I wish to pose a simple question:

How would you determine the price of a product or service for multiple countries?

• You could go through each country and work out a value.
• You choose a base currency and do real time conversions.
• You could use comparable item counting.

Each method has merits, but they are reliant on a lot of manual and repetitive work. They may also cost you when the method fails to take local conditions such as taxes into account.

Work out individual value - This is a long process, but probably the best when working with 1 or 2 currencies in familiar markets. For example, I'm likely to set Pounds, Dollars and Euros because I am familiar with costs in the US and in Europe, but I'm not so sure about prices in South Korea, for example.

Real time counting - (Determining a price in a default currency and converting it into alternative currencies on the fly.) This method has several issues: the price will change constantly, people are nervous of products with constant price changes, and it doesn't take local taxes and other costs into account. Customers in the EU, for instance, wouldn't be charged VAT.

Product Counting - (Finding a product similar to your own and using its price in each country to set your own.) The problem is that the product has to be the same in each country, and it doesn't account for import costs.

So how do burgers help? Well, let's start with an example:

I'm running a subscription site in multiple countries, and I want to display subscriptions to people in their own language and currency.

Identify the costs per country

For each currency, identify any additional costs such as sales taxes, shipping , and any additional costs associated with selling products or services in a country. If it costs you more to supply a country, be sure to include it in your price.

Choose a stable currency as your base

This does not have to be your country's currency, since it's just something to work from. For instance, if you use the Big Mac index, the default currency is dollars, so you may wish to use dollars. Or, you might choose the currency you do your accounts in.

Define the default currency levels

Next, work out the subscription levels in your default currency. Lets say we use $10, $20 and $30 as our levels. Obviously, how you determine the initial price is up to you, but I suggest testing multiple prices before settling on one. Also, remember when choosing a currency conversion system that you can override it when you need to.

Start counting Big Macs

No, seriously! A Big Mac is a perfect comparison tool. It's made of the same ingredients in every country, and is competitively priced. This means that, while McDonalds makes a profit on each burger, it's carefully calculated to be roughly the same % in ever country. For a list of the costs of a Big Mac in every country, you'll need a subscription to the Observer, or you can go to www.oanda.com/currency/big-mac-index

source: Economist

Our next step is to count how many Big Macs are in our subscription. So, a Big Mac in the US costs $3.57 so 10/3.75, and we would need to multiply it by approximately 2.8 to equal our subscription. So, to determine the relative value of a $10 subscription in other countries, we find the value of a Big Mac and multiply it by 2.8.

Lets do a simple example: A Big Mac in the UK is 2.29, and when we multiply that by 2.8, it would be 6.412.


function bigmac($value,$cost,$rate){
return round((floor($value/$cost) * $rate),0,PHP_ROUND_HALF_UP);
}


For PHP users a quick function where $value is default subscription, $cost of the burger in the default country and $rate is the current exchange rate. Works only currencies with similar exchange rates

The real economics of the Big Mac index

The example above is an extremely simple way to use the Big Mac Index. Economists will use the index to determine the purchasing-power parity, which was first proposed by Gustav Cassel. (Purchasing-power parity is when a countries exchange rate is determined by the price of a shopping basket from a super market)

The video from the (http://www.metalproject.co.uk/) explains how economists can compare Big Macs by country to determine the relative value of almost anything. However, this rate often varies wildly from the actual rate, which is affected by many other factors.

Always round up

Now, of course you'll want to convert 6.412 to something a little less programmed, so round to 7,13,19. You'll notice in this example that the bigger the value is, the more of a discount it's getting, and the further it will drift from market demand.

Low inflation currencies probably should be rounded to the next 5 or 0 to maintain a nice pattern.

Note: This only works for low inflation currencies, so don't try this with Zimbabwean dollars. In the example, our Pounds are now 10, 15, 20. Suddenly, the site is making a profit on the lower price and losing on the higher price. Ultimately, it works out even, so long as there is an even distribution.

What about larger subscriptions

Sometimes, Big Macs are just to small to be useful. As you saw in the previous examples, the more Big Macs you work with, the greater the rounding error will be. So, when dealing with larger numbers, we could use an alternate index.

One possible example is the iPod Index. Initially proposed back in 2007 by Comsec, the iPod has become as ubiquitous as the MP3. Unfortunately, they do not maintain the index, but it's possible to recreate it using the Apple store and some googling.

Other methods

One technique I've used is what I call 'over pegged middle'. First, you need to know the number of subscribers for each level and the total income they bring in. Then, whichever total brings in the most income is the one you do the Big Mac check against.

Next, round that figure up to a 5 or zero and match the other subscriptions by using the same ratio as the original subscription. This will cause an imbalance because the majority of users will pay more, but it will also make higher earning subscriptions more tempting.

Any suggestions for how you would work out subscription prices?

Currently I run:

• Google Analytics
• Google Weboptimiser and other A/B testing
• GetClicky
• Heatmap software
• Occasional CSS History profiler
• Surveys

If I want to track a user across all these currently I can't for example if I want to see the clickmap of a user I can't compare it with Google Analytical data for example. This is fine but the more work I do the more I want to be able to follow a user through the entire experience, now at this stage many people may start to think ok, reduce the number of third party software and this thought has occured to me. The reason I use getclicky and Google Analytics is I can't do better it's that simple.

Privacy Concerns

The biggest issue when linking multiple systems together is the inevitable extra privacy issues, while these systems are separate they are psuedo anonymous combining them makes it much easier to identify a user especially when linked with a login/commenting system where they have to give their email and other information like name. However in many ways I think centralising your data makes dealing with concerns easier to deal with for example you can set up a single "remove me from your tracking" service (also you can track how many people have opt'd out! oh wait is that wrong?) so centralising my data not only will make things easier for me it will make it easier for visitors who have privacy concerns.

Central storage area

The obvious way to centralise all the data is to create a central storage repository and put data in it, of course this immediately prevents several obvious problems.

• Replication
• Single Point of Failure
• Reliability

Replication - There is rarely a good reason in life to have two working copies of something, your analytics data included, apart from the fact you have to maintain both copies you also have to check data integrity and it's taking up space and therefore costing more to store.

Single Point of Failure - while not normally a problem, when something is being continually used both for read write it''s life expectancy is limited made worse by the fact that several parts of the site will be reliant on the system to make choices, if the system falls over or worse is just slow it will cause issues throughout the site.

Reliability - One of the reasons to use third party services is so I don't have to handle such things as uptime and reliability any benefit in getting someone else to do the work is lost if I then redo it.

the advantage is speed and as long as it's up we should be able to access everything instantly.

Decentralised with key link

The second approach to look at it is linking all the various services with a common key. Most third party services worth anything will allow you to store a custom value against a visitor. If the same custom value is used per visitor for all the services then they can be tracked through various calls to each services API. This is easier said then done...

A couple of problems that immediately come to mind

• Identifying the unique visitor
• Linking a visitor after the fact
• What controls the initial identification

It also has the potential for a single point of failure of the totally centralised solution, the service that tags visitors is down the data is lost. This however seems a much smaller risk, at worse some visitors are not tagged correctly and it probably means the site has far worse problems!

Identifying the unique visitor - This at first glance seems easy but to be accurate is actually more difficult and is a post in it's own right. Once identified the next problem is choosing a naming strategy for a visitor Id if we had a centralised relational database this would be easy it would be the id of the row but we don't. Some ideas I played with was timestamp, IP and profile type or some combination of these.

Once the ID of the unique user is set and stored on their machine either through a session, cookie or some more hardy persist storage they can be simply picked up in the future.

Linking to a user after the fact - There can be times where a user maybe identified after a service has stored data about the individual some systems will automatically tie in the old data with the new, others won't unfortunately there is not much you can do barring a recursive check and additions. For example let's assume a user visits a site on a laptop from home, then visits at work. We treat his work log in as a different instance, when he logs in, we can identify this new visitor under the same user. However we have already sent a pile of custom keys to all our analytical packages.

What controls the initial identification - here is a more tricky issue in the scenario to my blog, a simple wordpress plugin that checks to see if a persistent storage or cookie is on the users machine, determines ID and adds a cookie as needed.

so two competing systems both with problems the solution seems to be a blend between the two.

Decentralised in a Centralised way

I'm going to run through two examples of the way I'm going to centralise my data, one for here timnash.co.uk and the other for a membership site.

On timnash.co.uk I'm going for a totally decentralised approach, a wordpress plugin, will identify users based on if they have been tagged before as I have no easy way to identify if they are previous user on a different browser machine, except if they comment there is no major advantage of maintaining any form of database control. Users will be tagged with a combination of timestamp+profileid+random number
This is then included as custom data to all the stats gathering packages and stored on the users machine using browsers persistent storage. If a user wishes me not to collate individual data they can opt out via the privacy page, this will place a persistent storage cookie, telling the system to not attach the key to their pages, to opt out entirely they will still need to individual drop out of each service.

For a Membership I run I plan a similar system however as it has a login system, individual browser profiles (unique keys) will be stored against a logged in user. This will allow these profiles to be linked via the username and has the advantage of spotting password sharers if their are a large quantity of browser combinations (it should be able to detect even if users use proxies or are on a corporate network)

so that's the plan, anyone see any major issues with it? let me know, ideally before I fully build it! How are you managing your various data services?

For example if you were going to run an extortion service let's say which at best a stupid idea and at worse criminal then putting the address of your legitimate company would be stupid. However being a smart fellow you might choose to then change it to a holding address for your mail. Unfortunately Google Cache saves the original address and well your pretty much screwed at that point and look just a little silly.

Let's take an example, who could we pick on...

Verified SEO

Lovely site, offering to sell you a verified SEO status at just $199 a month, no wait $99 they must be having a sale. Now let's compare two versions of their footers the current one, and this one from Google Cache

The current footer

The old one from cache

look they moved...
I wonder who else is at the old address well according to Merchant Circle a Mr Charles Preston, wonder if he has a site... oh look so he does!

Charles Preston SEO

What a nice chap, apparently according to his site...

His record of success speaks for itself. In the early nineties he taught himself computer programming and website development. Using only books and a burning desire to change his fortune, he became a certified and sought after adept at several website and database development programming technologies.

He invented time travel as well, this man talents show no bounds! It is of cause quite possible Charles Preston has been a very unlucky chap who just happened to work in the same office as the person trying to hide their real details, and if he is well think of the links, oh wait you didn't get one, doh!

Takeaway hints:

• Don't upset someone enough to make them come look for you
• Don't use your business address for your nefarious deeds
• Don't think because you have whois-guard on mean people won't find you
• don't rip people off!

p.s anyone wanting to become a Verified SEO please click here for your shiny new badge!

The two big releases from Paypal have been Adaptive Payments and Adaptive Accounts, Adaptive Payments is a collection of methods of payments that changes the way you do business online (at least that’s what the marketing department at Paypal said I still think they are pretty useful though) while Adaptive Accounts will allow you to generate your customers with Paypal accounts on the fly (yes you read that right) This article I’m going to focus on Adaptive Payments and in particular split payments, though fear not I will be talking about the other features over the next few weeks and months.

Split (parellel) or Chained Payments

One of the features that is going to appeal to Internet Marketers and Ecommerce developers is the Split and Chained payment feature, this allows someone to make a singular payment but the payment is split amongst several receivers this immediately opens up some amazing possibilities. With Adative payments you have:

• A Purchaser or Buyer - the party who is buying the product
• A Receiver - a party receiving money from the Purchase
• An API Caller/handler - a Party which instigated the transaction and determines where funds are sent, the API caller maybe a receiver but can't be the purchaser.

Split Payment

A singular Payment is split so the money is divided amongst one or more parties, each party is shown on the invoice, in effect while their has been one payment their are several transactions. The purchaser can see each party and interact with them, for example requesting a refund against one of the payments rather then all.

Chained Payments

A Chained Payment a singular party becomes the API Caller the purchase is made in the API caller name and the payment is then split to other parties which could include the original API caller. In this scenario the buyer only sees the API Caller in the purchase even if several transactions have occurred.

Paypal Split and Chained Payment Usage Examples

Trials and Upsells

Using Split payments a merchant can provide multiple payment cycles for different products for example:

A user visits a site and purchases the online version of a product and is also offered access to a Joint Venture Partners product as part of an upsell if he agrees a split payment is made one to the original merchant and the other to the JV partner, while the user has made just one payment his invoice clearly shows two separate transactions. A problem with one of those transaction that results in a refund only effects that transaction. Allowing JV partners to have a direct financial relationship with the customer during the merchants sales person. Transactions do not have to be of the same type, while the original purchase maybe a one off payment a JV transaction might be a pre approval subscription.

Drop Shipping

Dropshipping is where a site actually does not have any stock but purchases directly from a drop shipper on purchase. When the purchase is made the dropshipper is sent the shipping details of the client and the order as well as the wholesale price of the product plus their commission. They then ship the product on behalf of the original site. With Adaptive Payments Chained payments this can be instantly automated into just 2 payments rather then just one. When the purchaser sends payment to the Merchant the merchant then generates a split payment to all drop shippers along with sales information.

The advantage is that within Paypal every item purchased by the purchaser is passed to multiple dropshippers as one job making tracking processing a lot easier and far fewer payments.

Instant Affiliate Payments

Have a direct relationship with Affiliates you can literally split the payment, Why is this better then a monthly pay back, if their is a refund you can refund from both your Merchant account and the Affiliate account, either partially or fully! Allowing Affiliates instant access to their cash as long as they have the understanding it maybe refunded, of course you can choose to take the entire refund or indeed in part.

Is your Ecommerce system ready for Adaptive Payments?

Almost certainly not but over the next few months and years the larger e-commerce software will start to adopt this technology but by then a new breed of payment systems will be in place which can take maximum benefit. For Eccomerce systems to accept split payments they will need to create Adaptive Payments Gateway as a payment provider however to make maximum use then it will require a change in the way eccomerce systems work.

Ways current Ecommerce Systems could use Adaptive Payments?

So you want to use these right now with Zen Cart or OS commerce and similar? Well with a little work you could get something working, here is how I would implement Adaptive Payments Split Payments to notify 3rd Parties.

Let us assume certain products within your shopping cart require paying 3rd Parties, these are treated as regular products we just store their Product ID for future use along with who we have to pay and what call we need to make.

Assuming your Ecommerce system has flexible gateway system, building an Adaptive Payments gateway is very similar to building any Paypal based API gateway their are a couple of strange authentication changes meaning you will need to send Public Keys in Headers rather then in Post data. To generate the Payment details we would need to look at the Product IDs in the basket and check for third party products. Create a Payment button with the correct data and send the chained or Split Payment with the IPN return set to the cart, on return of the IPN request make additional calls as required to notify the third party suppliers, this is not unusual most carts have the ability to allow such calls after purchase for autoresponders. Of course this does require the third party to accept such calls and have some sort of headless Ecommerce system.

Why Headless Ecommerce Systems are the future of Ecommerce!

A headless system is one with no user interface, so no pretty web pages, rather its designed to be interacted with by web services. Think of them as listeners when data is sent to them they process the data and return if the transaction is completed. When combined with split payments these systems can be used to automate the purchase and delivery of digitial products or order of physical product without the user ever having to go to the companies own web site in effect allowing them to expand beyond their own user base. With Headless Eccomerce Systems a web site procurement program can be added directly into other peoples systems.

Examples

Membership site - A headless Application manages membership to a site allowing site owners to subscribe users to the site, after payment the API generates the user with subscription appropriate to whatever was purchased. The Membership can be integrated directly into the original merchants checkout process as a cross sale.

Printing on Demand API - A headless API which accepts print on demand orders from Publishers who as part of their upsell process offer hard copies of their book, on purchase the Publisher makes a split payment with the royalties going to the Author, Printer and themselves, after payment is complete they call the Printers API to fire off the print job.

This was a quick introduction to what split and chained payments can do as well as introducing the idea of headless ecommerce systems, over the next few weeks and months I plan to show more and more of the ideas as well as more practical examples of usage.

Hours prior to to Geocities closure, Reocities was born a project to archive its content, it got a lot of twitter time including myself and they manage to scrape a hefty chunk. However unknown to them Yahoo had been working to save Geocities through archive.org

For legal reasons Yahoo felt they could not wholesale dump Geocities content to archive.org but did provide the site with every assistance to allow them to store and and access all publicly available sites at time of closure, they also allowed their bots unlimited connections and bandwidth to grab as much content as possible.

Why didn't they publicise it?

Good question, but they were quite keen when I asked that the message was made clear they had worked with archive.org and that this was a long term plan, as David said back in June. With archive.org not being indexed however it does mean a large part of the web has still vanished from day to day searches and so potentially their still is a place for projects like reocities.com.

Sometimes watching television can be frustrating and I don't mean because of the silliness of CSI awesome computing and forensic capabilities No what I find silly is the way advertisers try to leverage the web. So I would like to introduce you to a case example.

Park Hampers – Park Hampers are a Christmas saving scheme based in the UK they work by you paying for your hamper in the weeks months prior to Christmas when it comes to Christmas time they deliver your hamper. Its aimed more at low income families or people who are terrible at saving. Their SEO team should be shot!

Their recent TV campaign tells you to visit park11.tv this is of course a redirect to a truly terrible landing page, but it is not the landing page that concerns me but the fact other then this URL there is no mention of Park11 or Park11.tv anywhere on there site this results in a Google Search for Park11 being:

Christmas Hampers? No. Parkisons disease for Christmas? No thanks

What has gone wrong for Park?

Park obviously want to track number of hits their TV campaign is bringing to their website so have created a unique url for that campaign the aforementioned park11.tv this I assume logs the user before redirecting to the landing page. Park have numerous other URLs leading to various landing pages and mini sites so this seems to be part of an overall strategy the problem is that as the unique url has diversified away from the core brand they haven't laid any foundation on their site to cope with it.

So they don't show in a Google search for Park or Park11 so what?

How many people put urls into Google not the url bar on a web browsers? I would suggest quite a lot especially those people who perhaps are not as web savy which are in part the customers Park Hampers are aiming at. So by having a sponsored listing they are simply losing traffic and what traffic they are picking up they are paying for via PPC. Not only are they paying for an advert on tv they are then paying to pick up the traffic from that advert!

In the case of Park they have a small reputation issue as well, while badly researched by them Park11 association with Parkinsons can't be helping as users arrive at Google but find no results for hampers they do read a pile of scientific jargon if that doesn't put the user off they may well visit the wikipedia page on Parkinsons. Which to be fair I think every one should so here is the link again.

How do you solve the problem

First off all sorting out the rest of Park Hampers site so that its pages are ranking, then reference Park11 campaign create a dedicated landing page for it with the keywords in use and at least internal navigation pointing to the site. Just to be safe surely you would optimise for keywords such as Park11 & "Park Eleven"

Park are not the only company not to do this, but since they are on tele right now advertising I thought they were the perfect example.

Update: Myself and Carolyn were bored over the weekend and so have been playing with look at Park Hampers redirect strategy to say its a mess is an understatement, they own park1.tv through to park40.tv and seem to be using most in various tracking, about 20 of the Google results for park1-40 actually have Park anywhere in the top 10, examples of other Park redirects include park5.tv and park15.tv. This itself wouldn't be that bad but in addition Park own another 8 or so domains including myparkmag.co.uk, gopark.co.uk etc these are not minisites but rather badly designed redirects. In short a mess, don't fall for the same mistakes.

Update2: I incorrectly identified gopark.co.uk as belonging to Park Hampers, this is in fact a site owned by a third party with no link to Park Hampers who has asked I clarify rather then remove the reference, please see my about page for my Disclaimer on Facts and Figures. I have also written a more fuller apology to gopark.co.uk.

At the time I first double checked our own bots don't do anything quite so stupid before suggesting that I thought it unlikely but would happily test it. Dave suggested a wager oddly enough one I never took him up on and I'm glad I didn't!

How we crawl robots.txt file

The need for speed is paramount when crawling a site, a bot is taking up server resources and you want it to complete its required action in as short a point as possible. If your bot follows REP (what's REP See Post notes for details )it's first action should be to download the available robots.txt file, on average these files are 2-4kb in size very small and take no time to download, however a file sent with a 404 is closer to 22-40kb assuming it also sends the associated html. a much larger size given the majority of sites do not have a robots.txt file this means if you are not careful your robot will spend more time downloading a useless file then anything else. The method we use is to simply ask initially for packets if the return is a status 200 we proceed to download the file, anything else and the status is stored and is ignored.

Is the way you do your crawler the correct way Tim?

There is no "official" recommendation within the RFC governing REP that covers how you should treat status codes and which you should follow to only follow Status 200 is by far the most efficient method but it comes at a cost as you could be ignoring the file! It also doesn't totally protect against downloading 404 pages as some servers send out a status 200 not 404 when a page can not be found.
A draft proprosal did suggest that other status codes should be followed including 3xx related to moved documents temporary or permanent it did not explicitly mention dealing with cross domains.
I have started to make changes to our own bots See Post notes for details

How does Google deal with cross domain 301 of a robots.txt file?

It reads the file at least according to webmaster tools, in Bronco follow up post they show Google Webmaster tools accepting bit.ly/robots.txt file nice should we be alarmed potentially though only if your allowing custom urls to your user at a root level on your domain with dots in them so if your running a URL shortener then yes perhaps something to check.

Did you do your own tests?

yes I had already done some tests last night which backed up what they did here is how I tested.

Experiment 1 Cross 301 oh please say this doesn't work!
We created two domains domain A and domain B with a robots.txt on Domain A and 301 to a file on Domain B the robots.txt dissallowed access to /test/ folder, a test folder was put on both domains and index file was put in both, each domain was given a root index cross referencing each and each of the test files.

If Google crawled the robots.txt then Domain A should have 1 indexed page, Domain B 2 when finished.
with a monitor attached to the logs doing reverse DNS looking for a Google IP so we could watch the interaction some links were thrown at Domain A.

Result: Domain A - 1 page indexed, Domain B - 2 page Indexed

In Webmaster Tools a status 200

Experiment 2 - Let's give google the benefit of the doubt
Ok so maybe they have indeed adopted the 1997 draft and are therefore obeying redirects it will ignore a Status 666 right?
Fresh domain this time our robots.txt file will be in the correct location but will send a http status of 666

Result: Domain A - indexed 1 page

In Webmaster Tools - status 200

Experiment 3 - given you a robots.txt file regardless
Ok so what if we tell you our server is broken i.e 500 but we give you a correct robots.txt file?
Fresh domain, correct location but headers sent are http 503 - Service Unavailable we are telling it we are not available the server is buggered in effect.

Result: Domain A - indexed 1 page

In Webmaster Tools - status 200

Tim - If you think about this it actually supports the belief google have actually programmed in the ability to follow 3xx as otherwise it would have for the 3xx returned a 404 or a 200 and blank file

Experiment 4 - I'm not here even though I'm here
Final test send http status 404 but also a valid robots.txt file what you going to do Google!

Result: Domain A - indexed 2 page

In Webmaster Tools - status 404

Only in the final test did Google behave as if it was paying the blindest notice to http status codes, can we assume 404 is hard coded and it will accept anything else?

Why should you care?

While the potential for abuse is small unless you run something akin to a URL shortner what happens when your site is producing an intermittent 500 error. From playing with status codes it would seem Google if shown a invalid or unreachable robots.txt will continue to use the old file could this be a potential for abuse what about a sneaky redirect only google on a 301 from your robots.txt by a very mischievous hacker. food for thought, and I'm glad I didn't take that bet of with DaveN.

What you want more? Seriously I mean what do I need to tell you?
I will be running a seminar on Profiling website users, looking at life cycles and a huge pile of tricks and ideas to get the most out of your users. Want to know if colour effects genders differently? Want to know how to estimate gender in website visitors?

Then you should be attending this seminar! What's more its free well sort of, its actually free to Think Visibility attendees everyone else its £50 but of course what this really means is if you buy a Think Visibility ticket at £99 and use my discount Coupon TIMNASH the price will drop down to such a level that you got to ask yourself why not come to both

I'm afraid while this seminar will be filmed it will be only for internal use and not available for purchase, if it's a success I might run a future seminar and film it.

If you are interested in improving your conversions, or even just curious as to what it is that I find more interesting then SEO (or if your into SEO why what we do is so much more then the normal) then come along for the afternoon it's free, simply register to confirm your place at the behaviour modelling seminar.

Passive Profiling

From the moment a visitor enters a site a wealth of information is provided by them including hopefully where they have come from, their browser, their physical location (of their ISP at least), their language all of this can and is faked by a small minority but for the vast majority this information can be treated as reasonably accurate. Even with this limited information we can make educated guesses about a user for example we can guess if the user is at work or not.

Once the visitor starts to interact with the site we gain even more information for example once a suitable number of clicks have been recorded we can start to use behavioral models to attempt to estimate gender and age See Post notes for details. Return visitors provide even more information how do they return direct or through the original referrer? All of this builds up a picture which helps to determine how to present the site to the visitor and change them from a visitor to a “user” but this sort of profiling requires the user to stay on the site long enough to profile the visitor. 10 clicks may not sound much but that could easily be a completed transaction or a lost sale before passive profiling has had a chance to determine the best route for the visitor.See Post notes for details

Active Profiling

Active profiling in this context is confronting the visitor into a decision making process rather then allowing them to wander around the site on their own. This sort of profiling is not without risk people baulk at being told what to do and especially when a site does not operate in preconceived boundaries of how a site should behave. For many people the website asking questions just isn't cricket!

The key to active profiling it to force the user into making a decision which can then be profiled this is usually done by removing navigations or hiding content behind some sort of form. By giving the user no real choice (other then to bail) but to tell us something we can then use to show them the next step in our profiling. Let's take a really simple example if I am selling software I may want to identify larger corporate customers from small businesses I therefore present visitors with a screen with two options one for small businesses and one for corporate customers. Each leads to a different landing page selling the same software but highlighting different features of the software simple and pretty un-invasive we are adding a step between getting the information and this will increase the number of exits at that point but if those that stay convert higher percentage it's worth losing a few visitors to gain the information needed to improve conversions.

Pros of Active Profiling

• Gather information that you just couldn't gather through other means
• Confirm information gathered through passive profiling
• Can be introduced directly into visitors funneling process
• Much quicker and more reliable data then passive profiling

Cons of Active Profiling

• Higher bounce and exit rates
• Can cause confusion to visitors

The best method is of course to combine the two methods to gather as much information as possible while keeping the active profiling limited and filling only vital gaps.

Landing Pages - Case Study

Lets take an example of a site selling laptops to households it's target demographic is 18-30yrs olds in the UK.

On arrival to the site notices the top of the site has a loading icon in reality the site is well optimised however the site is generating the new arrivals profile to put them initially into one of 6 groups. Male/Female/Neutral UK/Not UK to do this the page is pulling the IP address to confirm country if not able to identify assume not UK, and using css history to determine gender (if this fails pesky firefox user! Then gender neutral)

Once the initial profiling is generated the assets are loaded a “British male” is presented with a female “Kirsty” , “British female” would get “Craig” while other would get “Barry” each have certain charms designed to entice and more importantly distract the visitor similar but more generic characters appear for the other 3. These characters then ask a question with four choices (this is our active profiling) Once loaded the characters have a hover element track on them to help determine how distracting the characters are being so that on future pages they can be brought to the fold or are pushed back into the background. The only two pages where the visitor is not determining the character position (though of course the visitor has no idea they are or it would ruin the effect) are this initial page and the last checkout page where they are always at the front almost egging the user on.

Once the user has “answered” the characters question they are further subdivided into groups from this point the wording, colours and location of buttons are determined by the profile they are in. In effect it determines if “Kirsty” talks tech to you or blue is your colour!

This sort of segmentation is highly effective if you already have a tight demographic you are targeting.

Preventing Comment Spam and Payment Fraud – Case Study

Something we have been working on for a little while is the way to identify users that are most likely to be spammers prior to them actually leaving the comment rather then just relying on identifying the comment as spam. For truly automated spam this is pretty easy to do, for human spammers (those people being paid through systems like amazon turk to leave comments) it's a little harder to identify but not much. By using a first past post point scoring system so no one issue will cause the visitor to be considered a problem you can build up a passive profile and compare it to a typical spammer who will have a specific click pattern, hover over search words and many using blocks of known IP, or indeed from a certain country in some blog cases. Once the passive profile has been matched the active profiling is engaged and forces the user into a simple question “Are you a spammer?” ok so not quite however when the visitor makes a comment rather then an immediate submission the user is presented with a logic puzzle or simply a question this is not to prove they are human as we actually know that already! But to see if they have engaged with the site or the post. If they pass through this active profiling then the normal spam prevention kicks in, if they don't then they can be subjected to what ever torments the webmaster has in store for them (a java applet is always cruel).

Similar techniques can be used to identify potential fraudulent transactions where users passive profiling might indicate their behavior is “suspicious” the active aspect would be used to reiterate part of the transaction process.

Over using Active Profiling

This post was inspired when my friend Andy Beard pointed me to a marketing tool which uses active profiling (though being marketers they added 400 additional buzz words) via a quiz to generate sales pages in what you could consider to be traditional quizes. When he initially pointed me to the program I was presented with a quiz asking quite leading and obvious questions before I could “see the video” after the second question I simply started randomly clicking until it went away it was only then did I realise the thing that was irritating and annoying was in fact what Andy wanted to show me!

So why did it fail? Well over use of active profiling results in “oh get out of the way” mentality where the user blindly clicks or feeds false information to just get rid or past the profiling system. This is a triple disaster you not only haven't gathered useless information, you don't know you have gathered duff information (unless you are confirming passive profiling and are double checking for errors) and you have an upset visitor more likely to bail. The solution is to use active profiling sparingly and only as part of a funnel sales process.

Do you use any of these techniques? If so have they helped?
If you have found this article interesting you might also like to take a look at my recent introduction to this type of user profiling.

<

What is SENSE Tim?

glad you asked SENSE is the uk largest deaf blind charity (note no and) it's dedicated to people who are both deaf and blind normally from birth it is an amazing charity and the work they do is vital to help give some hope to people who live in utter isolation caused by their own bodies. If you want to know more about what SENSE does I really suggest you check out their website sense.org.uk

So back to my day while I appreciate her enthusiasm her timing sucked so I cut her short and said very bluntly what's the website address.

She looked blankly and said well Google SENSE but I think it's .com (it's not it's sense.org.uk) anyway I dashed off but made a mental note to visit the site which I duly did while sitting on my train it's pretty terrible and so I spent some time making notes which I will send them though I doubt anything will be implemented but the whole incident got me thinking.

How do you record an off-line campaign accurately?

The simplest and most obvious route is when handing out information use a separate domain name for all offline promotional info that redirects to your main site. It's cheap to implement and assuming it's just a top level domain name change not going to cause to much confusion. you see larger companies do this on TV adverts normally with the .tv version of their trading name. However lumping all the traffic from your campaign really doesn't help you from an analytics side it also makes working out what promotion is working harder particularly as off line campaigns can have long lag times mail shots going astray for 5 weeks that old poster being seen in the railway station a year after it was put up. Getting any more detailed information and we are going to have to start going beyond domain names.

The problem is simple the longer the url the more typing the person needs to do the less likely they are to complete the whole url but give up and either go to the domain root or worse Google it. Yet to give each campaign a new domain would seem impractical for most businesses and a management nightmare.

Shorturl vs domain name

we are all familiar with the idea of using shorturls for social media campaigns where we are limited to a set number of characters but would they be usable for our offline campaigns.

Pros - Short equal less characters, hopefully means less likely to abandon type-in
cons - Any domain recognition goes out of the window, often short urls will use strange domain extensions and might prove hard to type in.

So the question is a potential customer more likely to type in:
www.mydomain.com/mytrackingurliscool or sen.se/wrt4

Well this afternoon I managed to convince a client to test it, here is the proposed plan.

3 separate mail shots each will include a unique shorturl for that mail shot (indeed we could go to that mail/poster etc) the shorturl domain is purchased and is 7 characters long including the dot. The domain root logs visit and redirects to the main site, the unique urls act like any normal domain shortner.

To test we will be split testing against long url equivalents though with an extra /m appended to the end for tracking purposes.

I will let you know the results but what do you think is this a good idea have you used such tactics? oh and if you happen to know anyone who was canvassing for SENSE in Sheffield today point them at this post and to the nice blonde lass I'm sorry if I was rude to you but I hope I have made up for it.