Jonathan Mendez's Blog

Optimizing Content: Give Users Control

A week and a half ago I spoke at Outsell’s BrainGain conference to a group of leading executives from traditional publishers on how they can deliver relevance to their audience. It was a great group of folks and the Outsell team does their best to steer them in the right direction. However, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that I was speaking to someone on life-support

Search has rocked their world. It has destroyed their content hierarchies. Yet, in a room of 100 leading publishing execs I could count on one hand the number that even knew that Google’s ranking algo is foremost based on links. Social media has also changed the game for them but there seemed little desire to embrace this or understanding why and how it works and no initiatives to lead in SMO rather than follow. Adding insult to injury, technologies like RSS and Ajax are fundamentally changing the way people interact with content while simultaneously destroying the core revenue models for many in the audience. All in all it’s a challenging time to be a publisher.

The first step to solving any problem is recognition and the good news is that publishers do know things have changed. They also realize they do not have the in-house knowledge to adapt. They want to learn, they want to change. But will they? Can they?

John Battelle has an interesting post about publishers and their lack of embrace of what he referrers to as conversational media. It’s a timely post especially considering that in great irony Time Magazine has just named “You”the person of the year.

What can publishers do to adapt? Here are a few broad ideas and some more tactical ones following in the presentation below:

1. Think like a search engine: Always deliver relevance based on what you know about the user’s goals.

2. Leverage the platform: The web is not a one-to-one but rather many-to-many exchange, free from hierarchy and oligarchy (this is the original vision of Tim Berner-Lee).

3. Release your content: The more content you have available the larger your audience and the more you will facilitate the exchange of ideas.

To be blunt it’s what you can do for your audience not what your audience can do for you. If you don’t keep your audience engaged and interested they will go elsewhere. There are simply too many other choices and zero switching cost. Worry about revenue models later or die today. The choice is yours.

Blog Tag: I'm it!

Seems there is a holiday game of blog tag going around that was started by Jeff Pulver. I was tagged by Avinash Kaushik. The idea is to present some personal things about the blogger so the readers can get to know a few things about who they are.

So, five facts that you probably don't know about me (actually in the holiday spirit of giving there are more than five here):

1. I’m a huge music fan (as you will find out). My five favorite concerts (top of mind) REM, American University 1985, Bruce Springsteen, Asbury Park Convention Center 2000, Year of the Blues Celebration, Radio City Music Hall 2003, Bob Dylan Columbia Records 30th Anniversary, Madison Square Garden 1993. Rolling Stones, Roseland Ballroom, 2002

2. I was a singer/songwriter for a few years and recorded on the (now defunct) independent label Bad Karma Records. I still love to play guitar and harp. I own a 1999 Paul Reed Smith CE, A 1994 American Standard Fender Telecaster, A 1976 Fender Telecaster Custom, a 1962 Re-Issue Fender Stratocaster and a Martin HD-28. I’m about to get a new Gibson Custom Shop CS 336. My harps of choice are Hohner Special 20’s.

3. I love wine and have a cellar with about 400 bottles. My collection is heavy with Italian Super Tuscans & Piedmonts and Red Burgundies. My current favorite wines are from Alcina Cellars and my new delivery from them just came yesterday. Here’s a wine of theirs I had last week. It was tasty (that's a wine term).

4. I have been playing in the same high stakes fantasy baseball league for 12 years. What makes our league great is that it is highly strategic. Each of the 18 teams has a 36-player farm system and each season we hold a minor leaguer draft where we select players from the majors all the way down through the minors and even high school. The league is a continuity league so once you have the player in your system he’s yours until you cut him or trade him. We can sign players to long-term contracts too and if you cut them before the contract is over you still have to pay. I think our league is about as close to real baseball as you can get. I’ve won the league three times and came in second place this year.

5. In 1999 I produced and directed the feature length documentary film “Tramps Like Us, The Magic of Bruce Springsteen” It was set in the parking lot of Bruce’s 15 night run of New Jersey shows during the summer of 1999’s E Street Band reunion tour as well as in Asbury Park, NJ. The film was called “a dynamic piece of filmmaking” by the Asbury Park Press and was screened at the Louisville Film Festival, The Screening Room in NYC as well as being the first official event at the 2000 grand reopening of the legendary Stone Pony in Asbury Park.

Well, that's enough about me. My blog tags are Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Marshall Sponder, Matthew Roche and Bill Slawski. You guys are it! I'm getting back to work...

Afterthoughts on SES Chicago

SES Chicago had a very different vibe from the six other SES shows I’ve participated in. The show was packed with first time attendees and lots of in-house folks. I actually think this is a really good sign. SEO/M has reached a turning point. On one level it has matured. Early practitioners now have years of service time in the field. At the same time, most small and medium sized businesses are just getting up to speed. No one is more conscious of this than Google. And their business strategy proves it. Google’s deal with Intuit on QuickBooks could be the most important partnership this year. Google also has a created what amounts to a full service solution for search advertising. Google will help build and host your page for you. Other services they provide for free include email, shopping cart, web analytics and testing. There are many companies online that have been selling these services to small businesses for a long time.

Someone else who knows what they’re doing is Danny Sullivan. In Chicago Danny announced his new company Third Door Media would launch a conference series for more advanced SEOs and SEMs. SMX kicks off in Seattle this June and I can’t wait to see the agenda Danny comes up with. By going up market Danny allows SES and SMX to both survive as they each cater to a different audience. I think this is great for the industry. There is a clear need for a higher level of strategic discussion around search as it gains more recognition and prominence in marketing plans. In many respects I feel that search is seen by C level execs as a marketing subculture. I think and hope that SMX will help change that perception.

My first panel was Ads in a Quality Score World. Danny moderated. Joining me were Andrew Goodman from Page Zero, Joshua Stylman from Reprise and Brian Boland from Microsoft. I had a chance to chat with Brain afterwards and don’t count Microsoft out of the paid search game. Every SEM knows MS traffic has always been better quality than any of the other engines. They have some deep analytic, targeting and optimization tools already in AdCenter and they are working on more. If they find a way to get impression volumes up they can pick up market share quickly. My presentation below focused on some of the issues around delivering relevance (which is what quality score is supposed to be all about) and Google’s attempts to measure relevance. At this point Quality Score is far from perfect but it’s a great idea and as I think Josh pointed out, it’s not going anywhere. Factoring in relevance between keywords, ads and landing pages will be part of Yahoo’s Panama as well. An interesting side note; Chris Zaharias, SVP of Strategic Services at Efficient Frontier pointed out in a webinar I had the pleasure of doing with him last week, how Google has attributed increased profitability in AdWords to their quality score initiatives and that the stock price has moved in lock step Quality Score improvements.

A note on Slideshare: If you want to see the slides in a larger size click the link on the player to the Slideshare site.

My second presentation was on Ad Testing Research and Findings. Andrew Goodman moderated and Anton Konikoff of Acronym, Hugh Burnham of Rare Method and Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro joined me. Gord had some great findings as always related to one of my passions, searcher behavior. In fact, my conversation with Gord in the “green room” about ways to marry qualitative and quantitative data on searcher behavior from query to conversion was one of the highlights of the show for me. My presentation focused on multivariate tests on Google ads that we’ve been doing. With each test (and we just launched three new ones this week) we continue to discover some interesting things.

I’m already looking forward to the next SES on my home turf in NYC. I anticipate a more agency centric crowd and with everything going on with Google’s Quality Score and Yahoo’s Panama I think we’ll see lots of talk about relevance.

How Simplicity, Recognition & “The Perception of Ease” Impact Landing Page Optimization

If there’s one landing page battle I’ve had to fight consistently with clients during my time as a strategist and consultant it is the fight for simplicity. Why don’t people like simplicity on landing pages? Here’s just a few snippets of what I’ve heard over the years:

“It makes us look unprofessional”
“It doesn’t represent our brand”
“It looks like a little kid came up with this idea”
“No one’s going to look at this and think we’re a real company.”
“Who will buy unless we tell them more about our product?"
“How much thought did you put into this?”

and my favorite…

“We though we were getting expert advice”

Yet, a funny thing happens after I beg and plead for their trust to at least test these concepts and ideas. They always perform well. In fact the more “designed” or “creative” or “informational” the page they are tested against, the better simple pages do. Lifts of 50-100% don’t surprise me in these types of tests.

My favorite story of all comes from the agency world. One creative director’s disdain for my design caused her to take my power point wireframe and convert it straight to HTML. She then sent it off to the client refusing to work on it since she was not capable of designing around simplicity. The client saw the HTML page and fired the agency from doing further design work. With no other options the page went live in its ugly and simple form for what was supposed to be a week. It had a 300% lift in conversion vs. the page that it replaced and is still live a year later. True story.

But today is a watershed moment in my understanding of the benefits of simplicity. Until today I’ve always thought that simplicity worked because it’s an easier user experience. Meaning, practically for the user from a content consumption and absorption factor and functionally for the user on an experience and interface level. Simplicity drives users forward in fulfilling their goal. There is no doubt about this.

What happened today is that I read an interview on Boxes and Arrows with Paco Underhill. Paco’s writing and study of consumer behavior have no peer. In this fantastic interview Paco states, “we live in a world in which time is in a state of acceleration. And therefore the perception of ease is as important as the reality of ease.” This observation hit me like my first time hearing the opening snare crack on “Like a Rolling Stone.”

I immediately realized that landing page simplicity does not just help users practically and functionally. It fosters a positive intention during the critical moment of recognition. Simplicity generates a comfort level and confidence in users based on the perceived ease of the landing page before they even engage.

The “moment of recognition” is the time on a landing page between when the page loads and when the user has determined if the page is relevant. Most research has pegged this “moment” anywhere from 3-5 seconds.

What really made Paco’s comments resonate with me is that I have begun to spend more and more time thinking strategically about the “moment of recognition” and how it impacts conversion rates. Just a few weeks ago OTTO tested if reinforcing the keyword and search engine on the landing page improved conversion. The hypothesis was that by reinforcing the keyword and source an easier and faster recognition of relevance would be created that would positively impact on the user experience and ultimately conversion.

The idea for the tests came from what Kayak does from their paid search ads.

What we found testing this same concept for our client was that on some landing experiences reinforcement was helpful. As helpful as a 71% lift in revenue per visitor (RPV) on important product lists and brand pages. On more generic category pages where it was easy for users to perceive relevance upon landing there was less of an impact (though still provided modest lift versus control).

We surmised based on the page designs and layouts that as the page became more difficult for the user discern relevance, the greater positive impact the reinforcement provided. I feel strongly that the RPV lift is due to the reinforcement shrinking the moment of recognition by placing the query and source in the exact location that eye-tracking studies show users eyes hit the landing page. This keeps users in the ever important “flow” of trying to achieve their goal.

To summarize:

• Perception of ease of use during the moment of recognition is a positive factor in landing page conversion

• Reinforcement of relevance during the moment of recognition is a positive factor in landing page conversion

• Actual ease of use fostered by simplicity is a positive factor in landing page conversion

Thanks Paco!

User Goals and Conversion from Search

Understanding user goals forms the foundation of my methodology for landing page and search ad optimization. Goal discovery also forms the core of searcher behavior research. This is all due to the fact that delivering relevance can only be done by first understanding the goals of users. Through my experience, research and user observation I've determined there are three distinct goal types that influence user behavior and factor in the performance of search ads and landing pages.

1. Primary Goal: Every user has a goal in mind when they use the query field. I've discussed and exemplified primary goals and goal paths before here.

2. Secondary Goal: The further along the user is in the consideration funnel the more important secondary goals become. Sometimes if you can’t fulfill the secondary goal you may not convert the user.

Example: User may know they want a down jacket (primary goal). They also may know they want it in black (secondary goal). Your site may have a down jacket the user loves but if you don't have it in black you’ve lost that conversion.

3. Latent Goals: We need to be very careful here. Your ad or landing page can awaken the user to additional considerations that they had not thought of. This can be a good persuasive technique or it can be a bad idea. There is a delicate balance between providing too much information, too little information and finding just the right balance.

Example (bad): The same user finds the down jacket they want. You have it in black. Your landing page messages that it has a goose down fill power of 650. Prior to reading that the user had no idea what fill power was. Instead of completing the purchase they go to Google to find out about fill power.

Example (good): The same user finds the down jacket they want. You have it in black. Your landing page messages that it has a sleeve pocket that can hold a mobile phone or iPod. The user had no idea that this was something that was available but knowing they will use it that closes the deal.

Discovering these three goals and considering them in your messaging is the first step to optimizing your landing pages and search ads. Only through testing will you truly be able to gather the insight needed to optimize based on evaluating the influence and optimal mix of messages that are needed to deliver relevant experiences and improve your ROI.