Looking at your site’s conversion rate seems to be a forgotten measure of a successful Web strategy. Instead, it’s more common to hear “we need more traffic”.

The conversion rate of a Web site is simply the ratio of the number of visitors who complete an action to the number of visitors who view the site. For example, if you had 30 sales out of 500 visitors your conversion rate would be 6% = 30/500.

If you actually had a conversion rate of 6%, you should be happy. The reality is most sites will have a conversion rate of less than 0.5%. This means you need 200 visitors to generate one sale.

Before ramping up an online marketing assault, it makes sense to improve your conversion rate first. An average pay-per-click visitor might cost you around two dollars. Working with the scenario above, if you wanted 10 sales you need to invest $4,000 in pay-per-click advertising.

If you could improve your Web site conversion rate from 0.5% to 2% you would only need to invest $1,000 to achieve the same result. Likewise, for the $4,000 investment you’d yield 40 sales instead of 10.

Let’s say your objective for the year was to achieve 10 sales per week:

Scenario A (0.5% Web site conversion rate)

520 sales = 104,000 visitors * 0.5% conversion rate
104,000 visitors * $2 ppc cost = $208,000 investment

Scenario B (2% Web site conversion rate)

520 sales = 26,000 visitors * 2% conversion rate
26,000 visitors * $2 ppc cost = $52,000 investment

The difference in investment between scenario A & B to achieve 520 sales is $156,000

There’s lot of assumptions in this example, and every Web site business is different, but principle of conversion is universal. The bottom line is; if your conversion rate is low, it’s an expensive exercise to increase sales just by driving more traffic to your web site.

Investing to improve your conversion rate through quality Web design & strategy creates leverage and a significant return on investment.

Tim Fouhy, Managing Director, Australia

Labels: Process and Methodology, Web marketing

Ever since blogging began there has been a debate over whether or not business bloggers should allow others to add comments to their blog posts. This has recently become extremely topical to us, as we engage in debate over our new Reactive blog.

Weighing in on the pro side of comments is the Web 2.0 community at large. The entire ethos of Web 2.0 is enabling the community to create content, it is the take-up of this ethos that have driven the success of community-content sites such as Wikipedia, Flickr and MySpace. In particular, Wikipedia’s content is continuously evolving, and is the result of the collective knowledge of all of its visitors. Enabling comments is, without doubt, the ‘right thing to do’ to stay on the good side of Web 2.0.

Another key argument for enabling comments is the business benefits of hearing what the public (and customers) have to say. This has been used effectively by many companies for research purposes, effectively the blog becomes an unpaid focus-group (presuming you can attract enough comment to get a broad sample).

However, there is plenty of argument for the con side of allowing comments. The most obvious gut reaction being: ‘what if people say bad things about us?’ This may sound over-protective, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where a disgruntled staff member or a competitor starts posting negative comments. If you allow comments on your blog, it is considered extremely poor form to then moderate those comments. Although another downside of comments is comment-spam, automated (or manual) entries promoting commercial sites. These are a tiresome annoyance, and lower the credibility of your blog in the eyes of the visitors, and also in the eyes of Google.

Seth Godin caused a stir recently when he removed comments from his blog. He removed them primarily because he didn’t have time to read (let alone respond) to all of the comments, but not every blogger is fortunate enough to have the number of readers that Seth does.

Clearly there are no right or wrong answers, and here at Reactive the jury is still out. We launched the Reactive blog without comments, but soon we are going to enable them for a trial period. Hopefully anyone reading this will weigh into the conversation, and let me know their thoughts on whether we should allow comments or not. Be nice :)

Tim O'Neill, Managing Director, United Kingdom

Labels: Web Culture and Trends

Reactive have noticed some websites coming to market that are primarily text based that have been developed entirely in Adobe Flash which led some of our team pose the question: Why would you do that, aren’t you creating a lot more work for yourself?As the Interaction Director at Reactive my first reaction is, 'why not?' For starters Flash works on all platforms in all browsers and will remain absolutely pixel perfect no matter what. As opposed to HTML/CSS sites which currently need to be tested, tweaked and retested in a minimum of 6 browsers across two operating systems. If you need more reasons see my entry: Tackling the thorny issues with Adobe Flash.

The example cited is http://www.pierinc.com/ a company that develops online applications using Adobe Flex and there in lies the primary reason for delivering their entire website in this manner: If you aren’t using the technology then you are going to have a tough time selling it to clients.With the latest release of Adobe Flex companies have the ability to quickly and efficiently deliver these applications on an enterprise level utilising the agile development model with a Flash front-end which will not have any of the issues prevalent in CSS.

Flex is a server side code based on xml which allows you to write and deploy flash based applications like pier in a very short timeframe. It is specifically designed for use with modular/component based systems/sites where you write the component; let's say the "news module" and then you just have to write something like this for your home page
Code for Pier site (very simplified):

This would grab the components and build them on the fly on the server and the deliver them to the client making it more efficient.

Find out more about Adobe Flex here

Yahoo maps using Flex

And the hard sell

The primary reasons Reactive does not utilise Flex is the current license cost of $20,000USD per CPU and the extensive use of component based development process which does deliver a more robust solution but the ramification is an increase in the time lines a decrease in flexibility and of course an increase on the bottom line.

The advantage of Flash sites in general however is that they can deliver a much more seamless user experience with a higher degree of feedback and a quicker delivery of specific requests, currently known as Rich Internet Applications. A couple of great examples developed by Reactive using Flash include, Global Corporate Challenge and Ferguson Plarre's Design-a-Cake.

With cManager, the new Reactive Content Management System (CMS), Web-Services and good use of Object Orientated coding practices we have developed a quick way of rolling out data driven flash websites.

Dan Oxnam, Interaction Director

Labels: Design and Usability, Technology

A couple of quick thoughts on what I see as the three thorny issues when it comes to Adobe Flash websites: Accessibility, Search-ability and the back button.

Accessibility
In my experience making Flash websites accessible is not because you can’t it is because of the cost implication for the client of pursuing this process. (According to WebAim you can make them (flash sites) more accessible than html )

Search-ability
Reactive have addressed the second issue of searchable flash sites with the Release of cManager 3.0 delivering a static version of the site for search-bots and then using server side redirection to deep link to pages within the site.

Back button
In the past it has been virtually impossible to make the back button function from flash sites meaning that one of the primary user navigation tools was disabled. With a bit of tweaking and bashing our heads together Reactive have managed to come up with a solution which works in almost all the current browsers (some of them just don’t meet the standards…) meaning that users can now browse through a site as they would html and bookmark/email pages of interest.

What does this mean?
It means there is absolutely no reason not to develop your site using all the power and potential of Adobe Flash. Reactive can help you deliver an accessible, Google indexable, searchable, bookmark friendly, back button enabled and content managed website.

What more could you ask for?

Dan Oxnam, Interaction Director

Labels: Design and Usability, Technology