Biznology Blog: March 2006

« February 2006 | Main | April 2006 »

March 28, 2006

Improve Search Marketing for Large Sites

My Search Engine Marketing, Inc. co-author, Bill Hunt has collaborated with me on another article. This one's called "Improve Search Marketing for Large Sites"—find out how big sites really are different and what you can do about it.

Posted by mikemoran at 8:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 21, 2006

Get Your Web Site Into Search Indexes

My co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., Bill Hunt collaborated with me on an article posted today on IBM's developerWorks. The piece, called "Get Your Web Site Into Search Indexes" shows you how to find out whether your pages are listed in organic search indexes and how to get them there.

Posted by mikemoran at 10:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 14, 2006

How Shoppers Use Your Web Site

Have you ever wondered exactly what tasks your site visitors undertake when they are shopping for something on your site? If so, you may want to investigate a technique called use cases, which allow analysis of your visitor's behavior—so that you can tune your site to sell more.

In the past, we've discussed the Web Conversion Cycle, which models the reasons that customers come to your Web site. And the marketers among us might have been perfectly happy thinking about their Web Conversion Cycle, but you technical folks might be appalled. “Where is the evidence that this is what our users are actually doing?” (Like drug dealers, technical folks always call people “users.”) Now, being a gear head myself, I actually agree that we might want to get some facts about what our visitors are doing before we go off and redesign the whole Web site.

As luck would have it, a methodology exists to do exactly that, brought to us by the User-Centered Design (UCD) professionals. (While UCD folks are passionate about making everything more accessible and usable, you might note with some irony that they haven’t worked very hard at coming up with an easy-to-understand name.) The UCD types are scientists of human behavior, an eclectic mix of analytical and sociological skills, who tease the insights needed out of user testing.

When your UCD people have done enough testing, they can develop a set of use cases. Use cases are detailed depictions of each step that your visitors take to complete a task—a task such as buying your product. Users engage in similar interactions for similar tasks, such as filtering a product list.

Perhaps you haven't performed user testing on your site—maybe you don't even have any UCD people. It's important that you model user's behaviors so that you understand the lower level activities they engage in on your site. Use cases vary, but they may be some high-level similarities. Your use cases may address one or more of these user activities:

• Browsing and Filtering. One strategy your visitors employ to find what they are looking for is to navigate and to refine lists of things—often by category. They look for the link that helps them get closer to their goal.


• Searching. Visitors find desired offerings by typing words or identifiers associated with those offerings,


• Viewing details. Clicking on a search result to see more information is one example, but any action that reveals more about of an item in the list fits the bill.


• Viewing related information. Visitors frequently need to explore surrounding information so that they understand what they are reading. This is an especially important behavior after viewing details from a search result—when a visitor “parachutes” into your site from a search, understanding context can be very important.


• Compare. Visitors often need to see several items in a list side-by-side so that they can see their similarities and differences—that helps them make choices between them.


• Buy. Depending on your site, this use case might entail dropping an item into a cart and checking out, or could encompass myriad offline connections (such as pressing “Call me” buttons, starting a text chat, find stores or dealers, filling out contact forms, requesting quotes, and others).

Shoppers have a lot of strategies they use to find what they need and buy it. When you analyze the behavior of your visitors and tune your site to help them do what they want, your sales will go up.

Posted by mikemoran at 11:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 13, 2006

The Search for E-Mail Relevance

E-mail marketing can be exquisitely targeted or it can be spam, depending in large measure on the work done by the sender to ensure relevance to the recipient. One method of targeting is to use search engines.

Relevance is the coin of the realm in e-mail marketing. Despite all the talk about how spam kings get rich, the truth is that hardworking, legitimate e-mail marketers enjoy a far more lucrative and customer-friendly existence. Jupiter Research, in its report entitled The ROI of E-Mail Relevance, noted that conversion rates for carefully targeted e-mail reach nearly 4%, while traditional broadcast e-mail techniques barely approach 1%. Moreover, using these techniques to deliver relevant offers yields 18 times more profit than the simpleminded blast approach.

Using everything from CRM systems to Web analytics, marketers can identify the right message for just about anyone. Did you purchases a laptop three years ago that may be wearing out now? The CRM system knows to spit out your e-mail address. Have you visited the Web site and looked at the same product line twice in the last week? The Web Analytics system can notice that and possibly get you contacted.

But how do you generate unique offers for each of these very targeted groups? It's incredibly expensive to create custom pages for so many offers.

Multifaceted search comes to the rescue. If you've already loaded up your product catalog in a multifaceted search engine, you can use search queries as your URLs in your e-mail marketing campaigns. BevMo.com and Northern Tool, for example, send e-mails that can drill into their product catalogs for just the right product or category of products, allowing shoppers to then drill yet deeper to find what they want.

Your CRM-based e-mail can do the same. Why not send those laptop owners e-mail pointing them to the top catalog page of your current laptops? Every feature is listed so that drill down to the best one is easy.

Your Web analytics system can do likewise. Why not send all who abandon your site e-mail offers that send them to a broader collection of products—maybe they did not know that you really have what they want. Again, the multifaceted interface allows shoppers to explore your products to find the one they want.

If you only use your search engine to help your Web visitors, you may be missing the boat. Your search facility is an easy way to generate dynamic content pages with no effort at all. Couple that ability with a targeted e-mail system and you may juice your sales sky high.

Posted by mikemoran at 5:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 10, 2006

The Future of Multifaceted Search is Fuzzy

Multifaceted search is a passion of mine—I have seen this technique improve experiences in both e-Commerce and other information retrieval interfaces. But, as useful as multifaceted search can be, it still suffers from one of the bugaboos of database search—exactitude. Is the future of multifaceted search a little fuzzy?

Steve Lavine says yes. Steve heads Transparensee, a start-up that claims to have built a fuzzy version of multifaceted search. He demonstrated it for me recently and it looked as interesting as its demonstration at the 2006 Demo conference.

The best thing about multifaceted search is the way it can eliminate "no results" queries. By showing searchers only valid choices to select, they never get a "not found." Transparensee goes that one better—besides showing the exact matches for the facet values selected, it also shows items that are "close."

Steve showed an example of a commerce search for digital cameras. If the searcher specifies a set of features and price and narrows the list down to one camera, Steve asked "Wouldn't you want to know that another camera met all the criteria but was $1 more than your price limit?" Similarly, if you were searching for a restaurant in a particular neighborhood, Steve went on, "Wouldn't you want to know about another restaurant that met all your criteria but was two blocks away?" That is what fuzzy multifaceted search can do.

Steve also showed off a different kind of multifaceted search user interface that uses slider bars—searchers use the sliders to make certain facets more or less important than others. In effect, the searchers decide the relevance ranking algorithm on the fly. This technique avoids the biggest user interface problem in multifaceted search: searchers don't know that they need to select facet values in order of importance.

With traditional multifaceted search (if you can call anything this new traditional), searchers select their facet values one at a time and see which ones remain after each search. If the searcher selects the desired price and sees a key feature disappear, backtracking to select that needed feature (and pay a higher price) is the only action available. Backtracking frustrates searchers, which is bad because frustrated people abandon at higher rates. Worse, some searchers won't even know how to backtrack or know that they must backtrack—abandonment is even higher for them. The solution to this dilemma is for searchers to gradually realize that they need to select facet values in priority order—if that feature is the most important, select that first (followed by selecting from the prices available).

But many searchers don't think that way. They'd like a more fluid experience. Fuzzy multifaceted search is one way to provide that experience.

I have seen the future of multifaceted search, and it's kind of fuzzy.

Posted by mikemoran at 12:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 9, 2006

The Death of Brand Loyalty

What ever happened to brand loyalty? In bygone days, retailers were powerful brands, but today that power has been supplanted by Google. When shoppers turn into searchers, what do you get? Check out this month's Biznology Newsletter, The Death of Brand Loyalty.

Posted by mikemoran at 10:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 2, 2006

Big Site and In-House Search Marketing

It was great to have a chance to do three sessions yesterday at Search Engine Strategies in New York. I served on the panel for questions in the Big Site/Big Brand SEM session, and I also presented at the Working as a Team session. The third session was a total Q&A at In-House Forum, which Barry Schwartz has carefully chronicled.

Posted by mikemoran at 1:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack