A great example of why the funnel is often a completely incorrect, inadequate, and even misleading metaphor for measuring conversion.
Example: "I'm having trouble optimizing the last step of my funnel." Did the first four steps of your funnel consist of showing pictures of naked women while the last step prompted the user to refinance his house?
Unless the steps of your funnel are real, meaning they actually represent bounded, uni-directional escalations of qualification and purchase intent (think a 3-step shopping cart checkout), then thinking of the 'flow' that way is defeating.
What Chris is talking about here makes a lot of sense, and to my mind boils down to something like this: the airline's win comes through offering the greatest perceived value to the customer, so tread carefully as you unbundle low-cost, high-perceived-value features for a small (unguaranteed) marginal gain.
Setting false expectations is pretty egregious as well, and in addition to losing the good will that would have been generating by offering the DirecTV for "free," the airline generates ill will that could, of course hypothetically, result in angry blog posts being written and shared.
Here's the funnel for an airline: be amazing, underpromise and OVERdeliver, and book flights like a mofo.
Loyalty is no longer post-purchase.
The next time I fly across the Atlantic I will fly Virgin, the next time I make a restaurant reservation it will be Bondir, the next CSS I write will be in Sass, the next phone I buy will be a Samsung, the next vehicle I buy will be a Toyota, the next time I go to NYC I will take a Bolt bus.
I am 100% sure about these purchase decisions, and I have never flown Virgin, never eaten at Bondir, written in Sass, used a Samsung phone, bought a Toyota or taken a Bolt bus.
How do I know these are the right purchase decisions? Because I trust my friends' experience, and a delighted customer turns into a priceless evangelist faster than we often realize.
This has transformed my experience with Twitter. I'm using it in Chrome just with the regular Twitter web client and it ROCKS! Nice work guys, definitely going to tell friends and coworkers.
Ditto. I'm building, grinding on customer discovery, reading HN to stay informed (and maybe a little entertained). Also, most of what I read on HN is stuff that is outside my comfort zone, and therefore I am not as able to comment as I would be if I stuck to reading topics with which I am already very familiar.
This is great. My friend and I were thinking of building something simple for GitHub -> GAE continuous deployment, but this expanded feature set is really the right path i think.
I signed up and am hoping to hear more, shoot me an email, I'd love to be in the loop and give more feedback as you roll out.
Possibly, yes. The 'start at the cart' theory of optimizations says that you should absolutely start with optimizing that 50% and working 'backwards.' The idea being that it is a lot easier to close sales that are in process than to generate more sales leads that may or may not be qualified enough to actually initiate a purchase.
Focus on reeling in the fish on the hook, to put it grossly, as opposed to putting more hooks in the water.
Pretty easy to see the other side of this though, and like the correct answer to any poker question, the answer ends up being "it depends". =)
So, regarding this being a fluke one-off or the assertion that there isn't data to back this up, I have reams of tests that display similar behavior, many with tens of thousands of unique participants. As the other commenter said, the example in the post was icing, not the cake, but I take your point and it's a good message that people are reading my posts who know something about this and maybe I can get a little deeper into advanced topics and results and stuff, so that's good to hear.
If your early-funnel optimizations directly predict the end-funnel conversion, I think that 1) that's awesome 2) the products you are testing have a huge amount of room to grow (also awesome, hope the hiring goes well it's always tricky finding great people) and 3) the phenomenon i was describing doesn't really apply to you and those products yet.
One thing that may not have been crystal clear is that it's one group of people that we are talking about, and examining the segments of that group. Let's put it another way. There are 1,000 people who see a certain offer page on a given day. 1 of those people is a fellow who has read 3 reviews, used competing products, and decided 100% that he is going to buy the product. The page could have a tiny little 10px link to add the product to cart, it could be in the footer and #EEE and this dude would still find it and complete the purchase.
Now, as you make it clearer to people why and how they should buy the product, you are not generating more interest like the first fellow's. You are simply inviting a broader selection of the audience to consider the purchase a bit more. That's really the principle that is at play here.
Example: "I'm having trouble optimizing the last step of my funnel." Did the first four steps of your funnel consist of showing pictures of naked women while the last step prompted the user to refinance his house?
Unless the steps of your funnel are real, meaning they actually represent bounded, uni-directional escalations of qualification and purchase intent (think a 3-step shopping cart checkout), then thinking of the 'flow' that way is defeating.
What Chris is talking about here makes a lot of sense, and to my mind boils down to something like this: the airline's win comes through offering the greatest perceived value to the customer, so tread carefully as you unbundle low-cost, high-perceived-value features for a small (unguaranteed) marginal gain.
Setting false expectations is pretty egregious as well, and in addition to losing the good will that would have been generating by offering the DirecTV for "free," the airline generates ill will that could, of course hypothetically, result in angry blog posts being written and shared.
Here's the funnel for an airline: be amazing, underpromise and OVERdeliver, and book flights like a mofo.
Loyalty is no longer post-purchase.
The next time I fly across the Atlantic I will fly Virgin, the next time I make a restaurant reservation it will be Bondir, the next CSS I write will be in Sass, the next phone I buy will be a Samsung, the next vehicle I buy will be a Toyota, the next time I go to NYC I will take a Bolt bus.
I am 100% sure about these purchase decisions, and I have never flown Virgin, never eaten at Bondir, written in Sass, used a Samsung phone, bought a Toyota or taken a Bolt bus.
How do I know these are the right purchase decisions? Because I trust my friends' experience, and a delighted customer turns into a priceless evangelist faster than we often realize.