SpeedDate.com is a pretty shady company. Less than 24 hours after my first post covering how shady speeddate is they took down their subscription page. When I noticed that their new subscription page looked familar I asked myself why… then it occured to me that SpeedDate has now stolen the MyLife subscription page. You can read the post about it from Chris Watkins, the UI Designer for Zoosk.
This is part one of a six part series where I will follow-up with the initial post covering all of the six weapons of influence by Dr Robert Cialdini. Unlike the book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, these posts will not maintain the same order as they are mentioned in Cialdini’s book and will be refocused specifically for affiliate marketers in mind.
Offer Spotlight: Cosmetyn from Clickbooth
In this offer we see a short form at the top right corner that lets the user admit that they are looking to remove their stretch marks. By making a person take a stand they will feel pressure to commit and continue filling out the form.
Unlike politicians, the average person does not like being inconsistent. Being inconsistent is a sign of weakness and our egos will counterbalance this weakness. Many times a person will stick to their guns even after knowing they made a mistake just to remain consistent.
Remember to always try to get your users to commit to a decision. With websites and forms it is difficult to get our users to call you up and admit they have a problem but by filling out a short form our users have taken a stand and will stick to their initial decisions.
Tip to Becoming a Super Affiliate: If you have a landing page setup where you have multiple “self improvement” offers available — get your users to admit they are looking to become healthier and more attractive. Have a form where they can write a short paragraph of “goals” that they would like to change after asking them if they are looking to remove embarrassing stretch marks and have whiter teeth. Once you are able to get your users committed to this mindset of bettering themselves, you can display offers from a wide range of campaigns available from Clickbooth!
Disclaimer: Remember never to use this tactic to deceive or “trick” your users.
Offer Details: If you are looking to promote this offer you can find it exclusively on Clickbooth - one of the top affiliate networks on the web. The offer pays $35.00 with a network EPC of $1.39. One of the great things about running this offer through Clickbooth is that you can place your pixels on the confirmation page for affiliates interested in running search traffic. Join Clickbooth and start making more money online.
SpeedDate.com has ripped off Zoosk’s subscription page - the text, images, layout, javascript functions, you name it –http://tr.im/flattered
It is one thing for some 20 year old affiliate to copy another affiliate’s fake blog to market acai berry pills but SpeedDate.com is a VC-funded company.
This is a clear sign that they are not making any revenue.
One of the best books ever is Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Dr. Robert Cialdini. This is a six chapter book where each chapter is a different “weapon” on how to influence people. What I love about this book is that he takes examples from what people have done in the past — what is also great is that he takes a scientific approach versus the MBA approach when showing how tests were run.
Seriously, read this book. Whether you’re an affiliate, in-house marketer, selling your services.. whatever it may be: this is a must read and should only take you a week if you spend 1 - 2 hours a day on it. I have seen offers go from barley profitable to 2x-3x ROI when making changes based off of these six weapons of influence.
Reciprocation - People tend to return a favor. Thus, the pervasiveness of free samples in marketing.
Affiliates — That “free trial” where you’re giving away a month’s free of your product and all you ask in return is for the buyer to pay for the shipping/handling.
Commitment and Consistency - If people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment. Even if the original incentive or motivation is removed after they have already agreed, they will continue to honor the agreement.
Affiliates — this is why email/zip submits work. Just get the person in the funnel and interacting with the website.
Social Proof - People will do things that they see other people are doing.
Affiliates — Doesn’t this sound like those “Ashley placed this game on Facebook” or “5 people think they are smarter than you” type ads? It also should remind you of all of those fake blogs.
Authority - People will tend to obey authority figures.
Affiliates — can you say: Oprah? This is why affiliate offers leach off of celebrities and the offer page will mention that the product has been featured in 60 Minutes, NY Times, etc.
Liking - People are easily persuaded by other people that they like.
Affiliates — This is why you always want to have attractive people in your creatives and landing pages. People like attractive people.
Scarcity - Perceived scarcity will generate demand. For example, saying offers are available for a “limited time only” encourages sales.
Affiliates — how many times do those landing pages have a countdown clock whenever an order is supposed to be made?
Chris Sherman asked if I’d like to start contributing to Search Engine Land. This is really exciting news and I’m looking forward to my first article.
More details to come.
The “double tail” is what I refer to when a search marketer enters such a specific keyword into their keyword list that it is unlikely to ever seen any impressions, let alone clicks or conversions.
First… what is considered a “tail keyword” in search marketing?
Going after the long tail of keywords means you have already identified your core keywords (for our example, let’s use “apartments”) in the city of San Francisco, California. For our core list we have “San Francisco apartments”, “San Francisco rentals”, “SF apartments” and so on… How do we turn these core keywords (head terms) into long tail keywords?
The most common method is adding modifiers. For example, let’s say we are one of the few apartment complexes that allows pets and want to make sure if someone searches for us can find us; so we might have “San Francisco pet friendly apartments” – this is pretty exact because we know three things about our user: they are living (or looking to live) in San Francisco, they are interested in renting an apartment and they also have a pet or in the processing of getting a pet.
Now how do we take the long tail keyword “San Francisco pet friendly apartments” and go into the “double tail” of keywords? We change our target of San Francisco into a more precise geographic modifier such as a major cross-street, landmark, or neighborhood. For example, someone might want to live by China Town, so we have “China Town pet friendly apartments” (or worse: “San Francisco China Town pet friendly apartments”) – now this is really precise and exact. Instead of knowing that a user is looking in or around San Francisco, we can pinpoint within several blocks where they want to live.
The chance that you will get sufficient search volume (impressions) is unlikely for the above mentioned double tail keyword. First, if a user is interested in a specific neighborhood of San Francisco, they are probably within 10 miles of the city… so instead of the hundreds of thousands of people who are looking to move to San Francisco, we are dealing with maybe a few thousand. Second, we also know that this Internet user is looking for pet-friendly apartments, which means it is a small sub-set of our already several thousand visitors (let’s say 10%) which means we are dealing with a few hundred people every month looking for an apartment online. Third, we have to remember that an average click through rate of your ad might be between 1% - 2% (let’s ignore that whenever a user gets this specific with a term, there is a slim chance that they will click on a paid search listing so 2% is pretty optimistic). After doing some math, we can say that out of 2% of maybe 300 – 400 (given that San Francisco has about a million residents) might be looking for this type of apartment during a 30-day period; which translates to about 3 – 8 visitors a month to our website. What type of conversion rate should we expect for an online “contact us” form? If your contact form is well optimized you can squeeze out 6% - 8% of your visitors to convert into a lead. 8% of 8 visitors is approximately half a conversion a month – so you might be able to get 1 conversion every two months.
Ok, so this isn’t bad. With our double tail keywords we might have paid $0.20 a click which makes our leads cost around $2.50/lead. Now how many “contact us” forms will have accurate contact information – this is another story. Will you follow up with every contact form? That is up to you. How many other contact forms did this user already fill out? In real estate I have seen about 3 – 4 (not including all of the emailing with Craigslist posts).
One thing to note – is that we assumed that all of the people who searched for “China Town pet friendly apartments” were not looking perhaps to buy an apartment, look for a cheap apartment, perhaps look for a room share (remember: the keyword might have been “China Town pet friendly apartments to share” and Google triggered our ad to show because we have a close match keyword). Imagine how long it would take to accurately decide what you want to bid for this keyword, which ad shows (let’s assume you are running three ads – which one triggered the conversion/click and which one just got lucky with a stray click/conversion?) – this amount of data might take up to several years to accumulate which by then Google most likely will have changed guidelines, operations, and new competitors may have entered into the arena.
The double tail of keywords does not work. When companies and advertisers boost to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of keywords – I wonder how many of them actually drive any of your traffic and can be properly optimized to deliver you revenue.
I have included a chart of the double tail in action and what you need to do in order to improve your campaign optimization.
Now this is a very long tail of keywords – over 75% in this example generates no revenue – maybe a few clicks here and there and if there is any revenue generated – it is so minimal and spread out that it is just considered as noise.
If we consolidate our keywords – and instead of having double tail keywords such as “China Town pet friendly apartments” and just use “China Town apartments” for our San Francisco apartment rental website, we have greatly decreased the number of double tail terms (cat friendly, dog friendly, animal friendly, dog ok, dog allowed, dogs allowed, etc…) and we have made our keyword list a lot more manageable as well as making it easier to optimize.
By eliminating a lot of the keywords in our apartment rental website, we managed to spread the keyword revenue share across fewer keywords through simple consolidation of terms that would never have received the volume to be optimized on their own.
How large are your AdWords accounts? Do you answer in…
Do the number of keywords that you’ve uploaded really matter? What about spend (monthly or lifetime of the account)? How about the total revenue search marketing generates for you? Or do you compare the profit search marketing generates over your other marketing channels?
You’ll notice that “ROI-focused” agencies will talk only about three things - they will brag about their client list, show off the total spend across all their accounts, or bring up the millions of keywords that they use… so much for being focusing on your returns!
I’ve been asked to give a talk about Adgroup Management which will cover how to build a scalable campaign from the ground up by understanding what keywords to place in what adgroup and how to form your adgroups around campaigns in the proper way.
Additionally, I was informed that they most likely will want me to moderate a session as well during the second day.
I’ll be following up with some more updates about this over the next few days.
Coming back from SMX London – I decided to write this article on the plane about optimizing keywords versus optimizing the funnel (landing pages and ad creatives). Too many presentations occurred this past week where advertisers and agencies were told to look at their keywords when optimizing their accounts – that keywords are the first step.
I disagree with the philosophy of “keywords keywords keywords”. If my product/service never changes, there are only so many different combinations of keywords that I can upload to my account. Eventually, I’ve exhausted every combination. Sure, over time there might be new competitors that I might want to bid on their trademark terms, or new slangs/variations of my keywords may become popular (from dating to “social dating”) – but for the most part that is just spending an afternoon every few weeks making sure everything is in check.
Eventually, I can only update my bids so many times. You get to the point really fast if you are in a competitive space such as online dating (over 60 advertisers in the US alone on Google) where you can no longer make any dramatic changes to your keyword bids (sure, you might be able to shave off a few pennies over the course of several weeks/months of getting sufficient data – but nothing that a day of work once in awhile can’t handle) – where do you go from here?
I believe first thing first is to optimize either your landing page and/or backend. If all you care about is having a lead filled out on the landing page – then you are killing two birds with one stone – if you are subscription-based (Match, eHarmony, Chemistry) then updating the funnel may or may not be in your control and area of responsibilities (if you are Match with 400 employees – probably not). For us, let us assume that this is some other guy’s problem – and that even though you two should be working side-by-side for whatever reason you aren’t (example: you’re a search marketing agency and your client does not want you poking around with their back-end).
You are left with your landing pages and the creatives that drive users to it. For a website such as Zoosk, we do a lot with the content network (it is no surprise when you hardly see us show up in Google Search). If you work on your creatives, you might be able to boost your click-through-rates from 0.1% to 0.12% which can be great for additionally traffic – but you aren’t freeing up anything to increase any of your bids (which is key if you want to dominate in Google Search). So for us we need to rely heavily on our landing pages (by the way, we must be doing a great job if we spoke at Search Marketing Expo London 2009 
)which requires hours upon hours of brainstorming, designing, developing, testing, and measuring.
At Zoosk we have tried multiple methods of converting our users. With our great presence on Facebook (over 8 million monthly actives if I’m not mistaken) we applied what worked on Faceboook to the traditional online dating world. Our process was not effective for users in the dot com space (can’t discuss the numbers too heavily but if you are/were in the online dating space and saw what we were doing – you can tell it needed some optimization).
Needless to say, we are currently using the traditional online dating model for landing pages of getting as much user information as fast as we can and then hope that if the user gets trapped into the funnel they will eventually convert because we believe that our product is unique with interesting features that many other dating sites do not offer their users.
I would like to think that there is a better way to convert my users and that a landing page can help speed up the process of getting users to subscribe and pay for the service. Even if I decrease my conversion rate by 10% but increase the rate of my user acquisition to wanting to subscribe by 15% — I now have a higher cost-per-acquisition for my “free users” because they are more likely to subscribe than before. This higher cost-per-acquisition can mean the difference from us bidding on position 7 in Google Search to maybe 5 or 6 without changing my keywords or ads – changing this much in my position is a lot more than shaving a few pennies off of my keywords during a multiple-month process (which may not even be effective because by then I can enter into varying shifts in seasonality/trends).
Yes, over the next couple of weeks/months instead of changing my keyword bids from $1.20/click to $1.17/click, I will be making dramatic changes to Zoosk’s funnel and allow us to go from $1.20/click to $1.80/click or even higher by changing the cost per acquisition for new users.
As I mentioned before – by doing this I might drop off on how many users actually complete the new user registration form, so once I open up a new target cost-per-acquisition and meet it, I can then optimize my ads and creatives to increase my click-through-rates and compensate for the missing users.
Keywords… I’ll get to those later. If users start to use terms other than “singles” and “dating” – please let me know – but I’m betting that after 10 years of online dating that I can afford taking a 10 week break from keyword research/expansion to focus on something else.
Note: the cost per clicks used in the post above is just arbitrary numbers… Zoosk would kill me if I disclosed our CPCs
Just before leaving London I wanted to pass along a screenshot to a colleague of an ad we are running in the US for an online dating term — found two great text ads on Google sponsored search that were literally one on top of each other and were so amazing… they deserved a blog post.
Below is a screenshot and some comments (gotta love Microsoft Paint!)
Note: DowntoEarth.com was Match.com’s (and parent company IAC) response to PlentyofFish.com (the world’s #1 free dating site)
