The Webinar Blog

GoToWebinar Puts Source Tracking In Beta

I just received an email announcing beta availability of source tracking in Citrix (soon to be GetGo) GoToWebinar.

If you aren't familiar with the concept, it is a technique that marketers use to analyze the effectiveness of different promotional channels. Let's say you promote your upcoming webinar on your website, on a partner's website, in your blog, and in a newsletter. You would like to know which sources attract a lot of people and are worth your time and investment, and which sources don't perform well, so you can ignore them in the future or try alternative approaches.

Instead of having one registration page link that you use everywhere, the idea is to have unique URLs that lead people to the same functional registration. Registrants all see the same thing, but you get reports showing the registration count from each URL they clicked on.

GoToWebinar lets you set up the sources during your webinar scheduling step. You give each source an arbitrary text name (which can include spaces).

The system then generates a URL associated with each source.

I tested it with 12 sources to see if there was a practical limit. It doesn't look like it, which is nice. Actually, it turns out that if you are comfortable with URL parameters, you can skip the setup step in the scheduler entirely. The only difference between URLs is the addition of a parameter named SOURCE. So your registration URLs look like this:

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/111111111?source=Source+Name+One

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/111111111?source=Source+Name+Two

The plus sign is used as a placeholder for a space in the name. Whatever you type after the SOURCE= parameter gets included as data in a new SOURCE column in your registration and attendee reports.

One use for source tracking that marketers often overlook is A/B testing of two design alternatives through the same channel. Let's say you use pay-per-click sponsored ads on a search engine. Even though all the registrations are coming through your search ads, you can assign each ad a different source parameter to see which one gives better results. Similarly, you could try two different versions of a click-through banner ad on your website, maybe only varying something like the background color or the button style. If your website shows both versions equally, you can track which version gives you more registrants.

This is welcome functionality, and to be honest, Citrix is playing catch up on the capability. It's pretty common now. I wrote about it on this blog nine years ago. One thing to remember is that Citrix only tracks completed registrations. There is no way to compare page views to completed registrations in order to analyze abandonment rates. That would be a nice next step once this version of the tracking is stabilized and placed in full production.

During the beta period, source tracking is available to all GoToWebinar users. Once the beta ends, the feature will be included in Pro and Plus plans (500 and 2000 participant capacities), but not in the Starter (100 participant) plan.

 

Technorati Tags: Citrix,GoToWebinar,lead tracking,source tracking,lead source tracking,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting

Adobe Connect Weighs In On HTML5

I just read a white paper Adobe released in June (I'm only two months late!) that talks about the philosophy and approach behind a move from Flash reliance to HTML5, JavaScript, and WebRTC in support of Adobe Connect web conferencing.

This is interesting reading, as it attempts to clarify a difficult subject in just four pages. If this is your first foray into the subject, it can be an uphill struggle to understand all the acronyms and caveats about compatibility. As end users, we just want "something that works" - but as with the fabled duck gliding smoothly across the surface of the lake, we don't really care to see the feet paddling madly out of sight. And when it comes to web standards for communications and collaboration, there are a LOT of paddling feet!

I will not try to re-summarize Adobe's summary of the situation, but it's worth highlighting a few of their more significant statements:

• Even though an audio standard for HTML5 was selected in 2012, it has still not been fully adopted across some of the biggest web browsers. Video still doesn't have a formal approved standard, partly because of patent contention. MP3 for audio and MP4 for video are the most widely used and most likely to be universal standards once everything settles down.
• HTML5 has no internal standards for local capture of video from a webcam, local capture of audio from a microphone, or local capture of screen sharing. WebRTC is the most likely add-on standard to handle these web conferencing needs.
• WebRTC is currently designed to meet the needs of one-to-one audio, video, and screen sharing communications between two computers. Its standards do not account for communications and collaboration between multiple participants in a single session, as we would see with webinars, webcasts, and web conferences.
• Even the WebRTC standards that do exist are supported to varying degrees in different web browsers. Here is the latest "scorecard" I grabbed from www.iswebrtcreadyyet.com

So with all due respect to the late Steve Jobs and his famous 2010 open letter saying "Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content" - there is still work needed to get us to an alternative common technology platform for communications and collaboration that can be used across vendors, browsers, and operating systems. Apple could certainly help push things along by getting rid of some of those red bars in the "Safari" column (and I am now seeing news stories indicating that the Safari team is indeed starting to build in WebRTC support).

One note of optimism in all this is the fact that the very popular iSpring converter for PowerPoint offers conversion to HTML5. The technology is quietly OEM'd and built into several web conferencing products that show PowerPoint slides as Flash video elements in a browser. Having a similar HTML5 compliant content stream will help those vendors make the jump - at least on the video display side of things.

 

Technorati Tags: Adobe Connect,HTML5,WebRTC,web collaboration,iSpring,Adobe Flash,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web meetings

TalkPoint Improves Interaction With Groups In A Room

Tomorrow I'm giving a training session via web conference to a group of 16 people gathered in a room. They'll watch me on a projected screen and listen through a conference phone. I know I'll have to work extra hard to keep them actively engaged and interacting with me and with the content.

The process would be easier if I had known about a feature in TalkPoint Convey that was introduced this summer. Called "Meeting Room View," it allows participants to join a web conference without audio or video broadcast elements. They simply retain the ability to type questions and answer interactive polls. You can see a short video explanation of the feature below (or if the clip doesn't play in your feed reader, you can visit https://youtu.be/bAM6WKFDeMA).

TalkPoint Meeting Room View

The implementation is simplicity itself. Participants don't need a separate "limited access" link… Everyone uses the same web conference link and chooses at login time whether to view and hear the full content stream or just have interaction controls handy. It doesn't require a separate app download (all interactions are handled through HTML5 and JavaScript inside a web browser). People in the room are less likely to create problems with audio feedback and create less bandwidth-suck on the room's wifi connection. Participant screens are less cluttered, leading to an easier ability to interact with the presenter. And unlike third-party smartphone polling solutions, in-room votes and questions are part of the main conference data, combined seamlessly with responses from other users at individual computers in other locations. There is no need for the host to switch between multiple applications to see participant contributions.

I love this idea and I love the way TalkPoint implemented it. As far as I know, it's a unique approach. But I'll bet other vendors start adding it to their products now that they've been introduced to the concept. It's just too easy an enhancement to make.

TalkPoint was purchased by PGi two years ago, but it still operates as a self-contained business operation. The basic Convey web conferencing application is offered in the usual tiered-capacity levels (100, 300, 500, 1000, 3000, or more). Optional purpose-specific add-on packages allow customers to create marketing portals, impose additional layers of security for web conferences, run prerecorded content as live webinars, run multicasting/unicasting behind a corporate firewall, or conduct training and hybrid (local/remote) meetings. The Meeting Room View feature is included in the "Continuing Education/Hybrid Meeting" package. I hope TalkPoint expands availability across all their licensing packages, as I see it offering value for many different web conference applications.

 

Technorati Tags: TalkPoint,Convey,Meeting Room View,webinar,webcast,webcasting,web seminar,web conferencing,web conference,online conference,online meeting

Using Webinars For Content Marketing

Is there a difference between a content marketing webinar and a lead generation webinar? I say there is. Wednesday, August 17, I will share best practices that can help you see better results from your content marketing webinars.

This is another in my free educational series sponsored by BigMarker web conferencing. I'll start my presentation at noon California time, 3pm New York time. We're scheduled for one hour, including time to answer your questions live on the air.

Register now by visiting https://www.bigmarker.com/webinar-success/Best-Practices-for-Content-Marketing-Webinars

See you Wednesday!

 

Technorati Tags: BigMarker,content marketing,marketing,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting,online seminar,web meetings

How To Submit A Bug Report

The knee-jerk assumption by any technical support department upon receiving a user reported bug is that the user did something wrong. In the majority of cases, they're right. But that's a problem for those other losers out there, not you! When you find a real honest-to-goodness problem, there are things you can do to help speed the problem resolution process along and make the tech support group take you a little more seriously.

Here is a basic template you should be ready to fill out when submitting a bug report. If you don't tell the vendor this information up front, they'll just have to come back and ask you anyway, so you might as well cover it in the initial write-up:

• Your operating system. Get specific, like "Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite)" or "Windows 7 Professional 64-bit."
• If you access the software from a browser, which browser you used. Get specific, like "Chrome 51.0.2704.106" (all browsers have an "About" command, often buried under Help, that lists the version in use).
• Which anti-virus software you have installed.
• Version of the vendor's software being used (try to find an About command with a version number).
• Brief summary of the problem symptom in 1-2 sentences. You need a shorthand way to describe the bug.
• Full description, including the operations you were doing when you noticed the problem.
• Is it repeatable/reproducible? Have you made the same bug reappear? Is it consistent or sporadic?
• Have you tried the same steps using a different browser or different computer? Have other users seen the same problem on their computers?
• Any situations where the problem doesn't appear, even though you would expect it to.

I realize that is more work than writing "The registration report didn't list all our users." But it's the way to get your issue resolved.

By the way… Your feedback to your web conferencing vendor is vital. Please go back and read this post from the archives on why your voice counts more than you think.

 

Technorati Tags: web conferencing,web conference,web meetings,online conference,webcast,webcasting,webinar,online collaboration,web collaboration