Do Web Users Scroll?

We’ve all heard it: “Web users don’t scroll.” But through our analytics work, our team has found very little actual data to support that common web myth. In fact, one of our biggest clients knows that users can be motivated to scroll down even the longest page (89% of users scrolled a long story page, and fully 60% saw 90% of the page). >>Full Story

Thoughts// An interesting blog post from Avenue A's Digital Design Blog about the age old question on whether web users scroll or not. A recent analysis of user behavior on both e-commerce sites and publisher sites provided some insights into this question. Among the findings:

• On average more than two-thirds of users on these pages scroll

• Nearly 75% of these users scroll before they do anything else on the page

• How far a user scrolls depends on the site; this research demonstrates that on average, users on publisher pages scroll to view about 40% of a page, while users on product pages scroll to view about 60% of a page.
  

All Content Is Dead

Content, it seems, is no longer king. User experience is high on the agenda as ‘lookers’ seek more a compelling offering. “I spent 40 minutes online trying to book a trip to White Plains, New York, with United Airlines. But the site kept telling me an upgrade wasn’t available. It shouldn’t be as difficult as this to book a flight.”

“I’ve spent four hours researching a single trip to Germany, and I still don’t know if I’ve got the best deal.”

A couple of not-so frequent flyers, you might think, who are not used to booking travel online, and have yet to cut their teeth on travel websites. Actually, no. These two quotes are from Henry Harteveldt, vice-president and principal analyst for travel at Forrester Research, and Joe Buhler, senior destination marketing analyst at PhoCusWright, two of the world’s leading analysts of the online travel market. >>Full Story

Thoughts// Okay, so that headline is just for dramatic effect. As a follow-up to yesterday's article (User-Generated Content Is Dead), our friends at Travolution posted a quick comment highlighting the article above, 'User experience - Time for the personal touch.' A great follow-up and a very well written article...thank you David...that we wanted to call attention to.

While I am the first to say that content is key, especially unique, engaging content, there does come a point where 10, 20 or 100 websites will have the same content as yours. And guess what, that probably already happened.

For example, how many ways can you creatively say that your flight to Milwaukee is $172? Or that the Washington Monument is 555ft tall?

The way you begin to differentiate yourself from the competition is user experience. And a combination of user experience, engagement and content will set your site apart.

Enough of my comments, I would highly recommend reading the article.

Long live the user experience!

(Editor's Note: Special guest appearance by the 'Burger King' made possible by your local Burger King restaurant.)

Travel Trends: What Do Women Want ?

What Women Want - If you've wandered in here looking for insight into the female psyche this Valentine's Day, we might have something for you. Unfortunately, unlike Mel Gibson in the movie of the same title, our thoughts are restricted to online user behavior of women.

Travel marketers have long known that women are the "deciders" when it comes to travel research, planning and booking. New studies summarized in AdAge show that women's online activities are getting sophisticated and complex. Not only do women comprise of more than 50% of the online audience but they're also spending more time online and are increasingly catching up with men when it comes to social media, gaming and other channels. Consider:

• The number of unique visits to women's community sites jumped 35% to almost 70 million from 52 million.

• 43% of women watch videos on YouTube (up from 27% in 2006)

• Women are increasingly playing games online and they're also more likely to pay for games online

• Women 45-54 are more likely to shop on impulse online -especially if given an incentive such as a discount or e-mail offer
  

• Travel continues to be the #1 most purchased item by women

Markers Rate The Best & Worst Online Tactics - What’s the best performing marketing tactic in online marketing? Whose budget got the biggest increase this year? A new report by MarketingSherpa gives a bit of insight into what our peers are doing. According to the report:

• Behavioral targeting is generally favored and marketers are moving away from poorly targeted display ads (yep no surprise there)

• While paid search is still an important tactic, marketers are increasingly turning to SEO due to it's better ROI. (This seems like a no brainer but you'd be surprised at how many of us ignore SEO)

• E-mail continues to deliver strong ROI (yes, as we wrote a while back, e-mail is not going away!)

• Analytics continues to be a hot button issue with more than 60% of those surveyed looking at ways to integrate "offline and online" tracking and overlay web analytics to search and email