Making searchers into visitors and visitors into consumers!
|
The hard truth about visitor behavior on the web is that most people searching for material won't find you and the ones that do won't stay. In laying the groundwork for improving this outcome, this page is focussed on 'why people leave', to make our point, we are borrowing the concept of 'cognitive dissonance' coined by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1956 to describe the discomfort and tension we exhibit when exposed to idealogical discrepancy. For example, a contradiction between our expectation or belief and new ideas, interpretations or unanticipated outcomes.
|
Why the web creates cognitive dissonance ...
|
When adapting this concept to visitor behavior on the web, we are interested in how and when cognitive dissonance occurs and how website visitors behave in order to remove any resulting cognitive tension. Conflict between visitor expectations and website outcomes can be grouped into three primary areas; misleading content, the dynamics of the web, and audience fragmentation.
|
Misleading content
|
At its most simple, a visitor may experience a form of cognitive dissonance where a website (or page) delivers unexpected content. Large volumes of web publishing advice focuses on the importance of encouraging visitors (traffic) to your website – in effect turning searchers into visitors. If we examine the Google search paradigm, a search is made upon a short phrase (lets say: cognitive dissonance). The resulting options are ordered on the basis of context (term relevance) and PageRank (page importance). As the searcher scans the results, they make a decision based on three additional pieces of information; the title (usually the window title of the web page), the description (usually some part of the opening text of the web page), and the web address of the page. To a greater or lesser extent, these five items; context, PageRank, title, description and address can be gamed (manipulated for the purpose of improving search outcomes). Legitimate manipulation is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), inappropriate manipulation is likely to get your website or web page 'blacklisted' and removed from the search results. If this combination grabs the attention of a searcher, they click on the web link, in effect transformed into a visitor to your web page.
Your new visitor comes complete with the contextual expectations that they had as a searcher. In effect, the visitor will make a rapid and largely involuntary assessment of the appropriateness of your content to their perceived need (more complex than simply the search phrasing). Although as a web publisher, you cannot address all relevant expectations, as a starting point, your web page is effectively guilty of misleading content (whether deliberate or accidental) if the content does not match the synopsis (the five items that turned the searcher into a visitor). Significant inconsistency will create a state of dissonance, and most likely the visitor's immediate departure from your website.
Using the example of a search on the phrase 'cognitive dissonance', I would expect pages containing definitions and psychological discussion, perhaps a page on web visitor behavior is a stretch, however if I ended up on a page about accommodation in Morocco then I would feel my time was being wasted. Obviously, simply getting visitors to your web content is insufficient. If it is accompanied by perceived manipulation, then it is likely to create a level of distaste in the mind of your visitor that prevents them from absorbing any meaning from your content, no matter how well intentioned – this is why we have borrowed the term cognitive dissonance which includes the process of becoming closed to communication that is contradictory to an established belief or expectation.
|
Web dynamics
|
In many ways the nature of the web encourages a sub-optimal result. The 'systems' involved in the consumers experience of the web, including devices, browsers, and search tools, can create either a poor experience or an unanticipated outcome. Something we looked at when we discussed media dynamics. As an example, lets consider how search can create cognitive dissonance because of the inherent difference between human expectation and computer algorithms. In this scenario the visitor's dissonance most commonly results from an unfulfilled expectation of positively aligned results. In some cases, the actual outcome is proliferated by negatively aligned results. This can be due to concept pollution from emotionally, sexually, or socially charged search terms.
The pejorative effect of unmoderated search around these charged terms is demonstrated by the well publicized results of a Google search on the word 'Jew'. A dramatic enough demonstration of the difference between human filtering and machine weighting to warrant Google publishing a specific explanation on how some disturbing anti-Semitic results are included in the search outcomes. Google calls this an 'anomaly', whereas it is more accurately a demonstration of how the dynamics of the web, in this case an algorithm driven search, can create incongruity and potential dissonance in a resulting site visitor. Other examples are sexually charged results scattered through most search phrases that include the word 'girl' or drug related results that turn up in searches including the word 'speed'. These are dramatic examples of search outcomes that may trigger cognitive dissonance, however many more mundane system practices fail to meet user expectations (for example advertising pop-ups and results driven by size of payment), leading to less severe but more widespread consumer dissatisfaction.
|
Audience fragmentation
|
When we discussed visitor behavior earlier in the BAOWP site, we said it was a common mistake that most web publishers considered themselves as the audience because it was too difficult to focus on a suitable 'model' audience. This was our encouragement for web publishers to address their audience(s) as effectively as possible, however in reality, the audience is fragmented, whichever 'model' you choose, the content will resonate for some and disenfranchise others. The disenfranchised group will most likely exhibit the effects of cognitive dissonance, refusing to assimilate the message if it contradicts their expectation, instead departing rapidly. Some part of your audience will be dissatisfied, the aim as an effective web publisher is to try and ensure that it is not the most important audience groups that exhibit dissonance.
|
Controlling cognitive dissonance
|
The short answer, as a web publisher, is to keep your search elements (page title, opening content and address) in alignment with the page content in order to keep visitors long enough to become content consumers.
In addition, regular examination to ensure that the needs of the best fit segments of your audience are being met, will reduce dissonance in critical audience groups. This only comes from a well conceived and regularly examined web communication strategy and a strong understanding of your audience and your content's place on the web.
In addition, use accepted practice, appropriate branding, navigation and content structures to meet the expectation of your audience in relation to the nature of your content and the purpose of your site. First-time site visitors make a rapid assessment of the likely suitability of a site and the general 'feel' and style of a site communicates as much as the content about the likely suitability and appropriateness of the material to the visitor.
|
Certain models and types of websites have developed over time and signal to a visitor the class of site on which they have arrived.
|
|
|
