Archive for the ‘website optimization’ Category
-
New Conversion Optimization Case Study Posted – Increasing e-mail address capture on landing page form by 22.3%
If your business depends on capturing email addresses, you must read this just-posted case study.
FaveCrafts, a free content website aimed at crafters and part of Prime Publishing Group (a leading Internet media company that operates community and e-commerce web sites in the crafting, home décor, wellness, diet and cooking categories) worked with WiderFunnel to increase their e-mail address capture.
Testing, using an A/B/n strategy, increased the conversion rate on their AdWords landing page form by 22.3%!
Click here to read the FaveCraft case study.
Interested in more case studies on capturing email addresses?
Then, click here to learn how Tourism BC increased their permission-to-contact opt-in conversion rate by 12% with a few small (but oh-so-crucial) changes.
-
Lessons from Disneyland on Experience Optimization
Chris in DisneylandHow does an organization like Disney create such a remarkable reputation? What can we learn from it?
On a recent family visit to Disneyland, I aimed to gather clues to their success. As with each visit (this being the fourth in as many years) I was again impressed by the organization’s quality of execution.
What can Disneyland teach us about experience optimization? Continue Reading
-
MarketingSherpa Founder Anne Holland Joins WiderFunnel’s Board of Advisors – a Great Day for Conversion Optimization Fans!
I have been a fan of Anne Holland since 1999 when I found myself working in a high-tech start-up, part of a team developing a web analytics application (ah, those heady dot com boom days…) and wondering ‘What on earth am I doing here; what do I know about the internet, really, other than its a cool way to waste time?’
Then, as part of that time waste, I came across MarketingSherpa and my life changed Continue Reading
-
Client Conversion Rate Optimization Case Study Published on MarketingSherpa
Rudder is a Web 2.0 service that reduces the effort required to manage personal finances. This free online system simplifies complex financial information and delivers emailed account snapshots and graphs to help users make better financial decisions.
Rudder management worked with us because the conversion rate on their website was below their expectations and, in order to meet business objectives, they needed to quickly improve the conversion rate of the sales funnel.
So, rather than tweak the website and make “opinion-based” changes, management chose to make data-driven decisions by running statistically valid experiments (smart!). Continue Reading
-
Obama’s Lessons for Online Marketers
Today, the local business publication, Business in Vancouver (BIV), picked up on my blog posts about Obama’s use of conversion optimization testing, which you can find below:
If you have a BIV subscription, you can read the article here. If not, we’ve republished it with permission here: Obamasphere’s online lessons for marketers here, or on the author, Alan Zisman’s, website.
-
eCommerce Sales 2008: Bad News or Not-So-Bad News? (Is there an opportunity for you here?)
News of a drop in holiday sales comes as no surprise this year. Overall holiday retail sales were down 5.5% in the month of November, and 8% in December up to the day before Christmas, compared to the same periods in 2007, according to MasterCard Advisors, a subsidiary of MasterCard Worldwide.
But wait! eCommerce sales were not down by as much as overall retail sales.
ComScore’s end-of-season online sales figures put the tally at $25.5 billion, down “only” 3% from a year ago. And MasterCard Advisors’ report says overall ecommerce sales ended the season with a decline of “only” 2.3% (the emphasis is mine).
But wait! Unique visitors to eCommerce sites were actually up.
Continue Reading -
A Salute to Brave eCommerce Retailers
There are brave eCommerce retailers, truly working both hard and smart at making sure the avalanche of bad economic news does not sweep them over.
This morning, AdAge reports a ComScore finding that consumer web spending dropped 4% so far in November versus the same period last year — the first time e-commerce figures have shown a year-to-year drop. “Despite the recent reprieve that plummeting gas prices have given American consumers, the depressed and volatile stock market, declining housing prices, inflation and the weak job market all represent dark clouds hanging over their heads this holiday shopping season,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.
But there are positive forecasts too: Continue Reading
-
A Website Optimization Primer
Everyone in the Online Marketing world seems to be talking about ‘Optimization’ lately, but you may not always know what they’re talking about. Search Engine Optimization (i.e. improving your search engine ranking) is a very different practice than Conversion Rate Optimization (i.e. improving your website conversion rate), which is also different from Web Performance Optimization (i.e. improving your page load times).
Continue Reading -
Show me the money (not the clicks!)
I’d like to discuss an important principle that is surprisingly often misunderstood, and that is evaluating success based on correct performance indicators.
What not to do
We recently met with a prospect company that kindly shared a report on the success of their recent advertising campaign’s pay-per-click activity. The ad agency that handled the PPC (along with the rest of the ad campaign) reported that the campaign was a raging success.
Unfortunately, the only measure of success the agency was using was the proportion of the given PPC budget spent. They had managed to spend 100% of the PPC budget for the campaign and therefore concluded that they had been incredibly successful.
It turns out that they were using PPC as a branding activity which, Continue Reading
-
How long will it take to get conversion optimization results with Google Website Optimizer?
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/testIf 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.
Raquel Hirsch
Chris Goward
