Day 23 – Shoemoney System Review

Time Spent: 5 minutes
$ Made: $0
Main Focus: N/A
Today’s Value (1 to 10): 1
Overall Value (1 to 10): 1
My Thoughts: Another fat goose egg of a day. I have to be honest here (you expect nothing less of me!), I’m really really disappointed in how this system is playing out. I just can’t wrap my [...]

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Day 23 – Shoemoney System Review

 Day 23 – Shoemoney System Review  Day 23 – Shoemoney System Review  Day 23 – Shoemoney System Review

 Day 23 – Shoemoney System Review

Day 22 – Shoemoney System Review

Time Spent: 5 minutes
$ Made: $0
Main Focus: N/A
Today’s Value (1 to 10): 1
Overall Value (1 to 10): 1
My Thoughts: Guess what I’m going to say…yep…Nothing new today.
I did have the rest of the eBay arbitrage videos show up in my account today as “Coming Soon!” along with a couple of Facebook videos. You’ll probably [...]

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Day 22 – Shoemoney System Review

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 Day 22 – Shoemoney System Review

Ask the Scientist: Price testing methods and practices

Editor’s Note: The MarketingExperiments community is an interactive group with a great deal of questions and answers between marketers and their peers as well as with the MarketingExperiments staff. Occasionally we publish these interactions on the blog when we think there is a particularly good question that our readers can benefit from…

QUESTION:

I am in the process of doing a short survey of our clients to gauge interest in some new products we will be introducing in the fall. I want to find out what they would be willing to pay for these individual products.

2570218810 72f9ba502e 225x300 Ask the Scientist: Price testing methods and practicesMy gut tells me that if I list three prices, they will always select the least expensive. Is there a way to ask a price (or range-of-price) question that truly elicits a reasonable response?

We are doing the A/B/C testing on price once we roll out the products. I am now at the point of trying to determine where to set price for testing purposes. Any guidance you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Deborah
Vice President of Marketing
Overland Park, Kansas

ANSWER:

Deborah, your sense is consistent with our experience.  Asking customers what they would be willing to pay is at best an unreliable way to determine the optimal price for a new product. The two best approaches in our experience are to base initial new product prices either on “comparables” or “value.”

Comparables: If there are other similar products on the market, then you can get a sense for a good starting point based upon the range of what customers are already paying for the closest competitive offerings.

Value:  If there is insufficient information available about comparables (e.g., because the new products are truly breakthrough in nature), then you can try to discover what your ideal customers are currently paying to satisfy the need your new product fulfills, or what it is currently costing them by failing to satisfy the need.

For example, let’s say you make a webcam system for builders and commercial developers that would allow them to remotely monitor their building sites for theft and vandalism over the Internet. You might base your initial per-camera pricing on what it costs to hire a nighttime security agency to guard an equivalent area.

Or you could base pricing on building industry and insurance industry statistics about average annual losses due to theft and vandalism and on the rates to insure unsecured building sites. Then, determine whether adding your system might, in addition to reducing losses, qualify to reduce those insurance rates. This is referred to as “value-based pricing.”

You may be able to extract value from customer surveys by asking them about the nature and annual costs of the problems that your new product addresses and how much it currently costs them to either solve or make do without a solution.

Again, though, once they perceive the risk that their answers might influence future product pricing, the predictive accuracy diminishes quickly.

I hope this is helpful, Deborah.

All the best,

Bob Kemper
Director of Sciences
MECLABS Group, LLC

Related Resources

Price testing online subscriptions

Landing Page Optimization – Finding ideal price points

Offer Pricing – How to test and optimize your pricing

 Ask the Scientist: Price testing methods and practices

Day 20 – Shoemoney System Review

Time Spent: 5 minutes
$ Made: $0
Main Focus: eBay Arbitrage Replay…Same videos, Round 2
Today’s Value (1 to 10): 1
Overall Value (1 to 10): 1
My Thoughts: One of the unfortunate things about getting content early is when you get the content a second time around, it’s very anticlimactic. Today I got the first of 3 or [...]

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Day 20 – Shoemoney System Review

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Google Analytics: New browser-based, data-privacy opt out important, but what consumers really need is education

Back in March, Google got more serious about protecting user data privacy (as it should be), and to that end has announced plans for a browser-based opt-out for Google Analytics.

2404940312 e759c4030d 225x300 Google Analytics: New browser based, data privacy opt out important, but what consumers really need is educationIn typical Internet fashion, the blogs and Twitter lit up with doom and gloom news that web tracking was dead…run for the hills web analysts. In fact, it was very reminiscent of the reaction people had when Germany announced they were going to investigate the legality of Google Analytics and collecting data on their citizens. But, as with past incidents, people calmed down and life went on.

Personally, I am all for Internet privacy. We as businesses and marketers need to respect users’ wishes if they decide they do not want to be tracked (even if retail counterparts do not honor this). If a significant amount of people are choosing to opt out, then we need to adapt and find other ways to determine what our users want and need. Heaven forbid we talk or engage them more personally (see blog post of different ways to do this online).

But in talking with people that have concerns about being tracked online (especially by Google Analytics), I typically find that they simply misunderstand what the tool does. Most people with concerns feel like it is a Big Brother tool that tells us exactly who they are, tracks them after they leave our site, and relays to us every website they visit.

They lighten up significantly when I tell them that the tool is really used to anonymously look at users of our website and help us understand how to make our process, products, or websites better.

In fact, we cannot even see (at a personally identifiable level) who these people are if we are following Google Analytics’ terms of service. Once they hear this, most skeptics see the value and how it can really make the Internet a better place without negatively impacting privacy.

What I hope Google does

When Google releases this opt-out feature, my desire is they also release an FAQ page or other educational outlet to debunk the privacy myths about Google Analytics. I truly believe it is urban legends, what people do not know (fear of the unknown), or other more invasive measurement tools that cause the privacy scares. Perhaps if people are properly educated they will be less reluctant to opt out.

Whatever it decides to do, Google should err on the side of too much information. When it comes to anxiety, perception is reality. And as with any anxiety, we must overcorrect to overcome it.

But in the end, it is ultimately up to the consumer. And as painful as this is to say as a web analyst, we need to respect our visitors and their desire for privacy, even if it is a poor or wrongly informed concern.

Related Resources

What the “opt-out” option means for Google Analytics

Google adds more flexibility and intelligence to Analytics and Website Optimizer

Friction and Anxiety in your marketing process: defining the difference

 Google Analytics: New browser based, data privacy opt out important, but what consumers really need is education

Day 19 – Shoemoney System Review

Time Spent: 5 minutes
$ Made: $0
Main Focus: Nada
Today’s Value (1 to 10): 1
Overall Value (1 to 10): 1
My Thoughts: No new videos. Took the day off.
If you want to check out the Shoemoney System, you can see it here: Shoemoney System. [...]

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Day 19 – Shoemoney System Review

 Day 19 – Shoemoney System Review  Day 19 – Shoemoney System Review  Day 19 – Shoemoney System Review

 Day 19 – Shoemoney System Review

Monthly Blog Earnings – April 2010

Here’s the monthly blog earnings for April 2010:
Banners – $30
Adsense – $18.42
LinkXL – $30.00
Total: $78.42
Top Commenters

Andrew@BloggingGuide
Nicole Price
Ample
DavidJParsons
Laptop Briefcase
Domain Search
Cheat Codes
Kate
cisco training
Legitimate Home Jobs

Want a permanent link on Blueverse.com? Just post some comments and shoot for the Top Commentators list. It’s pretty easy to make the list.
Want to get some more exposure to [...]

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Monthly Blog Earnings – April 2010

 Monthly Blog Earnings – April 2010  Monthly Blog Earnings – April 2010  Monthly Blog Earnings – April 2010

 Monthly Blog Earnings – April 2010

Day 18 – Shoemoney System Review

Time Spent: 5 minutes
$ Made: $0
Main Focus: Nada
Today’s Value (1 to 10): 1
Overall Value (1 to 10): 1
My Thoughts: Here’s today’s update:

Shoemoney System Video – No new videos.
eBay Auctions – No sales yet. Quite a few views and a watcher on one that ends in a couple of hours today. The other one has [...]

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Day 18 – Shoemoney System Review

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 Day 18 – Shoemoney System Review

Day 17 – Shoemoney System Review

Time Spent: 30 minutes
$ Made: $0
Main Focus: Finding your audience
Today’s Value (1 to 10): 1
Overall Value (1 to 10): 1
My Thoughts: More on finding your audience today. The video was pretty good, but mostly common sense stuff. It basically dealt with finding people you can connect with that correspond to your niche. It’s kind [...]

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Day 17 – Shoemoney System Review

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 Day 17 – Shoemoney System Review