CAPTCHA is more than a catchy name, it’s an acronym — Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. But in practical terms, CAPTCHAs are often Consistently Annoying, and Prevent The Conversion from Happening A-Lot.
One study by Stanford University (link opens as PDF) found 3 human users agreed on the “translation” of the CAPTCHA only 71% of the time…
Who creates a game only to give it away for free? Where’s the $$ in that?
The freemium business model is taking over — an estimated 65% of revenue generated by the 100 top grossing apps in the App Store, and an estimated 72% of total App Store revenue comes from freemium mobile games. In-game purchases like extra lives, special powers, virtual goods and personalizations are driving the revenue…
Before we dive into the links, there’s still time to register for Conversion Conference and Affiliate Management Days upcoming in March. I’ll be speaking on Remarketing and Checkout Optimization, respectively. I would love to connect!
When it comes to sharing links through Twitter, what makes them click?
Dan Zarella from HubSpot set out to answer that question, analyzing over 200,000 link-containing tweets, and measuring several characteristics that appear to influence click through. Dan’s findings are presented infographically (WordPress tells me this is not a word, but I don’t care), which we will here break down tip-by-tip, along with some real-world examples…
Kicking off our new weekly feature Infographic Friday are our friends at Invesp Consulting, who have compiled some interesting stats and trends on social networking from around the globe.
Why does this matter to ecommerce?
We have become a social networking culture, and this behavior is permeating every area of our lives. Even solo activities like using search engines is becoming socialized, as is shopping, travel, education and even work…
It’s easy to spend too much money on pay-per-click.
The infographic below breaks down Google’s top spenders in Google Adwords, but also highlights how CPCs (cost per click) vary across industries.
While some of these click prices are not surprising, like for health insurance or wireless Internet deals (high ticket value and/or recurring revenue), others like ‘zumba dance dvd’ are considerably high relative to retail prices…
Straight from Google’s Quality Guidelines comes the mantra for the white-hat SEO community: “Build your site for users, not search engines.” And Google means it.
The search giant disclosed its latest algorithm update includes page layout as a ranking factor, with a focus on how much above-the-fold real estate is dedicated to visible content vs. advertising or other distracting, useless shiny things (like splash pages)…
Facebook announced yesterday regarding its developer platform — namely, new features in its Open Graph are now available to all application developers.
The new features were no secret, but we can now see them in action from 60 partner applications involved in the Open Graph Beta including Netflix, Hulu, Zynga, Spotify, Washington Post and Kobo.
So what’s the big deal?
2 New Features for Facebook Open Graph
Open Graph applications use elements of the development platform to provide ‘frictionless sharing’ to Facebookers’ Timelines and Tickers, which will also appear in friends’ News Feeds…
If you frequent tech and marketing blogs, by now you’ve heard about Google’s latest major change to search – Search Plus Your World (or SPYW, possibly pronounced as “spew”).
Google now offers a “personal results” option for logged-in Google Account users that incorporates content shared by connections within Google+ and Gmail contacts (pretty much anyone in your email history with a Gmail address)…
We conversion optimization specialists are always banging the “don’t rely on your gut feel” drum, and telling you that you have to test everything or perish in a horrible pyre of mediocre KPI performance.
While it’s true that our guts often get it wrong and testing can help that, they also influence testing. Most tests are set up based on a gut feeling that changing XYZ will cause a lift…
Persuasive selling is part art, part science, but 100% apart of conversion optimization. Understanding what motivates our customer is key — it’s not just about what the offer is, but how an offer is presented. Consider this little case study from the Harvard Business Review Daily Stat:
If You Say I’m Special, I’ll Buy
In an experiment that provided participants with an opportunity to buy a discounted coffee mug, those who were told they had been randomly selected to get the discount were 3 times more likely to want to buy than people who believed everyone got the discount…
If you caught last week’s post on Netflix’s dipping customer satisfaction, you may have missed a comment left by our Chief Strategy Officer, Cliff Conneighton:
There is one other factor to consider that is not widely known or discussed: A big issue in customer sat is that Netflix and other streaming providers don’t have current releases. And they can’t get them because of the studios’ clinging to their “theatrical release window” model (new releases always appear in theaters way before availability via other media) and Netflix clinging to the one-price all-you-can-eat model…
It was a rough year for Netflix. The handling of its pricing and rebranding of its DVD service has landed the ‘Flix on several “worst of 2011” lists and sent 800,000 paying members packing. Perhaps its timing couldn’t be worse. With Amazon, iTunes, Redbox, Hulu, Crackle, CinemaNow and even Google holding the potential to break out as serious competition, can Netflix afford the slip up or will the damage to its brand sink the ship as early as this year?
Customer Satisfaction in Decline
Netflix 6-point drop on the annual Foresee E-Retail Customer Satisfaction Index from 85 to 79 is a troubling signal…
Well it’s the end of the month and the end of the year — so Happy New Year to you from all of us at Elastic Path, wishing you peace, joy, love and sales for 2012. To wrap up the year, here are some fab ecommerce blog posts from around the Web from December.
Before we begin, a quick heads up. I’ll be speaking in San Francisco in March at the Conversion Conference and Affiliate Management Days…
Another year has come to an end, and 2011 will surely be one to remember. From Google’s algorithm changes to the loss of some search referral data, the launch of Google Plus and the +1 button (hey, there was a lot of news from Google) to the loss of Steve Jobs. Ecommerce continues to be defined by the way consumers use technology, and no doubt, 2012 will bring further advancement and a few surprises…
Averages often shroud insights, which is why we should always apply segmentation to our data analysis. A fantastic example of this is recent findings by by Seewhy, which analyzed 264,631 abandoned carts and found a very strong relationship between the dollar value of abandoned shopping carts and abandonment rate.
Check out the 2 spikes in the chart below. Surprised by the percentage of low dollar value cart abandonment? This is reasonably explained by the shipping cost to item cost ratio…
What makes a good tweet?
That’s the million-follower question. It’s tough to know exactly what your Twitter audience wants to hear from you, what will make them unfollow, what will make them retweet or @reply, and what will make them buy.
The answer is “it depends,” but you can fill in that blank by testing a variety of tweet-styles and measuring engagement. Here’s 17 to get your creative juices flowing…
Tap is the gesture that replaces the click, but unlike a pointer mouse that has pretty good accuracy, our fingers can often activate the wrong thing. And when things are difficult to activate, a user can give up.
Jakob Nielsen’s research on iPad usability consistently shows that “read-tap assymetry” is a major problem. (English translation: text that is large enough to read but too small to tap)…
A dear friend of mine left the comforts of Canada a few years ago to take up life on African soil, and I enjoy following her adventures and experiences through her blog. One of her posts titled Finally Some Good Customer Service? got me thinking about how the Western customer-is-always-right business culture is not practiced everywhere.
“In Canada (and other developed countries), the salesperson or business owner depends on the customer to bring in their income…
Social commerce is estimated to reach $30 Billion (yes, that’s Billion with a ‘B’) in the next 5 years. How is that possible?
Facebook Commerce is more than just Liking product pages. There are 7 dimensions driving Facebook Commerce that make up the “F-Commerce Ecosphere,” as shared by Janice Diner, founding partner of Horizon Studios, a social media consultancy at the Meshwest conference this week in Vancouver, BC…
In our neverending quest to increase conversion rates and revenue, we often focus on web design and offers, and overlook the power of customer reviews. There are many benefits of reviews, not only to your customers, but also to your merchandising and purchasing team. But attracting reviews is a challenge — even Amazon’s average sales-to-reviews ratio is 1300 to 1. Do you know what percentage of customers ‘convert’ to review contributors? What can you do to attract more reviews?
The benefits of customer reviews
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Just a note to our beloved subscribers, we recently refreshed the look of GetElastic.com and with it came a few hiccups including a glitch in our feed that sent out a blank message to email subscribers and a truncated post to our RSS followers. If you missed our Ecommerce Link Digest for November on Friday you can view it here, and while you’re at it, check out the new look!
Thank you for your patience and we will be back to regularly scheduled programming Tuesday…
November was a big month for online retail, with Cyber Monday emerging as the highest day for online shopping, new records set for mobile commerce and the introduction of Google+ pages for businesses and brands. (I’ve also seen more facial hair around Vancouver than during the Stanley Cup playoffs). But here at Get Elastic, the [...]
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Words matter. It’s proven that your choice of verbiage can dramatically impact your email open rates, paid search click through rates and landing page conversions. Marketers spend thousands of hours and dollars testing and tweaking text to find out what performs the best. It’s easy with the wealth of testing tools available for your campaigns, [...]
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Inactive email subscribers. The ones that you mail, mail and mail again for months or years, and never an open, never a click. Removing them can help your sender reputation, as too many inactives can be a flag to ISPs and hurt your overall delivery percentage. But cutting them off prematurely could mean lost future revenue. What should you do?
The rules of engagement
ISPs track both positive and negative engagement activities which can impact your deliverability…
Coined in 2005 by the online arm of the National Retail Federation, Shop.org, Cyber Monday is now a household name. The Monday after Thanksgiving is the unofficial kickoff of the online shopping season (though trends http://pulse.chasepaymentech.com./ show shoppers have been spending for the last 3 weeks), and is known for its deals that rival Black Friday’s in-store doorcrashers.
But does Cyber Monday live up to its hyper? What’s the deal with Cyber Monday? We’ve collected over X stats about 2011’s most anticipated online shopping day…
Link building is critical to SEO, but tougher for commercial sites than for blogs and other content sites. Not only is it difficult to attract links directly to product pages, product pages can disappear when products sell out – along with their links. So ecommerce SEOs need to get creative.
Though social link building is hot, hot, hot, traditional forms have not lost their importance…
As discussed on Get Elastic last week, behavioral targeting is the new wave of online advertising. A form of behavioral targeting called “remarketing” is close cousin to paid search and email marketing, with the bonus of only reaching people who have visited your site in recent days.
Also coined “remarketing” (by Google Adwords) or “remessaging” (by Microsoft AdCenter), retargeting gives you an opportunity to re-engage site visitors with targeted messages and offers that appear when site abandoners surf other sites around the Web…
Back links have always been an important part of SEO, but the type of links that influence search engine rankings have changed over the years.
Links from topically relevant and authoritative sites serve as signals of quality for the content they point to. The authority of a web page, or “Page Rank” in Google lingo, flows from one web page to another through (most) links, making link building a staple SEO strategy, but also one that has been abused by spammers…
Your holiday merchandising is set, your developers are in a deep code freeze and all your marketing campaign creative is in. Your sales are already picking up, is it too late to tweak your website for maximum conversions this season? No!
Here are 7 eleventh hour tactics you can use to squeeze the most dollars out of your holiday traffic this year.
1. Optimize for speed
Site performance matters…
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at SEMNewsDaily.com
