Web Developers Can’t Sell. Sorry.
michellesblog.net
michellesblog.net
That would be a foolish over-generalization.
I'd be shocked if a professional surfer could tell me much about physics.
Just because you can, it doesn't mean you necessarily should. I'm a lot more effective as a marketer when I am selling someone else's code versus something I could scrap together.
This doesn't excuse programmers from ignoring your advice. We're a stubborn lot, and we make a living diving into situations where we have no idea what the hell we're doing, figuring it out, and carrying the day that way. We try to apply that to marketing, which is why most of our companies fail - it doesn't work that way in other fields. The ability to learn on the fly is usually more costly than it is with building software.
Having a debilitating disease such as ALS is almost certainly much more strongly negatively correlated with being a physicist than is surfing, yet nobody would be silly enough (given the notable counter example) to say "people with ALS can't be physicists" as a blanket statement.
But he is definitely not your standard Physicist.
Human beings can't surf.
I also know very few good salespeople who can code.
This post was written because I had clients who had built software, sold it off, and then were all big in their britches and thought they were marketing gods. The ads they wrote were totally awful and they blamed everyone but themselves for their high bounce rates.
Maybe there are coders who are marketing gods. Just know that people have a finite amount of energy, so if they are studying marketing, they probably aren't bothering to write solid apps. Jes' sayin'.
You are continuing to make statements which are based more in prejudice than reality, and the edgy I'm-joking-but-I-really-mean-it shtick doesn't suffice to make the statements true.
There is no rule that says after you know a programming language, learning how to market or write copy will cause a cache eviction from your brain. Look at 37Signals, who are marketing gods by any conceivable definition of the term. One of their marketing coups was taking a sort of obscure computer language mostly used by academics in Japan and popularizing it worldwide on the strength of a not-so-revolutionary-but-still-pretty-nice web framework and the very revolutionary idea of marketing an OSS product aimed at developers.
Peldi from Balsamiq is very worthy of emulation as well, and he is also widely viewed as one of the most competent Flex programmers around.
P.S. If a marketing god is looking at bounce rates then that should be considered autodemicide. Bounce rates are a terrible metric which are more useful to people outside your organization -- such as Google's search relevance team -- than people inside it. There is almost no conceivable circumstance under which they're more informative than looking at conversion rates, and the work required to extract what precious little signal they have among the noise would be better spent on almost any other task, for example, A/B testing.
And look how I said all of that while still knowing what a hashmap is.
You know your comment isn't totally fair, right? Jason Fried's not exactly Don Knuth.
Also, while it's true that every dev should be able to be a B-player marketer or salesperson, the A-players in all our fields are definitely at another level. Watch them price products, or negotiate large deals.
This is an exception, but rarely the case.
In regards to bounce rates, yes, they are absolutely important and are one of the core metrics you want to reduce when you implement split A/B testing. Think of it this way: if you open a physical store and most of the people who walk in immediately walk out, is your marketing effective? How much did you spend to get that person to walk in the door? If you have a high bounce rate, you will inevitably have a low conversion rate.
If you have a high bounce rate, you will inevitably have a low conversion rate.
If this were true, then you could use a low conversion rate as a proxy for making the decisions you are currently making based on bounce rate. If two metrics inenvitably say the same thing, ditch one of them. The interesting case would be when they differ. However, if your bounce rate and your conversion rates are telling you different things, then your conversion rate is right, because of the two metrics it is the one actually putting money in your pocket. If I were selling a product and the best thing I could say about it was "Either superflous, or wrong!", I would stop selling it. Everyone should stop selling bounce rate.
However, it is not the case that if you have a high bounce rate, you will inevitably have a low conversion rate. Many pages on my site have a high bounce rate, which is almost entirely due to my traffic acquisition strategy, which is organic SEO. Because a) Google is not infallible with regards to relevance and b) organic SEO is greatly helped by providing linkable resources, some of which can be consumed without leaving the page, this tends to increase my bounce rate relative to relying on, e.g., paid CPC traffic responding to an ad telling them they need to sign up for my free trial. Since customers pre-select for willingness to sign up, bounce rates among that traffic are much, much lower.
(In this case, as an artifact of an implementation detail, any interest in seeing the signup form will cause someone to be recorded as non-bounce. Of course, if I had implemented the form the other way and made that click do some JS wizardry to pop the form up in a lightbox, then the bounce rate would increase automatically. The fact that my bounce rate is very sensitive to my implementation details rather than any externally visible difference in user behavior should be a strong hint as to how useful it is(n't)!)
Of course, I don't have the luxury of telling customers on organic searchers "This site offers a free trial! Don't click here unless you're ready to sign up for it, you'll hurt my metrics!" and even if I did, wow, that would be a catastrophically stupid thing to do now wouldn't it. I make thousands of dollars off the organic traffic even if 70%+ on some pages satisfy their immediate desires without generating a second page view. (And if they satisfy their immediate desire and then link to my page from their blog or class home page then I am so far ahead of the game it isn't even funny.)
Bounce rates also reinforce a pageview-centric metrics model which was suboptimal but chosen for technical reasons years ago, and is now VERY suboptimal, given that we can have high engagement interactions these days without ever generating a second pageview, thanks to implementation details like Flash or AJAX. (For that matter, we can have high engagement intereactions without a FIRST pageview, because a good portion of the conversation occurs outside of our own websites. Given that I'm telling this to a social media consultant on a forum commenting about her blog I feel a heavy dose of Whoa This Is Meta at the moment.)
Folks interested in more detail on bounce rates and their inherent, ineradicable suckiness can read my blog post on it later this week.
As a marketer, I always try to think of what's best for the customer. In terms of bounce rate, it's actually pretty annoying to THINK you are going to find the right page when you Google it, only to discover something useless to you. So I try to keep bounce rates low because it increases customer happiness.
Maybe it makes me a wuss to think that way, but I've honestly never had an issue producing ROI.
I see what you're saying in the first sentence but I do not think that the second sentence follows from it. For customers who are in goal-directed mode, often times a bounce is the positive outcome and multiple page views are the negative outcome.
As a trivial example: suppose someone Googles [Rackspace affiliate program phone number]. Their intent is crystal clear: they want to call you. http://www.rackspace.com/information/contactus.php achieves their task and will almost certainly result in a bounce. If you wanted to reduce your bounce rate, you could put the contact link four clicks down and do several millions in usability research devoted to discovering new, innovative ways to get people not to click on it, but that would be prioritizing a meaningless and arbitrary metric over your customer satisfaction.
P.S. If there is anyone reading this from Google please don't get any ideas about new research projects from the above paragraph.
A typical example supporting your case would be a blog post. Most people come to your blog post via a link and they read the post and they go back to whatever they were doing. Even when web analytics tools will call them a bounce (because they just saw one page), I would say them non-bounce because they spent time doing what they came here for.
This is a worrying statement from someone who is supposedly a web marketing expert!
There are some inconsistencies too; now your claiming bounce rate is important for customer sanity - something I certainly would agree with! But I'm not sure you can logically extend that to linking with conversions.
As a programmer foremost I think I am a pretty good marketer too; so perhaps that's why I find what your saying disagreeable. Indeed I work with someone [as a consultancy] who describes himself as a "people person" and marketeer (and is supposedly a good one). He can't, alone, sell my software for jack shit...
I think there is room in these analogies for a middle ground where we can pool our skills; programmers to explain it, marketers to give it that needed gloss.
Also I feel none of your points (in the blog) are rocket science; it does something of a disservice to programmers, who tend to be very bright, to suggest that is where they fail. I think the key points we fail are as follows:
- difficulty in writing good, non-technical, copy
- looking objectively at the subject matter
- spotting where a "newbie" to a site/software might get confused on it's purpose how it works (and then explaining or working round that)
On the other hand we tend to be good at things like solid SEO, keyword marketing, spreading the word in a grass roots way - etc.
The only thing I would agree with is design; a lot of people try to sell bare metal work with the promise of a "custom design". That never works - your better off with a sexy design and a few missing, soon to appear, features :)
There are programmers who ARE struggling with the basics, I agree. But Im sure there are good and bad people in marketing.
I would say the best way to calculate conversion rate is after you exclude bounced visitors. Bounce rate tells what percent of people found your website wasn't what they were looking for. Conversion rates should tell, how good job am I doing in convincing the visitor, if the visitor chooses to spend time on the website and hence showing interest.
These two metrics are related and but not as tightly. And of course website can (and should) be optimized separately for both of these metrics.
EDITED for clarification:
Just to summarize, following is a pretty good way of seeing things:
CONVERSION RATE = (Total # of non-bounced visitors who completed goal) / (Total # of non-bounced visitors)
For all practical purposes, we should exclude bounced visitors from analysis as it just creates noise. Bounced visitors are the ones who got to your site because of chance and you should separate them from the visitors who came to your site with full interest.
First, you assume to know why visitors bounce (the "website wasn't what they were looking for"). That's quite a jump since bounce rates are about behaviour, not the causes leading to that behaviour.
For example, let's say I'm a bad writer and designer. My page may be absolutely the one a visitor was looking for, but due to my bad writing and design, the visitor thinks it's the wrong one. People scan web pages, they don't read them.
As another example, let's say I'm shopping for a new mobile and your page sells mobiles. I may bounce not because I'm one the wrong page, but because your price is easy to find and it's completely over-the-top in my opinion.
Second, there's also the problem of defining and measuring bounces.
Third, the conversion rate is, to some degree, a relative measure. Any number, say 10%, is meaningless unless you have an idea what's usual (for webpages similar to yours). Therefore, it doesn't matter what base it uses as long as everybody uses the same base.
Overall, I believe bounce rates are rather useless compared to other measures.
We all make generalizations when we are trying to make a point, because it is the best way to state a point clearly. A title like "Many webdevelopers seem to have a less-than-average capacity to sell" states something so mind numbingly obvious that you'd ignore the article. When someone says "webdevelopers can't sell", you should interpret that as "if you are a webdeveloper, you may be interested in this article, because you may be overlooking some important things that help you sell your app".
Interestingly, your type of response illustrates the article: you criticize details, while ignoring the big picture. That's the same as mentioning your features, but not the problem you solve.
If anything the title does a pretty good job of getting people to read it. Even if it does that by annoying a significant part of its target audience ;)
This piece is surprisingly fluffy. Of the five bullet points, the first is a cliché, and the second are so obvious that they haven't even reached that status.
Good for Social Media: @mashable, @readwriteweb, @jowyang, @adamostrow, @tamar, http://www.chrisbrogan.com
Overall marketing: @adage
Software marketing: @asmartbear
PR: @haro, @joshdilworth, @skydiver, @briansolis
I hope this is a good starting point for you. :D
But I look poorly on the use of link-bait titles. It's deceptive and ultimately annoying, particularly when it employs a generalisation.
After all, there are a myriad of different people involved in the development of a site. Many stake-holders and many opportunities for mistakes and misunderstandings. The basic point is this; there are many reasons why a site doesn't do as good a job of selling as it could. Blaming it on web-devs alone and their perceived inability to sell is horse-pucky. Frankly, most web-devs aren't employed to sell, they're employed to make things. Why should they cop it?
The simple truth is, I COMPLETELY VALUE web developers because the work they do keeps me employed. I don't code, but I also expect that they value the experience I bring to the table as a marketer as well. This post is essentially a way of saying, "I don't tell you how to code, so please trust me to do my job."
Good web developers DO VALUE the importance of marketing and sales. I think we have a lot to learn from you, but with this kind of post you are helping to alienate developers.
Please don't take me wrong, that's just my humble opinion on the matter.
I didn't intend for this post to get to the top of Hacker News. I should be more careful next time.
Also, I perfectly understand your frustration. I've had some opportunity to see the issue from both sides and it's unfortunate when someone refuses to see the value in your work.
And as much as this is drilled into our heads over and over again: keep it coming. It's all too easy to forget the fundamentals..
Point #1: "Lead with benefits, not with features." was great.
Every single web store has pages upon pages of meaningless marketing speak on every product page, and the tech specs are either: a) at the very bottom, in small font, b) under a separate tab, or c) broken, inaccessible, and unreadable.
When I have to go to a third-party review site to find out what the resolution of a monitor is or whether the netbook I'm looking at has an extra RAM socket, I can't exactly call this a good shopping experience.
While management is more likely to write a purchase order for salespeak driven marketing than developerspeak driven marketing, if you're aiming at developers that might not be so true.
I'm less likely to buy, or ask for a purchase order for, an online source management system, for example, if it lists 'why we're so great', rather than features. As a developer, I would be looking for the feature set not some bullet-point buzzword list.
Working in the industry I met a guy who was a very good mechanic, but really good with people. He started selling products while he worked as a mechanic. He become rich, and he didn't wanted to sell!!! People trusted him because they knew he was not going to trick them.
That said, it probably means she herself isn't too bad at marketing since, after all, it certainly grabbed quite the attention span here (and exactly the sort of crowd that would benefit from the knowledge she has shared).