, which offers a way to not only bookmark pages but also annotate those pages both for yourself and for anyone who trusts you.

You can see my profile easily and see what I have saved and tagged, or at least the public version of what I have tagged. Diigo call it social annotation which is an interesting concept as it opens the world, and specifically the corporate world, to semantic trust. I keep harping on about e-PR but I wonder if KFC know that I have commented on their “dietary guide” in a less than positive way? The reality of this open (trust) network is that the large corporate animals either better be on their best behaviour or better keep their eyes wide open.

(Thanks to Dan Otterburn for putting me onto Diigo)

Jan 21

In a monthly e-commerce “conversion olympics“, the winning team achieved a 24% conversion rate. Not bad: in fact its 10 times the average of 2.4%.

The figure of 2.4% comes from shop.org. According to their survey, if you are converting at better than 10%, you are in the elite top 7% of e-commerce websites.

That’s at the top of the table. At the bottom end of the food chain, plenty of sites are chugging along at below 1%. And an interesting 9% of websites do not even know their conversion rate.

Possible reasons behind this are:

  • Don’t know what conversion rate means.
  • Don’t know their own conversion rate.
  • Do really know - but it’s a secret.

In fact for a lot of e-commerce firms, their conversion rate is their big competitive advantage. If you have similar gross margins as your rivals, similar costs, then the only thing left is your conversion rate. A better rate means you can bid more for Google AdWords, run more banners, send more e-shots. This means it’s a good idea to keep it secret.

So the measure of a good conversion rate is: better than your competitors, and trending up. Maybe think of a bricks-and-mortar supermarket: what’s their conversion rate. 99% ? 99.9% ?

Jan 14

I’ve been a little quiet on here over the festive season so I just thought I would wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2008. I’m back in posting mode now :)