How many clicks? Barriers to Downloads
How many clicks will an end-user put up with to download a software product?
This isn’t a new question. The most common answer is “any click is a barrier”. But I think this whitewashes the complexity of the interaction between the publisher and the consumer. I believe the answer lies in the inherent value of the content transferred in the transaction, and how “heavy” the click.
Distribution or Delivery?
Imagine walking down the sidewalk in your town. You pass a casually dressed young person, aggressively distributing handbills printed on neon green paper. Did you take it? Did you alter your path to avoid having the flyer thrust into your hand? Did provide your userid and mailing address in exchange for the leaflet?
Now imagine heading to the Post Office to pick up a box that didn’t fit in your mailbox. A quick flash of your ID to verify your name and address, and away you go.
How many clicks would each of these scenarios encompass online? Are all the clicks the same?
No real data
We’ve looked for click rates studies and abandonment rate studies to help us understand the software design implications of this user behavior. We’ve found no real scientific evidence we can point to that provides evidence of a ratio for clicks to abandonment (if you have one please point us in that direction).
Value Drives Clicks
We’ve put a stake in the ground that an end-user’s point of indifference is based on the inherent value of the download to the user. This seems pretty obvious to us, but is hard to generalize and measure. Our purely anecdotal benchmark follows the price of computer-games; if the download is valued at less than $29 USD the end-user’s willingness to “click” or provide specific information about themselves diverges greatly from those software products that are valued at greater than $29 dollars.
Let us know if you have found a better description of the “how many clicks” barrier.
Hi Jay,
When you say you haven’t found studies on this, perhaps they’re not public for the most part nor readily available. But here at Sun we’ve studied this quite closely for many products over time. Using Omniture click stream reports, it’s very easy to see where abandonment occurs. The biggest drop off is for downloads that require login or registration. That is the biggest “barrier” — abandonment rates are typically 30-50% higher than products that do not require it. And this is for very similar products, all of them free.
It’s been a debate for years whether it’s “worth it” or not to require registration before download, and there is no “right” answer. To some product teams, the value of the customer data outweighs the higher abandonment rate. To others, their goal is to simply get their software in as many hands as possible.
The solution I like is to not require login or registration before downloading. Rather, build it into the installer. This gets your software in as many hands as possible. Then, if you’ve taken the time to download it and are actually installing it, you’re likely to get a higher quality of data anyway.
Regards,
Gary
Gary Zellerbach
October 1, 2008 at 15:02 pm
Thank Gary,
We see many different behavior profiles across our customer’s software distribution initiatives. And we’re never short of theories as to why users behave the way they do (smile). We routinely scan for publicly available data on this subject so as not to fall into the trap of thinking our data must representative of the wider industry. As I mentioned before, the data pool is very lacking.
I predict that the abandonment ratios you’ve shared here will be referenced more than a few times!
Jay Nash
October 2, 2008 at 11:47 am