One more present under the tree—custom video messages from Santa
December 20th, 2011 | by The Gmail Team | published in Gmail (Google Mail), Uncategorized
Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Product Marketing ManagerLast Friday Santa opened up the Ho Ho Hotline and teamed up with Gmail to send personalized holiday phone calls to anyone you know who has been nice (or naughty, for that matter) in the U.S. or Canad…
December 20th, 2011 | by Shane Cassells | published in Google Conversions
This is the second part of a three part guest post by one of our GACP partners, Conversion Rate Experts.
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In the first part of this three part series, we looked at how many marketers rush into setting up their conversion rate optimization process but Conversion Rate Experts (one of our Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants) recommend instead applying a little bit more strategic planning, and how this can get you a much better outcome and avoid you overlooking some fundamental factors. Now we need to drill further into this approach so that you have can be armed with all the research that you need and make an informed decision going into your actual experimentation. Make sure you check out part 1 to see the previous three steps.
Step 4: Research the market
No business exists in a vacuum. You need to understand the ecosystem that you are working in. Study your marketplace by researching
- Your competitors
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- Expert commentators
- Social media
- Review sites
- Anywhere your target market gathers.
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Explore possibilities for improving your positioning against that competitive environment by building upon your company’s core strengths.
Step 5: Reveal the hidden wealth in your business
You will likely have elements within your business that would be highly persuasive to your prospects, if only your prospects could get exposed to them. The key is to identify all of these persuasion assets, then present them to the prospect at the right time in the buying process. In effect your website should be a “proof magnet”, incorporating all the necessary support material, persuasive content and evidence necessary to move your prospect forward with confidence.
Your website should be a “proof magnet”.
It can also be useful to identify assets that would be compelling to your prospects —
- Invest time in gathering your company’s existing material and sort through your collection to find under-used persuasive assets.
- Create missing assets that would be persuasive to your target market, if only you had them.
- Compile a wish-list of persuasive content and material that your company needs to acquire from outside sources, such as paying for material to be created or interviewing clients for case studies and results.
Step 6: Create your experimental strategy
Extraordinary improvements come from extraordinary ideas. Take all of the ideas you’ve generated from the research, and prioritize those big, bold, targeted ones that will grow your business in the shortest time. After collating all the ideas, prioritize them based on three simple metrics:
- How likely is it to double your conversion rate?
- How easy it is to implement the test?
- Has this idea worked before?
Summary of Part 2
Rather than starting with the first optimization experiments that come to you, it will pay big dividends if you take a short step back and really research and prioritize what you should be working on. As you have seen, there might be gold hiding in terms of your positioning in the marketplace and in your previously under-used proof elements. You can see how Conversion Rate Experts used this exact process to quadruple Voices.com’s conversion rate from under 5% to 22% here in this case study. In the next and final part of this series, we will put all of this research and planning to good use.
Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team
December 20th, 2011 | by Google Analytics | published in Google Analytics
From our initial limited release of Flow Visualization in October to our recent release to all customers, we have received a lot of positive feedback from our customers. The idea of using Sankey diagrams and applying them to traffic through a website s…
December 20th, 2011 | by Scott Knaster | published in Google Code
By Satish Kambala, Staff Software EngineerAt Google we believe that speed matters and a faster web is better for everyone. That’s why we started the Make The Web Faster initiative. To improve the speed of a website, we need to measure how fast web pa…
December 20th, 2011 | by Google Docs | published in Google Docs
This year, we introduced over 100 new features to Google Docs to make creating, sharing, and collaborating in the cloud an even better experience.In addition to the features you asked for the most, like page numbers and vertical merge, here are our tea…
We’re better together: how cloud, mobile and social are transforming the way we work
December 20th, 2011 | by Ashley Chandler | published in Google Apps, Google Enterprise
Posted by Amit Singh, Vice President, Google EnterpriseWho puts in a 9-5 day anymore? Or works on their own? The demands on our time are multiplying, information is increasing exponentially, and there are still only 24 hours in a day. So when you go to…
What were we watching this year? Let’s rewind 2011.
December 20th, 2011 | by A Googler | published in Google Blog, Uncategorized
One hundred years into the future, when our great-grandkids look back to what was capturing the world’s imagination on YouTube in 2011, what will they make of us? Will they still be delighted by babbling babies? Will they still be “so excited” ab…
December 20th, 2011 | by Inside AdSense Team | published in Google Adsense
When it comes to customizing the appearance of AdSense text ads, we’ve heard from many publishers that they aren’t always sure what combinations to pick. As a starting point, we offer a set of default options for ad colors, font size and font face,…
New 45° imagery for Detroit and 4 other cities
December 20th, 2011 | by Lat Long Blog | published in Google Earth, Google Maps
Earlier this month we highlighted 21 new cities with updated 45° imagery on Google Maps. In our last 45° imagery update of the year, we have 5 new cities from the Midwestern and Southern regions of the US.Detroit, Michigan is one of those cities I
December 20th, 2011 | by Wendy Wu | published in Google Apps, Google Enterprise, Uncategorized
Posted by Dan Doyle, Chief of Police, Lake Havasu City, ArizonaEditors note: Today our guest blogger is the Chief of Police, Dan Doyle, from Lake Havasu City in Arizona. Lake Havasu P.D. has 120 employees and they switched to Google Apps in May, 2011. …
Let the games begin!
December 20th, 2011 | by Google Chrome Blog | published in Google Chrome
Every year, lots of people have fun tracking Santa as he takes flight around the world to deliver gifts. This year, Santa is getting some help from the Chrome Web Store elves who have already started delivering the gifts of gaming to more than 200 mill…
December 20th, 2011 | by Google Students | published in Google Student Blog
Introduction: Veronica Rae Saron is a Google Student Ambassador at Rice University. In this four-part blog series, Rice+, Veronica will share about the various creative ways that the Rice community is using Google+ to enhance their world. Stay tuned fo…
December 20th, 2011 | by A Googler | published in Google Blog, Uncategorized
We’ve made a new $94 million investment in a portfolio of four solar photovoltaic (PV) projects being built by Recurrent Energy near Sacramento, California. This brings our portfolio of clean energy investments to more than $915 million. We’ve alre…
December 19th, 2011 | by Blog | published in Google Orkut, Uncategorized
After launching a complete communities redesign, as you probably had noticed, we are still launching new features for communities, like the live update on topics and the quote feature.Thinking on how to make the user experience even better, we’ve add…
December 19th, 2011 | by Stephanie Taylor | published in Google Open Source, Uncategorized
Ever wish you could get your students to stop texting and start using their phones productively in the classroom? Do you ever wish for an easy and quick way to measure what your students have learned? If so, you’ll be excited to learn that we recent…