Have you got too many websites?: July 25, 2005: New Thinking by Gerry McGovern

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July 25, 2005

Have you got too many websites?

Please read the corrections and comments on this story

By Gerry McGovern

Too many websites are nearly always a bad idea. Getting your customer to remember one web address is more than enough of a challenge.

I recently did some work with Petro-Canada, a major oil and gas company. Petro-Canada has a customer loyalty program called Petro-Points. Some time ago, Petro-Points arranged a survey, and it encouraged customers to fill out the survey online by offering extra points.

People often saw the notice for the survey at the gas station. The survey stated that they should go to petro-points.ca. However, a significant number of people ended up going to petro-canada.ca, which is the main Petro-Canada website. In fact, the number one search on Petro-Canada for some time now has been “survey”.

Basically, what happened was that by the time people had got home, they still remembered the lure of extra points if they filled out this survey, but they forgot the petro-points.ca website address. (Perhaps, they had never even remembered it in the first place.) It was a Petro-Canada initiative, they figured, so they put “Petro-Canada” in the search box and clicked on the first link.

Large organizations have many challenges when it comes to the Web. There’s so much they want to tell people that if they put it all on the same website it would make things very cluttered. One solution is to set up dedicated websites. I think that’s a poor solution because the chances of such websites being found are very small.

For some reason, governments seem to love creating lots and lots of websites. It is estimated that there are some 4,000 UK government websites. I don’t know how many U.S. government websites there are, but I saw a study that there are almost 1 billion U.S. government webpages. You get websites like stopsmoking.gov, haveyoustoppedsmokingyet.co.uk, smokingisnotcool.ie. (These are not actual websites, but you get the idea.)

Unfortunately, many of these dedicated websites have more to do with organization politics than with a genuine desire to communicate. In government, for example, a department or body will get allocated some budget. Having a website is like ticking a box of all the little things they need to do to show that they spent the budget.

So if your current website is bulging, and it’s not a good idea to set up all these little websites, what do you do when you have so much to communicate? You face reality. You have more and more to say to people, and they have less and less time to listen. The more you try and shove at them, the more they are likely to ignore you. Every good communicator knows that if you bombard journalists with press releases you will likely be ignored.

If you can get your customers or citizens to remember one website address, that is a major achievement. Setting up all these separate websites is splitting your budget, splitting your energies, and splitting the attention of your reader.

It also makes your web strategy more difficult to manage. Because Petro-Canada thought that everyone would go to the Petro-Points website to fill out the survey, they didn’t initially have a reference to the survey on their main website. This led to a lot of confusion and annoyance.

Gerry McGovern

Some corrections and comments from Petro-Canada on the above story

It was a retail gas station survey, not a Petro-Points survey.
Our site operations group (not our Web team or Petro-Points) created a new free gas contest/survey Web site (without our knowledge) because they were going after a targeted audience: customers who had recently visited a Petro-Canada retail gas station and retained their sales receipt. Promoting "free gas" on our corporate Web site would have attracted a larger audience, but not necessarily the right audience.
The sales receipt included the url of the dedicated survey site (www.petrosurvey.ca) plus a 14-digit number that they had to take from the physical receipt and enter into a field on the dedicated Web site. Once the customer completed the survey, they were entered in a contest to win free gas, not to win Petro-Points.
We (our Web team) discovered through our petro-canada.ca Web metrics that many readers were entering in "Petro survey" and variations in the search box. We deduced people were trying to find info about the retail survey. To rectify the situation, we developed a page for our corporate site so it would appear in the search results when readers searched for these popular terms. The page redirected them to the survey Web site with instructions indicating that they needed their gas station sales receipt with relevant info. We wanted to dissuade readers who did not have a valid sales receipt.
After we published this page, queries for "survey" appeared to be satisfied by this page as click-through paths showed readers clicking through to the actual survey by means of this new page. Customer email queries also ceased.
We spell the company name and loyalty program as Petro-Canada and Petro-Points respectively.
We are not a government organization.

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