Web Site Design Principles -- A visual design & architecture primer -- cont'd.
On the Web, ?where? EQUALS ?how?
Do you think Tiffany?s would build a store on this "road"...
I?m going to guess you answered ?No? ? for the obvious reason that a high-end Tiffany?s Shoppe with pink marble floors, $80,000 a year salespeople and a Champagne Dispenser in the restroom is probably not going to be able to cover its nut doing business at that location. And that seems as it should be ? insofar as it makes sense to us that there should be a ?match? between the type of business and the location.
But on the Web, obviously, that?s not the case ? there is no ?place? in the same sense ? but there ARE differences of circumstance. At bottom, what we would hope to determine by geography in the offline retail realm is simply the nature of the customer. On the Web, we can know a great deal about the customer, through a number of different methods ? but that?s not what I want to talk about next.
I think all this spy shit is actually robbing us of our instincts as marketers. We have accepted a layer of abstraction between our ?shops? and the ?street? for thinking that we don?t have to (or can?t worry) about that on the Web, and for a reliance on data-mining-based methods of traffic refinement, that are expensive as hell, but just subsidize putting us in a deeper hole with the so-called Click Scientists -- who are getting a little too fucking uppity, if you ask me. How much of all the absolute dollar and margin benefits of our conversion improvement learnings of the last 5 years have just gone RIGHT THURR?
The unfortunate condition I want to call out, though, is that, compared to what we could be doing to consider and reflect WHERE THE CUSTOMER IS COMING FROM, we?re acting like a bunch of 90-something retired Madison Avenue execs trying to come up with dog food jingles while the candy-striper fills our mouths with inspiration ? lol.
But seriously, what customer do you think of when you design a tour? Do you consider what you know about traffic acquisition methods to influence the design ? sure, everybody comes up with galleries for TGPs, but that?s not so much marketing having influence over the design as the necessities of the model dictating a format that is, in my opinion obsolete ? did y?all forget how much better it was when the
accident of frustration factored more on behalf of the sponsor/submitter than the surfer?
I?m very impressed by what I see some guys in France and Italy doing in that regard. Okay ? tangent: If you don?t already agree with me that a number of over-zealous, short-sighted TGPs fucked the whole shit up WAY TOO SOON, I?ll convince ya ? but not here. For right now, just accept that the content glut that happened when video clips hit the scene, and everybody thought all that
still shit was suddenly worthless ? either that, or they just said ?fuck it? and dumped it on the market to grab traffic YEARS before we had to ? but either way, that cost us A LOT.
It would be nice to get
edge back with the application of some solid marketing science now ? most of y?all think just cuz you paid some designer a buck or two and it looks
pretty that you got something -- no disrespect, I can?t say I have seen every site ? I am sure I?m not the only one here with a dotcom pHD ? but ? okay back to the original train?
...matching site design to traffic acquisition type, based on the idea that if you look at the street your customer is walking on, you should know what your storefront should look like.
I wanna paste something in I wrote a few weeks back? it was a
good thread started by Polish Aristocrat:
"What % of overall adult industry paysite SALES comes from GALLERIES and TGP's ?"
The conversation came to the question (to paraphrase Lenny2):
?What makes the quality of traffic different on AdWords clicks versus organic results?"
My answer (which relates here, for there being a design implication if my assertion is correct)...
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Lenny2
But why would that be?
The surfer is coming from google...they typed in a search, and my title and description is along side the organic SERPS for that keyword.
So if I buy the top adwords spot for big tits or I organically have the top ranking for big tits, why would the traffic clicking one link retain any better or worse than the traffic clicking another?
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by 2HousePlague
Very simple:
Owing to a higher level of Web search experience, the average surfer now KNOWS the difference between an AdWords ad and an organic result.
Surfers now understand perfectly well that those links on the right were put there by people who pay for them to be there. When you're looking for something you hope to get FOR FREE, knowing that a link is a paid ad is a negative.
Surfers are still largely ignorant of SEO methods that influence what's on the SERP, however. For this reason, surfers engage organic links both more frequently and with a greater degree of hopefulness.
Now it's important to understand how this divides traffic from the SERP into two categories -- one going to AdWords links, the other following organix.
Although there are a number of query terms that get enormous daily volume, the bigger volume (as a percentage of the whole of daily queries) is the sum of millions of queries, whose individual volumes are tiny.
And we all know from online marketing 101 that the closer you come to offering the precise thing the consumer was looking for, the higher the initial conversions, the higher the ultimate retention.
There can be no argument that the organic listings are MUCH more likely to reflect the specificity of the query -- when the query is specific. Even those of us who've managed keyword lists with tens of thousands of terms can tell you this is true.
So, surfers clicking on an AdWords ad (and, therefore, not an organic listing), are either:
A. Unclear in their desire, or
B. Taking a chance
In both cases, the likelihood for disappointment on the part of the surfer (and also for the AdWords advertiser, as a result) is much higher for AdWords clicks than for organic clicks.
Organic clicks, for being undertaken by the surfer with higher hopes, also lead the surfer down the "path of frustration" -- which is what I call bouncing around in TGPs, not finding what you want, getting hornier and hornier, etc. I don't have the numbers, but would bet confidently that far fewer surfers that engage organic links come back to the search engine, than those who engage AdWords links. Translation: a click on an organic result is more likely to produce a sale -- even if the purchase is made out of frustration or impatience
To summarize: Organic Link Clicks and AdWords Link Clicks ARE different, because of what we know (instinctively) and can verify (if we bothered to) is differrent between the surfers who make one choice or the other --  ( )*
j-
*(That was more like 4 cents, I think -- LOL) |
CONT'D -- (when i come back, we'll take a look at a basic e-comm site mock-up I put together as a "shell" - -cuz that makes the points I'll be making clearer)
2HP