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P.S. the facebook t-shirt is ironic

Nifty fella, Ben Hunt. He wrote the excellent web design book “Save the Pixel”. We first met a couple of years ago when he had his epiphany about building websites designed to convert higher, rather than just looking splendid. We share a love of internet marketing, English comedy and a plethora of children. He was a guest speaker at my Art of Blogging seminar in 2009 and he was brilliant. A lovelier man you could not wish to meet.

I have been following his progress with this book since he got commissioned to write it. Ben is extremely thorough and very entertaining. I haven’t read the book yet, but I have seen a few preview chapters. Bottom line: if you have any interest in IM, treat yerself this Christmas and get it.

Only question I’ve got for Ben now is why he styled the title after a 1980s musical. “Convert!” reminds me of the excellent parody “Elephant!” – the musical version of the Elephant Man in the underated film, The Tall Guy with Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson. In fact, here’s a clip to amuse you (and Ben)…

One thing that is really powerful in internet marketing is the ability to see exactly who your site visitors are, where they came from (IP addresses), which keywords they used to get to your site, how long they spent on your site, where they navigated to on your site, which keywords led to a sale, or a sign up, or a phone call.

All of this data is powerful in determining what to change or focus on in order to increase conversion rates. Most of it can be found using Google Analytics, although I prefer Hitslink.

Even better is this tool from Clicktale. This simple application allows you to record visitor sessions on your site, view them as video, learn from them.

It also aggregates these recordings so you can get a “heat map” of where people went, where they tried to click, where they hovered – all incredible data that you can use to move things around on your site to make is more slippy. I’m recording you reading this right now!

I highly recommend you take a look at this software – they do a free trial:

In the name of market research, your comments on these two videos we’ve produced for kitchen sink specialists Sinks.co.uk would be very much appreciated. The only difference between them is the choice of music.

Sounds like a small difference, doesn’t it?

Each element of everything you put on a website will have an impact on your conversion rates. All of these add up to have a profound effect on how many visitors convert to a lead or a sale. This is a simplistic test, and also a bit of fun. It’s really to get you thinking about your own site and how you can break down elements to test people’s reaction. And the simplest way of doing that is to simply ask them (so watch the video and leave your comments below. Ta!)

I’ve been working very closely on relaunching the kitchen sinks website for Brass & Traditional Sinks Limited. It launched today at last!

One small factor that I have proven increases conversion rates (although I’m not going to disclose here by how much is the use of a photo by the telephone call-to-action, typically top-right on most “money” sites.

The majority of websites will use a stock photo of a girl with a headset on. Since reading “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell a few years ago..

.. I have been intrigued by the idea that our subconscious makes the right decision (am I going to buy from this person? is this a genuine work of art? do I fancy this person?) etc. but then our conscious mind spends forever procrastinating about that decision.

I’ve taken this into website conversion rate optimisation by the testing of this one factor – the call centre girl picture – by varying the positioning and the “reality” of the photo. I have found that the very best converting picture is one of a real person that works within the business. Add to that the need to look into the eyes of the customer – pictures of people looking down or at a computer screen really suck.

If you check our skip hire or portable toilet hire websites, you’ll see that I’ve added a red pencil “This is Louise. She really works here” with an arrow pointing to Louise – who really does work here.

This makes us stand out in a number of ways. It breaks convention. It adds authenticity. But the real killer, for me, is that this is a genuine photo and I believe that visitors to the site can subconsciously tell that it is a genuine picture, and that helps overcome the number one barrier to conversions – trust.

The Real Deal at Sinks.co.uk - click to enlarge

I’ve not got them to add the red pencil stuff yet, but the picture of a girl on the sinks website is of Vicky who – guess what – really works there! I took the picture with my iPhone whilst filming the videos for their website (still editing them). It’s not a perfect picture in terms of resolution and composure, but it’s completely real and that’s what matters online.

This theme was discussed at length at my last internet marketing course – if you’re in a market that is dominated by companies full of cash (like the travel industry, for example), it is far better to use your actual personality, your “voice”, to create a brand that no-one can compete with (because no-one can be you) rather than looking like a low-rent corporation copycat.

I’m a big fan of optimising websites for conversion – squeezing as much juice out of the lemon as possible by making changes to website elements based on user behaviour.

I found this fascinating piece of research today based on 46 people being “eyetracked” for one hour whilst looking at mock news websites and real multimedia content. The really interesting finding is something that backs up something I’ve been banging on about for a few years – that most people’s eyes engage the top left of the screen before being “engaged” enough to move down and around the screen. This is why being 1,2 and 3 on Google is SO important for grabbing maximum traffic. I call it the Golden Triangle – that part of the screen where most of the cash is.

On top of that, this research found that headlines grab people’s attention more than images! This is a deceptively profound piece of evidence that backs up the power of copywriting in SEO and CRO. I’m always banging on about the fact that you’ve got nano-seconds to grab their attention. If you don’t: poof! they’re gone!

I’ve borrowed their eye tracking image for you here (click to enlarge):

The eyes have it!

It’s common sense really – we’re conditioned to read from top left down to bottom right (in the West at least). So a web page should be a bit like a news story – put all the good, juicy, interesting headlines right at the top then lead them down into more detail that fleshes out the story/your proposition.

It also back up my other bug-bear with business website owners – stop listening to the designers! They don’t know what they’re doing. Looking pretty is NOT the purpose of your web page. Converting visitors to customers is!

Take a look at the full research results here, then pop back over here to discuss by leaving comments on this blog. It’s a great topic!