10 Questions for Teasing Out Market Opportunities đź’ˇ [Twitter]
- What established companies are resting on their laurels?
- What products have gone so far up-market that a broad base of customers can no longer afford them?
- What successful products have critical flaws for a subset of users?
- What products are people using for a different purpose than originally intended?
- What popular products are extensible and could be augmented to work even better for a particular niche?
- What inefficiencies can be solved by borrowing new technology and applying it to an older space?
- What areas have a bunch of new people looking to join who are willing to spend money to succeed faster?
- What popular products have been acquired and shut down, leaving a void of demand?
- What companies have stopped listening to their customers?
- What companies are unable to keep up with feature demands because of legacy?
Unleash your faceted navigation: How I increased a company’s organic traffic by 230% in 2 months [Andy Chadwick]
What is faceted navigation? Quite simply, the various options and selections that help customers narrow options down on a website, usually in the form of filters, is known as faceted navigation. It allows people to customize their search based on what they’re looking for on the website:
The problem with faceted navigation is, if it’s not controlled, your site can end up with (quite literally) billions of URLs with low value or duplicated content.
The article is quite technical and full of details and multiple examples. Here’s a short summary:
If you run a website that uses filters, make sure you maximize your chances of ranking for longer tail queries by unleashing the power of your facets. Generally, your filtering system should follow these rules:
- If the facet has search volume, we’d like it to result in an indexable URL.
- If more than one filter is applied, and the resulting page still has search volume, we’d like the URL to always resolve to one permutation (i.e. we don’t want “/womens/black/dress” and “womens/dress/black” to be created).
- If the facet does have search volume, we’d like to be able to customize the page title, meta description and add some on-page copy (in the above example we’d like the page title to be “women’s black dresses” with an appropriate meta description and some on-page copy).
- If the facet doesn’t have search volume, we’d like the menu to either intelligently switch to some sort of AJAX based logic, so that a new URL isn’t even generated, or we’d like the URL that is generated to be blocked by robots.txt and noindexed.
Uber was swindled out of $100m in ad spend and no one is talking about it [The Hustle]
In 2017, her internet watchdog organization Sleeping Giants was nipping at Uber’s heels over ads the rideshare company placed on Breitbart.
Uber responded by cutting ~$15m worth of ads.
Surprisingly, the rideshare leader saw no significant drop in user acquisition.
On closer inspection, Uber exec Kevin Frisch found all sorts of problems with their ad partners, like:
- Impossible numbers: The number of daily ad clicks reported by some networks were higher than their total active users.
- Slimy practices like spying on users’ mobile app store usage, then claiming credit for organic sign-ups.
In the end, Uber cut ⅔ of their ~$150m ad budget — with no negative effects — and launched the first major ad fraud lawsuit.
Click farms generate billions of clicks per minute, and most marketing teams are slow to question what looks like excellent data. When they do, they’re often surprised by the findings
Lesson learned: up to 99% of programmatic ad spend is being wasted. You just don’t know which 99%.
This had interesting consequences:
- P&G cut $200m in digital ad spend and increased its reach
- Chase dropped 99% (395k websites) from its display ad network and saw no business change
- Ebay killed paid search after finding that most of its spend went to existing users
7 Ways to Analyze a Customer-Journey Map [Nielsen Norman Group]
Evaluate your journey map to identify low and high points, failures to set expectations, unnecessary or too long steps, channel transitions, and moments of truth. Use this information to find opportunities for improving the journey.
Above: a sample customer journey map for someone shopping for a new car.
The article analyzes each step of the journey, with instructions and tips along the way.
CRO Soft Skills [Elise Maile]
Soft skills are important in any professional setting, but with a job in conversion rate optimization you’re likely to be working with a lot of different teams; a sort of glue connecting marketing to engineering to product to analytics.
So, what soft skills are most useful to be a successful Conversion Rate Optimisation specialist?
Listening (to customers, colleagues), communicating, being organized, flexibility, curiosity, integrity.
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Until next Thursday!
Radek Sienkiewicz
PS. GrowRevenue proudly didn’t let a single cent get swindled. By not running paid ads 🙂
