Pictures - To Zoom or Not To Zoom
If you include pictures of your products, people, facilities, etc. on your site, ensure that site visitors can easily zoom in or expand on the pictures. Evidence shows that if site visitors can get a good visual representation of what they are interested in, then they are happier with the site and typically more successful in their visit. Here are a couple of examples. One of our customers is an online retail gift site. They have the functionality on their site to be able to click a button to make any gift display in a larger separate window so the visitor can get a good look at it. When we analyzed the click stream data of the site visitors we found that 526 of the 1704 site visitors (31%) viewed the larger images of gifts.
This population reported a success rate of 51% and a failure rate of 29%. When we looked at the 69% of visitors who did not view larger images they reported a success rate of only 42% and a failure rate of 37%. That’s a huge difference! So you might think, yeah that makes sense for gifts but I’m a hospitality company and my visitors don’t need big pictures of rooms or hotels. Not so fast! We looked at the population of visitors to 2 hotel sites and analyzed their suggestions for improvement of the sites. Along with the usual “make it easier” and “lower rates” there were a surprising number of comments about pictures. Here are some examples:
- “It’s very hard to decide on reserving a room without any visual idea of what the hotel is going to look like.”
- “Add pictures of the rooms. It is nice to see pictures.”
- “Photos of the hotel and rooms could be a bit larger.”
- “Add some pictures of the lobby area, meeting area and most important - rooms.”
- “The pictures are teensey.”
Our advice: Include pictures on your site wherever it might be appropriate. Add the functionality to allow folks to view a larger image or close-up if they want to. It will have a dramatic positive effect for a good percentage of your site visitors.
It may be OK that they leave
Conventional thinking is that you want people to visit your site often and stay for a long time. Makes sense. Also, conventional thinking is that pages on the site that people exit from are bad - they contain something that is turning the visitor away - causing them to leave the site prematurely. This can be totally misleading. We know from compiling over 10,000 aggregated unique site visits that only 14% of e-commerce site visitors come to a site with the intention to buy. We also know that 71% of e-commerce site visitors are only there investigating - either seeking product information or pricing and comparison shopping.
These folks are probably not going to buy in this visit because they want to check out your competition. It follows then, that they are going to leave the site at some place and may be totally happy with the page they left from. To prove the point we used our new path navigation analytical capability to analyze click stream data from an e-tailer’s site. We looked at the site visitors that were there to gather product information. Then we looked at their aggregated click stream for the population that went to product pages and then exited from the product page.
The visit success percentage of this group was 57%! This tells us that the exit pages - in general - weren’t causing a problem at all. Then we looked deeper - at the individual exit pages that were causing success and those that were causing failure. From this data we were able to isolate product categories that were causing problems and alert our customer to them. The message is that visitors exiting from a specific site location may not be symptomatic of a problem. A problem exists when they exit from specific areas and are unsuccessful in their visit to your site.