Category: internet marketing

One of the most important growth features at early Facebook was the contact importer. You’d upload your email contacts, we’d match them against our user base, and you’d find your friends. Simple.

The teams working on it were measured on contacts imported. Millions of them. Every week the numbers went up. Big smiles all round.

Problem was, nobody was tracking what happened next. How many of those imported contacts actually got invited? How many of those invitations led to a registration? How many of those registrations turned into someone who actually used Facebook?

When we finally instrumented the full flow — contact imported → invitation sent → registration → active user — we found massive drop-offs at stages nobody was watching. We’d been celebrating the sound of water entering a bucket full of holes.

I see this everywhere. Companies obsessing over the top of the funnel while the bottom leaks. It’s the most common mistake in digital marketing and probably the most expensive.

At eBay we had a similar moment. We measured CRU — Confirmed Registered User. Anyone who finished the registration form. But “finished the registration form” and “actually bought something on eBay” turned out to be very different things. When we shifted to ACRU — Activated CRU, meaning someone who’d actually done something on the platform — it completely changed which marketing was working and which wasn’t. Sounds like a small definitional tweak. It was ground-breaking.

The lesson is always the same: draw out every step between the first touch and the action you care about. Measure every step. Find the cliff.

We did this with a 10-step email conversion flow at Facebook and found that one of the middle steps — an asynchronous processing tier — was silently crashing and losing messages. Users would start the flow, hit this invisible wall, and vanish. Nobody noticed because the steps on either side looked fine. Fixing that one thing gave us a “tens of percents” improvement. Not single digits. Tens of percents. From one broken step that nobody knew existed.

There’s a balance though. I always say the journey from click to conversion should be as short as possible but no shorter. At Meta this thinking led directly to lead gen ads (where users submit info without leaving the platform) and click-to-messaging ads (where the conversion is just starting a conversation). We put the conversion inside the creative itself. But you can go too far — if you strip out so much friction that people convert without understanding what they’re getting, you end up with chargebacks and churn. In 2024, selling Quest headsets, my team made exactly this mistake. Twenty years in and I’m still learning.

The other thing that changed how I think about conversion was growth accounting. Danny Ferrante introduced it at Facebook in 2008:

Acquisitions − Churn + Resurrections = Net Growth

At Facebook, churn and resurrections were each double the size of new acquisitions. So a 1% improvement in either had twice the impact of a 1% improvement in acquisition. Most companies throw all their conversion effort at acquisition. The maths says that’s probably wrong.

I’ve put all of this into a one-page Conversion Rate Optimisation cheat sheet as part of the companion stuff for my book Click Here. It covers the 5-step conversion audit, growth accounting, friction reduction, the Big Green Button test, and why you should always log with two independent paths (we found a >10% discrepancy at Facebook between server-side and client-side counts because of a pre-fetching bug that was logging “active” users who never opened the app).

It’s free, it’s one page. Print it out and stick it next to your monitor. The bottom of the funnel is where the money is.

I have written here plenty of times about my cocktail making and paper airplanes sites. I have also written in the past about the depressing truth of shrinking markets and about finally getting to the year of mobile in 2010. This is really important when I look at the growth of both of my websites.

Specifically the mobile internet is growing really, really fast but the desktop internet is slowing down and usage is transitioning to mobile. The interesting thing is that different topics lend themselves to mobile and to the web today. Paper airplanes and cocktail recipes make a really nice pair of examples for that:

When you look at paperairplanes.co.uk the mobile web is still a very small percentage (you probably want to sit at a computer screen/desk making these):

Whereas with cocktailmaking.co.uk the mobile web is already at 50% (you are probably in a bar or at a friend’s house and trying to figure out what to drink/how to make your favorite drink):

The same holds true when you think about what mobile OS you are optimizing for. In India it seems you’d be an idiot to spend a minute thinking about iOS whereas in the USA you’d be crazy not to have iOS as a top priority. Mobile is the future, it’s on a clear track to be the majority of all traffic to my websites but I should be focusing on mobile for cocktails whereas maybe, long term, paper airplanes is a dying business (perhaps I could fight off the increasing number of competitors in web SEO but I am not sure it’s worth it).

For another article I wrote on some deceptive content in my adsense units I took the following screen dump

I think this is great work by someone at Google and would love to meet whoever is responsible and learn from them. This ad is perfectly contextual and in the moment. I bet it has amazing response rates and probably drove a lot of growth for their webmaster tools. Also in general it reminds me of a great point from Andy Beal… people who visit your site via “allinurl:” or “site:” are probably webmasters and most likely competitors.

That data is useful 🙂

On the margin optimizing to make your experience (yes you, the person reading this now) better is not a good idea for most of the advertising supported websites you use (the one notable exception is Google). I say this because if you are reading this post you must be a web power user 🙂 so view a lot of page views. Their time is better spent working on their least loyal users.

Here is why (using data from my sites).

The deeper a user is into a site the less likely they are to click. The following graph shows CTR by depth (in page views) into my site for a user on ads. For a CPC driven advertising marketplace getting someone with 5 page views to view 6 is half as valuable for me as getting someone with 2 page views to view 3.

This following graph shows the relative value (for me) of getting you from 0-1 impressions on my site, 1-2, 2-3, etc… As you can see the value added is rising to 4 page views and then starts to decline after 4 page views. A while ago I did another post on this showing the double impact of google adsense sell through rate https://www.alexschultz.co.uk/google-adsense-/ as you increase page views per user.

Now don’t get me wrong you are probably a massively valuable user to all the content sites you regularly consume. Below is the revenue per user curve for my sites based on how many page views you have viewed. The last bucket is 6+ (not just 6) so you can see someone who views 6+ pages is 5 times as valuable to me as someone who views one.

That being said my biggest return is by getting all the folks who view 1 page to view 2 and that’s pretty much true for every content publisher I have ever seen (have done a little side consulting for a few companies).

I guess the big question I don’t answer here is how much investment does it take to get a power user to view one more page than getting a low use user to view 2 pages rather than 1 🙂 Perhaps my note on reducing bounce rate via recommendation engines gives some answer to that.

Planned posts:

• The key to understanding your website
• Diminishing return on user value against page views per user
• Cume vs GRP in offline media and what it means for internet marketing
• How to optimize for the median

I hope you stay with me and read them all 🙂

I just completed a panel on facebook advertising at Affiliate Summit West.

I always enjoy affiliate summit because it is full of people who really understand internet marketing. It’s always good to talk to people here because their entire livelihood is based on how good at internet marketing they are. I find that when someone is using their skills to put food on their table that a lot of the theoretical rubbish is thrown out and folks really really focus on doing what works. Often in a big company people get very cerebral and theoretical and engage in plumping their egos about how clever they are rather than focusing on what works. For all the well publicized negatives about the affiliate industry that is a huge positive for me. This industry really knows it’s stuff.

The single most interesting thing about the panel today for me was Markus’ point about how plenty of fish see huge branding impact from Facebook ads. He called out that when they run an ad campaign they see an up tick in total traffic well beyond the direct clicks and when they stop that campaign often a chunk of that uptick continues afterwards. This is I believe the crux to where internet marketing is going in the near term. More focus on the harder to measure branding values online… if TV can do it, so can the internet!

Anyway thank you to my fellow panelists for stepping up to talk about fb ads:

• http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/ – markus
• http://www.shoemoney.com/ – shoemoney
• http://www.purposeinc.com/ – dk
• http://globalizer.com/ – mark
• http://www.jimkukral.com/ – jim (our moderator)

Here are some totally self interested positive twitter comments a friend sent to me which I wanted to share:

Looking at the Japanese search market is always interesting. In Japan, Google’s search results pages are notably more ad-heavy than in other markets, while Yahoo Japan takes a more minimalist approach. This is the opposite of what you might expect given the global perception of these brands. It’s a great example of how local market dynamics can create very different user experiences.