When people talk about the difference between online and offline advertising, one of the big themes is accountability — you just can’t get the kinds of data about, say, a TV campaign, that you can about an online banner. (Though the online world isn’t entirely transparent, either.) A startup called Convertro is trying to change that.
Until now, Convertro has analyzed the effectiveness of online marketing. Today, it’s launching a product that offers similar data for TV campaigns. Instead of relying on surveys, it promises to actually track the link between TV ads and traffic to your website.
There’s a lot of technology involved (or at least a lot of jargon). It took several tries for CEO Jeff Zwelling and COO Armen Avidissian to explain it to me. On the simplest level, Avidissian says Convertro can track TV effectiveness based on time — if, after an ad airs in a certain area, and there’s a surge of web traffic from that area, you can probably assume the ad was pretty effective.
Not that Convertro’s data is that basic. Zwelling says the TV product includes modules for measuring direct response (traffic that the ad drove directly to a website), the halo effect (an ad causes increased awareness, leading to more traffic), and the impact of different creative mixes in a campaign.
Avidissian says this data can be useful even if your main goal isn’t selling products off a website. For example, a big box retailer could use TV ads to drive traffic to their website, and then give that traffic a special discount offer that customers bring in to the store.
There’s something interesting going on over there on Fab. The design shopping site found that some of its best customers – that is, those who convert to paying customers the quickest, those who spend the most, and those who return the most often – are mobile users.
The company has known about this data for some time, but wanted more in-depth analysis, so it hired software-as-a-service firm Custora to help them dive in and figure out the lifetime value of the mobile customer, specifically those using the iPad. The results are impressive.
Since the beginning of the year, Fab says it has known that customers with mobile apps are more engaged. The company launched its mobile apps on iOS and Android in October, and by the time it reached one year post-pivot, the company found that over 40% of usage came from mobile applications. Could it be that mobile applications, with their addictive, time-sensitive notifications about Fab’s flash sales draw users in? Or is there something that’s inherently more enticing about the Fab experience when using a mobile device or tablet?
By the start of 2012, it became apparent that mobile customers behaved differently. They purchased more than two times faster, bought more often, and had larger basket sizes than online shoppers.
But Fab noticed just a few weeks ago that iPad customers’ behavior really stood out. With help from Custora, the company discovered that iPad customers convert to making their first purchase exponentially faster than non-iPad users, with over 40% making a purchase by month 3 and over 70% purchasing by month 7.
Fab was also seeing impressive conversion rates for iPad users.
“A lot of really good businesses build their business model around getting to 10% conversion rate to purchasers within 6 to 12 months,” says Fab CEO Jason Goldberg. “It’s simply amazing that we’re seeing 10% conversion to purchase within the first week for iPad users.”
In terms of revenue, iPad users were found to be worth twice as much two-year revenue as non-iPad users. And, even though only 15% of Fab users are iPad users, those customers are expected to generate 25% of Fab’s revenue over the next two years.
That last figure is really remarkable, especially because, in the grand scheme of things, the tablet market is still in its early days. What will these figures look like three years in? Five?
And more importantly, why are iPad users such great shoppers? Is it just that they can afford to be?
As it turns out, that’s actually one of Goldberg’s explanations. iPad users have more disposable income, he notes, and are “just more likely to be design lovers.” But it’s more than just the person on the other end of the device, he says. It’s the device itself, too.
“The tactile touch experience of the iPad more closely resembles being able to physically ‘touch’ a product like physical-world shopping versus the web which can feel more distant when browsing with a mouse or track-pad,” says Goldberg.
Plus, the Fab iPad app itself has been designed to take advantage of the device’s form factor, by focusing on one product at a time, while the Fab web experience allows users to browse across sales and products. The iPad app will soon get another major improvement too – the company is developing its Retina-ready application, which it plans to have out in a few months’ time.
But all this almost makes you wonder if perhaps online shopping sites should begin taking their cues from the iPad to better improve their own experiences. Although computers don’t typically have touchscreens, there are ways that online stores could somewhat mimic the tablet experience through layout choices and navigational flows. Would users balk at a tablet-like interface on the regular ol’ web, or will they eventually come to expect it?
It’s far too soon to know the answer to that, but as far as shopping sites go, expect them – and maybe even Fab – to experiment with the concept in the months to come.
There are plenty of companies trying to create new forms of group texting or social networking. There are far fewer who are trying to offer a messaging service that crosses the web, email and mobile devices in a seamless way. Facebook is perhaps the most obvious example, but its utility is social — you might not want to use it for work, or for organizing your kids’ little league game, or for communicating with the parents of a class you’re teaching.
Enter SendHub, a startup in this year’s Y Combinator class, that has already started to get some serious traction by focusing on professionals. The company offers a clean interface for creating and organizing groups of people, and communicating back and forth with them over their desired format.
The result is that it has been growing fast. When Sarah Perez covered SendHub in February, the company was sending 30,000 messages a month. Now, it’s sending around that amount per week. Check out the graph below. The numbers are still small, but they’re in the right direction. YC partner Paul Graham says that its growth looks like AirBnB’s in the early days.
What types of users are causing this growth? A few big partnerships are helping, including one with Teach For America and another with the Florida Department of Education, cofounders Garrett Johnson and Ash Rust tell me. But some people are using it for social purposes as well, including a group of cross-fit trainers who coordinate times to work out. And there’s a variety of folks who veer into Facebook Messaging territory by communicating with each other to keep social activities like beer crawls together.
How does the app work? You’ll need to go to the website, sign up with Facebook or Google or a new user account, then enter the information of the people you want to share with. You can do it manually, or import CSV docs from Gmail, Outlook and other email clients. You’ll also get a new local phone number (the company uses Twilio’s voice messaging platform on the backend).
Then you can start writing messages and texting them out to people. Other users can also join using a keyword you choose. So a local business could invite existing customers via uploading its CSV file of them and asking new users to text in to sign up (which is how most people are joining). You get a unique new phone number, and you’re asked to either add contacts manually or via a bulk importer.
Users who receive the texts are also sent a link to go back and rate the message or block the sender. So if a local business starts spamming too many deals, they’ll be able to get feedback quickly.
But why did the growth take off? The founder joined YC with a product in hand, but they tell me they got a bunch of design help that has made the site easier to use for people. Other cofounders with specific technical skills have also helped them with scaling their services for new waves of users. And, they also got encouraged to focus on every single user who called in. Right now, they’re sleeping shifts so they can respond to any issues 24 hours a day.
Where to next? “Email and social will be our primary focus in the short term, Rust says, but we expect voice will be an important frontier for us to develop.”
“We did a basic integration and we’re seeing over 3,000 calls a month. IM is attractive, but it’s not requested nearly as much.”
These types of messaging apps are inherently viral, but sometimes have trouble making money as a result of too much success (see: GroupMe, Beluga). SendHub provides a set of premium features instead. If you want to go above 1,000 messages a month, you’ll need to pay at least $10 a month. If you want more than three groups, larger API requests, the ability to bring your own number, phone support, or a branded profile page, you’ll need to buy more expensive options.
The team still has a couple things to work out. In testing it out, the bulk importer had some trouble uploading my contact list. And the interface has some oddities, like an error message telling you that you need to type in a ten digit telephone number, which appears as you’re typing your number in. But all in all it feels right, and the engagement numbers seem to indicate that many more users will, too.
Although I think you’re better off not hosting your hot, hot beta launch screen yourself, if you simply must have complete control there’s LaunchEffect, a WordPress theme that recreates the complex process of asking for – and storing – email addresses of wannabe beta users.
The system supports three basic functions:
Visitors to your website sign up using their email.
Upon signing up, the page generates a special URL for them to share with their friends.
Use the URL to track your most active referrers and reward them for spreading the word.
You can then track the most excited folks – the folks who referred the most people – and give them a special prize like a beta account, a goldfish, or a bag of onions.
LaunchEffect is free but a premium version adds an animated countdown, a more brandable experience, and a more formal blog layout. You can check out a demo of the premium version here. The premium version costs $35 for a single-site license.
Again, some folks like to have complete control and some like to cede a little control for proven performance. Either way, it’s a fun way to build a buzz.
It’s a tipping point of sorts: smartphones are not (yet) being used by the majority of U.S. residents, but among mobile users, it looks like they have now outnumbered those on lower-end devices — or so consumers think — according to research out today from Pew.
As of February 2012, 46 percent of the 2,253 adults surveyed said they are now smartphone owners — growing 11 percent in the last nine months, while 41 percent of adults own a device that is not a smartphone.
What’s interesting is that these are averages, meaning that we really are seeing a critical mass affecting different demographics. The numbers are actually significantly higher in certain age groups like young adults: among college graduates, 18-35 year olds and the well off, those who said they used a smartphone was at 60 percent and up.
(The converse: very low numbers in another group, those aged 65 and up: only 13 percent of them own smartphones.)
Unlike a lot of the market research that comes from the likes of IDC, Gartner, Strategy Analytics and so on, Pew’s findings are not based on “channel checks” with operators and retailers and vendors who ship devices; rather, they are based on how users describe their mobile status.
In a way, that is almost a more telling indication of what is going on — especially if you compare the numbers against those provided by the analyst firms.
For example, Pew found that only 20 percent of mobile owners said they owned an Android device. That was only a rise of five percent on May 2011. Some 19 percent describe their phones as iPhones, a rise of nine percent on May 2011. BlackBerry went down to six percent from 10 percent in May.
Given that by many accounts Android is outnumbering iOS — recent numbers from comScore put the percentages at 47.3 and 29.6 percent — that says something about the brand currency of Google’s Android and how many people actually seem to consider that when they are choosing and using smartphones.
Branding and the idea of users staying loyal to their platforms is one question; another is around how these devices get used.
If the great promise of smartphones is to get users connected and communicating in ways they haven’t been able to do before, it’s something of a reality check to see that today some eight percent of mobile owners still couldn’t say with certainty whether they owned a smartphone or not. At least that number was down from 14 percent nine months ago.
