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I apologize for any inconveniences that will occur during the migration.
Wish me luck, I am merging 2 blogs and probably there will be lots of clean up and data to recover :(
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Should hosting companies be liable for losses during downtimes failures due to their incompetency?
Loading ...That’s right. Today I am going to show you how you can lose money with Google and a way to fix it.
While browsing online, I came to the ad to the “Save on Airfare” ebook. Usually skeptical about such sales letters, I went further to read reviews/scams website and see if it’s worthy or not. Based on the finding I decided to give it a try.
So, I first searched for Save on Airfare ebook download. I came to find that the website who is selling the book is www.myairfaresecrets.com. Since I am kind of a keep I used a power search to directly find the link to the pdf file, and suprise, the book was available for FREE. Now, that’s a easy way to lose money, with just a simple search on Google:
How to Lose Money With Google
Or check this search query:
How to Lose Money With Google 2
In respect to the author’s work, I did not download the book, and I also notified him of this error and promised to help with a quick fix. Hopefully, I will get a free ebook and subscription for updates for life :D.
So, here are some quick fixes for “Joni Morrison”, the author:
1. if you don’t want search engines to index your documents use the noindex tag:
<html>
<head>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />
<title>Don’t index this page</title>
</head>
2. since the page has been indexed, you need to login into your webmaster account with Google and use the URL removal tool to request a de-indexation
Google Webmasters Removal Tool
3. Put the page/directory under password and make it accessible to members only
4. Use the robots.txt to restrict the access to a file or directory – tutorial here
I hope this will help those in need.
Update: the website owner has now partially fixed the problem. However, the cache page from Google is still accessible:
Partial Fix
So, Google does mistakes when it comes to SEO – you can read their score card here.
But they also have some usability/persuasion issues also, on their product details pages on Google Products. Look at the image below. What is Not Specified supposed to mean? Size, shape, color or what?
Google Product Details - Conversion Barrier
You got to dig deeper, click link on Technical Specification, and have your brain do some workout to actually understand that Not Specified actually refers to the Service Provider:
Not Specified Means Service Provider Not Specified
Here’s a quick fix for them:
Quick Fix For Google Products (Detail Pages)
And another one:
Another Quick Fix For The Same Problem
One of the ways businesses can associate which calls are attributed to which marketing campaigns is by associating a unique telephone number to each campaign, medium or traffic source. Simply put, if visitors will come on your website from Google’s organic search result they will see a different contact us number than if they came from an AdWords campaigns.
Technically this is done by tagging all landing page URLs with a call tracking parameter or, for organic traffic, reading the query parameter and the search phrase, for the most important search engines (“q” in case of organic traffic from Google, “p” for Yahoo).
Based on the referring URL you can dynamically change the “Call Us at {phone #}” and at the same time write a cookie on your visitor’s machine, for attribution purposes.
A caveat of this technique is that the dynamic insertion can go wrong and you can leave your visitors in dark, as you can see below:
Dynamic Phone Insertion Gone Wrong
The moral? Have a backup strategy in place (display the phone number in more than one place on the page or always display a “static” phone number).
This is the second part of the series on the monetary valued of guest checkouts (read the first part here). For the next two parts of the article I will describe a couple of methods that can be used to derive the opportunity loss due to “locked checkouts” – a term I coined; sorry about that – , which are checkouts that require visitors to login or create accounts to finalize the purchase. The first method (which is to be preferred against the second) will generate accurate results and will be based on real numbers, while the second is more likely a forecasting method based on, well, approximations.
The approach described in this article is the only way to compute the exact monetary gains of the guest checkouts and it is actually a split test strategy. You will set up an A/B test, with a conservative split of the traffic, e.g. 90% of your visitors will see the original checkout process (the registration required version) and 10% of the visitors will go through a guest checkout. The conversion page will be the thank you page/receipt page. Keep in mind that to use this method you will need to be able to split the traffic, to two separate paths (URLs).
Let’s suppose this is the first page your visitors will see after clicking on the “Proceed to Checkout” button. This will be the original (A) for your test.
Booksamillion Checkout
For the variation page (B), you will have to rename the Create New Account to Guest Checkout.
booksamillion Guest Checkout
During the next page(s) of the checkout don’t ask for a password or email ID until the end of the process, on the receipt/thank you page. On that page don’t forget to offer an incentive for users to sign up (10% off for the next purchase, personalized offers for members, etc.)
A very good example to follow is actionenvelope.com, on which you can buy as a guest and at the end of the purchase you can create an account:
actionenvelope.com Thank You Page
Compare the conversions and the results by analyzing at the revenue generated by each of the two paths you’re testing! Be amazed!
That’s all folks! It’s not really that complicated, all you need is courage to do it, and some chips and soda for the IT guys :)
PS: Another useful metric to compare is the number of visitors you lose at the sign in page (create account VS proceed as a guest).
In the third part (and the last) of the article, I will describe how you could derive the opportunity loss for guest checkouts, without actually implementing a split test.
This article is about the optimization of what I consider to be one of the lowest hanging fruits for ecommerce websites, the checkout process. It can also relate to other types of web properties that require customers to pass through an online checkout process in order to purchase products or services.
Definitions: a locked checkout is an online process that requires visitors to create an account in order to complete a purchase. Usually requires them to create provide a name and a password before the order is processed. A guest checkout is a checkout that leaves allows shoppers to buy products/services without asking them to create a username and a password.
The article is split in three parts. In the first part we will look at the psychological impact of the non-guest checkouts by utilizing an analogy of a brick and mortar shopping experience and a Sign In page for an online checkout. In the second and third part we look at the numbers needed to evaluate how much money you’re leaving on the table if you don’t offer a guest checkout option.
Part I: The psychological impact of a locked checkout
No matter how much effort you put into paid advertising or other traffic acquisitions strategy, there will be not much value if your website is not converting browsers into customers at an acceptable rate.
For the purpose of our article we’ll assume that you’ve spent resources to improve your landing pages. They are perfect: there’s no flaw between your keywords, ads and landing pages, your ad messages are in alignment with your visitors’ goals, your landing pages are matching their expectations and persona, and so on.
Your visitors are ready to buy from you and they click on the highly desired call to action button, the Add to Cart, and then they proceed to your Secure Checkout. On the first page of the checkout process, or the so called Sign In page, can visitors buy from your store without strings attached, more specifically, can they start the checkout process as guests?
If not, here’s how how a similar “welcome” on the Sign In page could sound in a brick and mortar store:
If you like to buy something from us you first have to create an account – here’s a nice form for you to fill it out -, give us some private details such as your email address and your full name, tell us exactly where you live and share with us your credit card information. If you don’t want to do the aforementioned, sorry, we can’t sell you.
Would you buy from stores if they would ask you all of the above? I bet you wouldn’t. Similarly, that is what is going through the minds of your website’s visitors.
When we fill forms (online and offline) we are asked to share pieces of information such as names, addresses, phone numbers and even more sensitive ones like credit card details. Automatically, our brains will enter suspicious mode and will start asking questions such as why do you need my shipping address or why do you need my full name. Some of these questions will have obvious mental answers and will be answered in the unconscious mode. But other questions will trigged F.U.D’s (fears, uncertainties and doubts) which will be affecting goal completion rates and the overall website conversion rate.
Some visitors (and by some I mean lots of them) will ask themselves why are you requiring them to fill certain fields or why do you need them to complete some actions, i.e. why do I need to create an account to buy a product/service or Why do you need my email address to ship me something physical?
And when they start asking themselves, they start to leave/abandon the checkout process. And when they start leaving the checkout process, you start loosing money. How many? Stay tuned and I’ll show you two methods for calculating how much money you’re leaving on the table with locked checkouts.
Warning: if you’re going to implement the technique describe below, do it at your own risk!
That’s right. You can use Google’s own tool, the Website Optimizer, to implement a nice cloaking (well, technically it is not cloaking, but the results will be the same).
So what SEO cloaking mean? Simply put, you display some content to search engine bots and another one humans, with the purpose of manipulating the search engine rankings. Most of the cloaking scripts are identifying the IP of the user agent (humans or search engine bots) and based on a predefined list of IPs of search engine bots will try to guess if the visitor is a bot or human. Others, have bots traps to find robots. Based on the findings, you will setup your web server to serve the tricky content to SE and nice looking content to humans.
What does Google Website Optimizer do? While the technicalities are not the same, the result is almost the same: it displays two (or more) versions of a page to some visitors, and other content to another visitors. For a simple A/B test 50% of your visitors will see the page A and the other 50% will be automatically redirected to page B (test page). The result of GWSO is almost similar to cloaking: a redirect; while Google will keep the original page in their index and therefore will rank it high, your visitors will see a test page (not necessarily indexed or ranked in search engines, but high converting). Make sure search engine will not index the test page.
Scenario
You rank high with a page, but the page is not converting well. You design another page and run a test to see if it’s performing better. Let’s say it does convert 50% better than the original. However, when you replace the old page with the new one, your ranking will drop and you don’t have enough visitors anymore.
So, how could you balance this? How do you rank high at the same time with having a high converting page? Well, you can use Google’s own tool for the trick (at your own risk, don’t blame me for getting banned).
First, you will run a test and identify a better converting page. Next, run a follow up test and split the traffic 95% to the converting page and 5% to the page that is ranking high. Let the test run for a while (until it conclude and a little more)
This way your high ranking page will show up in SERPs and your converting page will persuade people to act. That’s it. As simple as that!
Honestly, if you continuously test and search for a better converting page, at the same time with keeping the old one live, I don’t see why Google will ban your website. After all that’s the purpose of website testing: continuously testing! However, keep in mind to stop the test and rerun/run another one once you’ve identified a.
Disclaimer: please read Google’s policy on testing and cloaking!
A real concern anyone involved in A/B/n or multivariate testing should be worried about is what’s going to happen to the search engine optimization (SEO) efforts while, and after the test is done.
If you don’t set up and follow up your tests correctly – and I don’t mean how you setup your testing platform, but the technicalities of how you implement the test on your web server – you can encounter two major problems:
1. Duplicate content issues in search engines. In this case, the control version can be totally excluded from the index or the ranks can decrease
2. Browser bookmarkers. In case if your variation pages change URLs and they are bookmarked by visitors with the changed URLs, once a winner is found and you removed the variations URL, visitors will reach a 404 not found page
To address these issues I do the following:
1. Add the following meta tags in ALL variations of the tested page:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow,noarchive”>
This will tell search engine spider not to index the page, not to follow the links and not to archive the test page(s) in their index. However, this is not working all the time so,
2. If your tested page changes URL (i.e. testing /olympics.php against /olympics_test.php) you should put the test page(s) under a different directory (i.e. www.mysite.com/testing/) and
3. Exclude tested URLs (complete directory of specific files) in your robots.txt file
To exclude directories use:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /testing/
To exclude just the file use (not recommended):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /testing/olympics_test.php
4. If you’re testing variations using the same page URL with different parameters (i.e. /olympics.php against /olympics.php?test_ver=5) use the rel=”canonical” meta tag, to tell Google and the other search engines that the control page is the page they should index.
I add the line below in the <head> section for all variation pages (i.e. /olympics.php?test_ver=5):
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mysite.com/olympics.php” />
5. Tell you programmers and link builders not to link to your testing directory/page at all (IT should be careful about internal linking, and link builders should not link from external websites)
6. If you plan on testing minisites (more pages under the same testing directory) use “rel=”nofollow” on all internal links of the minisite. Additionally you can put all the links under Javascript so they won’t be followed by search engine bots
7. Once the test is concluded and you found a winner, do a permanent redirect (301) for all tested URLs to the winning URL. For example, in your .htaccess you can add:
RewriteRule ^(.*)mysite.com/testing/olympics_test.php$ http://www.mysite.com/olympics.php [R=301,L]
If you’ll implement all of the above you will have a better chance of not getting into duplicate content issues or ranking fluctuations, due to testing and experimentation.
However, if your pages do get indexed by search engines, you should take the necessary steps to minimize the impact on rankings, as soon as possible:
1. create a Google Webmaster account and keep an eye on your 404 page errors. Eventually ask for the test pages to be excluded from their index
2. create a custom 404.html page, then track and fix 404 errors with the help of Google Analytics. On your 404 error page, add this to your page tracking code:
pageTracker._trackPageview(“/404.html?page=” + document.location.pathname + document.location.search + “&from=” + document.referrer);
Your code should look something similar to:
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try{
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxx-x“);
pageTracker._trackPageview(“/404.html?page=” + document.location.pathname + document.location.search + “&from=” +
document.referrer);}
catch(err) {}
</script>
I hope this will address your boss’ concerns on SEO and it will provide more flexibility for testing!
I see a rising trend for computer generated heatmaps of websites, used for landing page optimization and conversion rate optimization. I am updating an older post regarding such tools.
If you’re using services like feng-gui or attention wizard you should be aware of the following:
Pamela Anderson
Computer Generated Heatmap on Pamela Anderson
And here is how real people will look at the same image: (images and video courtesy of Peter Hartzbech from imotionsglobal.com):
Real Human Heatmap Gaze
Real Human Spotlight Fixation
Real Human Spotlight Gaze
Here’s the video:
Model looks at you (left) and at the product (right)
The heatmap at 1024x768 res
Same website heatmap taken at 1920x1200.See the differences? Not sure if it's even technically correct
The hotspot seen by human eyes as per foveal view
Banner Blindness Eye Tracking Study
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