Red Herring is a widely recognized brand famous for spotting Microsoft during their infancy. On the other hand, NASSCOM is India’s top association of IT industry and is highly regarded for building India’s brand for IT services. I feel lucky to be nominated for these awards. The whole Wingify team (see below, yes we’re 8 people now) deserves to be recognized:

Please wish us luck for these awards. We have our fingers crossed!

The point of writing a product review is to share information and experiences with the product. There is a lot of information that can be shared using a well written product review. Six main elements should be written in a great product review that will generate sales. The first is product description. Describing the product should be followed by proof that you know the product and what it’s capable of. A description of the product’s buyer should also be included. Videos and images are great tools to enhance a product review. They may be followed by any criticism of the product that is necessary to give the reader a balanced product review. A review should end with a call to action. You want the reader to feel compelled to purchase the product.

Description

A product review should give a good description of the product. The size, weight, look, smell, and feel of the product should be described. The ordering process and customer service practices of the company should also be described. Consumers want to know if you had a great experience talking with customer service. They also want to know how long it took from the time you ordered your item until it was received. Describing the ideal buyer of a product is very helpful to potential buyers. One of the things that a potential buyer wants to know is whether the product is for them. When describing an item it is important to avoid too much detail. Your review should not be longer than a few paragraphs.

Comparison

Potential buyers want to know how the product compares to similar products. Comparing and contrasting similar products helps readers decide which product is the best match for them. Comparison reviews are great for attracting readers. When you are comparing, make sure that you define which product is better and why.

Tell A Story

Giving background information about why you ordered the product and how it has helped you is great for generating sales. Storytelling also helps customers empathize with your situation and think about how they are like you. Storytelling is a great tool for connecting with the reader emotionally.

Talk About Price and Value

Consumers want to know that they’re getting the most for their money. Most consumers don’t mind spending more money for a superior product. All opinions shared in the review should be supported by facts where possible. Using expert sources such as statistics is a great way to lend credibility to a product review. Using personal information is valuable when talking about personal products. Your section about price and value is a great place to share an opinion about why someone should buy a certain product.

Use Images

Words are very important, but nothing tells a product’s story like pictures. According to gibLink, including photos allows the reader to visualize exactly what you are reviewing. Images are also great for breaking up large amounts of text. Making a video of the product in action or even showing the content of the box and describing the items is very helpful to prospective buyers. Submitting the video to YouTube can generate even more traffic to your review.

Criticism

It may seem counterproductive to criticize a product you would like to sell, but many readers won’t believe a review that is completely positive. Some aspects of a product can be seen as either positive or negative, and its important to be balanced in your review. Writing an objective review is important because your writing needs to read like a review and not like an advertisement. A review should sound like the writer is trying to help the reader, not sell something to them.

Be Specific

Covering specific details of the product is important because they show you actually used the product and have experience with it. You may want to talk about what the product is best used for and what may not be a good use for this product. Giving very specific details about the product and situations that may be encountered while using the product will prove to the reader that the product is genuine and the results you discuss will actually be produced by this product.

Talk About Benefits More Than Features

It’s great to describe the product, but consumers need to understand how the product can lessen or solve a problem they have. Consumers want to know why they should buy this particular product. What are the benefits? Discussing the benefits of certain ingredients is helpful to many consumers. Be positive and remember the type of reader you are trying to influence.

Call To Action

A product review tells the potential buyer what to do next. It’s a good idea to link a website where the product can be purchased. Listing a phone number or email to contact for more information is also helpful. A quick summary of your review should be included right before the call to action. The potential buyer should understand what product they are buying, what problem the product will help them solve, and how the product will benefit them. It’s also helpful if they understand why a particular product is a better buy than the competition.

Note: this post is from a guest author David Murton. Email us if you’d like to contribute a guest post yourself.

Notice that there are about 17 million search results and Visual Website Optimizer blog (which has nothing to do with Christmas or New Year per se) is ranked #2. That’s not all, the blog post got hits from all sorts of related searches. Here are a few (also see highly relevant previous post on this blog: Joke of Long Tail Search Keywords):

• merry christmas and happy new year to your boss
• merry christmas and happy new year
• Happy New Year Gifts
• merry christmas and happy 2011
• merry christmas hope you have some fun this year
• the whole team with you Happy New Year 2011

I think you got the idea. All in all, that blog post has got 30+ searches on this post in last 6 hours for similar phrases. Who would have imagined that? My guess is that Google is factoring in high page rank of the blog and then if title matches it ranks the post highly. This is a big lesson for startups and other online businesses which still have unoptimized homepage titles such as ‘Welcome to Joe’s Pizza Site‘. Homepage usually has the highest page rank of all website pages, so it is crucial to have optimized titles (such as ‘Pizza Joint in Manhattan – Joe’s Pizza’).

PS: If you still haven’t checked our promotion, please signup for FREE 2500 visitor Visual Website Optimizer account.

• Get more traffic:
  • Organic Traffic: SEO (for the terms that are relevant to us and are maximally searched)
    • Onsite optimiztion
    • New content
    • Off site optimization (backlinks)
  • Paid Traffic: PPC Adwords campaign
    • Research of keywords so that CTR is high but CPC is low
    • Tracking all metrics (cost to acquire customer, lifetime value, etc.) and tweaking campaigns
    • Scaling campaign once campaign has been tweaked
  • Paid Traffic: Sponsorship / Direct Ads
    • Researching which sites (where prospective customers hang out) can directly accept ads / sponsorship
    • Facebook, LinkedIn or other alternative means of advertising
  • Social Media
    • Using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other channels to generate traffic
• Generate Buzz
  • Public Relations (get published in newspapers!):
    • Writing and releasing press releases
    • Contacting journalists and pitching it
  • Bloggers (getting reviews written in blogs)
    • Contacting and pitching bloggers
• Retaining customers
  • Usage Analysis
    • Coming up with a plan to convert users signed up for trial into customers
    • Targeting active / inactive users by doing usage analysis
  • Email marketing
    • Newsletters
  • Retargeting
    • Targeting visitors who show interest
• Converting visitors into customers
  • Analysis from Google Analytics
  • A/B testing and conversion rate optimization using Visual Website Optimizer
  • Analysis from Clicktale and heatmaps
  • Incorporate qualitative feedback at different visitor touchpoints
• Competitor Analysis
  • What is working for them?
  • Where are they getting traffic from?
  • How are they generating buzz?

Have I missed any aspect? Please leave a comment below and I will add it.

In this post, I compile some of the most pioneering research papers that will shape up web analytics in years to come. As you will see, some of the papers are more than 10 years old. This shows that academia has long been doing interesting research in web analytics and will also make you realize just how basic our existing web analytics capabilities are. So, get ready dive into the future of web analytics:

Review / Introduction

• Review: Web usage mining: Discovery and applications of usage patterns from web data
• Recommended: Discovering internet marketing intelligence through online analytical web usage mining
• Great Introduction: Web mining: Information and pattern discovery on the world wide web
• Compilation of Techniques: Mining interesting knowledge from weblogs: a survey
• Another Compilation of Techniques: Web usage mining as a tool for personalization: A survey

Applications / Techniques

• Technique: Mining access patterns efficiently from web logs
• Application in personalization: Web mining for web personalization
• Technique: Finding generalized path patterns for web log data mining
• Application: Mining web logs to improve website organization
• Application in ecommerce: Integrating e-commerce and data mining: Architecture and challenges
• Technique: Improving the effectiveness of a web site with web usage mining

Examples / Implementations

• An Example of mining: Mining web access logs of an on-line newspaper
• Tool: Wum: A web utilization miner
• Tool: WebSIFT: The web site information filter system
• Tool: KOINOTITES: A web usage mining tool for personalization

Hope you liked the list. If you know any specific paper that I may have missed, please leave a comment. I will add it in the list.

You see I love Split Testing blog is all about (duh) split testing. And I expect search engines to send to the blog people looking for things related to split testing. Of course, a bonus for us, search engines can also send visitors looking for related topics such as SEO, online marketing, web analytics, etc. However, some of the visitors we get from Google were searching for completely different things. Sample some of the following keywords where our blog is apparently ranked highly on Google:

• conversion statistics rodents of unusual size
  (whoa! Why would Google rank our blog for this term? Why would someone search it in the first place?)
• world optimizer
  (So, now VWO can optimize the world too?)
• Enjoy a bit of downtime
  (Google, you should read and understand this)
• why do you split 8s
  (I have no idea what this means)
• excuses for not performing well
  (We do A/B testing, not self help book publishing)
• VISUAL SITE HACKER
  (a potential startup idea!)
• can you have the same website at two different URLs
  (a honest question for sure, but “A/B testing” would have actually scared this visitor)
• bouncing sidebar
  (Google probably mixed up bounce rate, and sidebar case studies)
• how can I give feedback to their ideas
  (may be first try A/B testing your feedback on other people?)

The point of this post isn’t to belittle Google’s job. It is a fantastic search engine and does amazingly job in long term searches. The humorous queries above constitute <2% of total search volume we get.

But, still, it is always good to see such queries in web logs. Makes up for a good laugh. Plus, gives a room for improvement in (now) slow-moving search industry.

Making parallels to web analytics, current set of tools (unfortunately) only provide information on what is happening now. Your favorite tool will churn out data on number of visitors, page views, countries, referrers and what not. This exactly tells you how your website is doing today. However, this completely misses out macro trends. Sure, you can see a historical graph of number of visitors and all sorts of other metrics but that is only the first step towards knowing what has changed.

Ideally a web analytics tool should go deep on the segment level and mine signals in the (historical) data and correlate different metrics automatically for you. Here are some of the examples that I expect an analytics tool to mine automatically for me:

• Accounting for other variables, correlation between Twitter activity and number of organic searches. (Which isn’t obvious but could indicate that I’m doing a great job on Twitter building my site’s brand)
• Show meta-trends in the drift of the type of traffic I’m getting, countries visitors are coming from or the time spent on page. Am I slowly getting more traffic from niche blogs as compared to Google? That tells me what I am doing is working with niche blogs and should probably do more of that stuff.
• Automatically deduce what content or website sections see atypical visitor behavior so that I can act fix it (if it leaks) or use it for further gains (if it works).
• Tell me top 5 common paths my visitors take on the website and if there has been a significant shift over time.
• Source data from all different inputs: social monitoring tools, newsletter tool, etc and automatically correlate my activities outside the website with what is happening on the website.

Most of what I have written above isn’t super hard. Some of it can be done by having simple heuristics built into the tool. Moreover, data mining and machine learning has progressed a lot and I am surprised web analytics industry has been so slow at adopting the methodologies. Though Google is taking the right steps with their intelligence feature but it still it leaves a lot to be desired: where are correlations, recommendations, trend mining and other interesting stuff? Nuconomy was doing the right stuff but they took far too long, didn’t innovate a lot and end up getting bought by a company for in house analytics.

Web analytics shouldn’t be simply a data collection and reporting tool. It should actually be collection, reporting and mining tool. My tool gives me 100s of metrics to look at which I can’t keep looking at day after day (unless it is my full time job). Instead it should mine all 100s of reports for me, and show me interesting nuggets on what has changed (and possibly what could change). So I ask: where is the innovation in web analytics? All I see around is dumb reports ready to get mind by a human.

What is your perspective on this? Do you think web analytics is ripe for a major change?

So I fished out research papers on the internet which tell you how to increase your revenues online. Here is the list for your reading pleasure:

Usability

• Web site usability, design, and performance metrics [PDF, good paper with lots of information]
• Influencing the online consumer’s behavior: the Web experience [Good, detailed paper]
• The impact of initial consumer trust on intentions to transact with a website: a trust building model [PDF]
• The role played by perceived usability, satisfaction and consumer trust on website loyalty [needs subscription for fulltext]
• An empirical study of Web browsing behaviour: Towards an effective Website design [PDF]

Miscellaneous

• Practical Guide to Controlled Experiments on the Web: Listen to Your Customers not to the HiPPO by Microsoft Research [PDF, Good paper for A/B split testing internals]
• Predicting bounce rates in sponsored search advertisements by Google [PDF]
• How well does result relevance predict session satisfaction? by Yahoo Research [PDF]
• Generating Web Site Traffic:  An Empirical Analysis of Web Site Visitation Behavior by UC Berkley [PDF]
• Predicting online-purchasing behaviour [needs subscription for fulltext]

After compiling this list and reading most of the articles, I realized there is a large disconnect between what happens in research and what is actually applied in the market. Do you agree? Did you even know such kind of research happens at all?

The answer is to write website content including keywords and phrases that people search for at prominent places. This is such a no brainer advice that it borders on being completely useless.  The real challenge is to know what people search for. You can (and should) bring process to researching what exactly people search and how to rank on it:

Step 1: Go to Google’s Keyword Tool

This tool displays a lot of juicy information on the keywords we enter and other automatically generated related keywords list. Mainly, what we are looking for is:

1. A list of keywords in conversion optimization domain (or your area) where we can rank
2. Particularly, we are interested in keywords that get most searches on Google (and similarly on other search engines)
3. If you want to do paid advertisements on Google (Adwords), we are looking for keywords with minimum competition, maximum search traffic and minimum cost

Enter your main keyword in tool. For example, I enter “conversion rate optimization” as the keyword and get a long list of related keywords. To derive maximum information on these keywords select ‘Show All Columns’ from the drop down (‘Choose columns to display’) towards top right.

After you click on show all columns, you will see an image like the one above. You can note we have multiple data points here:

1. Local monthly search volume. Number of monthly searches from the region you have chosen (US, India or any other region)
2. Global monthly search volume. Number of monthly searches from the whole world for that particular keyword.
3. Advertiser Competition. An indication of how popular is this keyword from sales perspective (since advertiser competition will be greatest on the keywords which generate most sales). But then you want to avoid heavy competition as it will decrease your visibility.
4. Estimated Cost Per Click. If you bid for this keyword on Google, what should you expect to pay. In this case the bid is in Indian National Rupee (INR), so don’t get alarmed

Let’s download all this information in MS Excel format to crunch some numbers. Click on Download all keywords (.csv for excel) towards the center right.

Step 2: Delete irrelevant keywords

Open the freshly downloaded list of keywords and pour through it. You will notice that it may have many irrelevant keywords. In my case, I found a lot of keywords related to currency conversion. Delete all such keywords. Aim  to have a short list of keywords which closely relate to your area of operation.

Step 3: See competition on Google for remaining keywords

In the list we have a field called advertiser competition. But that related to PPC campaigns on AdWords. For organic, natural search results (from SEO perspective) we want to know the competition on Google search. Ideally, it will be easy to rank on the keywords which have low competition.

A good proxy of competition on Google is the number of search results. So fire up Google.com and take each keyword, enter it into the search engine (you can try including the keyword inside double quotes to get finer results but searchers seldom use double quotes so best to enter keyword as it is) and note the number of search results. For example, the keyword “optimizing conversion” (without quotes) gets us 1,650,000 results while “improving conversion rates” gets us 3,930,000 results. This tells us that there is more competition for the latter keyword than the former. Make a new column in excel and for each keyword add number of search results into it. It may be bit tiring to repeat it for 30-40 odd keywords but trust me, it will be worth it.

Step 4: Do the magic!

This is the step where we define our new metrics for each keyword (using the existing columns in the excel):

Idea is that those keywords are most attractive for SEO which get  most searches on Google but have least competition.

This ranks keywords on bringing most traffic through AdWords CPC campaigns.

This ranks keywords in your area which will be most pocket friendly.

This ranks keywords in your area which will be most pocket friendly and which bring in most traffic.

So, you simply add these four new columns and do simple calculations in Excel to get values for these four new metrics. (Tip: only do the calculation for the first keyword, drag the results down to all the rows to get values for all keywords automatically).

Step 5: Sort the columns to get most important keywords

Now all you have to do is sort the columns for Organic Attractiveness and PPC Attractiveness to know which keywords are best for SEO and PPC Campaigns respectively. In my case, for SEO (Organic Attractiveness) I get following keywords at the top:

Click here to download the excel file.

I marked some keywords in green to indicate the keywords which I think will turn out to be most useful. Red keyword (“conversion rate”) is too broad to be useful. And I left topmost keyword (“conversion tracking”) uncolored because Wingify doesn’t only concentrate in this to justify maximum effort into optimizing the website for it.

In the end I get keywords “landing page optimization”, “conversion rate optimization” and “conversion optimization” which will yield maximum benefit from SEO perspective. If I choose to advertise on Google through Adwords, all I have to do is to sort the column PPC Attractiveness (Volume or Budget or Overall) to get list of keywords on which I will be bidding first.

Let me know if you find this strategy useful by leaving a comment below.

• Web Analytics – the first step is to actually measure conversion rate of your website. Tools like Google Analytics,  Clicky and Woopra make is quite simple to define your website goals and then measure the goal completion rate. Different tools may have different terminology but essentially every web analytics tool worth its salt with have ability to track conversions, knowledge of which is an absolute must. Think of it in this way: how can you optimize a metric if you don’t know what the metric’s value is. So if you are not measuring your conversion rate, you should forget about improving it.
• A/B Split Testing – these tools allow you to make different versions of your website in order to test which of it leads to maximum downloads, sales, signups or conversions. Main idea is to keep testing your ideas of what works and what doesn’t, instead of relying on intuition.  With introduction of easy to use tools such as (our very own) Visual Website Optimizer, split testing has become a very simple, yet extremely effective methodology. Nothing beats increasing conversions than testing your ideas against hard, cold facts of your visitor clicks. Google Website Optimizer is another tool for split testing which is available free of cost, though it does require technical understanding of HTML, page tagging, etc.
• Behavioral Targeting – this methodology requires extensive planning and segmenting of visitors into different groups to show customized offers/pricing/promotions. Ultimate idea of BT is that you  tailor  your website according to behavior of the visitor (e.g. number of pageviews, entry page, etc.). BTBuckets and our labs tools are the ones which let you try and use behavioral targeting for conversion optimization.
• Clickmaps and heatmaps – these tools let you visualize which parts of your website get most clicks and which parts don’t get even a single click. Such tools come handy when you have doubt that perhaps your call-to-action is not very visible on the page. What these tools will tell you that while your button isn’t getting any click, people are clicking onto your bullet points (which are not hyperlinked) in search of more information. So perhaps it is a good idea to hyperlink those bullet points. Crazyegg and Clickdensity are some of the most affordable tools  that let you generate a clickmap of your website.
• Visitor movies – tools such as Clicktale and Userfly give you a magical power of peering over your visitor’s shoulder to see what exactly they are doing on your site. What these tools enable you to do is to see each and every action by your website visitors. The tools will literally replay all mouse moves, clicks, keypresses that a visitor does.  Though it ultimately becomes cumbersome and tiring to watch 100s of visitor movies, this method is still a fantastic way to gain qualitative insights.
• Voice of customer – when every other method fails, you should resort to surveying your visitors:  why exactly they didn’t make the purchase, was your pitch clear, did they understand what you are offering. All other tools tell you what is happening on your website, customer feedback tools such as Kampyle or GetSatisfation tell you why it is happening.
• Live Chat – taking surveying users idea to next level, live chat tools (Olark and  numerous other tools) actually let you chat with your live website visitors. They can ask you questions or you can initiate the conversation. Having a live chat feature on your landing page and sales page can help boost conversions because visitors may have N number of doubts which your page may not be clearing; chatting with you can answer most of their concerns.

Apart from these categories, numerous other tools in search analytics, PPC analytics, affiliate management, etc. are available but the  above ones are the most useful ones. Even amongst the above, I will argue web analytics and split testing tools should be an absolute must for anybody serious about improving his/her website conversions.

Leave a comment here if you think you have additional toolssuggestions for conversion rate optimization which I missed here.