Interested in your live chat experiences, can you say roughly what % of visitors will engage in it?

We've never had a live chat setup before, but we received about 8-12 emails a day about orders, so I'm sure we'll have some people wanting to talk to a real person. We're revamping our entire support system. I'll update you guys with more info since I'll probably be handling customer service.

The company I interned at for a while was a home building company that had ~50k visits a month and less than 200 live chat requests a month. It was usually in between the 125-175 mark. They had an outside company take care of the requests and paid them based on a pre-agreed on amount. Like 200 requests for x$ for the month of January. Anything over 200 would cost y$ more. I wish I knew more but I was just getting into Analytics at the time and this was my first experience playing around with the marketing campaign and having access to anything at all related to it. The company has also since filed for bankruptcy and closed down.

Live chat sometimes also gives you the ability to promote and initiate chats which can be very effective apparently. Eg, "Hi there I see your looking at our product, any questions on it?"

Yes. The company we're going to use offers a pop-up like, "Hey, can we assist you?" But I don't think we'll implement this. We're a large merchant which has lots of vendors on board which manage their own products.

This would be the single quickest way to drive me away from a website. I think the 'live chat online' is a great idea, and if I have questions about the product then I will use it... but the last thing I want is someone trying to chat to me every time I visit a web site.

Do you ever have any issues with call quality? I have been thinking about purchasing a UK number so friends back home can call me without dialling abroad...

I have a UK skype number and take calls in the US. Call quality is very good - pretty much the same as a cellphone.

Thanks. I remember using skype to dial out a few years ago and the quality wasnt always that great... but I guess its probably come a long way since then.

We haven't had any problems at all, if your downloading/uploading a lot of stuff though obv it might be bad. The biggest problem is turning the mic on in time to receive the call lol (only get 1 every now and then)

I read in this thread about sites where you can hire a cheap service (design, logos, music, code... heck, anything). I was trying to search, but the thread is too big. Help?

www.fiverr.com
www.odesk.com
www.elance.com

I've had it done to me before didn't mind it at all, it was nice to chat to someone and get my questions answered without having to find them. I see how it could be irritating though.

I'm sure under the right settings it could be useful. You can see if the same IP goes to the same page over and over, or if it spends x amount of time on the page, etc. I'd say it depends heavily on the industry. A retail site with simple products where people browse a BUNCH probably isn't the best. But something specific like a local landscaping company or a furniture moving company would be PERFECT for it.

Is there any way some of you guys can PM me the sites you work on? I try to follow some of the thread but its hard when you talk about what you are doing "for your site" when I don't know what site you are working on. Only asking because i'm doing some work on a site at the very beginner level and looking to improve it.

thanks to everyone contributing to the thread

Can anyone tell me the purpose of a FB landing page? If you use the right like box on your website, a like click will subscribe you to that group. This seems better than linking to a landing page and trying to get them to like it?

At work we've had great success with live chat. For 3 years it's been one of our top converting channels. We do about 50,000 online and offline chats per year across 3 websites (1.2M visitors).

I really have to fight against "management" who insist on wanting to use proactive chat (where you interrupt a visitor with a 'Hi want to chat box'). I try to explain that chat is so successful and so many visitors engage in it, so we do not have a chat problem where users can't find the chat option or don't know that chat is available. It's not fixing a problem. Then I tell them, "do you like it when that interruption occurs on websites you visit" and the answer is always, "no, it's annoying" and then I tell them, "why would the users of our site not find it annoying also?"

In our case the chat operators are our call center employees who don't really understand anything about "web user experience". When I did allow proactive chat two years ago I remember I was doing content updates on one of our sites and was getting chat invites on every single page view. If I were a regular visitor I definitely would have left that site after the 2nd invite. Our chat software shows you how many times the person has visited the site - so my number at the time was like 480 so it should have been obvious that I wasn't a regular visitor since 90% of them are at 1-2 visits.

We use LiveZilla chat which used to be free but now costs a little bit. But we have 75 operators so the cost (one time cost of $1500 for v4.0 with unlimited operators) is 5% of what other chat software would cost. We'd be paying about $6,000 a month with any other chat platform.

If the purpose is strictly getting more "likes", then you're correct.

Having a FB landing page for a FB ad reduces CPC by almost half. This can be especially worthwhile if you have an active FB community.

Thanks, I don't understand what you just said though I don't think, are you talking about CPC for running a campaign on Facebook to get people to like you? How does it reduce it by 50%?

Sorry. Yes, when running a CPC campaign on Facebook, you get 45% off per click if the landing page is a Facebook page. That's one good reason to have a Facebook landing page. I"m sure there are other good reasons too, like if you want them to get straight to your community engagement area.

Regarding the "likes". Go with a smaller box. The huge box that pulls in your feed plus has the people pictures gets approximately zero traction. The largest FB widget I would put on a site would be similar to the one SEOMoz has on the right.

Looking at click patterns across several properties and niches, bigger isn't better with the FB widget. It's a laughably bad black hole in the heat map, and generates an astonishing ~30-40 requests per load, slowing down the page.

Thanks! Interesting info I didn't know, will try and run some more FB campaigns to test this

I actually saw this link and thought I would share.


How to Build a Fan-Worthy Facebook Page
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/222729

Oh hey, thanks for the link. Didn't know they lifted the 25 likes requirement before being able to claim a fan page URL.

No worries. I actualyl didn't know that you couldn't change the name after 100 likes. I had a friend who wanted to name a fb page 'SEX' and then he wanted to change the name at a later date after he had thousands of users, to a business page.

Well played Fb, well played.

If you had to choose between 2 names: example.co or example.us which is better?

Obv. bought both but wondering which should be primary? The .com and .net are squatted on so there's no competition with regard to becoming established.