Posts from August 2009
Monetize This
By Lindsay Hasz | Aug 25, 2009 3:05:41 PM
Building a monetization model is like traveling to a foreign country. It starts out confusing, not knowing where to begin or even how to speak the language, but after some time, you broaden your horizon and learn a few things. You start to wonder, ‘’Why isn’t everyone doing this?’’
Monetization is the method in which you convert a site’s activity into a monetized amount. This can range from a button clicked to an application completed. This is essential to one’s business because it helps you put a dollar value on each visitor’s movement. By combing analytics, one can determine not only which area gets the most activity, but what’s the most valuable (and those are often not the same!) For example, you may know that the billboard on the homepage gets the most clicks, but you may not know that by promoting one call-to-action over another in that space could double your monetized value. Building a monetization model is a key example of how ZAAZ “meets at the intersection of creative and logic.”
There are numerous benefits to building a monetization model.
- Optimization analysis and reporting: quick valuation on optimization requests, discover which key buying activities are worth more for testing purposes, etc.
- Gather important key findings such as value per visit/ value per application
- Time series data: analyze seasonality, utilize predictability of the model
- Dynamic prioritization: determine which initiatives have highest ROI potential
- Match-back to offline sales regression (full circle sales cycle)
- Correlate data to survey analysis with regards to brand opinion, etc.
- Monetize loss avoidance within optimization field
When building a monetization model, you must start with a few major questions.
- Who are the stakeholders? Is it the product team or marketing team? They’ll probably want the model for completely different reasons…
- What are the identified monetized transactions? Is this readily accessible? For example, can we get contribution margin per product? Do we have the data to support separating visitors into different segments?
- How will we use the results? How granular will we need the data to be?
- What are the assumptions? Does everyone agree? How do we determine what’s a good benchmark for these areas of unknown?
- Difficulty agreeing on strategy of model (gaining buy-in on a model that does not reflect actual revenue, but still carries tremendous value)
- Too much data… How do you decide what actually goes into the model? How do you be sure you’re using deduped data so as not to double-count any activity/ revenue?
- Agreeing on the assumptions
Even with the challenges listed above, building a monetization model to represent your site is essential to the growth of one’s business. It is a direct way to measure how successful a marketing campaign was, how to predict next year’s seasonality, which call-to-action is best used on what page and so forth. ZAAZ has built these for multiple business models and believe it is completely worth whatever hurdles you may come across, just as is it to travel somewhere new.
Lindsay is an Online Test Designer in the Optimization department at ZAAZ.
ART & COPY
By Elena Moffet | Aug 20, 2009 1:23:25 PM
Art & Copy opens in select cities tomorrow! If you live in Chicago, New York, Denver or Seattle, then you are one of the lucky ones.
In Seattle, the film will screen at Northwest Film Forum. ZAAZ's own Katherine Leggett will be hosting a panel discussion on opening night. The panel follows the 7 o' clock screening, and panelists will include Pam Fujimoto (art director) and Cal McAllister (founder of Wexley School for Girls).
You can read more about the panel, and buy tickets at the NWFF site. Read more about the film itself at the Art & Copy site!
Creating Solid Mobile UX
By Anders Rosenquist | Aug 14, 2009 12:15:18 PM
[Cross-posted from MobileUX]
The momentum of mobile application development has accelerated over the past year. Apps have increased the functionality of mobile devices, and the success of Apple's iPhone app store has lead the charge in the introduction of app stores on other platforms such as Android, Palm, Nokia, and soon Windows Mobile. A key element in the adoption of mobile apps is a focus the user experience. There are lots of good apps out there, but many more bad ones.
So how do you ensure creating a great
mobile experience for users? There are two key ingredients: One is focus, the
other is testing. "Focus" actually has multiple parts, including
simplicity, consistency, and great performance. Taken together, these parts
help pinpoint the core elements to meets users' needs. Focus is especially
important for clients that have existing sites or applications - there is often
a strong push to include much of the functionality that a user would encounter
on a desktop. But because mobile has many different interactions than the
desktop - frequency and duration of use, context (e.g. riding the bus, walking
downtown), and input methods - it important to focus on core elements that be
engaged with during common “mobile” usage.
Edward Tufte nicely describes all the extra
screen stuff as the "computer administration debris" - on mobile the
content is the interface.
Amazon has effectively minimized this debris and focused on content in their mobile app. By
providing the core elements, mobile users can quickly and easily engage with Amazon's extensive
range of products and purchase them. Their mobile app is
highly focused.
The other ingredient in ensuring your
mobile app hits its mark is usability testing. Here the key is to have users
engage with the app on the actual device and to have them complete authentic
tasks. We like to have users sit or stand in the lab while interacting with the
device. We record the device
interface (either directly or using an emulator that runs on the observer's
computer) along with the user's voice and facial expressions. Here we capture
interaction issues as well as affective elements - how the user engages with
the app, what gets them excited, etc.
This provides a great opportunity to test out what features to include,
along with highlighting issues that need to be addressed.
I've quickly described two core pieces in mobile app creation - focus and testing. It is important to note that there is a ton of thinking and decision making that goes into this process. But doing so helps ensure the best mobile experience possible.
Anders Rosenquist is a Senior User Experience Researcher at ZAAZ and works on a variety of usability and UX issues. Anders is particularly interested in the multiple faces of mobile, including interface design, testing, strategy, and the mobile ecosystem.
Social Media Teams: Different on the Agency Side than Internal
By Ryan Turner | Aug 10, 2009 7:27:51 PM
[Cross-posted from Web Social Architecture.]
One of the things I've been saying a lot lately is that over the next couple years, we can expect to see corporations adding dedicated internal social media teams. Does this sound like a statement of the obvious? Then maybe the corollary is more interesting: I think agencies should do the opposite.
I've seen a similar pattern in a dozen or more corporations in the past year: Responsibility for social media falls to the person or people who get interested and raise their hands. They come from PR, customer service, marketing--and sometimes just out of the woodwork. Good!
In other words, responsibility for social media tends to happen in an ad hoc way--and I actually suspect ad hoc is a perfect way to staff an emerging discipline. And staff it you must.
Social media requires a new combination of skill sets, traversing all the disciplines I just mentioned, but also including strong writing skills, a thick skin, and the social savvy to interact with customers through online media in ways that are on-brand, authentic, human, and bounded by corporate guidelines, policy, and politics. It's hard, but for the right people it's super fun.
For the corporate social media team, representing the brand is a full-time job, with its own discrete challenges and rewards. They need to focus on developing the skills and experience to do it well.
But on the agency side, the whole thing is different. Agencies need to bring to bear their full range of capabilities to support clients' social media efforts, and that includes all the "traditional" digital disciplines--at the agency where I work, we have a 10-person social media team that includes people from development, analytics, search, optimization, user experience, creative, and client services. It's a witchy brew. Our goal is to implode the whole idea of "social media" in the next 2 years.
So my message to agencies is: Adapt, or specialize yourself into an oblivion-vortex!
To be sure, social media specialty agencies (I have friends at several of them) provide a tremendously valuable service with their depth of expertise in social media. But my prediction is, as web marketing evolves further, the breath of expertise brought to bear by "traditional digital" agencies will pose a grave threat to the specialists. They simply won't match digital agencies' capabilities in development, analytics, creative, usability, planning, and optimization.
Seven years ago, we were explaining the idea of online community. Three years ago, we were selling the importance of Web 2.0. Today, we're answering ubiquitous demand from clients that "social media" be included as a component in all our web work. Give it another 2 years and clients will see "web" and "social" as synonymous--data, content, service, identity, content objects, and relationships as integral to a holistic web strategy.
So on the agency side, there should ultimately be no such thing as a "Social Media Team," only a company made of web-savvy, passion-driven professionals who can support all aspects of corporate social media efforts--from concept through implementation. The nuts and bolts, and rubber meeting the road, and the delivery of the service belong on the client side; and the vision, concept, and creative / conceptual infrastructure are where agencies can help. All in all, I have to admit, it ends up looking a lot like Mad Men, which my 90 year old Grandmother, true story, described as "the most realistic show yet about the '50's."
"It shows," she says, "exactly how we lived."
The Fable of Free: Lessons from an iPhone App
By Shane Atchison | Aug 10, 2009 12:02:03 PM
Marketers everywhere are tasked with devising clever promotions to drive interest in products and services. Often these promotions include free trials or demos or free versions of these products or services, with the hope that limited free use will hook consumers into long-term purchase of the real thing. Such promotions are often successful, but there's also an inherent danger in free, especially when a free version displaces or devalues the brand.
Such was the case with iPhone app Colorama -- Kids Coloring Book. Colorama is just what it sounds like -- a digital coloring book with simple drawings developed for the iPhone and iPod that allows kids (OK, adults too) to select from among 53 blank drawings and fill them in with color using the touch-sensitive interface. Drawings can be saved, shared, used as wallpaper, and more. As far as apps go, it's a winner. Fun, easy, and useful.
The app was developed and launched in early 2009 by my colleague Ethan Arutunian in his spare time, with artistic direction by his wife and additional development by a friend. Colorama's initial development and marketing were well executed, and Arutunian was careful to place analytics tagging throughout the product to measure things, such as weekly downloads, frequency of use, most popular drawings, drawings per person, and so on.
To generate momentum at launch, Arutunian sent an initial e-mail blast to friends and colleagues informing them of Colorama's availability in the app store ($0.99). Within the first two weeks, Colorama rose in the rankings to among the top five kids' games. Then when spring came around, they got the idea to capitalize on an event; so they launched a free Easter promotion.
It consisted of a free Easter book that contained a limited number of drawings. After coloring any of the drawings, users were prompted to buy the actual Colorama book at the download store. Additionally, Arutunian used the same analytics tagging with the free version so he had immediate access during the limited promotion to track downloads and user behavior.
It seemed like a no-brainer -- "Hey, let's give kids some eggs and bunnies to color" -- but the promotion quickly devolved into a marketing miscalculation.
What parent doesn't want to download a free Easter coloring book a week before the holiday? Downloads of Colorama's free version skyrocketed in early April. At the same time, downloads of the actual version dropped off dramatically. Users clearly preferred "free" over "buy." The full version dropped out of the top five rankings, eventually settling at number 15. Sales dropped by half.
Uh-oh.
Sensing big trouble and constantly monitoring his real-time analytics data, Arutunian pulled the free Easter promo after only three days. But the damage had been done.
I like to use the analogy of radio: whatever's on the air is what's popular. It's self-fulfilling. Take a song off the radio or don't play it at all, and few will buy it. Perception and visibility are reality. In this case by not being in the top five rankings Colorama lost its initial momentum and perception of an app that kids need to download (despite it being a very cool product that my kids love!).
Had Arutunian not been monitoring the analytics data and had not pulled the eggs out of the basket, as it were, who knows how low the ranking may have dropped. The Colorama case study proves what savvy marketers already know: free isn't always good and that you can never underestimate the value of timing and good metrics.
