The Stealth Mode: Trada’s Position on Staying Stealth

March 31, 2010 By 24 Comments

Debate: Stay Stealth?

One of my favorite startup debates is about stealth mode. It seems like the approach du jour is blog first, fundraise second. Vivek Wadhwa (@vwadhwa) TechCrunch even published a piece decrying the end of startup stealth mode. Fast forward to yesterday and Dan Frommer (@fromedome) of Silicon Alley Insider declares, “Stealth Mode is Back.” He noted that Chris Dixon (@cdixon) of Hunch tweeted, “New early-stage start up trend: get big quietly, so you don’t tip off potential competitors.”Which is in direct contradiction to his earlier blog post, “Why you shouldn’t keep your startup idea secret.” Notably VentureBeat cited that five of the 26 companies that presented at Y Combinator Investor Day were still in stealth mode.

Like all opinions on strategy, those against stealth mode are right in some cases and totally wrong in other cases.

Let’s just start right in with my position: I am a firm believer in the value of stealth mode if used in the right way. Of course, there are exceptions to this, so I’m not making a blanket statement that the every company should do things this way. We’ve been in stealth mode at Trada for almost 18 months now. You’re reading this because we finally felt it was time to change that. Stealth mode has been a fundamental tenant of our approach to building the company, and I think it has served us well.

First, let me say that a big part of the debate comes down to what people actually define as stealth mode. Many people think stealth mode is about locking your team in a room, working through the nights unbeknown to anyone else, and emerging at some point with a fantastic market changing solution to something. While this is one definition (and you’ll see that I actually agree that doing this is a very bad idea in almost all cases), it’s not actually the definition that I use.

My basic definition of stealth mode is borne out of a general philosophy of prioritization in startups. If your business can survive and make substantive progress without doing something right now, just don’t do it (this is the un-Nike philosophy I suppose). Every day in a startup you battle the same two limitations: resources and time. You have to constantly be clear about what you are trying to achieve, what metrics move the business forward, how to learn enough about something to form an opinion of it, and in what order you think doing things will set your business up to scale. Every new thing you take on requires time and effort. Not just to create but to constantly manage and evolve forever in an ongoing fashion. So my definition of stealth mode is simply to not do all the things that come with being a public player.

Debate Point: Telling People What You’re Doing

In the beginning there are three basic things every startup needs: experts to give you input on your product as you’re building it, users to help you beta test your product in a real-life setting, customers who will give you real money for what you’re building and take real risk in doing so. You need all of these people to bake the cake.

I list these as three distinct sets of people as many times they truly are different. Someone who will show up one hour a week and give you feedback on every release may never take out their credit card and put their own business at risk by using your system. That doesn’t discount the value of their expertise and the influence it could have over how you build products. Conversely, a willing customer might not have the time to give you consistent feedback in the design stage – they just want the benefits of what you’re offering when it actually works. The perfect situation is to have a few people moving between all the categories.

As Trada, we spent an immense amount of time engaging people in what we were doing. We did this with in-house user groups almost from the very start. We had more than 50 PPC experts work with us as we built out the market and tried to understand the dynamics that matters when you asked individuals to do something they knew but in a collaborative and competitive way for the first time. Bill has a more in-depth post about how we did this.

We also spent a ton of time talking to all the different types of members of our ecosystem: PPC experts, PPC advertisers, small agencies, large agencies and the ad networks themselves. Each conversation was invaluable, and we didn’t play hide the ball with them. We just trusted they’d keep it to themselves. And for the most part they did.

Stealth Mode Pro: If you can find enough beta customers without the world knowing whom you are? Can you get enough input on the feature set from real users without having to blog about it? If yes, you don’t need to talk publicly about what you’re doing.

Debate Point: Exposure
The minute you become external about your business (more than maybe just a simple terse website which we had for over a year), you have added a whole new department to your business. Being external these days is about participating in a conversation with the market. There is no such thing as being broadcast only in a startup. You have to get involved and involvement takes time. Time that may not be worth it versus everything else you have going on. As we’ve headed towards our public launch, we actually hired two awesome Social Media Managers, Elaine and Anna, because we understood the level of engagement we’d need to have in the conversation. There is simply no way I could have justified this expense a year ago. It’s very telling when you go to a blog-first startup if their last blog post is 3 month ago. They simply underestimated the effort involved to be in the conversation.

As another note on exposure, when you put an external face on the company there is a different expectation about the polish and process that exists with the company. If I email someone at a publicly facing company, I expect a response somewhat quickly. Usually there is a phone number to call. We didn’t even have a Trada company phone number until 1 week before we launched (thank you to Michael and Ben for whipping this together in short order). If I proactively fill out a customer interest form, I expect some kind of response. So many companies I know just route this to whoever will take it in the business and hope it gets a response. To be fair, writing an email to very public companies like Expedia is like throwing rocks into a well. You’re extremely surprised when you’re rock comes back to you.

While every startup entrepreneur will tell you they love interacting with everyone interested in their company, there are some days when you just have more pressing things to do than field questions about what you’re up to. Now don’t go and jump down my throat on this. I did not say “some days there are more important things than your customers” – quite the opposite. It’s not the inbound customer emails that are time consuming; it’s all the other inbound communication that is. People are curious, especially about new things. They want to interact and in these days of public comments and no-introduction necessary internet bravado, they will simply send you an email. This is awesome if you’re in a mode where you can respond to it. Even during our times of no public presence, I found myself starting way too many emails with “Sorry for the delay.” I think this is a net bad, and it’s dangerous to cater to it before you’re ready.

Stealth Mode Pro: Commit to the public conversation when you can actually commit to it.

Debate Point: Being Public Takes Infrastructure and Process
Related to my last point, when you start interacting with people you don’t know (e.g. those who won’t give you a break if you screw up), you need process and infrastructure to manage this. Do you know, right now, how long on average it takes for a support ticket to be closed at your company? How about how stale your inbound leads are? How long you website has been down on a Saturday at 11:00pm? How many prospect voicemails are in your voicemail queue and how old they are? Is everyone in the company saying the same things to prospects? Do you have a “culture” of customer experience that is commonly known in our organization?

Communication takes infrastructure and infrastructure cannot work without process. Both cannot become efficient without iteration. Fortunately these days there are very low cost ways to organize your communication. Salesforce handles non-customer inbound (and response) pretty well, ZenDesk does a good job of capturing customer/user inbound and response pretty well (although trying to get a frigging average open and closed ticket time from ZenDesk is like pleading with a 3 year old to sit still – come on guys its Ticket Management metric #1 – please fix this). Email and phone cover the rest. With ZenDesk you can front your email with a “support@” address and with Google Voice you can front your account management team’s cell phones with one consistent phone number and voicemail. The ability to create the illusion of scale and order is available almost for free these days.

Stealth Mode Pro: Avoid having to invest in infrastructure and process until it’s absolutely necessary to deliver a level of service that the public expects.

Debate Point: Playing your Own Game
The last major argument I have in favor of stealth mode is simply the most obvious – that you should play your own game for as long as you can. Being able to pick and choose what is correct for your business with as few outside influences as possible is a luxury that you won’t always have. This doesn’t mean don’t talk to people and adjust based on what they say. You absolutely have to do this from day one. Just don’t have the conversations in public. I don’t know a lot of people that take their relationship issues to the park and invite anyone walking by to opine on what would work best for them. Take advantage of private conversations and reduced noise for as long as you can get away with it. Focusing on a small set of objectives will allow you to learn quickly and fail things out of the system that won’t help your business.

If you are able to play this game, you will be able to launch your company with the direction, momentum and scale that you think is defensible. All good ideas drive competition sooner or later. In our world, the size (and growth rate) of the market on both sides (advertisers and optimizers) is in the end the competitive advantage. We do have some feature tricks up our sleeve and an incredible ability to expand our model into adjacent businesses (you’ll see a lot of this from us in 2010). But once the cat is out of the bag you cannot help but play to the crowd and to the competition. And you have to embrace this. We work for our crowd. This is something we’re trying to instill in everything we do. But before you’re ready, this can be distracting and hard to ignore. The problem with playing the competition is that you don’t know the holistic path your competitors are taking. You get glimpses into their strategy and tactics. And you start playing game theory with them. Once you’re doing this you’re not optimizing your own strategy anymore, you’re optimizing against the market’s current valuation of the strategies it sees. Once you’ve carved out your own path, scale, scale, scale.

Stealth Mode Pro: It takes time to bake a cake. You might have to iterate through a few big mistakes along the way. Do this in private for as long as you can so when you come out of the gates you are charging as fast as possible up the first hill you want to take publicly.

Some Final Thoughts
In the end, being stealthy or not is situational, like all business choices you make. I understand all the counter arguments to what I’m stating here: the value of engaging the market, the immense feedback you get from participating in the conversation, the customers that opt into what you are doing by reading about you, the exposure your concept gets, etc. And I do understand how you can leverage that into competitive advantage. In the end, this is a philosophical choice about focus and timing. I only wanted to plays devil’s advocate to a lot of the current wisdom that says talk about your idea as soon as you have it. I believe for us it has worked well to do the exact opposite, or better said, to talk about as much as possible, just behind closed doors.

Filed Under: Trada News Tagged With: , ,

Finding The Need for International Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

March 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Do You Need This Man On Your Campaign?

Since our recent launch we’ve gotten a surprising number of inquiries from advertisers looking to run international paid search campaigns. Many of these inquiries come from non-US based companies looking to sell to their local markets. More recently, a smattering of these requests are coming from US companies looking to expand their existing PPC campaigns into international markets. Either way, they all ask the same first question, “Do you have optimizers in Country X or who speak Language Y?”

To date, Trada has focused primarily on US-based or English-speaking optimizers (PPC experts) because we’ve been focused primarily on small- and medium-sized US businesses. These types of businesses tend not to sell internationally (yet!). Because of this we always happily noted these requests but didn’t have much capacity to accommodate them. But recently, as we’ve started to work with a broader spectrum of companies and have begun relationships with more digital agencies, these requests are coming in on a daily basis.

So why not just put US optimizers on French campaigns (or vice versa)?

While understanding technically how to do paid search is pretty much the same in every country, there is actually quite a lot of variability in the administration and the content of non-domestic campaigns. For example, to advertise on Yahoo in the UK requires a special UK Yahoo account (you can’t just go into Yahoo Search Marketing and geo-target the UK like you can in Google). Keywords, ad copy and regional dialect come hugely into play. We’ve run a few UK campaigns, and surprisingly, we’ve seen this be true even between US-English and the Queen’s-English (I’m a Brit, so I can say this with a straight face!). A great example we learned early on is that SEM isn’t even “SEM” in the UK, its “digital marketing.” Who knew?

As a cultural example, before I started Trada I was building green data centers in Iceland using their incredible wealth of geothermal and hydroelectric power. It was surprising to see that Icelanders don’t market anything as “green” or “eco-friendly.” In their minds, (and very fairly so -  they’ve been one of the most eco-friendly countries in the world for years), it’s nothing new.

New advertisers want to know how many native-speaking optimizers we have for a given region or language. And we’re listening to them. We’re starting by understanding what those numbers are (by collecting more information from our optimizers) and also where the demand is. If we have enough qualified optimizers in a region, we will start to accept advertiser campaigns for those areas or languages. We believe fully in the power of the crowd, so it’s fundamental to us that we have enough optimizers in a region to run the core crowdsourcing Trada model even with a smaller crowd.

What’s interesting is that we’re also starting to get questions about optimizer skills. “Do you have optimizers that know small business and have worked on those campaigns?”  We did some quick polling and found not only was the answer, “Yes, quite a few,” but the pedigree of those optimizers was impressive.

All of this is to say that Trada is moving into a new phase. We’ve simply hit a scale where we need to say more about what’s already here and let both sides of the market leverage it. We’re building a whole new set of tools to help optimizers find campaigns their skills are appropriate to, and we’re also helping advertisers attract just the kind of optimizers they want. This might be based on skills, prior experience, Trada statistics, language or any other combination of things. We still believe in a free market (where optimizers can find and join an array of campaigns – maybe even some types of campaigns they haven’t worked directly on). But just like stock finders in the stock market with more options available to you, it’s important to be able to find the types of campaigns you want and conversely the types of optimizers you think might be great for you.

So by all means, if you want to run an international campaign or you want to experiment with your existing campaign in an international region, please don’t hesitate to ask us. If we don’t have enough optimizers yet in that region, we’ll make sure we go find them for you.

Filed Under: Paid Search, PPC Tips Tagged With: , , ,

How Much Data Is Enough?

March 29, 2010 By 5 Comments
How Many Clicks To Get To a Purchase?

How Many Clicks To Get To a Purchase?

One question that comes up frequently from Trada’s small business customers is how much is enough data to make decisions about their paid-search campaign. This is an understandable question as small businesses want to know that every penny they spend is being spent in the most efficient manner possible. After spending $500, do they have enough data? After 1,000 clicks? After 1 month? After a few conversions? The challenge of answering this question (like most questions in paid search) is that there is no right – or sometimes even simple – answer. The right answer for the specific customer depends on a number of factors:

What kind of product or service are you selling, and how long does it take for a purchaser to realistically research and decide on your offering?

This is a critical dynamic to understand before you start a search campaign. Companies that are selling expensive products where the buyer is likely to research their options thoroughly first, will likely have a longer conversion period than customers who are simply collecting email registrations or selling impulse buys. If a company is selling a $1,000 swing set, it’s unlikely that someone clicking through to their website is going to buy on the first visit. Or maybe even second. Or maybe even within a couple of weeks. All the money you’re investing in clicks up front, won’t bear fruit for a few weeks until prospects actually turn into buyers.

What is your target market and how does that affect your click volume?

Many local businesses have a very defined geographic radius that they are targeting their campaigns to. The number of people on any given day that might be searching for their product or service in that region might be limited. Thus the click volume of their campaign is somewhat limited sheerly by the market size they are targeting. As a basic rule of thumb (if you have no other data), between 1 and 2 out of a 100 visitors to your website will likely buy something. This translates through to a 1-2% conversion rate. At this rate, you’ll have to see at least 50-100 clicks before you can expect someone to buy something. Realistically though this is an average over a long period of time. Its not uncommon for conversions to be bursty. Your campaign will get no conversions for 300 clicks (in this example), and then you’ll get 4 conversions in the next 100 clicks. The average in this example is 1% (4 conversions in 400 clicks). So you can’t look at the first 100 clicks and make a quick decision. A very simple analogy here is sitting down to play Blackjack in a casino. While the odds are against you in the long term, we all know that what happens in the first 5 hands of play (you may win them all, you may lose them all, or something in between) are rarely a predictor of how you’ll do over 100 hands.

How broad is your product offering and how wide are you casting your net?

If you have a small business that is selling a lot of products online in a catalog (say for example that you’re selling cameras and all the parts and accessories that go along with it), how broadly have you chosen to advertise your wares. Are you focusing your campaign merely on cameras? Or are you advertising every product you have? If you focus on cameras, you may require a longer waiting time until a customer converts (my first question above.? If you’re focusing on all your products, that means you’re likely spreading the clicks between different types of customers and products. The broader your approach, the more slowly you get enough data in any category (cameras versus lenses) to make an informed decision. You may get 200 clicks on your campaign but 100 have gone to camera related ads and 100 have gone to lens related ads. That’s barely getting to the average expected conversion rate of 1%. Per my last point, you may not get a 1% conversion rate right away – this is an expected conversion rate over time. Now take this concept and extend it. What if you are advertising cameras, lenses, camera straps, film, processing, flashes, tripods and carrying cases? You will be spreading the clicks around all of these items, and it will take a longer time to get enough clicks on any category to see a conversion. In this example, you’d likely need something like 800 clicks before you got a conversion. While in reality you’ll likely see a better than 1/800 conversion rate, there is a chance this can happen.

Are you focused on broad search terms of specific long-tail terms?

One of the great parts about paid search is that there is a never ending list of keywords that might find you a conversion. There are obvious ones “camera store” and less obvious ones “what tripods fit a canon rebel XS.” The more obvious ones will get higher volume but are less specific about what the buyer wants and will usually convert less frequently. The more specific ones target a more specific buyer (and usually cost less) but are limited that the number of searchers typing in that whole phrase is less. If you’re playing in the long tail with specific keywords, you may have to wait a lot longer to get those first 100 clicks.

So to go back to the start, set the right expectations up front for your campaign. Be honest about the buyer you are looking for, how many of them there are, how likely are your keywords to attract them and how many strategies you have running at once. This should let you decide what the right combination of clicks, conversions, and time is that you’ll have to invest into paid search.

At Trada, we ask customers to commit 3 months to the marketplace. If nothing else, we find this sets the right expectation for most companies new to paid search. The good news is that it’s very likely we’ll have amazing results well before that time!

Filed Under: Keywords, Paid Search, SMB Marketing Tagged With: , , ,

What We're Reading This Week

March 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Matt Hessler Reading...Super Chevy Magazine.

This week was full of excellent reads. Lots of changes in paid search the past five days. Have a suggestion on a good blog post or article we should feature? Ping me at elaine (at) trada.com. (This is the part where I try to get you to do my work for me. Awesome, no?)

If you’re not in the mood for any reading, we leave you with a video from the Google Business Channel on AdWords Search Funnels.

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The Virtuous Cycle of PPC and SEO

March 26, 2010 By 3 Comments
PPC and SEO Work In Tandem Together

PPC and SEO Work In Tandem Together

Many companies ask the question “Should I do PPC or SEO first?” Our own Dan Tisser wrote a cogent argument for why PPC should be the last layer you build into your online marketing strategy. While I agree with him, I think PPC and SEO can be used together both at the beginning of the life of a website as well as in a continuous virtuous cycle.

The main difference between SEO and PPC is simply the timeframe in which it works. SEO can take months to pay off. You do all sorts of keyword research, edit your content to match it, build some links from high PageRank sites and make sure the search engines are indexing your site and starting to promote you for the right keyword. SEO rules of thumb say give it a month, maybe two, for the effects to kick in. While it’s worth the wait, what if you’ve missed something important along the way? Perhaps a keyword with high-converting traffic that never dawned on you, or some kind of meme that emerges in your category after you’ve done your original SEO work?

This where the dynamicism and instantaneous nature of paid search can pay dividends. While PPC has many obvious benefits, direct benefits such as attracting customers who declare their intention to buy your products through your searches, it also has side benefits if you know how to look for them. Two are message testing and keyword exploration. I won’t go into message testing in depth, there are a number of good articles about it already, but the immediacy of people’s reactions to various different messaging can influence the content you should have on your landing pages.

More importantly, keyword exploration can be invaluable from PPC. Through any sophisticated PPC system (e.g. AdWords, Trada, etc.) you can see the actual search terms that users are searching on. By using various match types in Google, Yahoo, Bing, et al you can actually find lots of keywords (searches) that you might not have expected. This keyword knowledge (and all the stats around it such as volume and conversion rate) can be worked instantly and constantly back into your SEO strategy.

Take for example one of our case studies, YouRenew. YouRenew lets you send them your old consumer electronics (such as Blackberries or iPhones or Xbox s) and they send you money in return, on the back-end recycling your electronics for you. Looking at search terms that were driving conversions for them, I noticed a preponderance of search terms that looked like “cash for my blackberry.” I assume this theme emerged with all the advertising online related to Cash4Gold. Somehow it got stuck in people’s heads, and they applied it to other things they were looking for. In keyword research for YouRenew, they may have never thought of this search approach and not designed any of their content to reflect it. I am speculating, and they may well have done this before I noticed it. Either way, the value of the data generated by PPC could be worked right back into an SEO strategy.

PPC and SEO are a virtuous cycle. Find things quickly in PPC, design long-term cost savings with SEO, rinse and repeat.

Filed Under: Keywords, Paid Search Tagged With: , , , ,

PPC Rocks! Well, Kinda.

March 25, 2010 By 2 Comments

PPC Rocks. But It's Still Part of a Band.

I say kinda, because PPC should be the last part of anyone’s online strategy. The goal of pay per click is to get users to your website with proper key word selection and compelling ad copy. The goal of PPC is to get people to the party; it’s not up to PPC to make them stay. That’s the responsibility of good design and proper search engine optimization. Let me explain how this all works.

Good design is, well, good design. This means that a site is easy to navigate, with relevant and congruent content that makes users view multiple pages, spend more time on the site, and hopefully produce the desired outcome (a conversion metric such as – a purchase, phone call, leaving a comment, etc.) while differentiating itself from the competition, if necessary.

Well executed search engine optimization will ensure proper messaging when being indexed by search engines. This means that the messaging of the site (a product of good design) will match how the site is read by the search engines and then ranked in order by keywords. Only after good design and SEO is in place should proper pay-per-click advertising tactics be used.

When all three elements come together, this is what a search experience should look like:

1. An Internet user types in a keyword that is targeted by both PPC and SEO.

2. The ranking of the site appears in both the organic and paid search listings of the search results page, thus increasing the chance of a click through.

3. With good design, the user finds what they are looking for and a conversion is triggered.

4. Search engines reward the PPC advertiser for its high relevancy with lower a cost per click and higher ranking.

PPC rocks, but it isn’t the end-all be-all that so many people incorrectly believe it to be. SEO, design AND PPC are all required for the most effective online branding strategy.

Filed Under: Paid Search, PPC Tips Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Venture Singularity

March 24, 2010 By 5 Comments

Singularity

At a somewhat recent dinner with Brad Feld (@bfeld) and some other great Boulder tech entrepreneurs we got into a discussion about Ray Kurzweil’s book on the Singularity. A heated debate ensued whether his theory about the convergence of technological computing capacity, and our ability to understand (and thus integrate computing into) the brain was believable or not. Brad graciously bought everyone around the table the book, and we agreed to meet back in a month and debate it further. Since then I have been plowing my way through the book. Kurzweil is, if nothing else, the Philip Glass of technology theories. He pounds you over the head with example after example of data that supports his arguments. Without going into my opinion on the overall subject (I have about 100 more pages to read before I think I can form a conclusion), it did make me think a bit about the challenges facing the venture capital industry these days. Seth (@sether) wrote a good overview piece of the continued struggle of the VC industry to right size itself in the last few years and find its equilibrium point. I wanted to chime in a bit on this subject from the perspective of what I see as the coming venture singularity.

The starting premise of the singularity is that computation grows exponentially over time for the same cost (duh!). That means in 10 years we’ll have 100x the capacity to do what we do now. It’s basically a Moore’s law analysis across computing, hardware, bandwidth, densities, etc. I don’t think anyone can disagree from the data that computation is on this trajectory, and we’re now hitting the interesting part of the curve (e.g. the knee). What we’ll be able to do in 2020 will be almost unfathomable given how we look at the world today and few of us (me included) will even be able to conceptualize what 2030, let alone 2040 will look like. This is interesting as it will happen in my own lifetime (bummer to those born in 1900).

What underlies the challenge of the VC industry is many companies (let’s stick to pure software for the time being) are seeing an exponential reduction in the cost to build, test, market and deploy solutions. The inertia of the VC world was founded upon the need to spend $2M to build a product, $1M to take it to market and $5M to grow the business to a substantive point ($10M run rate was the traditional crossover point for practical profitability in software startups for the last 20 years). Fortunately for entrepreneurs that has all changed, and thus unfortunately for a number of Venture Capitalists who’s models (e.g. fund sizes) are stuck in the past.

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Motivation In Game Systems and Real-World Applications

March 23, 2010 By 10 Comments

Can We Help You Get Here?

In one of my many previous lives I attempted to develop (and did successfully build a prototype of) a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). If you have heard of or played Everquest, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, Star Trek Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Second Life (not really a game), or any of a host of other offerings, you know what I’m talking about. I spent many hours researching the genre and developing the prototype (about 3 full-time years by my wife’s estimation—sorry, hon) as well as a business plan. What a big surprise for a geek, huh? The funny thing is that I’m much too busy to have done anything more than dabble in any of the fine products I mentioned above except as research. Talk about somebody with no life.

In the process of researching games, I learned a lot. For instance, how expensive it is to develop the code and content (in-game objects—the world itself) for a MMORPG; how much time it takes and a lot about how games and the people who play them operate. One book in particular I found was of great interest and was always referred to by authors of the dozens of other books I acquired on the subject (I have receipts and a wife who grumbled, “What do you need all these books for?” to prove it)—Richard Bartle’s “Designing Virtual Worlds” (DVW to the folks in the industry).

DVW is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read. It describes many of the whys and hows of piecing a virtual world together—whether it’s a full 3D affair like the modern MMOs or old-style text-based MUDs (Multiple User Dungeons) to the Sims or many of the Facebook games. One subject in particular was important to me because I wanted to draw a bazillion people to my virtual world and keep them there—what motivates players, what makes them tick and what makes them stick.

Bartle describes 4 types of game playing roles that are discernible in the styles of most gamers:

· Explorers
· Achievers
· Socializers
· Killers (although I prefer the kinder term “griefers”)

Each of these kinds of players is motivated by different things and each is necessary to a functioning game environment. Note that people are not fixated in one role all the time, but change their behavior over time back and forth, although they tend to have a dominant behavior that they return to.

Like the name implies, explorers are fascinated with discovery. They want to boldly go where no one has gone before or just to answer the question “what’s over there?” Not only do explorers like to discover the in-game geometry (the “world”), they also want to uncover new facts, to learn new ways of doing things and reveal secrets best not plumbed by mortals.

Achievers want to be the best. They want to acquire skills and let the rest of the world know how much they know or how powerful they are. If you’ve ever heard someone who plays World of Warcraft (WoW) say with more than a little pride, “I’m a 45th level fighter” (whatever that is), then they are probably an achiever. All player types have or want to accrue in-game money and goods, but achievers do so more for the sheer act of acquiring. But money and goods don’t necessarily translate to a sense of achievement, because they can be spent and traded — fortunes come and go. In real life, think of your resume as a set of achievements– you can’t trade your experience away, but it can impress people and open doorways. This is what motivates achievers.

Socializers play the game for social interaction with fellow gamers or a sense of belonging to a community. Many of these people join in-game guilds and like adventuring with a close circle of friends. They often communicate with each other in-game and in real life. A couple of marriages have sprung from EverQuest and WoW, I’d venture to call the folks in such relationships “socially involved”.

Griefers, like socializers, are in the game to interact with other people, but usually in a more adversarial or competitive role. They prefer games that offer PvP (Player vs. Player) features like dueling and the ability to steal in-game objects from other players. Griefers also like to push the limits of the game system– if they can develop a script or find a loophole that lets them game the system to their advantage, they’ll use it– all within the rules. Like achievers, griefers are competitive but in more of a ‘me versus you’ way.

All of these roles (yes, even griefers) are necessary to a healthy, sustainable gaming environment. How these roles inter-operate contributes to that health.

For example, there has to be some difficulty to overcome or the game is too easy—griefers often supply these challenges. If players are not allowed to be griefers, then artificial adversaries are usually introduced, either Non-Player Characters (NPCs) or monsters to bargain with, quiz, shoot at or eat the player characters. An explorer needs obstacles or their expedition to the far reaches will be as exciting as watching paint dry. Achievers need griefers or their achievements are meaningless and don’t feel like they have been earned. Socializers need external threats to closely bind the group together into a bonded “we.” Achievers and explorers often can’t go it alone, so they must team up with guilds to slay that dragon or sail to a far away continent.

So, what does this have to do with Trada? Well, if you are not a gamer or familiar with any of the games mentioned above, you were able to possibly substitute the concept of your favorite social-networking site (if you have one) for a game. People join and visit Facebook and even eBay and Mint for some of the very same reasons that gamers play games—to achieve, explore, socialize or push limits.

I am familiar with at least two people who joined Facebook to friend as many people as they can, even though they don’t really know them that well (sound like an achiever?). I also know several people who are very proud of their rating on eBay. Some people jump on blogs and forums just so they can give grief to others who post there (sometimes called “flamers”), liking a good fight. You’ll find explorers out there if you think about it (Genealogy.com is really big with my brother, Steve) and socializers are obvious when it comes to social networking sites.

Trada is a destination for a community of optimizers (and advertisers). If you think about it every marketplace in existence is a community of some kind. We at Trada want the marketplace to be someplace you want to go. Why? Well, to be honest, it’s good for business. Your satisfaction as an advertiser or optimizer is key to our and your success.

So what can we offer people in our community to motivate them? Well, the money is obvious to an optimizer, and money spent (well) is what the advertiser wants. Since it’s primarily optimizers who work in Trada, constantly pruning and watching their campaigns like virtual farmers with a crop, I will focus on what it takes to motivate them.

Achievers want to accumulate the best statistics. The leader board is their Everest—they are happy as long as they are at the top. They want to accumulate “points” or “badges” that tell of their accomplishments—much like a boy scout. For this reason, Trada is developing a way of rating optimizers (and advertisers) to indicate their abilities and accomplishments. For instance, an optimizer may get a badge for every 10 conversions they get in a campaign in a certain time period or having 10 ads approved by the advertiser with no rejections. Having 3 of such badges may open up new opportunities, like the ability to join more campaigns or have ads automatically approved.

Explorers will want to fully investigate what can be done with keywords and ads—finding that ideal sweet spot that makes the campaign purr like a well oiled machine. Explorers need tools that give them information and they need ways to consistently recall optimal settings they have configured before. For this reason, Trada is developing more tools, better reports and the means to save and recall preferences for sorting, filtering and ranging data consistently. We’ve made experimental forays into this area with Keyword Management, but as some of you are aware, we have a long way to go and fully intend to go there.

Socializers will want to leverage the community to get the best performance for the advertiser, and thereby the best ROI for their time. Taking the attitude that a rising tide raises all boats, they will find that working together on a campaign or culling poorly performing optimizers from the campaign will make the most money. Socializers need communication tools, and Trada has already created (very) limited means for communicating among optimizers and between optimizers and advertisers. Eventually, we plan on fully integrating our community (currently on Ning) with our marketplace, with forums, FAQs, and site messaging and alert.

Griefers in Trada want to have an edge over the competition. Maybe they’ll use a custom tool that helps them generate killer keyword lists or have a secret sauce for ad copy that can’t be beat. It’s gaming the system, but within the boundaries of the rules. For this and other reasons, Trada will provide an API for accessing and uploading data more effectively and allowing third parties to develop tools to leverage that data. If these tools prove effective, then griefers can make more money by selling their custom tools to others.

Stay tuned. There’s a lot we still have to do and we want to keep you all interested and happy.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

What We've Been Reading

March 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Intense Reading. Michael needs an iPad.

We’ve been exchanging articles left and right around the Trada office about what matters to our company. Here are some of our favorites that we think you might enjoy too. Don’t thank us! Just send us an iPad (care of Elaine).

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What is Google Quality Score and What it Really Means

March 19, 2010 By 6 Comments

Quality Score is at the core of how Google AdWords works, it determines where an ad shows up, how much each click will cost and whether or not the ads will continue to run.

Google defines Quality Score as:

The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).

The factors that affect Quality Score are:

  • The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google; note that CTR on the Google Network only ever impacts Quality Score on the Google Network — not on Google
  • Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
  • The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
  • The quality of your landing page
  • The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
  • The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
  • Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
  • Other relevant factors

The way that I look at this is that Google wants to provide a consistent user experience and provide the best information for each search query in organic AND paid listings.

A recent example we have been using around the office is the search query, “Tiger Woods.” An advertiser could buy this keyword and get massive traffic lately, but unless you own the site TMZ.com, you will get so badly dinged (meaning extremely high price for each click) by Google. Eventually, it will be turned off. This happens because none of the content that an advertiser has on their site has anything to do with the golfer suffering marital problems.

Often, we get asked by advertisers what is the secret to optimizing for quality score, and the answers that we always come back to are:

  • Build small adgroups that are highly relevant to the landing page with corresponding, well-written ads
  • Make sure your entire website, business or products are covered
  • Break up adgroups that have mixed performing keywords. Keep the keywords that are performing well in one adgroup and the poor performing keywords in another and write new ads.
  • Test new keywords, new ads, new landing pages and bid pricing. When you are done testing, test some more.

This is just scratching the surface of what PPC is, and what it takes to run an effective campaign. The Internet is a living, breathing, thing and PPC campaigns need to be constantly adjusted, tested, and optimized to get the highest return.

The bottom line is there are no secrets or tricks to optimizing for quality score. It takes a huge effort, tracking and organization to really learn what works for a particular Web site. This is really where Trada can help an advertiser; we have an army of PPC experts that do all of the things mentioned above. These experts (we call them optimizers) compete against each other to build quality Ad groups while optimizing for quality score.

Not Quality

Filed Under: Keywords, Paid Search Tagged With: , , , ,
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