What is your social media ROI? Can you measure the increase in traffic quality coming to your site from your social media actions?

Tell me your social conversion rate

“Social media is revolutionizing customer care.” Yawn.

“Social media is helping brands build awareness.” That’s sounds interesting (not).

“Social media increases the quality of the traffic coming to your site in measurable ways.” Now you have my attention.

Don’t Hate Me for My Myopia

It is my choice of career that has given me this singular focus when it comes to online marketing. There are other people to create brand image. There are smart, dedicated people trying to improve their company’s customer service.

I say “you go!”

But, I want measurable, tangible data on how social media gets qualified prospects to a web property, and how it helps me carry on a conversation with them making them more likely to buy.

I can already hear Qwitter messages landing in my inbox. I hate Qwitter personally, but it is a FABULOUS metric, the equivalent of email’s unsubscribe rate. So, I have to listen. It’s an measure of my social media Return On Investment, my social media ROI.

What is your social media ROI? Can you measure the increase in traffic quality coming to your site from your social media actions?

What is your social media ROI? Can you measure the increase in traffic quality coming to your site from your social media actions?

This Attitude is Good for Social Media ROI

How many times do you have a great conversation in the social space only to find the company’s website opaque, posing, and irrelevant?

Social media won’t work if we’re transparent in our social graph and obsequious everywhere else.

Let’s encourage businesses to put content out that draws people to their website. They will quickly begin to realize that certain content works (educational, entertaining content) and certain content does not (home pages with self-aggrandizing copy).

ROI is the great informer for these companies.

The Importance of Social Media ROI

If our stuff is worth talking about, why hold it back?

There is a camp of social media digerati that believe social channels are not for promotion, that it is evil to advertise where conversations are the norm.

But, if conversations are going on around a brand or a company, why deny the social citizenry of a chance to own or use their offerings?

It’s just plain selfish to hold back.

When buying is an outcome of conversation, ROI tells a company how it’s doing in starting and continuing those conversations.

Online communities are arbiters and aggregators of ROI

Let’s face it. We want the support of companies as we complain and cheer about their products. We want them to hear us, to reply to us, and to see things our way.

And we are not above the occasional bribe.

How many times have you started a complaint with, “I spend $_____ with your company every _____, and I expect… .”

We regularly use ROI as a way to get attention.

Communities that raise their hand get more attention. They drive it, highlight it and can take it away. They should be rewarded for their financial contribution to companies with increased support, more say in product design… and the occasional bribe.

What do eBook Groupies and Designer Laptop Bags have in Common?

I’ve recently begun working with J’Tote Designer Laptop Bags, and heard a story that illustrates this concept perfectly.

It seems that the women of an eBook community have developed a love for J’Tot’e’s chic laptop bags. How do we know?

  1. Mysterious spikes in J’Tote’s Web traffic led to the discovery that people were posting about them on the forum.
  2. Boxes of bags were soon waiting to be shipped to the group’s members.

Visitors from this community stay on the J’Tote site longer than average, view more pages, and have a very low bounce rate (a measure of the number of visitors who leave immediately after visiting a site).

The folks at J’Tote now make it a priority to tune into the conversations on the forum, and are certain to give them warning when inventory clearing sales are imminent.

Companies speak ROI

It is the lingo of the bottom line; the babble of budgets; the conversation of the coin. If we want more companies to engage in social media for all the “right” reasons, we need to communicate with them in this language: more visits from interested conversationalists who buy their products.

We need to speak to them with ROI.

It’s one thing for a company to monitor our conversations attempting to gauge positive or negative sentiment. It’s quite another for them to know that their Facebook page is generating additional visits and sales.

There is a catch

Companies that don’t measure the ROI of social media won’t get the message. They’ll continue to ignore important communities, cut social budgets and generate plenty of negative social sentiment in the digital conversationsphere.

If you’re not measuring, you’re not listening.

J’Tote is listening. Are you?

On July 21, I’ll be showing you ways to measure your social ROI, and in particular, your social conversion rates.

Did you know there was such a thing as a social landing page? It’s nothing like your landing pages.

Did you know that there are six major conversions that happen when you add social media to your sales funnel?

My presentation is just one part of a spectacular Master’s Group Training being held in Austin by Webmaster World, the PubCon people.

Only, you don’t have to attend a full PubCon to go.

Not only will you learn from me how to measure your social media efforts, you’ll learn how to do the things that make social media work.

  • Andy Beal will tell you about social media reputation management.
  • Dan Zarrella will give you the low down on Twitter and Facebook optimization.
  • Brett Tabke will show you how he reached influentials in his social graph and put PubCon registrations slashed his marketing budget.

Oh, and there is also an search marketing track going on at the same time. Yawn.

We’re going to make people love your business through your website at The Conversion Scientist. Subscribe to learn the strategies and tactics that turn more of your visitors into leads and sales.

I want measurable, tangible data on social conversion rates, on how social media gets qualified prospects to an online property, and how it helps me carry on a conversation with them making them more likely to buy.

Read this article if interested in improving your social media conversion rates.

Not only should B2B marketers try everything that B2C businesses are using, they risk irrelevance if they don’t.

What are you afraid of?

The goal of my Ion Interactive presentation “What Can We Learn from the Bad Boys of Marketing?” was to shake things up a bit.

Conversion marketing is about bringing visitors to choice. B2B conversion marketers carry this same burden.

Can marketers in more conservative industries use techniques proven to increase online leads and sales in B2C markets?

In my Ion Interactive webinar, I use two B2B landing pages to illustrate how these B2C techniques can be used: Mary O’Brien Adwords Advantage landing page AdwordAdvantage.com and CoverActionPro.com.

The elements are the same for B2B conversion marketing as they are for B2C webpages.

  • Long copy
  • Bold headlines
  • Highlighting and bullets
  • “Johnson” boxes
  • Risk reversal
  • Testimonials
  • “Act” buttons
  • Signatures and postscripts

Check out Secrets of The “Bad Boys” of Online Sales Conversion for a detailed description of these Useful B2B conversion marketing elements.

I go as far in the Webinar to state:

“Business to business copy sucks. It’s horrible to read. There is a need, that when someone recommends a site to their boss that you look professional, but it doesn’t mean you have to write like an idiot.”

Ready for B2B Conversion Marketing?

Anna Talerico interviews Brian Massey • B2B Conversion Marketing

Anna Talerico Hosts Conversations on B2b Conversion Marketing

Certainly you can deliver a high-converting experience without harming your online brand, like CoverActionPro.

You have to work harder. You can’t ask a committee of executives to review your pages. You have to know how your page is performing and how changes are affecting your results.

You can learn more about analytics and their proper application at my AEN Short Course “Web Analytics: Tools and Best Practices” on June 11, 2010.

Enjoy the Webinar and don’t miss Anna Talerico’s Conversations on B2B Conversion Marketing podcast. Or give your sales a boost. Check out our lead generation solutions tailored to your industry.

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Brian Massey

Location marketing finds interesting ways to connect geo-relevant businesses to passionate, influential mobile customers or prospects.

I had the pleasure of being on a panel with Tim Hayden recently, and overheard him talking real-life targeted banner advertising: billboards that connected with your mobile phone as you passed by.

I could only imagine what a billboard would say to me.

But the more I listened to Tim, the more I became intrigued with his vision for the future and the present.

Tim was nice enough to answer some questions on his birthday, of all days, and my summary of what I learned can be found in my ClickZ column “Mobile Marketing and Your Digital Geo-relevance.”

My favorite quote didn’t make the editing process:

“We aren’t wired to sit on our asses all day and stare at Twitter,” says Hayden.

Tim asks businesses the question, “How can we have compelling touchpoints, beyond the device that will bring people back to the device to engage us?”

Einstein has given me some doubts about where I am. He demonstrated that time and space is really quite malleable. It leads to the conclusion that you can never really be sure that you are where you think you are; you can also never really be sure you are when you think you are.

Fortunately, we have these little computers we carry around called mobile phones to tell us both when and where we are…relatively. It turns out that these devices are fine for fixing us in time and space, unless you are standing too close to a neutron star.

These devices are also good at telling advertisers where we are, where we want to be, and where we’ll be in between.

Is “Mobile” Necessary?

The term “mobile” already seems a bit quaint. It’s like calling an automobile “out-of-home transportation.” It’s not necessary. It’s a car, and we “drive.”

Likewise, a device that is with us always really doesn’t need to be called “mobile.” All we have to do is “be” somewhere. The rest is implied. When I turn on a device that has GPS capability, I begin to “be” somewhere in the digital sense of the word.

Famed VC John Doerr admitted that we don’t have a word for the next mobile/social/new commerce “wave.”

“Geo-relevance” is written more frequently these days. And I like the double entendre: we can know what businesses are relevant to us geographically, but mobile device users are also making themselves more relevant wherever they are “being.”

Tim Hayden prefers the term “mobile lifestyle” to describe what he calls “passionate and influential” smartphone users. He also likes the term “digital out of home advertising” My personal mobile strategy has been limited to adding a mobile theme plug-in to my CRO blog, so I’ve asked Tim to give me his view of the mobile space.

Mobile Marketing and Geo-Relevance: The Power of Location Marketing

Location, location, location.

Location Marketing Helps with Geo-Relevance

Just as mobile devices determine where individuals are “being,” business can “be” somewhere in a digital sense as well. Let’s consider some ways businesses can use their “being” to connect with customers.

All we need is some way to figure out when we are “being” in the same place as a business is “being,” and magic starts to happen. Because of the Internet, that business can send a message through this intermediary suggesting that I start “being” in their store instead of nearby. Coupons, menus, and hot new products may entice me to shift my location, and my digital beingness along with it.

Location marketing finds interesting ways to connect where a business is being to where a prospect is being.

Though subtle, the distinction is important.

You “are” where you physically stand. You are “being” where the Internet thinks you are. Where you “be” is different from where you live or where your computer is. As a business you can “be” in many places.

Tim imagines a day not too far in the future when a smart roadside billboard can be a place where your business is “being,” reaching out to passing mobile devices.

Communicating Location via Social Media

We tell our friends where we are “being” by communicating a business’s location. An e-mail with a link to a map is sufficient to establish a bar, coffee shop, or restaurant’s geo-relevance to others. There are some other, more interesting ways of borrowing a customer’s geo-relevance to enhance your businesses digital location.

Foursquare is a popular “being broker,” encouraging visitors to build a business’s being by associating it with their being, sharing it with all of their social connections.

As a business, you should start by encouraging customers to check in through Foursquare or Gowalla. Install Wi-Fi. “Being” somewhere does not an ad make, so check out Foursquare for Business for opportunities to advertise to visitors and their social network. Brightkite is another, more venerable mobile marketing or being broker.

Search and Place: The Power of Location Marketing

Search engines with geographic features such as maps and routing act as the intermediary for your future being. If you want a hamburger; if you need a new dry cleaner; if you want to know where to buy a lab coat in a strange city, search combines prospect intent via keywords with their location. Search is your place intermediary.

Search engines know the business’s geo-location, but you should help them legitimize and optimize your locations. Leverage Google My Business listings to indicate your geo-relevance. David Mihm of GetListed.org packed a great amount of local search strategy into his presentation at InnoTech Portland this month.


21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

  • 43 Pages with Examples
  • Assumptive Phrasing
  • "We" vs. "You"
  • Pattern Interrupts
  • The Power of Three

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Mobile Devices “Wire” Our Touchpoints

Tim offers the example of a nightclub that issues cards with RFID chips in them. When a card-carrying patron comes to the door, the host can see on her terminal who has come and their preferences for seating, drinks, and appetizers. Tim believes that these “smart touchpoints” are well suited to leverage the digital location defined by our phones.

Tim asks businesses the question, “How can we have compelling touchpoints, beyond the device that will bring people back to the device to engage us?”

Mobile Applications

“I applaud anyone who is reaching out to mobile users who are passionate and influential,” says Tim when I ask about the value of mobile apps.

He prefers promotional microsites designed for the small screen. They can have more impact and are often easier to implement.

Some businesses are a natural fit for apps. There are services, such as MobBase, Kyte, and Mobile Roadie that can make it easy for any business to develop a third-screen presence.

Mobile Advertising via Ad Networks

As I write this, I’m receiving the news that the Google AdMob merger has been approved. The Mobile Marketer article, “Google becomes world’s largest mobile ad network: 9 implications,” spells out the implications.

Because of Google’s self-service search advertising model, this merger bodes well for small and medium-sized businesses that want to begin leveraging mobile advertising.

Mobile Marketing and Privacy

Tim falls squarely into the “privacy is dead” camp. While we should have more control of our privacy on our personal devices, Tim acknowledges that where we “be” reveals plenty about us.

Influential smartphone users leverage the wholesale transparency implied by this utter lack of privacy. These users produce “earnest to visceral” user-generated content. They are building a public personal brand for themselves, and are exactly the people that businesses of all sizes should reach out to.

It’s hard to think about mobile marketing when we’re just getting our heads around search and display advertising. Still, businesses must do what they can to establish their digital “being” now and keep an eye on the intermediaries that can connect them with passionate, influential mobile device junkies.

NOTE: Portions of this article originally appeared on ClickZ.

Brian Massey

This is the last in this series of core conversion marketing strategies: The Site as a Service Pattern. Get visitors into a trial from your home page, use email notifications to keep them interested and engaged, and you will get more and more customers from your online marketing efforts.

You can do almost anything on the Internet now. You can monitor your finances, socialize, organize ideas,manage your job search, broadcast your travels, and recruit college students.

The core conversion marketing pattern that these sites should adopt is the “Site as a Service Pattern.” This is the fifth and last of the core conversion strategies in this series.

Explore other site patterns in The Five Core Patterns Of Conversion Marketing and The E-commerce Pattern.

These sites are delivering a service that is consumed online. Typically, the primary conversion is “join” or “subscribe.” However, many of these sites’ business models rely on return visits, so “login” is also an important conversion beacon even though it appeals to existing customers.

You don’t have to have a savvy Web 2.0 application to adopt the Site as a Service pattern. In fact, if more sites using “E-commerce” or “Considered Purchase” patterns would see their sites as an online service, they might find themselves being more successful.

In general, you should select the site-as-a-service pattern if:

  • You are providing a service that is consumed online
  • Your prospects can make a decision to buy relatively quickly
  • You charge a fee to use the application, or rely on advertiser revenues

How is this different pattern from the Portal Pattern discussed in a previous column? The portal pattern is focused on content-oriented businesses while the site-as-a-service pattern assumes an application-driven service. However, if you believe you should build a portal pattern website, look closely at site-as-a-service. You might find these strategies more effective.

My goal with this post is to explore three strategies that are conversion deal-breakers for sites that deliver an online service. Get these strategies right, and you should be able to optimize your way to higher conversion rates. Get any of these wrong, and you will find yourself struggling to improve.

The trial for The Site as a Service

Online applications have an amazing advantage over the other sites I’ve discussed: you can try the product right there on your computer. Therefore, I consider a trial strategy the first key conversion strategy.

A trial strategy has these primary advantages:

  • It requires minimal commitment from the visitor
  • It let’s you start the sales conversation via email
  • It lets the visitor experience the product first hand

How much should you charge for the trial?

Beware the free trial. By offering a free trial, you may be delaying the purchase for those who would buy on the spot. Good conversion copy will remove risk from the purchase decision, so a free trial is often a sign that you don’t know how to communicate the value of your service.

Free trials deliver less-qualified prospects, and your conversion from trier to buyer will probably be low. Consider a free trial only if you rely on word-of-mouth as a core marketing strategy and you have built sharing features into your sales process.

Almost any nominal fee will increase the likelihood that a visitor will use the service during the trial. Furthermore, the conversion from trier to buyer becomes much easier, since you don’t have to ask them for a credit card at this critical juncture.

Even if you offer a free trial, evidence suggests that taking the credit card at the start of the trial will result in more paying customers, even though it will significantly reduce the number of triers you have.

The extreme version of this strategy is the “freemium” model, in which a portion of the service is given away for free, and more advanced features require payment. This strategy begs the question, “If your service is free, how valuable can it really be?”

For more on the psychology of “free,” please read Dan Ariely’s book and blog, Predictably Irrational.

How long should the trial last?

This is a question for which I don’t have any research to point to. I would like to hear your findings in the comments.

From a business perspective, the shorter the trial, the sooner the business can begin charging full fare for the service. Length of trial can be made irrelevant if you see the trial period as a time for educating, engaging and cajoling trial customers to use the application.

For example, an aggressive (daily) email auto-responder series delivering “how to” instructions and “did you know” tips will on its own move triers to buyers regardless of the trial period. Get this right, and you only need your trial to last long enough to support your email auto-responder schedule.

The home page for The Site as a Service

If a trial is your first key conversion strategy, then your home page is your trial landing page.

The home page must convert visitors to buyers or triers. While it is important to communicate the primary value proposition and key benefits, it is the application itself that ultimately communicates its value.

Many sites-as-a-service provide services that we already have solutions for. The value proposition is often that you can do something better, cheaper or easier.

I recommend making the home page the first step in using the application. The most extreme example of this is the Google home page. For years, it’s basically been one blank, two buttons; type, click, instant gratification.

Ask for the first piece of information in the registration process on the home page. Before you ask them to register for a trial, they’ve begun using the application, and have already had a win or two in the process. You can be creative with this step. A dog kennel might offer a simple form on the home page asking, “What is your dog’s name,” and that starts the process of scheduling a boarding.

The home page has to deliver a well thought out (and tested) value proposition and links to pages that discuss features and benefits for those that need more information. However, for those that are looking to solve an immediate problem, let them dive in.

Notification email

I have a theory for why Facebook beat Friendster in the online social network market. I think it was the “Poke” feature. In Facebook’s eyes, “Poke” had one purpose: to send an email to a user’s friend, reminding them to come back to the site. This email—and the many others that Facebook sends—came from a trusted source, and reminded users to come back to the site.

What excuses can you come up with to send an email to your triers and buyers?

It starts with the confirmation email, sent when a visitor registers for a trial or purchases the service. Was yours written by a developer? If so, it probably states something like “click here to confirm.” More socially capable engineers may throw in a “welcome” at the top.

The confirmation email is a chance to remind the user why they signed up, to educate them on how the application will make their life better, and to invite them back to the site.

Almost any excuse will do. I’ve subscribed to hundreds of online services and Web 2.0 applications. I rely on them to optimize my life. I’ve tried hundreds and pay for a handful.

You would think that I get a constant barrage of these notification emails, right? Wrong. The ones that I pay for did a good job of keeping me on the hook via email. Those that I just won’t use, I opt-out of.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you’re a spammer if you send email to your buyers and triers. Here are some examples of trier emails from my personal experience:

  • Mint.com sends an email every 30 days telling me they miss me if I don’t login. I use their bill alerts, so I like the monthly reminder to go back and make sure nothing has changed with my banks.
  • PageOnce.com did an amazing thing for me: they told me when the minutes on my phone plan were out. That email alone prompted me to renegotiate my mobile phone plan, and has made me spend time with this personal online assistant service.
  • VolunteerSpot.com missed an opportunity by not sending me an email when my volunteers signed up for a job on the site. The CEO has assured me that this will be corrected, but I don’t use the application today as a result.

Slideshare.net sent me this:

We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right. ;-)

Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

I don’t know that any of my presentations had been particularly active, but I did tweet one of them.

My point is this: when someone has signed up to try or buy your application you are an email marketer—not a spammer. If you send them email you are going to struggle if you don’t aggressively work to get them back to your site. Always give them the option to opt-out.

If you’ve been following this series, you may be wondering why I didn’t choose the purchase process as a key conversion strategy for this pattern. I was pretty vociferous about not losing a customer with a bad shopping cart experience.

The truth is I feel strongly about the effectiveness of the strategies I’ve discussed, that I believe a prospect will get through the worst registration process if you get them right. Get visitors into a trial from your home page, use email notifications to keep them interested and engaged, and you will get more and more customers from your online marketing efforts.

Finally, I hope one day that all websites will see themselves as a service, an application. One day, the idea of a web “page” will be quaint. Each site we come to should take us by the hand and help us solve whatever problem is on our plate, even if the only thing we’re looking for is information.

Is your website a service? How would it change if you decided to put up an application instead of a bunch of pages? Please put your thoughts and examples in the comments.

We’re going to make people love your business through your Web site at Conversion Sciences. There is plenty you can do to increase online sales conversions, and we share it all. Learn what that you can do to convert more of your visitors into leads and sales.

Originally published in Search Engine Land.

This is the year for conversion rate optimization.

Still we have to remember that website optimization is at the top of the conversion stack. First you have truly know your visitor. You have to create a content platform to answer questions. You have to identify the best media strategies and channels to reach your target audience. And most importantly, you have to have the content your customers want. And then you’re ready for optimization.

This is indeed the year for website optimization. Exciting things are happening. First we have the first ever conversion conference happening in May. Now there are more resources for marketers than ever, including Google analytics and similar programs. The library of books that are now available emphasizing the importance of conversion is steadily growing. These include Avinash Kaushik, Tim Ash, and Brad Geddes are some of the best.

Still we have to remember that website optimization is at the top of the conversion stack. First you have truly know your visitor. You have to create a content platform to answer questions. You have to identify the best media strategies and channels to reach your target audience. And most importantly, you have to have the content your customers want. And then you’re ready for optimization.

Is 2010 the year of conversion rate optimization

The year of CRO.

“What advice do you give marketers who are just getting started with conversion optimization?”

First, consider a content conversion strategy. Educate your customer about different aspect of your product and see what that can do for conversion.
Then look at what I call the “Bad boys of Conversion.” These are the experts that know how to phrase, emphasize, and structure their copy to really draw in visitors. They realize the value of imaginative copy. Study the tricks and tools that they use and apply them yourself.

Take a look at your confirmation pages and notification emails. Each of these are opportunities to get customers back to the site to finalize the purchase or to make another purchase.


21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

  • 43 Pages with Examples
  • Assumptive Phrasing
  • "We" vs. "You"
  • Pattern Interrupts
  • The Power of Three

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.


“What are the biggest opportunities for conversion optimization that marketers aren’t taking enough advantage of yet?”

Marketers need to remember to test all their communication efforts to see if they are actually effective. Whether its serial testing or split testing.

Celebrate if your favorite page fails a test. Be like the The Cheerios Guy who runs around telling everyone he lowered his cholesteral. Let people know you increased your conversion rate. Be competitive and always try to improve your results.

And finally, don’t depend on IT. Set up a lab on the side utilizing the wealth of free or inexpensive tools available where you can do some basic tests.

Once you’ve proven the usefulness of these preliminary tests, it’ll be amazing how IT’s schedule for bigger testing projects seems to magically open up.

“What are the top 3 reasons optimization programs fail?”

  1. Resources to champion and implement the program. You need someone to really focus on optimization.
  2. The program doesn’t have momentum. You need to learn from each test, to understand why you got the results you did, and then draw conclusions regarding the next test that needs to be run. And then actually conduct these new tests, and DON”T WAIT to do it. You’ll lose momentum. In other words, use your data to take action.
  3. Really emphasize making analytics and conversion as part of company culture.

Will this be the Year of Conversion Rate Optimization for your Company?

Tired of redesigning your site only to get zero results? Our conversion-centered website redesign method guarantees results in weeks, not months.

Test, analyze and redesign your website to improve conversions with the best CRO agency in town.

Conversion analysis reveals missed opportunities. What is the proper way to charge for online content and increase the number of subscribers?

The New York Observer paints a pretty stunning picture of one attempt to launch an online newspaper website. Was it to be expected, or is this an online sales conversion problem?

The article states that, after a $4 million overhaul and redesign, newsday.com, the online arm of the Long Island daily Newsday had attracted only 35 subscribers in three months.

Author John Koblin also writes that, since moving the site content behind a “pay wall,” traffic has dropped from 2.2 million monthly unique visits to 1.5 million in just three months. This may not be surprising, since there is little free content available from the online newspaper.

Is Newsday.com the Titanic of Online Newspapers?

What online newspapers can learn from New York Newsday

We can learn a lot from big disasters.

We can’t help but watch — self-conscious but riveted – when great endeavors come to a disastrous end. Myriad books and movies have been produced round the sinking of the Titanic, and after almost a century it still resonates in our collective memories.

Long Island daily New York Newsday launched a grand ship in their online newspaper at newsday.com. At a reported cost of $4 million they launched a designer’s site and placed their content behind a pay wall. After the passing of three months, they had garnered only 35 paying subscribers. The acquisition cost is staggering.

But it wasn’t a single iceberg that struck the hull of newsday.com. Instead, they got mired in the ice flows off the coast of bad choices.

No disaster is the result of one mistake. It is the culmination of a series of poor decisions with a dose of misfortune.

You’re making the same mistakes on your Web site.

I completed an in-depth review of the newsday.com site in my fast-paced presentation from PubCon South.

Does Content Want to be Free or Behind a Pay Wall?

I don’t think so. The price people will pay for content is determined in part by:

  1. The price placed on it – What do others think it is worth?
  2. Relevance – Should I care about it?
  3. Timeliness – Am I getting information when I need it?
  4. Uniqueness – Can I get the same thing somewhere else for free?

If your content wants to be free, then you haven’t branded it with at least one of these aspects.

Newsday’s content should pass the test with flying colors.

  1. Price: They’re pricing it at $5 a week.
  2. Relevance: It is certainly relevant to residents of Long Island.
  3. Timeliness: New stories every day and breaking news.
  4. Uniqueness: How many online news sources are there for Long Island?

As you will see in my website review of Newsday.com they didn’t make the case. To some extent the content – stories, videos and applications – should make the case by itself. However, the site has the same categories, layout and value proposition of many news sites.

So far, all Newsday.com has done is put a price on it’s content.

How to Charge for Online Content

What Newsday’s designers and developers failed to tell management is that newsday.com runs on computers, and computers can monitor the activities of those reading the online edition. This means you can test just about anything in the court of public opinion.

Instead of changing everything, newsday.com should have tested their way into the new business model.

  • Test the variety of business models to be available: micropayments, donation strategies, “pay for everyone” strategies, as well as the “pay wall” approach.
  • Test how much “free” content is needed to keep site traffic up.
  • Test how to present pricing.
  • Test the price points that will deliver subscribers.

Of course, a testing strategy doesn’t deliver a $4 million pay day to an agency and development team. There are few incentives for patience. If management didn’t think they had the time for a measured rollout before, they certainly don’t now.

Key Page Review-Free consultation.

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Newsday.com Reacts

Blog BobBlitz.com posted a chart showing four possible layouts for the Newsday.com site. It appears that newsday.com is “enhancing its website” by “updating its color scheme.”

I don’t believe this is going to help.

It’s great that they are asking their readers what they think, but Newsday’s problems are elsewhere when you look at it through the eyes of a Conversion Scientist.

I believe Newsday has worked to prevent subscribers from completing a transaction on their site.

Would you like an analysis of your site? Request a Conversion Sciences Free Page Review.

Brian Massey Conversion Marketing

This is a guest post by Brian Combs of ionadas local.

A Local SEO Horror Story

About eighteen months ago, the SEO agency of which I was then a member was hired by a company in the travel industry. Their websites were seeing a 20% drop in traffic from Google. Even more worrisome was the nearly 25% drop in sales from Google.

Meanwhile, their keyword monitoring tools were saying everything was fine. Their tools watched several thousand keywords on a monthly basis, and the rankings had not substantively changed. If a keyword was third last month, it was third again this month.

We were tasked with determining the cause of the drop and prescribing a remedy.

The culprit was the new Google Maps business listing. These are the seven (at that point ten) listings that come up with the Google Map on queries with locational intent.

Austin plumber - Conversion and Google Maps optimization.

Austin plumber Sample Google Maps business listing.

Note: The example image is from a different industry than the client in order to protect the client’s identity.

These Google Maps had begun popping up for a large number of the client’s search terms. A keyword that was third in the organic listings was likely to be pushed below the fold. As a result, the traffic from Google was dropping precipitously.

And conversion was dropping at an even higher rate. Clearly, it was the best traffic that was being lost.

I would posit that this represents the biggest change to Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) since they began including paid listings above the natural listings.

Does Local SEO Matter for You?

If your business needs to generate website visitors, phone calls, or foot traffic from people in particular geographies, then local SEO is likely appropriate for you.

Do your keywords include a city (or neighborhood in them)? When you search on them, is the so-called 7-pack (or any Google Map) returned?

Google is constantly enlarging the universe of keywords that generate map results. So if the map is not returned today, it may begin doing so in the future.

Google is even assuming local intent when none is expressly stated.

For instance, if you search on [coffee shop], Google will determine your location from your IP address, and return you a list of coffee shops your area.

Impact on Conversion Rate

The impact of this change by Google can hardly by overstated. Even if you’ve worked your website to the top of the organic listings, the addition of the Google Map listings will have a substantial impact on Click Through Rate (CTR) and post-click conversion rate.

Which begs the question, what impact does placement within the 7-pack have on CTR?

While no studies have been published on this topic as yet, the assumption is that the curve of traffic decline within the seven maps listings is not as steep as it is for the ten organic listings.

Also, the company name within the Google Maps listing can have an effect. Known, branded companies certainly have an advantage. And those that are nothing but a list of keywords are likely at a conversion disadvantage.

Reviews and Their Impact on Conversion Rate

The Google Maps business listings very prominently list the reviews a company has received. These reviews may have been placed directly with Google, or may have been pulled into Google from third-party systems such as CitySearch.

Both the number and the quality of reviews within Google have an impact.

The number of reviews greatly impacts the ranking of the business listings. If all else is equal (which it never is, of course), the ranking with the greater number of reviews will be higher. A large number of reviews can overcome many other deficiencies in Google Maps optimization.

I have not seen any studies on the impact of the number of reviews on conversion, but I expect they are positively correlated. If there are two listings, one with twenty-five reviews and one with no reviews, people will tend to look at the business with reviews first.

And while the quality of reviews has little to no impact on rankings, it can certainly have a significant impact on conversions.

This is not to say that an occasional bad review is going to drive you out of business. We’ve all read reviews from clearly unreasonable people, and most people will give a company the benefit of the doubt.

But if the preponderance of reviews are negative, and the reviews seem reasonably written, you had better work to improve your product/service quality, and encourage happy customers to write reviews for you.

Brian Combs is the founder of ionadas local, a provider of Google Maps optimization in Austin, Texas.  ionadas local 13359 N Hwy 183, #406-245, Austin, TX 78750, (512) 501-1875

New presentation debuts at Innotech eMarketing Summit in Portland

After collaborating for a ClickZ article on Social Conversion with Dave Evans, I was pleased to get an opportunity to work with him to expand on the topic. I presented the topic at the eMarketing Summit during Innotech Portland 2009.

This is a topic that is moving quickly, and I suspect you will have something to say. Please do.

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What is Your Social Conversion Rate?

We’re going to talk today about your social conversion rate.

There is a lot of discussion about social media, Twitter, blogging. What should we be doing? How do we know if we’re doing it right? How do we implement it? How do we pick the places to start? Should we be on Facebook or should be on Twitter? The goal of my presentation today is to give you a way of looking at social media so that you can make those decisions specific to your business.

I am going to start with a premise which you may or may not buy: Advertising was designed to simulate word of mouth as word of mouth was inefficient. Was it designed purposely for that? But that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to have a trusted relationship where we could recommend our own products with more people than we would get simply by waiting for word of mouth to filter through.

Today that’s not the case. Word of mouth is very efficient. Things are changing in advertising.

Defining Conversion

Let’s talk about paid media and earned media, which I’ve redefined a little bit. We’re going to talk about the typical funnel that we are all aware of. Some, add a stage to this. Some add several stages to the awareness consideration funnel. And then we’re gonna talk about the post-purchase funnel.

Dave Evans in his book, “Social media marketing an hour a day”, does an excellent treatment of the post purchase funnel. Unfortunately, he couldn’t be here today to co-present with me. So I get to take all the credit.

We’re going to talk about two kinds of metrics, predictive and definitive and about some of the things we might measure in each of these stages.

The arrows are conversions. So, I will define conversion as a movement to the next stage.

For most of us, a conversion is generating a lead, completing a shopping cart, and that is still true. But in looking at the funnel, we realized we need to convert people to understand what our business does, to be considering our solution as part of their solutions, and then, of course, to take action.

So in different businesses, we’re going to map this differently. It’s going to be interesting challenge.

Paid Media and Earned Media Funnels

Let’s start with paid media. This is very simple. Put in a quarter and connect with someone. Buy a print ad, buy a display ad, Google AdSense, Pay per Click advertising.

However if you’re advertising paid media where you pay somebody for the right to put your message out in public, it’s considered paid media.

Generally or traditionally earned media was applied to articles in press today. We really can apply it to social media. So I’ve expanded the definition of earned media to include social conversation.

I like earned media better than social media because social media sounds like we’re out talking to people. Earned media sounds like we’re out earning our media. And I think that is really where the bar needs to be set.

Your content needs to be worthy of being talked about. Your product needs to be worthy of being talked about. How you talk about your product needs to be worthy of being talked about.

Predictive Metrics and Definitive Metrics

Let’s cover two kinds of metrics. They’re predictive metrics and they’re definitive metrics. Predictive metrics are something that conversion scientists of which all of you will become one day use to get an idea of what’s going to happen. So I know if somebody adds to cart, that’s pretty predictive of them buying something. But not everybody buys, that’s called the abandoned rate.

Somebody visiting my webpage is predictive of a level of awareness. I can assume they’re aware of my company or my brand. It’s predictive. My bounce rate is 90%. It’s not a very good predictor.

Average, page views for visit, time on site, those are more definitive. They tell you what is happening and what has happened. I like definitive measurements because they’re usually really close to business goals.

They bought the product, they downloaded the white paper. They gave us a lead. They called.

Levels of Conversion

How do you measure awareness? How do you measure how well people are becoming aware of what you’re doing through your advertising?

First is conversion to awareness. When somebody says, ah, this company does this. They become aware of what your brand, what your company does, what problem it can solve for them would probably myself or them in the future.

Brand marketing and image marketing are designed to get people to understand what you’re about. Usually at a very high level. But good brand marketing can take you quite far down.

A couple of metrics we would look in here, predictive. How many impressions are we getting? How many people are seeing our ads and ostensibly reading them and understanding what our brand is about?

Becoming aware of our company, RSS subscribers, searches that are made for brand keywords. Those are all what I would call predictive measures.

As you’re thinking about putting together a social media campaign for each media, you need to be asking, what are my predictors? Do I want to measure those? Or do you want to focus more on the definitive measure?

From the awareness standpoint, if they do come to my website, I might infer that that is an accurate measure of their knowledge of my brand. And if I come to a brochure page and tells me I’m the leader in something that I don’t understand, it doesn’t tell a story, they may not actually understand and be aware of what we actually do. They just come to a brochure website. Click throughs, page views, contest entries.

If you’re running a contest, bounce rate, these are all definitive measures of how we’re doing from the awareness standpoint.

Consideration Conversion

So this is considered a conversion consideration. Processing, developing a preference for what you process of someone, developing a preference for what you provide.

In a lot of business to business sales processes, this can be a 30 day, 60 days, three months, six months, nine month process. People are buying something that’s high budget item. A lot of people may be involved. There are lots of little conversions that happen in here as they go through the consideration process and understand what you do, why you’re better, what their alternatives are or what happens if they go without. What happens if they choose someone else. Going through that consideration process around your product or service.

Predictive metrics that I would focus on are:

  • Minimum number of return visits. If you are a consultant in a high consideration process, return visits would indicate that coming back, home, more information, and you can generate return visits with good things like good email campaigns and social campaigns, bookmarks.
  • How many people are bookmarking, a piece of information that they’re consuming. Key page visits, key page key pages are a first and foremost, your landing pages. I believe home page and your bio pages are your product pages.
  • Number of searches made, time on site.

Those are all predictive of people who are engaging with you, who are in the conversion consideration process, definitively. This is where leads and downloads come from. So I know that they are learning more about my product. If you’re downloading things, giving me information, calling me, attending my webinars, attending my seminars. I believe that ours has subscribed as a sample of that.

We don’t know how many people are really reading through our RSS. So this really might qualify better as a predictive metric. Newsletter, circulation visits, to comparison shopping center, shopping pages, and any online chance that they’re doing. All indicative of consideration conversion, people who are engaged.

How many of you have a sales cycle that is longer than 30 days, 60 days, three months, nine months, a year. You’ve got to keep people engaged and entertained in a web.

The web is such a great way to do that. And with social media, we actually have the opportunity to get other people to help us do that.

Conversion to Action

When we say conversion, this is usually what we’re focused on. They bought something, they became a lead, they did something that’s going to materially benefit my business, add to cart, coupons or a couple of predictive action-based ones.

All of the consideration ones I generally use as predictive. If somebody joined the house list, they increase in my eyes the number of people who are going to be buying, even if that’s over time,

Anybody who’s watching anything on their website that tells you things are moving in the right direction or not. Find a dealer. I think that would be a great predictive one. How many people are searching for dealers?

They buy something. They subscribe to our online service. They renew, they upgrade, upsell, add on and they purchase again.

The Post-Purchase Funnel

So we’ve got our traditional awareness consideration action funnel. All of us are taught that in marketing school or we learn it from our sales guys. And what we do with social media is we say, all right, we need to do blogs and Twitter so that we can start cramming more people into the awareness funnel. Get them into the front and work them down to action. That’s what we’re going to do with social media.

Dave Evans in his book said there’s a post-purchase funnel. And these guys are your prime targets for social media. They know your product, they like it, or they hate it.

But these are where you’re going to find your influencers. The guys that will build your tipping point, that will spread the word and begin the feedback cycle.

Just like we did with awareness, consideration, and action, we’re going to go through the same process with the last half of the funnel.

First of all, you have to convert them to use the product. If they buy it, they spent money on it. Aren’t they going to use it? Not necessarily.

Think of all the people who are building web 2.0 applications who do a freemium model and they come in and they sign up for the free trial, a free demo. Software companies then don’t do anything to encourage this person to use it.

Well, they forget about it. Maybe they did it on a whim. It seemed important at the time, something more important came up. Whatever the issue is. If you aren’t actively converting people from buyers to users, you are missing an opportunity.

Predictive Metrics

So what does that mean from the social media funnel? Visits to your help site, service calls, visits to your user forums. These are all what I think are predictive of increased use. An increase in visitors to your forums and increased in posts on your forums, increasing help calls means people are trying to use your product. I would call that predictive.

Reservations is a great example of predictive things to watch that tells people that they’re using your product. Reservations predicts coming and spending money.
Loyalty program and repeat buy.

Definitive Metrics

Unique login. We’re just talking about logins, renewals, registration cards, returns. People are using it. They might not like it. They are returning it. You’ll get a company like Zappos. They’ll let you order three or four sizes of the same shoe and return the others. It turned into a very positive thing for them.
Logins, I think is probably the closest you’re gonna get. If you have a website as a service.

Forming an Opinion

We then need to convert them to form an opinion, Oh my God, are we spoon-feeding these people? Can they not think for themselves?

There’s really two components to opinion. It’s my own personal experience and the experience of others.

My opinion might be swayed by what you hear from other folks. Certainly going to be swayed by my own experience. But people tend to want to either be contrary to the crowd or join the crowd. And depending on what the talk is, the buzz is out there in the social network, social networks or the social media space about your product, it can significantly influence opinion.

How many of you are familiar with the net promoter score? The net promoter score asks one question, would you, after using my product, recommend it to somebody else. They survey, they go out and they ask that one question and they ask you on a scale of one to 10 would you recommend my product?

Then you take the positives, subtract the negatives and that gives you your net promoter score. If you’re a net promoter score is negative, you know that there is something wrong with the product, with the experience, with followup or customer support, etcetera.

It’s a great, great predictive measure of opinion surveys. There’s a number of ways of measuring buzz. I’m assuming that we’re all still trying to figure out exactly how to prioritize and spend our money and resources at this time.

So I’m not going to talk about those tools, but I think there’s been a lot of discussion about those here. What are the comments like? How good are the ratings? How good are the reviews?

Definitively: Are people renewing? Are they upgrading upselling, add on purchases? Are they joining affinity groups? How are my returns? How many bookmarks am I getting?

This tells me, people are plugging into the places a where they can hear other people’s opinion and eventually express their own.

What are you doing to predict whether people are forming an opinion? In other words, how do you know if the loyalty programs don’t indicate somebody who’s bought the product, use the product, developed enough of a positive attitude that they anticipate buying more of the products and joining a loyalty product probably fits better here in the opinion, conversion, would you agree?

One of my clients is selling a software website as a service product. And they’re using a book to teach people the process of using the site and why it’s different, why it’s unique.

Therefore people who visit the book site and buy the book is actually predictive of people using the software. That’s an interesting use of content as a predictor.

Conversion to Talk

Give them some place to talk. Now, today they’re finding a lot of places to talk. You don’t necessarily have to give them a place to talk, but if you can, then you get to be a part of the conversation. Pretty much off talking on Pixo and Bebo and places that you don’t play. You don’t get to be a part of the conversation.

If they’re coming and talking on your blog, you get to play. It is a really good idea to create these social landing pages.

The things that people are talking about was really interesting. Rojas said that if somebody tells you, they’re going to get you 10,000 followers on Facebook, what value is it? I believe friends and follows, authority are all predictive. So yes, having a lot of friends on Facebook can be predictive somewhat.

You’re going to find out whether 10,000 friends translates into X sales per month of your product, X number of leads of your product, search your rank. So using things like Technorati, Google Search. Google Page Rank, these are all indications that people who are linking back to you, and they’re very predictive of how you’re doing out there.

Definitive measures of people who are talking

Things that you can measure, things you can put on a graph. number of comments, number of reviews, number of ratings, how many link backs are you getting? How many shares are you having through share this with a friend? How many people are using discount codes, sending out invitations? How many user groups? What are your user group memberships, both online and offline.
These are definitive measurements of people who are putting themselves in a position to talk about whatever. If they like you, they’re likely to talk about you.

People are using hashtags. II think that would be definitive measure of talk. If you can use the Twitter API or go do a regular search and harvest those things, the problem with Twitter is it’s big and it’s hard. It’s expensive to get those metrics out right now. So it’s hard for me on a weekly basis to make strategic decisions. But the people who are representing me on Twitter will use those on a day to day basis to respond and be a part of the conversation.

A predictive metric of talk

How many posts you make on other blogs? So I just got an email from somebody. I posted something on LinkedIn. He came back, visited my site and commented on my blog and talked about a book that I’m in the process of publishing. The more posts you make is predictive of the number of posts you’re gonna be on your blogs.

And there is a correlation there. When I post three times a week, my traffic just goes. When I stop and cut back to one a week, to a month, it drops or at least flattens out almost like a volume switch.

Anything you can do to measure that sounds predictive because they’re coming to a website and we don’t know what it’s going to mean. It’s essentially a measure of clickthroughs.

But as you start to say, okay, we need some way to measure use. We need some way to measure opinion. We need some way to measure talk. And when someone measures the feedback loop to the original funnel, you start to think, okay, well let’s use bud URL. Let’s use Google tag tracking.

You start to put the things in place that just measure those things rather than just, all right, we need a Twitter page. Puts a little bit of planning in place and if it’s not working for you, you can stop it and see. Can you really unplug yourself from the social media sphere?

Social landing pages

Now we all know that in the awareness consideration action funnel landing pages are incredibly powerful. If we have an ad that says 20% off and we take them to a page that says 20% off, instead of taking them to homepage, they are in the right place. And we were more likely to engage them and get them to finish. The landing page does not give them distractions, distracting navigation, ways for them to hedge their buys, but really gives them the information they need to make that decision to buy that product at that time. Our conversion rates go up.

So what are the social equivalents?

I would argue the best social landing page right now is the blog. And I like the blog because it services all three levels of the social media funnel, the post purchase funnel.

It provides information, which means people, can better use your product or service. In this case, I write a lot of best practices about how to implement email, how to implement landing pages, how to write copy, the things that I recommend to my clients I use my blog to increase use.

User commentary will influence opinions, or you can comment on my blog. People add. people subtract, people argue. This helps to influence opinion. It also helps to influence use.

Calls to action generate talk. There’s a big box on there says if you got something to say, here’s a place to say comment here.

At the same time, blogs are promotional. You really can’t see any of the promotions, but I promote books that I believe in and things like that on my website. And there is a way to join email. Therefore, I am providing specific offers, which bring people from my blog back around to the awareness or the consideration phase. And the beauty of this kind of word of mouth is that people tend to jump in at the consideration phase because the social or the earned media has already taken them through awareness. So you don’t have to worry about explaining to them what you do. You can start talking to them about solving a problem.

Anytime I put something out in social media, I use a trackable URL and that tells you what content is getting traction, what posts are interesting. And it is always not what you expect.

More social landing pages: the help page. This will be good for use help pages increase use. Give them some resources, put those in your notification emails.

Forums that we’ve been doing social media actually for years and years and years going all the way back to the use groups. That’s 25 years ago, social media forums.

As all the components, you can tell people who are highly active, they don’t do friending. Number of posts is the trust system they use here. So, you know, you trust somebody. If they’re a guru or senior poster, they have a thousand or 25,000 posts since joining our forum.

Micro blogs, I’m still trying to figure out what the best practices are in terms of measuring Twitter’s impact. I think the measurable URLs coming back to the Twitter verse. Being able to do searches for tags. Twitter is really just a telephone company and the applications that are going to be coming on to help us manage and understand what’s going on in the Twitter verse are going to be amazing.

Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Everybody’s creating these, these resources for affinity groups. So these become great landing pages. You can post, you can encourage other people to post. You can post videos. So you do the entertainment. You’re increasing use. You’re increasing opinion and you’re giving them a place to talk. These are pretty effective. A lot of these are siloed. In this case, this is a fan page, everybody can see this, but to participate you have to be a member of Facebook. Thus you start to getting these siloed things and it’s going to reduce your social conversion rates.

And finally bacon. I think this is completely under utilized. Bacon is the notification email version of spam. It is the confirmation email that you get. This one is a great example, it was sent to me by mint. After I hadn’t logged on for 30 days and said, we miss you. We just want you to come back and log in. And I could actually, it was a great, a great service cause I had gone in and started doing something, got distracted and forgot. And they sent me this. I got back in and I love using it now. So I’m really glad they sent me this a little bit of bacon.

Whenever you send a confirmation says thank you for subscribing to the newsletter. We want to confirm your email click here and don’t add. Let’s think of a better example. Somebody has just subscribed to your site. So your online sites and you say, thank you for joining click here to S to confirm your email. And that’s all you put on there. Well, how about here’s where you can get started. Here’s our help files. There’s a forum you can visit.

You can start getting people into the use with each of these notification emails. I think it’s terribly under utilized. Every touch is an opportunity to get people further down to create another conversion. So that is it.

What I wanted to do is, once again, plug my friend, Dave who’s really did a lot of the legwork on around this, but thanks for your contributions and the presentation will get better. I promise. Thanks to you.

There are 10,000 online strategies to choose from in the marketing landscape. Will you try them all?

Brian Massey at Innotech

Brian Massey at Innotech

No matter how unique your product service or business is, your Web site follows a specific pattern. For each pattern. There are certain set of strategies that you must get it right or you will have difficulty converting traffic to leads or sales.

Listen to my presentation from the Innotech eMarketing Summit to learn what pattern your web site should follow, and the three strategies that you must case to make the Web work for your business.

Listen to Brian Massey’s Presentation

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