pandora advertising

Despite our love of social media and engagement-driven marketing, display advertising isn’t going anywhere fast.

Analysts and Google CEO Eric Schmidt are in agreement that (display advertising) is the next major cash cow for them, estimating that display will account for more than $1 billion in 2010.

And that’s okay. But it means we need to do it better.

I’ve often heard (and even thought) that if you build an exceptional web property/mobile app with a ton of users, advertising will be a sufficient revenue model. The fact is, (most) advertisers aren’t stupid. Traditional banners have lost a lot of their effectiveness. Here’s how Pandora is making it work.

1. Pandora offers experiential advertising. Instead of only offering pay-per-click models, Pandora draws users into the brand experience. Users can interact with the ads: scroll over special deals, play a funny video, launch a station… And it’s all in a way that doesn’t irritate the user.

2. It spans platforms. From unobtrusive ads at the bottom of mobile, to music-infused blurbs between songs, on up to stations customized to your brand, Pandora meets consumers where they want to connect.

Pandora is offered via web browsers or downloadable desktop apps. Pandora also offers free mobile apps across platforms to offer their services and, of course, advertisements.

3. Each advertisement has custom dimensions. Face it: Users are virtually unresponsive to your banner ad.

Generally speaking, Nielsen’s eye tracking research typically showed that there are no fixations within advertisements. And users don’t fixate with design elements that resemble ads. In the early years of display advertising on Web pages, people ignored ads because they were usually totally irrelevant. Not only that, most banner ads were as creative as you’d get from a box of crayons and a drawing pad. (Even worse when the animated gif arrived and everything had to flash off and on just because you could). Source

Sure Pandora ads show up in (generally) the same places, but the shape, size, feel, and experience of each ad created is crafted to allow the brand to interact with the user in a completely custom way. Bottom line: They don’t look like “ads.”

4. They empower advertisers to use a medium users are already familiar with. Instead of using never-heard-of songs to avoid copyright, Pandora has brands associating products with the songs users are already singing along to.

There is nothing new for the user to learn or retain. Rather, the user is now able to connect a brand to something they’re already opting into engaging with.

5. They’re targeting based on on-the-fly user inputs. This means the user experience is customized as the user customizes and experiences the website!

Case in point: Clicking the “thumbs up” on a party-themed hip hop song changed my ad from the Ford’s “Sales Event” to Barcardi’s “Color your summer.” Those of you who can’t see the correlation between party-themed hip hop and Barcardi are in serious need of a vacation or a college student.

Learn more about advertising on Pandora. No, I’m not a compensated blogger.
How are YOU using these trends to purchase or sell advertising?

Getting to this point isn’t always easy. Achieving a good conversion rate starts at the very beginning:

All of these things come together to improve website conversion rates, but end up improving other website analytics as well! Done correctly, bounce rates decrease, reoccurring (or baseline) website traffic increases, average time on site increases or levels out, pages per visit may increase.

What am I missing? What other methods have you used to improve conversion rates?

Perhaps you realize you need a “good conversion rate,” but you may not understand exactly what that means. That’s okay. Here’s what you, as a business owner or marketing professional, need to know.

Definitions:
Conversion: A user of your website completes a desired task (such as making a purchase, initiating contact, signing up for an eNewsletter, leaving a blog comment, etc). The desired task is completely relative to your business website. Here’s an offline example: A customer walks into your store and makes a purchase.

Conversion rate: The percentage of ALL website users who complete the desired task. If your conversion rate is 5%, this means 5 out of every 100 website visitors have completed your desired task. You may have multiple desired tasks; each will have a unique conversion rate.

Bounce rate: The percentage of all website visitors who immediately leave your website once they arrive. If your bounce rate is 30%, this means 30 out of 100 website visitors saw your one page of your website and left immediately.
My favorite way to illustrate this concept is with the bouncy ball. A user is a bouncy ball. Your website is the wall. Unless your wall is permeable and friendly, the ball bounces right off.

How do I track conversion rates?
Your analytics tool (such as Google Analytics) must be set up to accurately track conversions. Website developers typically do this for you when installing the analytics tool, though you must define what counts as a “conversion.”

How do I impact my conversion rate?
Qualified traffic: Driving traffic is often a large part of the online marketing budget; it is completely for shame if the traffic being driven doesn’t convert. Ensuring your website visitors are actually relevant or interested in your business website’s content is critical to success. Do not waste time blindly pushing people to visit your website. Understand your target market, know where to find them, then work on traffic building.

Information architecture: The way the content on your website is organized needs to intuitively make sense to users. If it’s confusing, they’ll probably just leave. (As a bonus, your information architecture also impacts your search engine visibility.)

User experience: The way a user interacts with your website is essentially the “user experience.” Things are laid out and designed in such a way to create a seamless, easy interaction. An offline example is interior design.
Creating a product experience online isn’t easy. In fact, it takes a lot of work. Once a user has become aware of your website, they either bounce (leave) or consume information. If your user experience is planned and implemented well, they might progress into participating, converting or even advocating on your behalf.

Engaging a Target Market: Graduating from User Traffic to User Advocate
Driving website traffic is often a significant part of your online marketing budget. Make the most of your investment by turning traffic into an engaged user advocate. You’ll learn how to turn your users into brand promoters by qualifying traffic sources, creating an engagement-friendly website, and letting your users know you’re plugged in!

Here is the presentation slides and video:

Presentation begins at 20:00 below:

More information at LA2M.

First, answer the following questions about your business goals and write out your answers:

1. Identify your ideal target consumer:
   • List the words or phrases that are most important to the type of customer that will produce the highest dollar amount for you?
   • List the words or phrases that are most important to the type of customer that will be the easiest to convert?
2. What is the primary task that you would like this consumer to complete before leaving your website (register, purchase, subscribe, etc.)?
   • On what pages of your site is this task referenced
   • On what pages of your site is the task itself facilitated?
3. Describe and number steps that are required for the visitor to complete primary task on your site?

Next, take a look at your web traffic via Google Analytics and answer the following questions:

1. Where is the majority of your website traffic coming from?
   • Which websites are you receiving referring the most links from?
   • Which keywords are producing the most referring links?
2. Which pages produce your highest bounce rate?
   • If you have set goals in your Google Analytics account, which pages have the highest conversion rates?
3. Which pages on your website have the most views?
   • How much time are they spending on these pages?

Now, based on the above, answer the following questions, giving yourself 1 point for every “yes” answer:

1. Have you defined a primary task for visitors of the site?
2. Is your bounce rate highest on your home page?
3. Your bounce rate is NOT highest on any of the pages where the primary task of your customer is to be completed?
4. Does more than one page link to or directly reference the page(s) that facilitates your primary task (not including the global navigation)?
5. Your primary task does NOT require viewing more than one page or executing more than three steps?
6. Does the page (or pages) that facilitates your primary task have the highest conversion rate?
7. Is the page that facilitates your primary task third place or higher among the pages with the most number of views?
8. Are any of the pages that promote your primary task third place or higher in most amount of time spent per page?
9. Did your list of words or phrases match three or more of the top performing keywords from your Google Analytics report?
10. Are less than half of your top referring sites paid advertisers for your brand?

Now add up your score:
10 = Excellent. Your site is best configured to achieve your core business conversion goals. Keep monitoring it’s performance and be prepared to engage in a few periodic tweaks to maintain its effectiveness.

9 – 6 = Almost there. Your site is doing some things well, but there is definitely room for improvement. Put some thought into how your site is set up to engage your target customer and facilitate your primary task. Some professional advice would be helpful.

5 or less = There’s work to be done. Roll up your sleeves. Your site is missing a number of key elements to facilitate effective conversion. Consult a web professional to review your call-to-action, navigation and your core conversion goals.

A Few Things to Remember

Generally speaking, your bounce rate should be low — particularly on the pages where your visitor conversion takes place. While there are a number of valid exceptions to this (such as ads or links that reference other sites), in general, this would mean that when a user lands on a page within your site, instead of leaving your site after viewing that single page (a bounce), they complete the primary task (a conversion) and potentially view additional pages.

Look at the pages that receive the most views. How much content is on the page? How easy is it to find and interpret the important links? Content and navigation design combined equal the “user experience.” While your website may have much in the way of visual and textual information and functionality, it’s most likely an individual user will only focus on 20% of it. Therefore, it’s important to maximize the user experience and time spent on the site by focusing primarily on that which allows the user to consume information most critical to conversion. Essentially, make sure your conversion has a clear, easily accessed call-to-action.

While this is a simple analysis utilizing only data gleaned from a Google Analytics integration, perhaps it has yielded some interesting insights on your website’s effectiveness in addressing your business goals and market needs. Identifying such correlations are important to determine your site’s productivity and identify its strengths and weaknesses. A comprehensive assessment of your website’s performance is an integral part of your business’ digital strategy. Without a clear idea of where you are and where you need to go, it’s impossible to achieve any measurable results. If you are not currently measuring your site’s conversion, speak to your digital team and put those wheels into motion today.

Original guest post at Module’s Digital Conversation Blog

I’ve been thinking about the “call to action” lately. The call to action is too often an afterthought. Too often, I’m looking at a website wondering what action it’s target market is supposed to take. Before we get in too far, let’s review a few examples of a call to action–which, by the way, should be designed based on the website owner’s return on investment needs.

• Newsletter sign up
• Contact form submission
• Online sales
• Quote request
• Consume information
• Request information

There are a variety of actions a user can take but without a definitive, obvious, effective call-to-action a user’s action might just be to leave the website all together. When a user fulfills the intended call to action (completes a form, initiates contact, whatever), website analytics regard this as a “conversion.”

One way to determine how your call-to-action is performing is to first look at two things within your website analytics:

1. Bounce rate (should be a low percent, at least under 30%) and
2. Conversion rate (should be a high percent, depends on nature of your action).

If your website isn’t performing the way it should be, it’s time to take a look at its user interface. Let’s face it if your analytics aren’t where they need to be, you’re tying to bungee cord to your users’ feet making sure they’ll never convert.

But the greatest failure by early mobile developers is their apparent disregard for usability–a huge time waster. It’s no wonder many design-and-usability-loving-websites have passed by mobile applications to be featured! The archaic looking designs were difficult to navigate and therefore made disposable by users.

Today there are over 15,000 iphone applications alone, in addition to another 2,000 Blackberry applications. And, finally, users have begun to demand arespectable interface. Developers have teamed with information architecture and user experience planning rockstars to perform. The result has been applications I consider straight-up-sexy, example: Strokes, a golf game scoring app that allows users to export scores to Facebook or Twitter (by BickBot). Clearly I’m a big fan.

While building an iPhone application isn’t practical for all businesses, ignoring the mobile user is a big mistake. In the past 90 days, mobile web has been as hot of a topic as web development itself (well, darn close!).

Blog posts across the Blogosphere given the following tags: mobile web (red) vs. web development (blue)

Mobile web is great for meeting the needs of users on the go who need quick information, but may not access it on a regular basis. For Biznet (disclosure: my employer), we wanted to make sure clients on-the-go could contact us and find our office while they were out on the road. Simple, not worth an app. The problem was our website, like many websites, didn’t feature our address on the front page. Our phone number was there, but not touch-and-call ready.

The result took this:

and transformed it into this:

The interface is user-friendly and easy to navigate. The call-to-action is obvious. Win-win!

The point of this post is really just a PSA. Please pay attention to the rapidly growing population of mobile users. Respect their time and eyes by creating interfaces that are practical and easy to use.

• Adaptive Internet: Automate processes, position as knowledge discovery, cost-effectively maximize time of users
• Adaptive Internet: Automate processes, position as knowledge discovery, cost-effectively maximize time of usears
• Adaptive Internet tailors a website to user performance and UE. Website dynamically adapts based on individual users & groups.
• Adaptive Internet: info & manner presented, done by usage & performance patterns; objectives: improve UE and user performance

Web Accessibility Overview Mary Donnelly

• ONE THING you can do to make your site more ACCESSIBLE: Use headers
• Motor Challenges: Some use their mouth, feet, or voice to navigate. Ensure all function are avail. via keyboard
• Simple layout, group text under headings, use simple language, use color & words to describe errors, be CONSISTANT!
• Deafness Solutions: Synchronize captions for any video files
• RT @zspencer: Three phase design process! Define! Design! Build!
• Blindness Solutions: Provide text equiv. for all non-text elements; provide empty alt descriptions for non-important images
• For Word & PPT, provide other means of downloading the information (perhaps via text).
• Use <label for=”firstname”> First Name </label> etc for forms
• Instead of only using color of bold/italics to emphasize, use *asterisks*
• RT @jjmorse: #iue09 “Date before you marry” – Landing page should ask users for personal information – let them get more comfortable first.
• @ksattler Answer: Don’t say “image of” (or photo of, etc), just state what the content is.
• @heidigoseek I’m one of 5%! Slideshare is great up uploading PDF, ppt, & Keynote presentations
• Blindness Solutions: Provide text equiv. for all non-text elements; provide empty alt descriptions for non-important images
• Blindness Challenges: Images are unusuable, users listen to web pages, jump via tabbing (instead of using the mouse).
• “Inaccessible websites can result in lawsuits.” “The ADA is becoming increasingly active online.”
• When creating websites, you should befriend 508 Standards. http://bit.ly/WY8LO

Diagnosing and Addressing Online User Experience Challenges C.J. Goebel, C. Morton, C. Demetris Design Challenge

• Easy to use
• Competitor consideratinos
• Compelling to desired audience?

Approach

• Proritize market
• Observe target users
• Interview target users
• Design candidate solutions
• Dianose designs before building

Design should be swayed by one “most important” user type. Key Takeaways

• Opinions are poor predictor of behavior
• Often, differing opinions indicate a difference of perceived target user type
• Diagnose the site without building

Interaction Designers are the Next Generation of Business Leaders Jim Jacoby

Believe in your entitlement Take control when the time is right Act boldly even if all of the facts aren’t in Stand on your process, it works If you doubt yourself, trust you process Push open closed doors Create new positions and organizations Question everything Own your destiny

And we’re off!

13 Search Engine Optimization Tips for Web Content

1. Headlines
Headlines are often an afterthought, but are definitely critical in engaging readers. Readers chose their content based on engaging headlines, and notice them based on relevant keywords.

2. Fresh, hot content!
Your husband may not notice a new hair cut, but Google will notice new content. Each time your website or blog updated, a new or updated Google listing is created. This increases your visibility! (Fresh content exemplified in image.)

3. Keywords in content
The key to not making this spammy or awkward is to ONLY use relevant, appropriate keywords. If you have done a keyword analysis, you know which phrases and wording those searching for you are using. Phrase these words in your content as those who are searching for you do.

Example– Keyword: “garden supplies”; your content includes “gardening supplies and tips.” You may want to re-word it to accommodate the singular form (“garden”) instead (“garden supplies and tips”).

If you’re not comfortable doing this, don’t stress. Chances are you’re doing it organically (without realizing) anyway.

4. Describe your linked content
Instead of saying, Check out the 13 Search Engine Optimization Tips for Web Content HERE. Link the entire thing (Check out the 13 Search Engine Optimization Tips for Web Content!). This identifies the link and provides keywords for weighting and indexing.

5. Formatting
Organize your content with appropriate formatting. Use bold to indicate headlines or critical points. Italics are often used for emphasis or descriptions.

6. Tagging posts
Depending on how your content management system (CMS) is set up, you may have an area to include keywords that appropriately describe, index, and organize your page. This makes it easy to reference your posts at a later date.

Example– This post will include 3 tags: “marketing,” “copywriting,” and “SEO.” In the future, when referring to these topics, I will be able to access a link on my website that specifically pulls up these tags.

7. Embeddable media
Using embeddable media is not only engaging, it provides an opportunity to link bait. Link baiting simply means leaving a link to your website/web page from an outside website/web page back to your own. This means when you upload a video to YouTube, then embed the video to your website, you should include a link to this page on in the YouTube description.

8. Image tagging
Not only does this allow blind users to “see” your image, it provides the search engine with a description of what was once an invisible box. Keep in mind, the tags are behind the scenes–only seen by search engines and whoever is looking at the code behind the image.

Example– Hover over the below image and read: “Biznet logo: Biznet does web development, online marketing, and all things nerdy”

I use a WordPress blog, so adding tags is easy. Just add your description (tag) in the Image Description.

9. Social media integration
Adding social media elements, such as blogs or forums, invite conversation and continuously updated content. Search engines trust these sources because it’s user-generated. What a beautiful thing!

10. Link Baiting
Another thing to consider is the weight of the linking website’s popularity. Kevin uses the analogy that this is akin to “king and queen of the prom.” Everyone votes for them, so their listed first!

This is all a little confusing, but don’t try and over-complicate it. Think of it as the electoral process; some websites (states) get more influence (votes) than others. For example, CNN’s website linking to you weighs heavier than John Doe’s blog.

11. Guest posts
Your network is full of insightful, intelligent people. Share their knowledge with others in your network by inviting them to guest blog on your website. This will attract a new audience, insight link backs, and add fresh perspective (and keywords!) to your content!

12. Alternative communication mediums
Writing is great, but sometimes it’s helpful to optimize with a variety of communication methods. As an added bonus, it can also ease some communications. Media is viewed differently by search engines, so make sure to include descriptions with your media!

Examples–

• Video
• Audio
• Slideshare
• Graphic reps
• Animation

13. Include misspellings in your metatags
Have you ever had a typo in a Google search? Did it take you a moment to realize? This happens all of the time! Including misspellings in your meta tags (again, only seen by search engines and those looking at your code), can help you grab visibility when this happens!

EXTRA TIPS

★ Check your progress with alerts
Google Alerts allow you to know when your name, company, product/service, competitor, etc is mentioned. You simply put in the keyword or phrase you’d like to keep track of, and Google emails you whenever this keyword is indexed.

★ Understand traffic with analytical tools
Google Analytics is a great, free analytical tool that is easy to plug in. You’ll know where your traffic is coming from, how long they’re on your website, and what they’re interested in.

★ Keep the design clean and simple
An easy-to-navigate website means less stress and better usability.