The Commerce360 Blog

Kathy Sierra challenges the difference between pre-sale and post-sale activities / effort / communications / seduction techniques. It strikes to the heart of her premise that 'creating passionate users' is a marketing technique, and should be budgeted as such. I'd like to add another piece to the puzzle - the 'during-sale' phase.

What Kathy called 'before' is really best represented by the intense amounts of time, money, and energy on spent on attracting, contacting, interrupting, or even conversing with people. But the comparison of resources allocated to those lead generation activities vs those invested in the actual buying/selling process is where the trouble starts. The horrible stuff that happens after the sale is just the icing on the cake!

Think about the money spent to buy highly targeted paid search terms which send you to generic home pages where it's your job to dig through the navigation to find what you want. They take the time and spend the money to be exactly where you want them in terms of the search, then drop the ball immediately as you engage to try and buy.

Now consider the rich media ad that takes you to a website where you can't find answers to dozens of your actual questions so you wind up back at Google trying to find reviews, tech specs, or other stuff that really should have been right there waiting for you. The disproportion in spending between demand generation and website architecture and content is insane. As the Eisenbergs have said, why spend so much time trying to fill a bucket full of holes?

The tricky part is trying to figure out why marketers do this. They may not yet realize that customers are their best evangelists, but surely they realize that prospects aren't yet customers. Why abandon them so early?

I believe the Eisenbergs (again) have the answer. Marketers sell, customers buy, and rarely the twain do meet. Sellers think the glossy features and benefits brochure is a winner. Buyers look at it and instantly generate 5-50 more questions. Sellers are proud of their snazzy new web page, yet lots of buyers don’t get a warm fuzzy feeling from it (ie, they leave) because it lacks testimonials or awards. Others leave because it's too cold and impersonal. In these cases and many others, failure to consider the buying process and address the needs – step by step – of those to whom you’re selling results in the abysmal conversion rates everyone is used to.

We’re in the middle of a Persuasion Architecture process for a product which helps ease some of the side effects of chemotherapy and other cancer treatments. Today a lot of time was spent digging into the differences between how doctors and nurses (and the different personality types of each) interact with the website and product information. Every time we do one of these it’s just amazing to see the massive number of absolutely critical pieces of information that it forces you to include on the site that would have otherwise NEVER even been considered.

Yes, this requires allocating time, people, and dollars. In our experience it generally comes to between one and three months of the paid-search spend of those we work with. So instead of working with a leaky bucket, they take a month or two off (metaphorically) to create something that’s nearly water-tight, and then go back at it. While the rest of the world saves that money and just tries to put more water in faster hoping somehow they can out-run those holes. (Note this wasn’t meant to turn into a Persuasion Architecture commercial - but you can call us if your bucket is leaky).

Kathy’s post covers people who are seduced fast and hard enough to make it from the dangling of the shiny thing to the purchase on the steam of the shine alone. She’s 1000% right that the post sale experience counts too – as is always pointed out when someone asks a crowd how many people saved their iPod boxes (vs their boxes for almost anything else.)

But before you go improve your user manuals and packaging, stop and look at your website and all the places people trying to buy from you are getting stopped. Work on disappointing them less while they’re trying to buy and THEN get around to disappointing them less after they’ve bought.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Years ago your little Real Estate Agency put up a web site and you began to notice that visitors were coming from sites with strange names like Yahoo and Alta Vista. Later you got hip to how things worked and gave your sisters' son a few bucks to 'optimize your site' while he was home from College on summer break. Next they offered to put you right on the front page for any term you wanted, if you'd just give them $0.05 each time someone clicked - sounded like a good deal. And today you spend hundreds of thousands (no longer at $0.05 per click) and have a team of 5 who write copy and work on organic optimization.

One small problem. Your relationship with the search engines isn't what you think. They're not trying to organize the world's information and help people route to the most relevant stuff. Despite what they say. They're trying to own it all. One step at a time.

So one day you wake up and find out that they've built a Real Estate page. More focused and will help bring in more views for your paid ads they tell you. But week by week you watch more and more services inhabit the page until you get the idea that maybe nobody needs to visit your site anymore.

-- Now change 'Real Estate' to the name of your vertical market, and re-read those three paragraphs. Welcome to your future. I'm not saying they don't have the right to do it, and I doubt most industries or advertisers are going to stop subsidizing them on their way. But it might be time to think long and hard about a backup plan.

Oh ya. Yahoo improved their Real Estate section today. (comments here and here and here.) Google did Finance recently. Watch for Travel and many more.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Does it matter how many pageviews your site serves? Of course not. What matters is how much you sold, how many people signed up, how informed or persuaded they became, or how engaged visitors were (and for how long) in whatever it was the site is offering. Yet “page views” is a common, prominent, and frequently discussed metric in website analytics.

The death of page views is being discussed (here too), giving a good reason to shine a little light on what it tells and doesn’t, and how we can perhaps better use this common metric.

Page views are a popular measure for three reasons:

1. They give some idea of how many steps a visitor took, how engaged they were, in the process or information that your site is providing.
2. It’s something of a universal, and therefore provides a way to compare one site to another – how many page views did your site get last month? How many averages pages per visit?
3. Analytics companies tend to set their fees based on page views.

The argument that page views are flawed cannot be denied. The problem is that a page view is not a consistent and universal measure of progress or anything else. A good site design, well written copy, and clear navigation all lower page view counts. Ajax programming techniques and other java widgets provide functionality that would have required a page refresh, without a page refresh, and thereby also lower page view counts while at the same time increasing what can be accomplished on a ‘page’. RSS syndication takes the content from the page and puts it somewhere else where it is seen - without being counted.

One of the reasons this came up is that someone decided that MySpace has a lousy design which requires way more clicks than necessary, thereby inflating its page view numbers, and then took the trouble to estimate how much lower it would be if the pages were better designed. (see the large drop after Q1, 2006?) And it turns out that if this were the case the $580 million the site changed hands for might have been a substantially lower number.

But assuming you’re not looking to pawn your site off on Rupert Murdoch, or aren’t selling banner ads for your primary source of revenue, what does this mean to your use of the Page Views metric? I think it just suggests that you should think of it as a very relative measure.

Continue to watch it as a quick barometer of activity. Given your current site design and content, page views do provide a sense of how visitors are consuming the site from one day (or week) to the next. You’ll obviously want to know the ‘internals’ (number of visitors and average pages per visit) too.

Force yourself to think about why you’re driving that number of page views (and pages per visitor). Take it to heart that driving down the page view count by improving your design, content, or navigation is a good thing. Calculate and track your average revenue per page view, and try to drive it up by both improving page content and navigation and by eliminating links and paths that your analytics show to be generally unprofitable.

And remember three things:

• Page views are a lousy way to compare disparate sites.
• You don’t sell page views, so there’s no pride in having a lot of them.
• You do pay for page views (with most analytics) so you might as well make each one count.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Great interview with Seth Godin over at Blog d'Kawasaki. Done in support of his new book, which is apparently a greatest hits reprint of blog and other columns, both the questions and answers are worthy of your time.

My favorite of the 10 questions, has Seth relating his theme of storytelling to the Cluetrain idea of conversations:

Question: What is an example of company that created a brand by conducting a dialogue with customers?

Answer: You don’t know many either, do you Guy? Ahh, we agree! I think that while markets are conversations, marketing is a story. Starbucks creates conversations among customers, so does Apple. The NYSE makes a fortune permitting people to interact with each other. But great marketing is storytelling, and if you’ve been to a Broadway show lately, you’ll notice that audience participation is discouraged. That doesn’t mean that great playwrights don’t listen! They do. They, like great marketers, listen relentlessly. They engage in offline conversations constantly. They poll and they do censuses and most important, they have true conversations with small groups of real people. But THEN, they tell a story.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It took only about 24 hours for Google to respond to my call for more statistics for search listings, such as the number of impressions and clicks. Well sort of. Yesterday Google Base, their database listing product began offering these details to its users.

Great. Can we have this info in the main search listings too now please?

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 5:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's easy for brand and marketing communications to get so wrapped up in subtleties and details that the core message gets lost or subsumed. Websites (and trade show booth) are two common examples where it’s often possible to stand there and stare and yet be unable to figure out ‘exactly what do they do?’.

One of the nice components of what I’d call ‘web 2.0’ design trends is a focus on simplicity and clarity – often centered around a clear central service statement. Today I came across a prime example at San Francisco based Mule Design. Landing at their site your eye is instantly drawn to a perfectly clear and simple declaration of their purpose. (click the image to enlarge)

The statement itself is followed by an equally clear qualifying statement, at which time users should be fairly clear if they’re in the right spot or not, and can then move onto taking in the other elements of the site’s navigation and information.

Does your site make it this clear exactly what you do?

BONUS: A list of web2.0 companies and their traffic volumes. From here you can go see what a whole bunch of these sites look like, and hopefully see the design trend I mentioned.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why is organic search the bastard stepchild of search marketing? I think there are two main reasons:

• Paid search is predictable, organic search is not. In paid search you control the keywords for which your listings appear, the copy that is displayed, the target landing page, and the date when listings first appear. With organic optimization you can attempt to influence each of these but the results are quite unpredictable and essentially uncontrollable.

• Paid search is measurable, organic search is very difficult to measure. The paid networks including Adwords and Yahoo Search provide easy access to impressions, click-through rates, average positions, costs, and conversion rates/values. Analytics packages will tell you how many organic clicks you got and provide conversion rates/values, but getting any more takes work or is just plain impossible.

Imagine if we had a clear picture of the current and potential value of organic search position rankings. Here’s a rough idea of what I’d like to see:

1. Each referring URL from an organic engine should provide the position number along with the keyword that drove the click.
2. Analytics software should be able to later look up (from each engine) the distribution pattern of clicks for each keyword (ie position 1 got 23.3% of the clicks, position 2 go 7.3% of the clicks, etc.).
3. Using these two numbers it would be possible to get a report of the potential traffic for each keyword if you achieved various positions in the search results. Summary reports should show how much traffic if you achieved #1 for every term, and then a bunch of other target distributions (20% of terms in the top 5 slots, 30% of terms in the next 5 slots, 20% on page two, etc.)
4. Using your actual conversion rates and gross / net revenue numbers, produce the same tables showing the revenue potential of various combinations of organic search success. In other words, tell me that I’m now in position #12 for ‘professional table saw’ but that if I earned position #3 it would be worth a 650% increase in volume and a 12% increase in conversion for a total economic value of {whatever the hell it would be}.

This all just one quick example. Nothing wished for here would be hard if the engines would provide a little data and the analytics companies would do a little work. The recently leaked AOL data, combined with some other publicly available info and a cool new tool from Black Hat SEO offers a sliver of this dream.

BTW, while I’m fantasizing about SEO tools we could have if the engines acted as if it were our pages that were enabling them to create fortunes and the analytics providers wanted to actually help us improve our businesses, here’s some ideas for how a keyword research component, which would act as sort of the front end of the process that leads to the conversion/revenue tracking piece wished for above:

1. Push a button and the tool reads the copy on your current site, delivers a list of recommended and related keywords.
2. A list of other URLS that gain a lot of clicks from those keywords is provided, and additional keywords that drive traffic to those sites are added to your list.
3. Your master keyword list shows the page(s) on your site where each word or phrase appears, with marks to indicate an exact sequence or proximity-only match. Words on the list that don’t’ appear anywhere on the site are flagged.
4. The keyword list also displays your current SERP position (where you rank) on the major engines and a with pop-up window displays the historical trend.
5. Apply the same ‘what if I was #1’ reporting from above to the full ‘wish list’ of keywords (as opposed to just those which are actually driving traffic). In effect show me the maximum potential revenue of my business (based on current relevant keywords, conversion rates, and revenue/margins).

If these kinds of numbers and level of visibility were available, maybe organic search would get the respect and budgets it requires and deserves. The problem seems to be that the engines only earn their money indirectly off of the organic listings, so they’ve been very slow to provide tools and data. It may be that the only way to get the data we need is to demand more organic data in return for spending big $$ on the paid side.

In any case, it's amazing the impact the AOL data leak is having on organic search. Google will soon be releasing some data (hopefully without the negative aspects), and I'm sure that will stir things up even further.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Earlier this week we were in a strategy session with a new client helping them to understand the value of dramatically expanding the scope of the content they planned to add to their new retail website. We want to encourage them to move beyond the picture-price-paragraph that still characterizes too many web retailers, and instead become a massive information warehouse on their unique market segment.

Yesterday I noticed Jacob Nielson's new Alertbox article, which provides interesting data and view, mostly supportive, on the idea of expanding site content and specifically the number of site pages. Jacob points out that a typical linear graph of page views shows how dominant a few pages are in the total traffic of most web sites, but that if you instead plot a double-logarithmic chart what you see is that in fact the less visited pages do contribute significantly when aggregated, but in the case of most sites there really aren't enough pages to fill the long tail. So it droops, as you can see below.

It would take a lot of pages to fully fill the tale in Jacob's example (259,000 to be exact) but the idea that there is traffic out there for more content on your topic is one that doesn't require these types of impossible numbers, nor does the tail have to be filled all at once. It is interesting however, that he shows the filling the tale would be worth a doubling in site traffic according to these projections.

Expanding the size of your site, if done with quality relevant content, almost certainly expands the range of search terms from which you'll draw traffic, and if wisely architected into your site should improve visitor satisfaction and potentially return and conversion rates. Blogs have helped some people turn at least one part of our websites into ongoing 'works-in-progress'. It would benefit all of us - marketers and site visitors - if more sites would continue to pick our tails up off the floor.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The AOL/Thelma Arnold fiasco has proven the risk and potential value of what John Battelle called the 'Database of Intentions'. The implications of the issues surrounding this database will be discussed and debated for days and weeks to come.

Jason Calacanis, who has some juice at AOL but probably can't make it happen, suggests that AOL for one stop collecting search data.

While that debate begins and then rages, I'll suggest a less drastic option: opt-out.

All the engines should agree to a delimiter that when it precedes a search, leaves that search out any permanent tracking. Any search that starts with "!!" for example a search on "!! the stupidest person at AOL", would return results but not be added to the 'database'.

Don't we at least deserve that level of control?

Update: Traffick reports that iquick does not retain any search data.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google attempts to squash concerns about click fraud by proving that other people can't solve the problem any better than they can. It's interesting, not surprising, but really doesn't change the status of the click fraud issue at all.

In a new report on click fraud, Google's Click Quality Team claims that many of the 'click fraud detection services' used flawed methods and have their own technical problems which cause them to incorrectly diagnose and report on clickfraud. Mistaken reading of page reloads, and mistaken attribution of advertisers and networks are cited as errors the Google team uncovered.

If these click fraud detectors are selling snake oil, then Google is right to call them out. But just because these guys can't isolate and identify it, it doesn't prove or disprove the existance or extent of click fraud. It just proves that click fraud is very difficult to detect, which we knew. In any case, it's great to see Google engaged and talking. Like their recent invalid click reporting, it's another step in the right direction.

Now how about putting some tools in adsense to show click spikes, document the time interval between clicks from the same origin (and exceptions from these averages), and better yet lists of the URLs where clicks originated?

I don't believe Google or anyone can stop clickfraud, an if it's happening on distributed networks on at a slow pace and followed by some deeper clicks into the site, I doubt anyone can even detect much of it. But the anecdotal cases (or suspected cases) I've seen were batches of sudden clicks, and it stands to reason that the majority of these types of clickfraud are it's easier to detect than the slow, small, random clickfraud. If it didn't feel like Google (and Yahoo for that matter) were so unwilling to help with the big obvious stuff, it would be easier to give them more credibility and understanding on the broader and potentially larger issue.

(Via John Battelle's Search Blog)

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apparently China is blocking RSS traffic coming through FeedBurner. And Dave Winer rightly points out that this is a big problem with having RSS centralized through one source.

Feedburner is a cool service that provides analytic reporting on RSS feeds. They started when RSS was a little tiny baby, have innovated consistently, and have been rewarded with huge marketshare and success. But is insane that I or anyone with a serious analytics package still has to use them.

RSS isn't some exotic experiment anymore. It's just about as fundamental to online success as a home page. It's a significant method of communication and client/user interaction. It's directly connected to our web sites. Why is robust RSS analytics support not available in Omniture, HBX, Google Analytics, or IndexTools?? (These are the ones I use and know don't support it, please comment on the others that should be taken to task.).

When I look at how many visitors my site had today, or how many times a page (particularly blog post or other feed-like tidbit) was displayed, wouldn't including RSS numbers make that data far more accurate and useful? Isn't that what these packages are supposed to do?

I'm sure I have no idea how hard or easy adding this support would be, nor do I really have any appreciation for the ten-mile-long feature wish list these developers are wrestling with. I'll also admit that I really don't care. I'll instead point out what is becoming a recurring theme in my analytics posts; these packages have to start to be judged (and start judging themselves) based on how fully they solve real world problems. Analytics data that excludes RSS is a partial solution.

An example of the RSS readers-per-day summary provided by FeedBurner.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 7:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Spending some more time in Google Analytics has generally been improving my view of the tool, but there are two glaring omissions that would need to be fixed before I could strongly recommend it. Surprisingly, both of these issues have to do with missing links.

The first is referring URLS. Google Analytics has a referring domain report, but the only way to get the full referring URL is to use a rather buried sub-menu "Refering Souce > Analysis Options > Cross Segment Performance >> Content" and even then the referring URL is not a link but rather you’d have to type in the domain and then copy-paste the balance of the URL.

(This workaround was found by JustAddWater.nk who describes it and offers some background and other thoughts.)

Could that be any more frustrating and inconvenient?

The second is inbound search links! Google Analytics has a CPC vs Organic Keyword report which shows keyword that generated inbound traffic by engine, but there appears to be no way to actually click out and see the search engine results page. I commonly do this to see who is ranking above/below and try and get a sense for how to improve ranking on that keyword. With GA it’s necessary to go manually rerun the search, then ‘find’ yourself in the results.

Neither of these functionalities is complex, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an analytics package without them. Google Analytics is clearly being enhanced on an ongoing basis – I wonder why these features are left out and where they stand on the ‘to-do’ list?

BTW: ROI Revolution has a great blog with ongoing Google Analytics tips.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 2:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Slowly but surely the search engines are changing, and because of this and a number of other reasons, the principals and practices of search engine optimization are changing as well. (Or should be, I guess there will forever be folks out there worried about their meta tags...)

A huge aspect of the change going on in search optimization is the death of simplicity. The algorithms we're being judged by are lot more complicated. The level of competition has increased 1000-fold in just 2 or 3 years. And we no longer want a lot of visitors, we want qualified prospects with a defined intent at the precise time that our information matches where they are in their buying process. These changes and dozens more like them alter the concept of 'being optimized'.

Aaron Wall covers one of the issues forcing change in this thought provoking post, which includes the following:

I frequently get asked to look at a page to see if I think it is perfectly optimized. But I rarely think you can tell if a page is perfectly optimized just by looking at one page. Most of the optimized pages I am asked to look at have no clear goal at hand. Is the page meant to be link bait? Am I supposed to buy from the page? How is the page integrated into your site?

There's a long trail where this idea leads. I hope to explore it here in the near future.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Omniture SearchCenter has had something of a tortured history, first released in in early 2005 as a 1.0 version that was essentially a really bad mock up of a potential application, and then again in early 2006 as a 2.0 version which was essentially a very poor beta.

But the company and the teams assigned to it persevered, and half a dozen painful months later they turned version 2.1 into a stable if still unimpressive application. Today version 2.2 hits the streets, and to their credit they’ve included the #1 requested feature from a ‘User Advisor Council’ meeting held at the Omniture Summit this past March: bi-directional synchronization with the search engine management consoles. It’s worth noting that this feature didn’t even seem to be on their roadmap when the users made clear what a priority it was.

The Sync feature allows PPC managers to make keyword, campaign, or bid changes directly in the Google, Yahoo (and now MSN) interfaces and then sync these changes back into SearchCenter. Previously once you began using SearchCenter, you had to make all changes via the SC interface. And the SC interface is far from intuitive or efficient. Also, since the engines are constantly adding new features, SearchCenter users were perpetually behind, forced to wait until Omniture moved these capabilities into the interface.

There is still a lot of work to do on Omniture SearchCenter, but the company has dramatically extended the resources assigned to the project, and they’re hard at work on version 3.0.

The challenge is that SearchCenter needs tremendous work on both the management and the reporting sides of its capabilities. The improved paid search reporting that SearchCenter enables today is the reason we choose to use it and recommend it to our clients. But there is far more breadth and depth of reporting, and a lot of report formatting and navigational issues that could be dramatically improved. I personally hope they focuse 80% of their efforts in this area, and make work on campaign and bid management a clear 2nd priority.

There are several reasons I advocate this approach:

1. The engines themselves have pretty good interfaces for keyword management, bid changes, and campaign organization.
2. SearchCenter has to replicate and implement management functionality against Google, Yahoo, MSN and other engines – meaning the workload per feature is very high.
3. Omniture is never going to keep up with four changing management interfaces in terms of features, it’s a perpetual game of catch up.
4. Omniture’s strength (in SiteCatalyst) is as a reporting system. They don’t help you to manage your website or marketing campaigns, they report on them. I think this is the right model for SearchCenter too.
5. Reporting alone is a huge and important task. It will take them another year or two to really nail it at its full potential. Any effort on management takes away from that.
6. The reality is that the entire current keyword management interface in SearchCenter is a UI and logical disaster and needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up.

So the choice they face is between doing something rare and valuable and directly in their expertise sweetspot, or something that at best duplicates existing functionality and at which they’ve proven rather incompetent. Doesn’t seem like too tough of a management decision.

The one exception (and there may be others) is bid automation. Conceptually that is a value-added feature, although I contend their current implementation has some critical flaws. But more importantly, with Google and Yahoo adding features like day-parting and position targets, isn’t it likely that they come in with very good to great business rules for bidding and make this feature unnecessary as well?

So we’re very glad to see Omniture SearchCenter 2.2, and congratulate the teams there on listening to their customers and getting the product to this stage. We’re looking forward to version 3.0 and beyond, and hope the listening continues.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Liana Evans, a Search Marketing Manager here at Commerce360 is presenting next week at the SES conference in San Jose. She's speaking on the Search & Regulated Industries panel on Tuesday August 8th at 1:15pm. A session description is below. If you're planning on being at the show, go see Liana and stop in to say hello after her presentation.

Search & Regulated Industries Involved in pharma? Gambling? Alcohol sales? Run a medical site? Offering legal advice? Chances are, you have to deal with regulations from the government, from search engines or from your own company about what you can and cannot say on your site and in your ads. How can you stay within the rules yet not compromise your search marketing campaign? This session explores the issues.
Tuesday August 8th at 1:15pm

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 1:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The importance of ‘conversion rate’ as a core analytics metric is being debated in blog posts from Avinash Kaushik, Matt Jacobs, and LunaMetrics.

Avinash makes the point that conversion rate as generally defined is a vastly over-rated metric because it focuses only on ‘sales’ and thereby forgoes all users who came with an intent or goal other than buying something. Matt says that conversion rate doesn’t discern the quality of the revenue. And Luna responds by saying that these are both true but somewhat advanced concepts and probably a bit more than many online marketers can wrap their heads around at the moment. (These are obviously very brief summarizations, please read the original posts for the full thrust and subtlety of each writer.)

On the whole I have to side with Luna on this one. Most web sites have a clear primary purpose (sell, sign up, download, etc.) and this is invariably tied to business revenue, and therefore I think that the percentage/ratio of site visitors that ‘convert’ is vitally important and needs to be prominently tracked. We’ve also found that high visibility of the abysmally low conversion rate can really help get apathetic executives engaged, either intellectually or at least in approving resources for site redesign, persuasion architecture, A/B or other landing page tests, additional content, etc. Without this number they thought the site was ‘good enough’, or more realistically just had no way to think about its efficacy.

Having said that, if the business and site can reasonably discern other goals beyond the ‘conversion event’ for certain site visitors (customer service, presale research, etc.), then tracking their success to ‘Task Completion Rates’ makes great sense. The major analytics packages should enable this at a core level, making it possible to use custom-defined funnels as ‘completion rates’ that can be connected to inbound traffic, marketing programs, and other data just as fully as (traditional) conversion rates.

It is undeniable that businesses have all kinds of additional complexities not reflected in a conversion rate. One time vs repeat customers, high margin vs lower margin items, high-ticket and complex purchases which happen only after a long list of intermediate milestones are reached, post-purchase issues and customer service, on and on. Of course we’d like to capture as much of these issues in analytics as possible, to provide clear and actionable reports. But the need for more segmentation and granularity doesn’t minimize the importance of the more base metrics. Luna is entirely right that most online marketers are barely crawling and so asking them to run and do backflips just isn’t reasonable.

Beyond the distinctions in priority that are really the core of this discussion, the issue highlights how far the current crop of analytics tools are from what we all really need. My fellow bloggers are pointing out that the conversion rate metric lacks sufficient context and levels of granularity. If we have web sites to achieve results, and analytics software is supposed to measure performance and report on results, shouldn’t they at least be able to cover the concept of conversion well?

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)