Going the extra mile
Yesterday I stumbled upon this blog post http://www.nonlineblogging.com/blog/2010/2/11/dont-be-mr-average-why-averages-are-a-bad-bad-thing-in-digit.html and it’s right on.
If you think about it, you can’t really improve conversion rates unless you start segmenting your traffic and identifying those under-performing segments. Sure it takes time but compare it to the investment you make in acquiring media and driving visitors to your website. Go the extra mile: segment your traffic, figure out which segments are not converting and target them with relevant and personalized messages. Improving conversion rates for these segments is the only way to increase the average.
Recommendation engine for e-commerce sites, build vs. buy?
Some of the online retailers we talk to, realize the value of cross-sells and up-sells and decide to embark on a “DIY path”. I may be biased here but I think product recommendations are one area in which you don’t want to reinvent the wheel.
There are 2 reasons why a DIY approach does not make sense in this case. The first is the development cost of building a system that works, and the second is the learning curve of optimizing it.
So how difficult is it to develop a recommendation engine? online retailers who decide to build a recommendation engine are not aware of the various components that need to be in place. Here are just a few them:
- The recommendation engine should track every major activity shoppers perform on the site including viewed products, categories and brands; items added to the shopping cart and purchased ; search keywords they used ; traffic source visitors arrived from, Geo-location data, and the list goes on…
- The system must support multiple recommendation types and should be able to display the right one (and more than one on a single page) based on where the user is at the purchase funnel (if you have less than 10 algorithms your system is extremely naive)
- Finding correlations between items/users is easy. The hard part is to choose which correlations should be taken into account and which should be ignored
- The system should have built in a/b testing and reporting capabilities so that it could be optimized and demonstrate its value. This point is very critical as few online retailers actually measure the impact of their homegrown systems
- The system should have an interface that allows marketers to control the outputs of the recommendation engine based on different variables.
The second reason I mentioned is the experience it takes to optimize such a system. There are many things that will determine the impact a recommendation engine will have on the business, and if it’s your first time building one and it’s a one-off project there is no chance you are going to know them or invest the time to learn them. In fact you are probably going to develop a very naive system and you’ll stay with v1 for a long time. You will not test different widget designs or various placements on the page.
The decision to build or buy a recommendation engine should be ROI based. You need to consider the impact it will have on your business versus the cost of development. Building a very naive system may seem cheap but will also likely to deliver poor results and without supporting systems you’ll never know it.
Amazon web services migration completed
We’ve been working hard on moving our infrastructure completely over to Amazon Web Services and we’re happy to announce that the transition is now completed.
Using Amazon Elastic Cloud computing allows us to scale our infrastructure on demand in real time, in response to traffic spikes our customers experience and also scale it down when needed. And the cool thing is that everything is done automatically.
Optimization, segmentation and dynamic targeting
I saw a few discussions on LinkedIn Answers about dynamic content and I realized there is some confusion about the term and what it means. People confused dynamic content with website optimization. I wanted to clarify the difference here.
There is a fundamental difference between optimizing content based on a/b testing using tools such as Google Website Optimizer and serving targeted content based on manual or automatic segmentation rules. The first means someone creating multiple versions of a webpage and then activating a tool to measure which page variation is the most effective in achieving a certain conversion goal.
When we talk about Dynamic content in the segmentation/targeting space we mean that content will change dynamically based on visitor’s attributes and intent: for example promotional banners will change based on search keywords or Geolocation data. Of course it’s important to run testing on dynamic targeted content to measure its impact on conversion rates and sales but this testing is very different than the a/b testing done for optimization.
Increasing PPC campaigns ROI using optimized landing pages
A few days ago a merchant contacted us as he wanted to increase conversion rates by adding personalization to his e-commerce site. We took a quick look at his site and noticed that he’s spending almost $1000 on Google Ads per day and his value proposition was mainly low prices. He was advertising a sale on almost all of his ppc campaigns.
When we clicked on one of the ads, and arrived to a landing page there was nothing on the page about the big sale which had been promoted in the ppc campaign. In addition the “Retail Price” was not listed on the page so customers who landed on the page and were expecting to see a big sale were disappointed and left the site.
If you are spending so much money on ppc, you can easily increase your ROI by personalizing and optimizing landing pages to reflect the message which brought the customer to your e-commerce site in the first place. In this case adding a “big sale” banner for the ppc segment and showing the list price would definitely move shoppers in the right direction.
We also recommend that you do not stop in personalizing landing pages but also show targeted messaging through out the session or even on return visits for customers who arrived with a specific intent (in this case to benefit from a sale).
Personalized store locator
There are so many opportunities to enhance the shopping experience by personalizing it. A few days ago I came across rockport.com and found their use of my Geolocation information to be very compelling.
Rockport shows you the nearest stores to you at the bottom of the page
This experience is much better than the standard one and definitely sets rockport apart. I wish they would have take it even further and show me product availability in stores near me automatically when I’m browsing products on the site.
Product recommendations on out of stock pages
2. Another action you can take is to allow shoppers to get notifications when the product is back in stock. By doing this you engage customers and build up your permission based marketing database at the same time
3. Consider offering a coupon for first time visitors who landed on an out of stock page but purchased a similar product during the same session
Segmentation and targeting service released!
We have recently added a new member to our eCommerce Personalization suite: meet our post click segmentation and targeting tool.
The tool allows marketers to define highly targeted customer segments and present visitors with relevant personalized messages and product offers throughout their shopping experience. If shoppers arrive from your Google Campaign why not welcome them with the same message/offer you had on your Ad copy?
No coding , no IT , 5 minute implementation
Like our other services, the new segmentation tool is built on top of our Zero Integration technology and is utilizing a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model, and thus can be implemented in a few minutes. No coding, no back end integration we do it all.
Add content anywhere
You can add personalized content on virtually any page of your your website and tie it directly to search terms, referring urls, or referring marketing campaigns that brought the customer to your website. You can decide on which pages the content will be visible and do it yourself in a few minutes without IT involvement.
We understand your catalog really well
Our technology automatically extracts deep catalog information from the site HTML pages so you can go beyond banners and target visitors with individualized product offers.
Social media integration
We introduced some innovative features which allow marketers to develop intimate relationships with customers and target them based on profile information from Facebook. These features are enabled if we you using one of our social shopping application.
We kept it simple
One of our design principles was to keep it simple. We’ve developed a clean, simple yet powerful tool that can be used without training by any marketer.
Feel free to drop me a line at ido at barilliance.com if you want to test drive the tool
Product Recommendations titles
- Trustworthiness as recommendations are not provided by the merchant. They are based on the “wisdom of the crowd”
- Transparency, shoppers are informed why products are being recommended to them
Facebook connect vs. share
With all the buzz around social shopping, web 2.0 and widgets people often ask us what is the difference between Facebook connect and a “share this” button you see on many product pages of online retail sites.
Facebook connect pop up
The main difference is that users who click on a Facebook connect button become your registered users. That’s right, by simply logging into their Facebook account on your eCommerce site they created an account with you. Depending on the user’s privcay policy you may access valuable information including birthday, interests which you can use to personalize and enhance the user’s shopping experience.
When visitors on your website uses the share button they do not become registered users on your site and and you have no records of them.
When implementing a Facebook connect application you can also start communicating with users via email. You need to ask the user for special permissions right after they connect. This will enable you to email them without asking them for their email address. Your emails will be routed by Facebook to the email address they had registered with Facebook.