Conversion Conference Blog

By Linda Bustos

Director of Ecommerce Research, Elastic Path Software

 

This post is the second in a 2-part series on getting started with remarketing (also known as retargeting). In my previous post I discussed how remarketing works. Today we examine ways to nail down your strategy before picking a remarketing tool and setting up your first campaign, along with ideas for what to retarget.

 

Why You Should Never Design in the Box

So you’re ready for remarketing, so why not dive right into Google Remarketing to walk through the steps of setting up your maiden campaign? Self-managed remarketing tools have step-by-step set-up processes, but without a mapped-out plan, some steps can stump you. The options you choose such as negative audiences and membership duration can’t be decided on the fly.

Planning scenarios in advance allows you to brainstorm, then hone in on the ideas that are most feasible or rewarding. Think about your creative – how you might want to A/B test it, and if you need ads to be dynamically populated (not all tools can do the fancy stuff).

Before launching a campaign, you need to populate your “audiences,” or groups of visitors that take certain actions on your site. Knowing how you want to target visitors (based on your conversion goals) is the first step in deciding which pages to “tag” with tracking pixels, and what to name them so you can build your member lists.

 

Determine Your Retargeting Goals

Your conversion goals don’t need to be completed sales – they could be blog subscriptions, white paper downloads, email or webinar sign ups, trial downloads or site memberships. Remarketing can also be used as a branding tactic to stay top-of-mind, in which case the conversion goal is a visit back to your site to see what’s new.

Select a few goals to build scenarios for. Your most important goal may not be feasible (e.g. if you don’t receive enough traffic to build an audience of 500 members within one week in order to launch a cart recovery campaign) so it’s good to have alternatives to try. You can also run several remarketing campaigns at the same time as long as they’re all using the same retargeting service.

 

Know Thy Customer

Don’t forget to use your web analytics to inform your strategy. What is your average days to purchase, or visits to purchase? (This can differ between product categories you may carry). Which areas of your site are most frequently visited (and can quickly fill an audience if you want to retarget specific products)? Which products have the highest margin and can absorb the additional expense of experimenting with remarketing? Do visitors from certain countries poorly convert that you can exclude from your campaign?

What other information do you have about your visitors’ behavior? Use any quantitative or qualitative data that may help you understand what motivates their conversion.

 

Be Exclusive

Like negative keywords in a paid search campaign, negative audiences are just as important as the “positive” ones. Think through what actions on your site might indicate a visitor should be excluded from a particular campaign. For instance, you don’t want to keep targeting visitors who have completed your conversion goal. Which page(s) should you tag with a “burn pixel” that removes these visitors from the pool?

Another example, if you have a membership site, a log in is a good indicator that you don’t need to follow this visitor around with pleas to join your community.

 

Create a Scenario

Your scenario is based on the trusty 5 Ws of journalism, but it helps to swap “Who” with “Why”

WHY – conversion goal

WHAT – user actions that show intent to this conversion goal

WHERE – pages which correspond with these actions

WHEN – how long you can realistically retarget users for this conversion goal before your ad becomes irrelevant

WHO – segment of visitors that perform the WHAT, minus anyone in a negative audience

 

Here are a couple examples in a sample scenario format:

 

SCENARIO A (General Campaign)

Objective: Keep brand top-of-mind for visitors who abandon the site and communicate our value proposition
Site pages (to tag): All
Audience (Positive List): General site visitors
Exclude (Negative List): Visitors who viewed Affiliates or Careers pages
Cookie duration: 365 days
Maximum exposures: 11
Creative: TBD, A/B test
Notes: (If any)

 

SCENARIO B (Flagship Product Campaign)

Objective: Retarget visitors who view our flagship product
Site pages: Amazing Product 1.0 product page, “amazing product 1.0” search results
Audience: Visitors to these pages
Exclude: Completed purchasers
Cookie duration: 14 days
Maximum exposures: 11
Creative: TBD
Notes: (If any)

 

Once you have a few scenarios and have settled on a tool that meets your requirements, you’re ready to get started tagging your pages, designing creative, building out your campaigns and launching your ads. Interested in learning more? Join me at Conversion Conference West 2012 for my session: Many Happy Returns: Remarketing Strategies for Converting Site Abandoners, where we’ll discuss the best and worst practices in this brave new world, along with plenty of creative strategies to get started in remarketing right away.

 

About the Author

 

Linda Bustos is the director of ecommerce research for Elastic Path Software and the author of the Get Elastic Ecommerce blog. As an ecommerce consultant, Linda has helped some of the world’s largest online retailers and technology brands improve their conversion rates and user experience. An online retailer herself, Linda moonlights as a jewelry designer for Robin Hood Couture, her line of handmade accessories.

Meet Linda in Person!

Linda will be presenting a session on “Many Happy Returns: Remarketing Strategies for Converting Site Abandoners” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Linda on Twitter @roxyyo and @getelastic to touch base and request for a discount code!

 

 

By Brian Massey

Conversion Scientist, Conversion Sciences, LLC

 

Whether you design mobile apps, make chimichangas or provide investment advisory services, your copy writing always has to start with the same two questions:

1. Why is my reader here? Why did he or she click on this website, open this email, download this white paper?
2. Now that my reader is here, how can I make the experience of being here so delightful that the reader will consider his quest fulfilled and seek no further (i.e. on someone else’s website)?

You start with those two questions in your mind and you hold them there the whole time you’re creating copy.  You start every paragraph and edit every version with those two questions floating in the front of your brain.

That seems pretty simple, right? It’s a little more complicated than that—which explains why really great content stands out in all the millions of bytes of content out there.

Sometimes you’re in a situation where instead of one inspired, customer focused copy writer, you have a committee. In the worst scenario, you have a committee in a culture where kissing up is expected and the top level kissers have to kiss up to really old institutional practices. These august bodies do not write quick, responsive copy. They write heavy copy full of venerated jargon. The last time they read anything about writing for the web, they learned about Search Engine Optimization and their content is so full of keywords it looks like it was assaulted by an automatic weapon that shoots the same five words, over and over.

It is very difficult to get this kind of group to pay any attention to the two questions that must be asked repeatedly of every piece of copy.  But you must try.

Show them evidence by experts like Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute or Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, authors of Call to Action about the scientific work supporting the power of conversion writing. Focus on the benefits to the company. This is your only hope.

First you must convince them to answer the first question: “Why is my reader here?” and then you must make an even more difficult case. You must get them to answer the question “How can I make my reader’s experience delightful?”

The tricky part about this is that the only way to make your content experience a delightful conversion experience is to write in Human. To write the way people think. Those heavy, jargony, SEO-laden sentences are not how people think or speak. Words like “leverage your capabilities” and “utilize your CMS to maximize benefits” or “experience of a lifetime.” These are not things normal people say. These are words used almost exclusively in content that’s trying to make you do something you may not want to do. As such, your brain rejects these words. These words are like oil to water. They slide over the brain and out the ears with no impact.

A delightful experience connects with people on an emotional level. Not sappy, but human.

So here’s the thing. Next time you’re creating a piece of copy for your business, pretend you’re telling some people about in conversation and that you’re doing it on one of those days you have a lot of passion about what you do.

Write what you’d say. Nuke any unnecessary jargon, any overused ad words or anything that would make you shut down if it was in someone else’s copy.

What you’ll wind up with is a piece of copy much more likely to hook people who click on your content and turn readers into buyers.

 

About the Author

Brian Massey is the Conversion Scientist at Conversion Sciences and he has the lab coat to prove it. His rare combination of interests, experience and neuroses was developed over almost 20 years as a computer programmer, entrepreneur, corporate marketer, national speaker and writer. Conversion Sciences was founded to fill the Web with helpful, engaging and entertaining online Web sites that convert visitors into leads and sales. The company has helped dozens of businesses transform their sites through a steady diet of visitor profiling, purposeful content, analytics and testing. “There are places on the Web that make you feel like they were built just for you,” he says. “Is yours one of these? It could be.

See Brian Live!

Brian will be talking more about copy and its role in persuasion and conversion at the Conversion Conference 2012 on March 5^th and 6^th in San Francisco, California. Join him in his session on “Creating Killer Conversion Copy: Emails, Landing Pages, PPC Ads and More.” See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Brian on Twitter to say hello and request for a discount code!

 

By Jeff Eckman

CEO, Big Giant Conversions

 

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I just don’t know which half.” —John Wanamaker, 1838 to 1922*

 

Thanks to modern marketing technology and the commercialization of the internet, we now have the tools to know which half of John Wanamaker’s advertising budget was wasted. But the direct marketer has always held an advantage over the traditional brand marketer. Brand advertisers still rely on loose correlations to prove efficacy. The direct marketer (that is, most anyone who is involved in conversion optimization) has the rock-solid power of causality, and the ability to use attribution, to continuously optimize results. This often gets forgotten in all the commotion over analytics, digital media, marketing automation, which landing page color is better, etc. So, it’s time to go back to the basics, and remind ourselves that attribution is the mother of conversion.

But first, reflect for a moment: in this day and age, are there any excuses not to not take full advantage of the attribution potential that technology provides? Our marketing “founding fathers” had to go to extensive lengths to attribute a lead or sale to a specific marketing message—it would be doing them a disservice to not take full advantage of the resources available to the modern day marketer!

Before landing page optimization, before conversion optimization or before concerns about statistical significance, we must architect good, clean systems for attribution which will inform all downstream efforts. Modern technology allows for this, but only if we put systems in place to ensure it is accurate and meaningful. There are myriad systems out there for gathering the raw data and establishing genuinely causal “A leads to B leads to C” relationships. The key is implementing relevant and simple tracking mechanisms, then letting our natural human gifts of observation and creativity guide us toward optimized performance.
 

Attribution Types

The path to successful attribution can start by identifying different types.

• Consider classifying attribution into two categories: macro (e.g. click to sale) and micro (e.g. completed form to sales consultation).
• Then, identify which of these is most important in optimizing results. Attributing specific media buys should be considered especially critical, given the high cost of media relative to other downstream processes.
• Macro attribution is probably important to every one, but don’t ignore the little things—they can really help pick out problem spots in the funnel.
• Not all data is important data. Identifying focus points, looking for relevant attribution, helps in wading through large volumes of data, to ultimately focus on what really matters in driving results.

 

 

Back to basics: Why bother with attribution in the first place?

• If, for example, we are discreetly tracking results to each of several ads we have in market, proper attribution allows us to know which ad is generating the most volume, the best end results, etc. That specific advertisement can then have more budget devoted to it, leading toward a more optimized state.
• Attribution makes content matching possible in the creative. Let’s say in one ad, there was a promotional offer for a free widget. By attributing the potential lead to that specific ad, it allows all of the next steps to be relevant. Now, any messaging further downstream can reference the promotional offer, personalizing the engagement.
• Attribution generates clear, relevant data. Attribution allows a marketer to know which ad combinations are generating positive results further down the funnel.

 

Attribution Informs Testing

In the world of online testing and optimization, a page or experience is never declared the winner for long. The process continues in a cyclical fashion with results from test 1 helping to set the stage for test 2, and so on. Without good attribution, you may only have half a test, at best. Here are some questions that can only be answered with good attribution, and are critical to a truly meaningful test:

• While you may know which test won, what was the source of traffic that drove to the test?
• Did visitors come from online or offline?  Did callers get our number from the magazine ad or TV? Where were the form fills from?
• Which ads or campaigns are performing well and thus warrant a bigger spend and which are performing poorly and need to be dialed down?

 

Better Market Intelligence

With proper attribution in place, you can look for strengths and weaknesses across different channels, market segments, offers, time of day, creative/messaging and all types of demographics. Beyond the boost this can provide to your conversion efforts, think about what you can learn about your new customers as well as non-converters—your potential customers who decided not to commit:

• Which ads are connecting better?
• Is there a certain ad generating a lot of response at the top of your marketing funnel but failing to deliver conversions?
• What is the perfect combo of audience to ad to experience that generates the best results?

 

Conversion optimization, when done right, is a constantly evolving, virtuous cycle of growth, which attribution enables. At the end of the day, if we have succeeded in developing a causal relationship between the initial entry point from a marketing message, and the eventual conversion (or lack thereof), we can sleep well knowing which half of our advertising spend has been wasted. We can then rise the next day and shift our spending to the better-performing half. And, for now, let’s leave correlated relationships to the brand marketers, until they invite us to visit them on Madison Avenue.

 

* http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Wanamaker__John.html quote 100% attributed to John Wanamaker. just sayin.

 

 

About the Author

Jeff Eckman is the CEO of BigGiantConversions, a marketing startup that is boosting returns and consumer engagement from traditional and online marketing and advertising. Mr. Eckman has led conversion engagements with national and regional brands including California Closets, Athenahealth, Inc., and Children’s Hospital Boston, and the firm routinely partners with complementary marketing innovators including Digitas and ion interactive.

Mr. Eckman earned his BS in Operations Technology at Northeastern University, and holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. For over 14 years, he has been the drummer for Boston’s “Pressure Cooker,” an original reggae act. Jeff is also actively involved in regional business and community organizations.

See Jeff Live!

Jeff and Ginny Snook Scott from California Closets will be presenting a session on “How California Closets Boosted Revenues with Segmentation, Analaytics and Human Behavior” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Jeff on Twitter to say hello and request for a discount code!

 

By Robert Brady

Director of PPC Conversion, Trafficado

 

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is popular with internet marketers because you can track everything. You know exactly what search queries are triggering your ads, you know how much each click costs, you know which ad gets the highest click-through rate (CTR) and you know which clicks turn into actual conversions. This transparency and accountability is how I sell PPC to my clients and it’s how I demonstrate the value of ongoing efforts. But even if you have a great ROI, is there more you could learn from your PPC?

 

Learn from Clicks

You’re probably already testing at least two different ads in each ad group and rotating out the underperforming ad(s) on a regular basis. That’s great. It helps improve your CTR, your Quality Score (QS) improves, your account history is strengthening, your cost-per-click (CPC) goes down or your avg. position improves. That’s a lot of benefits, but what is it telling you about your customers? Take the following example:

First, you may be tempted to pause Ad #2 because it has lower CTR. However, we see that Ad #2 has a much higher CR, which led to a lower cost/conversion. Therefore, you would likely pause Ad #1 to get less expensive conversions. In addition to the performance boost, what else can you learn from this? Here are some additional learnings.

• The inquisitive call to action “How affordable?” gets better CTR, but it appeals most to price shoppers who don’t convert.
• The positive imagery of Ad #2, “Make your yard beautiful…” primes the user to convert.
• Mentioning Minnesota didn’t help CTR like I expected, but the “localness” may be increasing conversion.

 

Turn Learning Into Action

The 3 learnings above are great, but how can you act on that insight? Here are follow-up tests to help you learn even more about your customers:

• You like the higher CTR with the “How affordable?” copy, so test a landing page that offers 3 quotes from local providers. By doing the legwork for price shoppers you can capture customers earlier in the buying cycle.
• Positive mental imagery works with the ad copy, so extend it into the landing page copy. Test using more pictures of beautiful lawns. Maybe customers need an idea of what their lawn could be with a little help.
• Take the “localness” to the next level. Target campaigns to cities like Minneapolis or St. Paul. Maybe even suburbs like Ramsey, Anoka and Brooklyn Park. Make sure the landing page supports it too.

 

Get Started

Your PPC is doing great. CTR is good, conversion rates are healthy and ROI is positive. But you still have the chance to get even more out of your PPC as you look at your results and analyze what the data tells you about your customers. As you learn more about your customers you’ll be able to produce even better results. But that’s enough reading, get to it!

 

About the Author

 

Robert is a Google AdWords Certified Partner, Microsoft adExcellence member and is certified with Marketing Experiments for Online Testing and Landing Page Optimization. He has worked with a variety of different companies ranging from a small grass-fed beef grower in Idaho to a large B2B data storage provider.

He currently resides in Provo, Utah and can often be found skiing the greatest snow on earth, mountain biking through the Wasatch mountains or playing ultimate Frisbee at the park on a Saturday morning.

See Robert Live!

Robert will be presenting a session on “End to End PPC Conversion Optimization – From User Intent through Leaky Funnel Forensics” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Robert on Twitter to say hello to him and request for a discount code!

 

By Eric J. Hansen

Founder and CEO, SiteSpect

 

You already know that running multivariate tests can help you improve the usability and effectiveness of your site, but where do you start? Typically you want to examine your web analytics framework and truly understand the most important metrics, known as key performance indicators (KPIs), behind your business goals. Those KPIs, in turn, can be correlated to site factors that can be tested. This blog post will look at how to turn metrics into testable factors, A/B versus multivariate testing, and 5 key errors to avoid when getting started.

 

Starting at the beginning

If you don’t already use a web analytics framework for your website, it’s high time you start. This framework will make your goals and their measurement explicit and keep you focused on what’s important. Almost every website wants to achieve one or more RACR goals; that is, Reach, Acquisition, Conversion, and/or Retention. If you are focused on more than one of these goals for your business, you’ll want to set up a different framework for each of them, as you’ll be focusing on different metrics and therefore different factors to test.

 

Framing the big picture

 Let’s look at a very simple web analytics framework for Conversion using a hypothetical online retailer as an example:

 

Business objective	Website goals	KPIs	Target	Metrics	Dimensions	Segments
Sell goods	Increase online revenue	Average order value	$25.00 per order	# of sales per day	Geography	US vs. Europe

 

With this framework, we now have enough information to figure out which site elements, or factors, to test in order to understand which of them influences visitor behavior. Obviously, you will want track those pages and areas of the site that users click on in the conversion funnel, such as the “Buy Now” button and resulting “Thank You” pages.

Here are some of the things you could test and measure in support of an e-commerce website:

• What elements of the website led to the most “Add to Cart” clicks, followed by successful order completion pages (e.g. “Thank you for your order”)?
• Which combination of product information such as graphics, descriptions, layout, and color increased average order value?
• What combination of factors relating to site search most successfully brought users to pages from which they ultimately purchased products?
• Consider testing coupons and promotions.
• Test offers such as free shipping or financing.
• What about credibility factors, such as logos denoting secure credit card processing?
• Does the availability, placement, or look and feel of customer reviews and testimonials make a difference on purchase decisions?

Those are just a few things to think about. You’ll want to start with the factor(s) you think is most important to your KPI(s) and decide what experimental design is best. With A/B testing, you test one factor, such as a call-to-action button or a hero shot, against one or more variations to see which is most persuasive. While A/B testing allows you to test just one factor at a time, multivariate testing enables you to test many changes simultaneously. Evaluating the impact of combinations of factors and variations often reveals significant interaction effects that can have a dramatic impact on your conversion goals.

 

Common errors to avoid

There are five common mistakes that are easy to make when running multivariate tests. Here’s one of them:

1. Improper factoring caused by poor or no isolation of individual test changes; for example, changing a headline’s text, font color, and font size, all at the same time as an A/B test instead of a multivariate test.Why is this problematic? Because it’s difficult or impossible to isolate the impact of each individual change — i.e., was it the font color and/or the text that caused the visitor to behave differently?

Please join me at my session during Conversion Conference West on March 5 at 10:15 to learn the other errors to avoid and help you prepare your website for testing.

 

About Eric J. Hansen

Eric is the CEO and founder of SiteSpect, and the chief architect of the firm’s non-intrusive technology for multivariate testing, behavioral targeting and digital marketing optimization. He is a frequent speaker at conferences covering web analytics and optimization, and writes regularly on topics dealing with the intersection of marketing and technology.

 

Learn more MVT planning secrets from Eric!

Eric will be presenting a session on “The Essential MVT Roadmap: Test Planning Secrets to Ensure Success” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow him on Twitter and request a discount code.

By Jennifer Veesenmeyer
Chief Operating Officer, Stratigent

Stratigent was recently engaged by a global company to analyze lead generation forms across more than two dozen company websites and microsites. Although many of our findings were specific to that client, several key learnings would be valuable to any marketer looking to optimize their lead generation forms. In particular, we found that analyzing Form Completion Rate was a good source of actionable insight.

Our Approach

Our analysis went down three paths: (1) Establishing benchmarks that could be applied across the company’s business units; (2) Identifying best practices for lead generation forms; and (3) Identifying high impact opportunities for improving a few of the key lead generation forms.

Establishing Benchmarks

Our client had established form-level benchmarks by comparing to the previous period, but wanted benchmarks that could be applied across lines of business. In the process of establishing the portfolio wide benchmarks, we made two important discoveries:

• Although Conversion Rate was valuable when analyzing an individual form, it wasn’t a good benchmark because the definition of Conversion Rate varied widely across business units. In order to facilitate apples-to-apples comparisons, we limited the scope to Form Completion Rate which proved to be a more insightful benchmarking metric.

• Even though all the forms we analyzed were specific to lead generation, our analysis showed what everyone suspected – that determining a one-size-fits-all, portfolio average benchmark wasn’t very useful.  Instead, we established a benchmark for each type of form. Listed in order of highest form completion rate, they were: (1) Request a Coupon or Sample; (2) Request Information; (3) Subscribe to our Newsletter; and (4) Join our Community.

Identifying Best Practices

Having data and making recommendations is not the same as making recommendations based on your analysis of the data. There are many sources of information about how to build good forms based on usability best practices, but our objective was to go beyond generic recommendations and compile best practices for creating lead generation forms that were supported by our client’s data.

We began by documenting all the lead generation forms sorted by type of form (see above). From there we listed form attributes that are commonly associated with form conversion rate, such as the number of form fields, the number of pages, page load time, and the extent of imagery incorporated into the form.

We were surprised to find that there was very little correlation with those attributes and form completion rate. The best predictor of form completion rate was the type of form. For example, although it is generally recommended to keep forms short to improve completion rates, shorter forms didn’t automatically result in higher completion rates. For our client, Request a Coupon or Sample forms consistently had the highest form completion rates even though the form lengths varied between 1 and 28 fields. Prior to this finding, our client assumed that shorter was better, so to increase form completion rate, they would test shorter versions of the forms. Now they have begun testing some longer versions of the forms as well.

Identifying High Impact Optimization Opportunities

In our deep dive analysis of some of the key forms, we looked at all the typical segmentations, such as Referring Channel, Campaign, New vs Returning Visitors, Search Objective and more. There were two areas where we gained actionable insight.

• When analyzing Form Completion Rate by Referring Channel, we compared Most Recent to Original. We found that an average of 20-30% of Conversions from Direct traffic were originally referred to the site by Paid Search. Since most web analytics tools default to attributing conversions to the Most Recent referrer, the client had been underestimating the impact of Paid Search.

• Testing a hypothesis that mobile visitors to the www site were having difficulty with a particular form, we compared the OS of visitors who viewed the first page of the form with the OS of visitors who viewed the confirmation page. We discovered that Android users were having difficulty with the form because they accounted for approximately 30% of the mobile visits to the first page of the form, but 0% viewed the confirmation page. Armed with this knowledge, the development team was able to identify and fix the issue.

The Bottom Line

Form Completion Rate isn’t the most important metric for optimizing conversions, but it is a good source of actionable insights. If you’re not analyzing Form Completion Rate periodically, you’re leaving money on the table.

About the Author

Jennifer is VP, of Analytics at Stratigent, where she specializes in assisting enterprise-level organizations overcome the communication challenges of web analytics, such as gaining executive buy-in, building consensus and facilitating cultural change. She is highly regarded as an industry thought leader and is frequently asked to conduct educational presentations on the topic of meaningful reports. Not to mention one of the top rated speakers in seven years of eMetrics Summits.

See Jennifer Live!

Jennifer will be speaking with Joe Megibow, from Expedia about Analytics in a session titled, “What Gets Measured Gets Done – Using Analytics to Drive Conversions” at Conversion Conference East 2011 in New York City. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Jennifer on Twitter and contact her to request a discount code!