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I’m always looking for new avenues to get the word out about FlowBreeze, so recently I ran an experiment using StumbleUpon’s advertising program. If you’re not familiar with StumbleUpon, basically it’s just a random site re-director. StumbleUpon users are served up random pages based on their preferences and demographics. If they like a page, they can give it a thumbs up, tag it for their personal bookmarks, or write a review. On the other hand, if they don’t like a page, they can give it a thumbs down. The more thumbs up a page gets, the more frequently it is served.
Occasionally they are served sponsored pages, which is how the advertising program works. They charge $0.05 per visit with a 100 visit per day minimum. When you sign up for StumbleUpon advertising, you can specify the following (see image below):
- Target URL.
- Category. (I tried both the Software and Shareware categories)
- # Visits/day (100 minimum at $0.05 / visit = $5/day minimum).
- Demographics (male/female/both, age, country, state, and city)
My Stats:
- Visits: ~500
- Downloads: 0
- Purchases: 0
My Reviews:
- 3 thumbs up.
- 5 thumbs down.
- Telling comment made by one reviewer: “Boo proprietary software.”
Why I Did It:
1. Because I love StumbleUpon. Of all the social bookmarking sites, it’s the only one I truly use and dig (pun intended).
2. I have actually purchased items from pages I’ve Stumbled.
3. BreezeTree.com has been Stumbled in the past and vistors have converted.
Key Downsides:
- Targetting is too broad.
- Audience probably looking for freebies.
- Targetting is limited to one country or all countries. There is no subset for a single campaign.
- Ads start running at midnight, so targetting global visitors will eat up your visits before the U.S. wakes up for breakfast.
Who I Would Recommend It For:
- People with a lot of money to throw around.
- Sites trying to build a buzz.
- Sites that offer free or cool content.
- Site hoping to gain gain backlinks.
The Bottom Line:
My $25 would have been better spent lighting a $5 cigar with a $20 bill (or better yet, a $20 cigar with a $5 bill).
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Until this past week, I’ve never been able to tell whether AdWords was paying for itself or not. Somewhere between my ads and the payment processors, my tracking lost its way. It all hinged on a) the tracking working through the payment processors or b) the customer clicking the link to return to the BreezeTree web site after the transaction. Based on what I’ve seen in the past week, I’d estimate that those two methods were working about 10% of the time.
Tracking concerns anyone running a web based business because the cost of Google’s advertising is going up up up. They just reported a 46% rise in 3rd Quarter profits. While the boys in Mountain View are getting richer, the rest of us are wondering whether we’re just throwing money away. You think that the Chinese government is rerouting Google traffic to Baidu today in retaliation to Bush’s meeting w/ the Dalai Lama? Nah! My money’s on some Chinese hacker ticked off over the rising cost of AdWords.
To improve tracking, I decided to change the FlowBreeze order confirmation email. The old FlowBreeze confirmation letter included the registration information and a long list of instructions for downloading, installing and registering the software. It also contained a mini getting started guide. I decided to go with a minimalist approach in the email but link to a confirmation page (where the tracking code is). The new email looks like this:
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Dear [BUYER'S NAME],
Thank you for purchasing FlowBreeze flowcharting software. Your product registration information is as follows:
[REGISTRATION INFO]
If you haven’t already done so, we strongly encourage you to visit the confirmation page:
[CONFIRMATION LINK]
On the confirmation page, you will find…
- A link to download FlowBreeze (if you haven’t already done so).
- Installation and registration instructions.
- How to get started with FlowBreeze.
- Over 100 flowcharting templates.
- Links to help and support.
Again, thank you for your order. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Sincerely,
BreezeTree Software
###
With this system in place, I’m estimating that close to 100% of my customers have visited the confirmation page. Suddenly the light is on. AdWords is actually paying for itself - much better than I thought.
There are some flaws with the system. I’m using both Google Analytics and Google AdWords tracking systems, and neither does a great job of tracking. So I have to look at them both. My Venn diagram isn’t as cool as any of Jessica Hagy’s (my fav), but basically the tracking looks like this:
I’ll admit I don’t understand this because both systems are javascript based and placed at the bottom of the confirmation page. I cross referenced my own sales data vs. my server logs vs. Analytics goal tracking for AdWords vs. tracking shown on the AdWords Campaign Management page. Of the sales that come from AdWords clicks, some are tracked only by Analytics, some are tracked only by AdWords, and some are tracked by both.
So to get an accurate total you would need to determine A + B - A Intersect B. Figuring out that Intersect number on a regular basis is going to be a real pain.
Overall, I would say the conclusions to be had are:
- Give your customers a reason to visit your confirmation page.
- Offer something free for their effort (in my case, the 120 flowchart templates).
- Don’t rely on just one of Google Analytics or Google AdWords tracking systems.
- Don’t rely on Google Analytics for your web traffic analysis (the holes in this data reaffirm my opinion that Analytics sucks).
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Fireclick has published some interesting numbers on software conversion rates on their site:
http://index.fireclick.com/fireindex.php?segment=9
Fireclick is a web analytics company owned by Digital River, which owns a huge chunk of the payment processing market for software vendors. The data is compiled (anonymously) from all of Fireclick’s clients across different sectors. The software sector includes benchmarks for overall conversions, keyword conversions, email conversions, and many other interesting stats that help answer the “how am I doing?” question.
Of course, every business is different. You’ll glean only so much from the data, but it’s interesting to peak at anyway. And 1yr graphs confirm what everyone in the software business already has a good sense of - sales peak in March and dip August. At least it’s gratifying to know the climb upward is beginning this time of year.
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Everyone knows that Google is king when it comes to generating traffic for your website. In fact, many webmasters practically disregard Yahoo and MSN altogether in their SEO efforts. And software download sites? Their time has passed, right?
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t agree with those statements. I look at my stats everyday, and the traffic from Google dwarfs all other sources. And download sites? I barely see a trickle from them. But most of the time when I look at my web stats, I’m looking at daily or weekly snapshots. I hadn’t run any long term numbers in a while, so tonight I decided to look at the year-to-date stats then slice and dice the data. What I found surprised me:
Looking at just traffic and purchases, I assumed there was a gap in the data because Google visitors came back at some later point, after trying the software, and then made the purchase. But when I added the Download stats to the chart, the equation changed dramatically. MSN and Yahoo remained consistent between the three metrics, but Google dropped off significantly. This is a complete reversal of my last long term stats look-see.
And what’s the amorphous blob called “other”? Google Analytics doesn’t let you track external referrals for downloads, but luckily the stat package provided by my web host does (SmarterStats, in case you’re interested). Surprise, surprise. In the Downloads data, “other” is made up mostly of download site referrals and the rest is direct traffic.
I’m not going to jump to any conclusions yet, but I thought the data was interesting enough to share.
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There’s a basic concept in Six Sigma called Voice of the Customer. When you’re defining a project, you need to identify the critical-to-quality (CTQ) elements in your process that matter to the customer. Too often though, the voice of the customer isn’t heard until _after_ they become a customer. What about potential customers?
Taking a step back for a second, here’s a worthwhile quote from Jack Welch…
“One thing we have discovered with certainty is that anything we do that makes the customer more successful inevitably results in a financial return for us.”
Products and services sell because they solve people’s problems. They make customers more successful. And the only way you can solve their problems in the first place is if they become aware of your product, understand your product, and see the benefits. So the voice of the customer needs to start with marketing.
In his recent post on MicroISV.com, Dave Collins touches on this. He makes the point that software vendors should sell the benefits, not the features:
“Customers get freaked out by features. We don’t like them, they sound intimidating, and they do nothing to make us smile. But we love benefits. Save time, save money, use more for less. Lovely. Music to our ears.”
Stepping back into the voice of the customer mode, want do customers really want to know when they visit a site? It’s simple really, they want to know:
- What the product is.
- How it will benefit them.
- How much it will cost.
- How credible the offer is.
Notice that I wrote “How it will benefit them”, not just “the benefits”. It’s a fine distinction, but an important one.
When you get into the business of running an online company, “sell the benefits” is one of the mantras that get chimed over and over again. Emotion sells more than logic is the copywriter’s motto. Dave’s a smart guy and runs a successful software marketing firm, so I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about. But the problem is it’s a concept that gets misconstrued and taken to the extreme.
I’ve seen too many software sites that get so focused on the benefits that it’s hard to tell what the product actually does. Microsoft’s Silverlight page is a perfect example of this. Most enterprise software websites are even worse.
In any product genre, you can find numerous product sites all claiming to “save time, save money, use more for less.” But that’s not enough. What you really need to do is connect the dots between the benefits and the features in order to be credible.
Do customers really get “freaked out by features”? Not me. In fact, they’re typically the first thing I look for. When I’m buying a product to solve a problem, I need to know whether the product has the capability to do so.
Sure, I’m an engineer, so that may seem like a quirk. But the majority of my support time is spent on pre-sales inquiries. Are these people emailing me about the benefits? No, they are asking if the software supports one feature or another. That’s real data that proves to me that customers don’t get freaked out by features.
So the next time you work on your company’s marketing, put on your Jack Welch hat and think about how your product will make your customers more successful. Drill it down to how each of the features in your product will benefit your customers. The end result should strike a nice balance between “sell the benefits” and “sell the features.”
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Overwhelmed by all the advice you read about running an AdWords campaign? Here’s a simple and concise list I’ve gathered from several reliable sources:
- Break your campaign in groups of 10-20 highly related keywords.
- Use exact matching or phrase matching, but avoid broad matching.
- Use negative keywords (e.g., -free) to improve CTR & lower cost.
- Put keywords in the headline and repeat them in the body.
- Body: 1st line = descriptive benefit and 2nd line = a feature, offer, or call to action.
- Create separate landing pages for each target keyword group and make content relevant to keywords, putting the landing pages in sub-directories named after target keywords and making sure the sub-directory is included in display URL: www.blah.com/keyword.
- Find tangential keywords. **
- Always run 2 ads side-by-side. ***
- Run different campaigns for different geographical regions (e.g. US vs. Europe).
- Search Search Network and Content network ads in separate campaigns with lower CPC and daily budgets.
Notes:
* Make sure to disallow duplicated pages in your robots.txt file to avoid Google’s duplicate content penalty.
** Example of tangential keywords: I make flowcharting software. I targeted the keywords “E-Myth” and “EMyth” because I figured entrepreneurs who were standardizing their business processes might want to flowchart them. It worked.
*** Shuffle the word order, capitalization, try synonyms, price vs no price, etc. Run a week at a time and always replace the poor performer with a tweaked version of the good performer.
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One of the more frustrating things about selling online is dealing with AVS mismatches. Sometimes you get an email from a customer complaining that your payment processor won’t accept their credit card. Most of the time, though, the sale is lost without notice - unless you’re scanning your transaction logs daily.
So What is an AVS Mismatch?
AVS stands for Address Verification System. It’s a system used to defer credit card fraud by checking the customers billing address versus the address filed by the credit card company for that account.
Seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? So why is it a problem?
The problem often comes from customers buying with corporate credit cards. I’ve experienced this problem a number of times, and every time so far the problem is that the customer assumes that the address of their work facility is the same as the credit card billing address of record. Often it’s not.
Three Common Scenarios
Here are three common scenarios I’ve had first-hand experience with AVS mismatches:
Small Businesses: With small businesses, sometimes the owner will register the card with their home address used for billing. That’s fine, but they do need to realize that their business address is not going to be the same as their billing address when doing credit card payments on-line.
Medium to Large Businesses: Another common case is when the buyer is located in one state and the corporate headquarters is located in another. Their billing address is usually the address of the headquarters - not their local shipping address.
Parent Companies: This is just another variation of the same thing. If a company has corporate credit cards issued in the name of the parent company, then the buyer needs to know the billing address that the parent company uses.
What Can Be Done?
If you’re a customer, then it’s pretty simple. Find out your corporate billing address and use that.
If you’re a vendor, then there are several things you should do. First, put a small note on your order pages for customers using company buying cards. Second, periodically monitor your transaction logs, looking for AVS mismatches. Third, if a potential customer emails you about a credit card problem, use the advice given here to determine whether this may be the cause of the problem.
AVS Is Good for Everyone
Now all this may seem like a hassle - especially if you’re a customer. But online credit card fraud is a rampant problem, and e-commerce providers take fraud detection seriously. So they really are helping businesses with these extra security measures.
But customers benefit too. You and I are all potential victims of credit card fraud. Online, the fraudulent buyer doesn’t even need your card - just the number, expiration date and usually the 3-digit verification on the back of the card. So AVS checks are a simple way to ensure that one avenue of abuse is cut off, protecting us all.
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I wanted to say Thanks! to all the BreezeTree customers who have made this a great first year.
The first six months were a little slow, but after the release of FlowBreeze 1.2, sales really started to pick up. FlowBreeze (a Flowchart Generator for Excel) has benefited from a lot of word of mouth marketing. Plus, the internet has a way of rewarding you over time. As a site’s age grows, it collects a few links here and there, and rises in the search engines.
I’ve decided to publish my sales growth numbers along with traffic growth. I’m too secretive to provide actual numbers, so I’ve normalized the first month of sales and traffic equal to one (1). Numbers-wise, I will say that the traffic is up over 40,000 visits per month. However, that isn’t unique visitors and doesn’t filter out spiders and bots. The main point of interest is the trend.
Sales for most software vendors start out slow, but FlowBreeze benefited from having a beta test signup in place for 6 months prior to release. Beta testers were given a 50% discount, so I was able to sell a decent number of licenses right out of the gate.
So, without further blabbering, here are the sales growth and traffic growth charts:
This third chart is traffic overlaying sales. The interesting thing is that traffic is a clear leading indicator of sales. That may seem like an obvious correlation, but it’s reassuring to see that BreezeTree.com is getting relevant traffic growth.
Overall, I would say that this little flowcharting utility has outperformed my first year’s expectations. I will continue to improve the product and add features based on customer feedback. I am looking forward to releasing version 2.0 soon.
I will also be leveraging the FlowBreeze platform in several ways this year. First, I will leverage the existing code base to spawn off a Value Stream Mapping version of FlowBreeze. The other way I will be leveraging it is by taking advantage of Excel’s built-in data analysis strengths. this will come to light not only in the Value Stream Mapping product, but also in a Business Process Mapping tool that add metrics and process modeling to flowcharts.
So thanks again to everyone who has helped make this a great first year, and I look forward to having an even better second year.
- Nicholas Hebb
