Does your website have troubles with pogosticking? Here you can read how to deal with these troubles

January 30th, 2008 · No Comments

Pogosticking Before I am gonna tell you how to solve it, you first want to know what it is.

Pogosticking is clicking from the survey-page to the detail- page. When you haven’t fount the correct item you have click back to the survey-page. Again and again and again …..

A pogostick is a toy for children to jump up and down. (Look at the picture at the right)

Probably, you’re pogosticking a lot when you’re surfing the web. I will give you some examples of pogosticking:

Clicking from page to page, from result back to the survey-page
For example in a web-shop, clicking to the product and back to the survey. Again and again and again.

There is a big chance you are doing this regularly, at least I do.

Why does pogosticking happen?
Pogosticking happens because users cannot find the item they are looking for. This means pogosticking has a negative impact; it is not friendly for your customers. Often potential customers will leave your website because they can’t find the right item immediately.

There are a lot of possible causes of pogosticking. For example unclear descriptions and unclear titles. Users are looking for specific information. When a title or a description is not clear, they will click it anyway. Perhaps they find the information they are looking for…

Why do “people” click on bad descriptions? Because we are used to find relevant information on the first page

I will give you another example of pogosticking. It is an older example of the website of Sony Ericsson.

It is a survey of all mobile phones from Sony Ericsson. But, how do you know how the p910a looks like. To find out you have to click on the item. It is not what you are looking for and you will click back to the survey. In other words: You are pogosticking.

Research for pogosticking
There have been a lot of researches to pogosticking. The most important outcome is that pogosticking will reduce your conversion significantly. In other words: The more customers are pogosticking, the less you are selling.

How can you avoid pogosticking?
Look very careful to your website and make sure that your survey-page is absolutely clear.

Here I have another example of a very bad website:

Example Pogosticking Linksys

You can choose out of 398 products from a dropdown-box. When you don’t know what item you’re looking for, you are obliged to go pogosticking. You can understand, this is not friendly for your customers.

It would be better to divide these products into sub-groups for example wireless and conventional routers,

Tips to avoid pogosticking

Make sure that your survey-page has a clear description of all products. Sometimes a small picture wit a description works even better
When there are a lot of products on the survey-page (like the routers example) you better divide into sub-groups
Make sure there is a clear link-text. The customer knows what to expect, when he clicks the link.

Resources:

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