The anatomy of rewarding near misses

What is a near miss, and why is rewarding near misses important?

First, some definitions: 

• A near miss is when the visitor arrives on a page that is logically close to information on your site that they really want. 
• Rewarding a near miss is making it easy for the visitor get to the information they really want. 

Rewarding near misses is important because: 

• Visitors are arriving deeply within our sites via search engines
• They are itching to bounce from our site
• If we have good quality that people want, we should make it easy for them to find it

This problem happens far more frequently than may be immediately obvious (see this list of different types of failure), and certainly is not resolved just by tacking on a "related content" widget. 

The steps to evaluate when looking at near misses

There are three critical steps to consider when looking at near misses: 

1. The action that first brings the site visitor to the site, which will frequently be a search engine search.
2. The first page on our web presence that the site visitors sees.
3. The ideal page on our web presence for the site visitor.

A key question is whether there's a path from 2 (the page on our web presence that they land on) to 3 (the best page we have for what they are looking for). 

An example of not rewarding a near miss

Here's an example of where I start with a Google search on "povery reduction in india":

• The first page is 20 years old, so not very useful right off the bat. This also means that the site visitor may be less likely to even look around for other information. 
• There are World Bank pages that would probably be relevant to the searcher (for instance the main India page), but there is no linkage

This example does NOT reward being close. Although we are on a page about reducing poverty in India, it is from 20 years ago. Moreover, there is no link to any current page.

An example of rewarding being close

Looking at the World Bank again, let's say we do a search on india gdp. In this case: 

• Even the search results page uses World Bank data, which may mean the visitor can stop their search. 
• The first World Bank page is rich, and again re-iterates the India GDP. In addition, there are several other directions the visitor could go from there (other metrics in particular)
• Assuming the visitor is interested in digging into GDP, they can then go one level deeper to a tool where they could compare other countries or other metrics on the GDP graph. 

In this case, the site visitor is richly rewarded at every step, where the visitor could either stop with the summary information or dig deeper (or more broadly or laterally)

Some characteristics of rewarding near misses

Some of the characteristics of rewarding near misses are: 

• We actually have the information that the visitor is seeking, and in a form they can easily use it
• The initial page has as much information as possible on it (and ideally just simply answer their question), but in particular it provides context for going deeper (diving into GDP for example), going broader (for instance, going up a level to South Asia data), or laterally (for instance, to other metrics)
• The information is not silo'd or duplicated
• The information is either recent or has a clear path toward recent content

Also see 9 ways sites do NOT reward being close.