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).
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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…)

This morning, Google launched TV Ads, the latest in their expansion into offline media.

More than ever, it is important for marketers to integrate analytics and conversion optimization reporting from multiple channels. This is just another reason why I’m so excited about the new phone call tracking service, TrackYourCalls, that is about to open for private beta. (more…)

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, (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.

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.

I’m a big fan of Google Website Optimizer and we’ve found that most of our clients, not surprisingly, are enjoying the free price (and when I say “most”, it doesn’t mean that some don’t like the free price, just that they want to do more advanced testing that’s more practical with higher priced alternatives).

One issue I have, though, is with the 30-minute, single session cookie restriction. This rule means that Google Website Optimizer will only count a conversion if it occurs within 30 minutes and within the same session of viewing the test page.

So, if you visited my test page and saw one of 48 variable combinations, for example, and then 30 minutes later returned to the site to complete the transaction, you have a 98% probability (48/49, including the control) of seeing a different page combination. The problem is that the last combination is the only one that gets credited for the conversion, which shouldn’t necessarily be so.

This seems to be artificially oriented toward immediate impulse actions and may skew results.

I’ve passed this feedback on to Tom Leung (Google Website Optimizer Product Manager), and hope that they’ll be able to incorporate a change in the next Optimizer version, which I’m eagerly awaiting, I should add!

Ideally, we should be able to easily set our own rules for the timespan and persistence of the cookie based on the clients’ particular business rules and product purchase cycle.

There is one big problem with Google offering free products, like Google Website Optimizer and Google Analytics.

No, it’s not the product quality issue that you normally find when a company competes on price. Both Website Optimizer and Google Analytics are robust, enterprise-grade products. Although they don’t have all the best features available in some competitors, if you’re using the tools properly to their full potential, you’re doing better than most that pay for their website optimization and analytics tools.

The biggest benefit, that the tools are accessible to virtually anyone with a website, is also the biggest problem. Anyone with a passing interest in analytics can install the tools and quickly come to some interesting, and often invalid, conclusions.

There are surprisingly simple ways to draw conclusions from a/b tests or multivariate tests that will lead you to make disastrous decisions for your web site.

For example, the most basic rule of scientific methodology is that you NEVER touch the “control” during an experiment. This, unfortunately, comes as a surprise to many people that want to start testing online.

There are numerous other validity risks that must be accounted for, such as measurement tool assumptions, seasonality fluctuations, traffic segmentation factors, historical factors, among others.

Unlike a road driving test, which will give you immediate and obvious feedback when you’ve made an error (ie. your car is wrapped around a pole), an online testing error is careful to conceal itself in the numbers.

The question is: Are you sure your test results are valid?

We are very excited to announce that Google has published a case study based on an early conversion optimization project we completed with our client, Tourism British Columbia.

It is now available on the Google Website Optimizer home page for a limited (but hopefully not short!) time. Its permanent location is in the case studies page.

Yay!

Thanks to Tom Leung and Peter Harbison for making it happen. Cheers guys!