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Recently, I have been using Fullstory to view how my visitors behave on my landing page - and boy does it make a huge difference when that visitor comes from Google or Facebook ads.
Regular visitors from an email that I send out, or from a mailing list, reddit, forums, among others - actually read the content on the landing page. You can see the mouse move across the text as they read in some instances. You can see how they scroll, the breaks they take to digest. Though the clip is 3X faster than usual, below you can see how the scrolling and mouse movements make sense. [Ed. note: Clips are on source page.]
This visitor is very different - it feels like its a paid slave somewhere, or a bot that has clumsy intelligence, or a person that does not read. The mouse rarely moves, it does scroll - though mostly in one direction, and the pace is as if the visitor is not reading the content. Mobile users just scroll and scroll until the bottom and then they leave.
As a result I have stopped all my Google and Facebook campaigns and have focused on growing the service more organically via social sharing and friends. Has anyone else experienced this as well? I'd be happy to share videos or more details, but the difference is clearly noticeable. I'd be interested to see if Fullstory has any high-level analysis of this or if they can verify this behavior.
[...] I am not sure if this is true, but does anyone else experience very, very, very, different click-through and conversion rates on Google and Facebook relative to other organic means?
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday January 18 2017, @08:39PM
Seriously, I know it's overused as an excuse, but blame Wall Street -- or, more importantly, the attitude toward business that it represents. And then consider the attitude toward investments that it creates. And then consider the way said investors will force businesses to act.
What you seem to want (as do most customers) is a relatively "stable" business. A business that keeps doing the same relatively good work with similar quality year after year. But what customers of a business want is different from what investors demand.
That's not possible if you subscribe to the Wall Street model of a perpetual growth machine demanded by investors. Investors don't chase after companies that basically maintain stable revenue that basically keeps pace with inflation (as would be expected of a solid, stable company that keeps doing the same thing). Rather they want GROWTH. And not in an organic "this year we made a major innovation and will experience some growth with a new product for a year or two, but then we'll go back to stability for several years" way. No, they want big returns every year.
It's worse with tech companies because everything changes so fast. Thus, any new major initiative in Silicon Valley could easily see a huge pattern of growth for its first few years (possibly 5. maybe even 10 years if you're lucky).
But then what do you do to keep investors interested? How do you sustain that record of growth? It's basically impossible to do forever, but that's what the Wall Street myth demands. Even the most innovative companies on the planet can't do it.
So, you start cutting corners. Your product gets cheaper to manufacture or maintain or slightly worse in quality. (Same goes for services.) You ship costs overseas to bring them down. You resort to increasingly desperate methods to keep up the perpetual growth model, and eventually that's going to impact the quality of what you do in noticeable ways. Those exact "corner cutting" possibilities will vary depending on the type of business/product/service, but it happens everywhere.
Uber at least has somewhere to go -- it has plenty of markets to expand to with its main product -- and it's still privately owned. But once it reaches a reasonable saturation of markets or has an IPO and thus needs to start focusing more on short-term growth, be prepared for the bumps to appear. Unless it develops something major to reduce its costs, look for either increased prices or decline in service or both.
Capital investors are great in the early years of a business, but at some point we lost the idea that a business could then plateau after its growth spurt and just pay dividends or whatever. Now investors will just hop to the "next big thing," which is why companies like Google and Apple and Facebook go around DESPERATELY buying up anything that could be "the next big thing." If they miss it and a serious competitor develops, that's potentially the endgame for them.
(Well, there are actually still plenty of "dividend stocks" out there for people who want them, but the excitement is all over the growth. And now its not just rich people and bankers playing this speculation game anymore -- it's an entire machine sold to many Americans about how they can keep beating inflation in their retirement account returns, year after year after year. Everybody wins. Well... until the machine doesn't work that way anymore. Let's just all "keep the faith" in Our Lady of Perpetual Stock Returns. Because if we lose faith in that, it would be a disaster much worse than the Great Depression.)
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday January 19 2017, @12:18AM
Take it one step further, and blame yourself.
Wall street wants high returns, not only because they are greedy, but because their customers have to get great returns to be able to afford to retire. Investment funds need to keep cranking the highest possible returns to avoid being abandoned by you and me... How far do people look into the past when choosing their 401k funds?
Yup, in a wonderful twist of US greedy irony, the job sucks and you'll be outsourced, partially because you are trying to afford your retirement without a pension.
LOL, as they say.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:27AM
Whenever I make a similar argument as to why the news industry has faltered, in the US at least, that being because of "You" not wanting to pay for newspapers and insist on running ad blockers and there's no money to actually pay someone to do investigative journalism, I get modded to hell.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @08:52AM
Right, I'll just stop running ad blockers and get infested with malware, be tracked, and have pages slow to a crawl; that seems sensible. There's a reason why people block ads, and it's not because ads are typically reasonable and unobtrusive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2017, @12:22AM
Not sure I agree...I don't run blockers on most of my boxes, and I never disable JavaScript.
Can't recall getting malware. Probably depends on where you surf.
That being said, I do think it is creepy when I see ads for stuff I googled four weeks ago.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday January 19 2017, @06:12PM
If ad networks didn't insist on tracking my browsing behavior from one site to another, running proprietary JavaScript programs on my computer, or running video ads on non-video articles, then I wouldn't feel a need to use a tracking blocker.
(Score: 2) by termigator on Thursday January 19 2017, @04:10AM
Yep. And the Wall Street mindset exists in the executive board rooms of large companies. Years ago, I worked for a major tech company that had a history of providing bonuses to employees at end of year if the company was profitable. In my short time there, executives changed the bonus rule where bonuses were only provided if the company exceeds projected expectations. I.e. The company could still record a profit, but if it was not high enough to match or exceed expectations, employee bonuses were not paid out.
Of course, the rule did not apply to executive management.
Serious bullshit.