Richard Angel

If you've spent time managing your company's Facebook Timeline Page, then you know the myriad of engagement metrics you're faced with. From Page post link clicks to Talking About This demographics, navigating Facebook's Insights metrics can seem daunting to any marketer. To cut through the confusion, we've prepared a breakdown of the three most important Insights metrics you should be keeping an eye on in order to successfully manage your Facebook Page and cultivate an engaged community.

Virality (Talking About This / Reach)

Facebook defines Virality as the number of people Talking About This divided by Reach, or "the percentage of people who have created a story from your Page post out of the total number of unique people who have seen it." Confusing, right? Essentially, Virality measures the efficacy of your organic posts in capturing engagement. The higher your Virality percentage, the more engaging that post was.

When Facebook talks about someone "Talking About This" or "Creating A Story," what they actually mean is if someone performs any of the following actions:

• Likes your Page posts to your Page Wall
• Likes, comments on or shares one of your Page posts
• Answers a question you posted
• Responds to your event
• Mentions your Page
• Tags your Page in a photo
• Checks in at your Place
• Recommends your Place

In short, all of these actions are signs of engagement and demonstrate unique interest into your posted content. Virality gives good insight into the effectiveness of your posts and shows fan interaction out of the people who actually see your content (remember, Facebook says only roughly 16% of your fans see your Page's content).

As a first cut, Virality should be your go-to metric for determining what types of content you should be posting. Test out various types of post content (e.g., photos, questions, links, etc.) and see what works with your fan base. As you tease out the better performing content types, you can dig even deeper to understand how your content should be presented — how long a post should be, what time of day you should be posting, etc.

As you optimize your organic post content, keep in mind the end-game tactic — using Sponsored Stories to amplify distribution of your top performing Page posts. Sponsored Stories will help you reach a much broader audience, and serving up your most viral content gives your Page the best chance of acquiring new fans at the lowest CPA.

Talking About This / Total Fans

While much of the focus around Facebook marketing has been about increasing fan count, surprisingly few marketers are zeroing in on the quality of fan generation. This makes some sense, as traditionally CPA has been of utmost concern, and bringing this number down often means acquiring as many fans as possible through gimmicky promos or giveaways. I'll posit though that with Facebook's renewed focus around Sponsored Stories, Timeline, and Ads in the News Feed, fan quality will be looked at much more closely.

An important Insights metric to scrutinize when gauging the quality of your fan acquisition is the number of people Talking About This divided by the number of Total Fans. This calculation demonstrates what percentage of your total fan base is actually engaging with your Page, and tracking this metric over time will give you insight into the types of fans you are acquiring. If the percentage decreases as your fan count increases, this is a signal that the fans you are gaining are less engaged with your brand, and you may need to rethink your acquisition strategy. If the percentage remains the same or increases as your fan count increases, this is a positive signal that you are acquiring more engaged fans and your existing fan base is becoming more engaged.

Organic vs. Viral Reach

While you can expect that in Facebook's crowded marketplace, the attention your Page receives is fairly low, as a Page owner you need to be aware of your exact Reach numbers and use them as benchmarks for optimization. The best way to gauge your Page's Reach is through Organic Reach and Viral Reach metrics.

Organic Reach is the number of unique people who see your content in News Feed, in Ticker, or on your Page. By looking at Organic Reach over time, you can get a better sense of how well you are optimizing your content to be distributed through Facebook's channels (i.e., how EdgeRank is affecting distribution to your fans), as well as how much traffic you are driving to your Facebook Page from outside sources (e.g., email marketing campaigns, Facebook widgets on your website). Declining Organic Reach may mean your content is packing less of a punch, and fans are becoming less interested.

Viral Reach is the number of unique people who see a story about your Page published by a friend. By looking at Viral Reach over time, you can understand how shareable your content is. Ideally, you are creating content that reaches a large number of people organically and is then amplified virally. You should strive to achieve large multiples of Viral vs Organic Reach, which will mean you are driving much more value in your organic content, decreasing your cost-per-post and driving down need to spend more in distribution via Facebook's Ad platform.

While there are over 100 different metrics available in Facebook's Insights data set, focusing on Virality, Talking About This / Total Fans, and Organic vs. Viral Reach will allow you to efficiently evaluate and optimize your content management and Sponsored Stories strategies. If you'd like to review more Facebook Insights or would like to learn how Clickable can help with your social marketing strategy, please let us know.

YouTube has acquired RightsFlow, a company that helps songwriters, recording artists, labels, distributors, and online music services set up licensing and royalties arrangements.

Announced via a blog post on Friday, David King, YouTube product manager wrote that, “Smart copyright management is an important part of this online video service - it helps songwriters and performers to be appropriately compensated for their works, while also allowing for those works to be used in new ways.”

He went on to say that combining RightsFlow’s expertise (it was set up by two music industry veterans in 2007, one a composer, one an IP specialist) with YouTube’s platform will speed up licensing and make it more efficient. RightsFlow owns proprietary scanning technology, has a 30m strong database of songs and a huge amount of credibility in the industry.

Back in the day, YouTube got into a serious amount of hot water when it came to users uploading material they didn’t own. It subsequently invested millions in the creation of a filtration system called Content ID, which allows rights holders to send YouTube reference files (audio-only or video) of content they own, metadata describing that content, and policies on what they want YouTube to do when it finds a match.

Now, over 3,000 major media companies are using it to protect their content. 

But this August, YouTube reached a settlement in a class-action suit involving a group of music publishers who accused the company of encouraging users to upload pirated video clips of TV shows, films, and music videos.

The result was that music publishers were given the opportunity to enter into a license agreement with YouTube and receive royalties for musical works in videos posted on the site.

Google has already put hundreds of content-licensing deals with labels in place to offer music officially on YouTube. We’ve seen artists’ channels become phenomenally popular as a result and they’re now often picked as the place to premier new music videos.

Though YouTube also has agreements in place with major Hollywood and independent film studios to offer streaming rentals, RightsFlow’s fine reputation in the entertainment industry will undoubtedly further this progress - making licensing more accessible to publishers of all sizes in the process.

Argos is the latest retailer to open a QR code pop-up shop in the run-up to Christmas.

In a move similar to the eBay store near Oxford Street and John Lewis' virtual shop window in Brighton, customers will be able to scan the code of a selected item on their smartphone and will then be sent to Argos’ online checkout.

There will be 75 Christmas gift ideas on display at Paddington today and Friday, and then in Waterloo on Wednesday and Thursday.

Argos' head of brand development Siobhan Fitzpatrick said the retailer wanted to make Christmas shopping easy “in an active and engaging way.”

But despite its claim to be a unique pop-up gift shop, this is an idea that consumers will soon become tired of - and there has been little evidence of success in driving sales.

In fact, anecdotal evidence from John Lewis’ QR experiment in Brighton suggests that the codes do very little to attract customers.

To gauge the popularity of the display, which went live on 23 November this year, digital agency Leapfrogg stationed staff in a coffee shop opposite the window for an hour each day, from Monday to Friday the week after launch.

Obviously this methodology isn't exactly robust, but during the five hour-long periods, which were staggered at different times of day, just 38 people stopped to look at the window display - and only two scanned a code with a smartphone.

Speaking two weeks after the virtual shop window opened, Lloyd Page, head of brand marketing at John Lewis, said it formed part of a wider campaign to raise awareness about JohnLewis.com’s ‘click and collect’ service that has launched across 94 Waitrose shops. 

It’s early days, but since launch we’ve seen a week-on-week increase of 54% in click and collect sales to Waitrose Brighton."

Page said it was John Lewis’ response to changing customer shopping behaviour.

We want to ensure that customers can shop with John Lewis using the channel which suits them best, whether that’s in our shops, on the web, or through our mobile site. QR codes, although still a relatively new technology, are part of that multi-channel mix."

John Lewis’ window display ticks all the boxes for QR code best practice; it's an attractive display in a location where users should have 3G access – and most importantly users are directed to a site optimised for mobile use.

Though John Lewis saw an increase in use of the service it was trying to promote, it would not say how many people actually scanned the QR codes. It may have been that a normal window display would have had the same impact, and it's likely that other forms of promotion had an effect on uptake.

It will be interesting to see the final statistics from John Lewis' experiment, which will run until the end of December. But if consumers scan the codes at a rate of only 2 people every 5 hours, it will hardly have been a success. Even if the anecdotal evidence is way off-base, and perhaps 10 people scan the codes even five hours, simply displaying a link to the click and collect webpage might have been more effective.

We discussed the most innovative uses of QR codes here back in July (including Tesco in Korea below) and with numerous examples springing up almost daily, it would appear that the technology is here to stay for the immediate future.

However pop-up shops seem to be little more than PR stunts, as how many consumers will make the effort to go on a Christmas shopping trip to London then simply buy their gifts from Argos on the platform?

Or is Argos hoping that tired commuters will be queuing up to browse a shop on a busy platform on their way home from work?

Surely the only motivation is as to get people talking, which isn't neccessarily bad thing, but while it works in terms of press coverage there's serious doubt about translating this into sales.

In 2012 the Olympic Games are coming to London. They bring one of the most strict and heavily enforced set of trademark restrictions, sponsorship and marketing rule sets in the world.

In the UK we must follow The Olympic Symbol etc (Protection) Act of 1995 Failure to do so can be catastrophic for any brand or marketer.  

Not only are we talking about a possible criminal conviction for marketers if their brands misbehave, but a proposed amendment may reverse the usual burden of proof for brands in these criminal cases. 

There are lots of areas in which the IOC will look to police their brand and protect their very large sponsorship deals.

This blog post looks at AdWords because of the dangerous combination of “List A” and “List B”.  Simply put; you must not use two or more words from List A along with one or more words from List B.

The following AdWords samples are dangerous:

The trick is to avoid “Games” along with “2012”. Here are the two lists;

List A: Games, 2012, Two Thousand and Twelve, Twenty-Twelve.

List B: Gold, Silver, Bronze, Medals, Sponsor/s, London, Summer.

Of course, there are a number of points to highlight, the first being that I’m not a lawyer and this post is not legal advice.  

The second is that the IOC is likely, one hopes, to  be interested mainly in those brands  who may appear to be attempting ambush marketing without official sponsorship rather than picking on retailers who just happen to be trying to sell computer games in the summer of 2012. 

The challenge is that ambush marketing is prone to false positives. It may be the case that London 2012 or the IOC notice that quite a few branded t-shirts appear in the crowds for certain events. This could be coincidence but if the brands AdWords also appear to be in breach of the List rules then this may start to cause trouble. 

The Chartered Institute of Marketing has put together a PDF on Marketing and the Olympics and it is worth a read.

In addition to AdWords, I am especially concerned about affiliate marketing during the Olympics. Is it not clear whether brands will be held responsible for what their affiliates say. 

2011 has been an interesting year for social media. It started out with various small uprisings in North Africa, with social platforms an apparent catalyst for the full-on revolutions that followed thereafter.

We’ve also seen lots of great social campaigns this year, and many brands are now using the likes of Twitter and Facebook to provide great service to their customers. 

However, we also inevitably witnessed a number of foot in mouth incidents, and I thought it would be a good idea to compile them for your viewing pleasure.

I’ve sorted them into four categories: brands, agencies, people and platforms. Pull up a cushion…

BRANDS

Qantas

Where to start? Well, last year I wrote about the airline’s inability to do the basics of digital right (operational, service-based email). This year Qantas has been under the cosh somewhat, with strike action grounding its fleet of aircraft. Tens of thousands of travellers were affected, including Stephen ‘3.5m followers’ Fry.

So how did it use social media in this testing time? To launch a #QantasLuxury competition, that’s how. Qantas asked people to describe their dream flight. The beleaguered crowd responded exactly as you might expect.

Durex in misogynist joke shocker

Whoever is responsible for the condom brand’s Twitter stream in South Africa forgot that it wasn’t the 1970s with this tweet:

More followed, along with a lame apology, before somebody finally realised that this probably wasn’t a smart idea. It deleted the tweets in question. More background here.

Kenneth ‘doh’ Cole

As the world tuned in to Al Jazeera for its brilliant online coverage of the escalating situation in Egypt, this fashion brand thought it would be a good idea to hijack the #Cairo hashtag to plug a sale. People are dying! Buy more shoes! 

The social media trolling from Kenneth Cole didn't end there, sadly. 

GoDaddy shoots an elephant

CEO Bob Parsons went to Africa with a shotgun and the rest is history. ‘Problem’ elephant or not, some hobbies probably shouldn’t be videoed and uploaded to the internet for the world to see. 

Netflix vs stoner

It has been a tricky year for the video rental company, with customers in revolt and leaving en masse after a spate of bad decisions and even worse communications. The cherry on Netflix’s shitcake was the failure to own the Twitter account of a sub-brand it launched (and swiftly killed) called Qwikster. An “affable stoner” called Jason Castillo owned the @Qwikster account. Schoolboy error.

Chrysler Autos vs Detroit motorists

Chrysler Autos thought it would be a good idea to accuse the residents of Motor City of not being able to drive. Or at least one unfortunate individual who worked at the agency responsible for the Chrysler Autos tweets did. And yes, he was promptly fired.

@Easyjetcare’s lack of Twitter activity

I know that low-cost airlines don’t really care for offering outstanding customer service, but if you launch a Twitter account purely for the purposes of answering customer queries then why stop using it? It hasn’t responded to a customer in more than a month…

Braehead Shopping Centre

Not a place for family photographs.

AGENCIES

Sapient Nitro

"La la la, we wrote a song! La la la, we made a video!" Watch it here to understand why there was much guffawing in social land. More than 1,100 dislikes on YouTube vs 123 likes tells a story.

PHD Worldwide

Please, somebody, make it stop.

More background here, if you have the stomach for further analysis.

Grey New York

Hires plane to drag a banner with its corporate strapline over the Cannes Advertising Festival. Inserts a massive typo. Cue lots of irony-induced belly laughs, and a trending topic on Twitter. It was brilliantly effective in raising awareness, but the message itself left a lot to be desired.

Ketchum

The PR firm invited a bunch of food bloggers to dinner in a four star restaurant. Good start. It then served up an unusual twist: microwaved meals were used instead of the real deal. It also videoed the reactions of the unfortunate diners, and planned to upload them to YouTube. The bloggers were less than amused...

Bell Pottinger

Major PR firm in due diligence and bold claims shocker.

PEOPLE

Mark Davidson

I’m in the camp that believes that individuals should not employ ghostwriters to do their tweeting for them. All kinds of things can go wrong, especially when one of them turns rogue. More so when the 'client' is asleep at the wheel.

UPDATE: Apparently this was a big hoax. Mark says he wasn't using ghostwriters at all, he was simply creating mischief. Background here. Clearly I'm one of those bloggers who he wanted to "teach a lesson".

Ashton Kutcher 

Some things you can’t defend in private, much less in a public forum where 8m+ people are tuning in. Kutcher might have done a little more research before supporting Joe Paterno, a football coach who was fired after failing to report a paedophile to the police back in 2002. Kutcher has since left Twitter in the hands of his PR people. 

David Cameron, Louise Mensch & chums vs Facebook & Twitter

In summer, when England was aflame, certain wrong-headed politicians thought that social networks like Twitter and Facebook should be switched off. Madness, in my view, and a slippery slope. Presumably the TV channels would have been next, followed by the media at large. And then what? 

Suppressing social media platforms is so obviously not the answer. The disaffected have been rioting since time immemorial. Besides, social media platforms actually helped people to avoid the chaos, and a number of troublemakers have been jailed since summer for inciting riots on the likes of Facebook. 

Like brands, I feel that the powers that be should be tuning into Twitter to learn about sentiment, and to preempt issues, rather than trying to dictate terms over how it is used. Technology has always had it in the neck during civil unrest.

Gilbert Gottfried got fired

The voice of the Alfac duck thought it would be a good idea to tweet some jokes about the tsunami that devastated Japan earlier this year. Alfac axed him within an hour of discovering the tweets.

Jimmy Wales

There’s no doubt in my mind that Jimmy Wales is a good guy. But begging just isn’t cool, and his ceaseless ‘personal appeal’ for cash on Wikipedia is well past its sell-by date.

Here’s an idea: why not just put some contextual, unobtrusive advertising on Wikipedia to generate some revenue? Doesn’t it amount to much the same thing?

Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell’s ill-considered comments about social media and revolution helped to rocket propel him over a shiver of sharks. You don’t think Martin Luther King would have employed Facebook as a tool for raising awareness? Really? 

PLATFORMS

Google botches launch of Google Plus

I rather looked forward to seeing what Google Plus was all about, but when I tried to create my profile I was told that Google Apps For Domains customers were not supported. That’s right, Google prevented its 3m corporate customers from accessing Google Plus. I imagined that these were precisely the kind of people that it should have focused on, given what ‘Circles’ is all about.

I used a standard issue Gmail account to log into Plus, and last month Google finally opened up Plus for its customers. But now I have two accounts, and there’s no way to merge them easily. Talk about engineering apathy.

The slow, sad death of Digg

I continue to mourn the loss of a fantastic platform. Digg has unfortunately paid the price of annoying too many of its core users, and has never undone some of the bad decisions it made when rolling out Digg v4. Reddit, by contrast, goes from strength to strength.

So what did I miss? Let me know in the comments below. And here's hoping some of the more basic errors in judgement can be avoided in 2012!

Most of the digital professionals I know need to create at least one slideshow a year, whether for an internal meeting, a client briefing or a conference talk.

All too often I see slideshows that contain great content and ideas, but sometimes the slides are cluttered and confusing, or worse, boring. 

Thankfully help is at hand, to enable you to create wonderful slides in 2012.

The best presentations seem to have the following in common:

• Minimal text
• Attractive font choices
• Big and bold typography
• Smart use of icons
• Pictures and background textures
• A zero tolerance to typos
• 10 slides or less
• A focus on presenting key messages with clarity
• Lots of takeaways
• A little humour

All of the above helps to leave an impression that lives long in the memory.

There are plenty of other ways to help you optimise your slides. I've compiled a bunch slideshows on how to create standout slideshows. That's very meta, I know, but hey, the medium is the message...

7 tips to create visual presentations

Presentation Secrets

How to TEDx [Presentation Design Tips]

Slides That Rock

Boring to Bold: Presentation Design Ideas for Non-Designers

PowerPoint Porn: 100 Sexy Slides [Safe For Work]

20 Presentation Secrets You Won't Find Elsewhere

10 Commandments for Great Presentations

Making Presentations Better

Are you sharing the wrong slides?

7 Design Principles in Creating a PPT

I’ve been on record a number of times saying that I think the EC Directives relating to cookies are fundamentally flawed. We could make a parallel with the current UK/EU Euro ‘situation’ but let’s not go there. In the UK the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has a duty to enforce these directives and, as they say, “This isn’t going away. It’s the law.”

Yesterday the ICO released its updated guidance for UK website owners. You can download the PDF from the link in the news release. 

Given the tough task of interpretation, guidance and enforcement that is the ICO’s duty, I have to say that I think this document is a valiant and comprehensive effort given the task and I’d commend them for this. I would urge you to read it for the full details. It is clearly written and quite practical.

Below are some of my initial thoughts on reading this latest guidance.

Responsibility for educating users about cookies is being devolved to site owners.

My overriding feeling having read the report is that it is clear that whilst everyone, including the ICO, recognises that users don’t understand cookies (nor do they probably want to) and that there are, in my view and many others’, better solutions on the horizon (e.g. browser settings), we are about to hit a point where all website owners are going to have to deal with the inevitable pain of trying to educate users about cookies. 

I see no indication that any government, EU or national, or any particular body or association is going to take the (financial, mostly) responsibility to educate users at any scale. 

Indeed, it would be very hard to do so. However, there are parallels where this sort of task is being done e.g. the switch off of analogue TV in the UK which Ofcom is currently ‘marketing’ at scale. But the internet doesn’t deserve such treatment? 

So those of us who run sites are going to have to force it down our users’ necks and, maybe if we did it all at once, then the medicine will be bitter but swift and we can all move on. Maybe.

There are still some areas which appear near impossible for compliance.

The report mentions, almost in passing, that devices like mobile phones, internet-connected TVs and gaming consoles are covered by these directives and the same level of compliance is required as for websites. 

Not surprisingly the report doesn’t go into much detail as to how, practically speaking, you would be expected to implement such compliance on a mobile phone let alone a TV. It has got user experience train wreck written all over it. 

Also, third party cookies remain a nightmare from a compliance point of view. The report says ‘this is one of the most challenging areas’. You’re not wrong there. Even if one discounts the obvious challenges around cookies for third party analytics, targeting and so on, what about all those embedded YouTube videos, those embedded Slideshare presentations, not to mention any kind of widget, social log-in button, etc, all of which want to set cookies? 

The whole internet experience is becoming even more ‘networked’, embedded, atomised, API-ised. Trying to separate ‘first and third party’, even what constitutes a ‘single website’, is increasingly impossible. And, as with analytics tracking, there seems to be very little evidence to me that the users we’re supposedly ‘educating’ for some benefit really care or want these complexities explained.

Woah! The “that’s-going-to-be-interesting-to-see” bits

A few parts stood out for me that throw up a lot of big challenges:

• Essentially it seems that whilst there is a lot of talk about ‘shared responsibility’ (= unworkable), it is site owners who have to take responsibility for informing their sites’ users about third party cookies. The report even suggests to those third parties that they write into all their contracts that it is the site owners’ responsibility to ensure their users are informed, and consent to, the third party cookies. So I assume the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple etc. will all abrogate responsibility legally to the rest of us and it’ll be our job to explain what exactly Facebook is doing with cookies when our users log into our sites using Facebook Connect, for example? What fun.

• Non-EU sites will still be expected to comply where there are EU users using their sites. I’m fascinated to see what the likes of Facebook and Amazon have to say about this. Amazon famously ignored pressure to adopt Visa’s 3D secure. Will the Americans laugh in the face of the EU? And if none of these sites comply then what will that mean for the rest of us who will be freaking out our users with these ‘unusual’ messages? And is everyone confident they can even accurately identify ‘EU users’?

• ‘Device fingerprinting’ as a way of identifying a user is OK but cookies are not?! I’ve always thought that it has not been adequately clear what ‘personally identifiable information’ actually means. For me it means someone knows my name and where I live I guess. However, these Directives see cookies as ‘personal information’. I don’t. It seems, though, that device fingerprinting, is allowable. So are we just going to see a mass transition amongst tracking/analytics technologies away from cookies to device fingerprinting instead? Like the earlier moves from cookies to ‘Flash cookies’?

There are still plenty of grey areas or ‘loopholes’

Of course, I would not, could not, advocate site owners try to find ‘loopholes’ or ‘workarounds’. But it is necessary to try and see past the ‘could’, ‘might’, ‘in theory’ language that permeates this latest guidance to make decisions on what we actually do. 

The report does give a lot of very useful guidance on practical steps in section 10. None of this is that new and we have covered it before but it does outline the steps that organisations must take to be on the safe side of compliance. 

However, the grey areas or ‘loopholes’ that I noticed were as follows:

• A distinction is made between ‘subscribers’ (those paying for the internet connection) and ‘users’, where the former’s preferences might take precedence. A single ‘subscriber’ in a household, therefore, might be able to determine cookie opt-ins on behalf of the whole household? More interestingly, in a work-based internet usage scenario, “… it would not seem unreasonable for the employer’s wishes to take precedence". Given most usage of the Econsultancy site is at work, does this mean we’re a bit more exempt from compliance? (Intranets, by the way, are deemed to be exempt, at least by the UK’s ICO). 

• It is allowable to ask consent for *all cookies you use at once*. Yes, you have to explain what all those cookies are and what each one/type does. But we all know that no-one reads those explanations. People see an annoying tick box thing and probably make a fleeting judgment on whether to proceed or not. If the main message here is "Consent to cookies so we can save your settings" and the detail contains “useful information on the benefits to you of behavioural targeting” then you can imagine you’ll get a lot of consent. If, on the other hand, the main message conveyed is “Consent so we can target you behaviourally… honestly it’s a good thing, and, in any case, you’re getting this for free so we’ve got to make money somehow…” you can imagine consent levels will be less good. So essentially it appears possible to use ‘Trojan Horse’ cookies to sneak the more ‘evil’ ones through in the small print. Clearly this absolutely isn’t in the spirit of the guidance but appears allowable.

• In a similar vein to the above it appears you can retro-actively add new cookies, or alter the function of existing cookies, without re-seeking as explicit consent as you require the first time around. The language is vague here and clearly this would be a bit ‘sneaky’ but there is nothing explicit around requirements for re-consent if you change your cookies. We might see some ‘bait and switch’ cookie consent tactics going on?

• It is pointed out that where users log into your site it should be relatively easy to ask them for consent to cookies. Though this will need to be done *separately and in addition to* your usual T&Cs. So I’m seeing two checkboxes rather than one. This seems reasonable. However, it is much harder to get consent from anonymous users. And it is now no longer acceptable to take the user’s browser settings as ‘implied consent’. However, if you show some kind of message or notice (that needs to be suitably ‘distinguishable’, ‘prominent’, ‘positioned correctly’) and the user neither consents nor disagrees i.e. takes no action at all (which seems very likely) then this can be taken as implied consent. So I suspect we’ll be entering an era where there is some mechanic/user interface which is deemed ‘prominent enough’, that users will likely learn to ignore, and that will be enough to comply for non-logged in users. This will be important for a lot of publishers.

• “The level of consent required for any activity has to take into account the degree of understanding and awareness the person being asked to agree has about what they are consenting to.” Does this mean, for example, that Econsultancy’s user base of internet-savvy professionals would need a lower level of consent?

• The “Google Analytics Exemption”? The final page of the report contains guidance on the use of analytical cookies. Whilst it is clear that analytical cookies (for many this means Google Analytics) are covered by the directives, the wording here suggests that if you are using such cookies in a “non-intrusive” way (and Google have always been *very careful* not to associate Google Analytics with any personally identifiable information – indeed you are not allowed to under GA’s terms of use) then “.. it is highly unlikely that priority for any formal action would be given…”.  I read that as “we’ve got better things to do than go after people using web analytics”’. 

I think it is clear enough what organisations need to do, albeit there are still areas of compliance that are going to be very problematic from a user experience viewpoint.

Those hardest hit are large media properties that have mostly anonymous users and rely on technology-driven targeting for advertising optimisation as these are deemed the most ‘intrusive’ cookies. However, there are a number of ‘get out clauses’ for these players, most obviously the surprising apparent allowance of device fingerprinting technology for user identification.

What do you make of it all? Which areas concern you most? Let us know in the comments below...

OC&C Strategy Consultants recently produced these videos of Peter Fitzgerald in conversation. Each offers a snap-shot on innovation, future trends and some of the success stories from the world of online retail.

What is the most important element of your checkout sign in page?

Guest checkout

As I’ve blogged many times before, guest checkout is critical to conversion. Forrester Research found that 23% of consumers abandoned the checkout of the last site they shopped on that didn’t have a guest checkout option.

Though creating an account is usually not more daunting than checking out as a guest, it’s all about perception. The goal in web forms and processes is to minimize the perceived difficulty of completion. Character input is harder to do on mobile devices, therefore registration is a major source of friction. Making it very conspicuous that you offer guest checkout will reduce exit rates.

Note: The following tips your customer base prefers the guest checkout, and that the guest option is the primary call to action. If this does not apply to your business (no guest checkout option or high percentage of customers are account holders, such as B2B or B2E), simply substitute the sign in for guest checkout as the primary call to action).

Consider the fold

Walgreens has a guest checkout, but it’s presented last, after sign in and registration. At first blush, it’s unclear if there is a guest option.

ASOS offers both options above the fold, but the guest checkout link may be overlooked.

Competing calls to action

Users often begin typing in open fields without noticing what task they are completing, which is why many type keywords into email sign up fields on home pages or mistakenly try to register in a returning customer area. So it’s best to make your guest checkout call to action bold, juicy and top-center.

Crate and Barrel’s guest checkout button is bright and blue, but smaller than the sign in field. In essence, the open field is a competing call to action which is visually larger. Some users will overlook the button and just start typing.

Blue Nile places the guest checkout button front-and-center, but its black color could be tested against other colors, as it does not stand out as much as the big blue Sign In Now button, or the open fields. Eye tracking studies would reveal which area of the page attracts immediate attention.

Lowes smartly designs its sign in page with all 3 checkout options above the fold, with the primary call to action larger than the open input fields. One could argue the registration link is unnecessary, as a guest can save information in an account.

It’s tough to get confused with Home Depot’s simple presentation. It’s worth testing this approach against your existing design.

I’m also a fan of Amazon’s simple sign in approach. It’s worth testing this as well.

Testing ideas

The cart sign in page has one goal – an initiated checkout. Exit rates at this stage are the measure of the page’s effectiveness.

Testing the sign in page can be done effectively and quickly with user testing — you may not have enough traffic hitting the sign in page from mobile devices to support an A/B test at this time. Test for task completion, watch if/how users scroll, what errors they make, their comprehension of written instructions and the ease of error correction.

If you’re ready to jump into A/B testing, your focus should be on the layout (how you present your sign in options, similar to how you would test on your www site), clarity and persuasion of your copy (instructions) and design of your call to action buttons (labels, color, shape, size and placement.)

Next up: mobile checkout.

Looking for help with mobile commerce strategy? Contact the Elastic Path consulting team at consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how our ecommerce strategy and mobile strategy services can improve your business results.

One of the great things about online shopping is that it offers the opportunity to find just what you’re looking for, at a terrific price. But, shoppers often tell us they’re nervous about purchasing from unfamiliar online stores. Is this store trustworthy? How reliable is their shipping? Do they have good customer service? What happens if something goes wrong?

Today we’re announcing the launch of Google Trusted Stores, a new pilot program that helps shoppers identify online merchants that offer a great shopping experience.

The Google Trusted Store badge is awarded to e-commerce sites that demonstrate a track record of on-time shipping and excellent customer service. When visiting a qualifying store, shoppers can hover over the Google Trusted Store badge and see metrics on the store’s shipping and customer service performance.

 

To participate in the program, merchants voluntarily share data about shipments, and Google collects customer service metrics when shoppers seek Google’s help with a problem.

Are you working on an e-commerce project and in desperate need of some inspiration? Well, I think you will find Monster Meltdown e-commerce collection quite helpful. Not only does this inspiration set provide you with a heaping helping of ideas, it is broken down into 22 parts that cover the wide range of pages and issues e-commerce sites face.

You may already know that the entire collection is not free, but some of it is. And this is why I really wanted to take a minute to focus on the portion of the content that is free. This not only allows you to get a taste for what you will get with the full collection, but also serves as a valuable inspiration tool even if you can’t justify the purchase.

While the free content includes the digital books introduction, it also contains the first three topical chapters. These three articles on their own represent a huge set of inspiration. Let’s take a look.

E-commerce Site Design Styles

This is the first chapter of the E-commerce Meltdown collection and is a great introduction to the topic. In this article I break down all 120+ of the featured sites into various design styles. Since this looks at the topic of ecommerce from a very high level it is most likely the sort of inspiration that will be helpful early on as you build a new e-commerce site.

I find that e-commerce sites are most often categorized based on the type of product they offer. This is rather logical of course, but in my opinion somewhat limited. As you will find in this set the styles come from a wide range of industries. Even better it includes sites that do millions of dollars in business all the way down to tiny shops with much lower revenue.

The end result is a breakdown of beautiful e-commerce sites into various overall design buckets. Some really diverse ideas and samples can be found here for lots of fresh ideas.

Browse the free chapter Site Design Styles.

E-commerce Home Pages

Chapter three of the collection features e-commerce home pages. Given that home pages tend to get the most attention, and are a reasonable place to start, you will find that home pages is really where this book begins its journey.

In an effort to take a fresh look at the topic, this article breaks down e-commerce home pages into various layout formats and strategies. Again I find that most often we look at industries, not strategies. This is why I personally love this chapter. I really think it demonstrates that we can take a different look at an age old topic and draw some fresh new ideas.

Read the free chapter E-commerce Home Pages.

E-commerce Category Pages

What I really love about this collection as a whole is that it affords the opportunity to look at many of the less glamorous nuances of an e-commerce site; category pages are one such topic. While such a part of the industry might never warrant many write ups, this one provides a heaping helping of samples.

This free article breaks down over 100 e-commerce category pages into some common layout patterns. As you dig through you can easily see a very wide range of solutions to a given approach. As always, the idea is to inspire and challenge. I hope this set can really bring some fresh ideas to your everyday work on such pages.

Checkout the free article, E-commerce Category Pages.

Conclusion

As the first collection on Monster Meltdown, this set is a great first look at what is to come and hopefully the free chapters can really provide some fresh ideas on their own. And of course I really hope you find enough value in them to justify purchasing the full collection. Regardless I am happy to be able to publish content in the spirit of the original Design Meltdown for free!

As announced yesterday, Google will begin to encrypt searches made by logged in users, which also means that sites will no longer receive referral data from these searchers. 

This referral data, which reveals the organics search terms which led visitors to a particular webpage, is vital in assessing the performance of keywords, optimising landing pages and more. 

The decision to remove this source of data has been justified by Google on privacy grounds, citing the example of people using wi-fi in public places. Referral data from paid search ads will still be available, whether the user is logged in or not. 

There is plenty of anger at this move by Google, perhaps best summed up by the headline of Ian Lurie's post: 'Dear Google: This is War."

I've been asking some of our guest bloggers and search and e-commerce experts what they think of this move... 

What impact will this have for SEOs and web owners? 

James Gurd, independent e-commerce and marketing consultant

The negative impact is the hit to optimisation. SEOs and web managers rely on the organic keyword data to evaluate which keywords are performing well vs. those that aren't. They then can analyse landing pages and site paths to identify what might be putting off traffic for specific keywords, come up with hypotheses for testing and test different landing page/content solutions to improve engagement and conversion.

While this is done to add value to the website, it is achieved by improving the user experience. By removing the keyword data, you are effectively blind as to what is really happening. For example, if I have a landing page that has 5,000 visits each week but really low engagement and poor conversion, I can currently dig into the keywords and find out which ones are contributing to the poor stats.

With Google's new change, all I would see is one piece of data for generic keywords with no granularity. How can I optimise the website effectively with a reduction in data quality?

Kevin Gibbons, Founder, SEOptimise: 

It's difficult to say,but at the moment, assuming we won't be able to access keyword data and there's no way of working around this, it gives greater emphasis towards keyword research and rank tracking from an SEO perspective. As this is likely to be the most accurate of predicting the volume and value of traffic from individual keywords.

There are lots of questions still to be answered, such as how does this affect all analytics providers and tools such as Hitwise and SearchMetrics, which rely heavily on providing market share research at keyword level. So I think there's still a big learning curve ahead before we finally know the implications of what this means to our strategies and the best ways of working around this.

Matthew Curry, E-commerce manager at Lovehoney:

For online retailers, there are two issues:

1) Being able to track conversion rate and page path on an organic keywords basis is important, and I'm not convinced (at least, if the proportion of (not provided) entries increases), that I will be able to accurately do this.

Analysts, including me, expect this percentage to be higher than the single figures suggested by Google, and will therefore cast doubt onto the confidence of some results.

2) Not being able to see the UTM variable for keyword nixes a fair bit of innovative work, through either personalising content based on keyword or phrase (it is somewhat insulting that Google considers this practise to be primarily cloaking, rather than proving a more targeted experience), or in the case of MVT, being able to segment visitors based on inbound keyword in post-test analysis.

Teddie Cowell, Guava:

It's not good from an analytics point of view. The main loss is the referring keyphrase data. They will have a less clear view of how people arrived at their website. Things like bounce rate tracking may also be harder.

Rishi Lakhani, Search Marketing Consultant

It's downright wrong that Google is treating SEO and PPC data as two separate situations. Although SEO isn't technically 'paid for' media, businesses invest a lot in it, especially around user personalisation, and better user experiences.

At the same time, just like paid search, brands need to know what to invest in, and secluding this data isn't right. Google should either apply this broadly, to include paid search, or shouldn't block those referrers, as long as brands have taken care to protect user privacy. 

Malcolm Coles, Product Manager, digital at Trinity Mirror:

It has been quoted as being single digit percentages of logged in searchers, but I suspect this will be a higher figure for searches as you might expect logged in users to be more advanced or loyal users.

This figure is only going to go up as Google pushes G+. It's reasonable to assume that as more people sign up for accounts, they'll stay logged in to Google forever, pushing the percentage who are affected higher.

Dan Barker, e-commerce and online marketing consultant:

It damages the usefulness of every web analytics package on the market. It's doubly sad as, after many years of users asking, Google had just released a great update to Google Analytics that improved site owners' ability to understand what was happening in natural search. This doesn't knock that totally on the head, but it makes it less useful.

Google's #1 organisational value is "Focus on the user and all else will follow". But if you're a website owner, this change reduces your ability to focus on the user, as it means you understand less about how users are reaching your website.

Alex Moss, Search Marketing Consultant, Pleer:

This isn't good for SEOs and may even have a detrimental effect on Google later on. If SEOs don't know individual keywords that are performing, we won't know if specific landing pages will actually serve what the user needs.

As an example, if I have a page optimised for five keywords and four of them actually need to lead to a better quality page rather than the one they're landing on, how do we know what those terms are and how to give a better experience to the user?

Combined with the fact that more and more people are joining Google+ and therefore will be more inclined to sign in, this problem will only get worse over time...

Is this just about privacy? 

James Gurd

My view is that it's a cynical commercial decision by Google to ensure the only way you can get accurate keyword level data is by ploughing on with paid search. Yes you can get the data from Yahoo, Bing etc but what's the use when Google has over 80% market share in UK and in some countries like Holland, much higher.

For me there is no logic to the privacy claim. I am a logged-in user every time I use Google on my laptop, and the keyword searches I use contain no private data. What difference does it make to me if a web owner knows that today they had one visit from the UK on the keyword "exercise bike". Nothing. It can't identify anything about me because Google, quite rightly and because of legislation, doesn't pass on personal information. So how does moving to SSL protect privacy? It just doesn't stack up.

Kevin Gibbons: 

I think everyone's been caught by surprise a bit by this one. Normally Google's decisions, whether they are popular or not, aim to make things more relevant and easier for users, but I'm struggling to understand the reasoning behind this change. 

Obviously Google will often have a need to increase revenues when it comes to algorithm updates too, but they mainly look to improve things for users at the same time, at least in theory. Continuing Google's revenue growth patterns of previous years was always going to be a huge challenge, but if this is the key reason behind removing keyword data from analytics then it's a very bold and risky move in my opinion to say the least and could quite easily backfire.

We're currently running a poll about this on SEOptimise, and based on the results so far, a resounding 82% say that this is a revenue-focused change. 

Teddie Cowell:

I suspect it's to prevent other businesses monitoring Google's clickstream data, think about the Bing/Google spat earlier in the year. Clickstream data is a very important, often overlooked data source for search engines these days.

Matthew Curry:

It doesn't offer privacy, at least not from marketers. Searchers will open natural and paid results in tabs following a search, so ultimately the search term is still being passed. it "does" protect from software on the computer, or the network, or ISP, from pulling these terms. I imagine Hitwise is not too happy.

The way this has been framed is a little unnerving, Google should at least make clear its vested interest here, and it has made me distrust the word of Google somewhat.

Malcolm Coles: 

There have been privacy concerns raised around Google's cookie and referrer data. But what should have been a good privacy PR story just looks weird due to their decision to pass the keyword data for PPC not SEO.

I've yet to see a convincing reason for this that focuses on the customer. Paying advertisers want the data, but that's a different matter to the principle of doing something for privacy reasons for searchers.

Dan Barker:

The pitch is that this is about privacy, but there were lots of ways Google could have protected privacy to the same extent without hobbling web analytics tools.

I think the project probably started out as a pure 'privacy' thing, which is great, but the implementation of this also helps Google in other ways. For example, it makes it a little bit harder for SEOs to understand what's going on in Google. PPC was already more measurable than SEO. This further diminishes the measurability of SEO vs PPC.

Probably the biggest thing is that this hides data from its competitors. Over the last few years, Google has massively diversified outside of search. This change means Google themselves have as much data as they've always had, meanwhile their competitors (and everyone else) lose some of that knowledge.

Almost half of affiliates (46%) we surveyed now work full-time in the industry, up from 34% in 2009, which shows the increasing professionalism of this sector. 

These findings are taken from our third Affiliate Census, conducted in partnership with the A4u and sponsored by Commission Junction and Argos.

Here are a few highlights from the survey. 

More full-time affiliates

Interestingly, the proportion of hobbyist affiliates (18%) has only decreased by 2% from 20% in 2009. However, the proportion of part-time affiliates has decreased significantly from 46% two years ago to 36% in 2011.

While 15% of affiliates work as employees at someone else's company, the vast majority of affiliates (85%) are self-employed or own the affiliate publisher they work for.

Which of the following most accurately reflects your involvement in affiliate marketing?

Increase in affiliate commissions

The survey found that the average affiliate is driving significantly more revenue for merchants than in the past. 48% of affiliates are now driving at least £60,000 per year for merchants, compared with 31% in 2009. 

This increase in revenue from affiliates seems to be reflected in the increased commissions.

57% say their commissions have increased in the past year, while 19% of those enjoying this increased income say their commissions have more than doubled. 

By how much have your affiliate commissions increased in the last year?

Affiliate categories and linking methods

We asked respondents which affiliate categories were most important to them, in terms of the revenue generated. 

The most important category by far is content (58%), followed by blogs / forums and pay-per-click (level-pegging on 26%).

Which are the most important affiliate categories for you in terms of how much revenue they generate?