My friend, Juan Guillermo Tornoe’s Hispanic Trending blog is always a good read. His post Search Engine’s Perception of Hispanic vs. Latino made me think.

First, the headline made me consider why I think of myself as Hispanic but never use the term Latino to describe myself. For those of you confused by that, Spanish is my first language. I never learned English until I went to school. My parents immigrated to the US from Argentina in 1962 and my mother’s family spoke Spanish as their first language centuries before Columbus bumped into the island of Hispaniola, they are Sephardi jews.

Second, the image search is revealing. The way people use the terms, Hispanic & Latino, is often interchangeable. However, it’s obvious that the people using the term have different ideas about what they means. I simply never thought before about how valuable image search is in understanding the underlying terms. Marketers take note; what an interesting way to determine relevance.

Read the post, it’s short, but it might make you think too.

So what is the right term, Hispanic or Latino? If there isn’t one right term then how do you choose which one to use?

Related Posts:

• Net Gain: Latinos Are Going Online More Than Ever
• The Cost of Leaving Hispanics Lost in Translation
• The Search Engine's Love Affair With Blogs

I just arrived home from San Francisco where I attended the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. As always, it’s great to catch up with friends and participate in enlightening conversations. A key theme of my presentation: how to get organizational buy-in to testing and conversion optimization.

Marketers often get so worked up about the prospect of optimization and persuading more customers that we forget something. Before we can pursue optimization, we must convince those in our own company about optimization’s value.

Here, then, are some tips for convincing executives, coworkers, teammates, and anyone else in your company of the importance of investing in marketing optimization, analytics, and conversion improvement efforts.

Get the Math Right

When you present your numbers, don’t assume your listeners are getting the math right:

• 100,000 people visit your Web site
• 3 percent of people convert into a desired outcome
• Your site gets 3,000 total conversions

What happens when you increase conversion rate by 1 percent? How many total conversions does your organization hear?

• 3,030
• 4,000

Translate All Numbers Into Dollars

Another dangerous assumption to make is that your listeners can translate numbers into dollars. Always show impact in terms of dollars. Use average order value (AOV) or average lead value (for lead-generation or registration sites).

Let’s say your AOV is $50 and your company spends $200 for every 1,000 visits. For those 1,000 visits, your conversion rate is 2 percent, which equals 20 actions. For every 1,000 visits, you gross $1,000 in sales (calculate: $50 AOV x 20 actions = $1,000 in gross sales). If you increase your conversion rate modestly to 3 percent, your gross sales increase is 50 percent, or $500 per 1,000 visits (calculate: 3 percent x 1,000 visits = 30 actions; 30 actions x $50 AOV = $1,500 in sales).

It’s also helpful to show the dollar impact over an entire quarter or a fiscal year.

Oftentimes companies have a hard time determining AOV or average lead value with any degree of accuracy; that’s OK. Of course, the cleaner your data, the easier it will be to have organizational buy-in. The key is to show some sort of monetary value. We often encourage our clients to make a conservative estimate that most in the company will agree on.

Leverage Your Reach

Show your team the advantage of taking control of the visitor instead of existing solely at the mercy of visitor traffic.

With an AOV of $50 and a modest conversion rate increase from 2 percent to 3 percent (50 percent), the sales increase is impressive, but that’s only one part of the story. In the table below, you can see the impact of increasing both conversion and traffic:

In the “good” column, you get more from the traffic and spend. Your CPA (define) goes down, and you generate more profit from your advertising. You won’t grow faster, but you make more.

Let’s say you reinvest some of those dollars into acquisition spend to drive more traffic. You can grow exponentially and outspend your competition, you can even afford for the conversion rate to go down a bit. Your conversion and traffic increase rockets your growth dramatically.

This advantage of conversion rate optimization is often missed or overlooked by many companies.

With a conversion rate increase, you now have a choice:

• Use incremental profits to expand reach: 133,000 visits x 4% conversion rate = 5,320 orders
• Lower your marketing acquisition costs. If your acquisition cost was $100 per action, with this efficiency it would now be $66 per action.

Again, even with modest increases in conversion companies can begin to wean themselves off addictive traffic or make their traffic work harder for them instead of working harder for traffic.

Is There a Catch?

While there are many tools to aid marketers in their quest, there’s still no conversion rate black box. Conversion optimization always require resources and effort, trial and error, and sometimes sweat and tears. And it never ends. Optimization is a continual process of gaining customer insight, implementing changes, testing, then starting the whole process over.

The Bottom Line

You can’t always control the amount of visits, but you can control what you present to visitors. Why not optimize it?

Still have doubts? Ask yourself: what would it cost you to double traffic (if this is even possible) versus doubling conversion rate?

*Article cross-posted on ClickZ

. .

Editor’s Note: Want an even easier way to get buy-in for conversion optimization? Join Bryan on June 3rd in Manhattan at the Call to Action seminar. Today (May 9th) is the last day to take advantage of the early registration discount for the Call to Action and Persuasive Online Copywriting seminars, so hurry up and make your business case for the trip. It’s a lot easier to convince management when you can save up to $300 off the price of admission.

Related Posts:

• Seven Years of Change, Seven Years of Staying the Same
• eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, San Francisco
• The Price of Perfection
• Website Optimization Starts With a Hypothesis
• Testing Add-to-Cart Buttons: Stuck in the Middle With You

Social media advertising isn’t just another fad. With all of that juicy customer info we give social networks each day, for free, businesses of all sizes are lining up to cash in by offering the right ad to the right person, guaranteed — or so they think.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Here’s the promise Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, made to media buyers last November:

With Facebook you will be able to select exactly the audience you want to reach, and we will only show your ads to them. We know exactly what gender someone is, what activities they are interested in, their location, country, city or town, interests, gender [etcetera, etcetera] . . .

Several months later, this is the result:

Apparently, David at Broccoli & Cheese wasn’t a good target for this ad:

As you read this, thousands of 18-34 year old men are watching Tampax commercials. Not because they want to, but because television is an imprecise medium that makes it hard to get the right ads to the right people. As a result, we’ve been conditioned over decades to expect irrelevance at the commercial break.

But wasn’t the Internet, and in particular, social media, supposed to turn that tide? Take Facebook—they know more about my day-to-day life than my parents do, and surely enough to serve me ads that I’d find remotely useful. But they’re dropping the ball. Big time.

[…] Will someone out there besides Google please get their [expletive] together?

If MarineCFO’s Chief Financial Officer is reading this, chance are s/he’s not thrilled with Facebook.

To be clear, I don’t think MarineCFO was silly to place this ad. It’s just that, like me and perhaps even you, we’re easily seduced by the promise of demographics. We like to think it’s sufficient.

Demographics are like catnip for marketers.

They make being wrong feel so right. They always seem to have the right answer. They help us justify lazy decisions. They give us such wonderful opportunities to prejudge our audience — specifically, how they define themselves and what they want to hear, see or read — based on a few scant details. Yet by themselves, demographics can never be accountable for anything because they’re based on correlation, not causality.

Marketers, and the advertising platforms that prey on them, need to look beyond the logistics of ad placement and stop thinking of “targeting” as a one-way, two-dimensional process. Demographics are important, but without the context of psychographics [define], they’re quite often useless. To paraphrase Mark Twain, to a media buyer armed with vague demographic data, everyone looks like a target.

I wonder where and how these ads would have been placed had they planned the campaign with personas.

Related Posts:

• Why Virgin's Banner Ads Work, Even on Facebook!
• Is Your Reputation Worth $15 Billion?
• Spooked by Spock?
• College Tonight Tries to Convert the Facebook Fatigued
• Have We Gone 2.0 Far? Facebook Wedding Invites!?

The new “Ouch Point” survey from the Opinion Research Corporation suggests that U.S. e-commerce websites are still — believe it or not — frustrating shoppers.

As first reported by Direct Magazine, the survey found that…

• 19% dislike learning an item was back-ordered or out of stock after said item was placed in a shopping cart
• 14% are frustrated by Web sites that malfunction as payment is being processed
• 8% are confounded by unclear return policies
• 6% don’t like unclear shipping information
• 6% dislike not getting an acknowledgment after an order has been placed

Adding another dimension to these numbers, Jack Loechner at MediaPost explains that:

. . . iCongo, Inc., released the results of a consumer survey conducted by Harris Interactive that reveals [that] 33 percent of online U.S. adults indicated they are more likely to shop online rather than in-person at a store due to the high price of gasoline.

If there were ever a time to optimize your e-commerce website, it’s now.

What else causes friction? Read FutureNow’s 2007 Retail Customer Experience Survey for answers.

. .

Join FutureNow’s Bryan Eisenberg on June 3rd in New York City for the Call to Action seminar. Based on his bestselling book of the same title, Bryan will show you how to improve conversion and brand affinity by reducing friction for the customer. Register by this Friday and save $100!

Related Posts:

• Yahoo Beats Google in Customer Satisfaction
• Are Friends More Influential Than "Influencers"?
• 4 Q's Your Web Analytics Can't Answer
• The UK's Top 50 Ecommerce Sites
• Future Now's 2007 Retail Customer Experience Study

Who would throw away a perfectly good UFO house?

That’s exactly what happened in Taiwan more than 20 years ago, as you can see from these Flickr photos.

Wow. An entire resort filled with UFO-style houses.

Abandoned.

Seeing this made me think of the websites that are abandoned each day, each quarter, by businesses that decide they need to redesign instead of enduring the less glamorous process of website optimization.

According to one blog, there are a several rumors as to why the “UFO house” resort in Sanjhih was abandoned. One story suggests that someone was killed there and the resort is haunted. Another is that the Taiwanese government outlawed bathing beaches in the area. But the most believable explanation is that the design was impractical; the resort is in a remote, windy area near the sea, and if the houses are indeed made of fiberglass as it appears, it would get incredibly hot in the summertime.

Form without function is art, not business.

In August of last year, Internet Retailer’s Form and Function survey of “243 chain retailers, catalog companies, virtual merchants and consumer brand manufacturers,” and found that…

60.3% . . . have redesigned their e-commerce sites in the past year, including 20.1% in the past three months and 14.3% within six months. Of the retailers planning to overhaul the look of their web sites, 74.7% expect to do so within 12 months and 28.6% within 90 days.

[…] “The pace of web site design is brisk because more retailers know that having an attractive site that makes it easy to find merchandise and make a purchase is a competitive advantage,” says Joey Lechtner, director of e-marketing services for Fry Inc., an Ann Arbor, Mich., web site design and e-commerce development company. “Retailers ‘keep up with the Jones’ [sic] and if their competitor redesigns a site, they notice and take action.”

A costly redesign? Just to keep up with the neighbors? What if these earthlings — these so-called “Joneses” — take their design cues from outer space? Sure, there are times when a website redesign makes sense, but if you plan it with human visitors in mind in the first place, redesigning each year would seem crazy.

And let’s face it. Maybe you don’t need a redesign. Maybe you just need to recognize that you’ve built a cool-looking-yet-impractical UFO house that would be fine if you just painted it white and installed solar panels, reflective glass and an air conditioner.

That’s my website optimization metaphor and I’m sticking to it. For now.

Related Posts:

• Is Something Wrong With Your Design?
• Internet Retailer Web Design Conference, Miami
• 10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Using Flash
• Why Rivets, Not Icebergs, Sink Websites
• Big Impact, Small Changes on Amazon

If you’ll be in New York City on June 4th — or looking for an excuse to visit — here’s your chance.

The IMC Mobile Marketing conference, in addition to offering a 20% discount to all GrokDotCom readers (click here for details), is letting us give away three free tickets to their event.

How To Enter

All you need to do is leave a question — not a comment — below that addresses a common or interesting concern about mobile marketing.

Be specific. The more detail you give, the better our chances of giving you a clear answer.

The three most interesting questions (according to Bryan and me) win. It’s that simple!

Who Should Enter

Anyone reading this who wants to learn more about mobile marketing; especially those who read GrokDotCom often but don’t comment. We’re setting one of the free tickets aside for a first-time commenter, so don’t be shy!

Why You Should Bother

Because EVERYONE’S questions will be answered. That’s right. Even if you don’t win, we will have mobile marketing experts (from the conference and others) answer your questions. Besides, your odds of winning free tickets are pretty darn good.

How You’ll Know if You’ve Won

We will email you. We’ll also announce the winners next Monday in a new post.

Good luck, and may the best questions win!

. .

Editor’s Note: Happening in the same hotel, the two days prior, June 2nd and 3rd respectively, FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting and Call to Action seminars give you even more profitable excuses to visit New York. Register by Friday, May 9th and to save up to $300.

Related Posts:

• IMC Mobile Marketing: The Next Evolution
• Students Open to Mobile Ads When Properly Bribed
• Google Feeling "Double-Lucky" on Mobile
• Bryan Eisenberg on Websites That Stink (in a Good Way)
• Two FutureNow Seminars, 6/2-3 in New York City

The New York Times is reporting on Amazon’s lawsuit contesting the recently enacted New York state law which requires online retail outlets to collect sales tax on items sold to the state’s residents.

Slashdot sums up the new tax law:

“…based on a novel definition of what constitutes a presence in the state: It includes any Web site based in the state that earns a referral fee for sending customers to an online retailer. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of affiliates–from big publishers to tiny blogs–that feature links to its products.”

We should all support Amazon in their fight. This could affect all of us who buy online in the future — at least in the United States. Let’s all buy something from Amazon today to show our support of their fight.

P.S. - If you need a suggestion on what to buy, you can always pre-order our next book, Always Be Testing.

Related Posts:

• How to Increase Shopping Cart Abandonment
• Big Impact, Small Changes on Amazon
• The Demise of Borders Books: Death by Internet
• Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate: January 2008
• Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart

When I wrote about how Mint.com quickly builds trust with visitors, I forgot to mention that — although coworkers had recommended Mint’s financial planning service — a former FutureNow client had written in to say he was impressed by how Mint’s website appeals to the four buying modes.

Ah, yes, the four buying modes; Spontaneous, Competitive, Methodical and Humanistic.

Since I was stuck in Competitive (fast + logical) buying mode, I ended up blogging about how Mint’s site addressed my trust concerns by using trigger words — “does not store your account numbers”; “bank-level data security”; “anonymous” — that appealed to me. Meanwhile, our former client, Patrick from JigsawHealth.com (see small picture above), was looking at the big picture.

Patrick even did a screencast to show how understanding the four buying modes is essential to creating a website that converts by speaking to many types of visitors at the same time.

If you’re interested, you can read the Inc. Magazine case study on how Patrick worked with FutureNow to double his landing page conversion rate from 10% to 20% making just a few copy and design adjustments in order to speak to these different buying modes.

There’s no doubt that Patrick’s a smart guy, but this is hardly the first time one of our clients has outwitted me with our own methodology. To be perfectly honest, it happens every day. Brian Bond, our VP of Marketing and Product, the guy who markets the marketers, is a former client.

I’d like to think the reason our clients consistently get strong results is because everyone who works here is a genius, but that’s not true. Could it be that only smart clients hire us? (As much as I’d like to say that and mean it, past experience suggests otherwise.) No, it’s much simpler than that. The reason FutureNow’s clients get results is because, once you optimize your website from the visitor’s perspective, you’ll never look at websites — any website — the same way.

Related Posts:

• Can I Please Have the "Mac Guy" Back?
• Screencast: Does Your Site Appeal to All Buying Modes?
• How A Pretty Face Can Push Visitors Away
• How to Double Your Conversion Rate
• Screencast: Hunting for Early Bird Persuasion, Part 3

I have a friend who works in the online marketing department for a multi-million-dollar clothing retailer in Canada. Because they’re still stuck in the dark ages and don’t yet have an online store, the company’s web marketing team consists of four people.

A week ago, my friend called me to ask, “What’s the industry average time spent on a site?” Her boss asked her to find out because she was doing a presentation to the marketing team and would be attempting to describe what was happening on their website.

My friend was looking at her analytics reports, assuming they should be reporting metrics like “time spent”, but she couldn’t give me any explanation as to why they were measuring certain things or how it all fit together. This marketing team had no idea what their analytics were trying to tell them.

Sound familiar? Whether or not we care to admit it, this problem is all too common. By themselves, the facts can be deceiving. If the facts don’t fit into a larger story line, they’re meaningless. Just because something happened, that doesn’t make it newsworthy. That’s why…

Marketers should think like news editors.

Your web analytics program works for you, not the other way around. It’s the news wire that serves your staff of reporters and, as editor-in-chief, it’s your job to decide which stories are most important.

There are two types of approaches to web analytics reporting:

• The beat reporter reliably follows the same story from day-to-day. If you tell the beat reporter to follow “time spent”, she will diligently explain where visitors spent the most time, how much time they spent overall, and how much time they spent today versus yesterday, last month, last year, and so on.

• The investigative reporter tries to find the meat of the story; to get the bottom of what truly matters. If you tell the investigative reporter to follow the “time spent” story, she’ll start to ask big picture questions. She’ll want to know why time spent matters, how it relates to your other metrics, whether “time spent” means one thing on one page and something very different on another, and whether it even matters if visitors are spending more — or less — time on your site verses the competition’s. She even wonders if this whole “time spent” thing is really a distraction. She doesn’t want to spend her time chasing false leads.

Like other default metrics, average time spent tells us nothing on its own. The company that my friend works for has over a thousand employees. Most of the staff in their home office and brick-and-mortar stores use computers every day, and many of them likely have their browser set up to go directly to the company’s homepage automatically. Each day, a large amount of their traffic probably comes from employees, not potential customers. If this is the case, the average time spent on their site tells them very little about the customer experience on their website, because employees’ time spent would skew this number. Likewise, the traffic sources would be skewed and the average page views and bounce rates from the landing page would also be skewed.

Don’t use your analytics tool just to report the facts. Become an investigative reporter. For each piece of information you find, ask yourself why it matters. Ask how the metrics tie together. Most importantly, ask yourself how the web metrics you report on tie into your overall business goals.

That’s how reporters break news.

. .

About the Author: Melissa Burdon is an investigative reporter (or Persuasion Analyst) at FutureNow. She’s also a recovering Canadian. Oh, and it’s her birthday.

Related Posts:

• Measuring Visitor Engagement: Tools + Tips
• Unlocking Key Performance Indicators: Order Acquisition Ratio
• Unlocking Key Performance Indicators: Bounce Rate
• Unlocking Key Performance Indicators: Conversion Rate
• Unlocking Key Performance Indicators: "Take Rate"

Have you ever noticed that if you really want good information about a product, you’re much more likely to find that information in a product review than in the product description itself?

Why aren’t product descriptions more helpful?

Here’s one thought: Men and women may care about different things. Product descriptions may not be speaking to both genders’ needs. In product reviews, men talk about what they care about, and women talk about what they care about. This may be one reason why reviews help increase conversion.

Here’s a real life example. I searched for reviews for gas grills. Although the reviewer’s gender isn’t always obvious, I picked two that had a good chance of being either male or female.

First, an excerpt from a gas grill review by “dickiedo” — I’m guessing that’s a man:

Pros: It is sturdy, attractive and cooks good.
Cons: I wish the control knobs were on the front of the grill.

I bought this grill at Home Depot in the morning and that afternoon I grilled the best steaks I have ever cooked using the cooking instructions provided by Weber. The next day I grilled some great tasting hamburgers. Before cooking the burgers I heated the grill and easily brushed off the residue from the steaks leaving the cooking surface clean. I really liked cooking on my Weber charcoal grills, but I am now a firm Weber gas grill fan.

Now, an excerpt from a gas grill review by “juliet166″ — I’m guessing that’s a woman:

Pros: weber quality, even cooking, portability, easy cleanup
Cons: 14oz. propane canisters, lack of warming tray, no side trays

I became a weber convert several years ago after purchasing a genesis silver c, and experiencing the exceptional cooking found in weber grills. Due to a divorce and move to a small apt without a deck, I was desperate for a grill that I could easily transport outdoors to use, but would not take up a lot of space inside my apt. Because of the dome shaped lid, it easily fits a small roast, or vertical rib stand. Clean up is easy just by letting the grill run a few minutes and then brushing with a wire brush.

I have not had any issues with the automatic ignition. I have been using my grill for 3 months now, and it always starts on the first or second push.

Here’s what’s interesting about these two reviews: They’re an example of the gender preferences Joseph Carrabis of NextStage Evolution talks about on the iMedia Connection blog, where he insists that women purchase strategically while men purchase immediately:

Men make purchasing decisions based strongly on immediate or present needs.

Women want to know that today’s purchase will meet their immediate needs, mid-term and even their needs long-term needs. Long-term and far-term usability can even be a stronger consideration for the female purchasing persona than immediate need

Notice that in Dickiedo’s testimonial, he’s talking about purchasing the grill that morning and grilling that afternoon — great job of speaking to a guy’s immediate and present need.

In Juliet’s review, she’s commenting that even after 3 months, the grill still starts on the first or second push, meeting a longer-term durability need.

Carrabis discusses another gender difference:

Men are willing to make a purchase once it has been demonstrated that someone else was successful with the same purchase; kind of a, “that worked for Joe, so it’ll probably work for me” mentality.

Women posit things differently. It’s good to know if something worked for Sally; it’s better to know what Sally’s motivations were for her purchase. Success in itself isn’t meaningful unless the conditions leading to success are the same. (So much for women not being cut out for the sciences!) This can be thought of as, “it may have worked for Sally, but Sally bought it for reason A and I’m interested in reason B, so the same purchase might not work for me.”

Juliet shares her background motivation for purchasing the grill. She’s recently divorced and moved to a small apartment without a deck. She wanted something she could transport outdoors but wouldn’t take up a lot of room. Now a woman can compare her motivation to Juliet’s to see if it’s a good match for her situation, for her motivation.

How can manufacturers and e-commerce sites use this information to create better product descriptions that sell more products?

1. Talk about both immediate and long-term value. “Take it home this afternoon, grill steaks tonight”; “Our grills start at just the touch of a button now, and for months/years to come.”
2. Talk about different motivations for buying the product and successful uses of it. “With our even heating system, grillers of all skills can cook the perfect steak every time”; “If you live in an apartment but still want the that backyard grill experience, this is the grill for you. It’s small and portable, but with a domed lid, so it’s big enough to cook family meals like a small roast or vertical rib stand.”

One more hint. While both Dickiedo and Juliet mentioned “easy cleaning”, Juliet got very specific with what that means (”Let the grill run for a few minutes and brush with a wire brush”). This may also tie-in with women’s need for longer-term value. I know a woman who’s sworn off a famous cookware brand because their products are very sensitive and hard to clean. Remember, she’s not just thinking about cooking dinner tonight, she’s picturing how she’ll use the product for months, even years to come. Make sure you’re talking about what it’s like to use and maintain the product in the future as well as the present.

By using keywords that address the underlying motivations of both men and women, your product descriptions are sure to pick them up before the competition.

. .

About the Author: Holly Buchanan is co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth — Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys. If you’d like to become a customer pickup artist like Holly, join her on June 2nd for FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar in Manhattan.

Related Posts:

• Do Men and Women Laugh at the Same Ads?
• Online Copywriting 101: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet -- Part 2
• The 7th Deadly Claim -- "Best Value"
• 1,000 Tips for Selling Online Without Paying a Copywriter
• How Men and Women View Images Differently