Disqus - Latest Comments for sherrett

Re: QR Codes in Books - Do They Work?

James Sherrett — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 12:57:24 -0000

Thanks for sharing the details of your QR inclusion in the book, Lee. It's rare to find actual numbers on QR-code effectiveness and usage patterns. Great to see some real data!

Re: Global Mobile Commerce Infographic: Shoppers’ Habits Around the World

James Sherrett — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 12:41:56 -0000

Todd: yes. The data we analyzed was from 200-million visitors and the numbers on the map are the percentage of site traffic on mobile devices.

Re: 5 iPad mini Web Design and Development Early Best Practices

James Sherrett — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 19:11:27 -0000

Dave, thanks for the comment. We tested on a number of 7" tablets from our device lab including the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire. It was that testing that provided the hands-on research for the best practices in this post. We just don't mention the devices by name.

Re: How To Do Mobile A/B (Split) Testing with Mobify

James Sherrett — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 19:08:14 -0000

Brock, thanks for the additional question. I believe the option to do a mobile-only experiment is only available in the Platinum tier of Optimizely.

But that doesn't mean you can't do a mobile-only A/B test, just that you'll have to do the traffic segmentation in a different way, or run an all-device A/B test and then segment out the mobile results in your analytics or BI tool.

Re: Top 11 Mobile Web Development Tools Used at Mobify

James Sherrett — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 19:26:53 -0000

Hi Bob, thanks for the question and for mentioning all those great 'Made with Mobify' sites.

Today, we don't have a universal tool or template to change the font size on all 'Made with Mobify' sites because we leave the design decisions up to each original site owner. It's their decision on the font sizes. Hope that helps.

Re: Mobile performance benchmarks: How does your mobile performance measure up?

James Sherrett — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:50:03 -0000

Monique, thanks for the comment. We considered adding in Lifetime Value and think it's an essential metric to track but opted to omit it because it's very difficult to do well without more in-depth data.

There will be more to come on the 3 modes of mobile users very soon.

Re: Mobile performance benchmarks: How does your mobile performance measure up?

James Sherrett — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:48:17 -0000

Peter, thanks for the comment. Can you give me examples of some metrics that would generate?

Re: iPad 3 and Retina Screen: What it means for your mobile commerce site

James Sherrett — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:47:59 -0000

Do you have a better example of how to show the difference?

Re: iPad 3 and Retina Screen: What it means for your mobile commerce site

James Sherrett — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:58:54 -0000

Hey Scott, good question. Thanks.

Support for SVG is pretty good, but there are some gaps. Here's a good table showing the support across browsers: http://caniuse.com/svg-img

If you're ready to go ahead with SVGs, it makes a lot of sense to use them for logos and UI elements.

But photos are a different story and will most likely not have the desired effect when converted from raster to SVG format.

Re: iPad 3 and Retina Screen: What it means for your mobile commerce site

James Sherrett — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:31:48 -0000

Thanks much for the comment, John. Have you tried out an iPad with the Retina display?

I ask because I was a skeptic as well. How different could it be?

Then I used one for this past weekend and it's amazing how quickly your eyes start to expect the crispness and clarity of well-optimized images.

Your mileage may vary with the display but innovators who embrace the new Retina display as an opportunity to showcase how good images can look will benefit a lot.

Re: Mobile Web Growing 8 Times Faster than Web

James Sherrett — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:44:16 -0000

Hi Simon, at the current rate of mobile web adoption browsing the web by mobile devices will surpass desktops by 2014. We're working on more posts that describe the usage patterns in great details. Thanks for your comment.

Re: Google Adwords Quality Score Now Affected by Mobile Optimization

James Sherrett — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 16:59:34 -0000

Hey Nick,

Thanks for your question.

We don't know whether Quality Score makes a distinction between tablet devices and mobile devices or whether they're all treated as mobile.

Today the industry standard is to treat iPads and tablets as mobile devices and they are included in mobile devices stats in Analytics, for example.

But I think as we see iPads and tablets grow in popularity and in their contribution to e-commerce we'll see them treated as a distinct device type with targeted optimization.

Re: Google Adwords Quality Score Now Affected by Mobile Optimization

James Sherrett — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 16:56:12 -0000

Hey Angie, to follow up on our thread here on how Google weighs mobile web optimization in rankings for organic search vs. AdWords, Google has now announced that its search spider, Googlebot, now crawls smartphone websites - http://blog.mobify.com/2011...

Putting a bit of imagination in place we can see how mobile site optimization may soon influence organic search results as well as AdWords Quality Score.

Re: Groupon Mobile Campaign: Inside the Data

James Sherrett — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:29:17 -0000

The retailer was in consumer electronics.

Re: Google Adwords Quality Score Now Affected by Mobile Optimization

James Sherrett — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:29:40 -0000

Hey Angie, thanks for the comment. We decided to go with that subject line for 2 reasons:

1. We try to keep our subject lines to less than 30 characters (with spaces) to fit in the preview of most email clients.

2. Most of our clients receive traffic from Google as both organic and paid search results and are very keen to know the latest information on both types of traffic.

Hope that sheds a little more light on why we chose that subject line.

Did you enjoy the article and learn something new?

Re: Starting Guidelines for Tablet and iPad Website Design

James Sherrett — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:52:43 -0000

Hey Graham, thanks for the comment and suggestion.

I think if you're building a site from scratch, considering building a responsive site is a great option, as long as you have the right budget, ongoing tech team and timeline.

But for existing sites it's not so simple.

What we hear from clients and industry contacts is that for existing sites it's next to impossible to start from scratch. This applies especially for e-commerce or international sites that have big existing investments in the technology and processes to create and manage the site.

Re: James Sherrett joins Mobify as Vice President of Marketing

James Sherrett — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:16:52 -0000

I says: “It’s not everyday you get a chance to join a killer company like Mobify with a kick ass product running for customers like Threadless, Lululemon and Conde Nast."

Re: Starting Guidelines for Tablet and iPad Website Design

James Sherrett — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:49:24 -0000

Good additions, Jason. Thanks!

Re: James Sherrett joins Mobify as Vice President of Marketing

James Sherrett — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:02:20 -0000

Thanks for the kind and encouraging comments, all. It's been an outstanding first few days with Mobify already and I'm excited for each new day.

Re: In the world of e-commerce, Apple's iPad generates insanely disproportionate revenue compared to traffic

James Sherrett — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:23:49 -0000

iPad conversion numbers are high but 2 data points is not enough for this sort of generalization.

Re: Possibility is easy, Execution isn't

James Sherrett — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 12:42:09 -0000

More experiments in public that persist and invite discovery, connections and serendipity and less propriety over ideas. Diminish the not-built-here mindset.

It's a cultural change that's required for agencies to start being part of inventing things. And it will be process / practice changes that create perception changes.

For instance, what if an agency adopted the same 20% time policy as Google for 1 month, with the understanding that the policy would continue if good, interesting inventions resulted? Seems like a worthwhile experiment in itself. Is it realistic?

Re: - This is going to be BIG! - I Recommend You Read This Post

James Sherrett — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 13:09:02 -0000

Hey Charlie, great post on recommendations. Thanks for kicking off the conversation and sharing your thoughts.

I'm interested in recommendations and we've built a small experiment called Recotype (http://recotype.com) to add value to recommendation flows in real time.

Basically, we noticed 2 things:
1 - people were asking for, receiving and declaring recommendations on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
2 - people were shortening 'recommendation' to 'reco.'

From those 2 observations we created a simple way to save and collect your recommendations (so far only on Twitter).

Add #reco to any tweet. That's it. Recotype collects all the related tweets (replies, retweets) into a thread and sends you a short link to see it.

We wrote up what we learned in our first month running Recotype here: http://blog.adhack.com/2010...

Summary:
* locality is key in ~80% of recommendations
* recommendations have 4 distinct patterns of use
* fast is good but not always best
* recommendations are alive and evolve
* recommendations blend professional / personal networks
* networks can explode recommendations by matching experts to requests

We recently added Topics and Locations as well for any additional hashtags in the threads because people were adding them.

If any of this is of interest or works for you, please give it a try and let us know what you think.

Re: Young+Stupid

James Sherrett — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 13:58:42 -0000

Hey Dan, great, thought-provoking post.
Another way to put the best way to approach the current state might be to say that because of the accelerating pace of change and the squirmy nature of everything today, the problem that needs to solved is unknown.
So how to consider solutions without a problem?
In that case, it makes sense to try as much as possible, as fast as possible -- to discover what emerges as the problem.
Not willy nilly trying everything, but using a disciplined and purposeful approach.
A few names for this are emerging -- agile advertising, the lean ad campaign -- from folks working with lots of experience addressing this scenario.
Glad to share more if you're interested.

Re: Young+Stupid

James Sherrett — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 13:58:42 -0000

Re: why agencies need labs

James Sherrett — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 07:28:21 -0000

Isn't the bigger problem not that a Labs mentality is preferrable and required, or that Labs needs to be integrated into the culture, but that Labs is hard on the P & L? Hard to sell to the beancounters?Google is frequently cited as the prototypical example of Labs done well. But unless you're a very profitable organization, like Google, how to do justify it?(Here's some back-of-the-envelope calculations for the costs of Google's 20-percent program: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/201... times when I've seen Labs initiatives done well are when they're used as marketing to show clients and prospective clients what can be done.Does that provide the most realistic approach to putting Labs into practice?