April 1st, 2010 → 1:23 pm @ Rob Kingston // No Comments
Assumptions can be dangerous, especially when making important decisions off assumptions. The more you make, the more convoluted and abstract the truth becomes. Here are a few you might like to become aware of:
In reality, people may be doing something else while they load your site - especially if the load time on your site is high. ClickTale is a good tool to measure user engagement… and page load times.
Many studies and sources indicate that visitors do not browse content linearly. They usually scan through and pick out the most obvious and relevant information for their needs.
This depends on so many factors:
Often times visitor have much better things to do than look at your site - they might get hungry, call a friend or whatever else they feel like doing.
Everyone’s needs are different and your product can’t be everything to everyone. (If it is, it’s probably not the best, either…)
Far from it - you can often learn more form a little bit of qualitative data like an interview of a customer or salesman than you would get out of Analytics anyway. Granted, you have to ask the right questions…
Even though your competitors are using the neatest “conversion techniques” stolen directly from Amazon.com - doesn’t mean it’ll work for you (or them, for that matter). All sites are different and you need to find out what works for your situation.
Pffft… whatever.
Making the call to action big, red and obnoxious MAY sound like a good idea, but in some instances, this fails miserably.
Definitely not… This is a very dangerous assumption. It’s best that you marry your stats up with your business’ objectives before you go about boasting that you’re receiving 20% more hits for spending 10% less in PPC.