But I just felt I had to call out an example of how poor copywriting and writing for search engine robots can ruin a decent Unique Value Proposition.

I was referred to a site to look at their homepage design (see screenshot, highlighting is mine), and immediately noticed that they had a prominent Unique Value Proposition (UVP) statement, which was promising.

The UVP statement wasn’t the best I’ve read, but at least it was an attempt that could be tested and refined. But the sub-text under the UVP was what irked me enough to write this post.

Someone decided to “we-we” all over the UVP! And it looks like they also tried to write for search engine robots instead of humans with credit cards:

“We specialize in custom ties, custom bow ties, bowtie / cummerbund / handkerchief sets, custom cufflinks, matching gift boxes, women ’s scarves, and much more. We can custom make your neckwear any way you desire. We have both standard ties and clip on ties as well as extra long ties for your custom ties. We even have custom ties for boys as young as 6 months. Our products are great for corporations, organizations, churches, choirs, schools, uniforms, athletic teams, fraternities, formal and special events, and many more.”

Notice that by focusing on SEO only, they end up with copy that will resonate with no one.

Here’s the official tally from our free We We Calculator:

Your Customer Focus Rate: 37.50% (3 customer-focused words)

Your Self Focus Rate: 62.50% (5 self-focused words, and 0 mentions of the Company Name)

You speak about yourself about 2 times as often as you speak about your customers. Might that have an impact on your effectiveness?

I’m not a Search Engine Optimization guru, but I’d wager that any SEO prowess you lost by fixing that kind of copy could be made up by 1 or 2 quality, keyw0rd-rich inbound links from reputable, related sites, don’t you?

So the natural thing to do is trim non-performing words and phrases in order to increase the efficiency of your PPC spend.  And that’s exactly what one client did, except rather than increasing his efficiency, he dropped his sales by 30%.

Why?

Because, depending on what you sell, lots of people buy on their second, third, or umpteenth visit to your site, rather than the first visit.  Those visitors are building confidence in you as they move through their buying process.  But most systems don’t (or can’t) track user behavior over multiple visits.   So when those early and middle buying-stage keywords shown up as non-converters, they get cut.

The shame is that not everyone is able to track the following sales drop off, which may not occur for days, weeks, or months, back to the act of cutting those keywords.

Trading away Dennis Rodman as a Non-performing Player?

Would you trade Dennis Rodman for non-performance?  Of course not, right?  Rodman’s defensive stats alone tell the tale.  At his prime, Dennis was pulling down a truly astonishing 18.7 rebounds per game.  For reference, the previous year’s league leader in rebounds (David Robinson) averaged 13 per game.

But if the only stats you looked at involved scoring, you’d get a different picture. Comparing Rodman’s 8-9 points per game against other star players’ 20 or more points per game, you’d likely have been misled into trading Rodman, only to find yourself wondering why you started losing games and everyone else’s scoring stats went up against your team.

Think of your assisting keywords terms as the Dennis Rodman’s of your PPC campaign, except you’ll get all the assists and none of the off-court shenanigan’s.

There’s plenty of other ways myopic analysis can leading you astray

A recent eConsultancy post discusses how Google’s default window for tracking cookies can distort traffic data.  Left in its default cookie window setting, Google Analytics (GA) will classify visitors as “search”-driven traffic for six months following a single search based click through to your site – regardless of how they got to your site previous to that search or how they might arrive at your site following that search. Here’s an example of how this might skew your results:

Let’s say you’re driving traffic to your site via radio ads and that a listener, after hearing your ad, types your url directly into his browser.  Later, he comes back but this time, he types your business name into Google and clicks through on a displayed search result.  Following that, he visits your site three more times via bookmark or directly typing your URL into his site. That’s a total of 5 visits.

Question: How many of those visits would GA classify as search-driven?

Answer: 4 out of 5.

GA would count the first search-based visit and then all of the remaining 3 visits, despite the fact that the following three visits didn’t use search and may have taken place several months after the initial search.  Multiply that by all your visitors/visits, and you can see how your understanding of what drives traffic to your website might be distorted in favor of search. And under the impression that your traffic was mostly generated by search and not, say, your radio ads, you might be tempted to cut them from your ad spend.   Obviously, the same thing could apply with e-mail campaigns, magazine ads, etc.

Bringing Clarity and Orientation to Web Improvement Efforts

Any experienced Web Analyst or Website Optimizer could extend this list of “gotchas” and “classic mistakes” almost indefinitely.  It’s just not that uncommon for an uncareful analysis of data to lead online marketers either to analysis paralysis or sub-optimal optimization strategies.  Is it any wonder that 70% of businesses collecting wed data fail to act on their analytics data?

Obviously this issue has been central to Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s Web careers since the beginning.  It’s why they helped found the Web Analytics Association; why they published The Marketer’s Common Sense Guide to eMetrics, Call to Action and Always Be Testing; why they created Persuasion Architecture; and ultimately why they’ve built the OnTarget program.

The central theme amongst all of these issues is bringing clarity and actionable insight to Web improvement and online marketing efforts.  They are all answers to the business owner who feels confused or disoriented by the data he’s given and want’s a clear direction toward more sales/conversions and improved website performance.

So, if you find yourself struggling to make sense of your online marketing data, or frustrated by non- or counter-productive optimization efforts, ask yourself: are you giving credit where it’s deserved?  Or do you need help achieving greater clarity and actionable insight from your optimization efforts?

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.

Let’s compare a few keywords to demonstrate the difference.

Traffic searching for “buy Monet print” is highly targeted. These are visitors who are looking to purchase a product from a vendor who sells Monet prints. If someone is searching for “Monet”, this does not necessarily mean that the visitor has intentions of buying anything, but perhaps is just looking to learn more about Monet.

The less targeted traffic might not be coming in with an interest to buy what it is that you are offering, and perhaps are simply looking for information or education on a topic.

In an ideal world, we would separate this traffic into different buckets. By doing that, we would be able to separately track those visitors who search for a very general keyword, who might be less targeted, from the more highly targeted traffic who are searching for more long tail keywords.

Averages are messy. We don’t just want to know what our average overall site conversion rate is based on all of the traffic we get. We want to know what our conversion rate is for those visitors who are highly targeted, separately from the conversion rate for those who are less targeted. This will really help us understand how we are truly performing with the traffic that has real motivation to buy what we offer.

Most web analytics and tracking software don’t make it simple for you to separate all your traffic into these buckets. It’s much easier to determine what needs to be fixed if you can look at the performance of the entire buying process based on keywords which tells us level of intent and motivation.

Are you segmenting your search engine traffic based on the intent of the keywords?

Think of your site’s search box as a last chance to get a visitor to take action on your site.  A majority of visitors will only use internal search as a last resort when they are unable to find what they are looking for through the landing page and its subsequent navigation. If the visitor gets zero results or are still unable to find what she wants in the search results, that result page will be her last stop on the way to your competitor’s site. While internal search is not used by the majority of visitors,  it is necessary to provide a visitor with relevant and useful information when she does search.

Your visitors expectations of your site’s search is that it will perform as well as the search they are used to from their favorite search engine.

There are many ways that search result pages can be optimized to provide visitors with an easy means to find what they are looking for — or at least something that will keep the visitor moving through your site. Here are a few places to start:

Drill down and sorting options -  Long lists of results can be daunting. Give visitors the option to drill down by various criteria. Allow visitors to drill down or to sort by category, price, brand, sale items, availability, best selling. Test which ones have the most impact.

Correct Misspellings - Misspellings are easy mistakes to make. Plan for these mistakes by bringing visitors the right results when they use the wrong spelling. Let the visitor know they have made a mis-spell (”did you mean: dictionary? “) and either provide the results directly on the page or provide link to the properly spelled results. Mine these on a regular basis and they’ll also provide you insights into merchandising opportunities.

Consider Related words - Visitors often use their own words to describe what they want, they may not use the exact words your site (or your industry) uses to describe what they are looking for. Use related words and common synonyms to bring back relevant results.

Listen to visitors -  This is the only place on your website where you can get qualitative visitor information without pestering them or taking them out of the buying process. An early stage visitor who doesn’t have a lot of knowledge on the subject may  search more often (but less efficiently), thereby yielding good insight into what words other early stage visitors think of. Look at what visitors have entered into your search, visitors may not know the exact name of what they are looking for. Mine the analytics data, look through the terms visitors are searching by and use this information to help bring future visitors closer to what they actually want.

Don’t have what they are looking for?- If you don’t have what visitors are looking for then you must present visitors with options to move forward. Give similar or replacement products if you don’t carry the specific product they are looking for, and if all else fails present links to most popular or featured items.

Help your visitors out by optimizing your search results we these tips.  Following these rules you will be able to keep visitors on your site and bring them closer to the finding what they are looking for.

Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.

Read more about how we scale and normalize the data.On the results page, you’ll also see a list of the top searches, top rising searches, and a world heat map graphically displaying the search volume index with regions, subregions, and cities.

Keep in mind that Insights uses data aggregated over millions of users without personally identifiable information, and is powered by computer algorithms. Additionally, Insights only shows results for search terms that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool. For more information about how Google protects privacy, please refer to our privacy policy.

Go try out Google’s Insights for Search for your keywords. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

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.

In the second and final installment of Bryan’s interview with Ralph Wilson — recorded at February’s Search Engine Strategies conference in London — the two shift their focus from personas (as discussed in Part 1) to improving landing page conversion by creating better “scent” for the visitor.

In the video, Bryan talks about a study conducted by usability guru Jared Spool that shows, among other things, that…

• When visitors found the “trigger words” — keywords that either get stuck in their heads, either consciously or subconsciously, often from advertising — on the landing page they’re sent to, they were content with what they found a whopping 72% of the time.
• When these same visitors didn’t see their trigger words on the landing pages they found, their search was only successful 6% of the time.

Despite all the heady research that analyzes how people actually search for — and find — things on the Internet, it’s so obvious that it’s almost funny: We sniff around for relevant info like animals on the hunt. We go where the scent takes us. If we find what we’re looking for, great. Game over. If not, we retreat to home base, regroup and go out on a slightly more refined path until we see it in the corner of our eye. Then we pounce.

. .

Want Bryan’s advice on how to make your website stink (in a good way)? Meet him at FutureNow’s Call to Action seminar on June 3rd in Manhattan.

Marketing firms, usability firms, even companies’ internal marketing teams are crafting personas. Posters of personas are hung proudly in conference rooms. Tacked-up personas dress cubicles from coast to coast.

Sadly, many of these personas are only attracting dust bunnies. They don’t see any recognition past the initial creation.

If you spent any amount of time and resources building personas that represent your customers, it’s reasonable to consider getting more out of them.

Instead of letting your personas drift into a faint memory, here are a few things you can use your personas for.

Tweak Your Personas

A reason some personas get put in drawers is they aren’t as effective as they could have been. Profitable personas are representatives of all buying modes your customers have as they consider you or competitors. The measure for effective personas is that they must evoke empathy in your team and be tied to your business goals.

Go ahead and tweak your personas if need be.

Your Personas and Your Competitors

See exactly how well your competitors are doing with your personas. Take your personas through their site. Be brutally honest.

For each persona, note where your competitors do well and where they fail. In some cases, you’ll find they do better with one or two of your personas. Use this information to shore up your site to provide a superior experience for all your personas. Many times you’ll find new ideas and inspiration for changes in your persuasion scenarios.

Keyword Research

We’ve had many clients who eagerly used personas for everything but researching keywords. We often have to remind them to use their personas for this purpose. Start by brainstorming some of the terms and phrases each persona would use in relationship to your product/service in the early buying stages. Then move on to middle and late stages. By going through this simple exercise, you’ll immediately have a list of potential keywords you may not have otherwise considered.

Be sure not to ignore the low-traffic keywords you dig up. Often times these terms cost much less, reveal true buying intent, and, as a result, convert at astounding rates.

Offline Inspiration

Personas can also be used to inspire and guide your offline marketing efforts. Run all your creative through your personas, and estimate their response. Often you’ll find a particular creative works for some personas and not for others. Instead of ignoring the rest of your personas, adjust the creative to reach them as well or produce additional creative for the other personas. Have you noticed that Geico has very different simultaneous campaigns? The gecko and cavemen campaigns appeal to different customer segments.

Give Personas a Say in Your Marketing Budget

A well-crafted, well-researched persona set represents all your potential customers. But not all personas are equal in their monetary value to the company.

When you’re trying to make tough budget decisions on where and how to market, you can use your personas as a guide. We had a client who had more marketing opportunities than resources and time. Using his personas, we were able to help plan the rollout of an ambitious redesign project by starting with the site elements that appealed to two of his most valuable personas. The redesign’s second phase was to shore up site elements for secondary personas.

You can use this same line of planning to determine how and where to spend marketing dollars, online and off-.

Conclusion

Don’t let your personas get off easy by using them for only one or two projects. Instead, drag them out for everything. Run all your new creative by them, even use them to come up with more effective site optimization ideas. (That’s a column for another time.)

What have your personas done for you lately?

Reprinted from my ClickZ column.

[Image from Ingmar Bergman's 1966 classic film, Persona.]

And don’t forget to check out the tag cloud on the top-right [example], which will give you some sense of visitors — at least the ones interested enough to bookmark it — tend to categorize the site.

(Hat tip to BloggingPro for pointing this out!)

[His publishers said] “The End of Intuition” is a terrible name. So boring. But Ian Ayres didn’t believe it. That’s what he wanted to call his new book about how much better it is to test ideas through random trials rather than just trusting some marketing guru or focus group — or intuition. His editor thought he was nuts and insisted that “Super Crunchers” was a much zippier name.

So the two of them decided to do some random testing of his book on random testing. They took out a Google ad and half the time someone was doing a search on “data mining” or “number crunching,” a little ad on the right would appear for a new book called “The End of Intuition.” Half the time the same ad appeared for a new book called “Super Crunchers.”

Based only on this information, which title do you think won? Make your best guess, then keep reading.

To me, it’s pretty darn obvious; “Super Crunchers” had to perform much better if they keywords they targeted were “data mining” and “number crunching.”

Sure enough…

“Super Crunchers” got way more traffic — 63% — and thus became the title of his book.

I was actually a little surprised it wasn’t higher than 63%, but I don’t have access to the actual ad.

There are two types of people in customer research. There are Humanistics, who have a great ability to empathize with other people. They truly want to understand why people behave the way they do, what their deeper motivations are, and how to better relate to people. Then there are Methodicals. They’re superior number crunchers. They like statistics and spreadsheets. They base their decisions on facts (even if they’re merely justifying to themselves a decision that’s already been made based on emotion).

I’d be curious to see this test repeated with different keywords like “customer insight” or “customer research”or “understanding your customers.” These are keywords more likely to be used by Humanistics, who would be more attracted to the title “The End of Insight.”

If the subject matter of the book is truly aimed at more Methodical researchers, “Super Crunchers” is definitely the way to go. I’m not suggesting Ian change the title of the book. But never underestimate the power of words. The keywords you choose will affect your results.