User Experience

In October 2009, Guardian News and Media launched its online Fashion Store, allowing users to browse from over 300 retailers and once again proving its ability and willingness to evolve. With this have they hit upon a business model which works for advertisers, publishers and users alike?

Cutting out the middle-man

With publishers increasingly looking to advertising and sponsorship deals to replace lost revenue from dwindling newspaper sales, the Guardian has effectively cut out the middle-man to provide a useful service for its readers. Given the choice I, personally, would much rather a dedicated area within which I can browse a number of brands and ’shop the look’ championed in this week’s style section, than sidebars full of promotion boxes for brands I may have no interest in.

Indeed, online retail analysis has suggested that people shop for fashion online in a different way to how they might shop for other products. Most clothes shoppers know what stores and labels stock what they’re looking for. So, rather than searching for a particular item, they would look for their favourite clothing brands and then search for the item within the brand’s site. As the Guardian Fashion Store offers the choice to search by brand, it fits with this shopping model much more snugly than side-bar advertising could.

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An interesting new study by the guys over at Catalyst Group shows that although users like Microsoft’s new search engine Bing, they are unlikely to switch.  From a usability focus group of 12 (expected to capture 80-90% of issues), after using both engines 8 said they preferred Google while 4 said they liked Bing.  That being despite the fact that 82% preferred Bings design, 64% preferred Bings organisation of features and another 64% preferred Bings refinement and filtering options.  With regards to relevance of results, the majority of users thought both engines preformed equally well.  I think  this goes to show how entrenched Google has become in our thinking when it comes to search.  Even though Microsoft won 3 out of the 4 tests and tied the last, two thirds of users were unprepared to switch.  After all, we no longer search for something, we Google it!

What I found particularly insightful, was in seeking out participants for this study the researchers were unable to find anyone who hadn’t heard of Google, but none of the participants had heard of Bing.  Granted it’s a new engine, but it just goes to show the marketing mountain Microsoft has to climb if it wants to even get close to knocking Google off the top spot (although I’m sure having $100 million to throw at the problem won’t hurt!)

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So you’ve got a website, you think it’s cool and you’re pretty sure other people will like it, but you’re just not getting the traffic, so what can you do about it?  Well there are a number of simple and some not so simple things you can do to get more people coming to your site.  Below we’ve compiled a basic top 10 of things to do.

1)    Optimise your page titles
Eh?  A page title is the part of the page right at the very top of the screen, it contains a brief description of the page contents and is used by search engines when deciding how to rank your site/page in search results.  It’s also part of what users see in the search results so it’s important to get this bit right.  You want to make sure you have words and phrases that accurately describe what is on your page and are also terms that people are searching on.  You can use keyword volume estimator tools such as Google Adwords to show you how much search there is on each word and choose the best ones to use.  Although it may be tempting to only use super high volume words, remember you’re unlikely to rank for competitive terms such as “football”, so try more specific phrases such as “Football news UK”

2)    Links links links
This bit isn’t so easy, but massively important so it’s worth paying attention.  Many of the popular search engines use the number of inbound links you have to your site as a measure of popularity, therefore the more links you have the better you will rank.  While there are many underhand ways of gaining more links, the best way is to promote yourself in a non spammy way and great content is a good way of doing this…

3)    Quality content that attracts attention
Having high quality, timely content that naturally attracts links is what all search engines seek to promote and ultimately reward. Having a blog on your site is a good way of creating fresh content and if your posts are good, hopefully attracts links.  Also the ability to comment on posts creates user engagement on your site which helps you connect with the users of your site, creates a sense of community and ultimately return visitors.

4)    Optimise site copy
Along with optimising page titles, it is also important to optimise other parts of the site such as H1 tags and the articles on the site.  There needs to be a delicate balancing act done here so that you don’t ruin all your articles by trying to squeeze in as many keywords as possible, but subtle changes such as changing soccer to football shouldn’t ruin the flow and will better match search queries. Jeremy explores this in depth here.

5)    Make sure your site is indexable and accessible
Search engines cannot read the text within images, and although it’s getting better at reading text content within Flash you should provide text only alternatives or the search engines will not know what search terms to rank you for. You also have to make sure  your content is accessible, i.e. outputting text content using a JavaScript function will mean search engines cannot access the text.

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From the first day of 2009, Google’s Best Practice Funding scheme (a euphemism for agency commissions) will have ended. Yahoo too will be changing the way it rewards big spending agencies by moving to a tiered scheme. We’ve been thinking hard about how that will affect clients, agencies and the search engines themselves. And the answer is that, for agencies and their clients, there will be real impact. Google, in the meantime can roll on regardless.

Since Google accounts for at least 90% of all UK search spend (and therefore half of all UK online ad spend), we’re focusing here on them but Yahoo’s decision (it will begin to pay back four per cent to spenders of between £50,000 to £100,000 a month and nine per cent to spenders of £100,000-plus) will have an impact too.

BPF was Google’s replacement for direct agency discounts and was pitched as a way to encourage growth and ‘best practice’ among agencies. Where agencies invested the money they saved through the scheme in delivering better search (for example, systems, technology and people), that’s just what it did. But, many used it as their route to margin, particularly the traditional buying agencies that were used to receiving large discounts on offline media.

Under the last iteration of the scheme, agencies that spent more than £15m a year got more than seven per cent of it (£1m-plus) back. That is a large sum of money to remove from whichever line in your P&L account you put it but if you’d been putting it right at the bottom, you now face a real issue with profitability.

At iCrossing, we put our BPF cash into our own search technology and our team, not our bottom line. But, even for us that is still money that will be missed since lost business revenue can only ever be replaced in three ways – reduced investment, higher prices or lower costs. None of those is an attractive prospect and agencies will be looking for understanding from their clients as they look for ways to offset BPF while at the same time increasing (not just maintaining) the quality of their service.

In short:

1. Pitch time: agencies who were simply using BPF to bolster their P & L or passing this back to clients as a point of differentiation to win search accounts are going to be hit hard. Serious, fundamental renegotiation of large contracts will serve as a stimulus for many clients to consider their options and indeed other agencies

2. The experts will win out: those that invested BPF in developing real search expertise and technology, can make natural and paid search work together to develop efficiency, and use ‘native’ digital planning techniques (e.g. linguistic profiling and genuine customer journey insight) will be the ones that deliver real value and therefore should hold on to clients and pick up business in the new swathe of pitches - as long as those clients hire on value rather than just cost.

3. CPCs unaffected: it’s been speculated that CPCs might decrease since agencies will have less to spend on keywords. But, BPF average payout is probably more like 3-4%, rather than 7-8% and individual accounts still represent the majority of Google’s spend (not agencies) so we’ll see little impact in the price of search

4. Google steams on: the sheer dominance of Google as the country’s most popular search engine negates the normal dynamics of buying and selling. Since buyers are unable to choose alternatives, where Google leads, we must follow. That Yahoo has changed its agency commissions too demonstrates this

So, there’s our thoughts, what are yours? Do you think that the effects of the change will be manifest themselves in different ways? We’d love to hear from you. And if you’re interested in any more insight into how BPF might affect your own search campaigns and strategy, give us a call.

I read some interesting stuff in a recent eMarketer report about on-line travel marketing. It was US-focussed but doubtless has plenty of relevance for on-line travel cos outside the USA too. One of the most interesting findings was that whilst in volume terms US on-line travel bookings continue to grow, it’s existing customers that are driving this growth by booking more trips. The percentage of travellers who book their trips on-line - as opposed to with a travel agent - has actually been in decline. Why?

“The decrease stems from customer dissatisfaction with on-line travel agencies (OTAs), specifically with unfriendly booking engines and navigation tools. Mired in old technology, the OTAs have failed to keep pace with a newer and more innovative breed of travel websites built around user-generated content,” is the conclusion the report reaches.

I’d agree with this - though I don’t think it’s just user generated content that’s making newer travel sites stand out.

At iCrossing we work with lots of travel clients and increasingly we are encouraging them to look beyond seeing their website as a glorified booking engine. Travel purchases are often complex things, and research is a crucial element of the customer’s buying journey. So fix that booking engine, get the navigation right and then start thinking about offering a richer content experience for potential purchasers.

Like what?

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Here’s a top tip when you’re posting pictures in HTML - expect many of you know it already. Sometimes, if the original image is too big, it won’t fit properly on the screen. With the iCrossing internal blog, for example, it ends up overlapping the middle column.

If this happens, you don’t need to manually resize the picture itself - particularly handy if you’re linking to one hosted elsewhere. If you use the visual editor on Wordpress or a similar platform, you can simply drag a corner of the image outline to resize it.

If you use an HTML editor, check the line of code that embeds the image, which might normally look something like “img src=’path to image goes here/image.jpg’”. It may also specify “height=’number in pixels’” and/or “width=’number in pixels’”. Take out the height bit altogether, and change the width bit to “width=’100%’”.

This should scale the picture to the full width of your post, keeping the height in the correct proportion. Obviously, choosing a lower percentage will make the picture smaller still.

Google’s latest innovations in the way it displays search results in its natural listings has huge implications for user experience and the way we create websites.

‘Sitelinks’ emerged late last year. They are the links that appear under the number 1 search listing that enable you to click directly on a main navigational link that resides on the destination site - think of them as shortcuts. OK, so this helps us get from A-B better and extends the brand’s success at capturing search real estate - effectively pushing other sites lower down the results page.

This example for Woolworths illustrates the natural search navigation at work:

A good overview of Sitelinks can be found on the Google Webmastercentral blog here.

More recently Google has started presenting a ’secondary search’ box within the natural results. This allows people to search all pages that Google has from a site without leaving the search engine. Which means that the much of the huge usability investment you may have made can be by-passed in a click…

The implications are more clear than ever. Search friendly site design means taking into account the whole user journey, from search through to action. This extends the idea of usability from optimising e.g. a shopping cart process into the way people navigate through brand networks.

Now x this by every device and interface Google will interact with people in 3 years time. Wow.

Once we accept that we have lost control of the ‘home page’, and that every page on our site can now reside somewhere else before the click,we can start to put search at the heart of our creative planning. not an original idea, but one that I will keep repeating until someone tells me I am insane, and then I will not believe them.

I really like this post from the Logic + Emotion blog by David Armano that discusses the growing link between offline and online engagement (or touch points) with brands.

This chimes with an approach that I think really helps to communicate to clients how the modern web works. Put simply, we are finding ways to explain interaction to our clients, and there is no reason why the rules of interaction should be any different online than they are offline. Using offline behaviours as metaphors to help businesses understand their online behaviours sets the conversation very firmly in the context of people and not promotion. Put simply, forget that you are a business for a minute and think about treating people how you would want to be treated yourself.

As David’s post says, when it comes to brand interactions, the two worlds are already becoming indistinguishable. Already it is nigh on impossible to pin someone’s brand perception to one particular interaction or channel. However, as he also says in the post, brands themselves aren’t necessarily joining up these experiences. That’s the first challenge. The second is doing it in a way that works for people first and foremost.

A colleague and I had the pleasure of hosting two panel sessions for the IMRG last week and it was an interesting barometer on thinking in the retail sector.

The great and good of retail (practically every high street brand) and online assembled at the plush offices of the Royal Bank of Scotland on Bishopgate to explore developments in comparison shopping and social media with speakers from Google, MSN, Kelkoo, ReVoo, Yahoo! and Berry Bros. & Rudd, a wine retailer.

Comparison shopping portals have become very successful businesses by being useful to online shoppers in a straight forward way – “help save me time and money”. They can dominate search results because of the breadth of inventory at their disposal, but the mood in the audience was how can they help my business upsell, showcase new products and compare like for like e.g. “I know my mp3 player is more expensive than my competitor, but I include 5 free tunes and no delivery charge”.

Most of the audience agreed that consolidation in the comparison market was going to happen and that pure price comparison will disappear. At the very least “User Generated” reviews of the retailer will be widespread and Kelkoo are trying a star rating system for their retail trade partners right now.

The social media session was fascinating because when my colleague Dean asked the question “who is making money out of social media” nobody raised their hands.

The audience acknowledged that conversations were going on all over the place about their products, but didn’t really know how to take that first step and join the conversation, but more surprisingly they didn’t know if it was worth it.

Some of this stemmed from the retail marketers assembled not being comfortable at taking forward a proposal in their company for a social media programme.

Some expressed the view that Online was so measurable it had made a rod for its own back by not being able to measure the effects of social media. I smiled to myself when I heard this because it struck a chord from objections I’d heard several years earlier from other sectors regarding blogging. All sorts of things can be measured for social media programmes including:

• reduction in complaints as one panel member explained as one airline’s CEO recently experienced by apologising for a mistake on YouTube
• brand sentiment can be measured (come and talk to us for more information about this)

and any other measure you wish to track.

The conversations about you happen - some are good, some are bad, some give you ideas for product or service development, some give you real insight into your customers needs and behaviour.

If your corporation doesn’t listen, doesn’t join in, won’t be useful and authentic, then one of your competitors will and you’ll miss out on those great business growth opportunities. Or worse still, face very damaging PR (Cillit Bang) or a $200m law suit (Kryptonite). Ignore them at your peril.

dConstruct breaks out of talking about door handles (last year into a packed auditorium of web-savvy developers, designers and social media evangelists.

Tom Coates, a part of the Yahoo! Brickhouse team built his talk around the ‘web of data’ - data becoming more user-centric, more connected, and more useful… I am a fan of this way of understanding the rapid changes all around us in digital… Tom kept it fresh by declaring that ‘Your product is not your website’ - it’s anywhere where your brands reaches in the network. Network applications build instant connectivity via API’s, 90% of twitter activity is through APIs. Flickr is everywhere too. ‘The product… goes everywhere the network goes..‘

This fits well with how at Spannerworks we have been articulating how brands now live in networks and how they must adapt to a marketing world where we are fast moving away from channel control to evolving your brand in networks. Challenging big brands to make their data available, let their customers play with it and collaborate with other brands, for example to build a useful body of data needs scale, and lots of it.

Media owners should inherit the new world. Great content, data scale, ready built communities and recognisable brands (not always a positive thing) connected to networks in any way a user wants should make hay today. So, whoever your data curator is, promote them to head of interactive and the job’s a goodun..