ThomasNet helps us focus on conversion

Last week I attended a local seminar by ThomasNet, focusing on website conversion. The two hour event featured TN Content Manager Ed Edwards. Experienced with both TN’s website, as well as client sites, he was a good pick to make this presentation. Ultimately, the presentation was a subtle vehicle for expanding TN customers into web design/content clients. Here are some take-aways:

63% of website visitors are looking for shipping info (on top of everyone looking for pricing information, as we have discussed before).

86% of visitors will not return to a website they decide has insufficient content.

One attendee brought up poor follow-through on web-requests. In my notes, I called this mystery meat response—you never know what you get until you try it. This could be a post or two all by itself.

Good content improves the quality of the leads generated by a website. (Or more importantly, the corollary: a poor website generates poor leads, leading managers to think the web doesn't work to generate business.)

Ed made a very obvious, but valuable example of the benefit of improving conversion, basically assuming all is the same except the number of submitted RFQs goes up 1%, the example company realized 20% increase in sales.

Product search keyword-phrases can consist of the following three elements:

• Product type
• Application
• Product attributes

Overall, good, if seemingly obvious information. Of course, I’m reminded every time I go to a seminar like this how little some marketers understand the web or are simply behind. Hopefully they all got a good kick in the right direction.

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Now for those more interested in what ThomasNet product positioning is like these days:

Ed showed how TN’s ‘Quick Links” features allow visitors to ThomasNet.com to drill down to product content quickly. That content comes in the way of a 'catalog' hosted by TN. The example he used showed a TN listing that went from 12 actions & average 35 seconds/viewer to 38 actions, 113 catalog pages viewed, with average duration of 3:09.

My take on this example is that this catalog traffic probably would have happened on the clients website if the Quick Links went straight to the customer site (assuming they had the same content there). I do like the Quick Links concept, and that some clients can benefit from the tools TN has to organize products in their Catalog offering.

The classic ‘vertical site’ justification was made, comparing TN aggregation of vendors as similar to Expedia or Travelocity. You don’t go to Google to get plane tickets, it was pointed out. Yea, but...

Also noted that in the search discussion, Ed used examples where TN Catalog pages were ranking high. While you can debate the use of their catalog service, it seems one should not discount TN because they are SEO experts who can get content ranked high. The online catalogs and ‘quick links’ are TN’s entrée into parametric search, but they are vendor specific, unlike GlobalSpec.