Usability Key Feature for Auto Sites

Usable Sites Earn High Marks Two high-performing sites, Honda and Kia, are found by J.D. Power to each focus on usability and allow shoppers to access information quickly and easily. As a result, both Honda and Kia perform well in each of the four measures examined in the study: speed, appearance, navigation and information/content.

‘Edgy’ Sites Fare Worse In contrast, some of the lowest-ranking websites use what J.D. Power identifies as an edgy, brand-centric design that put marketing goals ahead of meeting shopper needs. As a result, they perform particularly poorly in the appearance measure. Certain design elements on these sites hinder speed, ease of navigation and user access to information and content. Read more at www.marketingcharts.com

The proportion of online retailers with mobile-tailored sites has tripled in the last year but still remains small, according to a new study. In its second annual mobile commerce audit, digital strategy firm Acquity Group found that 12% of the top 500 Internet retailers had sites optimized for mobile phones, up from 4% a year ago. And despite all the buzz around mobile apps, the share of companies with downloadable mobile apps is only 7%, up from 2% last year. Only 5% had both a mobilized site and an app and only 2% had an e-commerce-enabled app. In terms of specific devices, 11% had apps for the iPhone — up from 1% last year — but few had ones geared to other smartphone platforms such as Android, Palm or the BlackBerry. Only 12% of retailers had mobile sites that allowed customers to complete a transaction through checkout on at least one type of smartphone, and only 2% offered apps with check-out capability. Read more at www.mediapost.com

Tying an online ad or piece of email marketing directly to a customized landing page that acknowledges the initial communication and has a specific call to action can improve lift by 40%, according to a survey by CrownPeak.

Product-specific advertising performed better than its holiday-themed counterpart, though many retailers still failed to direct the majority of ads to a clear consumer call to action.

50% of product-specific advertisements linked either to a canned “search” or “category” page, or the website home page.

Some advertisers - primarily content aggregators - directed ads to specific landing pages, which then featured advertisements for other providers of the product. Read more at www.marketingcharts.com

When mobile Internet users were asked to identify the top three elements that most influence their decision to return to a mobile Internet site, they reported: The speed at which the site loads The ease of navigation on the site The quality of the content on the site itself Among mobile Internet users, several small but telling differences were revealed when comparing smartphone owners to feature phone owners, says the report: Both groups prioritized the speed at which a mobile site loads, Smartphone users looked next at the quality of the content, ranking ease of navigation as less important Feature phone users found ease of navigation almost as essential as their number one concern, how fast the mobile site loads. Read more at www.mediapost.com

The 2009 Omniture Online Conversion Benchmark Survey, conducted in July, reveals that most marketers miss opportunities to increase conversions. About 80% of the 1,000 online or interactive marketers responding to the survey do not serve up personalized content to Web visitors, not do they promote Web site content based on performance metrics.

Forty-two percent of marketers participating in the survey spend less than five hours per week optimizing advertising media. Less than one-third frequently test online content. And 70% of the content decisions that appear on Web sites are made by one person, unsupported by data.

See more at www.mediapost.com

Your ads are often not selling the products that you designed them to sell. We have found that upwards of 48.38% percent of the time people end up buying a product different than the the one featured on ad they clicked on, and upwards of 11.28% of the time they bought a similar product, but not exactly the same product as the ad they clicked on.

For each keyword and product combination we looked at, we placed them in to one of three buckets: Exact, similar and unrelated. “Exact” would mean they purchased exactly the same product or product category of the ad they clicked on. “Similar” would be if they looked for XYZ sleeping bag, but purchased ABC sleeping bag, meaning they still purchased a sleeping bag, but it was a different brand or model from their search. “Unrelated” represented when the users search had no relation to what they ultimately purchased. After conducting this analysis, we found the following information: Read more at searchengineland.com

Recession-Proof Interactive Marketing

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Don’t make me use your half-baked mobile channel

Several sites I visit have decided to foist their stripped-down, (sometimes) photo-free mobile channels upon my iPhone. Some give me a special iPhone only version (fine) - while others force me to use the lame mobile channel that also works on some plain-Jane Samsung phone that’s about eight pixels wide.

I bought the iPhone so I can look at your REAL website. Is the mobile version handy? Sure, but you better give me an easy link back to the real site. The big offenders: MSNBC.com and Newsweek.com. I cannot load their normal sites on my iPhone - period. CNN.com and Time.com also give you the mobile channel by default - but both give you options to get to the main site (Time.com at the very top - bonus points). CBSNews.com has a custom iPhone channel (yay!) but no link to the normal site (boo!). ABCNews.com loads up the normal site by default.

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Getting the right web analytics tool is only half the battle; the real focus of your web analytics program should be the people who work with it.Go to the source

A good call-to-action is worth its weight in gold. Interactivate’s CEO offers tips to finesse your CTA.

During the infancy of the World Wide Web, when people had more time and email was a genuine novelty, “Click here” was a darned good call-to-action (CTA). It was simple, direct and easily understood by the greenest newbie online.

Fast forward 15 years or so. Using a conversion mechanism that is approaching middle age in internet years is like using a 14K dial-up modem: not exactly highest tech. If your conversion rates are stuck at single digits, try these tips to bring your CTAs up to 21st century speed.

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