The boom in online commerce has generated great technological advances and also great challenges for marketing and sales. The measurement and understanding of consumer behavior on the WEB has led to the deepening of usability concepts and web analysis metrics, trying to adapt what we know about marketing to the characteristics of online users / consumers.
Can economic psychology help e-commerce?
My opinion is that on-line behavior is only part of everything we can know about the user on the Internet. The online shopper is the same as the one who goes to the local store, we can therefore assume that the web world is analogous to the offline one. It is necessary to understand the human being who is in front of the computer or his mobile phone, the one who decides to initiate the interaction with what we offer him through a digital medium and makes decisions while browsing.
On the other hand, in the commercial sphere it is still true that the potential of a brand is associated with its ability to be identified as representative of a product and its visibility. The correlation of these two factors in online commerce would be their link with keywords (most common search terms) and their positioning (visibility) but, by measuring these two factors, can we anticipate whether a user will click?
Introducing economic psychology into the equation can help those responsible for the WEB in their work of "bringing" sites closer to users and consumers, expanding the possibilities of improving "engagement" and the way in which the site responds to their needs.
Influence of the way people make decisions:
Searching the web is a continuous decision-making process and humans usually have limited capacity to analyze information; We act with a combination of strategies that simplify the process and condition what we do when turning on the device.
There are two phenomena that can help us understand online behavior when a user starts the search process on the web and their understanding can help to imagine strategies to improve e-commerce actions: the anchor effect and the effect of the context (framing effect).
Let's go back to online marketing:
A good positioning favors the person to see our site (let's say it is the analog of being at the end of a supermarket dock) and visibility is undoubtedly crucial, but it does not determine the choice of the product. We can anticipate that being on the first page is not enough to ensure that our target audience clicks.
Visibility modulation by framing effect and context
Users have their own starting point when they enter the network and guide their actions by its “map” that includes: what you know, what you expect, what you like and what you get in the process. In decision-making, this starting approach will define the probability that someone enters a well-positioned site or modulates the magnitude of the effect of your site's visibility.
Internet search. Framing effect and context
Let's think for a moment about a search X. The user writes a word or group of words that are related to what he wants to achieve, for his part the search engine returns a list of results that according to its algorithms respond better to what that user is searching.
Will a navigator click on our page or not? Let's try to understand a little more how the user who is looking makes decisions and his interaction with the search engine.
The first phenomenon that can affect whether the user will click is the framing effect. Each person has their preferences and has a starting point to make decisions in their searches; Your personal history determines what results you consider acceptable, and it is your satisfaction of your criteria that will determine whether or not you keep looking.
The user will visually scan all the entries thrown by the search engine and will stop at the one that is “salient” or highlighted in the short search description, which will be the one that corresponds to their frame of reference. If this short description matches your expectation it will enter the page, if not, it will discard it.
The number of pages that you will visit will therefore depend not only on being on the first page of results but also on the satisfaction of the framing criteria of the person you are looking for, the satisfaction of your criteria and the number of pages that you find relevant and this may vary. by off-line factors.
In such a way that although it is said that the best place to hide a corpse is the second page of Google, this is not necessarily true; The person will make decisions to continue searching or to stop their search according to two determining elements of their framing: if the description actually resembles what they are looking for and if the pages they have visited have satisfied their search criteria. The person will not visit many relevant pages, not one, but they will stop as soon as they meet their criteria, if they do not get it on the first page they will continue.
However, the complexity of user behavior does not end here, because the criteria are not immutable and as the user explores, another thought process acts that influences decision-making: the framing effect or context effect.
People are sensitive to the way in which information is presented and their criteria vary to the extent that they get support or not for our initial point of view. This phenomenon can influence the decision to click on the site, both initially and in the chaining of each search, in such a way that the probability that someone clicks will be influenced by the information that the user gets in the previous click and also by the information you read in the short descriptions of the posts before and after your site. Moral: study not only your competitors, but also your neighbors.
If we consider that the user may be affected by the search chain and also by the information that the nearby entries offer in relation to the keyword, SEO can better understand the bounce rate or develop strategies to favor the "salience" or relevance of your entry is greater than that of your neighbors. It is a challenge that requires developing business intelligence, knowing the user offline and taking advantage of that experience for user tests and a more contextualized interpretation of keywords.
And what is the role of emotions?
