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Search is some­times referred to as the “data­base of intent”. The reason is simple – never before have pro­spects so clearly told advert­isers what they want before they arrive at the site. The trick is to max­im­ise this opportunity.

The concept of deep-linking isn’t spe­cific to search. It applies to all online mar­ket­ing activ­ity, such as dis­play, email and social. The dif­fer­ence how­ever, is that the search phrase is an addi­tional data point that should be used to seg­ment and effect­ively fun­nel the user towards desired action.

Con­sider the site struc­ture below for a moment:

Just a few years ago, it wasn’t rare to find cam­paigns that were all point­ing to the home page (or worse, the many times severely lim­ited internal site search functionality).

The first issue with this approach, is that someone arriv­ing from a spe­cific search such as “product x specs” will not imme­di­ately see the product they are expect­ing, and pos­sibly just hit the back but­ton in frus­tra­tion and appear as a “bounce” in the site analytics.

Secondly, even if they are determ­ined enough, and decide to give the site a second chance, they still have to find their way through via internal nav­ig­a­tion and search func­tion­al­ity. This leaves them vul­ner­able to get­ting lost, frus­trated and ulti­mately giv­ing up, and return to their search engine of choice for a bet­ter match to their ori­ginal query.

Simplist­ic­ally, there are two levels of seg­ment­a­tion when it comes to keywords and land­ing pages:

1. Type: e.g. Cat­egory, Product, Service
2. Intent: e.g. buy, com­pare, com­plain, trouble shoot

At the first level, advert­isers will send cat­egory searches (e.g. “print­ers”) to a cat­egory page, and product spe­cific searches (e.g. “brand X model Y”) to the product page. Isn’t that nice and simple?

At the second level, the advert­iser will util­ise the search mod­i­fi­ers to bet­ter under­stand what the con­sumer wants. E.g. a search for “brand X model Y spe­cific­a­tions”) will send traffic to the cor­res­pond­ing sub page or sec­tion of the land­ing page.

While this might seem like com­mon sense and straight for­ward to imple­ment, there are a few things to con­sider. The second level of seg­ment­a­tion increases the com­plex­ity of the cam­paign by quickly mul­tiply­ing the num­ber of indi­vidual land­ing pages. These indi­vidual land­ing pages need to be checked so they are up to date, access­ible and have the required call to action for up sell or cross-sell.

In return when all stars align, advert­isers can expect hap­pier site vis­it­ors and improved con­ver­sion rates.

Even if search has matured incred­ibly over the last few years, both from a tech­nical point of view and as a chan­nel that gains board room level atten­tion, a lot of the basic issues remain the same. I’m not talk­ing about cross-channel click attri­bu­tion and life­time value, but cam­paign coördin­a­tion and achiev­ing the appro­pri­ate buy-in at all levels of the organisation.

Earlier this year Ban­ner organ­ised a Search Huddle. This was an intim­ate ses­sion for B2B mar­keters with speak­ers from Autodesk, Avaya, and Microsoft.

While the event was roun­ded off by Cedric Cham­baz, mar­ket­ing man­ager at Microsoft and myself, by look­ing at the latest devel­op­ments of search and what lies ahead, what gen­er­ated the most debate was how to get the fun­da­ment­als right; what can you do today, to make a tan­gible dif­fer­ence to achieve your objectives?

Dominic Jukes, web mar­ket­ing man­ager at Autodesk shared his exper­i­ence of man­aging inter­na­tional paid search cam­paigns, and high­lighted recent cor­por­ate struc­tural changes that had helped facil­it­ate increased own­er­ship and sub­sequent coördin­a­tion of their search mar­ket­ing efforts.

Avaya, rep­res­en­ted by editor-in-chief Jerome Toulorge, used paid search in a dif­fer­ent innov­at­ive fash­ion. With the object­ive of gen­er­at­ing sales through their chan­nel part­ners, together we had cre­ated a paid search reseller pro­gram that was rolled-out with selec­ted part­ners across Europe. The chal­lenges faced where not so much about tech­no­logy as it was about com­mu­nic­a­tion and education.

The event clearly high­lighted that although search can many times be per­ceived as a highly tech­no­logy focused mar­ket­ing chan­nel; the biggest factor to suc­cess is still the people driv­ing it.

With search engines char­ging for clicks and not impres­sions and typ­ic­ally being con­sidered a dir­ect response chan­nel, you may be for­given to think that there’s little need to optim­ise for click-through rate (CTR). How­ever, since CTR is the major­ity factor to determ­ine the so-called qual­ity score, which impacts the cost-per-click (CPC), this will affect the suc­cess of the cam­paign; regard­less of if object­ives are sales, leads or traffic.

Why are search engines doing this? The adverts CTR is an import­ant sig­nal of “qual­ity” for search engines. The logic is that if the advert matches the users query, they will click it. There­fore the higher the CTR, the more rel­ev­ant the advert is assumed to be. And of course, since the search engines charge advert­isers per click, their rev­enue increases.

The fol­low­ing chart out­lines the main factors that determ­ine the qual­ity score for a keyword on Google Adwords. This qual­ity score is then used in an algorithm that determ­ines click-cost and pos­i­tion.

Due to this, it’s very pos­sible that an advert appear­ing in top pos­i­tion is pay­ing less per click than the one below. The search engines are of course max­im­ising their rev­en­ues by the higher num­ber of aggreg­ate clicks that the top CTR advert is producing.

To make things more com­plex for advert­isers, con­sider the fol­low­ing scen­ario: an advert with lower CTR is con­vert­ing very strongly on the web­site, as it effect­ively pre-qualifies the traffic. In com­par­ison a high CTR advert for the same cam­paign con­verts poorer, as it doesn’t seek to fil­ter out unwanted traffic at the ad level, but instead on the land­ing page. Which should you run?

At this stage you would need to cal­cu­late the actual cost-per-action and volumes that can be achieved, depend­ing on objective.

In prac­tise, it’s dif­fi­cult to make this type of dir­ect com­par­ison on a live cam­paign, due to the ever-changing nature of com­pet­i­tion, qual­ity score, pos­i­tions and costs. How­ever, from exper­i­ence, typ­ic­ally for b2c the bene­fit of a higher qual­ity score from optim­ising ad cop­ies towards CTR (with res­ult­ing lowered CPC and higher pos­i­tion) out­weighs the altern­at­ive, whereas for B2B it might not be the case.

There are many, many cus­tomer seg­ment­a­tions in the world of mar­ket­ing. Typ­ic­ally, these involve a chunk of research to determ­ine a set of buyer arche­types. These are often then given names such as ‘big man on cam­pus’, ‘har­assed MD’ and ‘digital refusenik’.

As an approach, they can be pretty help­ful. They provide a short­hand way of look­ing at an audi­ence – one which enables us to form more tar­geted strategies that speak to the real needs of our key targets.

The prob­lem, how­ever, is that typ­ic­ally they are simply made up.

That’s unfair of course. These seg­ments rep­res­ent por­traits of group­ings of char­ac­ter­ist­ics as seen by the research­ers. We get a group of people that kinda, sorta look like X. But the point I’m mak­ing is that exactly what these group­ings are is fun­da­ment­ally down to the sub­ject­ive view of the researcher.

Myers-Briggs – the ulti­mate segmentation?

A few years back, I decided to try to do bet­ter. I’d been on some lead­er­ship train­ing course and taken a test to determ­ine my Myers-Briggs per­son­al­ity. I found what it told me to be both accur­ate and intriguing.

Many of you will know of Myers-Briggs – it’s been around some 50+ years and is based on the work of Carl Jung. Essen­tially it breaks the world down into 16 per­son­al­ity types (which can be clustered into 4 groups). The indi­vidual types are given 4-letter codes. Mine is INTP which means I’m Intro­ver­ted, iNtu­it­ive, Think­ing and Per­ceiv­ing. I won’t go into more detail here as you can find out all that on the hundred’s of sites already devoted to the topic.

The key thing for me is that over the years mil­lions of people have taken Myers-Briggs tests (the most widely used is called the MBTI). This means that we have a huge body of evid­ence about what makes an indi­vidual per­son­al­ity type tick. I began won­der­ing whether we could use these types as a kind of über–segmentation system.

Typ­ing IT buyers

We decided that the only way to find out was to try an exper­i­ment. At Ban­ner, we cre­ated a kind of Myers-Briggs-lite test that could be com­pleted in a few minutes online. We then tested it to see that it broadly delivered the same res­ults as other tests. And then we invited IT pro­fes­sion­als in the US, UK, France and Ger­many to have a go. Every­one who com­pleted the sur­vey got a copy of their res­ults and a little bit of ana­lysis for their effort.

We got just under 1,000 responses. And the res­ults were rather remarkable:

Focus­ing just on Europe for a moment, out of the 16 types, two alone accoun­ted for 40% of the IT pro­fes­sion­als we sur­veyed. One was my own type, INTP (which we termed Archi­tects) with 22% and the other was ISTP (which we called Craftsmen).

We then com­pared Europe to the US – aston­ish­ingly the top per­son­al­ity type in Europe accoun­ted for just 5% of US IT professionals.

And France and Ger­many were almost polar opposites.

A present­a­tion of the top-line res­ults is embed­ded below. You can down­load it from Slideshare.

The good and the bad

So is this really the pan­acea for seg­ment­a­tion? Well, not quite.

Where it appears to work well is in spe­cial­ised job roles. As soon as it is exten­ded to more gen­eral busi­ness roles (eg gen­eral man­age­ment) the indi­vidual per­son­al­ity spikes van­ish and the dis­tri­bu­tion returns to that of the gen­eral population.

There are those who are not con­vinced by Myers-Briggs as an approach to per­son­al­ity – Google ‘Cri­ti­cisms of Myers-Briggs’ for a pretty com­pre­hens­ive list. There are a whole bunch of other com­pet­ing systems.

But, as a pos­sible approach it at least removes some of the sub­jectiv­ity from seg­ment­a­tion. The pro­files we built up (by review­ing every piece of lit­er­at­ure on the sub­ject) gave us over 60 dif­fer­ent per­son­al­ity attrib­utes – from how people make decisions and how they like to be com­mu­nic­ated with through to what kind of par­ents they make and how they react under stress.

See what you think.

Money is tight. Budgets are squeezed. You simply don’t have the resources to do everything. It’s decision time: do you spend what you have on grow­ing the brand or on gen­er­at­ing demand and hit­ting the num­bers? If you are like two-thirds of the attendees at one recent B2B event, you’ll have chosen brand. If on the other hand you are in the grip of the bean coun­ters, you’ll have opted for demand.

But here’s the rub: whichever you chose, you chose wrong.

In the land of the blind

After all these years, it still amazes me that so many in the industry think in these kinds of bin­ary terms. Brand or demand. Stra­tegic or tac­tical. Even mar­ket­ing or sales. It’s a recipe for death by silo.

The truth of course, is that the decision is never bin­ary. Every piece of demand activ­ity you pro­duce is an embod­i­ment of your brand. Like­wise every brand com­mu­nic­a­tion should drive demand.

To focus on demand gen­er­a­tion for a moment – there is a tend­ency in the industry to think purely in terms of the num­bers. How many clicks/downloads/sales/whatevers did this com­mu­nic­a­tion achieve? It often leads to a nail the prob­lem, ham­mer the offer, for­get the brand approach (well, we did fol­low the guidelines). And you know what? It works. To a degree at least.

The prob­lem is that this tends to focus so heav­ily on what we do it leaves no room for how we do it. The end oblit­er­ates the means.

Demand meet brand, brand meet demand

As soon as we focus on how we gen­er­ate demand and what it means for the brand, some­thing inter­est­ing happens.

For one thing, the cus­tomer comes more sharply into focus. We think more about how we can help them deal with the prob­lems they face and less about simply what car­rot we can dangle to get them to do stuff.

We also take a longer term view. Not of the res­ults – we still need to hit the num­bers. But we begin to con­sider the leg­acy of what we cre­ate. What effect will it have on our repu­ta­tion? What will the recip­i­ents say to friends and col­leagues about us? What will they think, the next time they see some­thing from us?

And, while I’ve focused on demand gen­er­a­tion here, the bene­fits also extend the other way. By mak­ing more brand-focused com­mu­nic­a­tion respons­ible for grow­ing demand as well as brand, we give it focus. We avoid the upward creep that ends with brands try­ing to cap­ture lofty ideals that are irrel­ev­ant to the con­text their cus­tom­ers find them­selves in (the world peace syndrome).

The res­ult will be a stronger brand, greater demand and increased loy­alty. Now doesn’t that sound like a good decision?

Land­ing pages would seem to be a fairly tedi­ous topic of con­ver­sa­tion; how­ever they can often make or break cam­paigns. And all too often, it’s the lat­ter. Many cli­ents have sep­ar­ated mar­ket­ing and web teams, leav­ing the IT-driven web team to pro­duce the land­ing page. This can cause issues with the link­age between the cre­at­ive and land­ing page con­tent, less than ideal land­ing page struc­tures with call-to-actions hid­den below the fold and nav­ig­a­tion bars divert­ing the users from the key action com­pan­ies want them to take. Altern­at­ively, it could be that the cli­ent has out­sourced their land­ing page con­struc­tion to an external agency that like to build pretty Flash-driven sites that are a night­mare from an SEO per­spect­ive and addi­tion­ally, external host­ing exposes the site to poten­tial secur­ity attacks. It seems that due to the rel­at­ively short shelf-life of cam­paigns and thus cam­paign land­ing pages, the think­ing and atten­tion needed is not being given to the primary way of con­vert­ing poten­tial customers.

Changes are afoot though, driven by social media. Coke has announced that they will stop cre­at­ing cam­paign sites in favour of driv­ing people to their social media com­munit­ies on Face­book and You­Tube instead.

Uni­lever is fol­low­ing suit and the likes of T-mobile with their Life’s for Shar­ing cam­paign last year were already driv­ing people to their You­Tube com­munity as the main call-to-action. And the social media sites are gear­ing up towards the trend: the latest news from Face­book is an Omni­ture part­ner­ship to provide (among oth­ers) cor­por­ate Face­book com­munit­ies the web ana­lyt­ics expec­ted before for cam­paign sites. Why the change? Well, mar­keters have had enough of cre­at­ing dis­pos­able cam­paign sites (which I whole­heartedly agree with) that are dumped after the com­pany has moved to the next quarter or the next big push they are focus­ing on. Secondly they want to drive people to exist­ing com­munit­ies where their audi­ence is already, in a mind­set ready to share and engage. I get that too, how­ever am in a quandary about driv­ing the organic rank­ings of social com­munity site as opposed to the client’s own site. In my mind, only brands that are of cer­tain size and don’t neces­sar­ily sell online would want to do that.

We are test­ing a best of both worlds approach instead with one of our cli­ents (cam­paign due to launch in a couple of months, will keep you updated on the pro­gress!): instead of the usual cor­por­ate land­ing page, we are cre­at­ing a socially super­charged aggreg­ator site. The site com­bines cli­ent and user cre­ated social con­tent from You­Tube, Face­book, Slide­share, Scribd etc with the client’s cor­por­ate con­tent (trial down­load offers, reviews, webinars and tutori­als). This way, the exper­i­ence for the user com­ing to the site is much more valu­able, the social back-links are build­ing the SEO rank­ings for the cli­ent, not for social sites and hope­fully, with the improved exper­i­ence, the con­ver­sion rates are improved as well. I believe the future of cam­paign sites is social and that long-term, “green” think­ing needs to be integ­rated into marketing.

For those lucky enough to escape the grey mono­tony of Lon­don last week (I was not so lucky) and escape to Bar­celona for the Mobile World Con­gress, they were in for a rare treat. In recent years the world’s largest mobile event has des­cen­ded into a rather dreary almost bor­ing lit­any of the same ol’ same ol’. This year appears to have been any­thing but…

Microsoft’s ebul­li­ent Steve Balmer lit­er­ally char­ging back into the fray with MS phone 7 which, I’m kinda shocked to say, seems to be get­ting rave reviews. Android show­ing its mettle with some decent look­ing kit like the new Motorola CLIQ XT and the inev­it­ably slick UI we’ve come to expect. In addi­tion, Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s key­note on Google Goggles and the emer­ging aug­men­ted real­ityspace was great. Apple, in true brand fash­ion, deign­ing not to attend but still able to cause a monu­mental buzz with the run­away suc­cess of the AppStore. And Nokia? Des­pite the much-hyped but largely panned col­lab­or­a­tion with Intel on a new mobile OS called MeeGo, Nokia unveiled no new devices at all which is a first at MWC. Rather they chose to extol (or is that excuse?) the vir­tues of their Ovi store which seems unable to slow the gal­lop­ing suc­cess of AppStore. This piece of You­Tube bril­liance high­lights the com­mon perception.

As the mobile space seems, moment­ar­ily, to be fix­ated on applic­a­tions, MWC was awash with hun­dreds of com­pan­ies try­ing to muscle in. The recur­ring theme? A con­cern sur­round­ing the lack of stand­ards in the applic­a­tion space and the com­plex­ity that is caus­ing through­out the mobile eco­sys­tem. Man­u­fac­tur­ers, under­stand­ably, seem slow to adopt a com­mon stand­ard and all are try­ing to des­per­ately nur­ture a developer net­work to mimic Apple. How­ever, oper­at­ors and net­work pro­viders are try­ing to lasso developer com­munit­ies together (check out the Whole­sale Applic­a­tion Com­munity to see just how big that groundswell could become) in a dir­ect assault on Apple.

So des­pite the obvi­ous allure of Bar­celona at any time of the year, Mobile World Con­gress 2010 appears to have been a real barn­stormer. Two pre­dic­tions. MWC 2011 will def­in­itely be even more enga­ging as the mobile space con­tin­ues to evolve so fren­et­ic­ally. Lon­don weather in Feb­ru­ary 2011 will be just as shyte. I’ve begun beg­ging for my ticket already.

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been work­ing to pro­duce an at-a-glance map out­lining some of the main options B2B mar­keters face in using social media to engage their audiences.

And now, cue fan­fare, it’s ready. Woo-hoo!

You can down­load a groovy hyper­linked PDF ver­sion here. Feel free to share it too.

And this is where you come in – what have we missed that really should have been on there? We’re look­ing for those forehead-slapping sug­ges­tions that’ll make us go Doh! and then scrabble to pro­duce ver­sion 2. Ideally, we’d like them before 24^th Septem­ber when we’re host­ing a social media huddle at our new offices (BTW if you’re a tech­no­logy mar­keter and inter­ested in attend­ing, email steven@b1.com and you could grab one of the last remain­ing places).

Con­tent mar­ket­ing is one of today’s hot mar­ket­ing top­ics – par­tic­u­larly in B2B. It’s been fuelled by the per­cep­tion that tra­di­tional push mar­ket­ing doesn’t work in a social media driven world – it’s too shal­low, too manip­u­lat­ive, too inauthentic.

While this view is almost cer­tainly over­stated (plenty of push mar­ket­ing cam­paigns are still gen­er­at­ing healthy responses) it has a point. There is a wide­spread desire on the part of cus­tom­ers for more human, less spun com­mu­nic­a­tions that add value to their decisions rather than mud­dy­ing the waters.

The answer for many mar­keters is con­tent. While it is being touted as the bright shiny new thing, there is of course noth­ing really new about con­tent itself (white papers, for example, have been around for as long as the tech­no­lo­gies they talk about). The new news is really in the shift­ing of con­tent to the core of B2B mar­ket­ing strategy and the explo­sion of dis­tri­bu­tion channels.

Cre­at­ing com­pel­ling content

The key to devel­op­ing an effect­ive con­tent mar­ket­ing strategy is, as with all mar­ket­ing, rel­ev­ance. More than ever you need to step into your cus­tom­ers’ shoes. What are they strug­gling with? What do they need to know? How can you help them? (Note: help not sell.)

On top of this, why would your cus­tom­ers send your con­tent on to their col­leagues and fiends? What value are you adding? This brings me on to…

Con­tent shouldn’t be pass­ive or static or a one-off

Going back to the white paper, there is a danger that con­tent is viewed as the Switzer­land of mar­ket­ing – neut­ral, dis­en­gaged, pass­ive. The real­ity is quite dif­fer­ent. While con­tent does not assume the overt sales role of advert­ising or dir­ect mar­ket­ing, it should be any­thing but pass­ive. Good con­tent is a con­ver­sa­tion. It engages the audi­ence. It is part of a pro­cess (not simply the end of one).

It is crit­ic­ally import­ant to take the long view of your con­tent mar­ket­ing pro­gramme – how does one piece of con­tent lead to another? How and where are you invit­ing cus­tomer par­ti­cip­a­tion? What tools are you build­ing in to help cus­tom­ers achieve their aims (and which will give your con­tent a viral aspect)?

Think once, cre­ate many

As I men­tioned above, there are now a wider vari­ety of ways to deliver con­tent. So when cre­at­ing your con­tent, don’t simply stop at the usual sus­pects (eg vari­ations on a PDF doc­u­ment). Not every­one wants to read off screen.

So in addi­tion to ebooks, cre­ate vari­ations of the con­tent as a pod­cast, present­a­tion, video, an edit­able wiki, blog post, dead tree book, a news­let­ter, a webinar, an applic­a­tion or wid­get – and that’s just for starters. Of course, you don’t have to do the lot but by widen­ing out the media you use you will widen the reach and increase the effect­ive­ness of search.

And dis­trib­ute everywhere

There are so many dis­tri­bu­tion options for con­tent it’s stag­ger­ing. For PDF-like mater­ial (docs and present­a­tions) – check out Slide­share, Scribd, HubPages, Author­stream and Slide­boom. For video there is, of course, You­Tube (where you can cre­ate a branded chan­nel quickly and eas­ily) but also Vimeo, Daily­mo­tion and a bunch of oth­ers. For pod­cast­ing, there are iTunes, Pod­cast Alley and many more. And for com­munity there are LinkedIn, Biznik, Face­book or, if you want to cre­ate your own, Ning.

Then there’s pro­mo­tion which can cover everything from tra­di­tional media through to rich online media hous­ing your con­tent and on to Twit­ter, blogs, RSS, Deli­cious, Digg, StumbleUpon – the list goes on and on.

The trick, once again, is to take a hol­istic view of your entire pro­gramme. Although, import­antly, to also relin­quish con­trol allow­ing your audi­ences to share and dis­trib­ute your con­tent too.

Isn’t all this just thought lead­er­ship in new clothes?

Well yes and no. Thought lead­er­ship is a legit­im­ate and laud­able aim of a con­tent mar­ket­ing pro­gramme. But it is not the only aim. The end res­ult of pretty much any con­tent mar­ket­ing pro­gramme should be the per­cep­tion that you are the go-to people to talk to. How­ever, pure play thought lead­er­ship is not the only game in town.

If we have all learned any­thing in the last couple of years, it’s that com­munity mat­ters. Con­sumer gen­er­ated con­tent has already gained adop­tion in B2C. And B2B itself has a long his­tory of round tables and testi­mo­nial case stud­ies. What this means is that it is not always neces­sary to be the thought leader as long as you know the people who are and can get access to their heads and opinions.

5 approaches to try for starters

There are numer­ous approaches you can take to begin devel­op­ing a con­tent mar­ket­ing pro­gramme. Here are 5 to get you going:

1. Grow your own expert – every busi­ness has a few experts (in B2B they tend to have more than a few). Find yours and use their brain(s) mer­ci­lessly. If they are artic­u­late and present­able, use the rest of them too. Just make sure you remem­ber this is about help­ing cus­tom­ers (not show­ing off).
2. Rent someone else’s expert – short on experts? Need greater impar­ti­al­ity? Speak to an ana­lyst house to help you cre­ate high value con­tent without it being tain­ted by the sus­pi­cion of spin.
3. Make a stand – what do you hate in the mar­ket? More import­antly, what do your cus­tom­ers hate? Take a stand, rail against it, begin a movement.
4. Research – tra­di­tional or social research can arm you with invalu­able con­tent and an excuse to engage cus­tom­ers and pro­spects. Make it really good and it could get you on Radio 4.
5. Com­munity of gurus – bring cus­tom­ers and part­ners together to cre­ate a thought lead­er­ship com­munity. Run invitation-only sum­mits and round tables. Cre­ate a home for them online. Hang a forum off it for every­one else to get involved. Poll for opin­ion and incor­por­ate it into the discussions.

There are of course many, many other options.

I’ll leave you with a final round up:

• Con­tent is an import­ant tool for today’s B2B marketers
• It is fun­da­ment­ally about help­ing cus­tom­ers achieve more
• You need to take a hol­istic view
• Think once, cre­ate many
• Dis­trib­ute everywhere

With the next Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit just a couple of days away, one ques­tion to ask is once you’ve got the leads, then what?

For clas­sic B2B sales this often ends up in a con­ver­sa­tion around the hand-off pro­cess to sales and closed loop mar­ket­ing. But just as import­ant a ques­tion is: is your web­site play­ing its part?

Over on Con­ver­sion Rate Experts they have an excel­lent art­icle of the worst offend­ers when it comes to killing a lead stone dead. These include:

• The ‘empty cart’ but­ton posi­tioned where you’d expect the ‘sub­mit’ button
• The ‘too easy to click’ but­ton (or hover state) where you have to have the pre­ci­sion of a ninja to select what you need
• Ses­sion expir­ies (I’m glad this one is on because it sends me postal)

It’s a great art­icle and they are also look­ing for sub­mis­sions for a hall of shame.

Image by Mugley on Flickr