Shopping around the web these days has become a frustrating affair. Not only is Google serving up obscure blogs on the first page, some of the largest players like Target seem to have forgotten that an excellent shopping experience is what turned them into a household name.
For example, try shopping for bath towels on Target.com. Type in “Fieldcrest towels,” in Google Search and Target comes up first place in the organic listing. Notice too that Target has paid for a PPC ad for “Fieldcrest towels.”
However, once you get to the website, good luck outfitting your bathroom. The towel is supposed to be available in a choice of colors: white/black stripe, white/grey, white/brown, white/green and white/taupe stripes. Yet, only the black stripe photo is displayed for all of the examples. Moreover, the two white/black stripe towels that are pictured are different. One has two stripes and one has four. So not only is the customer unable to see the color so that they can match it to their sea foam rug, they also haven’t a clue as to what design they are buying.
As the Internet focuses on Social Media, photographs become increasingly important. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ posts share better with great photographs. Unlike video or text, photographs are immediate, beautiful and engaging. Unfortunately there are ownership issues surrounding photographs on social media that every photographer, marketing manager or business should be aware of.
The issues related to copyrights are clearly listed in the Terms of Service agreements on every social media site. Buried in these lengthy, complex agreements are terms that are designed to protect the social media site. Each agreement is a little different and they are updated and changed periodically.
On most Social Media sites when materials with intellectual property rights like photographs are posted the poster is granting a non-exclusive sub-license of the photograph to the social media site. The sub-license is free and it allows other users of the site and the social media site itself to turn around and then use or license the photo for free or for profit. The photographer (or owner of the exclusive license) retains ownership of the photograph but only in a non-excusive capacity once it is posted.
Why do these sub-licenses matter?
From a professional photographer’s perspective by posting a photo on a social media site they are basically removing the ability to ever sell the exclusive right to the photograph down the road. Should the photographer’s work ever become valuable both the social media site and any other entity that has acquired the photograph through the site can use it as they see fit for profit without owing royalties to the photographer. In the case of Google+ this license if forever, called an “irrevocable” license.
Here is the TOS for Google+
“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.
You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.
You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.”
Google+’s user agreement is the most extensive of all the social media sites in that it is irrevocable. The forever nature of the license means that under no circumstances can the poster of the photographer ever recover exclusive rights to the photograph.
Like any other art form, web design is completely subjective. A web site might look like a thing of beauty to one person, and a complete mess to another person. There is, after all, no accounting for taste, and everyone’s tastes are different. However, there’s more to a web site’s design than merely its appearance. A web site design can have an enormous impact on conversions and even the most subtle design decisions can have a big effect. For example, a user might be more inclined to click on a green “Buy Now!” button more so than a red one. Finding a good balance between a site that looks good and a site that performs well in terms of conversions can be a real challenge.
How then can something as subjective as web design be analyzed in an objective manner to find the most effective design? One widely technique is A/B testing. In a nut shell, A/B testing sets up two or more control groups: Group A will see one version of the site, while Group B will see another version. This way various design elements can be tested and compared.
But is A/B testing really the best way to determine the most effective web design? Perhaps not. This excellent blog post by Steve Hanov suggests another method for finding the best design. Best of all its fully automated. Set it, forget it, and the page will “learn” which elements result in the most conversions.
In his post, Steve outlines the epsilon-greedy algorithm, also known as the multi-arm banded problem. Given a set of variations for a particular page element, the algorithm can make an ‘educated’ decision on which element to show based on its past performance. The best performing page elements are displayed the most frequently.
The algorithm records of the number of times a particular page element was displayed, and the number of times the element resulted in a conversion. However, the algorithm will also adapt to change. If a page element’s conversions begin to decrease, the algorithm will start to adapt and display different variations. The best part of this is that you can set up different variations of page elements one time, and let the computer do the work of figuring out which variations are the most successful. Pretty neat stuff!
Armed with this knowledge, I set out to try a few experiments with it, the result of which is Robo_AB_Tester, a small PHP class library I created which implements the epsilon-greedy algorithm. You can give it a try here.
Robo_AB_Tester tries to abstract away as many implementation details as possible and create a simple interface that is, hopefully, easy to integrate into a PHP based website. Once it is set up, it will:
For more details, see the demo page.
As I began to post a recent article from a blog on one of our SEO Moves Facebook pages, a little message popped up informing me of a new way to promote my business online. After clicking to “Learn More” I have found that Facebook has just released a new option to “Promote your Post” for all business pages that have more than 400 likes. They also came out with a handy guide explaining how to use this new functionality titled “Promote Your Page Posts“. Here is a screenshot of what the initial promote option looked like for me:
Based on the information provided in the guide for using this feature, the higher you set your budget, Facebook will automatically attempt to determine the number of users that would be reached by your promotion. Once you start the promotion, you are able to pause it, adjust it, and resume it at your will. You can also target the promotion to users by location or language. This will cause the post to only show promoted for users that are from the set location or language and can be helpful for a regional company that would like to promote a sale or special offer in only one particular area. The entire process is described in the guide as:
News reports like this one from globalpost and businessinsider have been popping up over the last couple days reporting that Google Chrome has become the worlds most used web browser as reported by StatCounter. Immediately when I heard this I thought that there was no way this could be true so I went to check my own Google Analytics Data…
Google Analytics Browser Data on Car Rentals over the past 30 days:
Google Analytics Browser Data on Housewares for the last 30 days:
As you can see, chrome is not even close to catching up to internet explorer in any of these verticals. To make sure I wasn’t going crazy I ran some reports on Travel in Germany, The Middle East and Spain.
Last night while browsing Facebook’s iPhone app, a little message popped in at the top of my News Feed informing me of a new Facebook iPhone app devoted to managing the pages you are an admin on all from one place.
While the number of smartphone users continue to grow daily and as social media interaction is developing into a major factor in the credibility of “great content” in Google’s eyes; I decided to head over to App Store and give it a try.
