Dan Zambonini design + technology * people = culture.

Using Advanced Segments to Guess Amazon aStore Performance

This is the third post about my ongoing ‘affiliate’ experiment. I’ve set up a very simple Amazon aStore to allow people to buy the Kindle in the UK (see what I did there? SEO in action, baby). I then advertise the URL using Google AdWords, hoping that the commission made through sales outweighs the cost of the AdWords. It’s a tried-and-tested method; nothing new (except that it’s new for me).

I’ve previously complained that - because the final purchase transaction occurs on the Amazon server - it’s impossible to track conversion/goals using Google Analytics: which visitors actually go on to make a purchase? And, more importantly, which keywords produce visitors that convert most often?

I’ve come up with a hack/workaround, that I think works. With aStore, the Amazon mini-shop is embedded at your URL using a frameset. The Google Analytics (GA) code is placed within this frameset (not within a frame, as Amazon controls the frame), so as the user navigates the shop, it doesn’t record the individual URLs. In fact, I’m not convinced that GA even registers individual page requests. But, it does seem to record time on site.

So, to ‘best guess’ users who have made a purchase, we can use the GA ‘Advanced Segments’ feature to create a segment that represents users who have reached our goal. Instead of our goal being an accurate ‘checkout success’ page, we’re going to use the time they spent on the site, as that’s one of the only things we have access to.

I created a segment that matches all visitors who spend more than 3 minutes on the site. In theory, these are users who do more than ‘bounce’, and are more likely to be those who are going through the checkout process.

Based on the number of users in this segment per-day, and the number of sales I make each day (it’s actually about 5 per week, on average), I’d say this ‘best guess’ metric is about 80-90% accurate. There generally seems to be 1 or 2 visitors who match this segment on the days that I make 1 or 2 sales, and 0 visitors on the days without sales.

I can then use this metric to report on which of my AdWord keywords create ‘converting’ customers.

As you can see, I’m probably wasting my money buying clicks for generic phrases like ‘kindle’ and ‘amazon kindle uk’, and should concentrate on the more specific (and therefore higher intent) keywords. Note that all keywords are limited to UK visitors only (there’s no way I’d bid on a generic, global ‘kindle’ keyword!).

Anyway, there you have it: Advanced Segments to the rescue.

PS Feel free to copy my keywords and site; this project isn’t about making money, but about undergoing the process itself. I hope the information I post is more valuable than the odd few quid I currently make through the scheme (otherwise I’d be blurring out all my keywords and stats above).

posted 3 days ago

Penolo - New Side Project

I’m working on a new side-project this weekend, called “Penolo”. I’ve had to change the tag-line in the logo for the time being (it’s such a simple idea, it can be summed up in two words!), but just thought I’d share this with you for now.

The lovely - free! - typefaces are from the awesome League of Movable Type.

posted 1 week ago

The Lost Identity of Music Genres

I’m lucky enough to work in Soho, London: a buzzing little area of narrow cobbled streets. It’s full of everything you could want, and sometimes feels like a tiny (in London terms) cultural oasis surrounded by the tourist throngs of Oxford Street, Regent Street, Leicester Square and Covent Garent.

It is also home to myriad boutique fashion stores, record stores, and other attractions for the modern hipster. Each morning, I’ll pass at least one young, fashionable waif wearing a sequinned Metallica T-shirt (I kid you not) or a “vintage” (sic? sick?) Led Zeppelin or ‘Rage’ (as they’ve now been abbreviated to) T-shirt.

And it bothers me.

I know that fashion changes, and that the cyclical retro thing has always happened. But it’s more than fashion. It’s about losing the identity and support of a community.

The first record my mum bought for me, aged 13 (me, not my mum) was Iron Maiden’s incredible 1988 album Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. And then there was Megadeth. And Metallica (I liked them both; a big no-no in those days). And Slayer. And so on.

Yes, I was a ‘metaler’. As, mostly, were my friends. Many of us weren’t the popular ones at school. We were largely the outcasts, either because of our grades (normally higher than average), social backgrounds, physical appearance, or whatever. I guess the growing the hair long and the faded/patched denim is a reaction to that: if you’re going to be ostracised, you might as well go whole hog and show that you know that you’re not ‘the same’. It’s almost like stating that YOU decided to be the outsider.

Plus, of course, those physical things - the denim, hair, metal band t-shirts - identified other members of your clan. You were safe with others. For anyone who has ever been to a metal gig, you probably know that the fans are some of the warmest, nicest, and - yes - gentlest people you’ll meet (as long as you stay out of the mosh pit). And they’ll bloody-well stick up for each other too, when push comes to shove.

Now, of course, metal is fashionable. Like punk before it, and rock-and-roll before that (ad infinitum), the underground scene becomes increasingly mainstream as the masses vie for credibility.

Now EVERYTHING seems popular. The internet has - wonderfully - opened up every music-scene under the sun to anyone with a computer. It’s cool to like anything these days. You can ironically like X-Factor. You can like French electro. You can like a crackly YouTube video of a teenager playing a home-made ukelele. You can like Jewish Metal (and who wouldn’t?).

But alongside all this wonderful mass-acceptance and diversity of audiences, maybe we’ve lost these support mechanisms; the outcast credentials that once made us easily connect, empathise, and protect with loyalty.

posted 1 week ago

Short URLs Not Necessarily Better

I said that I’d post a follow-up about my UK Kindle affiliate experiment. At the moment, I’m still tweaking it: it’s just about breaking-even, with generated revenue roughly equal to the AdWord spend. With a little bit more tweaking, I’m hoping to tip this towards ‘positive revenue’, though suspect it will never generate any significant cash.

Anyway, on to the minor point I wanted to make…

My first Google AdWord got an excellent Click-Through Rate (CTR), thanks to some fairly well-targeted keywords, that balanced competition (low) vs volume (medium to high) vs implicit intent (e.g. including the word ‘buy’).

Amazon offer a range of affiliate options. I originally used the standard embedded affiliate link through to specific products, which you can see at the root URL, http://uk-kindle.com, which is a very basic HTML page - some introductory text (written to be both instructional and search engine friendly), followed by the affiliate links.

Amazon also offer something called the aStore, which allows you to embed a configurable ‘shop’ into an existing site, via a frame/iframe. I didn’t originally like the idea of this - for my situation, with no existing respectable ‘site’ to sit around it, it looks a bit bare, and is not particularly great for SEO. However, I did want to quickly test it, just to make sure.

I set up a second AdWord, exactly the same as the first, but linking to a different URL: http://uk-kindle.com/shop/, which uses a frameset to display the ‘embedded store’.

I configured each AdWord to display an equal number of times, as I was testing the performance of the websites, not the AdWords (which were exactly the same, except for the /shop/ part of the link).

The unexpected result was that the /shop/ AdWord actually produced a higher click-through rate, consistently, of an additional 3-4%. Remember: I wasn’t trying to improve the CTR, but to test the difference between standard affiliate links (at the root URL) and aStore (at /shop/).

My guess (this is probably detailed elsewhere with more scientific research) is that the /shop/ part of the URL better matches the intent of the user performing the search: a link to just uk-kindle could offer reviews, photos, or any other type of information. The /shop/ part of the URL explicitly states the nature of the website. As an additional benefit, I’d also expect to get higher quality traffic, with the /shop/ URL stopping people clicking who aren’t intending to buy a Kindle, and therefore saving me money.

And, in case you’re wondering, the aStore appears to out-perform the standard links too, though not by a significant margin.

posted 1 week ago

The Nonlinear Nature of Pricing

As people like Mr Kelly and Mr Godin point out, there’s a big difference between free (0p or 0c) and non-free (1p or 1c), much more than the difference between 1p and 2p, or even 1p and 10p. It’s a ‘special’ price point.

As retailers have known for years, there are other special price points: the decimal system combined with our psychology has led to the .99 pricing model (£9.99, £14.99, etc). This means that we perceive a bigger difference between £9.99 and £10.00 than between £10.00 and £10.01.

I’ve created a graph that shows my best guess as to where these perceived ‘price points’ are.

Note that this is not based on research, but solely opinion. I’d love to hear (comments below) if you have any thoughts or know of any data on this subject.

My graph assumes that every £10 represents a new ‘step’ in perceived difference (i.e. the difference between £30 and £29 is perceived as larger than between £34 and £33). Also, I suspect every additional digit represents a bigger perceived step (£100, £1000, etc.).

There are also some cultural price points, which I guess are around £3 (or ‘the price of beer’), £25-30 (gym membership, mobile subscription, etc) and £50 (just because it’s half way to £100).

posted 1 week ago

Are New York Twitter Users More Sophisticated Or Shrewd?

It’s been exactly a year since I launched a number of automated Twitter accounts that search-for and re-tweet information about free giveaways in various cities: @freelondon, @freenewyork, @freesanfran, @torontofree and @freecardiff (note that I won’t be including @freecardiff information in this post due to a lack of data).

These accounts were created at the same time, and behave the same: they never pro-actively follow anyone, but follow-back anyone who follows them.

It’s been interesting, and sometimes surprising, to watch these twitter accounts grow over the year, so I thought I’d publish some of the statistics about them.

The accounts have amassed between 1,000 and 4,500 followers each, and have each tweeted between 500 and nearly 2,500 times in the last year.

They’ve been added to quite a few lists, between 30 (for Toronto) and 120 (New York).

What interests me is how these differ, especially with respect to the number of active Twitter users in each city. This is a difficult number to find, but Sysomos published some fairly comprehensive research that we can use. I’m not so interested in the actual number of users, but more the relative numbers and how they compare.

Sysomos estimate that Toronto and San Francisco have roughly equal number of active Twitter users, with New York having almost twice as many, and London coming out on top with almost 2.5x as many.

We can use these ‘Twitter population’ numbers, along with the statistics we quoted earlier, to calculate some interesting ratios, as seen in the following graph.

Again, we’re only really interested in relative numbers, so everything has been normalised to show the differences clearly.

Although London supposedly has the highest number of Twitter users, and the @freelondon account produced the highest number of tweets about free things, it amassed the worst (on-par with Toronto) number of followers per tweet, and was placed on the least number of lists per tweet. It also garnered the least number of followers compared to the number of active twitter users in the city (i.e. it attracted the smallest available percentage of users for its demographic), and was placed on the least number of lists, relative to the number of active users in the city.

In summary, Londoners seemed to be the least interested, relatively.

In comparison, New Yorkers seemed to embrace it. The @freenewyork account attracted the highest number of followers, but also the highest percentage of twitter users in the city (i.e. Followers / No. of Users). New Yorkers were also eager to place the account on a list, with the highest number of Lists per Number of Users.

What does this mean? Are New Yorkers more hungry for free deals? Or, as I suspect, are they more sophisticated Twitter users, that are able to find useful Twitter accounts more easily, and are more willing to share them with lists (and #followfriday recommendations, from memory)?

Let me know your thoughts!

(Plus, if you want me to create a ‘free’ twitter account for your city, let me know; they’re fairly easy to set up.)

posted 2 weeks ago

Bathcamp, March 10: Design Critical

On the evening of March 10th, 2010, I’m curating an evening of talks in Bath about design, which I’ve dubbed “Design Critical”. Here’s the blurb I wrote for it:

For most of our recent history, technology has been focused on the mechanics: does something solve the problem or not? Over the last few decades we have gradually become aware of the importance of design to technology solutions, whether it is ergonomics dictating the comfort of a stapler, the whitespace of a magazine improving readability, or the psychological choice of wording in an online checkout process.

Most recently, we have seen a reversal of roles; design is now the foremost factor, and technology is forced to adapt to fit the design. Apple re-thought hardware components to achieve the sub-millimetre precision needed for the iPod shuffle construction, some video game developers spend more money than Hollywood movies on animation, and even lower-end automobile companies like Nissan are now focusing new marketing campaigns on their design-led strategy.

At BathCamp #10 we’ll take a look at a wide variety of design, and how it’s influencing and improving every-day technology.

If you’d like to talk about design of any type - whether it’s web, print, hardware, video game, industrial, or anything else - let me know. We’re looking for talks of any duration, whether you want to talk for 3 minutes or 20 minutes.

posted 2 weeks ago

Should Seed Funds / VCs Insist On Prototypes?

If you have a great idea for a web app, one of your options is to apply for Seed funding, to get it up and running. Understandably, given the amount of money exchanged, many funds ask to see a demonstration or prototype as part of the application. For example, NYCSeed says:

What if I don’t have a product prototype to show you?

Seeing a prototype of your product is important to us.  Given the availability of open source software, and online resources, putting together a prototype should be within reach of anyone, requiring only minimal resources.

But should they be asking for this?

I would argue that unless the app is breaking technological ground, and the technology needs to be proved (e.g. a new protocol for streaming video), then a prototype is reinforcing bad practice.

For most apps, the development is not the difficult part. Sure, it may take the longest chunk of time, but you shouldn’t just dive in and get coding. A successful app usually relies on intelligent research and a whole lot of user experience design - sometimes up to 30-35% of the total app-build time. Quality development is essential, of course: nobody wants to use an insecure, poorly performing, unreliable application. But it’s no longer the part of application development that needs the most attention.

posted 2 weeks ago

An Affiliate Experiment: Buy Kindle in the UK

I’m increasingly coming across stories about people who make a full-time living through affiliate schemes; I’m sure we’ve all read a similar story.

These people set up dedicated websites to sell a particular product/service, then use SEO or Online Advertising to get traffic to the website, making a percentage of any sales that arise from the website.

This sounds too good to be true, so I thought I’d try it out.

I’ve chosen the Amazon Kindle as my item of choice, specifically targeting it to UK customers. I’ve set up a website, called UK Kindle (uk-kindle.com), with Amazon affiliate links to the Kindle 2 and Kindle DX. My reasons for choosing this combination are:

• I needed to buy one anyway, so might as well get some money off!
• I already had an Amazon Affiliate account (we use it on The Januarist).
• It’s a high-value item, with excellent (currently) affiliate percentages - at 10%, you can currently earn between about $25 and $45 per sale.
• There’s little information about how UK customers can buy a Kindle (you have to buy them through the US store).
• There’s not that much competition.

At the moment I’ve set up a Google AdWords campaign for relevant keywords, and it’s doing pretty well - I’m getting about a 11% click through rate, resulting in about 80 clicks a day. This costs around £15 a day, so I need to sell, on average, about one a day to make back the costs.

It’s only been running about 4 days so far, but it’s been extremely hit-and-miss: most days result in no sales, but one day (Wednesday) resulted in 3 sales (of the Kindle 2), plus some accessories, meaning I’m currently just above breaking-even (by about £10). But that could change tomorrow, if nobody bought anything today.

Two frustrations so far:

1. Google Analytics and AdWords are almost real-time (within an hour or so), so you can track fairly accurately how the site is performing. BUT, Amazon Affiliates reports don’t update until the next day, and then it’s on US time, so I have to wait until about 36 hours after each day until I can tell whether I made a loss or not.
2. Because the actual ‘sale’ is made on Amazon, I can’t hook a ‘Conversion’ or ‘Goal’ into my Analytics/AdWords, so I can’t accurately track which keywords perform, and which are costing me money with no results.

This weekend, I’ll spend some time working on the SEO side of it too (to hopefully make it appear in natural search results), though it may take months for Google to index it. Either way, this post is the first step towards that SEO goal - please feel free to re-blog this post! Or, if you really want, buy a Kindle from the site!

I’ll let you know how it goes after it’s been up and running for a couple of weeks, which should give me a better idea of how it’s all averaging out.

posted 3 weeks ago