Posted on 29 April 2010 by Hurol No Comments

Is your digital content working hard enough?

How many clicks do you hope to get when you send out a digital newsletter? Do you expect your customers to follow the links through to three or four different articles?

From our observations, most users will only click on one link in your newsletter or EDM. Put simply, they’ll read only one article or news item, and then they’re gone.

This sobering statistic sheds light on the criticality of content. What will the outcome of that all-important, solitary “click” be? Will it deliver the user deep into the appropriate section of your website, where they will find exactly what they are looking for?

Read more

Posted on 29 July 2009 by Hurol No Comments

Using faceted search to sift through soil products

Overview

Camden Soil Mix provides products and services to customers in horticulture, agriculture, viticulture, civil works and commercial landscaping; as well as services in earth management to local councils.

Customers rely on the diverse range of sustainable, organic products on offer, and need the ability to find the right product to suit their growing or landscaping application.

Following acquisition by WSN Environmental Solutions, the business undertook a market analysis and segmentation project and, from this, developed a focused strategy to engage key categories of customers. They sought to re-design the website with these customers top of mind – so that each market segment could find what they were looking for quickly and easily.

Bienalto was engaged to devise the new site. The resulting architecture – which utilises faceted search on the WordPress platform – intuitively guides customers to the products they seek; whilst remaining supportive of WSN’s design aesthetic and sustainability focus.

Read more

Posted on 6 November 2008 by Hurol 3 Comments

Does your site need a search engine?

When was the last time you were frustrated by a poorly performing site search function? Chances are, it wasn’t too long ago.

There’s a prevailing attitude amongst web users out there: site search doesn’t work. It’s not surprising, given the common practice of ‘let’s chuck a search engine on our site’ without planning how it should work.

If it doesn’t work, then why bother? Why should you include site search, when it requires a reasonable investment to implement and maintain?

Read more

Posted on 21 May 2008 by Hurol No Comments

Multivariate testing: what, how, why

Lots of companies direct their campaigns to landing pages, but very few use multivariate testing (MVT) to optimise these pages.

Yet MVT, when done right, can greatly enhance the page’s performance.

Read more

Posted on 17 April 2008 by Hurol No Comments

Using site search analysis in integrated marketing

Two years ago, in my book Search Analytics, I said that “the quality of onsite search is poor and the idea that it can be studied to optimise websites is yet to reach critical mass acceptance.”

I lamented the fact that site search was a vastly neglected – yet eminently useful – tool on company websites.

So what’s changed in two years?

Read more