How To Prove You’re Not “Information Harvesting”

August 14, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

Just wanted to privately share some tactics to help you counter Google’s aversion to opt-ins in your landing page MVP. It’s hard enough getting a startup idea off the ground, to have to deal with arbitrary Google Adwords funny business.

If you are using the Launch Tomorrow process, email addresses have always been seen as “currency”. Emails are something valuable a prospect can give you to indicate that they really need the product you want to offer. Moreover, when selling online, you need email opt-ins to establish a relationship. In order to contact your prospect, you need an email address.

Google disagrees–kinda. One of the quickest ways to get on Google’s bad side is what they’ve dubbed “information harvesting”. How’s that for a “made up” problem?

Photo by Robert Wiedemann on Unsplash

Information harvesting means they’re unhappy you’re collecting private emails in exchange for “not enough” in their eyes. They’re chiding you for not providing a good user experience for the Adwords searcher. Yes, of course, but UX is not the point of a landing page collecting opt-ins, now, is it?

Specifically, here’s what Google says they don’t allow:

promotions that prompt users to initiate a purchase, download, or other commitment without first providing all relevant information and obtaining the user’s explicit consent
promotions that represent you, your products, or your services in a way that is not accurate, realistic, and truthful

With information harvesting, Google’s algorithms put you in the same bucket as late-nineties identity thieves. Long lost Nigerian prince relatives. And it’s up to you to prove (to a human employee of theirs) that you aren’t one, assuming you aren’t of course.

That’s what’s so uncomfortable about this policy. Personally, I try to be straight with myself and others as much as I can–all the time. So it feels unpleasant to be guilty until proven innocent. And tedious, to say the least. I do (unfortunately) know from my own experience, as well as other founders’ I’ve worked with.

In practice, though, the information harvester label will stop your landing page MVP in its tracks. Full stop.

Google suspends your entire Adwords account. Ouch.

If that happens, here are a few options:

Drop Google, and move to other traffic sources for your landing page MVP
Ask (without grovelling) GOOG to re-instate your account, and address each of their specific objections head on.
Don’t gather emails, just sell a very low priced product–one which requires email for delivery. At least then you offset the cost of advertising in addition to getting emails.

With respect to dropping Google as a traffic source, it might not be the best source of customers for you in the long term. I’d argue it’s worth haggling with them anyway. You can get a lot of cheap, targeted market research about your value proposition from them–really quickly. They have traffic (ranked #1), and more importantly, they have more searchers than anyone else on the planet. If you want to find prospects searching for a solution to their problem, Google’s hard to beat.

Asking for Google to re-instate your account is a good, albeit slow, option. Typically, the actual changes they require aren’t that big, or at least there are simple workarounds.

For example, if you are asking for an opt-in, you need to be explicit, clear, and logical on exactly why you need their email address. Explain exactly what they should expect. If you are being up-front, transparent, and honest, you’re golden. That tends to help.

You also need to be clear WHERE IT SAYS ENTER EMAIL ADDRESS:

how often you will email them
how to unsubscribe, which google calls an “option to discontinue direct communications”
whether you will pass on user details to other companies.

There are also a few important components which must be on your Google-friendly landing page. This is true for both search and display traffic.

For example, if you have a form on the page, you must also include a privacy policy. Google wants you to be up front about your privacy policy, to openly declare what you’re doing with user data. You can hire a lawyer to draw one up for you, or you can just grab a subscription on iubenda [aff link]. It’s a privacy policy as a SaaS app. Select all of the tools you are actually using on your website, and get a lawyer approved privacy policy in 30 minutes. That’s an easy one. Usually, having a privacy policy increases conversions anyway. They’re possibly doing you a favor.

Other bits you need on your landing page include:

contact details
a phone number, especially, will help

You may need to clarify your business model to Google. You may also need to be transparent, and explain it to your Google sourced visitors. What’s free, what isn’t, and when they can expect to pay for something. Sometimes this can cause difficulties if you are a broker or middleman.

Ultimately, it will always come down to a judgement call by Google staff, so you will always need to comply to their requests. At the same time, they do accept that you’re running a business (or starting one). It’s the question of navigating that fine balance, so that everyone is happy.

The third way to get ditch the “information harvesting” label is quite simple…sell. Don’t just collect info. Sell at a loss if you need to. Sell an ebook for $1. Sell a higher priced service (think concierge or Wizard of Oz MVP) that addresses their problem. You may be able to get away with pre-selling the product.

At that point, you will need the user’s personal details to deliver the product. More importantly, you identify the people who are actively in the market for solutions and willing to pay for them. If you do sell (and collect sensitive information like bank or credit card details), you’ll need to use SSL. Grab a free one over here.

As you can see, you have a couple of options if you get this labelled slapped onto your account. Bing has started doing the same. Rumor has it Facebook is starting to “crack down” on information harvesting.

Want to know more about experimenting with landing pages? You’ll find my book Launch Tomorrow helpful. It goes into depth with everything else you need to think about, when putting up a landing page to test out demand for a new product.

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SEO, PageRank, and the Landing Page MVP

July 9, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment

July 9, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment

Quicksand for online marketing newbies

Here is a question that I got from a member of my audience: “How to improve page rank of my landing page MVP?”

So the question relates to the algorithm Google uses to figure out what page to display when preparing search results for particular keywords. That’s what Search Engine optimization (SEO) is. And PageRank is a key part of SEO. PageRank’s a patent Google has. It’s based on a system similar to how academic citations work.

If a lot of pages refer back to your page, then your page is considered more authoritative. So your page should rank higher. Now–to be completely transparent, I don’t consider myself good at SEO. In terms of SEO tactics, I can give you advice I’ve heard elsewhere, but I don’t think that’ll be useful. But I can tell you how I think about it strategically, as it’s easy to hire someone to do SEO tactics if you think it’s worth it.

Easy to hire someone to do SEO tactics if you think it's worth it. Click To Tweet

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What is a minimum viable product anyway

April 9, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment

Some people think MVPs need to be minimal. Some people think they must be viable. Others are misled into thinking they need to have a (beta) product.

Bah.

MVP means running an experiment. Find out how to do that with Launch Tomorrow.

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Dropbox explainer video? You’re missing most of their Lean Startup story…

March 21, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow 1 Comment

Drew Houston launch tomorrow — Not launching can be painful, but not learning can be fatal – Drew Houstan, Founding CEO of Dropbox

“Not launching can be painful, but not learning can be fatal.” That’s how Drew Houston, the founding CEO of Dropbox, describes his team’s approach. Dropbox, if you haven’t heard of them, does file-sharing in the cloud. And they’re famous for the Dropbox explainer video which got them lots of eyeballs on Hacker News, as the basis for explosive growth later.

They give users access to the same files on all devices, regardless of where they are used.

After interviewing their geeky friends in MIT dorm rooms, the Dropbox founders wanted “write once, read anywhere” file management to apply to all files. Not just a software developer’s source code. They started working on developing a working prototype to solve their own problem.

When Dropbox launched, a number of cloud storage competitors with deep pockets already existed: Google Drive, iCloud, AWS, Carbonite, to name a few. To get their product off the ground, Dropbox had to be different. And simple to understand.

Hypothesis: Latent demand for product concept X makes product development worthwhile

Test type: Value Hypothesis

Success Criteria: Able to get signups based on description

dropbox landing page launch tomorrow — Simplicity captures interest

Traffic Source: social media and online communities

If we build it, how will we acquire traffic?
Who exactly will be interested?
Are they interested enough to establish a relationship with us?
What kind of conversion rates do we get?

Result: Pass. The team was able to acquire traffic that converted based on a description on a landing page. At the same time, they were building prototypes to assess the technical viability of the product idea. As this initial market test proved that some pent up demand existed, the team dug further.

Step Back: This test established baselines, which could then be used to explore the product presentation further. Also, it helped them reach out and establish contact with their market, independently of their immediate personal network, thus providing a slightly more unbiased signal. Also, using such a page potentially allowed them to test a path to market, to locate their most rabid fans.

Hypothesis: Variation X meaningfully positions the product against customer alternatives

As part of their application to YCombinator, Dropbox really wanted to get Paul Graham’s attention. So they created a video aimed at attracting early adopters. The goal was to explain the product concept as a story. The core differentiator (big idea as they call it) was “write once, read anywhere”. Make changes to any copy, and all copies are updated with the same changes.

Test Type: Value or Growth hypothesis

Success Criteria: signups > X or conversion rate > X% (established previously) — more accurately in Dropbox’s case it was to get accepted into the YCombinator accelerator program.

Create an explainer video for your complicated new product. Make sure your audience understands it, without being overwhelmed by technical details.

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Traffic Source: HackerNews, link to landing page with demo video targeted at early adopters

Result: Pass. Built list of around 5,000 interested prospects. The problem description resonated strongly with their targeted early adopter audience.

Step Back: Moving to a video format helped get across the product’s story more effectively. This made it more accessible to everyone. In and of itself, an explainer video is just a change in format–similar to how a bestselling book is treated as a candidate to become a blockbuster movie. Ultimately, a landing page that tests demand much get across the story well. The medium for telling that story is secondary to the relevance and quality of that story to the target audience.

As Dropbox’s initial target audience was quite technical, this explanation mapped to a number of tools and behaviors they already knew from software development. And they were more than happy to run with the write once, read anywhere concept. Arguably, this niche perceived other cloud storage as defective because it didn’t support this kind of functionality. As a result, they needed little convincing and persuasion to hop on board.

Hypothesis: Paid search can be a profitable engine of growth for Dropbox

Test Type: Growth hypothesis

Success Criteria: Customer Value > Customer Acquisition Cost

Traffic Source: Paid search engine marketing

Dropbox experimented with using paid acquisition on a landing page. This is not an early-stage landing page MVP test. It’s an attempt to figure out what will grow the company, not whether the product idea is attractive. They hired an experienced search engine marketer, who went out and made landing pages. On those pages, they hid the free option, replacing it with a free time-limited trial.

google adwords launch tomorrow — AdWords interface is showing incorrect campaign conversation numbers. Difference of numbers are computed here.

[images:Dropbox]

Total ad spend: approximately $3,000 in the image above

In their words, here were the problems they faced:

The most obvious keywords were expensive.
Long-tail had low volume.
Hiding the free option was shady, confusing and buggy.
The conversion numbers on Google’s dashboard were inaccurate.

Result: Fail. As their cost of acquisition at the time was at least $233 for a $99 product, the experiment to test paid acquisition as a profitable traffic source failed. Based on the economics of paid search, pay-per-click didn’t look like a viable growth strategy for Dropbox.

Step back: Even though PPC as a source of traffic didn’t work for them, it solidified their confidence in their ability to retain customers.

If people bought, their subscription retention rate was over 75%. In short, they had a great product their community loved, and they had product market fit. In Drew Houston’s words, this meant that “product-market fit cures the many sins of management.” After this idea failed, Dropbox created a famous explainer video which went viral, thus proving that a viral engine of growth was better for them.

Hypothesis: A simple value proposition resonates more with the target audience than a complex one

Test Type: Value hypothesis

Success Criteria: Conversion rate > initial conversion rate

Traffic Source: Paid search engine marketing

dropbox design launch tomorrow — Simpler the better!

Result: Pass. Simple and concise converts better, as does having a clear call-to-action for the next step.

Step back: This test type is taken out of the traditional toolbox of conversion rate optimization (CRO).

The idea is clear to the founders. They want to communicate it as concisely and effectively as possible to their target audience. Even if they move to a different traffic source later (as Dropbox did), a clear and powerful value proposition ensures a high conversion rate for all further marketing efforts, including free traffic sources. Moving too early into this kind of testing can be a type of premature optimization.

The Takeaways

The key tactic Dropbox used was to to test both market and technical viability simultaneously. In addition, they did a number of smaller tests. Each test checked a much smaller piece of the bigger puzzle. This required them to break down the overall vision into discrete tests which they built and ran.

Build -> Measure -> Learn

By running a series of experiments, Dropbox stayed with the ethos of MVP=experiment. Each cycle around the Build, Measure, Learn loop gave them greater insight. Each step they took tested something new about their target market and their product.

As a result the product evolved very quickly, because the team gathered actionable yet counter-intuitive data. This helped them build a strong USP (unique selling proposition) in a crowded marketplace using technology that was theoretically possible but unproven.

There is a lot more to a minimum viable product than just a beta software release. This post aims to make that clearer.

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