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…)

One of the most common challenges that web site managers face when venturing into improving their conversion rate through multivariate testing, is what I call “variable proliferation syndrome”

When a web sales or marketing team is first exposed to the promise of increasing their conversion rate by testing simple changes to their landing page or purchase funnel, they can become understandably giddy. Giddyness, however, rarely lends itself to scientific testing methodology.

The promise is exciting, but when the site manager doesn’t know which elements will produce the most dramatic result (or whether multivariate testing is even the best first step to take) the inclination is to test everything.. at once.

I was speaking with Tom Leung, Google Website Optimizer Product Manager, yesterday and he confirmed that (more…)