Amazon’s Black Friday social media fail
Image: M Holden (Flickr)
At the time of writing, the second morning of amazon.co.uk's Black Friday promotion, the online retail giant's social media presences are being besieged by irate shoppers. People are angry, confused and vowing never to shop with Amazon again. What went wrong and how can you save your business from a similar fate? Let's find out.
Amazon's Black Friday promise
Amazon has been trailing its Black Friday promotion in the UK for about 2 weeks now. It promised a week of spectacular deals and American-style shopping bonanzas the likes of which our Atlantic cousins could only dream of. Every hour a small number of amazing one-off deals would be released and it was a first come first served race to grab them.
So less than 24 hours after it was launched, how can the promotion be going so badly? Amazon's facebook page is filled with angry comments and its own forums are overflowing with disgruntled customers vowing to never set a virtual foot in the store again. Where did it all go wrong?
The deals ... aren't really deals at all
The source of most people's anger is that, having been led to believe that this sale will be akin to Amazon chucking wads of the cash in the air and shouting “bundle!”, there isn't anything actually worth buying at the sale price. The coffee maker that was reduced to £350, the fairly mediocre laptop priced down to £450. These are not the Black Friday deals that people were expecting. A particular piece of pricing that has got Amazon in the most hot water so far is its deal on the computer game Vanquish which, it turned out, could actually be purchased for less than the Black Friday price on the Zavvi website.
If you're going to have a special one-off amazing price you'd better make sure it's not more than your competitor’s price for it on a normal business day.
No one’s listening
Someone at Amazon must be watching, listening to the fury that's brewing out there but you'd never know it. As far as I can see there have been no replies by Amazon staff on their forums and no attempt to answer questions on their Facebook page.
Not all of the comments are plain anger. Lots of people aren't clear on how the buying system works. Is it the first person to click on the item that gets it or the first person to complete the checkout? These questions could be easily cleared up but they haven't been and people are really frustrated.
While Amazon does nothing and says nothing it can only lose. Maybe Black Friday won't lose them sales today but they will lose customer trust and loyalty and that is far worse for their business in the long run and far more important than a couple of days of big traffic.
As one commenter put it: 'glad I read these posts first. Am not even going to bother. Will do my shopping on Play.com.'
The keyword holy grail: your users
What are the most important keywords for your site? Take a look in your analytics and you’ll find a very comprehensive list of keywords that people used to find your content. So these are your important keywords right? Wrong.
Those keywords aren’t the terms you can use to shape your content because it’s your content that has given birth to those keywords. Let’s say you’re selling a product called Blue Widgets. The top keyword referrer to your site is ‘blue widgets’. Success! Right guys? Right ... ?
This ranking success is only a success for people who are searching for ‘blue widgets’. What if only 20% of your customer base thinks your product is called Blue Widget? What if the other 80% are calling your product Blue Sprocket? The problem is that you don’t know what they call it because your keyword list only contains terms that are already driving people to your site. You need to know what the other 80% are searching for.
And that’s where your users come in and more specifically, your community. Take a look at your social media presences and online forums. What keywords are people using there? What are they calling your product? Collect this information and analyse it. What phrases appear most often? Are there any recurring long tail phrases you could use?
Use these newly found keywords to build content and PPC campaigns which will catch searches related to your old keywords. Sure you might not want to rename your main product but you can certainly incorporate new, recurring keywords into subheadings and into copy.
This technique, of course, works just as well for information provision as it does for sales. Organisations can benefit from taking a break from internally approved language and checking out what everyone else in the world is calling their products and services (a disparity that is apparent all too often) and optimizing their website for these ‘unofficial’ terms.
Don’t have a website that just sells Blue Widgets and don’t have a website that just sells Blue Sprockets. You want to have a website that sells ‘Blue Widgets and Sprockets - the best coloured cogs on the web’.
Bonus tip for vBulletin communities: an easy way to export your thread tags (a valuable goldmine of keywords) is to log in as admin into the control panel, click on ‘Threads & Posts’ and click ‘Tags’. You can copy these, page by page, into a Notepad doc (to strip them of formatting) and then paste them into one big handy spreadsheet. I do month on month comparisons so I can spot new and emerging keywords that can be integrated into site content.
Brave and stark – Eminem’s new album artwork
This is the first of what I hope will be lots of future thoughts on design landing on my blog. The inspiration is the cover of Eminem's new album, Recovery, which is breaking the hip-hop trend for busy album covers and complicated fonts to deliver a sparse, clean and challenging piece of artwork.
The theme of the album is roughly that of Eminem's fall from artistic grace after delivering a double set of stinkers in the guise of his last two albums. Not only is Recovery being billed as a return to form but the stark imagery on the front cover is extraordinarily striking for a rap album.
The lettering on 'recovery' manages to slip in a nice cross symbol in the 'O'; no doubt referencing both the health care connotations of the symbol and it's visual resemblance to the prescription (and non-prescription) pills that have blighted the rapper's health. We're also treated to the trademark backwards 'E'; a nice touch that doesn't at all detract from the powerful symbolism in the 'O'.
However, the massive amount of space smack bang in the middle of the cover is perhaps the most arresting feature of the artwork. The vanishing road of course embodies all the cliches of the 'long road to nowhere' / 'the road a man must walk alone' etc. but it doesn't stop it being any less powerful, especially considering there aren't many rappers who's egos could take a shot of the back of their head being used as their only presence on their own album cover.
I’m number one in the SERPS. Should I still buy PPC ads?
This is the question I set about answering in my capacity as E-marketing Executive for Alzheimer's Society. We were the first natural result for a number of search terms that we were also buying PPC ads for. I wanted to know what the effect of turning these ads off would be (both in terms of traffic levels and the quality of visitors) so I set up a little experiment.
The method
I paused five of our keywords on Google Adwords that ranked alzheimers.org.uk number one in the natural results for the same search over a period of two weeks and assessed the differences in traffic and visitor quality using Google Analytics' keyword tool.
The results
Considering that we were number one in the natural rankings I was shocked at how much difference it made to traffic levels by turning off the ads that were triggered by the selected keywords.
Across all five keywords the 'best' performance was a 10% drop in traffic and the worst was over a 50% drop in visitors with the rest averaging out at around 20%. Clearly then, turning off the PPC ads for high performing keywords definitely has a major impact on the levels of traffic you will receive.
Although the quality of the traffic marginally improved as observed in increases in the average time on site, pages per visit and decreases in bounce rate; these gains in no way were as significant as the drop in traffic.
The conclusion
Despite what hardened internet geeks like myself might think about sponsored results (I barely see them as I scan to the natural results) it's obvious from my experiment that people do click on them and that they do contribute a lot of traffic to a site.
So, for my part, I'll be turning my ads back on to capture those internet users that don't discriminate between paid and natural search results and, let's face it, who probably don't know or care what the difference is either.
The method
I paused five of our keywords on Google Adwords that ranked alzheimers.org.uk number one in the natural results for the same search over a period of two weeks and assessed the differences in traffic and visitor quality using Google Analytics' keyword tool.
The results
Considering that we were number one in the natural rankings I was shocked at how much difference it made to traffic levels by turning off the ads that were triggered by the selected keywords.
Across all five keywords the 'best' performance was a 10% drop in traffic and the worst was over a 50% drop in visitors with the rest averaging out at around 20%. Clearly then, turning off the PPC ads for high performing keywords definitely has a major impact on the levels of traffic you will receive.
Although the quality of the traffic marginally improved as observed in increases in the average time on site, pages per visit and decreases in bounce rate; these gains in no way were as significant as the drops in traffic.
The conclusion
Despite what hardened internet geeks like myself might think about sponsored results (I barely see them as I scan to the natural results) it's obvious from my experiment that people do click on them and that they do contribute a lot of traffic to a site.
So, for my part, I'll be turning my ads back on to capture those internet users that don't care to discriminate between paid and natural search results.
Advertising wants you to lie to your girlfriend
The Argentinian beer manufacturer Andes has taken it upon itself to remedy a problem as old as alcohol itself. Both personal experience and lazy pop psychology tells us that men go out drinking less after they get a girlfriend because their better halves don't approve of their man's drunken excesses.
To bring this fledgling demographic of men back into the pub (and, more importantly, to get their brand talked about by potential customers) Andes have created a sound proof cubicle that can be filled with a variety of non-pub background sounds. This means you can call your (quite rightly) distrustful girlfriend and lie convincingly that you are in the office despite the fact that you're slurring all your words and may or may not have dropped a kebab down the front of your shirt.
Basically, it's not going to fool anyone but it is a cool brand awareness campaign.
The ad for it below is (apparently) in Spanish but you get the idea.
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About
Tom Hubbard-Green is the E-marketing and Social Media Manager at Alzheimer's Society and a freelance technology journalist.
His articles have been published in a variety of magazines and industry publications including Figaro Digital, Org Zine, O2 Venue magazine and The City magazine.
The views expressed on this blog are his own. Obviously.
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