It is good practise to have your own customised error page, which is in your own template look and feel, as this provides a consistent user experience and allows you to communicate a suitable message; whilst being in control of that message. Additionally if you don’t create a formal process for errors of this nature you may risk how well your site is perceived by search engines.

Most search engine optimisation and usability experts will recommend you have a customised error page that makes some apology to the user, explains in basic terms what has happened, and suggests some useful and popular content or pages to visit as an alternative. Tip: Don’t reference “404″ in the page content as it is meaningless to the user.

Here’s what we do, which seems to work for us :

Example of a customised error page

Whilst all of this is professional and does something to rescue a poor user experience; for a commercial website, this is a missed opportunity. Make the most of your error pages by turning what could have potentially been a poor user experience into a commercial opportunity by creating a commercial error page.

Tips for Creating a Commercial Error Page

1. Start by doing some simple analysis into your most popular products and pages with highest conversion rates.

2. Do your research first, and if your are a new site, wait a couple of months to get some statistically meaningful performance data.

3. Don’t just put your most expensive products on the page, as this may look hollow and may not convert at all. Wait until you have some interaction and conversion rate data beforehand.

4. Identify top 3 to 10 products and present them in the error page content.

5. Identify top converting pages and explain what these pages are, asking if they might be of interest to the user.

6. Put your search box on your error page.

7. Optimise your error page by testing performance of different products.

8. Analyse the visitor route to error and see if there is a pattern or commercial inference to be made.

Here’s the best commercialised error page I’ve ever seen.

Best Commercial Error Page We Have Seen

Note the friendly and apologetic intro, the huge search box in prominent position, and the placement of the trendy, popular and celebrity-fave footwear items. This brand is working hard to make me like them and to get my business.

It’s worth saying that I was surprised to find a huge number of giants in online retail with a lot of opportunity to increase commercial usability and user experience, by improving on their current solution. Such as ASOS and their automatic redirect to the homepage , Argos and their complete lack of customisation and possibly the biggest surprise of all was Amazon and their slightly formal and completely non-commercial message; which for a web retail giant like Amazon, could be a considerable bit of scooping up to be done. (As you have gathered, I didn’t need to look past ‘A’ to find a surprising amount of missed opportunity.)

Automatic re-direct to home

Er... Where Am I?

Mal Function

Kudos to Zappos for leading the field. Do please let me know if you come across any really good or really bad error pages in the comments!

1. Introduce an aggressive analytics procedure.

It matters not that the revenue you generate goes forward to support a cause, as opposed to generate a profit. An online donation is still a conversion, or ‘sale’. Analyse your traffic on a regular basis (at least monthly) to identify benchmark performance metrics and trends, and adapt accordingly. Using products such as Omniture SiteCatalyst, or Google Analytics (free), you can set your own criteria as to what is a conversion, though I would suggest the key conversion would be the completion of a donation transaction. You should on a weekly or monthly basis, look at the absolute number of unique users, by referring source of traffic and total number of donations for the same period. If you divide the total number of donations by the total number of unique users (by referral source) you will know your average conversion rate for the time period. You can then analyse each referring source individually to assess if that source provides quality traffic, i.e. traffic that converts at a rate equal to or higher than average conversion rate. If you have a spreadsheet whizz (or if you can afford a data analyst in your organisation) have them put together a pivot table with other comparable data, such as average donation value (site-wide), compared to average donation value by referral source. In terms of using the data, such analysis will show you how and where to focus your traffic generation efforts. If, for example you discover that a medium sized source of traffic, has a conversion rate half of the average and a low donation value – you know you could be using your time more efficiently elsewhere, by growing a smaller, but more efficient referral source.

2. Online advertising (for free).

It goes without saying that one of the best ways to attract online donations to your cause, is to advertise your cause to people online! As a charity you get to do this for free! Yes. Seriously. Free. Not everywhere of course, but on Google AdWords for example. Google Grants is the scheme that allows registered charities to apply for a free grant, of $10,000 a month to spend on AdWords. Of course there is a heavily scrutinised application procedure to avoid abuse of this scheme, and it does take a very long time to be approved. However for $10,000 a month to spend on one of the most responsive and efficient forms of advertising (search engine marketing), with the world’s largest search engine, who can’t wait a few months? Find out more about Google Grants.

Additionally; to raise brand awareness and profile you should take advantage of free advertising opportunities that exist with some of the display ad networks. AdJug, for example is one of the fastest growing, open and transparent ad-exchanges in Europe, serving over 1 Billion ad impressions a month, and offering free inventory opportunities to a different charity each month. Contact Nikki Staveley to find out if you qualify.

3. Use Social Media to Increase Donations

As a charity, you naturally have an engaging message and purpose that will strike a chord with many people. Social media is therefore a perfect and free method of interacting with your supporters, finding and attracting new supporters, and of course generating traffic and donations to your website. What is social media? In this case we’re talking about online media which allows members to link up, share information, establish a profile, contribute stories and develop two-way communications. Such examples of social media that facilitate this behaviour are Facebook, Twitter and Qype. Let’s be clear however that there are different ways of using social media; i.e. advertising on a social media outlet, or being an active and valuable member of a social media outlet. We’re talking specifically about being an active and valuable member of a social media outlet. As the first stage of the buying cycle is ‘awareness’, using social media to increase awareness of your brand, cause, values and work is an absolutely invaluable opportunity. Posting stories, interesting facts and time-sensitive campaign information is easily possible using social media, and all serves to engage your community of fans, friends and followers with your core message. Our recent work with GlobalGiving UK, a charity that supports real people and projects at grass roots level uncovered some incredible statistics and a case for expansion of social media strategy. Our analysis showed that Facebook and Twitter featured highly in the top referring domains for GlobalGiving UK traffic, and most importantly that this traffic resulted in conversion to donation at a far higher than average rate. In the case of Twitter this was twice the average conversion to donation rate, and with Facebook – even higher still.

Follow @GlobalGivingUK to see how they are communicating their message to Twitter friends or become a fan on Facebook.