Optimization Mistakes that Kill Startups. I once believed optimization was the secret weapon that could make almost any startup successful. It was certainly a critical part of reaching millions of users in each of my first five startup marketing roles. At a couple of startups we saw a tripling of conversion rates from a single experiment. When we tripled conversion rates, we tripled the effectiveness of every future marketing dollar. I first became a fan of funnel optimization at one of my early startups where we had hit a wall trying to develop scalable customer acquisition channels. We decided to temporarily stop trying to find new customer acquisition channels and focus instead on improving conversion rates. These benefits probably have you chomping at the bit to start your own optimization program. Here are the three most common optimization mistakes startups make: 1) Premature optimization – Optimization is about improving the path that users take to reach a certain destination within your website.
Less is More (But Who Decides?) - Continuations. Table Stakes Are Dangerous. Much has already been written about Twitter and Flickr’s recent forays into photo filters. In particular, my friend MG wrote today that adding filters to Twitter and Flickr is a misguided attempt to catch up to Instagram: But let’s not beat around the bush: both Flickr and Twitter have rolled out these updates thinking filters will somehow make them more competitive with Instagram.
These are purely reactive moves that show a fundamental misunderstanding of why Instagram is what it is. To add some color here, I’d guess that the addition of filters to Twitter and Flickr (and every new photo app that launches) is a result of believing they are table stakes for mobile photos. Launch without them, and your photo-taking app starts off at an immediate disadvantage. For Twitter and Flickr, filters must seem like a base requirement if they want to have a hope of converting Instagram users, who have already come to expect photo filters as a core feature. What is your startup doing? Kudos. Speed Is A Killer - Why Decreasing Page Load Time Can Drastically Increase Conversions. Can the speed of your website really have that much of an effect on your sales? Even if your site isn’t loading too slowly, can it still be improved? And how does Google factor into all of this?
You might be surprised. According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online. This means you’re not just losing conversions from visitors currently on your site, but that loss is magnified to their friends and colleagues as well. The end result – lots of potential sales down the drain because of a few seconds difference. So how do you test and measure your site’s load time while squeezing every drop of performance out of your website? How Fast Does Your Site Load? A really nasty trend: apps that write to Twitter or Facebook wit.
Today I spammed my Twitter followers. I didn’t really know that I was doing that. And that pisses me off. You’ve probably seen this kind of spam. It usually comes when someone you are following wins a mayor badge on Foursquare. Sometimes you don’t even realize it went out. How many people watch their outbound tweets very closely? I don’t. But today I tried a new feature from Listorious that lets me answer questions from people who visit my Listorious page. All of a sudden I was getting complaints from people who were getting spammed to death. Yikes. Then I went and tried to figure out how to turn it off.