Relevancy.org

The Long and Winding Road, a Yahoo + OMD recent study, reveals a lot about today’s user behavior during its daily online and offline consumerism.

By way of multi-channel surfing, in-market consumers are gathering information all the way well before any intend to really buy what they are looking for.

Search plays a large role into that data amalgam as it is used to help gather the many bites and pieces needed for a prospective consumer to make up his mind about one’s product or service.

No more is the road to purchase a strait path or a gentle curve (funnel). Today, the shopping experience now ressembles a series of detours (tumbler) that truely symbolizes the way the brain thinks; doubtful and assertive. Simply said: human.

Looking for the keywords used to search lead to a better knowledge of the prospective visitor. That helps understand its personality and build a persona out of it… Do you follow me?

Enter persuasion architecture (PA) which look for a visitor to act according to a pre-planned scenario, a path of sucessives call-to-action and interactions to engage him into a dialogue.

Take 5 minutes to evaluate yourself: Take the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II

Who is the inner self?

According to a recent Shop.org study, the average conversion rate is declining in major retail sites since 2002.

IF with

• recent site redesigns,
• better ecommerce technology,
• almost real-time web analytics and
• broadband access now common for most users,

the capacity to convert is not gaining traction.

THEN it is NOT a question of technology.

Engage early each of your site visitors with a relational initiative to gain mind share and possibly a conversion or risk loosing him to the category killer whom cannot be beaten on price.

Analysis of a user session at a search engine suggest that is short in time and very superficial in its depth.

Usually, most web searches are initiated with up to three keywords. No more than three queries are performed by one user during the same search session. During those queries, only one term is modified either by remplacement, substraction or addtion

Only the two first results pages (at 10 sites per page) are viewed by web users with the most clicked hyperlinks being located in the top five results of the first results page.

Today search behavior analysis shows 3 growing trends:

• shorter session time (fewer minutes spent searching),
• minimal query modification (by one term within same search session)
• surface skimming in regard to consultation of search results (fewer results pages viewed).

This decrease in interactivity signifies that web visibility is narrowing. Increased efforts will be needed as the limited number of top positions are under greater stress from competition with fewer web users willing to venture past the first page of results.