Minimum Viable Product

Validating a product
1

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

Christian Baudry - Fabien Mansoubi ChrBaudry@Gmail.com

Validating a product
Tools and Indicators
2

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 )

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

  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.

The Sitemap 4

  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

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


The Sitemap 5

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.

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


Make it shine 6

  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.


Fake… but alive ! 7

  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.


Key-words Analysis
Creating a Campaign 8 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.


Key-words Analysis
Creating a Campaign on Google Ad-words (2/5)
9

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.


Key-words Analysis
10

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%.


Key-words Analysis
11

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


Key-words Analysis
12

  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.


Key-words Analysis
13

  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.


Key-words Analysis
14

  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.


Analytics
Using Google Analytics with Snappages
15

  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.


Wait and see…
16

  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.


A Few Days Later…
Prices have gone wild !
17

  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


Few Days Later…
Overall Cost
18

  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.

A Few Days Later…
Surprising observations…
19

  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”.


Few Days Later…
Google Analytics
20

  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
21

  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.


A Few Days Later…
Google Analytics
22

  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…
Geolocation
23

Three Countries : USA, Canada, China


A Few Days Later…
Geolocation
24

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.


A Few Days Later…
Geolocation
25

  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…
Trends
26

  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…
Xtras
27

  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
28

  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
29

  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)


To be continued…
30

  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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