Marketing Technology Blog

An important, but unfortunately too-often overlooked, aspect of web design is usability. Most experienced web designers understand the basic concepts and principles of usability, but the more complex a website, the more important usability testing becomes. E-commerce websites are especially important to test because one small bump in your checkout process or design could substantially decrease your profits. Typically, I recommend some form of testing if there is any process or series of steps necessary on the website.

There are many ways to conduct usability tests, but I think UserTesting.com is an extremely affordable way to quickly start testing. For just $29 you can start a testing by submitting a set of testing instructions. Then a tester will take a video of their test and create a written report. It’s cheap and fast.

That said, you do tend to get what you pay for. This obviously won’t provide the same results as a $20,000 usability study with a eye-tracking nor will it turn your average web designer into a usability expert (Tuitive is fellow MTB blogger Jon Arnold’s company). But it gets you started in the right direction. If budget or time are a concern, try UserTesting.com. If nothing else, it should be able to tell you “hey, we have a problem” or “we seem to be ok”.

I had a tester take a look at my web design firm directory and attempt to advertise on the directory. I’ve embeded the video from my review below. Just by looking at the video of the website’s real use, I’ve identified several key changes I should be making in my upcoming redesign. Take a look:

I’m beginning to think there are two kinds of internet marketers – those that are aware of conversion optimization and those that aren’t. Fortunately, the number of marketers that are aware of this key tool/process/methodology is quickly increasing. If you’re not familiar with the extreme power of conversion optimization on a website’s bottom line, check out the following:

• 151% more sales – Optimize Software
• 21% more signups – Gyminee
• 18.5% more revenue per visitor – Skype
• 22% more sales – BabyAge.com
• 113% more trial signups – BLR.com
• 24% more reoccurring monthly revenue – Grasshopper.com
• 32.5% more trial signups – SAP
• 25% more signups – Campaign Monitor
• 329% more auction bids – Skinner Auctions
• 8.5% more searches – MSN Real Estate
• 10% more ticket purchases – Delta
• 118% more contact form submissions (PDF) – Imaginary Landscape (via A/B Tests)
• 20% more trial signups – Less Accounting (via A/B Tests)
• 15% more sales – Get Defensive Driving School (via A/B Tests)
• 15% more account signups – YouTube (via A/B Tests)
• 200% more signups – Highrise HQ (via A/B Tests)
• 30% more signups – Highrise HQ (via A/B Tests)

In the coming weeks and months, I’ll spend more time talking about the details of conversion optimization and how to apply it to your site. In fact, I’ll be speaking Oct 21st at the Masters of Business Online conference in Indianapolis on conversion optimization for e-commerce. If you have any immediate questions about what conversion optimization is or how to do it, just post a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them!

If you’ve ever wanted to look over the shoulder of someone visiting your website, you can.  ClickTale’s (affiliate version) tagline is “Record. Watch. Understand.” and they literally record a video of a user’s browsing session including:

• The movement of the mouse
• The click of the button
• The scrolling of the page
• The typing of form data

The only piece of data missing from the equation is where the user is actually looking. A video on their homepage provides a quick summary of the service with an actual example, be sure to watch it.

The service offers several other useful tools alongside the basic session video:

• Click Heatmaps (CrazyEgg is a much more affordable solution if you don’t want the session video)
• Form Analytics and Funnels
• Detailed Link Analytics
• Real Time Reporting

I originally used ClickTale several months ago on an e-commerce site to test various aspects of the page. Despite it’s scary tracking power, I have several large caveats regarding the service (though some of these may have changed since I tried it):

• The first is an obvious privacy issue. Most website visitors would be shocked to discover a website had this much power to track their usage. Watch the video, it feels very personal. I don’t think there’s anything here that would go against most privacy policies, but it’s definitely a level above most analytics tracking. I mentioned earlier that form data tracking is included, but it is important to note that this data is only visible if the user submits the form.
• While it’s interesting to track individual users, you quickly realize that watching the individual user sessions has limited practicality and takes a lot of time. Even if you speed up the video, it’s difficult to gain significant insight without watching a lot of videos. However, you can tag visitors via Javascript while on the site. You can create tags such as “Checkout_Failed” or “Clicked_Customer_Support” in order to focus on specific visitor segments.
• The page I most wanted to test was an AJAX-heavy one page checkout page. Unfortunately, ClickTale has a limited ability to handle the AJAX. It actually supported it better than I expected, but definitely not well enough to really prove useful.
• In my opinion, the usability and design of the reporting backend was very poor and hard to use (developer documentation on the support form was excellent though).

Pricing starts at $99/mo for the paid version. There is a free account which is useful to get an overview of the system but extremely limited in functionality.

I’d love to hear what you think of ClickTale, both from an outside perspective looking in and especially if you’ve used it before. Is this taking user tracking too far or is it the best thing since sliced bread?

Permuto, a new company bringing the same level of performance and measurability of search engine marketing to display advertising, officially launched today at the Shop.org conference. Shaukat Shamim, CEO and co-founder of Permuto, spoke with Doug for about an hour on Tuesday and you could tell they were launching something special.

Currently, ad serving models are fairly dumb when you’re shopping online. Large indexes of product are inventoried and classified utilizing keywords… then magically appear when you land on a page. The result is always similar products. Large ecommerce companies like Amazon utilize buyers habits and provide you with products that other buyers purchased. This still isn’t personalized.

Permuto’s flagship product, ShopperConnect™, is a new all-inclusive advertising platform and network for retail merchants and brands that integrates shopping data, dynamically-optimized creative, media buying, backend reporting and ROI calculation – all in one solution, eliminating the need for marketers to piece together these various offerings on their own.

Online display advertising is a fantastic way for merchants and brands to reach their target audience, but it is plagued by poor measurability, analytics and performance, and is traditionally low in return compared to search engine marketing,” said Shaukat. “The reach of online display advertising is 3-4 times the size of SEM, so ShopperConnect represents a huge opportunity to create significant value for our partners – all in one comprehensive solution.

ShopperConnect’s proprietary system accurately tracks and determines an online consumer’s ActiveShopper™ Score for millions of individual products. This score enables Permuto to deliver highly-personalized, relevant, and attractive offers to shoppers, both new and returning, and provides merchants a powerful channel to tap into the 80%+ reach of online display advertising, with greatly enhanced conversion rates and search-style depth.

Already, recognized shopping sites like Heels.com, Like.com, and others have tapped into ShopperConnect to engage active online shoppers.

The key driver of ShopperConnect is the ability to observe and analyze ActiveShoppers, online buyers who are far enough along in the intent to purchase process to be highly valuable to brands and merchants. An ActiveShopper Score calculates a consumer’s likelihood to purchase a virtually unlimited range of individual products, at the SKU level, determined by combining user observations, inferred related products, and page context. Permuto then helps merchants reach their target audience by serving dynamically-generated, highly-relevant product and brand-specific offers to them.