In last month’s column, I brought up the idea that the first impression your web site makes can have a bigger impact than many of the more traditional design considerations we tend to regularly obsess about. My theory is that users’ gut-level reactions when seeing a new site for the first time—and the split-second judgments they make about the site based on that first impression—have a major influence on the likelihood that they’ll ever end up transacting with that organization. I was intrigued to find that the amount of time it takes a major league baseball hitter to decide whether to swing at a given pitch is exactly the same amount of time it takes web users to start forming judgments about a site. The magic number for both turns out to be 0.05 seconds, or 50 milliseconds. Which is way faster than we can think consciously.

I decided to test this concept a bit at some recent speaking events. During my presentation, I show the audience a glimpse of two different sites, flashing each up on screen for about half a second (as fast as PowerPoint would let me). I then asked the audience which site they’d rather do business with. The results have been overwhelmingly one-sided. Almost everyone chooses the second site. When I ask people why they chose the site they preferred, they used words like “professional” and “credible.” For the losing site, they used terms like “small-time” and “cheap.”

Ouch. Pretty harsh judgments for a split-second view.

Read the full article on SearchEngineLand >

Question: What do web users and professional athletes have in common?

Answer: They both make fast decisions about their next action based on limited information in the blink of an eye.

This thought occurred to me as I was reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. It’s quite an amazing book. I say that because it’s a book about brain science and psychology (ooh, gotta get me some of that) and yet it’s really fun to read. Seriously.

The thrust of the book is that the traditional model of how human beings make decisions based on either a rational or emotional basis is flat wrong. Instead, the author’s position is that we make decisions using both our rational and emotional minds simultaneously.

Pretty heady stuff, to be sure. But Lehrer weaves in such compelling and well-written stories that otherwise dry subject matter really comes to life. I was reading a passage about New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s decision-making ability on the field when the similarities between his thought process and that of a new user arriving at a site for the first time hit me.

Here are the lessons I took away from the first part of the book:

Read the full article on Search Engine Land >

If you are managing PPC across the three major search engines, I would guess that your budget allocation looks very similar to many of our clients’ –  ~75% to Google, ~15% to Yahoo and ~10% to MSN.

And honestly, that’s being pretty generous to the latter two, unfortunately.

Truth be told, as happy as I am with Google (no seriously… minus some frustrations, I really am), for the sake of diversification I would very much like to see our spend more evenly distributed.  Similar to investing for retirement, it is worrisome to have too many eggs in one basket.

But, alas, I don’t see any major shift in spend among these three Tier 1 engines happening anytime in the near future… if ever.  The search volume from Google, combined with the ease of their platform, the robustness of their reporting tools among other pluses leaves us pretty much addicted to Google.

But what about the 2nd tier PPC engines, comprised of platforms such as Ask.com, Business.com, 7Search and others?  Is this a source of diversification worth exploring?

Results from Tier 2 engines are mixed as you can see from PPC Hero’s recent survey that asked ‘Which second tier PPC search engine has generated the best results for you?’.  31% of advertisers have never tried a 2nd tier engine.  16% of advertisers said that none of the Tier 2 engines have ever worked well for them. But there are some bright spots like Ask.com and Business.com that are producing results for some:

Until 1/2 year ago I would have been among that 16% who had tried 2nd tier engines, but not seen good results.  Recent experience, though, lands me happily in the purple piece of the pie.  We have actually seen some great results for some of our B2B clients on Business.com and are excited about the unique features this platform provides!  If you are a B2B advertiser and you have not yet explored Business.com, now is the time to do so for a number of reasons.

Reason #1: Data Speaks.  Here are last month’s PPC results for one of our clients.  As you will note, Business.com is the 2nd highest campaign for lead volume and the cost per lead is $22 less than Google:

Reason #2:  Cool Features. Business.com has some unique features that make this a pretty sweet channel to include in your marketing mix.

For starters, you get a WHOLE 60 characters for your headline and 150 characters for your description!  Holy PPC, this is like Christmas for those of us who are used to squeezing in 95 characters total into an AdWords box!

Second, it is not a blind auction.  You can actually view the top 5 bids to help make judgments about what to bid yourself.  There are pros and cons to this, but I have to say that I personally find this to be a nice mini-vacation away from the blind auction/quality scoring black box.

But what I like best about Business.com, is the option to include ‘Multlinks’, or multiple landing pages/calls-to-action as such:

Reason #3:   New Conversion Tracking. The clincher.  For those of you who have steered away from Business.com in the past due to their lack of conversion tracking, those days are gone.  Granted in beta, you can now track your listings to conversion and ROI data:

So will Business.com work well for all B2B advertisers?  Absolutely not - among our clients, the results have been mixed thus far.  As with any channel, you’ll need to test, track, analyze and refine to determine if Business.com is a viable marketing channel for your organization.

Best of luck if you decide to diversify and venture down the Tier 2 path - Business.com or otherwise.  Feel free to share your experiences, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

This post is part of a series examining some oft-neglected online customer touch points and exploring ways to optimize them.  Today, I’ll look at a type of page very similar to thank you pages - the logout confirmation, or logout thank you page.

As appealing as a loading dock?

Logout thank you pages are utilitarian, and often overlooked. Similar to an e-commerce confirmation page, a logout page appears after a completed transaction, so it’s outside the sales or conversion funnel.  Also similar to other types of thank you pages, logout pages are typically starved for design and marketing attention. All that creative attention is focused on the site’s interior - the cool account management tools, real-time information, or whatever else is provided in the logged-in area.

It shouldn’t be this way. Logout thank you pages can be a prime opportunity to support your brand and offer more ways for your current customers to engage with you.

It’s where and when you say it

I recently re-read Paco Underhill’s great book “Why We Buy” and was struck by how his discussion of store signage and zones could apply to web sites. According to Paco, it’s important to take every opportunity to communicate with customers, but communication alone is not enough.

The message must suit its environment.

Store owners, in Paco’s example, should understand what shoppers are doing in each area, or zone, of a store before placing signage there. What actions are customers taking in that zone? Are they walking quickly past, or are they waiting in line? What else is in that zone to look at, what might customers be thinking? As he puts it,

“Each zone is right for one kind of message and wrong for all others. Putting a sign that requires 12 seconds to read in a place where customers spend 4 seconds is just slightly more effective than putting it in your garage.”

(Read the full article…)

Are you ignoring an engagement opportunity?

The way an organization handles a simple email unsubscribe transaction can leave a lasting impression on the audience. It’s a customer engagement opportunity to increase goodwill - and even make a sale.  Think of it as another marketing channel.

[Note: This post is part of my "Every Touch Point Matters" series. See my previous posts on Optimizing Error Messages and Optimizing the Thank You Page.]

“You don’t love me no more…”

Rejection! One of your email newsletter subscribers decides she wants a cleaner, lighter inbox - and that your newsletter is dead weight. Last year, I was that subscriber.

Looking at my email In box, it appeared every online interaction I’ve had since 1995 came with an annoying little brother of a newsletter that has followed me around ever since, waving his hands and yelling, “Watch me! watch me!” Since a swift kick was out of the question, I’ve dealt with the situation by applying filters (as if putting an email in my “To Read” folder made it any more likely that I’d read it) and by hitting the Delete button. And then one day, a particularly irrelevant email triggered an avalanche of stored-up irritation. After calming down, I resolved then and there to tackle the problem at its source:

I would UNSUBSCRIBE.

I unsubscribed from over twenty email newsletters before I ran out of endurance, patience, and caffeine. As you’ll see in the examples below my experiences varied widely.

Why does this matter to companies?

Why does such a minor interaction, far from the glamor and dazzle of the mighty landing page, even deserve a blog post? Why do email unsubscribes matter to companies? There is a one-word answer to this:

Goodwill.

Whatever your subscriber’s motivation for unsubscribing, how you handle this simple request can affect their perception of your company from that moment on. You can either build goodwill or you can burn it.

And another one-word answer:

Opportunity.

Again, whatever the reason for the unsubscribe, the visitor is now ON YOUR SITE (minimally, they’re on your email subscription platform). That’s an opportunity to engage, communicate, and present your brand in a good light. It could even be an opportunity to change their minds or redirect their interest to a different offering.

So!  Let’s look at some guidelines, and then a few examples.

(Read the full article…)