Thoughts From The Cake Scraps

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Curse you Burger King! We had something so special together!  I had become more than a customer, more than a brand loyal, I was a brand ambassador.  I actively told people about how great you were and now you have betrayed me.  That makes me quite mad.

I remember it like it was yesterday.  I was traveling and I was hungry and in a rush.  I was passing through the Milwaukee airport.  I just needed a little something to keep me going and I was not in the financial position to shell out $12 for a chicken wrap and a soda.  I quickly located the fast food options.  It wasn’t time for Cinnabon, so Burger King it was.  I looked over the (overpriced) menu to see what I wanted.  Being an airport location the menu was quite sparse with very little detail.  I decided on a double cheeseburger, not the deluxe one shown on the menu.  I didn’t see any signage for a meal combination and sometimes airport locations have limited options, but I wanted the soda so I asked the server, who waited patiently while I surveyed the menu, if I could get the double cheeseburger in a meal.  He looked at me and said, without missing a beat, “Sir, this is Burger King.  You can have it your way.”  And that was my introduction to Burger King as a brand.

To put it plainly it was awesome.  I just thought to myself, “that is amazing how he did that without missing a beat.”  Skip forward a few years and McDonalds $1 double cheeseburger enters the picture.  Delicious!  What a deal!  The $1 burger got me in the door and I loved it!  Then McDonalds made 2 critical miss-steps with me.  The first was the Monopoly game (I will link to this in the future when I write on it).  The second was the switch to the McDouble.  I hated them for it, but at least I could understand given the tough economic times that were upon us.  Plus, it had been on the dollar menu for quite some time.

Then, on October 19, 2009 Burger King burst on the scene with the $1 double cheeseburger.  I was still slightly loyal to McDonalds at that point.  Mostly because there is one on almost every highway exit but also because they still had a $1 option.  But, the aggressive advertising by Burger King during the football season got me to stop during one of my many trips.  Everything the commercials had promised was true.  It was bigger, it tasted better, it had 2 slices of cheese, and – best of all – it really was $1.  It was at this point I became an brand ambassador.

Every time fast food was brought up I would chime in with my opinion on BK.  I also told people about how the $1 burger at BK really was better than the $1 McDouble at McDonalds.  While driving I would actually wait to eat so that I could eat at a Burger King rather than a McDonalds.  In fact, not only would I wait to go there, but I would then buy items that I knew they had killer margin on.  I loved the value and I wanted to support them.  All of this love, and then they stabbed me in the back.

Well, to be fair it was National Franchisee Association (represents 80% of the Burger King locations).  They claimed they could not make enough profit the burger.  They demanded it be changed and, due to the heavy pressure, Burger King complied.  This change happened on April 26.  They had the $1 double cheese burger, spent tens of millions advertising, for 189 days, or about 6 months.  Wow.

I understand that a company has to make money, but this is just wrong of the National Franchisee Association.  Why not just change the double cheese burger to have 1 slice of cheese and then make a “cheesy double” that has the 2 slices of cheese?  The change intentionally confuses customers.  I still feel dumb every time I have to order a “McDouble”.  It just sounds silly.  And the BK Dollar Double is just as bad.  Plus, now if you ever have to raise the prices, you have to change the name!  So the move by the NFA not only burned tens of millions of dollars spent on advertising, they are now spending millions more on advertising the BK Dollar Double, they created confusion among customers, and forced a move to a menu item that cannot have its price changed.  How stupid and short sighted can you be?

In addition to confused customers, think of the lost productivity – a critical issue during peak hours.  Whenever somebody orders a double cheeseburger it must be clarified if that person really wants a $1 or the more expensive one.  They then might ask what the difference is and this takes even more time.  The alternative is to just take what the person orders at face value and deal with angry customers who thought they were getting the $1 item.  In a business where efficiency is measured in seconds or less, all of these small issues add up.

I am not happy with you Burger King and I think I will check out Taco Bell the next time I hit the road.

Do you think this whole thing feels like a bait and switch?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

Businesses want to see the product that they have.  That is fairly obvious.  What may be slightly less obvious, though we probably all know it if we stop and think, is that businesses want to provide us with the tools we need to engage with them.  A basic offline example is carts at the grocery store.  This is provided to you simply to make shopping with that store easier and so that you can buy more stuff (as opposed to if you had to carry it all in your hands).

These same sorts of tools exist on almost all e-commerce websites in one form or another.  A simple example is a search box.  The option to search provides the visitor with a tool to find what they are looking for.  Another example is product categories.  A company doesn’t just put all of the products they have and place them into a single index page.  They try to group them by how they think their (potential) customers would group them.

All of these things make it easier to engage with the business.  The tools make it easier to shop or discover product.  This, hopefully, will get you to buy more product which is how the business can justify the investment in whatever tool they have developed.  Some, like the search box, are easy to see the value in while others may just be for fun.  Either way the end goal is the same.

Clearly it costs money to develop and implement these tools, therefore the initiative has to generate money.  This could be directly (sale now) or indirectly (brand goodwill for later purchase and/or consideration).  The hard part is measuring the value of one of these tools retrospectively.  If it was upfront, then test, test test.  But, in some cases, that just isn’t possible or wasn’t done for some other reason and yet the leadership will still want some number to hang their hat on even if it is just a very rough estimate.

The problem with reading tools after the fact is that it is very hard to prove direct value.  Sure you can see how much demand came through the tool.  Or how many visits interacted with it and how many times it was used in total.  You can look at participation metrics for the tool.  You can look at data point after data point but one very tough question will remain: how much of this is incremental?.  Even if you launch something and it is used by a significant portion of your visits, you will still have a hard time saying what is truly incremental.

For instance, mother’s day is coming up.  Let’s say you launch a page that lists many products for mom.  You may see that for those visits the % of time that a product is viewed and then purchased will decline.  But don’t worry, they are just browsing for gifts.  They are using the tool exactly as expected.  But if this change in behavior happened on the whole site you would have an issue because people are viewing product and simply not buying.  You might read that as a poorly designed product page or that your visitor can’t find the information they want.

On the flip side, you may launch some tool and find that anybody that touches the tool is like pure gold.  Conversion is up 50% for visits that use the tool.  Everything looks great, right?  Well, what if all of those people were your best customers anyway; what if they are your most engaged and most likely to buy?  Perhaps your tool is actually lowering conversion for these people, but the fact that they perform so well compared to the site as a whole causes you to miss this issue.  And, at worst, to declare the new tool a success!

The solution, of course, is to test everything.  That way you will have a true and clean read of the exact lift of a new tool.

What are your favorite tools that you wish all sites had?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

Conversion, however that is defined for a site, is always the reason the site exists.  For me, a conversion is a visitor viewing at least 2 pages.  If I can do that then I know that I have engaged the person enough to look around the site a bit more.  You probably have some other definition of a successful conversion on your site.

A fairly common conversion point for a website is account creation or e-mail capture (e-mail sign-up).  The most common way to look at how successful the sign-up process is is by using a fallout report.  A nice funnel that shows how many you started with and how many fell out at each step.  The bottom of the funnel is the total number of people that made it through the process.  This is a great way to look at things but there are two very different ways of doing it.

The first way is based on pages viewed.  This is a very common way to look at fallout.  People that made it from Page A to Page B to Page C.  This works nicely in a very straightforward way.  It gives you a nice view of the total performance of that site path.  Unfortunately, at least in some WA tools, that is about all you can get at with the basic reporting capabilities.  The problem with this is that you might be missing some huge cake scraps, or golden nuggets, of information by looking at the data in aggregate.

Setting a success event on each of these pages will provide a much greater degree of flexibility.  For instance you could very easily look at campaign tracking codes and see how many of each event was set for each tracking code.  This might give you information that you simply didn’t have before.

Say, for example, that you had both display advertising and paid search campaigns pushing traffic to your site.  In all likelihood you know what the conversion is off of each of these tracking codes but you might not know how many of your email sign-ups are coming from each campaign.   It is very easy to start setting a success event on the sign-up confirmed page so that now you can get a count of that event by campaign tracking code.  Perhaps you find out that your paid search converts better but they don’t come and sign up for email.  This might cause you to change the messaging that you are doing in paid search (perhaps message email strong to drive sign-ups or message something else since e-mail sign-up just didn’t work).

Similarly, if you had a 2-step process, and set a success event on each page, you would be able to see if one type of campaign had huge sign-up issues.  Perhaps you would learn that you want to create a different on-site expirence for that type of campaign to drive up sign-ups.

Another thing that is great about using events is that they are easy to trend across time whereas fallout reports based on page views can be a bit more difficult or time consuming to generate.  The downside is that you probably have a limited number of events, so use them wisely.

What type of conversion goal do you have for your website?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

I think I am going to try to refocus myself a little bit and talk about my life in the world a web analytics a bit more.  This was one of the things that I talked about at the onset of the blog and, while I have made a few posts on WA, I don’t think I did quite enough.  I didn’t publish what I was learning.  I didn’t take time to look back at what I learned in any given week.  Learning happens, often times, in small steps and so if we never take a moment to look back we never realize just how far we have moved.

Have you looked back on your acquired knowledge recently?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

All sorts of talking heads have been in the news recently discussing what the impact will be of the decision that Spirit Airlines to charge people up to $45 per carry on.  They talk about how other airlines will watch them to see how the program is received by the public.  Then of course there are the Southwest commercials that only talk about how they don’t have bag fees.  But all of these people, in particular Southwest, are missing the boat.

People  get upset when new fees are implemented.  Some fees, like for checked baggage, are just frustrating while others, like charging for bathroom use, are silly, and still others are illegal (like charging for handicap assistance).  But these fees only make people upset for the moment and then they pay.  I would argue it is in danger of becoming a confusopoly.

What makes it worse is that the pointless TSA rules force you to discard items (like beverages) and yet provide no oversight on the cost of the beverage on the other side of the gates.  Meanwhile they are spending $1 Billion on scanners that, by all accounts, don’t work, are able to transmit ‘nude’ photos (as specified in the requirements document in the original proposal), and could damage your DNA.  And of course this is tax dollars and additional security fees at work.

Whatever, the point is there are lots and lots of fees which brings me to the point of this post: all of the power is in the hands of Kayak and Priceline.

Think about it for a second.  Airlines are imposing these fees so that they can get the lowest far shown, which should drive business.  This clearly is based on the assumption that price is the most important thing to customers that are traveling.  And yet nothing is being done on these comparison sites to expose this.

Which brings me to my secondary point: Southwest is getting screwed.  If I ran Southwest starting tomorrow, the first thing I would do would be call up Priceline and Kayak.  I would get an estimate of what it would take to add “how many checked bags”, “how many carry-ons”, “how many in flight meals/snacks”, “how many in-flight bathroom uses”? and similar things to the site and I would pay to develop that functionality.  The prices people see now are simply no longer valid.  There are too many additional add on costs to just keep ignoring them.  And for an airline like Southwest, to not expose that more in a pricing engine is a HUGE miss.

While I like the lower costs, and I like the idea of only being charged what I use, I also think I like to feel like I got a deal, or at least am not being taken for every cent I have.  It is a very delicate balance, and probably depends on the point of the trip (business or fun).  This could get interesting.

What do  you think about the more a la carte structure (besides that cable companies should offer it)?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

People like to makes jokes that the Winter Olympics are just a bunch of sliding games.  Well, for the most part that is true.  In fact, it may be totally true.  It is also true that most of the events require quite a bit of money to make happen.  Lets face it, there are not very many natural bobsled runs or half-pipes.  And getting to the top of a mountain isn’t exactly an every day sort of event.  But none of these things are the reason that I think the winter games are more American than their summer counterpart.

No, the reason is that you and I could be there if we wanted to be there.  If we worked hard, practiced hard, and then rinsed and repeated, we could get there.  This is, in my opinion, in stark contrast to the summer games.  For many of the keystone events of the summer Olympics you are either born with it or not.  You could 100% optimize your body and will still lose every single time in the marathon.  You just cannot do it.  Same with sprinting.  You screwed from the onset.

Take Michael Phelps.  Good swimmer?  Sure, but it is all in the genes.  He has Marfan Syndrome which, if it doesn’t kill you, makes you an ideally proportioned swimmer.  Here is an article explaining it a bit more.  Or another way is to look at this graphic that explains him a bit more:

Here’s what it says:

1. He is 6-4 but has a 6-7 wing span
2. His lactate levels are the lowest ever recorded for a swimmer (he’s really good at producing energy)
3. Not only are his arms long, but he has short legs allowing him “to plane in the water”
4. He can hyperextend his elbows, knees, and ankles giving him an extremely unique ability in his stroke

So again, he was born for it.  There is simply nothing that you can do to match it.  Make no mistake, I am not saying that the Winter Olympics don’t take athleticism.  That would be absurd.  I’m just saying there just isn’t the same level of genetic predisposition for the sports.  At the very least it is clear that genetics are a much lesser impact for the winter games.  Which also probably cuts down on the whole drug thing because it is so much more about the perfection of a skill set than about raw, athletic (and genetic) ability to compete.

I acknowledge that there are certainly sports in the summer games that are much more skill based.  Rowing, for one.  Shooting events.  Volleyball.  I am just saying that, as a whole, the winter games are less dependent on innate ability and more about a honed skill.  The pinnacle of a “you too can make it” mentality.  And, to me, that just seems so darn American.

Or do you guys think it is Canadian?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

Well, their advertising got me in the door.  I decided to check out what this whole cruise thing was all about.  It looks like a great time, but I can’t help but think that their User Experience could be significantly improved (and therefore their conversion rate). Carnival is making some HUGE mistakes.

Making sure you have a usable website, one that is intuitive and easy to navigate, is a key element of converting your visitor into a sale.  Lets take the first page after I entered in some information about where and when I wanted to take a cruise:

The first thing I notice is that I am left to assume that these are per person rates.  Maybe it says that somewhere on the rest of the page, but this section is clearly the focus.   Making sure your user knows that this is a per person rate will save on hard feelings down then line.  After all, I am booking a room and rooms (at hotels) usually don’t care if you have 1 person or 2.  If I have never been on a cruise (and I have not) I could easily assume these are rates per room.  Update: It does not say that on the page, only when you hover over the lowest price (not shown in picture); does not show up when hovering over any of the other prices.

Next I see that the base room would cost me $729 while the Suites will cost $1,399.  That’s quite a difference.  I wonder what I get for $1,399.  Let me click on the “Suites” link with the camera icon.  This is what will sell me on getting the expensive room.  A nice overlay pops up on top of the current page looking like this:

Hmm…the first thing I notice is that I clicked on the Suite and the picture that pops up looks pretty unremarkable for the price.  Oh wait, the Interior room is selected.  Huh?  That seems like a pretty big miss.  But okay, I figure that out and click the suite.  I give them another chance to sell me on the room.  And…it is just an enlarged picture of the little thumbnail.  Thus far I am not convinced that I will double the price of my cruise.  But what could they do differently?

First, they could give me more pictures.  It is basically free for them and would do tons to help convert me.  Some pictures that I would love to see:

• What does the view out the balcony look like?
• How big is the balcony?  What does it look like?
• Is there a TV (like in the other rooms)?  Where is it?
• How big are the closets?  Where are they located?
• What does the bathroom look like?
• It says it has a large vanity/dressing table…where’s that?
• A whirlpool tub is listed.  Again, what does it look like?
• How big is the desk in the corner of the room?

All of these things are items that people want to know.  They want to know what they are getting for their dollar.  Instead there is one generic shot that does almost no good.

The next things is the text below the single picture: “Includes stateroom category: JS, OS and VS.”  Ohh, right.  Category JS.  I’m not sure what JS means to them but to me it means Jack Squat.  Why would these letters have any meaning to me?  And, to make matters worse, I cannot click them to figure out what the heck they are talking about.  It is just meaningless text unless I’m some sort of cruise expert in which case I wouldn’t be on this page to begin with!

Sorry Carnival, I’m not even all that interested in what your big green details button would give me.

What do you guys think?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

This is a must read.  It is quite possibly the most ridiculous business idea I have ever heard.  And yet here a guy is, that has made$11,000+ so far.

Basically Bart Centre started a business, Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, that is centered on the idea that atheists will not be taken when The Rapture happens and neither will pets.  This is how it is sold according to the Feb 22, 2010 issue of Business Week:

“In this event, they say, the righteous will be spirited away to a better place while the godless remain on Earth.  But what will become of the pets?”

And the website itself says:

“The next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World.”

“If you love your pets, I can’t understand how you could not consider this.”

So everything about the site, including the name – Eternal Earth-Bound Pets – is focused on making pet owners feel bad that when The Rapture comes their pets will be left behind.  Thankfully for them, atheists will not be taken and, therefore, will still be around to take care of the pets.  But of course there is a fee for this.  $110 gets you a 10-year contract.  IF The Rapture happens in that time, the pets will be taken in by atheists approved by Eternal Earth-Bound Pets.  Otherwise you just burned you money, similar to any other insurance deal.

It is very clear that Mr. Centre thinks that his customers are complete and total morons.  But, to his credit, the guy is completely upfront about his whole business plan:

“I’m trying to figure out how to cash in on this hysteria to supplement my income.”

“If we thought the Rapture was really going to happen, obviously our rate structure would be much higher.”

I’m not sure how I feel about this whole thing.  On one hand it seems like the phrase “a sucker is born every minute” has never been more applicable.  On the other, if you really think that The Rapture will happen, and that your pets will not make the trip with you, this could ease your concern.

It is the same thing that a tarot card reader, ghost communicator, or any ‘fortune teller’ relies on.  They, and perhaps their clients, know that they are completely making stuff up.  BUT, if, at the end of the day, the person with the ‘power’ has made the customer feel better, or given them hope, or given them something exciting to think about, has the person got their moneys worth?  I, for one, hate horror movies and cannot imagine why someone would pay to have themselves scared (and haunted mazes are only slightly better).  And yet there is no way that I can call the whole genre a scam because not everybody feels the same way, obviously.

So do you have pet after-rapture insurance or is the whole thing a scam?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

That is quite a bold statement and one that would likely stir up much debate on its own, but I am going to do this with a twist.  I am going to use the homeless as an example of people making a very hard choice for the good.

Background: I was reading a post on an occupational field that most of us would rather not find ourselves in.  The author was clearly biased and talked at length about how bad of a job it was, how dangerous it was, and how tough it was on a person both physically and mentally.  I didn’t find their arguments all that compelling and commented on the post and told them why.  My basic problem was the author was presenting this occupation as a last resort.  That the workers had to do things that were outside their contractual obligations.  They had to do it without saying anything or they wouldn’t get paid.  These sorts of things – and yes this was a legal occupation in the USA.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I have already said that many people would not want to do this job.  But to say that these workers didn’t have a choice…well, I just thought that was dehumanizing in a very substantial way.  They were not forced to work.  They had clear legal recourse if the employer violated the terms of the contract.  They had a choice and the ability to choose what we want to do is a very important part of life.

Current Topic: Which brings us to why homelessness is a choice.  As I was tossing around the above case in my mind, poking it to see what holes I could make in my own argument, I came to this odd realization.  These workers could have chosen not to work, even if they had a family.  They could have chosen homelessness.  Now, this is where most would stop.  We can debate other contributing factors to homelessness, but I would rather skip debate on that point in favor of more dialogue on my next.  The homeless choose not to do more wrongs simply to escape.

Think about that for a second.  These are people that may not know where their next meal will come from, when it will come, or if they will even make it to the next meal.  Just think of the terrible weather in Washington D.C. right now.  They may not even have a place to sleep.  It’s tragic.  (Which on a side note is why I’m very happy with the effort my company, Lands’ End, made this past season with the Big Warm Up).  And yet they are still on the street rather than in a job they hate.  They are not committing blatant acts of lawlessness so they can be arrested and have a place to stay and food on their plate.

So in a very odd way, I am holding them up as a beacon for people that truly hate their jobs.  As I have alluded to in this post, there are many, many other debates that could be had around this topic but I just thought the conclusion that I came to was so peculiar, in a fascinating-thought-experiment sort of way, that I had to share.  I suppose I could have used an argument about the days of yore when honor was king, and death before dishonor, and all that.  This just seemed more interesting.

What do you think?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

I love to get a good deal. There are few things more pleasing than knowing that you were able to negotiate to a place where both you and the seller were comfortable with the agreement.  And despite what some may have you believe, a company really does want you as a customer; this is the case now more than ever.  So take your business elsewhere is you are unhappy, try and be reasonable, try to get a great deal if you can.  But don’t be a jerk about it.

I recently had an experience with an online retailer that I have recently taken quite a liking to.  Martin & Osa is part of the American Eagle company.  You know kind of like Abercrombie and Hollister or Gap and Banana Republic (Old Navy too!).

Anyway, they have a really great site that I like quite a bit.  It is easy to navigate and includes many great subtleties that  I won’t go into here but that I appreciate as a web analyst and novice usability analyst.  The other thing I like is that they have free shipping on orders over $100, they include clearance items in there % 0ff promotions, and they have free returns (you may have had to purchase over $100 to get that, I’m not sure).

On New Year’s Day they ran a 20% off and Free Shipping (no min) promotion.  Like I said I really like some of their stuff so I loaded up on around $100 worth of stuff.  It arrived a few days ago and literally the same day then ran a 30% off promotion.  I checked online and they were still in stock of each item that I ordered.  I kind of felt ripped off.  Sure I was happy with the 20% off but then to contact me again with 30% off within a week.  On the same stuff?  It just rubbed me the wrong way.

So I placed another order with them with the exact same items in the order and a few extra that I decided I could get with 30% off.  The plan was to just return all of the other stuff I purchased since I was getting the same stuff but with an extra 10% off.  But, being in the e-commerce business I know how much returns cost and shipping.  So I didn’t want to be a jerk and take advantage of their policies.

I called up their 24 hour number (excellent job M&O!) and asked if I could just get the credit on the stuff I bought earlier and then cancel the whole new order.  Sadly, they cannot price match to a promotional price.  This probably makes sense in most cases because people wear the stuff they purchased (and take off tags) so they can’t return it anyway.  Since I just got my stuff I could still return it.  I was also a little sad (but understood) why they could not price match my full price shirt I bought at retail (and linked to my online acct. via email) that was just send to clearance for a $30 price reduction.  They could match it in store, but not over the phone.  Oh well.

What I must say is that during this whole experience I valued his honesty.  He flat out told me to return the other stuff and keep the new order.  He answered each question without hesitation and was very clear in his answers.  Way to go Christian!  You did a great job.

So the moral of the story is always try and get a good deal (like getting 30% off instead of 20%) but also be reasonable.  It didn’t work this time, but sometimes all you have to do is ask.  Oh and by the way, my second order was actually twice the size of my first order with 30% instead of 20% so I don’t think M&O did too badly in the whole thing.

Do you love to get a great deal?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.