What do you read when you are not reading about marketing? What are your favourite blogs – marketing, technology or otherwise? Let me know – I am always in the hunt to find new, innovative thinking ‘out there’ that will educate, inspire and (please, oh, please) entertain me.

Which blogs do I read, you ask? The usual suspects, of course, but one I like in particular is Bob Gilbreath’s, The Challenge Dividend (www.challengedividend.com/) and have been following it for some time now.

As Bob states in his masthead, “This blog promotes a revolutionary idea that is actually pretty simple: Challenge Leads to Improvement” In it he discusses all sorts of ideas from all sorts of sources, always philosophizing about – and providing evidence for - how only challenges (and our perception of a situation as being a challenge) lead to innovation and improvement in science, in business, in your life.

However, it wasn’t until the most recent post that I realized why I enjoy his blog this much (OK, call me slow): his tag “Challenge Leads to Improvement” could just as easily apply to what we at WiderFunnel do daily.

We don’t take a web page conversion rate for granted, ever. We definitely perceive it to be *our* challenge. With all our clients, we see the given conversion rate as a starting point (“the challenge”) against which we run experiments and test variations until we succeed in lifting it (“the improvement”). And it’s all accountable to the third decimal point (to make all CFOs happy)

However, it always genuinely astounds me how some prospective clients, who think nothing of dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars – if not millions— on media buys (online and offline) with the express goal of driving traffic to their websites, are squeamish about a much, much smaller investment in conversion optimization. (And in our case, an investment that is pretty much going to pay for itself many times over — guaranteed)

Their media buys are successful in driving visitors to their site – driving prospects that did see their needs reflected in the AdWords ad they searched for and clicked on, in the email they received and clicked on, in the banner add they saw and clicked on. But somehow, only a small percentage of that traffic (0.5%? 2% 10%? – what about the rest!?) actually takes action on their landing pages.

Don’t these marketers feel challenged (in Bob Gilbreath’s sense) to do something about it? To improve the conversion rate and actually deliver to these web visitors what they came for? (Not to mention feel challenged to provide the return to shareholders who invested in the media buy in the first place!)

I guess if we take something for granted we don’t feel the challenge to improve it. Kudos to those marketers who are – in droves— seeing the challenge, not taking the conversion rate for granted and joining the conversion optimization camp!

Bookmark on: |  Send to a Colleague |  Print This Post

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Champion-Challenger, conversion rate optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.