Archive for April, 2007
Can You Stop People From Cheating Digg?
Bennet Haselton, a frequent Slashdot contributor, shares his ideas behind preventing the gaming of Digg and services like it.
Have you ever seen people put a link in their profile to their HotOrNot picture, saying “Go here and vote me a 10!!”? Similar to the people who send links to their friends and say, “I just posted this, please Digg this for me!” The difference is that on HotOrNot, it doesn’t work. On HotOrNot, you can cast votes for a picture in one of two ways. The first way is to go directly to the URL for someone’s picture; the second way is to load the front page, where a random picture from the database is selected at random, and vote for whatever picture comes up. The catch is that the votes that you cast by going directly to someone’s picture, are simply ignored in calculating the average score for that photo. The only votes that are counted are the votes cast for random pictures displayed on the front page. So if you want to manipulate the voting for your own photo, you’d have to load the front page hundreds of thousands of times waiting for your own picture to come up repeatedly, which is hard to do without being detected.
It’s an interesting read. I wonder, do you think this is foolproof? Would it work? I’ve never met an algorithm that couldn’t be gamed at some point or another.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Is Traffic Holding Back Your Business?
In his MondayMorningMemo, Roy Williams lists the four most common invisible problems that limit your selling opportunities with their appropriate solutions.
Problem 1: Your ads aren’t convincing.
Problem 2: Your ads aren’t reaching your prospects with sufficient repetition.
Problem 3: You’re already selling everyone who likes to buy what you sell.
Problem 4. Your reputation has slipped, or your product is no longer in demand.
As Roy says, “Traffic. If we had more traffic, we’d make more sales. What we need is more traffic. But traffic is rarely the problem. It’s simply the byproduct of a problem you haven’t been able to see.”
Find out the solutions at What’s Holding Your Business Back?
PS - We agree. The headline on our homepage is “Driving More Traffic Is Not The Answer”
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Do Men and Women Process Images Differently?
…yes and no, some conflicting studies say. In this now famous eye-tracking study, researchers found men and women focused on slightly different, er, body parts.
But now antother study has come out, saying men and women both look at faces and, um, other body parts.
So what’s really going on? I think the second study points out two interesting things:
- Women’s focus changed depending on their hormone level
- Women spent more time than men focusing on couples that were “intertwined”, if you know what I mean
I’ve started studying how men and women process images. One of my theories is that women are more interested in images with more than one person. They are intrigued by the relationship between the people in the image. I’m still researching, so don’t know if it’s true, but it’s a hunch.
I ran across a blog post Alex Harris did in 2004 talking about some testing Netflix was doing on their home page. Go check out the two examples: One is an image of a couple enjoying a movie, the other contains images of hit movies.
Now, I don’t know if this is really a male vs. female thing. It could be a Humanistic vs. Spontaneous-type thing. Humanistics are very relationship-focused. Spending time with a loved one may be more important than watching the movie. Spontaneous folks love action and adventure. They may prefer the actual act of watching the movie and not be that concerned with who they are watching it with.
But I wonder how these images would test if broken down by gender. Would women prefer the “relationship” image of the man and woman on the couch with the popcorn and wine? Would men prefer the “hit movie titles” image?
What do you think? Any preferences? Ladies? Gents?
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
Could You Delete Your Email List to Improve Engagement?
In a bold move, CBS Sportsline cleans up their email lists by unsubscribing their readers. We also unsubscribed readers recently, and our list is healthier.
This is what their email said:
Dear CBS SportsLine.com Member, We would like to confirm that you still wish to receive THIS WEEK ON CBS SPORTSLINE.COM. This email newsletter is delivered to your inbox every week - bringing you updates and previews on the week’s expert analysis, video, Fantasy Sports advice and the hottest sports topics from CBS SportsLine.com writers. Please confirm your CBS SportsLine.com enrollment status by clicking on the confirmation button below. If we do not hear from you by April 30, 2007, we will remove you from this email list.
In today’s email environment, you shouldn’t care about the absolute number of subscribers you have. Instead, reader engagement, the quality of the relationship readers have with you, is what’s important.
Nobody expects subscribers to read every issue, but if they haven’t read a newsletter even once in three months, then assume they’re not interested or don’t have the time to invest in reading it. Make any other assumption and you risk the quality of your subscriber interaction. The last thing we want is for the newsletter to degrade into a perception of opt-in sp*m.
CBS Interactive is a client, so we’ll follow up with them to let you know more about their results from this email list cleanup.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Athletic Math Nerd Seeks Someone To Hum Seinfeld Intro Music With
Would you date this person? Most of us wouldn’t.
But the person that would is sure to respond passionately to such a bold headline. According to Fast Company, if you want people to love you, you’d better figure out who’s gonna hate you…
We examined more than 1,000 Match.com ads–from men and women, old and young. Our search yielded headlines like this one: “Hey.” Folks, if your opening line is “Hey,” you better be hot.
Another said “Looking for love.” Well, duh, you’re on Match.com. At least two-thirds of the headlines said nothing–and did it poorly.
Why do these headlines suck so much? Fear. Fear of saying too much. Fear of saying something clever that someone might think is stupid. Fear of saying something revealing that might turn someone off. The headlines try desperately not to exclude anyone. In doing so, they succeed at boring everyone.
The “Hey” phenomenon is rampant in the corporate world. Branding is nothing more than a company’s personal ad, and companies are as bad at it as singles. Gap (NYSE:GPS), for example, is the “Hey” of fashion, thus its recent woes. And Ford Motor Co. (NYSE:F) –who, exactly, does it want to date? Brands with enough scale think they can get away with being generically likable. And some can, at least for a little while.
Your company is an athletic math nerd; not everyone is going to buy your goods. In fact, more people won’t buy from you than will. So, why are wasting so much time trying to be all things to all people in your marketing?
If anything, the fear of being disliked afflicts marketers more acutely than daters, because the stakes are higher. “Most marketers feel that if they make a bold statement, they risk not just alienating customers–but also their boss, and their boss’s boss,” says Charles Rosen, founding partner of Amalgamated ad agency. “That fear takes the edge off of all communications.”
What exactly are you afraid of? Stand up tall. Say who you are. The only thing more embarrassing than humming Seinfeld with your customers is humming it broke and alone.
(Note: Many of us around the office are quickly becoming big fans of Dan & Chip Heath who authored this article. My copy of their book Made to Stick is screaming for mercy from all the dog ears.)
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Written by:Anthony Garcia
Transcript: Google Website Optimizer Interview with Tom Leung, Part 2
Recently, Google announced the open beta for Google Website Optimizer, a free testing tool available to any AdWords marketer. I had the opportunity to discuss it with Tom Leung, business product manager for Google. Check out part one here.
Bryan Eisenberg: Now that people have a free tool, one of the questions they have is, “What resources will I need to actually implement tests?”
Tom Leung: Let me put it this way: if you have the ability to change an image on a particular page or change a headline, or you have the ability to add our scripts to your page, you can test. However, there are some people who may want extra help and that’s why we work with certifying different partners like [your company] to help provide a consultation on what to test or how to evaluate the results. The tool’s designed for do-it-yourself marketers. But for those who want extra help, that’s available either through our free technical support or more advanced professional services, like our authorized consultants.
BE: One of the questions that keep popping up is if I start tagging the pages and I start making a couple of variations, how long do I have to wait until I get results that are meaningful?
Continue reading my ROI Marketing column at ClickZ…
Read Part 1 of this interview…
or, listen to the interview in-full.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Subliminal Advertising? It’s a Subliminal World!
Don’t you just love tracing back the connections to everything? Jeffrey and Bryan were driving from Dallas to Austin this morning to get in town for their Call to Action Seminar and saw a bunch of taxidermy billboards. Meanwhile, I was flying in to Austin from my hometown which is headquarters to Cabela’s, world-famous for the taxidermy displays in their retail stores. (I’ve actually heard people call it the “dead zoo” but you can’t get away with that where I live.)
Fast forward a few hours and the three of us are having dinner at Estancia, a new Austin Churrascaria (Brazilian Barbecue). I mention that if they had wild game on the menu, you could start one of these in my little town of 6,200 people because the Cabela’s boys would keep it very busy. We share a laugh, which is then cut short by the Gaucho waiter bringing more leg of lamb past the table. Mmmmm. A nice hint of mint.
Done with dinner, we’ve beached our stuffed selves onto the furniture at the hotel and Bryan says, “You’ve got to see this YouTube video on subliminal advertising.” What brought that up? I hand him my MacBook and he quickly finds the video. Pretty cool. It all makes sense now.
I have some questions for you after you watch it.
What unspoken positive messages are you giving your customers? (on your website or in your store).
What unspoken negative messages are your customers taking from your place?
Are you giving them the ammunition they need to create positive word of mouth or negative word of mouth?
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Written by:Dave Young
Conversion Stumbling Blocks in the Real World
Driving by Sonic on a main road in Houston at 11pm one night, I saw a large billboard advertising an Oreo fudge milkshake. The message quickly hit my stomach and my instant craving made me pull off to check out the goods. I looked around for a drive-through and didn’t see one. Instead, I noticed that each individual parking spot had an ordering menu so I pulled into a spot.
There was a big red button with copy that said ‘press when ready to order.’ Although I’d never been to a Sonic before in my life, I’ve been to a drive-through before, and the copy on this menu board clearly told me what action to take. I placed my order as my mouth began to water.
The order was in, but I had no idea what to do next. I sat in my car for a short while, wondering if someone was going to come out and bring me my order, but it seemed to take awhile. I looked around on the board next to me but nothing explained what to expect after placing my order. I thought that perhaps I was expected to go to a drive-through at this point, or maybe I was expected to go inside.
I decided to press the big red button again and ask what they wanted me to do, and was explained that someone would be out shortly with my order.
If this scenario had happened online, I probably would’ve bailed out of the checkout process. People just don’t spend a significant amount of effort and time trying to figure out what your sales process! If the customer has questions that aren’t being answered once they’ve entered the checkout process, they’re likely to just drop out and go somewhere else.
Check your analytics. Take a look at how many people are entering your checkout process and dropping off before converting. And ask yourself: Why would you be willing to give your customers’ dollars to your competitors?
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Written by:Melissa Burdon
Do You Know HOW to Convert Visitors to Sales?
This quote from an AdWeek article at Yahoo News got my attention when it stated that:
…online marketers are largely unaware of their customers’ preferences.
The article then rehashes the common knowledge that online marketing spend is up, while average conversion rates are steadily sinking. It also cites a few research studies that speculate as to the reasons why conversion rates currently suck.
Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the “U.S. Retail E-Commerce Update,” said the disconnect between spending and results can be attributed to online retailers doing too little traditional market research while relying too much on Web metrics.
The article continues…
Online marketers “treat Web metrics like religion,” he said. “They don’t look at what’s behind the numbers.
“Market research tells retailers why customers are doing things, which is different than only measuring what consumers are clicking on,” said Grau. “Online retailers can use focus groups, e-mail and consumer conversations with customer service agents to find out what people care about.” But Web analytics follow user behavior, and that kind of data doesn’t explain why people do things, he said.
The article also refers to those sites that perform above average, suggesting that:
…top-performing e-commerce sites–those with conversion rates of more than 10 percent–stand out from the pack because they “know their customers and their competition well enough to provide a one-stop shopping experience,” with convenience and customized features suited to their target audience.
Far be it from me to argue with these conclusions, but they’re too shallow for my tastes.
Let’s speculate for a minute…
Let’s imagine that:
- You know WHO your customers are.
- You know WHAT your customers are doing and not doing on your site (i.e., web metrics).
- You actually know WHY they’re not converting.
Now what? Do you now know HOW to convert them?
Every client we’ve dealt with has had enough WHO, WHAT, and WHY information on-hand to make a positive impact on their conversion, but most have yet to figure out HOW to leverage this information to maximize and optimize their conversion rate.
I wish it were as easy as running a few focus groups, creating a few new promotions, offering free shipping, etc–but, it isn’t. If it were, the average conversion rates wouldn’t suck.
Marketers need a system that will manage the seemingly endless variables, understand quantitative and behavioral data, help them prioritize resources for conversion impact, synchronize cross channel message, give them deeper insight into web analytics, equip them to develop relevant creative on-demand, then turn it all into online customer experience.
A tall order, for sure. Thankfully, I know of a such a system 
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Written by:Anthony Garcia
Lights On, Lights Off
Last night, I was looking around JCrew and noticed in the fitting rooms they had an interesting switch labeled “Daytime” & “Nighttime.” Hitting this switch made the fitting room seem moonlit or sunlit, so you can see how the clothes will look in both situations.
After mentioning this to my girlfriend, she told me that H&M’s dressing rooms also have a switch that is named “Daylight” that turns on a bulb that fills the dressing room with more natural light.
Yes, e-tailers, you can display your items in multiple ways. Don’t be afraid to venture outside of your company’s bottle and consider using more innovative ways to display products on the website. You’re doing it in your retail stores, so why are you waiting to implement it online?
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Written by:Josh Hay
