This is the presentation from our talk at the Smart Content conference in New York on October 19th, 2010. We talk about how we used analytics to make design and content decisions in some of our projects and our own blog.

1. Randall Snare &
Elizabeth McGuane
Content, data
and humans

2. Randall Snare @randallsnare
Elizabeth McGuane @emcguane
Mappedblog.com
@mappedblog
iqcontent.com
@iqcontent

3. A thought experiment
let’s take the ocean . . .

4. Image from all-freeware.com
Imagine if you were tasked with listing everything that’s in the ocean. How would you start?

5. Whales
Image by Daren Stones, flickr.com/photos/photojour/
Listing by animal?

6. Jellyfish
Image by St. Grundy, flickr.com/photos/stgrundy/

7. Sharks
Image by Ken Bondy, flickr.com/photos/kenbondy/

8. Starfish
Image from Phlog That, phlogthat.wordpress.com/

9. The beach
Image by Elizabeth McGuane
By human interaction?

10. Ships
Image by Amberd Design Studio, AmberdDesign.com

11. Image from 3DM3.com
Submarines

12. Mermaids
Image from donaldsweblog.com
By myth?

13. Coral reef
Image by only_point_five, flickr.com/photos/eclogite/
By things that are disappearing?

14. Icebergs
Image from Ice Stories, icestories.exploratorium.edu

15. Fishermen
Image from Wilderness Classroom, wildernessclassroom.com

16. Pirates
Image from pirates.sakraft.com

17. Seagulls
Image from Ben, flickr.com/photos/visbeek/

18. There are a lot of things
in the ocean

19. What stories can we
create with all of those
things?

20. Moby Dick
Image from filmschoolrejects.com

21. Titanic

22. The Hunt for Red October

23. The Birds

24. The Little Mermaid

25. Fishing industry
Image from lib.noaa.gov

26. Gulf oil spill

27. David Attenborough
David Attenborough: the greatest nature storyteller of all time.

28. Disparate data can create an
infinite amount of stories.
You get to decide what story
you want to tell

29. Do products ever sell
themselves?

30. Sell by telling a story

31. How much we want an iPhone?
Which comes first?

32. Or the way Apple sells it?
Which comes first?

33. How our client sold
A little bit... unsexy

34. And it wasn’t working
Snapshot taken 1 month prior to iPhone
launch

35. But this was the easy sell
It’s an iPhone

36. Not really that easy

37. What the (historical) data said
• We had always lost people moving from
the brochureware to the online store - the
start of sales funnels
• From the data, we were able to make
certain deductions

38. People don’t like to be corralled

39. People don’t like to be corralled
We were making them choose what type of
customer they were before they could even
see a phone

40. Users hate this, the system
demands it

41. Users hate this, the system
demands it

42. When you can’t redesign
the system
• Do a magical redesign?
• Write content that makes people
buy?

43. But content isn’t fairy dust
We had to consider
structure, usability and
psychology, based on
the available data
And we had to make
every word count

44. So we collaborated
• UX analyst
• Content strategist
• Analytics expert

45. The process

46. Shape content for the user,
not the system

47. Give people more

48. The proof

49. The hard sell:
Broadband

50. What was wrong
In 6 months since product launch, only
12% of visitors (22,000) successfully moved
beyond the broadband landing page
Of those 22,000, only 1597 converted

51. Lots of red = bad

52. We had to be careful
with words
We had complicated products sold based
on data transmitted (3MB, 7MB) per
second
We also weren’t allowed to say it was ‘fast’ -
or we’d face legal smackdown

53. What we had

54. Fussy,
unusable
detail

55. What we looked at
Referring sites

56. What we looked at
Learning curve:
People who don’t know
Vodafone sells broadband

57. Page exits: 36%

58. Obstacle:
People couldn’t get past this
page

59. External search terms

60. Internal
search

61. Poor organic
SEO

62. So we had a lot to worry about
• Are we using the right
keywords?
• Is the content too jargon-
laden?
• Can people tell the
difference between the
plans at a glance?

64. What we did

65. Clean, clear &
up-front

66. Don’t make people
hunt for the next step

67. The results

68. With no outside campaigns or ads,
we saw a 100% increase in sales

69. Then apply human
expertise to your
content issues
Gather a body of evidence

70. Health insurance
The policy?
Or the person?

71. Design a funnel so people buy
health insurance policies online.
Our mission:

72. Our data:
Only about 1% of
site’s users buy online 78% dropped
out between step
1 and step 2

73. Our data:
This site had 7
separate purchase
funnels

74. Our data:
Conversion rates were
highest at evenings and
weekends Highest rate
at 9 pm

75. Our data:
Lots of pogosticking
Users can’t
compare plans,
must go back
and forth

76. Our data:
66% of the people who
buy their health insurance
online are between 20 and
39 years old

77. Our data:
53% of the search
terms are about specific
medical or health
information
1%2%2%
6%
14%
23%
53%
Site search terms categories
like ‘swine
flu’ or
‘pregnancy’

78. Our data:
The paradox of choice,
via Barry Schwartz
“for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate
of participation went down by 2%. You offer 50
funds, 10% fewer employees participate than if you
only offer 5.
Mutual fund
company
example:
Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

79. What did we do?
1. Divided the content by persona, rather
than by health plan
2. Wrote explanatory text
3. Designed the information for ease of
comparison

80. 1. Divided the content by persona,
rather than by health plan
53% of the search
terms are about specific
medical or health
information 1%2%2%
6%
14%
23%
53%
Site search terms categories
Why?

81. What did that look like?

82. 2. Wrote explanatory text
Why?
Only about 1% of
site’s users buy online

83. What did that look like?

84. 3. Designed the information for ease
of comparison
Why?
High refresh rate

85. What did that look like?

86. Design is a balance of data (both
analytics and content)
Data requires interpretation, which is a human endeavor. You can decide what to use from
analytics data, and what to showcase from content data.

87. How analytics
can inform your
strategy
The Mapped story . . .

88. We have a blog

90. Our strategy is selfish

91. We write what we like
We went to see a movie . . .

93. And we wrote a sequel set in Ireland. This is how we write what we like.

94. We have a tiny following, but it’s people we respect in the content strategy and UX industry.

95. A response, a statement
A new kind of post, that Elizabeth wrote in response to some conversation in the content
strategy realm.

96. This was our most read post yet.

98. Who do you want to be?
We adjusted our strategy a bit. We still write what we like, but we respond to what’s going on
around us, like a newspaper (not this one).

99. The numbers game:
misinterpreted analytics

100. Quality versus Quantity
It doesn’t matter the numbers of your followers, it matters who they are. That doesn’t mean
you shouldn’t want a lot of readers, but it should mean that you care who those readers are.

101. Q
Q
No
Yes
We don’t need to cater to ‘fairytale slide template,’ but we should to someone searching for
‘bullet points on how to end a story’ because we write about stuff like that. We don’t provide
fairy tale templates and we never will.

102. “hilarious bullet points”
My favorite search term (and we totally provided hilarity)

103. Analytics is about
language
What’s important is what’s behind the numbers, which is a person, their behaviors, their
motivations and the language they are using and reading.

104. Questions?
Randall Snare:
randall.snare@iqcontent.com
Elizabeth McGuane
emcguane@gmail.com