Local company helping deliver better online business results
by
Alan Zisman (c) 2007 First published in
Business
in Vancouver November 27-December 3, 2007; Issue 944
High Tech Office column
It’s 11 o’clock at night. Do you know what your website is doing?
All
too often, our websites aren’t doing what we want – failing to make it
easy for users – for would-be customers to buy our products, sign up
for events or just find the information we want to share with them.
Websites can fail to be effective for various reasons:
•IT staff often design
online forms with little regard to effective design;
•marketing
may demand more personal information than is really required, driving
increasingly privacy-conscious users away from the website;
•amateur designers can make navigation buttons and tools hard to find;
and
•even
professional web designers may overload users with fancy animations and
splash screens, wasting their time enough to turn them into someone
else’s customers.
Raquel Hirsch of
Vancouver’s
WiderFunnel
Marketing (
www.widerfunnel.com)
points out that “you can have a million
visitors a month, but if they’re not transacting or clicking where you
want them to, you’ve wasted your money getting them to your site.”
She estimated that typically, only between 2% and 10% of the people
visiting a website stay to complete a transaction there.
WiderFunnel is the only Canadian consultant authorized by
Google for its Website Optimizer
software.
Using
this software, WiderFunnel can help a client set up a series of tests
that run as many as hundreds of webpage versions simultaneously to
point to the combination of design and content that leads to the best
results.
Many companies have done website usability testing, but
typically the tests are carried out in a lab. WiderFunnel’s tests use
real web pages displayed to real users, live on the Internet.
The results, available live, provide a more accurate picture of how
users are responding and how to get optimal results.
Like
most of Google’s software, Google Website Optimizer is reasonably easy
to use and available free (
services.google.com/websiteoptimizer);
anyone can download it and use it.
Google has established a
network of Google Website Optimizer authorized consultants to help
clients use the software in a more disciplined manner to optimize their
websites for more effective (and profitable) outcomes.
WiderFunnel
promises the expertise to enable organizations to know what sorts of
website content and design changes are worthwhile testing and how to
analyze the results.
Google’s
Tom Leung noted that
authorized
consultants like WiderFunnel “have a strong track record in planning,
executing and troubleshooting website tests.”
As a result, they
can help organizations “combine Google technologies with industry
expertise and classic marketing frameworks to provide specialized
managed solutions.”
He added that this can be a way for
organizations to boost results when using advertising programs like
Google’s popular AdWords.
WiderFunnel, according to Leung, shares Google’s “overall vision for
the power of testing and performance marketing.”
WiderFunnel Marketing was launched in June 2007 by veteran marketer
Hirsch and website developer
Chris
Goward.
The young company’s evangelism for Google Website Optimizer is already
showing results.
According
to Goward, client
Tourism British
Columbia was buying TV ads in Los
Angeles and San Francisco directing interested viewers to a website to
request mailing of pamphlets and other information.
Prior to working with WiderFunnel, the website had a 71% conversion
rate; optimization pushed that further to 79%.
Polling
firm
Environics saw more
dramatic results: real-time evaluation and
optimization enabled them to increase the percentage of people signing
up for web-based seminars by 290%. •