The Measure Of A Web Site

E-business integrators and vendors are trying to draw a correlation between the easy appeal of a well-designed Web site and an increased number of widgets sold on that site.

That's the crux of the emerging world of so-called "conversion rates," control over which is part art and part science.

As long as e-commerce sites take a phased approach to enhancing their online shopping mechanisms they should be able to distinguish what features are more likely to spur surfers to buy, says Michele Rosenshein, an online commerce analyst at research firm Jupiter Communications.

Maus Haus' Mark Vomiso tailors site to clients' needs.

Some sites start with status appeal. When designing Tavolo.com's Web site, Mark Comiso, managing partner of Web integrator Maus Haus, San Mateo, Calif., moved the Culinary Institute of America's symbol higher up on the cookware company's site to play up the site's affiliation with the school for professional chefs. That sort of cachet will appeal to high-end clientele who love to cook and have the discretionary income to spend on Tavolo's products, he says.

However, many retailers opt for more complex changes, launching a new site and upgrading the navigational path and the shopping cart all at once, Jupiter's Rosenshein says.

Combining those changes "undermines your ability to measure conversion rates because you can't tell which of those changes was most effective in making the difference," she says.

But Internet consulting groups have other tricks.

"We recommend using a splitter where you have equal flow going to the old site and the new revised site," says Jay More, president of Human Factors International, a consulting firm that helps clients such as Dell.com make their Web sites easier to navigate. "Then you can really measure the changes in buying behavior empirically," he says.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Angara offers products and services to help customers make those types of comparisons.

The company's technology measures the effectiveness of a site's content and merchandising by segmenting site traffic, says Angara CEO Mark Metcalfe. "We then measure the proportion of people that came to the site to buy tennis rackets vs. those that bought tennis shoes," he says. "We also measure click-through rates."

Angara's subscription service combines the technology of three separate companies: Excite@Home's MatchLogic subsidiary, Naviant and Persona (formerly PrivaSeek).

Each of these services culls specific types of data about site visitors to help facilitate more effective marketing campaigns.

Not all clients require all services, Metcalfe says. For example, Greatcoffee.com was primarily interested in geographical data about customers and potential customers, and so opted to use the MatchLogic component of Angara's service offerings.

Angara licenses its service based on the amount of traffic to a site, says Rich Clayton, vice president of marketing. He estimates the monthly cost at about $15,000.

Integrators say both design and technology initiatives must be undertaken in order to drive conversion rates up.

"There are two problems to solve," says Jeff Gallimore, director of technology strategy at Idea Integration, a consulting and integration firm serving clients such as Compaq and Motorola.

"You have to get people to come to where you are, and then figure out how to keep them there and make them buy something," Gallimore says. "That's two separate sets of skills and techniques," he says.

Savvy e-commerce sites are looking for tools to help them discern what site features,a bonus gift, an affiliate program, or an overhauled site,precedes a jump in sales.

A 1-800-Flowers.com spokesman says the average industry conversion rate hovers around 1.5 percent. He estimates that 70 percent of the site's customers start at www.1800flowers.com, as opposed to arriving there by clicking on a link on another Web site.

About 10 percent of those visitors make a purchase, the 1-800-Flowers.com spokesman says.