These 4 Head-Smackingly Simple UX Changes Grew Sales 50%

Nick Eubanks, April 12, 20130 Comments

Online commerce continues to growth in the double digits every quarter, and with more money being spent online, online vendors are constantly being presented with the opportunity to increase their online sales.

The idea of spilt testing and conversion rate optimization are certainly not new, but there is a lot of room for improvement in the approach.

Split testing is a critical path item for improving the conversion potential and performance of your website, but it's not a vacuum. There are other important considerations you need to consider before you start testing – like what to test.

Known Unknowns

The easiest path is to test the obvious items, those you are fairly certain will have an impact on your conversions.

The most obvious are elements like:

• Price
• Headlines
• Social Proof
• Layouts
• Sales Copy

These pieces of your web page have become the standard starting points for conversion testing, but what about the elements on your site that are adversely affecting conversion that you are unaware of?

Unknown Unknowns

The old saying goes that the more you know, the more you don't know. So how do you gain insight into problems you don't know about?

Observation.

It is a simple concept that is not executed on as often as it should be. Take the time, and make the necessary arrangements, so that you can watch you users use your website.

UserTesting.com is wonderful for this. It has helped us find specific problems that were directly leading to lost revenue, that we had no idea even existed.

The trick here is creating a scenario where you can play Big Brother, because you will never get the full truth from asking.

You need to let your customers navigate your web pages and conversion funnels, and pay close attention to both their mouse movements and the specific language they use to describe their behavior.

Dollars and Sense

A few months back I wanted to test a full shopper loop, from query through checkout, to see where we were leaving money on the table.

We had been running a number of A/B tests and seeing good results but this didn't give any visibility into how visitors were experiencing our site; how they were thinking about it.

Here's what we learned:

1. Cluttered Category Pages

Our category pages were too cluttered with descriptions, and actually made it daunting for our visitors to read all of the crammed description copy we had written

Before:

After:

2. Missing Pricing Information

Visitors were getting to our products pages with prices and add to cart buttons, but because of the layout of our category templates, they were not seeing the prices - becoming frustrated, and leaving!

The solution in this case was so simple; all we did was add a small image in the header telling users they needed to scroll down for pricing!

Before:

After:

3. No 'Add to Cart' Button

The next issue is almost laughable in retrospect, but people were missing our "add to cart" button. Why? Because it didn't look like a button, it was simply a plain text link that said "add to cart".

Directly in line with Steve Krug's manifesto, the solution was to stop making our customer's think, and make the button look like a button!

The new button now looks like this:

4. Checkout Confusion

The final head smacking moment came while watching users go through the checkout process and submit test orders.

Between clicking the submit order button and the thank you screen there is a 2-3 second delay while the order processes, but the users don't know that! So while all of this heavy lifting of hitting the payment gateway, hitting the inventory server, etc. is all going on – the user is left staring at their screen wandering if anything happened.

This led to countless occurrences of people repeatedly clicking the submit button, clogging up the order processing functionality, and causing the shopping cart to stop dead in its tracks. It is nauseating to think about how many orders were lost due to this lack of attention to detail on our part. The fix, again, was so simple: just tell the user's what's going on – set an expectation, and here it is:

So. Freaking. Simple.

Closing The Feedback Loop

Again, in retrospect these are all head-smackingly simple changes, but we never would of thought about them had we not physically watched users go through the process.

It is amazing how much actionable information you can instantly glean from watching and listening to people use your website.

The slightest little thing that has never occurred to you, your boss, or anyone else on your team – may be the one small change that is costing your money.

After making the four simple changes above, daily online sales have increased by almost 50 percent! And this is only the beginning, the real lesson here is that you can't change what you don't know – so you need to be proactive and turn the unknown unknown's into known unknowns, so you can fix them.

What are some small changes that have led to big results on your websites?

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Foreign investors play large role in U.S. shale industry

April 8, 2013

By PennEnergy Editorial Staff 

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

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In early 2013, Sinochem, a Chinese company, entered into a $1.7 billion joint venture with Pioneer Natural Resources to acquire a stake in the Wolfcamp Shale play in West Texas. This investment highlights a renewed trend toward foreign joint ventures. Since 2008, foreign companies have entered into 21 joint ventures with U.S. acreage holders and operators, investing more than $26 billion in tight oil and shale gas plays.

Investment in shale plays in the United States totaled $133.7 billion between 2008 and 2012, as part of 73 deals. Joint ventures by foreign companies accounted for 20% of these investments. The rest of the investments were either part of outright acquisitions—such as the Australian BHP Billiton oil company's acquisition of Petrohawk Energy Corp.—or were joint ventures among American companies (such as Hess and Noble Energy with Consol Energy) and financial institutions.

Most of the foreign investment in these joint ventures involved buying a percentage of the host company's shale play acreages through an upfront cash payment with a commitment to cover a portion of the drilling cost. Foreign investors in joint ventures pay upfront cash and commit to cover the cost of drilling extra wells within an agreed-upon time frame, usually between 2 to 10 years. Both U.S. and foreign companies benefit from these deals. U.S. operators get financial support, while foreign companies gain experience in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that may be transferable to other regions. Plus, foreign companies can operate in a stable market with a sound legal system and low political risk. In addition, exploration and development opportunities are decreasing in much of the rest of the world. While foreign companies may pay sizable initial costs through joint ventures, these deals can be considered a cost of entry to the development of hydrocarbons through the latest technology.

Most of the recent joint venture deals with foreign companies shifted from the dry natural gas plays to more liquids-rich areas such as the Eagle Ford, Utica, and Wolfcamp—a trend similar to domestic operations. All shale plays contain some liquids, but those with a higher liquid-to-gas ratio are more attractive because of the higher value of hydrocarbons that have crude oil and petroleum liquids in addition to natural gas.

http://www.pennenergy.com/articles/pennenergy/2013/04/foreign-investors-play-large-role-in-u-s--shale-industry.html?cmpid=EnlWeeklyPetroApril122013

Can Quality Score Be Gamed?

Andrew Goodman  |  April 5, 2013   |  1 Comment

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Like most complex games with many intelligent participants (such as financial markets, chess, and high-stakes poker), your first hunches about how to "get ahead of the pack" in the Google AdWords auction are likely to be trivial, clichéd, or just plain wrong.

This year, as ever, you'll read plenty of articles focusing specifically on Quality Score and "what to do about it." Conference sessions will teach you Quality Score "tips and tricks."

Since this is about rank and CPCs, admittedly we'll always be driven to crack the code in some way.

This dates all the way back to when Overture ran a pure PPC auction. Under those circumstances, would it make sense to write extremely restrictive, "filtering"-style ads to maximize the value of a click to your business, while garnering a lot of free impressions? Of course it would. High CTRs, in that instance, wouldn't be desirable. Overture tried to address that problem with a laborious, cumbersome human editorial process. (Arggh.)

When AdWords finally introduced CTR into the ranking formula, it led to a great leap forward in relevance, and fewer opportunities to game the system. That being said, many of us enjoyed early-era tricks. Fun in a time machine set to 2002: come in guns blazing so you enjoy very high CTRs associated with high ad positions. Then, "lock in" that CTR history by doing this at a reasonable volume, then gradually walk your bids down, holding your position. That worked pretty well then. The system is much more sophisticated today.

People are still routinely coming up with "Why don't I move my queen way over there now and put my opponent in check?" moves for AdWords. Those moves are usually neutralized by a more sophisticated algorithm. Google's spokespeople - not always wanting to say much about the formula beyond the published overviews - have often felt compelled to dispel certain AdWords myths. The "don't get your hopes up" points made by AdWords product developers in recent years have included:

• AdWords normalizes for match type. You're not going to be penalized for using broad match or rewarded for using exact match.
• AdWords normalizes for ad position. Aim for the positions that make sense for your business. Lowering ad positions that by definition enjoy a worse CTR does not harm your keyword Quality Score or any account-wide factors.
• You can't improve Quality Score with negative keywords. (Really?) Well, I've heard that said by a high-ranking Googler, and no, I don't really believe it.
• While there is an account-wide Quality Score factor (enough bad history across the board can affect your whole account), one of Google's top AdWords architects has denied that there is a specific factor at the ad group level. One badly chosen keyword in an ad group won't "contaminate" others in an ad group.

Current industry consensus is that 50 percent to 75 percent of AdWords keyword Quality Score comes down to CTR, with personalization elements adding complexity. Since Quality Score is reputedly calculated on the fly for each query, the reporting you see in your account is not "the" number, but rather an average. (For Google's ever-changing summary of how Quality Score is calculated, go here.)

"Other relevancy factors" round out the CTR factor. These may involve semantics; display and destination URL (Google can tinker with how much users, and Google, trust your company's main identifying factor); and the vagaries of how many ads Google wishes to show on a page.

"Landing page experience" is another component of Quality Score. It's probably exaggerated by third-party pundits today. Note the word "experience." User experience is best measured by user behavior patterns, not solely based on some arbitrary formula about which keywords match which landing page elements, etc.

Further to the landing page question: recall that Google started out by banning a narrow range of user experience violations, such as pop-ups. Later, it extended the policy to a wide range of trust-eroding practices. It's important to scrutinize both the letter and intent of Google's Landing Page and Site Policies to understand if there is something you're doing wrong. Google is trying to protect users from scams and bad user experiences, and it does so through a combination of automated and editorial means. Hobby horses such as landing page load times enter the mix at various times, sending some advertisers scrambling to overreact to those stats for all the wrong reasons. (Speeding up your site is always a good idea, but you have no idea how much AdWords Quality Score is penalizing you for having a slow one, if at all.)

There are too many moving parts to user experiences for Google to be effective in policing them with human and bot oversight (though a quick read of the guidelines implies that human oversight and manual scoring shouldn't be ruled out as elements of Google's practices). Rather, proxies for bad experiences may be used as Google's models become better and better at confirming bad patterns statistically. (Do horrible bounce rates factor in? Well, they should, but then, why does Google let you keep spending so heavily on pages with horrible bounce rates? Assume nothing.) And it might be easiest for Google to do relatively little on this front unless real humans take a real dislike to your ads or business model. Now, as ever, Google does not like "thin" affiliate sites, click arbitrage, fake comparison sites, banned pharma products, and so on.

Make no mistake: "crappy" pages often have little difficulty being associated with keyword Quality Scores of 10. If the site is good enough to get the job done, and the whole campaign does a good job of matching up users with related commercial intent, then Google isn't going to throw up roadblocks needlessly.

It's not a good idea to obsess over Quality Score. Advertisers are doing a bad enough job settling on the correct metrics to manage campaigns to; testing ads methodically; understanding statistical significance; understanding campaign settings; unraveling attribution puzzles; and so on, that they're likely to fail in attempts to test cause and effect in Quality Score engineering.

That being said, the system isn't bulletproof. We can still prevail over competitors if we follow strong hunches about the vulnerabilities of Quality Score and the effects of the overall formula on rank and CPC. Consider the following tips:

• In addition to keyword-level calculations, Google may apply an account-wide calculation that impacts your ad positions and CPCs. Many advertisers get paranoid, therefore, about low Quality Score keywords, and race to pause them. But they may be overreacting. Low Quality Score keywords are probably diffuse or wrong in intent, and need to be addressed. But if they're not high volume, they probably don't hurt that much. What is more interesting is the opportunity you might have to lock in a higher overall account Quality Score by continuing to hammer hard at your high volume "10" keywords. Maybe you're bidding a bit higher than you would like on some of these. But more impressions for 10-Quality Score keywords that are working OK for you economically can't hurt your account Quality Score. You're laying down all of this positive history. Maxing that as a proportion of your spend in the account may be a benefit from a Quality Score perspective.
• Google has kept "Display URL" in the mix as a kind of wild card in Quality Score calculations. I believe it is largely a "rich get richer" shortcut for Google to emphasize trust and quality in the results. Think broadly about your business strategy. Everything about the way you build your brand and conduct your business should be aligned with improving that brand's reputation. "Throwaway domains," generic microsites, and quick shifts in strategy won't be aligned with Quality Score health, long term. This also means that Quality Score benefits recognizable brands and well-liked micro-brands. The Johnny-come-lately with a weak offering and a stop-and-start ad spend is not going to garner the same responses as a business with a consistent marketing strategy.
• Units like Sitelinks, designations like Trusted Stores, captivating visuals like Seller Ratings Extensions: various ad innovations of these types tend to goose up CTRs, all else being equal.
• In a Quality Score world, trying to finesse your spend by not buying your brand keywords is a counterproductive strategy. You need to own these and you need most variations of these to become 10s. Combine premium placement in the large ad unit with Sitelinks (for example), and your CTRs may go through the roof. As such, you're laying down statistical evidence that you're significantly more loved and trusted than Google's models would predict (i.e., what your competitors can muster).
• If you're managing only to CPA and failing to push your ad tests harder to find potential mutant ads that deliver great ROI along with "less bad" CTR, you're not optimizing your account fully. Reconsider the advantages of more clicks on ads.
• Geo-target if that helps you push up response rates to ads and user engagement on-site.

With these ways to legitimately "trick" Quality Score, you'll have enough on your plate. Meanwhile, many of your competitors will be frantically moving their chess pieces into clichéd or trivial positions, until they finally realize you've been thinking 10 moves ahead. Checkmate.

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2259595/can-quality-score-be-gamed

Men, Women, and Status in Negotiations

EDITED BY PON_STAFF ON MARCH 21ST, 2013 / BUSINESS NEGOTIATIONS

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A growing body of research suggests that status concerns vary depending on the gender of interested parties.

First, men tend to care more about status than women do. Using a university sponsored fundraising campaign, researchers Bruno S. Frey and Stephan Meier of the University of Zurich examined how social-comparison information affected contribution rates.

• Male students who learned that a high percentage of students had contributed to the campaign were more likely to make a contribution than were female students who received the same information.

In the context of negotiation, professors John Rizzo of Stony Brook University and Richard Zeckhauser of Harvard University asked a group of young physicians about their reference groups and salary aspirations.

• Male physicians compared themselves to reference groups that earned higher salaries than the ones female physicians selected. 
• In addition, men’s salary reference points were more indicative than women’s of how much they earned later.
• Finally, women tend to compare themselves to particular individuals whom they know, while men tend to assess themselves according to information about typical behavior.

For this reason, when negotiating, consider offering different social comparison information to men and women. You might tell a male prospective hire that you’re offering him more than you’ll give others with his qualifications (assuming that is true).

When negotiating with a female prospect, you might be more specific:

“We recently interviewed someone similar to you, a Kellogg MBA with several years of consulting experience. To signal how much we want you to work for us, we’re offering you more than we offered her.”

http://www.pon.harvard.edu/?p=34147/?mqsc=E3486922&utm_source=WhatCountsEmail&utm_medium=PON%20Harvard+Negotiation%20Insider%20Tuesday&utm_campaign=Negotiation_Insider_03262013