Diary of a Market Hacker

Are you a designs-that-sell or get-more-traffic person?

September 14, 2007 – 12:43 pm

Conventional wisdom tells CEO’s and VP’s of sales that more traffic equals more sales. In my experience, this is how they approach an online sales channel initially. As usual, reality is not so simple. The principals of presenting value and aligning your offer with what the customer is seeking still apply. The major difference is that easily accessible competition changes what the customer is actually looking for from moment to moment.

While getting more traffic is often beneficial, the wrong kind of traffic sent to the right kind of landing page isn’t going to help a companies bottom line. The reverse is also true. Highly qualified traffic from even multi-word-buying-terms sent to a landing page that’s not designed with conversions in mind can yield an equally disappointing ROI or even damage a companies brand.

Let me elaborate. If www. joes-pancake-batter .com sells the best pancake batter on the planet and they happen to rank above the fold for something like “really good pancake batter” they likely have visitors from that search who are ready to buy some really good pancake batter.

Now, if old Joe doesn’t put up a site that affirms to his “really good pancake batter” seekers that this the place to be, he’ll likely loose the majority of his traffic a few seconds after they arrive. They’ll just give him the back button and go somewhere else. Poor Joe…

To make it worse for Joe, he’s lost another customer to his arch nemesis ,Mary, of marys-awesome-batter. com.

Let’s assume that you are selling a product that really wins customers once they try it and they tend to buy regularly and even at Christmas or whatever for friends and family. You’ve accomplished something there. Most products are a one time buy, but what you have becomes part of someones life because it really does provide a worthwhile value. Good job! Ol’ Joe has the same sort of deal.

The problem is that Joe thinks his batter is so good that folks just have to try it and that the batter just speaks for itself.

JOE! I for one do not have such amazing computer technology at my disposal and, sadly, cannot taste your pancakes buy licking my monitor.

I can, however, tell you that I don’t see what I want to see and what to do next. I got bored and didn’t see the value in your site let alone your batter. I clicked back and went to Mary’s site where she quickly lets me know that this is place to be for really good pancake batter. Actually, Mary simply told me it was true and then showed me a really tasty looking hi-res picture of pancakes and her product right next to it. mmmmmmm… batter. I’m almost there, almost ready to buy. Mary then showed me who else enjoys her product and told me how I to can have it for my very own. Mary didn’t burden my eye balls with pointless design elements and goofy gadgets or text that doesn’t really provide any value. Bottom line, she didn’t waste my time, she was graphically and textually honest and she reinforced her claims with product reviews that I believed.

The moment of truth, I decide to buy some batter. I click the encouraging add to cart button and I’m then taken to a page that appears to be my shopping cart. I proceed through the super-awesome-extra-short-done-before-you-know-it check out process and I click confirm! Mary smiles as she gets the email. How nice for her.

Joe, meanwhile looks at his web stats and curses Google, Yahoo for sending crappy traffic. Then he’s grumbles about how blind his customers are. After all, he’s convinced that people just need to try it and that his wares will speak for themselves.

We like Joe and want Joe to succeed. He has a major problem on his hands. His pancake batter page ranks highly for what, at least for Mary, is a very profitable term. For Joe, the same term is sealing the fate of his batter business now and in the future. Instead of converting a visitor to a long term customer when the customer was ASKING TO BE CONVERTED he is now forced to wait for one or more things to happen. For instance:

1. Mary’s batter is worse then box wine and I decide to give him another shot.
2. Mary ticks me off with bad customer service or something else and I decide to give Joe another shot.
3. I’m a lover of pancakes and will try different batters in some order that suits me. This probably means that I need to be referred back to Joe’s batter somehow, remember it, or find it again in a search.

All of these things are out of his hands.

What’s worse is that because Mary’s batter was so completely mind bogglingly amazing, I decide to write about it in my pancake blog and even Digg it on digg.com!

Joe is in real trouble now. His traffic is going to start dropping as Mary’s traffic goes up from my link.

• Why does Joe’s traffic drop?

The possibility that my link (and others) helps marys-awesome-batter . com rank above above www. joes-pancake-batter .com is very real.

• Joe’s landing page is working against his brand, his traffic and his sales. …ouch

Though Joe has a product of great value to pancake lovers everywhere, the way he presents it is preventing people from discovering that fact and preventing him from realizing his dreams of becoming pancake king of the south. He’s even being counter productive by not recognizing the issue.

Here’s what Joe should do

1. Think hard about what folks want from his website first, not his product. They’re already there because they want “really good pancake batter”.
2. He has to show them that the page and then the product is what they’re looking for. Of course, 1 and 2 might overlap.
3. Pick one or two items on the page that do not contribute to addressing the needs of the visitor in they’re quest to determine if Joe’s page is the place to be.  Change or remove the elements.
4. Test the changes with simple A/B testing and review the results after reasonable amount of time.
5. repeat 1 through 5

The profitability of his traffic will increase by following steps one through five.

If Joe’s traffic was resulting in 10 sales for every 1000 visitor per day (conversion rate of one percent) and he he now has a conversion rate of 1.5%, a mere 1/2 percent increase, he increases sales by fifty percent with no increased marketing costs (other then the page changes and testing) or changes in traffic volume or quality.

Joe used to think that all he needed was more traffic. In this scenario, with the old conversion rate, he would need 500 more pancake lovers visiting his site that convert at the same rate. That means he has to make sure his ad copy is good and accurate, he doesn’t get hit with click fraud and that he doesn’t spend to much on the new ads and search results. All that for a site that might yield another 5 sales a day.

If Joe actually focused on selling his product more efficiently, he’d make every bit of his traffic more profitable. Then, he could go out and get those 500 more visitor knowing that his time and money spent will be 50% more profitable.

-Jeremy Brooks