Overcoming HiPPO Feedback on Website Design

One of the most important milestones in a website redesign project is during the 1st round Creative Comps presentation which is usually attended by various internal website stakeholders. Unfortunately, it is common for the the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) to have plenty of feedback on the creative comps even though the HiPPO rarely knows much about web design nor is familiar with website's analytic data (or any other strategic analysis that was done to develop the wireframes) which were then used to design the creative comps.

Instead of presenting first round creative comps to a bunch of HiPPO's why not quickly test them against the actual audience they were intended for? By using several free tools on the web you can give your websites audience a voice in the creative process!

5SecondTest.com is a great free tool that allows you to upload and present a design (e.g. your creative comp) to a user for 5 seconds and then asks (in words) what they remember of the website. Is it design elements, the marketing slogan, the call to action? The 5secondtest will help you determine how effective the new home page design is in driving traffic that support your website's key performance indicators (think goals) and the websites branding (e.g. are you a paper company and no-one mentioned the keyword "paper" in your test)?

Feng-Shui.com is a free artificial heat mapping tool. It has proven to be surprisingly accurate and it's free (compared to the real eye tracking tests which can cost tens of thousands of dollars). By combining the heat mapping data along with the 5SecondTest you can gain a better understanding of how the websites intended audience will scan your home page and where they are most likely to click on (e.g. if your main call to action isn't even being registered on the heat map you probably have a design problem).

If you have time create the HMTL for the creative comps and use Clicktales.com to actually test mouse movements and where your visitor will actually click. You can have all the links go to dead pages but it is interesting to see if a majority of the intended audience will your home page links that directly support your websites key performance indicators.

For example, when my website was launched I believed the "Learn More" button would attract the most number of clicks on my website. Neither the 5SecondTest, the AI heat Map (Feng-Shui.com) or the Click data (Clicktales.com) confirmed this assumption.

What people remembered most about the website was overwhelming the bee (over 50% of respondents listed this keyword first) which the AI heat map confirmed. In addition, the Clicktale data showed that over 50% of my visitors where clicking on the Read More link for the Blog and the Website Consulting list. See screen shots below.

If I like the idea that my website design is strongly "bee" branded (so hopefully its easier to remember) and I want most of my website visitors to click on the Consulting and Blog links then the design probably works for me! I don't want the website associated with the bee/buzz theme nor clicking on the SEM or Blog links, I should probably move onto the next creative comp and conduct the same type of tests.

Remember, although the design of a website must adhere to a companies branding guidelines the design still needs to focus on driving traffic into the areas of the website that support the websites' key performance indicators. By conducting these fast, free, simple tests prior to a creative comp review with several HiPPOs in the room you can be armed with specific data when a HiPPO makes a comment like "No one will remember we are a paper company with that design" or "No one is going to going to click on that Learn More button".

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Related Links:

• 5SecondTest.com
  
• Feng Gui
  
• Clicktale
  

Credit: Many of the free tools listed in this Blog (and the HiPPO term) were brought to my attention by Avinash Kaushik. His new book Web Analytics 2.0is a must read especially if you find yourself all to often looking but not necessarily acting on your website analytic reports.

Back to the Basics: Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

Its amazing how many paid pay-per-click (ppc) ads appear in search engine result pages (serps) that are poorly written or irrelevant to what I was searching on.

Here are some basics principles to keep in mind when launching a pay-per-click campaign:

• Keywords - Only bid on keywords that are highly specific to your business and are likely to convert into a sale. Limit your ads to only display in certain geographic regions if it makes sense to do so.
  
  
• Ads - Include the keyword in the ad headline and then explain your "unique selling point" (USP). Basically, whatever makes your product or service better than your competitors. If you can, offer a teaser of some kind; a free gift, a discount or a trial sample of your product.
  
  
• Landing Page – Include the keyword you bid on, reinforce the messaging of the ad, include product screen shots and a clear call to action.

See our videobelow to see how we used the basic principles described above to achieve a 10.15% click-through-rate (CTR) and 4.79% conversion rate for a client during a 6 week PPC pilot program (even before we did any keyword analysis or A/B testing on the landing page).

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Setting up Unique Profiles for Sub Domains in Google Analytics

Many websites use sub domains to make it easier for the public to find specific content on their website. A sub domain is logical name that is used before the root domain instead (instead of www) like energy.ihs.com or pharmacy.ucsf.edu.

By placing the same Google Analytics Javascript on all your sub domains, you will have one profile in Google Analytics that will aggregate all your website data.

It is still probably a good idea to setup a unique profile for each sub domain, especially if the web content on each sub domains belongs to different business stakeholders.

To setup unique profiles for each sub domain within Google Analytics you will need to create a new profile for each sub domain and then only include the analytic data from that sub domain.

Create a New Profile

1. Click on the "Add New Profile" link.
2. Select the "Add a Profile for an existing domain" radio button and enter a Profile Name that can be easily identified to the sub domain before clicking on the Finish button.
   

Create the Filter

1. Click on the "Filter Manager Link" and then the "Add Filter Link".
2. Enter a filter name that can be easily identified to the sub domain, select the radio buttons "Custom Filter" and "Include" and under the Filter Field dropdown menu select "Hostname".
3. In the Filter Pattern field type in the subdomain you are creating this profile for followed by a backslash that is immediately followed by a period, then type in the root domain followed by another backslash and period and then type in the top level domain suffix of your website (such as .com, .net, org, etc). Hence, your Filter Pattern should look something like this analytics\.rwebconsulting\.com.
4. Under the Available Website Profile list, select the profile you created in Step 1 and click on the Add button and then the Save Changes button

Here is a video describing how to setup unique profiles for each sub domain in Google Analytics:

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Related Links:

• Google Analytics Help – Domains & Directories
  
• Sub Domain Information
  

Using Social Media to Drive Conversions

Do you have a great product/service that most of your customers love? If so, you should be able to further increase product awareness and sales by creating "online buzz" for your product through social media channels (social networks, wikis, email, calendar events, podcasts, blogs, videos, etc); especially in industries that are competitive in feature sets and price.

In an abbreviated form, atypical sales process can be summarized in the following phases:

• Awareness – customer defines a need for a product or service.
• Research/Consideration – customer researches different company product offerings based on factors like price, features, support, design, reputation, etc.
• Purchase – customer purchases the product online or in-store.
  

Take for example, the portable music player industry which has dozens of companies that offer similar products at similar prices. Two of the most popular include the 32 GB Apple iPod and Microsoft Zune which have very similar features, specs and pricing (see a competitive review at: http://reviews.cnet.com/zune-vs-ipod/). There is a good chance that a customer might buy the iPod over the Zune (or vice versa) depending on the positive social media generated for it – customer recommendations, product reviews, blogs, videos of the device, number of social network followers, etc.

If you offer a great product or service that develops a large advocate base, consider adding social media tools to your website like the free one at addthis.com which is being used on this blog. Your advocates will use the social media tools to promote your product which will increase sales from those that are considering/researching your product.

Research vs. Buying Intent Keywords

In my "What Makes a Good Keyword" blog I wrote about how important it is to do a through analysis of potential keywords before investing the effort optimizing your website or launching a pay-per-click campaign

If your website sells a product or service, keep in mind the most probably intent of the user between different keywords. Is the user just browsing the Internet on a subject or is it more likely they are ready to make a purchase?

For example, imagine you have a website that sells all types of shoes and are considering which of the following keywords to optimize your website for: "top shoes", "running shoes", "ASICS Gel-1130". In general, the more specific a keyword search is ("ASICS Gel-1130” in our example) the more likely it is that the user is ready to make a purchase and not just researching the subject ("shoes" in our example) anymore.

Beware: While identifying keywords with buying intent (or whatever your definition of a site conversion is) verify the number of searches on the keyword phrase (by using a tool like Google’s External Keyword Tool). Many keywords that are buying orientated are less searched upon but you’ll find that you will be able convert more of these visitors.

To learn more about our SEO Website Consulting services contact our website consulting team.