Kissmetrics Blog

To add to this (and as patio11 has said several times in his articles) OKCupid does this with regularity, and has provided a people with great deal of entertainment and information value, and have been covered many times in the press. They've also possibly indirectly helped their business doing this. http://blog.okcupid.com/ KISSMetrics is another: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/

I honestly couldn't follow most of the math but found this really interesting. I used to do UX analyses at a marketing agency and would constantly link clients to [1]. Page speed is huge, especially on desktop where its easier to navigate away. OP mentions this, but I imagine the effect is massive on a site where users are actively researching a topic and have tens of tabs open and so can easily switch to a similar website. I do think this test could have been done without banner ads involved. Looking at page load speed per user and how that effects traffic would likely have the same results. From my link below: > A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. [1] https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/

Given the cost of abandonment and lost sales due to slow page rendering (there's a lot that's been written about that), even a 3% loss of conversions due to slow frontend code over 2 years is a lot of money. For a million-dollars-a-year business, that's upwards 6 months worth of a developer's time. [0] 3% based on how many people will abandon a page that takes more than 1 second to render: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/?wide=1

Hi Michele, There's some different schools of thought on this. A lot of content marketers and SEO experts recommend lots of articles targeting long tail keywords. However, the newer thought process is to write longer more in-depth articles and spend equal time promoting those articles. As you can see from the article we published, we found longer articles lead to more shares. Brian Dean found that content length impacts Google rankings (http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors) and KissMetrics got a similar result as us in terms of shares being correlated with longer articles (https://blog.kissmetrics.com/share-on-social-media/). The sweet spot for the length depends on sharing source and the domain you are writing about. Thanks for your question.

Serious question - have you asked this question of people who might really have this problem? This is customer development 101. This is a great resource on the topic: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/26-customer-development-resources/

Hootsuite sucks. It's clunky, and the UI is horrible. Buffer writes great blog posts, but I just don't see the value in its service. HubSpot, if you can afford it, is what I enjoy using the most to post to social media because of its Social Inbox. For Pinterest and Instagram, Piquora looks promising and so does Postris. Read/skim these articles: -https://blog.kissmetrics.com/automate-pinterest-marketing/ -http://www.inboundio.com/blog/ultimate-list-23-marketing-tools-softwar… Another great tool I love for social media management is sproutsocial.com.

Actually their recommendation engine is a little too accurate. It drives as much as 70% of their views. They have to purposely randomize it. For those curious how it works: See the brilliant talk from the guy who heads it up himself (this was a great talk to attend in person) http://www.mlconf.com/mlconf-2013/mlconf-2013-agenda/xavier-amatriain/ One reference I could find for the statistic from google: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-netflix-uses-analytics/ I don't think they'll have to worry about this anytime soon.

I read an interesting article about Mint.com. I think your product could follow a similar marketing path. It revolved around a blog to establish credibility first. http://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-mint-grew/

Hmm, that's gonna be tough. I find the Wordpress+GetPrismatic or even Disqus kind of combination quite competitive to get traffic, and in a tech area, as I said, there are lots of great syndicators. I agree that your USP is subtly better though. Are you already profitable? Also, why did you call it Sett? The metaphor isn't very obvious from your website. And you should think of a better headline. Here's a good article: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/ultimate-home-page-headline/

In your case, I would try content marketing. Create a blog with short, but smart analysis made using your app. Kissmetrics' blog style: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/ Two or three posts a week, several tweets a day always re-announcing all your posts; posts not dated, looking like a library of expert essays; post with lists and "definitive guides". I am studying to become a growth hacker, if you want to talk, contact me.

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/landing-page-design-infographic/ is a great start. Just focusing on 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 8 will put you ahead of the game.

Well there's one simple advice: be authentic, have a voice. Apart from that it's hard work. A simple guide can be found on kissmetrics that I'll post below. Check out @soundcloud and @david community management to learn from one of the best in the market. http://blog.kissmetrics.com/ultimate-online-marketing-recipe/

update: don't let the data discourage you, though. it's actually not bad. 400/600 clicked signed up? that's fantastic! only 40 people went through with the sign up? I would say thats just user churn because of bad onboarding. the first thing I would do is let people sign up with just email and password, and actually let them use your product, for a free trial period. the second thing I would focus on is getting your users to the "magical moment" of your app. Thats a term I first read in context of someone from the growth team at facebook talking about user churn and growth. for facebook, the magic moment for example, was "seeing your friends".[0] For your app, I think, the magical moment could be the first time a user sucessfully onboards a new client through your app, and sees how easy it is to collect all the requirements etc. If they go through that, and its really much easier with your app, they can't help but start their next client project with your app as well, and upgrade to a paid plan. But to get to that moment, you probably need at least a couple of days. I would not charge users before that moment. [0] https://blog.kissmetrics.com/alex-schultz-growth/

> Culture is not a good or bad thing. It’s a shared thing. I sometimes hear people say “they aren’t a culture fit” as if it’s a bad thing, or others feel bad pointing this out as if it’s an indictment on someone’s character. It’s not. I am not a culture fit at probably any other company, which is why I had to help start one! This (which is one of Brian's notes in the article) is one of the best ways to think about culture that I've encountered. A company can't have "good" culture or "bad" culture. It just has a certain shared way of doing things that may or may not vibe with you. On a related note, Tony Hsieh of Zappos believes what your culture is doesn't matter as much as having a strong identity. Just figure out who you, as a company, are and the rest will follow: "...one of the really interesting things I found from the research is that it actually doesn’t matter what your values are, what matters is that you have them and that you align the organization around them. And the power actually comes from the alignment not from the actual values"[1] [1] https://blog.kissmetrics.com/zappos-art-of-culture/

Hey Keith, I'm glad you brought this point up! Well, in all honesty, design is something of personal preference. But, the 'right design' is the one that strikes a chord with the majority of your users, making them 'feel at home'. There are a lot of examples I'd like to cite, but, the best example you can use for reference is most of Apple's web design philosophy (P.S - I'm NOT an Apple 'fanboy' though I like their designs). Another one would be Stripe. They have some pretty consistent designs! As a bonus - Every designer has his/her own version of 'good design rules'. These are just mine :) -Don't use complexity where it's not needed. Borders and gradients add complexity. (good example: iOS 7) -Generally, try to use contrasting colors for action buttons (Purchase/Sign up/Subscribe). There is some psychological study associated with the color choice too. Link: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/color-purchases… -Once you use a color for a particular type of button (Action, or example) maintain it throughout the site - So your users will know which buttons are important and have side effects (like, costing them money) and which ones don't. -Contrast is everything. If you use a dark headline, then use a light background. And vice versa. Also, a small black box of 100px x 100px provides more contrast than a mild grey box of 200px x 200px. Contrast is not something that is proportional with colors. Always experiment! - Sometimes, you get…

You could have stopped after the first sentence, that was the useful part. Not sure many here need a lesson on the nature of startups, how Adwords works or how Google dominates the market. You're right that if you can't get the £50 to show some promise it's not worth spending more - but you blame Google for not getting it to work, when they actually give you all the tools to sort out a cheap and efficient campaign yourself. It might not be 100% perfect, but if you consider why that is and the amount Google are doing behind the scenes, then go on to work around the constraints, you'd probably not need to blame them for your (generous) free credit running out with no profit. So you're bootstrapping another startup; why use startup B to fund startup A? Especially when startup B is in a highly competitive market. The current best practice seems to be to do 'customer development' (look up Steve Blank) or to basically validate your market before launch, during launch and then get paying customers ASAP. So why not just ditch cutpricedhotels (which is a spelling mistake, btw, unless intentional - agree with other commenter on domain name for that reason - another sign of a lack of attention to detail) and focus on your main startup? Get it paying for you? Perhaps to get that going you could try putting up some real cash (now you know how not to do it) and testing the market for a landing page on dashoot.com. I came across a decent roundup of things to do for a profitable Adwords…

I know you say you're not the idea guy, but that's basically how this comes off. Kudos for putting yourself out there to get advice and feedback though. Not knowing much about your background, here's everything I would tell a non-technical person who wants to do a startup (as a non-technical person doing a startup myself): Ideas are worthless until they're validated. Get out, talk to customers in a market that you think you can make an impact in. If it's something that you care about, are knowledgeable in, or if there's a problem that pisses you off that you think you could solve with your startup, those are good places to start. Still test in the market though, because you're only one data point. In the words of Steve Blank (go read everything by him), get out of the building! ...or at least get on the phone to start. If you're trying to build something that appeals to the general population, just go stand at a subway or bus stop where people are just waiting and have nowhere to go and ask them questions. People are usually bored there anyway. If you're building a B2B product, call business and set up appointments to meet them. Learn customer development. Put up an Unbounce "coming soon" page and start engaging with folks that care about the problem you're trying to solve. Start a blog on Tumblr (better sharing features, but any blogging platform would do). Link the blog to your "coming soon" page and vice versa. Get your social media pages in order (Twitter, Facebook,…

Your site needs to have a strong benefit statement. I need to find out in two seconds whether it is worth me reading more. Your primary message needs to be well above the fold and needs to solve some pain point. Without that, any visits you get to your site are somewhat wasted. Next, you need to think about how to get your target customers to visit the site. Who is your target market and where do they gather? Advertising on Facebook can be fairly well targeted so that you're not throwing away money advertising to people that aren't in your target market. Finding people that are social 'kingpins' and getting them to become advocates is another method. Who are the bloggers that cover your space? Can they be contacted to tweet or blog about it? Can you develop a referral system or offer the app for free/reduced price in exchange for the referrals. Perhaps Klout.com can be used to identify some of your targets, or, technorati, etc. J Conrad Levinson wrote some good books on Guerilla Marketing that talk about leveraging this, cross-promotions, etc. Getting Press Releases accepted by the sites/magazines/periodicals that cover your market is another way. A well written Press Release directed to the right person can sometimes get you noticed. Social buttons, Facebook Page, Twitter account - all generate buzz and make it very easy for someone to like/share the page. Include referral codes/bonuses so that your client become your best salespeople. Your sales message needs to do…

Wouldn't it be more valuable to create a twitter account for the startup and get involved? By giving time to the community on twitter you reinforce the impression that you care about the users. Respond to @messages and keep people up to date on what you're working at. If you're good, you'll get coverage through followers and retweets, and it'll be free. Maybe I'm misreading this, but promoted tweets look ripe for abuse by people who think social media is just ``another source of free traffic.'' (I've stolen that from the blurb of this article: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/social-media-abuse/.) The truth is, for me, that I automatically ignore content that is an obvious form of advertising. To summarize, Perhaps you'll get more ROI with an active (and free) twitter account than with one-shot ads that cost a lot. As a final question: What is the lifespan of a promoted tweet? Are they less transient than normal tweets?

With regards to the last point, there's actual research to back this up: #3 with the headline "Directional Cues" https://blog.kissmetrics.com/eye-tracking-studies/ Also, looking down and away from another person is not confidence inspiring. I don't think I need to cite research in order to point that out.

"Sexy" has long been used to describe something visually attractive, not remotely related to sex. Here's Jonathan Ive talking about sexy computers: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/sexy-design/. Do you think they're actually sexually attracted to these machines? Or implying other people will be? I think you need to revise your word connotations.

Not the OP, but... You put a cookie on their machine when they hit your website, tracking where they came from, and exactly how much you paid for that visit (because FB will give you which cohort they came from). Then you track that to a sale, and you can determine how much you made from them. If it is a single sale, then that's basically it (obviously you track return visitors and amortize the cost of them against that too). If it is a SAAS, then customer value calculation is a little more complicated (you record how long people stay with you etc). Most ecommerce platforms or marketing platforms have this setup with a click of a button. Here's a link to KissMetric's page on this: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/customer-acquisition-cost/ A16Z included this on their metrics post: https://a16z.com/2015/08/21/16-metrics/

Depends on if the tester actually knows what they're doing. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/your-ab-tests-are-illusory/

You forget that Mint was pretty successful prior to the Intuit acquisition. Their messaging was validated prior to launch, and it seems like Penny App took a page from that messaging with the use of "bank-grade security". [1] https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-mint-grew/

Assuming you're into startups, you should start a company. Read this post - https://blog.kissmetrics.com/built-and-launched-a-saas-company/ You could actually do this for less than $40k if you had a co-founder. This guy just paid retail price for a developer and designer but if you either knew how to do it or got a co-founder you could do the same thing for less than $5k probably.

Of course they do. Netflix original content is specifically targeted towards its users. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-netflix-uses-analytics/

Good ones to start with: og:image og:title og:description https://blog.kissmetrics.com/open-graph-meta-tags/

UTM Tags are used to traffic sources and campaigns. Here is short write-up by KissMetrics about them [1]. It is less of SEO/advertising but more of tracking the efficacy of various marketing channels / campaigns. [1]: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-to-use-utm-parameters/

Site loading speed is very important https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/

IMHO the first thing would be to identify your target audience and i.e whether its enterprise, b2b or end user then tailor your approach and app towards them and if there is a growth/expansion strategy that you want to persue. http://sixteenventures.com/sell-itself https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-saas-marketing-is-different/