1. Keep it simple. The simpler it is for visitors to complete a purchase the more purchases (and fewer shopping cart abandonments) you’ll see. Make it simple to find the product and go through the checkout process.
2. Provide complete contact information including a telephone number. Buyers want to know you’re real and they want to know how to reach you in case of a problem.
3. Provide encouragement throughout the checkout process. The best way to do this is to let buyers know what stage of checkout they’ve reached, and to provide them with highlighted signage to let them know what to do next.
4. Use product pictures in shopping carts. This reminds visitors what’s in their carts. It also reinforces, in the visitor’s mind, the reason(s) for the purchase.
5. Link back to the product page. After an item has been placed in the shopping cart, the visitor should be able to click on the item and be directed back to the product page in a new window for example. This makes buying comparisons easier and ensures the visitor has the right item for his/her needs without leaving the shopping cart.
6. Don’t keep shipping costs a secret. Nothing kills a conversion faster than a $19.95 shipping and handling charge on a $10 item. Provide shipping cost information on the first page of the checkout.
7. Is it backordered? The visitor finally reaches the end of the checkout only to discover that the item isn’t in stock. Do you think they’ll come back when the item comes in? They won’t.
8. Provide complete product information including sizes, colors, styles and other product descriptors. This will cut down on product returns because buyers will know what they’re actually purchasing. Avoid hyping products for the same reason.
9. Keep terms of service (TOS) simple and unambiguous. What’s your guarantee? What’s your return policy? Eliminate the boilerplate and give them the facts.
10. Provide a menu of payment gateways. Not all buyers want to pay by credit card. Some don’t even have a credit card. Buyers should be given the option to pay by debit card, personal check (snail mail), PayPal and other similar services, bank transfer and, if the want to stop by to pick it up, you’ll even take cash.
11. Never blame the buyer. When a potential buyer clicks on the wrong link, or forgets to enter all data fields, put up a message explaining the problem and how to fix it. The customer is always right and it’s always your fault. Period.
12. Offer gift cards. Some buyers just don’t know what to buy as a gift. A gift card solves the problem.
13. Use real testimonials. If you’re doing it right, you’ve gotten good feedback from some buyers. Ask permission to use their testimonials. Don’t use fake testimonials signed by Diane E., California. It’s an obvious fake testimonial.
14. Provide a customer service line. Outsource it if it isn’t part of the budget but buyers want to know there’s help in setting it up, whatever “it” is.
15. Avoid distracting links. If your home page is crammed with PPC ads and links to other sites, it’s distracting and you’ll see a lot more bounces (visitors who never get past the home page).
16. Offer incentives. Free shipping encourages buyers. So do upgrades, i.e. “Spend at least $50 and receive 10% off your entire purchase.” Some buyers will do the math and figure out they’re getting something for half price.
17. Welcome repeat visitors by name. Your customer data base is filled with solid gold information including names, purchase amounts, items purchased and so on. First, welcome a return buyer by name. Then, offer suggestions for purchase based on individual buying histories. (See Amazon.com for examples of using data base information to boost conversion ratios.)
18. Provide a currency converter. Not all buyers will be using your country’s currency. Make it easy to convert from euros to drachmas to dollars.
19. Offer a free newsletter. Your regular buyers will appreciate it when they’re notified ahead of time of upcoming specials, new product launches and other site related information.
20. Add a forum. This is a great way for buyers to share information, make recommendations and complain. It’s also a great way for you to handle complaints quickly, with the resolution posted right there on the complaint thread.
21. Provide informational content on your site. This establishes your credentials and credibility as an authority, whether you’re selling kayaks or bake ware.
22. Learn from your competitors. Visit the sites of more-established competitors to see what they’re doing to convert. How is the homepage designed? Navigation? Checkout? You can’t copyright an idea so you might as well “borrow” from the best.
23. Improve site stickiness. In other words, give buyers a reason to return. Some suggestions? The Sale of the Day, Tip of the Day, Your Horoscope, This Day in History, etc. This keeps your site green and visitors returning.
24. Let buyers post product reviews. Nothing sells better than a positive review from another buyer. Of course, the converse is true, too. Nothing will kill a sale faster than a bad review. And if a product receives lots of bad reviews, drop it from your product line.
25. Target your site’s skin to your demographic. If you’re selling collectible knives, your site should have a certain “look” and that look doesn’t include pastels and prissy type. Big, bold and manly — that’s the way to go. On the other hand, if you’re selling needlepoint patterns, a nice pastel background with little flowers works perfectly.

Search engine optimization is designed to attract search engine spiders. It’s also intended to ensure that your site is accurately and completely optimized. But, once traffic arrives on site, conversion optimization takes over.

Keep it simple. Keep it easy. Keep it honest. Not only will you see a boost in conversion ratio, you’ll also see a nice pop in return buyers. And they’re the best buyers any web site owner could ask for.

Think Outside the Design
The value of web standards really amounts to recommended use of markup to semantically describe content. Once mastered, the web developer is able to make intelligent and conscious decisions on the “right” compromises to be made for a given project. We are constantly working towards standardization and have had dialogs about the best practices for markup in various situations, it’s the World Wide Web Consortium’s role to define the purpose of markup; the platform for web site optimization. Web site optimization has little to do with search engine optimization or any of the W3C’s validation tools. Instead web site optimization deals with steps taken to improve user experience by:

• reducing page weight
• re-factoring of markup, CSS and/or Client Side Scripting
• making content accessible
• making content semantic
• reusing imagery
• optimizing the weight of imagery
• caching and deferred loading
• reducing latency to reduce download or render time

In short, the goal is to use the minimum code to achieve the desired result. Unfortunately, clients may not always afford us the proper time or resources required to give the most polished result possible.

Think it Through
Web standards in and of itself does not necessarily contribute to reduced file sizes, however what it does do is endorse healthy use of semantic markup that does give way to reduced page weight through table-less markup and a focus on cascading styles sheets for presentational material. By using document object model scripting, procedural code no longer needs to live inline in the html document itself. Take advantage of your page’s semantic structure to use the DOM to the fullest.

Code becomes art when we take our code to the next level by re-factoring it to maximize it accessibility, by reducing our dependency on the markup for presentation and procedural user interface components. What remains to be done when all of the content in a document is rendered as the design calls for, content properly described with your tags, images optimized for reuse and weight? Now, we consider scale, what happens when this site we’ve worked so hard to optimize becomes highly trafficked (think: Digg Effect) — or if the site already is, let’s make sure to optimize the server’s role in the user experience.

Caching is one of the chief techniques to be leveraged to improve user experience both on the client-side and the server-side. Making objects like cascading style sheets and JavaScript files external can also benefit from the technique of combining files to reduce latency. It’s much less “work” to download a larger file once than it is to download (or check for freshness of) several files. Unfortunately, many of the most visited sites could benefit greatly from even a dash of web site optimization. Issues like multiple CSS file or JavaScript files demonstrate little regard for the benefit they could provide their visitors as well as their own bottom line.

Move on to compression; consider pre-compressing your CSS and combined JavaScript files to reduce server load for high traffic sites. Go a step further and create a proxy that makes sure to return the “not modified” codes to user-agents checking for freshness of objects in your site after first download.

Without getting into code for each portion, let’s consider the typical components of a “well-designed” HTML document:

1. masthead
2. navigation
3. breadcrumbs
4. body
5. sidebar
6. footer

Within each there are a myriad of possible methods to semantically describe the content of the components. Let’s have a look at a few basic cases:

• Unordered Lists for navigation, breadcrumbs and copy in list items.
• Non-tabular layout for forms and use of labels and access keys for accessibility
• Use of <p>, <em>, <strong>, <dl>, <h*>, <table> tags for content

Diving into a single common challenge can show how understanding of web standards cascades into an optimized user experience, let’s look at a technique that combines several techniques by several authors, each of which contributing to many fundamental factors of web site optimization; specifically: image reuse, semantics, presentational separation, caching, latency reduction, image optimization, and accessibility/platform independence. Anyway, on to the challenge — image based main navigation with hover effects. Without being distracted with pseudo-code let’s have a look at how using what we know about web standards leads naturally to web site optimization and a very desirable result for the user:

1. Start with an unordered list, in the case of drop down menus, let’s make that a nested unordered list
2. The unordered list is styled as required using CSS such that any copy is moved out of view by hiding overflow and indenting the copy out of view of user agents that support CSS, but still leaving it accessible to screen readers etc
3. Now imagery is added for each of the tabs for the various states (hover, visited, active etc) as necessary

Normally this is where things would end. At this point we have the desired result, but it’s not an optimal experience for the user. Again to the credit of numerous designers and developers turned authors out there additional techniques can be applied to optimize the menu quite a bit:

1. Combine all of the images for each button in the navigation into a single file
2. Combine all of the image states the navigation into a single file and use CSS to shift the desired portion of the image into view when required
3. Put any JavaScript required for desired effects; e.g. transparency, sliding effects support for browsers that don’t support standards as we would like etc an external file

In the previous three steps, we’ve:

1. Reduced the latency required to load the main navigation imagery and the overall render time for a given page
2. “Pre-Loaded” and cached the other anchor states for the navigation without using any client side scripting
3. Cached the JavaScript for the navigation by making it external (the same is obviously true for the CSS), improving the render time for subsequent page views

Now apply a few more techniques to the site as a whole:

1. Take advantage of the compression support of popular browsers and compress JavaScript and CSS so that it can be sent instead of the larger uncompressed versions
2. Combine our CSS files and JavaScript files respectively, similar to the combining technique for the navigation imagery to reduce latency
   Cache these compressed versions of the combined files on the server so that
3. Cache these compressed versions of the combined files on the server so that every page view requested doesn’t require the web server to have to prepare the same files over-and-over on-the-fly. Instead the server can send static files immediately (which it can do with tremendous ease).

With the various techniques we all apply to our projects just adding a few more steps of optimization greatly improves the user experience.

Make it Your Own
Standards simply help us agree on what markup is intended to do and how it’s elements work together for describing content, web site optimization picks up where web standards leaves off. The W3C encourages us to use markup to describe the content and separate the presentation and functionality from markup as much as possible. Once we get used to the idea our time is best spent optimizing our code to work in the real world. I’ve intentionally left out the “how” because that’s an ongoing debate whose conclusions are at best situational. There are quite a few frameworks out there that help developers apply many of these principles to their projects right out-of-the-box, but it’s not too difficult to build your own framework for your own style of work.

So what’s the final word? Well, similar to the stance that Ethan Marcotte put forward I suggest that web standards be the baseline that we use to optimize sites to perform for the targeted user agents. One day it may be easier to leverage standards to achieve a predictable user-experience across all user-agents, but for now it’s best to have more skills and mastery than are required to render a job well done.

• Easy Implementation
• Keyword and Campaign Comparison
• Create Custom Dashboards
• AdWords Integration
• Trend and Date Slider
• E-commerce Tracking / Funnel Visualization
• Email reports
• Improved Site Overlay / Heat Mapping
• Improved Traffic Segmentation e.g. GeoTargeting

All of these are extremely handy especially when you have the ability to track the results on your own to make sure everything is kept honest. I’m looking forward to a hands-on test drive. Check out the tour now.

First a definition:
“Foveal View” — The area of visible space where the user is best able to focus with maximum detail. The point here is that outside of the focal area the eye (and therefore the mind) is not perceiving color nor as much detail. Understanding this concept cascades into the takeaways that follow.

Now some highlights from Andy’s portion of the video + my two cents:

1. The traditional marriage to 800×600 optimized design is really on it’s way out (as many people have noticed looking at their site statistics). Instead wider screen layouts not only bring more content above the fold, reducing the amount of scrolling required to use a page, but they also compliment a user’s natural behavioral desires while using a site,
2. Page elements should be organized in such a way that relevant blocks of information are near each other so that the brain can make logical associations and accurately assess relevance while scanning a page,
3. “Information Blocks” should be wider than tall for easiest consumption — again this is in step with the wider layout point above,
4. Typography & whitespace use (contrast) are also as important as ever; when properly used they create a guide to lead the eye through blocks of content in the body of a page or in navigational areas.
5. Group navigation items to contain 7 +/- 2 options per group. This avoids forcing the user to stop and process the information. In other words, use this principle to create at-a-glance usability in your navigation, which is vital to conversion.

Heat mapping sites like the following are useful in understanding the result of the eye/brain interaction. Use the insight above to review your design and your heat map results to identify problem areas in your user interface design. Here are some popular tools:

• crazyegg
• clickdensity
• ClickTale

Let’s not forget Google Analytics (Urchin) is useful when using the "Site Overlay" view in also seeing which anchors are most clicked in your site.

However, what we’ve long called “EBO” or Eyeball Optimization is explained masterfully by Andy — Well done!

Since I’m not sure how long that video will be in place so here’s the “permalink.”

In part one of this two-part series we reviewed the basics of conversion rate optimization and how Google’s Web Optimizer — a free tool from Google — can help improve your conversion rate, making tire kickers drive off the lot. We also examined some of the tests that GWO performs to deliver useful conversion rate analytics. But there are additional benefits to using this performance assessment tool. Let’s have a look:

Test Problems Identified During Usability Testing
In part one, we urged you to undertake usability testing — sitting actual humans in front of a monitor to move through your site identifying anything confusing. From usability tests, you should have a list of problems and issues identified by your testers (or your observations of them). Then move on to use GWO to analyze anything other problems.

For example, if several people thought the checkout was confusing, test it after site launch to see if the checkout page is where many visitors bounced (opt-out of the sale). If so, you need to make the checkout more simple, don’t make visitors think. Remember, usability tests identify why visitors aren’t buying and that’s one thing you want to know now!

Test Your USP
Your USP — your unique selling position — is what sets you apart from the competition. It could be your low, low prices or the assurance that high cost means high quality. In any case, describe your USP in a few words. Then, look at the competition to see what they use as their USPs and conduct some A/B splits to see if, maybe, your current USP could be changed, clarified or refined.

What Do Visitors Take Away From Your Site?
Make a list of priorities — the five messages or sell points you want each visitor to remember when s/he leaves the site. Then, run GWO tests to determine if these five points are clear. You’ll be able to tell with the reporting GWO provides which messages stick and which are lost on visitors.

Characterize Your Ideal Buyer
Male, over 30, income over $50K annually — make a list of the characteristics of the ideal buyer. This is who you’re trying to reach. Your copy, site design, graphics and images should be directed straight at your target demographic — the market segment you most want to reach.

Test Headlines
Headlines are critical to site success. If they don’t motivate buyers to action you won’t make sales. So try different headlines in A/B splits to see which headers pull best. Headlines should describe the benefits of products or services (not product features), they should emphasize ease of use and finally, they can’t be overblown bombast, i.e., headlines must be believable. In fact, all site text must be believable.

Test Your Tagline
The tag line is the phrase that follows your site or company name, e.g., Dow: Better Living Through Chemistry. The tag should express the essence of your site and, in a few words, the site’s USP.

Test Pricing
Cheapest isn’t always best. Many consumers take comfort in knowing that they’re getting better quality at a higher price. This “velvet rope” approach to marketing is what makes haute couture so expensive. Test pricing to find the comfort level of your target demographic.

Also, drop prices a penny. $24.99 sounds so much less than $25.00. It’s a strategy that’s worked for decades and all of us fall for it because we tend to round down not up.

Promotions and Give-Aways
Buy one get one free. A one-month free subscription. Enter our Island Hide-Away Sweepstakes. Test these one at a time to see which promos have the greatest impact on your site’s bottom line.

Make the Call to Action Link Really Obvious
A colorful button labeled “Order Now” tells the visitor what’s expected and how to complete the most desired action. Don’t let them guess. Tell them what to do next.

Other ways to make points stand out? Bold type face, italics, high-lights, arrows — anything to grab the readers’ attention — quickly.

Test Site Layouts
A single-column layout gives you greater control over the order in which information is presented to visitors. Make sure the most important information comes first.

Also, studies show that people read from upper-left to lower right, stopping at the headlines. That makes the upper-left corner of each page prime site real estate.

Critical Information Goes Above the Fold

Some visitors don’t scroll so if they don’t see it above the fold they don’t see it at all.

Test Images
A picture is worth a thousand words — sometimes. Test various images and color usage to see what pulls best: a tabletop product image, product in use by happy customers, etc. A/B splits will tell you what you need to know, here.

Typography
Critical to site success. Don’t overwhelm visitors with pages of text. Use enough to make the pitch then get off stage. Know when to stop selling.

Use simple language to describe product benefits not product features. Make sure visitors have all the information needed to make a buying decision and address common buyer objections, e.g., too expensive, etc.

Test font sizes and colors for readability and use bulleted lists for quick delivery of key points. Refine after each test.

Accessibility
Accessibility is closely married to usability. Start by testing your site in different browsers and at different screen resolutions to get a “customer’s eye view” of your on-line business. What looks good in FireFox may not look so good in IE.

Keep download times as short as possible. 90% of visitors will sit through a 10-second download. Only 10% will sit through a 30-second download so keep site pages light on graphics, Flash animations and other bells and whistles.

Activate Google’s site search feature using Google Mini and Google’s Free Web Search tools. These make your site more accessible to search engine users.

Create “clickable” features. Users click on anything – links, pictures, graphics — anything that captures the attention of the visitor should be clickable.

Test on-site adverts such as Google Adwords. Adwords allows you to split links into various channels for A/B split testing. Test for: ad size, shape, positioning on each page and color formats to make ads pop out or blend in with the rest of your site design.

Finally, establish and record baseline measurements for comparison purposes. Compare test results to your baseline findings to determine what’s working and what needs more work.

Google’s Web Optimizer is a terrific tool for improving your site’s conversion rate and improving your bottom line. However, be patient. It may take several refinements before your site is fully optimized to convert visitors to buyers.

Also, remember that conversion optimization is not a goal. It’s a process — one that continues even as your site sees improved traffic and sales. Optimization should take place regularly and every change you make should be tested for results. Does the change improve conversion? If not, go back to what you had and try again.

Conversion optimization is a little bit of a science, a bit of an art and a whole lot of trial and error so keep at it. With Google’s Web Optimizer, you have the tool to test how your site is doing.

Use it to grow your site to profitability faster. Use it to achieve site success. Use it to make your site the best it can be. After all, that’s what we’re each trying to do in the world of e-commerce — and Google wants to partner in your success.

Within the e-commerce sphere, the “mind games” between site owners and search engine designers have focused on search engine optimization (SEO). After all, you can’t make a sale if visitors aren’t reaching your site. However, as the web marketplace grows exponentially more competitive, attention among webmasters and site owners has turned to conversion optimization — converting site visitors to buyers.

Conversion optimization has nothing to do with SEO. SEO is designed for spiders and bots. Conversion optimization is based on two factors only: the needs and motivations of human site visitors and persuasive site content and design to encourage humans to make a purchase or perform some other action. Any other considerations are sub-sets of these two factors in conversion optimization strategies.

Measuring Human Motivations and Site Effectiveness
SEO is based on the development of numbers (metrics) that are immutable. Numbers are numbers, there’s no debating that. The interpretation of site metrics, on the other hand, is a true combination of art, science and testing.

Assessing conversion rate optimization must apply a completely different approach to data gathering and the accurate, actionable assessment of the cold hard facts (percentages and such) that are the basis of SEO.

The Google Website Optimizer (GWO)
Google owns SEO (sorry Yahoo). It is now moving into eyeball optimization (EBO) to help site owners improve conversion rates. It’s got lots of features, it’s totally flexible in designing useful tests for human reactions and it provides data using simple to read and understand charts showing what’s working and what would work even better.

One key point here: after indexing billions and billions of web pages, who is going to know better what works and doesn’t work for solid EBO? After all, all the Google gurus have to do is evaluate their top performing sites to develop measurement criteria and tools to improve conversion optimization. Google is going to know what works.

One other point worth mentioning — it’s free. A flexible, user-designed test engine developed by Google and available free. It’s a must have for any site owner, site designer, webmaster or SEO.

What Can Google Website Optimizer Do For Me & How Can It Do It If I Don’t Know the Difference Between a Statistical Mean and a Statistical Average?

Multi-Variable Testing
Got to have it. When quantifying human motivations and the effectiveness of a site page, you must have data to compare — data based on site variables such as a different home page image or revised site text. There are hundreds of variables within any website. Color selections, type font, type color, navigation tools, product images and descriptions — literally an endless list of variables.

Google’s Website Optimizer allows you to design tests to compare variables to see which ones work best. Often called A/B split tests, these simply compare a change or two to see which performs best. For example, you might have a picture of your product on test site A and a photo of the product in use by a human on test site B. Simply by comparing visitors’ reactions to pages A and B, you can make refinements to your site.

Another useful A/B split test to check the success of your Adwords placements is to create two identical ads with two different destination URLs. You’ll quickly discover which placements pay for themselves and which should be dropped.

Easy Analytics
The information gathered by Google during testing is delivered in an easy-to-understand format. You’ll see, in graphic form, where visitors go and where they don’t go when on site. Taking a good hard look at your bounce rates and possible paths-thru-site are essential parts of your ongoing conversion optimization diet.

Usability Testing
Real humans navigating your site. Get as many people as you can to site down and click around — from your computer-whiz 12-year-old to mom and dad who still use dial-up. These tests provide the reasons why visitors take specific actions — over and over again.

Eyeball Optimization
GWO shows you what attracts eyeballs but doesn’t generate a click. It also shows what visitors miss entirely because it’s misplaced or mislabeled. Every page should undergo an “EBO” to improve conversion rates.

Follow the Leaders
You can’t copyright an idea so use the same features and techniques employed by higher ranking competitor sites. Then, conduct A/B split tests to see which changes show improvement in conversion optimization.

People Are Still the Same
There’s nothing new about direct response advertising, which is what successful sites use. Infomercials, newspaper ads, TV 30-second spots — these are all examples of direct response advertising and the same motivators that work in other media will also work on your website. Once again, you can’t copyright an idea and the principles of direct response marketing haven’t changed one iota.

Determine and identify the buyer’s needs; provide the solution to meet those needs. It’s worked for the past few millennia and it’ll work for you today.

Small Steps or One Giant Leap
Do you make incremental improvements or try to fix everything all at once. It depends on where you are right now. If you’ve optimized your site (or paid to have it optimized) a small step here and there can make a huge difference, and a major revamping of your site may actually set you back in the optimization race.

On the other hand, if you’re just launching, run a couple of A/B splits and other analytics to see which site pages are hot and which are not. Adjust accordingly. The point here? The more optimized the site, the less optimization is needed so if you’ve been at it for a while, take small steps and assess improvements. If you’re just starting out, launch, track and adjust as needed — whether it be small steps or the proverbial giant leap.

Create a Diagram of Your Marketing Funnel
Start with placed adverts (Adwords, paid links, etc.) Add your home page, each product page, the checkout, automated order conformation, customer care and order fulfillment. Each one of these is a component of a sale and, from the list and with the help of GWO, you’ll be able to more clearly identify holes in your marketing funnel — those areas most in need of improvement, i.e., optimization.

Now, this is just the beginning. Conversion optimization is an on-going process and there are additional steps you can take based on test results delivered by Google’s Web Optimizer — steps that we’ll look at more closely in part 2 of this series.

Continue reading part 2 ›

MDAs can be obvious or very subtle. For example, the MDA on a commercial site is to induce visitors to buy something. That’s obvious. Other MDAs include providing an email address, providing additional personal information, opening an account, signing up for a service, asking for a quote or opting in for the monthly newsletter.

Less obvious MDAs include submitting a blog entry, starting a forum thread, referring new visitors, book marking the site or reading critical sales or informational copy. You could also include coming back again as an MDA for almost every site. That repeat traffic is valuable in building your online enterprise.

Identifying the MDA
Before visitors can perform any MDA, pyoup have to determine what the MDA is for each age of your sitep. And though that may sound like a simple task, it’s not.

Multiple MDAs
Multiple MDAs can cause problems if not presented properly. It’s difficult to persuade visitors to perform one task much less two or three. There are several reasons for this.

Visitors aren’t very patient. They want to determine if your site is what they’re looking for, they want to conduct their business and move on to Mah Jong solitaire. Asking a visitor to complete a customer satisfaction survey after a sale is like asking visitors to take their SATs again. Not very likely.

Ambiguous MDAs
You see this quite often on NFP sites and sites designed to provide informational content. For many of these sites, the MDA is to have the visitor make a donation. However, on the same page viewers may be offered the opportunity to become a member, to receive regular updates or to be bombarded with affiliate spam. (Can we send you useful information from time to time?)

More than one MDA per page will deter many visitors from performing any actions. Too confusing. Too much time.

Linear MDAs
A common aspect of many service providers’ web pages, linear MDAs require visitors to perform more than one action in a series.

For example, the first MDA for a site selling debt consolidation services might be to motivate visitors to click on a link from the home page that will take them to a form to be completed in order to access the debt consolidation services. In cases of linear MDAs, each page of the site must clearly state the MDA for that page.

Continuing to use the example of the debt consolidation company, if the MDA is to click a link to a form, the link itself would appear on the home page. It would be very large and well labeled, i.e. Click here to get started. The home page copy would be directed specifically to the MDA. Urge and persuade the visitor to click on that link.

The next MDA, completing the form, would be addressed on the link from the home page. In fact, there are usually several (many) MDAs for a single site and each page of the site must specifically address the MDA for that particular page.

No MDAs
More commonly found on personal sites and owner-designed commercial sites, the lack of a clearly stated MDA will leave many visitors scratching their heads and wondering just what they’re expected to do. Not only should you have a clear picture of the single-most important MDA for your site, you should make sure your visitors know just what that MDA is, as well.

Optimizing the Homepage for Maximum MDA Conversion
A site’s conversion rate is nothing more than the rate at which visitors perform the MDA. If one in 10 performs the MDA the conversion rate is 10%. If only one in 100 performs the most desired action, the site’s conversion rate is 1%.

The site’s homepage is the first place to clearly introduce and identify the MDA to the visitor. The MDA call-out should appear on the home page above the fold. It should be the first thing visitors see without scrolling. For example:

Welcome to Nutty Nick’s Wicker Hut
20% Off Everything You Buy

That header identifies the MDA &MDAsh; buy some wicker from Nutty Nick. Here’s another headline that defines an MDA. What do you think the action is here:

Sign up for our FREE newsletter and
you may win a free trip to Bermuda!!!

Obviously, the headline is intended to persuade visitors to opt in for a newsletter. It’s clear, unambiguous and it offers an incentive for completing the action.

MDA Incentives
“Why should I?” and “What’s in it for me?” are two questions many visitors ask when the MDA offers no clear benefit to them. That’s why incentives are useful in many cases.

What kind of incentives? Well, anything FREE is always good. Free shipping and handling, a free extended service warranty, free (and really useful) information, the chance to win something &MDAsh; there are plenty of incentives you can employ to encourage completion of the MDA.

Just make sure that the incentive and the MDA are closely tied and closely positioned as in the example above. The incentive doesn’t have to be expensive but it should deliver clear benefit to the visitor.

Also, when more than one MDA is the goal, limit the number of calls to perform an action to exactly one on the home page. Other, less critical actions can be introduced on landing pages, aka zone pages, within a site.

Optimizing Zone Pages for the MDA
Once visitors have navigated the home page (and performed the MDA), they next click a link that takes them to a zone page or landing page (same thing). Once again, the MDA should be clearly displayed above the fold on each zone page.

Zone pages serve different purposes. A link off the home page to a description of company services looks and sounds very different from the zone page for the check-out or contact us page. In all cases, visitors must recognize the personal benefit to them when they choose to perform the action for that specific page. They will save money. They will receive something useful. They will find a solution to a specific problem. Any discriminating visitor is going to ask, “How does this help me?” Provide the right answer and you convert. Provide the wrong answer, or no answer, and that visitor is a click away from gone.

That’s why every site owner must consider the MDA for each page of a site. MDAs must also be specifically targeted on individual pages within the web site. Directions for performing the MDA must be clear, unambiguous and persuasive. Finally, on every page of your site, the visitor must see the clear benefit of performing the MDA &MDAsh; even if the most desired action is clicking on the link back to the home page. Clear, straightforward and persuasive.

If you don’t have a clear understanding of the MDAs for the pages of your site, neither will your visitors. So, if your conversion rate isn’t where you’d like it to be, develop text for MDAs and optimize every page of your site.

A landing page is the page that visitors first see after becoming curious enough to click on a link to your site. The link may be found on search engine results pages, within a specifically-targeted email, on the site’s navigation toolbar or within another website.

In many cases, these are links you pay for. The organic results delivered by SERPs are free, but, unless your site appears on the first two SERPs, it’s unlikely that visitors will connect.

In many cases, the landing page is the site’s home page — but not always, even within SERPs. Landing pages can appear anywhere within a web site.

Paid Links Demand ROI
If your landing page receives prominent display within search engine results pages, congratulations. Upward of 50% of visitor traffic found that landing page through an SE query. However, only 20 to 25 sites can appear on page one of Google’s SERPs. What about the other 10,000 links Google delivers to its users?

Often, smaller sites employ paid links to drive site traffic. Google Adwords, for example, is a PPC (pay per click) means of building business. The important point is this: PPC programs have to more than pay for themselves in order for your site to remain a viable business.

Any form of paid linkage to one of your landing pages must deliver a nice ROI. And to do that, you need a fully-usable, engaging landing page. Otherwise, visitors won’t stick around long enough to read about your low prices and free shipping.

The Purpose of the Landing Page
While all site pages have a purpose (at least on well-designed sites) a landing page typically has a special or singular purpose: to sell a particular item, to announce a product sale, to entice visitors to opt in, complete a questionnaire or perform some other MDA (most desired action).

First determine the MDA the landing page addresses. Then, design everything — from headlines and text to graphics and pictures — to support the completion of the MDA.

Try to keep to one MDA per landing page. Again, the landing page has a specific purpose. Extraneous information, slow-loading videos and a confusing call to action are distractions, along with affiliate links, text links and unnecessary animations. All distract the attention of the viewer from your MDA.

Landing Page Design Principles

1. Create a headline that accomplishes the following:

   • tells the visitors that they’re on the right page;
   • clearly states the purpose of the landing page — the MDA;
   • engages the visitor, piques interest, encourages the reader to continue.

   The headline should be a grabber and appear “above the fold” — the top of your home page. That’s the most valuable real estate on your site.

2. Use short blocks of text and single sentences surrounded by negative space (white). Visitors tend to scan rather than read the entire page, even if the text is pure poetry.
3. And because readers scan instead of read site text, use lots of headers, sub-heads and bullet lists.
4. The first sentence of each block of text should provide the critical information you want to impart, again because visitors scan, often reading just the first sentence of a paragraph or block of text.
5. Employ an unambiguous call to action. “Order Now!” “Call now before you forget!” Leave no doubt what action is expected of the visitor. Calls for action can appear throughout the landing page text and a call to action should be the last thing visitors read.
6. Choose a type font that’s easy on the eyes. Avoid script fonts and fonts with lots of curly-Qs.
7. If the landing page sells one or more products, provide visitors with pictures of the products.
8. Prices, including shipping and handling costs, should appear below the fold. But they should definitely appear.

Creating a Prominent Landing Page
If your landing page is also the home page, by definition it has prominence to visitors and to search engine spiders. However, if your landing page or pages are within the site, it’s important to make sure search engine spiders recognize the importance of this page within the site — its prominence.

Spiders use a number of criteria to determine a particular page’s prominence within the context of the entire site. Location is one criterion — the more clicks away from the home page, the less prominent — at least to the limited capabilities of current search engines.

Text is another criterion used to assess prominence. Keywords, keyword density and an automated comparison of keywords in the text against keywords in various HTML tags is another indicator of a page’s prominence.

Finally, the number of links pointing to a particular page is an important factor in assessing page prominence. The more links connecting other pages to your landing page, the more prominent it will be to search engines when your site is indexed.

This is especially important when landing page product offerings differ significantly from other products sold on the site. Search engines employ a mathematical taxonomy to classify each site within a particular category. So, if you market educational toys but introduce a landing page offering children’s books, it’s important for search engines to reevaluate the site’s taxonomy and to expand the site’s classification to include ’sellers of children’s books’. One way to do this is to create links within the site all pointing to the landing page.

Landing pages are useful as motivators, as site directories, information sources and for many other valuable purposes. However, the development of an effective landing page takes careful thought and an understanding of what drives both humans and search engine spiders.

Generate increased site traffic and improve your conversion rate with a well-designed, well-written, well-placed and well-connected landing page on your site.

Too often, site owners design site pages and generate site text based on their personal likes and dislikes. It’s a natural thing to do. But, is it the smart thing, the right thing to do? The answer lies in every site owners’ understanding of what attracts and keeps humans on site and on point to perform the most desired action (MDA).

SEO Falls Short
It’s not about SEO. SEO is, by definition, designed to optimize the site for accurate, complete and beneficial search engine indexing. It only marginally applies to the drives and motivations of those with credit cards. Buyers. In fact, many SEO strategies actually work against visitors performing the MDA. Keyword dense text, for example, often reads like spamglish. SEs may like it. It’s off-putting to many humans.

The focus on SEO should take place in the design of the site’s “backstage” architecture, hidden from the audience. Eyeball optimization (EBO) takes place on the presentation layer. SEO gets them there. EBO keeps them there and converts visitors to buyers.

Eyeball Optimization
Often the most overlooked aspect of site design is the first impression it makes on visitors. It takes the average visitor less than 10 seconds to decide if a site is what s/he is looking for. That means the home page has to be right on target.

Right color scheme. Right text font. Right tone to the copy. Right graphics and images. But how do you know what’s right?

First, define your target demographic with the utmost specificity. This is the ideal buyer for your products or services. Imagine this individual. Determine and list all of the following:

• male or female
• age
• education level
• income level
• associated interests & hobbies
• core personal values
• community status and association
• family size; family role
• core needs
• desires and expectations

This often requires making reasonable assumptions regarding visitors. For example, if you’re site markets high-end homes, it’s safe to assume that serious visitors come from high income brackets. Conversely, if you’re marketing legal bankruptcy services, it’s safe to assume that income levels don’t meet spending levels.

Second, don’t go with what appeals to your tastes, likes and dislikes. You’re much too close to the project to determine the “rightness” of the chosen color motif. But, it’s easy enough to research what works and what doesn’t. Just Google up the top-tier competition to see what colors they’ve chosen. You can’t copyright colors and you don’t have to be a graphic artist. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Just do a little research.

Third, consider questions of accessibility. How accessible is the site’s message? This includes everything from the readability of the type (size and font) to the number of clicks a visitor must make to reach the MDA. The more clicks, the fewer MDAs.

The Value of MDA Analysis
An analysis of the marketplace, and the development of a target demographic, contribute to the completion of the MDA by increased numbers of visitors (higher conversion rate).

With commercial sites, the most desired action is to get visitors to buy something. That’s why you’re there. But as an MDA, “Get them to buy something” is too expansive. It’s not specific enough.

A broadly-stated MDA is much less helpful than a specific MDA. With a specific action in mind, your site’s design, layout, architecture and site text can be more specifically targeted to encourage visitors to perform the MDA.

What do you want visitors to buy? How much would you like each buyer to spend? How important are repeat buyers? What are the stumbling blocks between the visitor and the MDA? Answer these questions and your well on your way to designing a site that delivers the highest possible conversion rate.

Here’s a sample of a specific MDA designed for a site selling after-sale motorcycle accessories: I want men under 40, who ride motorcycles and have discretionary income, to purchase at least two items with a combined retail value above $50 on their first visit. I want that buyer to return within six months to make another purchase of equal or greater value.

With an MDA like this, the site owner is in a much better position to:

• define demographic motivations (price, status, problem solver, etc.)
• design a site that appeals to this individual
• set product prices and pre-determine margins
• write copy appropriate to the demographic
• develop an actionable strategy to retain customers
• meet and exceed expectations of visitors

The Call to Action
Believe it or not, many site owners skip this essential element of overall site design. The call to action tells the visitor what to do. For example, when you hear advertisements on the radio or TV, they often end with the words “Call today” Act now” or “Don’t wait another minute.” These are calls to action, telling listeners what the next step is. “Pick up the telephone and place your order. Do it now before you forget!”

Calls to action should be spread throughout any website. These calls to action should also be contextual, providing visitors directions on what they should do next from their current location within the site.

In some cases, the call to action might be something as simple as, “To learn more, please click here.” On another page, the call to action might be “Please proceed to our secure checkout to process your order.” Think of these as helpful directions to visitors as they navigate your site toward the MDA.

Also think of them as important sales tools. The call to action should be targeted directly to your ideal buyer. The language and the message should be unambiguous. For example, a mutual fund site might employ the dignified, business-like “To obtain a prospectus or to speak with one of our customer care representatives, please click here.”

The site selling skateboards would employ a different tone. “Order 3 jammin’ wheels right now and we’ll give you the 4th roller FREE! We’ll even ship FREE so you keep more $$$ in your pocket. Now, that’s HOT!!!”

Design your call to action to suit the sensibilities of your target buyer.

Conclusions
There’s no doubt that search engine optimization is important (critical) to the success of an ecommerce site. However, search engines don’t make purchases. Your site designer can make the site readable to SEs to ensure that it’s optimized for search engines and properly indexed.

However, you or your designer should pay just as much attention to eyeball optimization (EBO). This includes everything from colors to text layout to graphics and pictures. These are the things that attract attention and keep visitors from clicking off.

Finally, create useful calls to action throughout your site. These visitor directions tell potential customers what’s coming up and what to expect. They also tell customers what to do next. Buy an item, complete a form, opt in for a newsletter or pick up the telephone — the MDA may vary, but a potent call to action is the best, no-cost way to improve conversion rates.

Search engine optimization (SEO) gets them to the site. What they do (or don’t do) once SEO has done its job is up to the site owner or designer.

Most visitors view the home page and leave. Wrong products. Weird typeface, confusing navigation — it can be anything from color motif to lack of clear prices. SEO gets them there, but it doesn’t convert them to buyers.

What Is Conversion Optimization?
Is it easy for visitors to find the right product? Is check-out convenient, offering numerous payment options? Is there a telephone number visitors can call to talk to a human? If not, the site isn’t conversion optimized.

In broad terms, conversion optimization enhances the visitors’ experience when they visit to browse. A site so optimized is: engaging, attractive, very simple, convenient and secure. The objective?

Enable visitors to quickly find what they’re looking for and to move without delay through the site’s checkout — just as in the brick-and-mortar world of retailing.

How To Optimize Conversion
Undertake Regular Site Analysis

Site metrics are statistics, raw data that reveal visitor actions (or inactions) and behaviors. There are dozens of site analysis programs that create metrics to help with site refinement.

To develop useful metrics, first establish a site baseline for comparison as conversion optimization is underway. Maintain records of metrics to determine which refinements are working and which aren’t.

Target Metrics To The Most Desired Action (MDA)
The first step in improving conversion rates is to define the site’s objective — to sell products, disseminate information, generate click-throughs or provide customer service, for instance. With the site’s objective defined, it becomes easier to develop metrics useful to increasing the number of people who perform the most desired action.

A commercial site owner wouldn’t find ‘number of pages viewed’ especially useful since it’s not specific to the site’s goal — to sell product. On the other hand, developing a list of keywords used by most buyers would be useful. It’s a great way to refine a site’s keyword list.

Metrics programs generate raw data. That’s all. It takes an understanding of ecommerce dynamics to turn that data into useful information, aka site metrics. And the important first step in the development of utile information is to define the site’s objective.

A site owner or web designer should be able to state a site’s objective in one, short sentence. If it takes more than that, redefine the site objective. Then develop the metrics that facilitate an improved conversion rate.

Applying Site Metrics
The purpose in developing site metrics is to create a data-based strategy to induce more visitors to perform the MDA. It’s not enough to identify problems and trends. Site owners must then take action to address problems and enhance the visitors’ overall site experience.

For example, site metrics might reveal that less than 5% of traffic ever gets past the home page. In this case, breakdown the home page to find why so many visitors leave. Too confusing? Too much information? Not enough? Convoluted navigation? If only five out of 100 visitors ever see interior pages, something is wrong with the home page.

Another example? Which search engines are delivering the most traffic? And why? Is it simply page rank? Does the site even show up on SERPs?

Useful site metrics will provide data on visitor activity, search engine activity, keywords, text and layout, checkout procedures and virtually every other aspect of site design and its impact on visitors.

Site Usability and Conversion Rate
The easier it is for a visitor to perform the MDA, the more likely it will be performed. If buyers don’t find complete, detailed descriptions of products, they’ll be less likely to make a purchase.

If they’re confronted with endless data fields that must be completed, they’re less likely to complete the on-line form. The ultimate objective in site analysis, therefore, is to improve the usability of the site. The more useful and usable the site, the higher the conversion rate.

Usability encompasses both site structure and site skin — what visitors actually see. Site architecture should be designed to accommodate visitors in several ways. Ease of navigation is, certainly, important. But so is page weight. Visitors just won’t wait for long downloads anymore.

An easy-to-use, flexible and secure checkout, with numerous payment options, increases a site’s usability. And a one-click check-out is an ideal usability option that repeat buyers appreciate.

Accessibility is another aspect of site success. Is the text helpful, informational and easy to read or is it just hard sell content? Are navigation links large and clearly labeled? Is a site map available from every interior page?

A recent study published by DoubleClick.com indicates that more than half of all visitors who place something in their shopping carts fail to actually make the purchase. These buyers made the purchase decision, but there was no follow-through. Perhaps they found the check-out process confusing, or lacked the confidence in the site to enter personal information on line. The point is, something happened between purchase decision and final check-out. Chances are, lack of site usability was at least partially to blame.

Additional Benefits to Improving Site Usability
Improving conversion rate is, indeed, the primary objective of site refinements to enhance usability. However, site owners derive a number of on-going benefits in the regular development of useful site metrics.

Analytics will improve download times, increasing the likelihood of visitors staying around. Pages packed with animated graphics, Flash scripting and QuickTime demonstrations can be broken up to lessen download times.

With a highly-usable site that delivers everything visitors need to complete the MDA, site owners will lower costs for customer support and service. If a visitor can log-on to view the status of an open order, there will be fewer telephone calls to customer support.

With conversion optimization, routine site maintenance costs will be lowered. The site is visitor friendly, SE friendly and compliant with all open programming standards.

Finally, a site optimized for ease of use and visitor convenience generates more repeat traffic and more repeat sales. And repeat sales are the foundation of any retail business — virtual or real world.

The Process of Conversion Optimization
Metrics should be developed regularly and compared to previous results to identify the activities of visitors. They should also be developed to suit the site’s purpose and MDA.

With useful metrics, a strategy of site refinement should be developed and implemented in stages. At each stage, new metrics should be produced to determine whether recently implemented refinements have had the desired effect. If so, initiate the next stage. If not, determine the problem and refine accordingly.

Remember that visitors are looking for convenience, ease-of-use, helpful information and security. The long-term objective is to increase site usability through refinement, measurement, further refinement and further measurement.

A higher conversion rate will naturally follow.