Non-hyperlinked URL shows holding page as referral

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SearchCap: The Day In Search, November 29, 2013

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Black Friday – A Cautionary Tale From An Online Retailer Back in 2010, I wrote a post entitled,“Black Friday? Bah! Cyber Monday? Humbug!” in which I...



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

from Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/q9iXd6CJlgQ/searchcap-the-day-in-search-november-29-2013-178543

Kyle Rush Reveals How the Obama Campaign Broke Every Online Fundraising Record: Free #MozCon Video

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

Every year at MozCon, I have the joy of working with our fabulous MozCon speakers. One of the speakers, who we were most excited about for MozCon 2013, was Kyle Rush. Kyle's name might not be on the tip of your tongue, but he worked on possibly the biggest and best online marketing campaign, Obama for America, as their deputy director of front-end web development. From there, he went to The New Yorker, and he just announced that he's headed over to Optimizley.

When Kyle told us he wanted to present about the conversion rate optimization and a/b testing the Obama campaign did, there may have been some squeeing from Rand (like the Packers won) and me (like over new Sherlock episodes). Marketing nerds. Because regardless of your politics, Obama's reelection campaign not only broke fundraising records, but changed the way we think about using big data and CRO.

Kyle rocked that MozCon 2013 stage. He presented a ton of actionable information for attendees, and he was one of our top scoring presentations. When we went to decide which full-length MozCon presentation to share with all of you, for free, Kyle's was it. Enjoy!

Video Transcription

Kyle: Thank you, Cyrus. It feels great to be in Seattle. I just came from New York City. Is anybody else here from New York? Yeah. You guys all know what I mean when I say it feels great to be in Seattle. You guys know how to do the summer with this 77 degree weather. This dry heat is awesome. We've got to figure out how to get that in New York City. Can we get on that?

As Cyrus said, my name is Kyle Rush. I'm currently at 'The New Yorker.' Before that I was at the Obama campaign. I worked on a lot of the product and tech aspects of our online fundraising. Obviously, we ran a lot of optimization on that. So, that's what I'm going to be talking to you guys today about.

Before we get started, I want to give you guys some context on what we jumped into, the situation on day one at the Obama campaign. All the media outlets at the time were reporting that we were expected to raise one billion. They did probably $700 million in 2008. So, we were expected to raise one billion.

Just to put that into perspective for you guys, Amazon's Q4 profit for last year was only $97 million. So, when you spread that out over a year and a half, which was the life of the campaign, you still only get like half or a little over half what we were expected to raise on the campaign. So, this was a pretty daunting challenge.

But, in the end... Oh, I didn't mean to click to. But, in the end we did $1.1 billion. So, we exceeded expectations. None of us thought we could do it. Obviously, that's a lot of money. We did $690 million of it online as Cyrus said.

Another thing that I want to talk to you guys about is just an example of one of our online fundraising programs. That was called Quick Donate. This was a way for our users to save their payment information so that they could do one click donations on the Web, and they could also do one click donations in email - which had never been done before. So, we had to do a lot of funky engineering to get that to work.

But, you could also SMS donate which was a first for political campaigns. It was actually a big achievement for us. Because the Federal Election Commission said that political campaigns can not use short codes to fundraise. So, we weren't allowed to work with AT&T and Verizon to send out short codes and ask people to text those. We had to engineer a way around that. When we launched SMS donations it was the first of its kind.

Quick Donate brought in $115 million over its lifespan. It had 1.5 million users. This was a thrill to work on. But, obviously, this type of program we optimized. We ran a lot of tests. Those are kind of the things I'm here to share with you guys.

You might ask how did we get here. We ran 500 experiments. We always had a test running. It was really, really intense the amount of traffic that we had. We did weeks of user testing. User testing is really simple. It's just putting a user in front of a computer and observing them.

We used a program called Silverback. I don't know if any of you guys are familiar with it. But, it records the eyesight camera and the computer screen at the same time. So, you can actually see your user making a donation. We learned a lot from this. We did it on and on and on to the point where we probably did weeks of it.

Sorry, this thing is pretty sensitive.

We also just did general data gathering which I really like to do. Because if you're not gathering data then you're kind of flying blind. Just a data point to show you guys how much data gathering we did, we did over 668 million Google Analytics custom events. I'll be talking about those in a minute. But, that's a ton. I don't think that I've ever worked at a place that pushed Google Analytics to the point that we did on the campaign. It was pretty intense.

You might ask 'What did that all get us?' It got us a 49% increase on our donation page conversion rate. And, it got us a 161% increase in our email signup page. These are two really high level conversion goals for us.

The email signup you might not have known about. We didn't really talk about it. But, I'll let you in on a little secret. Email is responsible for just about 90% of our online fundraising. So, gathering emails on our list was super important. We spent a lot of time optimizing email acquisitions.

The three things that I want to talk to you guys about today, and this is really what optimization means to me, is experimentation. I think we're all mostly familiar with this. This is A/B testing, multi variate testing. The second is observation, and that's what I was talking about when I was talking about user testing. You want to observe your users using your product. Otherwise, you're not going to know how they're using it. Because you're not a user. Also, just general data gathering, which is super important.

First up is experimentation. Sorry. This thing's super sensitive. We identified a process when we were on the campaign. I want to share that with you. I'm sure everybody has their own processes. But, this is what really worked for us.

The first step for us in experimentation was to identify our goals. I mean this from both a micro and a macro level.

On the macro level I just talked about some of our goals which was email acquisition and donations. You need money to win a campaign. In our instance we needed emails to get that money.

But, I also encourage you to focus on micro goals. This is like conversion goals when you're running tests. You should just measure everything. So, micro goals can be like the error rate on a form, like how many errors do you get when somebody mistypes their email address. Is the label clear enough there? You just really want to measure everything.

One thing that really blew me away on the campaign is that we started measuring the conversion rate on the follow-up page. So, when you made a donation and it was successful you got taken to a follow up ask that asked you to save your payment information.

That was Quick Donate. That was the opt in to Quick Donate. That was a very critical conversion goal for us, because we found out early on that Quick Donate users were four times more likely to make a donation in the future. That's like money right there that we needed to focus on.

We measured that goal even though we weren't changing that page at all. We were changing the donation page. Then, we found out that some of the variations that we ran actually affected the follow up page. It's really, really important to measure as many conversion goals as you possibly can when you're doing your experiments just to get a good sense of what's going on.

The second step that we would do is develop hypotheses. This is really important. It's just basically like the scientific process that you guys all learned in grade school. Develop your hypotheses and then test them. This is really helpful in making sure that you're staying focused.

It's really easy to fall in this trap when you realize how much you can test. You just start to test everything. You don't want to make any decisions. You just want to test. It's like, 'Oh, what color should the submit button be?'

'I don't know, test it.'

Don't do that. That's not a good idea.

Create high level hypotheses. One of ours, for example, in the campaign was that less copy does better than more copy for conversions. So, we tested that on our splash page. We tested that on our donate page. We tested that on our email sign up page. We tested it everywhere on the site. We figured out different experiments to test it.

That's actually number three here is to create experiments. Create many experiments to test your hypotheses. You might want to test the same experiment more than one time. Because you might get different results in the time of the day. There are all kinds of weird things that can happen. Test it multiple times and create several experiments that test your hypothesis.

Oh, wow. The fourth, and I can't stress this enough, is to prioritize with ROI. I touched on this a little bit earlier. But, as you start building out your experiments... I'll iterate this with an example from the campaign.

We ran an experiment where on our donate page we had a picture of the President behind a donate form. That was our control. But, then we added an inspirational quote above the President's head. It said something like 'Stand with me, work with me, let's finish what we started.'

When we tested that we got something like a 17% increase in conversions. Because it made the page just a little bit more inspirational and made people really want to finish and stand with the President. That was awesome.

That was just adding copy. That only took us, like, a couple of minutes to get onto a page and actually into production when it won. So, ROI on that is really high.

Our finance team wanted us to implement paying by check, because they had some data that said a lot of people don't have credit cards. Maybe they have checks that they can pay with. It sounds like a crazy idea to me, but the data that we got from them said that we could expect a 3% increase in the conversion rate.

But, on the technical side that was kind of a big lift. That would take days, if not weeks, to implement. We're only going to expect a 3% lift. So, when it comes to figuring out what experiments are going to give you the highest ROI, just really dig into the data and make sure that you're focusing on experiments like the inspirational quote and not things like changing your whole donation system for just a 3% increase in donations.

The fifth one is very easy - test your ideas. Then, lastly, you want to record results. I can't stress this one enough either. Because on the campaign what happened is we ran so many tests - 500 total - that we couldn't always remember what the result from one test was.

If we didn't have this awesome Google doc that we built out that recorded the time, the hypothesis, the result, a screen shot of the control and the variation and the results, and a link to the results, an optimized link, if we didn't have all of that we really couldn't have functioned. Because you just can't remember the results of 500 tests.

You can also disseminate that information when you have it in a Google doc. Just make sure that you're recording your results.

Now, I just want to talk about four areas where you can experiment. I've ordered these by ROI. Copy is, in my experience, by far the highest ROI that you can experiment with. It's very simple, because you don't have to change any code or anything. Changing copy only takes a minute or two, and the results that you can get can be really awesome.

Here is the Quick Donate opt in page that I was talking about before. This is the page where if you make a successful donation we ask you to save your payment information for next time.

We did a variation of the header. This one says 'Save your payment information for next time.' Very simple, right. Then, our variation changed the copy and it said,'Now, save your payment information.' It only changed a few words around. It's not a huge change. Obviously, it only took us like a minute to get this test into production.

By making the copy more direct and directing the user into what we wanted them to do we got a 21% increase on conversions. Again, this is very little development effort, but a huge result in conversions, or conversion lift I should say. Here you can see if you missed it before what the control and the variation was.

After copy, the next highest ROI area of experimentation that I would say is imagery. Because it's very easy to switch images out, almost the same as copy. It takes a little bit longer, though.

Here's an example of what we did on the campaign with imagery. This is our splash page for the 'Dinner with Barack' contest which is a super cool contest. You could actually win dinner with Barack. They would fly you out to Washington, DC. You'd sit down with Barack and have dinner. Sometimes Michelle would be there. Actual people won this contest. After you submit you would get entered into that.

Here we have a picture of the President. We figured out early on that big smiling pictures of the President worked because people love him. We had a hypothesis that people would be more likely to submit this if they could picture themselves in that scenario. You can't really see the people that he's talking to. It doesn't really seem like a real contest. It's like, 'Could I really have dinner with Barack Obama?'

So, we came up with a variation that gave the user a view of a little bit more of the situation. Those are two actual people on the right that won this contest. They flew them out, and they had dinner with Barack and Michelle.

The results of this putting a more situational image in there gave us a 19% lift in the conversion rate. Again, this does not take a lot of time to implement. It's just a very easy test. We got a huge lift on it.

Here are the two different images so that you can see them again.

Another area that I want to talk about is performance. This is going to be a little bit techie for technical. But, you guys are all probably very familiar with how page load affects conversion rate. We were, too. Early on in the campaign we knew that Amazon had published a statistic, and it's a crazy statistic, that even 100 milliseconds of additional latency on page load could drop the conversion rate by one percent. So, that's like huge.

We're obsessed with performance. We want to make our pages as fast as possible. Here is a look at the architecture diagram for the platform that we started with. It's very simple. It's very basic. It was built by a company called Blue State Digital which was one of our vendors. I actually came from there before I started at the campaign.

It worked really well for us in the beginning, because it was built out of the box. As the first engineer there I didn't have time to build a new platform. This was already out there and working.

The user makes requests to a load balancer, and that splits requests to two clusters. If you're asking for the page it would send you to the web cluster. If you actually hit submit on the form it would send you to the payment cluster.

Very simple, but there were a lot of problems with this in terms of performance. We, on average, saw five second page load time which is horrendous when you're processing $690 million worth of donations. You want something more like below two seconds, or how about zero seconds. Can we get the page to just load automatically?

It didn't have a CDN. I don't know how many of you people here are familiar with CDN. That's content delivery network. If I'm in LA and I request a page, in that architecture diagram the servers were in Boston. So, the data has to go all the way from Boston to LA. If you put it on a CDN... We used Akamai. There's an Edge server in LA, so it gets it to you much quicker.

There wasn't any caching in this environment. There were a lot of things that we needed to change. We basically started from scratch and built a new platform. We asked Blue State to turn their hosted platform into an API that we could hit on the client side.

Here's what that looked like. I'm going to run through it really quickly. We put our static assets, which is our JavaScript files, our images, our CSS and such, on an Amazon AWS S3 bucket which is a super simple data store. It's awesome.

Then, we put the Akamai CDN in front of that. So, we have really fast access to those. Then, we generated our HTML, the actual pages for these, with a static site generator called Jekyll which is built in Ruby. It's super simple to work with. It's great for front end engineers. They don't have to worry about server side templates and all of that stuff.

Then, we hosted all those HTML files on AWS S3 just like our static assets, and we put Akamai in front of that. The cool part is the two donation processors. Like I said before, Blue State built a donation API for us to post to, and then they had load balancing on their end. They had two nodes behind their endpoint.

We put ours on EC2, and we put them in two different regions. We put one payment processor in California, or it may have been Oregon. But, it was on the west coast. We put another payment processor in Virginia on the east coast.

So, if you had an IP address that was in the western side of the United States you'd be sent to the west coast payment processor, and the same for the east. If the west coast went down for some reason... There was actually a hurricane in Virginia and actually caused EC2 servers to go down during the campaign. All that traffic just got sent to the west coast. It was great. It was very redundant.

Once we got this system in place there was never a down time for accepting donations. We were accepting donations 100% of the time.

The new platform, the biggest metric I think is that it had an 80% faster time to paint. That means how fast the user puts something on the screen, not page load. The browser can start rendering the page, and the page load metric can still be going on because maybe it's loading some JavaScript or something that's not critical for page load. I like to focus on time to paint. We got 80% faster here.

To show you what that is, what that looks like, I use WebPagetest - which you guys should all use if you're not using it now. It's super easy to get data like this. The top film strip shows you that that's the fast platform. In one second we have a painted screen. That's a screen that the user can start filling out a donation. That's super fast. The only thing that's not loaded is the graphic assets. Those load by two seconds.

You can see our old platform doesn't even have anything on the screen by four seconds. That's awful.

We did a lot to increase the performance here. We had a 63% reduction in page weight. We just threw out all that legacy code and wrote our own. We went from something like 720 kilobytes to, like, 120 kilobytes. Then we had a 52% reduction in HTTP requests which is one of the most common things that contribute to page latency.

What did we get with an 80% faster time to paint? An increase in conversions by 14%. To measure that, we made a page on the fast platform that was identical to the slow platform. Then, we A/B tested them with Optimizely. 14% is not as big as the numbers I was talking about before, but this was in the beginning when we first launched this platform. This was the A/B test to put it into production.

When you calculate the $250 million that this platform brought in over its lifetime that's $32 million dollars. I'll take that. The money raised on the campaign was tight. Just by making that 80% faster we got $32 million. Obviously, this takes a lot more engineering, time, and effort, which is why it's less ROI than the copy and the imagery. But, this is huge. This is $32 million dollars that we got just by making that faster.

The second area of optimization that I want to talk about is... Sorry. This is experimentation and user experience, which also takes a little bit more time.

The screen that you're looking at right now is a donate page that is already super optimized. This was later on in the campaign. We had run hundreds of tests on this page, and it was performing brilliantly. We ran a lot more experiments on it to try and increase the conversion rate, and we kept failing. We couldn't get the conversion rate up. So, we got really frustrated and we couldn't figure out what to do.

We decided to try something big. What we did is on the variation we chunked the donation experience into four parts. Because if you look at this slide right here you see all 16 fields. It looks very intimidating to fill out. It looks like it's going to take you forever. But, if you look at this one all you have to do is select an amount. That's a much lower barrier for entry on engagement here. Then, you just go through that and it guides you through very nicely.

We tested this one. I like to call this the gradual incline instead of steep slope. We got a 5% conversion lift. Obviously, that's not as big as the numbers before. But, like I said, we had already picked all that low hanging fruit. So, 5% at that point was major, because we went a month or two where we couldn't get the conversion rate up at all.

That was a pretty big win for us. Like I said, it was on an already optimized page. You can see the two forms here. One is obviously much simpler to fill out, or it looks like it is.

Here are some best practices I want to share with you guys. The first is start simple. You don't have to make this complicated. My motto in any engineering scenario at all is start simple and test up. You don't have to make a really fancy user experience. You don't have to make it all Ajaxy when you launch.

Just get something out there and get it into production, because done is better than perfect. Then, since you're in production so much earlier you can start experimenting. Each feature that you roll out you'll know what affect that has on the conversion rate because you can test it.

The second is always have a test running. If you have traffic coming to your site, which you probably do right now, and you're not running a test that's just wasted potential right there. Because you're not learning from the people that are going to your site. Always have a test running.

The third is don't be afraid to fail. I can't stress this one enough. I can't actually remember the numbers, but I want to say something like only 20% of our experiments on the campaign actually raised the conversion rate. A lot of them were a statistical tie where it resulted in nothing. Some of them even decreased the conversion rate. Those are pretty damaging psychologically, but you can't let that get you down.

I want to show you an example of this. Ignore the amount buttons. This is a bad screen shot. I don't know how this came about. But, everything was the same except for a little check box down there that says 'Save my payment information on the variation'.

Somebody had the idea to instead of ask the follow up screen to save your payment information we wanted to put it on the donate page. Because they thought maybe that would increase the conversion rate on saving people's payment information. Well, this slide is a little out of order.

That actually reduced our conversion rate by 44%. Right when we saw that we stopped the experiment immediately and just moved on. That's the whole thing about testing. It's not permanent. You can just move on. You might not even have thought that that would result in that. I'll go back to this side. If you aren't failing then you aren't testing enough, because you're not going to have 100% success in your tests. It's just not possible.

The second area of optimization I want to talk about quick is data gathering. You really can not gather enough data. That's really my motto.

We on the campaign just gathered any kind of data that we could think of - error rates on forms, when people focused in the forms, and how long it took people to submit the form. And, how long it took for our Ajax response when the user hit submit to get a response from the server so that we could tell the back end engineers how long it's taking. Because we want it to be faster, obviously. Anything we could think of we measured it.

Again, here's this number. We did over 668 million Google Analytics custom events. Here's an example of one. This is an interactive infographic that we put out to showcase our 1 million donors. It was pretty early on in the campaign. It has a lot of little pieces of interactive content there where you can scroll to see names, what are the most popular names people donated under, and where people are from.

One part of that is this little piece right here which you can just scroll through and see the most popular names. We put Google Analytics custom events on the left arrow on the right arrow, and we found that 82% of the clicks were to the right arrow. So, that left arrow was unnecessary, and it's just cluttering the UI and gives the user more options. You obviously want to be guiding the user through what you're presenting to them.

We used that learning to optimize our UI's further down the road, and we just didn't put left arrows on anything, because it doesn't really make sense. This is the Google Analytics custom event to track that data. It's super simple and it's arbitrary. The category is one million infographic. The label is name slides. Super simple.

The last area that I want to talk about is user testing. This is actually a really cool example, because it solved a problem that I don't think that we were going to be able to solve without user testing.

This is the last step in the donation process. This is where we're asking for your employer and occupation. This is required of us by the Federal Election Commission. So, there's no choice. We had to gather this information.

Well, when we put the error tracking on our donate form we found out that the two most common errors behind people entering their credit card information was employer and occupation. We were like,'Wow, that's really weird. How can that be such a hard question?'

We went through and looked at the data people were submitting. It was like, 'None of your business', 'F you'. People just aren't comfortable, right. So, that was that. There's nothing we can do to make people more comfortable, really.

So, we just left it at that until we started doing user testing. We took a lot of the volunteers that came into headquarters. There was a ton of them. There were students, there were retired people, and all kinds of age ranges.

We sat them down on the computer on Silverback, and we asked them to make a donation. Sorry, I'm cheating a little bit. We found out that the students and the retired people did not know what to put in there. Because they're not employed.

Again, this is us thinking as us as the users. We work for the campaign. 'I know where I work. I work for Obama for America.' That's a very simple question for me.

But, to a retired person it's like, 'What do I put in there?' So, they don't put anything, and then they hit submit and that triggers the error. That's why the error rate was going up so high on these forms.

Once we got that feedback from user testing and observing our users use our product we put a little tiny - and I don't know if you guys can see it but it's just a little tiny line that says 'If you are retired please enter "retired" in both fields'. Little tiny bit of copy. It did not take us a long time to put that in there.

Adding that field hint in reduced the error rate by 63%. That's just crazy. Like I said, we would not have known to test that beforehand if we weren't doing user testing and watching our users.

I blog about all of this stuff a lot on my personal website. It's kylerush.net. I go into a lot more in depth on the technical side and a lot more experiments if you want to check that out.

That's all I have for you guys. Thank you.

Cyrus Shepard (emcee): Let's step over here under the light...

Kyle: ...You want this?

Cyrus: Awesome work, man.

Kyle: Thank you.

Cyrus: I assume you're using the enterprise version of Google Analytics.

Kyle: Is there an enterprise version?

Cyrus: Yeah, yeah.

Kyle: I know that we had a direct line over there where we were like 'Hey our stuff's not loading, can you please do something?' They were, like, 'Refresh it because there was too much data…'

Cyrus: Yes, yes...

Kyle: ...It was a lot going on.

Cyrus: One question I did want to ask. For your testing platform, did you build that yourself, or did you use an off the shelf version?

Kyle: No, we used Optimizely.

Cyrus: You used Optimizely.

Kyle: Yeah, which is awesome...

Cyrus: ...And, you'd recommend it?

Kyle: If you guys aren't using that, use Optimizely. It's amazing.

Cyrus: Yes, question?

Amanda: Is this on? There we go. Hi, my name's Amanda Stevens. I'm from marketing agency in Winnipeg, Canada. Fantastic presentation. My question for you is you talked a little bit about the design elements and the UX changes you made to the website to add that lift. I'm just wondering if you can expand on some other design elements that you incorporated to increase conversions.

Kyle: Yeah, sure. I don't want to be too harsh on design, but in my experience what we tested on design, embellishments and stuff, is just kind of a waste of time. It's fine if the designers want to put that in there. That's great.

But, like I said, when you're testing, like, button colors, and rounded corner versus square corner, do not waste your time with that. That's not going to do anything. It's just going to sink. It's a time sink.

Really, when it comes to design, our brand was all about imagery and photos. That's where we got the real big increases in design changes is imagery. Other than that, I wouldn't say that we found anything as far as design goes that had a real impact on the conversion rate.

Amanda: Cool. Thank you.

Kyle: Yeah.

Cyrus: Yes.

Alan: Hi, I'm Alan. I'm with Three Ventures Technology and Agency. I actually watched Dan speak at an analytics conference in San Francisco. One of the things that I think I actually would like to ask you about is why Optimizely and not Google Analytics content experiments with the multi arm banded approach, and basically minimizing the time increasing a certain conversion rate at 95% probability. So, I mean the amount of time basically that it would take for an A/B test to finish at those rates.

Kyle: Yeah, sure. I can talk about this forever, but I'm going to make it really brief. If you're an engineer there's really no other option for you. Because Optimizely makes your life so, so easy.

All it is is running JavaScript on top of your page. When you can do that you just add CSS classes to the page and it changes the design. It's so easy.

We actually were tasked with finding other A/B testing platforms that were either cheaper or I don't know what the situation was. We evaluated a lot. I don't want to dump on other platforms, because every one has its use. But, for us on the campaign Optimizely was by far the best.

One of the problems with Google Analytics is the data's not live. Optimizely gives you a live reporting on the results. So, you can see right away if your experiment is dragging your conversion rate through the dirt and you can stop the experiment.

It also gives you a lot of customization. You can do really advanced targeting. You can target people based on a cookie. You can target people based on their region. It has, like, a JavaScript expression.

There's nothing that we couldn't do in Optimizely. Any idea that we came up with we could do in Optimizely. We tried it in other platforms. There were a lot of limitations. From an engineering perspective that's why Optimizely is great. That's mainly why we chose to go with it.

Alan: Cool, awesome. Thank you.

Kyle: Yeah.

Cyrus: And, I think we have time for one more. We'll go over here.

Q: Okay, so I work in fundraising. Most of the time the relationships that we're dealing with in terms of how long a person is going to donate is five or ten years, longer if we're talking about direct mail. So, it seems like a lot of what you were looking at is immediate return. I don't know if you had an LTV where you were saying we got a 60% increase in conversions, but it affected the LTV or even just the length of the relationship by X. Did you look at things like that?

Kyle: Yeah, we did. I would say it's very difficult to measure something like that, because it's not like an exact, like the user's on the page clicking something. But, if you think about it, we've been raising money, not me personally but the campaign, since 2007. So, there is a long term donation cycle there.

The campaign is actually still raising money now. They have an organization called Organizing for Action that exists to support the President's legislative agenda. They're still raising money.

I would say that in a political campaign where it's so crazy and there's a deadline that is election day, which usually people do not have to deal with, it's more about the short term. But, they are still doing long term stuff. We just didn't have to worry about that as much because it was November 7, that's the day.

Q: Okay, thank you.

Cyrus: Kyle, thank you so much for coming to Seattle.

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How to Swaggerjack the Power of Visual Memes - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by lenawest

Visual assets like memes and truly informative infographics have always been (and will continue to be) effective ways of driving traffic and generating conversations. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Lena West walks us through some of the more effective examples, proving that it isn't difficult to create visual assets that get people talking.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard:

Video Transcription

Hey there, everyone. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. My name is Lena West from Influence Expansion, and I am here today to talk about how you can swaggerjack the power of visual memes to really boost your traffic and your SEO results.

So first, a couple of things I want to talk to you about is a couple tactics. So we're going to kind of get into the nitty-gritty a little bit here, so tactics that I have used with our clients that I know work. So first let me also say that I am not an SEO expert, and I don't play one on TV.

I'm a social person. But one of the things that I've noticed in our work with clients is when we are really heavy handed using a lot of images, you would think that it wouldn't work, it wouldn't be effective, but it is. I notice that not only do they get better search engine rankings, but they also get a lot of traffic and a lot of social signals. So all that's good stuff. So I'm going to show you a couple of things that we do to get that done for our clients.

First thing I'm going to talk to you about is Wordless Wednesday. If you don't know what that is, I'm going to go into it. Infographics, and do not laugh at me when I say infographics because I know everybody might be tired of infographics, but there's still some life there and there's still an opportunity for us to get it right and get some visibility going with infographics and get some juice out of it still.

Then I'm going to talk about quote graphics. So you've seen these probably on Facebook, a lot on Pinterest. It's a really nice background, and then on top it's got some text that kind of makes you feel good about yourself and good about your soul. So I'll talk about that in a minute.

So first, let's talk about Wordless Wednesdays. So what is Wordless Wednesday? I was first introduced to Wordless Wednesday when I started doing some work with BlogPaws, and complete disclosure, I'm on the board, but they are a great organization. BlogPaws is a pet organization, and they help pets with blogs, people who blog about pets, and that sort of thing.

What they do is they'll post pictures of dogs and cats and ferrets, and it's really interesting because they just post the picture, no words, hence Wordless Wednesday. They post it on a Wednesday. Because they don't force the content on the reader, what will happen is people will start to comment like crazy about what they think that particular animal is saying or what they think the scenario is about, etc. It really boosts engagement, and it gets people talking.

The thing that I learned the most about Wordless Wednesdays is, if you Google it, like right now if you Google it, you will see that there is about 7.7 million, and it will probably be more as you're watching this video, depending upon when you watch this, 7.7 million search results. If you look at the top five results there, you're going to find that not a lot of them are big brands. They're small companies. So there's really room to grow and participate in this particular meme. I'm going to talk to you about how to do that in a second.

So that's what Wordless Wednesdays is about. It's about slapping up probably an innocuous looking picture and getting people to comment and share. It works. It's super effective. Something creative happens when you don't force content on people.

So how do you swaggerjack the Wordless Wednesday? The easiest thing to do, number one, is just chime in on Wordless Wednesdays. Just start tagging your blog posts as Wordless Wednesdays. Now that you can use hashtags on Facebook, you can do it on Facebook. Start really getting in on Wordless Wednesday.

The other thing that you can do is make your own meme. So one of my clients has, I believe she calls it, Scarlett Says Saturdays. So that's the alliteration thing going on.

I've also seen Throwback Thursdays. You guys have probably seen that. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you're consistent. If it's Throwback Thursdays, it's not Throwback Thursdays once a month. It's Throwback Thursday every Thursday. That's the thing that makes the difference. That's where you get the juice from this Wordless Wednesday type meme is being consistent and doing it every single week without fail.

The power of the visual meme is amazing. Some brands that get this right, and you guys probably have seen some of these ads, it's the folks at Old Navy. Oh, they are amazing with the retro thing that they've done. They've brought back some '70s stars, Mr. T and The Brady Bunch people. It's just amazing what they've done with graphics. They've got that whole retro meme, that visual meme going, and it is working for them. Old Navy does more sales than Gap even does. So it's been really effective for them.

Another brand that gets it right, our friends at Dos Equis. So what's the saying this guy? He's the most unforgettable man in the world or the most interesting man in the world. "When I'm busy I drink Dos Equis." We know this guy. He's like the Old Spice guy. He's always around. He's this distinguished looking gentleman with white hair and a white beard. It's not Santa, but it's the Dos Equis guy. But they've used the power of the visual meme so that every single time you see this guy's face, you don't even have to see the Dos Equis logo. You don't have to see anything. All you know is something cool is going to come out of this guy's mouth, and they're going to make him look like James Bond meets MacGyver in this commercial.

So a couple tools that you can use to figure out which memes are hot so that you can jump on the bandwagon, KnowYourMeme.com, QuickMeme.com, and MemeCenter.com. So check those out. Those are really good places for you guys to get a start.

Second thing I want to talk about, infographics. Now I know that infographics have been overdone and overused, but I'm going to talk to you about something a little bit new in a minute. The first thing that we have seen work for our clients, in terms of getting more traffic and definitely more social shares, is going to Google images, doing a search and also going on Pinterest and doing a search for whatever industry they're in plus the word infographics.

So if your client is in wellness, let's say, so they're in healthcare. Maybe it's a vitamin company or a supplement company or something like that. Go and search for vitamins plus infographic, wellness plus infographic, healthcare plus infographic. You'd be surprised at the infographics that come up. Some of them are going to be crappy, and some of them are going to be really well done. All you have to do is copy-paste. Grab that infographic.

The beauty of infographics is, at the very bottom, mostly what you see is the attribution. So it's whoever created it has their logo at the bottom. So you usually don't have to worry about that when sharing infographics. Always make sure to give attribution though, because you don't want to be steeling anybody's stuff and trying to pass it off as your own. You don't want any problems like that. But copy-paste. Share stuff. It doesn't have to be your content or your client's content for you to share it. Fill that editorial calendar with some infographics.

So for those of you who are tired of infographics that are already existing, I've got something for you too. Design your own. You can make your own. Your clients are sitting on tons of data. All you've got to do is ask them: "Hey, have you ever done a survey? What were the results? How many results did you get?" You'd be surprised at what clients reveal when you start asking the right questions.

Great way for you to design your own info-graphics, here are a couple tools, visually, Piktochart.com and Infogram. I am partial to these folks because they have a really nice pictogram. They have a really nice user interface. It's very easy to kind of figure out what's going on and it's highly customizable, and what -- free. So I like that.

Brands that get the infographics game right think outside of the box. So there's this company called Warby Parker Eyewear. I've got to really slow it down with that -- Warby Parker Eyewear. What they've done is they have done an annual report for I think the past two or three years. There's one for 2010, 2011, and I think 2013 maybe, or 2012. They've done an annual report for their company using an infographic format. You've got to publish the annual report any doggone way. You may as well make it sexy. I think it's great. Google it. You're going to love it. You're going to love how they're used the infographic format to get that content out there and to share that content with their audience.

Another company who blew it out of the water, folks called LunaMetrics. You may not know who they are, but I guarantee if you work in the social space at all, you have seen their infographic. Google it. I promise you. It's an infographic. It's a white background, and what it does is it gives you all of the standard sizes for every single social channel layout. So it tells you the ideal size for your profile image on Facebook, your cover image for your Facebook page, your cover image for Twitter. It gives you all of those graphics all in one really long infographic. I know I have used this for us in my company. I've used this for our clients. I know other pros in the social space use this all the time. Who gets the credit at the very bottom?

The folks at LunaMetrics. It's been passed around thousands and thousands and thousands of times. So really check that out.

The last and third thing I want to talk to you about in terms of swagger-jacking the power of visual memes is quote graphics. Say that three times fast. So quote graphics, you've seen them on Facebook and Pinterest. They've got that nice background, and usually it's like a lake or some flowers or something, or maybe even a watercolor background. Some of them are bright, kind of in your face. They have some sort of saying or quote on top in very stylized text.

What I love about these images is it doesn't matter the size of your company or your client's company. You can use these. Here's how. If you're representing a bigger brand or if you work at a big brand, you can use these quotes because you get to choose what the quote image says. You get to pick which quotes you use. You can use these quotes to really humanize a big brand to bring it down, to make it connect with people in a very real way. So using words and images, you can use it connect with people.

If you're representing a smaller brand or a smaller company or if you work at a smaller company, you can use quote graphics to develop that know, like, and trust factor with your clients and the people who are visiting your Pinterest boards or visiting your Facebook page.

Again, based on the quotes you select and the backgrounds you select, we've had custom backgrounds made for our clients. So we'll create, I don't know, a suite of like five or six custom backgrounds and just throw different quotes on the top of those various backgrounds and swap them in and out and get them up on Facebook and get them up on Pinterest. It's been really amazing in terms of the sharability and the traffic.

Always, always, quick tip from Lena, at the very bottom put your URL or your client's URL so that people know exactly where to go to if they want to find more information about this company that shared this great quote with them.

As always, just like with infographics, you can search, copy, paste. You can find them on your own. I think there's a really good one on Facebook. If you go and search for quote graphics on Facebook, you'll see it. There's a whole Facebook page devoted to these.

The other thing you can do is create your own. I like these tools to do that. You've got to have your own background with most of these tools. But Pinwords is great. We use Pinwords a lot, especially if you have your own background. If your designer has done a custom background for you, Pinwords is awesome. So I'm going to circle the one that I like. Pinwords. Oops, I don't think you guys can see that. Pinwords. I like Pinstamatic as well and Quozio. So those are three options for you to create your own.

Brands that get this right, I'm going to save Peugeot Panama for last because I love what they've done, and it's like OMG. But LL Bean and HGTV. It's very tempting when you're on Pinterest or when you're creating these graphics to smack products in there and use it as a sales channel. Could you do that? Yeah. But that's like complete cheese-ball.

You want to be creative. So what the folds at LL Bean have done, so okay what's the energy of LL Bean? What are they about? They're about camping and outdoors and being in the wilderness and that sort of thing. It's got that outdoorsy vibe to it. So every single board on their Pinterest board, their main Pinterest board, every board is about outdoors or animals in the wild. People are pinning this stuff like crazy. You would think, "Well, why don't they just put pictures of their jackets?" Because nobody cares. People want to share pictures of animals and really cool tent set-ups and outdoor, what do they call it, glamping. So there's loads of pictures of glamping on LL Bean Pinterest boards. They really get it right. Check them out.

HGTV does something very similar as well. So HGTV is all about DIY and renovating and painting your house and that whole bit. So they've got some boards.

But Peugeot Panama, they take it for me. What they did, you have to see it. Please Google it. What they've done is they've taken pictures of their cars, and Peugeots are kind of small cars. So what they'll do is they'll take pictures of the car, and they'll chunk them up into nine or six different images and they'll put them back together on the Pinterest board so that when you go to the Pinterest Board, it's almost like a puzzle. It's the coolest effect. It's a very cool way that they've deconstructed the images to reconstruct the bigger picture. It's absolutely amazing.

So I hope that you see that images are not our enemy, and images are actually our friend. We can do so much with images. It's not just about alt text and trying to cram text in there and only use text. You can get a lot of social signals. You can get a lot of traffic and really great search engine rankings, because if you're doing well on social, you all know that you are going to come up high on those search engine rankings.

So feel free to chat me up in the comments below. Let me know what you're thinking. Ask me any questions. If I speak too fast and I left something out, let me know. So thanks so much for listening. See you online.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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SearchCap: The Day In Search, November 27, 2013

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