Irreverent Thinking

As organisations become ever more fleet of foot it becomes clear that the “old world” approach of making huge, long range policy decisions is no longer appropriate. For some time now I have been advocating a “test, test and test again” approach mixed in with a quasi-Kaizen methodology when it comes to improving the performance of websites. This is borne out of being able to have a complete view of what happens when we make changes to a site (thanks to our VITES™ platform); when combined with statistically correct sample sizes and A/B testing, this gives you the clearest (probable) indicator of how successful a change is.

I note that a search on Google turns up some interesting results, with some companies, such as Nike, embracing the idea, and no less than Forbes Magazine citing it as the reason for the wealth of creativity that comes out of our US cousins across the pond. Thomas Edison was once quoted as saying “I HAVE not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” This approach has its problems which need to be addressed, but the greatest problem is with its name- Trial and ***ERROR*** - which states clearly that mistakes will be made. Sadly most of today’s inwardly-focussed corporates seem to lack the courage to take this step. Even worse are the companies that make sweeping changes without trialling them first; in the case of AOL a $75m loss in revenue.

The companies that do test fly; the ones that don’t end up stagnating and die.

The moral?

To succeed you have to fail occasionally

PayPal is widely maligned but for me it has got one huge thing in it’s favour - I know it, it’s in my Pod!

I spend my time preaching about the value of consistency and familiarity but seldom do I get such a violent reminder as I did a few weeks ago. Having bought a few things on eBay I was going through the process of bulk paying for them when  I was stopped dead by one item that required me to go through a “channel partner”. This was a nightmare; I wanted to go click, click, click to pay for my stuff in my familiar way and now I had to look, search, read, learn.

Yuk!

Keep it simple = keep it familiar (unless you can improve on it - lower sellers fees is not an improvement, ever)

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% ?

It that so unusual? It’s probably rather dependent on whether I go in there a lot, which I don’t. He does, however, know quite a lot about me and stores it away in his memory. From what he said to me he knows:-

1. My favourite drink is Guinness and that’s pretty much all I drink

2. He knows I go on the train to London a lot as I will pop in for a pint on my walk back from the train station

3. He knows I smoke as I have to go outside and will leave my money on the bar whilst he’s pouring my Guinness

4. He knows I am male

Ok, so why the irreverent twitter about my local pub? Well, I was thinking that my company builds websites that learn about its visitors by their behaviour and was this a violation of privacy? The answer is “no”. The local barman sees me coming though the door and sometimes has a pint on the go, he says “hello” and if I’m in a suit and it’s around the time that the London train gets in he will ask if I had a good day in London. What he is doing is improving my experience, he’s treating me personally even though he doesn’t know my name - in fact sharing my name would seem wrong and too personal.

So why aren’t more websites like that? They should learn what I like and slant the content towards my interests. YouTube doesn’t do it; it only shows the most popular and latest videos of the day, which I hardly ever watch, so why waste my time downloading the content on that page - take a leaf out of Google’s book and just show the search bar.

More sites will certainly start to work this way and our new VITES platform certainly lets companies do that - it’s just a matter of time before it becomes the standard way to operate.

I frequently see organisations, large and small, using Google’s Analytics (GA) as their method to measure RoI or whatever else they think they need to establish and I wonder what drove them to that decision. I know it’s free and I know that Google is all cuddly but there are a couple of issues that I am torn on:

1. Google’s role as an advertiser and a reporting agent are in direct conflict. I am sure that one does not directly affect the other but they will gather market data and the temptation to mine this for commercial gain must be huge. Avoiding using GA would remove this all together. Have a read of “Google minding your own business” from Donna Bogatin to see an expansion of this topic

2. Session-based analytics are pretty useless in the grand scheme of things. Knowing that 1000 people visited your site today and 10% of them converted from the search term “blue widgets” might, on the face of it, tell you a lot but misses out so much important information such as “which people are the 10%” and “how much did these 10% go onto spend over x months”. These are real e-business questions that Google Analytics fails to answer.

3. GA works by running a script on the page, this script has a size over 5k - doesn’t sound a lot but the Google search page is just 12k. A good target size for your landing pages are 25k so this is a 20% increase in size = 20% longer to load the page.

4. There are some legitimate privacy concerns as Google is acquiring information about private individuals such as their IP address and their buying and browsing history. Now you could argue that this is not personal information but I think if you look at it from a moral standpoint it is, in many ways, far more personal than, say, my date of birth or maybe even my name. Tracking me via my IP address is far more reliable and finds every place I go - tracking me by name only works where I use my name so I can choose whether I can be found. You don’t have the option to switch off your IP address.

5. If GA is so good then why does Google not use it themselves?