Archive for January, 2007
Landing Page Optimization 2007
Check out today’s SearchDay article we contributed.
According to a recent Marketwatch story, a growing number of advertisers are cutting their spending on search campaigns. The reason? Keyword inflation and low conversion rates.
So let’s get this straight — instead of taking the abundant traffic from search engines and working on ways to better convert that traffic, many advertisers are abandoning search in whole or in part, looking for a cheaper way to drive traffic. What do they expect will happen with the new traffic once it gets to their non-converting sites?…
…This situation is NOT Google’s fault! Blaming Google for your traffic woes is like a brick and mortar store blaming the city for its traffic. Once the customers walk through the door of your store, it’s your responsibility to convert them.
If people kept walking into your brick and mortar store, and over 80 percent left after their second step, you would probably do something to entice them to come further into your store. However, this happens every day on virtually every Web site out there, and marketers often do nothing about it.
Read more of the SearchDay article to find out why Landing Page Optimization is going to hit the mainstream in 2007.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Call to Action Index and Expanded Table of Contents
Back when we published our hardbound version of Call to Action in 2005, we were a little pressed for time. So it had a flaw or two here and there. But the content was solid. You must have thought so, because you helped us turn that edition into a bestseller!
Now the publishing house that brought you Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? brings you a new, improved Call to Action in paperback. We’ve worked hard to clean up the organization, remove material, add material, edit out the repetition and tie the tactical conversion content to the framework of Persuasion Architecture. This is what we hoped our book could be!
The one thing we wanted to include, but were told there wasn’t space for, was an index. A book like this should have an index.
And now it does. Perfectly free. Yours for the taking. The Call to Action Index and Expanded Table of Contents, in pdf format.
Just one catch: the Index and Expanded Table of Contents will apply only to the 2006 paperback edition. New, improved and revised. Available now!
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
The Value of Online Traffic
Is traffic cost inflation stalking you, or has it fully violated your 2007 marketing budget? No online marketer is exempt; online traffic costs will increase. It’s the nature of supply and demand.
This relatively new Internet economy is settling into familiar patterns, and the costs of doing business online are beginning to resemble those of our brick-and-mortar brethren. In the brick-and-mortar world, there’s no such thing as low-cost traffic.
The corner of 57th St. and Fifth Ave. in Manhattan is one of the highest trafficked intersections in the country. So it’s no surprise the cost of commercial real estate is priced accordingly. To establish and support a retail store there, you must take advantage of the traffic’s high margins and volumes.
Some domains, such as Blinds.com, Diamonds.com, Business.com, and CreditCards.com, are rare. The natural traffic that comes with them is similar to those of well-located real estate. Some brands, like Macy’s, Wal-Mart, and Apple, are so well known that they, too, receive lots of natural traffic.
Organic traffic isn’t free, either. Most highly ranked sites are firmly established and largely relevant to the search queries they attract. There aren’t a lot of these out there.
Most companies simply don’t have the capital or means to attract natural traffic flows. As in the brick-and-mortar world, they must work a little harder, advertise more, and otherwise make up for their lack of location. There’s usually a correlation between location and ad budget: the better your location, the more traffic you get without advertising; the worse your location, the more you need to advertise.
Continue reading my column at ClickZ…
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Problems with Landing Page Optimization?
Every time I read a “best practices” guide to optimizing landing pages, I cringe. I know full well the limitations and the biases inherent in what the teacher is about to dispel to the pupil. Even worse, I know full well the pupil is likely to accept the teachings as gospel, and run off to begin implementation. Honestly, I don’t blame them- implementation led by a methodology will inevitably outperform pure talent or intuition. However, the assumption in that last statement is that the methodology is based upon a framework that has been well thought out and proven successful. How many methodologies do you know that live up to that assumption?
Given this, you can imagine my thoughts when I saw “10 Landing Page Optimization Tactics” from Larry Chase arrive in my inbox. In my experience Larry’s stuff is fantastic, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt, even with my low expectations given the topic. You know what I discovered? His tactics were really just principles, and in them were some excellent words of wisdom, as always. Experiment with registration forms, and test multiple landing pages (see a theme here?) were just two of his stratagems. To his credit, he also added *sample* tactics (following through on his chosen title), but more as clarification and inspiration than as implementation orders.
It’s not all a love fest here this morning however, Larry did present what I’d consider to be the cardinal sin of Landing Page Optimization- keep them in the funnel. Don’t offer escape routes, as he called it. Hmm, escape routes. I don’t know about you, but I’m hard pressed to think of a positive mental image involving escape routes. Burning building. Bank Robbery. Painful (and long) first date? Why do we assume eliminating the “escape route” is sufficient for visitors continuing the process? Doesn’t the X button at the upper right corner of the browser offer the ultimate escape route?
Larry’s not the first person to suggest this of course, and he won’t be the last. It comes from thinking about where you drop the visitor who clicks through your email or PPC ad as a page, rather than an event within a scenario. You want one principle to improve your landing pages?- Don’t do that. Don’t assume you can stuff your visitors into a linear funnel, and because there’s no way out, gravity will pull them through. Stop waiting for your cat to bark. The online world is one without gravity. In the online world, visitors control their own momentum.
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Written by:Howard Kaplan
AdAge on Viral Campaigns…
Scott Donaton’s latest article over at AdAge touches on something I wrote a while back, after the Agency.com fiasco. He astutely writes (emphasis is added):
As with ads in any medium, those that work are those that start with an insight, show an understanding of their target audience, and have an authentic, relevant connection to the brand. Those that don’t smack of having been produced because someone wanted to do a viral video to please himself, his boss or his board. They’re the commercial equivalent of YouTube videos of kids falling off skateboards.
I couldn’t agree more. Too bad the insight part is the key, and plucking those off trees isn’t exactly a viable strategy in 2007.
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Written by:Howard Kaplan
Email Marketing Can Be Sticky
Is it me or have you also noticed Amazon has been sending out many more recommended book emails? Their last one really caught my attention.
It started… "We’ve noticed that customers who have expressed interest in Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results by Bryan Eisenberg have also ordered Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide by John Jantsch. For this reason, you might like to know that John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide is now available."
John is a great guy. I had the pleasure of spending some time with him in Kansas City during my book tour. We recorded a podcast together. I’d have to agree with Amazon, if you found Call to Action valuable you should order a copy of Duct Tape Marketing.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Some Google Advertisers Cutting Spending
From Dow Jones MarketWatch…
Keyword inflation, low conversion rates sending merchants elsewhere
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — A growing number of online advertisers are bidding a partial goodbye to Google Inc.
Frustrated by the soaring price of Internet-search advertising and diminishing returns from the ads they buy, mid-sized advertisers say they plan to reduce how much business they do with Google this year — in some cases, significantly.
Last year, for example, eBags.com co-founder Peter Cobb spent between $5 million and $8 million to peddle suitcases, handbags and other carrying cases online. Google got 75% of that amount.
But this year it will get “significantly less,” Cobb said. “The Google percentage has got to go down,” he said.
In many cases, the cost of an eBags.com ad placed on either Google’s own Web site or one of its affiliates now equals 45% of the price of the product it promotes. That’s crimping the company’s own profit margins and forcing it to look elsewhere to market its bags.
“We’re testing print ads right now,” said Cobb, whose company will spend up to $8 million on ads in 2007. Read the rest of the article
The article continues…
Keyword search prices on many terms rose between 40% and 60% last year, according to advertisers like Dan Sackrowitz, chief executive of Bare Necessities, which sells lingerie online. He saw his Google ad budget soar 50% last year.
The problem is obvious, traffic costs are puffing up like a marshmallow in a microwave and advertisers are having a hard time finding ways to increase traffic and lower costs. Simply put, Google advertisers are hooked.
Instead of looking for ways to increase return on traffic investment, the average marketer will look for another traffic fix. We’ve said before that the marketing battleground of the future is not traffic acquisition, it will be traffic conversion.
The exceptional marketer is looking for ways to optimize their keyword and landing page conversion rates.
Optimizing landing pages is something we’ve been doing with our clients for quite some time. We are a premier channel partner with Google and their new testing platform Google Website Optimizer beta. If you are interesting in our landing page optimization coaching service, we are going to take on a few testers over the next few weeks to participate in this beta with us. Contact us if you want to know more.
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Written by:Anthony Garcia
Delete Your E-Mail List
Do you have a successful e-mail list?
How do you determine its success:? Total subscribers? Number of weekly sign-ups? High open rate? Click-throughs? Comments generated?
All those numbers are important, but often the real value of a good list is the participation it stimulates between the subscriber and your business.
Too many businesses shell out too many dollars and resources to up their number of subscribers or to improve the demographic quality of their e-mail lists, while too few consider the quality of subscriber participation.
Don’t confuse participation with interactive technology. I’m not talking about keeping customers entertained with bells and whistles. Worthwhile interaction truly engages your audience.
So when we decided we wanted to improve participation quality with our company newsletter subscribers, we pulled up our list — and hit “delete.”
We wiped out a list of over 40,000 addresses, built organically and through co-registration. A list we’ve been mailing to since 2000. Before you conclude my book tour drove me mad (and it may as well have), read on.
At the end of the day, we don’t care much about the number of subscribers we have, we care about reader engagement — the quality of the relationship readers have with us. We don’t expect subscribers to read every issue, but if they haven’t read our newsletter once in three months, we assume they’re not interested, or don’t have the time to invest. Making any other assumption risks the quality of our subscriber interaction. The last thing we want is for the newsletter to degrade into a perception of opt-in spam.
Continue reading my column on ClickZ…
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Unspoken Assumptions
Kick the habit of assuming who your customers are, what they should want and how should deliver it.
Remember this classic scene from the Odd Couple?
Felix Unger: [to woman on witness stand] Ah … you assumed. My dear, you should never assume. You see, when you assume… [Felix writes the word “assume” on a blackboard] … you make an ass out of u and me.
Want to know what really gets in the way of better conversion rates? All too often it isn’t what you do. It’s what you don’t do! It’s not what you put in to your conversion system; it’s what you leave out of your conversion system.
I’m talking about the unspoken assumptions every business makes when it plans for conversion. Come see what I mean.
Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 145
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Written by:The Grok
Coremetrics Client Summit 2007
Date:March 20-22, 2007
Location: New Orleans, LA
About: Bryan Eisenberg will be presenting the keynote at this exciting conference.
For More Info: http://clientsummit2007.meetingsthatwork.com/
