80% or 20%? The Long and Short “Tale” of It
Written August 15th, 2007 by Chris SadlerThe answer, of course, is both. Let me back up. The Pareto principle would have us focus on 20 percent of items to get 80 percent of whatever it is we’re trying to maximize. But, the Long Tail has catapulted such Internet businesses as iTunes and Amazon. The Long Tail can best be explained by the quote of an Amazon employee, “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.” That is, the niches end up being more important in aggregate than the few popular items.
I’ve often thought that the Long Tail is crucial to healthcare marketing. Because if only a few people typing in “Tram Flap in Wisconsin” or “Level I trauma center” in Google end up having a changed perception — that led to the choice of our institution for health care — than our efforts have paid off.
So, what to do? I’ve examined our own Web traffic and our own search marketing efforts (both paid and naturally optimized) and have landed on the decidedly non-answer of “both.” I feel a bit like my daughter when we’re playing the “choose” game in the car and she quickly answers “carrots” to “peas or carrots?” but steadfastly refuses to pick when it’s “chocolate cake or chocolate ice cream?”
Before I defend each choice, I thought I’d share with you a look at three graphs. All three represent the page views of the top 150 pages; they differ in the time frame that was examined. Graph one and graph two represent two random days in the last six months. The last is a longer view of six months. I’m sure this is no shock to you, but we see a Pareto tail.
I could repeat this graphic by looking at any time frame. And, this distribution is repeated if we examine the referring search words used to reach our site, or the paid search terms to reach our site, or the search terms used on our internal search utility.
I’ll defend the Pareto principal first and say that we can’t possibly ignore the top 30 pages on our site that generate 65 percent of our page views. Not surprisingly, these pages are for jobs, contact information, physician search and some key clinical areas. I have to admit, though, that these are probably the very pages that get short shrift. When’s the last time you tried to look with a very objective eye at whatever page it is that offers contact information? It’s eye-opening, like viewing your own living room through your guests’ eyes when you have company over.
The good news is, once you’ve cleaned up that part, you can pretty much let them do their work.
That’s when it’s really important to try to maximize the Long Tail. Every day, most of our pages are responsible for thousands of page views – two to 10 page views at a time. I’m always amazed that a press release from three years ago still ranks high in Google and is responsible for a nice steady stream of visitors researching bariatric surgery.
So, how does one go about applying Pareto and maximizing the Long Tail effect? I’m really not sure of the answer and am hoping for some help from you. (Please share you comments at the bottom.)
Here are some things that I try to do:
1. Make sure the site is designed in such a way as to maximize search indexing. That means lots of H tags and alt tags and good old-fashioned body copy. Content is king, though maybe not at the box office. (Long Tail)
2. Come up with a good set of natural keywords to optimize. We can’t optimize every natural keyword on our site, or if you can, you have a lot more budget than I. But we can move down the tail and see what some of the good ones are. Or ask your analysts (if you’re fortunate enough to have them) to find out which ones might be most profitable. (Pareto and Long Tail)
3. Come up with a big list of paid keywords. Having more doesn’t cost you more as long as you stay away from the highly competitive ones. We have more than 800 keywords. I’m curious as to how many others might have. Most don’t get clicked on for any given day, but they all get clicked at some point, usually at a pretty fair price. (Long Tail)
4. Look at your internal search statistics. What are people looking for and finding? Is the content on those pages good? What are they looking for and not finding? We have created content on our site specifically because people were searching for it and not finding it. (Pareto and Long Tail)
5. Belong to a group like WebiScope to get new ideas and bounce ideas off wonderfully smart and talented people. (Doesn’t really apply at all, but I thought I’d add how much I like this group!)
August 15th, 2007 at 8:53 am
Chris,
Excellent post.
We have focused on the long-tail for our sites with great success (even before the term was coined). It’s the basic concept that drives our content creation, search engine efforts and other web marketing.
I have one question about your graphs. The percentages suggest a larger number than 150 pages. What was the total page count?
I hope this post generates more discussion - “The Long Tail” is the fundamental difference between the web and every other communications tool.
Ed
August 15th, 2007 at 8:58 am
Excellent analysis, and you are lucky to have the budget to buy all those terms. Our SEM efforts are focused on specific products, so the number of terms is fairly limited, and the price often high. But they get results.
The question I’d ask is how you hold off those in the organization that say we can ignore or drop pages that get only a handful of visits each month. It comes up here all the time. My answer, similar to yours, is that if one patient gets helpful information by visiting an obscure page on the site, then it’s worth having. Once that page is on the site, it doesn’t cost anything to keep it there. Same thing with experiments with various tools. It may turn out that they don’t get used a lot, but once there, if they are offering value to even a couple of patients, then they are worth keeping.
Among the most interesting piece of web analytics is looking at the terms people used to find your site. Always a fascinating exercise!
August 15th, 2007 at 9:06 am
Especially with specialty surgeries and unique medical offerings, I’m always surprised what people find on our site, and how many visitors have turned into customers b/c of a unique procedure or page they were able to learn about.
There is a sizable and active population out there who aren’t looking for a job, a quick contact method, or a doctor’s office phone number.
August 15th, 2007 at 11:46 am
Ed — You are correct. In each graph, the total page count was higher than 150. In any single day (the first two graphs), the page count was roughly 150. For any given quarter, almost every page on our site — 2,000+ — is hit at least once. And we filter out (or try to) spiders and internal visitors.
Neal — I don’t really get that question as much as I get the “where’s mine?” My favorite is the “where’s mine?” request along with a list of links that they want our site to look like.
August 15th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Oh, I get those too, to be sure. It’s usually IS that wants to “clean up” the web site and suggests dropping a bunch of pages and features because they aren’t used that much. But, to your point, they are used!
August 15th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Chris,
that was an interesting article on Long Tail in health care.
I would go further as to add that looking at your search logs can also give insight into your users mental mode and how they search for information, what terms they search on also speaks volumes as to why they are searching in the first place. If the information architecture of the site is labeled in a manner that does not make sense to the user who trying to find information, they will most likely try searching to compensate. So if users are constantly are searching for medical records and the content exists on the site, but its buried underneath about us. Its time to re-evaluate where that content should go or move it to a section that makes sense or logical to the user.
The search logs are also a great place to generate your natural keywords list, because you know those are the keywords people are searching with. “For example, “Detox” is the term a user would, as opposed to inpatient medical stabilization that a clinician would use. Big difference in the way people think and the terms people use. Knowing your target audience and mental mode helps in providing a site they will continue to use.
August 15th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Rob,
In my opinion, experienced web visitors use internal search by default. It’s the best way to find what you want on a large complex site. How often do you use the navigation links on Ebay or Amazon? I bet those guys have invested big bucks to create the most logical navigation possible.
Of course all sites need clear navigation, but our most motivated visitors use the internal search. It’s our job to make that search tool really useful. Provide a “best match”, catch mis-spellings, group results by categories, etc.
Ed
August 15th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
I would have thought the same thing, but when we did usability studies all but one participant used the site navigation to the exclusion of all else. When asked why, they responded that searches are usually so useless that they don’t bother with them any longer. And if we look at our search logs vs. our traffic logs, there’s no comparison. So we can assume that our users will utilize the site search the most, but actual practice doesn’t bear that out. At least not on our site.
August 15th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Ed,
In my experience you have two types of users who come to the site: one who quickly scans the site to see if they can find what they are looking based on the navigation (labeling) and if they can’t figure it out, they search for it as a last resort. The other type of user doesn’t bother looking at the navigation, they just go straight to the search box and query.
If you cater only to those that search, then no doubt your search has to work really well. Otherwise the user will give up and leave because they won’t want to click on each tab to try and find information if they don’t think its leading down the right path.
To your point about using the navigation on ebay and amazon. I do use the navigation links on ebay and amazon. On ebay, you don’t do a search to list an item. You click on Sell in the top right-hand corner. At some point on either site you will have no choice but to use the navigation, you can’t rely on search for everything. It also depends on how much time you have too. eBay and Amazon have gone to great lengths to work on improving their IA and using their sites a good user-experience. It doesn’t matter if your site is 10 pages or 100k pages deep in content, you shouldn’t ignore or make up for the lack of IA with search.
R
August 15th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Good points as usual from Neal and Rob. Of course our websites need both tools - well-designed navigation and smart search tools. My point is that the truly motivated visitor will use search to find specific content, and that ties in with the long-tail concept. When your site contains content on thousands of subjects, internal search is a navigational short-cut to that material.
Good navigation is necessary to move around the first few hundred hierarchical sections of your site, but beyond that you will need other approaches - site maps, indexes, subject lists, etc. Here’s one example:
http://www.umm.edu/ency/index/eng_index.htm
Right now, navigation and search are separate tools. Traditional navigation defines the fixed structure of the site, while search runs as a program. I think future web tools will blur the line between the two. Regular navigation will handle the “head” and search will navigate the “tail” - and do it seamlessly.
In the meantime, our usage stats breakdown differently from Neal’s. We get 10,000 visitors a day who look at more than one page, and 5,000 of those visitors use our internal search. So for visitors who don’t bounce out, we have a 50/50 split between navigation and search. This might be tied to our traffic sources, which are mostly from search engines. These folks are already in “search mode”, so they may be more likely to repeat their search on our site.
Thank you both for the thoughtful comments - I really enjoy the discussion.
Ed
August 16th, 2007 at 6:45 am
I have to remind myself that there’s search, and then there’s search. We have a general search option available on every page. That’s the one that doesn’t get used a lot. But we have many focused search options that get you to doctors, facilities, classes and events, health conditions, and more. The search for each of those is separate and distinct. When you combine all of those into the search category, Ed’s probably right. Actually, on our site it would then be much more than 50% of the visitors who don’t bounce out. I don’t know if that means our search is integrated into the navigation, as Ed describes, but the outcome may be the same.
Neal
August 16th, 2007 at 7:56 am
Great discussion. While I’m all in favor of thoughtful, good IA, I agree with Ed that the search utility on a site goes back to the idea of the long tail. If 80% of our visitors are interested in 20% of our content on the site (jobs, main clinical areas, physician search, etc.), that better be intuitive in the navigation. But it’s impossible to put 2,000 pages within two clicks of the home page (isn’t it?). We have eight main categories in navigation plus a couple of other ways to reach content quickly (i.e., quick links), but that’s simply not enough for some … niche … subject matter to be near the top. The search utility is great for quickly accessing the niches. As it is on eBay and Amazon. If I want Harry Potter, sure, it’s right there for me to access. But if I want Highlands Pipes and Drums, it might just be easier for me to type that in search. (Unless I’ve shopped there before and Amazon knows my preferences, but that’s another topic.)
August 16th, 2007 at 8:32 am
Great comments and views on the subject.
Chris, Ed, Neal, et. al.
I understand that its next to impossible to put 2k of content within 2 clicks of the home page. Not even Amazon or eBay can achieve that. In my experience, if you have a content heavy/rich site and I’ve worked on some extremely heavy content based sites. The user needs to feel/get a sense that when they click on a category, that the information they are seeking, no matter how deep it is in the site, they are at least headed in the right direction.
I’m not arguing against search at all, I think search plays a vital role in finding information on content driven sites. Especially users who are looking for Long Tail content or any content at all. I feel you need to have a good balance.
R
August 16th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Rob,
I think you are on the right track - the research I’ve read disputes the old “Three-click rule”
http://www.uie.com/articles/three_click_rule/
Site visitors will keep drilling down on navigation links, and not become dis-satisfied, as long as they feel they are making progress and not getting lost. This is great news for big sites. Narrow & deep may be better than wide & shallow. Asking the visitor to chose from five options five times in a row requires less thought than choosing from 25 options three times in a row. But both structures navigate to 15,625 individual pages. (if my math is right…)
Ed
August 16th, 2007 at 11:32 am
Ed,
the article from Josh Porter is right on the mark. Another person who actually talks about this is Steve Krug, author of “Don’t Make Me Think”. I saw him and Lou Rosenfeld lecture about IA and Usability in Chicago in 2003, and they both touched upon this topic. Steve demonstrated this by showing a slide for signs leading a user to a garage sale.This was an excellent example of showing the user they are headed in the right direction. In this case it was for his garage sale, which easily translates to web very easily when looking for content too. I highly recommend seeing the both of them lecture, its a great two-day seminar and worth every penny.
Thanks
-R