Left Brain, Right Brain

Designing website can take a LBRB (Left Brain, Right Brain) approach - to cater to 2 large group of web audience (presumably all the people in this world can be categorised into a Left Brain - more logical person and a Right Brain - more creative person)

So a website can have 50% real estate dedicated to a very logical-kind of treatment - ie brand/ messages / navigation can be very factual logical, text heavy describing in detail what this website is trying to communicate. And the other 50% real estate of the website dedicated to a very visual-kind of treatment to illustrate the message/ next steps into the website journey ,etc (example using images, videos, flash demo, etc).

The idea of this approach can help to drive a website design discussion so that there is less of a subjective view of the design, but rather a more objective approach helps to cut through the clutter to get every stalk holder to agree to one design. One design that fit the needs of the entire world - assuming all the people in the world can be categorized as Left Brain or Right Brain.

Things to look out for when reviewing creatives/campaign plans

Messaging

- need to identify key lead message among all the proof points

- requires legal approval on all messaging before usage

- key message may differ from country/region. Hence the right message has to be picked for the right country.

- message testing can be done to find out which message reasonate better with which country

Creative

- check if the country print can handle the the printout of the creative (e.g. printing black on newspaper will not turn out good in some emerging markets, perhaps better on magazine)

- creatives should cater area/real estate for local promotions (particular in demand generation campaigns) beyond key messaging

Digital

- Internet bandwidth in countries - emerging markets with lower internet bandwidth may require a HTML version of campaign website instead of a flash site

Possible reasons for high exit rate

Today we have a campaign results review and one of the key highlights is the microsite has high exit rate of 85%. The other 2 country campaigns has about 30% to 35% abandonment rate.

So the inevitable question comes along - why?

Here is a list of possible reasons - may not be exhaustive but its a good start.

1) wrong target audience

It may be that the target audience is wrong and we could be buying the wrong media. So even though there are click through from media to the microsite, but if the message is not what the audience expect, they will just close the browser or exit elsewhere.

2) Poor site loading time

If the site is heavy (e.g. flash), then the visitors may exit or close the browser. Different countries may have different patient level to wait for the site to load.

3) Poor internet connection speed / interruption

Some countries could be running on a lower bandwidth / lower internet speed, so it affects the loading speed of the site. Or even there could be a instance of connection drop (e.g. earthquake under the sea bed affected internet cables) - however such incidents typically will not last a few days.

4) Disconnect between media and microsite

Sometimes the message /look and feel on the media differ from the landing site, then the visitor may be confuse and leave the site.

If the media message is promotion but when visit comes to the landing site, the message is value proposition, then that will be a total disconnect.

5) Fake visitors

In certain countries, there are paid underground syndicates that just click on media to boost the cost per click, hence driving up the exit rate when it comes to the microsite.

If you have any other reasons, please share with me.