This is ridiculous. Whole Foods is being restricted from acquiring Wild Oats on the grounds that Whole Foods is an organic food store and that such consolidation would give it an uncompetitive advantage in the organic food sector.
The problem is that Whole Foods is no longer just a specialty food store. They now compete with all the other big super market chains that are also beefing up their organic food offerings. Whole Foods has also diversified its products to offer more than just your regular tree hugger fare. They are literally a one-stop (albeit expensive) shop for a lot of people. How can Whole Foods be equipped to compete with giants like Safe Way and Star Market, if its status as a specialty grocer inhibits it from acquiring companies and growing?
I recently turned my attention to website tracking. I realized that we’re doing a terrible job of figuring out what the hell our users are actually doing once they get to the site. Right now we use Google Analytics. As simple as most Google products are, I found this one wasn’t. So I spent the last few days diving deep into GA and researching competitive products.
My first conclusion was that I needed to better define which questions I was trying to answer. What exactly does tracking a user on a website mean? Here’s what I came up with:
1) Where is the traffic coming from (i.e. the source)?
There are basically three categories of traffic: direct, referring (a website that links to you), and search engine. Google does a great job of detailing all three. Also, when it comes to search engine traffic, it’ll even show you which key words resulted in visits to your site. Some of the results are very interesting.
2) How is it getting to us (i.e. the medium: natural search, paid search, flyer, newspaper, etc…)
This can be a much harder question to answer using just tracking software. If it’s a web-based medium such as paid search, then you have no trouble. GA can tell you exactly where the traffic came from. If it’s offline, you have to prepare your website to track the results effectively. The best way to do that is to set up a custom URL. For example, we recently powered photo broadcasting for the KCCN FM 100 Birthday Bash. At the event we handed out flyers with the URL, “bbash.kindfish.com”. Since we weren’t driving any other traffic to that sub-domain we could be reasonably sure that any direct hits were a result of our flyer.
3) What is driving the traffic (i.e. the campaign: a concert, a new promotion, etc…)
This is important in the context of knowing exactly what you’re tracking. For example: ok, the traffic came in from text ads I paid for on Google, but what was the promotion? If you’re using Google AdSense to drive traffic, GA fully integrates to give you detailed results. If you’re doing an offline promotion (newspaper promo for example), the same points from the previous question apply.
4) Which page is it coming to?
GA tells you exactly how many hits come to every page where you have the tracker code embedded. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to tell you where they go right after that. I want to know what path users are most commonly taking through our site. It seems this would be an obvious feature. Maybe I’m missing something.
5) What is the call to action on that page and is it being taken?
Hopefully each page on your site has some sort of purpose. As an early stage start up, our purpose is usually to get the user to sign up to use our service. Most of our pages are geared towards that action and Google has an interesting way of letting you track just how successful you are at getting users to take a particular action. It’s called a conversion goal and it’s basically a funnel.
6) What is the conversion funnel for a new user and is it being taken?
The one thing we weren’t clearly articulating every time we drove users to the site was the conversion funnel. This is probably the most important aspect of any campaign or traffic driver. Once your users get to your site, what are they supposed to do, and are they doing it? GA lets you set up specific goals in the shape of URL steps. For example, if your goal is to get user registrations, it might look like this:
If GA detects that a user hit all three URLs in succession, that’s defined as a conversion (successful completion of the goal).
7) If they are not taking the conversion funnel, where are they clicking?
This is something I really wanted to see but couldn’t really find. This ties in with my point earlier about user navigation. I want to know what path our users are taking through the site, especially if they are not taking a pre-defined path as defined by a GA Goal.
8 ) How many of the website visitors are unique and how many are returning?
GA is actually very good at this. It gives you full breakdowns of the returning visitors vs. unique visitors as well as returning vs. unique pageviews. If you click on the Visitors tab you can see a full breakdown of the data under the new vs. returning section. The Visitors section also provides excellent information broken down by days and even hours, geography, and browsers. Also, one of the coolest data points is average number of pageviews per visitor.
9) What is the average length of a visit?
This is also tracked by GA under the visitors area.
10) What path are they taking through the site?
As I’ve mentioned this is really the biggest missing feature. I want to have a view of the average path users take through Kindfish.com. Without knowing where they are clicking, it’s very hard to optimize the site’s navigation.
One of my favorite features is the GA site overlay. It tells you how many people clicked where. In some ways it address my concern about being able to tell what a users average path through the site is. The site overlay is basically a version of your live site that is loaded in a GA controlled browser frame where they overlay little numbers over each link on your site. You can actually click through and see the number of people that clicked where as you go deeper.
On the site overlay front, GA actually has some very interesting competitors. One of my favorites (I think we’ll actually try these guys out in conjunction with GA) was CrazyEgg. They offer you a fantastically well-visualized view of your users’ click streams as well as heat maps of where they are clicking. If you’re trying to optimize your site’s layout and figure out where a user’s eyes are going, there’s nothing better to help you understand this than a heat map of your site. ClickTale takes it one step further and actually _records_ your users using the site. You can then go to ClickTale’s website and watch video of your users using the site. Pretty impressive.
Apparently China has a real problem with cyber junkies. 13% of China’s Internet users under the age of 18 (2.6 million) are classified as addicts. These kids pretty much spend all day and night playing video games until they go insane. WOW. No, literally, that’s the game that killed this kid (World of Warcraft).
The Honolulu Star Bulletin had a great piece this morning. The first two sentences summarize it best:
“Anything made by McDonald’s tastes better, preschoolers said in a study that powerfully demonstrates how advertising can trick the taste buds of young children. Even carrots, milk and apple juice tasted better to the kids if it was wrapped in the familiar packaging of the Golden Arches.”
Basically, when given the same fries wrapped in McDonalds packaging vs. not, kids overwhelmingly opted for the Golden Arches. The same went for healthy food. The stats are unbelievable: almost 77 percent said that the labeled fries tasted best, only 13 percent liked the unlabeled ones. 54% preferred McDonald’s labeled carrots versus 23% who liked the unlabeled variety. Less than a quarter of the kids thought both samples tasted the same.
I love that these are 5 year old preschoolers too! It gives it such a Brave New World feel.
This begs two questions. First, how do we go about identifying all the arbitrary brand defined preferences we have built up inside our minds by the time we reach adult hood? We’re already overwhelmed with choice. How many times do we “just pick something” when we’re really following a pre-programmed response to a particular color or label? Maybe the brand is actually doing us a favor by helping us just pick something. After all, imagine a shopping aisle with only generic brands. How would you know what to pick?
Second, doesn’t this give super brands a higher responsibility? Take the case of McDonald’s. With all their effort to come across as a charitable organization helping impoverished kids all over the world, what if they turned their attention instead to the sky rocketing obesity rate in the US? Habits and thought patterns are instilled in people at a very early age, and can be almost impossible to change in adulthood. A company like McDonald’s could fundamentally change the way Americans approach food over the course of one generation and make serious money doing it. Everyone is concerned about their health. McDonald’s has an opportunity to ride the health wave and become the “healthiest burger chain in the world.” I know it’s not going to happen, but it sure would make for an interesting case study in brand extension.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes all these Web 2.0 social services tick. How is it that some services grow from zero to tens of millions overnight? What makes people flock to a service in such droves? Is it pure entertainment or is there a deeper reason? This is the first in a multi-part series that will address the components that make up a social virus.
The buzz word of the decade seems to viral marketing. The idea that you can spread a product like a virus by “infecting” the public. Understanding how to induce this infection is pretty much the holy grail of online marketing. Some companies seems to have it down: Yelp.com, Geni.com, Youtube.com, Slide.com. By the way, what do these four companies have in common? Oh yeah, they’re all founded by ex-PayPal people. Which brings me to my next point: some people have it down: Shawn Parker (Napster, Plaxo, Facebook), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and pretty much anyone who used to work at PayPal.
Besides people, the other thing all these companies have in common is that they appeal to the ego. Human’s are at heart social creatures that thrive on social interaction. But it’s deeper than that. All these services offer some sort of ego feeding component: how many comments have people left me, who’s viewed me, who’s looked at my content, how many friends do I have, where are they inviting me, how often do I show up in their pictures, how do I stack up against my friends in some category. Everything makes you feel just a little better about yourself. And like all things that make you feel good, this one is equally addictive (hence a virus).
Let’s look at one my favorite examples of ego feeding: MySpace. Like the slum on the wrong the side of town, MySpace is full of junkies. Their drug of choice: ego. I can style my profile page in ANY way that I want to show off how unique and individual I am. I can even add a song to my profile. In fact, if a friend of mine actually makes a comment on how cool my profile is, I have attained social nirvana. I have a counter that shows me just how many people have seen my profile. I also have a counter to display to the world just how many friends I have. In the ultimate act of cross user ego feeding, I have my top friends. This is like “coolness” currency. How many people have made me their top friends and who will I make my top friend? You know you’ve pissed someone off something special when they remove you from this sacred list.
Finally, what is the real MySpace crack? I have a public feed of comments where everybody can see just how in-demand I am by the number of comments, pictures, and invitations people have left for me. This is the ultimate in social validation. Every time something happens on my profile, I’m compelled to come back and interact. It feels so good to be wanted. To know that someone else is thinking of me and cares enough to actually come to my profile page to leave me some cyber love (slapping my forearm with a crazed look as I say this).
Figure out how to make people feel good about themselves and you’ve got a winner. Now all you need is to give people an easy way to tell other people about it (but that’s Part Deux).
Last night my friend Stacey and I figured out the meaning of life. We had help mind you; our Martini’s were fantastic. Alas we forgot to write it down, but it goes something like this:
People find personal validation through self-induced hardship. That last part doesn’t sound like fun, but maybe that’s just a product of being productive. Or not.
Tim Ferriss (who’s book, The Four Hour Work Week, I highly recommend) would argue otherwise. In fact, his book is all about how to implement the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule) to be productive by cutting out all the crap in your life. The idea is that 80% of your output comes from 20% of your input. Identify the 20% of your input that actually matters, focus on that, cut out the rest, and all of a sudden you’ve achieved Stacey-Sell life significance.
So to rephrase, people are happier when they’re most productive. You can be productive by busting your ass and working really hard (killing yourself with happiness) or you can cut out the clutter and focus on the few things that actually matter. I could have probably said all this with something simple like, work smarter not harder, but that would have been far too smart.
Well, not exactly. But the company that owns MySpace and what is quite possibly the worst news channel on the planet, Fox News, will now own the Wall Street Journal. On the one hand, you have to hand it to News Corp founder and CEO Rupert Murdoch. He knows media. He’s built an empire on tabloid techniques and it’s served him well. On the other hand, the WSJ is one of my favorite publications and I’d hate to see it become tabloid trash for the financial industry.
In his interview with the WSJ he expressed plans to put a lot of emphasis on expanding financial news and the WSJ online as well as adding up to four pages of more general news to the WSJ. On the surface, I think that’s a great idea. I’d love to get more general (but high quality) news in my favorite paper. But if the WSJ turns into a paper edition of Fox you can cancel my subscription yesterday.
