As a manager of online marketing and analytics, the most important role I play in my company is to make sure we get the most out of our online marketing budget, maximizing:

• Allocation of resources in the most profitable markets and channels.
• Continuous optimization of our page and enrollment flow to ensure that the people we get through the door convert to paying customers.

The 4 practices I’ll discuss in this article helped us increase our conversion rates. Before explaining what these practices are, let me give you a sense of my company and my specific role.

Univision is the largest hispanic media company in United States, owning three major TV stations: Univision, Telefutura and Galavision and dozens of radio stations. I’m a member of the Business Development team at Univision Enterprises. Our mission is to work collaboratively across Univision to assess, incubate and launch new and innovative businesses that enhance the loyalty and trust we have with the U.S. Hispanic consumers and deliver asset value to our sponsors/owners. I am primarily focused on the online marketing campaigns for all these new products.

The product and website I’ll discuss in this blog is the Univision Tarjeta Prepaid Card, which is a prepaid card for unbanked and underbanked hispanics in US, launched 3 years ago. The product has been a success, exceeding our original goals quarter after quarter. Our current site is located at www.univisiontarjeta.com and it is basically a conversion-optimized site, separate from our major media site www.univision.com.

Here are some practices that helped us achieve outstanding results in our conversion rates, this is just part of the insights I will be sharing in my presentation at the Conversion Conference in Chicago later this year.

1. Re-design
One major problem in business development units is that corporate funding and support can sometimes be limited, especially when the product is new and it is not yet a proof of concept. Ideally once you get enough funding and support the first thing you should do is to get the most qualified people for the job and re-design the website. When I started working at Univision, our analytics weren’t able to analyze any behavioral/statistical data. So we used best industry practices and user labs. In the coming months, we re-designed our website to address major issues such as:

1. Fix analytics for accurate traffic analysis and user behavior
2. Create a mobile version of the site
3. Simplify enrollment from a three step process to two
4. Optimize the toggle between Spanish and English versions of the site
5. Identify what potential customers wanted to see on the homepage and what information was more useful for them
6. Implement rotating hero messages and videos on the homepage.

Pictured above is the site before and after for both desktop and mobile versions. It is interesting to note that rotating messages in the home page and prominent videos placed on strategic parts of the site turned out to be distracting and unnecessary. In user labs people expressed great interest in these items, but in reality when we launched the site, those items were barely used and didn’t help to increase conversions. The takeaway here is that sometimes what people say is not what people do. Further down on this blog I’ll give you some advice on how to overcome this issue.

2. Testing

When optimizing a site redesign is the place to start. Rely on data if you have it, and if not rely on the best industry practices and user labs. But never, and I mean NEVER stop there. Once your analytics are in place and the traffic to your site is growing it is the perfect time to move to the second optimization stage: testing.

Testing can help you identify major issues, while vetting your design, images, placement of different elements and copy. Nothing else can improve your conversions more than designing a good testing plan and then acting on it. At Univision we implemented an A/B/C testing for our homepage that helped us shape the way our website looks today. We were able to identify irrelevant elements, test images, messages and call to action items. Below the the A/B/C testing we performed. After testing all three options the winner was version C. Some of the contributing factors that helped this version perform better were:

1. Image of the card, call to action, hero image, and money back guarantee seal all placed above the fold
2. Recognizable image of Univision talent that helped us maintain the brand connection and the level of trust with our brand.
3. Removal of rotating messages, videos and other non-relevant items for conversions on the main page

Version A | Version B | Version C

3. Deep dive in analytics

As I’m sure many of you know Google analytics is a great tool and can provide you quality information about your site and your audience, but as you grow you will need more sophisticated and complementary tools that can help you optimize your site at the micro level. At certain point Google Analytics is not good enough to help you identify opportunities that can improve your conversions by 1% or 2%. The difference may seem small, but when you are talking about thousands of visitors per day, these micro improvements really count. The job of a good online marketing ninja is to squeeze that extra 1% to 2% of your conversions. Below I’ve included a list of tools we employed to identify these micro optimization opportunities.

Clicktale: A tool that helps to fill in and respond to some weaknesses in Google analytics. The tool will allow you to see and analyze:

• Heatmaps: To see where people are clicking, where they are moving their mouse or fixing their attention
• Enrollment form performance: Unlike Google analytics, clicktale offers you this to users out of the box. Clicktale helps analyze how much time people are spending to fill out your form, and where they are dropping off. I have noticed some inconsistencies where radio buttons are present, otherwise clicktale does an excellent job analyzing enrollment forms.
• Recording user sessions: Clicktale will allow you to record dozens of user sessions without users even realizing they are being recorded. This is an incredible tool that allows you to see real visitors to your site interacting with your content. This tool allows you to avoid data being skewed when the opinions of the most outspoken members in the session can influence the opinions of other participants.

Thanks to this tool we were able to identify small conversion optimization opportunities on our homepage and in our enrollment funnel, here are few of the things we were able to accomplish:

• Removed menu navigation items from the enrollment form
• Removed downloadable PDF enrollment form, from the web based enrollment form

Additional changes we are currently considering include:

• Relocation of social media elements on the homepage.
• Reorganization of FAQ on the homepage
• Removal of login to “my account” at the middle right of the page

Tableau: Tableau is a business intelligence tool that can help you visualize Google Analytics data in a totally different way. Most of the time the reports in Google Analytics are presented as raw data, and it is difficult to get any insight out of it. Information is divided into three layers: Raw Data, Staging Data (or data analysis) and Presentation Data (or dashboards). What Tableau offers you is the ability to browse that data and find the most relevant information quickly. In the image below you can see conversion rates by city on a map where highly populated hispanic areas are highlighted in purple. You can also see the conversion rate for the entire US. To compare conversion rates for each state vs overall conversion rate. The beauty of Tableau is that you can navigate month-by-month, and that all numbers update in real time.

• The tools Tableau offers helped us to identify that conversion rates for our product were much higher in Florida than on any other state in US.
• We were also able to see where our strongest markets were located, and as a consequence, we were able to focused our online marketing efforts in those areas.

Custom In-House Solutions
Our product is a prepaid card where we make money where people start using the card. We profit from signature purchases, ATM usage, loads and monthly maintenance fee. So the ultimate metric for our business is CPL (Cost Per Load). Unfortunately, this was a metric that we were not able to track using Google Analytics or any other tool, so what we did was to develop an in-house solution that allowed us to track loads per each online marketing channel: Paid Search, Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Referrals and Direct/SEO traffic. The solution involved some custom programming on our site and at the backend of our merchant processing provider.

4. Continue testing and optimization at the micro level

Once your site is optimized and performing well, it is still no time to rest and think that your job is done. Trends change, competitors emerge, consumer behavior evolves, so it is very important that you continuously optimize at the micro level. While you won’t see vast improvement, but you will see improvements that matter.

At Univision Tarjeta we continue to launch new homepage testings and remove additional items from the enrollment form that are distracting from conversion.

Last but certainly not least, don’t forget to optimize your website for mobile visitors, traffic from mobile visitors is growing at incredible speeds and can bring you great benefits going forward.

The conversion optimization process is a pyramid, and works exactly the opposite of funnels path in conversions. Conversion optimization usually begins at a broad level and then narrows as you complete every step of the process.

The four step process I described above helped us to increase our conversion percentage (Conversion / Start Conversion) by 2.8%. The more sophisticated you get the more refined the improvements you can achieve. Assuming that prospect visits to your site will grow over time, any small improvement in conversion will have more impact on the bottom line. Just follow these simple steps and I’m sure no matter what stage you are at, you will be able to achieve more. I’ll be speaking at the Conversion Conference in Chicago where I’ll be sharing more conversion optimization tips and creative techniques to get the most out of your retargeting campaigns in paid search. Register now and take advantage of the early bird discount.

Visualization data is one of the key elements to understand information and make informed decisions; Google as the world’s biggest player in organizing has taken the lead in making these tools available for the public and is pushing this effort even further with initiatives such as the Google’s Data Viz Challenge.

Google has already integrated visualization data tools in some of its main products such as Google AdWords, Google Analytics and Google Docs.

Google partnered with WhatWePayFor.com and made the data for entire federal budget for the past several years available to the public to make into visualization. WhatWePayFor has made their data available via an API to contestants who want to take a crack at visualizing this data, and Google is offering a $5,000 prize to the best visualization. If you want to participate make sure you submit your entry by March 27, 2011.

Google is also showcasing some inspiring examples that you can see below… data visualization is on its early stage and the future is promising!

Samples

• When income grows, who gains?
• Years of schooling in Latin America vs Schooling in US
• Where does my money go UK?
• Where does my money go US?
• Job Loss in US from Jan 2007 to Aug 2010

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, Web Marketing Manager at Univision; the largest Hispanic TV & Media company in US. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

Everything has to do with the period of time you are looking at, to explain the phenomenon better I have taken a real example from the data of one of my clients. On this example you can see that the number of “Absolute Unique Visitors” for the month of October 2010 is 38,472 and for the same period the number of “Unique Visitors” is 41,240; on this specific case a difference of 6,71%. Why this happen? Is not suppose to be the same number in both places? What is the difference between “Absolute Unique Visitors” and “Unique Visitors”?

Let me explain this step by step… first at all the number of “Unique Visitors” will be ALWAYS larger that the number of “Absolute Unique Visitors”, the difference could be very small or very large depending what kind of website you have. If your site has a lot of recurring customers (banks websites – where people go on a regular basis to check balances) this difference can be pretty big, 20% or more. If your site doesn’t have any kind of recurring users this difference may be very small.

This is why…

Let’s say (as this example) you consider 1 month data range for your report, if you go to visitors (Google analytics menu on the left) you will see that” Absolute Unique Visitors” is 38,472 but if you create a custom report and add “Unique Visitors” as one of the “metrics” you will see that you will get a greater number 41,240 on this case… so which number will you believe? 38,472 or 41,240 well the truth is that both of them are accurate, here the explanation:

Click To Enlarge

Click To Enlarge

“Absolute Unique Visitors” is the number of “Unique Visits” you have in that period of time, on this case Oct 2010. In other words if a user log in to your site today and then in a week and then in two weeks, that person will be counted as ONE unique visitor for the month. That’s why this number will be always the smaller one. No matter how many times a user visit your site, if they log from the same IP address they will be counted as just one visit ALWAYS.

“Unique Visitors” is the number of unique visitors cut by the day, in other words… if somebody visit your site 3 times a day for 10 days, that person will be considered ONE “Absolute Unique Visitor” for that month but 10 “Unique Visits” will be actually counted towards the “Unique Visitor” total (3 times per day = ”1 Unique Visitor a day” x 10 days). So basically what Google analytics does is that adds up Unique Visitors for the day to give you a total “Unique Visitors” for the month.

Few days ago Google finally gave Google URL Shortener its own URL: http://goo.gl. The site works similar to any of the shorteners out there, but I found a cool feature that allows users to track referrals to their sites from off line channels. It is the integration of QR codes.

The way it works is like this, let’s say you have a long URL you want to make short: http://syndikomm.com/blog/2010/10/the-3-most-important-things-i-have-learned-from-%E2%80%9Cthe-social-network%E2%80%9D-movie/ then you go to http://goo.gl and enter your url on the URL Shortener field, automatically Google gives you a shorter URL address that people can use to go to the same content: goo.gl/sfoF, people do this for many reasons but two of the most important ones are:

1. They can send long URL’s through twetter or othermini blogging sites where characters are limited to a very small number (140)
2. They can track different channels individually and identify how people is reaching their blog, article or news. These shortener services give you reports of visitors to your site from the short URL.

The cool feature now is that Google integrates also QR Codes, so you can actually print the code on any publication or advertising piece and people with smart phones and the proper app (ie: QR reader) can get the page right into their phones without typing a single character… awesome!!

Thanks Google! really like these guys…

Ideas worth nothing…

In November 2003, as a student at Harvard University, Zuckerberg was approached by three fellow students (Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra) to build Harvard Connection, a website that later became ConnectU, a new idea of a set of interlinked social networks for people at a single college. Zuckerberg did some work for them, but then launched his own website — what’s now known as Facebook. It is true (as it is shown in the movie) that Mark Zuckerberg didn’t come up with the idea, but it is also true that the Winklevoss brothers didn’t have the experience, knowledge  and capabilities of building this site on their own… well… the truth is that IDEAS WORTH NOTHING, all that matters is execution and Mark Zuckerberg was exactly capable of doing what the Winklevoss never did. I’m not talking only about the technical part, which obviously was Mark Zuckerberg strength, he was also capable of distribute and sell the idea to other colleges and universities and he also managed to reach investors and create new ideas to build something bigger and stronger that the Winklevoss ever did.

Connections is all that matters…

Never sign a document without reading it….

The game of the moment is how to rank first in Google and other search engines, years ago it was an easy task, in fact so easy that a decade ago just manipulating the metatags you would be able to achieve highest positions on search engines; unfortunately with the Google algorithm getting more and more savvy every day, this is not the case anymore. Anyway it doesn’t mean it can stop you from appearing first in search engines, if you are creative enough, even if your website sucks you can get high rankings on Google and other search engines (or at least high traffic from search engines to your site). Some of the techniques I describe here are based on my experience working with different clients from products to services. I hope this article gives you a better understanding of how search engines work and how you can take advantage of them even if your website sucks.

The Problem Ranking First On Search Engines

The problem to rank first on search engines is that you have to have two things that are not easy to achieve without honest hard work, the first one is link popularity and the second one is relevant content. Even though Google analyzes about 200 factors to rank your site, undoubtedly these two are the most relevant.

Honest Link Popularity is difficult to achieve because it doesn’t depend on you, it depends on the criteria of the many users who arrive to your site (and think that your information is so useful and relevant that is worth to link to). These links are difficult to get especially when the source of the information is an authority. It is not the same to have an incoming link from the New York Times than having an incoming link from a farm directory in spammyland. Google qualifies authority sites from 1 to 10, the higher the ranking the more relevant the link, and the more relevant the link, the better the influence in your search engine ranking positions. You cannot go to link farms and create 1,500 links in a day and think that will help you… it is not! and Google already knows those sites are not worth a penny, they also know that you cannot go to the New York Times and ask a journalist specialized in your topic to write an article about you, including a link, search engines are savvy, more than you can even imagine.

The second problem to rank high in search engines is to create relevant content… if you create your site 10 years ago and you have keep it that way since then, you will never achieve the same positions of sites that are updated regularly with new articles and media content every day. The more content and the better quality of it, the better for your ranking in search engines. Good content is difficult to create because it requires a good knowledge of your industry, most of the time much better knowledge than your competitors; and it also requires a lot of dedication and resources, if you are going to write the articles you need to have the time, if you don’t you have to pay qualified people to do the job, which most of the time is not cheap.

So if you don’t have good link popularity and good content what are the options of your sites to appear first on search engines? NONE!… that’s the reality, but not the end of the world, there are some legal workarounds that you can use and benefit from this traffic even if your website sucks.

You can appear first on search engines even if your website sucks; in order to do that you need to take any of these two approaches: Ranking first on search engines by using “Universal Optimization” or Ranking first by just being creative and “implementing legal workarounds”.

Ranking first on search engines by using “Universal Optimization”

In May 16 2007 Google introduced “Universal Search” that basically blends results from news, video, images, local, products, books and most recently social networks and blogs. So if your site doesn’t’ rank first from your keywords of interest why don’t you implement a “Universal Optimization” strategy and pay more attention to other media content in your site (other than text) with better possibilities.

For instance… if you search for “Learn English” in Google, you will see that the 4^th result is a video commercial from a small local English school in Netherlands called “Soesman Language Institute”, it is not their website, which is far away from appearing in search results by these terms. The video that has been seen more than 6’000.000 times since released in December 1998. It is a powerful marketing tool and has allowed them to get a great position on search results (for a better competitive keyword) just by focusing on different media rather than text.

You can do the same by focusing in news, images, products, blogs or social media, with “Universal Search” opportunities are open to implement a real strategy for “Universal Optimization” and get stronger on areas where your competition may still be weak.

Ranking first in search engines by implementing “creative workarounds”

If your website sucks and you are not definitely close to achieve top rankings in search engines you can be creative and work in different fronts, here are just some:

1. Vertical Sites.

One of my clients had a difficult time ranking for their keywords of interest: “Learn English In New York” the strategy was to find a vertical site (specialized just on this industry) with top rankings already and include a profile page of my client there. The result was fantastic I found a company specialized just in language courses abroad called abroadlanguages.com on this website we created a complete profile page under the category “Learn English in New York”  at that moment there was more information on this profile page that in the whole entire website of my client. As a result my client got immediate rankings on Google because where people was searching for “Learn English In New York” this profile page was appearing in positions 5 to 10, but always on the main page. All student request received through this page were received from my client, in average 20 serious inquires per day. The lesson here is that you can benefit from organic rankings by using vertical sites that allow you to generate profile pages from your business.

2. Retail Stores & Shopping Engines

One of my clients produces and sells convertible strollers for babies, and they were having a really hard time ranking for their keywords of interest “bicycle baby carrier” after doing the analysis of the competition and analyzing the sites that were getting good rankings for these keywords we concluded that 5 of the 10 first results were resellers other than manufacturers. These resellers were on the following positions: Amazon:1,2; Walmart: 4; Sports Authority: 8; Models: 9; Tiptoeturtle:10; and 2 more sites were from shopping engines: Nexttag: 5 and Epinions: 6

That left MyZigo (my client) with just three positions available in an environment dominated for big players. Based on this analysis I recommended them to place their products on retail stores and shopping engines instead trying to rank on the top ten results for these keywords; the result couldn’t be better, if today you search for these keywords in Google, the stroller of MyZigo appear first, even with a thumbnail picture on the left side, the site is not theirs but they are definitely benefiting from these sales, the site at the top is a retailer store called www.jazzygearsports.com who is now carrying MyZigo products. By using this strategy myzigo was able to reach top positions and sale more products even tough their site has undertaken minor changes over the past year.

3. Marketplaces

Let’s say you are talent voice producer and you have your personal site, no matter how nice is your site most likely will take you months if not years of work to rank organic in search engines, one way you can do it faster and get exposure in search engines is using market places. Marketplaces are niche market sites specialized in just one product, for instance it will make more sense to you to register to voice123.com, or voices.com to get found that try to rank your personal site over theirs; by doing this you can benefit from organic traffic to your business and believe me, even if it cost you some it would be much less that you would have to spent if you want to rank first on Google for this category.

4. Lead Generation Sites

I have few clients in the finance and insurance business, the problem they have, specially in these challenging environment is that getting new clients and their sites at the top in search engines is very tough. Finance and Insurance are some of the most competitive industries in search engines and where I’ve seen more expensive click prices in online marketing campaigns. So if you want to benefit from organic search engine traffic sometimes is easier to partner with these kind of companies; if you enter the term “car insurance quotes” in Google, the site at the top result will be http://www.carinsurancequotes.com/. Even tough is not your site if you are on their database on the same local area where the consumer is looking to buy a car insurance you will get this lead. Off course is not free but it is cheaper that try to get to the same position for the same keywords on your own. The good thing is a that a lead is much better qualified prospect than just a click, but be careful, the business practices from some of these sites are not the greatest, some of them sell the lead to a lot of people (more than 10) or sometimes the sell the same lead but a year after. If you have the fortune to find a good lead generation site for your local area stick with it and benefit from organic traffic and great businesses opportunities.

5. Affiliate Marketing

If your site really sucks and you are not willing to pay the price to achieve top ranking positions, then join the companies that can do the dirty job for you…  this is know as “Affiliate Marketing”. Let’s say you have a small hotel or local break & breakfast in your area; but you don’t have muscle power and expertise to get exposure in search engines… what you can do is to join firms that can do this part not just for you but also for other small lodgings in your area. On this way, one single company will concentrate on the ranking and promotion and you will concentrate on your business and forget your crappy website. One great sample of these kind of sites is www.letmego.com, the have a large database of affiliated places in several cities and they promote the industry as a whole, then if somebody request a stay in your area, you will get the request and bid on it. You will pay only if the user book the stay with you, and the payment is just an small commission over the final sales price. By doing this you have thousands if not millions more of possibilities that somebody can find you by using these terms on Google, than promoting the site yourself.

So even though your website sucks don’t give up, you can still have some exposure in search engines if you do it right, just be creative, use all available resources and sites out there and get results. Happy Traffic!

I didn’t know about Patrick Jean or One More Production until today. I got an email early in the morning from Stumbleupon where they were recommending this video called “pixels” directed by Patrick Jean and executed by One More Production. I went to see the video and I have to day is one of the best short films I have ever seen, very creative and very well executed; I love it even more because it was shoot in New York, the city that I love and where I live since 1999. This video is a great example of how a successful campaign can not just drive traffic to a site but get you real businesses. In less than 24 hours of being release the video got 1 million viewers, so far, just days after the video has been published on Daily Motion (04-07-2010) seen more than 2 million times, it has been featured in many sites such as motionographer.com and many more. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts the power on viral campaigns is incredible, as David Skok has demonstrated a successful viral campaign with a short cycle time (like this video) can reach 30.000.000 in 20 days. I’m sure this video will become one of those phenomenons, and will represent Patrick Jean and his company years of new business, investment in creativity pays off. See the video below and judge for yourself.

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. – Independent web videos.

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

I recently listened a webcast on PPC Rockstars (a webmaster radio program hosted by David Szetela, founder of Clix Marketing) where David was interviewing Brad Geddes, a guru in Post-Click conversion optimization who was talking about the importance of a PPC management. It was really interesting for me because a lot of companies undervalue the professional help of a PPC or SEM professionals. Brad explained on a very simple way, how a PPC campaign can immensely benefit from basic management and good practices.

On the webcast Brad demonstrates how improving the quality score on your keywords, improving conversion rates, profits per sale (through cross sales) and adding negative keywords can increase the profitability of any campaign on more that 50%. The interesting thing about the presentation is that the data presented by Brad is based on reasonable achievable improvements but virtually any good PPC management firm.

In order to simplified the conclusions of this webcast and summarize the 12 slides presented by Brad, I created these spreadsheet based on the same data presented on this example.

Let’s say you run a “non managed” PPC campaign spending $1,000 per day and making $50,700 in profits. If the campaign is properly managed for an online advertising professional you could end it up making $134.672 in profits without increasing your monthly budget.

On this graph I presented 3 different case scenarios:

1. Change: Increasing Quality Score (from 6.5 to 8 ) – Result: Increased of $11,700 in revenues
2. Change: Increasing Conversion Rate (from 2% to 3%) – Result: Increased of $25,350 in revenues
3. Change: Increasing profits per sales (cross selling) (25%) – Result: Increased of $12,675 in revenues
4. Change: Adding Negative Keywords (0.5 improvement in Quality Score and 0.25% improvement in conversions) – Result: Increased of $10,725 in revenues

By applying all these changes you can see how the numbers at the end of the month have also increased, the largest increased though takes place where you increase your conversion rate, even by just 1%; that’s why the landing pages in PPC campaigns are critically important.

The problem today is that a lot of businesses don’t realize these new challenges on PPC management and they never focused on these critical factors; any good PPC management firm will be able to handle all these issues properly, and put your ROI back on track. As Brad has illustrated a good PPC management is always a good investment.

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

Bing is definitely committed to increase their market share one way or another, the latest big step is a dedicated line to advertisers (866) 272-9202, that they can use Monday through Saturday from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM Pacific time; to get help on the set up and optimization of their campaigns. Bing is offering free advice on keywords, bidding and even on ad copy. This is a major step for Bing, which doesn’t have the large number of advertisers that Google has and can finance this kind of operation. On the email they are sending out to promote the free service they also include some interesting data:

Since the launch of Bing, searches on Microsoft sites have grown nearly 52%, with 82 million users searching Bing every month.

Microsoft search query share grew to 11.3% in January.

As I said on one of my previous blogs, maybe is s good time to give Bing a second chance.

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano