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Can you read the logo?

And this one….

Today morning I got an email on something that has a link to the site for this brand.  And when I visited obviously as any user I tend to look at the logo to see what the company and was shocked. I can’t read what the logo is and I immediately called 3 of my colleagues and asked them to read what it is… and people are reading it like Dcigo, DDGO etc.,  I don’t know if that is the case with you too.  Post in comments what you feel.  This seem to be a travel brand ixigo which invested good amount of money and resources, nothing to blame but something to learn.  I apologize if there are any other marketing reasons behind it but I or the test users can’t read it.

In the field of usability it is often said and proven that 95% design problems can be found with only 10 users. Those 10 Users are not the people who sit next to your design team but actual users.

OK, now is another test which was asked to me when I was attending usability classes. Go back to the FedEX logo on the above and let me know if you find anything else.  You might if you have already known and if you are not you would be knowing after I said what it is.  And next time you see the FedEx you will spot it that and you will not miss.

That’s what happened I guess with the logo I had shown above. When the people design a logo or saw the logo before and know what it is, people can read it next time.  We, designers  get excited about our creativity but users appreciate creativity after they are happy with the usability.

Honestly now I can read the logo as iXigo after I knew and happened the same with the test users I chose.  This is all cognitive psychology of the people which designers are not generally deal with. So the best choice is to select different users to test your design.

The bottom line is “Design your logo for easy to read, remember, recall and represents your brand“.  When you have that kind of logo there are plenty of marketing benefits for the organization.  In other words, a small effort can cause a huge marketing benefits.

I proudly belong to the Design Community and thought it is a valuable post to share.  By the way, in Fedex logo there is an arrow -> between the letter “e” and the letter “x”

Former employees of Google have started a new search engine “CUIL” (pronounced as “Cool”). CUIL is making waves in the industry now…not sure the intensity of those waves but, do the users are ready for a new search engine like CUIL Search Engine? or move from their personal Google search engine?

Microsoft has built a search engine over no. of years and still trying to capture the considerable share in the search market.  Yahoo had acquired several companies like Inktomi with Overture and still have problems in having a pretty lower share in the search market.

Search Engine AskJeeves who built Teoma which was making similar waves like CUIL and people were hoping that it would replace google but it got failed.  Whether it is Teoma or Cuil, everyone was focusing on crawling the web extensively and increasing the indexing more documents than their competition and coming up with a innovative way of displaying the results. With the web scrappers sites are poping up extensively, I don’t think it is a valid USP to have “No of pages indexed”.  The question is…

Do the users ready to move from Google?

It is pretty clear that the users need easy to find, fast to access, and finally relevant to what they are looking.  I think Google has all of it to a large extent, but does that what CUIL was also looking at.  Unless users get these three benefits I don’t think they would be interested to get something new.

Driving Traffic from Search Engine’s Organic Results is the most cost effective and a only traffic driving channel for majority of the content websites and ecommerce portals. There are different SEO KPIs to look at different levels in the SEO process.

I got inspired from some ppt I viewed sometime back but don’t recall the name to give the credit.

Users “Search” to “Find” what they want. “Search” - What users are searching for? “Find” - What users are finding for what they are searching? Search starts with the Search Engines like Google but ends when they find the information they need on a document on web. The process of measuring how effective a SEO program at your company depends on these two important steps.

….pls. subscribe to the rss feed for updates to this post, will try to complete it by weekend

Search Engine Optimization…..Optimization??? then there is something web analysts can be helpful here?

Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing a website with an intention of (I think I should say “with a hoping of” : ) getting the site listed in the top 10 results for relevent search query for the business.  There is a reason why I said “hoping of” - if you are a search engine optimizer I am sure you would know, else you will know by end of the reading this blog post.

I think it is important that we should know where we started on this.  Before Google, there were search engines like altavista, lycos etc., were widely used eventhough there were only a few documents on the web.  As the web growing rapidly the importance of search engine has grown with the similar trend.   Now, let’s briefly understand how traditional search engines used to rank pages compared to the modern ones like Google, Yahoo, Live.com.

Internet Search Engines used to look at the meta data (data bout data) that is embedded in the html tags or meta tags to understand what a specific document is about.  One of  the  Meta Tags is Keyword tag, it stores “keywords” relevant to the page - it had utmost importance in such that the Search Engines were looking specifically in this area and  rank the pages if the user performs a search with these keywords.   Webmasters were realized that they get lot of traffic from search engines compared to any other channel and most people started misusing this meta-tags in such a way that their website gets lot of traffic.  And, SPAMERS became champions in this :(  Search Engines had to find new ways to understand the web document so that they can list it in the top 10 results for the searcher query.  Imagine you go to a search engine and do a search for “web analytics articles” and it gives totally irrelevant results because of the SPAMMY documents, would you take them as relevant to what you need?  and continue love that search engine.  So, it is important for the search engines to continue in the business they consistently need to provide the relevant results to the searchers needs.

Then, our beloved Google entered the industry with the refreshing look and feel web page, selling speed and relevance as the USP.  Google came up with a patented page-ranking technology which gives ranking score to each page in the website based on internal linking and external linking.  This kind of system was very much viable in the begenning since poeple post links to the other sites as they feel they are useful for others and absolutely for non-commerical benefits.  But, again most webmasters and marketers started misusing this by buying and sellings links, exchanging links and creating programs exclusively to get inbound links to their websites.

Imagine Google doesn’t have strong algorithms so that SEO’s and webmasters would easily get good ranks in Google….The users include ourselves would end up with frustration as we all are completely dependent on search engines like Google.

Google and other today’s search engines are also studying many other factors to understand what the document is all about.  They are studying the actual text on the web document, its font size, colors, backgrounds, images, alignment, theme of a section/site and much more.  Though most ethical SEO’s would optimize the sites in an ethical manner still there are people stuff the keywords here too to make search engines understand the document is relevant to something that actually it is not.

Marketers should realize more relevent traffic means more revenue but not just any traffic to the site.

The Approach I am proposing “A Data Driven Approach to Usability Centric Search Engine Optimization” would talk about using Web Analytics and Usability Principles to create an SEO strategy for your site.  Moving from the perception of “SEO is SPAM” to “SEO is Good Design”

Google has joined Alexa and Compete.com today by introducing a FREE service on Website trends (http://trends.google.com/websites) for competitive benchmarking studies. Find now thru Google, how your website is trending over a period of time and compare with your competition. Not only that, but also we can break-down the trends by region/country and correlate the data with search keywords and the visits to other websites by your website visitors.

Trends are important because trend is everything for the businesses to monitor on a regular basis. In the above screen shot, we would know that it is normal to have a spike on the year-end as it is a holiday season and rest of the months the trends are consistent.

Not only that, it is also important as the market sizes for your products/services are increasing or new markets are created for your products, you would need to know how well you are growing or declaining against your closest competition. In the below graph, facebook in India growing big while myspace is still consistent which may not be a positive indicator for myspace.com considering the businesses want to capture the international market too.

Google Website Trends also provide top 10 search keywords that drove traffic from the search engines and again a comparative trend with the competition.

Though marketers know which keywords drove traffic to their websites, they may not know how much traffic was sent to the competition for the same keywords. In this example, 30% people searching for bestbuy have also landed at walmart.com

Google says the data is collected from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. Funny thing is Google itself opted out from this data so we can’t see how Google, Youtube, Orkut doing

Pls. note that we can get actual numbers to the graph by signing into Google.

 Another Service from Google on the way for complete Market Research Data, luckily I got a beta login to try it out, here are the screen shots: http://www.google.com/adplanner

In addition to what is provided in Google Website Trends, here we also get Country Reach metric which I had also talked about a quicker solution to calculate country reach last year.  Ad Planner has ways to drill-down the sites by demographics.  This is a great tool to select sites to advertise on and even to know the demographics of our own site.

User Demographics and other metrics from Google Website Trends:

The user interfaces and user experiences would dramatically change as the Multi-touch Operating Systems start entering the market. I really anticipate a huge transition would happen at personal computers segment and so the peoples browsing behaviors.

iPhone is a clear success on the multi-touch. (I am not sure on the commercials though)

And, now HP has launched the first touchsmart PC (hopefully it will be used for multi-touch OS). Apple too has come up with the touch enable PC. http://h30440.www3.hp.com/campaigns/touchsmart/IQ500_NA/Model.html

The best part of the next generation user interfaces would hopingly overcome the usabiltiy obstacles that the industry is facing currently and even a novice user should be able to navigate thru Web without any assistance…it is so obvious the moment you touch the screen.

Most of the visual objects we use with 12X21 pixel arrow cursor may get obsolete…as now it is thru just finger which is little bigger than the cursor.  The visual affordance of the links/buttons would get a big change, just try to touch a link or button  and experience the interactivity The buttons, links, and all other input design objects would be very reactivie and  interactive.

Horizontal scrolling would likely to get a boost in place of current vertical scrolling.  We may not see the scrolling bars either.

Google announced that landing page loading time is soon to be incorporated into the quality factor that decides how much you pay to google for each click in the campaigns you are running on Google Adwords.  http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/03/landing-page-load-time-will-soon-be.html 

I think this is going to be another factor that SEM landing pages have to compete with those of competition. We would need to compare the landing pages with the ones that are competing in each of the keyword category…well that’s again a reverse engineering and require a lot of resources. Instead, I would prefer to build light speed web pages…light speed web pages? again that is also going to be dependent on network speed. 

Anything Google comes up is mainly to increase their revenue and their business continuity(TCE-Total Customer Experience which most established businesses measure and monitor to see any pitfalls that effects their business over-time) as a search engine. All these factors are closely inter-related that directly impact their top line.

For example, assume all other factors remains constant…Google has a potential of 100 adwords clicks a day for each of the keywords “discounted widgets” and “cheap widgets”

 www.widgetstores.com would like to pay $3 each for the two keywords i.e. $3 * 100 clicks * 2 keywords = $600 in total

www.widgetshop.com would like to pay $2 for each of these two keywords i.e. $2 * 100 clicks * 2 keywords = $400 in total

Now Google has to send all these 200 clicks (100 clicks * 2 keywords) to www.widgetstore.com for optimium benefit.  So, Google has a potential of making $600 on these two keywords assuming it’s searchers would be 100% satisfied (TCE) with www.widgetstore.com which is important factor for their business continuity as a search engine.

Lets say there are users visited Google.com and peformed a search with the keyword “discounted widgets” and adwords results being…

Link 1 position: http://www.widgetstore.com ($3 per click)

Link 2 position: http://www.widgetshop.com ($2 per click)

If good no. of people click on www.widgetshop.com in the link 2 position that means..Google’s recommendation in Link 1 alarms that it has a negative impact on their TCE which will definitely influence their revenues over a period of time.  To avoid this google will make the following adjustment algorithmatically.

Link 1 position:  www.widgetshop.com ($2 per click)

Link 2 position: www.widgetstore.com ($3 per click)

Now www.widgetshop.com being in link 1 position, it has the higher potential to get all 200 clicks for $400…This is what Google calls it as Click Popularity. 

After this…let’s imagine the searcher with “discounted widgets” clicked on www.widgetshop.com and visited the landing page and found that it is irrelevant to his search.  And he comes back to Google and does another search with “cheap widgets” and clicked on www.widgetstore.com.  Again their TCE is effected… And, there will be some revenue Google will be loosing as part of discountng multiple clicks for the advertisers.   

That is the reason “Accessability, Usability and Relevancy” should be the high prioirty things for everyone in the web business. I am sure all your website design and development guidelines are sorrounded among these three.

Conclusion: Building faster loading pages would be an excellent thing but that alone doesn’t contribute for the success in Google.  For example, assume www.widgetstore.com has a homepage that loads in less than 2 seconds and www.widgetshop.com has a home page that loads in 50 seconds…so Google likes www.widgetstore.com here. 

But, on a 2-second home page www.widgetstore.com can only provide a little text content that may not be targeted for everyone visting this page which will have an higher page abandonment…Here Google likes www.widgetshop.com. 

Ultmately, We will have to help Google success in getting higher revenues and TCE for our success in terms of traffic drivng to www.widgetshop.com

Pls. note that the above is only an illustraton, the actuals may vary when putting together various other factors.

When we all go to Search Engines like Google and do a search - we obviously expect the relevant results.

What should Google deliver as the results in order to satisfy the searcher’s needs. How would Search Engines know exactly what the searcher is looking for with a mere keyword that you have provided in the search text box? Have you ever disappointed with the results that Search Engines deliver for you?

Imagine I went to Google and just typed a keyword phrase “web analytics” in the Google’s search text box and just hit the “Search” button - Google does know that I am looking for something related to web analytics which is evident from the search keyword I have just entered in the search text box and it can also know since I am doing this search geographically from India, it would know I may be looking something related to “Web Analytics in India”. But, how does it know exactly what I am looking for?

Am I looking for what is web analytics or what it means? Am I looking for how web analytics works? Or Am I looking for where in the world this web analytics stays Or Web Anlaytics Tools Or Web Analytics Vendors Or am I just looking for Web Analytics Blogs or Articles on Web. When we target a generic keyword phrase like “web analytics” there could be hundreds of intentions could be related even from Search Engne Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization, Web Reporting & Web Analysis, and many more online marketing functions.

How would Google going to satisfy my search intention by providing relevant results which it always says it would when I can relate my intention to many of the above mentioned web analytics topics. What do you think that Search Engines would give me as the top 10 results that would satisfy my search need? What happends if Google give me results about Web Analytics Companies but I am looking for Web Analytics Reporting Techniques, what happends if Google gives me results on Web Log Analysis Software but I am looking for Web Analytics Jobs in United States - so it never matches.

The answer is Search Engines provide relatively different results that means it would provde a mixture of all the topics that can be highly related and commonly searched. The sites that can answer most of the search intentions or provide links to the resources can get the advantage to be ranked in the top 10 results of the search query.

The Search Results page for the keyword “Web Analytics” would normally look like 1 or 2 results on what is “web analytics” and 1 or 2 results from web anlaytics tools or vendors or web analytics companies and 1 or 2 results that can provide links to most of the web analytics topics such as a wikipedia or a directory listing.

But, that may not be the right always for satisfying the searcher needs - the probablity of not satisfying the searcher’s intention would always be 50%, that is the reason Google gives related searches at the bottom of the results page as you see in the above screen shot. When we do more specific search we many not get the recommendations from Google on Related Search but how Google ranks the top 10 results would remains the same - “Relatively Different” and unique content that can answer many of search intentions or provide links to the similar resources would always have an advantage to be ranked in top 10 results.

Lot of times, I have seen SEO’s spending time in analyzing the competitors results and their keyword relevancy and proximity to guess what works for optimizing their web pages (Tools like Webposition Gold, WebCEO provide similar analysis and reports) but I personally say a big “NO” and it is recommended to provide unique but relative content on the web pages. If we try to provide the same content that is already ranked in the top 10 there is likely to be filtered from top 10 results for that search query unless we convince Google that you have better content than the competition on the same topic.

Click Here to read Formula for Search Engine Optimization

For the last 10 years, the business owners and marketers were quite busy in moving or starting a web channel for their existing off-line businesses. And, even the new business models have come up on web. It was the case that they were paying a huge amount of effort in building web applications with innovative features to reach their prospects and clients in real-time and in fast. It is also true that a majority of web masters invested huge amount of $’s and building really some interesting web experiences but very few web masters are focusing on optimizing or even working on maximizing the return on web investment.

Though there is increasingly more marketers are turning to the web metrics data which has opened a new era in online industry, as the above graph from Google Trends depicts that there are more people started looking at Web Analytics very seriously after Google has rolled-out a FREE Web Analytics Tool to industry.

We have made significant shifts from working with the server administrator for getting the log files to working with the their-party vendors like Omniture (ASP Model) who provide real-time web analytics data.

We have moved from Log File Analyzers to sophisticated analytics systems which operate on page-tagging (cookie-based) technology.

We have moved from counting Hits for the site to behavioral pattern recognition for better optimizing the website investments.

We have moved from standalone KPIs to Integrated Web Analytics.

And, the best part is - Real-time Behavioral Targeting using web analytics data.

Today, I was talking with someone who is a webmaster managing various kinds of web sites. He has one specific question for me which I thought I should talk about it in my blog post.

“How do I Measure the success of a web page?”

I was a bit paused when I hear this question. And, that’s really an excellent question that should be looked into.

Well, when doing SEO I always see, though there are many common characteristics among the web pages, they always have a unique personality like individuals. Because of many uncontrollable parameters, a web page has unique personality which is what a web page with the same kind of content and links can be treated differently in search engines, even by the users sporadically. Perhaps, I will speak more on Web Page Personality in my future posts, now I really want to deal the question I was asked on “Measuring the success of a web page”. Please note, I am not talking about success of a web site but success of an individual web page.

Let’s take a real case as an example, have you ever advertised on Google, Yahoo or any other publisher’s sites or you might be getting some traffic to your website thru whatever source. Do they enter your website thru one of the web pages from your site which we call as entry page or gateway page. When the web site visitors land on one of your campaign landing pages or website gateway pages what would you expect them to do?

1. Buy a Product - Do you agree with people buy products/services as soon as they land on your website?

2. Fill-in a Questionnaire/lead generation form - Do you agree, people drop their email addresses and other personal info. as soon as they land on your website landing page.

3. Explore the website - Do you agree, visitors land on your campaign landing page and enjoy the user experience of your website or is it that you expect them to do?

Pls. ask the above 3-questions to yourself, the answers slightly vary based on what you are trying to achieve with your online campaigns or your website.

But, as soon as visitors land on a landing page or a website gateway page - within the first second they try to ensure themselves they landed on the right page. And, try to smell the scent that was lured them to come to this web page i.e. find the relevant text, links or images that help them to ensure themselves. If they can’t find the relevancy to their need of visiting your landing page…the best they will do is “Abandon Your Website Landing Page” and move their journey back to search engines.

So, the success of Campaign Landing Pages and Other Website Entry Pages is purely depended on how many people clicked on and get-into the next page of your website. These pages are typically I call as “Directional Pages”

A majority of the landing pages and gateway pages are “Directional Pages”. The primary duty of these directional pages is to direct visitors to the right section or source of information on your website. These pages include Home Pages, Site Maps, Product Listing Pages etc., The goal of all these pages is not to “Sell the products or services” but direct visitors to the right section where they find information or even buy something. Hence, the success of the Directional Pages is measured by no. of people getting into the websites. I use a metric called “Committed Visits” which is Total Visits to the page subtracted by exits at the page.

That is all about measuring success for Directional Web Pages. Now I will talk about another kind of web pages - Descriptors.

Descriptors receive visitors from Directional Pages. The goal of the descriptors is to talk to the visitor on your products, services or support in terms of giving an overview about your product, talking about the product features, provide the pricing, how your product works, how is it different from your best competition etc., Each descriptive page has one call to action (infact, several in many cases). On product overview page, you may call the visitor to read about benefits of the product, on the benefits page - you may call the visitor to learn about how is it different from your competition and testimonials. You would need to find out on which point you would need to call the visitor to make the ultimate action i.e. “Click Here to Buy Widgets Online!”

The success of these Descriptors is measured on No. of times the website visitors have taken the action on “Defined Call to Action”. For example - No. of times viewed the product flash demo, no. of times people clicked on Benefits link in Product Overview page. You can mix and match while defining these call to action even combine a few of them for each descriptive web page.

Lead Generators/Converters are the web pages whose responsibility is to convert the prospect into the defined goal. These are the  web pages that generally upsell your products or services, these are the web pages that pitches about the benefits of your product, offers, testimonials etc,

The success of these web pages is measured by associating the visits to these pages to the no. of goals achieved. For example, out of 100 orders that you made today check how many of them visited these converter pages prior to their purchase at your website.

I was recalling myself when I was learning computers, the teacher was telling computers is all about taking Input from the users and Processes (CPU) to give a defined Output. Similarly, we do have a list of pages that come into this category “Processors” (let me know if I could coin a better word

Processors are the web pages whose sole responsibility is to receive the information as Inputs and process it and give the defined output to the users. These are the pages typically we have in any website like login forms, registration forms, shopping carts, payment forms etc.,

The success of these processors is measured by no. of people started the process and completed the process successfully. The best example is web site shopping cart funnel. The success of shopping cart funnel is measured by looking at the people started adding products to cart, to checkout to payment information to our best friend thank you page or order confirmation page.

Similarly, we can measure the success for a registration form, login form etc.,