How Do You Spell Website Success ?

spelling errors on commercial websites are a turnoff for many people. A recent BBC News article highlighted bad spelling as a potential cause of lost online revenue. In other words, typos could hurt your conversion rate and "cost you deep in the purse" or "deop in the pursa" as it might have been written 500 years ago.

That ancient phrase dates back to a time when very few people could read and write, and there was very little writing for most people to read. The idea that we should have a standard way of spelling only gained traction after printing technology drastically increased the number of words being put on paper (and even then, it took several centuries for the plural of egg to settle down as eggs, rather than egges or eggyes).

Some people still aren’t sure that standardized spelling is a good idea, a view reflected among the more than 600 comments sparked by that BBC News article in just 24 hours. However, many of those comments missed the point of the article: Bad spelling can undermine website conversion rates.

As one randomly selected web shopper put it to me: "If an online store is too stupid to get their spelling right, why should I think they will get my order right?"
Why Typos Kill Conversion Rates

Spell It RightThe fact is, commercial websites rely on text — written copy — to conduct business, from describing the product to explaining the purchase process. Even sites full of fancy graphics have to use words, and whether accurate spelling matters to you personally is irrelevant when it comes to conversion rate optimization.

The relevant opinions, the ones that rule in CRO, are those of your website's visitors. (Note: The use of Lick instead of Like as the first word of this article was intentional.)

Why would a typo cause visitors to your website not to convert, even when those people may themselves be terrible spellers? Without performing a formal survey of website visitors, any answer to that question must be based on supposition, but here are some suggestions:

Accurate spelling and good grammar are equated with legitimacy, if not consciously then subconsciously. Some of us may be more aware of this sentiment when it is expressed in the negative: Bad spelling and bad grammar are cause for suspicion. For example, what's the first clue a piece of email from a stranger is a scam? Many people would say it's the bad spelling and grammar.
Virtual transactions lack familiar clues about integrity, sincerity, and trustworthiness such as facial expression, tone of voice, and body language. We may be looking to website copy for clues instead and good spelling and grammar signify respect for the website visitor because the site owner has made the effort to copy edit the content. Obvious failure to do so may undermine consumer trust, a valuable commodity when competing for online dollars.
Size and location matter. If you are a big brand name like Target or Walmart you might not lose too many sales due to a typo in the details of a product description. But a glaring typo on the home page of a smaller brand may cause new visitors who don't know much about it to bounce.

Tips Two A Void Spell In Miss Teaks

Typos may be acceptable in some places, like tweets and Facebook comments, but commercial website copy needs to be clean and accurate.

Don't rely on spell checkers. The above heading passes a spell check with flying colors. Spell checkers can be a big help, especially those that flag errors as you type, but they just don't have the human intelligence required to know which words you should be using.
Use multiple human editors. I don't know any serious writers who believe they can reliably copy edit their own work. As the writer you tend to see what you think you wrote, not what characters ended up on the page. In a pinch, "multiple human editors" can mean the person writing the copy and one other person, but three sets of eyes are better than two.
Make sure your graphics people use the spellchecker in Photoshop for any images that include words. They need to use it before rasterizing the text layer. Editing typos in flattened image files is a real pain so check before you save to JPEG, GIF, or PNG.
Read more: http://goo.gl/Z0PGj

3 Common Mistakes in Digital Media Data Analysis !!

With multiple campaigns in full swing and multitudes of data pouring in, it can be easy to misinterpret details and jump to conclusions about results without sufficient evidence. For example, media buyers may frequently be marketing to consumers who would have searched and/or bought anyway, without being hit with display impressions.

Buying behavioral, retargeting, search and other types of targeting data can make it even more likely that you are preaching to the choir. The trick is to determine whether your ads reached those consumers who truly needed to be persuaded or if they reached those who were closer to the conversion tipping point—either they already are or were likely to become customers anyway.

Certainly we want to avoid overkill and wasting money and impressions on consumers who didn’t need it. Before making a hasty assumption that may prove to be unfounded upon a deeper inspection, consider these common mistakes when examining digital media data.
Assigning a Causal Relationship Where There Was None

It can be quick and easy to assign causality when much of your data seems to point in the assumed direction. However, thorough testing of the hypothesis is required before jumping to conclusions.

For example, perhaps we have a lot of display impressions correlated with high search volume in one geographic area. Don’t assume that your display impressions caused the increased search volume. Perhaps instead there has been a general overall spike in brand interest in this market. Could offline tactics be the driver? Perhaps there was local news coverage related to your products.

To test the hypothesis that higher display impressions are driving search, increase or decrease display impressions and isolate other potential factors to see what kind of measurable impact—if any—this has on search.
Assigning Attribution for Sales Incorrectly

Particularly in markets where there’s a high likelihood that you’ll be targeting customers who are already buyers, attributing the sale can be complicated. This is especially true with site and search retargeting tactics.

Dropping a cookie on a user who visits your site or delivering ads across multiple networks to anyone who searches for your keywords can be very effective. However, in a typical purchase cycle, consumers shop around quite a bit. Absent a direct click-through-to-conversion path, it’s difficult to say that those who come to your site and viewed a banner made a purchase because of that banner. And, we don’t know what got them to the site the first time.

Are you showing ads to an audience who would have bought anyway and then attributing their buy to the fact that you showed them an ad? It’s a slippery slope that requires testing to measure the real impact.

To test your attribution theory and be aware of how retargeting might influence your results, adjust the number of impressions, frequency caps and other parameters and closely monitor and/or control for external impacts on search. When you have an overall picture of the pre-purchase drivers, you can more clearly begin to see what’s sparking the tipping point of conversion.
Failure to Consider the Big Picture

Digital media marketing through search and display don’t exist in a vacuum. Therefore, we must take a more holistic approach in determining the results. Don’t just look at click-through or search rates, but consider conversion rates, basket size, and other KPIs in relationship to these metrics.

It can be easy to say that display isn’t driving conversion if there’s no direct click-through to attribute, but how many consumers might convert with a higher basket size because of display impressions? If we look at the total number of impressions, but don’t see an increase in clicks, we might think it didn’t work, but we may be actually making more money because consumers trust the familiarity of the brand enough to make larger purchases. And, ultimately, isn’t that what we’re after?

Had we just looked at clicks or just at impressions, these results may have been obscured. To get a more accurate picture of results, we must look at all metrics from a holistic perspective to arrive at a bottom line.
Digital Media Analysis: A Double-Edged Sword

We definitely have access to hoards of data—infinitely more detailed than we could have ever dreamed of in the offline world. However, without careful critical analysis of this avalanche of information, we run the risk of jumping to conclusions without hard evidence or misinterpreting the data we collect.

Inspired by article: http://goo.gl/Taiqj