Seasons Change, Ads Get Borked

Posted on August 4, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords, Yahoo, YSM

(If this is your first time reading a search post from me: DSW are a very business-related keyword which unfortunately this blog manages to rank higher than my business on.  Apologies for the obfuscation: D01ch S1ght W0rds.  In queries and ad text its always spelled out normally.)

Well, the upcoming return of teachers to school has apparently massively shifted the number (waaaaaaaaay up) and the behavior of people searching for my search terms, and my previously decently performing ads have sunk to about 10% CR (Yahoo has also sunk, although the magnitude was a lot less).  I’m trying a couple of things to get them back up:

1)  My most common search term is a variation on “DSW list”.  I always hit that person with DSW bingo instead, which gets about a 1.5%ish CTR and formerly had a pretty decent conversion.  I decided to test actually giving them the lists, since I have them on my website and the page they are on tries to “upsell” people to the free demo about every other word.  The only problem is that for any of these search queries the #1 organic result is just as good as my site (although slightly less navigable).  So I decided to make my add stand out in the crowd:

DSW Lists
Free lists.
No kidding.
www.BingoCardCreator.com 

Given that almost everybody is using the full character allotment in every line, the white space immediately catches the eye.  That plus the fact that this very closely matches their query has caused the CTR rate on the ad to jump to about 6%ish (triple to quadruple my best previous performer for this ad group), and (this was the major shocker) the conversion rate is higher, too!  Its a shade below 20% after two days (umm, boo) but given that the rest of my ads have been at 5-15% for a week I’m considering keeping it (this means my CPA has shot past 60 cents — egads!  Call the medics!).

Also, I noticed that every single ad on Google AdWords is the same: “We sell X.  Come get it!”.  Boo for lack of creativity.  I know the character limit is a little constraining but surely there is a way to get meaningful copy in four lines — the Japanese have been writing sub-17 letter poems from what is effectively a 200 word vocabulary for 500 years and they haven’t gotten bored of them yet.   (This is even more impressive if you understand how they are constrained in subjects — autumn, for example, “leaves” you with radiant colors, dragonflies, and thats about it.)

So anyhow, with poetry as my inspiration and an appreciation for the corny-goofballness that a lot of elementary school teachers appreciate:

DSW Bingo
Roses are red, violets are blue,
Bingo makes students love you.
www.BingoCardCreator.com

The early results suggest that I am a better programmer than a poet.

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Support Does Not Scale. Customer Service Does.

Posted on August 3, 2006 by in customer service, popular, support

I’m a big fan of all things scaling, because thats what takes you from having to scramble for money on an hour-to-hour basis and gets you to the whole “Making money while drinking pina coladas on the beach” (or, in my case, iced tea in the shade) ideal uISV existence. Two of commenters recently left well-reasoned comments to the general effect that “Support costs a lot of your time and most users don’t need it. Don’t go overboard. Instead, help out the vast majority of your customers who don’t need support.” My comments:

Cutting a customer off: There is a certain school of thought that says you should have a maximum level of tolerance for any particular customer using support resources, and after that point you say “No more”. I actually think this is (potentially, depending on execution) a decent idea, which might suprise people in light of my recent paen to excellent customer service posts. You might also be suprised to learn that I’ve described someone doing it in the last 24 hours.

Here’s the cruel math of telephone customer service: the average cost of servicing a phone call is $12. The average profit of a small order is less. You cannot afford to absorb a support call for every small order. Class poll: who caught the fact that when the the representative offered free shipping and cookies to a minor no-profit-in-this-transaction customer it terminated a (potentially hostile) support incident in under a minute, totally obviated the need for a second call or an escalation to the supervisor, and still got the sale? And that that customer was so ecstatic to be brushed off he came back bearing hundreds of thousands of dollars? Thats the difference between support and customer service. As a support incident, that call was a waste of time/money. As an opportunity for demonstrating you’ve got an unparalleled dedication to customer service, that call is as good an opportunity as every other customer contact you make.

Saving Money/Time on Support: Your first line of defense against “wasting time” (never, ever, ever think of talking to a customer as a waste of time: see below) in support is producing a quality product. I sell to a rather non-technical market. I could be spending the rest of my life fielding calls on how to use the product — and I rather don’t want to, so I coded the project to be immediately usable by anyone who is capable of finding the Internet. The handholding starts at downloading/installation (clicking enter until you can’t anymore works and will dump you at my program’s main screen) and continues to my main screen (which doesn’t just explain what you need to do, it reads my app’s typical use case out to you, step by step). Improving your application is probably one of the best-scaling support investments you can make: if you consistently find yourself copy-pasting a canned “That feature is in the Tools Menu, 3rd from the bottom” response, you should probably go about making it more obvious. If you have a work-around for that annoying printing bug, fix the annoying printing bug.

How to Think of Support: I would generally advise against thinking that you’re wasting time doing support. Most people are rather poor actors — heck, most actors are rather poor actors. If you’re annoyed by the incident thats likely to come across to your customers. Think of it as an investment if it helps you — you’re investing in your reputation as a customer-service powerhouse. Against a reputation like that, firing off a few emails every day is cheap. (Think of it: suppose that 5% is an accurate accounting of the number of “needy” customers you have. Suppose you’re rolling in the dough at 1,000 orders a month. 5% of 1000 is 50, multiply by say 4 inquiries each is 200, averages to 7 per day. 7 emails a day is nothing — you can take care of that while brewing coffee.)

Politeness and a smile are free: You can’t always say yes to a customer request (although I’d strongly suggest defaulting to yes and requiring good reasons to say no, rather than the other way around). You can, however, have 100% of your customer-facing communications be polite and positive. For instance, compare the following two emails.

Bob,

You emailed me about this support issue 4 times this week. I’ve done what I can for you. Its obvious things aren’t working out. I’m refunding your purchase price.

Sincerely, Peevish uISV

Thats the wrong way to do things.

Dear Bob,

I have done some research regarding your support request. As it turns out, our product is regrettably not the best on the market for your needs. In our professional opinion, MicroFoos’ Foozle 2006 is a closer fit for your requirements. While it pains us to have not been able to help you, here at Pleasant ISV we are totally dedicated to customer satisfaction. Accordingly, we could not in good conscience accept your money with these issues outstanding, and have instructed our credit card processor to refund you.

Thank you for choosing Pleasant ISV and we look forward to the opportunity of serving you in the future.

Sincerely, Pleasant ISV

Content-wise, these emails describe the exact same set of circumstances. In terms of customer perception, these two emails are worlds apart from each other. Peevish ISV’s mail is, well, brusque and strongly leaves the impression that there was something wrong with the customer. Pleasant ISV’s mail doesn’t blame anyone (no, really, read it again — it doesn’t say or imply a single negative thing about Pleasant). It screams “we’re competent, we’re professionals, and we don’t accept anything less than the best”, and it leaves the door open rather than slamming it on your customer’s fingers.

An inspirational quote: “ We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — I have seen this one variously attributed to Aristotle and Adlai E. Stevenson. In any event, if you make excellence the routine in your customer service, people will know the difference. Promising good support/promising good customer service scales very well for your business. Think of it like the guarantee: you can’t afford for everyone to ask for their money back, but you know in advance that the overwhelming majority of people will not ask for their money back. And you know that the number of customers reassured by having the guarantee outweighs what you’ll spend on it. Support is exactly the same. Most people won’t need it, but lots of people are reassured by the fact that it is available if they do need it. Your customers have been trained for years to distrust software, despite the fact that most customers will not have any problems: software is impersonal, software gets in the way of them doing what they need to do, software breaks, and when software breaks they spend 10 hours in tech-support heck talking to people who hate them and don’t have any answers.

What if you could reassure customers? What if you had a deserved reputation for *not* blowing up in people’s faces, and for being a joy to work with? So beat the drum and beat it loudly:

If you have any problems, or just want to ask a question, talk to us. We have an actual human here. Even better — not just an actual human, you’ll get all your support emails answered directly from the head engineer/company president! (Try that with your other software vendors some time!) We care about your concerns and will work to make them right. Take a look at what Mary Sue of Normal, IL and Bob Smith of San Fransisco had to say about us: “Wow, I had expected to get a canned reply but they got back to me within 15 minutes and kept working until my problem was solved.” and “Pleasant uISV is the best in the industry, bar none. Once I bought one of their products and it wasn’t working out for me. They gave me my money back without me even asking and referred me to a competitor! It was more important that I be happy than that they make a buck. I’ll never stop using Pleasant and I recommend them to everyone I do business with.”

Or, you could say something like

Support incidents: Every customer has a maximum of four support incidents, after which they must pay a non-negotiable charge of $24.95 per incident. We do not answer requests about generic computer configuration problems, setting up web pages, etc etc.

Which of these two companies would you rather do business with? Which sounds like a risky investment? Which sounds warm and inviting?

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Semi-Offtopic: The Passion of the Customers

Posted on August 2, 2006 by in customer service, popular

I haven’t worked at Quill in years but I just remembered my favorite thing about the place: there is a wall right next to the breakroom which is devoted to customer service (have I mentioned that they’re fanatics about this?) It has daily metrics (I was never quite sure how they were gathered, but I suppose there must be a combination of phone surveys and automagically collected data) covering all the usual suspects: what percentage of customers are very satisfied, satisfied, etc; what percentage of orders had errors and where in the chain that error was localized to (one summer there was a spike on that graph, from “absurdly low” to “industry standard”, directly attributable to my team. You can draw your own conclusions as to how many of us kept our jobs.)

But my favorite part of the wall was letters. Quill had, to my knowledge as a lowly worker bee, two policies regarding letters: first, they were all collected and any workers individually singled out in them had the action noted on a publicly-visible board and in their file (and Quill would FIND you: there was at least one letter addressed to “that lovely Spanish woman with the Texan accent” and, by God, she got the credit for it). Second, the letters and/or copies (some people couldn’t bear to part with them) were posted on the bulletin board next to the numbers.

Anyhow, my favorite letter wasn’t a letter at all. It was a prayer card from a convent in, as I recall, New York. For anonymity’s sake we’ll call them the Sisters of Perpetual Gladness. Oh, they were a happy bunch, and it was contagious. Do you know why we had a prayer card from the Sisters of Perpetual Gladness? I don’t, because the people named on the card (whom the Sisters had dedicated a novena to — thats nine days of prayer, for you non-Catholics in the room) wouldn’t say exactly what they had done. Thats my personal metric for customer excellence: Nuns Praying For You (NPFY). Paypal, yeah, there’s a NPFY-0 business if I ever saw one. Quill probably has the highest NPFY of any any business I’ve ever been associated with. Keep in mind we were earning NPFY60+ for, well, prompt delivery of paper and pens.
But the Sisters were loyal customers and in Order Entry we lived for their call. I got one once — it made my year. And the Sister blessed me, too. I blessed her back, which was probably technically against company policy (although if you’ve been reading closely you know that when stacked against customer satisfaction policies were more like guidelines and guidelines were more like advice and advice was more like suggestions and suggestions were more like comments). Anyhow, for the Sisters, if they had asked Order Entry “We’d like an 18-wheeler filled full of printer paper and the most we’re willing to pay is, hmm, nothing. Oh, overnight delivery, too.” the only thing we would have said is “But Sister, where will we put your cookies?”

There was only one problem with the Sisters. We had some heavy-duty CRM (customer relations management) software at Quill. It supported locking a customer to one particular desk or extension — for example, if you’re the Big Important Government Account with a 6,000 page bid request your order is probably too important to be handled by $10-an-hour me, so you got locked to a specialist. The Sisters did not require any special handling like that. As a matter of fact, they required a specially-written rule to ban handling like that for their account. The reason was that every lowly worker bee could put a special handling restriction on an account, and everyone could take off a restriction from someone at equal-or-less access level, which made the Sisters’ account history look like a Wiki revert war (“They’re MINE!” “NO, they’re MINE!” “My family is from New York! I should get to call them*” “But you’re Jewish!” “So are you!” “Yeah, but I dated a Catholic once!” etc, etc)

* The Sisters’ order always had a problem requiring calling them, immediately. Typically, it was that they had missed an opportunity to get free cookies. At any given time, you see, Quill had hundreds or thousands of promotions running. Dozens of these ended in the punch-line “Free Mrs. Fields’ Cookies”. We got a very stern notice every month “Here are a list of the new promotion codes, in case a customer forgets. Remember, Mrs. Fields’ Cookies are NOT appropriate as a we’re-sorry and the customer must specifically mention the promotion to receive the premium.” An exceptionally morally upright employee would phrase the phone call something like this:

“God bless you. This is Sisters of Perpetual Gladness, Sister Mary speaking. How can I help you?”

“Hello Sister Mary, this is Bob for Quill Corporation Office Supplies. I was wondering if I could speak to you about your order of *checks watch* two minutes ago?”

“Oh, certainly.”

“Well, Sister Mary, we reviewed your order and there seems to be a problem. The last 47 times you’ve ordered with Quill, you ordered one free tub of Mrs. Fields’ Cookies. We see there are no cookies on this order, and wondered if there might be an omission.”

“Oh, thats certainly kind of you, but we didn’t see the free offer…”

“Didn’t see? Why, no problem, we can look it up for you. Do you know what catalog you were using?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t have it in front of me.”

“Hmm, I’ll bet it was the *check premium list* California july legal small offices circular.”

“Err, are you sure?”

“Well, did your catalog have the word Quill and some brightly colored office supplies on the front cover?”

“Yes, yes, it did.”

“Well, mystery solved! So did the circular. The promo was on page 437b. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll go right ahead and get this order and your cookies you to you. You don’t have to do a thing.”

“Why, thank you very much young man. God bless you.”

“God bless you too, Sister Mary.”

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More Business Firsts

Posted on August 2, 2006 by in customer service, popular

Processed my first refund today (um, yay?). Can I give a piece of advice for everyone who has a money-back guarantee (which should be everyone): any time your customer asks to invoke the guarantee, process the refund immediately, then write back to your customer.

Minimally, you should thank them for choosing your software then inform them you have refunded their purchase at their request, and sign off gracefully. If you feel the need to ask why, you can then ask why, but phrase it in such a way as it sounds like a favor to you rather than a business request. People will generally respond pretty favorably to requests for a 10 second favor after you’ve just given them money.

I learned this lesson through my first real employment, which was as an order entry operator at Quill Corporation Office Supplies. Quill is outwardly fanatical about customer service: without violating any confidences regarding their internal guidelines, suffice it to say they would rather have some customers get away with murder than inconvinience another customer to the tune of 5 bucks. I have seen their customer satisfaction metrics and the comparison to other companies in the industry, and the fanaticism works.

You might be inclined to ask why the person is returning the software, and then process the return pending a reasonable explanation. This is a mistake. There is no question that your customer can get money from you: the question is whether they go through you or they chargeback. I can scarcely find words to describe how much better for you it is that they go through you. Well, OK, here’s an attempt: if they go through you, it costs you either “nothing” or “very little” depending on your payment processor, if they chargeback you will frequently get hit with a large fee ($25+) on top of paying your payment processor fees, and frequent chargebacks will get your account yanked.

You might be inclined to write off a customer who has requested a refund. From a support perspective, this is correct. From a politeness perspective, wrong move. You’re not Quill with 6 figures worth of customers, but you are in a niche market, and your niche talks to each other. The next time your ex-customer is chatting with his friend and his friend expresses the same need he had, he will always, invariably, talk about his experience with you. Since he’s your ex-customer, this will not be a maximally positive conversation, but you can choose whether its “Well, I bought from Bingo Card Creator. It didn’t do exactly what I wanted but when I asked for a refund I got it in 10 minutes and I was impressed by his professionalism” or “I bought from those “#$”#%”$#!s at Bingo Card Creator. What a scam. It crashed my computer three times and when I demanded my money back I had to fight him three days for it. Burn in “#$#”$”, “#$”#%”#%”. So, Bob, how are your kids doing?”

Big deal, you think, how many people are going to buy or not buy on the basis of a quick conversation with a co-worker? Answer: this is the most influential form of advertising you will ever get in your life. I remember getting an all-hands memo when Quill gained a $X00,000 a year account because the purchasing officer had a good experience seeking a technically-out-of-bounds accomodation when ordering a single cartridge of toner for his wife. He wanted free shipping on a $Y order. We didn’t offer free shipping until $45. The representative he spoke to said “No problem sir, we’ll make an exception for you. And have a box of Mrs. Fields’ Cookies as our thanks for calling in”. Do you know what a box of Mrs. Fields cookies and eating a shipping charge costs us? Suffice it to say that its more than the amount of profit the company made on a $Y order. Do you know how much profit a $X00,000 account makes in a year? It pays for a whole lot of cookies.

(P.S. If your uISV ever requires office supplies, I heartily recommend my old colleagues at Quill. You will find no better service in the industry than you will get at Quill. If I’m wrong, the cookies are on me.)

Stupidly simple thing to keep in mind as a uISV: always leave enough money in your account to cover the most damaging single return you’re currently liable for. If you have a 100% money-back guarantee policy for 30 days, and you’ve sold $1000 of product in $25 increments, keep minimally $25 in your account. If you’re using Paypal, this will decrease the amount of time it takes to get your refund authorized. Even if you’re not, if you have to do account-balancing tricks to get your customer their refund (in my case, that could possibly require an international wire from Japan to the US, followed by funding my Paypal account and then processing the refund), it will take a while and peeve off your customer. What if two people request refunds? In this case, you’ve probably done something wrong. :)

Oh, why offer a refund? In a nutshell, because the marginal number of customers the refund offer will get you outweighs by many orders of magnitude the amount of charges you will eat processing refunds. Steve Pavlina covered this better than I ever could (search for “guarantee”, although the rest of his advice is decent, too).

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I Hate Typos + PAD Files Work

Posted on August 1, 2006 by in advertising, Analytics

After my surge in sales today I was wondering “Hey, why didn’t Google pick up any of these?”  Turns out I had marked my conversion page as http::/foo instead of http://foo .   Haha, regular expression FAILURE.  D’oh.  As those of you who use Analytics probably know, Google won’t go back and rerun data after you fix filters like that, so the information is lost forever… but given the microscopic number of conversions I have its pretty easy to get manually.

Incidentally, one of my customers found me through a PR5 shareware site which automagically lists anyone who submits a PAD file to the ASP.  Considering that file took all of two minutes to generate using their free tool and that PR5 site ranks higher than me for some keywords thanks to the advertising copy I included in the PAD file, thats not a bad idea for people bootstrapping up a mISV.

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A Month Worth Of Stats

Posted on August 1, 2006 by in Uncategorized

Might as well give out these stats, although since they include rapid ramping up of a business and ceaseless experimentation they don’t mean quite so much going forward.   But if folks wondering if they can make the leap or not want to see some actual numbers, here they are.  From opening my business on July 1st through August 1st (Japan time):

Business stats:

Sales (gross): $74.85

Sales (net): $71.79 (I pay Paypal $1.02 per transaction)

Expenses (subtotal): $68.02

Signup costs: $22 ($5 Google, ~$17 international fax for eSellerate)

Website: $10.02 (that technically pays for 2 months)

Advertising: $35 (I technically haven’t been billed yet)

Profit: $3.77.  Take that, Bill Gates! :)

Labor stats:

Development week: 50 hours (all tasks)
Post-launch development: 5 hours

Post-launch marketing: 25 hours

Post-launch support: 15 minutes (easy-to-use, mostly bug-free program = I write “Thank you for saying thank you” a lot)

Website stats (for my main site, not this blog):
Visits: 1,873

Page views: 4,704

Trial downloads: 270

There should be an asterix on these data: I got a large spike of hits from pirates when my software was cracked.  They accounted for roughly 120 downloads and a couple of hundred visits.

Advertising stats:

Google AdWords campaign:

Cost: $30

Clicks: 315

CTR: 2.45%

Conversion (to demo): 17.61%

CPA (to demo): $.61

Yahoo Search Marketing Campaign

Cost: $5 (its actually $30 but I got a $25 free coupon)

Clicks: 262

CTR: 2.28%

Conversion: 24.8%* (* its actually higher — Yahoo conversion tracking was off for a week or so)

CPA: 44 cents* (* its actually lower, for the same reason)

Organic search stats:

 Google: 154 hits, 17.5% conversion

MSN: 85 hits, 13% conversion

Yahoo: unknown, doesn’t disaggregate well from CPC campaign.

My goal for the rest of August: I’d like to see 10 sales and would be very pleased with 20 (10 sales a month makes this an amusing hobby, 20 sales a month is a meaningful change in my standard of living).  Aside from that, continuous improvement in marketing (.30 CPA and breaking in the top 5 organic results on my favorite 10 keywords), and getting Bingo Card Creator to be as good a product for teaching math (and potentially other subjects) as it is currently for teaching elementary reading.

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I'm Profitable

Posted on August 1, 2006 by in Uncategorized

I was worried for a little, particularly after increasing my advertising budget (sure, its only 5 sales worth per month, but was I overly optimistic?), but I got some orders today and I’m now profitable and will continue to be for the forseeable future.  Yay me.  I also like that its one month to the day after opening my business.

Big credit to my friends at JoS (especially those who chipped in with good advice) and the other businesses and software developers without whom none of this would be possible.  And, of course, to all the teachers out there.  I hope you enjoy the last of your summer vacation and have a bang-up school year.  (P.S. If you’re looking for an activity for your first day, can I humbly suggest icebreaker bingo?)

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Minor Programming Tweaks

Posted on July 31, 2006 by in Uncategorized

I’m actually cracking open the IDE today.  Nice to get away from marketing for a bit.  I have a bunch of stuff which is neither sexy nor fun but will improve the customer experience:

1)  Currently I pop up a visible JFrame when I print for a split second, which is annoying to the customers (it causes what is perceived as a gray flicker over the application window).  I moved this offscreen, which half solves the problem in one line of code.  The other problem is a new JFrame immediately grabs focus from my window, even if it only lives for a fraction of a second, which causes the title bar to flash a lot.  Going to play around with that some more.

2)  Also related to printing, if you print, say, 30 cards all of them get created before they are spooled out to the print, and they are only garbage collected after the printer reports that it has gotten them.  While this isn’t a problem on my souped-up development machine at least some of my customers are on P3s with 128 MB of ram, so I’ll optimize that (its the only significant use of resources in the program, to my knowledge).

3)  I’m going to give it an icon rather than the default Java cup of coffee.

4)  Maybe, maybe if I have time before dinner I’ll get the math facts thing working.

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On-page SEO for Small Companies

Posted on July 29, 2006 by in popular, search, SEO

(Note: If you were looking for software to create printable bingo cards, Dolch sight word bingo, or Dolch sight word lists, you should check those three links. The rest of this post is about how search engines work, and is probably not that interesting to you. However, because it repeats your search query frequently, the search engine you were using thinks its a perfect match for your interests. If you’re running a small business and wondering how to make it look better on the search engines, you’re in the right place:)

Some things which I’ve found useful, and which can be done fairly easily without compromising your ethics or your user experience:

Read More…

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10 minute tweaks to boost your conversion

Posted on July 29, 2006 by in popular, Uncategorized

Disclaimer: you know your market and your customers better than I do. Some of these will likely be different for people who are not pitching products to teachers.

Over the past month I’ve been doing a lot of tweaking of various things on my website, and generally after leaving a tweak up for two to five weekdays (my weekend traffic is highly skewed by the work habits of my customers) I evaluate whether it was effective or not. Its not A/B testing but its, shall we say, empirically driven iterative improvements. (As an aside: I’m sure my Japanese economics professor would say that I’ve just started doing things The Japanese Way (TM), as iterative improvement is routinely credited for everything from the quality of Japanese cars to… the quality of Japanese cars.) Anyhow, there are surely other, better ways to increase your conversions (such as optimizing your landing pages), but you can accomplish all of the following while brewing a pot of coffee.

1) Make your “download now” link an image. This delivered roughly a 100% boost in my conversion rate. Yeah, you read that right. I kept things very simple: it looks like a button (so its obvious you can click it), has unambiguous text (“Download (newline) Free Trial”), and I made it blue, which is figure is a nice inviting color which stands out on a site that tends to orange/yellow/white.

2) Within your main content area, put your goal for that page as the first textual link. This was roughly a 20% increase to the conversion rate. I don’t check what percentage of people get to my download page from the right-hand button versus from clicking on an exhortation in the text (although, come to think of it, I really should and could do that by just appending ?clickedOn=wherever to the link and then browsing Analytics’ “Dynamic Content” data), but systematic use of this convention has helped me alot. Here is my theory: some people will read your entire page, but a lot are just sort of browsing, and they’ll randomly click on whatever looks interesting — and you might as well have that be your goal (purchase or download, as appropriate).

3) There should be a download/purchase link on EVERY page. Want some fun stats? 71% of my visitors who download go straight for the cheese: they arrive at either my home page or an optimized landing page for a particular ad, and their next action is the free trial. What do the other 29% do? They dig around like veritable gophers. I have a non-trivial number of users who hit *every* accessible page in the site before downloading, including a rather suprising number who go through every link in the nav bar in order. And at some point the gophers decide they saw something they liked and convert. This has happened on every page I have written, from my free teacher resources to my about me blurb to… deciding to download after reading my privacy policy.

4) Your main page should have a screen shot above the fold. My program is not much to look at, but the printed output is pretty nice if I do say so myself (not exactly fine art, but it looks well done for elementary school bingo cards). I’ve tested having no screenshots/scans on the front page, having a screenshot only, having a screenshot and scan, having a scan only, etc. And I’ve tested where to put the screen shot. The conclusion: having a screenshot matters, a lot. Suprisingly (or perhaps not, since many, many visitors will leave in literally 10s or less if they don’t see something they like), it really matters that it is above the fold. To the tune of 25%. I put it south of my sales pitch on the main page for 3 days and changed nothing about the site in that time, and conversions nosedived. (Incidentally, I put the scan at the bottom of the page, after discovering having it was better than not having it but that if I put it above the spiel few people would scroll down to read it.)

5) If you use thumbnails, pop-up the full-size version in a new-window. This is probably a function of having non-technical customers, but you would be absolutely shocked at the percentage of users who in 2006 have not heard of the “back” button. I did some analysis on what people did right before they left: the largest group arrived at the site and left immediately. The second largest group clicked on a thumbnail and couldn’t find their way out of it.
Anyhow, you can quickly implement these, wait 48 hours, and revert them just as quickly if they didn’t work. You’ll notice that this data-driven improvement can’t happen without, well, data. Do you have analytics software installed yet? If not, what are you waiting for? (The only acceptable answer to that question: “My Google Analytics invite.”)

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