Answer
Sep 30, 2024 - 02:52 PM
Answerbase's team has always been focused on ensuring that any engagement and content creation has a measurable return, and that is what we'll continue to focus on. The great thing about technology is that you're able to track and measure results of digital content and engagement effectively, so we work to report back to you as best we can (and will continue to do so) in order to ensure that if you're doing your job that Answerbase is doing it's job in providing value back to you.
Let's clarify what each of our jobs are....
What is Answerbase's Job to Ecommerce Merchants?
When you spend time and money as a business, you need to produce an ROI on whatever you spend. Answerbase is committed to ensure that you're able to see the value as your engagement and content grows. These are the main things that you should be able to see through your Q&A engagement.
Answerbase clearly reports these results to our merchants every month in a monthly "Snapshot Report which reports back on content engagement, creation, Google traffic, and conversion assists. See an overview of this report here:
Our goal at Answerbase is that you can view your monthly snapshot reports and clearly see the value. There are other value propositions that customers experience through using Answerbase including email marketing collection, increased order value, increased customer LTV, etc.....and we'll continue to work towards enhancing these reports so you can clearly make the value connection and have meaningful KPI's you can report to your upper management.
We also want to get as granular as possible, so you're also able to see details around what's behind these numbers. For example, we have a specific "Conversions" report as you can see a sample here:
So we'll report back on the time line between the Q&A engagement and the sale, the percentage of your published Q&A's that have conversion attribution, and many more details that are valuable fro you to know about. We'll highlight a few of these items based on the above example and communicate what's notable about them.
What is Your Job as an Answerbase Customer?
These are items that you're likely already doing, we'll just make it easier and more efficient to manage these things....in a way that gives you a measurable ROI over time. Here's what we need you to do:
These are items you are probably managing anyway, Answerbase just makes it easier and more efficient....but there's no way around having your team be involved to provide this value. In fact, Answerbase will start sending you notifications if you're not doing something we think you should do in order for us to do our job. Let's talk more about what we do for you.
Let us know if there are any other questions and we'll make sure you're taken care of.
Let's clarify what each of our jobs are....
What is Answerbase's Job to Ecommerce Merchants?
When you spend time and money as a business, you need to produce an ROI on whatever you spend. Answerbase is committed to ensure that you're able to see the value as your engagement and content grows. These are the main things that you should be able to see through your Q&A engagement.
- Increased Conversion Rate: On average we see a 7.5% conversion rate for any customers that touch our capabilities on ecommerce sites, which is a notable conversion lift for most of our customers given that the typical ecommerce conversion rate ranges between 2-3%, Answerbase offers a substantial lift in conversions for the average ecommerce store. We actually see that 21% of Q&A pairs over time have attributable conversion, as we're able to resurface those through auto-suggest and then can surface those Q&A's in organic searches in the future (read more on that below).
- Increased Organic Traffic: Google's "Helpful Content Update" evolved into the "Helpful Content System" which was incorporated into its Core Ranking Systems in March 2024, making the discovery and creation of "people-first content" that demonstrates E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) critical for SEO moving forward. Answerbase customers have thrived through all of these updates as we ensure that customer questions related to your products that have regular search volume on Google are indexed and available to satisfy that search intent. Before the March 2024 update we were responsible for 9% of our customer's organic traffic on average, given the lift we've seen after the 2024 core updates (most notably with the August 2024 update)....if these levels sustain, we would expect that if your answering questions well with real product expertise the Q&A will be somewhere between 20-50% of your organic traffic over time. We're say the lower end of that just to be conservative, but the data as of September 2024 seems like it would be on the higher end of that spectrum.
- Increased Productivity via AI-Enhanced SEO Workflows: The agency partners we work with estimate that without Answerbase, they would spend a minimum of 30-60 minutes per page. Answerbase uses AI in accordance with Google's Guidelines (I'll speak to this more below in the section about Google's changes) and our AI-Enhanced tools significantly speed up the production and publication of high-quality, people-first helpful content. We have customers optimizing their most valuable product and category pages in less than 5 minutes per page. That's between a 6-12x increase in productivity.
Answerbase clearly reports these results to our merchants every month in a monthly "Snapshot Report which reports back on content engagement, creation, Google traffic, and conversion assists. See an overview of this report here:
Our goal at Answerbase is that you can view your monthly snapshot reports and clearly see the value. There are other value propositions that customers experience through using Answerbase including email marketing collection, increased order value, increased customer LTV, etc.....and we'll continue to work towards enhancing these reports so you can clearly make the value connection and have meaningful KPI's you can report to your upper management.
We also want to get as granular as possible, so you're also able to see details around what's behind these numbers. For example, we have a specific "Conversions" report as you can see a sample here:
So we'll report back on the time line between the Q&A engagement and the sale, the percentage of your published Q&A's that have conversion attribution, and many more details that are valuable fro you to know about. We'll highlight a few of these items based on the above example and communicate what's notable about them.
- Your Answers Drive Most Value Effectively Distributed and Leveraged on Your Site: Most merchants are answering questions via email, chat, social and other channels where they're answering for one customer and then that knowledge gets lost. See in the report the value difference between the "Posted a new question and received an answer" and "Engagements with public Q&A content". Effectively leveraged knowledge continues to drive value for you, well beyond the first person who asked...as you service the planet through your site and on search engines. Without this, your knowledge is being lost and underleveraged.
- Published Content Actually Driving Conversions: Most merchants we talk to talk about the articles and blog posts they create "for SEO"....but when we ask them what percentage of their content has conversion attribution...most of the time you hear crickets. It's because most of the time their content that they're spending money and time to create, has ZERO conversion attribution. See how the above customer, 45% of their published Q&A has conversion attribution.
- Transparency & Communication: We show the timeline between the engagement and purchase, and even track down to the individual Q&A pair on what is driving conversion...and even highlight the orders they "had a hand in" as far as conversion. We regularly have conversations with our customers related to not only the sales we assist in, but also their margins and "marketing touches"....so we can have an honest discussion about the value that Answerbase is bringing and make sure they're getting their money's worth.
What is Your Job as an Answerbase Customer?
These are items that you're likely already doing, we'll just make it easier and more efficient to manage these things....in a way that gives you a measurable ROI over time. Here's what we need you to do:
- Answer New Customer Questions: Answerbase will be be able to leverage your existing content to answer questions automatically when possible, but there will always be a percentage of questions that your customers are asking that your team and company has not yet addressed on your site. Answerbase needs our customers to have knowledge and expertise around the products that they offer and willing to service their customers through answering questions, if you're unwilling to invest the time in servicing your customers well through sharing the knowledge of your organization and staff....we're probably not a good fit. The expertise that is within the brains of your team is unique value that your company brings to the world....and while Answerbase will facilitate how to efficiently share and distribute that knowledge to give you a measurable ROI.
- Review & Optimize Your "People First" Content for SEO: Answerbase's workflows enable ecommerce customers to facilitate product page SEO and product category page SEO up to 12x faster than without Answerbase.....but any content that is optimized and proposed needs to be reviewed and approved as being helpful for the visitor of the page it's associated with. Answerbase naturally facilitate the recognition and generation of "People First Content" that Google is looking for and that content will perform and grow traffic on it's own over time, but you'll get the best results if you're working with our "AI-Enabled Helpful Content Recommendations" where we can focus on your highest converting products, categories and pages....and apply SEO consistent with how Google says to apply SEO. This enables your longer-tail Q&A content to be appropriately optimized to provide lift for the valuable short-tail search queries related to your products.
These are items you are probably managing anyway, Answerbase just makes it easier and more efficient....but there's no way around having your team be involved to provide this value. In fact, Answerbase will start sending you notifications if you're not doing something we think you should do in order for us to do our job. Let's talk more about what we do for you.
Let us know if there are any other questions and we'll make sure you're taken care of.
