Website Magazine December 2015

3 Pillars of Social Login

THE MAGAZINE FOR WEBSITE SUCCESS DECEMBER 2015

Everyday & Everywhere

Web Analytics INSIDE THIS ISSUE...

The SMB Content Marketing Checklist Solving the Web’s Cruft Problem Build Business Models with a CRO Focus

PLUS

0 5 P O T SEO Tools

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Why Unified Commerce Platform is a Must for Business Growth

Top 9 Tips to Consider When Selecting an E-Commerce Platform

To be successful in omnichannel commerce, companies can no longer rely on legacy siloed or homegrown business applications. No matter what a systems integrator tells you, these siloed bits of technology will never communicate as effectively as one unified platform.

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Executing a multi-channel business requires the right e-commerce platform.

Here’s our take on what a small- or medium-size business should consider when choosing their new e-commerce platform or re-platforming to replace legacy systems.

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12 Campaigns to Run this Holiday

The ROI of Responsive Design

Automated Replenishment Guide

Back in the Hopper: The Marketplace Fairness Act

As all retailers know, the holiday season is the most wonderful time of the year, if you’re ready for it. In this eBook we will explore key tips and tricks to keep your customers before, during and after the holidays, as well as the top 12 campaigns to run this year.

Sponsored by Windsor Circle

Don’t let your customers run out of their favorite products. By leveraging predictive analytics, powered by Windsor Circle, you can ensure your customers never miss an order. Download this free guide to learn how to set up automated, data-driven replenishment emails and benefit from recurring revenue.

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By now, the concept of responsive Web design is well known, and increasingly perceived as a necessity. Mobile shopping is soaring. Download our eBook discussing the ROI of responsive design and how to build the case to your executives for why responsive technology will grow your sales.

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Three versions of remote sales tax legislation are in circulation and each would create different consequences for those selling online. Read this two-page overview to learn why and how passage of a federal Internet sales tax law could impact your business.

Sponsored by Avalara

Download free at www.WebsiteMagazine.com/resources

Everyday & Everywhere

Web Analytics

24

Paying regular and rigorous attention to website performance and analytics is considered fundamental to the success of each and every digital enterprise; but it’s only the first step. Web workers and the enterprises that employ them need to know where to look and how to use that information once it has been found to cross-sell, upsell, plan and most importantly, innovate and make measurable improvements.

Explore Website Magazine’s

THIS MONTH IN WEBSITE MAGAZINE

DEPARTMENTS

Call for New 30 AVisibility Practices

09

Publishers everywhere are at the mercy of the “domain average” metric used to establish viewability scores, but there are better options.

10

Wealthy Webbies

To create a distinctive advantage over competitors, it has to be done with portions of the business they cannot easily inspect or duplicate.

34 Post-Holiday Email Retention With bargain and gift hunters galore, the winter months improve retailers’ email lists but the focus should then shift to retention.

36

Using Psychology to Improve Conversions

While there is no magic formula for content or design, it is possible to understand a target audience and which elements prompt their action.

38 3 Pillars of Social Login

Using social login to build complete customer profiles and create seamless experiences requires that brands understand these key elements.

Enterprise Ready: Big Data’s Impact on Revenue & Marketing

12

32 CRO-Focused Business Models

Stat Watch:

Small Business Lab: Content Marketing Checklist

13

Quiz Time: This Year’s Biggest ‘Net Developments

14

Top 50: SEO Software

16

Mastering Search: SEO Roles by Department

18

E-Commerce Express: Shopping Cart Recovery

20 40

Design & Development: Solving the Web’s Cruft Problem

Web Commentary: The Attention Economy

GET THE DIGITAL SCOOP Check out Website Magazine’s email newsletters covering search, e-commerce, social, design and more at wsm.co/webscoop.

From the

EDITOR Changing Perspective on Web Analytics It’s OK to admit – Web analytics can be confusing (and a bit of a bore).

Find Website Magazine at these Internet industry tradeshows.

Affiliate Summit Jan. 11-12 Las Vegas, NV NRF Big Show Jan. 17-19 New York, NY eTail Feb. 22-25 Palm Springs, CA

Except, it’s not; actually, it’s one of the single most important activities today’s enterprises and marketers can engage in as there is no better (data-based and repeatedly proven) way to correct what’s wrong and set a business on the course to success. If your company is serious about making improvements, analytics is where to start.

What many fail to understand about the practice of analytics is that it requires detailed attention every day and from every corner of the enterprise.

There needs to be a culture that supports such initiatives, and personnel committed to its success. Those that do adopt a data-driven culture (focusing more on the successful completion of goals rather than aggregating vanity metrics), enable access to meaningful data among key personnel and set consistent performance benchmarks are those able to make optimal use of their digital presence.

It’s time to change the industry perspective on Web analytics. In this month’s feature of Website Magazine, the focus is on helping readers engage in a useful and productive analytics initiative, discover the right tools and tactics to use, and learn how to overcome the implementation hurdles to capitalize on the true power of analytics. It’s time to start putting analytics to good use in every enterprise.

This issue also includes guidance on many other topics essential to ‘Net success. Website Magazine readers will learn how to improve their big data performance, understand how search engine optimization roles vary by company department and discover ways to eliminate the cruft from their digital experiences. There are also other very insightful contributions on email marketing, lead generation, viewability and more that should not be missed.

As always, we hope you enjoy this issue and invite you to join us on the ‘Net where our editors and industry contributors explore the topics that matter most to digital success.

Best Web Wishes, Peter@WebsiteMagazine.com

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Website Magazine, Volume 10, Issue 12, December 2015, (ISSN# 1942-0633) is published 12 times a year, January through December by Website Services, Inc., 999 E. Touhy Ave., Des Plaines, IL 60018. Periodicals Postage Paid at Des Plaines, IL and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Website Magazine, 999 E. Touhy Ave., Des Plaines, IL 60018.

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BRIEFS

QUICK HITS Data Scientists Winning at Life & Work Data from Glassdoor reveals that data scientists have the best work-life balance with a rating of 4.2 out of 5.0, followed by SEO managers (4.1) and talent acquisition specialists (4.0). That said, work-life balance has actually decreased in recent years, with data showing overall work-life satisfaction ratings falling from 3.5 in 2009 to 3.2 in 2015.

The Best Customer Service Channel Is… Millennials favor the online world while baby boomers prefer the offline – at least when it comes to customer service. According to a recent study from Sitecore, millennials are almost three times more likely to believe personal technology brands are best in treating their customers, while baby boomers are nearly 80 percent more likely to believe brick-and-mortar retailers treat their customers best. Regardless of channel, businesses need to make customer service a priority, as 89 percent of the study’s respondents said they would switch brands if they received poor customer service.

The Perfect Marketing Email The perfect marketing email includes percent-off deals, question marks and 6-10 word subject lines. This data comes from a Retention Science report, which shows that 38 percent of customers are more likely to click an email with a percentoff deal, while 47 percent are more likely to convert when compared to emails with dollar-off deals. What’s more, punctuation marks can have an impact on open rates, with data showing question marks increase opens by 44 percent when compared to exclamation points.

$ WHO GOT PAID? $33 Million

Social intelligence company Brandwatch has completed a $33 million Series C funding round led by new investor Partech Ventures. The funding will be used to accelerate the development of the company’s core technologies and products.

$2 Billion

In an acquisition reportedly valued at $2 billion, IBM is purchasing The Weather Company’s B2B, mobile and Web-based properties including Weather.com.

The acquisition is expected to be used for IBM’s new Watson IoT (Internet of Things) Unit and Watson IoT cloud platform.

$5.9 Billion In a blockbuster

acquisition in the mobile gaming industry, Activision Blizzard has entered into an agreement to acquire King Digital Entertainment (the maker of Candy Crush) for $5.9 billion. Activision Blizzard expects the acquisition will position the company as a global leader in interactive entertainment across mobile, console and PC platforms.

? OF THE MONTH

QUESTION

What is your company’s digital resolution for the New Year, and why?

To answer this question and possibly be included in an upcoming issue of Website Magazine, visit wsm.co/decqotm.

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Net

BRIEFS POPULAR WITH WM READERS 7 Plugins Every WordPress Site Should Use +

wsm.co/7plugins

A fast, secure and user-friendly site is crucial for better search positioning, user engagement and to drive conversions. These WordPress plugins can help Web professionals achieve just that.

APP FOCUS Instagram Unveils Boomerang Instagram is making images even better with its new mobile app, dubbed Boomerang. Users can leverage the app to stitch a burst of photos together into a high-quality mini video that plays forward and backward. What’s more, users have the ability to share their Boomerang videos to Instagram and Facebook directly from the app.

Communities for Care, Content and Conversions +

wsm.co/sapcare

Ratings and reviews are an integral part of today’s shopping experience. To help retailers generate the content they need, SAP Jam unveiled a new Communities solution in October.

Need More Customer Data?

Improve Your Design +

wsm.co/desdata15

For most businesses, customer data is as good as revenue. Not every enterprise knows, however, just how much a website’s design can impact the personal information a visitor decides to disclose.

# WEBTECHWATCH + LaunchKit: The new Super User Dashboard (https://launchkit.io/users) from LaunchKit provides mobile developers visibility into the users who are opening/engaging with their app the most. Just install the open-source SDK, define the “Super User” and LaunchKit will track their activity including app opens, total time in app, taps on screen and screens loaded, all without fingerprinting or advertising identifiers. Developers can also group their users by quality and target those users with specific messaging.

Discover more apps at ApplicationMagazine.com.

Have tips, stories, or funding or acquisition news to share?

Tweet us @WebsiteMagazine

Stat

WATCH

Wealthiest Webbies 615:1

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has the tech world’s highest ratio of CEO pay to median worker pay – earning 615 times (or about $85 million) an average Microsoft worker’s salary (or roughly $137,000) according to 2015 Glassdoor data.

While Nadella is not yet one of the richest people in tech (his initial pay package likely skewed the ratio), Oracle Executive Chairman Larry Ellison’s pay ratio isn’t far behind at 573:1.

Oracle’s Ellison also sits second on a list of 100 tech billionaires and millionaires – with an estimated net worth of $50 billion. Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates tops the list ($80 billion).

While tech titans like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos ($48 billion), Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg ($41 billion) and Google’s Larry Page ($33 billion) round out the top five wealthiest people in tech, there are some industry disruptors on the list who weren’t there as recently as a year ago.

Uber Co-Founders Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, for example, have a reported net worth of $6 billion each, but were not on any Forbes list prior to 2015, proving the tech industry is still quite lucrative for upstarts. This is especially true for software.

In fact, Q3 2015 data from Pricewaterhouse Coopers indicates that despite being down 17 percent in the number of funding deals, the software industry receives the highest level of funding for all industries, receiving $5.8 billion going into 412 deals.

20,000

U.S.-based developers earn more annually than any other country ($89,631.68), but do not have the most purchasing power as they can only buy roughly 20,000 Big Macs with that amount, while their peers in the Ukraine can purchase about 22,000 hamburgers with their $26,190.48 salary.

(Stack Overflow, 2015)

$139,500

Average annual tech wages are the highest in California ($139,500), followed by Massachusetts ($121,000), Washington ($119,300), New Jersey ($111,600) and the District of Columbia ($105,600).

(CompTIA, 2015)

$2.1 Trillion

Microsoft Corp.,Apple Inc., Google Inc. and five other tech firms now account for more than a fifth of the $2.1 trillion in profits that U.S. companies are parking in low-tax countries.

(Bloomberg, 2015)

1 Dell’s 2015 purchase ($67 billion) of data storage company EMC is the largest tech-specific acquisition ever, followed by Facebook’s 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion.

(Dell, 2015) D E CE M B E R 2015

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Enterprise

READY

Big Data’s Impact on Revenue & Marketing

By Rich Wagner, President & CEO of Prevedere

Big data has been a hot topic for years, but few companies know how to harness the unprecedented amount of available information for bottom-line benefits.

Consider this: According to an IBM report on big data, nearly 15 petabytes of data are created each day – that’s eight times more than all of the information in all of the libraries in the United States. Facebook alone processes 10 terabytes of data daily. For perspective, the entire Cornell Law Library is only one terabyte of information.

With this influx of information, it’s no wonder executives are overwhelmed, with publications running headlines like “BIG Data Equals BIG Headache For Executives” (Forbes) and surveys showing that companies still aren’t applying data adequately. A report by the Economist Intelligence Unit, for example, cites that 35 percent of executives lack the understanding of how to apply big data, and 62 percent of chief information officers (CIOs) report that big data buzz has resulted in unrealistic expectations from executives.

However, harnessing big data – especially the external factors that impact business performance – is critical to maintaining a competitive advantage in today’s rapidly changing business landscape. The trick is being able to take the extraordinary amounts of data and boil it down to the information that truly affects business performance and operating decisions. Understanding how these key micro- and macro-economic factors can improve financial performance and decision making is critical for companies seeking to come out on top in today’s highly volatile market, and the good news is that new technologies are making it easy to pinpoint the factors that correlate directly to a business – without the need for statistical degrees or a sophisticated understanding of economics.

Armed with critical information on how external drivers like foreign markets, commodity prices, manufacturing activity, consumer behavior, online traffic 10

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and weather data impact performance, businesses are poised to improve decisions in several key areas, including sales and demand forecasting, identifying marketing opportunities and threats and ultimately enhancing financial performance.

Sales and demand forecasting Accurate sales and demand forecasts are imperative to making smart decisions companywide, yet most quarterly forecasts miss the mark by 13 percent, according to research from KPMG International. That means decisions on supply purchases, product offerings and availability, pricing, promotions and more are based on erroneous assumptions.

Typically, such forecasts have been created using internal insights into sales and demand from previous quarters, but correlating those internal insights with the external factors that truly drive demand is crucial to improving these forecast measures.

For example, Tiffany & Co., which obtains half of its sales outside the U.S., attributes nearly seven percent of its May-July losses this year to changing currency rates. Additionally, the global demand for luxury diamonds declined significantly during the month of August thanks to a slowdown in China, the world’s second largest economy. By integrating such information into sales and demand forecasts, companies are in a better position to plan for and react to such changes in the global economy.

RaceTrac Petroleum, for example, was able to predict its foot traffic with 99 percent accuracy by examining how external factors impacted its sales, finding that weather was a particular determinant to traffic patterns and sales of key items. By incorporating its sales and vendor data with external drivers of performance, RaceTrac now stocks its shelves based on a more complete picture of business performance and has improved its forecast accuracy and financial performance as a result.

Marketing opportunities and threats Incorporating big data in the form of external insights into sales and demand forecasting also drives smarter marketing decisions. Knowing how demand changes in light of changing weather, changing consumer confidence levels and changing disposable income levels allows companies to price more competitively – running promotions when interest wanes and keeping prices steady during strong markets.

Likewise, such analysis is vital for determining when to introduce new products. For example, a car manufacturer that knows it can expect declining sales three months after housing costs start to fall may want to hold off on introducing a new model until housing prices start to rebound. If at the same time it knows that used car sales surge in similar conditions, it may want to encourage dealers to stock up on used inventory to meet increased demand.

A clearer picture of companywide performance Internal performance data plays an important role in helping executives better understand how their company performed year over year (YOY). Yet with-

out incorporating external drivers into this analysis, financial teams will only understand a portion of the factors that impact bottom-line revenue.

Today, there are millions of data sets from organizations and governments available. Companies must make sense of this big data and integrate it into their internal forecasting process to create a reliable set of economic indicators that reveal the ebb and flow of customer demands. With this data, they can better plan for “what-if� scenarios, predict performance and communicate potential changes.

A seamless forecasting process Businesses large and small are constantly faced with the challenge of how to better predict company performance. With the vast amount of exogenous data available, executives now have access to the information they need to make smarter decisions regarding sales and demand forecasts and budgets. Making sense of that data and correlating it to business performance is the critical challenge now faced by corporate executives, but smart technologies are making this information more accessible than ever before.

Small

BUSINESS LAB

The SMB Content Marketing Checklist

By Allison Howen, Associate Editor

Brands have become very strategic with their content marketing plans.

In fact, The Content Marketing Institute reveals there has been a 10 percent increase in business to consumer (B2C) marketers who document their content strategy over the last year (37 percent versus 27 percent). What’s more, 48 percent of B2C marketers meet with their teams either daily or weekly to discuss their content plan.

In order for small business (SMB) owners to keep pace with the competition it is imperative that they are equally as strategic as their big-brand counterparts. With the New Year right around the corner, there is no better time to start planning, and the checklist below provides a great starting point: Take Inventory – Begin by taking a look at 2015’s content. What type of campaigns garnered positive results and which were virtual flops? When taking inventory of previous initiatives, look at the content of each campaign as well as the format and channel it was distributed in. For example, did infographics resonate better than videos? Did lists work better than informative topics in email campaigns? Did Facebook posts get more shares at night?

Scope Out the Competition – The competition can be a big inspiration. Research, however, must go beyond a competitor’s blog. Don’t forget to look at email campaigns (this is why it’s a good idea to sign up for your competitor’s email list), social posts, video content and more. For instance, did the competition have success with a social contest? How often did they create videos? Did their blogging rely on contributor posts?

What Does Your Audience Want? – Audiences leave clues everywhere about the type of content they prefer, but it’s up to marketers to discover them. One channel sure to offer useful insight is social. Simply type 12

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in business-related keywords on networks like Twitter to find out what consumers are talking about, then create content around those topics. Moreover, look to frequently asked questions that could be repurposed into an informative blog post. A pet store owner who gets a lot of inquiries about the best way to remove pet stains from carpets, for example, may want to consider writing a “How To” article on the topic.

Brainstorm – After conducting the aforementioned research it is time to brainstorm. Think about new content ideas, angles, formats and channels, and don’t forget that some content can be repurposed. In the previous example of a “How To” article for removing pet stains, the business owner could repurpose the topic by creating an instructional video, and/or making an email campaign that features the products needed for the process.

Lacking inspiration? For a variety of tools to help brainstorming sessions, visit wsm.co/stormtools.

Create a Content Calendar – It’s time to put ideas on paper and create a content calendar for 2016; and don’t forget to take holidays and company celebrations into consideration when making one. Keep in mind that while it is important to fill out the calendar as completely as possible (especially the first quarter), it is also necessary to leave a little room for flexibility, as campaigns may change as the year progresses.

Assign Tasks – Once the content calendar is created, it is time to share it and tentatively assign tasks to team members. This makes each colleague aware of what is required of them so they can start brainstorming ideas for their assignments.

Track Results and Revaluate – To truly succeed in 2016 it is important to track results as the year goes forward. By reviewing campaign results each quarter, marketers can continuously optimize their strategies.

Don’t know what to track? Check out this list of 29 essential content marketing metrics at wsm.co/basic29.

It can be easy to get inundated with tasks during the holiday rush, but it is important for SMB owners to set aside time to prepare for the upcoming year. Creating a content marketing plan is a good starting point because it can help shape everything from email to social (and even search!) campaigns.

Quiz

TIME

Top Tech Developments

of 2015 Every year is a big year in the tech industry – the ideas become more innovative, the strategies get savvier and the unthinkable becomes a reality; 2015 was no different.

From the introduction of numerous new generic top level domains (gTLDs) like .tech and .sex to the unveiling of “Buy” buttons on major social networks like Facebook and Twitter, each week of 2015 had more than one headline-making story.

Although it may be difficult for busy Web professionals to keep up with all of the latest digital developments when occupied with their day-to-day business tasks, Website Magazine is here to keep ‘Net professionals in the loop. In fact, by visiting WebsiteMagazine.com, visitors can find a daily roundup of each day’s top tech stories and get this news delivered to their inbox by signing up for weekly email newsletters that cover the topics of e-commerce, search, social, design and more.

In the meantime, find out how in the loop you actually are by testing your knowledge of the top tech developments in 2015 with Website Magazine’s December’s Quiz Time.

Get the answers to this month’s Quiz Time by visiting wsm.co/qtdec15 or by scanning the QR code on the left.

1. What is the name of Google’s new parent company? a. The Search Justice League b. Zebra c. Alphabet d. Online Architect

Cheat sheet: wsm.co/googleparents 2. Which commerce plugin did WordPress’s parent company, Automattic, acquire in 2015? a. OrderStorm b. WooCommerce c. Ecwid d. SalesCart

Cheat sheet: wsm.co/wmbigmovers 3. Which social network gave emojis the hashtag treatment in 2015? a. Instagram b. Facebook c. Twitter d. All of the above

Cheat sheet: wsm.co/emojipound 4. Which big-name tech company unveiled a stock photo service? a. Adobe b. Microsoft c. Twitter d. Yahoo

Cheat sheet: wsm.co/stocknew 5. What is the name of Amazon’s new product discovery service that features a pinboard-style design (similar to Pinterest)? a. Amazon Closet b. Amazon Inspires c. Discover by Amazon d. Amazon Stream

Cheat sheet: wsm.co/amazonpin D E CE M B E R 2015

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Top

50

RANK WEBSITE

Search Engine

OPTIMIZATION

SOLUTIONS

Despite a steady stream of changes and often volatile shifts in ranking/ position, the state of the search marketing industry remains strong.

According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization’s (SEMPO) 10th State of the Industry report, which surveyed more than 500 digital marketers and agencies about their online marketing activities across digital channels, search engine optimization (SEO) is the most prevalent marketing activity for 94 percent of individual marketers/clients and 92 percent of agencies – significantly higher than when the survey was conducted in 2013.

Search-based advertising is also top of mind with today’s enterprises, with 84 percent of agencies/consultants and 83 percent of marketers/clients indicating they run paid campaigns.

What’s interesting about the report is that it reveals marketers are gradually diversifying their digital efforts. In relation to social media, for example, 65 percent of marketers and 66 percent of agencies managed social media (with Facebook Ads and Facebook Promoted Posts garnering the most use). Email also remains an important channel and is used regularly by digital marketers.

What stands out in the report, however, is the intense focus the digital business world places on all things SEO. While it remains one of the most effective channels, the practice of search engine optimization can be challenging.

Respondents to the SEMPO report revealed the most significant challenge is managing the ROI of SEO efforts, staying abreast of search engines’ indexing algorithms and technology, as well as optimizing destination pages. With so much competition, and the degree and volume of change in the way search engines return sites, enterprises are actively seeking solutions that can provide a surer way to accelerate their SEO success.

In this month’s edition of Website Magazine’s Top 50, readers will find many of the leading software solutions to support SEO initiatives on any scale. While this is not a comprehensive list by any means, it will serve marketers and agencies well as they pursue solutions to enhance effort and performance.

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Digital Power Players Get a preview of Website Magazine’s upcoming 2016 Digital Power Player Awards at wsm.co/powerplay16.

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Moz.com Wordstream.com KeywordSpy.com Majestic.com Raventools.com SEMrush.com Conductor.com Serps.com Woorank.com ScreamingFrog.co.uk SpyFu.com BrightEdge.com UpCity.com Ahrefs.com Ubersuggest.org AdvancedWebRanking.com Searchmetrics.com Link-Assistant.com Webceo.com CognitiveSEO.com AuthorityLabs.com Traffictravis.com BrightLocal.com HitTail.com KeywordDiscovery.com BuzzStream.com Positionly.com RankRanger.com Rioseo.com Analyticsseo.com Rankwatch.com seoClarity.net Seoadministrator.com WebPosition.com Ontolo.com KeywordEye.com Axandra.com Serpfox.com WebMeUp.com Linkdex.com Ranktrackr.com Seosuite.com GeoRanker.com Colibri.io SheerSEO.com Trendmx.com GinzaMetrics.com Lotusjump.com Seoeffect.com Linkfool.com

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Mastering

SEARCH

SEO ROLES

by Department

By Amberly Dressler, Managing Editor

The role that search engines play in the ability for an enterprise to be found online is well-known.

Despite the evidence proving SEO’s importance (see sidebar), not everyone believes it is their personal responsibility to optimize for placement on the search

Organic Matters

Sites listed on the first Google search results page generate 92 percent of all traffic from an average search (Chitika).

On average, 71 percent of searches result in a page one organic click (Moz).

Search accounts for 34 percent of website traffic, second only to direct (Yotpo).

On average, users conduct 12 billion searches per month on the Web in the U.S. (Comscore).

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engine result pages (SERPs). Although there are so many front-end and back-end factors accounted for in Google, Yahoo and Bing’s algorithms as related to search results page placement, all Web professionals should know how their individual work may impact their enterprise’s overall “findability.” While the following will serve as a high-level view of SEO roles by department, it will help brands encourage (and educate) their team members to start thinking like an SEO professional.

Content Writers There has never been a better time to be a writer. Companies are rapidly hiring both staff writers and guest contributors (read, “Thanks Content Marketing, Writers Have Jobs” at wsm.co/jobcm) to develop content at a rapid clip in hopes of improving user engagement, lead generation and, ultimately, search rankings.

The problem with asking a writer to write for SEO, however, is that many of them have to speculate as to what that means. This could result in an article stuffed with keywords, for example.

Let it be known: A writer should not change for the sake of SEO. They should develop content that solves

a problem, is easy to consume (e.g. subtitles, graphics, etc.), is timely, links to relevant sources, offers a compelling headline and ends when the problem is solved.

It is these elements that will lend themselves to good content that will be visited often and linked to from other sites. Headers, keywords, metatags and other SEO tactics are secondary to good content (addressed further at wsm.co/seodeets).

That is not to say, however, that there aren’t ways to improve content’s engagement and viral potential, like including numbers in headlines, colorful images above the fold, etc. (read more at wsm.co/viralboost). There are also ways to make informed decisions as to what to write about.

What’s trending on Twitter, for example, can spark a writer’s creativity, while frequently asked questions (see sidebar) from a support ticket system can fuel problem-solving-type content. These real-time topics should be on top of a set editorial calendar. Creating an editorial calendar will ensure there is always fresh content for users and the search engines to index and that an organization covers the breadth of topics it needs to persuade and engage users.

+ Further reading, “Why Businesses Should Combine Content Marketing with SEO” at wsm.co/seowrite.

Social Media Managers The impact social networks have on how a company ranks in the search engines may still be up for debate, but at the end of the digital day all good content needs to be shared. When shared, the chance of getting more clicks increases – and that is always beneficial to an enterprise. A social media manager should use a variety of insights into what to share and when. Buffer, for example, offers its clients the Optimal Timing Tool to recognize when posts should be shared depending on location, number of posts a day and levels of engagement throughout the day (see image).

Optimal timing can also be determined within Facebook Insights (as it shows when a brand’s users are most active on the social network), but it’s not the only way to use social to improve SEO.

+ Further reading, “Quick List of Social Media Best Practices for SEO” at wsm.co/qlsocial.

By using Buffer’s Optimal Timing Tool, social media managers can ensure they schedule posts for when they are most likely to be shared, clicked and liked – impacting a piece of content’s traffic numbers and possible rankings.

Designers & Developers Website Magazine recently published, “Web Design for SEO: Building a Strong Foundation” at wsm.co/seodevs and “SEO Design Lessons from the Pros” at wsm.co/prodevs, which go into greater detail about the major impact design and development has on SEO initiatives. Even still, it bears repeating that the decisions these digital professionals make impact everything from how a search engine crawls a website and how a user is able to interact with it to its device friendliness and page speed.

Software Buyers Even though some executives are out of touch with the day-to-day operations of an enterprise’s SEO initiatives, they are typically the ones relied on to purchase critical software for a company. Choosing the wrong content management system, for example, can hinder a company’s SEO efforts if it has a poorly developed code base or features archaic default naming conventions.

+ Further reading, “A Software Buyer’s Checklist for

Customer Service & SEO

Technical SEO is as important as the topics mentioned above (and addressed frequently at wsm.co/mastersearch), but different employees in a company need to know what impact they can have and are currently having on their employer’s bottom line. The basics of search is as good as a place to start as any.

While service reps aren’t usually tied to website content, the service that they provide can have a huge impact on SEO. Read more at wsm.co/csandseo.

SEO” at wsm.co/seocheck2.

E-Commerce

EXPRESS

Getting Shoppers

to Recover their

CARTS

By Amberly Dressler, Managing Editor

There are two sides, positives and negatives, to shopping cart abandonment.

On one hand, it can signal friction in the checkout process (e.g. lengthy forms, slow load times, high shipping costs, login issues, etc.) but on the other, shopping cart abandonment can merely indicate a shopper is in the research phase of their buying experience. Retailers need to look to their analytics to understand the differences.

This is because the majority of consumers use online shopping carts as a place to store products and, further, 37 percent of consumers who expect a shopping cart reminder also expect to receive a coupon to motivate them to finish their purchase (source: Bronto, 2015).

According to Kahuna’s (a communication automation company) Doug Roberge, the issue is that items sit in shopping carts and fail to get purchased.

Roberge advises that in order to overcome this, marketers need to be aware of what’s waiting to be purchased and leverage tools that help highlight the best time for a conversion push (see sidebar). For example, if the item is a larger purchase, the brand might allow the customer a bit more time before reminding her of the unpurchased item.

“Overcoming e-commerce friction is a delicate equation that shouldn’t be rushed or pushed too aggressively, but marketers can’t wait on the sidelines just hoping customers will make their forgotten purchases Oriental Trading Company keeps on their own,” said Roberge. shopping carts for 30 days and uses For luxury or big-ticket items brands them to retarget instantaneously should consider developing content that across the Web. 18

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informs the potential buyer about the product. An email about the cost- or energy-saving benefits of a new washing machine can keep the product top of mind for the person who left it in their shopping cart.

If opened, this message could serve as the perfect segue for an email containing a promotional offer (e.g. free delivery). The re-marketing of products with longer lifecycles should be more sensitive to the investment the user will have to make.

When it comes to smaller, more everyday purchases, retailers can increase the frequency in which they serve retargeted campaigns. While nobody wants to be bombarded with ads, they are expected.

When best practices are followed (check out, “3 Retargeting Best Practices for Retail” at wsm.co/3retarget), retargeting is a highly effective way to get shoppers to recover their shopping carts. In fact, a 2014 study from Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) indicated that 72 percent of millennials (age 25-34) will purchase products left in their cart if they are offered them again at a discounted price.

The problem, however, is that the majority of that same demographic are using ad blocking, according to Charles Nicholls, SVP of product strategy, marketing solutions at SAP and, “when they go dark, they go dark forever.” (For further insights, read, “How Marketers Can Overcome Ad Blocking” at wsm.co/adblocksos.)

When marketing messages are contextual, consistent and relevant (the three elements of fixing a broken marketing system as discussed at SAP hybris Summit in October), however, brands have a fighting chance.

Relevancy goes beyond retargeting with the products in a user’s cart. It also responds to user intent and hybris Profile has a rather unique method of addressing the natural decay in intent that arises when someone abandons a website, shopping cart or other brand experience. For example, if a person is looking at a camera, leaves the site and then comes back to look at the camera again, the “intent score” goes up and so too does the frequency of personalized emails, landing pages, etc. If they come back to the website without ever viewing the camera again, the intent score goes down. If someone buys a different camera altogether, the Profile solution ends the retargeting entirely.

While retailers think abandoned carts were pervasive in 2015, they will likely increase in the New Year as sites remember carts for longer (see images) and modern shoppers test which companies will incentivize them to complete their purchases. Retailers not leveraging retargeting are behind the curve, but simple strategies won’t be enough to lure modern shoppers to purchase. Creating wishlist capabilities, intent scores and more will set the bar in 2016.

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Design and

DEVELOPMENT

The Web’s

CRUFT PROBLEM

By TJ VanToll, Developer Advocate at Telerik

Open Web evangelist Kyle Simpson recently opined on Twitter about whether there was a term for hating the Web more and more as a user but liking it more as a developer.

A. User engagement can be impacted negatively when cruft distracts users from their goals.

There isn’t an exact term for what Simpson means, but the sentiment is agreed upon by many in the Web development community.

Between modals, app-install prompts, mobile Web fails, ads, mobile redirects and European Union (EU) cookie prompts, Web developers (just like average users) increasingly hate using the Web. The term that this article will use to describe the phenomena is “cruft”: the poorly designed, unnecessarily complicated or unwanted code and page elements that the average website includes, which does not contribute to what the user is trying to accomplish (e.g. read an article, buy a product). To put this into context let’s look at an example.

Visitors to the CNN article in Image A wanted to learn about psychopaths, but before reading they were required to view and experience social buttons, the temperature and a terms-of-service modal. That’s cruft.

Loading the article took 200-plus HTTP requests and used approximately 2MB of data, taking about three seconds to load using Wi-Fi. A test of this Web page actually indicated that it would take about 13 seconds to load on an average mobile network. This example wasn’t selected to single out CNN, but because it is now representative of the average Web experience.

So, what is causing the cruft in the CNN example?

A deep dive into code reveals some 200-plus HTTP requests (ad related and serving tracking/analytics functions); 25 of which are to different domains.

Since minimizing HTTP requests is a well-known best practice for mobile Web performance, why do many mobile websites violate this rule? Money.

Why does CNN show ads? To make money.

Why does CNN include tracking services? To learn more about the reader, to show targeted ads, to make money. Why does CNN use social media buttons? To

encourage sharing the article, to get more page views, to get more ad views, to make money.

Again, this isn’t intended to call out CNN as the “bad example,” but rather to show a specific model that has become pervasive for content on the Web. Developer Brian Rinaldi argued that the content model of the Web is broken because Web users thoroughly devalue content and writers. He contends that because users refuse to pay for content, publishers must resort to drastic tactics to make money from their writing.

Many people are attacking the cruft problem, but interestingly the innovation is mostly coming from outside the browser world.

Flipboard was perhaps the first successful attempt at fixing cruft. Flipboard takes content from around the Web and provides excerpts and links to the full content. This provides a pleasant browsing experience without all the cruft.

Flipboard has gone beyond this content preview role and now partners with certain content providers to display full articles directly within the Flipboard app — foregoing the browser entirely.

Image B shows the same CNN article in the Flipboard iOS app. The same content is visible, yet unlike the browser version, the Flipboard article is cruft free and loads nearly instantaneously.

Flipboard’s success hasn’t gone unnoticed. Its business model has been more or less copied by others, including Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple’s Apple News. The way Web users experience and consume content is changing, so how is the technology and development community reacting to the cruft problem and what is being done?

HTTP/2: The HTTP/2 specification offers to substantially decrease latency on the Web by serving compressed HTTP headers and loading resources in parallel over a single TCP connection. Once implemented in browsers, HTTP/2 should substantially lower the load times of sites relying on a large number of HTTP requests.

Mobile-friendly: Last year, Google announced that it will penalize sites that aren’t mobile-friendly in their search results, and display a “mobile-friendly” label next

B. The same article displayed in Fliboard is now “cruft free.”

to search results that meet their guidelines. This is a small tweak, but one that early research shows is having a noticeable impact on how digital experiences are built.

Proxy browsers: Opera Mini has long been acting as a proxy browser, caching resources on its servers to reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent to each individual device. Chrome for Android and iOS now includes a similar option to help users increase speed on the Web. Ad blockers: Ad blockers are the primary tool for attacking the Web’s cruft on desktop devices, but they have yet to make their way into users’ mobile workflow, largely because mobile operating system vendors have actively prevented them. Google has a fair reason for actively discouraging ad blockers, as it derives 80-90 percent of revenue from online advertising. Apple has also prevented ad blockers, but now allows ad-filtering extensions in iOS 9.

A Cruft-Free Future?

Despite these existing cruft-reducing features, this is still an area ripe for innovation. Why is it that for publishers the only real monetization option is to inject bulky ads that produce a worse experience for everyone? There’s no clear answer here, though many have spent years searching. While this is by no means the end of the open Web, it’s time to clean up the mess.

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Everyday & Everywhere

Web Analytics

By Peter Prestipino, Editor-In-Chief

Collecting, understanding and acting on business-related “intelligence” is critical to digital operations today.

As a result, paying regular and rigorous attention to website performance and analytics is considered fundamental to the success of each and every digital enterprise; but it’s only the first step.

While most view the default graphs, statistics and charts available in the myriad technology solutions used by ‘Net professionals daily as sufficient (be they marketing automation, customer relationship management, Web experience or e-commerce platforms), it is possible to dig far deeper into an enterprise’s available data pool and gather insights and answers into what may just be the primary issues websites are experiencing and, more importantly, what can be done about it. Web workers and the enterprises that employ them simply need to know where to look and how to use that information once it’s been found – and do so from a mature and sound perspective.

Most of the data companies have at their disposal is simply ignored. Regular performance reports are out of reach completely (unavailable entirely in some cases) from key personnel.

Data is discarded at crucial moments of the digital experience, or was never collected in the first place. It is difficult to deny that customer data is not being used to its fullest potential within many enterprises and it is preventing companies from cross-selling, upselling, planning, and most importantly, innovating and making measurable improvements.

It’s tough, if not impossible, to retain customers, plan inventories, personalize experiences and/or eliminate rogue actors in relation to fraud and security, without a deep understanding of customers and the information that results from their online activity. Those that do take advantage of the available data tend to have a significant competitive edge (and greater revenues as a result) and that’s reason enough to pursue the practice with a great deal more rigor. And it should start now.

According to a new study by the Economist Intelligence unit, commissioned by Wipro, there is a strong relationship between earnings growth and the strategic use of data. Adapting to this new reality will not, however, be easy. Seventy-four percent of executives surveyed expect the range and types of data they collect to expand in the next two years. While it could prove to be a breakout moment and validate the investment into analytics offerings up to this point, to maximize data use, today’s brands need to find opportunities to cope with the overload, the worries about quality and the general lack of skills within their enterprises now as well as in the future. They need to prioritize analytics and business intelligence (BI) initiatives every day, and everywhere.

The goals for any enterprise’s analytics initiatives are relatively straightforward – assist in delivering growth and identifying growth opportunities, control costs and manage risk. In order to make sense of the vastness of information available, analytics solutions and enterprise processes must be in place so the delivery of those goals becomes a reality.

Visual Analytics

Not everyone is comfortable with diving into some of the complexities of analytics and lucky for them, there’s another way to get a decent understanding of how users are interacting with a website (and its content) thanks to visual analytics solutions. Heatmap software solutions, like the oft-mentioned Crazy Egg, do an excellent job of revealing action and interactions taken by users, but there are also numerous other solutions. Discover five powerful visual analytics solutions at wsm.co/visanalytics.

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The Right Tools (and Tactics) for the Job What Web professionals really want to know (the reason they are even moderately interested in analytics and intelligence tools in the first place) is if their efforts and resources are resulting in some positive effect – revenue, awareness, engagement. To get the most useful information, however, requires using the right tools for the job to reveal the right data (at the right time and for the right people during their brand journey). Fortunately, there is no shortage of solutions available.

Google Analytics, which offers a suite of powerful features and benefits, is arguably one of the most popular (just over 69 percent of the top 10,000 sites use Google analytics according to BuiltWith), but there are many others worthy of closer examination. Its closest and most significant rival at the enterprise level is that of Adobe Analytics. While the company’s Marketing Cloud offering is considered pricey in relation to similar offerings, Adobe’s real-time data and reporting functionality, as well as its advanced segmentation capabilities (and integration with other Adobe products including its development and testing tools, and new Audience Marketplace, which will allow advertisers and marketers to buy and sell second-or third-party data), make it an ideal solution for those with more sophisticated demands or those who are planning on scaling their enterprise up and expanding the capabilities of their analytics and data initiatives.

Adobe and Google garner a great deal of attention among business-focused consumers of analytics solutions (and for good reason), but there are, as most likely know, plenty of other powerful options that do not nearly receive the awareness they merit. Piwik comes highly recommended among Internet retailers thanks to the platform’s strong e-commerce tracking capabilities, integration plugins for leading providers including Magento and PrestaShop, as well as its advanced reporting mechanism. Kissmetrics

The Power of Segmentation One of the most significant mistakes that Web professionals make is viewing all of their analytics at once but it is more useful to view the data in smaller batches and groups and there are numerous, incredibly useful ways to do so. For example, traffic can be segmented by the source of traffic, by device type or browser, by returning versus new visitors and a whole lot more. Segmenting traffic in this way offers an opportunity to understand how well a website is satisfying users. Discover more creative ways to segment website traffic at wsm.co/6segments.

is also a very popular business analytics tool lauded by the digital community and known to be particularly good at making it easy to build and interpret funnels. Its path report, for example, identifies the most common steps between the first visit and a conversion. With integrations available for numerous third-party tools, it too (if not always) tops the list of considerations of analytics tools often among Web professionals (particularly Internet retailers).

These are just some of the most utilized website analytics solutions on the market and they serve Web professionals well in their pursuit of insights that matter when the aim is delivering improvements and growth. No enterprise is alike, however.

INDUSTRY OPTIMIZED There are solutions available that were designed for specific types of companies, industries and markets. Fuel’s new Fuel Gauge marketing Dashboard, for instance, provides a good example of a solution that serves a niche industry segment well. Hotel and resort mangers using the platform can gain insights into their website, booking engine, email marketing, social media, online reputation, guest satisfaction, organic and paid search and more, in one system. Brittain Resort Management & Hotels (BRM) is the first to utilize Fuel Gauge to for its 14 properties and will track each resort’s marketing efforts, as well as conversion, occupancy and revenue tracking in real-time.

Geo-MARKET OPTIMIZED While Fuel’s industry-based approach will be logical for hoteliers, location-based marketing technology provider SIM partners approaches the analytics opportunity from another perspective. The company recently launched Velocity Insights, a suite of features for its local marketing automation platform that aims to help companies move beyond simple performance metrics to provide actionable analysis of their local presence. The solution provides insights into the visibility and performance of a brand’s location pages, measuring “listing health” by applying a proprietary scoring algorithm that assesses factors such as location data accuracy and reach across influential data publishers and aggregators. The system also provides demographic, Web and ranking insights to help companies optimize performance.

OPTIMIZED FOR SCALE As analytics technology solutions become increasingly more sophisticated, enterprises are focusing on the value it provides across the enterprise. Amazon Web Service (AWS), for example, launched QuickSight in early October, a solution to make data analytics available and understandable to any employee making business decisions, no matter how technically advanced their skill level.

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QuickSight is an aggressive player in the cloud data analytics software market as Amazon can likely offer more advanced, less expensive tools that will enable its customers take advantage of insights from data analytics at every level of the organization. QuickSight will start at $9 per user, much lower on average than the cost of the traditional BI services. The new tool also integrates with AWS’s data services, so organizations can scale to hundreds of thousands of employees to crunch data, run search queries and create data visualizations quickly. The new tool uses a new “Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine” (SPICE) to perform calculations and render visualizations.

The point of profiling the variety of analytics and intelligence solutions is to reveal that there are offerings available, powerful ones, which can provide an enterprise the information it needs to make decisions that will benefit the bottom line. Even with the best approach, however, other challenges remain.

Hurdles & the True Power of Analytics When Website Magazine launched 10-plus years ago, it was not uncommon to hear the word “hits” used as a means to convey website performance (as if it were an accurate representation, which it wasn’t). Today, the industry has become far more sophisticated (moving from elementary activity reporting in the past to advanced event-based performance tracking and predictive intelligence functionality today) and there are many challenges to overcome in the course of a brand’s digital life as a result.

The first challenge is often in understanding the industry terminology as well as the broader concepts and theories of analytics and BI. As enterprises begin their journey toward success with these initiatives, however, the following are the basic terms and phrases that will serve as the foundation for most analytics efforts. Yes, industry veterans should already know these, but a regular revisiting will ensure initiatives are staying on course (and improving).

Visits, Sources, Bounce Rate, Time on Site, Pages per Visit – these are the fundamentals of website analytics.

These relatively self-explanatory metrics can provide an immense amount of insight into campaign and business performance. It is when they are used in association with each other (and in tandem with supplementary data), however, that their true power becomes apparent.

One of the most significant problems in the realm of analytics today is that those responsible for these initiatives tend to group all website data together, instead of segmenting by source, referral, demographic or device. The sheer number of variables in aggregated data makes it incredibly difficult to see patterns, which can reveal potential tactics, channels or processes. The aim

that should ultimately be pursued is one of action. The whole point of gathering and examining analytics data is to be able to act on the real information available and that can’t be done without knowing what is causing action and activity.

The reason Web professionals struggle with Web data analysis is because they tend to act quickly, instinctively and (as are all humans) often subject to emotions, jumping to (often incorrect) conclusions accordingly. There is, of course, a better way. It is necessary to connect data at a deeper level by focusing on the metrics that ultimately matter most to an enterprise’s goals. As a result, it’s exceedingly important to communicate what’s happening – and those basic metrics outlined previously do not suffice. The solution is to build in key performance indicators from the outset that will satisfy analytics initiatives.

Start & End with Goals & Events Today’s businesses work in a performance-driven world; a world no longer content to measure unique visitors and page views, but rather with the satisfaction of goals and the occurrence of events. As acquisition costs continue to rise, this shift was inevitable.

Goals can be pretty much anything that indicates a conversion – such as making a payment or donation. Not all goals defined by an enterprise, of course, must be so closely tied to revenue; goals can also be set up for indirect revenue actions including creating an account or making a formbased inquiry. Say for example that a website offers an email newsletter; with a confirmation/thank you page in place, tracking the success of marketing and promoting that asset and channel is possible.

Goals are essentially specific actions that when tracked can provide an opportunity to produce improvement – more revenue, more registrations, etc. Whether for direct or indirect revenue, tracking activity through the goal funnel provides an opportunity to analyze the entrance and exit points that impact a goal.

Analytics systems can often do much more than this though; it’s actually possible to measure any and every action that takes place on a website through the use of event tracking.

Web pages, just like the companies that create them, are made of many parts. There are links within content, callsto-action (CTAs), sidebar navigation, the list is long. While clicks on these links may not always tie to some measurable goal, they do and can provide an opportunity to understand performance on a more granular level.

Say for example that a marketer wants to track the performance of on-site content marketing efforts in relation to the number of people that express interest in a newsletter. A form may be set up on the company’s own page, but it is important to track how strong CTAs are in generating a response. Event tracking those CTAs can be done quite easily by appending

some unique event tracking code to each, which will provide data on the effectiveness of every click. If a form is getting plenty of visits, but not conversions – the CTAs in the content are working, but it’s the form that may need work.

Event tracking can be used to track a variety of activity, from file download and video plays, to link clicks on interactions on embedded AJAX page elements. Since there can be so many different events that can be tracked, Web professionals should consider grouping events by category or type (e.g. link or file), defining the action (e.g. click or download), labeling it appropriately (to know which event it is specifically) and adding a value depending on its worth.

Events are really meant for tracking activity on any page element that does not have a destination URL (such as a thank you page). That being said, some incredibly useful insights can be gathered from using events (that just are not possible with goals). Say for example that there are videos on a website and a marketer is interested in measuring if users are skipping through them (because they are insufferably boring). By appending event tracking code on forward and rewind buttons, this insight can become very clear, indicating whether videos are engaging or not.

Hopefully enterprises have moved beyond basic activity reporting and are investing their time and resources into capitalizing on the true power of analytics – understanding on a finite level what’s making a difference. With a clearer picture of how well an enterprise is performing, it’s time to put that analytics data to use.

Developing an Analytics Initiative The real problem with Web analytics is that it is a real challenge to make good use of the data collected.

Calculating return on investment (ROI), for example, is no easy task as most fail to include the costs associated with the entire production and deployment of a project. It can prove useful however when there is a plan in place. If enterprises want to convert as many visitors to customers as possible, and are tracking goals in addition to key metrics like sessions and pageviews, follow this three-step plan to ensure analytics efforts mean something to the success of an enterprise.

Define the Audience Need Consumers want a specific product or service because it satisfies a need. When brands know what need that is, they are able to craft experiences that address their wants and desires. Analytics systems are useful in that they provide cues and clues about the audience including their interests, the manner in which they access a site, not to mention how well an enterprise is at capturing their attention. Do users consume more long-form or short-form content? Do videos produce greater time on site than other assets?

Establish Baseline Conversion Rates Conversion rates will be different for every enterprise, but when you know what it is (and for every referring source and channel) it is possible to emphasize the efforts and processes that yield the greatest result. Websites don’t often have one conversion rate, but rather many. Group similar offerings on a site to determine what, if any, discrepancies exist. Employ testing (A/B, multivariate) to identify what works.

Assign & Calculate Revenue Each action and interaction can be given a value. While an actual sale should be given a greater value than a click-through, as one requires further nurturing, analytics can be used to help assign and calculate or determine real-world value. From there, it’s just a matter of assigning dollars to action. When you know what is working and what is not, it is possible to prioritize decisions for the benefit of the bottom line.

Managing improvements spurred on by a rigorous analytics initiative is made much simpler thanks to the influx of business intelligence tools, solutions that aggregate essential data, analyze information from disparate sources, and help executives make sense of the data and more importantly, to drive change more quickly.

Analytics Everywhere… Every Day Analytics can be a full-time job and it can often take a dedicated professional to wade through the volumes of data available. If you know where to look and what to look for, only then can your brand be on the fast track to ‘Net success. Enterprises must adopt a data-driven culture, enable data access to all business users, and create a consistent understanding and interpretation of data.

Business Intelligence:

Generating Dollars from Analytics Change To help guide Web professionals through the business intelligence landscape, Website Magazine has developed a whitepaper exclusively for our readers, which can be downloaded at wsm.co/bidollars.

Net

ADVERTISING Average is Never Good:

A Call to Embrace New Viewability Best Practices

By Eric Wheeler, CEO of 33Across

Billions of dollars are at stake for publishers’ advertising revenue. The reason? They are at the mercy of the “domain average” used to establish viewability scores.

Media buyers typically measure ad views based on the average viewability of a website domain. That means they monitor a website but don’t account for how key issues — such as load times, ad placement, website layout and historical averages — can distort the metrics, leaving the publisher with a watered down score and the advertiser with a less than optimal experience.

Using a domain average is not an effective way to measure viewability.

The good news is that advancements in viewability are being made. For example, several vendors such as OnScroll have emerged that won’t even load an ad unit unless they know it will appear in view, while others differentiate through demonstrated higher viewability metrics. Still, the antiquated domain average metric remains the norm. The truth is that in-view ads are worth a lot more than the out-of-view ads.

As an industry, online ad buys should use the viewability of individual units, not the historical average of all ads on websites.

A Closer Look at the Problem

Today, viewability rates are calculated by the average load percentage of all ad slot positions (top, side and bottom) over a period of time.

For most viewability measurement companies, the evaluation process looks something like this: ad slot number one loaded 90 percent, while ad slot number three only loaded 20 percent of the time. When these two numbers are averaged, this website receives a 55 percent average viewability rate. However, slot one is way more valuable than slot three. Publishers that are 30

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engineering high viewability into their sites may not be getting enough credit for this effort and other publishers may be propping up slot threes with higher than actual average scores.

Why are we evaluating the entire domain versus the individual ad? It may be easier, but the easiest path isn’t always the best path. What does this average score mean to publishers and advertisers? Not much.

Solutions: A Lens into the Future of Viewability

As the industry demands higher viewability standards, publishers will need to ensure they can deliver.

Here are three ideas for improving on the viewability benchmark today: Make the shift from buying via domain average measurement to buying via ad unit measurement. It delivers a much truer ad view metric that benefits the industry as a whole. It benefits advertisers with more specificity for better targeting and measurement. For publishers, it boosts credibility through viewability. By supporting a pricing model that drills down into the ad unit level as opposed to the domain average, publishers will attract more and higher level advertisers.

Find good viewability partners. Publishers should work with viewability vendors like Integral Ad Science that make publishers more attractive by scoring the overall and specific ad unit viewability score for their site.

Redesign for Web and mobile. Publishers need to redesign their sites to fully monetize them. The good news is that this is already starting to happen.

AdAge recently reported that facing pressure from advertisers, dozens of media companies, such as Conde Nast, are re-evaluating where display ads appear to ensure viewability.

Publishers should think about new placements, not just the standard placements in the same content blocks. They should be creative with how ads are inserted into the natural flow of content as viewed on various devices.

Let’s clear up a popular myth: People often perceive their ads will perform better if they are above the fold. This is not necessarily true; it depends on what the site visitors are doing. Scrolling down is actually a sign of an engaged audience, so test basic assumptions during this redesign phase. Above-thefold metrics will quickly cede to currently “in view” and we’ll all be better for it. An ad that’s never seen is not worth much.

THE WAIT

IS OVER

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Conversion

CORNER

UNLEASHING CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION THROUGH YOUR BUSINESS MODEL

By Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTuners

Test, test, test! This common refrain has come to dominate the perceptions and activities of the conversion rate optimization (CRO) community.

comfortable in the repeatable nature of the testing activity itself, and familiar with the process. This is a false sense of security, and will often result in a myopic outlook that leads to stagnation.

Sure, testing is important as a way to validate changes to a Web experience, and make sure that changes are not actually making things worse. On the other hand, one of the problems with testing is that it operates on the Web experience. This creates inherent limitations.

Testing is just like the drunk person looking for their lost keys under the streetlamp at night because the light is better there. Similarly, many CRO practitioners never wander far from the cozy and comforting routine of repeatedly running tests, which at least on the surface produce some kind of clear measurable results (whether good, bad or inconclusive). They get

Your own narrow view of CRO will severely limit the amount of benefit you will derive from it.

So how does a CRO professional break out of this rut?

The key is to look beyond the website or landing page for additional leverage by thinking of a website as the part of the iceberg visible above the waterline. Most of the power will come from the vast portion that lies below. This is an important point in the context of competitors. If an enterprise wants to create a durable and defensible advantage against them, it is much easier to do it with the portions of the business that they cannot easily inspect or duplicate.

As a CRO, the job seems pretty clear – squeeze more value out of existing traffic arriving on a website or landing page. So that’s what they spend their time doing – looking for increased efficiencies. This may involve digging into analytics, optimizing traffic sources hitting the site, segmenting an audience to achieve a better fit or testing alternative content.

Some things, however, are either implicitly or explicitly out of bounds. One of the most common sacred cows is the actual business model. In other words, CROs are not allowed to change the calls-toaction (CTAs), or the format and sequence in which they are collected.

An online educational business, for example, has the goal of generating leads for their sales force. Typically the CTA on the site will be some sort of long and involved form (for a free information kit or something similar). Once the form is completed, the sales person will relentlessly try to “close” that prospect. What’s wrong with that? Although it seems like a perfectly legitimate strategy, it is not.

The company is requiring someone to give up a lot of information early in the process (severely restricting the number of people willing to invest the effort to fill out the form). Then it is trying to hardsell them on the phone (even though in all likelihood they are not ready to act). In other words, the business model requires a standing broad-jump on the part of a website visitor, and herculean effort on the part of the phone sales force.

Imagine the following instead. A website visitor arrives on a site, self-selects (via properly constructed user-centered site navigation) into a specific role, downloads a relevant e-book (without any information required in exchange except for an email address), receives a targeted email follow-up sequence that establishes thought leadership and provides helpful information over time, eventually follows an email link back to a targeted landing page on the site where they get an opportunity to chat live with a knowledgeable rep (while still remaining anonymous), the chat rep then schedules (in real-time) an appointment to talk to a career counselor (the sales rep) on the phone (collecting the information needed during the chat), the sales rep reviews the info collected and calls at the agreed-upon time to try to close the sale.

Now at first glance, this may seem like a conceptually more-complicated business model, but looked at from the standpoint of both the prospective student and the business it has many advantages. From the perspective of the prospect, the relationship unfolds slowly and naturally. The value received along the way is more

than what is being asked for in return. The steps are incremental and non-threatening. There are no big hurdles to surmount. The person feels like they are in control of the process, and are more likely to extend incremental trust and expend additional effort as the relationship deepens.

From the standpoint of the business there are benefits too. It is much easier to create content that speaks to a targeted audience and is seen as more personal and valuable. Much of the early stage follow-up can be done with automated email sequences – not requiring any incremental effort or human involvement. Early stage qualification can be done much more cost-effectively via chat than on the phone. The best-trained phone sales people are getting to talk to receptive prospects.

The phone sales people will have higher utilization rates (connecting with prospects a higher percentage of the time due to appointment prescheduling instead of outbound cold-calling followup). It’s a classic case of win-win.

Efficiency is doing things right – effectiveness is doing the right things.

Of course it takes some work to set all of this up. Email sequences will need to be developed, online chat will need to be staffed, all of the information collected about the prospect will need to be passed to the phone sales reps ahead of their appointments, the phone reps will need to be retrained to take advantage of the new workflow and available information (and to adjust their technique to a more gentle “close”).

Beyond the specific example of educational leadgeneration above, business model innovation can be done in a number of settings. In the e-commerce sphere it can take the form of frequent-buyer loyalty clubs, referral programs and incentives, and changing a one-time purchase into some kind of ongoing subscription-based payment model. In lead generation it can involve cross-referrals to other businesses that want to reach the same audience. The possibilities are limited only by a person’s own imagination.

Now is the time to start thinking more broadly about a company’s business model and not simply about its online marketing campaigns. How can marketers help engineer a better business model?

If it benefits the business and aligns more naturally with the needs of the audience, then they know they are on the right track.

Tim Ash is the CEO of SiteTuners, Chair of Conversion Conference and bestselling author of “Landing Page Optimization.”

10 B2B Lead-Generation Opportunities for Your Blog These are the elements that shouldn’t be missed wsm.co/blogb2b.

Email

EXPERIENCE

Post-Christmas Email Retention

By EJ McGowan, General Manager, Campaigner at J2 Global

With so many festive promotions to offer during the holiday season, attracting new customers from Black Friday through the New Year isn’t a problem for most email marketers. The true challenge is getting new subscribers to stick around after the holiday hype dies down.

After putting effort into pulling in new customers for the holidays, the key to long-term success is retaining those new subscribers and fostering strong customer relationships. However, the biggest mistake many marketers make in retention is treating new subscribers like the rest of their contact lists.

Below are a few tips and best practices to most effectively retain this season’s new subscribers and turn them into loyal brand advocates:

Hone Your Holiday Tactics The holiday season is a great time to prepare new subscribers for a lifetime of happiness with a brand. Marketers should use these first few months to grab their attention and leave a lasting impression.

This can be done by revamping the standard welcome message with a personalized seasonal greeting. Holiday subscribers aren’t a brand’s average contacts and shouldn’t be treated as such. Adding a personalized touch will make a strong first impression and give them an idea of what a long-term relationship with the brand might look like. Additionally, marketers should make sure transactional emails are well branded. Holiday subscribers will likely receive a flood of transactional emails during the season, so a company will need to ensure it stands out above the rest.

Slow and Steady, Santa Once brands have these new contacts, they have to treat them uniquely and avoid approaching them too aggressively. There should be a “slow and steady” period in the initial engagement, focused on building rapport rather than overwhelming new contacts with a blizzard of emails. To build trust and “introduce” a brand to new 34

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subscribers, companies should send informational content over promotional deals – they’ll probably be cutting down on the shopping after the holidays anyway.

Futher, if marketers purvey information, send surveys and request feedback about the customer experience, it proves that they appreciate the business. This will ensure a brand is still top-of-mind without being overbearing.

Re-Gifting Isn’t Always Tacky A retailer’s contact list will likely double, or even triple, in size between Halloween and the New Year. Retailers should use this as an opportunity to recycle old content.

All of the content will be brand new to holiday subscribers, so they could be a more receptive audience for campaigns that have some more life left in them. This will allow marketers to not only predict which campaigns will garner success (since they’ve executed on them before), but to also maintain efficiency despite a flourishing contact list.

Be the Gift that Keeps on Giving The secret to retention after the holidays is continuing holiday engagement even after the holiday season ends.

By studying contacts’ engagement with a brand throughout the holiday season this information can be leveraged in upcoming holidays in the New Year. By using reporting and analysis tools, companies can identify what type of product or deal attracted holiday subscribers to their brand initially and use that information to tailor and personalize deals moving forward. For example, if a man bought a woman’s necklace around New Years, send him jewelry promotions around Valentine’s Day. Or if a woman purchased children’s toys for Christmas, deliver toy promotions around Easter.

Don’t Be a Greedy Grinch Subscribers earned over the holidays aren’t always longterm wins. Email marketers should work to build a relationship with new contacts for the first few months of the New Year, but may want to taper off if they don’t receive engagement. Further, they will want to use engagement scoring to determine who is open to communication. If recipients are not interacting with the content, they should temporarily be suspended from the mailing lists and re-engaged after Christmas.

Holiday subscribers can be valuable contacts long after December but only if approached correctly. Still, even failure in a retention effort can be a lesson that pays off. Use new subscribers as a testing group if you lose more than half after the holidays end, and re-evaluate your overall email marketing strategy to optimize for retention. In short, don’t waste the opportunity holiday contacts offer. Whether they’re naughty or nice, there’s insight to be gained.

WEBSITE MAGAZINE

IN YOUR

INBOX

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Subscribe for our channel-focused weekly newsletters at wsm.co/email15 D E CE M B E R 2015

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Analytics

INSIDER

Using Psychology to Improve Website Conversions

By Dr. Liraz Margalit, Web Psychologist at ClickTale

If there is one important lesson learned from the many studies conducted in the Web usage, analytics and optimization fields, it is that to see results, online businesses need to “feel” their clients.

Understanding their behavior, their needs and the impetus for their actions requires a basic comprehension of psychology (and some great digital customer experience tools to gather the required data).

While there is no magic formula for button colors that convert, killer copywriting or winning layouts, it is possible to get inside the mind of a target audience and understand which elements prompt action.

Introspection and Web Behavior The process of understanding behavior could be best described by the psychological term “Introspection,” which essentially means to examine one’s own conscious thoughts and feelings, to obtain privileged access to one’s mental states. That’s not easy to do, however, when it comes to Web behavior.

Introspection (and self-observation) is a method in which people are asked to verbally report their mental processes. For example, to say why they made a particular choice or how they arrived at a particular judgment.

The main criticism to this method is that there is always a gap between what people report about themselves and their actual behavior. Therefore, when trying to optimize a website, relying solely on visitors’ feedback regarding their experience is not the ideal approach.

Instead, brands are using solutions to visualize visitors’ online behavior to bridge the data gap in understanding action and inaction.

Introspection’s Substitute: Behaviorism Introspection is about human self-reflection rather than external observation. It reflects the inner process of the human mind. In contrast, Behaviorism is more quantitative and looks at the external, observable causes of human behavior.

To be practical in the realm of Web analytics, the context of actions is of the utmost importance in under36

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standing browsing usage. While traditional analytics can analyze conversion rates and detect whether a website has succeeded or failed in reaching its goals, they are ineffective at providing a broader view.

When engaging in more refined exploration of human interaction on the Web, analysis based on server access logs alone (as is the case with traditional analytics) is anything but sufficient. To see the entire picture, it is necessary to examine and understand the visitor’s behavior, motivation and resulting actions.

A key element in the Behaviorist approach to understanding online behavior is gathering mouse-movement data, which can pinpoint user intent and interests.

Mouse-movement recording technology provides a series of interesting advantages when compared to classical usability tools. For example, it can be mass deployed, allowing for large datasets; it can reach typical and first-time visitors in their natural environment; and, most importantly, it is transparent to visitors, so no experimenter bias or novelty effects are introduced, allowing them to browse websites in their natural environment as opposed to lab conditions.

Session recording technology enables businesses to easily examine what is going on behind the screens, in the minds of the users. For example, it can reveal how many users considered clicking the buy button versus how many of them actually clicked it. Or, it can provide insight into the order in which they complete the fields of a form. Marketers can use this technology to get quantifiable answers to the questions that plague them, including whether people actually scroll down the Web page (and how far), where they hesitate on the page (and for how long), as well as what elements they are interacting (engaging with or concentrating on).

Session recordings provide answers to these questions and many more. Videos can be generated for individual or for segments/groups or users (for example, based on engagement time, location or first-time versus returning visitors). Likewise, recordings detect page elements that visitors interact with the most, the rate of scrolls (to infer interest), or whether the pages viewed have a minimum scroll reach (which may indicate that some visitors are searching for specific content but are not being successful), to name just a few.

No Room for Guesswork While it is possible to guess what changes to a Web page or website will achieve the highest conversion rates and then hope for the best, this is clearly not the best practice for online marketers as it wastes time and money, both valuable resources. Using Introspection and Behaviorism principles to develop valid hypotheses, understand behavior, run controlled tests and evaluate the results is the only path to improvement.

“Do You See Me?” “I see you! and so do your customers!”

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Social Media

MAVENS

Enhancing Customer Identity Management:

3 Pillars of Social Login

By Stefan Koenig, CEO and Co-Founder of Hull

In the quest for simple and intuitive digital experiences, website visitors are growing increasingly frustrated with having to create multiple usernames and passwords for each site they visit.

With email passwords, social media passwords, banking passwords, etc., the last thing most want is to have to remember another login to make a simple purchase. In fact, in a recent Web Hosting Buzz report, 86 percent of retail customers say that they are bothered when they have to create a new login and username.

For this very reason, social login has become increasingly popular among retailers looking to turn website visitors into returning customers. Retailers know that improving conversion rates (e.g. purchases) begins with improving the customer experience. Allowing visitors to register with a simple click to log in with their existing social media profile from Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn eliminates the need for long registration forms, verifications and password recovery. In fact, 77 percent of consumers reported a preference for social logins in the Web Hosting Buzz report.

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Despite its benefits, many businesses fail to take full advantage of the potential of social logins – using them ineffectively or not at all. In order to use social logins to build more complete profiles of customers and create seamless experiences, retailers must understand the three pillars of social media login.

I. Go beyond gamification Interactive elements including quizzes have proven successful in reaching today’s consumer, creating fun and entertaining ways for visitors to interact with a brand and share content. Many enterprises use social login to access these games, but limiting social login to brand engagement campaigns means companies are losing out on important insights. Using social logins merely for short-term marketing efforts limits the ability to enhance customer experiences and create comprehensive customer identities.

When social login is used only for one-off campaigns, all the information about user behavior is limited only to the game. Instead, implementing a social login for all digital marketing efforts – from shopping carts to commenting tools to customer service inquiries – will help digital marketers connect the dots between all of the ways a customer interacts with their brand.

II. Make it simple and intuitive Retailers know they have only seconds to intrigue site visitors. What they struggle to understand is how to get visitors to provide their information within those same seconds. Many use pop ups and embedded forms, but if they are not compelling, are too long or too complicated (squinting to read CAPTCHAs sound familiar?), brands waste valuable opportunities to convert.

Users are doing multiple things simultaneously, likely talking on the phone, texting or watching TV at the same time they are logging into a site, so the process needs to be simple – limit the social login choices to the top three used by customers (currently that’s Facebook, Google and Twitter), and offer a very short form for those that don’t want to use this method.

Creating an intuitive social login also means eliminating requests for new passwords and email verifications. To have users create a password for a site that they logged into via a social profile defeats the purpose of moving to one login. Plus, sending a verification email creates an unnecessary additional step that is cumbersome for users.

Finally, ensuring that a website remembers returning users is foundational for creating an intuitive, simple social login process. As the digital worlds become increasingly mobile, consumers expect to browse products on smartphones and make purchases from laptops. Knowing this, it’s critical that brands remember consumer preferences and shopping carts from device to device, whether it’s a mobile site, laptop or app.

III. Connect the data behind user behavior A common issue among retailers today is understanding and defining customers in a digital world, where one user may have multiple “identities” by a brand, with email, customer service and e-commerce all having different data on the same user.

Deploying a social login that effectively captures the products users are viewing and purchasing, the reviews they’ve given, the comments they’ve made or a customer service submission they have created can give IT teams, customer service reps and marketing executives the kind of information they need to be most effective. Ultimately, this insight allows brands to send the right message at the right time to the right user – increasing conversion rates.

The key to seamless user experiences Social logins are necessary to connect with and reach today’s consumer, but they must be implemented the right way in order to be effective. By creating a simple social login that not only remembers returning users, but

Eighty-six percent of retail customers say that they are bothered when they have to create a new login and username, proving the benefits of social login.

also connects the dots between a site visitor and a social media profile can create meaningful information that helps retailers better understand their customers. This better understanding translates to better communication, ultimately increasing sales and loyalty.

Did You Know?

When Janrain recently polled consumers (mostly under 45 years old with annual incomes less than $100,000), it found: 92% have encountered social login before.

3 out of 4 use social login.

70% leverage social login because it’s faster than registering the “traditional way.”

68% have left incorrect or incomplete information when site registration becomes tedious.

64% are more likely to return to a website that remembers them without a username and password.

53% are more likely to spend more time on a site that personalizes their Web experience based on profile and interests.

Web

COMMENTARY Competing in the

Attention Economy

By Amberly Dressler, Managing Editor

Did you know…Disney doesn’t sell amusement park tickets or products? Rather, they sell an experience, and they are competing for your free time to do so.

Keynote Cliff Notes: What You Missed Get a roundup of best practices, software updates and emerging trends discussed at this year’s tradeshows at wsm.co/keycliff.

This is one of the messages Constellation Research Founder R “Ray” Wang delivered at Episerver Ascend 2015 in Las Vegas when he spoke to a crowd of marketers, developers and other professionals interested in learning more about improving their digital experiences.

For those who have missed some of this Fall’s biggest “customer-day” type technology shows, know this: There is an attention economy where advocacy, engagement and time is as good as currency. Capitalizing on the attention economy can only happen, however, when content is delivered in relevant ways across channels before, during and after the sale.

While many savvy marketers have known this for quite some time and may be using solutions from the likes of Episerver, SAP, Sitecore, DNN, Monetate (and the list goes on) to do so, creating the amount of content needed to speak to customers/readers/users 1:1 presents a resource burden that most brands have failed to minimize – as copy, graphics, photos, suggestions and other creative content needs to be changed to address users’ wants and needs. The demand, however, is there and the available data is a big part of that.

At Ascend 2015, Episerver gave attendees an exclusive preview of “Profile Store” and its ability to aggregate user data from channels like Instagram, searches and website behavior. To put this type of information to good and immediate use, brands can prioritize user personas – and, in turn, reduce the amount of content needed to be created.

Episerver customer Mud Pie, for example, has three distinct filters on its site: baby items, fashion and living. A first-time visitor receives a generic “Welcome”

R “Ray” Wang discussing the Attention Economy at Episerver Ascend 2015.

message and a promotional offer to incentivize the initial purchase. Once Mud Pie is able to identify which products the user is interested in, Episerver will serve the correct content based on that persona. Even with its agency of record, Whereorware, and marketing automation company Silverpop, it would be too time consuming to update all channels (with images, copy, promotions) to more than a few segments, so Mud Pie has wisely selected to personalize high-trafficked pages based on past purchases, product type intent and more.

For example, someone looking at a baby item, will now see emails and landing pages based on that product and category (rather than Mud Pie’s living or fashion lines).

Not every company – retailer, service provider or information publisher – will be able to invest in a new Web content management system or a marketing automation platform in the New Year, but those who want to compete in the attention economy will have to make strides to deliver personalized content soon. When ready, their software and technology-related decisions should be fueled by how the product will help them personalize experiences at scale and what profile data those experiences will be based on.

If buyers spend their limited free time investing in a brand (e.g. viewing content, completing forms), enterprises will have to invest in them too. This starts with leveraging technology that allows enterprises to speak to users personally and, thus, get and maintain their attention in this changing economy.

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