What interested Hirschmann was the increasing focus amongst economists and political scientists on measurements of ‘exit’ - market share, sales figures, opinion polls and so forth, and the sidelining of ‘voice’, which is inherently harder to measure. Or, to put it another way, the focus moved to quantitative measurements that could be reduced to figures in a table and away from qualitative measurements of satisfaction and desired improvements. Hirschmann’s view was that whilst Exit is a good way of measuring success and failure for some goods, it should never be the only measurement. The book attempts to explain how to distinguish between scenarios where measurement of Exit makes sense and others where measurement of Voice is more valuable.

So what does this have to do with web usability? Well, we have a similar distinction: when we’re looking at web analytics, we’re measuring Exit. “Did the customer complete the checkout process?” is a question that’s all about Exit, as is “how many visitors did we have last month?”. When we do user testing, we’re measuring Voice: “what does the customer think and what improvements would they like to see?”. This means that the concepts of Exit and Voice are likely to be useful to us in certain circumstances.

One that struck me recently was the fact that sometimes, Exit isn’t an available option. Intranet systems don’t give the user the choice of using a different intranet, so this makes Voice - user feedback - a much more important mechanism of performance measurement and improvement. Monitoring total visitor numbers on an intranet tells you nothing about how well that intranet site performs. Because of this lack of choice, users will persevere with a system and learn to work around its weaknesses. There may be huge pent-up frustration with a system, but no mechanism to express this.

In contrast, large-scale e-commerce operators will pay close attention to the analytics, which typically consists of Exit measurements. Conversion rates are basically a measure of how many (or few) users Exit the process of buying a product. Analytics can’t tell you what those customers are thinking, but it can tell you what effect this has on your sales figures. Indeed, for competitive e-commerce sites, it’s sometimes better to trust what people do on your site than what they say about it (economists call this ‘revealed preferences’). It’s possible for people taking part in user testing to suggest ideas that they think might be useful at the time, but which don’t really make sense outside of the testing environment.

Finally, Hirschmann also devoted the final chapters of his book to the concept of ‘Loyalty’, explaining why sometimes some people will stick with an inferior service or tolerate declining quality of goods even when better alternatives exist. This is a lot more complicated to evaluate, but it’s also very relevant to usability; for example, it explains why Amazon can get away with breaking the usability rules but their newer competitors can’t. In some situations, for example internal company intranets, the ‘loyalty’ that staff feel towards their organisation or their team might make them less critical of a poor site than they should be.

In summary, these concepts are a useful way of thinking about the usability of different types of systems. If it’s an intranet, user testing and feedback is essential, because you’re not going to get changes in market share to tell you when you’re doing badly. For high-traffic sites or e-commerce, analytics is the first place to look for information about potential usability issues. When looking at any website or system, it’s useful to start by asking which feedback mechanisms are likely to deliver the most benefit, and Hirschmann’s concepts of Exit and Voice are a great way to do that.

A very valuable morning’s work. A good balance of information that catered well for a mixed ability group. Money well spent!

Becky Jasper, Marketing Director

Company Background

Isabella Oliver was launched in 2003, and has since become home to two essential women’s wear collections; Isabella Oliver Maternity and Isabella Oliver 365.

The brand was founded by Baukjen de Swaan Arons, Vanessa Knox-Brien and Geoff van Sonsbeeck; three passionate individuals whom aspired to create a clothing brand that women would love to wear.

Isabella Oliver use Google Analytics to track visitor behaviour and overall website performance on their e-commerce website, but they were looking for ways in which they can improve how they use the system.

Objectives

Below are some of the primary objectives the Isabella Oliver team had before the training:

• “I’m looking to learn new techniques and improving on what I do now”
• “I’m looking for better ways of working, finding out more about Google Analytics, reducing time spent on reporting”
• “I’m looking how to utilise Google Analytics to make my reporting less time consuming and how to set up our goals correctly”

What We Did

PRWD delivered their 3 hour in-house Google Analytics training session for Isabella Oliver focussing on the most important areas of Google Analytics for retailers looking to get the most value from this powerful analytics system.

Training, expertise and recommendations were provided in the following areas:

• Personalisation
• Annotations
• Goals and Funnels
• Advanced Visitor Segmentation
• Event Tracking
• Custom Reporting
• Analytics Intelligence
• Marketing Activity Accountability
• Google Website Optimiser

Results and Next Steps

Following the training, all attendees from Isabella Oliver now have a much better understanding of how they can personalise Google Analytics to their own specific requirements and areas of responsibilities. Even more importantly, they have learnt a wide variety of advanced techniques which will save them time and effort on a regular basis, as well as using Google Analytics to obtain more valuable customer insights.

Based on the training course feedback, attendees are now using their new knowledge and understanding on a daily basis, which in turn is ensuring they can save valuable time and effort in understanding how visitors are using their website and where opportunities to improve the site exist.

Comments From Attendees

A very valuable morning’s work. A good balance of information that catered well for a mixed ability group. Money well spent!

Becky Jasper, Marketing Director

I found the training provided by PRWD very useful and extremely insightful. Learning how to set up customer reports and automating my reports will save me time and effort in the future.

It was really great to hear about the new features that have recently been released and to see how powerful a tool Google Analytics can be. The Goals and Funnels section really helped me to understand where we were going wrong in terms of tracking our conversions.

The further reading and extra resources at the end will really help me gain even more knowledge about Google Analytics as well.

Amy Jackson, Web Manager

The PRWD training course was well structured, easy to understand and worked for both google analytics beginners and more advanced colleagues within the group.

Claire McNulty, Senior Marketing Manager

The training course provided a fresh burst of excitment to Google Analytics that has helped to be able to go on and measure relavent information that will help to improve the company.

Hannah Barker, Online Marketing Executive

View More Information on our Google Analytics Training

Case Studies on our Google Analytics Training

The Features module was created by Development Seed, and provides a powerful mechanism for packaging certain changes to a Drupal-based site that normally only exist in the database.  By moving the locus of change from the database to code stored in files, these changes are made available to version control systems and are made much more portable between installations.

Features makes it easy to create chunks of functionality, packaging together related Views, Content Types, Contexts and more.  As I mentioned on my personal blog in December, this can be very useful in deployment scenarios, but it also has the potential to allow developers (and power users) to create features that can be distributed just like existing Drupal modules.  Features is powerful enough that it’s possible to use it to create something useful and powerful without writing any code.

There are, of course, still plenty of ‘gotchas’ and Features itself is still technically a beta release, likely to change and improve before a final 1.0 release.  Without doubt, there are improvements to be made.  But we’re using Features in production at PRWD, and we’re confident that it will be a big part of Drupal development for all of our new projects.  More than that, I would expect that Features will grow in popularity to provide a platform for packaging functionality that becomes a standard part of any Drupal developer’s toolkit.

The slides from my presentation are visible below (from Slideshare):

An integral part of gaining end user insights into how well (or poorly) a website, intranet or application has been designed, user testing can be carried out in 3 main ways.

• Laboratory User Testing - this is the traditional approach which involves using a testing ‘lab’ which has a one-sided mirror, video recording facilities, a viewing area and other more advanced features
• Guerilla User Testing - this is simpler type of testing which doesn’t involve special labs, equipment and facilities, and is suitable for when there is very limited budget and you want to gain first hand insights from people using your website/application to carry out certain key tasks and and objectives
• Real Time User Testing (during one-to-one interviews) - this is typically carried out as part of meeting staff within an organisation when you are reviewing a company intranet

We have spoke about guerilla user testing at the How Do event last year, on 3 key ways in which you can improve online performance.

For more information on real time user testing, read on…

User Research and One-to-one Interviews

There are many reasons that you would want to speak to either customers, website visitors or employees in a one-to-one style interview, and all of them revolve around attempting to understand the opinions and recommendations from the people that matter most.

Gaining the most valuable and meanignful insights isn’t always straightforward, particularly when the person you are speaking to has never previously been asked for their opinions and ideas. This is especially true when speaking to staff within an organisation, whether you are looking to improve production processes, improve efficiency on the shop floor, or as is often the case with ourselves, reviewing a company intranet.

If you find yourself carrying out one-to-one interviews for whatever reason, you might like to take a look at a recent blog post of 5 tips when conducting user research.

To save you a click the 5 tips are:

1. Give the person you are speaking to the confidence that their input is truly valued
2. Give the person your full attention - keep your head up!
3. Ask open, probing questions
4. Bring the user research to life by incorporating user testing
5. Don’t rely on first impressions

Summary

Of course we are just scratching the surface to user testing and user research activities, but hopefully it has been of use. Of course get in touch with us if you would like more information or are considering these types of activities.

PRWD

Since we started over three and a half years ago, we are really proud to have worked with a wide variety of clients, from micro businesses through to blue chip brands. With ‘usability’ at the core of what we do, this has led to two quite distinct sides to our business proposition:

1. Online strategy development plus usability focussed website design and development for SME’s
2. Training, consultancy and conversion optimisation for larger businesses and blue chips

Proposition 1 – Usability Focussed Website Design and Development

How Serious Is Online For Your Business?

This is the primary question which helps us determine the types of SME businesses we work with, as it helps differentiate how much emphasis a business places on ‘online’ to generate enquiries, leads and sales for them.

Our usability services that are realistic for SME’s

Although there are many usability activities that will be out of budget for many SME’s, this isn’t to say that these companies can’t benefit from the principles of ‘good usability’ to help them improve the effectiveness of their website and online marketing activities. Using 2 industry leading platforms, Drupal content management system and Magento E-commerce, our web solutions are not only technically smart, but they have usability principles at their core.

Primary ways we help SME’s embrace and benefit from usability include:

• using the free web analytics tool Google Analytics to track and monitor visitor activity
• carrying out guerilla style usability testing (more on this explained in this presentation on improving online performance)
• considering how their website currently caters for their key target customer (messages, information, services, useful tools, easy contact methods)
• using another free tool Google Website Optimiser to test a different version of their primary action pages on their website
• calculating the potential sales and profit improvement they can expect to get using a ROI calculator (either for lead generation websites or for e-commerce websites)
• treating their website not just as a complimentary promotion of their business but with the potential to become an intregal part of their sales and marketing activities

Our usability services that aren’t realistic for most SME’s

There are a wide variety of our services within the ‘usability’ field which, realistically, aren’t going to be used often by SME’s due to budget constraints. These services include:

• usability testing in labs
• field studies
• focus groups
• expert evaluations
• card sorting
• in-house usability consultancy
• full user-centered design processes
• information architecture planning and development

What is your current on-site conversion rate?

This is another pivotal question which not many SME businesses can answer in full confidence. One of the reasons we developed our online conversion improvement calculator is to help demonstrate the sales and profit impact of improving your website through better use of web analytics, landing page optimisation and split testing.

Its worth listing out here the different types of conversion we generally look to improve, dependant on what the aims of the website are for the business:

• Online enquiry submission
• Online application completions
• E-commerce puchases
• Download of documents
• Newsletter subscriptions
• Monthly subscription sign-up

Proposition 2 – Training, Consultancy and Conversion Optimisation

Improving On-site Conversion Rates and Staff Productivity

For larger and blue chip companies we are often asked to provide services to help improve on-site conversion rates as well as improving staff productivity:

Services we provide in this area include:

• Advanced Google Analytics training
• In-house usability consultancy
• In-house workshops with retailers
• Public training on e-commerce best practice
• Public training on usability and user experience
• Public training on usability for financial companies
• Diagnostic reviews of company intranet systems
• Conversion improvement projects
• Usability testing
• Expert evaluations
• User and customer research

Our 60 Second Pitch

We are currently taking part in the new LEAD programme (a leadership and business development process), and we are often asked to provide our ’60 second pitch’. This is where it gets interesting! As explained in this newsletter, we have two very different propositions dependant on the type of business looking to utilise our services and expertise in usability and web development.

As we are working on our two 60 second pitches, please get in touch if you feel your business could benefit from some of our services, whether you are working in a SME or a blue chip company!

Enjoy the rest of your week,

PRWD

Here I want to share with you 5 tips when conducting this type of one-to-one research:

1) Give the person you are speaking to the confidence that their input is truly valued

Many people, especially those who have never taken part in this type of research before, think that there input won’t be valuable, for any number of reasons. This could include:

• they don’t use the website or system often
• they have never done this type of activity before
• they have never been asked for their opinion before
• they don’t feel their role is very important, so why would their opinions be important

We tend to give people cofidence in these situations by:

• explaining to them the approach that the user research is taking
• re-iterate during the meeting how valuable their views and insights are
• explain that this isn’t just a one-off experience and that gaining input from people such as themselves is a fundamental part to the website or intranet improvement process going forward
• ask whether they would like to be involved in further elements of the research and design process

It can be quite remarkable experiencing a persons confidence grow, from at the start where they are very apprehensive and introverted to becoming very passionate and open to sharing their views.

2) Give the person your full attention - keep your head up!

Rather than try and carry out the face-to-face meeting as well as making notes throughout on the key points being made, simply voice record the meeting (asking permission first of course) to allow you to give the person your full attention.

Benefits of voice recording the meeting include:

• the conversation is much more natural
• it ensures you will never miss a vital piece of feedback whilst you are making a note of a previous comment
• you are paying much more attention to what the person is saying, which in turns helps you think of which questions and prompts should follow next
• the person feels fully engaged rather than looking at the top of your head for parts of the meeting
• if you to choose to quote the person in the research report and findings work you do after, you ensure the quote is 100% accurate and note based on your notes

A few things to consider on voice recording meetings:

• if like us, due to the sheet amount of valuable insights and comments that each meeting contains, you choose to get full transcriptions of each meeting, this is a very time consuming exercise and one which we definetly recommend you outsource
• you may also be thinking of video recording the meetings, especially if (as I will come on to later) you also use these meetings to carry out user testing. You need to be aware that this will usually highten the sense of apprehension for the person which can affect their confidence in fully engaging with the process

3) Ask open, probing questions

Being asked to share your views on a particular website or company intranet is very much a one-off scenario (unless of course you are adopting a true user-centered design approach and will be engaging with that person throughout the design and development process). However familiar with a system the person is, it takes certain types of questions to get people to open up and share the types of insights that will be of most value in your research.

Typical questions we might ask include:

• Can you describe the reasons why you typically [add in different user scenarios]?
• Can you explain the approach you tend to take when [add in different user scenarios]?
• What improvements do you think would make your job/experience easier and more effective?
• At [add in various areas of the website or intranet], what information are you looking for and why?
• Can you explain a situation where you haven’t been able to find what you are looking for, and what have been your next steps?

It is vital that your questionning doesn’t lead the person down a particular route on purpose - the more natural and open ended you make the questionning the more likely you are of gaining really valuable insights.

4) Bring the user research to life by incorporating user testing

Providing the research you are doing is for an existing website or company intranet, bring a greater degree of engagement and value to the research by incorporating user testing into the meeting.

Website testing or system testing, not user testing
Its vital to stress at this point that when you explain about this to the person, you are clear that you are wanting to test the usability and effectiveness of the website or system, not their capabilities or ability to remember where certain information is.

Key points when incorporating testing to user research:

• avoid the temptation to use a lab testing environment - let the user work in their own comfortable surroundings, whether this is at home or at their desk at work
• don’t let the person blame themself if they are having trouble with a particular task for a scenario
• plan ahead with typical scenarios, and be as descriptive as possible
• ensure that the scenarios you are asking them to experience have some correlation to their potential wants and needs
• explain about the importance of them adopting the think out load approach, which you need for both your own benefit during the meeting but more importantly for when the voice recording is transcribed
• once it is clear they are unable to complete a task at a certain point, prompt them in the right direction and then let them continue on with their think out loud approach

5) Don’t rely on first impressions

Quite often the person that you are speaking to immediately makes it clear that they know their input won’t be very useful. This can be for a number of reasons:

• they only ever use a very small element of the website or intranet, and that can be explained in a matter of seconds
• they hardly ever use the website or intranet
• they are against change within their organisation and so they aren’t wanting to disrupt anything
• they dismiss the very fact that you are asking for their feedback, and are apprehensive that what they say will make any difference or actually be used to actually make improvements

This where the first four tips all come in to play - by giving confidence to the person, providing your full attention, asking probing questions and bringing the session to life by letting them use the website/intranet for themself, you will often find that the people who on first impressions seem to be offering the least amount of valuable feedback actually turn out the complete opposite.

Summary

User research is a highly valuable way of gaining end user insights, but it isn’t something that comes easily. There are many elements to carrying out successful user research and I hope these tips will come in useful for people who are already carrying this type of research, or who are considering it.

Further reading

You may also like to take a look at some of these related articles and presentations.

• article - top 8 business benefits of user testing
• presentation slides - 3 tips to improving online performance (step 1 is on gorilla user testing)
• video interviews - Royal Mail interviewing me on tips for good usability
• article - using the power of crowds to test your call to actions

Looking back on our 2009

Working through a recession

So here we are on the final lap of 2009, a year that will remembered by many for when the current recession made its presence fully felt. There is no denying that at PRWD we have felt the full effects of the recession, as both existing and potential clients reduced or in some cases completely froze their marketing spend. On reflection we have noticed a tale of two halves, where the first 6 months of the year was especially downbeat throughout the industries we operate in, whereas the last 6 months has certainly seen an uplift in confidence and willingness to invest.

As a very young business we are proud that we have worked through the recession thus far, and the experiences gained for us as a business (and the changes we have subsequently made) will certainly stand us in good stead going forward.

Our clients

Since starting out in 2006, this year has been our best so far in terms of both the variety and size of the clients we have worked with. In no particular order, we have worked with the likes of The Scout Association, Speedy Hire, VoucherSeeker, ResPublica, The Royal Mail, The Translation People, Econsultancy, Manchester Airport, Citibank, Contact Packaging, C&O Coatings, Red C and Flame Digital, along with a few more businesses. A full overview of our clients (both direct and through third parties) can be seen on our website.

Services provided

This year has seen us widen our service offering to cater for client requirements. Along with providing usability consultancy like we always have, delivering training has been one of our new services, in particular training on e-commerce best practice and advanced Google Analytics. We have remained flexible by providing both public training for Econsultancy as well as providing in-house training to larger groups of employees.

Developing websites using the Drupal content management system has also become an integral part of our service proposition, and our highest profile client has been new public policy think-tank ResPublica.

Continuing on the development front, Magento is now firmly in place as the e-commerce platform that we specialise in, both in delivering complete solutions and providing technical consultancy for existing Magento websites that need some TLC and high end technical expertise.

In these ‘tough economic times’, the likelihood of clients having budgets available for us to deliver a complete user-centered (UCD) design process to deliver new websites and applications is for the select few, but our UCD approach, explained by one of our clients, remains very much at the heart of our company philosophy. In fact, with UCD encompassing so many various services, we are often finding clients are using us for specific areas in order to embrace a more user-centric approach to a project.

Through our conversion optimisation services for clients with existing sites, we have been able to deliver significant improvements to on-site conversion rates, and a pat on the back must go to Google for providing a powerful tool for us to provide split and multi-variate testing projects for clients extremely cost effectively, using Google Website Optimiser.

Training

As mentioned already delivering both public and in-house training has become a core proposition during this last 12 months. Following on from a new course developed and delivered for Econsultancy entitled Usability and Best Practice for Online Retailers, we have developed and delivered a bespoke usability course for Financial businesses, and this has most recently been delivered to finance giant Citibank at their head offices, through Econsultancy.

Our in-house training course on Advanced Google Analytics has proved very popular, and the satisfaction we get from helping our clients fully understand the power, flexibility, personalisation, value and accountability that Google Analytics helps deliver for online marketing is overwhelming. Our only problem is ensuring our training course keeps up with Google who are constantly implementing new features and functionality, such as even greater intelligence and monitoring tools!

Case studies

We have made a concerted effort during this year to produce more case studies, especially for our conversion optimisation work and training. The only problem with delivering these types of services is that there is no tangible ‘end product’ compared to when we deliver websites such as ResPublica, so the best we can do is develop case studies showcasing what benefits, impact and ROI our work has delivered for the client.

Our case studies include e-commerce best practice training for The Scout Association, Advanced Google Analytics training for Speedy Hire, conversion optimisation for The Translation People and conversion optimisation for Contact Packaging.

Events we have spoken at

Alongside making more effort to produce case studies off the back of conversion improvement and training services, it also became clear this time last year that speaking at events was a vital element for us to demonstrate the importance of usability to business owners.

Our two most notable event presentations were Manchester Digital’s event Usability – What’s The Use? (which we also sponsored) and How Do’s Speeding Up In A Slowdown, which featured other speakers from Google and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Coming off the back of an Adobe AIR desktop application we developed for one of our clients, we also spoke at an event dedicated to Adobe AIR, and this included a presentation by Adobe AIR’s evangelist Andrew Shorten.

2010

So crystal ball time! As we look ahead to next year we have a good sense of where we will be focussing our efforts, with all our work sitting under the umbrella of usability and helping businesses increase their online sales, leads and profits.

Website Conversion Improvement

This is no brainer, but working with clients to improve the conversion rate of their websites will continue to be a primary service for us. Ironically, we are also hoping that in the North West, 2010 will be a year where more competitors enter the market which will in turn raise the awareness and appreciation of how important this type of activity is for businesses, especially those who invest in traffic generation (SEO, PPC, social media etc).

We expect that our ROI calculator for e-commerce sites and for lead generation sites will be pretty popular, and we will certainly be making good use of them when demonstrating to potential clients ‘how much profit per year you can expect from a 10% improved conversion rate’, for example.

Expect 2010 to be the year that the free testing and optimisation tool Google Website Optimiser is truly embraced in the online world…

Drupal Website Development

Building on the back of a series of Drupal based websites we have delivered, and with many years experience of this CMS and its capabilities, where suitable Drupal will be our CMS of choice for our clients. By also using our wireframing and prototyping approach during the design phase using the excellent Axure RP, development costs are kept to a minimum and we can invest more resource into the usability and conversion performance of our clients content managed sites.

Magento E-commerce Platform

Our Magento services and expertise, including the development of Magento Connect modules for the community, will play an important role in our business during 2010, and when combined with our e-commerce best practice knowledge and expertise, our fit with Magento e-commerce websites is very snug indeed.

Google Analytics

Along with using Google Analytics daily to monitor website performance for ourselves and our clients, building on the back of our Google Analytics training course we are certainly expecting to be spending even more time both using the tool and helping our clients learn how they can use it more effectively for their business. Client empowerment and website performance accountability are two of our major objectives, and allowing our clients to better understand Google Analytics is a really rewarding experience for us.

Training

We already have quite a few in-house and public training courses booked in for 2010, and to summarise we are expecting to focus on the following training courses:

• Advanced Google Analytics (in-house)
• E-commerce Usability and Best Practice (in-house and public through Econsultancy)
• Usability and User Experience (in-house and public through Econsultancy)
• Financial Services Usability and Best Practice (in-house)

Event speaking and masterclasses

When there are suitable opportunities for us to present at events we will certainly be looking to share knowledge, insights and case studies, and 2010 is also expected to be when we start delivering masterclass events. One thing we are acutely aware of in the north west is that at present there isn’t anything like the type of demand for usability, analytics and conversion optimisation services that there is in London. We therefore have to do what we can to create the demand, and event speaking and delivering masterclasses are two primary ways for us to do this.

Summary

In wrapping up, just by producing this review and therefore reflecting on this past 12 months has been an enlightening experience for us. Whereas its been a tough year in business, at least this summary helps us to realise that we have actually done alot more than what it has sometimes felt like as the year has sped by.

To build the site, we used a range of tools and techniques.  On the technical side, we used the Drupal content management system to power the site.  With our past expertise in Drupal development, this was a smooth process that resulted in a very powerful, flexible site delivered quickly and to budget.  For the design and usability, we made use of Axure RP to produce an interactive prototype that was invaluable in resolving design issues and speeding up the implementation phase.

Design process

In keeping with our focus on usability, we placed a considerable emphasis on simple, usable and logical navigation in the site design.  We evaluated and benchmarked several competitor websites, developing a clear idea of the target audience for the site.  Initial designs were sketched on paper, later revisions were created and improved in Photoshop and ultimately an interactive prototype was created using Axure RP.  This interactive, clickable prototype strongly resembles the finished site and enabled us to demonstrate the concepts, design and scope of the site before a single line of code had been written.

Site Features

The site is built to enable the publishing of a wide range of content produced by and about ResPublica - articles and publications from ResPublica staff, press coverage (including video) from media organisations, blog posts from staff and guest bloggers, as well as events, projects, people and job vacancies.  All of these are fully content-managed, enabling ResPublica staff to update the site regularly as required.

Integration with Twitter is also provided, enabling content creators to automatically send out tweets via the official ResPublica Twitter account whenever new content is added to the site.

Advanced Google Analytics features are also supported, including tracking of Site Search, events including downloads of PDF files and the sending of e-mails, and Goals to track signups to the ResPublica newsletter.  We’re big advocates of Google Analytics and it’s great to be able to use it to track engagement levels across a dynamic content-driven site like this.  If you’re interested in Google Analytics, you can read about some of our relevant services here.

Site Build

The site was built using Drupal, and a variety of contributed and custom-developed modules.  If you’re interested in reading more about this aspect of the site, you can read the case study on Drupal.org.

ResPublica Official Launch

Although the site has been up and running for several weeks now, ResPublica are holding their official launch today, November 26th, and we’ve just opened up some new areas of the site, including a blog which will feature a range of guest contributors.

We’re looking forward to attending the event, which will feature speeches by Phillip Blond and David Cameron.  If you’re interested in following the latest news from ResPublica, you can follow them on Twitter here or see their blog here.

In the current economic climate the success of our Google Adwords campaign is more important than ever before but rather than continuing to increase daily budget we needed to ensure we maximised the potential of every online visitor by increasing our conversation rate for enquiries.

Since PRWD started the project of conversion optimisation we have noticed the increase in online enquiries.

Andy Saxton, Sales Manager, Contact Packaging

Project Background

Contact Packaging are one of the UK’s leading providers of Pallet Wrap Machines. Following the development of a targeted micro-site to promote the range of pallet wrap machines that they provide, Contact Packaging and PRWD invest time each month to improve the on-site conversion rate of the website.

Although the website has always performed well for the business, during 2009 and the recession, traffic levels were reducing which was having an adverse effect on the number of online enquiries that were being received.

PRWD recommended that a split test should be carried out on the homepage to increase the number of visitors clicking through to the enquiry form and making an enquiry.

Objectives

The project objective was to use Google Website Optimiser to test 3 different call to action messages on the homepage, to determine which version encourages more visitors to click through to the online enquiry form.

By carrying out this split test and improving the click-through rate, it was expected that the on-site conversion rate would also increase as more visitors were actively being encouraged to make an enquiry.

In addition, another primary objective was to reduce the cost per acquisition that Contact Packaging incurred through their on-going Google Adwords campaigns.

What We Did

Analytics Evaluation

We used Google Analytics to monitor what the current bounce rate (single page visits) was for the homepage, along with what the current on-site conversion was. This gave us primary measures on which to plan the alternative marketing messages to determine which version resulted in higher click-throughs and overall site conversions.

Determine Alternative Marketing Messages

Following the analytics evaluation, we created 3 new marketing messages which we felt would encourage visitors to click through to the online enquiry page and make an enquiry.

The 3 messages were:

1. enquire online for our best prices
2. enquire online with NO obligation
3. make an online enquiry today

Split Testing To Improve Conversion Rate

Over the course of eight weeks we then implemented a split test using Google Website Optimiser, where we tested the original homepage with the 3 alternative marketing messages.

Results

Original hompage - 7.02% conversion rate

• Test version 1) enquire online for our best prices - 23% click-through rate (227% improvement)
• Test version 2) enquire online with NO obligation - 13.9% click-through rate (97% improvement)
• Test version 3) make an online enquiry today - 10.5% click-through rate (49.5% improvement)

Impact on Conversion Rate and Adwords Acquisition Costs

• On-site conversion rate increased by 215%
• Cost per conversion reduced by 79%

More Information

If you are would you like to increase the number of sales or leads your website delivers, please give us a call on 0161 918 6729. Also take a look at our other conversion optimisation case studies.

Do You Use Google Analytics?

If you are using Google Analytics you might also like to read more about our Advanced Google Analytics Training Course. Recent clients have included Speedy Hire, VoucherSeeker, one of the UK’s leading voucher code websites and award winning digital agency Red C.

With the list of companies who have been accepted in wave one announced, there is just a short time available for companies and creative companies such as ourselves to scope out projects and get them approved.

With this in mind we have listed below services that we provide businesses, such as the recent web design and development for new political think tank ResPublica.

PRWD Web Design Services for Creative Credit Winners

• Business analysis and customer research to open up new market opportunities
• Using the web to open up new online sales and marketing channels
• Website design and development for content managed websites
• Website design and development for e-commerce

We are already in discussions with a few businesses to see where we can provide our expertise and services, but if you are one of other lucky companies who are now seeking a creative company to work with then please get in touch with on 0161 918 6729 and ask for Paul Rouke.

Useful Links

• Case study of how we transformed a businesses offline sales strategy to online
• Case study of how we improved a clients website performance by 86%

Client Showcase

• The Red Cat - fine dining restaurant
• Blue Rhapsody - swimming pool design and builder
• Swift Dental - dental laboratory
• ResPublica - political think tank
• Contact Packaging - packaging e-commere store
• Contact Packaging - pallet wrap machine operation