No matter who you are, or what you were surfing before, or what mood you are in, when you arrive at the website of HSBC, Standard Life or Abbey, you are welcomed in the same way with the same message and the same range of services. There is little effort (well, no effort at all - I say 'little' in case I missed something) to increase conversion by providing content that is relevant to the user's desires stated before arriving at the site. That's a huge waste of a targeting opportunity, and it needs to change.
Take the Zurich Insurance website as an example (and I am not singling them out as particularly poor, they are a random example).
This is the page I get if I search for zurich car insurance uk and select the first result. Zurich knows (or could do, if it wanted to) what my Google search was, yet there is no acknowledgement here that I am searching for car insurance (half the page is devoted to home insurance); nor that I added the term 'uk' (I still have the option to select global sites); Zurich even seems uncertain whether I am a returning customer, which it is easy to find out with a fair degree of accuracy. All that real estate on options that are very unlikely to be of interest to me, could be used to increase conversion for what I said I wanted, which was UK car insurance. Yes, it may be the case that some car insurance searchers will end up buying home insurance but, come on, how many? And it may be that no matter what the user wants or who he is, it is best to display the link to global sites - but I bet Zurich don't actually know what effect that has on conversions.
Zurich has done what most financial institutions do: given me their standard homepage without bothering to pay attention to the information I am broadcasting about what I want. This is common behaviour, and not just for homepages. This is the Zurich page for car insurance:
Why am I being given a link for home insurance quotes, on the car insurance quote page, that I arrived at from a Google search for car insurance? Again, I am not questioning the link itself, but the fact that this is a major placement without any idea of how it affects conversion rates. If Zurich found out that this link increased car insurance sales by 5%, then by all means put it in there, but the point is that Zurich have made no effort to understand user activity in that way and customise the site accordingly. Zurich have still not acknowledged what I want, and are giving me reasons for dropping off the purchase path. I have come here looking for car insurance, so sell me car insurance, don't act as if we are still both deciding what we want.
In my spare time, I run a website that sells tea. I don't run this site any better than a million other small businesses, but I learnt early on about the importance of landing pages that are linked to any available information about the consumer’s intent. If the consumer comes to Tippyleaf from a Google search for darjeeling tea on Google, or a Google search for green tea, should I take him to the main homepage in both cases? Will I get better results if I take the first consumer to a page listing Darjeeling teas and the second consumer to a page listing green teas? The results vary and are not always intuitive, but certainly the homepage is not always the best choice. I may not have a lot of information about the customer (in fact, I only know what he searched for) but I can use the little I have to improve my conversion rates. As a website owner fixated on conversion rates, (1) you have no pride about which landing page you use … if it turns out that I achieve the best conversion rates by taking consumers to the hidden photo of my grandmother, I will do that; (2) you drop any rigid concepts such as 'website' or 'page': my most effective landing page is a search results page which, being dynamically generated, does not actually exist before I call it; (3) you learn that your predetermined ideas of navigation are not how the consumer sees your site, and you adapt your site to match the navigation patterns that achieve the highest conversion. it
It's not groundbreaking news that a website these days is little more than a collection of landing pages, a stopover in most consumers' journeys from Google to Google. The concept of landing pages is not a way to arrive in some deep, obscure or particularly customised section of your website because there is no 'website'. Certainly companies have trained consumers to expect certain elements in a website and to navigate in a certain way, but those concepts exist more in the head of the web designer than the consumer. Take a typical visit to the Norwich Union site, where I have come looking for home insurance. I click on the link for home insurance and follow that path all the way down, forking along the way according to some choices I am asked to make. There is an element of tunnel vision. I do not see what paths lay down the forks I did not choose (they are paths less travelled down, which I thought I would visit another day, but did not). Another consumer looking for home insurance will make slightly different choices and see a slightly different site. For each of us, norwichunion.com consists of (say) 10-20 pages in sequence. A consumer looking for motorcycle insurance will, again, see something completely different. The 'website' as it was designed means nothing to the consumer. This will be even more so now that Google breaks out pages within websites in its search results, so that users are further encouraged not to go to the homepage, as shown by a search for Abbey:
So why does Norwich Union present all three consumers with exactly the same site, with not even a nod to the effect that different paths will have on conversion?
Let us assume that most visitors to Lloyds TSB come from Google or moneysupermarket.com. That is a very different type of consumer for each scenario. The Google consumer is likely at the start of a purchase path, and by virtue of the search may well give Lloyds TSB some information about what he was searching for. The moneysupermarket.com consumer may be much further down the line in the purchase process and have a great deal more information about relative quotes. Due to the site structure of money supermarket, Lloyds TSB may receive less detail about what the consumer was searching for. Yet both are treated the same way when they get to Lloyds TSB, given the same choices. This is not really about usability, which is merely a means to an end. This is about driving conversion.
All the above is useful for its own sake and is basic website management. but there is another reason why it becomes important. Right now, most companies present their websites as 'websites' whereas the consumer sees 'pages'. That bipolarity is inefficient enough for the online company, with a resulting loss in conversion rates, but it will get worse as even web pages give way to data as the lowest common denominator. In some cases this is already happening. When a consumer comes to Tippyleaf having searched for Darjeeling Castleton, the site serves up the exact page for that tea. But the 'page' is merely a carrier vehicle for what the consumer really wants to see, and I really want him to see, which is the data of price, description and availability. It’s like the packaging for rice – I just want to sell you the rice, you just want to buy the rice, but unfortunately I need to sell it to you in a package for reasons of convenience and so on. At least, though, I hand you a packet of rice and nothing else. Large companies ignore what you tell them you want. When you come to a site like theAA.com, having searched for and therefore asked for something specific like an AA map of London, they present you with a whole range of disparate products such as breakdown cover and savings accounts. That is not cross-selling, it's just product diarrhoea.
As the basic unit becomes data, not a web page, consumers will find this data (an insurance quote, an address, an interest rate) in ways that will be increasingly difficult for the company to control. When the data becomes listed on Google Base, or mashed up into Yahoo Maps or turned into an RSS feed, the concept of fixed navigation will become completely irrelevant. Many companies will try to prevent their data appearing on such outlets, but that is ostrich behaviour. It says I don’t know how to deal with these distribution outlets, so I won’t use them.
None of this even begins to go near real customisation, or the more advanced ways to package data and drive conversion, let along mapping, understanding and exploiting the purchase paths in order to drive conversion rates (of course not, that's what you'd pay us for :) ). There are huge rewards there, which is why industry leaders like Yahoo allocate multi-million pound budgets to these questions. But financial institutions are not ready for that yet: first they must take the most important steps of listening to what incoming customers say they want.
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