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!

Director of Optimization, SiteTuners

Many times the name we call something greatly affects our attitudes about that something.

Take the term “home page”, for instance. In the context of the web, we all know that our home page is where most of our visitors will first meet us, experience our brand messaging, learn about our products and services, and hopefully determine if we offer solutions to their problems.

As such, many marketers treat their home pages as an electronic kitchen sink, throwing every message, offer, special, countless products and then further distracting us with endless rotating banners under the misconception that “we need to show everything … after all, it’s our home page”.

One of the reasons marketers have gotten derailed trying to construct effective home pages is because this page is referred to as “the home page”.

Think about it … “Home” commonly refers to a place you are content to stay; a place where one lives. In baseball, it’s a place a runner wants to reach to end his journey around the bases and score a run.

On the web, though, we want to get our visitors off the home page and into our site as expeditiously as possible. An effective home page:

1. Quickly communicates  what it is we do;
2. Allows the visitor to quickly decide if the company can meet their needs, and;
3. Guides the visitor to the page in the site that’s of interest to them

I like to think of the home page as more like an airport terminal. Remember your last visit to an airport? The problem you were trying to solve was to get to your destination as quickly and easily as possible. You were looking for information to get you to the right gate, and the shortest path to that gate, so you could board your plane. You didn’t care about flights to other destinations and certainly did not want to spend any more time than necessary there.

Remember that your home page should provide clear navigational information and direct the visitor to their desired destination. The challenge is to meet the various needs of all the many types of visitors who’ll arrive on your home page while not creating an electronic kitchen sink.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is through the development of Use Case scenarios. To learn all about Use Cases, why they’re productive and how to craft effective Use Cases, stop by my session, “Persona-Driven Conversions – Walk A Mile In Your Visitors’ Shoes” at the Conversion Conference in San Francisco, CA, March 5, 2012 11:15 am.

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.  ~Marshall McLuhan

About the Author

Noted author and speaker, Brian Lewis brings over 20 years of both hands-on and strategic online marketing experience spanning a diverse range of industries. In addition to co-hosting the Internet radio show “Best Search Strategies” on WebMasterRadio, Brian has led panels at Search Engine Strategies Conferences, Search Marketing Expo, SMX Advanced, PPC Summit, Conversion Conference, Affiliate Conference, AdWords Advantage, Online Marketing Summit, and Online Marketing Institute. Brian’s articles have been referenced in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Target Marketing, eMarketer, Search Engine Watch, Website Magazine, SEM Journal, and DM News. He continues to be in demand for speaking engagements on PPC, SEO and conversion optimization around the world.

He earned his B.A. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego and his M.B.A. from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, graduating both schools with honors.

See Brian Live!

Brian will be presenting a session on “Persona-Driven Conversions – Walk A Mile In Your Visitors’ Shoes” 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 Brian on Twitter  to say hello and request for a discount code!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

President, Vertical Measures

If your business has been stalling right along with the economy, you might get a much-needed boost from content marketing.

Content marketing is the creation, sharing, and distribution of information that’s relevant to customers you want to attract, engage and retain.  Content can be informational, educational, promotional, or entertaining, and if presented properly, it can help you spread your message, enable dialogue between you and your customers, and increase business revenue.

Customers no longer just want standard products and services; they want more engaged vendors.  They want to know that the companies they buy from will go the extra mile to provide advice and information.  This has led to an explosion in content marketing.

However, the process of content marketing can be confusing.  Businesses know they need to do it, but they don’t necessarily know where to start.  Answering six basic questions will give you the insight you need to get your plan off the ground.

What are you presenting?
The type of content you create depends on what your customers want to hear.  You can provide details about your products or services, but you also need to present content that isn’t necessarily about you, but help your customer make an informed decision.

Your content can include industry trends, advice, or an overview of the benefits of buying a particular product or service.  You can also be more direct and talk about your particular products and services, and include a call to action to buy or call for more information.

Why are you presenting it?
The content you publish will depend on what you’re trying to achieve.  Do you want to position your business as knowledgeable?  Helpful tips look like free advice for customers, which makes them come back for more. Talking about trends in your industry makes you appear in touch with a changing market.

Are you trying to generate leads or sales?  A how-to guide about installing a specific product with a link or contact number gives readers an immediate way to respond, and it gives you an opportunity to see who’s interested in your offers, whether they become customers or not.

Match your content to your business goals and you’ll get the results you want.

Who are you presenting to?
Your target markets will affect the way you present content.  If you’re talking to customers, you can talk about new products they might like, or new service delivery methods that make life easier.  If you’re talking to prospects, take a less familiar approach, touting the benefits of your products and inviting them to learn more.

Your audience will also impact the tone you take.  Consumer content can be presented in an informal or even humorous style, but some business content needs to be more professional and objective. Consumers will respond to more emotional benefits, but businesses need more rational facts to see the benefits to their bottom line.  Both audiences will respond equally to calls of action, but make sure there’s enough information to keep them reading.

Where will you present it?
Ideally businesses will present their content on their own sites, to reduce the number of extra steps for people to get there.  The question is where to go to find these new readers. You can advertise online or you can post content to social media sites like Facebook or Twitter to link people to your site. However the very best approach is to optimize your content to give you the best chance to rank at the top of a search engine results page. That’s the vast majority of people will discover your content.

When will you present it?
A website should never be idle for long, and the last entry on a blog shouldn’t be too old. Otherwise, you end up looking inactive, which will drive away people who are looking for up-to-the-minute information.  Search engines love fresh, new content too. That’s why you need to keep your content as fresh as possible.

There’s no set rule for how often you need to post, but the general rule is between once a day and once a week.  However often you decide to publish, the content needs to be relevant to your readers.

How will you present it?
The answer depends on what kind of information you’re providing.  Blogs tend to be the most popular form of content, because they can be short or lengthy, and the topics can be pretty open.  But there are other formats that can drive business as well.

White papers and e-books are great for presenting detailed information, and as downloads, they make great take-aways.  Product sheets and press releases are great for sharing news about your business in a quick, concise format. Video is a booming, highly consumed type of content and is easier to produce than most people think.

Content is the new marketing, especially in the online world, so put together a plan to consistently produce engaging content to keep your business alive and thriving.  To do this, create an editorial calendar. Set modest goals like writing two blog posts per week, sprucing up 5 product pages per week and creating one video per week. Then get started and stick to it!

About the Author

 Arnie Kuenn is the president of Vertical Measures, a search, social & content marketing company helping their clients get more traffic, more leads, and more business.  Arnie has held executive positions in the world of new technologies and marketing for more than 20 years. He is a frequent speaker and author of Accelerate! Moving Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing available on Amazon.

See Arnie Live!

Arnie will be presenting a session on “9 Powerful, Low Cost Content Ideas to Grow Your Business in 6 Months or Less” 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 Arnie on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and contact him to request a discount code!

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:

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.

Magic Lanterns

Have you ever heard of a magic lantern?  Unless you’re an avid history buff, the answer is probably not.  The magic lantern marked the beginning of modern society’s fascination with visual images.

In the mid- to late- 1800s, different investors experimented with glass slides viewed with a projector (all operated by hand of course).  The idea of projecting images from glass plates (usually onto a wall; screens came later) began many years before photography came on the scene.  Magic lanterns became popular as an accompaniment for speakers on the lecture circuit. This became the precursor to slide presentations and the movies.

Moving Pictures

Moving pictures – the silent films – took the nation by storm in the early 1900s.  In 1903, most Americans had never even heard of a picture show, let alone a moving picture theater.  By 1910 there were nearly 10,000 theaters across the country and movie-making had become a million dollar industry.

And we were never the same again.

From Then Until Now

We follow the trail of the movies as it transitioned over to television.  From there it grew to personal computers and now to handheld computers and smart phones.  The public’s fascination with visual medium has never slacked but rather has grown exponentially.

Now couple this growth of visual venues with the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media marketing.  It’s what some are calling the perfect marketing storm.

It is the combination of social media and online video converging as a marketing strategy.  Voila!  Meet social video!

Social Video

Social video is an interweaving of video sharing sites (YouTube for instance – but there are many more) with social media outlets such as FaceBook and Twitter.

You may be wondering what this has to do with you and the growth of your business.  The answer is simple.  For those who pay no heed to this exploding phenomenon do so at their own peril – in the business sense at least.

Stop and consider your own marketing and advertising strategies.  If you still think a few stock photos on your website, or awesome photos displayed in your online catalog, are putting you at the head of the game – think again.  That is fast becoming old school.

Why Videos Are Vital

Today’s savvy consumers have never lost their hunger for all things visual.  Additionally, they are now looking for value-laden content, and at the same time are looking for – and expecting – interaction.

In this series of articles, Social Media Marketing With Video, you will learn why it’s vital in today’s business economy to include videos in your overall marketing plan.  Among other things, video marketing:

• sets you apart from your competition,
• gives you a stronger standing with search engines.
• establishes you as a distinct personality
• builds your personal brand

Summary

Think of that forward-thinking speaker on the lecture circuits in 1840.  If his advance flyers heralded the fact that his talk would be accompanied by magic lantern slides, the number of tickets sold would far exceed those of the speaker who relied on his personal presentation alone.

Take a lesson here.  Video marketing is exploding all over the Internet.  It’s easy to learn, simple to produce, and will greatly enhance your online presence.

Social video marketing is too important to ignore.

About the Author

John is the CEO of 3rd Power Outlet and the founder of the award-winning ecommerce industry blog at ColderICE.com. John is an Platinum eBay Power Seller, Top-Rated Amazon Seller, Social Media Personality and ecommerce analyst for Wall-Street firms. John specializes in ecommerce, social rich-media marketing and mobile commerce. He is a dynamic and entertaining speaker whose presentations are packed with usable, actionable information.

See John Live!

John will be speaking with Mike Volpe, from Hubspot in a session titled, “Monetizing Your Traffic – Turning Blogs & Social Media into Conversion Gold ” 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? Check out John’s blog ColderICE and follow him on Twitter and request a discount code!