Step 1 – Determine the areas of your UVP to test

A good place to start is looking at your benefits and how your solution stands out from the competition on the basis of those benefits. The goal is to determine which benefits/messaging the customer deems most important, and therefore the best way to position your UVP. You’ll need at least two for A/B testing purposes, but no more than five, in order to keep the test manageable.

Step 2 – Develop an offer for each area

This can actually be the same offer, framed in different ways based upon the benefits. A free trial, free sample, a consultation, whitepaper, ebook or other offers can work well. The most important consideration is to make sure that the offer is uniquely tailored to the value proposition you want to explore.

Step 3 – Create ad groups for each offer

Tailor your ad messaging to match the value proposition you are trying to measure. For example, if your company’s value proposition is tied to your experience in your field, your ad might mention how many years you’ve been in business, certifications, or other concrete statements around the experience level your company brings to the table.

Step 4 – Create landing pages for each offer

These landing pages should elaborate on the messaging in the ads, and direct visitors to take advantage of the offer you created in step 2. Landing pages for each of the separate offers should be the same visually, but use very different wording to express the different value propositions in order to track conversions based on messaging only.

Step 5 – Measure conversions and qualified leads

When you set up your AdWords campaign, use equal spend and budgets to get the same level of exposure. The click-through and conversion rates will tell you which messaging is most popular with your target audience.

Once you have an understanding of what kind of messaging drives the most qualified leads, you can use the results you get from your AdWords campaign to your other inbound marketing channels. This will result in better customer experience, higher conversions, and greater revenue.

If you do decide to pull the trigger, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Privacy – some users will embrace the new social functionality; others will not. Providing users with control over how and when they decide to share is important to ensure that your current users are comfortable with the additional features. For happy users, make sure privacy controls are simple to use and easy to find.

• Moderation – for some web apps moderation may make sense, while for others it may not be feasible. For instance, if your user base is made up of business professionals, moderation may be unnecessary, while for product reviews you may want to include purchase verification or some other limits. If you do decide to moderate, make sure you have the staff to handle the approval process – no one wants to feel like his or her message was lost, and you may have a lot of repeat posts and frustrated users in the process.

• Organization – social integration requires careful thought about how it will be organized in order to provide the best user experience. This is true whether it’s reviews and comments on a product page, private messages from friends on an account page, or an interactive profile page with badges and rewards for social behavior.

• Metrics – while social options can be fun for users, they are only worthwhile if they accomplish the business goals you intended. Whether that’s an increase in purchases, time spent in the application or some other measure, make sure you’re tracking the results both before and after implementation so that you can directly measure the impact.

Deciding to integrate social features into your web application is a big step, but one that can lead to impressive ROI in terms of engagement and user loyalty. Making sure your social integration goes off without a hitch requires taking these areas into consideration at every point in the process from concepts and storyboarding all the way to final implementation.

Tell us what you think: What’s the biggest challenge you face in social feature integration for your web applications?

Digging Deeper

Let’s take the following hypothetical social game scenario:

A social game has been active for the last 12 months. Their initial MAU numbers increased rapidly in months 1 through 3, increased slightly in months 4 and 5, but have now leveled off to an even number. Meanwhile, DAU continues to increase. The overall conversion rate for in-game purchases is 2%.

From this high-level assessment, we can make some general (and potentially conflicting) assumptions:

• The game may not be retaining new players well.  – increasing number of new players engage with the game, but few are retained to subsequent months.
• The game may be retaining some subset of new players well, but not in general. – players who engage in a certain subset of activities are retained, those who do not engage in these areas are not well retained.
• The game may have a core following of well-retained players brought in via a specific channel. – players who are brought in by friends are retained, regardless of the activity played, while users who come in on their own are not retained well.
• The game converts well early on, but not later in the player lifecycle. – Most new players make a purchase, but then aren’t retained. Continual influx of new players keeps conversion rate steady.
• There are issues with conversion for new users, but not for users who are retained.  – the same subset of retained players continue to make purchases month after month, with only a small percentage of new players making an initial purchase.

Any of these explanations may be true. It is only through deeper analysis that we can uncover the insights that will help this game to improve.  Looking at the assumptions above, we can clearly see the need to track (at minimum):

• Which acquisition channels bring in retained users
• Which areas of the game have the most activity from new and retained users
• Which areas of the game are largely abandoned and/or cause users to stop returning
• When do monetized players typically make a purchase – here we can break this down even further into:
  • New players’ purchasing habits
  • Retained players’ purchasing habits
• Where in the purchase flow do most non-monetized players drop out, including:
  • Problems with the conversion flow itself (drop-offs)
  • Technical difficulties (failed transactions)

Answers to these types of questions require in-depth tracking capabilities and are unique from game to game. While some games may have multiple mini-games to track, others may have only one. Likewise, competitive games will have different measures (leaderboards) versus cooperative games (gifting) that make a direct impact on the level of engagement.

Knowing What to Track

Even with this basic scenario it’s easy to see that the analytics involved could potentially become overwhelming. It’s best to pick one area of your game to focus at a time, with the understanding that there will be overlap between these areas, such as acquisition channels potentially being covered by retention rates or monetization.

For example, if we wanted to understand the current monetization within our hypothetical game, we might measure the following:

• How long monetized users have played the game
• What areas of the game monetized users spend the most time with
• When in the play cycle monetized users are more likely to purchase
• What are the acquisition channels for monetized players

… and so on. In this way, we build out an accurate idea of what makes for successful monetization in this particular social game. We might also drill down further and gather information about whales versus more average purchasers.

Understanding what brings in your best players and payers, along with what keeps them engaged in your game isn’t as simple as running a few generalized reports. It’s only by digging into the data and gaining insights as to how players are interacting with your social game that you can truly start to optimize the play experience, and from there, your monetization rates.

 Sound off: What do you think is the most important metric for social game success?

Using a snippet of tracking code on the pages of your website, you will be able to create and define remarketing lists based on specific criteria such as the page viewed, the visit duration, whether or not the user made a purchase, and so on. You create custom ads to run on the Google Display Network to target these lists.

Once this is set up, users who fit the criteria you’ve set up will be shown the relevant display ads when they browse sites within the Google Display Network.

Analytics Integration

Your first step in creating remarketing lists is to link your Google Analytics account to your Google AdWords account. When this is completed, you’ll then need to update a single line of the Google Analytics currently on your website. Why would you do it this way versus adding in remarketing directly from AdWords? Several reasons:

• Users who fit your remarketing segments will be automatically added to AdWords from your Google Analytics account.
• You can create custom lists based on highly specific criteria within custom segments.
• You can create custom remarketing lists tied to your existing goal funnels and events
• Changes you make to your remarketing lists in Google Analytics are automatically ported over to AdWords.

Some ideas on how you might use this:

• A remarketing list targeting users from a specific location who downloaded a whitepaper or ebook
• A remarketing list that targets users who visited a landing page, submitted their information, but didn’t make a purchase
• A remarketing list that targets users who have purchased a specific product during the last 30 days
• A remarketing list specifically for users who returned to your site, but then bounced
• A remarketing list specifically for users who spent a lot of time on your pages, but don’t convert

The possibilities are only limited by what you are able to accurately track within Google Analytics.

Other Important Things to Note

While the new remarketing functionality offers tremendous opportunities to stay top of mind with your website visitors, there are a few things to know about implementing this functionality.

List Size

Retargeting lists only become active once there are 100 users on the list. Your display ads will not run until this criterion is met. Once there are 100 users on the list, the display ad competes with other ads in the same fashion as any other Display Network ad.

Cookie Duration

The default here is 30 days, and you’ll want to adjust this higher or lower depending upon the typical sales cycle for your product or service. This cookie can be set for as long as 540 days, which is helpful for seasonal and/or holiday ads.

List Overlap

When a user is a member of two or more lists, your ad with the highest ad rank is the one that will be shown. This means that if you want a specific ad to run for individuals who qualify for more than one group, you’ll need to increase your ad score and/or increase your bid to ensure that the ad you want to show is the one that has the best rank.

Privacy

Because use of the remarketing option requires additional tracking, you’ll also need to update the privacy policy to your website to indicate which remarketing option you are using, and give visitors a means to opt out. You also can’t use ads that gather personally identifiable information as part of a remarketing campaign.

Even with these considerations, the ability to pinpoint very specific segments of website visitors for retargeting can provide a tremendous ROI – especially when coupled with the data within Google Analytics. The key to finding success with remarketing is in analyzing the data to find the areas where remarketing will benefit you most, and begin your targeting from there.

Open Rate

This is the percentage of users who opened your email. It’s calculated by dividing the number of opens by the number of successful deliveries. Average open rates vary from industry to industry. For example, retail-based email marketing campaigns may see an average of 15%-20% open rates, while non-profits see 21%-25% open rates.

By far, the biggest contributing factor to open rates is the subject line. While there are many guidelines about how to write an effective subject line, the only way to know what will resonate with your list is to test subject line messaging. You need to have a specific strategy in place that will let you identify trends in the types of messaging that gets the greatest number of opens, and compare that to the click-rate to discover which types of messaging lead to engaged email recipients.

Click Rate, Click-through Rate, CTR

There is a lot of confusion around the terms click rate and click-through rate (CTR). Generally speaking, the click rate is the percentage of users who clicked versus the total number of recipients, while the click-through rate measures the number of users who clicked versus the total number of users who opened the email. However, this is not always the case, and different email service providers may track this metric differently.

In general, the click-through rate gives you a better idea of the effectiveness of your email copy and design, while the click rate is a better measure of overall list engagement. These numbers vary from industry to industry, just as open-rates do. If you find that your emails aren’t performing at least as well as industry benchmarks, there are many areas that you may need to address, including:

• Image use – if your entire email is an image, users who block images can’t see your messaging and this can significantly lower the number of clicks you receive.

• Call to action (CTA) – if your CTA is unclear or your links aren’t easy to spot, your recipients may not follow through, leading to lower click numbers.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of users who do not receive your message. This can happen for various reasons. Bounces are classified in two ways – hard bounces, or soft bounces. Hard bounces can impact your deliverability, so it’s important to trim these emails from your list.

Hard Bounce

A hard bounce is any bounce that is the result of a permanent error. This most often happens when a user has entered the wrong email address on a form, or the email address has expired. One easy way to prevent misspellings is to require email confirmation before users are signed up to your mailing list. However, for emails currently on your list, you may be able to correct misspellings for common domain names such as Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail.

Soft Bounce

A soft bounce occurs because of temporary errors. This can be due to a full mailbox, a server error, or some other issue. When it comes to soft bounces, you don’t need to clean these emails from your list. However, you may need to resend your email campaign to these users if your email service provider does not attempt redelivery on your behalf.

Honeypot

Some email addresses can impact deliverability more than others. Some anti-spam organizations seed the internet with email addresses that are used specifically to identify spammers. Known as a honeypot, these planted email addresses can cause the sender to be marked as a spammer by email servers across the internet, reducing deliverability considerably.

Honeypots are a major reason for avoiding scraped/harvested email lists, purchased email lists, and other means of collection that cannot be verified.

Are there any terms you’d like us to tackle in the second edition? Let us know in the comments section below!

The Challenge

Our client, an innovative online retailer with a unique clothing subscription service, needed assistance with their analytics implementation within RJ Metrics. More specifically, they needed to ensure that data was being properly tracked and reported to investors. They also needed dashboards created that would provide them with an overview as well as in-depth information on cohort analysis, acquisition sources, and advertising ROI.

Sepiida’s Solution

We provided an in-depth data audit for the charts and graphs currently within our client’s RJ metrics account, and provided a detailed report that referenced any discrepancies between source data and numbers reported within RJ metrics. At the same time, we built out dashboards with charts and graphs covering data high points and in-depth analysis of acquisition sources, advertising spend and conversions, plus cohort analysis.

The Outcome

Our client received a detailed report that allowed them to track down data discrepancies and provide an accurate view of their subscriber data for investors. Our client also received three dashboards with charts and graphs tailored to the information they need to run their business and make marketing decisions on a day-to-day basis. These dashboards, coupled with the reports explaining the underlying data points for each chart and graph, give our client the ability to not only track their data successfully, but to be sure that what they see on the screen matches their users’ experiences online.

Challenge Overview

A prominent online retailer with a unique subscription-based sales model needed to ensure that data about their subscribers and revenue was being reported correctly to investors. Additionally, they needed to have dashboards created for their own internal reporting and online marketing initiatives. All data was tracked through RJ Metrics, but they needed to track down discrepancies between RJ Metrics’ reports and other outside reporting systems.

Because of our expertise in working with RJ Metrics, our client turned to us for assistance with tracking down the variance between their current reports, and to create online marketing dashboards that were as accurate as possible. Our client needed to have a full understanding of where and how their data was being tracked while still having the necessary information to make online marketing decisions.

Sepiida’s Analytics Implementation Solution

There were many disparate tasks for this project, but we worked with our client to make sure that everything could happen concurrently. This allowed our client to see results faster, without sacrificing the accuracy that was crucial to their business.

For the initial dashboard audit, we compared numbers between multiple outside sources and those within RJ Metrics in order to identify which charts and graphs were reporting accurately, and which needed to be adjusted. We also included in that report the list of data sources and how the results were being calculated – thus making it easy for our client to spot the source of any errors, so that corrections could be made.

At the same time, we created three separate dashboards for the client covering acquisition sources, advertising spend and conversions, plus cohort analysis. To maximize accuracy, we worked directly with the client to know exactly how and where they stored their data, so that each query to the database would be properly formed.

Additionally, we put together a report for each dashboard detail- ing the tables, queries and restrictions used for every chart and graph in an easy-to-reference format. This meant our client knew exactly what each chart was measuring, so they could spot potential data issues early on and zero in on any problems.

Lastly, we went over each dashboard with the client, and explained each chart that was included, along with any potential data issues we’d spotted.

Final Outcome

In the end, our client received a complete and accurate dashboard for their investors – one that correctly reports subscribers and revenue, so that investors can see how well the company is doing at a glance. We also provided dashboards containing high level “at-a-glance” metrics as well as in depth charts and graphs that our client uses to inform their daily marketing planning.

Armed with accurate charts and graphs in RJ Metrics, our client is better able to understand the value of their repeat customer base, the ROI on their online marketing campaigns, and the best ways to reach out to engaged users.

Step 1: Determine your Average Order Value (AOV)

This number will be different for different types of online retailers, and there are a couple of ways to calculate it. Generally speaking, you want to take at minimum a three-month or six-month average of the amount spent per person.  If your business is seasonal, you may want an entire year’s worth of data in order to get a number that reflects purchase numbers over time.

Step 2: Determine the Average Lifetime Value

This number will also be different depending upon the type of online retailer. For subscription-based online merchants, the average lifetime value will be the cost of the subscription times the average number of months a user is subscribed. For other retail stores, it will be the average order value, times the average number of repeat orders per user.

Step 3: Determine Your Conversion Rate(s)

The conversion rate on PPC ads is the number of website visitors who make a purchase after clicking on an ad, divided by the total number of website visitors who click on the ad, expressed as a percentage. So if you have 10 sales for every 100 clicks on a particular ad, your conversion rate is 10% for that ad.

It is expected that different ads and ad groups will have different conversion rates. If there is a significant difference in performance between ads or ad groups, you may want to calculate the cost of acquisition in the next step separately for each ad or ad group based on performance.

Step 4: Determine the Cost per Acquisition

The cost per acquisition is calculated by taking the cost per click (CPC), multiplying it by the number of clicks to get total spend, then dividing that number by the number of conversions.  So if the CPC is $0.20 and there were 100 clicks with 10 conversions, your cost of acquisition would be $2.00 ($0.20 x 100 clicks = $20.00. $20.00/10 conversions = $2 per conversion).

Step 5: Bring it All Together

In order to determine if your returns are positive or negative, you simply subtract the cost per acquisition from the average order value. So if the average order value is $20 and your cost per acquisition is $2, you have a positive return of $18. If you have an overall positive return, increasing the amount you invest in your PPC campaign can yield higher click numbers, and in turn more conversions and greater profit.

However, if you return is negative, there are a few things you can do to evaluate performance:

1. Check individual ad performance – perhaps some of your ads are giving positive returns. You should focus on increasing the budget for these ads, while eliminating poor performing ads.
2. Check your keywords – often, low conversion rates can be tied to poor keyword performance. You may need to add negative keywords to eliminate people who aren’t ready to purchase, or you may need to find less-expensive keywords that will still perform well for you.
3. Check your conversion funnel – if there are particular areas in the conversion funnel where drop-offs are steep, conversion optimization and A/B testing can help you to solve the problem and improve your overall conversion rates and revenue.

Sound off: What’s your biggest challenge with your PPC campaigns?

Tip 1: Listen, Listen, Listen

While it can be tempting to use Twitter as a platform solely for broadcasting your message, better results come from thinking of Twitter as a conversation and acting accordingly. Choosing the right people to follow in your niche, listening to the conversations, and seeing what types of tweets are getting the most responses are all good ways to begin to plan your own Twitter strategy.

Tip 2: Strategize

As you look at the types of tweets that lead to conversations and interactions, consider what they have in common, and why they resonate with your intended audience. Twitter users are adept at filtering out spam, and once an account is seen as being “spammy” getting followers is an uphill struggle at best. For your strategy, consider:

• Why does my target audience user Twitter? What are they looking for?
• What can my tweets offer to the ongoing conversations?
• How can I add a sense of personality while staying “on brand”?

Tip 3: Offer Value

Once you’ve uncovered the ways you can add value for your target audience, you can enter the conversation. While it’s fine to post your own messages, if you don’t have many followers, you may get greater engagement by replying to active conversations and popular tweets with relevant responses.

Remember to target recent posts – Twitter is all about up-to-the-minute messaging, so replying to a tweet from the week before is not going to get you as much of a response as replying to one from the same day, or even a few hours ago.

Tip 4: Be Responsive

If you think of Twitter as a conversation, this becomes natural. People will want you to respond to their replies, and they’ll want to see that you’re engaged. As a business, you can expect to get customer service complaints (and praise!) on Twitter as well. Be prepared to respond to both appropriately.

Tip 5: Keep the Conversation Going

While Twitter can help you to reach out to interested users and even give you a means to promote your products and/or services, chances are good that you aren’t going to sell people in 140 characters or less. Make sure that links that lead to your site offer value, but also have a clear CTA that allows you to take the level of engagement to the next step, beyond just following your tweets.

Sound Off: How does your company handle your Twitter strategy?

 F2P or Free-to-Play

Most social games follow the F2P or free-to-play model, in which the game is free for all users, but power-ups, special items, or other features in the game cost a nominal fee. This is in contrast to the subscription model, where ongoing payment is required for game access, or the paid model, where one-time payment grants full access to the game.

With the advent of Facebook’s change to currency over credits, and the ability to charge subscription fees within Facebook itself, we may see a more hybridized approach develop.

Freemium

Compared to F2P, “freemium” is more often used in the web application space to denote those apps which have leveled tiers of service. For “freemium” service, the most basic level offered for free, while advanced features or support are available for a fee.

Because of the similarities to F2P, the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably.

Microtransaction

The purchase of virtual goods and features are often called microtransactions because of the nominal amount of money these items typically cost. Given the very small amounts of money involved for each individual purchase (anywhere from .10 to less than $10 generally) the lure of microtransactions is that more users will purchase when the price is low.

Some social games have a minimum threshold for purchase, while others do not.

In-game Transaction

In-game transactions are just what they sound like – purchases that are made without taking the users out of the gaming experience. These transactions can take multiple forms, whether from a “wallet” of funds the user has in game, the use of in-game currency, or other methods.

The purpose of in-game transactions is to keep the user as engaged in the gaming experience as possible, thereby increasing conversion rates.

In-game Currency: Hard Currency

Hard currency can take many forms, but its defining attribute is that users typically must pay to obtain it. For games with both hard and soft currency, hard currency is typically used for the best power-ups, the most exclusive items, and to unlock levels – it is the unit of measure for the paid economy in the social game.

In-game Currency: Soft Currency

Soft currency can take as many forms as hard currency, but the difference is that soft currency does not require payment to obtain. It may be given as a quest reward, for reaching various levels, or any number of in-game achievements. There are various ways to handle soft currency in a game – sometimes it is used to purchase lower quality items versus hard currency, or can be traded in for small amounts of hard currency.

Sound off: What are some other social gaming terms that you’d like to know?

The Pros

Simple to Update Your Current Site

If you need to make changes to current content on the page, a CMS can simplify the process greatly. Instead of adding new content to the page via HTML coding, and then updating the site through FTP, most CMS configurations let you make changes with just a few clicks.

Simple to Add New Content and Expand Your Site

New pages are also typically simple to add, and don’t require any HTML or .CSS code to make them fit with your existing site. Being able to add new content quickly, whether in a blog post or a new product page, can help you to get relevant information in front of your target audience faster than a traditional web development cycle.

Easy to Implement Functionality

Many CMS configurations offer plugins for things like analytics, event calendars, or even shopping carts. For open-source CMS options, these plugins may be created for free by developers. However, even for paid options, the cost is typically much less than hiring a development team to build the same functionality into an existing website.

User-Level Permissions

A properly configured CMS allows people across an entire company to make contributions to the website, without risking unauthorized changes or additions. User-level permissions allow for the immediacy of CMS changes to be balanced by proper quality control. In this way, companies get a content production flow that is fast and responsive without sacrificing quality.

The Cons

Unpredictable Development Cycles

Unless your CMS was built in-house, the development cycle for updates and patches to your CMS will be at the whim of whatever development team created it. While you do have flexibility on when to implement these updates, in the case of security patches you may have to patch quickly to keep your site secured against potential exploits in known flaws in older versions of the CMS.

Databases Add Complexity

You may already have databases implemented for other parts of your site – such as a customer login and account page – but having a site-wide CMS will mean an additional database, along with the requirements to keep it backed up and maintained. For larger websites, this can mean significant time and resources spent on proper data backup.

Potential Plugin Conflicts

While plugins are great for offering additional functionality, they don’t always play well together. In the case of a plugin conflict, it can take a great deal of time to track down the source of the conflict and resolve the issue. In some cases, it may require custom code to get everything to work as it should.

Potential Site Slowdown

One of the main advantages to implementing a CMS is the time saved when it comes to making changes on the site. However, for sites with a lot of plugins, add-ons or other custom additions to the CMS, the additional code can lead to a slower, less responsive site. Site slowdown can cause multiple issues, not the least of which being lost conversions due to user frustration.

Making the Choice

Whether you decide to implement a CMS or not will be dependent on several factors, including those listed above. However, if you are prepared to address any potential issues as they arise, and are careful to follow implementation best practices for setting up your CMS, the time and effort saved on content deployment can be well worth it.