duminică, 1 decembrie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Obamacare will Work Really Well By 2017, Promise! Website Unstable but Fixed for Vast Majority (Defined as 80%)

Posted: 01 Dec 2013 05:18 PM PST

David Plouffe, former Obama senior adviser and ABC News contributor says Obamacare Will 'Work Really Well' By 2017
Former Obama senior adviser and ABC News contributor David Plouffe said on "This Week" Sunday that the Affordable Care Act will "work really well" when all states run their own health care exchanges and fully expand Medicaid – actions that may not be seen until President Obama is out of office in 2017.

"This program was designed to be implemented by the states. And in most of the states that are running their exchanges it's going quite well," Plouffe told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "You talked about Medicaid expansion. I think it's just a fact, and it may take until 2017 when this president leaves office, you're going to see almost every state in this country running their own exchanges eventually and expanding Medicaid. And I think it'll work really well then."
Video



Work "really well" for who? If Plouffe means the average (and shrinking) middle-class worker, he is out of his mind.

Website "Unstable" but Fixed for Vast Majority (Defined as 80%)

ABC News reports White House Declares Obamacare Website Fixed, But Problems Persist
Two months after the troubled launch of its signature health care initiative, the Obama administration on Sunday announced that its online insurance marketplace now functions smoothly for the "vast majority" of consumers seeking to shop for and enroll in coverage.

Today "is not a magic moment but a process of continual improvement over time," said Julie Bataille, communications director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which manages the website.

The report identifies as root causes of the problems "hundreds of software bugs, insufficient hardware and infrastructure." It says technical teams have implemented 400 fixes, with more than 300 coming online in the last three weeks.

"We now believe the HealthCare.gov site works for the vast majority of users," Bataille said.  The administration has defined "vast majority" as 80 percent of consumers looking to enroll online.

Still, significant problems persist with the system.

The report implies that the website continues to experience unscheduled outages at least 5 percent of the time, and officials signaled that there are still concerns about slow-downs during high traffic periods.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius advised consumers in a blog post Saturday to visit the site at off-peak times — mornings, nights and weekends — to avoid delays and potential congestion. Officials said today they are not yet ready to begin aggressively summoning people to the site until it's demonstrated to be stable.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Puerto Rico the Next Detroit?

Posted: 01 Dec 2013 09:57 AM PST

Puerto Rico has been in recession for 8 years. The unemployment rate is 15% and debt has piled up to the tune of $70 billion. For Comparison purposes, California public debt is $96 billion and Detroit debt was $18 billion. Wall Street rates Puerto Bonds at one step above junk.

How did Puerto Rico get into trouble? The short answer is the same way as Detroit: loss of industry coupled with lavish pensions.

The Washington Post reports Puerto Rico confronts a rising economic misery.
Boxes and wooden crates filled with household items bound for the U.S. mainland are stacked high in the Rosa del Monte moving company's cavernous warehouse, evidence of the historic rush of people abandoning this beautiful island.

The economy here has been in recession for nearly eight years, crimping tax revenue and pushing the jobless rate to nearly 15 percent. Meanwhile, the government is burdened by staggering debt, spawning comparisons to bankrupt Detroit and forcing lawmakers to severely slash pensions, cut government jobs and raise taxes in a furious effort to avert default.

Officials in San Juan and Washington are adamant that a federal bailout is not on the table, but the situation is being closely monitored by the White House, which recently named an advisory team to help Puerto Rican officials navigate the crisis.

The island's problems have ignited an exodus not seen here since the 1950s, when 500,000 people left for jobs on the mainland. Now Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens, are again leaving in droves.

Puerto Rico lost 54,000 residents — 1.5 percent of its population — between 2010 and 2012 alone. Since recession struck in 2006, the population has shrunk by more than 138,000 to 3.7 million, with the vast majority of the outflow headed to the mainland.

The brutal combination of a long recession, a shrinking population and overwhelming debt has left Puerto Rico's political leaders struggling to manage a conundrum: How do they tame at least $70 billion in debt while marshaling the resources to grow a shrinking economy and battle corrosive social problems, including a homicide rate that is nearly six times the U.S. average?

Like states, the commonwealth of Puerto Rico cannot file for bankruptcy. Also, Puerto Rico's constitution offers bondholders strong guarantees that they would be paid before pensioners and public workers if the government went broke.

Puerto Rico's expansive web of debt includes standard government bonds as well as those floated by public corporations, including authorities for water and sewer, highways and electric power. Together, those bills have nearly tripled since 2000, as successive administrations turned to the bond market to plug gaping budget deficits. In addition to the $70 billion in government debt, the government also faces $37 billion in unfunded pension obligations, according to Morningstar.

Since 1996, the number of factory jobs in Puerto Rico plummeted from 160,000 to 75,000.

And while government workers make up about a quarter of the commonwealth's workforce — much higher than the U.S. average of 16 percent — their ranks are shrinking as the pervasive debt and economic problems careen toward a reckoning. Now, just over 41 percent of working-age Puerto Ricans are in a job or even looking for one.

As work has disappeared, more Puerto Ricans have relied on the government to survive: About a third of the commonwealth's population relies on food stamps, and residents of the island are twice as likely as those on the mainland to receive Social Security disability benefits, according to researchers.
Public Debt



Municipal Bankruptcies



Homicide Rate



Expect Default

Job flight, high crime rates, and huge pension woes in Puerto Rico seem similar to the problems in Detroit. However, there is no constitutional provision that allows US states and Commonwealths to declare bankruptcy.

Compounding the problem, Puerto Rico passed a massive set of tax hikes including corporate taxes, a broadened sales tax and a new gross receipts levy, hoping to get its budget under control. Given that tax hikes in the middle of a recession are about the worst possible choice, the situation is ominous.

So how is Puerto Rico's debt going to be paid back? The answer is it won't. Although, bankruptcy is out of the question, nothing can stop a default except a bailout by the US. Given that handouts from this Republican Congress are unlikely, look for Puerto Rico to default.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Seth's Blog : It probably looks higher from up there

 

It probably looks higher from up there

When we find ourselves on the edge of a precipice, looking down at the depths of the chasm below, it's easy to think that this time we went too far, that our plan is far too risky, that our product is way too bizarre, that our behavior is just too weird...

The funny thing about perspective is that most bystanders don't see you standing on a precipice at all. They see someone doing something a little edgy, but by no means nuts.

Just about all commercial behavior is banal. Even in movies that deal with businesspeople, the characters don't dream nearly big enough about one's ability to change the culture or the enterprise.

You're far more likely to go not-far-enough than you are to go too far.

Internal monologue amplifies personal drama. To the outsider, neither exists. That's why our ledge-walking rarely attracts a crowd. What's in your head is real, no doubt about it, but that doesn't mean the rest of us can see the resistance you are battling (or care about it).

       

More Recent Articles

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Don't want to get this email anymore? Click the link below to unsubscribe.




Your requested content delivery powered by FeedBlitz, LLC, 9 Thoreau Way, Sudbury, MA 01776, USA. +1.978.776.9498

 

sâmbătă, 30 noiembrie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Provision in Obamacare Likely to Force Up Cost of Many Family Plans

Posted: 30 Nov 2013 11:28 AM PST

In an ongoing trend, unrelated to Obamacare, companies have been passing on more and more healthcare costs to employees.

However, an ACA gotcha has impacted the way costs are passed on, with families taking a bigger hit than individuals at many companies.

Please consider Companies Prepare to Pass More Health Costs to Workers.
Many employers are betting that the Affordable Care Act's requirement that all Americans have health insurance starting in 2014 will bring more people into their plans who have previously opted out. That, along with other rising expenses, is prompting companies to raise workers' premium contributions, steer them toward high-deductible plans and charge them more to cover family members.

The changes as companies roll out their health plans for 2014 aren't solely the result of the ACA. Employers have been pushing more of the cost of providing health insurance on to their workers for years, and firms that aren't booking much sales growth due to the sluggish economy are under heavy pressure to keep expenses down.

A quirk of the Affordable Care Act could make it more appealing for companies to raise rates for family coverage than for individuals, said Vivian Ho, a Rice University health-care economist.

Starting in 2015, companies employing 50 or more people must offer affordable health-care coverage to anyone working 30 hours a week or more. But affordability is measured using the cost of individual coverage, capping the cost at 9.5% of income, Ms. Ho said. Raising family rates could help companies recoup costs without running afoul of that limit, she said.

Gannett Co., which owns more than 80 newspapers and 23 television stations, expects one factor in its increased health costs to be the addition of more employees to its insurance plans due to the ACA rules, according to a person familiar with the company's projections.

To address an overall increase in costs, Gannett has replaced the two plans for families it used to offer its workers with a single high-deductible plan that requires employees to pay the first $3,000 of medical costs each year, according to workers at the Indianapolis Star, one of the company's papers. For those with individual coverage, who make up a little over half of Gannett's insurance pool, the figure is $1,500.

The company also scrapped a sliding scale that let lower-income workers pay lower premiums. For some employees, the result was a 60% jump in monthly premiums for family coverage, to $575 from about $360.

Gannett said more than half of its employees will see premiums fall by 12%.

United Parcel Service Inc. made headlines in August when it said that it would bar spouses from its nonunion health plan if they could get coverage at their own jobs. The company said it expected to see an increase in its health-care costs in part from adding employees to its plan who currently opt out.

About 6% of employers ban coverage for spouses who can get it elsewhere, and another 6% impose an explicit surcharge for covering a spouse, according to Mercer. American Electric Power Co., for example, began imposing a $50 monthly surcharge this year to cover spouses with access to insurance at their own workplace. AEP said 92% of its employees usually sign up for coverage, so it doesn't expect a surge of new enrollment.

In another shift this year, companies have become increasingly aggressive about steering employees toward plans in which they pay more of the initial costs for their care in exchange for lower premiums.

Trucking and logistics company Ryder System Inc. has replaced one of its two insurance options with one such high-deductible plan. Ryder is encouraging employees to choose the new option in part by raising the cost of more traditional coverage.
Winners and Losers

Half of Gannett employees will see a 12% drop in premiums. But others will see a 60% rise. And for those who do see premiums decline, the drop will be solely because they are forced into high deductible plans.

Obamacare created a pool of winners and losers, with some of the losers far worse off than before. Many people were hardly affected at all, at least initially. In aggregate, ACA did nothing to lower overall costs, it just shifted costs around in an inefficient manner, making things worse than before. 

The most widely reported "success" has been the enrollment of tens of thousands of people into Medicaid. Because of cost sharing that kicks in later, many states are likely to regret that effort.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Kyle Rush Reveals How the Obama Campaign Broke Every Online Fundraising Record: Free #MozCon Video

Kyle Rush Reveals How the Obama Campaign Broke Every Online Fundraising Record: Free #MozCon Video


Kyle Rush Reveals How the Obama Campaign Broke Every Online Fundraising Record: Free #MozCon Video

Posted: 29 Nov 2013 03:32 AM PST

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

Buy the MozCon 2013 Video Bundle

Every year at MozCon, I have the joy of working with our fabulous MozCon speakers. One of the speakers, who we were most excited about for MozCon 2013, was Kyle Rush. Kyle's name might not be on the tip of your tongue, but he worked on possibly the biggest and best online marketing campaign, Obama for America, as their deputy director of front-end web development. From there, he went to The New Yorker, and he just announced that he's headed over to Optimizley.

When Kyle told us he wanted to present about the conversion rate optimization and a/b testing the Obama campaign did, there may have been some squeeing from Rand (like the Packers won) and me (like over new Sherlock episodes). Marketing nerds. Because regardless of your politics, Obama's reelection campaign not only broke fundraising records, but changed the way we think about using big data and CRO.

Kyle rocked that MozCon 2013 stage. He presented a ton of actionable information for attendees, and he was one of our top scoring presentations. When we went to decide which full-length MozCon presentation to share with all of you, for free, Kyle's was it. Enjoy!

Video Transcription

Kyle: Thank you, Cyrus. It feels great to be in Seattle. I just came from New York City. Is anybody else here from New York? Yeah. You guys all know what I mean when I say it feels great to be in Seattle. You guys know how to do the summer with this 77 degree weather. This dry heat is awesome. We've got to figure out how to get that in New York City. Can we get on that?

As Cyrus said, my name is Kyle Rush. I'm currently at 'The New Yorker.' Before that I was at the Obama campaign. I worked on a lot of the product and tech aspects of our online fundraising. Obviously, we ran a lot of optimization on that. So, that's what I'm going to be talking to you guys today about.

Before we get started, I want to give you guys some context on what we jumped into, the situation on day one at the Obama campaign. All the media outlets at the time were reporting that we were expected to raise one billion. They did probably $700 million in 2008. So, we were expected to raise one billion.

Just to put that into perspective for you guys, Amazon's Q4 profit for last year was only $97 million. So, when you spread that out over a year and a half, which was the life of the campaign, you still only get like half or a little over half what we were expected to raise on the campaign. So, this was a pretty daunting challenge.

But, in the end... Oh, I didn't mean to click to. But, in the end we did $1.1 billion. So, we exceeded expectations. None of us thought we could do it. Obviously, that's a lot of money. We did $690 million of it online as Cyrus said.

Another thing that I want to talk to you guys about is just an example of one of our online fundraising programs. That was called Quick Donate. This was a way for our users to save their payment information so that they could do one click donations on the Web, and they could also do one click donations in email - which had never been done before. So, we had to do a lot of funky engineering to get that to work.

But, you could also SMS donate which was a first for political campaigns. It was actually a big achievement for us. Because the Federal Election Commission said that political campaigns can not use short codes to fundraise. So, we weren't allowed to work with AT&T and Verizon to send out short codes and ask people to text those. We had to engineer a way around that. When we launched SMS donations it was the first of its kind.

Quick Donate brought in $115 million over its lifespan. It had 1.5 million users. This was a thrill to work on. But, obviously, this type of program we optimized. We ran a lot of tests. Those are kind of the things I'm here to share with you guys.

You might ask how did we get here. We ran 500 experiments. We always had a test running. It was really, really intense the amount of traffic that we had. We did weeks of user testing. User testing is really simple. It's just putting a user in front of a computer and observing them.

We used a program called Silverback. I don't know if any of you guys are familiar with it. But, it records the eyesight camera and the computer screen at the same time. So, you can actually see your user making a donation. We learned a lot from this. We did it on and on and on to the point where we probably did weeks of it.

Sorry, this thing is pretty sensitive.

We also just did general data gathering which I really like to do. Because if you're not gathering data then you're kind of flying blind. Just a data point to show you guys how much data gathering we did, we did over 668 million Google Analytics custom events. I'll be talking about those in a minute. But, that's a ton. I don't think that I've ever worked at a place that pushed Google Analytics to the point that we did on the campaign. It was pretty intense.

You might ask 'What did that all get us?' It got us a 49% increase on our donation page conversion rate. And, it got us a 161% increase in our email signup page. These are two really high level conversion goals for us.

The email signup you might not have known about. We didn't really talk about it. But, I'll let you in on a little secret. Email is responsible for just about 90% of our online fundraising. So, gathering emails on our list was super important. We spent a lot of time optimizing email acquisitions.

The three things that I want to talk to you guys about today, and this is really what optimization means to me, is experimentation. I think we're all mostly familiar with this. This is A/B testing, multi variate testing. The second is observation, and that's what I was talking about when I was talking about user testing. You want to observe your users using your product. Otherwise, you're not going to know how they're using it. Because you're not a user. Also, just general data gathering, which is super important.

First up is experimentation. Sorry. This thing's super sensitive. We identified a process when we were on the campaign. I want to share that with you. I'm sure everybody has their own processes. But, this is what really worked for us.

The first step for us in experimentation was to identify our goals. I mean this from both a micro and a macro level.

On the macro level I just talked about some of our goals which was email acquisition and donations. You need money to win a campaign. In our instance we needed emails to get that money.

But, I also encourage you to focus on micro goals. This is like conversion goals when you're running tests. You should just measure everything. So, micro goals can be like the error rate on a form, like how many errors do you get when somebody mistypes their email address. Is the label clear enough there? You just really want to measure everything.

One thing that really blew me away on the campaign is that we started measuring the conversion rate on the follow-up page. So, when you made a donation and it was successful you got taken to a follow up ask that asked you to save your payment information.

That was Quick Donate. That was the opt in to Quick Donate. That was a very critical conversion goal for us, because we found out early on that Quick Donate users were four times more likely to make a donation in the future. That's like money right there that we needed to focus on.

We measured that goal even though we weren't changing that page at all. We were changing the donation page. Then, we found out that some of the variations that we ran actually affected the follow up page. It's really, really important to measure as many conversion goals as you possibly can when you're doing your experiments just to get a good sense of what's going on.

The second step that we would do is develop hypotheses. This is really important. It's just basically like the scientific process that you guys all learned in grade school. Develop your hypotheses and then test them. This is really helpful in making sure that you're staying focused.

It's really easy to fall in this trap when you realize how much you can test. You just start to test everything. You don't want to make any decisions. You just want to test. It's like, 'Oh, what color should the submit button be?'

'I don't know, test it.'

Don't do that. That's not a good idea.

Create high level hypotheses. One of ours, for example, in the campaign was that less copy does better than more copy for conversions. So, we tested that on our splash page. We tested that on our donate page. We tested that on our email sign up page. We tested it everywhere on the site. We figured out different experiments to test it.

That's actually number three here is to create experiments. Create many experiments to test your hypotheses. You might want to test the same experiment more than one time. Because you might get different results in the time of the day. There are all kinds of weird things that can happen. Test it multiple times and create several experiments that test your hypothesis.

Oh, wow. The fourth, and I can't stress this enough, is to prioritize with ROI. I touched on this a little bit earlier. But, as you start building out your experiments... I'll iterate this with an example from the campaign.

We ran an experiment where on our donate page we had a picture of the President behind a donate form. That was our control. But, then we added an inspirational quote above the President's head. It said something like 'Stand with me, work with me, let's finish what we started.'

When we tested that we got something like a 17% increase in conversions. Because it made the page just a little bit more inspirational and made people really want to finish and stand with the President. That was awesome.

That was just adding copy. That only took us, like, a couple of minutes to get onto a page and actually into production when it won. So, ROI on that is really high.

Our finance team wanted us to implement paying by check, because they had some data that said a lot of people don't have credit cards. Maybe they have checks that they can pay with. It sounds like a crazy idea to me, but the data that we got from them said that we could expect a 3% increase in the conversion rate.

But, on the technical side that was kind of a big lift. That would take days, if not weeks, to implement. We're only going to expect a 3% lift. So, when it comes to figuring out what experiments are going to give you the highest ROI, just really dig into the data and make sure that you're focusing on experiments like the inspirational quote and not things like changing your whole donation system for just a 3% increase in donations.

The fifth one is very easy - test your ideas. Then, lastly, you want to record results. I can't stress this one enough either. Because on the campaign what happened is we ran so many tests - 500 total - that we couldn't always remember what the result from one test was.

If we didn't have this awesome Google doc that we built out that recorded the time, the hypothesis, the result, a screen shot of the control and the variation and the results, and a link to the results, an optimized link, if we didn't have all of that we really couldn't have functioned. Because you just can't remember the results of 500 tests.

You can also disseminate that information when you have it in a Google doc. Just make sure that you're recording your results.

Now, I just want to talk about four areas where you can experiment. I've ordered these by ROI. Copy is, in my experience, by far the highest ROI that you can experiment with. It's very simple, because you don't have to change any code or anything. Changing copy only takes a minute or two, and the results that you can get can be really awesome.

Here is the Quick Donate opt in page that I was talking about before. This is the page where if you make a successful donation we ask you to save your payment information for next time.

We did a variation of the header. This one says 'Save your payment information for next time.' Very simple, right. Then, our variation changed the copy and it said,'Now, save your payment information.' It only changed a few words around. It's not a huge change. Obviously, it only took us like a minute to get this test into production.

By making the copy more direct and directing the user into what we wanted them to do we got a 21% increase on conversions. Again, this is very little development effort, but a huge result in conversions, or conversion lift I should say. Here you can see if you missed it before what the control and the variation was.

After copy, the next highest ROI area of experimentation that I would say is imagery. Because it's very easy to switch images out, almost the same as copy. It takes a little bit longer, though.

Here's an example of what we did on the campaign with imagery. This is our splash page for the 'Dinner with Barack' contest which is a super cool contest. You could actually win dinner with Barack. They would fly you out to Washington, DC. You'd sit down with Barack and have dinner. Sometimes Michelle would be there. Actual people won this contest. After you submit you would get entered into that.

Here we have a picture of the President. We figured out early on that big smiling pictures of the President worked because people love him. We had a hypothesis that people would be more likely to submit this if they could picture themselves in that scenario. You can't really see the people that he's talking to. It doesn't really seem like a real contest. It's like, 'Could I really have dinner with Barack Obama?'

So, we came up with a variation that gave the user a view of a little bit more of the situation. Those are two actual people on the right that won this contest. They flew them out, and they had dinner with Barack and Michelle.

The results of this putting a more situational image in there gave us a 19% lift in the conversion rate. Again, this does not take a lot of time to implement. It's just a very easy test. We got a huge lift on it.

Here are the two different images so that you can see them again.

Another area that I want to talk about is performance. This is going to be a little bit techie for technical. But, you guys are all probably very familiar with how page load affects conversion rate. We were, too. Early on in the campaign we knew that Amazon had published a statistic, and it's a crazy statistic, that even 100 milliseconds of additional latency on page load could drop the conversion rate by one percent. So, that's like huge.

We're obsessed with performance. We want to make our pages as fast as possible. Here is a look at the architecture diagram for the platform that we started with. It's very simple. It's very basic. It was built by a company called Blue State Digital which was one of our vendors. I actually came from there before I started at the campaign.

It worked really well for us in the beginning, because it was built out of the box. As the first engineer there I didn't have time to build a new platform. This was already out there and working.

The user makes requests to a load balancer, and that splits requests to two clusters. If you're asking for the page it would send you to the web cluster. If you actually hit submit on the form it would send you to the payment cluster.

Very simple, but there were a lot of problems with this in terms of performance. We, on average, saw five second page load time which is horrendous when you're processing $690 million worth of donations. You want something more like below two seconds, or how about zero seconds. Can we get the page to just load automatically?

It didn't have a CDN. I don't know how many of you people here are familiar with CDN. That's content delivery network. If I'm in LA and I request a page, in that architecture diagram the servers were in Boston. So, the data has to go all the way from Boston to LA. If you put it on a CDN... We used Akamai. There's an Edge server in LA, so it gets it to you much quicker.

There wasn't any caching in this environment. There were a lot of things that we needed to change. We basically started from scratch and built a new platform. We asked Blue State to turn their hosted platform into an API that we could hit on the client side.

Here's what that looked like. I'm going to run through it really quickly. We put our static assets, which is our JavaScript files, our images, our CSS and such, on an Amazon AWS S3 bucket which is a super simple data store. It's awesome.

Then, we put the Akamai CDN in front of that. So, we have really fast access to those. Then, we generated our HTML, the actual pages for these, with a static site generator called Jekyll which is built in Ruby. It's super simple to work with. It's great for front end engineers. They don't have to worry about server side templates and all of that stuff.

Then, we hosted all those HTML files on AWS S3 just like our static assets, and we put Akamai in front of that. The cool part is the two donation processors. Like I said before, Blue State built a donation API for us to post to, and then they had load balancing on their end. They had two nodes behind their endpoint.

We put ours on EC2, and we put them in two different regions. We put one payment processor in California, or it may have been Oregon. But, it was on the west coast. We put another payment processor in Virginia on the east coast.

So, if you had an IP address that was in the western side of the United States you'd be sent to the west coast payment processor, and the same for the east. If the west coast went down for some reason... There was actually a hurricane in Virginia and actually caused EC2 servers to go down during the campaign. All that traffic just got sent to the west coast. It was great. It was very redundant.

Once we got this system in place there was never a down time for accepting donations. We were accepting donations 100% of the time.

The new platform, the biggest metric I think is that it had an 80% faster time to paint. That means how fast the user puts something on the screen, not page load. The browser can start rendering the page, and the page load metric can still be going on because maybe it's loading some JavaScript or something that's not critical for page load. I like to focus on time to paint. We got 80% faster here.

To show you what that is, what that looks like, I use WebPagetest - which you guys should all use if you're not using it now. It's super easy to get data like this. The top film strip shows you that that's the fast platform. In one second we have a painted screen. That's a screen that the user can start filling out a donation. That's super fast. The only thing that's not loaded is the graphic assets. Those load by two seconds.

You can see our old platform doesn't even have anything on the screen by four seconds. That's awful.

We did a lot to increase the performance here. We had a 63% reduction in page weight. We just threw out all that legacy code and wrote our own. We went from something like 720 kilobytes to, like, 120 kilobytes. Then we had a 52% reduction in HTTP requests which is one of the most common things that contribute to page latency.

What did we get with an 80% faster time to paint? An increase in conversions by 14%. To measure that, we made a page on the fast platform that was identical to the slow platform. Then, we A/B tested them with Optimizely. 14% is not as big as the numbers I was talking about before, but this was in the beginning when we first launched this platform. This was the A/B test to put it into production.

When you calculate the $250 million that this platform brought in over its lifetime that's $32 million dollars. I'll take that. The money raised on the campaign was tight. Just by making that 80% faster we got $32 million. Obviously, this takes a lot more engineering, time, and effort, which is why it's less ROI than the copy and the imagery. But, this is huge. This is $32 million dollars that we got just by making that faster.

The second area of optimization that I want to talk about is... Sorry. This is experimentation and user experience, which also takes a little bit more time.

The screen that you're looking at right now is a donate page that is already super optimized. This was later on in the campaign. We had run hundreds of tests on this page, and it was performing brilliantly. We ran a lot more experiments on it to try and increase the conversion rate, and we kept failing. We couldn't get the conversion rate up. So, we got really frustrated and we couldn't figure out what to do.

We decided to try something big. What we did is on the variation we chunked the donation experience into four parts. Because if you look at this slide right here you see all 16 fields. It looks very intimidating to fill out. It looks like it's going to take you forever. But, if you look at this one all you have to do is select an amount. That's a much lower barrier for entry on engagement here. Then, you just go through that and it guides you through very nicely.

We tested this one. I like to call this the gradual incline instead of steep slope. We got a 5% conversion lift. Obviously, that's not as big as the numbers before. But, like I said, we had already picked all that low hanging fruit. So, 5% at that point was major, because we went a month or two where we couldn't get the conversion rate up at all.

That was a pretty big win for us. Like I said, it was on an already optimized page. You can see the two forms here. One is obviously much simpler to fill out, or it looks like it is.

Here are some best practices I want to share with you guys. The first is start simple. You don't have to make this complicated. My motto in any engineering scenario at all is start simple and test up. You don't have to make a really fancy user experience. You don't have to make it all Ajaxy when you launch.

Just get something out there and get it into production, because done is better than perfect. Then, since you're in production so much earlier you can start experimenting. Each feature that you roll out you'll know what affect that has on the conversion rate because you can test it.

The second is always have a test running. If you have traffic coming to your site, which you probably do right now, and you're not running a test that's just wasted potential right there. Because you're not learning from the people that are going to your site. Always have a test running.

The third is don't be afraid to fail. I can't stress this one enough. I can't actually remember the numbers, but I want to say something like only 20% of our experiments on the campaign actually raised the conversion rate. A lot of them were a statistical tie where it resulted in nothing. Some of them even decreased the conversion rate. Those are pretty damaging psychologically, but you can't let that get you down.

I want to show you an example of this. Ignore the amount buttons. This is a bad screen shot. I don't know how this came about. But, everything was the same except for a little check box down there that says 'Save my payment information on the variation'.

Somebody had the idea to instead of ask the follow up screen to save your payment information we wanted to put it on the donate page. Because they thought maybe that would increase the conversion rate on saving people's payment information. Well, this slide is a little out of order.

That actually reduced our conversion rate by 44%. Right when we saw that we stopped the experiment immediately and just moved on. That's the whole thing about testing. It's not permanent. You can just move on. You might not even have thought that that would result in that. I'll go back to this side. If you aren't failing then you aren't testing enough, because you're not going to have 100% success in your tests. It's just not possible.

The second area of optimization I want to talk about quick is data gathering. You really can not gather enough data. That's really my motto.

We on the campaign just gathered any kind of data that we could think of - error rates on forms, when people focused in the forms, and how long it took people to submit the form. And, how long it took for our Ajax response when the user hit submit to get a response from the server so that we could tell the back end engineers how long it's taking. Because we want it to be faster, obviously. Anything we could think of we measured it.

Again, here's this number. We did over 668 million Google Analytics custom events. Here's an example of one. This is an interactive infographic that we put out to showcase our 1 million donors. It was pretty early on in the campaign. It has a lot of little pieces of interactive content there where you can scroll to see names, what are the most popular names people donated under, and where people are from.

One part of that is this little piece right here which you can just scroll through and see the most popular names. We put Google Analytics custom events on the left arrow on the right arrow, and we found that 82% of the clicks were to the right arrow. So, that left arrow was unnecessary, and it's just cluttering the UI and gives the user more options. You obviously want to be guiding the user through what you're presenting to them.

We used that learning to optimize our UI's further down the road, and we just didn't put left arrows on anything, because it doesn't really make sense. This is the Google Analytics custom event to track that data. It's super simple and it's arbitrary. The category is one million infographic. The label is name slides. Super simple.

The last area that I want to talk about is user testing. This is actually a really cool example, because it solved a problem that I don't think that we were going to be able to solve without user testing.

This is the last step in the donation process. This is where we're asking for your employer and occupation. This is required of us by the Federal Election Commission. So, there's no choice. We had to gather this information.

Well, when we put the error tracking on our donate form we found out that the two most common errors behind people entering their credit card information was employer and occupation. We were like,'Wow, that's really weird. How can that be such a hard question?'

We went through and looked at the data people were submitting. It was like, 'None of your business', 'F you'. People just aren't comfortable, right. So, that was that. There's nothing we can do to make people more comfortable, really.

So, we just left it at that until we started doing user testing. We took a lot of the volunteers that came into headquarters. There was a ton of them. There were students, there were retired people, and all kinds of age ranges.

We sat them down on the computer on Silverback, and we asked them to make a donation. Sorry, I'm cheating a little bit. We found out that the students and the retired people did not know what to put in there. Because they're not employed.

Again, this is us thinking as us as the users. We work for the campaign. 'I know where I work. I work for Obama for America.' That's a very simple question for me.

But, to a retired person it's like, 'What do I put in there?' So, they don't put anything, and then they hit submit and that triggers the error. That's why the error rate was going up so high on these forms.

Once we got that feedback from user testing and observing our users use our product we put a little tiny - and I don't know if you guys can see it but it's just a little tiny line that says 'If you are retired please enter "retired" in both fields'. Little tiny bit of copy. It did not take us a long time to put that in there.

Adding that field hint in reduced the error rate by 63%. That's just crazy. Like I said, we would not have known to test that beforehand if we weren't doing user testing and watching our users.

I blog about all of this stuff a lot on my personal website. It's kylerush.net. I go into a lot more in depth on the technical side and a lot more experiments if you want to check that out.

That's all I have for you guys. Thank you.

Cyrus Shepard (emcee): Let's step over here under the light...

Kyle: ...You want this?

Cyrus: Awesome work, man.

Kyle: Thank you.

Cyrus: I assume you're using the enterprise version of Google Analytics.

Kyle: Is there an enterprise version?

Cyrus: Yeah, yeah.

Kyle: I know that we had a direct line over there where we were like 'Hey our stuff's not loading, can you please do something?' They were, like, 'Refresh it because there was too much data…'

Cyrus: Yes, yes...

Kyle: ...It was a lot going on.

Cyrus: One question I did want to ask. For your testing platform, did you build that yourself, or did you use an off the shelf version?

Kyle: No, we used Optimizely.

Cyrus: You used Optimizely.

Kyle: Yeah, which is awesome...

Cyrus: ...And, you'd recommend it?

Kyle: If you guys aren't using that, use Optimizely. It's amazing.

Cyrus: Yes, question?

Amanda: Is this on? There we go. Hi, my name's Amanda Stevens. I'm from marketing agency in Winnipeg, Canada. Fantastic presentation. My question for you is you talked a little bit about the design elements and the UX changes you made to the website to add that lift. I'm just wondering if you can expand on some other design elements that you incorporated to increase conversions.

Kyle: Yeah, sure. I don't want to be too harsh on design, but in my experience what we tested on design, embellishments and stuff, is just kind of a waste of time. It's fine if the designers want to put that in there. That's great.

But, like I said, when you're testing, like, button colors, and rounded corner versus square corner, do not waste your time with that. That's not going to do anything. It's just going to sink. It's a time sink.

Really, when it comes to design, our brand was all about imagery and photos. That's where we got the real big increases in design changes is imagery. Other than that, I wouldn't say that we found anything as far as design goes that had a real impact on the conversion rate.

Amanda: Cool. Thank you.

Kyle: Yeah.

Cyrus: Yes.

Alan: Hi, I'm Alan. I'm with Three Ventures Technology and Agency. I actually watched Dan speak at an analytics conference in San Francisco. One of the things that I think I actually would like to ask you about is why Optimizely and not Google Analytics content experiments with the multi arm banded approach, and basically minimizing the time increasing a certain conversion rate at 95% probability. So, I mean the amount of time basically that it would take for an A/B test to finish at those rates.

Kyle: Yeah, sure. I can talk about this forever, but I'm going to make it really brief. If you're an engineer there's really no other option for you. Because Optimizely makes your life so, so easy.

All it is is running JavaScript on top of your page. When you can do that you just add CSS classes to the page and it changes the design. It's so easy.

We actually were tasked with finding other A/B testing platforms that were either cheaper or I don't know what the situation was. We evaluated a lot. I don't want to dump on other platforms, because every one has its use. But, for us on the campaign Optimizely was by far the best.

One of the problems with Google Analytics is the data's not live. Optimizely gives you a live reporting on the results. So, you can see right away if your experiment is dragging your conversion rate through the dirt and you can stop the experiment.

It also gives you a lot of customization. You can do really advanced targeting. You can target people based on a cookie. You can target people based on their region. It has, like, a JavaScript expression.

There's nothing that we couldn't do in Optimizely. Any idea that we came up with we could do in Optimizely. We tried it in other platforms. There were a lot of limitations. From an engineering perspective that's why Optimizely is great. That's mainly why we chose to go with it.

Alan: Cool, awesome. Thank you.

Kyle: Yeah.

Cyrus: And, I think we have time for one more. We'll go over here.

Q: Okay, so I work in fundraising. Most of the time the relationships that we're dealing with in terms of how long a person is going to donate is five or ten years, longer if we're talking about direct mail. So, it seems like a lot of what you were looking at is immediate return. I don't know if you had an LTV where you were saying we got a 60% increase in conversions, but it affected the LTV or even just the length of the relationship by X. Did you look at things like that?

Kyle: Yeah, we did. I would say it's very difficult to measure something like that, because it's not like an exact, like the user's on the page clicking something. But, if you think about it, we've been raising money, not me personally but the campaign, since 2007. So, there is a long term donation cycle there.

The campaign is actually still raising money now. They have an organization called Organizing for Action that exists to support the President's legislative agenda. They're still raising money.

I would say that in a political campaign where it's so crazy and there's a deadline that is election day, which usually people do not have to deal with, it's more about the short term. But, they are still doing long term stuff. We just didn't have to worry about that as much because it was November 7, that's the day.

Q: Okay, thank you.

Cyrus: Kyle, thank you so much for coming to Seattle.


Want more? Kyle's coming back for MozCon 2014, and you can buy your MozCon 2014 ticket today and save $400.

Can't wait? Get a front-row experience for all 37 sessions, plus their slide decks, with the 2013 MozCon Video Bundle. Moz Analytics Subscribers, you get $100 discount. $399 regular price - $100 subscriber discount = $299 for the entire video bundle!

Buy the MozCon 2013 Video Bundle


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Seth's Blog : Is there a reason for the friction?

 

Is there a reason for the friction?

If you want to visit DisneyWorld, you'll need to buy a ticket and wait in line.

If you want to see the full moon, you can go outside and look up in the sky.

Often, we're tempted to create friction, barriers and turnstiles. We try to limit access, require a login, charge a fee... sometimes, that's because we want control, other times we believe we can accomplish more by collecting money. Clearly, people value the moments that they spend at Disney--with hundreds of dollars on the line and just a few hours to spend, there's an urgency and the feeling of an event occurring.

On the other hand, far more people look at the moon. Just about everyone, in fact.

If your goal is ubiquity, significant friction is probably not your finest tactic.

There used to be very few resources that were truly scalable at no cost, resources where we didn't need to use money or queues to limit who would use them. In the digital world, that number keeps skyrocketing. It doesn't cost a cent to allow more people to look at the moon, just as it's free for one more person to read this blog.

If you're going to add friction, if you're going to create urgency and scarcity, understand that it always comes at a cost. By all means, we need to figure out how to make a living from the work we do. But with scalable goods, particularly those that have substitutes, don't add friction unless there are enough benefits to make it worth our hassle.

       

More Recent Articles

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Don't want to get this email anymore? Click the link below to unsubscribe.




Your requested content delivery powered by FeedBlitz, LLC, 9 Thoreau Way, Sudbury, MA 01776, USA. +1.978.776.9498

 

vineri, 29 noiembrie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Black Friday Roundup: Walmart has 10M Transactions in 4 Hrs; Exhausted Shoppers Head Home; Fights Break Out at Walmart; Real Fight is Online

Posted: 29 Nov 2013 06:20 PM PST

In some locations, people pushed, shoved, and fought their way through the shopping aisles. In other locations, traffic was normal.

All in all, I suspect people once again bought more junk they do not need and cannot afford.

Here is a sampling of the news.

Walmart Processes 10 Million Transactions in 4 Hours

The New York Times reports Exhausted Shoppers Head Home, Replaced by the Next Wave.
While some malls across the country were busy during the traditional postholiday shopping on Friday, the crowds at others seemed sparse to some regular customers, who compared them to a regular weekend's atmosphere. Perhaps it's possible that the earlier Thanksgiving hours and the increase in online shopping — with so many e-tailers offering competitive deals — had lessened the desire to peruse racks of clothes inside some physical stores.

Still, customers sensed there were deals to be had on both days, and parking lots at some malls were jammed again on Friday. On both Friday and Thursday, some customers complained about their fellow shoppers. Holly Schneider, another shopper at the Leesburg outlets, said prices were far better than consumer behavior. "People are rude, just really rude," Mrs. Schneider said. "There's no personal space. It's like you're not even there. They're bumping into you, knocking you down. They don't see you. They see where they're going."

IPad Airs and several televisions sold out on Target.com by midmorning on Thursday. Walmart announced that the company had sold 1.4 million tablets on Thanksgiving Day. Walmart also said it had processed more than 10 million transactions at its registers from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Thursday, including lower-tech items like nearly two million dolls.

Over all, online sales were up nearly 10 percent over last year by Black Friday afternoon, according to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark.

Walmart Black Friday Fight

What would Black Friday be without a fight? 



Link if video does not play: Wal-Mart Black Friday Fight

Real Fight Was Online

The Wall Street Journal reports On Black Friday, the Real Fight Was Online.
Brick-and-mortar retailers mounted a furious defense on Black Friday to head off incursions into one of the industry's biggest shopping days by such online rivals as Amazon.com Inc.

The tactics were evident in stores and on websites as millions of holiday shoppers lined up to spend their dollars on highly touted deals.

Chains like Macy's Inc. opened on Thanksgiving for the first time, and giants like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target moved their deals earlier Thursday, shifts intended to retrieve valuable shopping time that had been ceded to e-commerce, where the doors never close.

Best Buy Co. kept some deals hidden until customers showed up at stores, and retailers put more deals on the Web to better compete with Amazon on its own playing field.

In the early predawn hours of Thanksgiving, Jason Goldberger huddled with his team on the 20th floor of a Target Corp. building in Minneapolis to make sure everything was ready at the chain's most important store: Target.com.

Mr. Goldberger, who runs Target's website and mobile business, arrived at 2 a.m., His staff split into two conference rooms. One held a technology team responsible for the workings of the site. The other had people comparing Target's deals with offers from Amazon.com and Walmart.com.

Such big retailers as Wal-Mart and Target continue to struggle to keep up with Amazon on the Web. Despite years of effort, online sales still typically account for only around 2% of sales for the two chains.

But both companies are investing heavily to catch up. Target expects to spend more on technology next year than it does building and upgrading new stores. This year, it made virtually all of its Black Friday deals available online.

Store chains used rolling discounts to keep shoppers lingering and competitors' guessing. On Friday at 8 a.m. Wal-Mart started "Manager's Specials," which included unannounced promotions set by individual store managers who received a set budget to spur sales.

Flagging bargains too early risks having competitors match or beat prices. Market Track LLC, which tracks pricing on the Web, said Best Buy had advertised a Samsung gas range for $699 in its Black Friday flier. On Wednesday, Sears dropped its price for the oven to $599. By Thursday, Best Buy and hhgregg Inc. had matched the lower price.
It's far too early to tell if stores actually did better than last year or not. The answer depends on what people bought: loss leader sales items, stuff in general, or high-markup items.

According to a couple of close friends, store traffic was lighter than usual in my area, at least later in the day. I did not venture out personally.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Texas Welfare Recipient Says "Working is Stupid"

Posted: 29 Nov 2013 03:18 PM PST

Please consider the viewpoint of a 32-year old Austin Texas welfare recipient who says working is stupid because she gets nearly free housing, food stamps, a welfare check, and other handouts.



Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

France Minister of Industrial Renewal has New Target in his Sights

Posted: 29 Nov 2013 08:46 AM PST

Arnaud Montebourg, Minister of Industrial Renewal of France, has a new target in his sights, the French public procurement group UGAP.

Here is some background information about UGAP. Montebourg's complaint follows.
The Union of Public Purchasing Groups (UGAP), the French public procurement centre operates under the supervision of the Ministries of Economy and Finance and the Ministry of Education. UGAP's overall objective is to strengthen the social and environmental performance of public procurement, without increasing the cost of services offered.

Alice Piednoir, Sustainable Development Policy Officer & Purchasing Manager, says "We centralise applications and mutualise costs in order to propose offers that are financially successful. We ensure that the inclusion of social and environmental requirements in our bidding do not cause additional costs to the services offered."
Montebourg Targets UGAP Over "Made in France"

Montebourg is upset that UGAP does not supply enough products made in France, and he threatens to dissolve the group.

Via translation from Le Monde, Arnaud Montebourg Targets UGAP Over "Made in France"
Arnaud Montebourg has a new target in his sights: UGAP, the main central purchasing agency for state and local communities.

UGAP does not provide enough support for French companies in the eyes of the minister of productive recovery . In response, Montebourg threatens to apply for dissolution of the company.

"I consider that there is a serious problem with patriotic UGAP ," thundered the minister Tuesday, November 26 , before the presidents of the regions he received at Bercy. UGAP has a global order book except for France .
Montebourg is willing to overpay for everything as long as it's made in France.

Is it any wonder French government spending accounts for 56% of French GDP, highest in the EU (not that there is anything productive about that setup).

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

25% of Spanish Would Consider Leaving Spain for Economic Reasons; But Where Would They Go?

Posted: 28 Nov 2013 11:12 PM PST

The employment and pay situation in Spain is so bad that 33% struggle to pay their bills. More importantly, 25% would consider leaving the country for better opportunities.

Via translation from La Vanguardia, please consider One in three Spaniards have no money after paying their bills.
One in three Spanish claims to have no money left after paying the bills, according to a report on consumer payments. The study further reveals that 25% would be think of emigrating because of their economic situation. The same percentage say do not have enough money for a decent life.

Those are the most conclusive findings in the study Consumer Payments 2013, made by the Credit Management firm Intrum Justitia which surveyed 10,000 consumers from 21 European countries with the aim of understanding their payment behavior.

In regard to Spain, the percentage of citizens who say they have no money after paying the bills is higher than the European average, which stands at 26 percent, although some countries like Greece, Estonia and Hungary reach 40 percent.

If they have to prioritize in order to pay bills, the Spaniards choose to pay for the latest mobile phone and internet purchases. And if they can get savings on their household budgets, 79% do so by reducing leisure and clothing  expenses.

Another revealing statistic is that 25% of Spaniards say they do not having a sufficient amount of money for a decent life.  Estonia leads this ranking with 52%, followed by Hungary with 47% and Greece with 44%.

Eight in ten think that the Government lacks good financial control, compared to an average of 60 percent for the EU.
Trapped in Spain

25% would leave for better opportunities, but where would they go? The same question applies to Greece, Portugal, and Estonia.

The answer is nowhere. There are too few jobs elsewhere,  and plenty of xenophobia in France and other countries that are struggling as well.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Seth's Blog : Who's left?

 

Who's left?

The classified section of the Sunday New York Times used to be more than twenty or thirty pages long. Now it's down to one.

Part of this is due to the lack of new jobs in the post-industrial economy, but mostly it's due to job listings moving online. I was fascinated to see some of the jobs in last week's paper, and confess befuddlement at the thinking of those that ran them.

Here's one, from Amazon, for a level II programmer in their New York office. Just a mailing address, no online method for contacting or applying. They're using the newspaper to search for programmers unable to apply online, perhaps the best place to find this sort of programmer, but really, do they want them?

Or the ad from Paul, Weiss, a prestigious big law firm in New York. It's the biggest ad on the page, and goes into a long, long list of requirements for the job--Magna Cum Laude from a famous law school, more than three years with one of their competitors, etc. Which high-powered New York lawyers are reading the last single page of newspaper classifieds?

And my favorite, an equally long ad for Deloitte that instructs the applicant to go to a website and enter a 15-digit code, including several "1"s, some "I"s and a bunch of letters and numbers. Almost unreadable in the paper, and hard to transcribe. More than a billion combinations... why not just enter NYT1124?

Lots of time and money being spent chasing the wrong people with the wrong ads.

My point, and I do have one, is that if your HR department is run by policies that were established a decade ago, worth a new look. And if you are serious, truly serious, that talent is your competitive advantage, please understand that the way you look for and sort that talent is the highest-leverage way you've got to increase what you end up with.

       

More Recent Articles

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Don't want to get this email anymore? Click the link below to unsubscribe.




Your requested content delivery powered by FeedBlitz, LLC, 9 Thoreau Way, Sudbury, MA 01776, USA. +1.978.776.9498