Minimum Viable Product

Validating a product

[email protected] Christian Baudry - Fabien Mansoubi

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Using the following tools:

« Smoke testing with landing pages, AdWords » and « SEM on five dollars a day»

presented by Eric Ries in his « Minimum Viable Product Guide »

Christian Baudry and Fabien Mansoubi for the « Berkeley Lean Startup Practicum » Meetup

Validating a product Tools and Indicators

The Question : Is there a cheap way to determine if there is a demand for my product ?

A Solution : 1. Portal Design ( Snappages.com ) 2. Campaign Creation ( Google Ad-words ) 3. Key-words Analysis ( Google Keyword Tool )

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Christian Baudry - Fabien Mansoubi

Creation of the “Portal” (1/3) The Basics

 Supposedly a real website, our pages act in fact like a web portal. Information is presented in an unified way and features are explained but we are not hosting any real content.

 Using Snappages 30-days trial, we are going to create our “Portal”. Snappages also allows you to associate a Google-tracker-id to your pages so you can take a look at the traffic statistics later on.

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  Snappages automatically provides the sitemap for the website. A sitemap (XML format) contains the entire structure of the website. This is pretty useful since, provided the sitemap of the website, the search engines are now able to direct the users on all the different pages of the website and not only the first page

Creation of the “Portal” (2/3) The Sitemap

With a Site-Map : The user can access all the different pages

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Without a Site-Map : The user can only access the homepage

Why the sitemap ? : Without it, the traffic analysis made by Google would be inaccurate because we would never know which page is the most popular for, all the users are landing on the same exact page, the homepage.

Creation of the “Portal” (3/5) The Sitemap

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  Snappages.com comes handy to provide a professional look to our site with little time spent. Being a drag-and-drop application, no technical knowledge is required in order to create the first few pages.

Creation of the “Portal” (3/4) Make it shine

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  It is a good idea to use the Snappages blog in order to make the website look alive and recently updated. That way, users are more likely to browse the different pages in order to read the very last messages and discover the features the website offers.

Creation of the “Portal” (5/5) Fake… but alive !

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Key-words Analysis Creating a Campaign on Google Ad-words (1/5)

  Now that the website is created, we open an Google Ad-words account to create our campaign. Taking in account the specificities of your product, you might want to choose a specific geographic area.

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Make sure you deactivate the Devices : “iPhones and other mobile devices …“. Since we can only display our ads a limited amount of times everyday, it is better not to waste our “Impressions” on mobile devices for which the user is not likely to click on the ads and visit our website.


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Depending on the location you might want to change the ad schedule according to the audience targeted. In our case we are targeting art enthusiasts living in California so we set the activity from 8 pm to 8:30 am to 0%.


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Now you can finally create your ads. Make sure you follow Google policies otherwise you add will be rejected.

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  We now have to associate key-word to our ads. For this purpose, Google Ad-word provide a tool : The Key-word Tool. In our case, our website is about the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai so we input “expo shanghai 2010” in the search box.


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  We now have a precise idea of the key words we need to use in order to maximize our traffic. We see for instance that even though “world expo” and “world expo 2010” are similar, the first key-word has a Monthly Search Volume of 60.500 while the second one has only been searched 1.000 times.

  Nevertheless, a High Search Volume is sometimes due the broadness of the keyword. For instance “expo” returns a volume of 1.500.000 but would probably not bring us a lot of traffic since only a minority of people using the search word “expo” would actually be doing a search for the World Expo of Shanghai.

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  Using the best key-words, we can now associated them with our add on Google Ad and on Snappage inside the meta-data tab.

Depending on your daily budget, you might want to be careful with the expensive keywords. In general $0.20 per click is the average.


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  Using Google Analytics with Snappages is pretty simple as you just need to input the Tracking Id that G.A provides after you create an account.

Analytics Using Google Analytics with Snappages

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Wait and see…

  Now, all you have to do is to wait to see if your product attracts an audience by checking the stats every other day. If it does not work (you do not get any clicks)… the outcome is still positive: at least you saved time and money by avoiding weeks of useless developments and efforts.

  If the result is positive then it might be time to polish your product and associate a real website to your portal so users can now access the real thing.

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  When we started, each keyword had a price ranging between $0.05-0.15/click. After only a few days some prices for the same words reached $0.22, $0.40 and even more. Keywords like “expo” ended up generating clicks but are not worth using since the CPC climbed up to $1.00

A Few Days Later… Prices have gone wild !

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  After merely one week, the cost remains low at $3.35. Among the 7,335 impressions made, only 22 clicks, that means that we had one visitor for 333 impressions on average.

  Key-word like “expo” (CPC $1.00) generated 3,199 impressions for only 5 clicks while “expo 2010” (CPC $0.21 ) generated 1,662 impressions for 8 clicks. This shows the importance of key-words analysis during a marketing campaign in order to maximize efficiency.

Few Days Later… Overall Cost

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  It seems that for some reason, people adopt in general the key-word structure <words>+<numbers> and not <numbers>+<words>. This is illustrated by the two key-words “expo 2010” (1662 impressions) vs “2010 expo” (403 impressions).

  For some reasons, “2010 expo” has a higher CPC than “expo 2010”.

A Few Days Later… Surprising observations…

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  After one week we now have enough data to understand which kind of traffic we should expect and where the sources are. Apparently, the website have now be referenced by all the American search engines . No surprise here, Google is at the top but no signs of Bing, the Microsoft’s SEO.

Few Days Later…

Google Analytics

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  Unlike Ad-Words, G.A lets us know the different keys-words used even when they do not relate directly to the site. We see for instance that “where is chinese new year for 2010” generated more visits than “2010 expo”. Many other Key-words are also unrelated.

Few Days Later…

Google Analytics

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  We see that our Key-word Analyis was not worthless since the average time spent on the website is 20 times higher for “china 2010” than for “where is the chinese new year for 2010”.

  Some people who were targetting a certain topic like “expo 2010 pavill (pavillions)” arrived on the site and left quickly after noticing the lack of content. They would have probably stayed several more minutes if our “Pavillions page” had been filled with more info.

A Few Days Later…

Google Analytics

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A Few Days Later…

Geolocation

Three Countries : USA, Canada, China

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A Few Days Later…

Geolocation

If visitors from US and Canada were expected, it is surprising that we already received a visitor from China (Xian) where the most important SEOs are Baidu and Sohu. Perhaps Google is finally making its way to China.

We also notice that 2 visitors were chinese speakers but we only had 1 visit from china. Hence, the second visitor was using google (Chinese Version) from California.

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  Among our US visitors, we see with no surprise that they all came from either West/East Coast or Texas.

  While in California, visitors came mainly from the “intellectual” cities.

A Few Days Later…

Geolocation

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  Among the other interesting features of Google Analytics, we have the Loyality Tab which tells us the proportion of visitors who came back, probably expecting a major update in the content.

A Few Days Later…

Trends

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  When optimising the website, google analytics gives us important info about the user systems. This is important in case, for instance we planned to change the graphical resolution of the interface to something unpopular and therefore create a discomfort for the users. In our case, the most used one is 1280x800.

A Few Days Later…

Xtras

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  In order for the product website to be seen properly, we also need to make sure that our website respects the technical standards of the Operating Systems and Browsers mainly used.

 No doubt that our FreeBSD user is from Berkeley !

A Few Days Later…

Xtras

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  Last but no least, it is important to track the Software support since all our interactive content is based on that.

  In our case, if we had used the Java architecture to build our Blog or pages for instance, 16 % of our visitors would then have been unable to visualize the content and left comments.

  Same goes for flash with videos. (Critical for a site like Youtube)

A Few Days Later…

Xtras

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To be continued…

  We started 2 weeks ago and spent $25.25.   We understand much better what interests potential

customers, and where there is no interest.   BTW: The $25.25 were spent on three portals as we

were using this program with 2 other applications which were more complex.

  It is now time to create real features and to use the real applications…

  To be continued…

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Minimum Viable Product

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