While at SXSW in March, I ran into Shannon McKarney from Jaded Pixel, the company behind the popular Shopify hosted e-commerce platform. Shannon asked if she could interview me for the Jaded Pixel blog and I agreed. I’m cross-posting the interview below. The original is here.

What inspired you to write the book?
We were struck by how many of the sites we worked with suffered from the same design and usability problems. But that was really a symptom of the way people think about and manage their sites. So in addition to providing some concrete design guidelines, we wanted to try to change the way people think about web design. Personally, I wanted more people to see the money they’re leaving on the table by not designing their sites well.

How the Book Was Born
I had just finished a presentation on Designing for Conversion at Web Design World in Seattle in July 2006 and was answering some audience questions in front of the stage afterward when a kind but serious-looking gentleman handed me his card and said “I really enjoyed your presentation. How’d you like to write a book about it?” A quick glance at his card identified him as Michael Nolan, Sr. Acquisitions Editor at Peachpit Press/New Riders. After a stunned silence while my mind fixated on the long-held perception that ‘I don’t write so good’, I smiled crookedly at him and said with all the gravitas and certainty I could muster “Ummmmm… Sure?”

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February is a busy month for our team of speakers at Closed Loop Marketing. The 2008 Digital solutions Cooperative or Dscoop conference, where Lance Loveday will be speaking, takes place February 21st through February 23rd in San Diego, California. The 2008 Search Marketing Expo or SMX West is February 26th through the 28th in Santa Clara, California and will feature Lance Loveday, Sandra Niehaus and Amy Konefal, speaking on different topics within the search marketing field.

2008 Dscoop Conference

Lance Loveday will be on a panel discussing Internet Trends: What You Need to Know to Drive Your Business. At Dscoop, Lance Loveday , joined by other industry specialists, will discuss in a 90-minute session what one needs to know about internet trends. To be successful, knowledge of current and emerging Internet trends including search, blogs, forums and printing communities is essential. This session will include a how-to workshop with insights from leading interactive agencies to expand one’s business.

2008 SMX West

Amy Konefal will speak about Avoiding PPC Pitfalls. She will be joined by Addie Connor of Course Advisor Inc. When done right, pay-per-click (PPC) search ads can be a company’s most valuable marketing channel. But there are common pitfalls that can mean the difference between a campaign that bombs and one that makes a person the rock star of his or her marketing program. Fortunately, many of these are easy to fix, once people know what to look out for. This session will cover danger areas such as match types, content network ads, ego bidding, failure to track properly and more. Work shop attendees will learn how to increase their ROI on paid search.

Sandra Niehaus will co-present a session on Landing Pages & Multivariate Testing. Joining Sandra for this panel are Tom Leung of Google Website Optimize, Jonathan Mendez of OTTO Digital and Seth Rosenblatt of Optimost solutions at Interwoven. Known as the Wonder Twins Track, Landing Pages & Multivariate Testing is a session about what happens when one combines landing pages with multivariate testing tools; tools that change various elements of the page dynamically to see which tests better with people.

Lance Loveday will be joined by Shari Thurow of Omni Marketing Interactive to present SEO & Usability: They can (And Should) Coexist. In this session, within the Analytics and Usability Track, they will discuss how search engine friendly design does NOT mean human unfriendly design. In fact, done right, improving the usability of a site for visitors can also improve the SEO. This session looks at how both help each other.

Both conferences promise to be packed with vital information spanning the Search Marketing and Digital Solutions arenas.

When did the web site design process become a roadblock to launching a site, rather than helping it along?

When did the details of site design and function become a site owner obsession, more important than becoming visible, more compelling than getting a business online, spreading the word and making money?

And yes, before you say anything, we’re fully on board with the concept of details making a difference. We even wrote a book about it (Web Design for ROI). But there’s a point at which the details paralyze the process, preventing real action and forestalling any benefits.

Seth Godin wrote a post along these lines entitled “How to Create a Good Enough Web Site” in which he describes a simple””some web designers would even say heretical””process for quickly developing and launching a new site. Start with a design that’s “good enough,” Seth says, and focus on what’s important. By doing things in a practical order, not over-thinking the design, and getting signoffs at the right junctures, a web site can go from concept to launch in much less time and with much less trauma than usual. That’s the agile development approach.

From there, we’d add, it’s time to begin iterating and improving your site based on feedback and metrics. By making and testing small changes to design, copy, supportive advertising, and so forth, you can create an exceptional site that has incorporated valuable input””real, live, authentic input you had no access to during development. And you’ll be online a lot longer than otherwise.

What inputs matter?

To complement an agile web site launch, we recommend tracking and responding to your selected key metrics. That is, measurements that actually matter to your business goals. But most businesses are swamped with stats and measurements. Which ones matter, which metrics are “key?”

Here are a few to start with:

• Your ‘landing page’ conversion rate. This is the page or pages where you send marketing traffic, whether paid search, natural search, email blast, or offline advertising. Track and watch how effective this landing experience is for you over time. Consider doing A/B or multivariate testing to narrow down what works for your site, company, and audience.
• Your shopping cart completion rate (for e-commerce sites). It’s really not OK to have more than half your customers drop out of your checkout process, despite most sites averaging 60% dropoff. Check your analytics for trouble spots in your checkout, to pinpoint which steps are the worst offenders.
• Your RFQ / Registration process completion rate (for lead generation sites). As with a checkout process, there may be multiple steps, and a few of those steps may be bad apples as far as your prospective customers are concerned. Focus your update attention on those steps with the worst issues, and keep a constant, detailed eye on your stats.
• Your home page abandonment rate. If your home page is visible and receives traffic, then track how effective your home page is at drawing visitors deeper into your site. If your ‘bounce’ rates are very high, this may mean you need to clarify your identity, what you do, or improve your visual credibility. Or it may mean you’re using an advertising source that drives low-quality traffic. Either way, it’s important to know.
• Your end stats. By this we mean sales, contract signings, membership agreements, and so forth. Where things get real, in other words. Can you track your traffic, downloads, and lead through to what really matters? If not, you’re missing the full picture. You won’t know what traffic source is your most valuable, where to focus your iterative site improvements, or what’s actually delivering the best ROI for you, you’re working blind.

If you’ve found these tips valuable or at least intriguing, it’s not too late to register for the Voices that Matter conference in San Francisco (Oct 22-25) where Lance Loveday and I are lucky enough to be speaking alongside web greats such as Dan Brown, Jacob Nielsen, Kelly Goto, and many others. Hope to see you there!

SNAPSHOT:

• Search revenues are projected to triple to $44.5B over the next 5 years (Piper Jaffray). Google is already positioned to capture a significant majority of those revenues.
• But Search only represents ~50% of all online advertising revenue (current & projected)
• This deal is about positioning Google to go after the other 50% of revenue projected to come from non-Search ads

PROJECTED GO-TO MARKET STRATEGY:

Google is most likely going to bolt the DoubleClick ad server platform and ad network on to their existing AdWords system over time. By doing so, Google will open up a lot of additional graphic/rich media/video ad inventory for AdWords, addressing a big hole in their current offering. While they’ve had the ability to serve up banners and video ads for a while, non-text ads currently account for only a tiny slice of their overall inventory and revenue. When this happens, Google will not only be serving those ads – they’ll be selling that inventory.Why? Because Google’s huge network of 500,000 advertisers will help publishers monetize that inventory better than they can themselves. And if Google needs to partially subsidize some of those high-value publishers by paying guaranteed CPM’s for some time, they can do that. They certainly have the cash. And that will quickly become a moot point as the big brand advertisers (and their agencies) who are currently buying that inventory directly at high CPM’s will realize they’ll need to buy that inventory via Google or risk losing it to a higher bidder.

They will probably continue to offer the DoubleClick ad server product as a standalone product for quite some time so as not to alienate existing advertisers/agencies or publishers, but the real goal will be to make participation in their marketplace a no-brainer for everyone by offering better distribution and accountability for advertisers and better monetization for publishers. As Google gains more advertisers and publishers, the holdouts will have a harder time resisting the gravitational pull.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR:

Advertisers - Win
Online advertising gets more efficient. With Google as the primary hub and marketplace, advertisers get to deal with one entity and cut one check for most of their online advertising. Managing those campaigns will be very complex, but will still be much more straightforward than dealing with individual publishers with different pricing and deal structures.

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