8 conversion rate tactics below to help increase conversion rates on your website.
1. People Click On What They Want

People navigate the web by “scent”, Byran Eisenberg, conversion guru and persuasion architect, tells us. Scent was first described by Xerox PARC to describe the parallels between a human’s information-gathering techniques on the Web and an animal’s food-gathering techniques in the wild. People seek information through the “scent” given off by their trigger words.

According to research performed by usability guru Jared Spool, when visitors found their trigger words on a landing page, they were successful at completing their task 72% of the time; if the trigger word wasn’t on the page, they were only successful 6% of the time. The scent of the keywords kept them on the right path; lacking that scent, they stopped searching that particular “trail”. One tip to make sure you have your visitors’ trigger words covered is to make sure each major button or link:

completes this sentence: “I want to _____”.
includes trigger words / strong scent

2. Start Using Persuasive Call To Action Words

Impotent call to action hyperlinks like “read more” and “submit” sometimes make me feel embarrassed for website owners. They should know better.

Persuasive call to action hyperlinks should include an imperative verb and a benefit. For example, which hyperlink is more persuasive: A or B?

George found an investment secret that changed his life. Read More
George found an investment secret that changed his life. See how George doubled his income in one year.

You can see from this comparison why the second example is more likely to induce action.

3. Better Product Images Are Worth A Thousand Calls to Action

Having better-looking product images than other sellers will do wonders. If research is any indication, product images are a major factor in converting visitors. In fact, 83 percent of eBay shoppers skip listings without images, while sites with galleries get 15% more activity and those with so-called super-size photos show a 24 percent spike in sales. The better photo wins every time. Many people skimp on the quality of their product images and use manufacturer-supplied images which is a mistake.

4. B2B Products or Services Need Merchandising, Too

The same holds true if you are in B2B: Better product images are worth a thousand calls to action. Many B2B sites offer downloads of whitepapers or demos in exchange for completing a form, but fail to make the most basic of efforts to persuade visitors to do so. Don’t just tell them about your whitepaper… merchandise it. Show a cover, show them how easy it is to read with all your pretty charts. Test to see which pieces matter the most.

5. Headlines Must be Made to Stick

Most headlines (and copy for that matter) suffer from what Chip and Dan Heath refer to in their book Made to Stick as a curse of knowledge: Once you know something, it’s difficult to imagine what it is like to not know it. The headline on your page is the one thing that about 80% of your visitors will read. But while headlines are often crafted for their persuasive abilities, they often assume too much prior knowledge on the part of the reader. Make sure that everybody understands what your headline is about, even if they have no reference to understand it. Then invest as much time as possible testing your headline’s abilities to both (1) gather attention and (2) entice visitors to invest the next 30 seconds on your page by explaining what’s in it for them — in language they can understand!

6. Always be Testing

Doing A/B or multivariate testing used to require some in-house programming expertise or expensive third-party software. Thankfully, Google has provided us with a free alternative in the form of Google Website Optimizer. While it may not offer every feature some of the other solutions provide, it is quite an elegant solution and getting better all the time. I actually prefer that people don’t spend their money on a tool, but focus those resources on better copy and imagery instead. There are no more excuses for not testing regularly. Remember what Claude Hopkins wisely said in 1923: “Almost any question can be answered cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them – not by arguments around a table. Go to the court of last resort – buyers of your products.”

7. Should we be testing hundreds of thousands of variations?

This question illustrates the market’s misunderstanding of testing. For the vast majority of businesses, this is more like random testing. You can test thousands of combinations in a multivariate test, but being able to doesn’t mean you should. Let’s focus on this example. I’ve kept the numbers simple for clarity’s sake, but let’s assume:

Example I (not recommended):

1,000 = Test combinations (the number of page sections and variations in the test)
10,000 = Page views per day
100% = Visitors in experiment (we’ll run the experiment with all our traffic)
2.4% = Current conversion rate (average conversion rate)
20% = Expected improvement
The duration for this test: 34.9 days. (More than a month!)

Example II (recommended):

20 = Test combinations (focused on key drivers)
10,000 = Page Views per day
100% = Visitors in experiment
2.4% = Current conversion rate
20% = Expected improvement (focus on key drivers in the hierarchy of optimization rather than just random elements, and your expectations should be higher)
The duration for this test: 0.698 days. (Under a day!)

Under the guise of being “scientific”, the companies that originally offered these tools charged on a monthly basis. While they had plenty of experience in managing their software, they had little experience in identifying valuable tests. Plus, they had zero incentive to get quick results while customers paid a monthly fee.

Multivariate testing for the sake of conversion rate optimization should be scientific. However, testing is about improving your business results, not scientific experimentation. Unless you’re running a lab, you’re testing for profit. (No offense, non-profits… yes, you should be testing too.) Testing only what matters is how to recover opportunity cost. Time is money. Don’t waste it by testing which variables matter; rather, invest your time in improving those variables and your understanding of them. Fix the things that hurt your conversions as fast as possible, and make more money today.

8. Read the Reviews on Conversion

Reviews have been all the buzz the past couple of years. If you recently purchased something online, has a review influenced your purchase decision?

New research further illustrates the value of reviews:

77% of online shoppers use reviews and ratings when purchasing (Jupiter Research, August 2006)
63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)
86.9% of respondents said they would trust a friend’s recommendation over a review by a critic, while 83.8% said they would trust user reviews over a critic. (MarketingSherpa)
Most people don’t seem to focus on all the factors involved in implementing reviews to enhance conversion. It’s important that you test and optimize for conversion and persuasion by focusing on the following areas:

Placement for Visibility
Above the fold
Size
Stars or other graphic
Near point of attention or action
Review Interaction

Ease of reading
Sorting
Rating Distribution
Use across the site
Single Dimension versus Multi-Dimension Reviews

What are the key attributes across different categories
Can review content influence purchase decision
Credibility Factors

Negative and positive reviews
Review approval policy
Reviewer characteristics
What Does a Review Mean

Number of reviews
What questions are you asking
Qualitative versus quantitative
Reviews are just one example of the market trend demanding more authenticity and transparency, and they are key factors in getting your visitors to take action. Any time you have a choice between opening up more or less, always opt for giving your customers more.

What do you think? Do you have any ideas on how to make your website perform better?

What are cookies?

Cookies identify visits to a website via anonymous bits of data and numbers and remember each individual who visits a website and everything that they do anonymously. Without cookies, websites and their servers have no memory. Without a cookie every time you open a new web page the server where that page is stored will treat you like a completely new visitor.

Websites typically use session cookies to ensure that you are recognised when you move from page to page within one site and that any information you have entered is remembered. For example, if an e-commerce site did not use session cookies then items placed in a shopping basket would disappear by the time you reach the checkout.

What are persistent cookies used for?
A persistent cookie enables a website to remember you on subsequent visits, speeding up or enhancing your experience of services or functions offered.
For example, a website may offer its contents in different languages. On your first visit, you may choose to have the content delivered in French and the site may record that preference in a persistent cookie set on your browser. When you revisit that site it will use the cookie to ensure that the content is delivered in French.

Cookies are helpful for web analytics purposes because they are a way of identifying visitors to your site (new versus returning, visitor’s navigation through the website, better user experience by storing items in a shopping basket or saving a search that they made etc).

The thing to check is how long your persistent cookies are storing data for – a week, a month, until 2035? These will make a difference to how you understanding what unique visitors do on your site. And make sure you work with the techies to set the cookies expiration for a time that suits your business needs.
Oh and a very happy new year!

If you are a company with a sizeable email marketing budget and list you will be interested in increasing sales or increasing leads. But what should you key performance indicators be?
Some choices for a ecommerce-driven business are:

Sales (total sales, sales by campaign/type/segment/cell, per e-mail delivered)
Profit/margin per e-mail sent and campaign level
List growth/churn (size of database, growth month over month, churn rate month/aggregate)

Some companies are more about lead generation than pure sales. They want to get a lead into the hands of a partner or call centre or salesperson–so they are about efficiencies, rather than sales and/or profit margin. There choice could be:

1. Cost per lead
2. Funnel movement (how leads migrate through the funnel stages)
3. Total reach (how much of the prospect database can be reached at any given time). This includes churn metrics as well.

Notice that the primary KPIs for the two instances above are not about click-through rate or open rate.

When the real focus of the program is purely branding, the metrics seem simpler, but with a deeper definition:

1. Response rate (both open and click). Brand marketers are increasingly looking at the total reach of their base and less at campaign-over-campaign results. They want to count how many eyeballs were exposed to the brand each month, the resulting interactions and incremental Web exposures.
2. Site visits and site journeys. Site traffic statistics driven from e-mail are becoming increasingly valuable to see what content and interests are driven from each campaign/program and business division. Depth of site exploration… List growth. See how email traffic performs against searches made, types of products bought so you can define your personas against email marketing.

All brands place increased value on the size and relative growth of the database since it represents a potential share of market and voice. It is essentially the lifeline to reach a mass of customers in an efficient manner. This, combined with qualitative feedback, is quite useful in measuring brand attitude, awareness and level of involvement with the brand.
So also for example in this context thinking about how to encourage higher subscription rates to an email newsletter via personalised call to actions based on site activity or cookie id to move more people from your bottom left to top right (great customers).
Here are some standard KPIs but obviously every company’s KPIs will be different and will need to evolve over time as well.

E-mail KPIs:

E-mail sent/delivered
Campaign over campaign impressions/opens (total/unique/% rate)
Campaign over campaign clicks (aggregate/unique /% rate)
Click to open (% who open the message and click through)
Churn rate (% unsubscribe/opt out/undeliverable)
Send to a friend (viral rate)
ISP domain response (open/clicks)

Commerce-Driven Program KPIs:

Total sales (campaign, month, quarter, segment)
Profit/margin per e-mail sent / source
Sales per e-mail sent
Cost per e-mail sent
Average Order Value (AOV)
Number of orders
Conversion rate (to open/click through)
Number of site visits (page rank)

Demand Generation

Number of leads (by product/client type)
Number of downloads
Site visits
Page Rank
Cost per lead
Conversion rate
Membership/subscription/database growth

Web Focused

Cost per visitor
Number of leads by entry page
Heavy user share
Average page views
Stacking effect
Length of site visit by source

What do you think? Have I missed some that you think glaringly obvious…
Thanks so much for reading

Microsoft gatineau beta has just sent me an invite. It includes features such as being able to track your visitors and clicks, marketing campaign reporting, goal conversion tracking and which they are beefing up with the demographic data from passport (30million people have passport accounts I hear).

If you haven’t already done so, request a beta invite to http://advertising.microsoft.com/gatineau. Once you’ve set up your Gatineau profile, you may access your account by clicking on http://adcenter.microsoft.com/analytics

Will it make a dent in the market after the huge first mover advantage that Google Analytics has? Asides from the demographic data, Gatineau would need to match GA’s great UI and it’s additional features such as internal site search and being able to track Ajax and flash as standard predefined reports.

However, saying that the completely anonymous passport data is a pretty good USP because you get a percentage of actual demographic data for your visitors (did I say that it is completely anonymous – well it is). I am sure that Ian Thomas, liesdamnedlies.com and his team at Microsoft are elated that it is finally out of the door. Now it is time to try it, test it and give some feedback which I will do once I have tested it out on a live website…

Have you tried Microsoft’s gatineau yet?

1. Over time will departmentalised/silo-d analytics areas become part of a larger research and analytics function reporting directly to the Financial Director or chief executive officer? Presenting completed analysis or recommendations to executives can be far less effective on an on-going basis than the continuous, informal questioning and answering between managers and analysis. I think you need both, on-going silo-d analytics which really drills down into specific issues and centralised strategic analytics to align web analytics recommendations and objectives with overall company objectives on a strategic level (so there one number of how many customer’s you actually have rather than a politicised struggle between marketing and customer services departments for example).

2. Analytics is hard. Analytics takes resources. It takes effort for a company to create and assimilate learnings from analytics. Focus your analytics at the key leverage points of the business, for example in the case of a lead generation site such as rightmove your lead conversion rate. Focus analytics where it will have most impact to potentially help and change the business

3. Getting to a culture of fact/data driven decision making, requires your business to have real solid wins using analytics that will make people care from the top to bottom in the company. Once it is have been shown/proven that the eg the company’s conversion rate has increased due to multi-variate testing and changes to the form process or that PPC is generating a higher conversion rate or whatever the wins might be, a process of “yes analytics is important to me – it will help me – it could even help me get the bonus that I want” begins from people all over the company.

4. The analysts that you hire are extremely intelligent, humble, versative and political creatures that are in constant communication and debate with key decision makers and are at home with numbers and all the advantages and pitfalls of various analytics solutions, but most importantly are able to move beyond creating key performance indicators to aligning strategic business objectives of the website to the company’s business.

5. Well thought-out metrics that everyone in the business understands. The challenge is creating a shared understanding of the right metrics and what they mean.

6. Don’t rely on one proven and tested way to get insight. Try KPI metrics, try usability testing, try feedback forms and survey, try sophisticated metrics, try scoring systems, try multi-variate testing, try digging into the data to understand root causes and opportunities.

7. The most important thing with analytics is to get started. It is a journey not a competition. And each company’s journey will be different. Good analytics is an evolution of thinking and deciding.

Would you have chosen these 7 to be your most important things to think about when it comes to the analytics department within your company? Are there others I haven’t mentioned? Thanks so much for reading in any case

 
 

There are advantages and disadvantages to all methods of web data collection, be that javascript page tagging or log file analysis (or packet sniffing – but I will leave packet sniffing for my next post).

Have I missed any out? Which do you prefer? My preference is for a hybrid model with a web analytics solution that uses both javascript page tagging and log files (remember there can be political reasons too – for some big companies they like keeping control of their web data so a pure page tagging model is not ideal).

Page Tagging Advantages                                                     

Measure events in Web 2.0 rich Internet applications built with Ajax or Flash

Measure traffic on portions of your site embedded in other web sites where you don’t have access to logs

Track page views even if they were cached in ISP proxy servers

Track page views following a click on the browser’s back button 

Measure behavior within web pages, such as scrolling down or changing form fields

Measure shopping cart activity

Measure client side information, such as the browser’s screen size, etc.

Capture additional information items such as user login names or form field data that are passed through customized tags 

Breaks through proxy and caching servers – provides more accurate session tracking

Client side capture of ecommerce data – server side access can be problematic

Visitor data can be collected in near real time

Page Tagging Disadvantages

Set up errors lead to data loss and you can’t go back in time, if you make a mistake with your tagging you have a hole in your data

Firewalls can mangle or restrict tags

Cannot track bandwidth or completed downloads, tags are set when the page/file/event is requested not when the download is completed (although you can tag different stages of an event/file)

Log Files Advantages

Historical data can be processed easily

No firewall issues to worry about

Can track bandwidth and completed downloads and differentiate between completed and partial downloads

Monitor paths and drop-off points of search engine robots that index your site to help you with search engine optimization

Capture click fraud activity that does not execute JavaScript and remains invisible to page tags

Monitor page delivery performance, abandoned page views, and incomplete downloads

Securely capture http user names

Load historical information from before page tagging

Avoid the effort of modifying your web pages and scripted pages for inserting tags and then acceptance testing the modifications

Avoid the effort of monitoring your site for pages that are missing page tags

Measure views, for example, of your PDF documents that were directly found and clicked from search engines such as Google

Measure mobile browsers/visitors which may not fire JavaScript page tags

Measure page views even if the viewer clicked on to the next page before the page tag fired

Log file disadvantages

Proxy/caching inaccuracies, if a page is cached, no record is logged on your web server

No event tracking, no javascript, flash or AJAX tracking

Time consuming web server log file management and log file transfer from disparate web server farms

Thanks so much for reading and let me know if you think there are advantages or disadvantages to either that I haven’t mentioned.

 

Click here to see and also listen to my presentation of how Rightmove are using in this particular case tealeaf to understand their customer experience better and replay exactly what their visitors did and see it in their eyes (I’ve saved the presentation using Jing Project which is absolutely fab).

The presentation is just under 5 minutes long, includes all my slides, my voice (audio) and also a video of where a visitor’s journey went wrong using tealeaf’s session replay. It opens up in a new window, press play and you can listen to all 5 minutes (if you have the time that is). http://screencast.com/t/SadLainUI3

It was really great (not trying to be cheesy I promise) to meet and see everyone yesterday. You may be able me make out in the photo.

This Thursday 8th Nov I’ll be presenting at the London Stock Exchange and next wednesday 14th Nov at Web Analytics Wednesday in London’s covent garden. As we move beyond pure web analytics, to trying to get into our customer’s head to understand their experience on our website, how can customer experience management tools help us.

There are tools available now such as tealeaf and speedtrap that allow us to replay exactly what our customers did on our site, a bit like a video player of exactly what they did on your website. Very cool. I also had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours with Robert Wenig, CTO and founder of tealeaf yesterday.

What customers actually need compared to what they actually get

 
Sometimes an image says more than a thousand words… Have you come across this scenarion before?
Click on the image to make it bigger / readable

Why do we need to understand our customer’s experience and how can tools help us?

1. The unique session replay functionality would allow the company to hone in on live technical and customer orientated issues to achieve a fix with a quick turnaround on their website.
2. Help customer services teams work with customers where they were having a problem on the website doing what they wanted to do – so the customer services team can replay the customer’s session and tell them where they missed a step or alternatively where the website didn’t deliver.
3. Identify poor customer experience in our customer journey on the website e.g look up sessions where a page or image had a problem loading, 404 errors etc, couldn’t find address, couldn’t find product etc.
4. Identify fraud or unexpected activity on financial services websites and look at the fraudster’s activity.
5. Weekly meetings to go through problem sessions, come up with ideas and identify solutions.
6. Compare click activity on a page to mouse movements on a page to eg identify elements on a page that are encouraging a high number of mouse movements but that are non-clickable (and hence should be clickable).
7. Real time data.
8. With a snippet of javascript, the ability to see which fields in a form were filled out even though the form was never sent.
Are there others that I haven’t thought of? Are you getting inside your customer’s heads with pure web analytics tools so don’t use these customer experience management tools?

But there are alot of challenges associated with these tools:

1. The cost – they are extremely expensive.
2. Actually getting people internally within the company to use them, for example creating a culture where tech support and or customer services actively use these tools in their daily role.
3. Lots of training and learning and time on how to use the product and to configure the events required from scratch.
4. Set up and configuration of the product across all hosting sites and servers, tealeaf uses http requests for example.
5. Getting to grips with the “customer experience method of thinking” in terms of the perceived traditional web analytics definitions of items such as visits and page impressions versus “sessions”.
Have you found challenges delivering value using customer experience management tools?

This web analytics wednesday is a discussion on how we all think that these tools could or should drive or delivervalue to drive commercial benefit and of course better customer experience.
How do you get inside the head of your customers?

I will also be drawing on my experience at Rightmove (26 million visits a month and tenth most popular website in the UK) where we have started using tealeaf to help.

Any thoughts, ideas – do you use customer experience tools, do you wish you did, do you think that we don’t need them and we can get into our customer’s heads with traditional Voice of customer, surveys, polls, web analytics solutions, engagement metrics etc?

Thanks so much for reading and if you are coming to either of the upcoming events, see you soon

 

As web analysts, at times to fully get to the heart of an business issue we need to bring together web analytics metrics with empathy of the customer experience.

This is where customer experience management tools, which are not cheap, such as tealeaf and speedtrap have created a niche, and include a browser replay feature of individual Web sessions, including the specific pages a customer viewed and how he or she interacted with them, with or without mouse movements as well. Companies on a significantly smaller budget can use other tools to a certain extent such as Techsmith’s Morae, a usability lab on a CD Rom and Crazy Egg, free or almost, heatmapping of click and mouse movement over time.

Why we wish to understand the experience our users/customers in greater detail:

The unique session replay functionality would allow the company to hone in on live technical and customer orientated issues to achieve a fix with a quick turnaround on their website.
Help customer services teams work with customers where they were having a problem on the website doing what they wanted to do – so the customer services team can replay the customer’s session and tell them where they missed a step or alternatively where the website didn’t deliver.
Identify problems in our customer journey on the website e.g look up sessions where a page or image had a problem loading, 404 errors etc.
Identify fraud or unexpected activity on financial services websites
Compare click activity on a page to mouse movements on a page to eg identify elements on a page that are encouraging a high number of mouse movements but that are non-clickable (and hence should be clickable).

B2B customer issues: Identify issues that our B2B customers are having on the site. Allows customer services to replay customer sessions.
B2C customer issues: Identify issues that B2C customers, visitors to the site are having on the site. Allows customer services us to replay customer sessions.
Usability testing: B2B and B2C usability testing, where our test audience journeys on the website can be replayed to identify issues, be that on a form process or product. For usability testing, tools developed specifically for usability testing such as Morae will allow metrics such as “time on task”, “error rate”, satisfaction, mouse movement over time, mouse clicks, web page changes and survey results.

However, these customer experience tools will allow almost video recording replay of visitor sessions which can be used as part of a website usability process.

Mouse click and mouse movement activity, if that is all is wanted initially is offered either free or very reasonably by crazy egg – but that is all one is getting. On a page by page basis (each page needs to be tracked individually), a heat map of that one page where one can breakdown mouse click and movements is shown. However, there is no ability to replay sessions.

The ultimate aim is to drive improvements in the customer experience of the website you provide, small improvements to conversion rates can lead to significant increases in leads.

Successful capture of end-user sessions and session data.
Visual replay of end user sessions.
Successful search for sessions based on free-text and event constraints.
Click versus mouse movement activity.

Challenges associated with these tools:
Getting to grips with the “customer experience method of thinking” in terms of the perceived traditional web analytics definitions of items such as visits and page impressions versus “sessions”.
Either trawling through the source code of the website to identify unique code that can be used to set up the relevant metrics in the case of tealeaf (Tealeaf can implement site tracking without adding javascript to the source code, tealeaf uses http requests), or adding tracking tags throughout the website, in the case of Speedtrap.
Learning how to use the product and to configure the events required from scratch.
Set up and configuration of the product across all hosting sites and servers.
The ability to configure the customer experience tool to your exact requirements, rather than accept a standard “off the shelf” approach or black box approach, can be a blessing or curse depending on the processes in-house at your organisation. As they are completely flexible so reliant on good processes internally to set them up to maximise their return on investment.

Customer experience management tools with their ability to replay sessions are a window to better customer experience understanding. I hasten to add, I say a window – as it is up to the web analytics manager / user experience manager to drive value and understanding from these tools, to drive a better understanding of the customer experience.

With my web analytics association social media hat on, this week I was at the Virtual Worlds Conference, there was much talk of what brands are doing in these worlds such as Second life, Habbo Hotel and There.com. These worlds are constantly and quickly adapting given the competitive landscape, the nature of the internet and other services competing for visitor time.

 Virtual worlds can be as completely similar or dissimilar to the real world as we want.

The CEO of Habbo Hotels Timo Soininen when asked what’s new in Habbo Hotel, didn’t talk about new features, star appearances or new contests. His main point was monthly consumer updates to Habbo Hotel based on what’s going on, metrics and user feedback. Their main focus is to make the user experience as easy as possible and make it as easy as possible to get into the world.

“We’ve moved into a Scrum development process and agile development,” Soininen explained. “We like to think we know where we’re heading and sort of the big picture, but the road map really is only up to four months. We look at what’s going on and the metrics and the user feedback that we get and sort of go in monthly consumer update. We release something to the world, back end changes, navigation changes, item updates, on a monthly basis. We’re able to respond quickly.”

“We used to have a really traditional approach where you sit at a drawing board and spec it out and then hopefully after a few months, what you predicted back then is still valid,” he continued. “Given the nature of the Internet and the whole competitive landscape and other services competing for kids time, you have to do (a faster development process). I think you get much more meaningful results.”

The one plan Soininen could lay out for 6-8 months from now was a goal to dramatically simplify the website for Habbo Hotel. There will be some changes to the world itself planned in, but the majority of changes will apparently be to the Web interface to make it easier to actually get into the world.

“Basically what we’re going to do, in the spirit of simplicity is to make sure the first user experience is as pleasant as possible so that when the user enters the world, he or she has as easy a time as possible finding like-minded people,” Soininen said. “I think the really important thing for these casual worlds is to make the joining as casual as possible and not to go into a cumbersome registration process. We’re looking at that, but really focusing on the virtual world. And also giving users a sort of dashboard about their status in the virtual world. So the next time they come in, they see automatically what’s going on and what’s happened.”

Mike Wilson, found of Makena Technologies, creator or 3D virtual world There.com, mentioned about the successful engagements they have created for brands on their world. They built a special area for Capitol Music Group artists such as Beastie Boys, Korn and Lily Allen to make live appearances, for the entire record brand, not just one band. They are having success with brands because their world is PG-13, so brands don’t have to worry about dubious content appearing alongside them. Also, There.com can take the brand and put them where the highest traffic is, rather than being on their own private island.

Second Life founder, Philip Rosendale, waxed lyrically about the ability for virtual worlds to involve customers and have them join in the creative experience within a social context. For exmaple Toyota Scion and Pontiac offere fully customisable cars in Second Life. Similarly, for a CSI episode filmed in Second Life where visitors can solve their own murder mystery in Second Life. The episode went live this week to the total potential audience of CSI and can handle 20,000 players. See the CSI Second Life episode on the CBS website for a demo here.

To conclude, interesting and engaging things are happening in virtual worlds (have you designed your avatar yet?). Worlds like Habbo Hotel are admitting to using metrics and user feedback to create fast one month turn arounds on consumer updates of the world (virtual worlds analytics). Others spoke of the how virtual worlds allow audience and fanbase to go to the next level of immersion with the brand, so that they can step into the brand and become part of it. Brand immersion has been undervalued in the last five years. We see it as moving on the engagement from conversation to an actual relationship with the consumer, hence the interesting brand experiences such as CSI, Toyota, Renault Formula One and other stories.