10 things I hate about your website
Website annoyances are driving some customers away from online commerce - and most of the time the business has no idea they have gone writes Simon van Wyk.
A recent survey conducted by US ISP Hostway has revealed some interesting behavioural trends that happen when a website cheeses off a potential customer.
According to more than 2,500 web users surveyed by the company in July, the top 10 pet peeves are:
- Popup ads
- The need to install extra software to view a site
- Dead links
- Registration pages that block content
- Slow-loading pages
- Out-of-date content
- Confusing navigation
- Ineffective site search tools
- No contact information available on a web form
- Inability to use the browser’s ‘back’ button
If people get annoyed with a website, here’s what they’re most likely to do (with response percentages):
- Refuse to visit the site again (76.7% somewhat or extremely likely)
- Unsubscribe to promotions or messages from the company (74.2%)
- Refuse to purchase from that website (71.0%)
- View the company in a negative way (71.3%)
- Complain about the website to friends/associates (54.9%)
- Refuse to purchase from the company’s bricks-and-mortar store (45.1%)
- Take no action (30.7%)
- Complain to the company (24.8%)
Hostway VP John Lee said, “The Internet has matured to the point where consumers demand an easy online experience”. Consumers are warning companies, ‘You’re going to lose my business if your website experience is annoying.’”
“These results clearly show that consumers will make a behavioural change if they encounter a website that annoys them,” notes Lee. “In the context of this research, businesses have the opportunity to analyse their websites and make appropriate changes.” The interesting information in this list is at the bottom, not the top. While it’s not surprising that more than three-quarters of peeved customers would refuse to visit the site again, it’s worrying that only one-quarter would complain to the company. That means 75% of the customers who aren’t happy with your website won’t tell you about it - though more than half will tell their friends.
The takeaway from this survey is that, along with avoiding popups, extra software and dead links, companies need to put more effort into garnering site feedback, or risk losing customers with no way of knowing they’ve been lost.
Blog your way to better customers
In contrast to the conventional wisdom that people who read blogs are students and the unemployed, a study by Internet research firm comScore has revealed that blog readers are both wealthier and spend more money online than non-blog readers.
Blog readers are 11% more likely than the average Internet user to be earning US$75,000 or more, and they’re also 11% more likely to be using broadband. More than 50% of blog readers shopped online during the first quarter of 2005, compared to less than 40% of the total Internet population. That means blog readers are 30% more likely to shop online.
The average blog reader viewed 77% more pages than the average Internet user who doesn’t read blogs, and blog readers average 23 hours online per week, compared to the overall Web user’s average of 13 hours.
Business blogs only account for 3% of blog traffic (obviously they didn’t survey readers of the HotHouse blog!), while 43% of traffic was to news and political blogs and 17% to ‘hipster’ blogs (I believe they mean blogs for people who are ‘hip’, not blogs about low-riding jeans).
“The fact that we found 30% of the online population to have visited blogs clearly underscores the commercial importance of consumer generated and driven media,” said comScore VP Dan Hess. “While the blog audience is already quite large and growing, its demographic composition relative to the total population will appeal to many marketers.” And not just marketers who wear low-riding jeans, I might add.
Intra-story ads confuse readers
The placement of ads in online newspaper stories doesn’t appear to affect readers’ perceptions of an e-newspaper’s credibility, though inserting them into the middle of stories can confuse, according to research conducted by professors at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism.
The researchers analysed the responses of 114 e-newspaper readers after they read news stories with ads placed at the beginning, middle or end of the story. The research found that although readers remembered ads appearing in the middle of a story most, this may indicate a blurring effect, or readers not being able to distinguish advertising from editorial content.
They concluded that placing an ad in the middle of a story had the most harmful effect on the readers’ attitudes toward the sponsor, while attitudes toward sponsors that placed ads at the end of a story were the most positive, according to the study.
Meanwhile, Australian print newspaper publishers have admitted they have yet to work out how to make money out of their online properties. Responding to a poll showing that Australians aged 18-29 are spending up to 40% of their media time online, John Fairfax Holdings group executive Alan Revell told the Sydney Morning Herald that the Internet “is a young medium and one of the first things you have to do is attract your audience and then work out how best to monetise them. I think most publishers are still somewhere along that curve.”
Girls, games and gravitas
This item has no apparent application for business, but offers (slightly disturbing) insight into human behaviour. The Lycos 50, a list of the most-searched terms on the Internet, recently celebrated its 10th birthday by revealing the top 50 search terms of the last 10 years.
It’s a fascinating look at what people are looking for on the Web, although by looking at the list the most obvious conclusion is that the average search user is a hormonal teenage boy. The top five search terms were Pamela Anderson, Dragonball (a video game), Pokemon, Britney Spears and World Wrestling Entertainment.
Princess Diana, Jennifer Lopez and Anna Kournikova also figure prominently, while more politically-related searches included September 11 (number 9), OJ Simpson (26), NASA (38), War in Iraq (40), Osama bin Laden (42) and JFK Jr & Carolyn Bessette (49). Mobile phone ringtones didn’t make the list, but tattoos did (all the way up to number 6). George Bush didn’t make it, but Oprah Winfrey did (44) - I’m not going to speculate on the implications of that one.
Another report released at about the same time announced Australia’s most-watched TV programs over the past 50 years. Princess Diana took out both the first and third spots (with more people tuning in to make sure she was dead than watching her wedding), with the Sydney Olympics, Lleyton Hewitt’s appearance in this year’s Australian Open final and Australia’s appearance in the Rugby World Cup final making up most of the rest of the top ten. Which I guess shows that hormonal teenage boys watch Australian sport on television while waiting for their photos of Pamela Anderson to download!