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Archive for the ‘Don’t Do Like Them’ category

ITA Software Transparency – Publicly Hiring Hacker

July 25th, 2010

That’s what I call transparency :). When a company is posting a hacking opening on their careers section of the website. In this is the ITA software, a company that creates software for airlines: http://matrix2.itasoftware.com/ – might come handy when you search for your new airfare:

ITA Software Is Hiring Hackers

Well, actually they could’ve done even better, by mentioning in the job description, what exactly the candidates should hack, i.e. hack www.competitor.com database, or hack our clients emails, etc.

Ok, I am just mean. I know that they are actually looking for great mind that are capable of reverse engineer systems, find bugs in a software, but the job title sound cheesy.

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Posted in Competitive Intelligence, Don't Do Like Them

Tags: hiring hackers

How Much Revenue Are You Losing with Non-Guest Checkouts – Part 2 of 3

April 26th, 2010

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.

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Posted in Conversion Optimization, Don't Do Like Them, Landing Page Optimization, Usability and Design

Tags: Conversion Optimization e-commerce ecommerce guest chekcout

The Worst AdWords Ad

April 16th, 2010

While doing the regular check on the referring keywords for this blog, I’ve noticed that Google is ranking my website high for some keywords related to the websites I am spotting A/B tests, such as accountnow.com, autotrader.com or genbook.com.

Those keywords are irrelevant for my objectives but checking them lead me to the discovery of the worst 2010 PPC ad in Google I’ve seen until date:

The worst PPC ad of 2010

I know that is hard to manage dictionary based keyword lists, but the add looks totally ridiculous. Ask.com should spend more time in creating campaigns specific for domain name searches, with ads targeted more towards users and not search engines.

Do you manage dictionary based PPC campaings? What are your thoughts and how do you manage suck keywords and ads effectively?

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Posted in Don't Do Like Them, PPC, Usability and Design

Tags: adwords PPC tags

Why Bounces is a Better Metric than Bounce Rate

February 12th, 2010

This is the follow-up post on the bounce rate poll from Can You Answer this Simple Google Analytics Question?. If you did not vote yet, please do it before you read further.

The results are the following:

The correct answer is marked in the green box

As you can see, only 20% the voters got it right (only 25 votes). It’s not surprising as some of the reports in Google Analytics can be misleading, i.e. top content, content by title or content drilldown.

To find out the number of bounces (or the real bounce rate) one have to look at the landing page report, not at the content performance reports (top content, content by title or content drilldown). The reason is for that most of the time, a page will have a bounce rate only if it serves as landing page (single page visits).

For the example used in this poll

Misleading Bounce Rate

if one multiplies 826 (unique page views) by 52.17% (bounce rate) it results in 430 bounces, which totally wrong. Let me explain.

If you look at the landing page report (image below) for the same page, same time interval (dec 11, 2009 – jan 10, 2010), you’ll see that while the bounce is the sameas on any of the content performance report (52.71%) the real number of bounces is 24, which is not by far 52% of 826, but a merely 3% of it.

The Real Number of Bounces

If one will look at the Top Content report and see 10.000 unique page views (almost equal to visitors) with a 50% bounce rate, it might wrongly conclude that 5.000 visitors bounced.

So where is this confusion coming from? While the data in the Top Content, Content by Title and Content Drilldown reports are based on page views (unique or not) the bounce rate column is actually taking into related with data from other report and it’s computed based on the entrances to that specific page.

I think that the bounce rate in the aforementioned report should be supplemented by the Bounces column or. For that you can use the following custom report to have the bounce rate and the bounces in a single report.

If you wish you can use this custom report to look at the page views (I was not able to combine Unique Page views with Bounces in Google Analytics custom reports). I am looking at the page view columns as a relative importance of the page, then I look at the bounces and if the number is high compared to the page view I take a quick look at the bounce rate.

Custom report with pageview, bounces and bounce rate

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Posted in Don't Do Like Them, Google Analytics

Tags: bounce rate Google Analytics

Who Else Does the Same Mistakes as Search Engine Land?

January 20th, 2010

Here’s a good sample of a poor concept of a registration page (I did not expect searchengineland.com to do such mistakes):

search engine land mistakes on the register page

Huge Mistakes on Search Engine Land Registration Page

I will point the major problems only:

1. primary action (register button) is below the fold

2. the registration button doesn’t look like a button at all

3. secondary actions have more prominence than the desired purpose of this page (to register and create an account)

Funny thing, when I took the screenshot, the captcha was the bounces :)

To address the issues above you need to:

1. always have the main call to action above the fold

2. CTA buttons should look like buttons

3. identify the primary purpose of each page and make it easy for visitors to reach that goal. Secondary goals should not overwhelm the primary purpose

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Posted in Conversion Optimization, Don't Do Like Them, Usability and Design, Who's Testing

When Government Website Design Goes Wrong

January 15th, 2010

There’s nothing worse than a government website using free stock photos for it’s website. Especially when using images with people.

Why? In the case of the website below, the “pharmacist” in the picture is found on quite a few of bogus pharmacies. And the website is about medical services plans in BC, Canada. The association of the Government, thru that picture, with fake pharmacies is not a good think for them:

BC's Governmental Website and The Bogus Pharma Guy

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Posted in Don't Do Like Them, Usability and Design

Tags: bogus pharma government design

Don’t do This PPC Mistake

December 4th, 2009

I can’t stress on the importance of checking your destination URLs for your PPC landing pages. This is especially true when you advertise for terms such as “ad testing” .

These guys are really funny – they can’t deliver for them selves and they expect others to buy their services? C’mon! If you can’t do it for your business, don’t expect customers to come asking for the service. Their ad, followed by the related landing page:

Adwords Ad for "Ad Testing"

The Landing Page returned 404 Not Found Status...Oops

Google won’t give a damn that your page is not there. They’ll take the money and you won’t see the ROI you’re dreaming on.

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Posted in Don't Do Like Them, Landing Page Optimization, PPC

Tags: ppc lesson ppc mistakes to avoid

About the Search Functionality on Web Sites

November 29th, 2009

Today’s post is filed under the don’t do like them category. I will look at two websites that are wasting opportunities with improper implementations of the search functionality.

We know that ecommerce web sites like to force us to create accounts at checkout (which you shouldn’t do if you operate an online store), but asking visitors to register just to be able to use the search is quite new for me.

If you have a search function on your website, making it easy for your visitors to find it, it is primordial. Don’t just have link, somewhere on the page, which sends visitors to another search page, but display an input field followed by a search button on each page of your site. I will not go into details now (that’s for another post, later on) on best practices for search buttons, but how fast can you spot the search section of this page:

For the website depicted above, the search function should be a big issue, since the site is a forum and visitors are most likely to use to find information on it.

Can you spot the search section on this page?

Ok, suppose you did find it fast. Wouldn’t have been faster to spot an input field with a search button next to it, and wouldn’t be much easier if you could just type the query string and the hit a Search button? In this example, you are being redirected to another page which – what? – is asking you to register if you want to search:

You have to register to see the results

Another problem witht the search is not to have it at all. I went on this website I wanted to look for an technical asnswer to my problem. I went to the help section of the site, then, I’ve tried to find the search… Bad luck, there is no such option.

There's no search on this site

What the heck? You want me to call to find a simple answer? Ok, I will do it. Actually, I did it, waited for 20 minutes, then spend another 10 minutes to explain the problem and get the answer I wanted. I called a toll free number.

I wasted 30 minutes, but the company wasted at least $5 for this call, if not more. Instead a simple search functionality would’ve solved the problem.

And what’s worse for them is that I found my answer later on, on the same website, but I used Google search site:www.1and1.com “cron job”. Crazy…They have a dedicated help page for that problem, but they don’t have a search functionality to find it. Someone’s head should fall!

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Posted in Conversion Optimization, Don't Do Like Them

Tags: 1and1 red flag deals search functionality

(Extremely) Dirty Competitive Intelligence Technique

November 27th, 2009

I have to admit it. I was not sure if I wanted to publish this technique or not. But when I saw how many businesses are affected by this backdoor issue, I decided to go ahead.

Some clarifying points:

First of all, this is a dirty technique; well, extremely dirty. But isn’t spying on your competitors dirty anyways?

Second, I am suggesting a fix for it, so you can repair the backdoor to your site (if needed be).

Third, all the information comes from a public source (Google’s index) but I think it’s business owners’ fault and not Google’s, for letting confidential documents being indexed by search engines.

The hack described below can give you access to your competition’s confidential documents, if they’re hosted on a public web server. We’ll use Google’s magic search operator site

Check if your competitors documents are indexed by Google with:

site:competitor.com filetype:pdf

site:competitor.com filetype:eps (for print material)

site:competitor.com filetype:ppt (for power point presentations)

site:competitor.com filetype:doc

for more file types see Google’s filetype command help http://www.google.com/help/faq_filetypes.html.

No results? Try all of the following queries

site:competitor.com inurl:assets

site:competitor.com inurl:clients

site:competitor.com inurl:documents

site:competitor.com inurl:confidential

site:competitor.com inurl:management

You could the searches above at once with “site:competitor.com inurl:assets OR inurl:clients OR inurl:documents OR inurl:confidential OR inurl:management”, but I would do each search separately and then go thru each page anyway.

Already peeking in? :) Well, there’s even more. Sometimes, when you find a .pdf file, let’s say, www.competitor.com/assets/hotleads_08.pdf, try to navigate to www.competitor.com/assets/. Some directories will not be protected and maybe you’ll get even luckier.

So, what if you’re affected by indexing problem too? Scary, isn’t it?

I don’t know excatly how Google is indexing such pages (I guess, links from emails in Gmail or GTalk internal communications, or whatever the reason), but I’ll tell you how to fix it.

In your .htaccess file you need to restrict the access to confidential directories with a password using the .htpasswd file. There may be other methods also, but here’s how you can do it: http://www.apluskb.com/scripts/How_do_I_secure_subdomain_answer2152.html

If your confidential files are already indexed by Google I recommend making an exclusion request on Google Webmaster Tools ASAP.

I also recommend not having important document on a public server, like your web server. If you still want to access them online, buy a dummy domain name, and password secure the root directory.