Greg Krehbiel on Publishing and Online Marketing

I was thinking about declining ad revenues today, and it got me wondering how a print publication could make a better connection between the printed page and the online world. Getting somebody to type in a URL isn’t that hard, but it’s also not that sexy or exciting.

How long will it be, do you think, before printers can mass-produce little USB drives with a couple K of data on them?

Imagine a blow-in 3×5 card with a little USB port on the edge. That would open up lots of possibilities.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized

I don’t have a Kindle, but I have some friends who have and love them. Despite my general love of technology, so far I’ve preferred books. For a while (years ago) I tried reading the daily news on a Palm, but I didn’t like it.

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about formatting content for the Kindle. I think that’s a very good idea, and publishers should look into it. Along those lines, the good folk at Mequoda are doing a webinar on that topic.

But having said that, and despite it’s short-term success, I don’t see the Kindle as a long-term product. I have two reasons for this.

First, here’s my sane, sensible reason — Right now there’s a whole range of small devices, from the hand-helds, like Palms, Blackberries, iPhones and Droids, to the netbooks. I don’t see any reason why these other devices won’t be able to do everything a Kindle can do, so unless the Kindle starts to take phone calls, I think its utility as a substitute for the paperback has a narrow niche in the technology timeline.

Second, here’s my insane, wild-eyed prediction — I think there’s going to be a ground-breaking leap forward in display technology soon. I’m not sure if it will be digital paper (essentially a computer screen you can fold and put in your pocket) or some sort of projection display (either through eye-glasses or something else). But I don’t think screen-based computing is going to last all that long.

Having said all that, if I were in charge of developing the Kindle, I would look at getting college text books on the device. With the cost of college books these days, the idea of buying on device and a lot of electronic files sounds awfully good.

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I just read Google Versus Publishers, the Sequel, and agree with Mr. Filoux that Google should adopt the more granular ACAP protocol (for controlling what crawlers are allowed on a site). It’s almost impossible to believe that this would be hard for Google to do, and it would be a small gesture to publishers.

But I have a larger issue about copyright, and I think it’s right up Google’s alley.

I recently noticed that somebody Tweeted a link to a free download of a magazine I work for. They forgot to ask our permission.

Some people might say, “but isn’t this to your benefit? Somebody gets a free issue. They may subscribe.”

Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t, but that’s for us to decide, not some pond-scum internet spammer. Nobody has a right to other people’s property, and that includes intellectual property.

Google can help solve the problem of copyright infringement. Here’s how.

First, there needs to be a centralized content registry for publishers. This registry would be used to

1. protect branded terms,
2. protect copyrighted content, and
3. have a designated person at each publisher to manage abuse issues.

This is how the registry would be used.

• Search engines would give preference to brand-related searches for companies that own that brand.
• Publishers would register their content in the repository. Search engines already index content on web pages and compare similar text on different sites, so it should be easy to find unauthorized copies – i.e., to compare the copyrighted text in the repository with text that is being published on some other website. If an unauthorized site publishes copyrighted material, that site would be flagged for abuse and the publisher would be notified. If the issue isn’t resolved, the site would be blacklisted.
• Blacklisting would mean that the site would not appear in search engine results, and links to that site – on Facebook, Twitter, etc. – would be deleted. (Obviously this would require a cooperative effort between these services.) Accounts associated with blacklisted sites would be suspended.

Obviously this idea could use some refinement, but I think something along these lines would work. Furthermore, it’s consistent with Google’s mission to organize the world’s information. That mission has to include a kind of recognition of copyright. So something like this goes directly to Google’s core competency.

Other big web companies would want to participate in this effort because they’d want to look like good guys.

Finally — as another benefit for Google and the publisher — this publisher repository could be a self-funding effort. If every legit publisher voluntarily contributed their copyrighted material to a centralized content index, there are innumerable ways Google and the publisher could make money off of that.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized

If you have multiple subdomains on your site, like store.name.com and www.name.com, you might want to use the code that allows you to see them all in one Analytics profile.

But there’s a downside. Your stats for store.name.com/index.html and www.name.com/index.html will get combined.

There is also a solution. You can create an advanced filter to keep them separate. See How do I track all of the subdomains for my site in one profile?

Update: Unfortunately, this messes up the site overlay feature. When it tries to create a site overlay it puts your subdomain in the wrong place in the URL.

Greg Krehbiel Analytics

Les Hinton is exactly correct. Newspapers and other media outlets have only themselves to blame for de-valuing their own content by putting it out on the internet for free.

It’s time to reconnect “premium” with “content.”

A business model that assumes we can’t change for the content we produce assumes that our content has no value in the online market.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized

Hunter Boyle from Marketing Experiments gave an interesting talk at the SIPA Miami conference on ways to fix leaky sales pages.

He reminded marketers to put themselves in the mind of the visitor, who is asking three basic questions when he comes to your site or page.

• Where am I?
• What can I do here? and
• Why should I do it?

Hunter’s presentation was on “high-impact” changes to sales pages, so he pointed to some of the elements that are most likely to have a dramatic change in response.

• Headlines

• Testimonials
• Forms
• Navigation steps
• Price
• Product images

Some web pages have “related articles” links on the side, right? Well my mind is like one big “related articles” link while I’m reading or listening to a lecture. While Hunter was talking about these changes, I started thinking about some of the issues related to the examples he was sharing.

Hunter mentioned a marketing effort from a client (I believe it was an email) that mentioned “eight things” you could get. Unfortunately the landing page didn’t have the eight things.

So imagine an email campaign that promises eight things and sends people to an A-B landing page test. The test is set up to measure which page is more effective at driving traffic to the registration page.

For these purposes, let’s say the user’s action sequence would go like this.

1. Open email
2. Click on link to go to A-B landing page test
3. Click on “buy now” button to go to registration page
4. Register and finalize sale

The test measures how many people get to the registration page, but not how many people order. (Google’s website optimizer only allows one goal page, which is something they ought to fix. There should be primary and secondary goals. And maybe even tertiary.)

In this case, the email promises “eight things” of some sort. It’s an effective group of eight things, so it does what it’s supposed to do — drive people to the landing page.

But there are two landing pages. The A version has (or mentions) the “eight things,” and the B version doesn’t. Or maybe the B version mentions them, but they’re not clear enough to the visitor.

The users who go to the A page evaluate the offer, including the eight things, and some of them click through.

The users who go to the B page wonder where the eight things are and suppose they might be on the next page, so they click through — not because they’ve evaluated the offer, but because they’re confused. They get to the registration page, which also doesn’t have the eight things, so they bail.

What has happened? The B version — without the eight things — has won the A-B test, but it gets fewer orders. A marketer might look at his A-B test results and say, “Wow, this page increased my CTR by 75 percent. What a winner!”

Of course it’s not a winner at all. It only increased throughput in one part of the process, for all the wrong reasons.

There are two solutions to this kind of problem.

The first is to set up the experiment so that the “goal” page is the “thank you” page after a successful registration. That way you’re measuring which landing page got more orders, and not merely which landing page got more clicks to the next step.

This is not a good solution. It solves the problem of “which landing page gets me more orders,” but it makes it harder to optimize each piece of the funnel — mostly because it takes a lot longer to run the test.

Marketers should optimize each part of the process.

• Optimize the subject line of the email to get more opens.
• Optimize the email creative to get more clicks to the landing page.
• Optimize the landing page to get more people to the registration page.
• Optimize the registration page to get more completions.

Which brings us to the second way to fix the problem. Do the A-B test on the landing page only — with the landing page as the test page and the registration page as the goal page — but also set up a funnel in your analytics program so you can monitor every step of the process.

Then if the B page wins the A-B test but kills registrations, you’ll be able to see that in your funnel analysis, and you’ll still be able to run a quick, targeted test on your landing page.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized

Just got home from the Specialized Information Publishers Association conference in South Beach. It was loads of fun and later I’ll post some things on some of the sessions I attended.

For now, here’s a link to the presentation I gave on Actionable Analytics.

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Make my logo bigger!

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized

From what I’ve heard, only about 18 percent of web users ever click on a display ad. But studies have clearly shown that display ads affect people’s behavior. Sometimes people see the ad and enter the URL directly. Sometimes it leads them to search on a brand-related term.

For example, a web user might see an ad for a Dell Lattitude on the side of the page and then type “Dell Lattitude” into his handy little google search box at the top of his browser. At that point he might click on an organic link or a paid link.

What advertising campaign is going to get credit for any resultant conversion? If you’re measuring by clicks, it won’t be the display ad.

Which leads us into “view-through conversions,” where the display network takes credit for some percentage of conversions based on the fact that the ad was displayed to the user some time before conversion. (The time window can vary.)

But is that fair? Maybe the person was going to convert anyway. Maybe he never even saw your ad.

Another option is re-marketing, where a visitor comes to your site, gets a cookie, then goes out into the world and sees ads to draw them back to your site. It’s effective, but how do you measure how effective it is? What are you measuring against what?

It seems to me that the logical way to do this is to use a combination of re-marketing and an A-B split.

IOW, some number of people come to your site and get a cookie. That population is split into two groups. Group A goes off into the world and isn’t exposed to any of your ads. Group B sees your ads. Compare the behavior of Groups A and B. Any difference can be safely attributed to the ads on that network.

For some odd reason, display ad networks don’t seem to be able to do this, and I’m not sure why. It doesn’t sound technologically difficult, and it would convincingly prove the effect of the ads.

Greg Krehbiel Display ads

I’m going to be doing a presentation on analytics in a few weeks at the SIPA Mid-Year Marketing Conference.

The presentation has ten exercises to encourage practical steps publishers can take from the data on website usage. Here’s the first one, which has to do with fine-tuning your web pages for your visitors.

Step 1

Find the top 100 search terms that bring traffic to your site and sort them by bounce rate, from lowest to highest.
 
The top terms should describe your site / coverage / expertise. “Yes, these are the people who should be coming to my site.”
 
The terms on the bottom should get progressively further away from your coverage. If you find some of your key terms towards the bottom, you’ve found a problem to solve.

Step 2
 
Group your search terms conceptually and see which group makes up the highest percentage of traffic.
 
Step 3
 
Find the landing page(s) associated with that group of keywords.

Step 4
 
Review those landing pages to see how they can be optimized for people searching on those terms.
 
For example, you might add links to related content on your site. If you have any related products, be sure to add links from the landing page to the product page(s). If you don’t have any related products, consider an affiliate relationship with someone who does.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized