check out this post on New Amazon Echo Speaker Unveiled With Late October UK Release Date
Amazon has unveiled not one, but three brand-new Echo devices at a special event held at its HQ in Seattle.
The three new gadgets are the new Amazon Echo now at a lower price, the Smart home-controlling Echo Plus and a small quirky Echo Spot which contains a small circular display.
Leading the event is the brand-new Amazon Echo. This sequel to the popular voice-activated speaker now comes with a new design, improved audio and a cheaper price.

Amazon
According to Amazon the new Echo boasts improved sound quality over the original with sound processing by Dolby. It also comes with Amazon’s second generation far-field microphone technology which should make it even easier to talk to in big or noisy rooms.
Then of course there’s the design. Amazon’s taken a leaf out of Google’s book and like the Google Home, now offers the Echo with a range of different covers.

Amazon
It costs £89.99, is available to order now and will be released in the UK on the 31 October 2017.
Next up is the Echo Plus. This features the same design as the original Echo but comes with two major improvements.

Amazon
Firstly, it now has the same audio improvements as the Echo including both a dedicated tweeter and woofer and audio processing by Dolby.
The second feature is arguably the more exciting. Echo Plus is actually a smart home hub, which means that it is compatible with hundreds of smart home products straight out of the box.
You simply tell Echo Plus to discover what’s in your house and it will search for, and then connect to everything that’s compatible without you having to go through each individual product.
For the added convenience and slightly bigger audio Amazon’s charging £139.99 for the Echo Plus and it too will release in the UK on the 31 October.
Last but not least is the Echo Spot. This doesn’t have a UK release date but it’s sure to be a hit in the US.

Amazon
It’s essentially a tiny version of Amazon’s larger Show speaker, with a small circular display that can show information, requests. It also has a camera that means it can double as a nursery camera.
Finally Amazon announced that the Echo Show would be launching in the UK on the 16 November for £199.99.

Amazon
Bug drops Sitelinks Searchbox from Google search results
How LucidChart Used Kissmetrics to Drive Growth
this is a note on How LucidChart Used Kissmetrics to Drive Growth.
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LucidChart, a SaaS-based diagramming application with over 9 million users, wanted to make sure their site was more than just pretty to look at. They wanted to ensure that it was leading users down the path to purchase. This is how they used Kissmetrics to leverage the behavioral data their users were leaving behind and increased conversions by 30%.
The initial step LucidChart took was to dive deep into data to better understand and evaluate the customer journey across their site. They learned what users were doing, where they were going and where they were dropping off across their site. Using insights from Kissmetrics they found key areas in the journey where they could drive efficiency and which pages they wanted to test a redesign.
After creating the new pages LucidChart used the Kissmetrics Funnel Report in correlation with the A/B Test Report to determine the effectiveness variation of the new pages both as a stand alone and part of the customer journey. Until they locked in on the best performing pages and process to drive conversions.
Funnel Report
Growth and marketing teams use our Funnel Report to see where dropoffs occur before conversion. This report is entirely customizable and can be used to track any conversion path you’d like. Furthermore, you can segment the data based on lead source, location, referring links, etc.
Used for illustration purposes. This is not LucidChart’s data.
LucidChart was able to track different segments across the customer journey and compare one another as well as use the A/B Test report to test the new design against the old.
A/B Test Report
With this report, you’ll create your test in an A/B testing tool, such as Optimizely, and track the results in Kissmetrics.
All data is imported from A/B testing tool and stored in Kissmetrics. Note: this is not LucidChart’s data.
What makes this Kissmetrics report unique is that you’ll be able to see how a test impacts any part of your funnel. Want to see if a new headline on your homepage leads to more purchases? Or see how a test in the middle of the funnel impacts the bottom line? Get your answer in just a few clicks in Kissmetrics. Having both reports coordinated in the same tool allowed LucidChart to measure the effectiveness of the new pages’ impact on the customer funnel with the old pages.
The Results
The outcome? By combining the power of the Kissmetrics A/B Test Report with the Funnel Report, LucidChart discovered that 2 pages in particular, their new homepage and new product page, were driving a huge 30% increase in conversions.
“Insights from Kissmetrics drove a 30% lift in our conversions. All of our key customer behavior data lives in Kissmetrics, for both our product and website, so we can quickly identify and take action on any roadblocks across our growth cycle. Kissmetrics is essential to Lucid Software’s growth efforts.”
Spencer Mann, VP of Growth at Lucid Software
Every time a prospect visits your site or uses your product they’re leaving a digital trail of their behavior – showing what they’re doing, where they get stuck, what they like, don’t like and why. There’s tremendous value in that data and it’s critical for driving growth.
Kissmetrics enables you to capture and leverage all that behavioral data to increase conversions, acquisitions and retention.
About Kissmetrics
SearchCap: Happy birthday Google, EU Google Shopping changes & SEO tips
See details of post SearchCap: Happy birthday Google, EU Google Shopping changes & SEO tips below
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:
- CSEs will compete head-on with Google Shopping in EU search results
Sep 27, 2017 by Ginny MarvinTo provide “equal treatment” in the ad auction, Google Shopping will operate as a separate business unit bidding against Comparison Shopping Engines
- Google’s latest Easter Egg is a video game that shows up with searches for ‘snake’ & ‘play snake’
Sep 27, 2017 by Amy GesenhuesAnnounced in conjunction with Google’s 19th birthday surprise spinner doodle, the digital game can be played on both desktop and mobile.
- SEO content strategy: How to grow visits by 300% in one year
Sep 27, 2017 by Andrew DennisCreating great content isn’t enough to achieve great SEO results in and of itself. As columnist Andrew Dennis demonstrates, there is a lot that goes into a truly effective content strategy.
- Google marks its 19th birthday with a ‘Google birthday surprise spinner’ doodle
Sep 27, 2017 by Amy GesenhuesThe spinner leads to searches for 19 different Easter egg games and quizzes launched during Google’s 19 years.
- Why going global is essential to your business
Sep 26, 2017 by Chris ShermanThere are 7.5 billion people in the world. Are you reaching all of your potential customers with your search marketing campaign?
- Alphabet to create separate business unit in Europe to run Google Shopping
Sep 26, 2017 by Greg SterlingEffort is attempt to comply with European antitrust decision; would force Google to bid against rivals in the AdWords auction as a standalone entity.
- The non-developer’s guide to reducing WordPress load times up to 2 seconds (with data)
Sep 27, 2017 by Tom DemersWondering where to start with page speed improvements? Columnist Tom Demers shares how he tackled page speed improvements on several WordPress sites without (much) input from a developer.
- Updated for 2017! Enterprise Paid Media Campaign Management Platforms
Sep 27, 2017 by Digital Marketing DepotThe paid media marketing landscape has become increasingly complex, as the speed of search engine algorithms and development changes accelerates and marketers demand more integrated channel capabilities. Automating paid media campaign management through an enterprise platform can improve efficiency and productivity. MarTech Today’s “Enterprise Paid Media Campaign Management Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market […]
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Science Should Never Become Boring… Here’s Why
check out this post on Science Should Never Become Boring… Here’s Why
As you might expect, ‘athlete’ and ‘firefighter’ are two of the most sought after jobs for children. But it wasn’t a surprise to me to find ‘astronaut’ and ‘scientist’ holding their own in the top ten as well. Why not? Defying gravity, even zero gravity, must be one of the most exciting scientific developments of our time, and children everywhere want to be a part of it.
So, why is it that that in recent years 47% of young people think that science subjects are for those who are ‘boring’, with a further 55% of online conversation describing STEM as ‘too difficult’? What about the role physics has played in making space travel real? Or the scientific research which has allowed pilots to fly across the world at up to 39,000 feet? Science certainly isn’t boring and I’m fascinated to know why one in two schoolchildren think it is.
Answering a question like this is not straightforward, and no one answer can solve it. But I think one way to address the issue is by encouraging schoolchildren to understand science away from their textbooks. I was lucky – Mr Davies, my primary school teacher, was nothing short of legendary in the classroom. He loved doing the sort of exploding volcano experiments that left red stains on the ceilings, and got us jumping out of our seats from the start of the lesson.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Birch/Statoil
It was these kinds of lessons that put me on the path to where I am today: presenting science live at events, on the TV, and on the radio. Doing what I do gives me the chance to convey to the next generation that science is not only important, but fun.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves – not all science is volcano-exploding-awe-inspiring amusement. Some elements of STEM subjects can be tremendously pure, complex and difficult to convey. But, even these subjects can be explained to children in interesting ways. I’m not expecting every lab technician in Britain to charge towards their nearest school test-tube in hand; but when scientists can explain things in a way that we can all relate to, it’s great to try and make the link.
One way, for example, of presenting science to young people is as an explainer of everything we see. Science can answer a simple question, like why on earth your voice sounds different on video, or a more exciting one, like exploring how fireworks explode. Beyond this, science is about answering the most complex questions young people will face, so let’s do everything we can to make it engaging.
Explaining real-world phenomena, big or small, in terms of science is what I love, and that’s why I am working with Statoil and the Science Museum on this year’s Young Imagineers competition. Steph McGovern, Jill Tully, Lopa Patel and I are inviting 7-14 year olds to design the future, under the title ‘what invention would you create to make tomorrow’s world a better place’. We’re looking for a huge mix: everything from teleporters to biscuit dunkers welcome! Entries can be submitted here.
The ten most creative entries will be shortlisted and the entrants will get a chance to develop their invention with a top developer. Then, they’ll be invited to showcase their entry to us with a live audience in an exclusive day of events at the Science Museum, on the 18th of November. The winner will get an even bigger prize – their invention will be created and displayed inside the Science Museum for everyone to see.
More Google Algorithm & Search Results Shuffling
i wish you like this article on More Google Algorithm & Search Results Shuffling
Yea, yea, yea, more of the same. Google is updating their search results, it is in flux, search results are shuffling around. But I only try to report it when the signals all seem to be higher than the normal day to day shuffles. I always see people complaining about changes in Google but when it reaches certain levels, that is when I decide to cover it.
The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has a spike in complaints from webmasters and SEOs about ranking shuffles and the automated tracking tools also show huge changes. Here are some comments from the threads:
This week was the worst week we have seen from google since panda 4. With all other updates we gained traffic but this one hit us with >50%. Sales form google organics, adwords and Shopping ads are off by 95%.
We have seen the same. We’ve grown massively over the past few months and this week we have lost ranking from positions 2/3 to 5/6. Its impacted us dramatically.
I’ve noted some interesting changes in the SERPs this week. Too early to say what’s up, and it’ll have to settle before making a better assessment.
For info sites, I’ve seen recent good results by moving away from keyword structured pages to answer based content. Those pages got a jump in SERP inclusion.
I know a lot of people take these types of tools with a pinch of salt, but Algoroo and moz and showing big movements today in the US. In my experience, the UK usually follows. Hopefully its a reversal of what happened last week – because we’ve definitely been hit with something.
It is hard to say if this is related to the September 20th update or another Google update or unrelated at all. Google has not commented on anything this week, of course.
Here are some charts from the automated tools.
SERPMetrics:
Algoroo:
SEMRush:
Mozcast:
RankRanger:
Accuranker:
How to Get E-Commerce Customers Coming Back After Their First Purchase
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Getting prospects to convert to customers is one thing. But how do you get customers to buy again and again after the first purchase? This is where attentive, customer-focused emails come on. Despite some heralding the “death of email” over more modern platforms like texting and social media, good, old-fashioned email remains one of the best ways to seal the deal, engage customers and encourage repeat purchases.
So what kinds of emails should you send? How often should you send them, and what should they contain? Here are a few of the best examples of e-commerce follow-up emails and why they work so well.
The Repurchase Reminder
Oftentimes, when you make a purchase on a website, they email you immediately after encouraging you to buy again. This marketing strategy is rooted in the idea that customers are likely to come back and purchase while your brand is still fresh in their mind. But oftentimes, companies send emails out immediately and when the customer (naturally) doesn’t respond, they no longer follow up.
If your repeat purchase numbers are flat-lining and your emails are stale, why not wait until more time has passed (depending on how often the customer uses the product) to remind them? Here’s a great example from Sephora, which reminds the customer to restock based on how much time has passed since their first purchase:
Sephora reminds the user to restock based on their past purchase. (Image Source)
Another creative spin on the restock email comes from Clinique. Since their data likely shows that women tend to shop online for beauty products more than men, they wouldn’t have as much luck sending a shaving gel refill reminder to men — so they advertised a refill reminder for him, to her. See how they did it:
An advertisement for men’s shaving gel — targeted to women, who are likely the ones shopping for beauty products. (Image Source)
We Miss You!
One alternative on the restock/repurchase follow-up email is tailored to the bargain hunter, like this email from Starbucks. There’s no better way to stay top-of-mind than with a coupon, and many customers actively wait to purchase until they get a deal. Knowing this, why not reach out with a discount?
This reminder from the Starbucks Store gets right to the point with a discount for customers that haven’t shopped in awhile. (Image Source)
Bodybuilding.com sends customers an email if they haven’t repurchased after about 3 months:
Another common tactic is to follow up with customers asking them to review their recent purchase. Again, this is extremely common and almost expected — but customers don’t always have the time at that very moment to write up a lengthy review. So how do you get them clicking? Here are some creative ideas that take feedback to a new level.
Going Beyond “How Did We Do?”
For the customer who doesn’t have time to write up a huge review, but the company still needs their feedback data to work with, I present to you the Amazon 1-click review:
Amazon encourages busy customers to simply click to review the size of garments they’ve purchased online. (Image Source)
Of course, you’ve likely received plenty of emails asking for your feedback, and even some that go the extra mile by giving you a discount coupon, entering you into a contest and much more. But this one is noted for its pure simplicity plus its unobtrusive style. It doesn’t get in the way — one click and you’re done.
And speaking of Amazon, you already know that they’re the e-commerce leader simply because of how much they test, monitor, tweak and track everything about their site. One of the more famous changes was adding in the “Customers who bought X, also bought Y” feature. Now much more commonplace on e-commerce sites, this “Frequently purchased together” option often encourages greater purchase volume per customer.
But what happens when they don’t purchase all of the items together? Is emailing them about it a lost cause? Not exactly…
Frequently Purchased Together (But It’s Not What You Think!)
Not all “Frequently Purchased Together” emails have to be a sales pitch. And if the customer didn’t buy them when they were originally presented, there must have been a reason.
Of course, the reasons why customers choose not to buy could be a whole other blog post in itself, but knowing what you know, why not steer the customer more toward educating them about the product add-ons or accessories rather than simply presenting them?
An example of a Thank You follow-up email from BabyFirst. (Image Source)
Since, in the example above, the customer is shopping for baby-friendly TV shows, the company naturally recommends a couple of DVDs that a baby or toddler might like, as well as a coupon and directions on how to get it for free.
The Warranty Expiration Notice
This type of email normally applies in cases where you sell parts or electronics that are under warranty. When making a purchase, customers sometimes don’t opt for the extended warranty, preferring to rather stick with the original manufacturer’s timeframe. But reminding them that the original manufacturer’s warranty has almost expired, and inviting them to extend the protection on their purchase might be just the thing they need to keep their original purchase in good working order:
An official-looking email regarding a car warranty.
Here’s another example offering an enhanced warranty on a lamination machine:
A warranty announcement included on new products. (Image Source)
The “Just Looking” Reminder
With all of the email examples showcased so far, you’d need the appropriate data based on what the customer bought previously. But what if they haven’t bought yet, and are only looking? Are you out of luck? Not at all. Provided you have the prospect’s email address, you can still send them reminders, even if they haven’t added a product to their cart:
Recommendations on shirts and a reminder based on shirts and slacks previously looked at, from Calvin Klein. (Image Source)
Here’s another example that reminds the user of the products they browsed in case they want to take another look and don’t want to have to sift through their browser history:
An email reminding the user of the products they looked at. (Image Source)
Use Demographics to Sell
As opposed to many of our other example, these emails do not rely on previous purchases. They start fresh with new product recommendations based on the demographics.
For example – has it been raining in Minnesota for the past few days? Find all your prospects located in Minnesota and send them an email showcasing your umbrellas.
Many of your prospects are likely either searching for one because a) they don’t have one or b) the one they have is old, has holes, etc.
This can go beyond weather. Many political radio broadcasts will have “doomsday” meals when the inevitable apocalypse comes. When Barack Obama was president, Glenn Beck and many other conservative pundits advertised “4-week emergency food supplies”:
Image Source
Does this profit off irrational fears? Yes.
But it also means understanding your audience. If they’re afraid, what are they willing to buy? Sell it to them. If it’s snowing, what are they willing to buy? Offer it up for sale.
Marketing is all about targeting the right people, when they are most receptive to your product. What better products to advertise to those that fear end times are near?
New Product Recommendations Based on Past Purchases
Finally, we have the “new product recommendations” email. Rather than always notifying customers every time you have new items in stock (and hoping they might like some of them), why not segment the new product announcement emails based on what the customer has purchased previously? They’re much more likely to buy, and they’ll welcome the added personalized attention!
Despite the different products and industries, all of these emails have one major thing in common — and that is a dedicated — almost fanatical attention to customer orders, browsing habits and preferences. And although you may be doing a great deal of e-commerce by email, there are still, as these emails demonstrate, new ideas and approaches that can be capitalized on.
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8 Overlooked Mobile Design Best Practices You Need to Implement
this is a note on 8 Overlooked Mobile Design Best Practices You Need to Implement.
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93% of Internet users browse the Internet on a mobile device every day. That’s 3.5 billion people who could potentially be seeing your website on their phones or tablets at any given time.
It follows, then, that you should be working as hard as you can to optimize your online presence for mobile. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than having a marketing funnel that’s totally ineffective on non-desktop devices.
To give you some guidance, I’ve put together 8 mobile design best practices you need to be following. They’ll help you streamline your visitors’ user experience, maximizing the impact of your marketing funnel for any device.
1. Get Rid of Your Navbar
On mobile, real estate is at a premium – I think of my iPhone screen like a map of downtown Manhattan, where every pixel costs a pretty penny. Check out how much space a mobile navbar can take.
This means you need to maximize what you’re getting out of your website on mobile.
One easy way to do this is to drop your navbar on mobile.
On a laptop or desktop, your navbar can be incredibly helpful – it’s a simple way for your visitors to browse the pages on your site, making it simple for them to find exactly what they’re looking for.
But on mobile, your navbar can take up a ton of space that could otherwise be used for text, images, or whatever other content you have on your website or landing pages.
Now, you might be wondering how visitors are expected to browse your site without a navbar. There’s a few ways around this…
The most popular way is to incorporate a hamburger menu, which allows you to create a much smaller (but still branded) top bar. The hamburger menu acts as a drawer, pulling out from the left side of your screen to show the various menu items in your navbar.
Or, depending on the size of your webpages, you might opt to create a single-page layout for mobile devices. However, unless your website is relatively sparse content-wise, this probably isn’t the best option for your business.
2. Keep Important Elements Within Reach
Think about the time you spend on your smartphone.
I’m willing to bet you use it pretty often – maybe while you’re on the bus or waiting in the line at Starbucks (or perhaps reading this article, right now?). Now, think about how you hold it. If you’re like most of us, you’re only using one of your thumbs to interact with your screen.
You’re not alone: according to a recent study by mobile UX expert Steve Hoober, 75% of people only use one thumb to interact, too.
Years ago, the diagram below was a bible for mobile designers, giving them insight into how they should lay out content to optimize user experience for the majority of website visitors.
Image Source
Though the above may have been accurate at the time, things change quickly (and in technology, even quicker). In the last few years, our phones and screens have been getting bigger and bigger… but our hands are staying the same.
The way we hold our phones has changed – as such, screen “hot spots” have shifted, with touch accuracy dropping as we approach the screen’s outer edges.
Image Source
As a result, we as designers need to organize content in a way that puts primary interactions front and center, saving secondary and tertiary functions for the top and bottom screen edges.
The position of these functions relates directly to ease of access for a user. Primary functions lie in the area that users can access easily with their thumbs, while tertiary (and to some extent, secondary) functions lie in lower-accuracy zones and require a little more work to get to.
3. Optimize and Minimize File Sizes
You’re probably already aware of how important it is to optimize the size of the images on your website. They drastically affect load time, which has a cascading effect on both user experience and the search ranking of your pages.
This is doubly important on mobile. Not only are connections less reliable on mobile, but also mobile users don’t like waiting. That means if your page isn’t loading quickly, they probably won’t stick around to let it finish.
Use a site like TinyJPG, or tools like ImageOptim (Mac only) or Photoshop’s “Export for Web” to make sure you minimize the file size of your images before you upload them to your website.
There are two primary properties that affect file size:
- Quality: Put simply, quality is exactly what it sounds like. Turning down the quality setting will reduce the sharpness of your images and increase the possibility of artifacts appearing on your images.
- Size/Resolution: Go figure – the actual size of your image has a large effect on its file size. Obviously, you don’t want to make your images so tiny that your visitors can’t see them – but if, for example, the column you’re placing your image in is 600px wide, your image doesn’t need to be 1000px wide. Resize them to fit before uploading.
4. Link Phone Numbers and Addresses
Optimizing for mobile is all about streamlining a visitor’s experience. It should take them as few steps as possible.
This means taking advantage of interactions on mobile that will help make visiting your website (and buying your product or contacting your business) a pleasant experience.
If your website is sales-reliant or if phone is an important touchpoint in your marketing funnel, one of the most important things you can do is make it easy for people to call you.
One simple way to add value to your “contact us” page is to make your phone number a clickable link. Everybody knows the pain of frantically swapping back and forth between your phone and browser apps to type in a phone number, or trying to copy it and accidentally copying all of the other content on the page, too.
Trust me, making your phone number clickable makes a big difference.
All you need to do is link your phone number like this:
And it will appear like this:
123-123-1234
This will allow users to click to call.
In the same vein, you’ll want to make sure other important details are interactive as well – for example, clicking your address should open up a visitor’s Maps application. Though most apps like Facebook will automatically set this up, you can type your address into Google Maps and copy the Share link to link it to the address on your website.
It’s these little things that help make visitors feel like they’re not missing out on anything when they visit your pages on mobile, and it saves them from having to do extra work.
To put it simply, don’t let your mobile browsing experience choke your marketing and sales funnels.
5. Design for Responsiveness
If you were around during the advent and uprise of the mobile web, you might recall that most websites actually built entirely new layouts for mobile that would work for the smaller screens of the pre-iPhone era.
These pages often featured minimal images, and were relatively text-heavy to combat the slow browsing speeds mobile users received on their non-3G, non-LTE, non-WiFi networks.
Fast-forward about ten years, and the mobile landscape has changed entirely. Screens are huge, internet connections have quickened, and tablets exist.
These advancements (and other advancements in front-end design languages like CSS) have paved the way for responsive and adaptive design.
Though there are nuances between these two types of design, their principal purpose remains the same: create a single website layout that responds and changes dynamically based on the device each visitor is using.
Hopefully, the webpage template or landing page editor you’re using will automatically create a mobile-responsive version of your page as you build it, removing the hassle from you or your designers to manually create it.
There are a few things to keep in mind when we consider responsiveness:
- Image sizes: If images are important to the content on your page, make sure they’re clearly visible on mobile. Images that are 50% width on desktop may also show up at 50% on mobile, and that’s too small.
- Layout/order of content: Depending on the way you organize the elements on your page for desktop, your content may be awkwardly ordered when you shift to mobile. Double-check to make sure all content is in order, even on other devices.
- Animations: Animations that look fine on desktop might not work out well on mobile. Check these over on your phone before publishing your page to make sure they’re okay.
- Video: In keeping in mind my previous recommendations regarding file sizes, think about hiding (or removing) video on mobile. It’s large, heavy, and can drastically slow down your mobile experience.
- JavaScript: Though JavaScript is a wonderful and magical thing, it won’t always work on mobile – check to make sure it does.
6. Disable Popups
In 2017, Google rolled out their soft penalty for what they call “intrusive interstitials”.
In layman’s terms, this pretty much means popups. Here are a couple examples straight from the horse’s mouth.
Image Source
Basically, having popups show on your webpages on mobile devices greatly detracts from user experience, as visitors are unable to access or see the content they’ve clicked to find. To combat this, Google is penalizing pages with popups by reducing their search ranking, to discourage people from adding popups to their sites.
The simple solution? Disable popups on mobile. Seriously – just turn them off.
Allegedly, some user-triggered popups like scroll or click popups aren’t penalized – but I can’t find anywhere that confirms this, so take it with a grain of salt.
If your popup is rather important, add the content in as a section on your page, within your content (or even above the fold). This will stop Google from penalizing your site’s search ranking.
7. Optimize Forms for Mobile
If you’ve ever done some online shopping on your phone, you probably know how frustrating it can be to fill out form after endless form.
While the overall typing experience on mobile has vastly improved from the days of T9, it’s still not perfect. It relies heavily on autocorrect, and can still be quite taxing on the thumbs.
What’s the lesson here? A simple syllogism: long forms require a lot of typing. Typing sucks on mobile. Therefore… long forms suck on mobile.
If you want to try to minimize the negative effect mobile might be having on your conversion rates, try making one of the following changes to your form fields.
Reduce the number of form fields on your page
It’s simple – reducing the number of form fields a user needs to fill out greatly reduces their perceived workload, which can help in reducing visitor friction.
Though this isn’t always a viable option – often, form fields are there because they’re necessary – reducing some of the less necessary ones (last name, maybe?) or combining multiple form fields into a single field (first and last name, for example) can make a big difference.
Break up forms into multiple steps
Segmenting your form into multiple steps can help you increase conversion rates on mobile.
For example, if you have 9 fields, you may want to put only 3 in the first step. When a user fills out these 3 and presses the form submission button, they’re taken to the next page to fill in a few more fields, and so on.
This not only makes converting on your form seem less intimidating initially, it allows you to collect lead information in small bits from your visitors, which can help you if they eventually bounce from your form. I’d recommend collecting at least email on the first part of your form, so you can market to them in the future.
8. Utilize Collapsible Sections/Accordions
When your content has all been collapsed into a single column on a smaller screen, it’s going to end up being much longer.
This is an issue on mobile because it suddenly makes it much more difficult for a visitor to navigate and find what they’re looking for.
An elegant solution to this is to utilize collapsible content sections, otherwise known as accordions.
Accordions are containers that hold content; they show up as only a header and expand once a user taps on them. This allows your visitors to skim your page for the content or topic they’re looking for without needing to sift through a ton of copy and images.
You’ll need to do a bit of front-end work to put together an accordion, so get your designer or developer on the line!
Wrapping it up
Hopefully, these mobile design tips have given you some insight into how you can streamline user experience for the people who visit your website (or landing pages) on mobile.
The non-developer’s guide to reducing WordPress load times up to 2 seconds (with data)
See details of post The non-developer’s guide to reducing WordPress load times up to 2 seconds (with data) below
With Google’s continued focus on user experience and engagement metrics in recent algorithm updates, it’s become even more important for marketers to pay attention to how fast their sites are. Page speed has long been a ranking factor for desktop search results, and it may soon impact mobile rankings as well.
The benefits of improved load times go well beyond their impact on SEO and your site’s organic rankings, however. Consider recent Google data, which shows that “53 percent of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load,” or that “for every second delay in mobile page load, conversions can fall by up to 20 percent.”
So, how do you actually go about speeding up your site? For many non-technical marketers, trying to figure out how to improve page speed can be a daunting task. Which levers should you actually be pulling to generate a result? And how do you get those changes implemented on your site?
I’m not a developer. My company owns and operates a number of different (relatively simple) publishing sites built on WordPress. I set about working to improve load times for these sites without any developer intervention to see what kind of impact could result from some simple tweaks that anyone (even me!) could make. In this post, I’ll walk through each of the optimizations, explain what the impact on our sites was and share actual data around load times, Google Speed scores and more.
Three important points I’ll return to later in the post:
- As I said, these are fairly simple sites built in WordPress, so the plugins and solutions here are all WordPress-specific.
- A more complex site built on a different platform with different functions (e.g., e-commerce sites, more complex publishing sites) will have a lot of additional, more complex concerns and will also respond differently to these tactics than our sites did.
- Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to page speed; developers may tell you that to achieve a pure “best practice” page load time, you need to redesign your site (which may not be practical for your company at the moment). While that may be the case, there’s likely some combination of the tactics outlined below that you can implement to help improve page speed. Help developers to focus on the right metrics (which we’ll outline below) and work to get better.
All of that said, this post (and understanding some of the basic levers available to improving page speed) should help you better understand the potential for speed improvements on your site.
What are you optimizing for? Choosing the right page speed metrics
Like a lot of SEOs starting out, I focused my efforts on page speed, based on Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool recommendations. It’s straight from Google’s mouth, gives very easy-to-understand metrics (a grade, just like school!) and has useful suggestions for speeding up page load times.
The tool can definitely be helpful, but as you dig into page speed, you may recognize that:
- the grading can be a bit wonky. Sometimes you will speed up how quickly your page loads, and your score will drop. Sometimes you’ll do nothing, and the score will move around some. Remember that the holy grail here is to speed up your site for your visitors, so don’t just study for the test!
- it doesn’t appear likely that Google is using this score as a ranking signal so much as load times in Google Chrome relative to other sites within the search results you’re appearing in, as Search Engine Land contributor Daniel Cristo points out.
That bolded bit above about your speed being factored in relative to your SERP competitors is very important; if you have a simple B2B site, you may look at a successful e-commerce site and say, “Their site is way slower than ours and does great! We should be fine!” But the reality is, that’s not who you’re competing with. You want your site to be as fast as it can be, so you should be comparing it to the sites that are ranking in the most important search results for your site.
So, if we’re not using Google’s PageSpeed Insight tool scores as the be-all and end-all for our optimization efforts, what metrics should we be focusing on?
Search Engine Land columnist Chris Liversidge does a great job of breaking this down in further detail in his excellent post on different page speed events, but effectively my focus was on:
- time to first byte (TTFB) — How quickly after a request is made that your server and/or CDN (which we’ll get to in a bit) sends the first byte of data.
- critical render path/start render — Essentially, when your “above the fold” content is rendered.
- full page render — When the entire page is loaded.
Again, we want to focus on the user experience on our site, so making sure that the content above the fold is delivered lightning-quick and that the entire page loads quickly are really the main concerns. The TTFB metric (while imperfect) can be helpful in that it lets us know if our load time issue is a result of server problems.
So these are our metrics. How do we know if our pages are even slow, though?
Page speed measurement tools
First, we’ll need a tool to measure them. Fortunately, there are a lot of great free tools for these purposes. I used Web Page Test, which lays these out pretty simply. Here are the results for Search Engine Land, which are quite good for such a visual home page and a large and complex publishing site:
Where tools are concerned, there are a lot of options to measure speed and get suggestions, including:
And others. For our purposes here, I’ll be using data from Web Page Test.
What are our goals? What’s a ‘good’ page speed?
Again, the page load times will vary significantly from niche to niche and SERP to SERP, so our initial goal should simply be “get better.” That said, let’s look at some general best-practice guidelines around target times for these events:
- TTFB — Ideally under 200 ms (milliseconds), at least under 500 ms (A Moz study from a few years ago found that many top-ranking sites had a TTFB of 350 ms, while lower-ranked sites were frequently closer to 650 ms.)
- Start render — Ideally under 1 second, at least kept under 2 seconds.
- Full-page render — Ideally under 3 seconds, at least kept under 5 seconds. (Google’s John Mueller recommends under 2- to 3-second load times and mentions there that he uses Web Page Test as well.)
Again, if your full page load times are coming in at 15 seconds, and it’s 5 seconds before critical path rendering is complete, don’t just throw up your hands. Start optimizing and work to get those numbers down, even if you may not be able to get them to under a second.
Faster is better!
OK, so what can you actually do to improve page speed?
Let’s say you measure your page speed, and it’s slow; what can you do to make a difference?
The most common suggestions from Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool (and from optimization experts) include:
- reducing server response time.
- enabling compression.
- leveraging browser caching.
- eliminate render blocking code above the fold (CSS and JS).
- minify code.
- compress and resize images.
I’ll walk through here what optimizations I was able to implement on four different WordPress sites, and the before/after load times resulting from those optimizations. Again, these numbers won’t be true for all sites, and not every best practice will have the same impact on every site. But I think that through this process, you’ll see how some simple, quick optimizations can have a major impact on speed.
Please note that while there are some optimizations you can make with a basic understanding of HTML, there are some inflection points where it’s important to get a technical resource to jump in and figure out the best way to improve your site’s load times.
Step 1: Benchmarking our page speed metrics
First, I took a snapshot of each site’s page speed metrics on the site’s home page and a deeper article page. I did this specifically for the purposes of this post. If you’re looking to optimize your site, you’ll ideally want to look at metrics sitewide, or at least on a sampling of your highest-traffic pages and across a typical page for each template on your site.
Compared with some sites, these numbers aren’t terrible — but for simple content sites built on WordPress without a lot of bells and whistles, there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement.
What we did was implement four different commonly recommended page speed optimizations. Below, we’ll see the impact of each optimization as it was implemented, and then the cumulative impact of all of the optimizations.
So let’s dig into the optimizations.
Step 2: Code clean-up
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool recommended we “minify” each of the sites’ CSS, JavaScript and HTML. For this, we used a free WordPress plugin called Autoptimize. It took about 20 minutes to set up across the four sites:
After optimizing HTML, JS and CSS and loading the JS and CSS inline, Google’s tool moved minification and “Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content” into the “Optimizations Found” column:
What was the impact?
As you can see, a majority of the pages saw improvement, and some saw significant 20-percent-plus upgrades. But in some cases, there was very little percentage improvement, or even worse performance. There is some variance from test to test, but what you see is that while these improvements will generally improve page speed, their level of impact varies and is dependent on the site.
Please note: This is the free version of the plugin with a “best guess” at ideal settings. Be careful in making changes to your site’s code, and as I’ll mention later in the post, this is a particular area where you may want to look to a developer for guidance.
Step 3: Browser caching
Next, we wanted to leverage browser caching. Typically, you can use WordPress plugins like WP Super Cache or WP Rocket for this purpose, but these sites were hosted on WP Engine, which has some compatibility issues with some of those plugins. So, we simply enabled the WP Engine object caching:
What was the impact?
As you can see, this had a more dramatic impact than our code cleanup efforts, and for two of the sites we saw dramatic performance improvements of 20 to 30 percent, with just two pages seeing an uptick in start render time.
Step 4: Implement a CDN
Again, WP Engine has its own CDN option, so we enabled that, which is also an extremely simple process in WP Engine:
What was the impact?
This is the first implementation where we actually saw a marked drop-off in performance. A few things to note there:
- A CDN is implemented to improve page speed for users in different parts of the country, so theoretically its (positive) impact should be more for different test cases in different areas around the world.
- Again, this was just one test against a small number of sites — other folks have tested the WP Engine CDN and seen better results, so your mileage may vary there.
The important takeaway here is really more that, once again, not every optimization will have the same impact on every site, and occasionally, some efforts will have minimal or no real impact.
Step 5: Image optimization
Finally, we worked on compressing and resizing images on each of the sites. In some cases, the images on the sites had already been compressed, and the biggest culprit was (as you’ll see) the home page for site four. I find that on sites that have been ignoring it, image optimization is frequently the quickest, easiest and highest-impact page speed win.
To do this, we used an image compression plugin called Optimus. We also compressed and resized each of the images on the pages “by hand” to make sure compression didn’t impact quality and that the files were as small as possible:
There are a number of image optimization plugins for WordPress including, but not limited to:
Whenever you use these kinds of plugins, you do have to be cognizant of potential image quality/rendering issues somewhere on your site if you’re applying them to all of the existing images in your media library. (After some additional testing/recommendations from page speed pros — more on that below — we actually switched over to Short Pixel.)
There are also a number of tools available to compress individual images before you upload them as well, including:
And there are many others as well.
What was the impact?
As you can see from a couple of the home pages, compressing images can lead to some of the biggest page load wins. Best of all, compressing images and replacing the uncompressed versions is a task for which you won’t generally need any kind of development help.
Again, though, the level of improvement is dependent upon the site. Sites where images have already been compressed and resized (or just happened to be smaller) will obviously see little to no gain from this particular step.
So, what was the cumulative impact of our efforts?
As you can see, the results here vary from site to site. But we’ve shaved as much as 2 seconds off of load times by following these steps, and in almost every instance, we improved the speed at which visitors are seeing our above-the-fold content.
But some load times actually got a bit worse for all of our efforts, and it seemed that for a simple site, we should be able to beat a lot of these load times. So, what else can you do?
BONUS STEP: Hire a pro!
How Linkody Hacked Customer Retention
Here is an blog post on How Linkody Hacked Customer Retention.
Be sure to view the entire blog post and view the original source
Retention, huh?
It’s like interviewing for a job and getting to the last stage of the interviews — just to realize it’s not going to happen.
We spend money on getting people to our website, visitors spend eight seconds on the page and 98% will never return.
Boy, that hurts
It is especially painful for SaaS businesses because of their lengthy sales funnels and high acquisition costs.
A while ago we decided to gather data on how to attract visitors, move them down the marketing funnel and make sure they love using our tool.
But before we get into the details, let’s go through what retention rate optimization is and how data can be helpful in improving it.
What is Retention Rate Optimization?
Retention rate optimization is the process of improving the rate of customers returning to use your services.
It sounds like something you should be doing, right?
In numbers it looks like this:
- If 100 people land on your site, on average 2-3% percent will “convert” — i.e., do whatever you want them to do.
- In our case, it’s 8% of everyone who takes the free trial.
- So, if we want eight people to try our free trial we have to get 100 to land on our page.
- The retention rates of different industries are hard to predict, but, in our case, we are generally able to keep these eight people for a month. Afterward this will happen:
- 4 to 5 people will unsubscribe.
- But 3 to 4 will try our paid plans, from which only 1 to 2 subscribers will keep paying for more than a month.
This means that only one or two people out of 100 will keep paying to use our services. So naturally, improving this number became a big priority for us.
This is where retention rate optimization comes in, trying to boost your profit on every potential customer who lands on your page.
Now it’s time to explain the path we took.
Behavior Analysis
First of all, you have to try to understand your customer’s behavior:
- Why did they leave after trying the free trial?
- Why did they leave after trying the paid plans?
The best way to test your assumptions is by simply by talking to your customers via emails, calls, live chats or Skype calls. Anything will do.
One low-key method we tend to use is Hotjar’s Poll. To set it up you simply implement a small code snippet — similar to setting up Google Analytics — and set up the question sequence.
It looks like this: the question is triggered few seconds after you visit a page.
Ask simple, open-ended questions and soon you will have a lot more insight into why your customers do what they do.
Let’s get Ready to Monitor Data
Have you ever heard the statement, ‘Numbers don’t lie’?
Trust numbers more than you trust anyone. Period.
Google Analytics won’t cut it in delivering the insights into customer behavior you need. You will need funnel and event data monitoring software to help to visualize your events.
In this case, Kissmetrics is the perfect tool for this job.
The metrics these kind of tools offer is what one might need to investigate customers’ behavior.
Setting it up is a bit more technical than with Google Analytics because you have to assign tracking to every event you want to monitor. This will take some time if you don’t have developers at your disposal.
What’s great about behavior analytics’ tools is that they offer easy-to-schedule demo calls, in case there is something you struggle to understand.
Once everything is set, let’s see how we can use this data to improve your retention.
Improving the Onboarding Process
In general, users who have tested different features of your tools can be retained for longer than those people who haven’t tried such tasks.
Designing user onboarding shouldn’t be left to gut feeling. Instead, make sure to tailor it to the features your users find the most useful.
Once you can track events and see the impact your onboarding has on user retention, you can then form a set of assumptions. These assumptions should then be tested to see if iterating your onboarding could improve your retention rate.
Retention rate analysis
We discovered that people who used a key feature of our tool have a retention rate of 20.1%.
This key feature was also the first step of our onboarding.
The second step was to connect our tool to Google Analytics. As it turned out, people who did add Analytics stayed for an average of 12 days, with a retention rate of 7.69%. Compare this to the 1.69% retention rate for people who skipped this step.
We kept exploring the actions people took using our tool. Interestingly, people who used the disavow feature were much more likely to return — this cohort’s retention rate for 12 days was stunning 10.2%.
We had a 24% retention rate increase just by suggesting a few spammy backlinks to disavow.
Once you spot opportunities like this, your assumptions must be tested to see if seemingly useful changes actually deliver the expected outcome.
Imagine the impact if all of your customers would have the same experience as your “star” customers who make the most of your handy features.
From Free Trial to Paid Plan
Once you know the precise likelihood of people sticking around after performing action X, you can assign a value to this activity.
For example, ProdPad gamified their 7-day free trial by giving extra “free days” for each action people performed on the page.
This makes a lot of sense. Any free days you give to your customers are useless if they don’t use them to do things that will make them stick around.
You can even take this one step further. Investigate which actions increase the chance of people switching from free trials to paid plans.
Have a look at the data on activities that improve conversion rates between steps in your funnel. In this case, it’s customers moving from free plans to paid plans.
We discovered that people who linked Google Analytics to our service were 32.5% more likely to use paid plans, compared to those who didn’t link.
This is what we found using the same correlation for the cohort that used our disavow tool:
The disavow tool is seemingly so crucial to our retention rate that it more than doubles the conversion rate from free to paid plans.
Once you start seeing this kind of data, it’s then time to test to approve or disapprove your assumptions.
Improve Your Marketing Funnel
There are different ways to test your assumptions. Here are two:
- Involving your software team to adjust your onboarding and gamify your free trial
- Using Facebook ads
Obviously, the second option sounds a lot easier, right?
Easier means faster to test and that’s what we like.
After each interaction with a business, we internet users usually get bombarded with upgrade or discount offers. Indeed, it’s a shame not to help your users find their way back to you — and take the action they for some reason avoided.
Setting up Facebook for retargeting ads
Facebook offers amazing retargeting capabilities, allowing you to target any specific action that a specific group of people took.
First, clearly lay out the actions people can take on your site. Once you know the impact these actions have on retention you can make sure people use your tool to its full capability.
What’s more, I will show you how to display ads after almost any event-taking place while people use your tool.
First, let’s start by setting up the tracking. We will need to implement two things:
- A Facebook pixel — here’s the guide that will walk you through it.
- Event tracking — here are the codes to implement for facilitating event tracking.
Creating Audiences
Once that’s done, we need to define the specific cohorts (audiences) that we wish to guide further down the funnel.
Every event that occurs on your site is tracked by Facebook’s pixel and people who fall into specific categories can be shown specific ads.
We know our highest retention rate came from people who had used the disavow tool. Moreover, we know there were quite a few people who didn’t do that.
To start, head over to Facebook’s business manager, (1) then to Ads Manager (2), and finally, click on Audiences (3).
There you will be able to create cohorts or “custom audiences” (1). Next, create a custom audience based on “website traffic”.
Then you will have to define the event. In this case, we want to target people (1) who visited in the last 30 days (2) visited Linkody’s “dashboard” (3). Specifically, the ones who didn’t use (4) the “disavow” tool (5) in this period of time.
Make sure to exclude the other groups of people. There is no need to show ads to people who have already done what you will be asking them to do.
Showing Ads for the Right Audience
Now you can reach out to this cohort.
Show your customers the benefits of performing a particular action. Teach them what this feature can do for their business.
These people have most probably not grasped exactly how useful your tool or service is — the exact reason why others love it so much.
A great way to educate people about this is with video guides or blog posts. Film a walk-through or write a how-to guide describing the benefits of taking this action.
Then head over (1) to the Ads Manager (2) and create an ad of your choosing.
Next, select the ad’s objective: I suggest choosing between traffic (1), engagement (2), or conversions (3).
Then, all you have to do is select the custom audience you created before.
Done!
Now all you have to do is check if your retention rates are improving.
This will help you to quickly prove or disprove the assumptions you made before.
Go Ahead and Optimize your Retention
This guide can help you to get the best return out of the money you’ve already put down. So why not go ahead and test it to see if you, too, can boost your profits.