Thoughts From The Cake Scraps

It has been some time since I last posted on Twitter.  I have only used it for a few months but I feel like I can safely split Twitter into 4 types of Twitter users.  The User, The Contributor, The Talker, The Streamer.

The Streamer is the Twitter user that feels like they need to post every update in their life.  They use it like a combination of an Away Message and an IM to the world.  The problem is that, on the whole, most people don’t care.  And if they do, they probably already are in contact with you in some other way.  The other defining characteristic of The Streamer is the frequency of updates.  If The Streamer would only post once or twice a day then the Tweets could be interesting, even if they are just about general life.  The problem arises when this is done with an annoyingly large frequency.  Of course the threshold of annoyance will be different for different people so you will have to self-define that limit.

The Talker is the Twitter user that shares every link they come across if they can justify sharing it with a single follower and often times even when they can’t.  They retweet as often as possible.  Again, as is the case with The Streamer, each user will have their own threshold for how many retweets are too much.  The Talker will also have conversations on Twitter that really should be done in a Direct Message or some other communication channel.

The Contributor is that perfect blend of everything.  The Contributor shares only a few links, but great links.  The Contributor will share helpful tips.  The Contributor will share an interesting event in their life.  But really, they only share the cream of the crop and will direct their tweets with DMs and @replies rather than full on blasts to all their followers.

The User is person that is following a ridiculously large amount of people.  They are the user that only follows you hoping that you are a brainless sheep and will follow back even though you have no interest in what the person has to say.

Of course these are generalizations and things like TweetDeck help manage these sorts of things, but it would be nice just to have people use common sense.  It makes it better for everyone involved.

People can’t read what you tweet if you are tweeting 20 times a day because they don’t have the time for that.  Then multiply those 20 tweets by 50 followers and you start to see just how silly and, ultimately, less useful these people make Twitter.

Which Twitter user are you?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.  If these posts interest you, follow @TheCakeScraps!

Diamonds are not the only thing that is forever anymore. It is no secret that Google will dig deep and find things on a person that the person has long since forgot about. Individuals that are active on the internet are pumping out a HUGE amount of information that is then on electronic record.

It could be a post in a blog, a comment on a blog, a Tweet, a Facebook wall post, a resume on your college club site, etc. The list of places that your name might show up grows almost every day.

I was most recently reminded of this by an interesting site, Cursebird, that tracks curse words used in Tweets. It even gives a real-time stream. Not only that, but you can search by user and it gives you all the tweets that the person used a curse in and ‘rates’ them based on which and how many curses they use.  If you check it out, @TheCakeScraps has no results.

While you may know all of this, and it may all seem pretty common sense, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded every once in a while. I will leave you with the short – but great – post from Seth’s Blog:

A friend advertised on Craigslist for a housekeeper.

Three interesting resumes came to the top. She googled each person’s name.

The first search turned up a MySpace page. There was a picture of the applicant, drinking beer from a funnel. Under hobbies, the first entry was, “binge drinking.”

The second search turned up a personal blog (a good one, actually). The most recent entry said something like, “I am applying for some menial jobs that are below me, and I’m annoyed by it. I’ll certainly quit the minute I sell a few paintings.”

And the third? There were only six matches, and the sixth was from the local police department, indicating that the applicant had been arrested for shoplifting two years earlier.

Three for three.

Google never forgets.

Of course, you don’t have to be a drunk, a thief or a bitter failure for this to backfire. Everything you do now ends up in your permanent record. The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good stuff and to always act as if you’re on Candid Camera, because you are.

What are your thoughts on the legacy you leave on the internet?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

What do you see when you look at this picture?  Do you see a game of Jenga nearly complete?  Do you see a tower of block about to fall?  Do you see the next block that you would take out and add on top?  It all depends on your perception.

Many people will just see the picture as a game of Jenga.  Passive.  Just a picture.  That may be true, but what it represents is opportunity.  Yes, there is risk in taking the next block out.  But – as they say in a casino – you cannot win if you don’t play.

The economy is in an interesting state right now.  Things are a little wobbly.  But the interesting part is that we can change it.  All this is is economics.  As business pull back and cut ad spend that means that if you were to buy what they are leaving behind it will not only cost you less, but you will gain market share.

This won’t work with all businesses and all products.  Some things just won’t sell with things as they are.  Then go somewhere else.  Wal-Mart is growing.  McDonalds is growing.  Thrift stores are growing.  It is easy to just dismiss these things as obvious.  Resist the temptation.  What they are really doing is providing a service that people are seeking out right now.  Yes, in this case it is value, but it doesn’t have to be.

Really think about how your business can fit a need for the modern customer.  If Lands’ End had never expanded into apparel, would they still be around?  BMG is canning its mail-order membership.  I just got my “Final Mailing” because they are getting out and moving into a discount model rather than a mail-order model.  (On a side note, did you know that if you forgot to decline the ‘Featured Selection’ you could just write “Return To Sender” on the box and they have to ship it back and don’t charge you!)

The point is that people still have needs.  Visualize how you can help morph your current business to fit a need.  It may be as simple as shifting your marketing to promote value.  Or if you are doing that maybe you have to highlight the value and some other feature that the product has.

Winners and losers are being determined as you read this.  Which side is your company on?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

In the world of dashboard and report generation every little trick can help.  The trick might save you time, make something possible, or just look pretty sweet.  I think that any one of these is a great reason to employ an Excel trick, but I have to be honest; I am partial to the last one.

The reason that I love Excel tricks that look sweet is that often times if it looks sweet then it is also more likely to be used and appreciated by others.  On top of all of that it can be fun just seeing what Excel can do.  With all of that in mind, I give you my first post on Excel Tips and Tricks: Creating a Dynamic Data Validation Range.

The first tool that you will need is the “INDIRECT” formula.  The INDIRECT formula takes a text string and evaluates it as a range.  So, whereas normally a formula might say ‘=sheet1!A6’ and INDIRECT would look like ‘=INDIRECT(“sheet1!A6”)’.  The main difference is that the second formula is text and can be broken up into text segments and concanated together like this ‘=INDIRECT(“sheet1″&”!A”&6″)’ which is the key because then any component within the INDIRECT can be part text part cell references, calculations, formulas, etc.  Here’s and example of that ‘=INDIRECT(“sheet1″&”!A”&3*2)’ or if cell B1 had a value of 6 in it ‘=INDIRECT(“sheet1″&”!A”&B1)’.  All of these formulas would return the value that is in sheet1!A6.

Whew! Take a deep breath after that.  Perhaps take a second to play around with it because the next part relies on it.

The difficult part about using data validation in a cell is that the data validation range must be in the same sheet as the cell you are validating.  Unless you use a named range.  You cand define a named range in 2 ways.  The first is to select what you want and then in the box in the upper left corner of the sheet type a name.  The second is to use Insert > Name > Define (2003) or Formulas > Defined Names > Define Name >Define Name (2007)

Here’s the setup.  I am entering “List of Letters” in Sheet2!A1 with letters A – F in column A rows 2 – 7.  Select Sheet2!A1:A7 and type “Data” into that box in the upper left corner.  You should now have a named range called “Data”.

Then in cell Sheet1!A1 Use Data Validation and select List for the “Allow” drop box.  For the source type “=Data”.  You should now have a drop down in Sheet1!A1 that has all of the values from Sheet2!A1:A7.  Now you have applied Data Validation to a cell that pulls from a list on a separate sheet.  Nice.

Now for that extra piece of flare.  We need to redefine this named range.  For this go back into the Define Name – select the name and click edit; in 2007 use the “Name Manager”.

Now, we get to use the INDIRECT from before.  We will start off nice and simple.  While the current name should be defined as ‘=Sheet2!$A$1:$A$7’ we will just make that and INDIRECT so we get : ‘=INDIRECT(“Sheet2!$A$1:$A$7”)’.  Now we want to change this so that we know how far down to go.  Right now we go to A7, but what if things are added.  We would have to redefine the name every time.  Luckily, we can use the COUNTA formula to count the number of non-empty cells.  In this case COUNTA(Sheet2!A:A) should equal 7 (one for the heading and one for each letter).

Lets throw that into our named range definition in place of the last “7” so that we get: ‘=INDIRECT(“Sheet2!$A$1:$A$”&COUNTA(Sheet2!$A:$A))’.  Notice that we have to put in the quotation and ampersand right before the COUNTA because we are building a text string.  As a final touch lets say that we don’t want the heading the drop-down box in Sheet1!A1.  We have to change the row that the range starts on so we get : ‘=INDIRECT(“Sheet2!$A$2:$A$”&COUNTA(Sheet2!$A:$A))’.

As a final wrench, lets just say that the list on sheet2 is moved from A1:A7 to A:3:A9 with A1 and A2 blank.  Here we would just have to add something to the formula on the end to pad it for the blank rows and change the starting row.  In this case we would end up with ‘=INDIRECT(“Sheet2!$A$4:$A$”&COUNTA(Sheet2!$A:$A)+2)’

Let me know your thoughts on this post and if this worked for you!

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

An interesting thing happened to me the other day. I was having diner with a friend at a Mexican place and I had a craving for a quesadilla. I scoured the menu for quite a few minutes and came up with nothing.  I sat there thinking to myself “how can a Mexican place not have quesadillas on the menu?  Perhaps they don’t actually eat quesadillas in Mexico and this place is hardcore authentic.”

Now I have no idea if they actually eat quesadillas in Mexico or not.  Frankly, I am more interested in food that tastes good than if it is placed into the “correct”category.  That said it was still a let down.  I had settled on something else and was ready to order, but I made a comment to my friend about how bummed I was.

It took him about 10 seconds to locate them and point it out to me.  What, you might ask, was my problem?

I’m not sure if it is from reading too many blogs, going to too many websites, or just filtering out stuff just because but I missed the whole section.  After looking at it a bit closer I think I figured out why.  It was made to stick out.

That might sound a bit counter-intuitive at first, but its not.  I skipped it because it had a different background then the rest of the menu.  It was colored to stick out.  But for whatever reason my brain just skipped it.  Near as I can figure, it is just because if the menu was a webpage that is where the advertisement would have been.  Or at least it was blocked off and so my brain just read it as advertisement even if it was in the wrong spot to make sense.  I just ignored the whole section.  Keep in mind that this is while I am activly searching, trying to find something in the menu and I still skipped the whole thing.

For me it proves how cluttered the world is.  It proves how hard it is to stand out.  It proves that the game has changed.  What used to stand out and draw attention no longer works because people’s brains have been overstimulated with advertisements.  Do you even notice the product placement in moves/shows?  Sometimes it is painfully obvious and you can’t miss them (and then it just looks dumb) and the other times you miss them entirely.  Too much clutter.

Do you ignore clutter?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

When looking at a web site process, such as registration, it doesn’t take much testing to figure out that the answer is always less.

What information should we collect?  Less.  What questions should we ask?  Less.  How many steps should there be in checkout?  Less.  Less.  Less.  You get the idea.  The reason is that each step or bit of information, or whatever is another obstacle that the visitor has to overcome to convert.  Why add things that actually prevent the visitor from taking the desired action?  Because you’re greedy.  That is the only answer.  If you do not have a guest checkout, you’re greedy.  If you force someone to put in their address when signing up for an account to access ‘premium website features’ you’re greedy.  You only need an address to ship.  Don’t be greedy.

I was looking over a Slim-Fast package and saw this box that lets you “customize your weight loss journey”.  It sounded interesting.  I’m not overly concerned about my current weight, but was curious anyway so when I had a chance I decided to check out the site.

This custom weight loss plan is on the homepage.  Like dead center on the homepage.  You can’t really miss the red “Register Now” button.

The Slim-Fast Homepage

At this point, for me personally, I was already a bit hesitant.  I’m thinking to myself, why are they calling it “register” and not “Get Your Plan Now” or at least something that doesn’t sound as impersonal as “register now”.

Anyway, because I was interested I click through anyway.  Point them.  But look at the ridiculous amount of information (click to enlarge) they demand from the visitor (in this case me):

So here I am, all interested is seeing what Slim-Fast can do for me and this is what they give me.  It is about the worst possible experience I could imagine.  But, I pressed on.  I really wanted to see what this “customized plan” was going to be.  So, like any person who has no interest in giving out tons of information for no reason, I filled in the stuff with a bunch of junk info.

Boy did they get me.  After I took the time to fill the whole long form out (albeit with bad info) they don’t even give me the plan.  They e-mail it to me.  Well, I didn’t put in an actual e-mail address so it when to some random person.  At that point I just lost interest.  I could not go on.

So with all of this in mind, what was Slim-Fast looking to gain with all of that information?  Would they mail me crap I didn’t want?  Just e-mail me the coupon.  What could they possible need all that information for?  Invasive marketing was my only thought and that is why I gave them bad information.  I don’t want to be invaded upon any more than I can help.  But the bigger miss here is what they lost.

Sure, they lost my interest but they lost something much more than that.  They lost my money.  Imagine, here is a customer all set to lose weight.  They not only want to lose weight, they want to lose it with Slim-Fast.  And beyond that, they not only want to lose it with Slim-Fast, but they want a diet plan from Slim-Fast that will – in all likelihood – contain a fair amount of Slim-Fast product.  From snack bars to meal bars to shake powder to a shake-in-a-can.  And then different flavors of all of those things.  This was a free pass for Slim-Fast to sell a lot of product to a customer that wanted to be sold to.

Instead of taking this easy money, instead of helping me toward my personal weight loss goal – and using Slim-Fast to do it, which I would certainly tell my friends about -, instead of any of that they got a visitor that was just pissed at them.  I wrote them a letter telling them how bad of a site they had and pointed out the huge opportunity they were missing out on.  After several weeks I have not got a response.  This is not how you build your brand.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Give information about your product freely.  Get a customer to engage with your product for free.  If you are a quality product they will be more than happy to give you the rest.

In fact, this is a perfect opportunity to quote the late founder of Lands’ End – Gary Comer (who was a billionaire – so yes, it works):

Take care of the customer.  Take care of the employees.  The rest will take care of itself.

Do you agree?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

I was reading this interesting article over at CNN about how Cannon is urging its workers to “go home and multiply.”  The issue, it is hypothesized, is that a 12-hour workday is common.  This leads to people being too tired to ‘multiply’ and now Japan is sitting at a 1.34 birth rate.

The problem here is that this fails to look at the long term goal.  Or rather, fails to take a global perspective into account.  News flash: the world is not getting any bigger and we cannot continue to expand for forever.  We already have resource shortages in many parts of the world and solving those problems will only lead to more of the same problems unless the culture is changed along with the food and medical supply.  We don’t need to continue to increase the global population to be successful.  In fact, it is probably the opposite (for more information on this topic read Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed).

Watch out or this same thing can happen to your website.  It is easy to focus on what is perceived as growth.  It is easy to test and then restructure things to optimize.  But what does that mean for you long term?  Are you changing your culture along with your site?

Here’s what I mean.  If you find out that you can make the most money by showing a certain product on your homepage, that’s great.  You make money right now; you are ‘growing’.  But what about your other products?  If you do not step back and look at the long term impacts of your decisions you will find your company so far down the rabbit hole it will take MAJOR resources to change the direction of your brand.  Just because something makes the most money now does not mean that it will make the most money from a “lifetime value of a customer” view.

Similarly, if a company only can focus on the growth rate (immediate or lifetime value) of a particular product or line the company will miss HUGE opportunities in other parts of the business.  Just as Japan could increase the incentive of immigration if they wanted more people, your company should be looking at all of your product lines and options for growth.

The failure to see other opportunities can be devastating to a company.  Once you become a single product company, you are in a very tough spot (unless you have also changed your culture to match i.e. you only make one product but everybody in the world knows it is the best of all similar product by competitors).  Know your resources.  Consider the larger picture and the long term goals of the organization.  And try not to put in too many 12 hour days.

Is your company or website growing the right way?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

In my previous post on participation metrics I got a great question about how participation works across multiple visits.  And as long as I was going to write about that question, I thought it would be a great time to also state the single best reason to use participation metrics.

First, I will address the question about multiple visits.  It is a great question, and I would expect nothing less from a guy who is crunching Milwaukee Brewers stats dating back to pre-1900 over at Brewer Leaders.  Hell, Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe wasn’t even playing yet (bonus points if you tell me why he was famous in the comments).

Getting back to the subject at hand.  Participation metrics are generally only good for a single visit and a visit is arbitrarily defined by ‘the industry’ as you leaving the page or being idle for 30 min.  A full dictionary (pops a PDF) can be found here.  Therefore if you added a bunch of stuff to your cart and ended your visit the next time you came only the pages that you then touched would be counted.  This is the same for the non-participation metrics as well.  Therefore it would be possible to have a visit that only has one page and has an order and revenue associated with it.  Just think of a person sitting on the order confirm page, going idle for 31 min, then checking out.

There are metrics that will track across multiple visits, but because this is all based on cookies, to say they are reliable would just be wrong.  They are only as right as cookie deletion rates allow them to be.  Anyway, that is a whole post in and of it self.  But now you know about participation metrics (or most other metrics) across visits.

The other things I wanted to touch on – and the title of the post – relates to when to use participation.  The single biggest reason, in my opinion, is ease of communication.  People like to see big round numbers.  If you can say that a promotion page was viewed by 50% of your visitors by participated in 60% of your revenue that is easy.  There are less moving levers.  With revenue distributed, when page views go up for some reason (say you are doing a lot of liquidations and people have to click around to find something is a size or color they want) it is going to give an odd looking number compared to what people might be used to seeing.

Giving a nice number or % of total revenue just makes communication much easier.  And sometimes, when you’re working on something that you don’t really want to work on, finding the answer and communicating it out and being done with it is all you want.

These metrics discussions sure are fun, no?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

I have not had a post on some basic elements of Web Analytics in quite some time.  Previously I have talked about how a person is tracked on a web site both with internal campaigns and e-mails.  I think that stuff is great to know for anybody surfing the internet.  It gives you an idea of what all that stuff in the URL is.  Check it out if you haven’t.

Once question that comes up quite a bit centers around what a report or analysis means when it talks about Revenue Participation or Order Participation or other ‘Participation’ branded metrics.  The first thing you need to know is that it is not the same thing as non-participation branded terms (i.e. revenue <> revenue participation).  The second is that participation metrics are related to single pages within a website.

Simply put, when a metric has “participation” attached to it, the metric changes from being a distributed metric to a non-distributed metric.

Lets just concentrate on revenue, but know that the example is not specific to revenue.

Lets assume that I came to a site and purchased $100 worth of stuff.  Let us also assume that I saw 20 pages in that time, including checkout pages.  When an analyst is looking at reoprts on a page basis there are 2 ways to look at that $100 I spent.

The first way is to attribute (or distribute – however you want to think about it) that $100 across all 20 pages.  This means that each page gets $4 worth of demand.  This would include any page that I viewed, including the checkout pages.  This is nice because no matter how many pages I am looking at I am not double counting revenue.  It makes it simple.  You can just add up whatever pages you are interested in and you have your revenue number.

The second way is participation.  this would give each page that I saw $100 worth of revenue attributed to it.  You probaly don’t need me to tell you – but I will anyway – you cannot add up multiple pages with this method.  If you did that for my hypothetical purchase you would get $2,000 worth of revenue participation.

It seems a bit odd, but there are definite uses for each way of looking at revenue.  The first way – distributed – seems logical at first, but then you are giving revenue away from an index or homepage and giving it to a checkout page.  There is not $4 worth of demand on each checkout page.  With participation, each page gets full credit, but then you cannot add up multiple pages.  Each has its place.

I hope that that clears up the difference between participation metrics and non-participation metrics, at least as far as it relates to those metrics from a page within a website standpoint.

Do you have a preference between these metrics?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

In any field it is easy to look at day over day comparisons, week over week, month over month, and even year over year.  If you are diligent you might even go so far as to trend your data over time.  Perhaps you will include a trend for the current time period as well as a trend for the historical time period.  The graph will be very pretty I’m sure.  That is all great stuff.

The problem with all of this is that it is far too easy to get caught looking at the micro picture without ever taking the time to step back to look at the macro picture.  Where were you at the pinnacle of your stats?  Where were you at the depths?  And not just in the time period you are comparing.  I am talking about ever.

These are the things that you need to be aware of.  Not with every project you do, but just in general.  This gives you perspective.  Have your sales been increasing each year?  Great, maybe they have even been increasing for the last 4 years.  Even better.  But what if you are still at half of your sales from your peak 15 years ago?  The company was capable of doing it then.  Ask yourself “why are we not at that now?” and then try and figure out how to get there.

Don’t be satisfied with being close to the industry average.  While it is great to know where and how you tack up against others, it should only be a component of your overall picture.  Who cares if you are far above average on conversion?  Someone has to shoot for the stars.  Somebody has to be the new benchmark.  It can be you.

The point is that as an analyst, and we are all analysts to greater and lesser extents – in your job or not, you need to be aware of the overall picture.  Don’t just be a reporting monkey.  Know your stuff.  Know what potential there is.

And if you are setting a new benchmark, then pat yourself on the back.  You deserve it.  But then ask, how can I (or we) push that even further.

How have you pushed a benchmark in your life?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.