Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

Google’s decision to hide search terms in analytical reports for people who are ‘logged in’ is proving to be a pain for a lot of marketers. Marketers have come to rely on keyword analysis to help create compelling content for their sites so that they can drive customers to their business… but as Google is starting to create arbitrary privacy rules they begin to make the marketer’s job a lot harder. MediaPost points to a recent study that shows that “Not Provided” is now 40% of traffic for most organic search marketing analytics reports – thus providing absolutely no data for marketers.

MediaPost says more about the privacy change here: “Last year, Google gave signed-in search engine users an option to encrypt their search queries using Secure Socket Layer. The process encrypts Google search queries, meaning that data about visits from organic search queries no longer provides information, such as referring keywords, on each individual query. Rather than the exact word, Google began passing publishers the term “not provided” as the referring keyword for visits from search engine queries and clicks.”

As you can see, OfficeDrop has almost 50% of our search traffic as “not provided.”

What a pain. I guess I wouldn’t be upset about this if Google didn’t still make the info available in Google Webmaster tools. Why allow it to be displayed to marketers/webmasters in one place but somehow not in another? Are you really protecting anyone’s privacy? I don’t get it.

Dealing with Not Provided as a search term

In order to see what your true traffic driving search terms are (and unhide that annoying “not provided” term) you need to be a webmaster of your site. If you aren’t the webmaster then this won’t really help you; ask the person in charge of your site to invite you to be a webmaster.

1. Then go to Google’s Webmaster login here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
2. Select the site that you want to research
3. Select “traffic” on the left
4. “search queries” should become an option below “traffic” – select that
5. The last month’s search terms that drove traffic to your site will now be listed. You will probably want to sort them “clicks” to see the traffic that they are driving to your site; the default sort order is … well, I’m not sure.

These search terms are only kept in the webmaster tools location for a month or so, so you’ll need to download the results into a spreadsheet or something if you want to keep historical numbers! Again, it’s a pain.

A friend of mine, William Sulinski, has recently started a cool new project called From Holden. The concept is pretty basic – Will like to wear quality clothes (he’s way more fashionable than me!) but he, like me, is on a startup person’s budget. So he’s decided to start a verticalized men’s clothing company focusing on high quality shirts. It’s a cool concept, and I like the style of the shirts that he’s working on.

From Holden V Neck T Shirt

From Holden V-Neck T-Shirt

Will is on the cusp of a new trend in internet retailing, which combines manufacturing/sourcing with internet distribution in the goal of driving down the cost to the end consumer. I like the concept and will be asking for a few shirts for my birthday…

He talks more about what he’s trying to accomplish in a video on his Kickstarter campaign.

Please check out the From Holden Kickstarter campaign and, if you like the shirts, help Will out!

OfficeDrop recently got some great press on the most recent update of our Android app. It’s really awesome how device specific blogs can drive lots and lots of new downloads and users. I guess the major takeaway for app developers is that serious updates to apps offer tremendous PR potential. And that PR isn’t dead – if you’re selling apps then you need to use the media to drive new people to your store listings. Anyways, this piece of press was really awesome for spiking new users of OfficeDrop’s Android smartphone scanner app, so I thought I would share it.

Android Central Reviews OfficeDrop’s Updated Android App

Android Central, an authority in the Android app space, just reviewed the most recent update of the OfficeDrop Android app – and we are really happy that they liked it!

You can read the Android Central review of the OfficeDrop Android app here.

From the review: “The premise is simple but has plenty of potential. Whenever you have a document or something important that you’d like to keep electronic record of, you can open the OfficeDrop app and scan in the document, which is then uploaded to your account. With the latest version, document scanning has improved, with proper trimming and improved image quality.”

If you don’t have the updated app yet, you should get it! This app includes major image enhancement improvements + auto-cropping of mobile scans. we’ve just released a major improvement to our Android scanner app. This update actually improves the quality of the photo you take for you scans! So your mobile smartphone scanning just got better, easier and faster, and is part of our commitment to giving you the ability to get the best cloud scanning software possible. And it’s all designed to make using our file search better than ever – from the web or from your mobile device.

Get the OfficeDrop Android App in Google’s Play marketplace by clicking the button below on your Android device.

Ok, well here is my chance to brag a little bit. OfficeDrop recently released our updated Android scanner app, and included 7 inch tablet support. Well, we got some great press with this OfficeDrop Android Update. So I’m going to show off some of it here! As a reminder, I firmly believe that a solid PR strategy is imperatitive to any app marketing efforts. Users will need to remember your app’s name, head to the app store and actually type and then download the app. Even better, if you can get a reporter to link directly to the app in the store then the reader could go directly to the listing and get the app right away. Press does work for app marketing; our Android downloads are way, way up.

Anyways, here is the press that our Android app has gotten recently:

OfficeDrop Android App Press Reviews

August 13th, 2012

OfficeDrop – a Top 25 Business App for Android - Network World

July 30th, 2012

OfficeDrop, Escanea y guarda tus documentos en la nube - Lo Nuevo de Hoy

July 24th, 2012

OfficeDrop Review - Android Rundown

July 16th, 2012

OfficeDrop: Turn Your Android Into a Scanner - App for Android

July 16th, 2012

OfficeDrop Android Review - Android Authority

July 11th, 2012

How Mobile Apps are Changing Software - PC World

July 10th, 2012

Scan Your Receipts for Safe Keeping - Lifehacker

July 6th, 2012

OfficeDrop Releases its First Android Tablet App - BSDB Blog

July 6th, 2012

OfficeDrop Android, iOS Cloud Apps Help SMBs Improve Workflow - Mobile Enterprises

July 5th, 2012

Scan Documents From Mobile Devices Faster, Easier with OfficeDrop - CMSWire

If you actually want to get the OfficeDrop Android app, you can get it for free by clicking on the following button from your device:

I’m quoted in a PC World piece about how apps will change the nature of desktop software. I had a long conversation with the author, Jared Newman, about how OfficeDrop’s apps, both our smartphone scanner apps and our mac desktop scanner app, ScanDrop, are dramatically changing how we distribute our SaaS product.

The article’s thesis is spot on:

Not surprisingly, many developers are enthusiastic about the easy distribution and streamlined billing that app stores provide, yet these stores also introduce challenges–some that are unique to desktops, and others that have plagued smartphones since the dawn of the iPhone App Store.

I spoke with Jared for a while about how we were wrong about how customers wanted to use our service. They actually want to download and install apps, not use the web. We were off by 100%.

The soon to be famous Healy Jones quote is:

Healy Jones, vice president of marketing for OfficeDrop, noticed this shift away from the Web immediately after his company released mobile and desktop apps for its document-scanning service.

OfficeDrop, which provides searchable cloud storage, says that it sees seven times more user engagement through its apps than it does through the Web browser, Jones notes. Since releasing its first apps in 2011, OfficeDrop’s user base has grown from 7000 users to 140,000 users.

“We had a thesis that people did not want to install software; that the cloud meant that people could use a browser to interact with software and would never have to install anything. We were completely wrong,” Jones says. “People love installing software.”

Obviously I’m really bullish on apps. That’s also why I’m very bullish on tablets (and part of the reason OfficeDrop recently released an Android tablet version of our app.) Apps are how people want to interact with software. I’m happy people like HTML 5, but if it isn’t installed it’s not gonna grow as well as an app.

If you didn’t believe it before, believe it now. It’s tablet time; the traditional PC is on the decent and the future of personal computing is the tablet.

Click the chart to visit the original article (source: Aysmco)

See my other posts on tablet sales forecasts and tablets’ growing share of web traffic. Yup, I’m a big believer that the mobile revolution can’t fit in your pocket!

Here’s the punchline – loyalty really positively impacts in app purchases!

Here’s the data, from Localytics:

According to LocalLytics, “Of all users in Localytics’ study who made an in-app purchase, 44% did not do so until they had interacted with the app at least ten times. On average, a user who makes an in-app purchase will do so 12 days after first launching the app.”

Read the entire article – it’s really interesting.

I was able to help host a freemium discussion at the recent Unconference. Great notes of the event were taken here.

Also, check out the “Healy Jones in Action” shot below from the event. Thanks to Krushtown for all this great content.

Healy Jones in Action

One of my sysadmins pointed out a great post from yesterday on using a decoy on your pricing page. If done well this can be a great strategy.

I’ve used this decoy pricing tactic on OfficeDrop’s pricing pages for a while. In particular, our digital filing pricing page has an expensive plan that has nicely increased overall conversion on the page.

The main result of this decoy is increased conversion on the page. In otherwords, a higher number & percent of visitors to the page pick a plan and become an OfficeDrop user. It hasn’t really changed the MIX of plans (very few people pick the expensive plan and the same % of people pick the other plans). But I consider the decoy plan a success because it’s getting more people into our funnel.

You can see the pop here when we added a decoy pricing plan to our standard digital filing pricing page. This chart is the % of visitors who visited the page and then signed up for a plan. I.e. the conversion rate of the page. Note that there is a little dip in the beginning that has nothing to do with pricing; it’s a data error. The way to look at this w/o the data error is the two little peaks on the left are close to the pre-decoy conversion rate average; the hump on the rigth is the new average post addition of the decoy pricing plan.

What the Decoy Pricing Plan Looks Like

The decoy pricing is the “ScanPro” “ScanFive” plan on the right. (Thanks for the typo catch Pete!)

Decoy Pricing Plan

It’s designed to be expensive and to make clear that we’ve got the ability to support additional users in the plans… it’s not really clicked that often.

Anyways, check out the post I linked to above. You’ll find it very solid, and it explains why a decoy plan works.

Came across a study by a company called Comparz and found the following quote interesting:

Only 20% or less of SMBs found vendor websites and conversation useful. So what are SMB’s looking for? Over 90% of business users said that user reviews and user ratings and rankings would be the strongest help in making vendor decisions. In addition, 84% indicated that decision guides outlining what to consider when purchasing a solution and would be useful. They also seek a community where they can chat online with similar buyers.

This goes along with my mobile app marketing strategy of getting existing power users to step up and review new versions of apps in app stores.