Righteous Marketing

Since AdWords allowed advertisers to specifically target “smartphone” users, mobile PPC has been getting a lot of well-deserved attention. So why all the fuss?

Mobile Is a Horse of a Different Color

Typical PPC ads reach users in two ways. They show up on search engine results pages (and I’m lumping in search partners here) or as AdSense ads on content pages of other sites. The user sees these ads in a standard browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome or Safari) while seated in front of a computer. They’re on the internet for a reason and you can decipher at least some intent with keywords and ad copy. This is the PPC world in a nutshell and it’s awesome for people who know what they’re doing. But mobile doesn’t fit the mold.

Mobile users see PPC ads (and landing pages) in a much different way. First, the screen is much smaller. For some phones this means that the #1 ad on Google's SERPs is 20-25% of the space above the fold. For other phones this means that many users will never even see your ad even though you got an "impression." Second, smartphones have browsers that do all kinds of weird things. Some can handle Flash, some can't. Some have Javascript enabled, some don't. Some are full HTML browsers, some aren't. So not only could your PPC ads being shown in vastly different ways, but imagine what is happening to your landing pages. That video or Flash content may be worthless. Your images might be taking too long to download. As you can see, mobile needs to be treated differently.

Is It Worth the Effort?

The AdWords blog has a case study from Razorfish that shows a 7.5% lower cost/conversion on mobile advertising and a conversion rate boost of 9.3% for their mobile-specific ad copy. So in this situation, yes, the effort definitely paid off. If you’re still not convinced, here are the most critical areas to consider:

• Intent – Mobile users are probably looking at your site for different reasons than a desktop user. They may be looking for a phone number, address or hours. They likely won’t be going through a lot of page views (3G is fast, but not that fast) so think of what tasks that eliminates and what is left.
• User Experience – I will reiterate, smartphones are slower than computers so consider a mobile-friendly subdomain (ie http://m.linkedin.com) to serve a better user experience.
• Situation – The definition is in the name: MOBILE. These users are seeing and clicking your ads in a much different physical situation. Speak to that in your messaging.

What have been your experiences with mobile?

Recently I reviewed my New Year’s resolutions (yes, I do those) and realized that I was falling behind on my goals for Righteous Marketing. Therefore, please accept my public apology and help me rectify one of my major goals.

The Goal

I said I would post 3 times/week (which I have been doing) but I also said I would get one guest post each month (which I haven’t been doing). So this is a call for guest posts and here are some guidelines:

• Topic: Anything PPC or CRO related
• Length: 250+ words, pictures always help
• Links: Link to anything legit, I’m not picky
• Byline: Yes. Gotta give yourself some love

Last year, my most read post was a guest post, so I’m taking that as a sign that you like to see some variety. So, first things first, I need a post for March and it’s first come first serve. After that we’ll work something out (I wouldn’t be opposed to doing a couple guest post each month either.) If you’re interested send an email to robert “at” righteousmarketing “dot” com or you can reach me on Twitter here: @robert_brady.

I love reading books that talk about the psychology of buying. There is nothing more fascinating to me than the human mind. Recently I was reading and came across the concept of anchoring. I remembered the term from my marketing classes, but my experience in the internet space gave me a whole new perspective on the topic.

What Is Price Anchoring?

From Wikipedia: “Anchoring and adjustment is a psychological heuristic that influences the way people intuitively assess probabilities. According to this heuristic, people start with an implicitly suggested reference point (the “anchor”) and make adjustments to it to reach their estimate. A person begins with a first approximation (anchor) and then makes adjustments to that number based on additional information.”

In more lay terms, anchoring is comparing one price to another “anchor” price to determine how good of a deal the item is. You go to the store and see tomatoes on sale for $1.49/lb. You know that the farmer down the street sells tomatoes at his stand for $1.00/lb and therefore the store tomatoes don’t seem very cheap to you. However, another shopper sees the $1.49/lb tomatoes in the store and thinks it’s a great deal because the last time they bought tomatoes in the store they were $1.99/lb (and they don’t know about the farmer.) These two customers perceive the price differently because they have different anchors. Anchoring has a large effect on how we perceive value.

What If My Product Is Unique?

For those companies with unique products & services, your customers may have no anchor to help them see the value of your offering. Consider yourself lucky because you have the opportunity to set an anchor for them. Here are two examples:

SEOmoz.com

Just below the video and quotes you’ll see the three purchase options: Pro, Pro Plus and Pro Elite. If you want to join SEOmoz and are a cheapskate, you’ll pick Pro. However, for just a little more you could get Pro Plus and it’s nowhere near as expensive as Pro Elite. SEOmoz uses Pro Elite to set the anchor and that makes Pro Plus and Pro look more reasonably priced. I don’t have user data (but I’d love to hear from a Mozzer in the comments) but I would guess that Pro Elite is their smallest customer base. Sure they make more per customer, but even more than that, it improves the value perception for Pro and Pro Plus.

BaseCampHQ.com

BaseCamp has some interesting variations. First, they actually make the Plus plan larger so it jumps out and call it their “Most Popular Plan.” Second, they have ordered the options with the highest priced on the left and the lowest priced on the right. Despite these differences we see the same idea of using the Max plan as the anchor. They’re actually making it more explicit since left-to-right reading will have us see the Max plan first.

How To Fix It?

Some of you may only have two offerings and you’re wondering how you can use anchoring? Say your pricing looks like this:



LotusJump Pro may be the best value, but it looks expensive compared to Basic. What if you were to add a third plan that had increased functionality and a higher price point? This would serve as the anchor and make the Pro plan look that much more appealing.

What do you think?

If you spend very long talking about conversion rate optimization you’ll quickly come across a few key players. You’ve got Tim Ash, author of Landing Page Optimization and the organizer behind Conversion Conference in May. There is the ion interactive team of Scott Brinker, Anna & Justin Talerico, Megan Leap and company. You’ve got the awesome webinars done by Flint McGlaughlin at MarketingExperiments.com and a great blog at Conversion-Rate-Experts.com. Have you ever wished you could ask the experts a question about your site? Your problems? Now you can.

Introducing #CROchat Every Thursday on Twitter

Time: 1pm-2pm EST, every Thursday
Location: Twitter, just follow the #CROchat hashtag

You know that conversion optimization would greatly help your online efforts, but don’t know where to start? This is your chance to get expert feedback from authorities in the field. Don’t miss out and I’ll see you there!

Malcolm Gladwell has become one of my favorite authors because he looks very deeply into the psychology of decision making. Last week I reviewed one of his earlier works, Tipping Point, and today I’ll give you my takeaways from his more recent title, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (disclosure: Amazon affiliate link).

The 3 Main Points Made In Blink

1. “Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.”
2. “When should we trust our instincts, and when should we be wary of them?” The book helps you understand that our instincts can misguide us, thus helping us know when to trust and when to question those instincts.
3. “Our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled.” This is the crux of expertise. Experts can make a correct decision quickly and accurately because of training and experience. Intuition can be learned.

He presents many examples throughout the book to highlight these points, but I will only mention two. First, he cites a case where the Getty museum purchased a Greek kouros after 14 months of investigation. Scientific analysis and carefully tracing the documentation of the statue indicated that the statue was indeed authentic. However, nearly every expert in the field, upon first seeing the statue, called it a fake. They described their reactions very unscientifically, saying it looked too “fresh” or that they felt a wave of “intuitive repulsion.” Hardly enough to overturn the months-long analysis right? But those first impressions were more correct than the analysis as the kouros turned out to be a fake.

Secondly, he cites the efforts of Brendan Reilly at Cook County Hospital in Chicago starting in 1996. Reilly noticed that heart attack patients were resource-intensive and the method for diagnosing heart attacks was highly unreliable. Brendan found the research of a cardiologist from the 1970’s, Lee Goldman and began implementing a simple decision tree to diagnose heart attack patients. The tree utilized only 4 main criteria: the results of an ECG, is the pain felt by the patient unstable angina, is there fluid in the patient’s lungs and is the patient’s systolic blood pressure below 100. After two years of collecting data, this method proved 70% better at recognizing which patients were actually having a heart attack.

Takeaways

With the Greek kouros, the experts needed only a couple seconds to accurately determine its authenticity (despite the findings of a 14-month investigation). If you could ask your website visitors what they thought of your site after seeing it for only a few seconds, what would they say? Would they trust your site enough to make a purchase? Do they feel your site is spammy? Give it a try. Get 5 people who haven’t seen your website, let them look at it for a couple seconds and then ask them to give their first impressions. If you want more detailed info, hit up a service like UserTesting.com to get more info.

Lastly, Brendan Reilly was able to improve the ability of doctors to correctly diagnose a heart attack by giving them a method that SIMPLIFIED the process. Doctors go to school for years, have your entire medical history and can order hundreds of tests to make an accurate diagnosis. However, at a certain point the additional information actually made them worse at diagnosing heart attacks. How much information are you giving potential customers to “help” them make a decision? How many different choices do they have? Zero in on the factors that really matter and make the decision easier for your prospects.

What do you think?

PS Another book from Malcolm Gladwell that’s worth a read is Outliers: The Story of Success (disclosure: Amazon affiliate link), an interesting look at aberrations from the trend and what we can learn from them.

Now I have truly seen it all. Last week Google announced that they would be renaming the Google Ad Planner (their tool for making media buys on targeted sites) the DoubleClick Ad Planner. So why am I making a big deal about what seems to be a very trivial name change?

Google Dropped Its Own Brand Name

Google loves to hear it’s own name. Froogle sounded funny, so they renamed it Google Product Search (despite the longer name.) Gmail in the UK? Nope, it’s Google Mail (partially because they lost a lawsuit too.) They even have their own cell phone now, the Google Nexus One. They love putting their name on everything, so when they take their name off of something, it makes me wonder.

Possible Explanations

1. The tool isn’t doing well and they don’t want a failure to tarnish the Google name.
2. DoubleClick raised a stink and wanted some love. Maybe the purchase isn’t going as smoothly as we thought?
3. Google’s brand doesn’t carry much weight in the display industry (and DoubleClick does). Hard to believe, but entirely possible.

All of these are a little out there, so what do you think? Why did Google drop their branding from Ad Planner?

A couple weeks ago I registered to attend Conversion Conference West 2010 in San Jose May 4-5. Ironically, this is the first conference to focus entirely on online conversion, even though that is the success metric for most websites. So what do you get?

• 26 sessions, all focused on getting you more conversions
• 40 expert speakers
• 3 keynotes (Tim Ash, Bryan Eisenberg & Jakob Nielsen)
• One-on-one “expert office hours”
• Birds-of-a-feather lunches
• Network with the best conversion minds in the industry
• A great expo hall full of sponsors and exhibitors (shared with eMetrics conference for even more bang for your buck)

If you haven’t noticed, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is going to be a big trend in 2010. The worst of the recession may be passing, but companies still have their belts tightened and need to squeeze more out of less. Hence, CRO is the natural choice to get more from your email, your PPC, your SEO and every other marketing effort that gets people on your website.

How To Register

Simply visit the registration page here, and you can use the promo code CCW550 when you sign up to get $100 off. Sign up before April 10 and save a couple hundred bucks with their early bird pricing. Let me know if you’re going so we can meet up!

Perhaps I’m a little slow on the uptake here, but why does Google have three different keyword tools? The oldest of the three (to my knowledge) is the External Keyword Tool here. This is the tool I’ve had bookmarked in Firefox for years. However, a while back Google launched the Search-Based Keyword Tool. This represented a branch in the product development more than evolution since the search-based tool was intended to take “actual Google search queries” into consideration when looking at a URL or list of keywords & phrases. Then, a couple weeks ago I saw a tweet mentioning a new Google keyword tool that was only accessible from a link in AdWords. I have been using it quite a bit over the last couple weeks and I’m quite impressed.

The New Google Keyword Tool

Understand that I use the term “new” liberally because the official AdWords blog post about this if from September. So it’s new to me (in my defense, they say it’s in beta, so I like to think my account just didn’t get access until recently). You can read the official post for the details, but here is why I think this tool is too cool for school.

• Great Filtering – On the left sidebar you’ll see that you can check/uncheck the different main keywords to weed out less relevant threads. You can also display broad, phrase and exact match searches AT THE SAME TIME!
• Sorting – Now that you can actually display all 3 match types together, sorting by total search volume, or average CPC, will quickly give you a high-level snapshot of the opportunity.
• Competitor Research – Here’s a little trick for you to try. Take the URL of a competitor and put it into the “Website” box. Include all match types and then sort the list by relevance (drop-down box above the keyword list, right side). This will show you what Google thinks are the most relevant keywords on your competitor’s site and how much search volume they’re potentially getting.
• Self-Analysis – Now put your own URL into the tool and run the same process as above. Are you sending Google the right message?

P.S. When you first bring up the tool you’ll only see columns for Keyword, Competition, Global Monthly Searches, Local Monthly Searches, and Local Search Trends. The “Views” drop-down box will show you the other 9 columns of info you’re missing out on.

As you can see, I’ve been using some of my available time these days to read more. Today’s review is of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell.

What is the tipping point?

The main idea behind the book is that for anything to become an epidemic (and epidemic here is used for everything from actual disease outbreaks like syphilis to fashion trends like Hush Puppies to crime in New York City’s subway system) it must achieve a certain critical mass before it really “takes off.” This critical mass is what Malcolm refers to as the tipping point. If something doesn’t reach a tipping point if just fizzles out and dies. However, once the tipping point is reached, it explodes.

The 3 Rule of Epidemics

1. The Law of the Few – As you may have guessed, reaching the tipping point often requires special types of people get involved. There are three main types of people that are important:
• Connectors – These people know a lot of people and can quickly convey a message to other circles. Paul Revere was a connector and therefore knew who to tell “The British are coming!” These people have large networks and are constantly putting people in touch with other people. And they don’t know just anyone, they know other well-connected and influential people in other circles. Thus they can spread an idea into new circles and environments.
• Mavens – These are people who copiously collect information and love to share that information with other people who are in need of their information. Once these people get hold of information they’ll share it with anyone who will listen, and because of their reputation as a maven, people act on their information.
• Salesmen – These people do exactly what it sounds like, they persuade people to buy into the epidemic. They are masters of human communication both verbal and nonverbal.
2. The Stickiness Factor – In order for an epidemic to start, the idea must be memorable and motivate people to action. Otherwise it just gets thrown into the back of a person’s mind.
3. The Power of Context – Lastly, successfully reaching the tipping point often requires the right set of circumstances, or context. For example, Paul Revere made his ride at night, so he was able to find people at home and didn’t have to go out into the shops and fields. However, before despairing that this is out of your control, Malcolm points out that often it is small changes in our control that can make a huge difference. How did they reduce crime in New York? They controlled graffiti, public disorder and aggressive panhandling. How did they fix the subway system? They stopped fare jumping and painted over graffiti within hours, before anyone ever saw it.

Takeaways

Even though this book was written in 2000, I think it provides an excellent framework for internet marketers who are seeking the elusive “viral” hit, especially in social media. Consider the following questions:

• Who are the Connectors/Mavens/Salesmen in your industry?
• How can you get your idea to them?
• Does your idea need a fresh context?
• Is the idea memorable?
• Does it motivate people to action?

What’s your $0.02 on the book/topic? I’d love to hear from you.

Back in September I wrote about the paradox of testing vs. granularization and got some great insights from my readers. Today I would like to hear how you PPC managers & companies with PPC management deals handle the paradox of PPC vs. Conversion Optimization/Landing Page Optimization.

The Paradox

Tell me if this story feels familiar:

You take over management of a PPC account and make a lot of changes that quickly improves CTR, lowers CPC and brings up the overall QS of the account. All these indicate that you’re doing a good job of improving their account. However, the client isn’t very happy because they’re paying you a lot of money but haven’t seen a bunch more sales.

Herein lies the paradox. PPC management in it’s purest form involves choosing relevant keywords, setting appropriate bids, writing compelling ad copy, sending that traffic to designated pages and testing constantly. You’ll notice this definition doesn’t put you in a position to directly affect the number you’re being judged by: sales. At the end of the day, to justify yourself you need to show that your efforts are contributing to the bottom line, but your efforts are getting filtered through their conversion funnel and/or sales process. So what do you do?

Solutions?

At my last gig we attacked the paradox by helping design better landing pages and providing conversion optimization consulting as part of the package. We did this to protect the contract and add value, but unfortunately we were probably leaving money on the table by not seeking additional compensation for our additional efforts. Yes this created some very loyal customers (who wouldn’t be happy about a 20% increase in their conversion rate and thousands more in revenue each month or twice as many leads from the same click budget?) So how do you deal with this situation?