The Chameleon Net blog

Top Tips For Understanding Mobile Users

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:24:18 GMT

This topic was covered at yesterday's "Money Talks" seminar. I said I would post some info on how you can segment your mobile users within Google Analytics; well here it is! What appears below is cut from an article I wrote for Marketing Pilgrim in the States. You can check out the full article here.

Understanding Mobile Users: Entry Level

Even if you feel the implementation of a mobile strategy is a long way off for your company, and you have no technical skills whatsoever, there is no excuse for not starting to try and get a handle on who your mobile users are, and how they interact with your site. This is a customer segment that will grow in the future.

Demographics You can easily build up a picture of mobile web users through the plethora of surveys currently being released. Here are a few recent stats:

74% of iPhone users are over the age of 25, (31% are 35-49) and more than 70% of iPhone users are male. [see here]
64% of key decision makers in marketing departments are using mobiles to view emails [see here]
Leading mobile browsing systems worldwide (May 09) = iPhone/iPod Touch 37.2%, Opera 24.6%, Nokia 17.9%. [see here]
In 2008 61% of all smartphone owners had a household income of greater than $70000, compared to just 49% of normal mobile owners. [see here]
40% of “smartphoners” in ‘08 would access the internet at least once a week on their device, (78% for iPhone owners specifically). [see here]

Behaviour as well as looking at the demographics of people browsing the mobile web, it’s also vital to understand their goals are likely to be different to those of folks browsing on a computer. Conversion points for mobile users are often basic things such as finding a shop location, contact information, or viewing product details. Generally speaking goals are more immediate and information based. More traditional goals such as purchasing or accessing documents will only be undertaken as a last resort where a computer is unavailable.

Mobile users break down into three rough categories:

“Time to burn”: browsing between events / meetings etc: your goal is to offer bite sized chunks of interesting content in order to attract repeat visits later via traditional browsing methods.
“Monitors”: Users who browse your site for specific data that changes over time: stocks and shares, sports scores etc. Identify the information on your site which gets repeat visits and make it as easily accessible as possible.
“Need it Now”: Live information e.g. running information, store locations, opening hours etc should all be easily accessible from your mobile homepage for those people who are relying on your brand rather than just browsing.

Understanding the key differences between your mobile and traditional users should directly inform the architecture of the mobile version of your site. For instance: An airline may focus on selling tickets online, but its mobile site should focus more on check in information, live flight times, and airport locations for people who are about to fly. Similarly, a financial services company might view their website as a place for prospective customers to research their products, but their mobile site could add value by offering simple services to existing customers e.g. balance checks.

With a bit more budget you can start to build up data specific to your organisation. Marketers should be equipped with smartphones, as using a mobile browser is the best way to understand and discover the difficulties and opportunities surrounding your brand and the mobile web.

Understanding Mobile Users: Intermediate / Advanced Level

Google Analytics provides a segment for iPhone users, but a broader mobile segment for analysing this traffic would be preferential. The most obvious way to construct this segment is by grouping together the different types of mobile browsers currently on offer, but this list is ever-changing and many of these browsers are poor at executing JavaScript: mobile data will be missed altogether and the segment will be less accurate. [ more info here]

A better option is to construct a GA segment based around screen resolution, as there is a greater accuracy of data collection:

Open a new custom segment within your GA dashboard
Select “screen resolution” as the segment’s dimension. You can find this by drilling down on “Systems”.
Select the match type “Matches Regular Expression”
Paste the following regex into the next field: (^[1-2]?[0-9]?[0-9]|^3[0-1][0-9]|^320)x([1-3]?[0-9]?[0-9]$|4[0-7][0-9] $|480$ )

For the more advanced technicians amongst you the installation of mobile-specific tracking software is a further option, however this can be costly and difficult to integrate with GA. Bango Analytics, Mobilytics and Amethon are key players in this sector.

UPDATE APRIL 2010: GA now offers mobile website tracking for FREE.

Once mobile users behaviour on your site is isolated marketers are able to analyse top content, entry and exit points, site search, etc. It is crucial to try and understand mobile user’s goals this data. These goals will define the architecture of your mobile site.

I hope that's useful: Try applying this segment to your website and looking at monthly visitor numbers over the past 18 months: usually a pretty telling statistic.

If you're struggling to get buy-in for a mobile site, why not sit your boss down, give them an iphone and get them to complete a key user action on your site?! - better still set them a time limit of the average time it takes a desk-bound user to complete that goal.

Top Tips For Charity Digital Marketers: Jan 2010

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:54:16 GMT

Two weeks into the New Year and already Christmas feels a lifetime ago. For many marketers, January is a quiet month, with conventional wisdom saying that apart from a few obvious products (gym memberships, savings accounts etc) acquisition / sales will be average at best given the previous months gluttony.

However, January is a really exciting month for charity marketers, especially those dedicating time and resource to the web. We run the pay-per-click search advertising for several charities, and we always see an uplift in the number of donations made in the weeks following 1st January. These conversions will usually originate from a brand keyword search, or a search on the issue your charity is associated with, suggesting that these January donors are aware of who you are and / or what you do, and have been triggered by the passing of the New Year to give you some cash. Whether this is driven by Christmas guilt or a desire to start a new year on the right foot matters little, what matters is that as a charity you take advantage of it.

Here’s our top tips:

Defer December spend: that Christmas campaign you were thinking of running? Save it! People are stressed, busy, preoccupied and generally frazzled in the run up to Christmas. Your message may achieve greater penetration and be afforded more thought in the New Year

Target your warm leads: cross reference the following:

newsletter subscribers
people who’ve signed your petitions
people who have fundraised for you
people who have sponsored your fundraisers

with your list of regular givers. Those people that aren’t giving via direct debit are a good group to target with email, social networking or even offline material around the 1st January.

Ramp up your PPC budget for the month and spend it effectively: Have you checked your AdWords scheduling recently? Do you know if your daily budget enables your ads to be shown 24 hours a day? Do you use bid adjustment to spend your budget at the most profitable times of day? Failure to do these things may mean your organisation misses out on a great deal of potential regular givers through a lack of visibility in search results.

For many charities, January will be a peak time for getting people to sign up to do various fundraising events in 2010. The London Marathon is one particularly lucrative opportunity. As a result however, competition in search results amongst charities is extreme. First page bid estimate for “2010 London marathon” in Adwords right now is $1.25, and $1.50 for “london marathon charity”. Maybe 1 in 100 people who clicked on your ad for that term would download an application, so now is the time to investigate the long tail of keywords for events like this, especially if your budget is not very big. Keyword research should inform not only your PPC campaigns but also SEO. Whilst there is little point aiming for a top 3 spot in the “London Marathon” SERP, you could get a real win optimising around “run the London Marathon for charity”.

Finally, a word on improving website performance, with special regard to acquiring regular givers. Recent research shows that the way you present amounts of money on your site affects the number of people who convert. 3 price formats were tested in the study:

Dollars and cents numerical format with a dollar sign ($00.00)
Numerical format without a dollar sign (00.)
Scripted or written-out prices (zero dollars).

It was found that adopting option 2 led to significantly more acquisition. Even if you have the most convoluted CMS, testing this would not be a great deal of work. We recommend trying an A/B test using Google Website Optimiser if you want to improve your site's performance: delivering a percentage increase in donations would be great way to start your organisation’s year!

Of course, our top tip is to get in touch with Chameleon Net if you think we could help you with search marketing or website improvement!

Analytics > Assumptions

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:58:42 GMT

Last week at Chamtech09 (our digital trends seminar in the City) I spoke to two great audiences on the need to do away with decision-making and assumptions when it comes to creating online content. I argued that simple analytics data and customer feedback should drive the development of a web presence, and that a marketer’s focus should primarily fall on turning more visitors into customers; getting more visitors should be of secondary importance.

It was great to speak to a bunch of people who could obviously see the benefit of this approach, and I hope that I’ll be able to work with as many of you as possible in the future.

In this post I wanted to expand on a few points I raced through on Thursday, especially around the development and operation of a Google Analytics (GA) strategy.

“The numbers in my GA reports don’t add up”

There are numerous reasons why GA might not track an individual visit. The most common ones are:

User has no java support enabled so GA code is not read (>5% of web users)
Users are blocking the first party cookies GA needs to place on your computer (>5% of users)
Code is not implemented correctly on certain pages of your site (Best practice = implement it once in a piece of content that is called by every page e.g. the footer)
Code is being interfered with by other javascript on the page. Fix this by ensuring the GA code is called before these other scripts.
Browser fails to execute the code (increasingly problematic as mobile browsers are susceptible to this)
Pages are failing to load properly.
User bounces before page load completes (often explains why your adwords clicks > visits from adwords). This problem is increasing due to mobile browsing growth. Bloated sites often designed for computers rather than mobiles and the 3G network are especially vulnerable.

A common problem arises around unique visitors (aka “the hotel problem”) and it can be seized upon by people looking for a reason not to invest time in GA as an example of its “inaccuracy” (I know, I’ve been there!). Luckily, the problem is fully explained and illustrated on Wikipedia, as is the issue of total visitors not being equal to new visitors + repeat visitors.

Link tagging

You can track the RoI of every link you put on the web by attaching a source (e.g. person / dept), medium (e.g. email / banner ad / social campaign), campaign (e.g. twitter competition / april newsletter) and an individual content tag to each link. GA allows you to analyse the behaviour of users via the individual link they arrived on. Very quickly you can start to attach a pounds and pence value to links, campaigns, marketing channels and people within your organisation. Who doesn’t want to do that?!

You can create these links really easily in excel spreadsheets as they all follow the same pattern (links broken down by section for easy viewing, obv. this would be one URL string normally):

www. ursite.com/?

utm_source=xxx

&utm_medium=yyy

&utm_campaign=zzz

&utm_content=123

In each case you would want to make the utm_content tag an individual descriptor for that link. E.g. if I was going to send out a Chameleon Net newsletter containing a link to our blog the link would be (again, broken down for easy viewing):

http://www.chameleonnet.co.uk/blog/default.aspx?

utm_source=chamnet_marketing

&utm_medium=email

&utm_campaign=june_newsletter

&utm_content=blog_home

Within the GA dashboard, under traffic sources > campaigns, you can quickly compare the successes and failings of different source, medium, and campaign tags. Then you can easily drill down to the individual content tags for more granular detail. For each tag you’ll be able to see a host of metrics, most importantly goal conversions, but also bounce rate, time on site, and of course visits/visitors/unique visitors.

Pretty neat huh?

“My goals are hard to track”

A number of Chameleon’s clients are charities or NGOs, whose website in many cases provide information rather than make a sale or get an email sign up. For these organisations simply getting someone to read a page is the goal online; the real conversion, i.e. that person taking action, occurs offline in the real world. Goal tracking still has a lot to offer, and maybe you need to think about how your site and your offline conversions interact: e.g. display a unique phone number so you can track how many calls your site is generating.

Another idea might be to flip the situation and instead of focussing on where people are going within your site look at where they are coming from. If you have particular traffic sources that send traffic which tends to bounce out of the site straight away, isolate that traffic and look at its top landing pages. There may well be an obvious disconnect between the content on those pages and the traffic source / audience.

Alternatively, you can look to diversify the traffic sources for your site. Social networks are the web’s watering holes and you can easily (and cheaply) search for and enter conversations around your campaigns. We advise on developing landing pages aimed at audiences you don’t normally target and the process of entering these online conversations. GA will be able to let you know if you’ve developed a new audience and whether they are exploring your site beyond the landing pages you have set up.

**********

Phew, long post. Hope these tips help you and your digital marketing teams.

Remember; your site is made up of sources, (your audiences: get granular by using segmentation) behaviour (the content they browse) and most importantly; defined goals. Without goals your site has no purpose: identify the pages that your user sees when they’ve done what you wanted them to do, then work back through your funnel.

Hit me up in the comments below if you've got issues you want answering!

Focus on... Technology trends

louiser@chameleonnet.com (Louise Ryan) — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:14:37 GMT

I wanted to write this blog post as a follow up to my technology trends presentation i gave at Chameleon's client seminar held on the 29th April 2009. I'm going to touch on the issues I talked about, but mostly I want to give you some further reading and funky examples on some of the subjects I discussed.

Mobile

Firstly I talked about how until very recently it was pretty tricky to develop web sites for mobile devices. The huge variety of devices and hence different capabilities, screen sizes meant that to target mobile web users would mean rather a large investment. Over the last year or so that has changed with the release of much improved mobile devices which include great browsers e.g. Safari on the iPhone and Opera on the BlackBerry. Mobile web use is increasing massively and is going to influence almost every decision you make about your organisation’s web presence in the future. Jon von Tetzchner (CEO of Opera) thinks that mobiles are in fact going to become the 'primary device for web usage in most of the world'.

With all this improved web browsing technology, do we need to bother creating a mobile targeted web site? Usability guru Jacob Nielsen thinks so - read up on his feelings in his Feb. 2009 Mobile Usability Test Findings report.

What do we need to consider when building a mobile web site? The primary concern is your users goals and motivations. They're likely to be different if they're browsing from a mobile device than if they are browsing your site via a desktop. Here's a selection of other top tips:

Short URLs
Get rid of big logo/brand statements at top of page
Avoid plugins
Minimise data size
No popup windows
Forms – minimise user input – use defaults (radio buttons rather than text-input fields)

Geotagging

This is the process of adding geographical coordinates to various media or data items. For example, in the seminar I talked about how MSF are geotagging their letters from the field. Here's the focus on Chad example I used in my seminar.

Want to get some geotags for your data? MyGeoPosition is a great website to help you look up the coordinates you need.

Microformats

Please do take a look at the Wikipedia entry describing microformats. This will give you a good idea of what they are and how you might be able to use them in your website. If you want to see them in action and use the Firefox browser then do download the fab Operator extension.

Multi-touch

Move-stuff-around-with-yours-hands-coolness. Hopefully meaning death to the wrist killing mouse and much slicker user interfaces in the future. Check out the Wikipedia entry on Multi-touch and then take a look at this video on YouTube to see what the fuss is about.

Web as service platform

All the big players out there are really opening up their systems so they can be accessed and used from all over the place. Let’s take Facebook as a classic example. Since its success it has been criticized for being a ‘walled garden’. Developers could only work within its confines. It's now embracing the open web and has launched an API called Open Stream. This means that developers can create apps that interact with Facebook on other websites, via desktops widgets etc. Facebook has probably recognised that it needed to take this step to survive! Expect to start seeing these widgets soon.
Steve Rubel summarises the situation nicely in this article.

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time - from Wikipedia. Far easier to demonstrate than describe - check out the example videos below

Lego box models come to life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UxWkZtUKaI
AR on your mobile: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4FAKjfppp0
Just for fun: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW6_X9qBeds

We can build this type of stuff in Flash and have already put a prototype together in the office!

That's it! This article has turned out much larger than anticipated (and I didn't even mention twitter!) but with all the exciting new concepts and technologies out there I didn't want to skip anything!

Focus On... Website Conversion Rates

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:02:33 GMT

Conversion Rate: The fundamental KPI of your website

In an increasingly competitive online environment one metric all digital marketers should be focusing their attention on is the conversion rate of their own website. By conversion rate we mean the number of visitors who complete a desired action vs. the total number of visitors.

E.g. If your site sells CDs, and you get 100 visitors, of which 2 buy CDs, then your website conversion rate is 2%.

What we’re talking about is “how many of your visitors do what you want them to do?"

It’s important to decide on a purpose for each piece of marketing collateral you produce, from a button to an entire website. All of your efforts should be focused towards making as many people as possible who view that piece of collateral fulfill its purpose. Everything has a conversion rate, and not only can you measure it, you can give it a pounds and pence value as well.

In order to increase your conversion rates, you need to work towards what we call a “conversion culture”. In a conversion culture:

You are committed to using analytics, testing and customer feedback to inform decisions about your website’s content, and not the opinions / assumptions of internal staff.

You accept that a website is never finished and can be constantly improved via tweaking.

Why should I bother focusing on Conversion Rate?

Mainly because it allows you to generate more customers without any extra advertising spend. You should make the most of the content and visitors you already have, rather than spending more or diversifying in order to boost revenue. Even if you do this you aren’t improving profitability.

Increasing conversion rate rather than marketing spend means revenue from new sales goes straight into your bottom line. Think about it; you haven’t spent anything more on advertising, the cost of sales or overheads… you’ve just made more revenue from what you already had.

The profit generated by increased conversion rate may allow you to open up new advertising channels not currently feasible. More channels means a more stable business. This is especially true if you are currently reliant on search engine traffic alone.

Selling online is a ‘winner takes all’ environment. Customers may spend a long time choosing where to buy, but very small things are going to make them choose one site over another – and it’s only the winning site that gets the cash. This is known as the ‘slight edge’ and it’s usually got more to do with the buying experience than an item’s price. Increasing conversion rate = gaining the ‘slight edge’ over your competitors.

How can Chameleon Net help me improve my Conversion Rate?

We suggest allowing us to perform a conversion rate audit on one of your key customer journeys, from a landing page to completion of the desired action. Using your analytics tools and other tracking software we can provide a report which will list out where your UI could be improved to make the buying experience easier, and also highlight which pages in your customer journey need the most urgent attention.

Why Chameleon Net?

Although focusing on conversion rate is a relatively new online trend, usability and improving customer experiences have been right at the heart of our offering since we were founded 10 years ago as a bridge between high-minded website designers and technical back-end systems developers.

Several members of staff are accredited by Google for the use of Google Analytics, having passed the recently introduced examinations in the subject, and we have experience of using Google Website Optimiser; a new tool allowing you to quickly perform split and multivariate tests of new content in order to determine whether your new content outperforms older material. We've used this knowledge recently to help a major UK firm in the tourism sector double the conversion rate of their B2C booking engine.