New predictive models bring advanced online marketing research within reach of small and mid-sized businesses
Do you know what your site visitors see when they come to your site?
Unless you’re a marketer with a Fortune 500 company with an Internet marketing research budget of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for user experience research, chances are the answer is “no.”
Without a huge budget for research, small and mid-sized businesses used to have to rely largely on educated guesswork and, potentially, months’ worth of A/B testing in the real world to optimize their Web site’s ability to generate leads.
But now Fruition can help you start to optimize your site pages, with evidence-based research, before your site has even launched. And at a price – this is the game-changing part – that small and mid-sized businesses can afford.
Here’s the deal.
Traditionally, if you wanted to know what visitors are paying attention to on your site, you’d do what’s called an eye tracking study. Basically, you’d recruit a bunch of people to come into a lab and look at your page or pages. You’d use specialized software and a camera to track where people’s eyes went when they looked at your page and how long they focussed on given areas of the page.
Then you’d analyse all of the data from all of the people and create what’s called a heat map that shows the areas of your page that people focus on and the areas that they don’t notice.
The image at the top of this post is a sample of a heatmap.
And here’s a video that gives a good overview of what traditional eye tracking studies are all about:
This was (and is) awesome stuff. If you can make sure that the important, revenue-driving calls to action on your site get a lot of attention from your visitors, you can increase the Return on Investment from your Web site tremendously. It’s sort of the Internet marketing Holy Grail.
We’ve seen eye tracking studies double or even triple conversion rates for sites. That’s a 2x or 3x increase in the leads or sales generated by a Web site. That’s huge.
The only problem is that these studies are expensive. So mostly it was (and is) only big companies that have been able to afford them.
And that’s a problem if you happen to be running a not-so-big company’s Internet marketing but you still want to see big increases in the leads or sales your site generates.
Fruition’s found a way to solve that problem.
We’ve partnered with a company that’s developed a technology based on neuroscience research out of CalTech, USC and the Institute of Cognitive Science in Osnabrück, Germany.
“50% of all Web site visitors don’t buy because they can’t find what they’re looking for”
– Shane Cassells, Google
This technology lets us deliver most of the benefits of live eye tracking studies, but at a fraction of the cost.
Put in simple, non-neuroscientist terms, here’s how it works.
Our partner has taken the results from hundreds of actual eye tracking studies and used them to create a computer-based model that – with remarkable accuracy – predicts the results what people will pay attention to on your page.
So we can take a mock-up of your page – or better yet, a couple of different versions of your page design – upload it to our partner, and within 5 minutes have a really good sense of how well your key messages will connect with visitors.
How accurate is this model?
They’ve compared their predictions against the results of actual live eye tracking studies for the same pages and found there’s a 90% or better accuracy rate.
Here’s an example comparison. The image on the left is a heat map from an actual eye tracking study; the image on the right is from the predictive model. You can see how the predictive model accurately anticipates the 3 key areas where visitors’ attention goes.
That’s pretty accurate.
So what does that mean to you as a marketer or business owner?
It means that when you work with Fruition, we can quickly and affordably help you to get inside your prospects’ heads and understand what they’re paying attention to on your site and what they’re missing.
And it means that we can – again, quickly and affordably – help you to make sure that the parts of your site that create real, measurable business value for you (leads, sales, etc) are the parts of your site that people see.
The bottom line, as always, is the bottom line – more leads, more sales, less cost.
[ctaw]
