Site Tagline

I was told the first impression of my site can be improved. I searched and found an article about site tagline of which the checklists of engaging first-time visitors echo a new tagline suggested by our marketing person. After going though a list of candidates, at last, we decided to go with,

"Find online bargains and everything else."

Though it might not be as clever as I wanted it to be, it is clear. As usability guru Jaco Nielson said,

"The key job of the tagline for a website is to set the stage for enabling the user to interpret the choices and content that's offered on the site. In the usability lingo, the tagline should help establish the user's conceptual model. If the tagline is not clear, it may give people the wrong model and thus cause them to make errors or simply abandon the site altogether."

Our new tagline is on the site starting today. We'll see how it conveys and whether it's clear from your perspectives. Please comment and let me know.

Deal Search Questions

Online coupons are still not heard of by many shoppers. I took it for granted that online shoppers know means to save because I am able to find coupon codes to apply online to pay less, or I can go through some rare special coded links to get better price than other buyers. I can also access outlet or clearance promotions. However, other shoppers online might not be as familiar with what Keeca can offer. I should tell briefly why use Keeca and how it is different from Google.

As a starting point, I quickly collect several questions about our search and list them. Then I went though and briefly answered them one by one at Help Center. I hope they help to clear things up a bit more. The questions are far from complete and would like to be informative. You can leave me a question by commenting on this post, or simply fill out the feedback form and I'll try to have your question covered.

First Impression on a Site

I was in a phone with a friend who's working on a startup. My take-away was that the first impression on a site is critical to new visitors. Returning visitors tend to know where to click to find things around, but new visitors are like 'tell me what I can do here in 3 seconds' or they will talk away if the point is not made immediately.

I approached my sister who's visiting me from abroad and had not seen keeca.com for quite some time, I assumed. I asked her to just look at Keeca homepage and tell me what she perceived. She said,

"I don't know what to type for search."
"I am not sure what your site can return."
"How is your site different from Google?"

From engineering standpoints, adding on feature is probably the best approach to ease self comfort based on a blind belief to have features, features, and features. I'd say in addition to build site features, features must be useful solving users' problem, and perceived by users.

The importance of the first impression perceived by visitors is critical. When I look at HerCoupon for only a couple seconds, I can easily guess the site is for women and is for discount shopping. To build that instant understanding for Keeca homepage, I have works to do.

Google Finance bumped Yahoo Finance

Today, I added Google Finance to Keeca Web and bumped Yahoo Finance to make Google Finance the default Editor's Choice for stock research.

After all these years of Yahoo Finance dominating as the best finance portal for generic public in terms of public usage, Google released its Finance section at Google Finance that I feel special.

First, I found the interactive charting capability of Google Finance labeled with news event in time line quite informative for the reader to learn what happened when for the ticker being looked upon.

Secondly, the new Google Finance page implicitly personalize your interests by 'remembering' what tickers you had searched before and aggregate news for those tickers for you on the Google Finance page. Try a couple of ticker searches and you should see the personalization I am talking about.

Then there are other advantages over Yahoo Finance are better integration with related Blog postings, and genereously give the outbout links to other informative finance web sites including Yahoo Finance.

One more thing I like it for simple minded person who just want to get quick access to a company's financial statements, the income statement and balance sheet summary are right on the page dedicated to a ticker company.

Keep
Keck
KC
Kc
Kerk
Edit...
Ignore all
Add to dictionary

outbound
outbid
outboard
Edit...
Revert to "outboud"

Keeca Web Redesigned with Editor's Choices

To enable consumers search on the web for every thing other than online bargains, Keeca selects Google to power the Web search from Keeca Web. The Google Web search is ultra fast and relatively accurate than other generic search engine results. One can perform one search after another, scan through result listings for specific information. However, it is time consuming in many cases when you know what you want to search upon falls in a vertical domain, but just can't get the quality answers from a generic search engine.

The problem is time consuming, or put it other way considering the scenario, is that one can not find a quality site to continue down the searching path in a specific domain. Say you want to look for your local weather, maybe you don't know any quality weather site that can give you weather forcast of your city, so you need to perform a generic Web search to locate a weather site first, so you type in 'weather forecast' as the Web search term. You should find a weather site using 'weather forcast' search term, then from there, you search for the local weather by zip code or city name, depend on the search feature offered by the weather site you found. Or, if you want to search for a movie showtime around your area, you need to find out a quality site that have movie showtime information, so you probably type in 'movie showtime' as the search term to locate a site, before you can perform additional search to look for the showtime. Or, you want to search for a stock ticker and corresponding nformation for stock research and you don't have a clue where to begin with. Or, not sure a great news source to read or search the news .... Besides shopping online, we do a lot of stuff in daily life and rely on search in vertical domains more and more. Since the problem of this is time consuming, we need to provide a collection of quality vertical search engines or vertical portal (Vortal) to help our visitors. Thus, a new Keeca Web where you can search for every thing else in addition to online bargains is formed.

In addition to the existing Web search powered by Google, Keeca Web tries to bring a quick and easy partial solution to the table by presenting a collection of preselected vertical search engines, broken up into several main categories. Under each category from general information to shopping, to digital media search, I picked and list the best one I had experiences with and recommend it to you. The list is far from complete and is subjective. I do listen to your voice and welcome suggestions. If you know a good site that does particular type of searches and does it very well, please ... please ... tell me and I'll evaluate it for inclusion. The site that helps your daily life may help others too, and the people work hard behind the scene well deserve a link to their site from Keeca.

Seasonal Themes of Promotions

In addition to presenting 'Most Popular' deal search terms (see my previous post), I was thinking about what else may be useful to give consumers more hints for deal and/or online coupon searching. With minimum efforts, I started to maintain seasonal themes at the upper left of Keeca Deal. Here's a snapshot:

Seasonal Deals

- March Madness (NCAA)
- TurboTax/TaxCut
- Easter

These themes will be updated according to a marketing themes of the season. Depend on how long the season last, some will stay for days, some for weeks. Rest assured they will be up-to-date.

What Deal Search Terms are Popular?

If you'd like to know top shopping search terms being price compared recently, shopping.com has been maintaining what they call it Consumer Demand Index.

The Shopping.com Consumer Demand Index (CDI) makes it easy for you to put your finger on the pulse of consumer demand. With millions of shopping searches conducted each week, the CDI reveals emerging trends and hidden gems while highlighting the hottest products.

-- shopping.com

similarly, I wonder what shopping are searching for deals on Keeca. It make sense for the CDI being product focused because when it comes to price comparison, I won't be surprised to see top search terms are physical products that can be price compared. I also want to know whether our deal searchers are looking for things that we here at keeca.com do a great job of serving up deals for what they are looking for. For this, keeca.com added 'Most Popular' on to Keeca Deal. The 'Most Popular' reveals popular terms being searched upon recently. To make it more statistically significant, I chose to do it for past 7 days (rather than just 1 day) as it is clarified on the left of the page on Keeca Deal. It covers deal search terms only for now, not to be confused by Web search terms. The number of times a deal search term was searched are counted at the unique visitor level, meaning if someone happens to search the same term more than once in a day, the counter for that particular deal search term will only be increased and counted for one. Here's an example of what the 'Most Popular' look like:

Popular Deal Searches

1. turbo tax
2. turbotax
3. six flags
4. newegg
5. sea world
6. southwest
7. southwest airlines
8. virgin mobile
9. western union
10. eharmony
11. turbotax online
12. aaa
13. fandango
14. imac
15. pottery barn
16. snagit
17. best western
18. busch gardens
19. compusa
20. hilton

The 'Most Popular' deal search terms is refreshed every day, many times. Like myself, a consumer may come to Keeca Deal to get a sense of what else are being looked for by simply scanning though the list. I noticed it changes slightly every day. It fulfills my curiosity to some extend from consumer standpoint. As our traffic level grows (I hope), the stats will make more statistic sense.

The real use of this list can also be used to improve deal content we collect. Ideally, I'd love to see every key phrase in the top 20 list takes consumers to a bag full of quality deals of that topic. Our Content Dept should use this list to go through from the top and chase down the list, fill them up, and consumers will be satisfied, at least more satisfied than before.