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Turning Visits Into Action!
by By Rob Frankel Reviewed by Martha J. Retallick, August 2000 TCS Journal, Tucson Computer Society www.aztcs.org, , info@irpdesigns.com - September 08, 2000 at 02:04:02:
According to this e-book’s introduction, AvidSurfer is “a network of Web professionals employed at some of the most successful enterprises on the Web today.”They are not the CEOs we read about in business publications. Nor are they the journalists who write about them. Rather, the AvidSurfers are “in the trenches on a daily basis, developing and testing new tactics, functionality, and revolutionary new business models.”
Who are they? Well, they’re anonymous. Why? So they can offer insights on what works online without fear of reprisal from their employers.
These surfers who shall remain anonymous are here to help us improve web site conversion ratios. What’s a conversion ratio? The book defines it as “a measure of how many visitors to your site take the action, or actions, you desire.”
One of the most common examples is the e-commerce web site benchmark: the number of visitors who are converted to buyers. But that’s not the only conversion ratio on the Net. You might want to track the number of web web sitesite visitors who sign up for your free E-mail newsletter. Or you might be interested in the number of pages that people view when they visit your site.
Improvements in conversion ratios can lead to increased revenue, and, we hope, to increased profits.
And improving conversion ratios doesn’t necessarily mean embarking on expensive advertising campaigns or massive web site redesigns. For example, managers of one e-commerce site performed ad-hoc usability testing by watching family and friends order from the site. They found that their test-visitors became confused when they encountered a price and a button that said “Add.” Site managers understood that to mean “Add to the shopping cart,” but the visitors didn’t. When site managers changed the button to read “Buy,” orders increased immediately.
As the book notes, “[T]he whole improvement process—including the user observation—took less than an hour of time. This small investment of time improved the site’s conversion ratio by one-tenth of one percent.”
That slight increase in the conversion ratio translated into nearly $250,000 in increased sales annually. Not a bad payoff for one hour of work.
Passing the “Martha’s Printer Test”
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, this is an e-book. That means that it is only available on the Internet. It is in PDF format, which requires the Acrobat Reader software that is available for free from Adobe Systems. PDF is a platform-independent format, which means that it can be read by users of PCs, Macintoshes, and other computer systems. So far so good.
However, I’ve found PDFs to be highly problematic when they’re printed on paper. In some instances, I find that I am simply unable to print some pages of a PDF document because my printer chokes. The problem pages tend to be heavy on the graphics.
I have my own opinion on the usefulness of graphics in information-heavy documents—I think it’s better to leave them out and let the words carry the message. The AvidSurfers appear to have the same viewpoint. They use colored text boxes to emphasize important points, and that’s all. No stock photographs. No cutesy clip art graphics. No screen shots that look like mud-on-paper. The end result is a document that downloads quickly and prints without any difficulty.
In short, the AvidSurfers pass the “Martha’s Printer Test.” Purchase from:
Turning Visits Into Action! Proven strategies, tactics and techniques for improving Web site conversion ratios Authors: Rob Frankel Publisher: AvidSurfer
Price: US $19.99 http://www.AvidSurfer.com ISBN: 0-9679912-1-8
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