Quick roundup of stories which I found interesting this month.
E-commerce
- Secondary calls to action, the unsung heroes of persuasion
- Thinking of going mobile?, maybe consider QR codes while you’re at it
- Soft v Hard bounce rates, good insight – tried this one myself from Omniture
- Groupon take over CityDeal in Germany, expect the group buying market to continue to grow in Europe, it’s even hit Ireland
Social Media
- Measure it! kicked off, my thoughts here
- Brendan Hughes reveals some trust issues
- Ahh, so that’s what a Tweet looks like
- The rise of Social Gaming, the numbers are just silly
- 100 thoughts on Social Media, strange none of them involve ninja or guru
- Is Facebook killing CRM?, probably
Marketing
- Like Tom Hanks in BIG, Tom Doyle just doesn’t get it – Google’s new look- He’s not the only one
- Interesting,Inishturkbeg branding, via AdLandIreland (shiny new website from Nick McGivney)
- Irish whiskey still holding it’s own down under
Advertising
- Is it wrong I recognised most of these? The Evolution of Advertising in Sports Video Games
- Gary Colemans love-hate life with advertising, What’choo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?
- Nike world cup ad breaking all kinds of records, found it a tad boring myself
Some interesting statistics from Addthis.com, which is a sharing service website. You’ll notice many websites have a little widget allowing you to share the page via Social Media & Email. AddThis is one of the most popular alongside ShareThis.
Comparisons below are between Ireland, UK & US.
Click to Enlarge
What’s interesting here is the relative high amount of shares via Facebook (37.12%) & Twitter (16.54%) from Ireland when compared to overall averages of Facebook (33.23%) & Twitter (7.95%).
Email is the third most popular sharing method with 8.91% of Irish visitors choosing this, but compared to an overall average of 16.74% this appears quite low.
Addthis make a number of stats available, including Trends, Services Comparison and Country Comparison and give a good indication of how website visitors are sharing content. It’s important that websites allow their content to be shared easily and these services also enable detailed analytics into how visitors are spreading your content.
I found some research by Jackob Nielsen into eye tracking on web pages really interesting, in particular the conclusion that horizontal attention leans to the left where research found that web users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page and 30% viewing the right half meaning a conventional left-to-right layout is more likely to make sites profitable.
The analysis was performed on static 1024×768 web page resolutions with a focus on content rather than transactional websites but it would be interesting to see what impact this would have if changes to a layout were made.
Most e-commerce websites choose the familiar layout of product to the left, call to action on the right. Here’s a mockup of a Vodafone.ie product page with a heatmap of the Nielsen research laid on top (heatmap borrowed from ConversionVoodoo)
As you can see the product image and content are in the hot zone, but the price and purchase button are in relatively cold area of just below 7%.
Lets try that again, but this time with some layout tweaks by myself, putting the call to action right in the hot zone.
I’ve moved the image to the left most side of the page, and call to action right in the hot area. As 69% of visitors look at the leftmost 500 pixels – It’s worth putting all relevant content in that area.
Would this increase conversion? It’s difficult to say as there are many layout changes which would have a positive affect on Vodafone’s product page but the great thing about A/B split testing is it would allow an infinite number of contests to fine tune conversion.
It’s also no surprise to see this in the wild with BabeAge.com testing left side layouts converting 16.7% higher than conventional ones, something which they’ve been integrating throughout their website already. While it may seem odd to see the add to cart button on the left, based on Nielsens study and their internal testing it doesn’t seem that strange that it doesn’t conform to most other e-commerce websites out there.
Applying the same heatmap overlay to Apple.ie shows a strong correlation between content and call to action being in the right places.
Although eye tracking is incredibly useful, it’s also quite expensive. An alternative is to use HeatMap tools on your website to determine where users are clicking and moving their mouse. I love using CrazyEgg & ClickTale (Paid) but ClickHeat is a solid free alternative.
Switching all your content and call to actions to the left side of the page based on the research alone is probably not a good idea, but using A/B split testing will determine if small changes have a positive impact on your websites performance.
