This is the fourth posting in a series aimed at helping you as a Marketer evaluate conversion optimization services providers so you make the best possible decision of who to hire. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

Q4: “Do you follow a specific methodology to optimization?”

There are lots of people “out there” who know how to use tools like Google Website Optimizer, Omniture’s Test & target, Optimost and such. (And this is especially true of Google Website Optimizer because it’s an easy to learn, free tool). However, very few of those people know how to increase revenues consistently by using the tool.

To know how to increase revenues by using a testing tool (more…)

At a time in the economic cycle when lead generation and sales enablement is most needed, when Marketers should be rethinking every investment they make and how it helps their company increase sales, a new and important study by the CMO Council comes out reporting that less than 20% of respondents say their Sales and Marketing organizations are extremely collaborative. (Read the report here) (more…)

In this week’s SherpaBlog, the brilliant Anne Holland presents the positions of two camps, the Brand Camp vs A/B Camp, and their approaches to beating the recession. “Whichever side you’re on — brand vs A/B — someone else on your team is evangelizing the other direction as the best way to beat the recession,” she writes.

However, with the due respect owed, I question one of her conclusions: “Who’s right and who’s wrong?” she writes. “Hate to say it, especially as a chief proponent of measurement in marketing, but brand should always win.” (more…)

Your prospects online are different than in any other media.
When they’re online they’re looking for action.

Jacob Nielsen says his latest report on web usage shows that web users are increasingly action-oriented and impatient. Think about it. On TV they’re lounging, on radio or outdoor they’re driving, in newspapers they’re getting a start on their day (not looking for products). But online they are looking for something. Whether they know what they’re looking for or not, they’re in search mode. (I can hear the objections around social media users already, but they are looking for entertainment, usually pictures of their friends)

This is why search advertising works online and banner ads don’t, but that’s another topic.

How fast and easy are you making it for users to complete their action?

Here are three starting points for making high performance ‘Action Pages’: (more…)

There is lots of speculation about an imminent economic downturn. Whether it’s happening now or will happen later (or much, much later), as marketers, we must ask ourselves how is this going to impact my job, my budget — and my career? How can I prepare for it?

For the last few years, we in the online marketing space have been enjoying pretty strong tailwinds. For the first time in a long time (I have been around the block for a while), Marketing has been able to leverage revenue growth into larger budgets with relative ease.

Scrooge-like CEOs and tight-fisted CFOs have been allowing growth in marketing and advertising budgets less grudgingly than usual. They still consider it ‘a mystery wrapped in an enigma’ – but have been arguing less with Marketing about the need to spend.

So I wonder how seriously most marketers are taking concerns about a slowdown in the economy when developing and executing their demand-generation and marketing plans.

Whether or not a downturn is imminent, or already here, this is probably a good time for Marketers to take a breath and do some contingency planning.

The current model Marketing has been using to budget goes something like this: “I need a bigger budget because our revenues are growing, and media costs and the cost of pay-per-click keywords are escalating. So if we want growth to continue, we need to spend more”

But what happens when revenue growth slows down? (more…)

Just a few days ago, global management consultancy Accenture announced that it is acquiring Memetrics, a Web optimization testing company. This latest deal in our marketing performance sector follows Omniture acquiring TouchClarity and Offermatica last year and Interwoven buying Optimost.

IMHO these acquisitions represent not so much industry consolidation as a growing awareness (some might say ‘groundswell’) of the opportunity that conversion optimization presents to businesses, large and small, to “do more” with the expensive but anonymous traffic that is already on their websites. And — bonus! — it’s all measurable: it’s all about what customers *demonstrably* prefer and not what management or the web designer *likes*…

But (isn’t there always one?), there are real issues around execution.

Landing page optimization is not about the technology - it’s about business. There are many wonderful online testing tools, including free Google Website Optimizer, which allow marketers to run experiments on their web pages and determine which layout, offer, creative and copy combination deliver the highest number of conversions.

The execution issues revolve around… (more…)

According to MarketingSherpa’s “Search Marketing Benchmark Survey,” search marketing budgets are set to increase in 2008. OK, nothing new here.

But wait, here is the gem:

According to Stefan Tornquist, MarketingSherpa’s research director, “Most of the budgets were growing because search marketers thought that keyword prices would go up”

So, in other words, marketers will spend increasing amounts — to get the same results.

WOW, that’s impressive.

*Smart* marketers, however, will optimize the online conversion rate and get more business from the traffic *already* coming to the site…

So - no need to increase the budget. Just market smarter.

For years now I have been subscribing to my RSS feeds in MyYahoo. If some headline and brief summary seemed interesting, I would of course click through to the source of the article to read the full text.

From a traffic-building perspective, this worked very well for the publishers of content that interests me: as long as the brief copy presented was relevant, I was bound to click-through to read all of it.

But no longer.

With the new MyYahoo! Portal format, I can now mouse over the RSS feeds and read what seems to me to be the complete article or post without having to click through to the website publishing the content.

This is bound to have an impact on the ability of RSS feeds to generate traffic to websites and will put more pressure on copywriting skills so that people actually want to get the full story after mousing over…

The duration of a test is one of the most frequent questions we hear from our clients. It can be frustrating to see the time remaining estimate fluctuate, or worse, steadily increase as your test progresses.

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer.

The number of test combinations and traffic level are the variables that you can calculate. And Google has provided a calculator that does a ballpark job for you.

However, there are variables to reaching statistical significance that can’t be predicted, which are:
1. The conversion rate of the control
2. The spread between the conversion rate of the control and the alternative/test

If the conversion rate is high and the spread between the control and the variations are large, the test will complete relatively quickly. If, however, the test alternatives are very similar in conversion rates to the control, it will take much longer to reach statistical significance.

That is why our advice to clients is to let us design dramatic tests rather than piddling around with a word here and there. There’s much more upside to be had in being bold with the variations.

It’s also tempting to stop an experiment before it’s complete. And that’s fine to do if it’s not completing fast enough and you want to modify it and try again. But be careful in taking learning from an incomplete test. It’s easy to infer too much into all that green on the bar when it is really not ready to tell you anything.

In Jonathan Mendez’s blog, he recently proclaimed the death of “best practices”.

Not quite dead

At WiderFunnel, we firmly believe, and have seen many times through experience, that there are always better ways to do things. Best practices should not be used as sacred rules. Absolutes are dangerous and experience in one situation cannot be translated uncritically to another.

But, I disagree with Jonathan’s hard-line approach. Best practices are still very valuable as guidelines to help define a starting point.

Any Conversion Optimization expert knows that a more comfortable or familiar conversion funnel will produce less friction for customers. Reducing transactional friction is one of the key variables that will help increase conversion rates. That is one of the uses for best practices. They include general understandings of what will allow people to interact with your site and complete their transactions with minimal cognitive activity.

For example, people expect that a home page navigation bar will not be on the right side of your page layout. You may be able to prove (through statistically valid testing) in your particular situation that a right-hand nav works best, but that’s probably not the best starting point. If you want to design outside the box, fine. But why not make your control aligned with what’s been shown to work and then disprove the best practices from there?

In another example, people expect that clicking on your logo will take them back to the home page. It’s a Best Practice that eBay, Google, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best Buy, Wikipedia, and WiderFunnel all follow (among almost everyone else). But why doesn’t Jonathan Mendez? Maybe he just doesn’t believe in best practices. Or, maybe he’s tested and shown that it reduces his conversion rate. Hmm…

Keys to using Best Practices effectively include:

1. Using best practices as guidelines to develop a starting point for testing rather than as absolutes
2. Acknowledging that best practices are evolving and yesterdays’ cream may be todays’ sour milk
3. Continually testing against today’s best practices to create tomorrows