PPC
Great landing pages do not happen overnight or as a lucky happenstance. They are developed through many rounds of testing — some successful, some not. My experience with conversion improvement efforts and landing-page testing has taught me three critical lessons that apply, regardless of the type of company or conversion: Don’t settle for the first […]
Analytics & Conversion
When the iPhone was first released, everyone marveled over its amazing simplicity and user experience. The world fell in love, and the mobile industry was changed overnight. Other phones, if they weren’t smartphones, were suddenly viewed as cheap and not very useful. We have all experienced this same truth at the websites we visit. We […]
Analytics & Conversion
I’ve written about agile marketing several times in this column over the years. First, Agile Marketing For Conversion Optimization in 2010, and then, Have You Adopted Agile Marketing Yet? in 2012. Now it’s 2013, and I’m back with this year’s edition of my agile marketing stump speech. Why do I keep returning so doggedly to […]
Analytics & Conversion
Last month’s column on Why Big Testing Will Be Bigger Than Big Data — encouraging marketing experimentation on a much broader scale than ever before — was well received. But one question came up several times in the comments: how do you enable many marketers in an organization to run experiments at the same time […]
PPC
CPA Bidding in Google AdWords allows you to set a CPA bid, and then Google will do all the bidding for you. When it works, its fantastic, as you don’t have to spend all day trying to set bids inside the account. Instead, you can focus you time on more permanent improvements, such as testing […]
Amazon Alexa
They are out there, and they are not nice. They seek to take food from the mouths of your children and to put your career at risk. They are your online competitors, and they won’t think twice about leaving you crying helplessly as they eat your ice cream cone. In every industry, at least one […]
Commerce
We are only a month into 2012, but 2011 already seems like a distant memory. Christmas was over a month ago and Black Friday was approximately 6 months ago by my calculations. But as we reminisce on the year that was 2011, hopefully you were pleasantly surprised with how it turned out. For a year […]
Amazon Alexa
Previously in How To Increase Organic Keyword Conversions, we covered how to use Google Analytics to determine the entrance pages people are landing on after clicking through from organic keyword listings in search engines. We showed you how to look for typical issues with entrance pages that hurt conversions such as files with no navigation, old […]
Amazon
We frequently hear about the consumer brands that dominate their markets. Amazon controls 25% of all Internet commerce. Zappos grew to a billion dollar company in ten years with its Web-friendly business model and rule-breaking culture. But who holds the dominant Internet-driven position in your slice of the economy? Is it you? It could be. […]
Amazon Alexa
Gather close, dear friends and hear my words of warning. Gird yourself, for my tale would make any enlightened man or woman stagger back in disbelief. I do not share such news with you lightly. It is not my errand to harm or discomfort your mental or psychological wellbeing. Resist the urge to sever the […]
Content
You’ve heard it said a hundred times. Search engine marketing leads to a dead end if the web site isn’t designed to deliver what it promises. Many an anchor text, meta description and advertisement text have sent users into a house of horror because the landing page is a complete disconnect from what was marketed. […]
Content
We’re seeing a boom period in the development of new tools for usability testing, which is a great trend that foretells better web experiences in the coming years. Today I’m going to look at Usabilla, which my friend Keri Morgret and I used on her site Strike Models, which sells products for building remote controlled […]
Amazon
So you’ve assessed the feedback from your surveys and usability tests, analyzed the site within an inch of its life for obstructions in the customers’ paths, fixed the glaring errors and now you are ready to start devising some tests that will send the site into overdrive. However, if you are trying to explain your […]
Analytics & Conversion
Here are the three strategies that are conversion deal-breakers for e-commerce web sites. Get these strategies right, and you should be able to optimize your way to higher conversion rates. Get any of these wrong, and you will find yourself struggling to improve.
Amazon
In a previous post, I discussed the importance of using behavioral targeting to increase your conversion rates. I also wrote about how to use Google Analytics to understand personas of the users who visit your site. This post will present a fast and easy way to get your behavioral targeting (BT) process up and running. […]
If you asked some of the best online marketers in the business what one piece of advice they can give you to help make your site better, stronger or more profitable, I bet most would say “test your pages, test your techniques, and test your theories.” The one constant in search engine marketing is change. […]
Amazon
Search marketers can learn a lot from scientists. Scientists spend their life testing things, one after the other, incessantly trying to discover new interactions between atoms, molecules, viruses, bacteria, etc. One of the greatest scientists of all time, Albert Einstein, said, “A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment […]
Content
In Lance Loveday’s Just Behave column the other week on Designing For The Subconscious Mind, he described his experiences when showing two different web site pages to an audience a half second apart. He then asked the participants which web site they’d prefer to do business with. The “professional” and “credible” page won over the […]