Tips, tools, and best practices for B2B marketers.

Unscientific, self-inflicted user research on the benefits of not putting content behind registration forms.

October 7, 2007 | Posted by: Nicholas

Or, I came to read, not to register.

While doing research on web analytics today, I stumbled upon the SEMphonic home page. They are a web analytics company, so I’d love to hear how they’d interpret the data from my visit to their site. Here are some facts:

• I remained on their site for over 10 minutes.
• I downloaded three PDFs from their home page.
• I went to only one other page besides their home page (surprisingly, even to me, their About Us page).

As a result of the above, I plan on:

• coming back soon.
• telling others about the site. (Duh.)
• contacting them as soon as possible.

Why? One reason: they didn’t put a form between me and their most value content - a series of PDFs filled with information. (And these aren’t little two-page “white papers” that should really be blog posts; these are full-on 28-page - and more - publications.)

If I had encountered a registration form, I probably wouldn’t have immediately left the site. I would have returned to the home page and started quickly clicking and scanning other pages to find information and evaluate the company. The problem with that is all I would have found is typical brochure-ware marketing speak that neither gives me valuable information on web analytics or makes the company itself stand out in any way. So, I would have left disappointed and with, if anything, a negative impression of the company.

The benefits (see above) of not putting barriers between site visitors and the content they came to get should be obvious to senior marketers and management. The lunacy of making site visitors fill out a form - any form - should as well: Do stores require an ID check to get inside?

You can find research out there that supports and supposedly disproves this argument, but nothing tells the story like personal experience. Take it from me, as both an internet professional and an internet user, ditch all barriers that separate site visitors from your content, especially if you think that content is valuable.