1. It’s often where “low-hanging fruit” grows. Conversion obstacles can often be removed quickly, leading to large gains in a short period of time.
2. It’s an area where you’ve already succeeded in persuading the prospect. They are in the Late Stage of their buying process, so a relatively low investment can give you a relatively high return.  In other words, you don’t have to produce pages and pages of persuasive content to move the visitor forward in her buying process.
3. Customer expectations regarding their online shopping experiences are rising every day. If your competitor has a more optimized checkout, they may be taking market share from you.

There’s a very wide spectrum of online selling solutions, from a PayPal button on a single sales page to a highly-customized checkout with a floating/sliding/shining interface and behaviorally-targeted cross-selling.  Still, FutureNow’s clients tend to fall into 1 of 2 camps:  those with a 3rd-party cart and those with a custom-built cart.

There are pros and cons to each, which I’ll touch on briefly, but please don’t consider this brief post the authoritative work on the subject–there’s lots of research and reviews out there on the various shopping cart investment options.

3rd Party Shopping Carts, also known as “canned”: Some of the pros are lower cost, quicker time to market, and the efficiencies/convenience gained when you buy a package that handles payment gateway, fraud protection, SSL encryption, etc.  Some of the cons are lack of control over look and feel, lack of control over the user experience, and more difficulties encountered with testing and optimization.  The tradeoffs seem pretty straightforward, but a lot depends on the IT resources you have at your disposal.

Custom Shopping Carts: Some of the pros are a user experience that’s more tightly integrated with the rest of your site, better tracking for better analytics, easier to make changes and add features, and easier integration with testing tools like Google Website Optimizer.  The obvious cons are higher cost, more operational overhead, and slower time to market.  Again, the tradeoffs are the same, and a lot depends on your company’s resources, budget, and business goals.

Those prospects we speak with who are interested in optimizing for a higher return on their eCommerce investments often ask questions like: Can I optimize my 3rd party shopping cart? The answer is a definitive “Yes!” even on the most restrictive 3rd party carts. One of our clients enjoyed a 38% increase month-over-month in their “funnel conversion rate” just by adding some reassuring copy and links only in the areas of their cart they had access to: the header and the footer!

That’s an extreme example, but with our guidance, clients can make the best of their current platform, whatever it happens to be.  And many clients, after getting a few “wins,” decide they want to upgrade from a 3rd party cart to a partially or fully custom cart.  In that situation, we often work to optimize their checkout before it goes live, saving them time and money, and then continue to refine the customer experience and persuasiveness of the live cart through more formal testing. We also work with several implementation partners who grok Persuasion Architecture and can build custom carts based on OnTarget recommendations.

The point of all of this is that you shouldn’t defer or avoid Optimization based on what type of checkout platform you have.  Persuasion Architecture is “platform-agnostic,” and the best time for Optimization is always “Now.”

We often get asked:

How much traffic do I need before I start optimization?

Do I get enough traffic to my site to even consider optimization?

Will my tests take forever to run if I don’t have a lot of traffic?

How fast can I expect to see the results of optimization if my traffic is low?

These are natural questions from folks who haven’t dipped their toes into the optimization waters, but these questions indicate a few myths that I’ll attempt to dispel.

Myth #1: Traffic is the ‘magic metric’ when it comes to optimization

The fact is that the number of conversions is at least as important as traffic levels.  We’ve always said that a minimum threshold to do formal online testing is 5-10 conversions per week, and that this amount of conversions (regardless of traffic) can at least get you results in a matter of weeks instead of months.  A simple tool that illustrates the relationships between site traffic, conversion rate, and test durations is the Google Website Optimizer Duration Calculator.  This free tool lets you play around with data points and estimate test durations before you start your experiment.  I can personally say it has saved me a bunch of grief by warning me away from certain client experiments due to the duration estimates being way too long!  Try changing the page views metric, and see the impact on duration.  Now, try changing the conversion rate metric, and you’ll see it, too, can have a drastic impact on the duration.

Myth #2: Low-traffic sites won’t see results from optimization

The fact is that low-traffic sites can still see improvements from optimization.  Remember that “optimization” doesn’t just mean formal testing using a tool like those provided by Omniture or Google.  Optimization is about getting your company on a program of continuous improvement through hypothesis, change (via formal testing or not), and monitoring of the results of those changes.  Once you have “results,” you feed those learnings right back into the program and keep going.  Lower traffic sites may or may not be good candidates for formal testing methods like split testing or full factorial multivariate testing, but they may be great candidates for optimization!  We often try formal testing on low-traffic sites, and if it’s not productive, we switch our focus to “serial testing,” which means benchmarking the performance of something (an ad, a landing page, etc.), making a change, and then monitoring the impact of that change. Either way, we tend to get results.

Myth #3: Testing and optimization doesn’t really work for low-traffic sites

The fact is that optimization can definitely work, and even formal testing can work if you do it right.  One way to do formal testing on low-traffic sites is to focus on higher-trafficked pages.  Another is to test micro-conversions (e.g. reading product reviews as opposed to buying the product).  Still another is to make a B2C “view cart” page the conversion point instead of the purchase confirmation page.  There are plenty of methods to shortening the duration of a test, but we’ll keep a few of those to ourselves for now

Myth #4: It’s better to defer optimization until site traffic grows

The fact is that the time to optimize is always “now.”  There’s an opportunity cost associated with not doing anything, when you could at least be doing something less-than-optimal.  Your traffic may be less than optimal, but you can still optimize, and when your traffic becomes optimal, you’ll reap the rewards of earlier optimization work.  We’ve always used the metaphor of the “leaky bucket”:  If your conversion funnel is a bucket with a bunch of holes in it, why would you spend marketing money to pour more water (a.k.a. traffic) into that bucket?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to fix the holes, then start pouring more water?

We’re definitely invested in dispelling any other myths about testing and optimization, so feel free to ask questions or contact us if you think you have a unique case and aren’t sure if optimization is right for you.

A valid question/concern, to be sure.  Our answer is, of course, “It depends.”  However, here are a few approaches that we’ve seen work:

Extreme Effort Until a Certain Date

Look at your previous year’s analytics and the upward trend of conversions closer to the holidays.  When did it start to trend up in a consistent manner?  Mid-October?  November?  Late-November?  Based on last year’s trend line, pick a date after which you’ll stop optimizing and stabilize your site for the Holiday rush.  Then, free up all the budget and resources you can to work on an optimization to-do list from today until your stop date.  After the Holidays, you can finish everything that didn’t get finished before your stop date.

Optimize the Checkout Process

Another approach is to focus solely on the checkout process from now until the end of the Holidays.  This means leaving the homepage, landing pages, content pages, etc. alone until 2010, and just test and optimize the cart pages to squeeze every last conversion out of those folks you’ve persuaded.

Merchandise for the Holidays (a.k.a. Deck the Halls)

Some clients want a site-wide approach that ties in with Holiday shopping and gift-giving.  This is less about optimization and more about seasonal relevance, but it’s still a valid approach that could lift your Holiday conversions.  Many sites simply throw a Holiday-themed graphic on their homepage and call it “done,” but the world-class sites have little touches throughout the site to put their prospects in a shopping mood.  eBay has done some nice, subtle things to dress their site up around the Holidays, and I’m sure they have something up their sleeve this year.  One of our clients last year used empty real estate throughout the site, including the shopping cart, to display some Holiday messaging and graphics.  They also updated their checkout through the last week of the Rush to indicate how many days were left to have gifts reach recipients by 12/24, creating a nice sense of urgency as well as being informative.

Split Your To-Do List

A fourth approach is to simply brainstorm every optimization you think could impact your conversion rate.  Then, use various criteria to split the list into “pre-Holidays” and “post-Holidays.”  Commit the resources and intensity to get the “pre” list done, then leave the “post” list until everyone is back in the office and the 2010 budget is approved .  This is probably the easiest approach, but carries with it the risk that you’ll implement some low-impact optimizations, when you could have implemented the high-impact items.  In this case, we recommend outside help to prioritize that list!

We hope these ideas help everyone find an approach they’re comfortable with, execute well, and reap the rewards!

The ones who make it through will be those who are passionate about the customer experience, AND who are able to prioritize their work between now and the “Holiday Crunch” so that the hours expended actually impact the number of sales they make.

Where do you start if you want your site to be a stellar performer this Holiday Season?  A great place for most to start is on Shopping Cart Abandonment.  That’s low in your sales funnel, where you’re losing customers who were already acquired via marketing and persuaded to buy from you!

Let’s examine a prioritized list of reasons shoppers listed that caused them to abandon shopping carts.  Then, we’ll offer actionable suggestions corresponding to each concern.  The data comes from the 8th Annual Merchant Survey, conducted by PayPal and comScore in April of this year.

#1 High shipping charges

We’re all aware of this challenge, and it’s somewhat out of your hands, but there are things you can do.  One is to thing is to test different shipping offers in the cart.  Another, if you have a certain order value that qualifies for free shipping, is to display how much more the customer needs to qualify.  For example, “You are $xx.xx away from free shipping!  Continue shopping »”

#2 Wanted to comparison shop

Make sure you’re saving customer carts for at least 30 days, maybe more for the Holidays.  A recent study sponsored by McAfee showed that the average time span between visiting a site and checking out was 34 hours! Acknowledge that this behavior is occurring and plan for it.  If you’re sending “cart recovery” emails inside of 24 hours, you may be really annoying your prospective customers!

#3 Leaving to Google a coupon code

If you have a coupon code capture field on your “View Shopping Cart” page, you may consider moving that capture later in the checkout process, when prospects are more ‘invested’ in the process and less likely to bail and go “coupon Googling.”  Some of our clients offer coupons right on their site as a way to combat this behavior, and it works.

#4 Couldn’t find preferred payment option

Most eStore owners offer a proper assortment of payment options, BUT are your customers seeing them at the point of concern?  We call these Point of Action Assurances.  When the prospect is in your cart, and wondering about their payment options, are you reassuring them at the point of action that you offer BillMeLater, PayPal, etc.?  Test different placements of those assurances.

#5 Item unavailable at checkout

Yikes!  This issue simply needs to be dealt with on your product pages, before the cart.  If an item is out of stock, why not capture an email so you can notify when the item is back in stock?  Zappos.com does a good job of this when a certain size of shoe is out of stock.

#6 Couldn’t find customer support

Similar to #4, most online stores do offer good customer service options, but sometimes your prospects aren’t seeing them at the appropriate point in the cart.  Test those placements.  Also, if you use live chat support, and the chat service is “offline,” what is the customer experience like?

#7 Security concerns

Similar to #1, this is somewhat out of your hands…the Web isn’t 100% safe for shoppers, and they know it.  But, Point of Action Assurances, 3rd party security seals, and credibility of design are key.  Another great opportunity for testing different placements and different seals in the checkout.

Blogger’s Note: Apologies for excluding other winter holidays in the title of this post; I was just going for alliteration

The disturbing thought is that if this style of “starburst” guarantee seal has become so popular that there are free, downloadable icon sets out there, isn’t that beginning to hurt their credibility?  If everyone’s assurances are copycats, can a devastating loss of credibility be far behind? When something becomes a commodity, it loses value.

I don’t fault the designer, who was simply satisfying a perceived demand and trying to promote themselves and make a living.  But, I think we’re hurting ourselves as digital marketers when we settle for the same old generic approach.

When it comes to security, consumers do want to see the same badges across the Net; think Verisign, McAfee, and Digicert.  But, when it comes to business guarantees, I believe seeing the same badges across the Net will hurt credibility over time; it almost has to work that way.

So how do we fix this and make sure consumers find us credible over the long haul?

1. Demand more of your design/er – Let your creative resources be creative.  Ask for custom assurance graphics that reflect your overall site design, brand, and voice.  Better yet, ask them to be creative over and over again, and test your way to the winner.
2. Substantiate the claim – Make whatever visual element you come up with link to more information.  One of our clients has a guarantee linked to a popup window with simple (yet specific) content written in plain language explaining what they guarantee, how to get your money back, and how they are willing to bank on your satisfaction. In other words, put some skin in the game.
3. Avoid the “Set it and forget it” mentality – Last year’s assurances are this year’s BS, and will likely be even less effective next year.  The competitive landscape is always changing, and consumers get savvier and more skeptical every day. Just another reason to Always Be Testing.

Aside from my example, I’ve not seen much creativity in this area of web design.  Does anyone have examples they’d like to share of great, custom guarantee graphics? We promise not to copycat you

If you’re interested in improving your product detail/landing pages and cross-selling, this video (and upcoming Part 2 video) is not to be missed.

Here are 5 key, unanswered questions (beyond shipping costs) of the shopping cart:

1. Do you offer alternate forms of payment (aside from credit card)?
2. Are you safe and secure?
3. Why are you asking for this information?
4. Do I have to set up an account to buy?
5. Do I get to review my order before we transact?

I recently bought a Father’s Day present online from a gift retailer, and their overall shopping cart process was “OK.”  I would give it a “B-” grade; it was good enough to get me through the purchase without bailing, but not nearly good enough to earn brand loyalty.  But, they did a good job of clearly answering the 5 Questions, and it was enough to help them “Get The Cash.”

I captured some elements of their billing page so you could see how their design answers the 5 unanswered customer questions.  When you click on the screenshots, can you pick which design element answers which question?

Are you adequately answering the 5 unanswered questions? Whether your confidence level is low, high, or somewhere in between, we know you could run some interesting tests to validate your assumptions about how well you’re doing, and you might increase your funnel conversion rate in the process!  Want help?  Let us know.

1) Where are they entering?

Most analytics packages (including Google Analytics) make it easy to view your top landing pages.  If you haven’t checked this before you might be surprised at the number of visitors who aren’t entering your site through the home page.  That can be crucial information.

Maybe your PPC landing pages don’t provide all the information visitors need and you’re not giving visitors clear links back to your main site.  Maybe your UVP is only clearly explained on the home page, so that someone landing on your services (or a product category) page wouldn’t get that info.

But more than all of that, you’re trying to get an understanding of how visitors move through your site and why they take the actions they do, so you’ll need to know visitor entry points.

2) How are they entering?

Your analytics package should let you analyze traffic, breaking visitors down by source: organic search traffic, paid ads, direct traffic, etc.  And for organic and paid search, you should be able to see what keywords brought the majority of your visitors to your website.  From this information, you should be able to get a sense of the following:

• What are their expectations? Given your visitors’ traffic source and keywords, what are they looking for?  What would they most expect to find when they land on your website?  What scent are they following?

• What are their likely goals? The same key word search could easily be used by people with differing goals.  Chances are you might be ignoring all but one of them.  For instance, I could be searching on “Pensacola Day Spas” because I wanted to buy a gift certificate for my wife.   Whereas my wife might search the same term to see if they take last-minute or walk-in appointments.  Or maybe she’s searching  to see if they have a specific treatment?  The point is, it helps to mentally force yourself to brainstorm as many real-world behind the search terms as possible.

• What do they already know? Someone searching on your name or on the name of a specific service or product line obviously knows more than a visitor entering from a general search term.  Use your keyword knowledge to get a sense of visitors’ differing stages of the buying process?   Are they just starting out and searching for general info?  Do they already know exactly what they want?  Or are they somewhere in between?

• How well is your landing page matching up with visitor expectations and goals? Would visitors find their keywords on their entrance pages?  Would they know that they are in the right place, based on a 7-second scan of the page?  Do your entry pages have high bounce rates?  What is the average time spent on the page?

3) Next-page navigation – where are they going when they first hit your Website?

Now that you know where visitors are entering your site and you have a sense of their motivation upon arriving at your site, take a look at where they navigate to upon their arrival.  What are the most popular next pages? Look at this information while looking at the actual landing page.

• Are the most popular “next pages” the same ones you would have guessed?

• Are they pages linked to by prominent calls to action or embedded links placed within the active window? Or are they pages only accessible through your top or side navigation?

• What questions would those pages answer for the visitor?  Why do you think the visitor is moving to those pages? Is that action congruent with what you’ve seen of visitor motivation from their keywords/scent?

After you see what those most popular next pages are, click through to them within your analytics package and see where visitors are going from that next page.  If the majority of entering traffic (for a given page) is clicking through to a couple of different pages, you’ll often find that visitors navigate to the remaining popular pages following their first click.  You should start to see patterns forming – key, or most navigated to, pages will stand out.

Watch out for situations where your most persuasive content is NOT one of those most navigated pages; you can’t persuade visitors with content they never see.  Also, watch out for situations where one of your most navigated pages are also exit points, in those cases the visitor either lost confidence or didn’t find what they were looking for.

4) Where (and Why) are they leaving?

First, let’s talk about the difference between bounce rate and exit rate. A bounce is sort of like it sounds, someone came in on a given page and left on that same page without going anywhere else on the site.  Unless visitors are also converting on that same page, bouncing is bad.  It means visitors are rejecting you – either because you are attracting the wrong visitors, or because your landing pages are not re-assuring them that they are in the right place to find what they came looking for.

An exit rate simply tells you how many of the people who came to that page also left your site from that page, including both people entering the site on that page AND people navigating to that page from somewhere else on your website.

• Planned and unplanned exits. Some exits are good.  You expect people to leave your site after buying something/filling in a lead form.  Customers who log-into a registered user domain from your home page will likely show up in your analytics as a bounce.  Etc.  But you obviously don’t want customers to leave before reaching their goal or your goal.  Often you’ll find visitors exiting from pages containing your conversion beacons – product pages containing the “add to cart” button, service pages containing your lead form, etc.  Or you’ll see cart/form abandonment, where visitors start to convert and then back out.

• Take a look at “time on page” for the conversion beacons. Abandoning a page after a few seconds isn’t the same as dropping it after a few minutes.  A few seconds means it was the wrong product or service for them.  Someone leaving your page after a few minutes engaged with your content and never got the answers to their questions and/or simply didn’t have the confidence to buy.  Take a look at the page itself, what information are you not giving them?  Are you using great photos, persuasive copy, points of action assurances, risk reversals, etc. in order to instill buyer confidence?  What about shipping information?  Most of the exits on both this page and the cart page are caused by inadequate information and content on these conversion beacon pages.

• Page prior and broken scent? If you find a high exit rate page, look at the most popular entry paths to that page.  Look for mismatches between expectations in moving from the prior page to the exit page.  What were visitors hoping to find on that exit page and what did they actually find?  Was the hyperlink misleading or was the content simply anemic?  Try to figure out the Piss-Off Factor.

5) Form a hypothesis and test

Completing steps 1-4 should have shown you several mismatches between what you and/or your visitor expected and wanted to happen vs. what actually happened.  You should also be able to come up with some pretty good theories for why these mismatches are happening and what might fix them.  Even better, you should have a strong idea about what success would look like if your tested theory proves true.  In other words, you know what metrics are indicating a problem, so you know what metrics you should see change.  Congratulations, you’ve now made your analytics actionable.

Here are some further tips to help keep you going down the right path:

• Don’t test randomly - always test with a hypothesis regarding visitor motivation/behavior.  You’re after insight as much as lift – a “negative” test that gives you a better idea of what motivates your visitor is     actually better for your long-term success than a positive test that provides little or no new insight.

• The difference between micro-conversion vs. macro-conversion. Testing a page variable that reduces bounce rate and/or moves more people to a key persuasive page may or may not immediately impact your conversion rate, as you may be moving people down a funnel that’s leaking somewhere else.  Or maybe you’re engaging early stage buyers that won’t convert for another month or so.

• Know when to test for micro-conversions, such as moving from one page to the next; when to test for macro-conversions, as in how much bottom-line impact this change made; and when to set-up a secondary, earlier-stage conversion, such as signing for the newsletter or downloading a white paper vs. buying or filling out a lead form.

Bonus step – answer their questions, manage their anxiety, stoke their imagination.

When looking at a page in terms of visitor behavior and motivation, always ask yourself how well that page is answering visitor questions, how well it is re-assuring them emotionally that they are in the right place and on the right track to accomplish their goal, and finally how well it is appealing to their real desires.

P.S.  A quick note on how to integrate “best practices” into your optimization efforts.  Rather than blindly testing best practices, allow your knowledge of them to help you form theories about why visitors are or are not taking a certain action.  For instance, it’s a best practice to place your calls to action within the active window.  If your main call to action is in a side-bar and almost no visitors are taking that action, you might test moving your CTA into the active window.  For some fabulous books on best practices and testing, take a look at Call to Action and Always Be Testing.

P.P.S. If you enjoyed this post please consider Tweeting it please.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at jeffsextonwrites.com]

In our fast-moving industry, what gave ROI six months ago might not today.

Take, for example, the design pattern I like to call the “SEO Footer.”  This design element takes many forms, but essentially it’s using the footer of your website navigation to house keyword-rich anchor links as a means of increasing Search Engine Optimization.  It’s a decent idea, and was extremely popular a few years ago, but I personally find them ugly, hard to scan, and hard to use.

Personal opinions aside, we’ve got a great candidate for an optimization test.  Why?  Because its impact on your site’s SEO is much less clear than it was a few years ago.  And if it’s not giving you ROI on organic search traffic, guess what?  It’s just cluttering up your site design and hurting your chances of converting customers.

I’m the first to admit I’m not an SEO expert, and the real SEO experts have written some good stuff on this topic, but in my research, I couldn’t see any evidence that sites are testing to see if this tactic is still “paying off” like it did 6, 12, or 18 months ago.  So, there’s your free test recommendation.

“Wait!  What Do I Test? And How Do I Interpret the Results?”

Run a simple test where some portion of your traffic sees a version of your footer stuffed with juicy keywords, and some portion doesn’t.  Measure its impact on whatever conversion matters to you, or whatever conversion might rely most on intuitive navigation.  Examples: Visiting a specific section of your site devoted to a business vertical and downloading a white paper, or browsing and finding a particular product and adding it to a shopping cart.

You may find the presence or absence of your SEO Footer has no impact on conversion.  That’s OK, because you’re also going to dive into your analytics and/or your SEO reports and see if the absence of the footer hurt your rankings/traffic.  If removing those extra keywords has positive or no impact, then you may as well remove it in the name of simple, clutter-free design.  If removing it has negative impact, then you should optimize the existing design to make it look as good as possible, and resolve to test it again in six months.

Use this method to make every site element earn its right to be a part of your design, and you’ll optimize your way to ROI.

So start your headline optimization process with a close look at scent.  These links will help drive home the point:

Bryan Eisenberg gets interviewed on Scent and Landing Page Stickiness:

Click here to view the embedded video.

How lack of scent feels like “bait and switch” to website visitors

Broken scent between e-mails and landing pages accounts for 35% of failed campaigns

Step 2. Angle of Approach: After you understand what it will take to provide continuity of scent, you’ll need to do the research and idea generation to come up with that compelling hook, or angle of approach that will compel readers to stop and scan the article.

Think of it this way, if scent is about matching information, keywords, and look and feel, angle of approach is about matching your copy to visitors’ emotional drives, motivations, hopes, dreams, fears, etc.  Of course, it’s also about introducing a compellingly interesting thought into the reader’s mind.  For some incredibly helpful tools and techniques on Angles of Approach,take a look at the following blog posts:

How to connect with your prospect’s dominant emotion

How to polarize an audience to speak to the prospects you most want

Roy Williams on Choosing Whom to Lose

Why writing to a specific person (or persona) Overcomes the 200 Headlines Myth

The power of Magic Words – and how to find them

Sean D’Souza on the Power of New & Knew

Sean on how specifics beat generalities when it comes to Angles of Approach

Roy Williams on Framing First Mental Images

Compelling the visitor to keep reading

Why your headline may want to refer to an unseen action

I’d recommend you come up with at least a couple of different approaches and test them.  This might cause you to rewrite your first paragraph or two of body copy for each test variant, but it’s well worth the effort.

Step 3. Wordsmithing: Once you have the angle of approach and the “Scent” requirements, then it’s time for some of the traditional wordsmithing normally associated with writing headlines.  Can you sharpen the point?  Can you increase the curiosity factor?  Should it be a statement or a question?  Can you swap out words to create different emotional associations or connotations?  Can you test fractions vs. percentages?  What kind of presuppositions can you bury in And so on.

Here’s a monster list of links containing some of the best stuff I’ve seen on Headlines:

First, go sign up for Sean’s newsletter and get his free PDF report on Why do most headlines fail.

Second, read through Jay Abraham’s list of 100 Greatest Headlines Ever written

Third, listen to Gary Bencivenga’s explanation of why you should build credibility into your headlines

Now feast on Brian Clark’s brilliant headline articles:

5 Simple Ways to Open Your Post With a Bang

10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work

7 More Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work

Warning: Use These 5 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas at Your Own Risk

How to Get 53% More Readers for Every Blog Post You Write

And for sheer tonnage of listed techniques, it’s hard to resist Chris Bloczynski’s post:

99 Headline Techniques Revealed

Or SEO Blackhat’s 54 Headline Templates That Sell

Of course, it goes without saying that with all these choices, you’ll want to test and optimize, and the Grok’s own post on Top 10 Ideas for Testing Your Headlines is a great place to start, or you can watch the webinar on testing headlines and calls to action:

The spending level for Valentine’s Day gifts this year will be slightly lower than last year – $140 to be spent by men (versus $166 in 2008), and $75 (versus $90) to be spent by women, according to the BrandKeys Valentine’s Day Index, writes RetailerDaily.

Mature consumers prefer single-image advertisements over ads with multi-image collages by a margin of 66% to 34%, and also gravitate to images that show products and lifestyles,  according to a recent image-preference survey by Creating Results according to their “Photo Finish” study of more than 400 Americans age 40+, reports MarketingCharts. This is something to consider as you work on “hero” shots for your website as well.

Paul from WiseGrass attended our Wizard of Web class a while ago. I just came across this great Google Maps Mashup on his website. He showcases his wonderful lawn care work by letting people know where his showcase lawns are.

There are plent of businesses that could leverage something like this. Could yours?

The Google Website Optimizer team launches an official GWO YouTube channel. You’ll find several videos there including several from our Always Be Testing webinar series.

If you missed last week’s webinar I did for the Web Analytics Association with Akin Arikan and Josh Manion you can see the recorded version now. It’s titled Testing, Testing, Testing. Anybody Can Test. So Why Don’t You? Registration is required.

Thanks for all your support. This is the second year in a row that we have won a SEMMY award. Our article Three Reasons Your Visitors Don’t Convert to Leads took the award in the Design & Usability category. Congratulations to all the other winners and runners-up. There are some great articles there.

Unique Value Proposition (or Unique Campaign Proposition), is a brief, concise statement about what makes your website/business unique, and why customers should buy from you and not your competitors.  It’s been a central part of our Persuasion Architecture methodology from day one.

At our recommendation, our friends over at Accepted.com ran a UVP test on their website.  We worked together to draft a few versions of their UVP, worked with the designer to make it look professional, and ran an A/B/C/D test with three versions of their UVP against the control.  The UVPs expressed the length of time Accepted.com has been helping customers, how much success they’ve had, and the problem that customers are looking to solve.  The control was a stock photo graphic without a UVP statement.

The result?  Sure, you might expect some sort of lift.  How about an over 30% increase in conversion, resulting in tens of thousands of dollars in extra sales?

So if you haven’t sat down and brainstormed your Unique Value Proposition, maybe take 30% of a day and work it out.  Then test it and let us know what happens.  If the test seems daunting, try crafting a Unique Campaign Proposition and testing it in campaign messaging, assets, and landing pages.

While this type of increase is common with our clients, the interesting part of the story comes from a different metric.  During the duration of the test, the client’s Average Order Value dropped 28.05%.  A frightening metric, but no surprise given all the reports we’ve been seeing about lower budgets for online Holiday shopping.

The silver lining, directly attributed to the client’s optimization efforts, was that their increase in funnel conversion rate more than offset the drop in their Average Order Value.  So despite people spending less, the website is getting more people to successfully checkout and spend.  And this was just their first test!

The moral: Optimization is a highly effective way to make the best of the bad economic situation we’re in.  You can’t control how much less people are going to spend for the Holidays this year, but you can control improving your site to be more efficient–to squeeze more out of your opportunities.

Q: How many keywords would you suggest for starting a campaign?
A: We haven’t tested this specifically, but starting with thousands if you can avoid it is not a good idea. There are two dynamics – first you want to build up some good history with reasonable to good Quality Score, so from that perspective, going pretty slow and being highly focused and patient is best idea. On the other hand, what matters most is good relevance between all the components which will ultimately generate good QS. So if you have to build a large campaign, ideally you get some base built and then at some point you have to grow it, realize that there’s going to be a chasm to cross while you establish yourself – which may mean some high minimums and poor positions – and just fight through it. Google isn’t incentivized to put you in a downward spiral if your quality is good – recent success will trump history – so when you ‘get it right’ the QS and fate of the campaign will turn.

Q: Where do you find Impression Precentage?
A: I think you mean Impression Share, which is under the Reports Tab in Adwords as an optional field in the Campaign Report. (Or get it right in the campaign reports in ClickEquations!)

Q: What advice to you have for niche keywords that get low CTR?
A: Since keywords should only be triggered by relevant searches, the niche nature of a topic shouldn’t necessarily lower click-through-rates. The first thing to do is make sure you have picked good keywords and aren’t over-using Broad Match (see Match Type Keyword Trap for some ideas on this.) But ultimately all QS measures are relative, so if your CTRs are reasonable for your keywords, you shouldn’t be penalized.

Q: Is Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) relevant anymore?
A: DKI is effective in some cases, but it hasn’t proven to be universally effective in our tests. And as mentioned it doesn’t give Quality Score a boost. Use it if it works (meaning test test test)

Q: Instead of deleting a keyword, should you put it in a different ad-group with a lower bid?
A: Certainly moving low CTR keywords into ’special’ AdGroups is a good idea (but like other points here don’t go overboard). The bid it should get then depends on how the CTR varies at different positions, whether you can craft a text-ad that increases its CTR, and your own profitability. I don’t think there is a QS-based answer to that.

Q: Is there a book you’d recommend to better understand Quality Score.
A: There’s one in progress on Craig’s hard drive, but you can’t get it yet.

Q: How does Google rate a company that uses different product specific URLs?
A: I assume the question is about using different domains within a single account. I’d assume the domain doesn’t matter, that the URL and page are measured on their own merits for each ad/keyword.

Q: Our Google Rep told us that moving keywords between Ad-Groups erases quality score. Were they lying?
A: Maybe they had not yet completed their full Google training. Kidding but honestly there is a lot of facts for anyone to know. But Google has publicly written (on the Adwords Blog or in help files I believe) that QS is retained by KW ID and especially KW-AD ID combos, even if moved within a single account. The same is true for target URL. Anytime one of these is used anywhere in an account its historical CTR is known.

Q: You mention geographical performance as a Quality Score Factor. Please elaborate.
A: Google looks at the performance of you KW/AD combo within the geography of the searcher to influence QS. So if your ads get good CTR in New York City, for example, you’ll get a higher Quality Score when people search from NYC, than those who search from LA. It’s your own personal red states / blue states for QS. Would be cool if they drew us a color coded map.

Q: I’m seeing visitors come several times in the same session (via my web analytics) does this negatively effect Quality Score?
A: I can’t see why it would.

Thank you Craig for taking the time for the webinar and for answering all these questions. Do you have more questions? Leave them in the comments. If your research contradicts what we have found, then please comment as well.

• Established his own (very successful) ad agency
• Launched the Dodge and Chrysler brands
• Hired and mentored Leo Burnett, creator of the Marlboro Man, Tony the Tiger, Pillsbury Doughboy, and many other advertising icons that made his clients rich
• Turned positioning into a fine art form half a century before Ries and Trout even coined the term.
• Helped establish Cadillac’s pre-eminence among early automotive marks
• Wrote “The greatest ad of all time,” as voted in 1949 – an ad still listed in the top 50 of Ad Ages Top 100 Advertising Campaigns.

Interesting, but why should you care?  Because MacManus’s – and by extension Burnett’s – approach was the yin to Hopkins’ yang, and because MacManus’s approach still works today.

And what was that approach?

In a word, it was to position the client while dethroning competitors in the minds’ of the audience. He wanted to create, in the mind of the public, a deep-seated prejudice towards his client’s brand.

If, in the words of the legendary Gary Halbert, the biggest key to success is to sell to a starving crowd, then MacManus aimed to persuade the consumer that only his client’s product would fully cure their hunger, and then wait for the more-cheaply-persuaded and much larger mass audience to get hungry as their individual circumstances dictated.  This would be in contrast to targeting only hungry people and then selling to them via direct mail.

And so the two poles of advertising continue on to this day, as is clearly seen in the following comments by an extraordinarily successful brand builder, Chris Maddock.  Chris was responding to my request for his opinion on Google’s recent attempt to track the effect of offline advertising upon online sales/conversions.   Here’s what he had to say:

Jeff,

I think Google’s traditional ad analytics are interesting, sexy, and certainly useful on some level.  But I think the program could also be dangerous, in that it could give some folks faulty impressions of what is actually happening – or what is right – because it assumes advertisers know things they probably don’t.

Let’s say a local hardware store runs some print ads, and compares the online response to another time they’ve run radio ads.  If the print ads were for a short term offer, and the radio ad of a more institutional bent, the print ad could drive more traffic to the website and have the hardware store owner thinking that print’s the ticket.  The reality in such a situation is that the print advertising is impressing and motivating a tiny, albeit palpable, percentage of the market to respond and go the the website, while the time-sensitive nature of the offer makes the advertising all but invisible to the bulk of the market.  On the other hand the radio advertising is likely creating greater long-term top of mind awareness, yet probably not motivating as many to go the website.  Mr. Hardware likely thinks that the radio campaign was less effective, when in fact most category dominant businesses are those that eschew short-term sales, offers, promotions and the advertising tools that make them work, while leaning on intrusive media such as radio and television to push long-term awareness.  Over time, radio could likely drive many more visitors to the website – visitors who will likely buy.

So my worry is admittedly Hamiltonian.  Years of interaction with average business owners and traditional ad people has revealed a startling blindness to things like buying cycles, differences in long and short-term strategy, and proper media selection.

So these new Google analytics are cool.  I just hope the good people using them understand what they’re trying to make happen, and what the numbers returned really mean.

-    Chris

Do you see how Chris picks up the standard of Theodore McManus, Leo Burnett, and Roy Williams?  Although I think it is possible to intelligently and rigorously compare media, I can’t help but agree with Chris’s larger point.  Creating a prejudice in the mind of the customer before they’re hungry is often a more effective strategy than trying to only target hungry customers.*   But it requires a longer time horizon.  So if you are only measuring on the short term, you’ll likely come to the opposite conclusion and then deem your position to be “scientific.”  It’s a perfect example of one of the deadly sins of Web Analytics.

So what’s your time horizon?  And have you implemented a measuring/analytics system that will enable you to measure accordingly?

* To be fair, there are certainly also times when it pays to directly target hungry customers, rather than engage in a lengthier branding campaign.  I’m not necessarily advocating one over the other; I’m arguing that you shouldn’t base your decision on skewed metrics.

1. You use the set it and forget it strategy to PPC. If you setup your PPC campaigns months ago and haven’t adjusted a thing in it, I can practically guarantee you have room to improve it. The seasons change, traffic flow and traffic quality change, even Google’s Quality score changes.

2. You don’t have proper tracking in place. In a recent study of over a 1000 small and midsize businesses it was found that over half failed to properly track conversions. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Do you have enough insight to what is happening with your PPC ad spend?

3. You have not tested at least 3 variations of your PPC ad. Try testing the following variables in your ad copy: headlines, different offers, variations of your USPs (Unique Selling Propositions) or UCPs (Unique Campaign Propositions, and calls to actions (try, learn, get, save, etc.).

4. You have not tested matching options. If you are not getting enough traffic at your bid prices, test the different matching options. Test between broad, phrase and exact (standard) match to see which brings you the best combination of traffic and converted sales.

5. You have a long list of keywords in your ad groups. The keywords in an ad group should be tightly associated and extremely relevant to each other so you can be sure the ad(s) and landing page are effective for the ad group.

6. You have poor scent from the ad to the landing page. In 2001, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, shared their research with Wired on how humans look for information on the Web;  they use the same food-gathering techniques employed by animals. They follow scent. This is an example of bad scent. Make sure to match your PPC ad text with the message on your landing page.

Click here to view the embedded video.

7. You aren’t testing your landing pages to maximize conversion. With over 1100 variables that impact conversion, if you aren’t testing to see what the best combination to use are, you are leaving money on the table. You should always be testing.

If you would like to learn more about optimizing PPC campaigns don’t miss our upcoming Always Be Testing webinar on November 25th titled Google Quality Score – Exposing the Secret Factor to PPC Success. Sign up now, and even if you can’t watch the live viewing we will notify you as soon as the recorded version is available. Of course, the webinar is free so register today.

What: “Always Be Testing” Webinar: Google Quality Score – Exposing the Secret Factor to PPC Success

Quality Score is the PageRank of PPC. It’s a number Google assigns to your keywords which determines how much you have to bid, the position in which your ads appear, how often your ads are shown, and due to recent Adwords change it even determines if you can jump to the top of any search results page.

Understanding and managing Quality Score effects how you choose keywords, write text ads, and build landing pages. Knowing how your decisions impact Quality Score, and how Quality Score interacts with all the other controls you have in your accounts, can help you manage to greater PPC success

In this Webinar you’ll learn:
- exactly why the Quality Score in Adwords is so important,
- how Quality Score impacts the amount you spend and the amount you make from your PPC campaigns
- specific things you can do to drive the Quality Score higher for your keywords.

When: Tuesday, November 25, 2008 | 12:00pm EST

Where: Online, register here to receive your invitation

How much: It’s free, but space is limited so sign-up today!

About our Always Be Testing Webinars:

If you would like to view previous webinars please visit the Always Be Testing webinar archive.

For more details and to sign-up to attend, visit futurenowinc.com/abtwebinar.htm

We hope you’ll attend and share this with anyone you know who is looking to begin to test their marketing or to increase their testing effectiveness.

About the Series:
Whether your business has just started testing, is planning to test, or has been testing for years identifying the areas and elements that have impact is often challenging. Each month, Bryan Eisenberg starts off by taking attendees on a dive deep on a specific subject area to test in your marketing and give you ideas on variation you could test.

“Leach is unusual in giving his quarterback the authority to change every play, wherever the line of scrimmage. “He can see more than I’ll ever see,” Leach says. ‘If I call a stupid play, his job is to get me out of it. If he doesn’t get me out of it, I might holler at him. But if you let him react to what he sees, there’s a ton of touchdowns to be had.’ All Leach is really saying to Hodges when he sends in the play is, ‘Line up in Ace, see how they line up against it and call a good play…’

The Texas Tech offense is not just an offense; it’s a mood: optimism. It is designed to maximize the possibility of something good happening rather than to minimize the possibility of something bad happening…”

Unfortunately, most optimization consultants take the opposite mindset from that attributed to the Texas Tech Football Program’s by Michael Lewis in his NYT article I’ve been quoting from in this series of posts.  In short, most Web consultants focus their efforts on minimizing the possibility of something bad happening (of loosing an already convinced customer’s sale) by fixing usability flaws.

Yet if you want to move beyond page-level optimization, you’ll have to begin maximizing the possibility of something good happening – of convincing visitors to convert who may not already be convinced when they arrive.  And you do this by planning visitor interactions on a click-by-click basis, imagining:

• What questions will arise in their minds,
• What tasks they’re looking to accomplish,
• What expectations they had when they clicked the previous link
• What doubts and concerns are keeping them from moving forward

You’ll find that real scoring opportunities most frequently involve:

• Increasing the match-up between visitor click-through expectations and your content, as well as the match-up between their buying tasks and your selling objectives, and
• Adding content or hyperlinks to answer key questions and provide missing substantiation

Both of which are a far cry from simply tweaking buttons and testing navigation schemes.  And both of which require you to go beyond mechanically applying best practices or ‘mindlessly’ running A/B tests.

This kind of optimization requires that you see how visitor behavior lines up against the backdrop of your current content and then to choose a change/test based on your best hypothesis of why visitors are doing what they’re doing instead of what you want them to do.  Kind of like the Texas Tech QB calling a play based on the mismatch between the formation and the defensive response.

Here’s an actual example from LuLu.com*, specifically their page on softcover publishing:

Now, let’s say LuLu’s three desired actions on this page are, in order of priority:

1. Click the “Self-publish” button in the active window
2. Click the “Lulu Demo” button to the right of the tabs
3. Use the “cost calculator” tool located down below the fold

And just so you can see that cost calculator portion of the page, it looks like this:

Now, let’s imagine that the Web analytics are telling you that the majority of traffic is going to:

• The “Services” page as accessed by the top tab
• The Home Page (either from the back button) or main “Publish” page
• “Help” or “FAQs” either from the top tab or Footer Nav Links

And we’ll also imagine that very few page visitors are taking the actions we want.  Plus, those that are clicking on the “Self Publish” button are quickly closing out of the “upload/cart” – they’ve just got a huge abandonment rate.

Step 1: Take your best guess at what’s going on.

First, I’d imagine visitors coming here from the homepage, the Publish page, and maybe even directly from organic and paid search. And that means most of them aren’t quite ready to upload their manuscript just yet – they probably still have some questions.

Given that situation, the current label for the main call-to-action – the “Self Publish” button – will probably feel deceptive to the visitor.  They’ll likely think the button links to a demo or to more info, and then they’re taken to an upload page.  Is it any wonder they rapidly back out of the upload interface?  Do you see how the context of the click/hyperlink on the prior page can dramatically affect the performance of the current page?

I’d also guess that people aren’t seeing the real demo button because it’s outside the active window.  Plus, the page utterly fails to answer questions about the relative pricing, merits, and limitations of LuLu’s paper, book size, and binding options.  So instead of moving forward, visitors are moving backwards to the publish and home pages and navigating to Help and FAQ pages to try to find those answers/information.

Step 2: Test your hypotheses

I’d test an alternative main button label of “Start by uploading your manuscript for free” and I’d put some Point of Action Assurances near the button.  Something like, “No commitment to upload & you retain the copyright.”

This ought to better prepare visitors for where that button will take them, and it will better appeal to spontaneous shoppers, who are most likely to click that kind of call to action.

I’d also test moving the demo button down into the banner area, not too far from the “Upload” button.  This will make it more visually prominent and should grab some of the traffic now going to the “Services,” “Help,” and “FAQ” pages.  Plus I’d make sure the demo ends with a link to bring visitors back to this page; remember, we want to maximize the chances they’ll come back and convert!

Finally, I’d add copy next to the pictures of “Perfect Bound,” “Saddle Stitched,” and “Coil Bound” pictures, as well as creating some “How to publish as economically as possible” bullets next to the cost calculator so visitors don’t have to blindly guess at what size paperbacks are more expensive, what trade-offs are involved in using cheaper paper, etc.

Step 3: Get it done and learn from the test results

Here’s where a lot of companies get stuck.  They get the test ideas queued up and then they don’t get the new buttons or banners or pictures designed.  Or they don’t write the copy, or some such.  A week to a week and a half goes by so that they’re just starting the test by the time they should have actionable results.

At any rate, not every test goes the way you plan, obviously.  But here’s the beauty of testing this way: if relabeling the “Upload” button doesn’t have any success, but the other tests DO increase the time on the page, the use of the cost calculator, and the number of people watching the demo, maybe you need to test a special, “Upload Your Manuscript” landing page, with new assurances and upload info, giving visitors timelines, points of contact, etc.

Believe me, those kind of results aren’t a failure – they’re a first down!  Now you just have to keep driving toward the goal with follow-up tests.  And the cumulative results of this kind of testing creating the kind of customer insight for breakaway success.

So how can you jump-start this process?

Well, in the spirit of the Raider’s fast-tempo offense, I’m offering a fast-turnaround Web Optimization service, emphasizing do-able, quick-to-implement changes capable of driving real world touchdowns:

The 48-hour, $500 e-mail/ad campaign and landing page analysis

If you’re planning or in the middle of a campaign and want to optimize your results, I can personally analyze your e-mail, ad, etc along with the campaign’s intended landing page and provide you with insight-oriented and easily implemented tests/changes for driving results – just like the kind you saw with LuLu.com.

Better yet, I’ll provide you with an interpretation of the actual results – what to look for, how to make sense of what you’re seeing – and follow-on actions.  If we score a game-winning touchdown and you like the feel of that, you can sign-on for ongoing optimization with Future Now.

If you only walk away with additional insight and a better understanding of how to implement your own optimization efforts – hey, that’s more than worth it for $500 and 48 hours. If you’re interested, contact us.

* Note that LuLu.com is not a client and I have not seen their analytics.  Everything about this example is hypothetical.

And Tom isn’t alone in considering Michael Lewis’s sports writing to be a hidden treasure; just look at this marketing-based analysis of his book,  Money Ball.  But Tom Peters has been alone in recognizing the business applications of Michael Lewis’s astonishing article on the surprising innovation and success of Texas Tech Football, written no less than three years ago.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Action & Tempo:

“…[Coach Leach] had been harping on tempo all week: he thinks the team that wins is the team that moves fastest, and the team that moves fastest is the team that wants to. He believes that both failure and success slow players down, unless they will themselves not to slow down. ‘When they fail, they become frustrated,’ he says. ‘When they have success, they want to become the thinking-man’s football team. They start having these quilting bees, these little bridge parties at the line of scrimmage.’”

You have to learn by implementing, and it’s incredibly advantageous if you work hard to keep your testing tempo as fast and continuous as possible.  Theory and intuition are great at helping you figure out what to test, what to look for in your analytics, and how to interpret your data, but untested assumptions can kill you.  If you think that customers would respond well to X, figure out an easy-to-implement test to confirm or disprove that.  The last thing you want to do is let your website sit static for months while you plan a major change based off of faulty assumptions about the market and/or customer motivations.

Plus, even if you have a brilliant plan to improve your website, it won’t help you until you’ve actually implemented the changes.  So a fast cycle of smaller tests and changes not only keeps you safer by verifying assumptions and improving learning, but successful tests implemented early can pay off during the time you would have wasted staging a larger “batch” of changes.

In a similar manner, Texas Tech is well aware of the “opportunity costs” involved in not keeping their offensive op-tempo as high as possible:

“An idea about the use of football time was being challenged. The typical football offense seeks to eat up as much of it as it can. The Texas Tech offense, which at that point in the season had passed for more touchdowns than any team in the country, uses just a shade over two minutes on each drive. But speeding everything up has a curious effect on game time. A typical college football team runs 65 to 75 offensive plays a game. Texas Tech tries to run 90 – and sometimes does. A college team with a robust passing game might throw the football 35 times a game; at this point, 8 games into an 11-game regular season, the Red Raiders were averaging 53 passes a game.”

Preferring batch implementation of changes and tests is kind of luck holding onto the football to control the clock – you’re wasting opportunities to move the ball down the field and score.  Yet most companies, like most traditional football offensive teams, don’t have Texas Tech’s sense of urgency; they don’t understand the often substantial opportunity costs involved.  Here’s a real life example:

I presented a client with a lead generation website for a considered purchase with a Persuasive Scenario Analysis towards the end of August.   As part of that report, I also presented a prioritized list of “most likely to generate dramatic improvement” changes/tests.  And among those suggested tests, I predicted that the easiest to implement change that was also most likely to produce immediate results was to prominently display the company’s phone number within their banner.

About 1.5 weeks ago they finally made that change (along with several others) and went from getting 0 calls from their website each week to 20 calls in the first full week they had stats for the revised website.  One of those 20 calls converted into a sale.  Most sales average in at $20,000 to $30,000.

Now, I’m hesitant to put too much weight on only one week’s worth of results, but even conservatively downgrading those figures still results in a significant opportunity cost for NOT implementing that change right away.

Orientation

“Leach made his way to the sideline and from his back pocket pulled a crumpled piece of paper with the notations for dozens of plays typed on it, along with a red pen. When a play doesn’t work, he puts an X next to it. When a play works well, he draws a circle beside it – “to remind myself to run it again.” But at the start of a game, he’s unsure what’s going to work…

The Red Raiders trotted off the field at halftime with a lead, but not a large one: 14-10. A disappointing half, yet with hidden value. For 40 plays Leach’s offense had groped – digressing, probing to learn something new – and it had been useful to see how the empty spaces on the field shifted. Coach and quarterback now knew what they wanted to know about the A.&M. defense.  They had paid for the knowledge with time, but time means less to them than it does to any other offense in the land. A half to the Texas Tech offense is as good as a full game to most. The game within the game was about to begin…

In the five full years Leach has coached Texas Tech, four or five times each season the team has flopped around ineffectually for the first third or so of a game before racing off to score touchdowns at a rate unheard of in organized tackle football. It’s as if his opponent’s defense has some deep dark secret that takes time for his offense to extract.”

Action isn’t good enough if you’re just throwing stuff against the wall and not learning from it by reinforcing your successes and killing your failures.  Coach Leach doesn’t just know that this play worked and this play didn’t, he also seeks to understand why, so that he and his quarterback can adjust their overall strategy accordingly.  Once the Raiders have correctly sized up their opponents, that’s when the real scoring opportunities begin to appear.  Here’s what that looks like in the game Michael Lewis was describing:

“Leach had just a few minutes with Hodges, but he told him what he had noticed. First, the A.&M. cornerbacks were disguising their intentions. They were lining up as if to cover the fade routes – that is, before the play began, they stood between the receiver and the sidelines – but then, just as the ball was snapped, they were scampering back into the middle of the field. To Hodges it looked as if fade routes would be covered, so he had been sending his receivers on slants into the middle of the field. ‘Throw the fade,’ Leach said. ‘It doesn’t look like it’s there, but it is.’

The other glaring opportunity, to Leach’s mind, was A.&M.’s response to Tech’s formations. On the few occasions when Texas Tech lined up in a formation that suggested a running play, with two running backs, the Aggies ’put their ears back and stop the run.’ But when Tech was, as it preferred, in its passing formation, A.&M.’s fear of the pass caused them to leave huge empty spaces to run in. In the second half, the Tech running backs would be charging into pass coverage, and the Tech receivers would be running toward the sidelines.

There was one other thing Leach had noticed – and Hodges had noticed it, too. The A.&M. front line appeared tired. ‘The minute you see the defensive line bent over and their hands on their hips,’ Hodges told me, ‘that’s when you know you have them.’ The A.&M. linemen were a lot bigger than the Texas Tech linemen. They may or may not have been fatter – Leach insists they were – but their bodies were clearly designed for a different sort of football game than this frenetic one. ‘That’s the risk of playing 330-pound guys,’ Leach said later. ‘You get good push, but if you got to run around a lot, you get tired.’”

The problem with most companies is that even when they do run A/B and multivariate tests, they’re often just testing random variables or best practices, which means they have no basis for interpreting the results in terms of a larger ‘game strategy.’ If you only know that headline “A” outperformed headline “B” without understanding WHY headline “A” worked best, it would be like Coach Leach only knowing that play X worked and play Y didn’t without seeing the larger patterns or flaws in his opponents defense and without being able to exploit that during the second half.

Here’s a practical web example of this principle taken from Microsoft’s Experimentation Platform blog.  The post in question features three separate A/B tests and the second test of two different site search bars is a perfect example of how the WHY is so crucial.  But first, here are the two search bar designs:

Which one worked better?  Neither: the results were statistically negligible.  Now, if that’s all that you took away from that test, you’d have lost out.  But if you started the tests with some hypothesis about why one design might work better, you could follow up with goal scoring, revised search bar.

For instance, most people would find the search area of Option A much more inviting because it’s more spacious.  Plus, the “Popular Searches” is labeled as such in Option A whereas it’s something of a disconcerting mystery in Option B.

On the other hand, Option B does one very important thing right, that Option A doesn’t: it labels with strong verbs!  Rather than guessing that the magnifying glass means “search,” I can look at the big green button and instantly know that clicking on it will start my search.  That one is kind of a no-brainer, actually, especially since Steve Krug has rather famously taught that search buttons should either say “Search” or “Go.”

If you started with those assumptions, you might have actually created an Option C that combined the best elements of both features.  Something like this:

And then I’d be willing to bet rather heavily that you’d come up with a very clear winner. But if you simply threw Options A and B up in a simple split test and accepted the results without thinking about them, you’d never get to an improved search bar.

So how can you more consistently move past a “best practices” or a “let’s test everything” approach to Website optimization?  What kind of methodology will let you advance beyond page-level optimization to Website-wide conversion improvement?

Well, while that subject definitely builds on what we’ve just discussed, it’s also worthy of a post in itself, so make sure to subscribe to get Part II as soon as it comes out.

“By continuously changing the names of their store networks to such things as OrderAnotherCoffeeAlready, BuyCoffeeForCuteGirlOverThere?, HaveYouTriedCoffeeCake?, BuyAnotherCupYouCheapskate, TodaysSpecialExpresso1.60Euro and BuyaLargeLatteGetBrownieForFree, the chain is able to both promote items as well as guilt patrons into realizing free WiFi really isn’t totally free.“

How are you experimenting with words to boost your conversions? In this economy you must always be testing.

P.S. Manoj’s from Web Analytics World just published an interview about our book Always Be Testing.

Here’s an example from the world of politics:

When California’s conservatives wanted to define the word “marriage” by law, Proposition 22 was added to the California ballot.  It was officially titled the “Defense of Marriage Act.”  As the date for voting drew near, it became apparent that the proposition was going to lose by a wide margin.  Finally, a wizard said, “The meaning of a word is always bigger than its definition; words carry associations.  The word ‘defense’ is a violent word, conjuring associative memories of ‘national defense’ and ‘defense budget.’ It makes us think of Vietnam and bloodshed.  And what is the ‘marriage act’?  Sex.  Juxtapose the word ‘Defense’ with the ‘Marriage Act’ and you get a very uncomfortable feeling.  The subconscious image is that of a battered wife, defending herself in a marriage, or of a woman defending herself from sexual assault.  No one wants to vote for a thing called the Defense of Marriage Act.”

With just a few weeks to go, the new ads began talking about “Proposition 22, the Protection of Marriage Act.”

It won by a landslide.  “Protect” and “Defend” may mean the same thing in a dictionary, but they’re radically different in the human mind.*

And of course, there’s Newt Gingrich’s infamous memo, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” detailing entire lists of words designed to frame and color issues to favor GOP policies and platforms.

Indeed, when it comes to using strategic word choices to frame and re-frame the way an audience perceives an issue, the academic authority on the matter is George Lakoff, author of such noted books as Metaphors We Live By, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, and Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.  And, as one can guess from the title of that last book, George is not shy about applying his Linguistics theories to political debate.  In fact, he recently authored an entire post advising the Obama Campaign on how to most advantageously frame the issues.

Even more topically, there’s plenty of debate and analysis about whether “bailout” is an appropriate term for the proposed legislation to address our current financial crisis.

So clearly at least some politicians get this at a very deep level.  But what about marketers?  Here’s an example I’ll steal from Holly Buchanan: why do spas continue to talk about their treatments in terms of pampering and indulging?  Are these words really activating the right mental frames to best position a spa’s services?  Wouldn’t most women prefer to think about renewing or rejuvenating or healing rather than the more self-centered or selfish frames of indulging and pampering?

How this fits in with Web copy

When asked if and why political consultants are better marketers than most mainstream marketers, one of the very best campaign strategists in the business, Brett Feinstein, wrote back with the following:

“It’s not so much that we are better marketers…we aren’t. Most of the industry is filled with utterly incompetent marketers. This is a backwater for advertising. We make less than our equals in the commercial ad world and work a lot harder. It’s that we focus on different things…

We often see things in real time. Because of how most serious campaigns deliver message (few non-political advertisers buy 1,200+ GRP a week in a given market) we generally do not have to wait a few weeks to see the effect of what we are doing. In the biggest of campaigns, we are running tracking polls nightly. At the Congressional level, we are doing it weekly. We literally see if the ad moves the needle almost instantaneously and can tweak (or change) message much more nimbly than in the commercial advertising world. We also just move faster too. If Coke’s sales were plummeting, it would take them weeks if not months to change an ad campaign’s strategy and content. Just shooting and producing one new TV spot would take weeks and huge expense. I can shoot and produce a top-notch political spot in a day and have it on the air with a new message or look or whatever. And once I put it on the air, I can see if it is working within a day or two…” [Emphasis mine]

In a word, Brett’s answer as to why the best political strategists often create better messaging strategies than their marketing counterparts is not skill or deep theory but:

1. Measurement – they invest time and money to see the effects of their efforts so they can know what is and isn’t working.
2. Testing – they tweak and fine-tune copy and messaging during a campaign
3. Agility – coming up with a great new strategy is worthless if you can’t implements it in time to win the election.

Would it surprise you to learn that Web Optimization requires the same three traits?

1. Without the proper analytics and measurement, you can’t really know how your visitors are reacting to your copy/content.
2. Without tools to conduct A/B and multivariate testing, you can’t effectively drive continued improvement.  An understanding of language nuance is important, but you’ll still want to take your copy changes to the “court of last resort” with testing.
3. And without the ability to rapidly implement important website changes, you’ll incur enormous opportunity costs and fall behind your more aggressive competitors.

So, in my opinion, internet marketers really could learn a lot from (the very best) political consultants – both of the importance of messaging AND the importance of ongoing optimization.

* Quote taken from pg.113 of Magical Worlds of The Wizard of Ads by Roy H. Williams

** Of course, most politicians could learn quite a bit from business on the importance of creating customer loyalty by actually delivering on marketing promises

So as you ramp your sites and marketing up for the Holidays, do you have a few innovations up your sleeve?

Let’s face it. Despite the economic troubles, people are still going to want to give gifts, and find the best gifts they can for their loved ones.  They’re just going to be more cautious and spendthrift.  So empathize with that sentiment as they shop with you.

Encourage them to take their time and find the right deals.  Advise them to buy multiple items to save on their overall shipping spend (Amazon has always ruled this game in my opinion).  Heck, if you’re really bold, cross-sell them with similar items that cost less…it’s sounds crazy, but they might convert instead of abandon.

For a more concrete example, think about gift cards.  A certain percentage of gift shoppers will always end up giving gift cards, and that means a certain percentage of your early-2009 traffic will be gift card redeemers.  The buying path for gift cards is usually OK, but have you optimized it?  Do you plan to test and optimize it in the weeks leading up to the Holidays?

Now think about the card redemption process, which I think has even more room for improvement.  Here’s the experience I’ve always had when redeeming Holiday gift cards online:

1. Receive the card, note how much is on it.
2. Sometime between and 12/26 and 7/4, decide to redeem it (I’m a notoriously bad procrastinator).
3. Look on the back of the card for redemption instructions.
4. Following the instructions, type in the URL and land on the homepage.
5. Now I’m overwhelmed with thousands of products to choose from and no assistance offered.
6. I poke around a bit, maybe try to search by price range, and maybe buy something.

Boring.  Uninspired.  A bit tedious.

Here’s a dream of a better experience:

1. Receive the card, note how much is on it.
2. Sometime between and 12/26 and 1/31, decide to redeem it (Made a New Year’s Resolution about procrastinating less).
3. Look on the back of the card for redemption instructions.
4. Following the instructions, type in the URL and land on a unique landing page or a microsite, 100% dedicated to gift card redemption. No distractions.
5. I can select the value of the gift card and be shown ONLY relevant price range items, or receive a few friendly suggestions of ways to spend the $, or find out how other shoppers have been spending their gift cards.
6. The checkout flow is customized to my unique task of checking out with a gift card.

Those are just a few changes that seem achievable.  Pair those changes with optimization, and you might turn 1-time gift card redeemers into repeat purchasers.
If anyone wants to share their innovative Holiday Season ideas, feel free, but we understand why you wouldn’t necessarily want to give up your competitive advantage .

Can anyone give examples of extraordinary 2007-08 Holiday gift card experiences out there on the Web?

View FutureNow’s webinar on layout and design elements to improve your landing pages.

Click here to listen to Bryan Eisenberg chat with Mayer Gniwisch

(To download the interview for use on your ipod, etc., right-click here and “save as”.)

In case you missed it, our first podcast in the series is with Bernardo de Albergaria, VP & GM of eCommerce, Citrix Online and our second podcast was with Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist for Google. We’ve also recorded two “Always Be Testing” monthly webinars so far, the archived versions are now available.

Have you picked your copy of Always Be Testing? Our publisher says the first printing is already sold out and they are rushing to print a second run.

What: “Always Be Testing” Webinar: Landing Page Optimization: Layout and Design Elements

When: Monday, September 29, 2008 | 2:00pm EST

Where: Online, register here to receive your invitation

How much: It’s free, but space is limited so sign-up today!

About this session:

July kicked off the series with a webinar on testing trust and confidence building elements on landing pages (view archive ). Our August session covered improving landing pages focusing on testing calls to action and headlines. This month session will cover layout and design elements. Register today! Space is limited.

“Always Be Testing” Webinar Series is a monthly webinar that covers specific testing ideas, how to structure tests, and how to use Google Website Optimizer. The best part is that Google has decided to participate in it first-hand, offering the lastest tips and insights straight from Tom Leung, Google’s Business Product Manager.

“Landing Page Optimization: Layout and Design Elements” will be on September 29th, at 2:00pm EST and last about 30 minutes.

For more details and to sign-up to attend, visit futurenowinc.com/abtwebinar.htm

We hope you’ll attend and share this with anyone you know who is looking to begin to test their marketing or to increase their testing effectiveness.

About the Series:
Whether your business has just started testing, is planning to test, or has been testing for years identifying the areas and elements that have impact is often challenging. Each month, Bryan Eisenberg starts off by taking attendees on a dive deep on a specific subject area to test in your marketing and give you ideas on variation you could test. Along with these ideas each month Tom Leung will bring you useful insider tips and tricks about using Google Website Optimizer to easily test your marketing campaigns and website. Lastly, the two will team up to answer a popular question spotted on the Google Website Optimizer forums or sent in by our readers and listeners.

Register for the event today (limited space available).