I never troll the news looking for things to blog about, but this article, whereby Slate releases their web analytics and compares “our” type of web analysis to Nielsen and comScore, is a must-read for analysts. (And, it’s especially gratifying to see that they come down on the side of web analytic software and website publishers.)
Robbin
LunaMetrics
Even if you do a great job of search engine optization, you may find that the site that sends you more traffic than any other is called None.
Who is None? None includes all the visitors who type your website address into the address bar on their browser, or those who use a bookmark to access your site. None usually includes everyone who comes to your site from your email marketing, and even people who click on your website address in a personal email.
So what’s a web analyst to do? One simple option is to create new landing pages on your site for each way of finding you. So your January email marketing has one set of new pages, your February email marketing has another set, etc. Then you can use your web analytics to trace actions from that page.
There are three problems with this solution:
Alternatively, you can use a campaign code. Campaign codes require three elements:
Here’s an example. I had to use square brackets [like this] instead of the correct html brackets
, so that my blogging software would know this is only sample HTML.
If Jane Doe’s email signature currently includes a line like this:
www.thejanedoecompany.com
then the actual html (no campaign code added yet!) looks like this:
[a href="http://www.thejanedoecompany.com"]www.thejanedoecompany.com[/a]
Jane can track how many people go to her site from her personal email with the addition of a campaign code:
[a href="http://wwww.thejanedoecompany.com/?emailsig=Jane"]www.thejanedoecompany.com[/a]
Jane doesn’t have to change the home page at all. But she does have to alert her web analytic software that emailsig=Jane is a campaign, so that it will grab that text after the question mark and start tracking those emailsig=Jane visitors.
Unfortunately, how you tell your web analytic software to shake hands with the campaign code is different for every package. With Omniture, you have to be a supported user and ask them for special code to put in a special file. (Anything that’s expensive is hard to use, right? Adam Greco from Omniture Best Practices asked me to point out that it is a one-time set-up.)
If you don’t already know how to do this, you are probably wondering how you can set up a link with a question mark and some tracking code in it without changing the page on the website that it references. So go ahead — type in www.lunametrics.com/?anything-you-like. Or use your own site as the example site instead of mine. Either way, you’ll see that the site ignores everything after the question mark. It is only valuable to your web analytics software.
Robbin
LunaMetrics
People don’t care about me — but I don’t take it personally. Everyone is too busy caring about themselves to care about me.
That’s why I try hard on my company’s website to speak in the second person (“you” not “me”), and to write about benefits. All my website visitors have only one question: “What’s in it for me?”
Look at this company feature: “We create key performance indicators for your web analytics.”
Now for the corresponding benefit: “Once you have key performance indicators, you won’t have to wade through hundreds of reports – you’ll see your site’s performance at a glance.
OK, let’s try another example, feature first: “This barbecue light is battery operated.”
And now for the corresponding benefit: “This barbecue battery-operated light enables you to see when outlets aren’t available — like in your back yard.”
The first one is more about the seller: This is what we’ll do for you, or this is what our product does. The second one is about the buyer, “We’ll work our magic and here’s what’s in it for you.
Selling with benefits isn’t limited to the web. We should sell with benefits in
brochures, in sales calls, in advertisements. But I’ll leave that to the brochure blogs and the sales blogs and the advertisement blogs…
Robbin
LunaMetrics
Just a quick update on some new features and a chance to talk about how they affect conversion rates. First, I implemented FeedBlitz on the right side of the blog page, which lets you subscribe by email. That way, if you don’t know how to do feeds, or you don’t want to do feeds, you can just read this blog in your email. I linked to the FeedBlitz privacy policy right there at the email box, so that if you have any concerns about use of your name, you can see that FeedBlitz shares it with me and no one else. (A best practice for conversion – always show the right information at just the right time. If you care about collecting email addresses for your marketing, then get that privacy policy right by your sign-up box.)
Also, I implemented a new FeedFlare. FeedFlares are the little bells and whistles that show up at the end of the posting. The FeedFlare I implement is “Subscribe to this feed” which is now at the end of every post in the blogsite. True, you can subscribe to the feed by clicking the orange feed button on the right side bar, but once again, it is about providing just the right call to action in just the right place.
Robbin
LunaMetrics
I’ve been having an email conversation over the last couple days with John Zeratsky from Feedburner. (If you have a feed to your blog or website and aren’t already using them to measure your feed, it’s worth a look. Your feed readers are your most loyal feeders – they are your subscribers.)
The conversation with John started when I used some wizard or searched their knowledgebase looking for answers and the answer ended, “Was this helpful to you? Yes or No?” So I clicked No and wrote, “I figured out what do it but I don’t understand it. I feel like FeedBurner is written by techies for techies.”
John replied that non-techies do some of the writing, but in general I was right– technical people are their current primary audience, and they struggle over how to address the non-technical audience. Addressing the non-techie audience is going to become pretty important to FeedBurner over time if feeds become more prevalent (and if they don’t, FeedBurner may never reach their financial goals, whatever those goals might be.)
So here’s the example I gave John. This sentence really burned me (pun fully intended):
If you HTTP-redirect your
feed to FeedBurner, you may enter your original source feed URL here.
FeedBurner will use this URL in all feed links offered to potential
subscribers.
There are two problems with if. First, it is written in geek-speak. But second, I perceived that it was some kind of opportunity, like this: “If you want to HTTP-redirect….” After all, everywhere else I look on that site, they are offering opportunities to make one’s feed better.
In fact, here is what it means (and John gets all the credit for rewriting it, although I was disappointed to see that the new wording is not on their site):
If you have configured your web server to redirect users from your old feed to your new one, you’ll want to instruct subscribers to use your old address (so that the redirect can work its magic). Enter that original address here and we’ll instruct potential subscribers to use that address instead of the new one.
And I got it. In fact, when I finally understood it, I was tempted to write back, “Oh you mean, like a 301! Well, why didn’t you say so?” but then I would have been as guilty of geek-speak as FeedBurner.
A site like FeedBurner (and your site may be similar – with one audience at the beginning but a growing, different audience moving in over time) needs to address multiple personas. One way they could do this, I pointed out to John, is to use a definition in a box. So if I’m a non-geek, those fun-but-geeky phrases like “Burn your Feed” could be underlined with a dashed line and when the user clicked or even moused over them, the definition comes up. Alternatively, they could do exactly what John did in his rewritten text: keep the same tone as the rest of the site but make it for the masses.
My final thought is about having someone else read your site before you go public (or even after you do.) This particular small example wasn’t about just tech-talk but was also about phraseology — I looked at is as an opportunity (“If only you would”) and they meant it conditionally (“If you have already”) So, always get someone far outside of your space to read your site.
Robbin
I love MarketingSherpa. If it weren’t for Anne Holland and Company, I probably would never have ended up in this industry.
And the MS folks have been really good about keeping us marketers on the right side of the law. They did a great job with CAN-SPAM 2003 when it first came out. Not two weeks ago, they did a piece on email marketers who are getting sued for using patent-infringing technology.
So I was really surprised to see this piece on PETCO. It’s a great piece, it chronicles how PETCO made their customer comment section into an important part of their website. I was ready to send it to one of my customers and then suddenly remembered that Amazon received a business process patent for customer reviews, which even included leading customers to a webform to fill out that review.
Whether Amazon is planning to pursue the patent or not, and even if PETCO’s customer review system is outside of the Amazon patent, I thought MarketingSherpa should have pointed out the legal pitfalls. Maybe they will down the road.
Robbin
LunaMetrics
Right after I graduated from college, I worked at a magazine. One day, the executive editor came down to my office and pointed out a particularly ugly ad in the magazine. It was a direct response ad (“Call this 1-800 number for your….” etc.)
“We run this ad every month,” he said, “It’s awful. Please call the company and tell them that we’ll redesign it at no charge.”
So I called.
“Thank you for your offer,” the company representative said. “We know it’s ugly. We don’t like it either. But this ad outpulls every other test ad we’ve ever run.” Wow, was I impressed.
Contrast this to a conversation I had just last week. A customer asked me to create her Google AdWords campaign, but wanted to review the ads before they ran. “I don’t like them,” she said, “The way those ads are written — they just don’t sound like me.”
Well, she’s the customer, so I didn’t reply (something that email has made easy to do), but I sure did wonder if she wasn’t interested in making money or not. As long as the ad is ethical and clear, who cares if the tone is not that of the CEO?
Companies have multiple goals when they write for the web, as I pointed out in my last post on writing for the web. I’m also not saying that you should always choose the copy that outpulls — after all, maybe the test that loses the copy competition pulls a customer who has a longer lifetime value. Or maybe it does a better job of positioning your company in your niche. But if you’re going to choose less than optimal copy, be sure you know why you’re making that choice.
Robbin Steif, CEO
LunaMetrics
Yesterday, I sat down with a prospective client’s site, and notice that one of the first few links I clicked on was broken. Then I found another broken link. So I ran Xenu’s Link Sleuth and learned that the client had lots and lots of broken links.
Broken links happen for lots of reasons. You move something but don’t remember to move the links. Or, you just change the address (and forget to change the linking address.) Harder still is when you are linking to someone else’s site and they make changes that you don’t even know about.
Broken links are one of the fastest ways to turn off customers. Some visitors probably think, “This site can’t even stay on top of their own business, how can I trust them to stay on top of mine?” And others probably are less calculating — what they need isn’t on the site, so they move on.
A free program like Xenu will alert you to those broken links. Get them fixed right away — broken links are one of the fastest way to decrease your conversion rate.
While you’re at it, consider a custom “Page Not Found” page. Here’s what the generic “Page Not Found” looks like:
Pretty ugly, eh? Check out this better custom error page — notice how the site set the error page up to be included right within their site (so you don’t have to click the Back button), and how they reworded the error message to be a lot less abrasive than the generic version. I chose the Amazon site because I liked their wording, but found similar pages on many sites:
Here’s a link to an article about creating the perfect 404 Page Not Found error page. It’s worth reading because it addresses handling different kinds of errors (and has links to “how to do it” sites). You can also read this post I wrote last December about how foolish companies tend to look when they don’t admit their own mistakes on their error pages.
Robbin
LunaMetrics
I hear that the eMetrics Summit in Santa Barbara is selling out. (I couldn’t get in last year because it was all sold out.) The amazing part about this is that the Early Bird Registration isn’t over until this February 18, and the Summit isn’t until April 18.
Alternatively, there’s always the London summit, May 3-5 (and I am not kidding. This really is the world wide web. I have a loyal reader in Isle-de-France, Paris. In India. In Slovakia.)
So register now, while you can.
Robbin
LunaMetrics
Last night, my daughter announced that she’d purchased an external hard drive for her Mac on eBay. She pointed out that she only had to pay $6.99 for the drive but $10.00 for the shipping.
I didn’t think much about it until I saw this morning’s New York Times, which included an article about Amazon’s financials, their free freight policy and free freight in general:
“Academic research shows pretty convincingly that people have separate accounts in mind, one for the item itself and one for shipping,” said John Morgan, an economist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Using eBay auctions as his real-world laboratory, he showed that changing the ratio of item price to shipping charge, while keeping the total price constant, produces sharply different customer responses.
On eBay, Mr. Morgan found that bidders happily accepted outrageously high shipping charges if they thought they were getting a good deal on the item price of a used CD. Amazon, however, faces the opposite problem: its customers accord more weight to the shipping charge, even if modest, than to the discount on the item itself. Why should this be? Perhaps it is the online customer’s chafing at being asked to pay for the privilege of waiting for a delivery.
Everything about that from Professor Morgan was interesting – I just don’t agree with his supposition at the end. If the Amazon or similar customer demands free freight to compensate him for waiting for his delivery, why doesn’t the eBay customer demand the same? After all, anyone who has ordered from eBay knows that some vendors are prompt and others are not. Furthermore, some vendors are close to you (and so the product gets there the next day) and others are on the other coast, or the other side of the world.
No, this is really about the psychology of the transaction. A customer who purchases on eBay gets a thrill out of paying so little. After all, what words did my daughter greet me with last night? “Guess how little I paid on eBay!!” But the Amazon customer does’t say, “Guess what, I saved $3!” They are looking for a good deal, a fair deal, but not a bargain basement, guess-what-I-found-at-the-rummage-sale price. Furthermore, the Amazon customer is comparing the transaction to going to Borders (and if you are driving by Borders, the delivery feels like it is free) whereas the eBay customer is in the most amazing marketplace of garbage (after all, one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure, right?)
Which takes me to the issue of — who should have free freight? One of my e-commerce customers sells an industrial product and we did a free freight test for a month last year. The test did not pay for the cost of the freight charges we left on the table. So once again, free freight might really matter for ladies clothing, or books, but in some areas, it matters not at all.
No one has really figured out this free freight problem. But a few things seem clear to me:
Anyone have any great free freight stories?
Robbin
LunaMetrics
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