EyeView's Blog

Trust Indicators and Conversion

One of the repeated themes from the Conversion Conference last week in San Jose, was the importance of displaying your trust indicators prominently on your landing page.

Trust indicators are the visual clues you can use to let your site visitors see that you can be trusted. If your conversion involves some kind of financial transaction, you want to show that you have the highest levels of financial protection. If you’re collecting data, you want to demonstrate that your site is secure and your visitors’ data will be kept private. If you’re promising to deliver something, you want to express your commitment to service and punctuality.

In their New York Times bestselling book Trust Agents, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith write about the importance of trust as a commodity that can be shared, lent and borrowed. In addition to the kinds of security and integrity indicators, I mentioned above you should also borrow trust from your valued customers by adding their logos to your site. When your visitors see the logos of other trusted brands on your site they are most likely to trust you.

So far, so simple. Trust indicators have been tested on many sites and they have been shown to boost conversion in many cases.

As far as the authority borrowed from existing customers goes, I’m totally on board. As a consumer or a responsible buyer for a company, I can see why using the logos of big brand companies is a persuasive tool in convincing me to purchase. If it’s good enough for [fill in the name of a company you admire here] then it should be good enough for me. I get it.

But the security icons leave me a little cold. I’m a sophisticated browser. I feel confident about finding the results I want through search. I believe I can discern whether or not a company trying to sell me something is trustworthy or not based on the language they use and the images they present. I don’t believe that if any of those indicators gave me pause that it would be an image of a padlock that set me straight. I’m also not convinced that any symbol of security would help me overcome serious misgivings I might have about an online provider’s ability to deliver on its promises.

Leaving aside my personal prejudices, I still want to determine whether either of these kinds of trust icons have a place in conversion videos. Is there something more persuasive about animation with a voiceover which makes the flat representation of a security icon irrelevant? Should the corporate logos of your customers scroll through a video or should each one be animated as it would be on its own site? At what point does the “borrowed trust” of someone else’s logo become a distraction rather than a trust indicator and an aid to conversion?

Of course, I don’t have answers to all these questions right now. But you can be sure we will be running more tests with video trust indicators in the future.

Conversion Conference - First Thoughts

It’s been a hectic couple of days here in San Jose. The inaugural Conversion Conference, set up by Tim Ash from SiteTuners, is generally agreed by both attendees and presenters to have been an unqualified success.

From my perspective it was gratifying to spend time with so many conversion professionals. Everywhere I went people were talking about testing methodologies and the comparative advantages of A/B and multivariate testing. It was conversion geek heaven.

The speaking tracks were broken up into four groups: Persuasion, Best Practices, Hands On and Testing. Having sampled at least one presentation of each group I found them to be relevant and useful.

The conference kicked off Tuesday morning with a keynote address from Tim Ash himself. Tim is one of the pioneers of Landing Page Optimization and he delivered an entertaining introduction breaking down the basics into easily digestible and practicable suggestions.

Straight after Tim, two presenters tag-teamed a session called The Power of Split Testing. Both Brooks Bell and Lance Loveday delivered valuable insights into the basis of this vital art. Brooks, in particular suggested the 5 Ts that must be considered when it comes to A/B testing:

• Traffic
• Technology
• Time
• Trust
• Team

Throughout this and every other session I was in, people were tweeting furiously to get the word out to their networks. By tuning in to the conference hashcode, #ConvCon, I was able to get real-time updates from the parallel track. It was a sign of the conference’s quality that there was always something interesting going in each of the two meeting rooms and seating space was almost always at a premium with listeners sometimes spilling out into the corridor.

Day two started in fine fashion with a presentation from Bryan Eisenberg delivered at breakneck speed. Bryan’s energy, undiminished by his impressive weight loss, woke everyone up and led into another day of fascinating sessions.

All in all, I feel that the conference more than justified its existence. There was a clear need for a dedicated conversion conference and I’m thrilled to note that the next one is already scheduled for October. I have the feeling that most of this week’s attendees will come back and that, once word gets out, there will be more people lining up to visit the show. 

For now we will have to rely on the presentations from this show which Tim Ash has promised to make available to everyone who attended. In addition, all the sessions were filmed. I’m not sure what Tim intends to do with all this footage, but, if you want to see it, you had better contact him yourself and request it.

Conversion Conference West 2010

Do you know the way to San Jose? I do and I’m heading there early next week. I was thrilled when Tim Ash contacted us and asked EyeView to deliver a session on the impact of video on site performance at the first Conversion Conference. It’s not like we haven’t had other speaking engagements. It’s just this is the first ever conference aimed directly at conversion professionals.

The conference runs concurrently with the latest eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit and positions video squarely as part of the scientific search for superior site performance (I’m practicing my alliteration to prepare for my presentation!).

Several people have suggested that 2010 will be remembered as the year that Conversion Rate Optimization captured the mainstream attention of big-hitting marketers. Some of those people will even be attending the conference. I’m looking forward to hearing the keynote addresses from Tim, Bryan Eisenberg and Jakob Nielsen and rubbing shoulders with as many like-minded conversion buffs (conversion geeks?) as possible.

By positioning the conference alongside eMetrics, Tim has smartly staked the claim for moving conversion rate optimization away from the softer consultancy side of things and into the realm of measurable science. That’s exactly where we believe that EyeView sits and I’m keen to connect with others who are involved daily with the iterative cycle of testing and analysis that lies behind all our optimization efforts. 

If you’re going to be at the conference, please find me and say hello. I think it’s going to be a very productive few days.

Why I Don't Trust Nielsen

I came across this self-serving blog post at Nielsen.com, thanks to those awesome guys at MarketingCharts.

The gist of the Nielsen post is this. People watch ads on TV. People also watch ads when they watch full-length TV episodes online. Using each of the four metrics deemed important by Nielsen, online TV ads performed slightly better than regular TV ads. The four metrics are:

• General Recall
• Brand Recall
• Message Recall
• Likeability

The conclusion following these results is so delicious that I just have to quote it in full:

“Data shows that web video viewers are more engaged and attentive to the programs they are watching, which is likely a function of the viewing environment and the oft-required active mouse-clicking to initiate nd [sic] continue content.”

It’s not that I don’t agree with their findings. It’s more that I have serious misgivings about how they got them and what they intend to do with them.

“Data shows…”? Really? Which data? I’d like to see those figures and how you got them. Given that Nielsen notoriously extrapolates national TV viewing figures from a relatively small number of homogenous households, I am curious to hear more about their online video engagement statistics.

I’m also in love with the phrase “oft-required active mouse clicking”. It’s like someone from the 1950s has come to watch how we do things in the future. But then everything about Nielsen’s comparison of offline and online ads is so far from current that it’s laughable.

Online advertising isn’t about “Message Recall”. “Likeability” is not an end in itself and should not be measured as such. The majority of online advertising is about actions, not impressions and Nielsen, I’m afraid, has absolutely no way of measuring that.

If you really want to compare TV ads and online ads, you need to measure how many people made a purchase after seeing an ad – a metric that TV networks have been rightly coy about exploring as the results could undermine their entire business model; or at least undermine the high prices they charge, relative to online advertisers.

But we should give Nielsen some credit. They bravely point out that online ads are more effective that TV ads, even if the methodology behind this realization is a little dodgy. The recommendation must therefore be to lower spend on TV advertising and shift budget to online inventory, right? Wrong.

“…the data suggests the benefits of utilizing both platforms in tandem to achieve advertising objectives.”

Way to sit on the fence, Nielsen. It’s almost as if a large part of your revenue comes from TV networks trying to prove to advertisers that they should still be the primary supplier of ad space. Oh, wait, it does.

Check out this report which shows a minority interest sports channel paying $7.5 million dollars a year to Nielsen for the privilege of having its tiny viewing figures calculated, so that it can claim it has viewing figures, so that it can charge more money to advertisers for those figures. I shudder to think how much CNN or NBC must be paying.

If you’re a big advertiser debating where to focus your media buying for the next few seasons, you might want to find a better informed and more impartial source of information than Nielsen.

Meaningless Statistics For Viral Video

I love a well presented chart or a neatly laid out table. The guys over at marketingcharts.com, for example, put out a daily newsletter that delivers one good insight per day without trying too hard.

But this report from the usually reliable Millward Brown left me utterly cold. They claim to have developed a metric for determining the viral potential of your video. Their metric includes “Buzz”, “Celebrity” and “Distinctiveness”. As far as I am aware none of these is measured in SI units. Worst of all is that loaded word “potential”. In other words, even if you accept the crazy notion that you can actually measure the celebrity-ness or the buzz-ocity of your video, you will still only arrive at a figure which shows the potential your video has to go viral. Your video may or may not fulfill its viral potential, but at least you will know how likely this was to have happened… potentially.

Based on Millward Brown’s new index and a survey of over 100 ads, a bizarre statistic was reported here and elsewhere stating that only 15% of ads go viral online. Firstly 15% seems shockingly high to me, but when you look at their definition of viral success you start to see all sorts of chicanery in action.

To back up this statistical flim flam, Millward Brown offers eight case studies analyzing, post facto, the main viral drivers behind each. It’s a classic instance of “past posting”, the delicious con tactic that was used in The Sting. Out of the eight videos analyzed, three were ads that were shown during this year’s Super Bowl. The other five were similarly big budget productions backed up with additional TV and print campaigns. The only lesson Millward Brown is teaching here is that if you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making your video and then millions of dollars buying airtime for it so that tens of millions of people tuned in to the most watched program of the year see it, there is a chance that more people will watch it again online. It’s the daftest, most insignificant piece of research since this study into whether it’s better to be hit over the head by a full or empty beer bottle.

I understand that agencies are still taking millions of dollars from foolish advertisers to make viral videos with no discernible ROI. I get that this outmoded practice will be defended by other agencies paid by the first lot of agencies to try to lend them some integrity. But this latest attempt at selling the Eiffel Tower doesn’t even try to appear credible.

I call on the researchers at Millward Brown to use their metric to identify some viral successes (and failures) before they happen. Furthermore, in order for something to qualify as an online viral success the campaign must garner more eyeballs online than in any other medium. Let’s see you work your magic with that!

Conversion Optimization - Opinion or Science?

I have always thought it would be fun to be a consultant. I’ve got opinions, plenty of them. You name a subject and I can give you my opinion on it. I’m good like that. It’s a useful skill in conversation. I’m much in demand for dinner parties. I can say something semi-intelligent on a broad range of topics. I have an ever-expanding stream of anecdotes that I can apply to bolster my point of view. I am, like many others, a seething cauldron of eloquent subjectivity.

But that all stops when I get to the office. When we talk about optimizing conversion with our customers, we don’t bring a bunch of stories and best-case scenarios. We bring evidence – data captured from live traffic – that proves objectively what is happening for that customer on that landing page with that traffic from those sources.

Furthermore, we don’t rest on our laurels. We encourage our customers to ask “What have you done for me lately?” and we push ourselves to provide an answer. We do this because optimization of your site’s conversion rate is not a one-time cure.

Causing an increase or improvement is easy enough. If a picture is hung at a crooked angle, anybody can nudge it and improve on what there was before. Getting it perfectly straight requires something more. It requires measurement and testing. Getting it perfectly straight when the wall and perhaps the whole house is rocking from side to side requires planning.

There’s little room for subjectivity and opinion when it comes to optimization. If you want to ensure that your landing page is always performing in the most effective way, you need someone to build a plan that draws on the classic Scientific Method's cycle of hypothesis, experiment and conclusion, repeated for as long as necessary.

So, when you talk about optimizing conversion, are you giving your opinion or looking at the latest results of a scientific test?

New Video Marketing Quiz Lands With A Bang

We’re really excited to launch the newest Video Marketing Quiz with all new questions.

Following the success of the last quiz, we wanted to top ourselves and present some of the data generated by the tests we run in the most engaging way we could imagine.

Since the last quiz we have seen the format picked up and imitated by Omniture/Adobe, which just makes us think that we created an exciting product.

To mark this launch we are giving away hundred of dollars in Amazon vouchers to the people who take the quiz and the Tweet their results.

Every hour for the first eight hours after the launch today at 10 am ET, five lucky tweeters will be selected and sent $20 to spend any way they wish.

It doesn’t get more exciting that that!

Enjoy the quiz and get tweeting!

Viral Videos Suck... or... This Too Shall Pass

First of all I want to thank Nalts and his excellent blog for bringing this video to my attention. It’s another epic mini-movie from OK Go that showcases the band’s innovative use of short-form video to market themselves and their music.

It’s very entertaining. It’s also fairly useless.

Let’s take a look at their last huge viral success. The video for Here It Goes Again rode the first wave of YouTube’s explosion into global consciousness. You’ve seen it. Four indie nerds doing a synchronized routine on treadmills. It’s very entertaining. According to YouTube’s figures it has been viewed almost 50 million times. That’s just from OK Go’s own channel. The same video on EMI’s channel has added another 1.5 million and there are probably a few hundred thousand more views with other unauthorized duplicates.

So the band have produced a video that’s been seen around 50 million times. What did they do with that? Not very much. There seems to have been very little strategy behind the whole thing. If you watch the video on YouTube there are no live links allowing you to purchase either the video itself or anything else by the band. The video serves no purpose other than to entertain. Even if you were to ascribe every purchase of the song’s parent album Oh No to a viewing of the video, you would still end up with a dreadful conversion rate. Fifty million videos viewed has translated, to date, into less than 250,000 albums sold. That’s an embarrassing conversion rate of less than half a percent.

It makes me want to scream. If only their YouTube page was linked to iTunes. If only there was a link to purchase a video ringtone of the video for ten cents. If only the page was designed to drive 50 million viewers towards some kind of action. Any kind of action. If only 99.5 percent of those views weren’t totally wasted.

Damian Kulash, lead singer with OK Go sees it differently. He believes that the video’s huge viral success helped the band to sell out concerts on five continents and win a Grammy. I don’t doubt any of that, I just wish he’d tried the video ringtone idea as well (and cut me in for a percentage).

Which brings us back to now. This new video from OK is very entertaining. Before it even went live on YouTube, Kulash was complaining in the New York Times, no less, about his record company’s refusal to allow video embedding. Kulash was concerned that without the possibility of his video going viral, the band would be unlikely to replicate the success they have achieved. Fortunately for us, EMI caved in and we can now embed the video.

In the two days since it launched, it has been viewed almost 2.5 million times. The video page still carries no advertising or identifiable call to action. Sales of the new album are, as yet, unknown.

I think the video is very entertaining. It still makes me want to scream.

Great Resources for Conversion Optimization

People are always asking me what (and who) I read to keep up professionally, so I thought it was time for a post highlighting some of the most useful sources of information I turn to regularly to keep me up to day with the world.

Due to the nature of our EyeView’s business I find my blog reading time split evenly between content that is focused on conversion and optimization and commentary on the latest developments in online video and video advertising. So will split this post into two and deal with each area separately

So here is a list of the top 5 go-to reads for conversion and optimization. For each I’ll list a URL and Twitter ID where appropriate.

The best introduction you can have to the world of conversion is Bryan Eisenberg. Eisenberg is published all over the place, but is blogging regularly now at BryanEisenberg.com. There is very little in the world of optimization that Bryan hasn’t already written about, but you can be sure he always finds a fresh topic for his meaty posts. In addition to his work online, Bryan has co-authored two of the most informative books I have ever referred to – Always Be Testing and Waiting For Your Cat To Bark? Bryan tweets as @TheGrok.

The guys at Conversion Rate Experts don’t blog as regularly as I would like them to, but when they do, you can bet they have something weighty to say. With offices in London and New York, this team of conversion consultants have built their reputation on making a difference for some high-profile customers. They are definitely worth listening to.  

Brian Massey has cleverly dubbed himself The Conversion Scientist. It’s a great title, but it wouldn’t be worth anything if he didn’t back it up regularly with some real science. You can follow Brian on Twitter where he is @bmassey.

Raquel Hirsch and Chris Goward at Wider Funnel put out consistently great material that always offers food for thought and usually a practical way to apply that thought. Chris publishes a daily conversion optimization tip on Twitter as @chrisgoward and Raquel moderates a number of conversion optimization groups on LinkedIn.

 My last entry for now is a bit of a cheat. SEOmoz doesn’t focus too hard on conversion optimization, but the sheer breadth and volume of quality content that is posted there means that they are host to some of the best and most informative discussions on the subject. You can follow the SEOmoz twitter stream here and pick through the SEO stuff for some conversion optimization gems.

Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. What they mean is, when someone pays attention to you and respects what you do enough to reproduce one of your original ideas or activities you should be flattered. And we usually are.

Last July, before the release of his New York Times bestseller, Trust Agents, I approached Chris Brogan with an idea for a Twitter giveaway. I proposed that we give away 50 copies of his book on the day of its launch to the first 50 people who tweeted about a brand awareness campaign we were running. The campaign centered on our Video Marketing Quiz which is a fun interactive game that tests your knowledge of video as an effective marketing tool.

We were overwhelmed with the results. As soon as Chris tweeted about the giveaway, everything went nuts with thousands of people taking the quiz and tweeting about it afterwards. It was such a simple idea, yet it worked so well for us and we were tremendously grateful to Chris for his support and proud to be part of the launch for Trust Agents.

We knew it was a successful idea when Chris ran with it and instigated the exact same promotion with his pals at LinkedIn less than a month later. I’m sure it’s not the last time we will see Twitter used in this way.

This week our Video Marketing Quiz saw another form of imitation as Omniture, the web analytics company that was recently bought by Adobe, released an interactive game that tests your knowledge of banner ads as an effective marketing tool. If you disregard the background, the awkward fonts and the clumsy interface that never quite clicks on what you want to click, it’s eerily similar to our own Video Marketing Quiz. All of which goes to prove a few things:

• If something works for someone else, you might be able to make it work for you
• If you want to know who’s listening, check who’s copying
• Great ideas belong to the world (but it’s always nice to know you had them first!)

            

          EyeView's Video Marketing Quiz                                        Omniture's Pick The Winner Quiz