Tag: Web

Discount Sites driving Business

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

I am a big fan of e-commerce and Indian e-commerce especially. Having worked in the web development field for more than a decade, and having seen multiple start-ups in the e-commerce and e-learning domains, I love the fact that this industry is still booming. What drives this is simple retail sales.

The sheer number of sites who have set up shop within the past two years is mind boggling. With large foreign multi-nationals also entering this market, the influx of money to the country has also strengthened the economy. Obviously with a limited number of consumers (although this is a significant number), and growing number of providers, the competition had to go up.

To battle competition, services and sites started providing deep discounts. Consumers started using these deep discounts to make spot purchases, which drew sales for different service providers.

So much was the power of these spot sales that multiple sites started aggregating these discount coupons and discount sites were born. Sites such as Cuponation.in have spawned and boosted the e-commerce market in the country.

Now why should a consumer like you and me visit a discount site like Cuponation?

The answer is simple, getting a sweet deal on a product which you otherwise would have bought at a full price!

This is like the NET50 coupon of Dominos which you keep handy whenever you want to buy a pizza … have your cake and eat it too!

So why should a service provider look at registering on such sites … hmmm … to be honest, at a business level, you have to start thinking about the cost of sales of an individual customer versus the cost of a discount. If for a 1000 INR product, my cost of sales is INR 160, then I am more than happy to provide a 10% discount on that product since that would drive up my sales.

Another way of looking at this matter is if the contribution (revenues – costs) is positive and I am looking only at the revenues (in which case most likely I am VC funded ;-) ), then I would want a sales promotion like this to drive up my sales.

So it’s a win-win deal. The end customer is getting a good deal on a product he wants to buy, the seller is getting higher sales, and the intermediary (Cuponation in our case) is getting the commissions.

Visual.ly now supports Google Analytics data

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I love infographics. The way they break out data into beautiful little pictures and help you understand their impact is excellent. However, it can take a fair bit of efforts to create an infographic … believe me, I have tried and used multiple tools to do this. If you are thinking of doing those from the ground up, then you are faced with challenges such as choosing the colours, typography and which data to show in what manner.

If you are design impaired like me, then this steep learning curve is bound to turn you off.

This is where visual.ly really shines through. It provides you with templates for creating infographics. Templates which have been tried and tested and make your job of creating an infographic easy. What’s awesome is that they keep releasing kickass integrations such as this one, where in you simply have to give access to your Google Analytics data and it will create a weekly infographic such as the one above.

If you are a data nerd, then you may not appreciate the findings of this report, but then you should be able to relate to some of these important points. As a webmaster and a data nerd, I am happy that the organic search results have dropped … since now I am slowly looking at other sources of traffic. This drop in organic traffic has come due to a decent rise in social traffic and that makes me a happy webmaster.

Top 5 things you should do after launching a site

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So after toiling on that idea for more than 4 to 5 months, you have finally launched your site … the journey till here was literally blood and tears. Having to either grapple with the content management system (CMS) or even worse, having to convince the developers working on your site that the site needs to be exactly as the way you want it to be and not what they want it to be. You have managed to stick to the deadline that you set for yourself and finally the site is live!

You feel like celebrating … and you should. Fireworks in the sky, Champagne flowing … you have did it. It feels good to have reached here, doesn’t it?

Reality bites

Now time for a reality check.

Your site’s journey has just started, and its completion is not the end, but just the start. You still need traffic to generate revenues, you need growth in that traffic and you need people to talk about your site. Without traffic and sustainable growth in that traffic, your site is simply going to be a liability. If you are betting your website to do your sales, then have I got a thing (or two) to say to you!

A website once built, can only generate huge traffic if you are relying on the secret sauce. That ingredient which will ensure that thousands and thousands of potential customers come flocking to your website looking to buy your product/service.

The Secret Sauce

To generate traffic, you need to be organized. You need to try out different things to see what works, and then do more of that.

secret_sauceYes. It’s that simple. You need to experiment and see what works for you. This is more work than you actually thought, but trust me … if you like the reason why you started the site, you will love promoting your site! You would love it even more when people reach out to you and seek your help.

If you can Measure, you can Scale

The more help you offer to the good folks who visit your website, the more popular would be. Since people actually start feeling your website useful. It’s a matter of finding out where these people come from and trying to see if you can get more people to visit your site from there. This is easier said than done … and that’s why you need to follow these tips and get to point where you can start doing these experiments.

So buckle up Dorothy, coz Texas is going bye, bye!

To correctly measure the traffic on your websites, you need to have a couple of things setup.

1. Google Analytics (GA)

Google Analytics

I would suggest GA because of the ease with which you can generate insightful reports and also the enterprise class features you get to use for free. There are other alternatives to GA such as Clicky, Omniture and even Alexa for that matter. However, trust me and go with Google! We will save Alexa hacking for later.

2. Google Webmaster Tools (GWT)

Google Webmaster Tools

Using GWT and GA in tandem would be the backbone of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) operations. I have put up a Starter’s guide for SEO which you definitely need to go through. In case if Bing (Bing Is Not Google) search engine is relatively well known in your country (it’s at 16% market share as we speak in the United States), then go ahead and register on Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) as well.

3. Start re-writing your content

Schema

I know. You have just completed this task two days back. Life is unfair, I should have told you about this before you finished the site! But in reality, be prepared to keep fine tuning the content on your website on a regular basis. I keep doing this for my top content since the post might be old, but the traffic that comes to those posts is brand new!! Do not be afraid or lazy to re-visit the content on your site. It’s a given that you will revisit it. Embracing this helps you quickly write content better for your users and also for your search engines. Here’s a starters guide to writing for search engines using Schemas.

4. You are your website

Remember, at the start. People do not know of your website. Do not expect too many visitors from the word go. In fact you probably will have to ask your friends to visit your website. So start sharing your website link with people … share it with people whom you think will benefit from the advise you are giving on the website. Share it on your social networks asking your friends to visit the site and give you reviews.

You have to pimp out that site and in style! Use your personal equity and get the traffic rolling in … if the site is good, then soon your friends and contacts will start sharing your site without being asked to! The traffic to your site will slowly grow … but at the start, you are your website. It’s a part of you and you have to ask people to come and visit your digital presence … your website. Do not shy away from this. You would be losing out on a very good initial source of traffic if you are shying away from sharing your site on your own social networks.

Are you yourself not convinced about the content you are dishing out on the site? No? Then start sharing those URLs. Have a few social sharing widgets on your site and ask your good friends to share as well!

5. Prepare for the journey ahead

journey ahead

I have already said this before, but I am going to iterate this again and again until this really sinks in.

Driving traffic to your website is a continuous activity.

This does not mean that you need to stop everything else and only keep doing these things. But, this means that you need to allocate some time in your busy week for Measurements and Experiments. You need to play with your website, and see what different things you can do on your site.

If that means learning HTML or hiring a smart guy to do this work, then so be it. It will pay off in the longer run. Also, do note that if you shy away from this activity and rely on someone else to do this for you, then you are pretty much relying on that person for your traffic and the traffic will dwindle the minute he/she goes away.

So pull up your socks, and get ready for a wonderful journey of web analysis, traffic generation and customer engagement! You are going to love it!!

Hacking your Alexa Ranking

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In case if you are working in any web related business based in India, then you would be aware of Alexa. The site which maintains website rankings by traffic. These numbers are indicative, however some people rely on them so much so that they look at a definitive way of increasing the rankings only … instead of actually working on making an awesome site.

I am going to share a little secret with you.

These rankings can be easily hacked.

So, if you have a boss or a reporting manager who fusses over Alexa rankings, then here’s what you need to do –

  • Convince your team or co-workers (who are most likely bound to keep visiting your site on a regular basis) to install the Alexa browser plug-in. It’s a nifty tool for easily checking rankings of any site. Not only that, but also this is the plugin that Alexa uses to guesstimate traffic numbers on the site. Having more plugin users visit the site reduces your Alexa ranking.
  • To correctly estimate the figures, Alexa asks you to include a javascript on your site. Using this javascript, a small widget is displayed on your site … now although that might ruin the look of your initial design, the javascript will ensure that all your traffic is correctly accounted for by Alexa. Soon you should see a reduction in your Alexa rank.
  • Claim your site. Add as much detail as you can and also get some friends to give you good testimonials for the site.

Now I know what you will say … how does this really help your cause?

  • Well … over a period the person who monitors this false metric will see an improvement and hopefully ask about it. Then you can tell them about the hack. Reckoning will soon follow.
  • A competitor who is trying to assess your site’s traffic will be overwhelmed

Alexa rankings are an extremely rough and over rated method of traffic estimation. Let me repeat what I said earlier, this is a hack and should be treated as such … ideally you should be focusing on your product/service.

Scheming the Schema: An Introduction to Structured Data

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One of the major traffic sources for personal websites and blogs is Organic Traffic, i.e traffic originating from search engines. People working on the web would quickly realize that search traffic can also be bought through Pay Per Click (PPC) Programs such as Google Adwords and Bing Search Advertising. However, for those of us who do not have Venture Capital funded blogs to run, we still do things the old fashioned way … we write good content.

 

Content is still King

The good thing with this idea is that search engines such as Google do give more weight to things such as meta descriptions, meta keywords, and other Search Engine Optimization (SEO) wizardry which was erstwhile known to a few. Web applications like Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT) and Bing Webmaster Tools (BWMT) are making it easier for website owners to recognize these things and highlight important data to search engines.

Content is KingThis move gives the power back to the people, instead of focusing on complex discussions such as Information Architecture, Content Taxonomy, Tagging and Keyword Optimization, you just have to worry about one thing, and one thing only. Good quality original content!

How do these search engines make sense out of this content? Well, they look for patterns within the page. In fact, if memory serves me correctly, one of my classmates (who went on to become an ethical hacker) had written a similar piece of code for his final year engineering project. It’s a decade since he wrote the code, we can assume without a shadow of doubt that the search engine algorithms would be a lot smarter now to extract the right content. Smart enough to discern between the signal and the noise.

So how do site owners help search engines find important data?

One method is to use the tools that they provide us – the WMTs. However, each search engine has it’s separate nuance, and hence there was a need felt for a common standard … a standard which we, the content creators can use to signal to the search engines … that hey … this piece right here … yes this bold sentence … is meant to be special. It might mean something special to the person searching for it … it’s a beacon … a beacon of data.

 

Defining Schemas for better results

This is where structured data comes into picture. In early January of 2011, the major search engines came together and helped define the format of this structured data via schemas. You can see these formats on schema.org. An excerpt from their home page –

Search engines including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.

Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web.

What this means for us, is that if we use the mark-up defined for each of the individual schemas in our content, then the search engines will display this data in interesting manners to the people searching for that very piece of information. Wan’t to see an example at work? Here is one

Schema Display

Last week, I instructed my developers at EduPristine to start making use of certain schemas in our mark-up. It’s less than a week, and we can already start seeing them pop-up all over our search engine results.

 

Why Should You Bother

It does not take a rocket scientist to understand that in the game of organic traffic acquisition, the more interesting and relevant your search engine listing, the higher the chances of getting a click on your listing. Thus, marking of your content is bound to increase your organic Click Through Rates (CTRs). You can get this data in Google Webmaster Tools, better to check your current set of keywords (and their CTRs along with average ranks) and then compare the change when you start including schemas in your content.

If you have not heard about structured data or implemented schema.org before then I can guarantee you an increase in your CTRs and in your organic traffic.

Understanding the __utmz Google Analytics Cookie

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Google Analytics does tracking by using the urchin tracking cookies. In case if you do not know what are HTTP Cookies, then you need to start reading some of these articles that I am linking to!! They can give the crunch to your digital marketing initiatives.

Do bear with me through this post, I will get a bit technical. In case if you do understand a bit of PHP, you will enjoy this post. For now, just keep this information with you, it will come to your aid sometime later when you would be talking to your developers!

Some Cookie Basics first

So if you have any kind of server side script running on your server, then you can create your own cookies! You should know that on a PHP server environment, the entire set of cookies is available in the $_COOKIE reserved variable.

Isn’t this awesome? What this means is that with one line of PHP code, you can refer to all the cookies which are now on your site for each of your visitors.

If you take look under the hood, then you will see that there are many cookies used by Google Analytics.

kidakaka utmz cookie

Each of these cookies have a certain purpose. The way GA utilizes these cookies is well documented, and you can find the developer note here.

So why the __utmz Cookie?

The __utmz cookie contains the traffic source information in Urchin tracker format. It contains information about how and when an individual visitor hits your site for the FIRST time. That means whenever the visitor comes back to your site, this value remains unchanged.

Imagine a scenario wherein a visitor first sees a post of yours on Facebook, or on Google … or other traffic sources. The visitor comes to the site, checks out a few pages and goes away (… such a shame!!). After a few days, the same visitor comes back to the site via an ad. This time the visitor leaves his information on one of your contact forms (I do hope you are using these!).

How would you know that the user is a repeat visitor? The form will only contain data which is about the visitor’s current visit.

So, whom would you attribute this event to? Your advertisement (the later) or your social media sharing (the former)? Do you believe in first impressions or do you believe in the recency effect?

Without having information about the user’s previous visit to your site, you will always choose the later. Thus misattributing your visitor acquisition to the wrong medium! And that’s why the __utmz cookie is so important! In effect it represents a unique visitor for your website.

I treat the __utmz cookie as equal to a real person!!

Associated with it is a story, this story which rolls out in a set of visits. Google Analytics can tell you if you are willing to sift through the data that is available to you.

What can we do with this Cookie?

How do we bite into this Cookie? Well, there are more than one method of cutting this cookie!!

  • If you have conversions on your site (Downloads, Sales, Contact Forms, etc), then you can always use the value in this cookie to track the origin of the visitor. This will give you a definite number on which traffic source (and which marketing campaign) is more effective for you when it comes down to conversions.
  • Each __utmz has a unique value set, this unique value can be converted into a Custom Variable and you can then track a unique visitor across your site using this Custom Variable (the free version of Google Analytics allows 5 Custom Variables, so use them sparingly).
  • For the more technically sound platforms, you can use this and the other GA cookies to track the visitor ACROSS multiple visits. However, there are other tools which are far more easier to setup to do this viz., Mixpanel.
  • If you are betting a lot on acquisition of traffic via Search engines, then the __utmz cookie can be mined for keyword data … yes, the data which people are searching for and are coming to your site. However, as of 2013, GA only provides the keyword data of users who have not signed in into their Google Accounts (around 30% of the data is not available).

Hmmm … crunchy delight!! And nutritious as well!!

I would love to hear from you how else can we use this and the other Cookies. In the meantime, do start integrating your Cookies with your CRM for more visitor intelligence!

OLX is not only Badi Badi Baatein

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If you have missed out on the Badi Badi Baatein ad which has been running on the television for quite some time now, do check it out. I am embedding the ad below as well (I love the melody and the jingle … not to mention that sometimes I do identify with the procrastination tendencies as well!!)

OLX is the india classifieds of the internet. Where people go to the site for searching good deals, selling their stuff or even offering professional services.

Online Marketplace

The market for local online market places is heating up. The once free model of Craig’s List has suddenly seemed more viable and profitable by a lot of Indian players. However, do not worry, the local marketplace model is not only Badi Badi Baatein … there is huge money in this business.

How does this free model turn profitable?

Well, lead harvesting for one. Providing correct information to the people seeking it for another. Essentially creating a marketplace where otherwise there was only ignorance.

Where else would I go for finding a second hand slightly used Samsung Galaxy SIII for INR 20000?

As I said before there are multiple players in this game … but I feel of the lot, OLX is different.

OLX stands out

With a clean User Interface (UI), simpler forms and very easy user experience, I have found that OLX is the easiest to operate. Yes, I do use the site for promoting my companies offerings in the different targeted cities.

The good part about the OLX site is that when my ad goes beyond the listing due to inactivity, I get reminded via an email … clicking on the email automatically logs me in and lets me edit my listing. This way, I can fine tune my listing and hope to generate more business.

Success is not only defined on how well the website looks … if you have gone through any of the different and varied category/city listings on OLX, you will suddenly see a plethora of different listings … people wanting to purchase something or the other, people offering services … the perfect online souk.

Going ahead

In any market, there initially is a lot of people who are shouting and vending their wares … over a period of time as the market matures, the successful businesses buy out the lesser successful ones and the market quietens down. And from there a clear leader emerges. I won’t be too surprised if OLX is among those leaders of online local marketplaces in the future.

The fact that they have received their Series A funding simply goes to point out that people are willing to put their money where their mouth is and that this business is a profitable one.