Increase Conversion by Decreasing Engagement, Even with Video. Engagement is a magnetic “measure” of online effectiveness. You might call it an “engaging” metric. This is because it is a nice stand-in when real measures of sales, leads or subscriptions are too difficult to track or deliver disappointing results. “No, we didn’t increase sales, but look at the engagement!” Is the mantra. The definition of “engagement” changes from channel to channel. On a landing page, it may mean tracking how many visitors scroll the page, click on a form field, or watch a video. In social media, engagement can be measured by liking, commenting, following, connecting, uploading a photo – almost anything. On your website, it may be measured by how many visitors bounce, how long they spent on the site or how many pages they saw during their visit. In general, engagement is a predictive measurement.
As it turns out, this is not a very good assumption. The Fine Line Between Engagement & Distraction Don’t assume that better engagement means higher conversion rates. Until now. The Blueprint for a Perfectly Testable Landing Page - The Infographic. Landing Pages: What are the best viral landing pages. How Moving Fast Doubled Our Feature Engagement - SaaS Tips. As a SaaS business, we regularly make improvements in our software product because we care about our customers. We also want to give our customers a competitive advantage with our customer data so they can make better business decisions. When we started working on our new version of Live two weeks ago, we had a lot of discussion about whether we should rewrite the whole thing or just improve the visual designs. I’ll dive more into that a little later, but one of the big influencers for a rewrite was that we wanted to make a dramatic improvement in reliability and uptime — one that wouldn’t be possible with just a simple design upgrade.
What’s a new design worth if it doesn’t work? Funny thing is, when we finished building Live, our customers said it was fantastic…but still there was something missing. What went wrong? Instead of going back to the drawing board, we kept it simple. Building The New Version Of Live Some key requirements included: Flash was a big offender.
Problem Solved! 1. SaaS products aren’t viral. I recently gave a short talk to the portfolio companies of a SaaS investor, and prepped some notes around the topic of SaaS products and virality. It’s hard enough in consumer, much less SaaS For consumer internet entrepreneurs that are working on big markets, getting to virality is hard enough. There are plenty of sectors, like commerce or moms, where it’s almost impossible to achieve sustained viral growth, just because of the dynamics and narrow nature of the audience. When you turn your attention to SaaS products that are narrow in industry and profession, it’s even harder. The product is what matters1 The main point I make in this talk is that virality has a lot to do with product category.
You can stack the odds in your favor by choosing a product that has many of the following characteristics: Hope you enjoy the slides! Comments welcome. What Spending $252,000 On Conversion Rate Optimization Taught Me. Speaker Deck - Share Presentations without the Mess.
Why The Most Important Part of Your Brand is Invisible. By Mars Dorian, Contributing {grow} Columinst We talk all the time about writing cornerstone content, building effective web design, and connecting with your community in the social media world. Yessss, it’s all essential, that’s why it’s getting poured again and again into our membranes. But what about the invisible world behind engagement creation? That special “X Factor” that every great (personal) brand emanates, that elusive awesomesauce that connects them stronger to their raving audience than gorilla glued Lego pieces ? Danielle LaPorte has it. It’s often the invisible part of your online presence that turns visitors into raving fans. And before I go all paranormal on you, the “invisible” I mean doesn’t include ectoplasma and proton blasters.
It’s the elusive part that people cannot FULLY explain, but that tremendously affects the way they see your brand and interact with it. Let’s start with… The reason “why” Summonin’ some subtext Putting the “you” in your work What to do? Conclusion. Big Picture CRO. Twitter Open-Sources Clutch.IO, The Mobile A/B Testing Service It Recently Acquired. In August, Twitter acquired the small A/B testing service and development framework Clutch.io and announced that it would shut the service down on November 1st. Clutch, which Twitter describes as “an easy-to-integrate library for native iOS applications designed to help you develop faster, deploy instantly and run A/B tests,” will live on, however. The company today announced that it is open-sourcing the code on GitHub. The code is available under the relatively permissive Apache License 2.0. Clutch.io, it is worth noting, consists of two projects: the native A/B testing service for iOS and Android, as well as a toolkit for developing hybrid native/HTML apps for iOS.
The testing service allows developers to run A/B experiments on their native iOS and Android apps and Clutch.io offers SDKs for both operating systems that should make integrating this service relatively easy. Why “saving money” and “ROI” are probably the wrong way to sell your product by. I can’t remember how many times at Smart Bear I tried to sell Code Collaborator with the argument that it “saves you money.” And customers demanded it — some even required that we produce an ROI spreadsheet. And we did. The argument makes sense (though it’s wrong).
Code Collaborator is tool which helps software developers review each other’s work, just like an editor of a book. It cuts the time of a code review in half — maybe better — because it eliminates busywork. So the economics are obvious: If two developers would each normally spend an average of 30 minutes on a code review, once a day, that’s 20 hours of total time in a business-month. At a fully-loaded developer cost of $150/hr, that’s $3,000/mo. Code Collaborator costs $499/developer — one time — so you make your money back inside the first month! You can’t afford not to buy it, right? But this argument never worked, not once, even though the reasoning is sound and customers requested it. But that’s OK isn’t it? Marissa Mayer's Data-Driven Sales Revamp At Yahoo. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has always made her decisions based on as much data as possible. She famously relied on data to pick colors for Gmail and the Google homepage Right now, Mayer, and Yahoo's chief revenue officer Michael Barrett, have some huge decisions to make about Yahoo and one of its most important groups: its sales force.
It's no surprise, then, that Yahoo just sent out a survey to its advertising clients: Mayer needs data! Yahoo and other ad-supported Internet companies do surveys like these all the time, of course. Below, we've pasted some of the survey questions and some of the multiple-choice answers to them. Both are interesting to Yahoo employees and Yahoo shareholders. The survey: Removing This Design Element Improved CTR by 27% Search filters are a critical UX feature to ecommerce sites.
The larger your product assortment, the more necessary they are. But how you display the features may be helping or hurting your conversion rates. This week’s WhichTestWon feature test sought to discover if removing a “refine your search” toolbar above results on the UK Tool Centre website would increase click through rate. The hypothesis being the filter was a distraction, while pushing clickable results below the fold. Control Treatment Despite the search page having more than 100 product results, the test version without the filter improved click through by 27%.
I myself found this result surprising, as I tend to take advantage of filters. If you use horizontal filters, this is a great testing idea, whether text-based or image-based. But the same concept applies to the “banners” and featured merchandising zones so common on search and category pages. Challenge your love affair with “hero shots” Relevance matters.
How to Use a Single Metric to Run Your Startup. Collecting data is easy. There are lots of tools out there and ways to gather data about everything that’s happening with your business, from lead generation through to customer satisfaction. But what are we supposed to do with all that data? How does it help us focus on the key challenges at hand, provide us insights into our next steps, and drive success? The data you collect may be helpful at some point; but if you can’t cut out the noise, you’ll get buried. That’s why you should think about a single metric that’s most important for the stage of your company’s development, a single number that you want the entire company to focus on and improve upon. The One Metric That Matters (or OMTM) is a single number that you care the most about at the current stage of your startup.
Four Reasons You Need the OMTM for Your Startup As I’ve said, the OMTM is a single metric that you care about at a given point in time, for the stage of your startup. 1. 2. 3. Focus is good. 4. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 1. 2. The Shocking Truth About How Web Graphics Affect Conversions. Does this situation feel familiar? — Your web designer reckons your site is outdated. It makes you look amateurish. If we’re being honest, we might even say it’s downright ugly and you should be ashamed of attaching it to your brand.
The solution? A redesign, of course. Not just a few tweaks, mind you, but a reinvention, taking your tired old website and bringing it into the modern day. It’ll have snazzy vector paths, cute cartoon scenes, jQuery carousels, full-page high-resolution background photos, the works. Why? Well, check out the reasons! 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Many years ago, advertising legend David Ogilvy commissioned research into the use of images. What he discovered from testing various kinds and placements of images was quite different to the popular opinion of designers—then and now: Images can reduce readership. Yes, they catch people’s attention.
You might be wondering why you should care about research done in offline advertising. What Ogilvy Discovered 1. 2. 3. 4. 4.1.7 Dave McClure - Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR! - I. Understanding new AWS I/O options and costs | CloudVertical Blog. One of the most common issues we hear is that I/O on AWS is hard to predict, and often a bottleneck for applications. So today’s news that AWS have introduced two new ways to improve your I/O performance is an exciting development.
Aside from the performance benefits, these new options also introduce a number of additional cost variables. I’m excited to announce that, on the same day of introduction (as we did we programmatic billing!) CloudVertical now fully supports, analyses and provides reporting for these new EBS and EC2 options! We thought you might find it useful to get more information on the cost implications, so continue reading to learn about the options, costs and how they differ from existing standard EC2 and EBS resources.
New Instance Costs 3 existing instance types can now be deployed with EBS-optimized support (all examples taken using US East (Virginia) and Linux) Storage Pricing Standard: 10¢ per GB-month Provisioned IOPS: 12.5¢ per GB-month – a 25% increase. I/O Pricing. Startup Metrics 4 Pirates (Seoul) Does Conversion Rate Tell The Whole Story? Editor’s Note: Everyone wants to improve their conversion rates right? But are “conversion rates” the right indicators for steering you towards your most important goal: increasing revenues? The case study presented here is about how FoxTranslate.com (a document translation service), found that focusing on conversion rates alone can be misleading.
Read this article to discover what they learned. You’ll be surprised and it may change the way you run and think about your website tests. As most of you know, a popular platform for A/B testing new website features and landing pages is Google Website Optimizer. Over the past few months FoxTranslate has been running A/B tests to improve our website conversions. It wasn’t until we decided to make a redesigned home page variation that we started to “see the light”. We felt the new home page: Highlighted our core service features.Segmented the data into digestible sections.Offered a slicker and professional feel.
Revenue Improvement of Current vs. Jraitamaa.visibli.com/share/b5roxo. Building For The Enterprise — The Zero Overhead Principle. Editor’s note: DJ Patil is a data scientist in residence at Greylock Partners. You can follow him on Twitter. The enterprise is back. We’re seeing a resurgence of companies to help support everyday work tasks. Workday is replacing stodgy-feeling HR systems with intuitive software that users can easily navigate. Dropbox and Box are resolving the time-old challenge of file sharing and alleviating the frustration of using SharePoint. Even LinkedIn is providing novel recruiting and career management solutions for the general consumer and the enterprise customer. A central theme to this new wave of innovation is the application of core product tenets from the consumer space to the enterprise.
My team and I at the Department of Defense discovered this vital rule in the biggest enterprise of them all — the U.S. government. The real challenge for analysts is that they are already overloaded and tend to ignore additional tools that require training (remember these guys have real time pressure). Www.dashboardinsight.com/CMS/127a78af-82ff-4e91-a183-24ce58b9189d/MLR.pdf. The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development | Learn how to do Customer Development, an essential part of the Lean Startup® framework. The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development | The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development. 7 Ways to Make Customers Love You. Know Your Customers First Before Building A New Technology Company. By Martin at September 19, 2012 | 8:33 am | Print Even though I love technology, I always cringe when an entrepreneur starts his pitch by touting his new technology. He has forgotten that new technologies are perceived by most customers as causing more pain than the problems they hope to eliminate.
I chastise these startups to highlight the solution created by the technology, rather than highlight the technology itself. I usually get pushback about the success of all the great technology companies, like Intel and Apple. Let me be clear – technology and market-driven need not be mutually exclusive! The best companies find a way to drive the market with a solution based on their technology, rather than push their new technology as the solution for the marketplace. Yet we all know that many customers delay their adoption of the latest software platform, and fancy new hardware, for a year or two until all the “kinks” are worked out of them.
. • Get real customer input. It's Our Research :: Interview with Steve Blank. 10 Things Your Customers Wish You Knew About Them [Infographic] 461 Flares Filament.io 461 Flares × What does it take to deliver outstanding and above and beyond customer service? The simple answer we’ve found: An incredible understanding of how your customers think. Spending lots of time with your users and customers every day is one of the most important things I believe. Interestingly, a lot of the time, delighting users and delivering happiness isn’t at the top of everyone’s to do list. Seth Godin put it more succinctly then I ever could in a recent post: A few organizations have figured out how to turn customer service into a marketing opportunity and thus a profit center. They figure if they’ve got your attention, if they’re talking to you at a moment when you care a great deal, they can turn that into an opportunity to delight. Whilst we have also tried to do our best and write about giving the best customer service here on the Buffer blog, this time, we want to move away from the How To, and rather focus on just the listening part.
Leo Widrich. Mixpanel | Mobile and Web Analytics. 5 Psychological Studies on Pricing That You Absolutely MUST Read. Actionable Metrics - Say Hello to Cohort Analysis. 5 Reasons Recurring Revenue Models Work. Why Companies Need to Iterate Based on User Feedback. The 2 Things About Your Start-up Idea That Actually Matter.
Mkt research.