My Yahoo soap box

So, the latest scoop is that if you limit where a click-through can go, there is a higher chance of conversion.

Cryptic ‘nuff for ya?

On the subject of web click-through conversion, the question is how to improve the conversion rate when the person who clicks through to your ad (an act that costs money) will do what you want him to do which is to conduct a conversion event (leave their contact info and indicate product interests in our case). So far, limiting where the click-through goes seems to make the biggest difference. If you think about it rationally, it does not make a lot of sense; he could use the “back” button on the browser, he can just wondering onto somewhere else through “home” button, and there is even a "escape hatch" if he is willing to click amongst objects on the the conversion page to break out of the navigation limit. On the other hand, we are mostly animal of habits. So, as long as it does not look wrong/bad, when asked (or, more likely, given no obvious alternative), people will just do what they are told to do. The data is still a bit too early to be conclusive. But, the early report is quite positive on the change. The irony is that I am running this experiment on a crappy conversion page which does not even pretend to be nice by giving product info and/or images. Once you get there, you either leave your contact or else. The plan is that we will now set up better conversion pages that would do the same thing but in a less blatant manner. And, hopefully, that would improve the conversion rate still.

My question, a follow-up really, is that how does this setup of forcing people to convert impact the actual closing rate? After all, people may feel obligated to leave their info since there is no other way out. But, that is quite different from whether they will fork out the money to buy. At a purely ego-centric level, this is nothing more than idle speculation since, as the marketing guy, I am measured on the number of conversion rather than the closing rate which is much further down the chain of events. Something to monitor though.

Yahoo/Overture sucks so far. I have spent some time going over the account and poking at all the options and trying to figure out how to read the information. It is hard. As much as I hate to say this, since I do not own Google stocks, Google’s AdWords is much more intuitive and helpful for advertisers like me. So, here is my current laundry list of issues. 1. The impression rate seems to be quite low relative to what we are getting in Google. I accept the notion that Google remains the preferred search engine for techies thus the lower impression rate. However, there is no tool, that I have found, in Yahoo that would help you optimize the keywords in an existing listing. There is an option to provide estimates for a new listing, but it is not integrated with existing listings. 2. Duplications. I understand why they will screen out duplications. However, the duplication flag made no sense since the keywords that I am trying to get does not appear anywhere else. How is that duplication? 3. Conversion. Yahoo provides conversion tool like Google. But, Google now offers cross-channel conversion so that I can track both Google and Yahoo conversion from my Google account. How cool (and convenient) is that! Well, I have fired up a few inquiries to Yahoo support on the questions above. Who know, maybe I am just a lazy user who did not read the documentation closely. On that account, I can only say that is true of everyone user I know. Finally, still on my Yahoo/Overture Suckth soap box, what is the story with the log-off button on the Yahoo account? I won’t bore you with the details but it took me a few minutes to find the first time I used it. And, even now, I still go into a very transitory panic mode every so often because I cannot find the log-off button.

Oh, the reporter/analyst round is still on for the product launch. One reporter at 9am and one analyst at 11:30am. It is always interesting to be part of the call and observe. On one hand, there is a bit of adversarial relationship between the vendor and the reporter/analyst because the vendor thinks whatever product that he is selling is the cure-all for the world’s ills while the report/analyst need to be objective and put things in perspective. On the other hand, without those vendors with snake oils to sell, there is no news to cover for the reporter and no customers to buy the analysts' reports. Anyway, the 9am call was a bit on the testy side. She kept pushing for the question of “what’s new.” We danced around the issue a bit since it was more of a new target market than a brand new product. On the other hand, we could have been bold and assert, with quite a bit of confidence, that what is new is that there is nobody in this marketplace that does what we do. It may not be very “new” if you were an existing customer using our solution for a different reason, but for the new market place/users, this is a heck of a new thing. Hmm… So easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. The 11:30am call went better. She got our pitch and, fingers crossed, we will get mentioned in her blog.

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