Greg Krehbiel on Publishing and Online Marketing

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 What do you think?

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.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?

Make my logo bigger!

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?

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 What do you think?

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 What do you think?

I was just signing up for a conference, and the registration form had a couple “usability” problems.

First, it asked me for my zip+4. I don’t know what it is. I had to get a piece of mail addressed to me to find out.

Why would you do that? How many people actually know their zip+4?

Second, it asked for my fax number. Again, I don’t know it off the top of my head. I have to consult my business card.

Third, there was no indication of which fields were required and which were optional, so I didn’t know if I had to go look up my fax number.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?

I’m in the market for a dishwasher, so I thought I’d go to consumer reports and see which ones are the best.

I tried to sign up for their service and I got an error on the registration page. When you sign up you have to “create an account” with a username and password, and passwords on consumerreports.org have to be all lowercase.

This is a stupid mistake. Why limit your customer’s choice in creating a password?

I’ve developed a little algorithm I use to create passwords on websites. It helps me remember a secure password for each site. But sometimes it requires an uppercase letter.

So Consumer Reports lost my sale because of their silly password policy.

The lesson is simple — don’t restrict password options!

Then I wanted to send them a note telling them about this so they could fix it. But I couldn’t find a “contact us” page, or any way to send them an email.

That’s two mistakes.

They may know a lot about dishwashers, but their web team needs some help.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized 2 comments

Google has a new tool called the “Wonder Wheel.” Yeah, it’s a silly name, but it’s a good tool, and when used in combination with Google Trends and a standard keyword tool it could be a very effective way to increase traffic to your web pages.

First, give it a try.

1. Google a term that’s relevant to your site.
2. Click on the “show options” link at the top of the search results on the left-hand side.
3. Under “standard view” click on “Wonder wheel.” This shows different subcategories of topics under your search term.
4. Drill down into narrower concepts by clicking on one of the subtopics.

Each time you drill down you’re finding a group of related terms and you’re getting a more granular perspective on how the term relates to search.

With the “Wonder Wheel” you can get an idea of the structure of your search terms — e.g., how they might fit into folders in a content network campaign. And you can also get ideas for other terms.

But you don’t know which term gets more traffic. That’s where Google Trends comes in.

So you use the Wonder Wheel to get a sense of how Google organizes all the terms related to your primary search term, and to get ideas for related search terms (you can also use a simple keyword tool for that), then you use Google Trends to find out which terms and phrases get the most traffic.

Then comes the hard part. You need to go through this exercise before you finalize your content.

Let’s say you’re writing a story on the health benefits of green tea and you’re wondering what headline will attract the most search traffic.

First you go to Google Trends to compare a few ideas. Try “tea health, tea healthy, tea benefits” and get a chart like this.

Obviously “tea benefits” is the right way to go, so then you google “tea benefits” and try the “Wonder Wheel.” The first set of subcategories looks like this.

roibos tea benefits
oolong tea benefits
white tea benefits
black tea benefits
green tea benefits
herbal tea benefits
ginger tea benefits
chamomile tea benefits

Obviously you want “green tea benefits,” so you choose that one and get the next set of drill-downs.

green tea metabolism
matcha green tea benefits
green tea skin benefits
lipton green tea benefits
green tea benefits weight loss
green tea diet

Does the story have more to do with general health benefits, the effect on skin or metabolism, or diet or weight loss? Let’s say it’s about weight loss, so now you know you want “green tea benefits” in the title of the story, but do you want “weight loss” or “diet” (assuming they’d both fit from an editorial perspective).

Now consult Google Trends, compare “tea benefits diet, tea benefits weight loss” and see that weight loss is the clear winner.

I’m not saying that search results should drive all editorial decisions, but the simple truth of the matter is that if you want people to find your article, you need to use the words they’re looking for, not necessarily the words you like. The headline “Green tea is good for you” isn’t going to get the same traffic as “Green tea’s health benefits include added weight loss” for the simple reason that it has more of the terms people actually type into search engines. So use it as the title of your page and the headline for your story.

And if you don’t believe me, here’s an interesting article about how the Tribune Company used a method like the one I’ve just outlined to achieve a dramatic increase in search engine traffic.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized 1 comment

Rupert Murdoch is realizing that the advertising model — give away the content and sell ads on the page — simply won’t sustain most major media operations.

See Murdoch vows to charge for all online content

I believe two things about media companies.

1. There are too many of them, and some will have to fail
2. They are going to have to quit giving away their content

Media companies have to provide content that’s worth something, and then charge people for access. (If people won’t pay for it, then by definition it’s not worth anything.)

This article highlights a problem media companies face today. In this case, The Washington Post paid a reporter to do research and write a serious piece, which was then largely stolen by another site. To make matters worse, the other site is earning advertising revenue from that page — off the Post’s content!

Google could be the publisher’s white knight.

When Google indexes a page, it checks to see if the content on one page is like the content on another page (and, from what I hear, marks down sites that have too much duplication).

Google could display that fact in the search results by making it obvious that site B is parasitic on site A? Google could invent a rating system based on the amount of content that is … borrowed … and give the URL a “parasite rank.”

Of course in some cases the publisher might want its content on the other page. Many content providers syndicate their content to other sites. In those cases, the publisher and the content partner would want to suppress the “parasite” label. All that would be required would be for the publisher to register with Google as a content provider and list its authorized content partners. They wouldn’t get marked down for borrowing content.

This would reward the people who actually generate content and would penalize the parasites who feed off of it.

The next step would be for publishers to push advertising networks not to place their ads on sites with a high parasite rank.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized 1 comment

I am.

I read a lot of them, but not nearly as many as I’d like to.

There’s lots of good information out there, and I’m sure it would help me in my daily work, but I’m too busy with my daily work to read the things.

I’m sure this is true for lots of other professionals in other organizations, which leads me to this odd thought.

If I was a CEO I think I’d find a young “idea guy” and hire him to do three things — and only three things.

1. Read every white paper he can find that’s applicable to my business,
2. Sit in on every meeting he can, and
3. Keep a working “best practices” document on every functional area of the business.

I suspect that the increased efficiency would far more than pay his salary.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized What do you think?