Ok, another thing I hear marketers at the conventions I have been attending talk about with great obsession is conversion analysis, and rightly so.

But we do so to the point that we limit our analysis to the conversion zone at the expense of overlooking an equally common cause: usability.

If you reflect on your personal experiences with websites you have abandoned for reasons other than irrelevant content, you’ll probably agree with me that the #1 (or #2) reason you did so had to do with usability.

You couldn’t find something.  The site was too busy and difficult to scan.  The look and feel just kind of annoyed you.

These are the “first touch” reasons that will send most users away from your site before they get to point of considering your value proposition.

And so I have found myself increasingly interjecting, “you don’t have a conversion problem, you have a usability problem”.

The take-away is that scrutiny of landing pages and “conversion” pages should be complemented with studies on usability.