Conversion Conference Blog

Widerfunnel CEO Chris Goward on the Pitfalls of Being Tool-centric and His Take on SOPA and PIPA

Editor’s Note: With Conversion Conference 2012 San Francisco just around the corner, we thought it’s about time you learn a bit more from each of our speakers. So we put on our journalist/paparazzi hat and placed each speaker on the proverbial hot seat by asking four questions, including one which can be considered a burning issue for digital marketers and other professionals in the internet industry: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). From this day until the conference, we’ll be featuring a speaker and their answers to the questions so be sure to check out our blog regularly.

But wait, there’s more! You can join in and do some pre-conference engagement with our speakers by sending in your own questions through email, Twitter, or our Facebook Wall. We’ll make sure your questions get the attention they deserve and even feature them here.

 

Next on our list is Widerfunnel Marketing Optimization Co-founder and CEO Chris Goward. Widerfunnel is a full-service conversion optimization agency and is best known for developing industry-breaking process innovations, the Kaizen Method^™ for continuous conversion rate improvement as well as the LIFT Model™ framework for identifying test hypotheses. Chris is one of the most in-demand speakers around and he also writes for the Widerfunnel Blog.

 

1) What do you think is the hottest trend in optimization or conversion for 2012?

Aiming for marketing insights. Organizations are finally tapping into the power of Conversion Optimization testing to learn what works and inform their strategy. In the past, many organizations were focused on conversion optimization tips & tricks and “best practices” to tweak their landing pages. They’re now beginning to tap into this huge source of free knowledge to gain marketing insights that can influence their overall marketing and business strategy.

 

2) What would you say is the biggest mistake people (still) make when it comes to optimization?

Focusing on tools over human intelligence. The promise of testing & targeting tools and platforms to automate your optimization is alluring, but misguided. I’ve seen many examples of people getting much more dramatic revenue improvements using free or low cost tools while those paying through the nose for over-complex systems let them rot in a corner with nobody to fully utilize their features. Start with the right people, strategy and process and hold off on tools until you’ve proven the need for them.

 

3) What’s your take on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA)?

I’ve encouraged people to sign petitions against them.

 

4) What’s your favorite place to hang out in San Francisco (that one place you just have to drop by/visit when you’re in the city)?

Conversion Conference!

 

We swear we didn’t put Chris up to that last answer – but we have to admit, we’re flattered

Got a question for Chris that can’t wait till March? Post it on the comments section below, tweet it to us, or post it on our wall and we’ll make sure he gets it.

 

More About Chris

Chris Goward is a leading expert in Marketing Optimization. His methods have helped clients improve their website lead generation and sales rates by up to 290% for clients such as Ebay, Epson, BabyAge.com, ColonialCandle.com, SAP, Alfresco, Outrigger Hotels, Google and many more. His WiderFunnel LIFT Model is taught at the Unversity of Eastern Michigan Conversion Optimization program.

Chris is Co-Founder and CEO of WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization and is a regular speaker at conferences like PubCon, SMX, and IMC. Chris was the “highest rated speaker” at SMX Search Analytics and IMC workshops. His work has been published in Marketing Sherpa, Search Engine Watch, the Google blog, Search Engine Marketing Journal and DM News.

See Chris Live!

Join Chris at his session on “Case Study Compilation: The How, What and Why of Conversion Testing” 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.

 

 

Usertesting CEO Darrell Benatar on Hot Trends and the Best Italian Food in San Francisco

Editor’s Note: With Conversion Conference 2012 San Francisco just around the corner, we thought it’s about time you learn a bit more from each of our speakers. So we put on our journalist/paparazzi hat and placed each speaker on the proverbial hot seat by asking four questions, including one which can be considered a burning issue for digital marketers and other professionals in the internet industry: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). From this day until the conference, we’ll be featuring a speaker and their answers to the questions so be sure to check out our blog regularly.

But wait, there’s more! You can join in and do some pre-conference engagement with our speakers by sending in your own questions through email, Twitter, or our Facebook Wall. We’ll make sure your questions get the attention they deserve and even feature them here.

 

Now, for the part you’ve been waiting for. The first one in our Conversion Conference Speaker Q&A session is Darrell Benatar, CEO of Usertesting.com. Usertesting, as its name implies, is a company that provides usability testing to website owners. Their ability to provide the fastest and cheapest usability testing on the market is highly recognized within and outside their client circle.

 

1) What do you think is the hottest trend in optimization or conversion for 2012?

Looking beyond small changes that lead to incremental increases in conversion and actually trying to understand and improve the customer’s experience in order to make changes that lead to sustainable gains in conversions. Doing this involves going beyond traditional analytics tools and using feedback from customer service, surveys, and user testing.

 

2) What would you say is the biggest mistake people (still) make when it comes to optimization?

In relation to my answer above, the biggest mistake would be half-hearted measures to understand consumers’ experiences on the website, which result in half-baked efforts at improvement.

 

3) What’s your favorite place to hang out in San Francisco (that one place you just have to drop by/visit when you’re in the city)?

E Tutto Qua on the corner of Broadway and Columbus. Best Italian food in San Francisco. And not too expensive.

 

Unfortunately, the paparazzi style on these interviews appears to have seriously jeopardized our ability to get beyond “no comment” on SOPA and PIPA. Maybe next time we should give our speakers ample warning so they can learn about the issue, don’t you think?

Got a question for Darrell that can’t wait till March? Post it on the comments section below, tweet it to us, or post it on our wall and we’ll make sure he gets it.

 

More About Darrell

 

Darrell Benatar, a serial entrepreneur, founded Surprise.com in 1999. He didn’t believe in usability testing until he saw it in action. Darrell was shocked at the problems people were having with things he’d always assumed worked fine. So he began doing user testing for all redesigns of Surprise.com, which was later selected by Time magazine as one of the “50 best websites.” Pleased with the effectiveness of user testing, Darrell now focuses on helping other website owners do the same.

 

See Darrell Live!

Join Darrell at his session on “Biggest Usability Flops from 100K Usability Tests” 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 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

 

 

A good writer can create images better than a graphic designer.
Whenever we design a Web site, we inevitably ask our graphic designers to give us three comps. Then we, the completely unqualified non-graphic-designers decide which one we “like” best. We might even ask a number of our equally unqualified colleagues to tell us what they think.

Then we pay a copywriter a fraction of what the designers get, and ask them to write the copy for the site, knowing full-well that when we get it, we’ll revise it until every ounce of color, every animating metaphor, and every shred of a story is squeezed out onto the ground in a pool of red ink.

A good writer can create images and convey meaning better than a graphic artist because the writer has the richer toolset. Put down your red pen. Trust your copywriter.

 

Be bold and your visitors will see you that way.
If you’re designing a new site or refreshing an old one, it’s time to be a little daring.

Tell the designers to hold on until you’ve completed the copy. They’ll look at you like you have an arm growing out of your head.

THEN, start interviewing copywriters. Tell them that you’ll pay them to develop three different versions of your Copy Body, the document that contains the text from which you will take your copy when writing headings, text, offers, emails and any other Web-based communications.

The interviews will be short. You’re looking for a certain reaction.

When you present this proposal to the right writer, their eyes will flash. A smile may creep across their face of its own will. Be careful, though. If they say “You’ll pay me?” you’ve gotten a false positive. You want to choose the writer who feels that you’ve just opened the door to a cage of mediocrity.

If you let them out, they’ll take you with them.

Be very clear about what you’re trying to accomplish as a business and what your visitors are trying to accomplish. Give them a set of personas if you can.

 

Take no steps.
Once you have your three copy “comps,” do not allocate time to have the writing revised by a committee. Do not attempt to combine the best from each. Do not seek to insert superlatives that declare you the “leader,” to be “unique” or “innovative.” If you have to say it, it ain’t true.

If you have the right writer, one of your choices will be far out, one will be written in business speak, and one will be somewhere in between. Throw away the one written in business speak and consider the remaining two very carefully.

Select the copy body that best illustrates your value proposition, the one that captures the essence of your company without stating it. Look for metaphors that can be applied to a variety of your benefits. Seek a story that can stitch every page together into a coherent theme.

Then fix the inaccuracies, and leave everything else alone.

Does this sound scary? Wait till you see what’s next.

 

You can let the designers into the room now.
If you’ve selected an engaging copy body, it’ll be really clear to the designers what their designs should express. They can create real images from the ones your writer paints with words. They can guide your visitor through the story with navigation. They can throw away stock photos of pretty people and choose images informed by metaphor and analogy.

Give them the copy body, the corporate style guide and tell them to create a design. One design. Sure, you’ll make decisions along the way and maybe even significantly change the first comp, but try to let them do what they do well.

 

Steps you could add.
If you realize the immense advantage that powerfully written copy gives you, consider investing in some testing. Implement two of the three copy bodies on your home page and on key landing pages. Use analytics to see which makes visitors stick and which generates more leads or sales.

Which has the lower bounce rate?

Which home page generates more page views and more time on site?

Which has the higher conversion rate?

There is no better way to know if you’ve made the right decision than to test. And you may need some proof when your colleagues tell you that your copy isn’t “corporate” — and they mean that as a criticism, not a badge of honor.

Do you know a great copy writer? Do you have a success story or test results that demonstrate the power of effective writing? Let us know in your comments and I’ll feature you in a future post.

Photo courtesy andrewcs via stock.xchng.

 

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 Linda Bustos

Director of Ecommerce Research, Elastic Path Software

 

Have you ever visited a website and suddenly ads for the site are virtually EVERYWHERE you go on the web? Chances are, the website hasn’t purchased ad space on all your favorite sites, it’s simply retargeting you.

Retargeting (also known as “remarketing” and “remessaging”) is a close cousin to paid search advertising. But rather than being a tool for driving traffic, remarketing provides an opportunity to win back site abandoners (an average website may have goal abandonment upwards of 98%). Targeting web users who have already interacted with your site allows advertisers to get better results from display ads, strategically messaging visitors based on their site behavior and expressed intent.

While some may feel such targeting is akin to cyber-stalking, when done correctly, retargeting campaigns can provide stellar ROI for marketers. How does it work? How do you know if it’s right for you and how can you get started?

 

How Remarketing / Retargeting Works

Like personalization and A/B testing tools, remarketing technology uses cookies to track visitors and serve content. Tracking pixels are added to pages to correspond with your various campaigns and ad groups. As visitors view these pages, they are added to an “audience.” You may have an audience of all site visitors, regardless of where they entered your site, and you may concurrently have audiences targeted to site sections or actions taken on your site (like an abandoned web form or conversion funnel). Negative audiences can be set to exclude users whose site behavior indicates they are not prospects, such as career page views, or who successfully convert. Cookies may live for a few days to one year, and you can set frequency caps to limit the number of exposures your visitor will see on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

When tracked visitors arrive on publisher sites in the ad network, ads are shown based on what audience they belong to (audiences can be prioritized with higher bids). Google’s Remarketing program uses bids and Quality Score to determine “rankings” and impressions, just like with search marketing. Other vendors may use different methods of determining reach and charging advertisers, whether with a CPC, CPM or CPA model.

 

Is Remarketing Right For You?

While the benefits for online retailers are obvious, retargeting is not just for chasing down cart abandoners. Use it to improve any type of conversion, whether it be a site membership, blog subscription, content download, email sign-up, webinar registration or contest entry. It can also be used simply for branding, or keeping site visitors up to date with what’s new on your site.

Like search marketing (PPC), you must have a realistic budget to play with as well as in-house or outsourced help that can manage and optimize the campaign.

With search marketing, your traffic level is irrelevant. But remarketing requires a certain traffic level to “work.” Google Remarketing requires 500 cookied members of an audience before ads begin to appear. (Some networks recommend 1,000, others don’t have minimums.) If Google’s your tool of choice, it’s important that your site gets enough traffic to “fill the bucket” within a relevant time frame. If it takes 4 weeks to build a list of 500 abandoned carts, and 25% of them were added to the audience in the first week, the ads will likely be irrelevant for an abandoned cart campaign, depending on how long a user typically takes to complete a purchase. (Also consider that up to 30% of your visitors may be deleting cookies and effectively dropping out of your audience.)

 

How Can You Get Started?

If you’re already using Google Adwords, getting started with Google’s Remarketing tool is explained step-by-step here. http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=1302483&parent=1713922&ctx=topic Even if you are not intending to launch a campaign right away, building up your audience list as early as possible ensures you are reaching as many site abandoners as possible when you do run a campaign. Google’s product plays nicely with other Google marketing tools, so it’s a good get-your-feet-wet tool if you’re just getting started.

However, Google Remarketing has its limitations. It has less publisher inventory than other networks (limited to Google’s Display Network), so you may not be targeting all the outlets you want. It also lacks dynamic personalization of ad creative (such as showing a rotating carousel of recently viewed items or content). Running more than one remarketing tool at once is not a good idea, and audiences take time to build up. So, if you anticipate that Google will not meet your targeting wish list long term, consider launching with a vendor like Criteo, Adroll, Retargeter or Fetchback right off the bat.

http://www.criteo.com/

http://www.adroll.com/

http://www.retargeter.com/

http://www.fetchback.com/

But before you make any moves, you want to nail down your remarketing strategy. Part 2 of this article will discuss how to design retargeting scenarios based on your conversion goals and what you know about customer behavior.

 

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 John Ekman

Chief Conversionista, Conversionista!

 

In the 90′s I studied Engineering Physics for one year at the Technical University of Lausanne, Switzerland. I studied stuff like Quantum Mechanics, Solid State Physics, Complex Analysis and similar. In French. No kidding. It was not easy, but actually not as hard as you might think. However, during this year I NEVER managed to to buy bread in the bakery without being hassled. Here’s how it unfolded:

I went into the bakery, approached the lady behind the counter and spoke to her in French  -which  by this time was pretty decent:

- “Good morning, I would like two pieces of the dark little round bread with seeds which is on the second shelf, to the far right, thank you very much.”

Only silence.

Then: “Vous parlez de Pain de Siègle de Campagne Vaudois ???!!”, accompanied by a soul-penetrating gaze. As close as you can get to a slap in the face without actually delivering it.

The Bakery lady meant that if I had the audacity to come into her nice little bakery then I certainly should use HER language. How could I have the nerve to just walk in there and point at things without calling them by their proper names?!

 

So what do Swiss bakery ladies have in common with your web site?

Way too much unfortunately. Most sites have some point where they give their visitors a good old slap-in-the-face, if the visitor has the audacity not to use the proper language which should be used on that fine site.

Below I have some examples of the validation of Swedish Personal ID (social security) numbers. Although your site might not deal with such numbers you most certainly can use these ideas for your own validation of dates, postal codes, vehicle registration numbers and similar.

The examples below show perfectly valid variations of the same Swedish social security number. I was born on the 21st of March in 1965 so the first string is my birth date. It can be given with our without the initial “19”, and the separator can be a hyphen, a space or no space, like so:

19650321-8937

650321-8937

196503218937

6503218937

19650321 8937

650321 8937

 

Different sites use different formats but only one is correct in their little (bakery) shop.

So, if you write your social security number in any other way than “their way”, they’ll give you an error message which is the equivalent of a Swiss palm in the face. For example:

 

Trygg Hansa (Top Insurance company)

“The social security number you entered is incorrect.” Wow, that was not so fun to learn.

Should I seek help with the authorities to correct it?

 

 

SEB(Top bank)

SEB do something which is quite common. They only allow only ten digits in the field where you enter the number (= the format  YYMMDDXXX). If one decides to write “19″ at the beginning or a hyphen before the last four digits, you simply can’t enter the entire number, and it becomes “automatic failure”.

Then they tell you: “The social security number is not correct.” Oops, I really must have a bad number.

 

Tretti.se (Top E-commerce site)

Wrong number. “You must enter a valid number.” But hey, wasn’t that exactly

what I was trying to do?!

 

 

 

NetOnNet.se (Top E-commerce site)

“You have entered an invalid number.” Please give me a break, I’m trying my best here.

 

In addition to annoying their users, these sites do themselves a disservice. They get lower conversion rates and poorer outcome on their campaigns.

 

Validation – How should you do it then?

Ok, now you understand what I am getting at and it’s easy to talk others down. “Do it better yourself then, if you’re so damn smart,” you might think.

Sure. I will.

For starters: Accept all normal variations that the user may enter without any hassle. In the case of a Swedish Personal ID number – start with the six variations I wrote at the beginning of the article.

If you speak to your tech people they will tell you there are all kinds of methods you can use to “Parse”, “Scrub” or “Append” a text input string, so that whatever the user types in it’ll be passed along in the clean correct format you want.

 

“Put the blame on yourself, not on the user”

Secondly, if you still have to give an error message – blame yourself, not the user. Here is a suggested text:

“We could not figure out which number you meant. Write it in the format YYMMDDXXX and we’ll do the best we can.”

So do your visitors and yourself a favor: stop being a Swiss bakery lady. Stop giving your visitors a slap in the face and you will see that your conversion rate will increase.

 

(This post originally appeared at http://www.conversionista.se/validering-personnummer/ in Swedish)

 

About the Author

John Ekman is the founder and CEO of Conversionista! He is regarded as a Swedish authority on Conversion Rate Optimization. According to John, a Conversionista is someone deeply and crazily passionate about improving Conversion Rates. John has a long history in the optimization of online businesses going back to 1996.

See John Live!

John will be presenting a session on “What Have E-tailers Learned from Retailers? Absolutely nothing!” 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 John on Twitter to touch base 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.