Measuring Webpage Outcomes, Not Inputs – and Why Content Quality Matters

Measuring Webpage Outcomes, Not Inputs – and Why Content Quality Matters

October 2, 2013

Gerry McGovern gerry@customercarewords.com www.customercarewords.com @gerrymcgovern

In most cases you can expect a small fiberglass pool shell without delivery to cost $9k-$13k, medium $12k-$16k, and large $16k-$24k. Delivery fees could be anywhere from $600 to $2,500.

Useful tools

✓Deleted 50% of all content ✓Use of the Loan calculator increased by 236% ✓Traffic to the most important product information and services increased by 520 %

© 2011 - Customer Carewords Ltd 21 October 2013

5

Telenor – 87% reduction of pages

Total pages reduced from 4,000

to 500 Conversion rate 100% up Emails to customer service down

by 35% (key channel) Customer satisfaction ratings up

6

© 2011 - Customer Carewords Ltd 21 October 2013

7

Get out of my way !

90% Whatever……

TOP TASKS TINY TASKS

Content Publishing activity

#1 Remove Pages from Site

Remove Conditional Formatting

“Remove conditional formatting”

“Format text in a variety of ways based on conditions”

Remove Conditional Formatting

34%

© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 14

240m annual visits to Cisco.com

2m social media

mentions

4.2m social reach

3m customer app Downloads*

(6x YoY)

1.3m paid search

click-throughs

73m organic search

referrals

3m mobile web

visitors

1.4m social referrers

to Cisco.com

Cisco.com Social Reach Mobile Phones Tablets

Source: Cisco SiteCatalyst & other internal metrics.

2% 55% 91% 341%

Continuous Improvement

Identify Top

Tasks

Measure Top

Tasks

Task Based

Support

Tasks Pie Chart Download software,

firm…Configure / set

up a pr…

Troubleshooting (bug fi…

615

43Top 25%

26-50%

51-75%

Potential versus Current Customer

Top 25%

26-50%

51-75%

Tasks Potentia

l

custo

mer

Curren

t

custo

mer

Student

Job se

1 Download software, firmware, drivers, patches, updates 7% 10% 5% 2%

2Configure / set up a product (tech guides, notes, how-to's) 5% 9% 5% 4%

3 Troubleshooting (bug fixes, diagnostics, guides) 4% 9% 4% 3%4 Network design (tech guides, notes, examples) 4% 4% 5% 6%

5 Install / upgrade / migrate (tech guides, notes, examples) 4% 6% 4% 4%6 Pricing for an individual product or service 3% 1% 0% 1%7 Warranties 3% 1% 1% 0%

2010 15 Steps

Downloading Software for RV082

280 seconds approx

Download firmware: Obtain the latest firmware for your RV082 router compatible with Version 3 hardware.

Very Good TPI = 75 Task 1 performance =

Success Rate Comparisons

August 2011 February 2012

1

2

3

4

@gerrymcgovern

22

Effective Content for Better Outcomes

Andrew Bredenkamp @abredenkamp

Dr. Andrew Bredenkamp is president and founder of Acrolinx. Andrew has over 20 years of experience in multilingual content development. Before starting Acrolinx, Andrew was Head of the Technology Transfer Centre at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) Language Technology Lab. Andrew holds degrees in technical translation and linguistics and a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics. He is on the advisory board of a number of organizations, including Translators without Borders and The Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL).

Content Strategy @ Cisco

“The 4900 Series is ideal for space-constrained deployments.”

“Simplified Management: Edge switch auto-provisioning”

Zero uses of “you”

Content Strategy @ Cisco

Not “space-constrained” but “smaller”

No sentence over 18 words

Eight uses of “you”

Know your customer!

Your customer doesn’t care about you

Know your customer!

They haven’t come to read your content

Know your customer!

They have come to get something done

“How can I help you?”

Know your customer!

Age Education Time Interests

Hobbies GSOH Emotional state of

mind

But, don’t just ask yourself…

Test your prejudices

Creating content that works

Develop a language that works – For the task – For the reader

Some things that won’t help

Chicago Manual of Style

“I know the period or comma goes inside both single and double quotation marks, but is an apostrophe treated the same as a single quotation mark, or does it stay with its word? For example: “That ain’t nothin’,” Joe replied.”

“Good” grammar

“A preposition is something you should never end a sentence with.”

What will help

Task-oriented writing: Describing steps?

1. Format them as steps 2. Put each step in its own block 3. Each step should be a single instruction

Dimensions of language

Scanability Formality Readability (hint: not Flesch-Kincaid)

Lists (before)

This update affects the following operating systems: Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and all Mac OS X Versions after 10.6

Lists (after)

This update affects: Windows Vista Windows 7 Windows 8 all Mac OS X Versions after 10.6

Acrolinx can help

Acrolinx is an enabling infrastructure for deploying your content strategy

Acrolinx can help

Enabling infrastructure for deploying your content strategy

Acrolinx can help

Define your language – The right tone-of-voice – Keeping the whole team up-to-date and

honest – Avoid buzzwords, respect folksonomy – Especially people not in your team…

Analytics

Give the team feedback they need Get rid of the useless content Find the useful content that needs to be

fixed

Findability – Keywords – Trust -> Effectiveness

First, win eyeballs

Your reader is everywhere

You do not control who reads your content – Chinese/German readers like English

content – French readers like French content

Closer to spoken language helps non-native speakers

Remember: nature your audience abhors a vacuum

Three things to remember

Search-ready People-ready Global-ready

Three more things

Good practice: – Shared Standards – Optimization Support – Analytics

Putting it all together

Measuring outcomes helps you understand the content you need

Content Analytics helps you create content that will work

Thanks!

Gerry – Gerry@CustomerCareWords.com – @gerrymcgovern

Andrew – Andrew.Bredenkamp@Acrolinx.com – @abredenkamp