Objective: Find out about and choose a rate plan and phone.Range: 8-9Average Clicks:8.7Comments: A lot of choices. As with banks, comparison matrices made it easier. And faced with a real-life choice, many consumers would have had to click many more times. We phoned Co. Bs Customer Service line and verified information on an attractive plan, and found it was inaccurate. It was generally easy to choose either the rate plan or the phone first, and peliculas porno none of the sites skipped a beat.Considering the complexity of the purchase (e.g., if done in person), nice job by these companies, despite the seemingly high number of clicks.
Internet Access (ISP)
Objective: Find access plan and buy itThree companies offered dialup and DSL. Two were Baby Bells and the other 2 were Internet-only companies. Results blended.Range: 4-10.5 ClicksAverage Clicks: 6.8Comments: Companies A and D were the Baby Bells. The difference in total average clicks doesnt tell the whole story: it was decidedly harder to figure out where to go next on those two sites, and a web newbie may well have had a much xnxx harder time with these two. The reasonably fast DSL-availability checks kept us on board.
Music CD Vendors
Traditional mail order record companies and Internet-only entitiesObjective: buy a Classic Rock CDRange: 5-7 ClicksAverage Clicks: 5.4Comments: From a marketing standpoint, why force visitors to log inright away? This is how the older, traditional companies handle it. Before forcing me to look up my membership number, or sign up, tell me if you have what Im looking for. In the long run, we propose, users will be more likely to want to come back pornhub than if forced to sign up.
Office Supply Click & Mortar Companies
Objective: Buy a task chairRange: 6-7 ClicksAverage Clicks: 6.3Comments: Inventory is finite, so we didnt mind typing in our zip code first. Pretty straightforward and easy process even though A, B and C had different logical paths to the chairs.
Website Hosting Companies
Objective: Choose a hosting plan and order it, along with a new domain nameRange: 6-8 ClicksAverage Clicks: 6.7Comments: Significantly more user-friendly an experience than the youporn ISP group, despite the similarity in average clicks. Consensus was that Companies A, B and C easily led the user through options and choices; Most clicks involved investigating product choices, not hunting for the finish line. ISPs required significantly more mind-reading and/or luck to find the right information.
Survey Conclusions
Despite widely varying approaches, B-to-C websites offer fairly similar numbers of steps from arrival on the home page to consummating the sale (although the number of clicks does not tell the whole story)
The old 2-click and 3-click rules cant quite apply to most B to C sites; this is OK, as the best sites work just like the brick-and-mortar world, where a consumer can get assistance in efficiently narrowing down his or her choices and then easily act on the final choice. Many sites, however, would seem to reflect a corporate attitude that
a. Site visitors already know the website and the product/service offerings as well as the companys Marketing Department
b. If you shove enough extra or tangential products and services in front of site visitors, even if the information clouds the visitors ability to easily find out about and get what they came for, theyll buy all the other stuff, too?
The fact that many big companies have elaborate, well-funded websites offers no clue as to the ease with which they guide (or misguide) visitors through their offerings.
Companies big and small should test their sites usability objectively and subjectively, using subjects who are new to their websites, their product offerings, and, arguably, e-commerce.
Where are the buyers?
According to StatMarket, AOLs search facility is the top source among all referrers when it comes to the conversion rate, or percentage of visitors who buy after finding what they were looking for, with a whopping 3.3%. This industry leaders conclusions were widely reported, and also widely interpreted to mean that AOL might be THE place to put ones search engine marketing dollars.
Some bloggers and pundits took a more skeptical view, and we fall somewhere in the middle: We think it depends. Some considerations:
AOL users on average, are newer to the Internet, and perhaps more susceptible to the novelty of buying online.
It would be useful to know what the repeat purchase rate is
It would be useful to know the demographics of the websites that converted the visitors: industry, average purchase price, etc
It would be useful to know how AOL stacks up against say, Google and Yahoo! (#s 9 and 10 in conversions) when it comes to revenue produced and profit generated from these conversions.
Anti spam: the pressure mounts.
Microsoft combats spam on users screens, in addition to in the courts (see WebPromote Archives)
Late last fall, Microsoft announced what they say is powerful new anti-spam technology, designed to intelligently assist users of Outlook, Exchange Server and even MSN Explorer and Hotmail in blocking spam from entering e-mail boxes.
In addition to powerful SmartScreen Technology, the software giant has inserted the insights and experiences of thousands of users (or, spam victims) in the development of Internet-related tools.
See presspass/events/antispam/ for full details from the source.
Well have to hope that our screens are Smart enough to discriminate between legitimate, desired e-mail and spam. The best scenario: Benign and not-so-benign spammers get the message and stop clogging the entire e-mail enabled world with their instant trash.
