Improving Your Conversion Rate

Today In Digital Marketing is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. This week, Tod touches on:

• European Data Crisis Averted
• Improving Your Conversion Rate
• Meta Crawling Back After Apple Changes
• 3D Ads Coming Soon to FB/IG
• Will TweetDeck Go Paid-Only?
• TV Ad Spend is Dropping Like a Rock
• Yoast Plugin Causing "Fatal Errors"
• Google's New Calendar Booking Tool

Below is the transcription from this weeks topics

European Data Crisis Averted

We start today with some reporting from the New York Times, which this morning is saying a multinational deal has been reached that had threatened the presence of major digital ad platforms in Europe.

The issue was over a previous agreement between the U.S. and the European Union — an agreement that Europe recently struck down when a court found the pact didn't shield Europeans well enough from American surveillance programs.

At issue is this: As a response to the September 11th attacks, the U.S. passed the PATRIOT Act, which gave the government unprecedented powers in being able to take pretty much whatever data they wanted on people from the major data platforms.

Quoting the Times:

Businesses that send European Union data to American servers have pushed hard for the governments to reach a new deal. Since the last pact was struck down more than 18 months ago, regulators in European countries have said that companies cannot use certain web services, like Google Analytics and Mailchimp, because doing so could violate the privacy rights of Europeans.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said earlier this year it might shut down its services in Europe if the governments didn’t resolve their differences.

And while, yes, like a toddler, Meta cries wolf a lot and threatens to take its toys and go home, this threat was echoed by other platforms as well, who said they'd pretty much have no choice.

The deal is not final yet, but it sounds like they're just putting the finishing touches on it.

Improving Your Conversion Rate

Back in 2009, a long-time engineer at Google was looking at their search results page and thought to herself "That shade of blue we use for links.. It seems a little... I don't know... off?"

And so she tested a couple of different shades. And a couple more. Eventually, Google tested 41 different blues to determine which one people were most likely to click. Turns out, people will click links more if the blue leans over a bit into purple, compared to blues that have a tinge of green.

You might laugh at the seemingly tiny change, but that small tweak had enormous consequences. Indeed, people started clicking on more links — and that included links on ads. Google says switching to a slightly different shade of blue earned the company an extra $200m a year in revenue.

That engineer, by the way, was Marissa Meyer who went on to be Google's VP of search, and later, CEO of Yahoo.

A/B testing, of course, is a staple in a marketer's toolkit — especially those who sell things. For good marketers, increasing the conversion rate — even by fractions of a percentage point — is an obsession that can pay off in spades.

But how do you do it? What mistakes should you avoid? And where is the middle-ground between providing your customers with a rich brand experience and pushing them to buy.

For answers, I recently spoke with Shaun Brandt from Oddit, which provides advice to e-commerce merchants on their product pages and web sites. I asked him if he could only change three things on an ecommerce website's homepage, what they would be.

SHAUN: The first thing is when you land on the page, probably the most common thing that we're constantly pushing to customers is when the customer scrolls past that first section: do they understand what you do? And you'd be surprised how many submissions and customers we get where you go to that first snippet of the homepage, where you're introducing yourself to the customer. And they don't tell them, they use marketing jargon, or they're very vague.
It sounds silly that it should be in that top part because there's obviously a whole homepage that you can do that in. But so many customers make that first impression and either leave or scroll.
So it really is critical to be telling them and in a really simple way, exactly what you do right off the hop.
I think the second thing is... when you come to a site, and you see a brand with no reviews, or no one else talking about it, it becomes really hard to build instant trust for a brand and build that kind of rapport with a consumer.
A lot of what we're working with brands on is how do we build that even if you don't have reviews?
So maybe it's as simple as saying, Hey, okay, you don't have reviews, let's reach out to some of your Instagram followers and get some opinions from them. And let's start building our own reviews or pulling in, you know, reaching out to customers more personally and saying, hey, we'd love some feedback. Really helping them figure out unique ways to build social proof into their homepage, even if they are a new brand that doesn't necessarily have a ton of that.
TOD: It's interesting, because I discount the reviews on a on a product or a homepage, if it's clear that they've been cherry-picked. I don't mind seeing things that are automatically inserted from TripAdvisor or something, because I know that there's a sense of editorial control.
Whereas the ones where reviews say "I love this product!" and then the review name is just "Dave." You can't tell whether it's real, or whether they've just made that up.
How do you combat that if you were using your approach of reaching out to Instagram commenters and things like that?
SHAUN: [That's] where the design and UX layer comes in. I think it's a constant design problem of trying to make sure that they're actually real reviews. We would never recommend making up reviews.
I think Amazon is like the baseline of this, of trying to make sure that they're proven. I think that comes down to publishing what app that they were collected through, allowing users to access the database of them, rather than just saying, "Hey, here's a static image of it." Anyone can photoshop a review in... So there's different layers and levels to making sure that they feel more trustworthy.

Our full conversation was about a half-hour long and covered topics like:

• What the big broader shifts have been in how direct-to-consumer brands sell products
• The most common conversion rate optimization mistakes that brands make
• How to do ANY CRO when you're using something like Shopify where you don't have a lot of granular control over the design
• The surprising effect on sales caused by Apple shifting the search bar on mobile Safari to the bottom
• And much more

That interview is coming exclusively to the Premium Podcast Feed tomorrow. The Premium Feed is just like this podcast, but more — more stories, weekend editions like this, better audio quality, earlier release time, story links in the show notes, and much more. Tap the link in the episode notes to check it out, or go to TodayInDigital.com/premiumfeed

Incidentally, Shaun's company Oddit is not spelled the way you think it is.. Their web site is oddit.co. They offer what they call a free "quick win" which is a brief top-line report of changes they think you should make to your own shopping site. Again, their web site is oddit.co.

Meta Crawling Back After Apple Changes

Has Meta finally figured its way around Apple's privacy changes?

A new report by attribution platform AppsFlyer has found that Meta has returned as having the most mobile ad volume, overtaking TikTok in the top spot.

This was an analysis done in the last six months of 2021 — in other words, their first report where Apple's changes were fully in effect. This appears to show that Meta getting ahead of Apple's changes, with its own new attribution and event prioritization, has paid off for the company.

AppsFlyer says Meta's "quality signals" also were highest across in-app engagement for non-gaming apps and in-app purchases for both gaming and non-gaming.

And interestingly, as noted by MarketingDive:

Although... effects were more substantial to iOS apps, the privacy-focused changes also posed an impact to Android for mobile media companies, as 25% of total budgets shifted from iOS to Android from the first half of 2020 to that timeframe in 2021...

3D Ads Coming Soon to FB/IG

Speaking of Meta ads, they have a new partnership with a 3D e-commerce technology company that may soon bring 3D ads to your ads manager.

The way it works is you'd upload your brand's existing 3D design files, and this new tech will convert that file to Facebook and Instagram standards. They can be published from the tool directly to your product catalog on Meta's platform.

This is all going through Meta's new Augmented Reality API — which, we should note, is in alpha... meaning it's a very, very early and limited release. And probably quite buggy too. At least for now.

Will TweetDeck Go Paid-Only?

Let's hope this isn't true — a programmer poking around Twitter's code says she's found proof that the company plans to take its popular TweetDeck program and make it only available through its paid Twitter Blue service.

TweetDeck started out as an independent app that actually supported LinkedIn and Facebook too. Twitter bought it 11 years ago for $40 million and ripped everything other than Twitter out of it. But it's free (for now), doesn't contain any tweet ads, and has that familiar columns UI that some people like.

TweetDeck recently also got a UI refresh, which currently people can choose to switch to and from. I've tried it. I hate it.

It's possible this signals that Twitter's subscription service will start rolling out to more countries. It's currently only available in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. If they do move it to Twitter Blue and Blue is still only available in those four countries, that would lock millions of users out of the tool.

When contacted by media, a spokesperson said the company doesn’t have anything to share about this.

TV Ad Spend is Dropping Like a Rock

The glory days of television advertising are over.

TV ad spending reached its height before the pandemic and will never reach that level again. That according to new data from Insider Intelligence.

Their forecast says this year, spending on television ads will fall below 20% of total ad spending. This would represent the first time it's been that low.

And why? Obviously, on-demand content and all the various streaming options.

COVID lockdowns did bounce the numbers around a little, and even made it a little confusing as to what was happening with spending trends. Last year, ad spending in that sector actually grew about 6%. But when you look at that number in context, you realize that followed a 12% drop in 2020. Also apparently contributing to the small bump in 2021, more live sports back on traditional TV.

Insider says it expects within four years, TV ad spending will make up just 14% of all ad budgets.

This year, spending on connected TV like Hulu and other platforms will grow by 33%, and social video like TikTok by 45%.

Yoast Plugin Causing "Fatal Errors"

It's been a bad week for Yoast, the popular SEO plugin used on many Wordpress sites.

Earlier this week, the developers acknowledged their tool was creating duplicate sitemaps. Something that might confuse the search engines.

So, they put out an update and included some new features — the introduction of structured data timestamps so you could use the blockchain to track copyright.

And everything sort of went to hell. Some users reported the updated plugin caused fatal errors on the site, forcing the site admins to roll back to a previous version.

Yoast says it's fixed the problem.

Also, Yoast is not currently compatible with PHP 8 or higher. They are working on it.

Google's New Calendar Booking Tool

A nice addition to Google's work platform for freelancers and service-based businesses.

Google Calendar is adding a customer-facing appointment scheduling tool. This will let people schedule time on your calendar.

Currently, a lot of third-party tools do this (like Calendly) and they integrate with Google Calendar via an API. This, of course, is a more direct way to do it.

The booking page looks a lot like those third-party tools, and you will set up time windows in your calendar by adding what Google calls Appointment Slots.

This If your domain is on the regular release cycle for Google's work product, it will be rolling out starting April 6th and will take up to 3 days to get around to everyone. Those of you on Rapid Release have already started getting it, and those people may take up to 15 days to start seeing it.

It will work on all plans except Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Frontline, or legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers.

Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com