Week 9 was good.  I spent this week really diving into marketing Beacon.  The bulk of what I did this week involved making sure things were up to date or set up correctly.  I ensured that the local listings for Beacon were correct in directories like Google Places, Yahoo! Local, and Bing Local.  Once I was done with that, I worked on setting on some goal funnels in GA to track conversions for Beacon’s contact form.  I set up the funnel to track if the contact form was filled out from a specific page.  The other updating I did was related to the special offer page for the current promotion Beacon will be running.  This didn’t involve creating anything on the page, but rather making sure links worked correctly on the page and that links from other pages pointed to the correct special offer page.

Along with that work, I spent a large amount of time working on a PPC campaign for the special offer.  This was really fun.  I got to manipulate the keywords for ad groups within the campaign to try to ensure that the ads were associated with the right keywords to improve the quality score of the keywords.  The better the quality score, the more likely the ad will appear in related searches.  There were close to 20 ad groups that I focused on for this campaign.  After looking over the previous statistics, I tweaked the copy of the ads for each ad group to hopefully be more effective.  I also wrote one or two new ads for each ad group.  If you don’t know already, the ads have a limited number of characters for each line.  There are four lines in each ad.  The headline, line 1, line 2, and the display URL.  The headline and the limits you to 25 characters and the other three lines limit you to 35 characters each.  Here is an example to help visualize what I had to work with.

This equals 25 characters

This is the length of 35 characters

Here is a new set of 35 characters.

www.displayurl.com/35morecharacters

It seems like it would be easy to get your point across in that amount of space since you have 70 characters for the “meat” of the “sandwich”, but considering my second line was a predetermined mentioning of the special offer, I really only had 35 characters to deliver the message.  I was able to make the headline whatever I wanted to help get the message out there.  Also, the display URL can more or less be whatever you want.  It doesn’t have to be a valid URL.  It is meant to help convince people to click on the ad.  The ad is pointing to a real URL of your choosing in the background.

In addition to writing and editing ads, I was given the freedom to determine the best geographical area to target with the ads, I was able to give input on the daily budget of the campaign, and I got to learn about and set up some A/B testing within the campaign.  A/B testing is where you run two almost identical ads or websites or etc. and see which outperforms the other.  Once you get enough data you stop the less effective one and move on to testing the winner versus another small change.  Hopefully I’ll be able to see some results before the end of my internship.  If not I’ll have to check back in to find out how it’s going.

Everyone pay attention to me, as this is the most important lesson I can teach you aside from never wearing socks with sandals.  Testing is not a way to keep your head in the clouds pondering; it’s a way to constantly improve as you laugh all the way to the bank.  Sure you can expand the keywords you are ranking for and double your traffic, but doing some testing to double your conversion rate is a smarter, easier, and cheaper way to increase the productivity of your website.  But, make sure you are testing the most efficient way possible.  Below are some quick tips to help keep you on the right track.

1)    Have faith in your tools. Thanks to easy multivariate testing sites like Optimizely, we don’t have to worry about “how to test” accurately because their user interface can handle it.  Instead, we can focus on the “what to test.”

2)    Test hypotheses, not your own opinions. To be a great web marketing strategist, you have to break away from the concept that we always know best.  A great website is not an extension of you, but rather an extension of the users that interact with the website.

3)    It’s best to approach a test from all angles. Make sure you not only measure the quantitative data from the GA and your testing interface, but that you also set up a user feedback survey or poll question within your social media profiles to get qualitative data as well.

4)    Go big first. The initial take from a user’s first impression is important since people process images faster than words.  Make sure the layout and images are good first since they have a higher impact that the content.  Big then small is the way to go.  Make sure you nail down the layout, color scheme, and font first.  Then go for the small details of button size, headline, etc.

5)    Make sure to focus on one change at a time.  If you change the button’s color and location, and the headline from ad to ad, how can you be sure what really has the big effect?  Go for one item at a time and do quick tests based on the number of users that visit the pages.

If you sell multiple products on your website remember that visitors of the different product types are in fact different, and what works on one page might not work on another to create a conversion.  Always A/B test first to find the layout that works, then begin multivariate testing to focus on the details. Once you discover which layout is the best match for you to display information that your visitors like, your next step should be to determine the best headers, images, and call out buttons on each page.  Clear marketing messages, little visual distractions, and an obvious call to action will increase your conversions.  Listed below is a breakout of tips to help you optimize your landing pages for higher conversions.

1) The structure of the page has an effect.

a.      The less distractions the better for pages conversion pages.

b.      If you remove a visible navigation or several quick links form the page, you will reduce the number of engagements you have on a page (less distractions) which could ultimately help increase your conversions.

2) Each page should have 1 goal with a centralized focus point.

a.      If you want to increase sales for socks, focus on the socks for your socks page, and leave the advertising of the other products to a minimum.

b.      If you want to sell socks have an obvious conversion point such as a call to action “buy socks” button in the content section of the page.

3) Each Page should have a specific marketing message for each product you sell.

a.      On every conversion triggering landing page you should have a message that not only tells why people need the product you sell, but also tells them why they should buy this product from you.  This will give them the boost they need to convert.

4) Images and buttons do play a role in the conversion process.

a.      Make sure to conduct multivariate testing for images used on your page to determine whether it’s better to have images with people or not.  Sometimes visitors want to be engaged by people they have something in common with, but other times it might not be best if your website visitors have a big range in age, sex, or nationality.

b.      Test your buttons to see if your buttons are too aggressive, or not aggressive enough.  A softer conversion call out such as “get started” might get more visitors into the checkout funnel than the “buy now” button you have been using.

5) Use social media to help increase your brand and product awareness.

a.      I recommend using the facebook ‘like’ button and the twitter ‘tweet’ button on your product pages to help your message spread virally.  These buttons are great because they automatically are kicked to their profiles/accounts without causing your visitors to leave the page.  The best places for these small links are in the actual content section of the page so that they can share, after they have reviewed the page.

Sure every email marketing solution needs to do some basic things like import email addresses, build emails (on some scale) and send those emails. However, there are a whole lot of bells and whistles out there. After years of working with email marketing I have compiled a master list of what I want from my email marketing solution.

• Ability to compare email message data
• Personal representative available to help maximize effectiveness, segment your audience, give consultative advice, and provide trouble shooting expertise.
• Free customer support
• Email design and creation tools.
• Open & click tracking
• Spam checker to ensure your emails do not get sent to junk email folders.
• Inbox preview (including mobile), which is invaluable to creating universally accepted emails
• Works with you personally to clean up your email database to achieve the highest deliverability.
• Automatic data clense
• Unsubscribe processing
• Stays current on changes in the practices as major ISPs in order to resolve deliverability issues.
• Real time stats
• Ability to send targeted emails to opt-ins based on their actions
• Extra reporting on things like friend forwards, survey responses, updates and bounce inactivation.
• Easily integrates with Google Analytics
• Ability to run A/B tests.
• Allows you to set up automatic emails to remind or encourage recipients
• Data integration application to sync data with your applications
• Ability to upload email data

Last week Google made one of the most awesome upgrades to Google Website Optimizer! If you’ve used GWO much at all, you’ll agree that this upgrade will make your life much easier. I’ve outlined the primary changes below. If you want to read more about the upgrade directly from Google, visit the Official Google Website Optimizer Blog site.

There are 3 major changes in the upgrade that have me jumping up and down with joy:

1. You can now validate an A/B experiment by uploading a local file (this was needed badly), enough said;
2. You can disable a combination in an active experiment; and
3. Better color representation of a combination’s performance confidence.

The image in Figure 1 below is from the new GWO report. Click on the image to view a larger version. The biggest thing to note about the changes is that now you can disable a variation that is performing badly and concentrate on the variations that are doing very well. Just click on the checkbox (item 1) then on the disable button (item 2). This option will allow GWO to produce more definitive results much quicker and without having to stop, copy, and re-start the experiment. That is so awesome that I’m almost plum giddy!

The final major improvement to the report is the color representation of how well a combination is performing (item 3). Although Combination 2 is performing much better than 1 or the original, the graph will not turn green until it is truly a high confidence winner.

Go ahead and give it a try for yourself!

The number one question that seems to be asked is “What should I test on my site”. Ultimately, that depends on the type of site you have (i.e. eCommerce, brochure, etc.) and the goals of your site. When I’m analyzing a site for website optimization strategies, the first thing that I ask is “What is the primary goal of the site?” (i.e. lead generation, purchase a product, sign up for a newsletter, etc.) I believe that this is the most important question to know the answer to because it dictates all subsequent actions that you should take. Let’s look at one example answer to this question and how it affects the testing that should be done: “I want to generate qualified leads that I can use in email marketing campaigns.” From this statement, you can deduce that the best place to generate these leads is through some type of sign-up form.

A Sample Contact Form Analysis

Let’s assume that Google Analytics (GA) is already installed on the site. Let’s also assume that a “Contact Form” goal has been established. The image on the right is a sample funnel visualization for the contact form. Click on the image to enlarge it and see the detail. Notice that 201 visitors landed on the contact page and only 13% completed the first step in the funnel and moved on to the contact us form. This generally means that you have lost 77% of the potential new leads. Scary isn’t it? Now notice that of the 13% that completed the first step, only 40% actually completed the form. Overall, only 7.9% of all visitors that entered the funnel actually completed it. Now what?

Since 77% of visitors are abandoning the funnel from the Contact Page, that’s the first place to look to perform testing. The image below shows our fictitious contact page. Notice that the contact page also includes a phone number and mailing address. It’s very difficult (if not impossible) to identify how many of the 174 visitors that didn’t continue into the funnel actually called or send a snail mail in lieu of filling out the form. Or if any of them contacted the company at all.

There are many tests that could be performed on this page such as moving the form here with and without the phone numbers and addresses below the form; putting the form on this page and providing a link to the additional information, especially if the primary goal is to get visitors to fill out the form; or this page could contain 2 links, one to the contact form and the other to the additional information.

Use your imagination and see how many variations you can come up with. Share them here as an online exercise. Happy Testing!