NuCaptcha

NuCaptcha combines video-animated CAPTCHAs with behavioral analysis to improve the user experience while making it tougher for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) programs to decipher.

Video CAPTCHAs show letters moving back and forth, which could be captured as static images by OCR, but overlapping layers are much harder to recognize.

Behavioral analysis takes into account various cues to assess the security risk of a user. Legitimate users are shown easy-to-solve CAPTCHAs, while suspect spammers are given more difficult ones.

NuCaptcha is not free, details on their website.

VouchSafe

VouchSafe uses artificial intelligence to generate challenges based on object associations that humans can recognize but bots can’t. For example, drawing a line between two objects that match each other.

Hey, it’s harder than it looks! I couldn’t figure this one out. Despite the fact I got it wrong, the system could recognize I’m human by the interaction of drawing the line.

Honeypot Buttons

One of the tips from the original post was to use a “honeypot field” — a hidden CSS field invisible to humans, but fed to bots. Anton’s comment described a solution that uses 3 buttons with fake input element labels. For example:

“Don’t post this” | “Post this” | “Cancel”

You can catch robots with server-side validation easily because they tend to just “submit.”

Ask Bots to Play Nice

Finally, a bonus method. I can’t believe I forgot about this one…

Thanks again to our readers! Any more ideas? Please drop us a comment.

One study by Stanford University (link opens as PDF) found 3 human users agreed on the “translation” of the CAPTCHA only 71% of the time. Overall success rates were ~85% on average.

To add to the pain, they are not foolproof. Spammers can crack CAPTCHAs with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, and there are humans overseas that will fill in CAPTCHA forms for a dollar or two per thousand CAPTCHAs. (No joke).

While CAPTCHAs aren’t ubiquitous on retail ecommerce sites, they abound on subscription content sites, forums, social networks and blogs. They ensure only humans can create accounts or perform certain actions within accounts (such as post a link through Facebook), leave a comment or download content.

If you have or are considering a CAPTCHA to keep spam out, but want to minimize user friction, there are at least 5 workarounds for those crazy spaghetti-strung gobbledeegook spam traps (and often, human traps).

1. The Honeypot Trap

Bots malicious find open fields delicious, so set up a “honeypot” field with hidden CSS that is invisible to users. You can set your validation to fail when there’s anything entered into the honeypot field.

This method completely removes the friction of the CAPTCHA method — unless the user has CSS disabled, or uses a browser that auto-fills common fields. The latter may be a high percentage, so consider using a field that is rarely asked for by other sites, such as time zone, but something bots might recognize.

2. Skill Testing Question

A simple math question is often easier to complete than de-coding a set of words that look like they’ve been scribbled by a 3 year old with chubby chalk, which reduces friction without eliminating it entirely:

Image credit: 13things.net

OK, the above might prove you’re superhuman, or fresh out of college. It’s fun to inject a little humor into the painful process of proving your humanity. How about this:

Better.

3. Simple Task

Ubokia gamifies the prove-your-human process, using a creative drag-this-icon-here method.

A Flickr user proposes a tic-tac-toe game, where the human plays the winning move for X.

4. 3rd Party Authentication

If your CAPTCHA is used for a membership / registration, offering Facebook Connect as an authentication option, for example, eliminates the need for the CAPTCHA, and pre-fills form fields with information from the user’s profile to boot. This option is becoming more and more common, especially with membership sites.

Because not everyone uses a social network or wants to sign up with one, this approach doesn’t replace your CAPTCHA, but reduces friction significantly for a good chunk of your users.

5. Solve Media

Solve Media is a company that developed a CAPTCHA/display ad hybrid that requires the user to answer a simple question about another company’s ad on your site. Advertisers pay for the appearance, and at least in theory, should receive higher recall as the user is forced to pay attention to the ad.

Several major publishers have signed on for trials of the Solve solution, including Hearst Magazines and TV Guide. Publishers share 50% of ad revenue with Solve, making it a CAPTCHA workaround you can monetize.

6. Do Nothing

Hey, “do nothing” is always an alternative. I’ve seen many ecommerce sites drop the CAPTCHA or only show them selectively (for example, when an IP address is suspicious). For example, Netflix once used CAPTCHA and doesn’t appear to any longer.

If you truly believe your site needs a CAPTCHA, it’s worth A/B testing to see if it’s killing your conversion rates. Measure both conversion lift and impact on number of “spam conversions” with and without the CAPTCHA. You may also consider testing any of the above workarounds.

The freemium business model is taking over — an estimated 65% of revenue generated by the 100 top grossing apps in the App Store, and an estimated 72% of total App Store revenue comes from freemium mobile games. In-game purchases like extra lives, special powers, virtual goods and personalizations are driving the revenue.

This week’s Infographic Friday is homegrown, featuring snippets of findings from our latest research report Cashing in on the Smartphone Gaming Boom that examine avid and causal mobile gamers’ in-app spending habits.

Click image to enlarge

Thank you for tweeting and sharing! And don’t forget to check out the report, with more juicy facts on avid and casual gamers.

If you would like to feature this infographic on your own site, the embed code is below.

LARGE (900 x 3240)

<br /> <a href="http://www.getelastic.com/economics-of-free-mobile-gaming/"><img src="http://www.getelastic.com/wp-content/uploads/economics-of-free-apps.gif" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.getelastic.com">link will go here</a><br />

MEDIUM (600 x 2160)

<br /> <a href="http://www.getelastic.com/economics-of-free-mobile-gaming/"><img src="http://www.getelastic.com/wp-content/uploads/economics-of-free-apps-sm.gif" /></a><br />Via the <a href="http://www.getelastic.com">Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog</a><br />

• What could be worse than SOPA and PIPA? A similar Act on a global scale. Find out why some believe ACTA ‘Is More Dangerous Than SOPA’.

• Even if you didn’t take your site offline to protest SOPA, it’s important that you know How To Handle Downtime During Site Maintenance. Make sure you don’t confuse search engines — it could impact your rankings.

• HTML5 – this is why it’s hot. Amazon Scoots Past Apple’s Rules With HTML5 iPad Kindle Store. If you recall, Apple wants 30% of in-app revenue, this is a good workaround.

• While the 2012 predictions posts have for the most part died down, check out why shopping cart abandonment is set to rise in 2012.

• How Netflix Measures You to Maximize Their Revenue & How It Can Help Your Business is a good reminder why you must calculate customer lifetime value to know how much you can spend to acquire a new one. PS: Netflix’ LTV is 25 months and $291.25.

• Fun fact: the top 5 passwords used at Gawker account for about 25% of all users. The #1 password is — wait for it — 123456 (over 3000 accounts!) For more reasons why you should be diligent to push users towards secure passwords, check out Data Monday: Login & Passwords.

• Spotted in the wild: a paid search ad that lands the user on a customer review page rather than a product page. This is a great way to build user trust, no matter what you’re selling.

• You know we love infographics, and this one comes to us via Econsultancy: Profiling the Social Gamer. Hint: it’s not an 18 year old boy.

• The New York Times broke a story on an Amazon seller who offered refunds for 5 star reviews. Is this gaming the system, or mere incentivizing word of mouth? You decide.

Dan Zarella from HubSpot set out to answer that question, analyzing over 200,000 link-containing tweets, and measuring several characteristics that appear to influence click through. Dan’s findings are presented infographically (WordPress tells me this is not a word, but I don’t care), which we will here break down tip-by-tip, along with some real-world examples.

Here goes…

1. Write tweets between 120 and 130 characters long

If you’re anything like me, your problem is trying to fit your message into a measly 140 characters. It’s reassuring that longer tweets don’t underperform shorter ones. But why would longer tweets get higher click through?

It could be that longer tweets have more context around the link. We’re not into random clicking for the fun of it. Short tweets can be vague, for example:

versus

Does that mean never tweet short? No way. If you can evoke curiosity with a few words, do it.

2. Place links about 25% of the way through

This funny looking graph reveals that links at the beginning are cold, at the end are lukewarm, and a quarter of the way through are hot. I think this is a safe practice to adopt for every tweet – for whatever reason, it seems to work.

But why does it work? My theory is it has to do with the way we scan the web. Links at the end, well they trail off, and may be noticed less, similar to a cart button placed too far away from product info.

But consider it’s not all that important for some links to be clicked. Tweets are often posted simply to share interesting facts and ideas. Rand Fishkin’s tweet above is a stand-alone statement. He links to his inspiration as a reference, rather than a destination. A low click through rate would not be a failure.

3. Choose the right words and phrases

Apparently, you can double or triple your click through rate by including “via,” @name or “RT” in your post. These all imply that at least 2 people on the web like what you shared (you and the source). Hey, is twice as much social proof as you tweeting alone

Here’s a tip: ask your tweet-fluencial friends to share your website links using via, @you or RT if they’re not already.

4. Use action words: more verbs, fewer nouns

Adverbs like beautifully, quickly, steadily, amazingly, quite and totally can pump up your post. Here’s an example:

“Lomography is steadily growing and expanding its physical presence within the UK” is more interesting than “Lomography is growing and expanding its physical presence within the UK.” Steadily suggests there are some insightful details after the click on “why” the company is growing. Adverbs work best if they add some interest to the subject matter.

If you can’t use an adverb, try a verb. — preferably command verbs, such as “Check (out) …”

5. Experiment using the paper.li system

I’ll admit, this stumps me why daily digest posts achieve a mind-blowing 35% click-through. If you use Paper.li, track your click through rate through an app like Crowdbooster or Hootsuite and see if your shares get these kind of results (and please share in the comments and make be a believer!)

6. Tweet on the weekends

No surprise here, tweet volume from marketers is understandably down on the weekends, so there’s a better chance your links are seen by weekend socializers. Schedule tweets in advance with Crowdbooster or Hootsuite, and of course monitor click-through vis-a-vis similar links during the work week.

Another tip: Check out (ah, see what I just did there?) Tweriod, an app that will tell you your ideal time to tweet based on your audience.

Is that it?

I love Dan’s analysis, but I’d like to see more research on the click-through effect of:

Hashtag stuffing

Hashtags are styled like links and could “drown out” the call to action. Do they help or harm a tweet?

Affirmative verb at the beginning of the tweet?

Does using a command at the beginning of a written sentence have the same impact as it does spoken (as in neuro-linguistic programming)?

Shortened vs. truncated

Link shorteners conceal the domain behind the link, while truncated links may give clickers more confidence. They’re also longer, which may draw more attention (like a big checkout button). Does it matter?

Stand-out characters

Do WORDS IN CAPS, little triangles or musical notes attract more attention? While they may not influence clicks, if the tweet is more likely to be noticed in the first place, it naturally has a higher chance of getting clicked.

Photo sharing

Do links from Tweetphoto, Yfrog or Twitpic win more clicks because people crave multimedia content?

How can Tweets be tested?

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to A/B test tweets – yet (maybe someday there’ll be an app for that). If you’re handy with numbers, Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz has a process for hypothesis testing tweets you can try. (Interestingly, Rand found shorter tweets produced higher click through in his analysis).

Again, click through isn’t the perfect measure of engagement or interest. You can’t count how many people read your tweet and got value out of it without retweeting or replying to you, but you can measure which tweets spurned the most unfollows with Tweeteffect. It’s a good idea to make note of content that causes an unusual exodus, regardless of the length, link placement, use of adverbs or time of day.

Why does this matter to ecommerce?

We have become a social networking culture, and this behavior is permeating every area of our lives. Even solo activities like using search engines is becoming socialized, as is shopping, travel, education and even work. Ecommerce organizations should be paying attention to the conversation about them, and starting their own conversations in the social-sphere. Innovative companies are also make the shopping experience more social on-site and through mobile apps. And what’s innovative today will just be “normal” in the next 2-5 years.

The infographic below (source) breaks down Google’s top spenders in Google Adwords, but also highlights how CPCs (cost per click) vary across industries.

While some of these click prices are not surprising, like for health insurance or wireless Internet deals (high ticket value and/or recurring revenue), others like ‘zumba dance dvd’ are considerably high relative to retail prices. According to Google Shopping, these vids sell between $18 and $90. An average CPC of $5.18, even at the high end of margin, is an alarming cost.

It’s also interesting to note Lowe’s and Home Depot spend more on paid search per year than Amazon and eBay, with smaller catalogs. Without making assumptions about campaign efficiency, hypothetically speaking, it’s possible to advertise on more keywords and drive more traffic at lower campaign spend than your competition if you run a tighter ship.

Click infographic to enlarge

So how do you run a tighter PPC ship? Here are 5 things to keep in mind.

1. Know your limit, bid within it.

Your bidding strategy requires an understanding of what you can afford to pay per click (max CPC). Very simply, if your profit margin on a Zumba Dance DVD is $20, and you can achieve a 3% conversion rate through paid search, your maxiumum CPC is $20*0.03 or $0.60. Anything higher than this and you are hemorrhaging money.

However, you often need to bid even lower than your max CPC to cover the overhead of running your paid search campaign. For this you want to estimate a target ROI percentage. This calculator can help you determine your max CPC with this in mind.

Bidding strategies are complex and beyond the scope of this article, but the key is to ensure you are not bidding based on Google’s Traffic Estimator or first page bid estimates alone.

2. Always be negative.

Keyword match types have their trade-offs. Exact match is great for control, but limits your long-tail opportunity. If you go broad, you may pull in a lot of seaweed with your catch. Negative keyword research is essential when using broad match types to prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant keyword matches.

For example, a text-to-speech product bidding on “French speaking software” may be triggered for the keyword “learn to speak French.” Adding “learn” to a list of negative keywords can prevent unnecessary impressions (which dilute click through rate) and irrelevant clicks.

Negative keyword research is an ongoing practice. You can discover negative keywords with the Google Keyword Tool, Google Suggest, Google Search (visit pages returned in search results for the keyword) and my personal favorite, the Search Query Performance Report.

3. Be structured.

Certain keywords deserve their own Ad Groups, negative keywords, ad text and landing pages. This allows you to optimize messaging for better click through. For example, “Zumba DVD box set” could be separated from the general “Zumba DVD” group, and “box set” added as a negative keyword to the general “Zumba DVD” group. In addition to higher click through, the more focused landing page will likely boost your Quality Score as well. Both can reduce what you pay per click.

4. Always be testing.

Testing landing pages to improve conversion helps raise the ceiling on your max CPCs.

5. Consider search retargeting

In very competitive and expensive search categories, one little-known way to work get in front of eyeballs without paying astronomical CPCs is to use search retargeting with a service like Chango, Retargeter, Magnetic or Simpli.fi. Unlike site retargeting which follows visitors who have abandoned your site, search retargeting can display your ad around the web to visitors that have not seen your site yet.

For example, let’s say someone searches for “video conferencing software.” She does not see your ad (you do not need to use Adwords to use search retargeting), rather she clicks an organic listing which is in the data pool used by the retargeting network. A cookie is placed on her machine including the search referral keyword. Later in the week, she checks the forecast on the Weather Network, and your ad appears. The CPM or CPC through the retargeting network could be much lower than the $35 per click charged in Google.

Paid search is an important marketing activity but it’s not the only way to drive traffic. Know what you can afford to spend, keep optimizing your campaign and landing pages to improve efficiency, and look for other opportunities when costs per click exceed what is reasonable for your business.

The search giant disclosed its latest algorithm update includes page layout as a ranking factor, with a focus on how much above-the-fold real estate is dedicated to visible content vs. advertising or other distracting, useless shiny things (like splash pages).

Google states that customer feedback influenced this change, as it’s no surprise that sites with buried content make for a crummy user experience, as do pages that load slowly — another user-experience related ranking factor.

Design for Users – No, Seriously.

Google is open about its consideration of page load speed, and now page layout — but read between the lines, and you understand that it’s bounce rate that matters. And I mean bounce rate in the context of users pogo-sticking back and forth between search results (web pages) and SERPs (search engine result pages). This behavior is a strong indicator of which pages are truly relevant to a given keyword phrase, and which fail to deliver.

For example, if your page’s content and incoming links suggest high relevance for the search query “learn to speak french,” but you consistently have a high bounce rate and very short average time on page before users return to search to try other results, Google’s simply not going to want to keep ranking you highly. Whether the reason for your high bounce rate is too much non-content above the fold, painfully slow page loads, cluttered and confusing design or something else.

So, BRO (Bounce Rate Optimization — come on, you like this acronym) should be a priority, not just for hanging on to the visitors that arrive on your site, but to help keep those visitors comin’ through search engines.

How to Improve Bounce Rates

• Page load speed optimization
• User testing
• A/B and Multivariate testing

In that order.

Why?

Improving page load speed is low-hanging fruit. It can be performed without user involvement, and takes care of one of the biggest usability issues right off the bat.

User testing should be next, not that it’s any quicker or easier than quantitative methods like A/B and multivariate testing, but the insights you get from real people can help you make better testing decisions. There’s no point testing a whack of site elements that never were problematic for users in the first place.

Finally, A/B and multivariate testing is the process that helps you quantify the impact of changes against the status quo, rather than just making changes and hoping for the best. Use your web analytics to determine which pages to optimize first. Remember to segment traffic source to Google, and hone in on bounce rate by keyword. Look for pages that get high amounts of traffic, with higher than average bounce rate.

Designing for users is designing for search engines. Expect more algorithmic updates in the coming months that favor pages that keep users on-site.

The new features were no secret, but we can now see them in action from 60 partner applications involved in the Open Graph Beta including Netflix, Hulu, Zynga, Spotify, Washington Post and Kobo.

So what’s the big deal?

2 New Features for Facebook Open Graph

Open Graph applications use elements of the development platform to provide ‘frictionless sharing’ to Facebookers’ Timelines and Tickers, which will also appear in friends’ News Feeds.

While Open Graph apps like the Washington Post have enabled social sharing for some time now, there are 2 major changes:

Gestures

Apps can use their own verbs (Gestures). In addition to ‘Like’ ‘Share’ and ‘Recommend,’ you can ‘Want,’ ‘Heart,’ ‘Listen,’ ‘Purchase’ — or pretty much any other verb within Facebook’s guidelines (of being simple, genuine and non-abusive). For example, Netflix could say ‘Colby just added Limitless to his queue.’

Frictionless Sharing

Frictionless Sharing is a warm and fuzzy term for auto-publishing. The new feature makes sharing the Gesture the default. Users permit the app to share once, rather than go through the ‘friction’ of approving every single action for publishing.

Email and RSS subscribers: can’t see video? View this post on Get Elastic

What this means for Facebook users

If you hate the ticker and news feed now, you’re really going to hate it once it’s spammed with every single micro-activity your social network performs online.

You’ll also need to be careful about which apps you enable to auto-publish for you. Think about what you might not care to share, or what might not be an expression of yourself. For example, if you sample songs on Pandora, it doesn’t mean you like or recommend them. If you rent movies for your kids to watch, it doesn’t mean you are watching them.

What this means for Ecommerce

For brands, this certainly presents an opportunity to pump your word of mouth marketing full of steroids, particularly if your ecommerce business sells digital content such as books, news articles, music, movies and TV shows. Such products are inherently shareable — people have been discussing what they’ve watched and listened to read offline for years.

Physical goods retailers can leverage social and shopping apps that are already available, like Pinterest, Payvment or online gift card marketplace GiftRocket.

Commercial brands that successfully build relevant, experience-based apps like the Nike+ Running Monitor should get a lot of mileage out of these new features — no pun intended.

If you plan to develop or simply tweak your existing Facebook Application to include Gestures, check out the Open Graph Checklist. Facebook apps depend on approvals like the Apple App Store, and your Gestures must be in line with Facebooks requirements.

Google now offers a “personal results” option for logged-in Google Account users that incorporates content shared by connections within Google+ and Gmail contacts (pretty much anyone in your email history with a Gmail address).

For example, a search for ‘handbag’ shows me 10 personal results, one being Zappos, which I have added to my Google+ Circles.

Clicking the link shows me my contacts’ shared content.

Smart Zappos uses Google+ to share photos as well as informative articles that stand out in these kind of results. Zappos needs not to be in one’s Circle to appear, if a Google+ friend or Gmail contact has shared Zappos’ posting, it will also show up.

How SPYW Transforms Word-of-Mouth Marketing

While social sharing through Twitter and Facebook is good (and cheap) word-of-mouth for brands, Tweets and Likes have a very short half-life. The more Facebook friends you have, the quicker your Ticker updates. News Feeds are condensed to show only the most “relevant” stories, thanks to EdgeRank. Even if shares are noticed, if they are not relevant at that given time, they get lost in the haystack of updates.

Search Plus Your World obliterates the half life, hanging on to and indexing these shares and resurrecting them when they are relevant to a user. Who cares what Jessie, Joey and Johnny think about TurboTax until you’re in the market for tax software?

If Google could work a deal with other social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, it would really provide value to users. (Hey, it could happen!) But for now, if you want to show up in personal results, you’ve gotta drink the Googleaid.

How Search Plus Your World Affects Ecommerce

It’s obvious participating in Google+ helps your visibility in personal results. But it’s also likely that Google is or will factor social shares as a trust signal, and thus a ranking factor. Spammy sites don’t tend to get organic shares, so it’s one way to spot chaff among wheat. Because Google has full visibility into Google+, it’s easy to spot the fake “sock puppet” accounts — it’s tougher to game the system.

Social link building is becoming as important as old school link building. If you think you don’t need to invest in Google+ until it hits critical mass, or until you can demonstrate a “measurable ROI” from your efforts, competitors who do grok the Plus could leave you in their dust in traditional search rankings, not just personal results.

What You Should Do About Google+

1. Put the Google+ chicklet on all your site pages
2. Treat the chicklet like a call to action (don’t bury it, consider testing placement for best engagement, measure clicks on the button as a micro-conversion metric, etc.)
3. Appoint someone in your organization or an outsourced specialist to own your Google+ marketing effort (this can be part of a larger social media role)
4. Share images and video content regularly, tag appropriately with keywords (multimedia content stands out in search and may be weighted higher, also more likely to be shared by others)
5. Optimize your shares like you would for Twitter or the Facebook Newsfeed
6. Encourage Facebook and Twitter subscribers to also follow you on Google+
7. Segment your email subscriber list and target Gmail accounts with a special request to add you their Circles (along with the benefits of doing so)
8. Use Google+ as a microblog to give product usage tips, feature customer reviews, announce new products and sales events, etc.
9. Engage in “social listening” within Google+, find out who’s talking about you and engage with them. Activity across the network may give your social profile a bit more clout with Google when personalizing results, similar to EdgeRank’s Affinity Score.

While Twitter and Facebook are still important networks to nurture, Google+ deserves serious attention. If you want to be found in social search, now is the best time to start seeding the search engine with your content.