Monetizing Mediocrity

I laughed out loud while reading a recent Bloomberg article describing how Apple has a secret team hard at work to improve search in Apple’s App Store. Key to this initiative: finding a way to introduce paid search so that app developers can pay to come up first in search results. Oh yes, as a secondary objective, this secret team is also “trying to improve the way customers browse in the App Store.” Note that they’re improving browsing, not search!

Yes, the App Store, which the article correctly notes is a vital part of Apple’s business, urgently needs to be better monetized. Better functionality? Maybe, they’ll look at that too.

The App Store is a case study in bad design and a bad user experience. My sense is that it was created with the notion that users would primarily browse for apps of interest. But with 1.5 million apps and only 25 categories, you better have a lot of time to kill if that’s the way you want to find new apps.

Search is even worse. It starts with the well-hidden search box. Start typing in a word, and the search software will helpfully suggest phrases. But if you click on one of these search phrases, more often than not, you’ll come up with no results. Further, Apple seemingly permits companies to stuff their entries with the names of competitive products too, so you have to be extremely careful what apps you download, something I discussed in an earlier post.

Searching in the App Store is incredibly literal too. Apparently, concepts like wildcars or Soundex or even relevancy eluded Apple’s celebrated designers. In almost every respect, Apple appears to have succeeded in spite of itself.

Besides serving as a useful case study of how not to build an online store, business information companies need to consider how this impacts their products and digital strategies. Most business information companies distribute their apps through the App Store. It’s important not to take for granted that they will be found. Try searching for your own app in the App Store using common searches your typical user might try. I can pretty much guarantee you’ll be disappointed if not shocked by the results. Saying “download our app from the App Store” is unfortunately not enough direction for users. Also, spending some time to really think through your App Store listing is absolutely time well spent.

You should also keep an eye out for scammy apps that may be presenting themselves in confusingly similar ways in the App Store. Apple doesn’t seem to care, but you may be losing business to other app developers that don’t have your user’s best interests as heart, and this could ultimately reflect back on you. There are a stunning number of apps that seem to be gaming the system.

Apple’s planned solution to App Store search seems to be not to improve it, but to charge money for you to get the results you would expect to get if its search functionality worked properly. And much as I hate to say it, it may be worth paying up, because digital adoption starts with your users getting their hands on your app, and Apple is making that incredibly and unnecessarily difficult to do.

The 50% Solution

A saying attributed to the famous Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker is that, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” Apparently, that saying can be updated for the Internet age to read, “Half the traffic to my website is non-human; the trouble is I don't know which half.”

In fact, the percentage is worse than that. According to a study by online researcher Imperva, a whopping 61.5% of traffic on the web is non-human. What do we mean by non-human? Well, it’s a category that include search engines, software that’s scraping your website, hackers, spammers and others who are up to no good.

And yes, it gets worse. The lower the traffic to your website, the greater the percentage that is likely to be non-human. Indeed, if your site gets 1,000 of fewer visits per day, the study suggests that as much as 80% of your traffic may be non-human.

Sure, a lot of this non-human traffic is search engines (and you’d be amazed how many there still are out there), and that’s probably a good thing. After all, we want exposure. But the rest of this traffic is more dubious. About 5% of your overall site traffic is likely to be scrapers -- –people using software to grab all the content on your site, for purposes benign or evil. Sure, they can’t get to your password protected content, but if you publish any amount of free data on your site in structured form, chances are that others now have that data in their databases.

Obviously, if your sell online advertising, these statistics represent an inconvenient truth. The only saving grace is that your competitors are in the same boat. But if you are a subscription site, does any of this even matter?

I think it does. Because all this non-human activity distorts all of our web analytics in addition to our overall visitor counts. Half the numbers we see are not real. These non-human visitors could lead you to believe certain pages are more popular on your site than the really are; this could cause you to use bad insights to fashion your marketing strategy. And if you are using paid search to generate traffic, you could be getting similarly bad marketing data, and paying for the privilege as well.

Most importantly, this non-human traffic distorts reality. If you’re beating yourself up because of low response, lead generation or order rates, especially given the number of uniques and page views you appear to be getting, start by dividing by two. Do your numbers suddenly look a lot better? Bots and scrapers and search engines don’t request demos, don’t download white pages and certainly don’t buy merchandise. Keep that in mind next time you’re looking at your site analytics reports or puzzling why some pages on your site get so much more attention than others. Remember, not all data are good data.

How Zillow Spends Zero on Advertising

Doubtless everyone reading this is familiar with Zillow. We honored them as a Model of Excellence in 2006 .

They’re now a real estate listing behemoth that sports a market capitalization of $5 billion. We all know what Zillow does and how successful it’s been. But did you know that Zillow launched with virtually no advertising budget?

In a fascinating interview, Zillow’s Chief Marketing Officer, Amy Bohutinsky, explains Zillow launched with the classic “sell data with data” strategy. Using data to promote your data is – unsurprisingly – a marketing tactic available only to data publishers. And it’s a tactic well worth exploiting to the maximum.

Zillow launched itself with press releases aimed at the consumer mass market. It offered free access to data that was catnip to almost every consumer: instantly find the estimated value or your home, or anyone else’s for that matter. Zillow, after collecting and normalizing property assessment records from all 50 states, had developed an algorithm that looked at recent sales and area demographic data to calculate a home price valuation. Sure, it was necessarily imperfect, but the data was credible if not authoritative, comparable (all homes were evaluated the same way) and of course free. This quickly drove millions of page views, allowing Zillow to execute on its business model of selling listing enhancement to real estate agents.

But Zillow didn’t stop with this single gambit. Instead, it allowed consumers to sign up to receive email updates to their home valuation – every time the estimate changed, Zillow would send an email. This created critical ongoing engagement (important because the average person doesn’t buy or sell a home all that frequently), brand enhancement, and an important advertising vehicle (the email also presented information on nearby homes for sale).

Beyond this, Zillow regularly mines its own data to find newsworthy statistics that keep its brand front-of-mind and implicitly credential it as an authoritative and central industry player. It issues press releases on everything from the standard reports on where homes are selling most quickly and slowly, to offbeat data on the “10 biggest homes” or “10 most expensive homes,” and the like. Obviously there’s no shortage of material.

As we noted earlier, you’re most likely to get media coverage if you can provide facts and statistics. That’s hard news as opposed to opinions or transparent gimmicks to try to attract attention. More importantly, every piece of data you release reinforces your central market position, your authority, your knowledge and your expertise. You become generally understood to be the “go to” place for data in your market. There’s no better positioning than that, and best of all if you do it right, it’s practically free.

You can hear how another Model of Excellence winner, Capterra,  pulls of this trick when its CEO Mike Ortner joins us for our infamous “Excellence Revisited” panel at this year’s Business Information and Media Summit. Hope to see you there.

App Store or App Storage?

In a recent article in Talking New Media, a writer with the pseudonym Alain Parkeat takes the Apple App Store to task for its incredibly bad design.

While I am not a frequent user of the App Store, every time I have to access it, I wince. For a company that hangs its hat on its relentless pursuit of perfection in design and user experience, everything about its App Store is slipshod and half-baked.

Really, you couldn’t do it much worse. The problems start right at the core of the whole App Store concept: in a rush to have the most apps, it’s necessarily assembled a collection of the worst apps. And here I am not just talking about the quality of the apps. Rather, I find I must tread warily with every search, because the App Store is riddled with frauds and imposters. Search on the trademarked name of a popular product, and you’ll invariably get not only that product, but lookalikes clearly designed to fool those who are not careful. They use deceptively similar names, logos and trade dress. They also are apparently allowed to use competitive product names as search keywords. Scariest of all, many of these lookalike apps are free – and thus likely to be nefarious ploys to gain access to your data or your passwords.

Searching the app store is also remarkably difficult. You think basic search functionality wouldn’t be too tough to implement, but with the App Store, you’d be wrong. Searching is about as literal as you can get, meaning that you better get your input exactly right, because the search engine isn’t going to help much at all.

This of course leads to categorization. Yup, the App Store is all over that, with 25 categories to classify a reported one million apps. I guess I’ll just click on the category “business” and start browsing. Clearly, with an average of 40,000 apps per category, this isn’t a very effective discovery mechanism.

But the App Store does feature apps, and since these apps are about the only thing you can easily discover in the App Store, they get enormous numbers of downloads. How does one become one of the few, the proud, the featured? Well, you need a lot of downloads first. Yes, if you want to be successful in the App Store, you better be successful before you get to the App Store. Otherwise, you better be very lucky.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Apple App Store is that this is not some obligatory thing Apple threw together to keep customers happy. Indeed, it’s a major source of revenue, generating over $1 billion per month, with Apple helping itself to a nice share of the pie.

For most publishers, the harsh reality is that the App Store is, more accurately, the App Repository. Apple’s value is providing a central location for apps and easy downloads. As far as discovery goes, you’re on your own. If only there was an app for that!

When You Centralize Data, You Too Become Central

One of the ways that bricks and clicks are starting to merge is through a technology called beacons. It’s all the rage in retail right now. Acme places specialized transmitters in each of its stores. When a customer with an Acme app on his or her phone enters the store, the transmitter can push real-time, targeted promotional messages to that customer. Even better, the customer doesn’t have to access the app – it’s designed to wake up and alert the customer.
Cool stuff, and what better time to target customers then when they are inches from your cash register. Yet, not every promotional message generates a sale. Despite your best efforts, the customer leaves your store. Now what?

This is the interesting area where a start-up called Unacast is playing. It wants to marry the data you have on the customer who just left your store to online ad re-targeting platforms, so you can continue to advertise to these customers, in the hope of making the sale. Again, cool stuff.

But Unacast is taking this a step further. It is going around to all the manufacturers of these beacon transmitters and positioning itself as a central back-end data repository for this valuable shopping data. As a central repository, Unacast can watch where else the customer is going to gain both marketing and segmentation insights. Did the customer go to a competitor? Better re-target with your best deal then. Does the customer go to discount stores or high-end retailers? A retailer can not only learn a lot more about its customers, but is better able to serve them highly customized advertising messages as well.

It’s a data bonanza that will yield endless benefits, and Unacast is moving fast to lock up this opportunity. That’s important because there’s typically only room for one central clearinghouse in a market.

This is a model you might apply to your own vertical. If you are seeing numerous companies collecting similar pots of proprietary data, chances are there is both a need and an opportunity to be the central repository. Why you? Why not? You’re established, know the data business and you’re a neutral player. Central clearinghouse opportunities typically go to the fleet of foot, especially now because the value of data is much more broadly appreciated. Do you have your running shoes on?