Today, they are expanding the beta by adding automatic 3D conversion to all short-form videos that are uploaded in 1080p. All you have to do to view the newly-uploaded videos in three dimensions is click on the gear box on the bottom video panel, select 3D, and put on some 3D glasses.

If you’re unfamiliar with how YouTube’s 3D conversion works, here’s a little crash course, courtesy of the YouTube blog:

• We use a combination of video characteristics such as color, spatial layout and motion to estimate a depth map for each frame of a monoscopic video sequence
• We use machine learning from the growing number of true 3D videos on YouTube to learn video depth characteristics and apply them in depth estimation
• The generated depth map and the original monoscopic frame create a stereo 3D left-right pair, that a stereo display system needs to display a video as 3D

Youtube says that hundreds of thousands of videos have been converted into 3D already. With automatic conversion of these higher-quality vids, we’re going to start seeing a lot more opportunities to browse YouTube in more dimensions.

Have you been watching YouTube in 3D since they debuted it last year? Let us know in the comments

View more infographic round-ups here.

Paid, Earned and Owned Media:

Conversion In a Social World:

Tech Germs:

Such is the case of GoMo, a new service that helps site owners make their web property more mobile friendly. Found under the HowToGoMo.com URL, the site/service explains the reason for its existence, which essentially revolves around making a site more mobile-visitor-friendly. The site’s disclaimer states as much:

Millions more people are using mobile devices to get online every day. Does your business have a mobile-friendly site? If not—or if you’re not sure—you’ve come to the right place to get started.

From there, users can learn more about the mobile web, test to see how their site looks in a mobile browser environment, and get help on improving a site’s mobile usability.

In fact, GoMo has a list of suggestions of web development companies that can assist in the mobilization process, which includes such companies like Atmio, Duda Mobile and iLoop Mobile to name a few. In fact, it could easily be said this portion of GoMo is nothing but an advertising page for companies that develop and convert sites to the mobile environment.

It should be noted that GoMo does not actually build these versions for users, instead they suggest companies that will do the heavy lifting for you. If, however, you are looking for a free conversion, Google does link to their “Mobilize your business” service, which assists in the development for mobile landing pages at no cost. However, if you want a full conversion to the mobile environment, that’s not going to be free, at least if you’re using GoMo as your starting point.

As for Google’s motivation behind GoMo, they have another disclaimer explaining their approach:

Just because you can see your desktop site on a mobile phone doesn’t mean it’s mobile-friendly. Mobile sites are designed for the small screen, with the needs of mobile users in mind. A mobile-friendly site can help your business connect with customers and drive conversions.

Perhaps the most useful aspect of GoMo is the “Test Your Site” feature, which, like the description suggests, tests a site to see how it looks and performs in a mobile browsing environment.

Once a URL is entered, the service returns with a report generated by Google’s “GoMoMeter,” which is about as fun as it sounds. Over at the Google Mobile Ads blog, there’s a video promoting GoMo:

The key metric is the percentage of times the process is abandoned on each step. The implicit assumption is that steps with the highest abandonment rates are the biggest problem.

When you actually do this type of measurement, the most common finding is that the conversion funnel step abandonment rates look like a big U. The first step of a form process often has a high-abandonment rate, followed by a series of steps with small and relatively similar abandonment rates, concluding with a final confirmation step that also has a high-abandonment rate.

Different design philosophies and implementations will produce different curves, but this is the pattern I’d describe as “classic.” Given this common pattern (or the existence of any common pattern other than an equal rates), is it meaningful to suggest that the step with the highest exit rate is reflective of a problem? Not really. That would only be true if the natural forms abandonment model was that each step had an equal chance of abandonment.

Once you discard that assumption, it’s obvious that no particular level of step abandonment is positive evidence that the step is somehow broken or worse than any other step. Thinking the issue through, it should also be obvious that no particular level (or even change) in step abandonment is necessarily evidence of a problem.

This is a similar point to one I’ve made before many times about reporting. Just as no one Conversion Rate (or even an improvement in Conversion Rate) is positively good, a step abandonment rate must be viewed within a larger context.

Let me give you an example. Suppose you have form process with four steps and you produce a report like this:

Has the form gotten worse? Maybe, but perhaps not. Indeed, with no physical change in the process the real-world odds are heavily against such a conclusion. Far more likely is that the shape and quality of traffic into the form has changed for the worse. If you just started a major PPC effort, it may be that you are driving far more, and somewhat less qualified, traffic than before. Form performance will reflect that.

This point is especially critical to understand if you change your conversion process AND change your site design at the same time. This combination may produce worse Step Conversion rates even with a Form that has been signficantly improved – a fact that is almost always missed or mis-interpreted.

I believe this illustrates two critical points. First, a step abandonment rate taken as a single fact means nothing. Like so many individual metrics, it is dangerous and misleading when used as a single point of decision-making. Second, measured form performance is very dependent on exogenous factors.

This should give pause to anyone who thinks that the basic process of measuring conversion processes is to find the steps with high abandonment and fix them!

I’m going to step back for a moment and layout some more general principles for thinking about measuring conversion processes.

It seems to me that in building up a system of measurement, we have to a bit of a theory about form-based processes on the web. Here are some basic rules (some purely theoretical some based on actual experience) I think might make up such a theory:

• All forms will experience some friction.
• Each field and each form will contribute at least a small amount of friction to the process.
• Some fields inherently involve significant friction. These include commitment steps, complex steps and steps requiring personal or unusual information.
• Some visitors do not intend to finish a process – and these visitors may abandon at different steps. So eliminating a Form with a 10% drop rate will not produce an equal effect on final conversion.
• The lower the pre-qualification of visitors into a Forms process, the higher the effect of friction.
• Abandonment on a Form is most common when the user has not changed the field focus.

I believe these principles are sound, though probably not even close to exhaustive. Still, they produce some fairly straightforward analytic consequences:

• Some abandonment will occur in any Form.
• Some spots always have higher abandonment – this doesn’t mean they are “worse.”
• Some fields will have a higher abandonment – this doesn’t mean they are “worse.”
• Elimination of a step or field should always have at least a tiny incremental positive effect.
• Behavioral Analysis can measure the friction involved in a step – but not necessarily provide direction about how to reduce that friction.
• Changing the shape of the traffic into the form will likely affect BOTH the rate of step abandonment and the ratio of step abandonment between steps.

It should be obvious from this that the basic measurement task in a conversion process is not to simply identify step completion rates.

From the above discussion, it should be clear that a high abandonment rate doesn’t imply failure.

On the other hand, it is a purely empirical point whether or not such steps are easier or more difficult to improve than lower friction steps. Based on our real-world experience, I’d argue that the weight of empirical evidence is, in fact, in the contrary direction. It’s often easier to improve conversion processes by focusing on relatively low-friction steps.

A similar lesson applies to field-based abandonment. While the field focus (the place where the cursor was when the user left the Form) on abandonment is sometimes significant, it is quite often simply the first (or last) field on the form. Neither is particularly meaningful. So while looking at field-based abandonment can occasionally be helpful, it is hardly the slam-dunk analysis that people unpracticed in web analytics often expect.

In this post, I focused mainly on the wrong way to approach conversion process analysis. In my next post, I’ll take up some of what I believe are the real analytic tasks around form measurement!

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Moderator:

• Gillian Muessig

Speakers:

• Tom Leung, Product Manager, Google
• Glenn Alsup, President, Viewmark
• Philippe Lang, General Manager, SMB Solutions, LivePerson
• Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMoz

First speaker, Glenn Alsup, the president of Viewmark starts discussing about qualitative vs. quantitative data.

Qualitative researchers:

• Reject the thought of social sciences being studied like natural or physical sciences
• Qualitative researchers (Ql R) believe human behavior is always bound to the context in which it occurs
• Human behavior is personal and subjective

Quantitative researches: Believe that both natural and social sciences are testable and confirmable theories.

Glenn says Ql R is Gods Fuel:

Qualitative Researchers look at

• Goals
• Overview
• Description
• Scenarios

They Find:

• Finding
• Usability Issues
• Effects on Goals
• Lessons Learned

How is it effective?

• Look at it as a sales funnel
• Identify all your drivers – Offline, Online, Explicit and Extract
• Take the data and group attributes based on filters

Stages in the funnel

• Weight them by the value of that event
• Downloading a white paper is more valuable than looking at a banner
• Identify when the action took place
• When you convert, those drivers are calculated in different ways
• You want to increase conversions by identifying the right mix of marketing drivers

Next up is Tom Leung, Product Manager, Google who will discuss Google’s Web site optimizer.

Tom asks the audience what they’d do after visitor lands on site and what will they do to convert them? Apparently, Driving traffic is just the beginning.

• Invest in SEO and SEM resources for 100 percent of visitors
• Your pages may lose more than half their visitors in seconds
• A majority of those who stay do not convert

Steps to take:

• Evolve with continued improvement
• Drive appropriate traffic to your site
• Measure & analyze site activity
• Test changes and implement winners
• Repeat steps 1-3 until conversation rate is 100 percent

How does testing work?

When visitors reach your site, they see a random version of your site and the testing tool will tell you what percentage of users converted based on what version of your page.

Tom states the example of Picasa. The homepage has many images and uses the word ‘free’ a lot. The second page is much cleaner and offers a trial button. Also, it says a clear value of 30% conversion.

How to set up a test?

• Copy and paste a piece of JavaScript
• The control on top showss you that someone is trying to load the page
• The tracking script on the bottom tells you that they saw the page, and then you have another code on the conversion page which tells you they converted and what version of the page they were looking at

If you perform a test, each version of the page has a unique sticker for you to identify it by. After the test runs for awhile, Google will populate reports for you.

Best testing practices:

• Test a small number of variations
• Test big changes. If you don’t notice the difference between 2 combos within 8 seconds, visitors probably won’t either
• Consider early indicators if you don’t have enough conversions
• Don’t jump to conclusions. Tom says that less than 2 weeks is no good, focus on absolute conversion difference, don’t get too excited by sliver of green.

Additional Testing Ideas:

• Conversion Cocktail
• Trust seals
• Which testimonials
• Inspirational or fact-based pitch
• YouTube video
• Navigation bar

Next up is Philippe Lang, the General Manager of SMB Solutions, LivePerson.

Philippe suggests using a lot of information from analytics to know more about the visitors who come to your site. There’s a catch, as valuable as the data is, it can be tough to understand. Talk to your customers and ask them for their honest feedback.

• Points to watch out for when you monitor your Web site
• Keep an eye on visitor referrer information such as
• Search engine used
• Marketing campaign
• Geolocation
• Navigation behavior (page views, shopping cart content, and shopping cart abandonment)

Combine both real time monitoring and feedback data by involving your customers into a chat. Keep a watch on the patterns or trends.

Ultimate Feedback Look

• Begin by monitoring the visitors who come to your site
• Identify visitors who have unexpected behaviors
• Involve visitors by listening
• Translate customer feedback into action
• Refine and optimize your Web site

Philippe has 2 case studies.

1: Online University degree

Challenge: High abandonment rate in the online inquiry form

Reason: Customers did not appreciate the question about age of applicant. This led to customers leaving the form

Solution: Question deleted

Result: 20% increase

2: Outdoor gear retailer

Challenge: Sunglasses faced low conversion rates

Reason: Customers confused over size chart

Solution: Size chart redesigned

Result: 25% increase in conversion rates

If you know what’s wrong, you can fix it! Testing is great as it

• Heightens conversion rates
• Improves the sales process
• Increases average order value
• Forms relationships with customers

Finally, it’s Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMoz. He starts by mentioning the landing page contest his website had where readers could submit landing pages. After scouring through many submissions, the ended up testing 10. after going through all of them, one finds out that the page where you had to scroll down to get to the bottom of the page had the best conversion scores.

After the competition, he and his team tweaked the winner’s landing page to convert even better.

Takeaways

• If you think it will work, it probably won’t
• Landing page design is not universal
• Testing is the only way to improve
• Doubling your conversion rate is far easier than doubling your traffic

This was followed by a Q & A round where some of the most exciting things said were:-

Rand:- "conversion testing is a legal form of cloaking…"

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Moderator: Kevin Ryan, Vice President, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch

Speakers: Jennifer Doss, E-Commerce Marketing Manager, Lids.com, Jamie Smith, CEO, Engine Ready, James Beriker, President, Efficient Frontier, Chris Leggatt, Senior Account Executive, Moniker.

It’s Jennifer Doss who opens the session, she has a case of Lids.com it deals in selling of hats from sports teams and colleges. They have some goals like triple monthly revenue at CPA of $7, to boost up the sites sear visibility on keyword hats and to get a double revenue numbers from natural search.

The challenges which it faces are many over 10,00 pages and 20,000 sku’s, then the pages have not been optimized for indexing, there isn’t enough copy, keywords not properly targeted, content is not targeted to visitors and lastly there’s nositemap.

It has a couple of options in terms of paid tactics and they are manual management to be replaced, expansion of participation in other search programs, optimized paid search ad copy, Increased keywords from 500 to 13K and revised monthly PPC budget. The organic strategies entail dynamically generated optimization tags, blog strategy targeting specific keyword phrases, dynamic Google Sitemap file.

Now the time from results of the paid campaign, CPA decreased by 50%, monthly conversion increased 1,294%, monthly revenue increased 1,244%. On the other hand organic campaign lead to, #1 ranking in search engines including Google.

Up next was Jamie Smith of Engine Ready, who unfurled the 3c’s for success, they are, conversion drivers which are credibility, security, value, conversion inspiration, nearly customers – which are the one’s closest to a conversion. It was emphasized that there’s a need to address this category for immediate results. The other customers are non customers and didn’t use the cart at all, and then there are new customers.

Then the discussion moved on to the 3 C’s for SEM success, it was suggested that there’s a need develop a "visibility" strategy derived from the target market, goals and objectives. And the 3Cs are creativity, continuity and conversion.

Next point of discussion was the measurement of your success: for Creative its highest CTR, for continuity its least bounce rate, and for conversion it’s max. ROAS. For he watch path analysis she suggested navigation, i.e. Usability and Site design, Robust site search and lastly complete Shipping.

Chris was the next presenter, he discusses the characteristics of a good domain, he comes up with features, they are to have a natural generic brand, something that’s easy to remember, that’s clear, concise and descriptive, is visually pleasing and is an existing type in traffic. He also discusses other data such as there are 70% of the Internet users make use of direct navigation, which has shot up from 53% just 4 years back. Direct navigation is supposed to supersede the figure of $1.2 billion this very year. And that 43% of the direct navigation traffic is willing to purchase the products.

The last one to speak is James Beriker, he discloses that consumers are willing to pay online and are even ready to pay for services such as premium delivery and the like. The expenditure on retail on Google had shot up an astounding 134%, and it’s been through Google that’s been the most effective in driving conversions for retailers. MSN leads Yahoo in terms of spend preferences.

He moves further to deliberate upon the best practices in conversion, according to him they are, the Quality score which is the user experience and account structure. A higher quality score means a high clicks @ lower cpc, and leads to more conversions, revenue at lower CPA coupled with a higher ROI. Now what determines the user experience are the trio of search query, ad copy, landing page.

Search queries that are most relevant are the best, relevance in terms of title, description and the landing page doesn’t disappoint. There are also a couple of points for the account structure, they include organizing campaigns by product type, creating ad groups based on products, there’s inventory-based advertising.

About the promotions he suggests that it offers increase click-through rate in ad copy, offers only increase conversion rate meaning whether the message is being reinforced on landing page or not? A good idea would be to align print and online campaigns. About landing pages they should be built around motivation, value proposition including its clarity, make sure there’s no friction on your page with all the clutter etc, do you offer incentive to the visitor, which also helpful to counter the friction aspect. You also need to watch out for anything on the page that causes anxiety in the mind of the visitor and prevents them from a purchase.

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"Conversion Optimizer helps you meet your ROI objectives by automatically managing your bids according to a maximum CPA goal. By automating the bidding process, this feature helps you minimize your conversion costs while saving you time.

Here’s how Conversion Optimizer works: simply specify a maximum CPA bid and the Conversion Optimizer does the rest.

It uses historical information about your campaign and automatically generates optimal CPC bids for each auction. You still pay per click, but you no longer have to manually adjust your bids to reach your CPA goals. Since the Conversion Optimizer can choose a new bid for each auction, you’re provided with the additional benefit of spending money only on the search queries and sites where your ads are likely to convert. You can read more about how the Conversion Optimizer can manage your costs here.

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To get started, visit AdWords Help Center.

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The information people want about financial products tends to be hidden behind application processes on such websites. People who would like to see those details have no choice but to go through the process.

This may help the consumer, but it plays merry hell with the conversion rates. ComScore and Forrester Research looked into the issue of finance and abandonment, and found the devil in the details.

49 percent of applicants in their survey had no intention of completing an application process. That group cited a few reasons for why they entered a process on a financial website:

The top reasons cited by those who did not intend to complete the application included:

•  Wanted more product information (23 percent)
•  Not ready to apply (19 percent)
•  Wanted to see if they qualified for the product (14 percent)

Forrester Research Senior Analyst Brad Strothkamp said of the conversion problem, "Today’s financial services sites have a ways to go at both understanding and solving this important issue."

There is an object lesson here for site publishers. If people enter a conversion process, then abandon it, and do so in sufficient numbers, it probably means there is a piece of information that belongs in a FAQ or help section that visitors wish to find.

SES: The Almighty Conversion

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can’t be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

Potential online customers have seen the numerous stories about online break-ins and identity theft in the news. It’s created wariness in many who could be served well by an e-commerce site with products those shoppers would normally wish to buy.

ScanAlert’s Nigel Ravenhill said this lack of consumer confidence restricts e-commerce growth. His firm tested this in 2005 on an e-commerce site where consumers would either see or not see ScanAlert’s ‘Hacker Safe’ image.

As might be expected, this A/B split test showed better conversions with the ‘Hacker Safe’ displays. Cautious shoppers want reassurance that their transactions will stay secure. Listing contact information and hours where customer service will be available for questions helps with this.

Ravenhill also noted that extending a cookie to a 30-day life, to allow people to come back to their shopping carts, gives the site a second chance to gain a shopper’s business. If the person leaves and comes back, and doesn’t have to shop a second time, that could lead to a sale.

Bryan Eisenberg talked about his concepts for calling shoppers to action. He listed a hierarchy of optimization as rules of thumb for the e-commerce webmaster:

1. Functional – does it do what I need?
2. Accessible – can everyone access it?
3. Usable – is it user-friendly
4. Intuitive – does it feel natural and doesn

Best ways to optimize your landing pages:

1. Connect the search experience to the landing page experience. Wherever possible, use the same language on your landing pages as you do in your ads. It’s a real disconnect when you click on an ad that reads, “Online Conversion Rate Counter” only to land on a page selling a “Conversion Calculating Service.”
2. Integrate your landing page into your site. Some advertisers make the mistake of building stand-alone landing pages for certain keywords that are more-or-less “divorced” from the rest of their sites. This can make your business seem sketchy to potential customers, who you want to be able to trust you with their credit card info. A consistent experience across all of your pages and product offerings can help create a more convincing experience. (More on this below.)
3. Gain their trust. Use trusted, third-party security providers and make sure their badges and icons are clearly visible.
4. Offer tips and suggestions. How can potential customers best use the product? If you’re selling steaks, offer a steak au poivre recipe. There’s a potential for up- and cross-sell here, as well. Perhaps monsieur would enjoy a nice bottle of cabernet sauvignon with his tender, juicy filet mignon, oui? Just don’t go crazy with it, mon ami. (See 5 and 6, below.)
5. Stay on target. If your ad specifies John Deere tractors, make sure all of your tractors for sale on that page are John Deere tractors. In other words, if I had been looking for Caterpillar bulldozers I’d have clicked on an ad for them instead.
6. Cut the clutter. Your landing page should not be too generic and cluttered. This ties in with the tip above. If your ad is for discount wholesale 7Up, don’t clutter the page up with other un-colas. This helps keep the lead focused.
7. Ban the bling. Your landing page should be cleanly and attractively designed, but avoid distractions like music or other audio, animations and revolving logos. These can distract prospective customers from their purpose, which is to buy the product or service that they need, hopefully from you. Again, keep ‘em focused on the task.
8. Give them something to do. A little interactivity can help keep people engaged. For some products, especially big-ticket items, things like video testimonials and 360-degree tours may be good sales aids. Just let customers decide whether or not they want to view them by giving them control. And remember Tip 7: Keep the bling to a minimum.
9. Write right. Language counts. Think of your landing page as a salesperson in a showroom. What would a salesperson say to a prospect to help “get to yes?” Here are a few classic pointers:

• Make sure that your headers and subheads are clear and direct.
• Deliver your value proposition right away.
• Offer a persuasive message near the call-to-action—You know: “Don’t be left out of this amazing offer,” etc.
• Be nice with your call-to-action copy—”Submit” and “Buy Now” can sound like orders and put some people off. “Try it Now” sounds nicer.

Visit the Help Center for more on conversion rates.

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