Case Study – Conversions increase 5X for Assay Depot

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This article is short case study about our successful project with AssayDepot.com which engaged Red Funnel to help diagnose and improve their website last spring. Working with their team has been a extremely enjoyable experience for Mark and I, we wish them continued success.

Case Study

Service: Full website and Analytics analysis using Red Funnel’s science SEO service.

Results: 5-fold increase in quote and info requests for Assay Depot’s clients.

Background: Assay Depot.com provides direct access to expert advice about scientific assays and contract research services (CROs) via their open web marketplace to scientists in Big Pharma, Biotech, and Academic research. The site is focused on 5 target assay and service areas- Biology, Chemistry, DMPK, Toxicology, and Pharmacology with several thousand webpages covering individual services. The business depends on scientists requesting information and quotes for research services through Assay Depot’s referral engine and expert scientific staff.

Assay Depot engaged Red Funnel improve the conversion rate of the quote request process.

The Engagement: Red Funnel identified the key causes of page abandonment based on traffic movement to the most popular assays and services using Google Analytics, science-based SEO, and User Interface (UI) testing.

We worked with the team at Assay Depot to improve these areas by adding Scientist-targeted SEO content and improving the UI to lead visitors to the assays they were seeking. Over the course of the improvments, we saw:

• Decreased Bounce Rate (10%)
• Increased Time on site (> 1min)
• Increased traffic to relevant assay pages
• 5-fold increase in conversions

The bottom line: Assay Depot is now capturing more traffic and converting more visitors; resulting in more quotes for their customers in the CRO and Life Science Service business from scientists in Pharma and Academia.

Web Tactics That Propel Antibody Suppliers to the Top, a study by Red Funnel

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Web Tactics of the Top Antibody Suppliers

by Rusty Bishop

A few weeks back, I wrote an article about the “Top Antibody Supplier” study that was released by BioInformatics, LLC.  I got some great comments from readers Jack and Mark about Abcam, one of the top suppliers. Everyone seemed to be in awe of Abcam’s web presence. It was noted that they do an excellent job of appearing in the top Google Search Results.

We decided to use our knowledge and tool set to determine whether there was a correlation between the Top Companies in the Bioinformatics survey and those that appeared most often in Google Search Results (SERP) when scientists searched.

Correlation

After just a few searches for common gene-specific antibodies like actin, p53, and caspases, we began to see a trend that certain companies (Abcam, Santa Cruz, Cell Signaling) were almost always on the first page.  The very same companies that were on top of the Bioinformatics survey.

So we decided to put the Red Funnel research team into action to dig deeper and determine what separates these few companies consistently from the rest from a search/optimization perspective.

Results

The result is our first white paper – Web Tactics That Propel Antibody Vendors to the Top. Which is available for free to our subscribers.

Here’s some examples of the results in the report

• 385,000 annual searches for the top 44 gene specific antibodies entered into Google last year.
• 19 suppliers appeared on the first page of Google results in total for the top 44 antibodies.
• 4 important site code optimizations of the top ranking suppliers were uncovered.
• 100% correlation to page one ranking for one of the factors we examined.

Although the results are directed to marketers for antibodies, we believe they are applicable to those marketing any life science products online to scientists. These principles hold true whether you are selling kits, antibodies, or microscopes.

How the study was conducted

Red Funnel used tools freely available to the public online and…

1. Determined the most searched specific antibodies by scientists in Google.
2. Determined the “best phrase” used by scientists most often in their Google Search bars. For example – “actin antibody” vs “anti-actin”.  For more on this see ‘Learning to Speak Scientist.‘.
3. Determined which companies rank on the first page of Google for the top antibodies.
4. Examined 30 different suppliers to determine whether they sold the top 44 antibodies.
5. Ranked suppliers by percentage of products appearing on page 1 based solely on the products they sold.
6. Compared the web tactics of the companies that appeared often to those that rarely or never appeared to determine why.

How to Get a Copy

The article is available to our subscribers for free download.  Just follow a few simple steps to confirm your email address so our email provider knows that you requested it and it’s not spam. Once you confirm, you will receive an email with a link to download your free copy.

If you are already a subscriber, check your inbox for the download link in our latest newsletter or fill in your name and email and you will automatically be redirected to the download page.

Learn to Speak “Scientist” in 5 Minutes or Less

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The Language of Science for Marketers and Sales Staff

by Rusty Bishop

Scientists are a pesky lot.  We come from all parts of the world and focus on the tiniest minutia for years on end. We sleep in the lab and generally ignore everyone around us.  We’ll come to your booth and stand there idly touching your brochures, when what we really want is a very specific product. We’ll agonize over spending a nickel on an antibody that works and drop thousands to fly to a “meeting” in Hawaii.

Most important for the life science Marketer, scientists have a language all to our own. Unfortunately, the language carries a lot of redundant terms and abbreviations.

Consider “protease” or “proteinase”?

Is it “anti-actin” or “actin antibody”?

How about “ChiP” vs “chromatin precipitation”?

“DMPK” or “drug metabolism pharmacokinetics” – It’s endless…

..and the way we use that language is the way you have to market your products, especially online.

How Do You Figure Out the Words Scientists Use to Describe your Products?

Just like a new language – you listen! Or more specifically, you search for the most relevant words online.   Through their search inquiries for products, protocols, publications, and conversations about experiments, scientists are telling you what they want online -in real time and, most important, in large enough volume to be relevant. All you need is a simple keyword search tool and access to a Social Media Monitoring tool to “listen” and improve your marketing message.

Here’s what you are listening for:

Keywords -

1. What are the exact phrases scientists are using to describe my products (vernacular)? Ex - anti-actin or actin antibody?
2. What terms are associated with my products (context)? Ex – actin antibody + western blot
3. What volume (focus)? 10 searches per month or 1o,000?

The 5 Minute Exercise!

So let’s take the above and see what we can learn in 5 minutes.

1. Open up a Google Search Bar. Enter your product term – I’m entering “PCR machine”.  (Total time - 15 secs)

2. Note what Google returns for results. You’re looking for synonyms. Hmm, Thermal Cycler is the first hit.  Jot that down. (Total time - 45 secs)

3. Open your favorite Keyword Search Tool. Mine happens to be Google’s. (Total time – 55 secs)

4. Enter your product term – “PCR machine”. Analyze the data to see how many searches are conducted using the phrase – Google tells me there are 9,900 global monthly searches for “PCR machine”. (Total time - 1:30 minutes)

5.  Enter the other term “Thermal Cycler” – 22,900 global monthly searches. Not sure about you,  but I like to fish in a pond that has more fish. I now know that the majority of scientists online call a PCR machine a Thermal Cycler. (Total time - 2:00 minutes)

6. Analyze associated words in the list and build context  - gradient, troubleshooting, mulitplex, quantitative, buffer, etc. Note how the terms are used – “pcr troubleshooting” (Total time - 3:00 minutes).

7. Finally, compile the list into an excel sheet with primary terms and second terms. (Total time - 5:00 minutes).

Armed with this information you are ready for Step 2 – Discover what scientists want by speaking the language…

… and that’s the topic of our next post.

The author doesn’t do PCR anymore, but he sure did use a lot of Thermal Cyclers in the lab!  You can catch the next article by following the Red Funnel on Twitter or by subscribing to our newsletter.

Did you grab your .co yet?

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Time to grab your .co extension

by Rusty Bishop

July 20th marked the public release of a new web extension for businesses, the .co.

No, thats not a typo its .co not .com.

If you are an established company building a microsite or a new CRO that doesn’t want to use some crazy acronym now is the time to act.

For example as of this writing, Westernblot.co is still available for $30!

To put it in perspective there are 9 million websites registered with .com extensions and as of this morning there are only 330,000 .co extensions.

More reasons to get a .co

1. Prevent competitors from pulling traffic from you by registering your business name.

2. More doors equals more opportunities.  Add a new portal to your website.  How about invitrogenantibodies.co with a 301 redirect to the Invitrogen antibody page?  The possibilities for SEO and Search presentation are endless!

The price is small!

Happy selling.

Rusty is passionate about sellingtoscientists.co! Get his advice regularly by Twitter here. Also, become a fan.

Every Page of Your Website is Your Face

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Every Page of Your Website is Your Face

by Rusty Bishop

I previously wrote about how your website is like your face. It was a good article, but the statement was a little naive.

Now that we’ve reviewed over 30 websites with our QuickCheck Service, I’d like to modify that statement to more accurately reflect reality.

Every page of your website is your face

That’s right every page.

Think about the time you went to highly regarded restaurant with beautiful architecture, modern signs, and great food only to see tablecloths with food stains and frayed cloth napkins.  What did you remember?

The food stained cloth!

Why? Because it showed the restaurant didn’t care enough to clean the tablecloths or buy fresh ones. People notice when things are a bit out of place or don’t fit the picture. Its an intuitive response.

When you told your friends about the restaraunt, I bet you said, ” The food was great, but the tablecloths were dirty.”

Every page of your website speaks about how much your company cares in the same way.

In the modern web of Google, Bing, and Yahoo search, any page of your site can be directly landed on from the outside by a visitor looking for something they typed into the search bar. You need to be ready. From About Us, to Products, to Company Calendars, to Company News – the pages need to say,  ”Our service/product is the best and we love our customers. We want customers to love doing business with our company.”

Life science companies selling to scientists are a business-to-business dynamic. As such, the expectations are even higher for your products and website. A product purchase is an investment that has a direct impact on the success of a scientist’s research. Buying the wrong one from the wrong company can costs months of scientist’s life.

The reality is that most companies spend thousands of dollars on graphic design for their homepage, then neglect to update their calendar or their blog.  In fact, I’ve now seen 2 companies that haven’t updated their calendar of events since 2008! Its the dirty table cloth issue!

Scientists are just like everyone else.

We suffer the same biases as all humans.  Just like the dirty table cloth, no amount of product “data” makes up for the fact your site search engine doesn’t work properly and visitors can’t find your products easily.

We don’t remember your great graphics, your carefully crafted content, your sales offers.  Nope just that we couldn’t find your products on your website.  Case closed, Im moving on to a competitor’s site and products.

What you can do about it

Its time to take action. If your company’s website is getting complaints, take action yourself today.

Try one of these today:
1. Update your site with the right information. Whether it’s the latest trade show information, press releases or new product manuals, update them.

2. Solicit feedback from your customers about your site. Send them to your boss or post them by the water cooler late at night if you need to be anonymous.
 If your company won’t read them, send them to me and I will post them here anonymously for you. The internet gets the word out faster than you can imagine.

3. Get ideas – what consumer sites and business sites do you like? Pinpoint why you like them. Easy, fun, colorful, find-ability, clever, creative?
Take action and become indispensable! Your job depends on it.

What’s a Search Presentation Snippet and Why it’s Important for your Site

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Google Is Your Homepage – Part 2 -”The Snippet Text”

by Rusty Bishop,PhD

Search Presentation is the way your relevant page links appear to searchers in Organic Search results. In normal person speak, those are all the links that Google serves up in “blue, black, and green” when you search, not the ads that you never click.

In the Google-driven internet, it is critical that your Search Presentation contains appealing, information-rich text to attract visitors to your site.

I recently wrote about the three parts of the Search Presentation. Let’s quickly review based on the example below.

1. Page Title

2.Snippet

3. URL (web address)

Importance of the Snippets – Think Abstract

Studies show that many searchers rapidly scan snippets looking for key information (Google actually published 1 sec as the average time) about the relevancy of your offering.

The snippet is a great place to capture visitors with targeted key phrases and information that explains exactly what the visitor can expect to find when they choose your webpage.

In science terms, consider it the Abstract of your product or service page. For those not familiar, take a look at any scientific manuscript, the Abstracts are the first content you see.

Like any good Abstract, the snippet should contain easily readable text that entices the searcher to click through to your site.

Most companies we see in our QuickChecks fail to capitalize on the snippet opportunity. So let’s fix it!

Where does the Search Snippet Come From?

Snippets mostly come from two places on your webpage.

1. The meta description – in your site’s code, but only seen in Search Presentation

2. The page content – in your site’s content, can be shown in Search Presentation

In both cases, the text is copied by a search spider and indexed along with the page.

When someone enters a search string, Google presents the text usually containing one or more terms from the search in the snippet (see the example above my search terms are in bold in the snippet).

Why is the Snippet Broken or Showing Non-Sense Text?

Google and other engines will give preference to the meta description only when it contains terms entered in the search by the searcher.

Otherwise, Google will show random snippets of text from the page it “thinks” is relevant to the search in an attempt to query this searcher.

The meta description and snippet are limited to 157 characters.

For this reason, you see broken text strings like the above example ending in “…” when the words in a searchers query are contained in different parts of your content or you write meta descriptions longer than 157 characters.

How Do I get Google to Show What I Want?

Remember the job of Search Companies (Google, Bing, Yahoo) is to return the most relevant results to their customer, the searcher.

I like to imagine the Google Organic Results are saying – “Is this what you’re looking for?”

Our job as marketers then is to help search engines associate our products with what our customers might enter into their search query.

For example, if your product is an antibody, an academic scientist might enter western blot or anti-mouse along with a specific protein name.  Those terms can be added into the meta description underlying your product page to grab the attention of the searcher.

I might restate the above as – - By anticipating what terms scientists might search for to find your product you can provide attractive words to entice clicks to your page.

Of course you won’t get them all in 157 characters, so you have to target correctly based on research and market segmentation.

Sounds like work, huh?

It is work, but if you do it correctly you will get more relevant click throughs from Organic Searchers that drives more sales and leads.

Once again-

Remember the job of Search Companies (Google, Bing, Yahoo) is to return the most relevant results to their customer, the searcher.

They want people to keep using their search engine.

The more that people use their search engine, the more money they make.

It’s also how you make money, because Google is Your Homepage!

In our next article, we’ll show you how we work with our clients to write great meta descriptions to attract scientists.

Google is Your Homepage – Fix your Search Presentation

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Google is your homepage.

by Rusty Bishop

Google is your homepage. Of that there is little doubt.

Mark and I have now analyzed over 20 life science websites from design to content to code to product search rank through our free QuickCheck Service.

Several companies have granted us full Analytics access in order to serve them better.  In every case, Google sends the most visitors to these sites. In fact, its not even close.

This means your customers are searching Google to find your products, not your homepage, not Science magazine’s full page ads.

If you want to prove it to yourself, just ask your webmaster to print out or show you the Traffic Sources Readout from your analytics program (I’m digging into Webtrends right now, crazy!). If I’m wrong then your company is named Facebook.com or something is really wrong, e.g. you have no traffic.

What Google Is Your Homepage Means

Most scientists are not familiar with all your products even if they are very familiar with your brand. Researchers ready to buy are searching for very specific products and services for a specific diagnostic or experiment.

If Google really is the vehicle by which >70% of site visits come from, you must carefully plan every page to present key information when a scientist see’s your offering in the organic results.

If they can’t determine from the presentation of your offering in Google’s Search Results, why would they click through to you?

What You Can Control

You absolutely have control over what Google and other search engines present to potential customers. Web marketers call this Search Presentation.

There are three elements that appear in Search Presentation. I’m sure your familiar with them, you just don’t know it.

1. Page Title

2. Snippet

3. URL (web address)

Each one of these are entirely within your control to dictate what is seen by searchers.

Take the example above, where I searched for “multiparametric immunoassays systems”.  Which gave me Biomerioux’s VIDAS instrument. Let’s break it down.

1. Page Title – “VIDAS/minVIDAS:Healthcare”.

The title tag helps searchers make a more informed decision about the results they click on. A descriptive title tag can help pop out a result better for searchers.

Constructing Great Title Tags

You have 60 characters to write a great title tag, that means you gotta seriously think about the keywords. Google suggests you imagine the Title tag is the only thing you have to tell searchers what the page is about.

So what’s this page about?  Vidas is an automated, multiparametric immunoassay system for clinical diagnostics.  That’s 83 characters with spaces so we’re close.

How about – “Vidas-Automated Mulitparametic Clinical Immunoassay System”

That’s a pretty solid page Title. It contains keywords that describe the product and it pre-qualifies searchers that are interested in Clinical products.

How do I change the Page Title?

This is a pretty common question from marketers and sales.  The page title is part of the code that underlies every page on your website.

To see the page title, you browse to your product page , then select View > Source from your browser’s tool bar.

The page title will be designated with the code <title>Your Title</title>.  If you’re having difficulty finding it just perform a find on the source code (Command F) and search “title” that should bring it up for you.

In the above example, Biomerioux’s title code is on line 154 – <title>VIDAS®/miniVIDAS®: Healthcare</title>.

To change, you need to add the new text you want into your source code via the backend or server and you’re done.  Or just ask your webmaster to take care of it, since that’s what you pay them for!

In the next article, I’ll dig into methodology for crafting the meta description for a scientist Searcher Presentation. So please bookmark us or subscribe to learn more.

Example of Proper Image Text for Scientist Searchers

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This post is in response to a comment string from a previous article on scientific alt text.  It illustrates an example of building website content from the scientific visitor perspective.

Jon commented – Here are the alt tags I used …you are welcome to use them as examples etc. (perhaps these will go in the what-not-to-do section…which is fine, but teach me how to improve them). – webpage – morpholino optimization

First image, figure 1 panel 1
alt=”Figure showing target regions used in a Morpholino oligo-walking experiment through a region of RNA secondary structure in a hepatitis B virus leader sequence.”

This is a great start. But its a little long (5-7 words is best) and the context of the page is missing. I took a look at the page on morpholino optimization on your site and in the code I noticed there are potential issues with the title tag that can help us get this correct.

Remember  – the title tag is the most important for describing the image.

For example, the first image is titled – “optimal_target_1.gif.”, it could be improved with a better description such as “morpholino_optimization.gif” or “morpholino_silencing_efficiency.gif.”

Next use the alt tag to put the image into context of the page.

In this example, I might suggest- “Choosing morpholinos based on RNA secondary structure“.

Keep it brief as some browsers will break alt text.

The idea is to consider the context a scientist interested in your product (morpholinos) would be searching in google. They might be interested in “best practices for morpholino design” or “optimization of morpholinos” or “targeting morpholinos to RNA or secondary structure or hairpins“. You might also get “how to design morpholinos” type searches.

Now as you go down the page, image text should flow logically with context they meant to illustrate.

Second image, figure 1 panel 2

New Title = antisense_activty.gif, New alt text = “mRNA target position determines morpholino silence activity.”

Third image, figure 2 -

New Title = morpholino_target.gif, New alt text = “best target choice for a Morpholino oligo AUG start codon”

Each time considering what a scientist might be searching for.

Hope that helps

We are in the middle of assisting a large science company re-writing all the content, code and image text with scientific keyword association illustrated above. It seems tedious, but it is critical with all the competition out there.

Writing Proper Scientific alt Text

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by Rusty Bishop, PhD

Many companies spend thousands on Google Adwords campaigns to attract scientists, but only pennies on making their site attract scientists via organic search. However , if you sit back and think about how many times you actually click on a paid search link?  (I bet the answer is not very often.) That money should be headed the other way.

Today’s article is about writing proper alt text, a great way to punch towards that first page in Organic Results.

Why alt text?

Previously I wrote about  alt tags and  why its critical to use them to describe your scientific products on your website to capture Google searchers. In that article I described a typical scientist performing a highly targeted search string,

“antibody human Akt1 Western blot”

This search is highly targeted and the searcher is pre-qualified to buy. People entering 4 and 5 word search strings are looking for a specific product.  In this example, I am looking for an antibody to akt1 that works in a Western blot experiment. Most likely I need to do that experiment in the next few days, so I’m not browsing, looking for random antibodies for fun.

Think about your own searching…

If you are looking for a “great Italian restaurant in downtown San Diego”  would you enter that complete search string or would you enter “restaurant”. Obviously the former would return the exact results you want, while the latter wouldn’t be in the same zip code of what you want.

For this reason, you need to be thinking what does my product accomplish for a scientist and what would they be searching for. Then use that well thought out search string for your product image alt text.

A simple example of alt text or the lack thereof…

If you enter the string above in Google, you get a ton of results that are relevant, yet not a single image in the organic results.  Go ahead, try it now. Then, click on images in the upper left hand corner of the page. It should look like this:

Do you see all those panels with black lines in them?  Those are images of Western blots.  In this case, the first 2 are actually images of Western blots using an Akt1 anti-human antibody.  How many companies make this antibody?  I bet its at least 30.  Why aren’t their images here?  They either dont have them or they didn’t name them properly. They definitely didn’t use alt text.

The blot images above are on the websites of Cell Signaling and Abcam.  Both have the word “western blot” underneath indicating Google knows this is a Western blot just like I did.

However if you click on these images – both lead to antibodies for Phospho-Akt1. Bummer I wanted Akt1, not Phospho-Akt1.  With proper alt text associated with these images, Google would have shown me what these blots really were.

Writing alt text

The alt text on these images should be something like…

“phospho-Akt1 western blot with anti-human antibody” or “western blot with phospho-Akt1 antibody”

…this would distinguish these blots from those performed with “human Akt1 antibody”, which both Cell Signaling and Abcam both sell.

For some basic rules on Alt text, check out this article – “Alt Attributes: Describing Your Images for Better Web Accessibility.”

Attracting qualified leads online requires constant vigil.  If you have questions about how to create alt text, request a free consultation from Red Funnel. Our team is here to help.

In Praise of Pilots – Deal with Change by Testing

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By Mark Walker

Is the the speed of change different in the life science business world?

When you combine the trends impacting the rest of the business world such as new communication channels and devices with the rush of new discoveries and technologies into this marketplace, you have a potent mixture. If it’s not the market with the fastest pace, then it has to be in the in the top tier.

For marketers, new products from these discoveries (yours and the competitors) and new communication channels are just two of the trends making your lives “exciting.”

Picture a basketball court completely covered with set mouse-traps (the old spring-loaded ones). Someone tosses a single ping-pong ball onto the floor. Sprung traps flip and set off their neighbors. Now imagine that the traps reset themselves, the floor gets larger and the chaos grows. Ok, I admit I think it would be fun to be initial “tosser” and watch the activity from a safe place. I don’t know of a safe place in the life science business world. You are in the middle of the basketball court.

Use the Tools to Test Initiatives

Take advantage of the very tools contributing to this speed to test marketing initiatives and get feedback on results. It’s easier and faster to share information, right? Iterate quickly and constantly to test what works–and what doesn’t. Want to see how a new lead process works?  Pilot it with a region of your sales force. Test it with a couple of your inside sales reps. Want to test a new web page to get better conversion rates? Google has great free tools that you can implement.

When I worked with organizations interested in subscribing to our information service (a database for mining information about researchers and their grant awards), many were concerned about launching it to the entire sales force without testing. I would often recommend a pilot program. The idea was pretty simple.

• Set up the objectives and goals.
• Select a small, representative group of sales representatives (generalists, specialists, regional manager) .
• Train the pilot team on the service and set expectations for usage and feedback.
• Evaluate the results.

The value was evident for the organization. The overall investment and risk was minimal but the insights gained could be applied when rolling the new program out to the entire organization. The potential ROI could be extrapolated to the entire sales force and it was easier for managers to make the right decision and create buy-in for the sales force. Another element for success was in place as a result of the pilot. In the organization, there was already a group of peers that could not only help troubleshoot but specify best practices.

Testing Your Website? Of Course You Are.

For websites, there are free or inexpensive testing tools (Google’s Website Optimizer is an example) that can help you test different versions of a web page so you can see the changes that impact your activity. Amazon tests every pixel of their pages to find out what works (and doesn’t) and continues to iterate their home page and product pages. Not all companies have those resources but you can certainly test critical pages such as landing pages and sign-up pages as well as key elements such as Calls to Action, trying different copy, buttons and images.

Imagine you are having guests over to your house. You generally want to make that an enjoyable experience, right?  Why are you not treating your customers that visit your website in the same way? Tidy up, move chairs around to create some conversation areas, and decide where you are going to put the refreshments so your guests can get them conveniently.

Which Initiatives?

Google famously enables their staff to use 20% of their time on interesting projects not necessarily related to their job description.  Whether it’s a day a week or a couple hours each morning, the point is to include time to review new ideas (from customers, field reps, social media, internet, etc.) and think about how they could help your business.  Then figure out how you can test a couple of the ideas, quickly.

There are going to be blind alleys that we all go down when trying some new things. The advantage of the pilot is it reduces your risk by having a time point when it will end, requires a minimal investment in time and funding, and you come away with results based a set of measurable criteria. Test it and track it, then implement it, change it or shut it down.

What is your experience with pilot projects and what are the keys to success?  I’d enjoy hearing your story in the comments.