Round-up from the third and final day of Search Engine Strategies 2010 in San Francisco:The Better Hurry Up Insight Award: According to keynote Tim Ash, we have 1/20th of a second to convince people to trust us on a website. The easiest ways? Clean design and graphical representations of trust (Better Business Bureau logo, logos of major clients, guarantees, data security/privacy seals, etc.). Also, put numbers to your trustworthiness – “50,000 happy customers and counting” – this is a major trust factor to web users.
Best Shopping Cart Insight: If you make visitors bounce from their shopping cart back out to search for more to buy (called “pogo-sticking”) tests have shown an 11% average conversion rate. If you eliminate pogo sticking by keeping the shopping cart visible through the search process, tests have shown a vast improvement to a 67% conversion rate.
The Keepin’ It Real Award: People ignore stock photography 85% of the time on websites.
Best AdWords New Tool: Google now has a product in beta – Google Campaign Experiments – that allows single pay per click campaigns or ad groups to be tested for different variations. For instance, if you want to set your maximum keyword bid at $1 for half your campaign audience, and $2 for the other half, you can. Simple, yes, but difficult to do in the past because you had to create two campaigns with the different testing variables that basically competed with each other for Google marketshare. There were ways around that – programmatically serving up a different page to every other PPC visitor, for instance – but this required digging through analytics for results, a very manual process.
Best Marketing to Teens Insights: There was a fascinating presentation about how teens want to be marketed to, led by three teen(ish) entrepreneurs—Brian Wong, Daniel Brusilovsky and Ricky Yean. All had good thoughts in their respective presentations, but in general:
1) Help them accomplish something bigger than themselves – think Pepsi Refresh.
2) Be cooler than their parents – don’t try too hard to be “hip”, just be it.
3) Show how your product can do cool stuff, don’t just say it.
4) None of the presenters voiced a preference for one medium over another regarding how best to communicate with them. They said a variety of options was preferable (email, facebook, mobile, etc.) … the important part was choice.
