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Social Media Weekly BuzzWelcome to the second edition of Social Media Weekly Buzz. This week, both Google and Facebook managed to steal the majority of the headlines. Gmail’s outage on Tuesday sparked widespread panic and led most people, ironically, to use Google search to investigate the incident. In addition, the oh-so familiar, yet quite stark, Google search landing page has finally been patented, five years after being submitted to the USPTO. Facebook tested out a new ad scheme with direct offer engagement ads, and is being accused of leading a Welsh citizen to murder their partner. Also, have you checked out Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on YouTube yet? All this and more follows below:  • Gmail Outage – At 12:30pm PST, a small fraction of Gmail’s servers were taken offline for routine maintenance. Unfortunately, Google underestimated the load recent changes placed on the request routers… The result? Gmail went down for 100 minutes, and online chaos quickly ensued. • Google’s Search Landing Page Now Patented – After 5 years of fierce debate with federal bureaucrats, Google has finally won the right to patent their unmistakable home page. Google now owns the concept of having a large search box in the middle of the page, on top of two big buttons, with several links scattered here and there. Does this spell trouble for sites which possess similar layouts, such as Yahoo search?  • Facebook Tests Direct Response Ads – Craving a Chick-fil-A Chicken Biscuit? How about if it’s free? Soon you might be seeing more ad offers like this on Facebook if their testing of direct offer engagement ads goes well. Facebook has recently been exploring different advertising options as it gradually shifts away from its traditional sales funnel. • Facebook Regional Networks No More – Regional networks on Facebook are now officially gone. This move comes as Facebook attempts to expand beyond its college roots to a worldwide communication platform, not unlike Twitter. But is that really what users want? • Facebook Jealousy Blamed on Murder – A murder trial in South Wales has taken an interesting twist, with a UK prosecutor arguing that Facebook-related jealousy pre-empted the tragic event. Apparently the whole thing got started when Mrs. Jones started to “expand her social horizons” online. The last straw? When she changed her Facebook status to “single”. • Kremlin Launches YouTube Channel – Russian President Dmitri Medvedev launched his very own YouTube channel, located at www.youtube.com/kremlin. The main purpose of the channel will be to reach out to and connect with the youth of Russia. So far he has covered topics from good neighborhood ties between schoolchildren, to the outcome of the Second World War. • eBay Sells Skype – On Tuesday, eBay officially announced that it would be selling th  e VoIP and chat service Skype to a group of private investors for $2.75 billion. eBay will still retain a 35 percent equity stake in the service however, which they hope will increase in value under the new management. The decision to sell was provoked by a lack of synergy between Skype and eBay’s e-commerce and payments services.The Gmail downtime serves as a reminder of how much of our lives are becoming dependent on the Internet. As more and more services become cloud-based in nature, it is imperative that network interruption be minimized at all costs. Fortunately the Gmail downtime occurred during the night, which helped save what could have been a large-scale interruption in productivity for the US. Twitter experienced a similar issue not too long ago, though that issue was more malicious in nature, and not just a big mistake. Facebook continues to modify its services in order to improve both the experience of both consumers and advertisers. The direct offer engagement ads are a great source of lead generation for businesses, however it will be interesting to see how many people are willing to enter their address and other personal info for discounts and promotions. This is definitely a jump in the right direction for Facebook as it tries to shift away from its traditional sales funnel. The major step in this development is that companies will now receive instant results from the advertisements they publish on the service. The Facebook alteration that might not be met with open arms is the decision to completely remove regional network categories. As Facebook attempts to take a more worldly approach to its communications platform, it has the potential of upsetting long time users of its service. For them, Facebook served as a tool to better connect with friends, not strangers. In addition, many users prefer Facebook over Twitter for the very fact that it isn’t… Twitter. Any step closer to the other service could be taken very negatively among its fan base. The sale of Skype was definitely a smart move for eBay, whose e-commerce and online payments businesses really have nothing in common with the VoIP service. The real question is what prompted eBay to make the acquisition in the first place? Earlier in April StumbleUpon was also sold off to a group of investors after a failed attempt to synergize operations. Fortunately now the company can turn to focusing on its core eBay and PayPal businesses. Labels: Facebook, Google, Industry, Landing Pages, online marketing, Online Media, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Twitter, Video, web 2.0, Yahoo, YouTube You Drive Less. Shouldn't You Save More? Everyone is concerned about ever-increasing gas prices and one of our clients, GMAC Insurance, has a program that offers substantial insurance premium discounts to low-mileage drivers. To support this program, Overdrive Interactive recently launched a landing page for GMAC Insurance called "The Commuter Calculator".Using the site's online calculator visitors can find out how much their weekly commute costs and whether they are above or below average in the number of miles driven for their particular area of the country. Site links take visitors to the GMAC Insurance corporate site for more information about their low mileage discount program. Even though the insurance discount program is only available to drivers who have an OnStar-equipped GM vehicle, go to the site and try out the Commuter Calculator for yourself! Here's the URL for the site: http://www.lowmileagediscount.com Labels: Landing Pages, Overdrive News Landing Page Whitepaper Offers With Sub-Par Landing Pages?Over the last few days, I have been served ads for a couple of different landing page guides. In order to get the landing page whitepapers, the user is directed to what else- a landing page. Logically, you would assume that an ad or email for a landing page best practice whitepaper would point to a pretty well designed landing page, but don’t make assumptions too quickly. I do not have access to the conversion data for either of the pages to be discussed, so the following observations are based solely on my experiences of landing page elements that enhance or detract from conversion rates. One example of a questionable landing page design is for an Omniture landing page guide entitled “Does Your Landing Page Smell Like Your Keywords”. I use the term “questionable” because many design elements on this page are pretty good , but there are some design elements on this page that are extremely frustrating, especially in the context of downloading a whitepaper about landing pages. See the page below. The red line represents the “fold”; the portion of the page above the red line is visible without scrolling.
The next design element that is frustrating as an end user is the functionality of the form. Keep in mind, I was served the ad for the landing page in an email newsletter for online marketers- the primary subscriber base is most likely comprised of folks working at interactive agencies, which brings me to my concerns surrounding the form functionality. The first several fields are the standard fill-ins like name, email, but when you get to the drop down menus, things get a bit strange. One design element that seemed particularly odd was the industry selector. As I mentioned previously, the ad for this page was served to a group that is likely comprised on online advertising agency types, but neither “Advertising” or “Marketing” were available as drop down selections. Instead, the form has a selection for “Healthcare” which seems strange as I could not imagine many people in healthcare are developing custom lead generation landing pages in-house. Similarly, peculiar selections were available for other fields, especially considering the ad for this offer was served in an online marketing industry newsletter. Assuming the majority of folks that see this ad work at online ad agencies, it is odd that the most common job titles in the industry are not available in the drop down menu. There are no fields for “Account Executive” or “Account Director” although these are very common titles for the people that are seeing the ad impressions. Another unique component of this page that I find frustrating relates to “form growth”. If you select “Other” from the drop down, a new fill-in field appears below the drop down box. I personally find this very frustrating as I feel deceived by the advertiser as the form gets larger and larger as I complete fields. Look at the difference between the original impression of the form, and the expanded form that “grows” based on your selection.
This experience reminds me of the frustrating multi-stage forms in which users keep getting directed to new pages with new form fields, and there is no indication of when the form will be complete. Keep in mind, this page design could have been the result of extensive testing that indicated this design would lead to the highest possible conversion rates for this channel; however, it is undoubtedly counterintuitive to many thoroughly tested best practices, as well as my own experience in landing pages testing and design. Nevertheless, I won’t be reading Omniture’s landing page whitepaper- I bailed out of the conversion process before I could make it through the frustrating landing page and form. Labels: Industry, Landing Pages, Strategy, web 2.0 Landing Page Conversion ComponentsSo we have a client who has been struggling internally to get their landing page structure launched despite our guidance. The problem is there are dozens of teams and product managers and project managers in the mix and it is very hard to implement an enterprise-wide standard of best practices across the board – never mind a robust A/B or multi-variant testing platform. We are just trying to get the basics implemented. Hi All – just my 2 cents here. Labels: Landing Pages, Paid Search Benefit Driven Ad Copy and Landing Pages are Truly Silver Bullets When Used for PPCSometimes I like to post emails I send to clients explain certain best practices so here is one: Hello XXXX (of course I cannot divulge who they are), I know that this info has been presented to you guys in one form or another at different times but I thought I would package it up for you in this email just to make sure we are constantly evolving in the right direction. Below is a link to a PDF I think you all will find very interesting. http://www.ovrdrv.com/presentations/demystifying_search.pdf It is a study done by Google that talks about how strong benefit and offer statements in the ads coupled with strong conversion oriented landing pages is what drives the best results. Also below you will see an email from an actual client at XXXXXX (sorry I cannot reveal that either but of you get in touch with me I will show you the case study) who after 18 months of internal struggles with compliance and product managers finally got a few of our landing pages launched. At its worst, lead flow doubled and at its best, it increased 10 fold! I am sending this because I think we still have a ways to go in terms of creating and applying compelling offers against your different products and services that really resonate with your target audience. I know that the arsenal of offers we have now are what we are using in the current “battlefield.” But again I want to make sure we are setting the bar in the right place. Things like creating offer and benefit driven ad copy and landing pages are truly silver bullets when it comes to paid search and online marketing in general. The results you see from those efforts, as complicated from a content creation and messaging standpoint as they might be, are exponentially greater and faster then what you will get from optimizing on a keywords, clicks and bids. (Not to undervalue the surgical management of those items.) In addition, great offers and landing pages will greatly increase your stable of performing terms because you get higher click rates on your ads and conversion rates on your landing pages. I think once we have the keyword and ad copy situation stabilized (which should essentially be now) I would like us to have a breakout call that focuses in on what we are doing regarding this subject and what can be done to revisit the benefit and offer matrix we did when we started. Then we want to explore what can be done to carry those essentially elements more into our ad copy and landing pages. This is where you guys are going to see the most bang for you buck. Of course we are making recommendations against the pages you have now. However, in the long term I think we need to apply more energy against the content of the offers in addition to the topical and structural element page recommendations we are making now. Looking forward to these talks, Harry- Labels: Landing Pages, Paid Search, Strategy |
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