Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

If you are then you may like to head over to Econsultancy to take a read of forum post by CEO Ashley Friedlein.

The post (and subsequent comments) is titled Conversion Optimisation and Site Performance Consultants – please step forward!.

The reason I posted about this is if you read through the comments you will see an interesting mix of responses, and by the end of the responses you will certainly have a better understanding of which suppliers and consultants are out there and how their services are either a dedicated specialism or part of a wider portfolio of digital services.

Naturally I provided PRWD’s response to Ashley’s request, and below is an excert from the response:

Alongside ourselves featuring in the Econsultancy 2009 User Experience Buyers Guide, I’m so far surprised not to see more of the other 25 usability specialists that are profiled putting themselves forward. In this buyers guide I was also pleasantly surprised that almost all of my industry insights that I provided as part of our profile submission are featured.

Echoing comments you made in your post and what others have shared in their responses, my insights are very much centered around the definite shift in client focus, investment and expectations.

The shift in investment is from:

• new technology
• more features
• more functionality
• more acquisition spend

to:

• genuine customer centricity (not just the company statement)
• conversion optimisation
• advanced web analytics (segmentation, purchase/process funnels and simply using analytics to make real commercial decisions)
• testing

Analytics and Conversion Optimisation – Career Advice Too!

Towards the end of the comments you will see a request for career advice from Peter over in Australia.

Peter asked:

Hi everyone,
What advice do you have for a young professional looking to get into this field?

I’m fresh out of university and have started my career as a junior web analyst at one of Australia’s largest online publishers. I have a background in SEO/PPC, but conversion rate/landing page optimisation is something I’ve always been interested in and would like to specialise in the future.

Thank you Ashley for starting this thread and thank you to all that have posted.

I was pleased to be able to provide Peter with some advice from my 1st hand experiences in the fields of analytics, usability and conversion optimisation.

To save you a click my advice to Peter was as follows:

Hi Peter,

My advice would be to learn as much as you can hands-on in a commercial environment, and your current role certainly appears to tick this box. This is the approach I took and you can’t put a value on building expertise in this way.

You should aim to become the analytics/conversion optimisation evangelist within your organisation, continually providing key insights and presenting the business case for investing in on-going conversion improvement.

If you haven’t already I also strongly recommend you ‘get in to bed’ with testing, both A/B and multivariate. Having an understanding and appreciation of what to test and what tools are available will become invaluable for you, especially with you already having a good understanding of analytics.

Good luck with your career development in conversion improvement and optimisation, and message me if you would like some more advice.

Over at PRWD we have published details of our Advanced Google Analytics Training Course, and below I have provided details of what the course is about and who the course is aimed at:

Why Google Analytics Training?

Google Analytics is a free tool which is generally very simple to be installed on a website. There is an ever increasing number of websites using Google Analytics as their analytics tool of choice, but that isn’t to say businesses understand how to set-up Google Analytics correctly and how to get the most commercial value out of the statistics and reports available.

Google Analytics provides both basic and enterprise class features and functionality, but understanding what is available and what applies to individual businesses and users does not come easy.

This course, delivered in-house to ensure key stakeholders from the same company can benefit simultaneously, aims to help you and your business colleagues begin using Google Analytics effectively.

Objective

The course aims to provide you with the knowledge of how best to use Google Analytics on an on-going basis to gain the most valuable visitor insights and commercial value

What you will learn

• Personalisation – how to personalise your experience to enable you to access the most important areas for you in your specific role
• Goals and Funnels – how you should use these essential features to enable you to to track vital visitor behaviour and potential site issues
• Segmentation – how you can use segmentation to monitor specific visitor behaviour from highly targeted segments of your visitors
• Reporting – how you can create and manage reports most relevant to you and your business to help make genuine commercial decisions
• Marketing Activity Accountability – how you can best use Google Analytics to track all your marketing campaigns for full accountability
• Tips and Best Practice – essential tips and best practice on how to use your new found knowledge and expertise on an on-going basis

PLUS – Google Website Optimiser

An introduction to this essential tool and how you can use it to make continual improvements to your on-site conversion rates

Who is the training suitable for

• Offline Marketing Managers
• Online Marketing Managers
• Marketing Directors
• E-commerce Managers
• IT Managers
• Project Managers
• Marketing Assistants
• Business Analysts

Duration, delivery, location and cost

• Duration: 3 hours
• Delivery: training provided in-house for 1-10 employees
• Location: UK wide, and in particular Manchester and London
• Cost: £400 + vat (excludes reasonable expenses)

How to book

Easy, simply call us on 0161 918 6729

PRWD training clients

We have been privileged to train people working at the likes of Speedy Hire, The Scout Association, Mencap, Abbey, Yell and Pod1.

Further reading

• Case Study: In-house training for The Scout Association
• Econsultancy training course by Paul Rouke: E-commerce Usability and Best Practice

I’ve recently published a new post on Econsultancy, titled Traffic segmentation: humble or sliced, which pie are you having?

The point of my post is that its vital for businesses not to take a top down, one-size fits all approach when they (or their agency) are analysing site traffic and conversions.

We’ve recently started working with translation services business The Translation People to help them improve their online conversion rate. As with almost all businesses who have analytics installed, although there was no advanced traffic segmentation in place (apart from the standard paid/non-paid traffic sources and a few other) in order to get a realistic view of which visitors they should be looking to convert.

Cutting to the chase, as I describe in my Econsultancy post, by creating and applying an advanced segment which identified which visitors are likely to be good prospects, we were able to see that only 10% of all traffic where good prospects for thie business.

Since my last post there has been a fair bit going on at PRWD, some of which I can talk about and some of which we can’t make publically available as its work through partner agencies.

Testing Testing 1, 2 3

We’ve been busy working with some of our existing clients such as Contact Packaging (selling printed tape) and new clients such as The Translation People (providing document translation services) in optimising their conversion rates through analysis and testing (split and mutli-variate).

Event Speaking

Following on from my successful and rewarding presentation at the recent How Do conference in Liverpool, Rob Knight (PRWD’s lead technical architect) has spoken at an event titled Developing With Adobe AIR, which had a keynote from Adobe. Rob’s presentation was titled Business Systems With Adobe AIR and it featured the work we’ve done with a manufacturing company to deliver a user-centered designed business system for them. We have also developed a micro-site detailing our business systems and e-commerce services for manufacturers.

Case Studies

We’ve also released a couple more case studies of some of the work we have been doing and the results we’ve had, in particular on improving online sales by 400% for one of our clients and a technical case study on using Adobe AIR for business systems.

Twittering

I’ve been twittering over the past few weeks (not consistently I hasten to add!) and along the way picking up quite a few new followers, some of which I would put in the spam category. We have also been updating the PRWD twitter account although you tell its alot younger than my personal twitter account!

Featured Supplier In Econsultancy’s User Experience Buyers Guide 2009

We were delighted to be asked to feature as one of the 26 agencies who specialise in user experience and usability in Econsultancy’s annual guide on this topic. I also spent time providing feedback on a number of questions relating to the industry, and if you download the full version you will see various quotes from myself.

Econsultancy have published a new usability article of mine entitled:
Pureplay and high street fashion retailers – who values usability more?

In the article I’ve taken a look at the following high street and pureplay retailers from a usability perspective…

The pureplay fashion retailers I’ve taken a look at are:

• ASOS
• Net-a-porter
• My Wardrobe
• The Outnet
• Koodos

The high street fashion retailers I’ve taken a look at are:

• Harvey Nichols
• Miss Selfridge
• Topshop
• Next
• New Look

The five questions I posed to each of these retailers are:

1. How seriously are they taking cross-selling and up-selling in order to encourage higher average order values?
2. Do they make standard delivery costs clear before you get into the actual checkout process?
3. Are payment options and cards accepted clear prior to checking out?
4. Have they enclosed their checkout as a way of potentially reducing checkout process abandonments?
5. Do they provide clear customer service contact details during the checkout process?

Take a look at the article and see how these retailers stack up!

If you are a fashion retailer you might also like to read about the Online Fashion 100 event on the 17th June in London, organised by Leon Bailey-Green.