Show HN: measure curiosity of your website users | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: measure curiosity of your website users

popify.me

45 pointsmihar33 comments

Here's some background:

When developing new advertisement format, our team did a lot of data-mining and A/B testing to reveal unknown patterns in human behaviour. One of the patterns was that, if you put random badges on the edge of the screen, people will tend to click on them out of curiosity. If you put more coupons, they’ll click even more. And if you show them coupons only once in a while, the time pressure will make users click even more.

The resulting CTRs were dwarfing any other means of advertising. But beware, this behaviour only lasted as long as there were good deals hidden under coupon badges. Changing good deals to no deals would decrease coupon CTR for a whole site for weeks.

With promising CTR results, we wanted even more milk from a coupon, so we implemented a form for collecting emails for newsletter. The number of collected emails has again exceeded all expectations of our client. And, as if this is not enough good news from our tingling little coupon, niche and local websites are also reporting good physical conversion, meaning: people showing up in the stores with printed coupons.

So what is happening here?

A lot of curiosity and a big pull. Coupon badges basically generate a pull relationship with a customer, who is then more likely to engage with a coupon content.

Since all this sounds like a mouth-full and we can’t tell you exact statistics and our case studies, we give you popify.me

popify.me is the simplest version of coupons that you can test on your site and see it for yourself. You’ll prepare a coupon and put it on your site in a minute. There’s also a viral loop included for social media spread and some sweet statistics.

Would like to hear more about data-mining and testing process of yours.

we tested on 2M+ visitor news site with a real-value mobile operator coupons and on a local niche 100K+ site with a QR print coupons with a hefty discount.

Honest question: do you think that if this catches on, and will be seen on more and more websites, users will eventually get tired and stop bothering to click the coupons?

They won't. As long there are good deals on coupons, ppl will want to uncover them.

I even beleive that a site with a good marketing team could get rid of banners and use only coupons, which would kindly benefit the site visual complexity.

I also think that unless you start getting crap deals, a thing like this should stick. Ordinary people <3 coupons and getting free somethings.

Free haircuts anyone?

I think this looks absolutely brilliant, and plan on trying it out, as soon as I can figure out how to adapt it to my needs.

You see, I have an e-Commerce site, so it doesn't do me any good to have a printable coupon with a QR code.

What alternatives do you guys suggest in this case?

Also: where do the emails you collect on the coupons go?

1. for e-commerce, besides collecting emails for a newsletter, you could put a keyword to a coupon with which visitors can claim discount on your site.

2. you can download e-mails in CSV in your statistics link

tell your e-commerce site URL and I'll see if I can get any ideas

My site is a Norwegian online bookstore. No e-books yet, just paper books-- and we're not currently set up for a keyword (coupon code), but it's something we've been meaning to get implemented. The url is http://www.bokdykk.no, but the text is all in Nynorsk.

> you can download e-mails in CSV

I tried doing that in your example demo, and got an error message of: ERR1.

I'm just trying to be helpful here. Your service has a lot of potential. I'm sure you guys will do great!

We're looking into it. Thanks for the good wishes.

Mihar: your startup (popify.me) isn't in your profile. Add it there.

Given you're trying to sell a product, the NSFW in the sample coupon (i.e. the green one) seems like a really bad idea.

Interesting concept. I like how minimal you've kept it.

If your site is targeted towards business owners/webmasters in the U.S, I suggest having a native English speaker record the video.

I realize that comment may earn me some downvotes, but I really do think that would result in more users, and I'm willing to sacrifice karma score in order to help the OP.

We're completely aware of that, and really wish that we'd have a native speaker on hand :)

Just now we're pinging our old friend in NYC if she can lend a syllable or two.

www.voices.com

I don't really think that disclaimer is necessary..?

Perhaps not. I haven't been around HN for very long relative to a lot of contributors, so I wanted to make sure it was clear that my intent was to be helpful, and not to be malicious or rude in any way. I probably could have worded it better.

Sounds intriguing, wish your site video wasn't Flash based - can't watch it on my current device.

vimeo. sorry. here is the MOV link. I just put it on Dropbox. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/315950/popify%20short%20explainer.mo...

LOVE IT!

Maybe I'm just sleep deprived but this is awesome. The coupons just blow me away. Will you really let me drive your tractor if I become a power user?

PS: your default tweet sharing texts need to be funnier and more in line with the coupon's tone.

I agree, nice tip. The tractor is waiting, just start popifying. ;)

Each pop up click results in another 'page', meaning I had to click back around 8 times to get back here. Just FYI :)

Not sure I'm getting what you mean? Do you mean that the coupons take you on a new page?

Sorry, I explained that badly. I'm running Chrome (10.0.648.204) and each coupon click is resulting in another entry in the browser back history.

Yep, I can reproduce the problem but I'm not aware what triggers it. Maybe the JS changing the iframe's src makes a new history record in Chrome.

I'll have to investigate this further.

What was the CTR ? for badges and for coupons.

CTR for badges was like 8% with all the timing and randomness tweaks. Since coupons are not used to drive traffic to other sites we also measured newsletter signup and the engagement was mindboggling 3.5%

This is pretty AWESOME CTR and engagement. I mean, where is the catch ?

This is due to human curiosity which in turn generates a pull effect.

Banners and such are PUSH for a customer, he didn't do any action to call the stuff in his eyesight. Coupons are just tingling at the side and if a curiosity makes a user to click on it, this generates PULL effect and he is more likely to engage with a coupon. Or in the other words, this means coupons are a holy grail of advertising :D

nicely done! can I put more then one coupon on my site?

sure. check the embed additional parameters. view source of the index page for ex.

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