Florence is a Stardoll
Stardoll is a fashion portal aimed at 8-12 would-be girl-teens. The principal activity seems to be dressing celebrities with different clothes from a virtual wardrobe. Only Florence (9) is qualified to give me any insight into this world.
PB: What do you do on Stardoll?
FB: You click on a celebrity, or an athlete, or a singer and they’ll come up with lots of clothes next to them. You click on the clothes and drag them to on to the person. You can do Princess Diana, and royalty. You can dress Queen Elizabeth in casual clothes or rich clothes.
PB: How often do you visit the site?
FB: Quite a lot, normally after school. The site’s quick and I can do it before tea and after my homework. And I do it a lot in the holidays.
PB: Did you know there are clubs where you can meet other people?
FB: No, I haven’t discovered those. I just enjoy dressing up people.
PB: How did you find out about the site?
FB: It was from my friend, Sophia. We were having games in ICT and we were allowed to play on different sites, and we were allowed to play on Stardoll.
PB: How does Stardoll make money?
FB: I don’t know.
PB: Did you know you could pay to be a community member?
FB: No. I just thought you went on to dress up people. I thought there might be something else, but didn’t want to do it without my parent’s permission.
PB: How could Stardoll be better?
FB: I’d like fashion advice on what goes with what. And the men should be more interesting …
PB: Is Stardoll better than Club Penguin?
FB: With Club Penguin you can’t really do anything without being a member. With Stardoll there’s no real reason to pay to be a member.
PB: Thanks Florence.
<end of interview>
Great insight from Florence. I quite like the fact that Stardoll hasn’t pushed a commercial route for Florence. I suspect she will grow out of Club Penguin, and Stardoll will provide a teen-aspiring environment in due course.
Stardoll’s real achievement, like Club Penguin, is that their target audiences are buzzing offline. But unlike Club Penguin which has the hallmarks of an impermeable classic, Stardoll will need to constantly reinvent itself if it’s to remain ubercool.
Google Trends for Websites
The latest incarnation of Google Trends doesn’t just give you trend data on keyword searches, it also gives you great analysis of where else your target customers are going. Take a look at this analysis for MyMemory.
Not only will this analysis show where else your customers are going, but it also shows the keywords they’re also searching for. This kind of data usually costs lots of money (HitWise), and now you can have it for free. Enjoy!
How to achieve a 25% conversion rate on Google Adwords
Does this headline sound impossible to you? Generally speaking we consider a 10% conversion rate to be a good cross-industry average, but if you get everything just right, it’s possible to exceed 10%.
The key to achieving stellar conversion rates is rigorous testing and analysis of the data. First of all, make sure you’ve got the right tools to hand. You need Adwords Conversion Tracking set-up, and you need Google Analytics set-up, and then you need to link both accounts. When you’ve done all that, you’re ready to play.
Run your Adwords for a few days. Make sure your Adwords follow the usual rules. Now you’ll have some meaningful data to play with. Analytics will tell you exactly what’s going wrong with your landing page. The first thing I look for is the bounce rate. The bounce rate measures what percentage of visitors leave the moment they enter. You can expect a reasonable amount of organic traffic to bounce, it’s the nature of the web. But if you’re bouncing +50% of your paid traffic you’ve got one of three problems:
1. Your Adword is misleading. You’re offering a £7.99 Adword, but landing them at a £12 product page.
2. Your Landing Page is uncompelling - the visitor likes the Adword offer, but is unconvinced upon arrival.
3. There is a technical problem - 404 - page not found sites don’t sell much.
Your next port of call is the exit page analysis. Analytics will tell you how long people are spending on your site, where they enter and most importantly where they leave.
Back to 25% conversion rate on Healthspark. As you will recall this is a start-up store which is best described as in beta release. We’re doing loads of testing, and landing page analysis. We currently have PayPal and GoogleCheckout, but are waiting for the bank to provide a Merchant Account so that we can have an integrated payment system. My gut feeling was that payment was hindering sale conversion. This is often the case, customers are fickle, and a slow site, or anything slightly unusual will spook your potential customer.
However, Analytics revealed a high bounce rate on the Rosehip page, and it turned out that the default offer was putting customers off. The Adword itself gave a specific price offering of £7.99, but the options on the landing page defaulted to a 2 for 1 offer at £12.99. Switching this default option off lifted the conversion rate from 5% to 25% with a cost per customer acquisition of £1.50.
What this anecdote reveals is that micro-testing, and daily improvements on both your Adwords, and ecommerce platform are crucial if you want to win.
The joy of payment (gateway providers)
If you’re making money online, you could be raising revenue through Amazon Marketplace, eBay or affiliate traffic. It’s a doddle, you’ve got no exposure to credit-card fraud, no chargebacks, no settlement periods to worry about, you just collect a cheque or watch an electronic transfer go kerching in your online account.
But sooner or later you will make the jump into a full ecommerce store (get the book!), and when you do you’ll need to get a payment gateway provider (PGP). Well actually, you’ll need a few pieces in the jigsaw.
Last month, we launched Healthspark. Healthspark is an OScommerce site we built for £200, and it broke even on day 2. When we launched the site, I tried to bypass the PGP route, and went instead for just PayPal and Google Checkout (see earlier post on Google Adwords Checkout).
Both PayPal and Google Checkout are not PGPs - they’re complete payment solution providers. You don’t need an SSL certificate (the thing that gives you a padlock on your site). You don’t process credit cards, you don’t keep the data (in fact with Google Checkout you might not even get the email address of your customer).
The Paypal/Google checkout thing has worked well for HealthSpark in its infancy, until Google Checkout decided that the natural remedies for male problems might infringe its stringent policies. I don’t mind Google having anti-gun, anti-natural remedy policies, anti-everything but their response was strange. When Google complained, we pulled checkout. When we removed the offending items, Google wouldn’t re-instate Google Checkout until we’d put the buttons back (even though they didn’t work) on a LIVE SITE! Long story short, Google Checkout is back, but now we push on with a PGP.
If you want real control (and better credit card commission rates) you’ll need to process credit cards using a payment gateway provider (PGP). Your bank (Merchant provider) will give you a Merchant account. You then need to look at a PGP.
Your website can interface with the PGP in two ways. First (and best) it can transmit credit card details from a secure page (SSL - padlocked), the customer never leaves the site, and the PGP handles everything in the background. Second, you can pass your customer from our site to a branded page (hosted on the PGP’s servers), the payment is handled, and the customer returned to a thank you page on your site. This latter route is a good alternative, there are no SSL costs, no security risks, and the brand of your PGP can help secure the deal (e.g. NatWest).
Your bank will be keen to push their own PGP - most high street banks are now running their own PGPs, but look at the small print carefully, you need to consider commission rates and payment terms.
The joy of payment is a joy often deferred, whichever route you choose.
Chitika Premium Units - AdSense watch out!
I’m really impressed with Chitika’s behavioural targeted Ads. The Ads show in the context of the blog, and only show when the blog/content is directly relevant. This makes AdSense look like a scatter-gun approach, and surprisingly ham-fisted.
Chitika’s model is based on much less traffic, but it is highly targeted. Moreover, the quality of the click is higher, because the traffic hasn’t been irritated by lots of other irrelevant advertising. This is a bright future for context advertising - where you only get the advertising you want.
Nice to see Google’s monopoly being challenged. If I was Google, I’d do even more with Google Checkout, and make sure that adverts are only served to those likely to buy, so that Ads are served not just on context but on your previous buying patterns. Then you’d only get really useful ads when you need them. You don’t need a holiday ad when you’ve just got back from holiday.
You can see the Chitika Premium Unit in action on this page, by clicking http://baldysblog.com/#chitikatest=mortgage
What is robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a standard file that should be installed at the root of your website. It tells search engine crawlers what to index in your site (you might have folders with protected content in, that you don’t want appearing in Google).
You can verify it exists and whether it’s working at Google Webmaster tools.
Google Analytics Data loss
You may have seen this recently on the Google Analytics login page:
System Message: Analytics Processing Delay from April 30th to May 5th
Google Analytics experienced a data processing error from April 30th to May 5th. Almost all of the data has been recovered and is currently being reprocessed. The recovered data will be reflected in your reports within a few days. Please note that a small percentage of data, particularly in the area of e-commerce reporting, was not recoverable from those dates.
The trouble with free software is that you can’t really complain when you get this kind of loss, it just goes with the territory, and at least Google are sorting it out, almost. The worrying bit is the loss of e-commerce data, because these are the sites who live by this data.
I love Analytics. I’ll do a post shortly on how to get the most of its impressive integration with Adwords, but I can’t help but feel frustrated (and a bit paranoid) about how Google handles the data. For example, when you set-up conversion goals, you won’t see any real conversion data for 24 hours. Why is this? Are Google’s servers so slow, they can’t cope with the request for 24 hours? Nope, they’re slow enough to make sure you have to experiment with your campaigns to achieve success. Experimentation = Adspend.
Moving to WordPress
I’ve been blogging at Blogger.com for nearly two years. In general, I’ve enjoyed using Blogger.com. Its template management is easy, and I’ve enjoyed reasonable Google visibility. However, when my friend, Gary Kelly, drew my attentions to the possibilities of WordPress and TypePad, I decided it would be worth giving WP a whirl.
Gary correctly points out that the problem with the free Blogger.com is its spam content has hindered its search engine value. Many pro-blog consumers use ‘-blogspot.com’ to remove spam from their results (click here if you’ve no idea what -search term means).
Moreover, a recent study showed that 75% of Blogspot blogs are spam. If you’ve paid for a domain and hosting, logically, the author is more likely to be publishing with intent. Interestingly, this is a nice little throwback to the offline publishing world, where the high marginal costs of production have acted as a quality filter.
Moving to WordPress couldn’t have been easier. Just choose a hosting company with CPanel and Fantastico. I used BlueHost. Within minutes of registering the domain Baldysblog.com, I had clicked Fantastico and installed WordPress. Minutes later I’d imported all of the blog entries, and comments from Baldyblog.blogspot.com using WordPress’s import tool. I couldn’t be more impressed with BlueHost. For $6.95 per month (£3.50), I can host up to 5 domains, and I can install anything I like from the Fantastico interface. The next evening, I registered a new domain with BlueHost, and assigned WordPress to the new domain (naturalhealthlibrary.org - a new e-zine traffic generator for HealthSpark).
WordPress as a blogging tool is infinitely better than Blogger.com. Not least because the WYSIWYG works so well on Safari and Firefox. Frankly the Mac support on Blogger.com is embarrassing. But for me the real winner on WordPress is Brian Gardner. Brian Gardner’s WordPress themes transform WP from a blogging tool to a seriously powerful web content engine. His templates are extremely versatile, and as naturalhealthlibrary.org demonstrates, very effective tools for content propagation and SEO visibility.
The SEO value of WP is self-evident. Take a look at the category listings in the right-hand side-bar, and then look at the tag system. Plus, WP produces really precise and relevant page titles. I’ve already seen a significant increase in traffic following the move. However, the Blogger.com legacy has left me with a few problems that I’ve only partially solved.
First off, if you do the move to WP you’ll be stuck with duplicate content in the old blog. Ideally, you don’t want to delete the old blog because of all the inbound linking. Also, the WP import routine doesn’t import images, it just maps to the old images at your old blogger.com site.
I’ve removed the front page content to a new blog advertising the move to Baldysblog.com, and I’ve truncated recent posts. Ideally, I should truncate all posts, and move all images to the new domain. Anyone who can do this programatically, will earn their place in OS heaven.
Firefox 3 - for a more discriminating browser
In a recent blog, Seth Godin identified Firefox users as a breed-apart from other Internet users (Why downloading Firefox is like getting into college). Seth’s contention is that any user who has actively sought a browser apart from the staple Internet Explorer, or Safari on the Mac, is prepared to take risks, is techno-savvy, and is a power-user (and more likely to be a power-sneezer).If Seth’s right, downloaders of Firefox 3 are in a super-league. FF3 is currently in beta, but what a beta! It’s robust, it’s fast, it definitely beats Safari. Mac users can’t be weened off Safari, because it’s so beautiful - FF 2 was just plain ugly. But FF3 is a different browsing experience. Smart bookmarks, predictive URL viewing as you type, and best of all; a really Mac OSx metallic interface.But you know what’s really amazing? Firefox is not produced by an Operating System manufacturer, as a thinly-veiled land-grab product, it’s a completely free open source application built for the benefit of mankind. Internet Explorer and Safari are not free, they are subsidised by hardware and software giants. Firefox 3 is superior, it’s free, and there are no strings attached.My gut feeling is that paid for software is disappearing, and rightly so. Mass market software is too sophisticated to be produced by a monolothic software house, with profit at heart. The collaborative efforts of the open source community are infinitely more powerful and productive. I’d go further, anything that has a zero marginal cost of production, must tend inexorably towards zero. You’ll see it in video (YouTube), music (Napster etc), and all software.
Great mash-up
You’ll like this: Addictomatic mashes up Ask.com, Technorati, Addicto top blogs, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, Twitter, and more all on one page. No faster way to see what the web’s saying about anything. Bet Google buys them.