by Ron Richards, President, ResultsLab

The Moments of Truth for 3 kinds of people
and what can be done about these moments
to multiply results for publishers and advertisers

Your Visitors

Boredom
User testing is best done partly by sitting next to users representing the target population, watching their every action, and interviewing them about their self-talk. You can find the things that are the opposite of grabbers -- the things that bore them, or that make them feel dumb, lost and confused. These are trance states from which people escape by thinking about other more useful or interesting activities -- many of which are a few clicks or keystrokes away.

Web users are the antithesis of a captive audience. 

Therefore, it’s important not only to have a page full of grabbers, but to purge the non-grabbers, the poison language and graphics, the “zeros in the equation.” See The Multiplier Principle.

As a stimulus to creativity, imagine creating so many grabbers offering urgent learning -- and so little boredom -- that the user feels like a starved person feeding on a smorgasbord table full of their favorite dishes. That way they’ll fill their plate, and come back for many helpings.

Fascination, Not Just Interest
In preparing to train on-line magazine editors in grabber writing and editing, I wanted to show them a higher standard of visitor fascination.  So I described 10 Levels of Grabber Power.  For each level, I described the visitor’s self talk. 

I picked a reference point of, “Maybe I’ll read this some time,”  and gave it the nominal multiplier of 1.0x.  “Fascinating” I gave a multiplier of 2.5x -- expressing my belief that clickthroughs on that link would be 2.5x more.  “So what?” I gave a multiplier of .5x  You may be surprised by the self talk that’s far better and far worse than these levels.

To show the surprising leverage of this issue, I gave my wild guess at the multiplier for each of the 10 levels.  See The Multiplier Principle for an explanation of what I mean by multipliers, amplifiers (helpful), and attenuators (harmful). Then see four sections full of Grabber Development insights, and examples of grabbers before and after our improvements.

Having everyone on the development team sensitized to the upside and downside potential can have quite an effect on how the site is created and edited.

Clickthroughs and Link Strategy
Providing links and getting clicks are seductive goals for Web architects.  Sometimes they seem to be what the Web is all about.  But it isn’t so.

Depending on the site, the higher goals are for your visitors to be guided to pages they really need, and be reinforced by the content once they arrive at those pages.

You want them to have a feeling of freedom, while also having a sense of being well guided.  And for their sake and yours, you want to be sure they get your sites core content -- some of which may be prerequisite to their understanding and being persuaded by other content.

If your site has some persuasion goals, you may prefer that they stay a while in your site (or stay on your core-information pages), and not flit to some other page -- seduced by the links you provided. Many of these higher goals argue for fewer links, fewer clicks, and flatter structures.

I admit it; I like getting visitors to click.  It makes those fascinating tracks on clickpath tracking reports that let you know you have caused something. In fact, it’s the continuing primary measure of what interested visitors the most, and can lead to further improvements.

But every link can hurt or help -- as it plays it’s inescapable roles of: graphic attention getter, piece of grabber language, invitation to leave the current flow of reading/viewing (perhaps never to return), and a chunking tool (into too large or too small bites).  Some of the implications for site development are in my two Link Architecture sections which provide insights on link roles and strategies, as well as providing examples.

Understanding the roles of links and how they can help or hurt enables a site architect to explore which Link strategies maximize results.  All the following link strategy questions are explored in depth within Link Architecture.  I offer the questions here as a useful overview and checklist of key development challenges that must be addressed:
 

1. What’s the best balance between linear presentation and hyper webbing?
    
2. What’s the best chunk size for information, which determines how many links and whether you have a flat or a deep site structure?
    
3. How do you use links to guide visitors rather than confuse them with linkmania?
    
4. How do you use headings and graphics to sell the link clusters? 
    
5. How can you give readers non-confusing access all at once to multiple levels of the site?
    
6. How much and where should links be repeated, and in which of the many possible formats?
    
7. When should you use anchor links to guide them to another point in the same page?
    
8. What to do about the fact that every link on a page competes with the other links, risking drawing visitors away from your core content?
    
9. How can you let visitors recognize immediately that they have arrived at the intended target page?
    
10. Where, in your precious site real estate,  should you place your links?
     
11. How can you use proper link chunking and other tools to cause printouts to not break awkwardly?
     
12. How can you use links to cross sell other areas of the site, without losing people in the process?

Time Spent
For a database site like Amazon.com, it’s vital to meet the visitors’ goal of getting information fast. Thus their 1-click ordering method, and their partnering with other sites that recommend books -- arranging for the partner site to be linked directly to that book’s description and ordering page in the Amazon site.

But Amazon also greatly expands that relationship by cross selling within their own site. Therefore, another goal is to encourage more visitors to browse recommendations and search for authors and titles -- spending more time shopping in the store.

For corporate sites, and publication sites, time spent tends to be a good measure of interest, involvement, and relationship. If a large segment of visitors spend a lot of time, it’s not likely because those visitors are lost. A lost or bored visitor will usually bail out quickly.

Time spent usually correlates with page views which correlates with ad impressions delivered, another reason to keep visitors involved in the site.  So, how do you do it?

The key, yet again, is great Grabbers and making more things accessible through Link Architecture.

Thinking about the site
If enough people are thinking about your site when they’re not in your site, your traffic will soar.  That’s because thinking about the site is a step on the behavioral path to accessing it, and because it leads to talking about it with others.

The key to getting your site remembered and thought about is understanding stimulus-response chains.  To stick with our Amazon example, what if Amazon could do something to increase the likelihood that someone thinking of a problem thought of books; and having thought of books, thought of Amazon; and having thought of Amazon, thought that Amazon would have the book, be a labor-saving way to get it fast, and be well priced.

Or, for another prospect segment, the Amazon stimulus-response chain might start with the prospect thinking of what gift to give.  In that case, the chain might have additional elements on the end -- for example thoughts of the ease of having the book shipped with a card to the recipient, trackability, etc.

There are many techniques to use within a site to build such stimulus-response linkages in the mind. And of course, there are many to use in advertising messages.

For example, I have fallen in love with evolutionary biology, artificial life, and genetic programming. When I’ve gone to the biggest bookstores with a bibliography in hand, they have fewer than 1 in 5 of the books I’m drooling to read.  But my Amazon experience has built a stimulus response chain such that each tick mark on a bibliography is, in my mind, a note to order that book next time I’m visiting Amazon.

For the same reasons, there are negative stimulus-response chains.  When I walk by a traditional bookstore, the stimulus of the store produces a response in my mind of “Might be fun to browse, but too much trouble.”

Positioning, and Fundamental Human Desire, are at the heart of building stimulus-response chains in the visitor’s mind so they’ll think about you when they’re not in the site. In addition a lot of the “getting them to think about the site” work is done through quotes, which we’ll discuss in the third Moments of Truth page and in How to Get and Use Quotes to Double Response.

Action
A relationship is built on many actions, each leading to the next in a chain that’s as strong as its weakest link.

Do your prospects visit, drill deep, bookmark, revisit, e-mail or phone you, order, meet, agree, sign, buy, and buy again -- to name a few of their most important actions?

Since such visitor actions can cost you labor, phone money, and postage, you want some actions to be taken only by qualified visitors. The issue of when you should use techniques that increase clicks on your ads and links, and into your site, are discussed in depth (and quantified) in my Empty Calories Paradox.  Some of the tradeoffs proposed there may surprise you.

One idea is to say things on your site that will cause the unqualifieds to disqualify themselves.

As I review sites, I notice that much more could be done to prompt action, while also causing people to self-screen.  Few sites tell the visitor who should appropriately respond and why, at what stage they should respond, what kind of person will handle their response, how quickly they’ll hear back and in what form, what will (and won’t) be done with any information they submit, and that the company welcomes their inquiry.

I believe one of many things that sustains Microsoft’s dominance and growth is the way they handle people who reach out to them. I am struck by how quickly the tech support phone is answered, how professional and unhurried the expert advice is, and (to my constant amazement) how they thank you for calling at the end of every call.  Even software users who would rather not deal with Microsoft -- out of envy, resentment, or fear of their power -- are loath to give up such goodies.

Your site could do a tremendous amount of both action triggering and screening.

1. Developers:  Managers, architects,
    designers, authors, editors, webmasters
2. Your visitors     < Above  on this page
3. Your word-of-mouth allies     < Continue here

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