Here is the current list of features we expect to be in the public version:

1. 4 stage booking process
2. Autoresponder email confirming place/date with details and map link (Google Maps) to location.
3. Automated SMS sent 1 day prior to appointment with link back to a client-defined page
4. iCalendar interface for adding bookings, sent via an ordinary email address
5. Standard choice of 3 themes
6. High-quality soft-erroring on all stages
7. Reporting, covering number of people entering/completing each stage
8. Remember function to recall visitor details for repeat bookings
9. FAQ /Helper system
10. EU compliant privacy policy
11. Custom defined contents/fields/text/images

We’re pretty excited about this new application as it will be the first of a new family of standalone VITES applications that can be installed and used by non-technical staffers. It’s going to be a breeze to install and we’re sure you’ll see myBookingWizard generating the highest quality enquiries and bookings possible. Get signed-up now. Or follow the release on Twitter.

I think I have been naughty. I have completed the creation of the Big.TOE spec ready for formal sign-off… and I did it before looking in detail at the competition. Hmm, naughty indeed.

“But, but, but, I was really busy and everything was…” SHUT UP! Leave the excuses and move on. As it turns out we’re safe, and this is due to Big.TOEs collaborative element. Big.TOE had been guided by colleagues into a niche that not only exists, but suits our ethics here at Connected.

Phew, thanks guys!

So I spent a day looking at the competition in detail, and then sighed with relief. They are all so complicated. Even the free stuff. You’ve got to spend hours of annoying time-waste to get the answer to the simple question “How well are banners doing?”. And when you get the answer you’re surrounded by an infinite number of ways to see it. Very very naff and annoying.

Another ‘sigh-of-relief-inducer’ is that they nearly all use third-party cookies which a visitor can opt out of. Woah. What a way to undermine your reporting. Cue shameless Big.TOE plug:

• Big.TOE is server side reporting, so no third-party cookies.
• Big.TOE follows the principle of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) and will be bloody easy to use!!

So bring on the competition!

—-

This week we also delved a layer deeper into the inner workings of Big.TOE and gulped again.

Actually it doesn’t look too bad. We have a list of features for the first release and a technical plan (first draft) of how it will be achieved. There is some stuff to learn (like xml and excel) but it should piece together fine. The eye opener is how much bigger things look when you go deeper, it really is like descending from 30,000 ft.

—-

Well, now I have just gone and changed everything.

We – almost all of the company techs – were unanimously decided to base Big.TOE on XML. XML was to be the glue to stitch the different parts together. But now I have found something called Highcharts, which is just luuurvely. Its a 100% JavaScript graph building suite… and its luuurvely.

Highcharts is very attractive for many reasons; here are the main ones:

An example HighCharts Graph

• The graphs are just ace. The graphs are really really really ace!
• Its on the front end, offering tasty interaction between the graphs and the clients
• Very flexible with the data sent to them.
• Its JavaScript, giving opportunity to develop it, or tweak it.
• The graphs are just ace.

It can work with xml, but it doesn’t off the shelf. Now I want to use this, cos I like it. So I just have to persuade everyone else to agree to its loveliness. We can keep xml – if we still want it – for later upgrades. Trust me

Gulp.

How the hell can you ‘Project Manage’ a vague idea into a product? How do you start?… Well here is the thought process we (I got some help from the guys in the office cos I was blundering round like a blind dog) went through to turn the vagueness into something more solid, albeit still an idea:

1. We (Connected) decided we wanted something. We have been calling it BIG.Toe for a long time and everyone has a sense of what it is. A window into VITES, a face to VITES.
2. We looked at who we could sell it to – in fact – who we needed to sell it to.
3. We came to the conclusion of marketers.
4. We looked at who marketers were – ‘busy, non-tech etc…’
5. We looked at what general features marketers want (note we haven’t got a product yet).
6. We married what Big.TOE could provide to what marketers want (idea of product)
7. We populated a list of features that agreed on this marriage (a product)
8. We then broadly spec’d the product, which for us was mapping an interface, (note the spec was very broad indeed.)

Phew! Thanks guys we have an idea for a product!

—-

I had a milestone to present a scope accompanied by a spec to the boss which was coming up so that was the next stage. So I took the broad spec we drew up in the thinking-meeting the day before and completely annihilated it. I owned it. I questioned every aspect of it, attempting to keep the goals of Big.TOE in mind and I did a bloody good job. I managed to reduce a multi-page spec with drill down navigation down to three (yes 3) pages, with only 4 form fields, all in the aim of applying KISS. Our clients don’t want Big.TOE to be a complicated thing to use.

As it turned out I had missed a couple of elements… but that is fine. I talked about Big.TOE to my colleagues and these holes were quickly filled in. Essentially the spec had been through a transformation and had become more refined… It was good fun that. Whapap!

—-

Received some advice. “Be careful with time estimations“. You’re better off saying I don’t know, give me a day (or half a day) to make an estimate then blurting one out. People will hold you to an estimate; not to the minute, but if you’re 500% off – see linked article below – then you can end up in a world of pain.

Related articles

• Software development: dealing with awful estimates (programmers.stackexchange.com)

As time went by and as I learnt more, and learnt quickly, I received more in-depth answers on Big.TOE but they were still vague; it was never defined to me in the simple terms of ‘Big.TOE is this’. But over time I built a picture of what Big.TOE is or – more to the point – what it is going to be.

Big.TOE is going to be the best use of the data from VITES. Specifically it’ll be a reporting tool.

So, recently, Big.TOE was kicked off by inviting most of the guys for a meeting to discuss the ideas and goals of Big.TOE and to push it into production, I raised my hand to be the ‘project sponsor’, and I was selected. As this is my first project it was suggested that I write a diary… so here we are. The diary will follow in weekly installments.

Since the original specification for the world-wide web was drawn up in the 90′s by Tim Berners-Lee there is, remarkably, a ghost still haunting the Internet. It’s called the “HOME” page; we’ve all heard of it, we naturally assume that the page we land on when we click a link is the home page. The Internet has changed and gone are the days of arriving on a web-site looking for an index. We now live in a time poor world where we rely on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing to serve up good suggestions for where we go to next. They do this by indexing all the pages on the Internet (15 billion at the last count) and offering you one or two suggestions then they sell the rest of the space to companies willing to short-circuit their search algorithm.

These short-cuts, or PPC adverts as the world knows them, are pretty canny – they are often on the right track and in most cases make a fair stab as serving an advert appropriate to the search phrase you used. Ace; and what a business model as it will nett over £20bn in 2010 for Google alone.

One of the neat things about Adwords is that they don’t actually have to go to the home page. No, the advertiser can actually send the visitor anywhere they want. Over the last few years a special approach has evolved around providing neater landing zones for these (paid-for) visitors.

Deep-link pages

The first generation of thinking on this subject was to take visitors not to the home page but to a deeply-embedded page on the site that was more relevant to the search phrase. For example, a search for “laser hair removal” on Google could be sent to a product page talking more in-depth about laser hair removal. This worked. Typically, onsite conversion rates were 30-50% higher than sending people just to the home page.

They had flaws. This deep-link page actually has 2 sorts of audience now so needs to be designed to deal with both. The first type of visitor is the one that arrives directly from a PPC campaign, the second type is someone who has wandered around the site and found the page themselves.

Quite clearly, these two different audiences need two different styles of writing, content and actions. This mean’t creating pages that couldn’t have a focus on one type of visitor. The deep-link page was the first exposure for first-time visitors, the first time to impress them (5 seconds?) and stop them hitting [BackSpace] whilst for seasoned browsers they were well into the site and be prepared to give more time and effort to read the contents.

Landing pages

In early 2004 conversion rate experts were looking to improve on this and we saw the appearance of dedicated landing pages. These were designed with the single purpose of capturing the first time visitor and getting them to engage a little more so they would read further. Big, bold headlines and USPs around the search term were the order of the day.

As these pages became more sophisticated they got better at matching the search terms to the perceived need of the visitor, often reflecting the search term back into a series of bullet points. This is really the early foray into personalised marketing.

As the internet in general is more trusted, site visitors became comfortable leaving information on web-sites far earlier in the sales cycle. So we saw data capture forms and Buy-Now buttons starting to appear on these landing pages.

Compared to conventional deep-link pages these dedicated landing pages were a universal success. Typically you would expect a well-written landing page to convert 50% more visitors than deep-link landing pages.

There were a few other distinct benefits of using dedicated landing pages:-

1. The pages were lightweight, typically less than 50k in size and this reduced page-load time helped conversion rates greatly.

2. Google’s interesting policy of “rewarding” a higher position to landing pages that have greater relevance (quality score) meant that the landing page could be built with this in mind to further reduce the cost of Adword campaigns.

3. Campaigns could be run based on geo-based information such as Google local terms and search terms that included geographical references. Better geo-targetting produces better results.

4. Testing these landing pages was easy, you could easily create a raft of different landing pages and test them side-by-side. Even new campaigns could be raced against existing “banker” (proven) landing pages.

5. Companies could now create hundreds of landing pages for different scenarios, different times of day and different seasons. Personalisation was the key here. If you could segment your PPC traffic then you could segment where they landed the therefore how they were treated.

6. De-cluttering the landing pages was easy, traditional navigation items could be moved off the the page to generate a highly-focussed environment using an aggressive Choice Environment.

7. Reporting on success of landing pages was (on the face of it) simpler.

They did, however, suffer from being a one-trick pony. If the page didn’t work then the limited other navigation choices available can cause the visitor to [BackSpace] off the Landing Page and back to Google. Alternatively the visitor would find the odd link to “visit Main site” and then be dumped back on the home page or a deep-link page. The visitor may subsequently convert but it’s pretty unusual to track this conversion back to the Landing Page unless you have a visitor-centric web platform (ED: hey, you could try VITES…that would allow you to do that).

Landing Microsites

Enter the 4th generation of PPC Landing policies. This rolls-up the benefits of single-focus Landing and Deep-link pages. The entrance point from PPC traffic is largely the same as dedicated landing pages but this page is supported by a number of other pages; all focussed around converting the visitor. There are two main approaches used in the creation of Landing Microsites.

Conversion support microsites

These are designed around a single conversion objective, such as acquiring an email address and name. The supporting pages are created to address any of the classic barriers to conversion and vary widely from market to market. Typical barriers to first-page conversion can include:

1. Uncertainty that the site is right for the visitor.

2. Fear that leaving information on the site might start a spam cycle.

3. Unreadiness to move along the sales cycle at this time.

4. Concerns about the reputation and quality of the company operating the site.

5. Time to complete the conversion process.

6. Inappropriate call-to-action that is not relevant to the visitor.

It’s not just barriers that need to be covered; the visitor may simply not have enough information about your organisation yet. For example, they may not know whereabout you are and how far away you are.

In supporting the conversion the additional pages must address the relevant issues and attempt to bridge the gap between thinking about converting to converting. As the needs in each sector vary wildly I won’t go into detail about how you might address the supporting pages. If you want to have an informal chat about how to go about uncovering the issues and how you might address them then please do give me a call on 0845 051 4228 or email me.

Here is a simple example of dealing with a very common barrier to conversion; item 2 – fear of a spam cycle. Assuming that your organisation is ethical, open and doesn’t plan to spam visitors then a good supporting page would be “we value your privacy - learn more about what we do with the details you leave“. This page should start in simple tones explaining what happens next, why and when. Further down the page you should then delve deeper into your privacy policy and then finally the page should finish off with the formal Data Protection policy.

Critically, the page needs to be interspersed with opportunities to convert; not everyone will need to read the whole page before they are satisfied that you are not a spammer.

Cascading conversion microsites

For many organisations there are various different levels of conversion and furthermore very few organisations have a 1 step sales process. This raises the possibility of attempting multiple conversions in and around a microsite. The simplest way you can visualise this is; imagine taking your existing web-site and strip out all the pages and content that are NOT designed to convert, then add back in the supporting pages as found in a conversion support microsite.

By way of example, your organisation’s conversion points may consist of:

1. Sign-up for special offers/newsletter; requiring email address only.

2. Find a place/venue/office/clinic/park; requiring a postcode only and maybe an email address.

3. Request information; requiring name, address (if physically posted), email, inside leg measurement and gender.

4. Book an event/meeting/space/place/call. This would typically require a great deal of information.

5. Contact us; maybe only needing an email address and a message.

6. Call me back; would require a name and a telephone number.

Each of the above conversion points gathers different data, raises different questions with the visitor and has different outcomes. In the example above I would suggest the most valuable would be 4 and the least valuable would be 1 or 2. Certainly, the visitor motivation difference between them is great and could be addressed using a cascade conversion approach.

Knowing that visitors become more predisposed to leave information the longer they interact typically you would want to start the microsite with the lightest touch conversion, maybe a simple sign-up should be the primary call-to-action. There should be links to other conversion pages but the key here is getting the visitor to interact early on and it’s easy to leave an email address to sign-up for special offers.

The next stage is to cascade the next conversion points into the back of the previous one. What this means in real terms is that the thanks page for the first conversion is the second conversion point and in turn down the line ending up with the last thanks page as the book an event/place. However, the system you use to deliver the cascade pages must be able to remember what stage the visitor is at since many will return again and again as they don’t convert on first visit.

So what we have now is a process whereby the visitor is nudged gently along the sales cycle with ever increasing momentum. By the time they are converting on the last stage they are mentally conditioned to simply move along to the next stage.

The future of conversion zones

What does the conversion of the future hold for us? In the short-term we will see wider adoption of cascading and supported micro-sites but what comes after that. Peering into the crystal ball I can see the some of the following:

1. On-advert conversion; the ability to convert the visitor without visiting a web-site – the conversion tools and process will be provided by the ad network provider.

2. Automated conversion; centrally storing visitor information is already happening (Facebook login?) but lets see that rolled out into a simpler conversion process…[click here to get information using your Facebook account]. One click, conversion done. This won’t be limited to just social networking, the growth of OpenId and other centralised passport systems will make the whole process of conversion simpler for the man and woman in the street, maybe at the expense of technological complexity for organisations.

3. Death of PPC, hello PPA. Clicks are becoming increasingly meaningless in the Internet world; much like website hits of the 1990s. What matters is conversion and some networks are already moving to acquisition-based pricing which involves the ad network in conversion. Pooling of these skills will generate an ad industry focussed on conversion and not on clicks. Coming soon.

4. Whole of life journey. As web personalisation takes off we’ll see the emergence of totally personalised web-sites; tailored around the needs of the visitor. This will, in essence, kill off traditional landing pages/zones and replace them with highly targeted and focused web entities built around the individual needs of every visitor. Nirvana, and available now at a cost; contact us to find out more.

Originally published by Martin Dower as 4 articles in 2009. Brought together and updated for 2011.

Related articles

• Good lessons in 250 A/B tests (connected-uk.com)

We all appreciate the huge benefits in conversion rates that personalised content brings and most organisations also appreciate the long-term value in continual testing and improvement. So what’s stopping every-day companies from joining this revolution is the lack of a simple and commercially-available platform to deliver this nirvana.

End of the flat-web society

Our clever and rather cool personalisation and test platform, VITES™, has been used in beta form by a number of leading online organisations since it’s inception in 2004. For the last year we’ve been busy behind the scenes re-writing the core application and adding a number of client-requested features.

So, coming in Q1 2011 is our latest release of VITES, Version 3.0. Packed with new features, improved client interface, better scalability and much faster performance. All this adds up to a better and easier way to join the exclusive world of a personalised web through personalisation, behavioural management, server-side A/B testing and visitor profiling.

Want to be a candidate for the latest release? Speak to Nick or Martin and we’ll give you the low-down on what you can expect to get and how it can help your business.

This is the third major release of our personalised web platform and is a major step forward in functionality, performance, interoperability, speed of development and simplicity. No longer do you need highly-skilled development teams to realise the benefits of a personalised web site; VITES 3.0 utilises a template-driven environment to speed up and simplify deployment, allowing marketers to get on with what they are good at.

Priced on a supported-license basis from £500 a month, VITES offers a highly affordable way to provide Amazon-type personalised content delivery and testing.

Centralised visitor database

The key element in managing a visitors flow through the site and the sales process is the central store. This database records every action, every source and every (useful) piece of information that can be gleaned from the visitor across the whole of his or her life. Keeping this database in-sync with your back-end CRM system is critical and a number of tried and tested plugin modules ensure the correct and timely replication of the right data across all your platforms.

Building the history of the visitor’s behaviour and actions opens the door to a high level of personalisation that in turn supercharges your conversion rates, decimates your bounces and dramatically increases the value per visitor.

Traffic profiling

All inbound traffic can be assigned a profile to monitor each stream and serve unique content to the visitor. Full reporting is provided and a robust inbound/outbound API system is deployed to ensure data is reliably moved throughout the visitor transaction chain.

Profiles form the cornerstone of how content and actions are deployed on the sites as every profile can have it’s own unique or shared content and actions.

A/B testing

A/B testing is a fantastic baseline product that every site should use. It is the fastest and most accurate way to determine which content and actions work best with visitors. Position, copy, CTA, width, colour or image changes have dramatic effects on conversion rates and VITES can help you test these modifications anywhere on your site. With the VITES A/B testing plugin , you can:

• Run unlimited tests simultaneously
• Queue up tests into your own magazine and let VITES “lock and load” the tests automatically
• Define the traffic splits across the test
• Configure any number of elements or actions on the page
• Identify winning content for each test created using a statistically robust report
• Automatically live the winning test

Segmentation

With the unique segmentation capabilities of VITES, online marketers serve different messages and content to traffic groups based upon attributes such as geographic location, traffic source, referring keyword, visitor history, time of day and much more. Once you’ve created your segments, you can run A/B tests within those segments to prove what works best. Segmentation gives you:

• Simple set up and management
• Segments matched to visitor profiles
• Incorporate useful information, including visitor history, environmental variable, day/week and many other variables
• Read and write back-end CRM and external data for improved granularity

Behavioural Targeting

Onsite behavioural targeting enables you to customise your web site to create the most welcoming, enticing destination for your visitors by utilising a wide data set and automatically making decisions about what image, text, CTA or content to show at a personal level. VITES technology powers our behavioural targeting solution and provides a strong foundation for continuously improving your conversion rates.

• Simple testing – lock and load the variations and set the tests running
• Learn in real time using statistically correct tools as visitor behavior and activity patterns emerge
• Compare the performance against the banker to accurately verify results

VITES 3.0 is targeted for Beta launch early in 2011 but if you wish to have access to the limited Alpha release then please contact us.

We’ve just finished our financial year and, feck me, it’s been a busy old year. I’ll do a fuller post highlighting how the year went in more detail but the big thing we’ve seen this year is the explosive growth and (almost) 100% adoption of web site testing. From just 35% of our clients embracing testing in our last FY.

The growth has been so dramatic that we actually completed over 250 individual tests in May, June and July versus just 100 in the same period last year. So what is being tested and what’s working?

1. Page load speed is still an important factor. Landing pages, especially, benefit from slimming classes and whilst the need to have skinny 16k versions seems to be less critical than last year the target is still under 40k as you can expect to achieve twice the conversion versus a 120k page.

2. Relevancy is now a prerequisite. Dedicated landing pages for advertising terms out perform generic home pages by a factor of 2 and edge in front of deep-links by 25%. It’s worth double checking your traffic supplier or Adwords campaign to ensure you don’t have any old orphan campaigns that go to non-dedicated pages, far too many still slip through the net and this costs your conversion rate heavily.

3. Video is starting to make in-roads into certain areas and, critically, at certain times of the day and to certain audiences. In a group of personalised tests we found that certain groups of visitors (eg those that have generic hotmail, MSN or yahoo email addresses) respond far better to video-based pages than standard landing versions. Its not just video, the time to start using profiling pro-actively has arrived and start serving differing landing and content pages to distinct groups. Personalized targeting has shown a typical 10% lift in conversion over non-personalized content.

4. Numbers rock. Testing quantitative versus qualitative in copy is starting to show that using hard numbers work much better than general (soft) marketing messaging. Be mindful that the numbers you use have to be impressive in the context of the visitors needs.

The biggest lesson is the big picture here, continual testing shows continual improvement without the expected plateau that you would think occur. In fact the reverse is true, testing a little can be dangerous as you run the risk of testing items that are too small or too insignificant – think big, be brave and keep a close eye on the numbers so you can cut failed tests and rev-up the successful ones.

I expect our testing load to double in the next year. Bring it on

We laugh now but in the mid 90′s, there was this crazy notion that if you put up a web-site, any old web-site, then the money came rolling in. Even more crazy is that it worked…by the bucket load. Then along came “big” marketing and dragged us down some odd “brand-orientated, synergy-busting and paradigm-shifting alley”. Most of us got lost. Lost in banner impressions, land-grab, click saturation and massive paranoia about “giving away the crown jewels”.

Sadly what had happened is that really good personal relationships and transparency got smacked over the back of the head by mass-market tactics and thinking. It was wrong and a few companies avoided the headlong charge into “flash banner pages“, curious navigation and obsessive prettiness. You’ll recognize the companies that stayed away from this party, names such as Ebay, Zappos and Google spring to mind – there are a thousand others.

During what I call the “dim ages” many companies flocked to the outpouring of flash designers and online brand consultants. I feel sorry for them, during that period (2000-2003) we lost a fair few high-profile clients as they created their animated works of art that nobody wanted to sit through (remember the link “skip intro” appear on a thousand home pages?)

The dim ages were broadly a copy of old mass-marketing or 1:x broadcast style marketing. But what made the t’interweb so good in the beginning was the sheer vertical nature of the content, it started pretty much as a 1:1 media and that was it’s success. Thankfully we are now starting to see a shift back towards a 1:1 Internet and that is where its future lies.

You simply MUST focus on the needs of the individual when thinking about your Internet strategy and that means, due to the volume and disparity of people using the web, you must have a web platform that can identify individuals and serve them personalised content.

There are various platforms available but only one commercially available with open APIs. VITES 3.0, code-named 1:1 Superhero, offers everything you need to serve up personalised content to each and every visitor to your site. Regardless of how they arrive at the site.

License costs start at £500 per month and implementation from around £20k for a full turnkey service to slide under your existing site seamlessly and open up a whole new world of sales, data and conversion opportunities.

Here is a brief outline of what you can expect in the next release of the worlds first, commercially available, personalisation and customer journey platform

• Faster core platform, requiring less server computing power and faster serving of content
• In-built AB testing functions, faster, easier testing of content, pages and call-to-actions
• Server load balancing, giving higher system availability, improved fault tolerance and improved performance
• Off the shelf CMS support, de-skilling and speeding up changes to content
• Faster profile management, faster and easier creation of new customer journeys
• Reporting API, simplifying the export of business-critical data giving easier and faster access to real knowledge
• New User Group to support discussions, bug-tracking, feature request and cross-learning between clients

Initially released in 2006, VITES was designed to dramatically improve on and off site conversion rates by providing a scaleable platform that offered proper customer journey management (ala Amazon, Ebay etc) combined with a suite of testing tools that allowed accurate testing of new content, CTAs and traffic streams

Since it’s release, every client using the platform has seen at least a doubling of conversion rates and huge reductions in cost per enquiry/sale

The latest release is a ground-up rethink of what our clients and marketplace needed and part of this was a massive simplification in deployment of changes, testing and profiles

All current clients are on a migration plan to complete the porting to the new version by the end of 2010 and all new clients will automatically get the latest version of the platform

License charges remain unchanged, starting at just £500 per month for the basic 10k users per month version

Contact Liam, Martin or Nick now to find out more about how VITES 3.0 (Rangoon) can supercharge your web strategy.

VITES remains the only commercially available off the shelf journey profile and testing platform

Contact our licensing team (Liam, Martin or Nick) for further information.

System integrators and agencies should contact our CEO (Martin Dower) to discuss how VITES can help your clients