Google is a money making machine; that is why it has tremendous influence in the online ecology. Google has a lot to teach the world about relevance, credibility, value & user experience. However, Google isn’t a training company; it derives more than 90% of its revenues from advertising. It’s fascinating that Google makes most of its money from advertisers (sellers) but is forced, like every media company, to think primarily about the experience of its audience (buyers).

When buyers “buy naturally,” and sellers “sell effortlessly” you have the ideal human-computer interaction. Interaction occurs in a non-linear system that delivers exactly what prospective buyers need, when they need it, so they can accomplish their goals in the manner most comfortable to them. That’s a user experience we (everyone from IAs to designers and even marketing folks) can all buy into if our interests were truly aligned. Google needs to train advertisers to do a better job while maintaining its revenues. So how is Google “training” advertisers?  With sticks, not carrots.

Quality Score: The Grand Equalizer

Theoretically at least, advertisers and searchers interests should be aligned. After all, an advertiser pays for an ad placement based on context. If Company A is advertising for widgets, when people search for widgets they should be able sell tons of widgets. That’s the theory. In practice, the user experience of paid ads is tragically broken; just go ahead and see how many paid searches send you to a home page or a generic landing page. That hurts Google‘s reputation for relevance. Google suffers when advertisers fail to deliver a good user experience. Google’s solution to this problem is Quality Score (“QS”).  QS acts like a tax for those advertisers too lazy, too structurally rigid or just too misinformed to deliver relevant answers to searchers queries.

QS is based on an algorithm that scores the value of the user experience the advertiser is creating from clicking on the ad to the target page. QS weights the value of a bid in the auction for ad placement and forces the advertisers delivering the worst user experience to pay more than those with better user experiences competing for the same query. The penalties are substantial; we’ve seen advertisers penalized more than 60% of their paid advertising budget; sometimes they weren’t even aware.

Google’s Enforcing Great Experiences

Bryan and I have been thinking a lot about Google’s Adwords program, QS and it’s consequences. It’s encouraging us to think that designers, developers, content creators and marketers may wind up on the same page someday soon.

Substantial penalties piled on top of large budgets have a way of forcing even those most entrenched in status quo to cat. You might also find it as encouraging as we do if we explain how we perceive the difference between conversion — which is mechanical — and persuasion that is based on a holistic user experience.

Conversion has only recently become the must-have piece of the pie. You could see it gaining interest when Call To Action, our second book, hit the NY Times bestseller list in 2006. In the last few years it’s become mainstream. When we started our former company in 1998 we never imagined that it would take so long. Unfortunately we’re not all on the same page yet.

The ability to achieve truly dramatic improvements in conversion rates still requires a shift in “conventional” thinking. Design teams need to understand that while the goal may be conversion, the practice must be persuasion.

Conversion is all about “the click.” We all understand the macro-level conversion, which is the business’s site objective. But it is important to realize that conversion also takes place at the micro-level — every single relevant click pulls the user deeper into the buying decision process. It’s imperative for sites to persuade prospects with each and every click.

Knowing What To Do Is Not the Same as Being Presented A Reason Why

Conversion is what the user does; it’s the “take action” part of the buying decision process. At the macro-level, the visitor converts from prospect to buyer. Helping prospects convert involves making it easier for them to buy by getting out of their way. Getting out of the way usually entails a copy, usability, or information architecture adjustment.

As we worked with clients in the early days of our business, we began to realize we could remove the obstacles to conversion, but that would only take us so far. If conversion is fundamentally about completing your linear scenarios, and people rarely go about accomplishing their goals in a linear fashion – how are you designing to address the buying process behavior of the majority of these non-linear prospects?

Consider this example: A site selling seminars, a complex selling scenario successfully funnels a majority of its traffic to a registration form, but few prospective attendees who land on that page complete the form and click through. The page rejection rate is staggering. Thinking they have a conversion problem, the company performs a variety of A/B tests on the form page with little success. Nothing they do to “fix” the conversion problem yields significantly improved results. They imagine themselves at a conversion dead-end.

In this situation, the problem isn’t always the form; assuming the seminar is a good one it’s the scenario visitors participate in before they reach the form. Perhaps prospective attendees haven’t acquired enough information or developed sufficient confidence to feel comfortable completing registering yet. Hopefully they would realize that this linear sales process is undermining their prospective attendees’ non-linear buying decision process – the  site is failing to persuade before it attempts to convert.

Persuasion is about meeting the buying needs of your audience. It’s a non-linear, multi-branched, integral part of your selling process – you present relevant information for your buyers in a way that suits you as the seller and hopefully allows you to make the case for buying from you.

Non-linear scenarios are the ones visitor segments create as they navigate your website. In this type of scenario we measure conversion differently, from where people enter to where they complete the intended scenario and whether or not they hit our key value pages.

Improving an Average Conversion Rate Produces Average Results

The goal is to focus on cumulative conversion rates for the website instead of simply an average conversion rate. This is accomplished by explicitly planning these non-linear scenarios, or persuasive design. When we dissect the buying process into its component parts for each persona, then measure those micro-conversions in the click-stream, not only can we better understand how well we are persuading but we can also segment our conversion rates by persona segment.

Persuasion is the next step in conversion rate marketing’s evolutionary chain; it’s the stage where we evolve beyond primitive relevance and weave into the user experience a compelling force that delights users. You may clear every last one of your conversion hurdles, but you will still face the question of how you move your prospects from click to click, how you orchestrate persuasive momentum.

Building persuasive, persona-based scenarios that allow prospects to “buy naturally” is the only way to achieve the dramatic results that are possible when you think beyond conversion.

From a conversion perspective, the designer now asks, “How do I build a single pipeline, or experience, that gets me the highest conversion rate?” From a persuasion perspective, the designer will ask, “How do I build multiple experiences that give me the highest conversion rates overall? It’s the difference between trying to increase your conversion rate from 2% to 4% (a 100% increase) and imagining what small percentage of all your visitors you will have to write off because they are simply “unconvertible.” Reach for only 4% or 100% of those intending to buy?

The Future of User Experience Driven by an Algorithm

The future is not about optimizing conversion, nor about maximizing conversion, it’s about spectacular user experiences that convert effortlessly from the users point-of-view. We are among the small community advocating that point-of-view for years but that future will most likely be driven not by people like us but rather by how an algorithm determines the quality of user experience. We’re feeling confident change is on the way and if it wasn’t for Google’s algorithm you might call that naïve.

Join us Thursday, August 26 at 1:30pm ET for a webinar with UIE – Produce a More Persuasive Site: Where Design & Marketing Meet.

Two weeks of West Coast jet lag while keynoting three conferences means a lot of parties. At a reception, a guy named Peter told me that he read my book “Call to Action” a few years ago and that he used it as the basis to redo his company’s shopping cart. Peter more than doubled conversions based on the advice we gave him. However, he said he had an unbelievable battle to explain and use an obvious technique: leveraging his company’s point-of-action assurances into the shopping cart.

Maybe I can spare you that grief.

What Are Point-of-Action Assurances?

At the point when a visitor is ready to take action, to fill out a form, to click on a button or link, they are at a seductive moment. It’s a delicate place. It’s at that point they could lose confidence in their decision and not take the action you want them to take. That’s why you must provide messaging to bolster trust and confidence.

Let’s look at a few examples of how this can be done.

One of the earliest tests we ran over a decade ago was adding the words “we value your privacy” near newsletter subscriptions boxes on several clients’ websites. We placed those four simple words near the e-mail form field and the button used to submit the subscription form. It often doubled the conversion rate from visitors to subscribers.

If you want to take this to another level, check out what my good friends and screenshotaholic enablers at TechSmith do on their forms with a reaffirming message from their president.

Point-of-action assurances allow you to handle the possible objections or concerns your visitors have just as they are ready to complete an action and without them having to go anywhere else on your website to look for the answer.

Take a look at the download button from Firefox as an example of adding point-of-action assurances on a graphic button. Notice how they tell people how large the file is, what version, etc.? You could do the same thing if you are asking people to download white paper docs, PDFs, or any other type of files.

Amazon used this strategy for years on its “add to cart” buttons. Even though they removed it, we have still used it quite successfully for clients recently. Notice how Amazon used the words “you can always remove it later” on the button and the use of the lock graphic and the additional words “shopping with us is safe. Guaranteed.”

You can also use point-of-action assurances to help retail visitors overcome their shopping fears and reduce shopping cart abandonment.

Notice the use of the lock and the “Shop with Confidence” messaging alongside the credit card input fields in CafePress.com’s shopping cart? This point-of-action assurance helps visitors feel more secure about entering in their credit card information.

The folks from 37signals use this well-designed strategy quite effectively in order to get their visitors to provide them with credit card information to set up a free trial account for their Basecamp product.

Visitors to retailers often have other questions that should be answered as point-of-action assurances inside the cart, instead of making visitors search your website for answers to your return, shipping, or guarantee policies.

Notice how Shoeline.com spells out its policies from the shopping cart page all the way through the final checkout page? This is how it lets visitors know that all its products are guaranteed and that visitors can return products within 30 days for a refund or exchange.

So You Want More Leads, Huh?

Well, this strategy of providing point-of-action assurances is a must, then!

Keep in mind that, according to studies, a lead loses six times its effectiveness within the first hour of contacting you. So an effective strategy is to set expectations of how you handle your leads, what will happen after they fill out your form, and when and how you will respond. Take a look at what Rad-Direct.com is doing on its Web forms:

First, it sets expectations about what you can speak to a systems engineer about. Then, above and below the form, it lets you know that it will respond to all inquiries within two business hours (it also has the point-of-action assurance about respecting your privacy):

Use this simple and powerful technique of point-of-action assurances that direct marketers have been using in their work for years and watch how your visitors reward you with more actions taking place.

Last time, I shared with you the 10 landing page elements, such as the call to action, that make up the anatomy of a landing page.

Once you have identified your elements, there are five dimensions to evaluate if the elements will work at converting your visitors. The five dimensions are:

• Relevance
• Quality
• Location
• Proximity
• Prominence

Relevance

Everything else about your page can suck (the technical term we use in Brooklyn), as long as you manage to understand your visitor’s intent and meet it with a page that is relevant to their needs, matches their expectations, and explains things in terms they understand for where they are in their buying process.

First: If your visitor came from an advertisement, be sure tomaintain scent between the landing page and the advertisement. If it is a search or PPC (define) ad, then your ad and landing page should match the query the visitor used. And, the offer used should match from ad to landing page. If it is a display ad, the offer, imagery, colors, etc., should match from the ad to landing page.

Each of the 10 landing page elements should be relevant to the visitor’s goal while ensuring they complete the action you want them to. Remove anything on the page that is not relevant to their buying process and anything that does not help them convert. This will also ensure the message’s clarity.

Your message must also speak to the correct persona for their preferred way of gathering information, making decisions, and stage of the buying process.

Quality

The better each of your elements are crafted, the better your results. Your copy should be engaging and easy to read, both from a relevance and visual appeal. Your copy should be skimmable and scannable – visitors won’t waste time reading until they scan the page and make sure it is relevant to them. Your landing page and any graphical elements you use should look professional; that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to look pretty. Often times, ugly but professional pages convert better; don’t let your graphic designer kill your conversion rate. Even the quality of a voiceover in a demo can make a conversion difference.

Location

Where elements on the page are located can make a huge difference. Try to get the most relevant information and calls to action above the fold. If you have a multiple column page, what elements appear in what column also matter. The order of your elements matters too; this is often the case in copy where I have found that if I take the last paragraph of copy that is on the page and make it the first paragraph, it will usually increase conversion rates.

Proximity

Be conscious of what elements lay next to each other. An example I use is Overstock.com. A graphic next to the internal search box reads “Kids Titles for Learning and Fun” on its movie page. When the two elements are looked at together, visitors think they are related. They ended up thinking that the search box was for searching kids’ movies. As soon as we swapped the graphic to “search over 24,000 movies,” it accounted for a 5 percent increase in revenue. It was that big of a deal. Or as my friends from WiderFunnel will tell you: be careful of adding trust seals next to calls to action; sometimes the visual distraction causes visitors to not take any action.

Prominence

Stand 6 to 10 feet back from your page – what stands out? Is your call to action obvious? Can your visitor tell who you are, why they should trust you, and how you are relevant to their need in just a matter of seconds? Make good use of color, layout, and white space so key elements jump off the page and make the visitor’s eyes flow from one element to the next. Attention heatmaps, like AttentionWizard from fellow ClickZ columnist, Tim Ash, can be used to simulate visitor visual processing and attention to judge element visual prominence, but it can’t account for visitor motivation and your relevance.

These five dimensions of the 10 landing page elements, in conjunction with some testing, can help you have the most effective landing page for converting your visitors to take action. In my next column, I’ll share with you the seven factors of form design that are critical to your conversion rate.

Landing pages have become an important part of the marketer’s toolbox. To create effective landing pages, you should understand the anatomy of a landing page and it should be part of your landing page and optimization framework. After optimizing thousands of landing pages over the years, I want to offer this framework for understanding the 10 key elements of a landing page.

Not all of the following elements always need to be on a page to create an effective landing page. However, there are several elements that are essential to your success.

1. Logo: The visitor needs some way to identify who they are potentially doing business with. A logo won’t make your sale, but a poor one can lose your sale. A professionally designed logo always helps establish some bit of credibility. Most sites have this in the upper left hand part of the page; some have it on the upper right.
2. UVP or UCP: Once the visitor knows who you are, they need to figure out why they should do business with you. You should communicate this in a simple statement that explains your value proposition (UVP) or your campaign proposition (UCP).
3. Headline: The landing page headline should reinforce the scent from the ad that delivered your visitor to the page; that’s persuasive momentum. Your headline can either be designed in a text format or graphical format; it doesn’t really matter. Many marketers use a dynamic system to personalize their landing pages for the ad or keyphrase that attracted the visitor in the first place, to have better continuity (scent) from ad to landing page. Dynamic tools work, but beware.
4. Offer: Direct marketers know that the offer is one of the most critical elements of a well-designed campaign. That is why they spend a lot of time testing their offers. Offers must be clear and concise. A maxim of direct mail is that a confused mind always says “no.” The offer is the deal you’re presenting to your visitor. Don’t get this confused with a “call to action,” which is the action you want the person to take. Sometimes the offer is actually delivered successfully as the headline.
5. Descriptive copy: What supporting copy do you need to explain what you do, what you offer, and how it will benefit your visitor? This is often a list of key features and/or benefits. Don’t overlook formatting. Will the copy be delivered in block text, bullet point, or some combination of the two?
6. Product/service presentation: This is the imagery you use to support your copy and style for your page. This often takes the form of a product image, a product or service tour (photos or video), screen shots, or lifestyle images. A good picture can be worth a thousand words if you can use it to engage your visitor and give them a sense of what owning your product or service will be like. Likewise, poor quality graphics or presentations can confuse or turn visitors away. A great image won’t make your sale, but a poor one can help lose your sale.
7. Calls to action: I break out calls to action into three types: hyperlinks, buttons, or forms. The objective of many landing pages is to get visitors to complete a form. If that is the case, make the form easy to complete on the landing page, and avoid requiring the visitor to take an extra step – and going to a form page – if possible. Other than your offer, this is an important piece to keep testing. Calls to action should stand out (think contrast) and be obvious from the moment a visitor lands on your page. The visitor should always know what is the next step they should take.
8. Confidence building: A visitor will not convert if he doesn’t have confidence or trust in you. There are dozens of factors that affect trust or confidence in your visitors on your pages, and dozens of things you can do to negatively impact trust and credibility. I’ll cover only a few types of things you can add to boost confidence. Basic confidence boosting elements can be the effective use of testimonials or customer reviews, leveraging examples of previous customers, using third-party validators (such as media mentions or reviews, as seen in references, or trust marks), and using point-of-action assurances near your call to action.
9. Link to more information: Many experts believe your landing pages shouldn’t have any additional links other than your main call to action. I believe it depends on several factors, including the complexity of what you sell and the buying stage of your prospect (early stage buyers tend to be in information gathering mode not action taking mode – so let them gather information). Don’t blindly follow “best practices;” use your judgment and test alternatives.
10. Template elements: These elements are usually found in the header or footer of a template. They may be your copyright notice, phone number, live chat, address, privacy or other policies, etc. These are usually not elements of the persuasion process, but many can be supportive. All pages should have easy contact information and privacy policies.

Look at your landing pages and your competitors’ to see if you can identify these essential elements.

In my next column, I’ll explain the five dimensions of landing page element design that impact its effectiveness.

If you would like to see some of these elements in action, you can sign up for an upcoming Webinar I am doing on April 1, 2010 – “Don’t Be April’s Fool: Proven Techniques To Maximize Your Advertising ROI.”

There is no question that improving the forms on your website can improve your conversion rate. In fact, Gavin Doolan, of the Google analytics team, did a wonderful job explaining the basics concepts needed to improve form conversion rates. However, what do the forms that exist in the “wild” tell your visitors about you?

Does it say you care about your visitor? Your sales team? Your legal department? No one?

This past week one of my MarketMotive conversion optimization students sent me an example of a form she wanted to avoid as soon as she saw it as part of one of her assignments. Take a look at it and think about what issues you see with this form:

Let’s imagine the conversation in your visitor’s head.

“This form is a little hard to read!”

“Are they trying to hide something?

“Why do they need my job title?”

“A community screen name, why do I need one of these? I don’t want to join a community I just want to try out the software.”

“There are different types of accounts, let me think about what I might need.”

What do you think the odds are that this person is going to complete this form?

So what went wrong?

First avoid all light gray type on a white background, especially with a smaller font type. Your designer might think it looks nice, but I am wondering what are you trying to hide. Give them some contrast please!

If everything is required only highlight any optional fields.

Design the form so that it is in one column not two. It tends to convert visitors better and is a more natural experience.

Wait till later in the process to engage them in discussions they are not ready for like joining a community, or what type of account they may need. You are forcing them to make a decision and process information before they are ready to. Get them through the process as frictionless as possible. It wasn’t in the sales flow before the signup and the first place it showed up was in this first step of the signup process.

There has been some great analysis on how to improve your forms. Follow these guidelines and people might actually think you care about the visitor and your conversion rates may improve:

• Use a simple vertical layout and vertical aligned labels where possible
• If vertical aligned labels are not possible, use bold left-aligned labels
• When more than one field is placed on a line, ensure that they are designed to look like a single piece of information
• Emphasize the headers if you want users to read them
• If optional fields are needed, make them clear instead of using asterisks for mandatory fields
• Use single field for numbers or postcodes, allow input in various forms
• Let users focus on their task and avoid distractions
• Use real time feedback carefully
• If possible, place tips at the side of the relevant fields
• Provide users with a progress indicator showing them the steps involved to complete the form

Here is an example of one of my favorite sign up forms. What does this form tell you about the company you are considering doing business with?

Yesterday, my aunt Arlene called me in a panic. She had an appointment to run to and an online shopping cart full of gifts for her grand-children and great nieces and nephews and couldn’t figure out how to ship them to their multiple addresses. Amazon.com does a pretty good job at letting you put multiple addresses in your address book but when it came time to selecting which products go to which addresses a simple 8 characters could have made a huge difference.

You know I am big fan of Amazon and their focus on continuous improvement and testing, but I think they are letting bunches of people become frustrated because of the usability challenges of a pull down select form field. You can see below a screenshot of the page Amazon provides to send your choices to multiple addresses. Notice on the right the select pull down menu and the fact that it is showing only one address. My aunt, and I am sure plenty of other people might not figure out that you have to hit the little arrow in that pull down menu to see the other addresses. It is well known that many users find drop down menus a usability challenge. I checked this page on multiple platforms and browsers and it displayed the same way.

If Amazon would have defaulted the size of the drop down to show at least 3 addresses, I don’t think she would have had a problem realizing that her full address book was in this pull down. There certainly is room in the design for it, because the item descriptions on the left all take up at least 3 lines. However, the one line pull down probably looks better form a designer’s perspective. You can see in the code snippet below how Amazon could make this process easier with just 8 characters, size=”3″.

What do you think Amazon should do? Should they eliminate the pull down all together? Sending packages to multiple addresses is a big issue this time of year. Should they let their customers become frustrated at this process? What would you do?

Ask any designer what makes a great design for a web page or web site and you’ll almost always here the same common themes; usability, intuitiveness, feel/mood, eye catching, etc. Yet few will respond with what makes your business revenue – how the page converts visitors to take the action you want them to take!

Following are some practical and commonly overlooked elements of landing- and buying-page design to help answer some the above questions and help you think about design elements more objectively.

Lots of designers like to focus on color scheme too early in the process. Color isn’t the core of your design. There are six basic, equally important elements that make up effective design:

• Line
• Shape
• Value (lightness, darkness, shading)
• Blank (white) space
• Texture/pattern
• Color

Start with Element Prioritization

Determine the relative importance of all elements that will comprise a Web page. Not all elements are of equal importance. You may even want to assign a dollar or numeric value to each element in terms of revenue potential and based on size it takes up in the design. To be most effective, the layout must take this into account. Important elements may require specific placement on a page so that they may be more visually available to visitors.

• For every page, you must answer the question: What action do we want the visitor to take on this page? List these in order of priority.
• By first considering the design in grayscale, you can determine what elements stand out without color getting in the way. Note: a fabulous tool that will turn any existing web page you have into grayscale is GrayBit.
• Use brighter/bolder colors on elements such as buttons and header banners that reinforce the action you want a visitor to take on that page.
• Button size, position, and shape can also influence the visitor’s perception of how important an element is.

Position

Position refers to the relational properties of elements on Web page. No element exists in isolation; all are affected by the surrounding elements. A large, dark element, for example, may functionally obscure the presence of an adjacent small, light element.

Evaluate the positional relationships including size, shape, color and proximity of all the elements. Ensure each is visually “available” to the visitor. You may want to use the battleship grid layout concept I’ve shared in the past.

Contrast

Contrast is the difference between the light and dark areas of the page design, the juxtaposition of black and white representing the strongest contrast. Contrast dramatically affects readability and a visitor’s ability to spot elements critical to the persuasive process. Contrast is an important design consideration when people with impaired vision require assistive technologies to render Web pages readable.

When considering design contrast:

• Look at all design mock-ups in grayscale first. Colors evoke emotion. Introducing them first distracts you from the ability to see potential contrast problems in a design.
• Avoid too many dark colors.
• Avoid too many light colors. We were just involved in a site audit where the gray text on a gray background rendered the sites main offer too difficult to read. Simply changing the background shade can make the elements pop out.

Expectations

This is the design’s ability to employ basic conventions online users have come to associate with e-business. Sure, conventions can seem limiting and uncreative. But an online business must provide both a design and a layout that helps the visitor accomplish her task efficiently and without frustration.

• All text hyperlinks should be underlined or at the least very obvious.
• View Shopping Cart/Checkout links should be near the upper right corner. You may want to include a phone number as well here.
• Full contact info should reside in the footer navigation.

• What other things are you doing that confuse people and their expectations?

Perception

• Of speed. That should be the visitor’s impression of how quickly the site and each subsequent page appear onscreen. While a site can load with an absolute speed, it’s possible to give the impression it’s loading faster by prioritizing critical information and loading it first. Ideally, the visitor will engage with that information while secondary information is still loading. Actual speed and the perception of speed are often inversely related. The real influences are the users’ experiences and their ability to complete the tasks they came to accomplish.  Have you checked the load time of your most important pages lately?
• Of time spent on task. This is the visitor’s impression of the length of the persuasive process from beginning to end. Structural designs that use five pages when three would suffice needlessly waste visitors’ time. At a smaller level, forms that “look” long — even though they may not request more information — are often perceived as requiring more time to complete. In general, the longer the visitor perceives it will take her to accomplish her task, the more frustrated and disinterested she becomes. When was the last time you watched your visitors trying to complete these tasks? If it’s been a while, order 5-8 usability tests on UserTesting.com for $29 each. You’ll get a screen recording as they talk through what they are experiencing on your website.

How well designed are your landing pages and key buying pages?