This morning, eMarketer reports that US men are the minority online:

• Currently, 96 million males are Internet users, compared with 103 million females
• eMarketer estimates that the number of men online will reach 106 million in 2013—but remain the minority.

And how do Men differ from Women (on the Internet, anyway)?

• Online, men visit more sites and stay longer than females.
• They are search engine users and participate in all forms of social media, particularly videos.
• In addition, they are more mobile—avid users of laptops, wireless broadband connections and mobile phones.
• For men, online shopping behavior is more goal-oriented, much like offline trips to a store.
• Men are not as bothered by sites cluttered with ads and do not abandon them as quickly as women do.

This is crucial information, especially for Conversion Optimization.

The learning here is that when creating Test hypothesis to optimize landing pages for conversion, you must remember that “Men and Women aren’t created equal”.

The Twittersphere is exploding.

According to an analysis of February data by comScore blogger Sarah Radwanick, over the past several months, comScore has been watching how quickly traffic to Twitter has exploded:

• Worldwide visitors to Twitter approached 10 million in February, up an impressive 700+% vs. year ago.
• The past two months alone have seen worldwide visitors climb more than 5 million visitors.
• U.S. traffic growth has been just as dramatic, with Twitter reaching 4 million visitors in February, up more than 1,000% from a year ago.

But what are the demographics of Twitter users?

Well, marketing friends, it seems that we are in for a surprise.

Twitter Followers are older than you think

According to Reuters blogger Alexei Oreskovic, while Twitter “has the fast-growing microblogging service has all the earmarks of a young person’s pastime” Twitter devotees are grayer than you might expect:

The majority of Twitter’s roughly 10 million unique Web site visitors worldwide in February were 35 years old or older.

What Oreskovic discovered was that 18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter. It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend. More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.

Twitter is a rare example of older people embracing a new Web technology at such an early stage, says Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore

According to comScore, again, the skew towards older visitors, although perhaps initially surprising for a social media site, actually makes more sense than one might think at first.

With so many businesses using Twitter, they argue, along with the first generations of Internet users “growing up” and comfortable with technology, this is a sign that the traditional early adopter model might need to be revisited. Not only teenagers and college students can be counted among the “technologically inclined,” which means that trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to. And with those age 25 and older representing a much bigger segment of the population than the under 25 crowd, it might help explain why Twitter has expanded its reach so broadly so quickly over the past few months.

All this is actually great news –but only if your target audience is in the 25-54 year old crowd. But if it isn’t, you may be wasting your time (even if you are having fun).

We at WiderFunnel for example can attest to the (admittedly) surprisingly positive impact Twitter is having on our web traffic as well as new client generation.

We now have several examples of new clients finding us not by searching on Google (the most common method) but by searching for Conversion Optimization on Twitter. Since the decision-makers we target are at the C-suite level (a group normally populated by older segments) it all makes sense.

“The old recession playbook won’t work this time around” writes the author, David Court. And “those who follow the survival techniques of past slowdowns risk betting on the wrong markets, customers, advertising vehicles, or sales approaches.”

Now I am paying attention.

In this excellent analysis, the author tells us that this time, the old “doubling down” on large, historically profitable customers, geographies, and market segments will be ineffective.

Also, emphasizing again traditional media (i.e., television and newspaper ads), while cutting back on new advertising vehicles will not work either.

What marketers need to do instead is “toss out those historical expectations and focus on the emerging pockets of customer profitability” by:

1. Identifying anew who and where the profitable customers are, and

2. Using effectiveness to prioritize marketing and sales vehicles for reaching them

This means that marketing and sales executives must re-prioritize geographic markets and customer segments “at every shift of economic fortune.” And marketers with access to micromarket data have even more opportunities to enhance profitability.

Also, marketers must prioritize advertising vehicles based on better understanding of the effectiveness of different forms of advertising than many marketers have today.

In other words, only by looking at the conversion rate (i.e., the effectiveness of different forms of advertising) by micromarket will marketers know how much to invest on each tactic and each market.

Marketers “who assume the reach and cost of a vehicle serve as a proxy for its effectiveness, ignore the vehicle’s quality—that is, its ability to influence customers.”

Yes, in the end, only the sales conversion rate matters when assessing the value of the tactic (the article provides insights on how to do this even for the ‘least measurable’ of media).

In other words, from an online conversion rate optimization perspective, companies can maximize profitability by “focusing on micromarkets less sensitive to prices while also offering discounts or preferential pricing elsewhere to drive sales volumes.”

You can accomplish this by creating separate and distinct campaigns driving to different landing pages where you can test out not just layouts and creative, but the complete value proposition, as well as pricing offers.

Credit is tightening; at this very moment, your CFO is considering how best to preserve cash and cutting your advertising budget is looking very tempting. (Very, very tempting.)

Suddenly, your 1% eCommerce conversion rate isn’t going to cut it nor is your 5% lead capture rate because you know your CFO will expect you to maintain your target results in… (insert here whatever it is that you are responsible for: lead generation; eCommerce sales; bookings; etc)

Are you prepared?

With a smaller ad budget to drive traffic to the website, you must have a plan in place to get more conversions on your web pages so you can in fact keep generating the same results.

The answer –at least part of it — is probably right in front of you: the 99% of web visitors who did not buy contain a significant percentage of buyers to whom you did not communicate your value proposition properly. Now you need to:

1. Refocus your message; make it sharper, with a stronger call-to-action. Solve a problem rather than just hint at a solution

2. Rethink your audience; make sure your new target market has the problem you solve

3. Test different approached on your web pages. One size fits all won’t do it, as there are many segments within your target market and you need to speak to them individually and meaningfully.

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 they’re getting a lot of feedback from early users of the Website Optimizer tool that the experiments are just taking too long. The problem has nothing to do with the tool, though. The real issue is a lack of methodical planning processes.

In fact, it was a reminder to me of where most web managers are at in the process, because for our clients we rarely run into this issue. Our Kaizen Method ensures that the Funnel Experiment plans are aligned with business goals, identify target segments and personas, prioritize experiment opportunities and account for traffic levels.

A methodical process like this ensures that each Funnel Experiment plan recommends experimenting only with variables and variations that will produce maximum conversion rate lift within reasonable timeframes.

Here’s a tip if you find yourself plagued by variable proliferation: Test one thing. It’s better to get a quick learning (good or bad) than to get bogged down in a quagmire with an uncertain outcome.