marți, 21 septembrie 2010

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

How to Convince your Boss that CRO is a Win

Posted: 20 Sep 2010 04:20 PM PDT

Posted by Jamie

Today I’ll talk about one of my favorite topics, Conversion Rate Optimization (or CRO). I won’t be speaking about tools, case studies, or tips on what layouts or buttons colors work best; Dr. Pete, Paras Chopra and Oli Gardner have written some excellent blog posts on these topics recently. Instead, over the next several weeks, I’ll be posting a few lessons I’ve learned from doing CRO successfully (and unsuccessfully) for a variety of organizations. These are things I wish I had known when I got started.

Today’s post will focus on how to convince your organization to do CRO.

Make the Case for CRO using Simple Math

CRO may be popular on online marketing blogs, but I’m always surprised to learn that most organizations aren’t doing it. At the recent SEOmoz PRO Training Seminar in Seattle, conversion rate guru Tim Ash asked the audience how many of their companies were doing CRO. Of the 300 or so in the audience, only a few dozen individuals raised their hands. Of all the things I’ve worked on in online marketing, nothing has delivered a higher ROI than conversion rate optimization. And yet, it remains less popular than it should.

One explanation I’ve heard is that it’s difficult to get started. But with free tools like Google Website Optimizer, and affordable, yet capable services like Unbounce and Visual Website Optimizer, this excuse is quickly losing ground. The best explanation I can venture is that CRO doesn’t happen because it’s difficult to prioritize against the stack of urgent projects that marketing teams tackle each day.

Your first job should be explaining the potential return-on-investment of a CRO project. If your marketing team, boss or client knew the estimated ROI of CRO using metrics from their own business, they’ll be more likely to prioritize it ahead of other projects. So what’s the best way to make the case for CRO?

Use simple math. Take the numbers of conversions/goal completions from key process of your website, and show what would happen if they performed better. Imagine saying this to your boss or client:

The above example was generated using a simple Excel spreadsheet I created. Download the worksheet and just fill in the white cells with blue text (further instructions are later in this blog post). The spreadsheet will calculate a simple ROI and provide an easy, yet surefire argument.

The boxed quote above reflects the outcome of a retail web site example that has 632 sales a month with an average transaction size of $40. See the details in the screenshot of the spreadsheet below:

What to enter into the spreadsheet:

Experience Name
A friendly name for the User Experience you are considering optimizing using Conversion Rate Optimization. For this example we are using the Checkout Page of an typical retail e-commerce website.

Monthly Visits
I’d recommend the number of total Visits (for an average month) to the first page of the user experience you’d like to optimize using CRO. In this example above, this is how many Visits occurred on the checkout page of a given month. I believe Visits are better than Unique Visitors as they take count someone who visits twice during the same day as two distinct visits. I wouldn’t recommend using Page Views in this cell, since page reloads and other behaviors can make this number larger than it should be.

Monthly Conversions
The monthly conversions or successful completions to this user experience. In this example, the number of times a purchase was made from the Checkout page. For simple websites that have a single purchase experience, this is usually an easy number to determine. If not, make a best guess.

Average Cash Per Conversion
This is how much money you make on average for each conversion that is completed. An optional, but desirable field. A monetary estimate makes for a more compelling argument. For the example above, the company makes an average of $40 for each transaction. If you are a subscription business, this is where you would enter your customer lifetime value.

If you don’t have easy access to monetary values like average purchase size or customer lifetime value, just use the raw number of conversions to make your case. Using the data entered above, that would be the following (note that the Excel worksheet provides both):


Conversion Rate Increase
The estimated improvement that might be achieved using Conversion Rate Optimization. What percentage increase should you use? It’s up to you, but I like to estimate 10% improvement, because it’s believable and if your user experiences are not already very well optimized, this percentage is usually easy to achieve. But in my experience, if executed well, your first test will do, much, much better.

Keep it simple.

This is a simple ROI calculation. Some may argue it's too simple, but it makes a compelling argument that's easy to grasp. The key lesson here is while 10% may not seem monumental, when you see the expected ROI, it often is. And for a low effort with a big reward, it’s a slam-dunk. Use simple math to make your case and you'll have a better chance of getting your organization on board with conversion rate optimization. 

What's worked for you?

What’s helped you convince your organization or client to start doing conversion rate optimization? Please let me know in the comments!

---
Jamie Steven is the VP Marketing at SEOmoz, and a lover of pumpkin-flavored beverages including lattes and beer—both excellent choices for chilly fall weather.


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Seth's Blog : Do you actually care about privacy?

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

Do you actually care about privacy?

I'm not sure you do.

If you cared about privacy you wouldn't have a credit card, because, after all, they know everything you spend money on. And you wouldn't use the phone, because somewhere, there's a computer scanning what you say.

What most of us care about is being surprised. You don't want the credit card company to track where you're staying and whether you're buying flowers for someone you're not even married to--and then send you a free coupon for STD testing, right? Even if it was a good coupon, and even if they knew you needed it. No, you don't want this because you don't want to be surprised.

What many people miss about privacy and Facebook is that the company has always taken the position that privacy shouldn't be assumed. Sure, they've mishandled some of their user communications and feature rollouts, but basically, they offer the religion of no-privacy, and an entire generation or two is ready to grow up in public as a result. We're just not eager to be surprised along the way.

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Daily Snapshot: Immeasurable Courage and Uncommon Valor

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
 

Photo of the Day

Photo of the Day

President Barack Obama greets people following the CNBC jobs town hall meeting at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., Sept. 20, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Today's Schedule

Today, the President will award Chief Master Sergeant Richard L. Etchberger, U.S. Air Force, the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry. Chief Etchberger will receive the Medal of Honor posthumously for his heroic actions in combat on March 11, 1968, in the country of Laos.  He displayed immeasurable courage and uncommon valor -- deliberately exposing himself to enemy fire in order to place his three surviving wounded comrades in the rescue slings permitting them to be airlifted to safety. As he was finally being rescued, he was fatally wounded by enemy ground fire.  Chief Etchberger’s sons, Richard Etchberger, Cory Etchberger and Steve Wilson will join the President at the White House to commemorate their father’s example of selfless service and sacrifice.

All times are Eastern Daylight Time

9:15 AM: The Vice President meets with Senator John Kerry

10:15 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

10:30 AM: The Vice President hosts a roundtable meeting with university presidents from six leading research institutions to discuss Recovery Act investments in university research programs

10:45 AM: The President meets with senior advisors

12:30 PM: The President and the Vice President have lunch

1:15 PM: The President awards Chief Master Sergeant Richard L. Etchberger, U.S. Air Force, the Medal of Honor. The Vice President also attends. WhiteHouse.gov/live

2:00 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs WhiteHouse.gov/live

3:00 PM: The Vice President meets with Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou

4:30 PM: The President and the Vice President meet with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates

WhiteHouse.gov/live  Indicates Events that will be livestreamed on WhiteHouse.gov/live.

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog. 

President Obama's Town Hall on the Economy, Business and the Middle Class
The President takes part in an unusual sort of town hall in conjunction with CNBC.

Fighting Fraud and the Consequences of Defunding the Affordable Care Act
Learn about efforts to fight fraud in the Medicare program and the consequences of defunding the Affordable Care Act.

No Excuse for Holding Middle Class Tax Cuts Hostage
Deputy Communications Director Jen Psaki debunks the House Republican's bogus attempt to hide behind small businesses as they pledge to block middle class tax cuts.

Get Updates

Sign up for the Daily Snapshot

Stay Connected

 
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Publicat de 1 la 06:28 0 comentarii

SEOptimise

SEOptimise

How to Manage & Grow Your Social Media Network

Posted: 20 Sep 2010 06:15 AM PDT

One of the problems and frustrations I find with social media, is that there are now many different website’s and each of them require managing contacts in different ways.

So, for example, you’ll often end up with a completely different set of contacts on each site – when in many cases it would make far more sense if you were just connected to the same people on Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare etc.

Because each of these sites have their own friend/follow system, it’s pretty much impossible to keep track of everyone you’re connected to. This means that if you sign-up for a new social media website, like I did recently on FourSquare, you have to start all over again by adding contacts from scratch.

It is possible to import friends on many of the sites by importing your Twitter or Facebook contacts – but that doesn’t always allow for everyone you’re connected with elsewhere. Recently, I’ve tried to manage this in a more central location, using the following steps:

  1. Go export crazy! The first step is to get an email list of contacts from Facebook, LinkedIn and any other social media sites with contact list exporting available. Sometimes you have to dig around for export options, but it’s normally available – even if they do try to insult you through not so subtle captchas!
    LinkedIn
  2. Collect all contacts into GMail or FlowTown - This helps you to organise all of your contacts into a single location. Personally I find FlowTown to be very useful – especially for analysing demographics – but GMail does the job here too and is free (FlowTown charges per import).
    Flowtown
  3. Group contacts - Filter those who you’d like to connect with on all sites and if you want to be more selective over who you connect with, then it’s useful to separate professional contacts with friends and family.
    Flowtown
  4. Import connections – most social networking sites have the option to import contacts via CSV or GMail – so once you’ve collected and organised all of your contacts into a central location you can look to import these into each of the social media website’s you use.
    Twitter Import

I tried this out a few weeks ago on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, StumbleUpon and Foursquare – instantly finding new contacts who I’m already connected to on other sites. So from my point of view, it’s been a far more efficient way of managing and merging social contacts – has anyone found a good way of managing contacts across social media networks?

© SEOptimise – Thinking of attending SMX London in May 2010? get a 15% discount code!

The forever recession

There are two recessions going on.

One is gradually ending. This is the cyclical recession, we have them all the time, they come and they go. Not fun, but not permanent.

The other one, I fear, is here forever. This is the recession of the industrial age, the receding wave of bounty that workers and businesses got as a result of rising productivity but imperfect market communication.

In short: if you're local, we need to buy from you. If you work in town, we need to hire you. If you can do a craft, we can't replace you with a machine.

No longer.

The lowest price for any good worth pricing is now available to anyone, anywhere. Which makes the market for boring stuff a lot more perfect than it used to be.

Since the 'factory' work we did is now being mechanized, outsourced or eliminated, it's hard to pay extra for it. And since buyers have so many choices (and much more perfect information about pricing and availability) it's hard to charge extra.

Thus, middle class jobs that existed because companies had no choice are now gone.

Protectionism isn't going to fix this problem. Neither is stimulus of old factories or yelling in frustration and anger. No, the only useful response is to view this as an opportunity. To poorly paraphrase Clay Shirky, every revolution destroys the last thing before it turns a profit on a new thing.

The networked revolution is creating huge profits, significant opportunities and a lot of change. What it's not doing is providing millions of brain-dead, corner office, follow-the-manual middle class jobs. And it's not going to.

Fast, smart and flexible are embraced by the network. Linchpin behavior. People and companies we can't live without (because if I can live without you, I'm sure going to try if the alternative is to save money).

The sad irony is that everything we do to prop up the last economy (more obedience, more compliance, cheaper yet average) gets in the way of profiting from this one.

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