Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '13 Ingredients in the Perfect
Social Media Contest'
With the competition for attention within social media at an all-time high, the
struggle to keep fans and followers engaged with your companys social outposts
is real, and ongoing. In addition to smart use of visuals (see our Social Media
Image of the Week blog series for inspiration), businesses often turn to social
media contests []13 Ingredients in the Perfect Social Media Contest is a post
from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-marketing/13-ingredients-in-the-perfect-social-media-contest/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=13-ingredients-in-the-perfect-social-media-contest
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Saturday 30 November 2013
Friday 29 November 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] Kyle Rush Reveals How the Obama Campaign Broke Every Online Fundraising Record: Free #MozCon Video
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Kyle Rush Reveals How the Obama
Campaign Broke Every Online Fundraising Record: Free #MozCon Video'
Posted by EricaMcGillivray
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!
MozCon 2013 free video - Kyle Rush - Win Through Optimization and Testing
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 dataâ'
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
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Campaign Broke Every Online Fundraising Record: Free #MozCon Video'
Posted by EricaMcGillivray
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!
MozCon 2013 free video - Kyle Rush - Win Through Optimization and Testing
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 dataâ'
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
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[Build Backlinks Online] 2nd Annual Dragon Blogger Technology Gift Guide in the Social Web Cafe (2013)
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '2nd Annual Dragon Blogger
Technology Gift Guide in the Social Web Cafe (2013)'
Justin Germino (a.k.a. Dragon Blogger) knows his technology. He also knows what
thrills kids at Christmas (having two sons, himself), as well as thrilling us
bigger kids, when it comes to gadgets, games, and tech. Last year, I interviewed
Justin for a ...
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Technology Gift Guide in the Social Web Cafe (2013)'
Justin Germino (a.k.a. Dragon Blogger) knows his technology. He also knows what
thrills kids at Christmas (having two sons, himself), as well as thrilling us
bigger kids, when it comes to gadgets, games, and tech. Last year, I interviewed
Justin for a ...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BasicBlogTips/~3/HvkiBTdPUAY/dragonblogger-technology-gift-guide.html
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[Build Backlinks Online] Don’t Be Afraid to Give Away Your Content Marketing “Special Sauce”
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Don't Be Afraid to Give Away
Your Content Marketing "Special Sauce"'
With all the holidays approaching (and just passed), I have been noticing my
attention being captured by all things food or recipe-related. Tender Roasted
TurkeySweet Succulent Ham Sinfully Rich Spicy Pumpkin Custard. So, when fellow
HoosierJay Baerand his blog post titled,5 Reasons You Need to Give Away The
Recipe For Your Secret Sauce appeared under []Dont Be Afraid to Give Away Your
Content Marketing Special Sauce is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social
Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
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Your Content Marketing "Special Sauce"'
With all the holidays approaching (and just passed), I have been noticing my
attention being captured by all things food or recipe-related. Tender Roasted
TurkeySweet Succulent Ham Sinfully Rich Spicy Pumpkin Custard. So, when fellow
HoosierJay Baerand his blog post titled,5 Reasons You Need to Give Away The
Recipe For Your Secret Sauce appeared under []Dont Be Afraid to Give Away Your
Content Marketing Special Sauce is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social
Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/content-marketing-2/dont-be-afraid-to-give-away-your-content-marketing-special-sauce/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dont-be-afraid-to-give-away-your-content-marketing-special-sauce
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[Build Backlinks Online] How to Swaggerjack the Power of Visual Memes - Whiteboard Friday
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'How to Swaggerjack the Power of
Visual Memes - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by lenawest
Visual assets like memes and truly informative infographics have always been
(and will continue to be) effective ways of driving traffic and generating
conversations. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Lena West walks us through some of
the more effective examples, proving that it isn't difficult to create visual
assets that get people talking.
Whiteboard Friday - Lena West - How To Swaggerjack the Power of Visual Memes
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard:
Video Transcription
Hey there, everyone. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. My name is Lena West from
Influence Expansion, and I am here today to talk about how you can swaggerjack
the power of visual memes to really boost your traffic and your SEO results.
So first, a couple of things I want to talk to you about is a couple tactics.
So we're going to kind of get into the nitty-gritty a little bit here, so
tactics that I have used with our clients that I know work. So first let me also
say that I am not an SEO expert, and I don't play one on TV.
I'm a social person. But one of the things that I've noticed in our work with
clients is when we are really heavy handed using a lot of images, you would
think that it wouldn't work, it wouldn't be effective, but it is. I notice that
not only do they get better search engine rankings, but they also get a lot of
traffic and a lot of social signals. So all that's good stuff. So I'm going to
show you a couple of things that we do to get that done for our clients.
First thing I'm going to talk to you about is Wordless Wednesday. If you
don't know what that is, I'm going to go into it. Infographics, and do not laugh
at me when I say infographics because I know everybody might be tired of
infographics, but there's still some life there and there's still an opportunity
for us to get it right and get some visibility going with infographics and get
some juice out of it still.
Then I'm going to talk about quote graphics. So you've seen these probably on
Facebook, a lot on Pinterest. It's a really nice background, and then on top
it's got some text that kind of makes you feel good about yourself and good
about your soul. So I'll talk about that in a minute.
So first, let's talk about Wordless Wednesdays. So what is Wordless
Wednesday? I was first introduced to Wordless Wednesday when I started doing
some work with BlogPaws, and complete disclosure, I'm on the board, but they are
a great organization. BlogPaws is a pet organization, and they help pets with
blogs, people who blog about pets, and that sort of thing.
What they do is they'll post pictures of dogs and cats and ferrets, and it's
really interesting because they just post the picture, no words, hence Wordless
Wednesday. They post it on a Wednesday. Because they don't force the content on
the reader, what will happen is people will start to comment like crazy about
what they think that particular animal is saying or what they think the scenario
is about, etc. It really boosts engagement, and it gets people talking.
The thing that I learned the most about Wordless Wednesdays is, if you Google
it, like right now if you Google it, you will see that there is about 7.7
million, and it will probably be more as you're watching this video, depending
upon when you watch this, 7.7 million search results. If you look at the top
five results there, you're going to find that not a lot of them are big brands.
They're small companies. So there's really room to grow and participate in this
particular meme. I'm going to talk to you about how to do that in a second.
So that's what Wordless Wednesdays is about. It's about slapping up probably
an innocuous looking picture and getting people to comment and share. It works.
It's super effective. Something creative happens when you don't force content on
people.
So how do you swaggerjack the Wordless Wednesday? The easiest thing to do,
number one, is just chime in on Wordless Wednesdays. Just start tagging your
blog posts as Wordless Wednesdays. Now that you can use hashtags on Facebook,
you can do it on Facebook. Start really getting in on Wordless Wednesday.
The other thing that you can do is make your own meme. So one of my clients
has, I believe she calls it, Scarlett Says Saturdays. So that's the alliteration
thing going on.
I've also seen Throwback Thursdays. You guys have probably seen that. It
doesn't matter. What matters is that you're consistent. If it's Throwback
Thursdays, it's not Throwback Thursdays once a month. It's Throwback Thursday
every Thursday. That's the thing that makes the difference. That's where you get
the juice from this Wordless Wednesday type meme is being consistent and doing
it every single week without fail.
The power of the visual meme is amazing. Some brands that get this right, and
you guys probably have seen some of these ads, it's the folks at Old Navy. Oh,
they are amazing with the retro thing that they've done. They've brought back
some '70s stars, Mr. T and The Brady Bunch people. It's just amazing what
they've done with graphics. They've got that whole retro meme, that visual meme
going, and it is working for them. Old Navy does more sales than Gap even does.
So it's been really effective for them.
Another brand that gets it right, our friends at Dos Equis. So what's the
saying this guy? He's the most unforgettable man in the world or the most
interesting man in the world. "When I'm busy I drink Dos Equis." We know this
guy. He's like the Old Spice guy. He's always around. He's this distinguished
looking gentleman with white hair and a white beard. It's not Santa, but it's
the Dos Equis guy. But they've used the power of the visual meme so that every
single time you see this guy's face, you don't even have to see the Dos Equis
logo. You don't have to see anything. All you know is something cool is going to
come out of this guy's mouth, and they're going to make him look like James Bond
meets MacGyver in this commercial.
So a couple tools that you can use to figure out which memes are hot so that
you can jump on the bandwagon, KnowYourMeme.com, QuickMeme.com, and
MemeCenter.com. So check those out. Those are really good places for you guys to
get a start.
Second thing I want to talk about, infographics. Now I know that infographics
have been overdone and overused, but I'm going to talk to you about something a
little bit new in a minute. The first thing that we have seen work for our
clients, in terms of getting more traffic and definitely more social shares, is
going to Google images, doing a search and also going on Pinterest and doing a
search for whatever industry they're in plus the word infographics.
So if your client is in wellness, let's say, so they're in healthcare. Maybe
it's a vitamin company or a supplement company or something like that. Go and
search for vitamins plus infographic, wellness plus infographic, healthcare plus
infographic. You'd be surprised at the infographics that come up. Some of them
are going to be crappy, and some of them are going to be really well done. All
you have to do is copy-paste. Grab that infographic.
The beauty of infographics is, at the very bottom, mostly what you see is the
attribution. So it's whoever created it has their logo at the bottom. So you
usually don't have to worry about that when sharing infographics. Always make
sure to give attribution though, because you don't want to be steeling anybody's
stuff and trying to pass it off as your own. You don't want any problems like
that. But copy-paste. Share stuff. It doesn't have to be your content or your
client's content for you to share it. Fill that editorial calendar with some
infographics.
So for those of you who are tired of infographics that are already existing,
I've got something for you too. Design your own. You can make your own. Your
clients are sitting on tons of data. All you've got to do is ask them: "Hey,
have you ever done a survey? What were the results? How many results did you
get?" You'd be surprised at what clients reveal when you start asking the right
questions.
Great way for you to design your own info-graphics, here are a couple tools,
visually, Piktochart.com and Infogram. I am partial to these folks because they
have a really nice pictogram. They have a really nice user interface. It's very
easy to kind of figure out what's going on and it's highly customizable, and
what -- free. So I like that.
Brands that get the infographics game right think outside of the box. So
there's this company called Warby Parker Eyewear. I've got to really slow it
down with that -- Warby Parker Eyewear. What they've done is they have done an
annual report for I think the past two or three years. There's one for 2010,
2011, and I think 2013 maybe, or 2012. They've done an annual report for their
company using an infographic format. You've got to publish the annual report any
doggone way. You may as well make it sexy. I think it's great. Google it. You're
going to love it. You're going to love how they're used the infographic format
to get that content out there and to share that content with their audience.
Another company who blew it out of the water, folks called LunaMetrics. You
may not know who they are, but I guarantee if you work in the social space at
all, you have seen their infographic. Google it. I promise you. It's an
infographic. It's a white background, and what it does is it gives you all of
the standard sizes for every single social channel layout. So it tells you the
ideal size for your profile image on Facebook, your cover image for your
Facebook page, your cover image for Twitter. It gives you all of those graphics
all in one really long infographic. I know I have used this for us in my
company. I've used this for our clients. I know other pros in the social space
use this all the time. Who gets the credit at the very bottom?
The folks at LunaMetrics. It's been passed around thousands and thousands and
thousands of times. So really check that out.
The last and third thing I want to talk to you about in terms of
swagger-jacking the power of visual memes is quote graphics. Say that three
times fast. So quote graphics, you've seen them on Facebook and Pinterest.
They've got that nice background, and usually it's like a lake or some flowers
or something, or maybe even a watercolor background. Some of them are bright,
kind of in your face. They have some sort of saying or quote on top in very
stylized text.
What I love about these images is it doesn't matter the size of your company
or your client's company. You can use these. Here's how. If you're representing
a bigger brand or if you work at a big brand, you can use these quotes because
you get to choose what the quote image says. You get to pick which quotes you
use. You can use these quotes to really humanize a big brand to bring it down,
to make it connect with people in a very real way. So using words and images,
you can use it connect with people.
If you're representing a smaller brand or a smaller company or if you work at
a smaller company, you can use quote graphics to develop that know, like, and
trust factor with your clients and the people who are visiting your Pinterest
boards or visiting your Facebook page.
Again, based on the quotes you select and the backgrounds you select, we've
had custom backgrounds made for our clients. So we'll create, I don't know, a
suite of like five or six custom backgrounds and just throw different quotes on
the top of those various backgrounds and swap them in and out and get them up on
Facebook and get them up on Pinterest. It's been really amazing in terms of the
sharability and the traffic.
Always, always, quick tip from Lena, at the very bottom put your URL or your
client's URL so that people know exactly where to go to if they want to find
more information about this company that shared this great quote with them.
As always, just like with infographics, you can search, copy, paste. You can
find them on your own. I think there's a really good one on Facebook. If you go
and search for quote graphics on Facebook, you'll see it. There's a whole
Facebook page devoted to these.
The other thing you can do is create your own. I like these tools to do that.
You've got to have your own background with most of these tools. But Pinwords is
great. We use Pinwords a lot, especially if you have your own background. If
your designer has done a custom background for you, Pinwords is awesome. So I'm
going to circle the one that I like. Pinwords. Oops, I don't think you guys can
see that. Pinwords. I like Pinstamatic as well and Quozio. So those are three
options for you to create your own.
Brands that get this right, I'm going to save Peugeot Panama for last because
I love what they've done, and it's like OMG. But LL Bean and HGTV. It's very
tempting when you're on Pinterest or when you're creating these graphics to
smack products in there and use it as a sales channel. Could you do that? Yeah.
But that's like complete cheese-ball.
You want to be creative. So what the folds at LL Bean have done, so okay
what's the energy of LL Bean? What are they about? They're about camping and
outdoors and being in the wilderness and that sort of thing. It's got that
outdoorsy vibe to it. So every single board on their Pinterest board, their main
Pinterest board, every board is about outdoors or animals in the wild. People
are pinning this stuff like crazy. You would think, "Well, why don't they just
put pictures of their jackets?" Because nobody cares. People want to share
pictures of animals and really cool tent set-ups and outdoor, what do they call
it, glamping. So there's loads of pictures of glamping on LL Bean Pinterest
boards. They really get it right. Check them out.
HGTV does something very similar as well. So HGTV is all about DIY and
renovating and painting your house and that whole bit. So they've got some
boards.
But Peugeot Panama, they take it for me. What they did, you have to see it.
Please Google it. What they've done is they've taken pictures of their cars, and
Peugeots are kind of small cars. So what they'll do is they'll take pictures of
the car, and they'll chunk them up into nine or six different images and they'll
put them back together on the Pinterest board so that when you go to the
Pinterest Board, it's almost like a puzzle. It's the coolest effect. It's a very
cool way that they've deconstructed the images to reconstruct the bigger
picture. It's absolutely amazing.
So I hope that you see that images are not our enemy, and images are actually
our friend. We can do so much with images. It's not just about alt text and
trying to cram text in there and only use text. You can get a lot of social
signals. You can get a lot of traffic and really great search engine rankings,
because if you're doing well on social, you all know that you are going to come
up high on those search engine rankings.
So feel free to chat me up in the comments below. Let me know what you're
thinking. Ask me any questions. If I speak too fast and I left something out,
let me know. So thanks so much for listening. See you online.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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
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Visual Memes - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by lenawest
Visual assets like memes and truly informative infographics have always been
(and will continue to be) effective ways of driving traffic and generating
conversations. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Lena West walks us through some of
the more effective examples, proving that it isn't difficult to create visual
assets that get people talking.
Whiteboard Friday - Lena West - How To Swaggerjack the Power of Visual Memes
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard:
Video Transcription
Hey there, everyone. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. My name is Lena West from
Influence Expansion, and I am here today to talk about how you can swaggerjack
the power of visual memes to really boost your traffic and your SEO results.
So first, a couple of things I want to talk to you about is a couple tactics.
So we're going to kind of get into the nitty-gritty a little bit here, so
tactics that I have used with our clients that I know work. So first let me also
say that I am not an SEO expert, and I don't play one on TV.
I'm a social person. But one of the things that I've noticed in our work with
clients is when we are really heavy handed using a lot of images, you would
think that it wouldn't work, it wouldn't be effective, but it is. I notice that
not only do they get better search engine rankings, but they also get a lot of
traffic and a lot of social signals. So all that's good stuff. So I'm going to
show you a couple of things that we do to get that done for our clients.
First thing I'm going to talk to you about is Wordless Wednesday. If you
don't know what that is, I'm going to go into it. Infographics, and do not laugh
at me when I say infographics because I know everybody might be tired of
infographics, but there's still some life there and there's still an opportunity
for us to get it right and get some visibility going with infographics and get
some juice out of it still.
Then I'm going to talk about quote graphics. So you've seen these probably on
Facebook, a lot on Pinterest. It's a really nice background, and then on top
it's got some text that kind of makes you feel good about yourself and good
about your soul. So I'll talk about that in a minute.
So first, let's talk about Wordless Wednesdays. So what is Wordless
Wednesday? I was first introduced to Wordless Wednesday when I started doing
some work with BlogPaws, and complete disclosure, I'm on the board, but they are
a great organization. BlogPaws is a pet organization, and they help pets with
blogs, people who blog about pets, and that sort of thing.
What they do is they'll post pictures of dogs and cats and ferrets, and it's
really interesting because they just post the picture, no words, hence Wordless
Wednesday. They post it on a Wednesday. Because they don't force the content on
the reader, what will happen is people will start to comment like crazy about
what they think that particular animal is saying or what they think the scenario
is about, etc. It really boosts engagement, and it gets people talking.
The thing that I learned the most about Wordless Wednesdays is, if you Google
it, like right now if you Google it, you will see that there is about 7.7
million, and it will probably be more as you're watching this video, depending
upon when you watch this, 7.7 million search results. If you look at the top
five results there, you're going to find that not a lot of them are big brands.
They're small companies. So there's really room to grow and participate in this
particular meme. I'm going to talk to you about how to do that in a second.
So that's what Wordless Wednesdays is about. It's about slapping up probably
an innocuous looking picture and getting people to comment and share. It works.
It's super effective. Something creative happens when you don't force content on
people.
So how do you swaggerjack the Wordless Wednesday? The easiest thing to do,
number one, is just chime in on Wordless Wednesdays. Just start tagging your
blog posts as Wordless Wednesdays. Now that you can use hashtags on Facebook,
you can do it on Facebook. Start really getting in on Wordless Wednesday.
The other thing that you can do is make your own meme. So one of my clients
has, I believe she calls it, Scarlett Says Saturdays. So that's the alliteration
thing going on.
I've also seen Throwback Thursdays. You guys have probably seen that. It
doesn't matter. What matters is that you're consistent. If it's Throwback
Thursdays, it's not Throwback Thursdays once a month. It's Throwback Thursday
every Thursday. That's the thing that makes the difference. That's where you get
the juice from this Wordless Wednesday type meme is being consistent and doing
it every single week without fail.
The power of the visual meme is amazing. Some brands that get this right, and
you guys probably have seen some of these ads, it's the folks at Old Navy. Oh,
they are amazing with the retro thing that they've done. They've brought back
some '70s stars, Mr. T and The Brady Bunch people. It's just amazing what
they've done with graphics. They've got that whole retro meme, that visual meme
going, and it is working for them. Old Navy does more sales than Gap even does.
So it's been really effective for them.
Another brand that gets it right, our friends at Dos Equis. So what's the
saying this guy? He's the most unforgettable man in the world or the most
interesting man in the world. "When I'm busy I drink Dos Equis." We know this
guy. He's like the Old Spice guy. He's always around. He's this distinguished
looking gentleman with white hair and a white beard. It's not Santa, but it's
the Dos Equis guy. But they've used the power of the visual meme so that every
single time you see this guy's face, you don't even have to see the Dos Equis
logo. You don't have to see anything. All you know is something cool is going to
come out of this guy's mouth, and they're going to make him look like James Bond
meets MacGyver in this commercial.
So a couple tools that you can use to figure out which memes are hot so that
you can jump on the bandwagon, KnowYourMeme.com, QuickMeme.com, and
MemeCenter.com. So check those out. Those are really good places for you guys to
get a start.
Second thing I want to talk about, infographics. Now I know that infographics
have been overdone and overused, but I'm going to talk to you about something a
little bit new in a minute. The first thing that we have seen work for our
clients, in terms of getting more traffic and definitely more social shares, is
going to Google images, doing a search and also going on Pinterest and doing a
search for whatever industry they're in plus the word infographics.
So if your client is in wellness, let's say, so they're in healthcare. Maybe
it's a vitamin company or a supplement company or something like that. Go and
search for vitamins plus infographic, wellness plus infographic, healthcare plus
infographic. You'd be surprised at the infographics that come up. Some of them
are going to be crappy, and some of them are going to be really well done. All
you have to do is copy-paste. Grab that infographic.
The beauty of infographics is, at the very bottom, mostly what you see is the
attribution. So it's whoever created it has their logo at the bottom. So you
usually don't have to worry about that when sharing infographics. Always make
sure to give attribution though, because you don't want to be steeling anybody's
stuff and trying to pass it off as your own. You don't want any problems like
that. But copy-paste. Share stuff. It doesn't have to be your content or your
client's content for you to share it. Fill that editorial calendar with some
infographics.
So for those of you who are tired of infographics that are already existing,
I've got something for you too. Design your own. You can make your own. Your
clients are sitting on tons of data. All you've got to do is ask them: "Hey,
have you ever done a survey? What were the results? How many results did you
get?" You'd be surprised at what clients reveal when you start asking the right
questions.
Great way for you to design your own info-graphics, here are a couple tools,
visually, Piktochart.com and Infogram. I am partial to these folks because they
have a really nice pictogram. They have a really nice user interface. It's very
easy to kind of figure out what's going on and it's highly customizable, and
what -- free. So I like that.
Brands that get the infographics game right think outside of the box. So
there's this company called Warby Parker Eyewear. I've got to really slow it
down with that -- Warby Parker Eyewear. What they've done is they have done an
annual report for I think the past two or three years. There's one for 2010,
2011, and I think 2013 maybe, or 2012. They've done an annual report for their
company using an infographic format. You've got to publish the annual report any
doggone way. You may as well make it sexy. I think it's great. Google it. You're
going to love it. You're going to love how they're used the infographic format
to get that content out there and to share that content with their audience.
Another company who blew it out of the water, folks called LunaMetrics. You
may not know who they are, but I guarantee if you work in the social space at
all, you have seen their infographic. Google it. I promise you. It's an
infographic. It's a white background, and what it does is it gives you all of
the standard sizes for every single social channel layout. So it tells you the
ideal size for your profile image on Facebook, your cover image for your
Facebook page, your cover image for Twitter. It gives you all of those graphics
all in one really long infographic. I know I have used this for us in my
company. I've used this for our clients. I know other pros in the social space
use this all the time. Who gets the credit at the very bottom?
The folks at LunaMetrics. It's been passed around thousands and thousands and
thousands of times. So really check that out.
The last and third thing I want to talk to you about in terms of
swagger-jacking the power of visual memes is quote graphics. Say that three
times fast. So quote graphics, you've seen them on Facebook and Pinterest.
They've got that nice background, and usually it's like a lake or some flowers
or something, or maybe even a watercolor background. Some of them are bright,
kind of in your face. They have some sort of saying or quote on top in very
stylized text.
What I love about these images is it doesn't matter the size of your company
or your client's company. You can use these. Here's how. If you're representing
a bigger brand or if you work at a big brand, you can use these quotes because
you get to choose what the quote image says. You get to pick which quotes you
use. You can use these quotes to really humanize a big brand to bring it down,
to make it connect with people in a very real way. So using words and images,
you can use it connect with people.
If you're representing a smaller brand or a smaller company or if you work at
a smaller company, you can use quote graphics to develop that know, like, and
trust factor with your clients and the people who are visiting your Pinterest
boards or visiting your Facebook page.
Again, based on the quotes you select and the backgrounds you select, we've
had custom backgrounds made for our clients. So we'll create, I don't know, a
suite of like five or six custom backgrounds and just throw different quotes on
the top of those various backgrounds and swap them in and out and get them up on
Facebook and get them up on Pinterest. It's been really amazing in terms of the
sharability and the traffic.
Always, always, quick tip from Lena, at the very bottom put your URL or your
client's URL so that people know exactly where to go to if they want to find
more information about this company that shared this great quote with them.
As always, just like with infographics, you can search, copy, paste. You can
find them on your own. I think there's a really good one on Facebook. If you go
and search for quote graphics on Facebook, you'll see it. There's a whole
Facebook page devoted to these.
The other thing you can do is create your own. I like these tools to do that.
You've got to have your own background with most of these tools. But Pinwords is
great. We use Pinwords a lot, especially if you have your own background. If
your designer has done a custom background for you, Pinwords is awesome. So I'm
going to circle the one that I like. Pinwords. Oops, I don't think you guys can
see that. Pinwords. I like Pinstamatic as well and Quozio. So those are three
options for you to create your own.
Brands that get this right, I'm going to save Peugeot Panama for last because
I love what they've done, and it's like OMG. But LL Bean and HGTV. It's very
tempting when you're on Pinterest or when you're creating these graphics to
smack products in there and use it as a sales channel. Could you do that? Yeah.
But that's like complete cheese-ball.
You want to be creative. So what the folds at LL Bean have done, so okay
what's the energy of LL Bean? What are they about? They're about camping and
outdoors and being in the wilderness and that sort of thing. It's got that
outdoorsy vibe to it. So every single board on their Pinterest board, their main
Pinterest board, every board is about outdoors or animals in the wild. People
are pinning this stuff like crazy. You would think, "Well, why don't they just
put pictures of their jackets?" Because nobody cares. People want to share
pictures of animals and really cool tent set-ups and outdoor, what do they call
it, glamping. So there's loads of pictures of glamping on LL Bean Pinterest
boards. They really get it right. Check them out.
HGTV does something very similar as well. So HGTV is all about DIY and
renovating and painting your house and that whole bit. So they've got some
boards.
But Peugeot Panama, they take it for me. What they did, you have to see it.
Please Google it. What they've done is they've taken pictures of their cars, and
Peugeots are kind of small cars. So what they'll do is they'll take pictures of
the car, and they'll chunk them up into nine or six different images and they'll
put them back together on the Pinterest board so that when you go to the
Pinterest Board, it's almost like a puzzle. It's the coolest effect. It's a very
cool way that they've deconstructed the images to reconstruct the bigger
picture. It's absolutely amazing.
So I hope that you see that images are not our enemy, and images are actually
our friend. We can do so much with images. It's not just about alt text and
trying to cram text in there and only use text. You can get a lot of social
signals. You can get a lot of traffic and really great search engine rankings,
because if you're doing well on social, you all know that you are going to come
up high on those search engine rankings.
So feel free to chat me up in the comments below. Let me know what you're
thinking. Ask me any questions. If I speak too fast and I left something out,
let me know. So thanks so much for listening. See you online.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Thursday 28 November 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] 18 Things For Which I Give Thanks
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '18 Things For Which I Give
Thanks'
I am thankful for my wife, who loves me and put up with my frequent travel and
heavy workload. I am thankful for my children, who are I think turning out to
be kind, loyal, accountable and happy. I am thankful for my extraordinary team
at Convince & Convert, who deliver world-class thinking []18 Things For Which I
Give Thanks is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and
Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
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Thanks'
I am thankful for my wife, who loves me and put up with my frequent travel and
heavy workload. I am thankful for my children, who are I think turning out to
be kind, loyal, accountable and happy. I am thankful for my extraordinary team
at Convince & Convert, who deliver world-class thinking []18 Things For Which I
Give Thanks is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and
Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/convince-convert-news/18-things-for-which-i-give-thanks/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=18-things-for-which-i-give-thanks
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Wednesday 27 November 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] Checkout Page Optimization: Just Follow the F.A.C.T.S.
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Checkout Page Optimization: Just
Follow the F.A.C.T.S.'
Posted by Yoast
Editor's note: This post was co-authored by Joost de Valk and his brother
Thijs de Valk.
At Yoast, we've recently written about how we've drastically changed our
checkout page. This process and our findings gave us the idea to do a best
practice of sorts on checkout pages. As it is, a lot of checkout pages are far
from optimal, and this short film from Google Analytics is rather harsh but lays
it out quite well:
There are some elements to a checkout page that, in general, really help your
conversion rate. Ignore these findings at your own peril. I'll be looking at the
following factors, all of which have a serious impact on your conversion rate:
Focus, Assurance, Clarity, Time, and Social proof.
Focus
A page needs focus for people to understand what it is you want. On the
checkout page this is doubly true; if your focus isn't on the process of
checking out, people will get confused. And confused people don't convert.
An easy way to add focus to your checkout page is to implement calls to
action. Calls to action are somewhat of a science, and people have performed a
lot of tests to find the call to action that will work on any website. However,
we believe it all depends on context.
Call to action
You should always use a color for your call to action (CTA) that stands out in
your design. Usually we recommend people use a color they haven't already used
in their design (or at least that page). Next, bigger is better. The bigger you
make your CTA, the more attention it will draw to itself, thus the more focus it
will render.
Obviously the size of your button needs to stay workable. Also think about the
shape of your CTA. We like to use calls to action that are shaped like an arrow,
because they give people a sense of direction. The shape of your CTA alone will
give people a sense of forward movement, which is associated with all things
positive:
Lastly, the copy on your CTA is of importance as well. In general, be short
and concise. People don't like reading buttons, they just want to know where it
leads.
Clutter
Especially on your checkout page, you need to remove as much clutter as
possible. By clutter we mean "mess" on your website that distracts from the main
goal. Any element on a page that's not aimed toward that page's main goal is
clutter, and too much clutter makes your page lose focus altogether.
Clutter that is "outbound" (takes your visitor to another page) is especially
bad. Make sure that the most important thing on the page is your checkout
process. This can mean removing breadcrumbs, products you're cross-selling and
sometimes even a "continue shopping" button.
Assurance
Assurance is something people crave. People have to feel safe on your website
and its pages, because if they don't, they simply won't spend their money there.
So be sure to give them the safest feeling possible.
Safety signs
One of the most important things is to assure people your website is ok using
safety signsâsigns that mean the page/site you're currently viewing is
free from malware and is "hacker proof." People want a visible affirmation that
the page they're viewing is safe, especially if that page is the checkout page.
They want assurance that their money will be safe. So don't just expect people
to understand your website is safe; show it.
Payment methods
People want to know as soon as possible if you're offering the payment method
they want to use. So it's best to show the credit card logos of the companies
you support. If you support PayPal, include that as well, obviously. To avoid
clutter, we've done this on our checkout page:
This way, it actually adds clarity to the payment options, assures people we
have their kind of payment method, and reduces clutter by not showing it
somewhere else.
Unexpected costs
As in the video, people do not like to be surprised at the counter. That's why
unexpected costs are the #1 reason people abandon their shopping carts. To
prevent this, you need to assure people that there won't be any unexpected
costs. This can be as simple as adding a line like "there will be no additional
costs" next to the total of the visitor's shopping cart.
Clarity
Clarity and conversion are often mentioned in the same sentence. If your copy
and your pages aren't clear, they just won't convert as much as they could. So
be sure to make your checkout page process as clear as possible.
Progress bar
A progress bar gives people insight in how far along the process of checking
out they are, and also adds the positive effect of gamification. This
gamification effect means people will want to get to the next step as fast as
possible. On our own checkout page we've decided to have people always step in
on the second step. The first step is choosing a product:
The reason we do this, is because the visitor has already taken the hardest
and biggest step in your process: he chose a product he wants to buy! So
validate that step and make them feel good about it. This way the visitor has
already done part of the process without any effort.
Product images
It has to be very clear that the product people have added to their shopping
cart is actually the product they want. Showing pictures of your product is by
far the easiest way to do this. An added bonus is that (decent) pictures
actually increase your conversion rate.
Inline validation
Another form of clarity is inline validation. This makes it very clear for
users whether they've correctly filled in the field or not:
This kind of immediate feedback is very clear and actually makes people more
likely to complete the entire form. And in fact, creating inline validation for
your form fields isn't hard at all, as we explained in a post on the technical
aspects of implementing inline validation recently.
Time
Time plays an important role in your conversion rate. You literally just have
seconds for your page to load and convince your visitor that they should stay on
that page.
Site speed
In order to convince your visitors within that few-second window, your site
needs to be fast enough. Having a website that's too slow, can literally cost
you money. This is especially important if you have a (large) user base on
mobile devices.
Cookie expire time
You can actually have your website "remember" what people added to their
shopping cart. This information is stored in cookies, and you can determine how
long this information will be stored. Only 50% of your shopping cart visitors
will buy within an hour. After that, it takes people a lot longer to make a
decision.
If you want 80% of your shopping cart visitors to buy what they added to the
cart, you'd have to save those items for 7 days. Doing this will make sure
people can leave your website, come back later and simply pick up where they
left off. This makes it a lot easier for people and removes the risk of having
people go through the choice and thought process of picking one of your products
twice.
Social proof
Social proof is a powerful way to persuade people. There's nothing more useful
for influencing people than other people telling them your product is awesome.
Social proof works because people will get more confidence in a product if they,
for instance, read good reviews from other people. The manufacturer of a product
is always going to say their product is fantastic. Having other people talk
about it, simply makes it more objective, and thus more trustworthy.
However, you have to take care, because social proof can also seriously
backfire. You have to make sure you're using positive social proof. Positive
social proof means providing people with things they can gain from using your
product, instead of what they're risking not to gain (negative social proof).
Telling people what they're risking, or worse, how many other people are risking
it, can have the exact opposite effect of what you're trying to achieve. People
will only find more reason not to use your product.
Testimonials
Testimonials are stories or pieces of text from actual users about your
product. If positive, these can have great impact on people. Always be sure to
use as much information of the person giving the testimonial as possible. Adding
pictures has been found to increase trust, even if the picture didn't make any
sense at all. However, a picture of a face always draws more attention:
This actually has a drawback, because people looking right at you will keep
your attention. If at all possible, it's best to have the eyes of the person in
the picture pointed to an important element on your page, such as your
call-to-action.
Lately we've been reading a lot about 'mini stories'. These are basically
testimonials, but written like short stories. When written right, mini stories
are supposed to have a kind of seductive effect on people.
Numbers
Telling people how many went before them in buying your products persuades
people to also buy your products, especially if it's a high number. This is due
to multiple things, among which peer pressure is probably the most important.
It's basically trust based on numbers. Peer pressure means people are afraid to
"stay behind" if a lot of other people have already done something. When using
this tactic, be sure to use the exact number of people who've bought something
or signed up, and to not round anything up. It turns out that for your visitors
exact numbers are more believable.
Authority
Telling people what other important people or businesses have used your
product or service is a great way of persuading people. Especially if you use
the kind of people and businesses you know your visitors will like. This is all
because of the Halo Effect, which means people's impression of you can be
influenced by their overall impression of you. So if you make that overall
impression more positive by naming those great names working with you, they'll
think more highly of you.
Up to you
Your checkout page needs every much bit of thought as the rest of your
website. In fact, if you manage to convert more people here, this will be the
closest thing to direct money you'll ever find in Conversion Rate Optimization.
So what do you think? Let us know!
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/D3fk9_NkTlU/checkout-page-optimization-just-follow-the-facts
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Follow the F.A.C.T.S.'
Posted by Yoast
Editor's note: This post was co-authored by Joost de Valk and his brother
Thijs de Valk.
At Yoast, we've recently written about how we've drastically changed our
checkout page. This process and our findings gave us the idea to do a best
practice of sorts on checkout pages. As it is, a lot of checkout pages are far
from optimal, and this short film from Google Analytics is rather harsh but lays
it out quite well:
There are some elements to a checkout page that, in general, really help your
conversion rate. Ignore these findings at your own peril. I'll be looking at the
following factors, all of which have a serious impact on your conversion rate:
Focus, Assurance, Clarity, Time, and Social proof.
Focus
A page needs focus for people to understand what it is you want. On the
checkout page this is doubly true; if your focus isn't on the process of
checking out, people will get confused. And confused people don't convert.
An easy way to add focus to your checkout page is to implement calls to
action. Calls to action are somewhat of a science, and people have performed a
lot of tests to find the call to action that will work on any website. However,
we believe it all depends on context.
Call to action
You should always use a color for your call to action (CTA) that stands out in
your design. Usually we recommend people use a color they haven't already used
in their design (or at least that page). Next, bigger is better. The bigger you
make your CTA, the more attention it will draw to itself, thus the more focus it
will render.
Obviously the size of your button needs to stay workable. Also think about the
shape of your CTA. We like to use calls to action that are shaped like an arrow,
because they give people a sense of direction. The shape of your CTA alone will
give people a sense of forward movement, which is associated with all things
positive:
Lastly, the copy on your CTA is of importance as well. In general, be short
and concise. People don't like reading buttons, they just want to know where it
leads.
Clutter
Especially on your checkout page, you need to remove as much clutter as
possible. By clutter we mean "mess" on your website that distracts from the main
goal. Any element on a page that's not aimed toward that page's main goal is
clutter, and too much clutter makes your page lose focus altogether.
Clutter that is "outbound" (takes your visitor to another page) is especially
bad. Make sure that the most important thing on the page is your checkout
process. This can mean removing breadcrumbs, products you're cross-selling and
sometimes even a "continue shopping" button.
Assurance
Assurance is something people crave. People have to feel safe on your website
and its pages, because if they don't, they simply won't spend their money there.
So be sure to give them the safest feeling possible.
Safety signs
One of the most important things is to assure people your website is ok using
safety signsâsigns that mean the page/site you're currently viewing is
free from malware and is "hacker proof." People want a visible affirmation that
the page they're viewing is safe, especially if that page is the checkout page.
They want assurance that their money will be safe. So don't just expect people
to understand your website is safe; show it.
Payment methods
People want to know as soon as possible if you're offering the payment method
they want to use. So it's best to show the credit card logos of the companies
you support. If you support PayPal, include that as well, obviously. To avoid
clutter, we've done this on our checkout page:
This way, it actually adds clarity to the payment options, assures people we
have their kind of payment method, and reduces clutter by not showing it
somewhere else.
Unexpected costs
As in the video, people do not like to be surprised at the counter. That's why
unexpected costs are the #1 reason people abandon their shopping carts. To
prevent this, you need to assure people that there won't be any unexpected
costs. This can be as simple as adding a line like "there will be no additional
costs" next to the total of the visitor's shopping cart.
Clarity
Clarity and conversion are often mentioned in the same sentence. If your copy
and your pages aren't clear, they just won't convert as much as they could. So
be sure to make your checkout page process as clear as possible.
Progress bar
A progress bar gives people insight in how far along the process of checking
out they are, and also adds the positive effect of gamification. This
gamification effect means people will want to get to the next step as fast as
possible. On our own checkout page we've decided to have people always step in
on the second step. The first step is choosing a product:
The reason we do this, is because the visitor has already taken the hardest
and biggest step in your process: he chose a product he wants to buy! So
validate that step and make them feel good about it. This way the visitor has
already done part of the process without any effort.
Product images
It has to be very clear that the product people have added to their shopping
cart is actually the product they want. Showing pictures of your product is by
far the easiest way to do this. An added bonus is that (decent) pictures
actually increase your conversion rate.
Inline validation
Another form of clarity is inline validation. This makes it very clear for
users whether they've correctly filled in the field or not:
This kind of immediate feedback is very clear and actually makes people more
likely to complete the entire form. And in fact, creating inline validation for
your form fields isn't hard at all, as we explained in a post on the technical
aspects of implementing inline validation recently.
Time
Time plays an important role in your conversion rate. You literally just have
seconds for your page to load and convince your visitor that they should stay on
that page.
Site speed
In order to convince your visitors within that few-second window, your site
needs to be fast enough. Having a website that's too slow, can literally cost
you money. This is especially important if you have a (large) user base on
mobile devices.
Cookie expire time
You can actually have your website "remember" what people added to their
shopping cart. This information is stored in cookies, and you can determine how
long this information will be stored. Only 50% of your shopping cart visitors
will buy within an hour. After that, it takes people a lot longer to make a
decision.
If you want 80% of your shopping cart visitors to buy what they added to the
cart, you'd have to save those items for 7 days. Doing this will make sure
people can leave your website, come back later and simply pick up where they
left off. This makes it a lot easier for people and removes the risk of having
people go through the choice and thought process of picking one of your products
twice.
Social proof
Social proof is a powerful way to persuade people. There's nothing more useful
for influencing people than other people telling them your product is awesome.
Social proof works because people will get more confidence in a product if they,
for instance, read good reviews from other people. The manufacturer of a product
is always going to say their product is fantastic. Having other people talk
about it, simply makes it more objective, and thus more trustworthy.
However, you have to take care, because social proof can also seriously
backfire. You have to make sure you're using positive social proof. Positive
social proof means providing people with things they can gain from using your
product, instead of what they're risking not to gain (negative social proof).
Telling people what they're risking, or worse, how many other people are risking
it, can have the exact opposite effect of what you're trying to achieve. People
will only find more reason not to use your product.
Testimonials
Testimonials are stories or pieces of text from actual users about your
product. If positive, these can have great impact on people. Always be sure to
use as much information of the person giving the testimonial as possible. Adding
pictures has been found to increase trust, even if the picture didn't make any
sense at all. However, a picture of a face always draws more attention:
This actually has a drawback, because people looking right at you will keep
your attention. If at all possible, it's best to have the eyes of the person in
the picture pointed to an important element on your page, such as your
call-to-action.
Lately we've been reading a lot about 'mini stories'. These are basically
testimonials, but written like short stories. When written right, mini stories
are supposed to have a kind of seductive effect on people.
Numbers
Telling people how many went before them in buying your products persuades
people to also buy your products, especially if it's a high number. This is due
to multiple things, among which peer pressure is probably the most important.
It's basically trust based on numbers. Peer pressure means people are afraid to
"stay behind" if a lot of other people have already done something. When using
this tactic, be sure to use the exact number of people who've bought something
or signed up, and to not round anything up. It turns out that for your visitors
exact numbers are more believable.
Authority
Telling people what other important people or businesses have used your
product or service is a great way of persuading people. Especially if you use
the kind of people and businesses you know your visitors will like. This is all
because of the Halo Effect, which means people's impression of you can be
influenced by their overall impression of you. So if you make that overall
impression more positive by naming those great names working with you, they'll
think more highly of you.
Up to you
Your checkout page needs every much bit of thought as the rest of your
website. In fact, if you manage to convert more people here, this will be the
closest thing to direct money you'll ever find in Conversion Rate Optimization.
So what do you think? Let us know!
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!
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/D3fk9_NkTlU/checkout-page-optimization-just-follow-the-facts
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[Build Backlinks Online] TITLE
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '7 Ways to Spruce Up Your Landing Pages for the Holidays' 
You may view the latest post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WordStreamBlog/~3/do3WmFWCAVk/seasonal-landing-pages You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
In my last post on ad text improvements for the holidays, I mentioned that your PPC landing pages are a critical component you need to tweak for the holiday season.
It stands to reason that a highly effective, holiday-targeted PPC campaign needs to incorporate contextually aligned landing pages that support the expectations of holiday shoppers that are clicking on your paid ads. This article is going to focus exclusively on improvements that you can make to your website's landing pages in order to maximize your performance potential during the holiday season.
Similar to my last post, we're going to categorize landing page tweaks into two specific areas.
Below is a quick outline of how I'd like to cover landing pages. The seven tips I provide below will tie in to these two key areas of focus that you should keep in mind anytime you are developing a landing page (beyond just the holiday season):
Two Key Areas of Focus for Landing Pages
- Creating Alignment with Ad Text and Search Context
- Driving for Conversions
Let's start by discussing how you can ensure that your landing pages are properly aligned with your ad text and the context of your prospect's search…
1. Emphasize Time-Sensitivity and Sense of Urgency
If your paid search ads are constantly reminding shoppers about your year-end deals, countdown promotions, etc. you absolutely need to communicate that same sense of urgency and time-sensitivity above-the-fold on your landing pages. Check out this distinct example from Amazon.com:
The Landing Page:
Chances are, Amazon.com is running a bull rush of holiday-themed text ads right now, many of which are likely promoting some degree of time-sensitivity combined with an urgent call-to-action. Amazon.com reinforces that type of messaging by placing a Black Friday Counter on one of their landing pages, further emphasizing the fact that these deals won't last.
If you are using any sort of urgent messaging in your ad text, look for ways to implement that language on your landing pages as well.
2. Prominently Display Promotions and Specials
If you are creating text ads that communicate specific promotions, be sure to make those exact promotions prominently visible on your landing pages. Let's check out another example…
L.L. Bean: Here's the Ad…
And here's the Landing Page…
As you can see, there is close alignment between the promotion in the ad text and the actual landing page header. L.L. Bean has done an excellent job ensuring that their "sale" and coupon code messaging in their ad text is prominently displayed on their landing page as well, right there above the fold (meaning, users don't have to scroll down to find it).
As a shopper, I know exactly what I'm going to get AND I am even more confident that I made the right choice because the promotion that I was interested in is clearly communicated to me a second time. I KNOW WHAT I NEED TO DO TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE PROMOTION! Providing this level of guidance and alignment to your prospects will reward you in the long run.
3. Provide a Clear Path to Conversion
This is a fairly basic recommendation, but one that tends to get overlooked more frequently than you may think.
Make it as easy as possible for your prospects to convert. This means ensuring that your prospects do not have to click more than two times to get to a conversion form. For e-commerce companies, it should be one click from your product to your order form. For service-oriented businesses, you should feature a conversion form directly on your landing page. Anything beyond 1 to 2 clicks to convert and you will see your bounce rates climb.
(Shameless Plug Alert: if you are a WordStream customer, you have access to a dedicated landing page builder and lead management tool right in our software that was built with PPC-optimized landing pages in mind. As an added bonus, any of our customers that register and verify a subdomain for their WordStream landing pages before Dec. 31, 2013 will be automatically entered to win an Apple iPad Mini!)
4. Ease of Navigation to Relevant Content
Similar to providing a clear path to conversion, online businesses should also consider making it as easy as possible for prospects to access relevant information that may give them a better chance to find more targeted content/offers and convert. A great example of this applied to the holiday season is REI's Gift Center. Let's check out the example:
REI: Here's the Landing Page…
Here's the Navigation Menu…
REI has made it exceptionally easy for its potential customers to navigate to even more gift ideas on their site by providing a unique, gift-oriented product menu in their navigation. Not only that, but they differentiated their "gift center" from the rest of the menu bar by highlighting it in red.
Now, a disclaimer. You'll hear conflicting opinions on this type of navigation. Many hardcore landing page experts (usually coming from the inbound marketing side of the universe) will balk at the idea of adding menu navigation to your landing pages. Some businesses simply don't have a choice as they don't have dedicated landing page builders that can incorporate that feature. Others will simply find that providing additional navigation from your PPC-specific landing pages opens up a lot of opportunity for additional conversions. Experiment with what you have, and don't listen to any absolute recommendations until you have some data to work with, especially during the holiday season, as this is probably the most important time of year for your landing pages to perform well.
5. Use Seasonal Color Themes and Images
First, an example.
Oriental Trading Company: Here's the Landing Page…
How's that for holiday spirit? It's almost… too cheery… Maybe I'm just Scrooge!
Regardless, if you have the capability, create landing pages that incorporate holiday-specific images and themes. If you want to wow your prospects right off the bat, a stylistically sound landing page can go a long way.
Just try not to go overboard…
6. Create Mobile-Optimized Landing Pages
You've heard it before, you're going to hear it again. The movement toward mobile is real, and you need to respond. Creating mobile-optimized landing pages will be a huge improvement to your holiday campaigns now that all of us are opted-in to enhanced campaigns with improved mobile targeting.
Imagine Christmas mornings all across the globe. I would be willing to bet that quite a few lucky individuals will be getting some sort of mobile device under the tree. And (*gasp*) what's that? A $100 gift card to their favorite chocolate shop where you can order online? Guess who's going to find your ad on their mobile device and try to make a purchase right there, that morning? You don't want to lose out on that type of business, and studies have shown that mobile purchases and general traffic spike massively during the holidays. Creating mobile-optimized landing pages is a must if you want to capitalize on this traffic.
If you need some quick resources for creating mobile landing pages, I recommend giving DudaMobile a look.
7. Enable Social Sharing and Customize Default Sharing Messages
Last, but not least: social media integration.
Developing landing pages that incorporate some level of social media sharing options is a great idea to capitalize on the giving and sharing spirit of your holiday shoppers. Check out this example from Moosejaw:
Moosejaw: Here's the Landing Page…
I've highlighted the social sharing buttons (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) on the left.
Enabling social sharing from your landing pages opens the door to allowing your shoppers to promote FOR you. In fact, you can make your biggest fan's job a little bit easier by customizing your default sharing messages from your unique landing pages. Depending on the tool that you are using to build landing pages, you should have the option to edit the sharing message that is automatically populated in the comment/tweet field of the link that your shoppers would like to share, making it exceptionally easy for your best customers to spread the cheer.
Shoppers like knowing that the companies that they are interested in are also connected to their common networks. Social sharing is an excellent feature to enable for the holiday season if you have not already.
At the end of the day, it's all about making your prospect's journey as smooth and satisfying as possible. Tight alignment between your ad text and landing pages is crucial to not only providing that experience that is likely to drive a conversion, but also to showing the Google Gods that your keywords deserve a nice little Quality Score boost this holiday season.
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.
[Build Backlinks Online] 2 New Programs Prove the Inmates are Running the Social Media Asylum
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '2 New Programs Prove the Inmates
are Running the Social Media Asylum'
If youre reading this, you probably had little doubt about the power of the
populace armed with social media to profoundly impact the behavior of
companies. But, if you had even a scintilla of suspicion that it wasnt true, it
should have evaporated this week based on these two events. You Gotta Fight []2
New Programs Prove the Inmates are Running the Social Media Asylum is a post
from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-case-studies/2-new-programs-prove-the-inmates-are-running-the-social-media-asylum/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=2-new-programs-prove-the-inmates-are-running-the-social-media-asylum
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
are Running the Social Media Asylum'
If youre reading this, you probably had little doubt about the power of the
populace armed with social media to profoundly impact the behavior of
companies. But, if you had even a scintilla of suspicion that it wasnt true, it
should have evaporated this week based on these two events. You Gotta Fight []2
New Programs Prove the Inmates are Running the Social Media Asylum is a post
from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-case-studies/2-new-programs-prove-the-inmates-are-running-the-social-media-asylum/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=2-new-programs-prove-the-inmates-are-running-the-social-media-asylum
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday 26 November 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] Automate Your SEO Reporting by Exporting Your Leads into Excel
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Automate Your SEO Reporting by
Exporting Your Leads into Excel'
Posted by Brian_HarnishThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to
the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz,
Inc.
For any SEO who collects email leads from web forms, the dreaded part of their
existence tends to be the end of the month, when it comes to reporting
conversion results to clientsâverifying, re-verifying, downloading, and
exporting them to generate the all-important month-end reports. It can take
hours and can be very tedious, but the information gleaned from this process is
well worth it. There are, however, ways to optimize your workflow to the point
that it almost feels like cheating your way through the process.
By using standalone programs or macros (mini scripts within a program), a
project that would normally take hours turns into minutes, and I want to take
this opportunity to teach you how to do this on your own. I will use a
standalone program and a macro that I found through my research to demonstrate
the process so you can get a better idea of what is involved.
How to scrape leads from your Gmail (or almost any other email client)
There are a wide variety of ways to scrape leads from Gmail. You can spend the
money to get a program like UBot that will help you automate the task without
much effort. You can get a program like iMacros, and spend the time learning how
to build proper macros that will scrape from your email box. You can spend the
time to learn how to program scripts using Grease Monkey, or you can program
your own stand-alone scripts. Whatever you do, you will want a solution that is
as quick and easy as possible and helps to automate the task without adding much
effort. I found a program on Black Hat World that is made to work on Windows, so
you Mac users will need to install Windows to use it. You can download the
program here.
While I am aware of the hesitation involved in downloading anything from
black-hat websites, my own tests of this tool have worked out well. There are
comments and reviews about this tool around the web, and it seems to work well
for many users. My own research has not found an instance of this tool doing
anything nefarious behind the scenes, and I would not hesitate to use it in my
own email scraping.
How it works
This program works by accessing the Gmail account that is added to it and
exporting the To:, From:, Body:, and Date: fields from each email. Here is how
to use it:
Select the email settings you wish to use to download your emails. You can
select To:, From:, Subject, and Date. The "Body" export is disabled; according
to the tool's creator it would end up scraping all of the HTML.
Enter your username. This is your full email address (username@domainname.com).
Enter your password.
Enter the server and port number you wish to use. By default, it's set to
pop.gmail.com and port # 995.
Select whether or not you wish to use a secure connection. This will allow the
program to access Gmail whether or not a secure connection is available. If your
email does not actually require a secure connection, be sure to uncheck the box.
Once these settings are selected, it will save a file in the email extractor
folder with a name that looks like this: 10-1-2013-1-00 AM_Username@gmail.com.
This program is quite useful for those who either do not have or just don't use
Microsoft Outlook. If you have Outlook but are not comfortable with downloading
and using this program, you can set Gmail to send your messages to Outlook, and
then set up Outlook macros to to export all messages to Excel (covered later in
this article).
Be sure you don't violate your host's terms of service
This program can also work for other email hosts. Try it! Be sure to put in
your applicable login details, and you should be able to scrape your emails
without any trouble. However, be sure that you are actually allowed to scrape
email from your host. Not all hosts will allow you to do so. Before using
egregious scraping on your email account, just double check your terms of
service (ToS) so that you don't accidentally get yourself banned from your email
service. Why would an email service not allow scraping? Well, it can cause
bandwidth issues if you have hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of emails to
export. If this becomes an issue, you may raise an eyebrow or two at your email
provider. So, be sure that you really want to do this if you want to place such
a large load of use on the email services. The author of this article is not
responsible for things that may happen if you do not follow specific terms of
service regulations. For your reference, here are the terms of service from
several common providers:
Gmail ToS: Gmail does not have any terms that specifically prohibit scraping
emails. While Gmail does state you may not access it using a method other than
the interface, this is a very gray area that does not provide examples. If
someone is collecting lead information for a valid reason like monthly reporting
for their own use, there shouldn't be an issue. If, however, someone is using
access via another method in order to take down the Gmail service, then I would
imagine this is where the Terms of Service here comes into play. And this is why
I mentioned the large bandwidth usage that downloading thousands of emails can
cause to a server, for example. Be sure you really want to proceed before doing
so and make sure you won't be somehow banned from your email service as a
result. We are not responsible for egregious misuse of a service with intentions
to cause interference of the service through significant bandwidth use.
MSN ToS: Does not have any terms that ban exporting emails using any of these
methods to export emails. (Be sure to read your own ToS).
Yahoo! ToS: Does not seem to have any terms that prohibit exporting emails.
(Be sure to read your own TOS).
Hostgator email limits: While ToS doesn't specifically seem to limit scraping
or exporting of emails, there are policies and limits in place. According to
Hostgator's mail policy and limits page, "Each connecting IP is limited to 30
POP checks per hour." Possible interference issues with Hostgator services and
this software can occur if you are using the software 100s of times per hour,
for example. However, because it uses at least one pop check in order to
download your emails, you shouldn't have too many issues unless you continue
multiple downloads of emails from your account per hour. In which case, you will
"likely get a password error indicating that the login is incorrect." Such an
issue corrects itself within an hour and the email checking will automatically
unlock.
Also according to their mail policy and limits page, their VPS plan and
Dedicated do not have the same restrictions as their shared accounts do, so you
will probably have more success with high-volume scraping on your own private
servers.
A fair warning, however: I haven't specifically tested this with Hostgator, so
be sure to use caution when exporting too many times.
Importing your scraped file into Excel
Once you have scraped your email and it saves it as a text file, it shows up
all garbled. What we want to do now is import it into Excel so it displays all
of the tab-delimited items as columns, so that we don't have to manually copy
and paste every single one. To do this, let's open up our file in Excel by
clicking on File > Import.
It will ask you: What type of file do you want to import? By default it has
selected the CSV format but let's select the text file format since our program
saved this to a text file.
Now, click the file that you want to open and click on "Get Data." The text
import wizard will pop up showing you settings to choose from. Select the
"Delimited" option unless it is already checked by default. Then click on Next.
In this step you can set the delimiters that your data contains. Remember when
we selected the semicolon back while importing our file? Select the semicolon
option here. Then, let's click on next.
Here, we can set up our columns and set the data format. For our purposes,
however, let's just go with the default options.
Now, it will ask you where you want to put the data. You have a choice of
Existing Sheet (which starts at =$A$1), new sheet, and pivot table. For the
purposes of this article, let's just go with the default and click on OK.
Here, you see we have perfectly aligned columns and data without much work.
Now you can move forward with formatting these columns and data in whatever
orientations or pivot tables you like.
How to download leads from Outlook to Excel
For those who use Outlook, depending on your version, it can be cumbersome to
get the data out of the program and can take longer than in just about every
other program. Thankfully, Outlook features macros which can be used to export
all of your data in the span of just a few seconds!
Step 1: Find or create the macro script you want to use
There are a ton of options and configurations available for this task. For our
purposes, we will use modified versions of the scripts located here.
Before we get started, we will need to get the basic code from the very first
code snippet, shown below. This code only exports the Subject, Received Time,
and Sender of the email message. Our goal is to modify this script so that our
new code will extract the entire body of the message and output it to the
spreadsheet as well. Don't worry! I am going over each line of code that we
modify in this tutorial! This way, you will understand exactly what we are doing
and why.
Sub ExportMessagesToExcel()
Dim olkMsg As Object, _
excApp As Object, _
excWkb As Object, _
excWks As Object, _
intRow As Integer, _
intVersion As Integer, _
strFilename As String
strFilename = InputBox("Enter a filename (including path) to save the exported
messages to.", "Export Messages to Excel")
If strFilename "" Then
intVersion = GetOutlookVersion()
Set excApp = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
Set excWkb = excApp.Workbooks.Add()<br> Set excWks = excWkb.ActiveSheet
'Write Excel Column Headers
With excWks
.Cells(1, 1) = "Subject"
.Cells(1, 2) = "Received"
.Cells(1, 3) = "Sender"
End With
intRow = 2
'Write messages to spreadsheet
For Each olkMsg In Application.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder.Items
'Only export messages, not receipts or appointment requests, etc.
If olkMsg.Class = olMail Then
'Add a row for each field in the message you want to export
excWks.Cells(intRow, 1) = olkMsg.Subject
excWks.Cells(intRow, 2) = olkMsg.ReceivedTime
excWks.Cells(intRow, 3) = GetSMTPAddress(olkMsg, intVersion)
intRow = intRow + 1
End If
Next
Set olkMsg = Nothing
excWkb.SaveAs strFilename
excWkb.Close
End If
Set excWks = Nothing
Set excWkb = Nothing
Set excApp = Nothing
MsgBox "Process complete. A total of " & intRow - 2 & " messages were
exported.", vbInformation + vbOKOnly, "Export messages to Excel"
End Sub
Private Function GetSMTPAddress(Item As Outlook.MailItem, intOutlookVersion As
Integer) As String
Dim olkSnd As Outlook.AddressEntry, olkEnt As Object
On Error Resume Next
Select Case intOutlookVersion
Case Is < 14
If Item.SenderEmailType = "EX" Then
GetSMTPAddress = SMTP2007(Item)
Else
GetSMTPAddress = Item.SenderEmailAddress
End If
Case Else
Set olkSnd = Item.Sender
If olkSnd.AddressEntryUserType = olExchangeUserAddressEntry Then
Set olkEnt = olkSnd.GetExchangeUser
GetSMTPAddress = olkEnt.PrimarySmtpAddress
Else
GetSMTPAddress = Item.SenderEmailAddress
End If
End Select
On Error GoTo 0
Set olkPrp = Nothing
Set olkSnd = Nothing
Set olkEnt = Nothing
End Function
In order to get started, fire up your version of Outlook. I'm using a
relatively old dinosaur version (Outlook 2003), but the steps can easily be
found online for all versions. Most Windows versions should allow you to use
Alt+11 to open the Visual Basic code editor, which we are going to fire up next.
To do this, follow these steps:
Step 1: Click on Tools.Step 2: Click on Macro.Step 3: Click on Visual Basic
Editor.
Next, we are going to copy and paste our code here into the editor window.
Now, I used the revision 1 script and modified the original version to extract
text from the body by coding the following lines. One after line 19, and one
after line 29:
.Cells(1, 4) = "Message" <-- This line tells the macro program to add
another column to the first row that is labeled "Message". This will add a new
column that displays the text extracted from the email. This one was added after
line 19.
.excWks.Cells(intRow, 4) = olkMsg.Body <-- This line tells the macro
program to extract the message text from the Body of the email. This way, we
have an extremely easy and fast method of verifying all of our important
conversion emails that we are going to be using in our reporting.
Now that we have our script ready, let's go to the Visual Basic macro editor.
In the project window underneath the project, right-click within the window,
click on insert, and then click on module. This will bring up a VbaProject.OTM
file that you can add your code into, as shown in the following screenshot:
Once you have made your desired modifications (or if you desire to use the
original script and copied and pasted it, just click on the floppy disk in the
upper left hand corner and save the file. Or you can use Ctrl+S to save it.
Then, close the Visual Basic editor.
Next, we're going to run our newly modified macro! First, make sure the folder
that you want is selected and all the leads you want to export to an excel
spreadsheet are in that folder. Then, let's click on Tools > Macro >
Macros.
Next, you will see a Macros window pop up. We need to click on the macro we
want to run, and then click on run.
True to the nature of the script, you will be prompted with a dialog box that
asks you what you want to name your file. Let's call it "ExcelExportTest". It
will save it into your My Documents folder. Fire up Excel, and open your brand
new spreadsheet. Here is the final version of our example, complete with all
extracted elements of that folder:
Wrap-up
By using these methods, it is possible to greatly reduce the time that you
spend on manually verifying and copying/pasting leads from your email box. It
will be completely automated! Once you get the hang of using these methods, most
of your time will be spent in the formatting phase that comes next. So, it will
be necessary to spend this time adding some proper formatting that will help
make your reports beautiful and impactful.
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/BtkbNd0uBQk/automate-seo-reporting-export-leads-into-excel
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Exporting Your Leads into Excel'
Posted by Brian_HarnishThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to
the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz,
Inc.
For any SEO who collects email leads from web forms, the dreaded part of their
existence tends to be the end of the month, when it comes to reporting
conversion results to clientsâverifying, re-verifying, downloading, and
exporting them to generate the all-important month-end reports. It can take
hours and can be very tedious, but the information gleaned from this process is
well worth it. There are, however, ways to optimize your workflow to the point
that it almost feels like cheating your way through the process.
By using standalone programs or macros (mini scripts within a program), a
project that would normally take hours turns into minutes, and I want to take
this opportunity to teach you how to do this on your own. I will use a
standalone program and a macro that I found through my research to demonstrate
the process so you can get a better idea of what is involved.
How to scrape leads from your Gmail (or almost any other email client)
There are a wide variety of ways to scrape leads from Gmail. You can spend the
money to get a program like UBot that will help you automate the task without
much effort. You can get a program like iMacros, and spend the time learning how
to build proper macros that will scrape from your email box. You can spend the
time to learn how to program scripts using Grease Monkey, or you can program
your own stand-alone scripts. Whatever you do, you will want a solution that is
as quick and easy as possible and helps to automate the task without adding much
effort. I found a program on Black Hat World that is made to work on Windows, so
you Mac users will need to install Windows to use it. You can download the
program here.
While I am aware of the hesitation involved in downloading anything from
black-hat websites, my own tests of this tool have worked out well. There are
comments and reviews about this tool around the web, and it seems to work well
for many users. My own research has not found an instance of this tool doing
anything nefarious behind the scenes, and I would not hesitate to use it in my
own email scraping.
How it works
This program works by accessing the Gmail account that is added to it and
exporting the To:, From:, Body:, and Date: fields from each email. Here is how
to use it:
Select the email settings you wish to use to download your emails. You can
select To:, From:, Subject, and Date. The "Body" export is disabled; according
to the tool's creator it would end up scraping all of the HTML.
Enter your username. This is your full email address (username@domainname.com).
Enter your password.
Enter the server and port number you wish to use. By default, it's set to
pop.gmail.com and port # 995.
Select whether or not you wish to use a secure connection. This will allow the
program to access Gmail whether or not a secure connection is available. If your
email does not actually require a secure connection, be sure to uncheck the box.
Once these settings are selected, it will save a file in the email extractor
folder with a name that looks like this: 10-1-2013-1-00 AM_Username@gmail.com.
This program is quite useful for those who either do not have or just don't use
Microsoft Outlook. If you have Outlook but are not comfortable with downloading
and using this program, you can set Gmail to send your messages to Outlook, and
then set up Outlook macros to to export all messages to Excel (covered later in
this article).
Be sure you don't violate your host's terms of service
This program can also work for other email hosts. Try it! Be sure to put in
your applicable login details, and you should be able to scrape your emails
without any trouble. However, be sure that you are actually allowed to scrape
email from your host. Not all hosts will allow you to do so. Before using
egregious scraping on your email account, just double check your terms of
service (ToS) so that you don't accidentally get yourself banned from your email
service. Why would an email service not allow scraping? Well, it can cause
bandwidth issues if you have hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of emails to
export. If this becomes an issue, you may raise an eyebrow or two at your email
provider. So, be sure that you really want to do this if you want to place such
a large load of use on the email services. The author of this article is not
responsible for things that may happen if you do not follow specific terms of
service regulations. For your reference, here are the terms of service from
several common providers:
Gmail ToS: Gmail does not have any terms that specifically prohibit scraping
emails. While Gmail does state you may not access it using a method other than
the interface, this is a very gray area that does not provide examples. If
someone is collecting lead information for a valid reason like monthly reporting
for their own use, there shouldn't be an issue. If, however, someone is using
access via another method in order to take down the Gmail service, then I would
imagine this is where the Terms of Service here comes into play. And this is why
I mentioned the large bandwidth usage that downloading thousands of emails can
cause to a server, for example. Be sure you really want to proceed before doing
so and make sure you won't be somehow banned from your email service as a
result. We are not responsible for egregious misuse of a service with intentions
to cause interference of the service through significant bandwidth use.
MSN ToS: Does not have any terms that ban exporting emails using any of these
methods to export emails. (Be sure to read your own ToS).
Yahoo! ToS: Does not seem to have any terms that prohibit exporting emails.
(Be sure to read your own TOS).
Hostgator email limits: While ToS doesn't specifically seem to limit scraping
or exporting of emails, there are policies and limits in place. According to
Hostgator's mail policy and limits page, "Each connecting IP is limited to 30
POP checks per hour." Possible interference issues with Hostgator services and
this software can occur if you are using the software 100s of times per hour,
for example. However, because it uses at least one pop check in order to
download your emails, you shouldn't have too many issues unless you continue
multiple downloads of emails from your account per hour. In which case, you will
"likely get a password error indicating that the login is incorrect." Such an
issue corrects itself within an hour and the email checking will automatically
unlock.
Also according to their mail policy and limits page, their VPS plan and
Dedicated do not have the same restrictions as their shared accounts do, so you
will probably have more success with high-volume scraping on your own private
servers.
A fair warning, however: I haven't specifically tested this with Hostgator, so
be sure to use caution when exporting too many times.
Importing your scraped file into Excel
Once you have scraped your email and it saves it as a text file, it shows up
all garbled. What we want to do now is import it into Excel so it displays all
of the tab-delimited items as columns, so that we don't have to manually copy
and paste every single one. To do this, let's open up our file in Excel by
clicking on File > Import.
It will ask you: What type of file do you want to import? By default it has
selected the CSV format but let's select the text file format since our program
saved this to a text file.
Now, click the file that you want to open and click on "Get Data." The text
import wizard will pop up showing you settings to choose from. Select the
"Delimited" option unless it is already checked by default. Then click on Next.
In this step you can set the delimiters that your data contains. Remember when
we selected the semicolon back while importing our file? Select the semicolon
option here. Then, let's click on next.
Here, we can set up our columns and set the data format. For our purposes,
however, let's just go with the default options.
Now, it will ask you where you want to put the data. You have a choice of
Existing Sheet (which starts at =$A$1), new sheet, and pivot table. For the
purposes of this article, let's just go with the default and click on OK.
Here, you see we have perfectly aligned columns and data without much work.
Now you can move forward with formatting these columns and data in whatever
orientations or pivot tables you like.
How to download leads from Outlook to Excel
For those who use Outlook, depending on your version, it can be cumbersome to
get the data out of the program and can take longer than in just about every
other program. Thankfully, Outlook features macros which can be used to export
all of your data in the span of just a few seconds!
Step 1: Find or create the macro script you want to use
There are a ton of options and configurations available for this task. For our
purposes, we will use modified versions of the scripts located here.
Before we get started, we will need to get the basic code from the very first
code snippet, shown below. This code only exports the Subject, Received Time,
and Sender of the email message. Our goal is to modify this script so that our
new code will extract the entire body of the message and output it to the
spreadsheet as well. Don't worry! I am going over each line of code that we
modify in this tutorial! This way, you will understand exactly what we are doing
and why.
Sub ExportMessagesToExcel()
Dim olkMsg As Object, _
excApp As Object, _
excWkb As Object, _
excWks As Object, _
intRow As Integer, _
intVersion As Integer, _
strFilename As String
strFilename = InputBox("Enter a filename (including path) to save the exported
messages to.", "Export Messages to Excel")
If strFilename "" Then
intVersion = GetOutlookVersion()
Set excApp = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
Set excWkb = excApp.Workbooks.Add()<br> Set excWks = excWkb.ActiveSheet
'Write Excel Column Headers
With excWks
.Cells(1, 1) = "Subject"
.Cells(1, 2) = "Received"
.Cells(1, 3) = "Sender"
End With
intRow = 2
'Write messages to spreadsheet
For Each olkMsg In Application.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder.Items
'Only export messages, not receipts or appointment requests, etc.
If olkMsg.Class = olMail Then
'Add a row for each field in the message you want to export
excWks.Cells(intRow, 1) = olkMsg.Subject
excWks.Cells(intRow, 2) = olkMsg.ReceivedTime
excWks.Cells(intRow, 3) = GetSMTPAddress(olkMsg, intVersion)
intRow = intRow + 1
End If
Next
Set olkMsg = Nothing
excWkb.SaveAs strFilename
excWkb.Close
End If
Set excWks = Nothing
Set excWkb = Nothing
Set excApp = Nothing
MsgBox "Process complete. A total of " & intRow - 2 & " messages were
exported.", vbInformation + vbOKOnly, "Export messages to Excel"
End Sub
Private Function GetSMTPAddress(Item As Outlook.MailItem, intOutlookVersion As
Integer) As String
Dim olkSnd As Outlook.AddressEntry, olkEnt As Object
On Error Resume Next
Select Case intOutlookVersion
Case Is < 14
If Item.SenderEmailType = "EX" Then
GetSMTPAddress = SMTP2007(Item)
Else
GetSMTPAddress = Item.SenderEmailAddress
End If
Case Else
Set olkSnd = Item.Sender
If olkSnd.AddressEntryUserType = olExchangeUserAddressEntry Then
Set olkEnt = olkSnd.GetExchangeUser
GetSMTPAddress = olkEnt.PrimarySmtpAddress
Else
GetSMTPAddress = Item.SenderEmailAddress
End If
End Select
On Error GoTo 0
Set olkPrp = Nothing
Set olkSnd = Nothing
Set olkEnt = Nothing
End Function
In order to get started, fire up your version of Outlook. I'm using a
relatively old dinosaur version (Outlook 2003), but the steps can easily be
found online for all versions. Most Windows versions should allow you to use
Alt+11 to open the Visual Basic code editor, which we are going to fire up next.
To do this, follow these steps:
Step 1: Click on Tools.Step 2: Click on Macro.Step 3: Click on Visual Basic
Editor.
Next, we are going to copy and paste our code here into the editor window.
Now, I used the revision 1 script and modified the original version to extract
text from the body by coding the following lines. One after line 19, and one
after line 29:
.Cells(1, 4) = "Message" <-- This line tells the macro program to add
another column to the first row that is labeled "Message". This will add a new
column that displays the text extracted from the email. This one was added after
line 19.
.excWks.Cells(intRow, 4) = olkMsg.Body <-- This line tells the macro
program to extract the message text from the Body of the email. This way, we
have an extremely easy and fast method of verifying all of our important
conversion emails that we are going to be using in our reporting.
Now that we have our script ready, let's go to the Visual Basic macro editor.
In the project window underneath the project, right-click within the window,
click on insert, and then click on module. This will bring up a VbaProject.OTM
file that you can add your code into, as shown in the following screenshot:
Once you have made your desired modifications (or if you desire to use the
original script and copied and pasted it, just click on the floppy disk in the
upper left hand corner and save the file. Or you can use Ctrl+S to save it.
Then, close the Visual Basic editor.
Next, we're going to run our newly modified macro! First, make sure the folder
that you want is selected and all the leads you want to export to an excel
spreadsheet are in that folder. Then, let's click on Tools > Macro >
Macros.
Next, you will see a Macros window pop up. We need to click on the macro we
want to run, and then click on run.
True to the nature of the script, you will be prompted with a dialog box that
asks you what you want to name your file. Let's call it "ExcelExportTest". It
will save it into your My Documents folder. Fire up Excel, and open your brand
new spreadsheet. Here is the final version of our example, complete with all
extracted elements of that folder:
Wrap-up
By using these methods, it is possible to greatly reduce the time that you
spend on manually verifying and copying/pasting leads from your email box. It
will be completely automated! Once you get the hang of using these methods, most
of your time will be spent in the formatting phase that comes next. So, it will
be necessary to spend this time adding some proper formatting that will help
make your reports beautiful and impactful.
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