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Crank up Your Holiday Sales with Heat Maps

October 26th, 2011 by RyanDraving | No Comments

You’re running a bit behind your e-commerce goals this year, and everything depends on the upcoming holiday season. In the pit of your stomach, you feel a sense of dread. If your conversion rate doesn’t increase significantly by the time holiday traffic starts hitting your site, you might get a bundle of coal in your stocking instead of a big fat bonus.

Everything you’ve tried so far has flopped. You have a beautiful (in your own humble opinion) website that follows all the latest UI trends and marketing theories. You’ve spent hours poring over what keywords are being Googled to find your site, your most popular web pages, the volume of visitors you’re receiving, and what links they’re clicking on. You’ve been getting a huge amount of visitor traffic to your website, but your conversion rates are, quite frankly… pathetic. Somehow your website is attracting visitors who refuse to pull the trigger. It might not be that the visitors aren’t interested in your offerings. It could simply be that something’s fundamentally wrong with the design of your website. But how do you acquire the data to figure out how your site is failing to direct the visitors to actually buy your goods and services?

Why Eye Tracking Is Not the Answer

Eye tracking might seem like the answer, but it can be quite expensive and tends to draw conclusions based on a statistically small group of people. It’s essential to pair eye tracking with a strong analytics program. Think of eye tracking as dessert, and a robust analytics program with extensive analysis as the main course. Similar to focus groups, a company has to pay for a group of people to be organized and placed in a controlled environment for testing every single time new user experience data is needed. Additionally, eye tracking is incompatible with people with poor vision, the elderly, and most people of Asian descent. While the data can provide valuable insights, it can be expensive and statistically insignificant.

Why Heat Maps Are So Cool

We prefer a handy little technology called heat map software. Heat map software provides similar results to eye tracking, but it gathers that data in a very different way. Heat map software monitors visitor mouse movements, and then combines data from all visits to create a color-coded map displaying the web page’s levels of activity. Unlike eye tracking, heat map technology runs on a bit of code installed on your website and gathers data based on actual visitors to your website without requiring any human intervention. We recommend heat maps as a sidekick to your primary analytics package. Some companies even use it as their only analytics tool (bad idea, but certainly possible). Since heat map solutions often integrate into your website with a simple bit of JavaScript code, there is no need to organize groups of people for eye tracking every time your company wants to measure user reaction to a design change.

Tips for Success

One of the biggest complaints about heat maps is that the JavaScript code increases page load time. To avoid this problem, simply ask your programmers to insert the code just before the </body> tag in your web code HTML, and it will load after the page contents have already rendered. Using this trick, heat map data tracking will not affect visitor experience. In fact, the anonymous data monitoring process will be completely invisible to visitors.
Be aware of these downsides before you buy:

Heat maps are not a good fit for every website. Websites with dynamic web content will not be able to gather reliable data.
Additionally, in some programs the admin panel that displays data reports can be painfully slow. In some cases it can take up to a hour to load a single page. This doesn’t affect the live webpage for the end user, but it could give your analytics team a good excuse to whip out their iPads for a round of Angry Birds.

If you’re ready to give your standard analytics a strong sidekick or you need a simple tool to communicate user experience to your boss (or client), consider heat maps. You’ll gain a constant stream of real-world data in a simple, visual format to get your whole team behind web design improvements.

Let us know how you use heat maps for your website. How did heat maps affect your conversion rate?

Conversion Optimization: The grand-slam of website design

July 10th, 2011 by RyanDraving | 1 Comment

Every single element on a webpage impacts what visitors ultimately do, from the wording to the fonts to the color and position of all elements, as well as how easy it is to complete a form or transaction. To maximize conversion rates, companies need to combine creativity with a holistic, results-based analytical approach.

Landing page optimization, results-tracking, testing of new ideas, user-friendly forms, and learning from experience are all part of good website design, and all contribute to higher conversion rates. However, all the website traffic in the world doesn’t mean much for e-Commerce companies unless those website visitors are actually buying. Awareness that your company exists is nice, since you won’t sell anything if people don’t know you’re out there. Traffic is important , but even a well-trafficked website of a well-known company can fail if the design doesn’t convert visitors into buyers and generate sales. Companies who neglect any of these will lose visitors, and therefore, revenue, to those who dedicate resources to conversion optimization.

What Conversion Rate Should You Expect?

The average online conversion rate for e-Commerce stores across all industries is 2%– yes, that’s right, an AVERAGE of just 2% of website visitors to e-Commerce stores actually purchase. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? An industry-specific breakdown of average conversion rates tells a little more of the story:

Type of site	Conversion rate
Catalog	5.8%
Software	3.9%
Fashion & Apparel	2.3%
Specialty	1.7%
Electronics	0.50%
Outdoor and Sports	0.40%

Catalog sites have a clear advantage, with a 5.8% conversion rate, because most visitors come to their sites to shop. But even though their visitors are more likely to have the intent to buy, only 5 or 6 of every hundred visitors actually do. It may not seem like much, but when you consider that websites can generate tens or even hundreds of thousands of visits per month, and even more if you’re a very big player, it all adds up. If landing page optimization didn’t make a difference, no one would be doing it.

Steps to Improve e-Commerce Website Conversion Rates

Track

The first step is to gather information on the results you are getting from your website – you can’t fix problems you don’t know exist, and you can’t judge improvement if you don’t know where you’re starting from. There are many tools now available to track how people find your website, how many visitors you have, how long they spend on each page, and where they go as they navigate from one page to another. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are free and easy for any webmaster to set up, and will give you the basic information you need to know about who’s visiting your site and what they’re doing once they’re there.

Test

Once you have benchmarked the data on what’s currently happening on your site, you can start making small changes and testing the impact those changes have on visitor behavior. Google Website Optimizer enables you to create multiple versions of the same page, each with one or more elements slightly different, and to compare the differences in visitor behavior generated by each page. For best results, follow Google’s guidelines to effective A/B split or multivariate testing, so you’re not misattributing changes in results to an elemental change that didn’t actually cause the difference.

Tweak

As you see improvements in visitor behavior and conversion rates on your site through testing, implement those changes that increase your conversion rates, and then choose the next element you’re going to test. Never change more than one element at a time so you can appropriately assign responsibility (or hopefully, credit) for improvements. Monitor the response over time because there are many factors that influence conversion rate, including the calendar, sentiment and payroll cycles, and you don’t want to overemphasize the impact of any one factor. Each change will improve upon the previous version of your site, and will bring you one step closer to maximizing your conversion rate.

Repeat

The process of testing and then tweaking your site in response to your results should be an always-ongoing process, because visitor behavior is always evolving. The effectiveness of some elements decreases as people become accustomed to them– banner ads, for example, were once a major advertising draw, but are now far less effective because many consumers have developed “banner blindness” and no longer “see” banner ads.

There is both an art and a science to landing page optimization and e-Commerce website design, and when all the elements come together the right way, magic happens and conversion rates can far exceed industry averages.

Pitching Social Media to Organizational Leaders: Crowdsourcing Solutions

June 10th, 2011 by admin | No Comments

Last week I played facilitator to a group of super-sharp social media professionals at the SoMeBizLife conference in Doylestown, PA (put together by Chuck Hall). This group helped me crowdsource some answers to tough social media questions like:

How can we be sure a client is ready for social media?
What are the common objections that we hear from organizational leaders?
How can we demonstrate value in social media efforts in advance of a project?
What kinds of expectations need to be set?

I’ve updated my presentation with a number of the deeper questions that the brain-trust came up with – as well as some of their solutions. Thanks to all of you who participated!

My favorite five takeaways (shown below) are all included in the SlideShare presentation on Pitching Social Media:

Remember the ROI (Risk of Ignoring). Conversations happen with or without you. Do you want to be able to influence the conversation?
Listen first. Start with listening. Discovering what people want and care about and how your competition is playing is a powerful and smart strategy.
Integrate social into transaction points. Make it easy to leave testimonials or to tweet, as in “Hey! I just bought a cool supersonic widget from Widget Masters!”
Help educate clients that costs and demands will change. I like to think of this as crawl-walk-run. The needs for a listening project are different from an engagement effort – and will change as engagement is progressively expanded and moved to internal team members.
Use the marketing needs pyramid to determine if the basics are in place BEFORE a company contemplates a social media presence.

We don’t have to stop here though. Check out the full presentation and all of the other great ideas put together by this group. Please add your questions and ideas on pitching social to organizations in the comments below to continue the conversation.

Post by Skip Shuda, shown here doing some “deep listening” to his collaborators!

Can You Engineer Social Media Campaign Success?

October 10th, 2010 by admin | No Comments

MIT Media Labs won $40,000 by putting together the fastest crowd-sourcing team in the world this past winter. The MIT Media Lab team attributed their deep knowledge of social networking mechanics as being central to their victory, as outlined in a Forbes article about the Red Balloon Challenge. In a nutshell, they made heavy use of crowd-sourcing with a recursive, incentive structure for the social network. By recruiting a strong, well dispersed team with a big focus on sharing the incentive to not only find the balloons but to spread the word and recruit more potential balloon finders, the MIT team was able to generate a Social Network of

It got me wondering – could we all engineer our way to social media success?

So I started doing some reasearch. My first stop was the cyber-anthropology series on Influencers that Dr. Michael Wu of Lithium has been putting together. Social Networks, Communities, the components of Influence and conversational dynamics are all covered with clarity and depth. His blog is a terrific source of insight and inspiration for anyone hoping to understand the deep mechanics of Social Media.

Dr. Wu identifies six key factors contributing to influence in Social Networks; two for the Influencers and Four for the likelihood to be Influenced. Influencers have two key factors they can leverage:

1) Credibility (expertise in a given domain)

2) Bandwidth (ability to transmit message/knowledge through social media channels)

The likelihood of a person being influenced is impacted by four key factors:

3) Relevance (the right information)

4) Timing (the right time)

5) Alignment (the right place)

6) Confident (the right person)

All of these factors were prominent in the MIT Media Lab victory. However, the role of incentive for this “campaign” also needs to be considered.

Next, I researched DARPA’s project report from the Red Balloon project. They identified a wide range of factors in being an effective competitor for the Red Balloon project. Those factors are repeated below, with my interpretation of how they fit into Michael’s influence model. You’ll see that his six factors are spot on for supporting the Red Balloon crowd-sourcing effort. I include the six factors below in parentheses, where applicable.

Media coverage of the team (Bandwidth)
Team built around an existing social network (Bandwidth, Alignment)
Name recognition of the team (Credibility, Confidence)
Planning time available to organize the social network (Timing, Alignment)
Method for searching Twitter posts (Relevance)
Search engine ranking for the team (Credibility, Bandwidth, Confidence)
Mobilization and dispatch ability (Timing, Alignment)
Team geographic coverage (Bandwidth, Alignment)
False report rejection strategy (Relevance)
Mobile phone App (Alignment, Timing)
Team overall Strategy
Team network hierarchy (Bandwidth, Alignment)
Trading/Collaboration strategy
Operations center for coordination, mobilization, tracking and entry decision making (Relevance, Timing)

The DARPA team also identified eight distinct tools for the geo-location problem, meaning how they answered the question, “How do I quickly reach and communicate with a wide, dispersed audience across multiple, social media channels?” The eight factors were:

1) marketing and media broadcast strategies to recruit team members

2) Recursive, incentivized recruiting of networks of friends/associates

3) Extraction of data of reported balloon locations from open Internet Sources like Twitter

4) Automated means of extracting data

5) Deployment of technology with automatic reporting capability (e.g. iPhone Apps)

6) Dispatching team members as spotters to search or confirm reports

7) Website design that motivates, encourages recruitment, or allows easy, secure reporting

8 ) Search engine rank optimization of website

In our work at Team and a Dream (soon to be Philly Marketing Labs), we’ve found that Social Media at the campaign level can be done quite effectively. With embedded incentives, the ability to tap into an area of interest or passion can be driven towards specific outcomes (register for a newsletter, watch a video, make a contribution or find a red weather balloon). In the case of the DARPA contest, several teams used social networking mechanics.

In fact, the MIT win was impressive, but not decisive. Given that the entire contest lasted under 9 hours, eight other teams had considerable momentum and used many of the MIT techniques as well. But given over 4,000 entrants to the contest, the quality drops off pretty quickly. By the 43rd place, the number of balloons reported near the end of the race had dropped to just 2. In fact, the winning strategy was not exactly obvious before-hand. A quick review of some brainstorming of social media strategies before the event shows that while crowd-sourcing was identified as a critical success factor, the idea of how to motivate that crowd was not anticipated in the blog post. Furthermore, the MIT Media Lab’s prominence and influence seems to have played a critical role.

The Wrapup.

What are some conclusions we can take away for this quick study of the DARPA Red Balloon experiment? Here are a few takeaways for your consideration.

1) Social Media strategy and team quality matters. The top 1% of the contest entrants outperformed the rest by a strong margin. Part of this “quality” has to do with credibility and the attendant reach of the team. Part of it has to do with applying a well-informed strategy grounded in an understanding of the campaign objective and aligning with the available channels.

2) Social-Search tactics rule. The prominence of Search strategies combined with Social Media techniques becomes evident in the post-contest analysis. Strong SEO rankings for the recruiting web-sites as well as powerful search tools for scanning Twitter, Social Media and news reports allowed for a broad, pre-contest reach and rapid identification of relevant information during the contest.

3) Whats in it for me? The MIT strategy to distribute the winnings maximized incentive for the network members to actively participate. Bragging rights are nice, but hard cash is better. In fact, the number of man-hours employed to win this efforts likely amounted to pennies per hour of effort. There as a bit of a lottery effect, but you had control over you odds. The more people you helped recruit, the better your odds of winning some cash. The recruiting/bootstrapping efforts via the web site and email outreach reportedly increased the team from an initial 5 to 5,000 in 48 hours, with hundreds of thousands of page views in a very short timeframe.

4) Strategic Use of Technology can help. While I don’t think the MIT team used an iPhone app, some of the top competitors did. The strategic use of mobile computing can help with this type of geographically based initiative. Thinking about your mission might imply other strategic technologies. For example, voting tools for panels or ideas, video submission tools or bar-code scanning apps are examples of tools that could play a role in distributed or crowd-sourced initiatives.

5) Campaigns vs. Community. Understand that this is an example of a very focused campaign-oriented effort. This is very different than building a sustainable, long-term community organized around a common mission or passion. In a community building effort, a number of other factors, like roles in your social networks could be taken into consideration. Food for a future post.

Have you used any of these ideas with success in your Social Media marketing efforts? I’d love to hear from you. Or leave your comments on our analysis to add to the discussion. What did we miss? Do you have another perspective you’d like to share?

Social Media Participation Policy for an Individual – w/ example

February 14th, 2010 by admin | 6 Comments

Uncle! I’m officially overwhelmed. This week, Google launched Buzz and suddenly my already under-serviced, over-informed social media channels went sagging under the way of a brand new social media contender.

Its not fair. Especially to anyone who is expecting me to “show up” and contribute in the Social Media sphere. But in fairness to me, I’m feeling inundated with “channels”.

My brain grew up in the 1960s. We had 1 telephone line per household and it took 30 seconds to rotary dial it. I didn’t see an email until the 80s. I was taught that you should focus on a problem, not skip from one to the next to the next to the… or worse, do them all at once!

So I’ve been making a map to help me manage my Social Media channels. I WILL be the master of my communication Destiny! Soon. Read on to hear my plan…

Recently, Valeria Maltoni (Twitter: @conversationage ) asked if people regularly prune their under-used social channels. It sparked a short conversation between me (@skipshoe), @communimatrix and @conversationage.

Turns out that Colleen Wainwright is all over this. She has her Twitter Policy page, complete with her philosophy, top 5 reasons for using Twitter, her follow policy and her Twitter Colophon. (Yes .. I had to look up Colophon as well).

Colleen gives a nod to Ike’ Pigott’s Twitter Policy page. Ike focuses on how he plans to show up on Twitter – his follow policy and his rule that there are no rules (or at least no etiquette).

Valeria posted this ConversationAgent thread on the idea of how Valeria participates in in social networks while articulating her generous philosophy of:

be helpful
be in conversation
connect ideas and people

In that post, Valeria responds to a comment pointing out that individuals and organizations have different approaches to Social. In that spirit, I’ll start with my Social Media Participation Policy for @skipshoe.

I’m thinking that my participation policy needs to address my broad use and intent, the channels I plan to use, and topics I might cover. This is for my audience AND for me. If I can identify and commit to a handful of channels, then I can improve my effectiveness.

How about something like the following?

Channel: The name of the Social Network and Media Channel

Purpose: Why are you there. Best not to make it completely self-serving… it is a 2+ person space, afterall

Topics: What kinds of topics am I looking to cover here.

Attire: How I plan to come to the party. From Professional to Business Casual… to Flip-flops, towel and beer.

Attendance: How often might you expect to find me here. No promises… just an intention

Lets give it a try. I plan to do this for four channels: Twitter (@skipshoe), Facebook, TalkaboutTribes (this blog) and LinkedIn. I may add in some IRL (In Real Life) Networking channels and some specific online forums later.

Channel: TalkaboutTribes Blog (this blog)

Since this blog may have many contributors, this is only my perspective on using Talk about Tribes. Some of my colleagues may have a completely different take.

Purpose: To share, gain feedback and co-create ideas, strategies, frameworks and other perspectives around Social Media. I love the idea of tribes and tribe-building as a primal ground for our participation in today’s social networks. New generation tribes are emerging daily, which include the best of tribal practice, but transcend by incorporating new practices enabled by new technologies and new ways of thinking.

Topics: Ideas, strategies, frameworks and other perspectives around Social Media

Attire: I’ll be wearing my lab coat … with a scientist’s eye, I hope to dabble in anthropology, psychology, network theory, analytics and marketing

Attendance: I’ll be monitoring your comments regularly (multiple times a week). I’d love to be blogging 2-3 times a month. At least once a month is more likely.

Channel: LinkedIn

Purpose: To engage in conversation (sharing, listening, learning) around my profession as social media strategist, internet marketer and entrepreneurial coach. There is a strong IRL-virtual intersection here.

Topics: At the time of this writing, I’m following threads on Social Media Metrics, Analytics and ROI. Social Media Monitoring is a close second. These areas of focus will follow the cycles of my own professional learning and curiosity.

Attire: Professional attire – I’ll wear a sports coat. I hate ties.

Attendance: At least weekly. Oh yeah, I follow my friend Ed Callahan’s advice on only connect to people I’ve met in person. This really helps keep my network on LinkedIn strong. If you want to link to me and we haven’t met, we can connect outside of LinkedIn (here for example) or we can meet in person (I drink a lot of coffee).

11/20/2010 Update – I’ve had a ton LinkedIn requests from interesting people, but my policy has prevented me from Linking to them. As of today, I’m going to try another approach. I’ll let you know if this helps me create new, helpful connections or dilutes my LinkedIn network. If I haven’t met you in person, then you’ll get the following response:

Thanks for the invitation.

I used to follow LinkedIn’s recommendation and only connect networks with people I actually know. For me, that means we

met in person (or by phone) and had a conversation. How else can it be a trusted network? I’ve been using this rule for a couple of years now and it

really helped me to keep my LinkedIn network operating as a powerful resource for me and my colleagues.

However, recently there have been a number of interesting people and useful connections offering to connect with me through LinkedIn. If you are one of these people, please take a moment to explain why you think we should LinkIn. Do we share a common interest – or is there potential business synergy? Let me know. Also – please tell me something about you or your business that can help me create a visual or mental image of our new relationship.

If we met at a speaking engagement or some other event, please remind me of our conversation.

If we haven’t met in person (including by phone), We don’t have to connect networks to help each other. If there is something I can help you with, please use my email address below to let me know how.

If you feel there is an immediate opportunity to work together then lets set up a call or meeting – and we can LinkIn afterwards.

Thanks for understanding.

Skip

skip@phillymarketinglabs.com

Channel: @SkipShoe

Purpose: Exploration, learning, sharing, joking, coordinating, water-cooler chatter.

Topics: Twitter probably best represents my work-life balance. I’ll talk about business stuff, especially sharing cool learnings about Social Media, but also Aikido, Integral Theory, parenting, my friends and the Philadelphia, Western ‘burbs lifestyle

Attire: Jeans and tee-shirt

Attendance: Erratic. I’m trying to use Tweetdeck and Gist to hone my Twitterfeeds into streams of really useful content, which I can then share – or comment on. But I might get busy and disappear for days on end. I will watch for your mentions or DMs. And if you DM me what looks like a broadcast message, I will probably unfollow you. I sometimes cross-post business stuff with @teamandadream, my company Twitter account.

Channel: Facebook

Purpose: Facebook can be addictive fun. I don’t take it seriously at all… but it keeps drawing me back in.

Topics: Mostly goofy stuff about things that happened in high-school (they didn’t have technology back then), commentary on life… or really just commenting on others commentary on life

Attire: 70′s clothing.

Attendance: I indulge probably once or twice a week

Channel: Meetup. Integral Philly Meetup Coordinator.

Purpose: Individual and collective development in and through an integral context.

Topics: Our intention is to practice both form and formlessness. We hold conversations to explore and unpack challenging topics raised by members using an AQAL (Integral Theory) lens. We actively explore movement, beauty, art, silence and nature.

Attire: My Gi for Dojo practice

Attendance: Weekly. This is mostly an event management site, although I do hope our members start participating in dialogue. Hmm. Maybe I need to seed some conversations?

So that’s my first cut at my personal Social Media Participation policy. Do you have one? If so, please share in a comment below. Anything you would change or add to what I’ve included here?

Let me know!

Conversion Optimization: The grand-slam of website design

What Conversion Rate Should You Expect?