Call to Engage

Most websites are designed to direct you towards a “call to action.” This may be a call to purchase, contact, subscribe, tweet, or download. “Click here” and your wildest fantasies will come true…

This is a very important component to brick and mortar businesses on the Web that need to quantitatively measure the number of contacts, revenue generated from each contact, and cost to acquire these contacts. For a digital downloads site, it’s an even cleaner and more direct route. Set up an Google Adwords campaign, measure the number of exposures, cost-per-click, clickthroughs, and the number of downloads or purchases. It’s a direct funnel with little wavering and clearly defined holes*.

The analytics funnel can be measured simply with numbers in, numbers out, and diversions along the way. 0-100% optimized.

What about blogs, online books in HTML, magazines, or art exhibitions and galleries? An argument can be made that for these types of sites, the goal is to get the user to engage more than it is to get the user to click, buy, or contact. If you are using a photo montage, slideshow, or writing thought-provoking blog articles, is your goal to ship the user away via a click, or to get her engaged, talking about your story, and believing in your vision? A “call to engage” is what this site needs. Design to lead the user into your story, captivate her with your photos, and rid the landscape of peripheral “calls to action.”

Most news sites follow a three or four-column approach to their website. This can be understood, as the news business model is tied around advertising. But, wouldn’t it be nice if you read your articles with big type, restful whitespace, and engaging pictures? Many follow the recipe, but forget that the signal gets lost for the noise when your reading one amongst four columns, and the highest contrasting elements on the page are the banner ads, trying to get you to click away and buy a cell phone.

The next time you redesign, consider if it would be most appropriate to have numerous and loud calls to action, or provoking and relaxing calls to engage.

*The attrition and loss of users along the way due to checkout abandonment, site bounces, or click-aways.

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Posted by Andy Vaughn on April 22nd, 2010 in business, design | 1 Comment »

How to find out if it’s just You

Yesterday, I met with a client who had a drop in contact requests for his product over the last month. We took a look at the website analytics, compared conversions, and indeed his numbers were down from the same month last year. We could assume economic shifts, weather changes, or voodoo curses may have caused this event. But, in order to get the real nitty gritty, I pulled out my toolbox of useful metric resources.

Here are a few resources we used to see whether the change is “just him”, the industry, or some type of Black Swan:

Keyword Trending

I look at top keywords, and how they are performing in Google Trends compared with last year/month. Google Insights, is another useful resource, where you can drill-down by geographic information, and compare terms.

SERPS

Take a look at the search results. Google sometimes shifts its algorithm, and you may lose the top spot to a site like Mahalo, or another site with new, updated and current information. Google’s Webmasters Tools gives a decent indication, but nothing beats a signed-out, cache-cleared search.

Analytics

Take a look at your own analytics. Check your traffic sources, search keywords, and look for significant changes. If you go up to change the date, you will be offered the option of increasing the timeline. I will sometimes look across multiple years to see the growth and trend for a particular site.

Competitive Intelligence

Use a site like Compete to compare your site with other competitors’ sites. Alexa does some CI as well.

Marketing Efforts

One place where I like to keep a pulse of the market is inside my Google Adwords account. If you use the keyword research tool under the tab “Opportunities,” you can get a measure for the average CPC bid, global/local searches, and approximately how much it is to enter the advertising market – which in turn will tell you how much your competitors are currently spending on advertising in the same industry. This tool provides a ton of information, I highly suggest keeping a good eye on it.

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Posted by Andy Vaughn on April 7th, 2010 in business | No Comments »