The Online Marketer’s Secret Weapon: A Site that Works

Every Web marketer knows that success in the online channel is a game of inches: it takes a rigorous process of campaign testing, optimizing, aggregating and retesting just to get the tiniest incremental improvements in user response rates and conversions.

But while the industry focuses on squeezing every dollar of value out of acquisition strategies, billions of dollars are being left on the table by campaigns that drive users to sites they can't use.

Just how severe is the problem? Consider this: last year, companies that advertised on the Web spent $6 billion to send users to sites that failed 44% of the time. In a study by the Nielsen Norman Group evaluating user behavior on 20 e-commerce sites, users were unable to complete 218 of 496 very basic tasks—such as locating a store or buying a gift—due to poor usability. Nielsen calculated that the average site could increase sales as much as 79% through improved usability.

In a game of inches, that's a country mile.

The good news is that improving the usability on most sites can be relatively simple and inexpensive. Most poor user experiences are the result of a site's failure to conform to basic usability best practices, such as those governing page load times and consistency of navigation. Usable, well-accepted data on what users need to succeed are widely available and should be an integral part of every Web marketing strategy.

The best method for pinpointing the precise causes of breakdown in the customer experience is actual user testing. Usability testing involves active listening and engagement of qualified users as they attempt to complete typical tasks on the site. It improves on survey and clickstream methods by providing raw, qualitative feedback from real users, allowing the moderator to dig deeper into usability issues the moment they occur.

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