Media Optimization
Monkeying Around With Web 2.0 Strategy
Steve Rubel’s post on “Why We’re Like a Miliion Monkeys on Treadmills” made me smile. Bryan and I are also way too often asked questions about how to create a Facebook, blogging or Web 2.0 strategy. Our answer is similar to Rubel’s:
Surely, channels are where the action is at. However, it’s important to remember they are just that - and they change. Circa 1998, perhaps when many of you were 10, The Globe.com, GeoCities and Tripod were all the rage. They faded from our horizon over time. The same thing will happen to many of today’s hot sites. In fact, I advise marketers not to invest too much time in creating “a Facebook strategy” as much as they don’t have “an NBC strategy” or “a New York Times strategy.” Instead, I encourage them to people watch, learn and then plan based on their audience and the big picture.
The most interesting action is in sociology. In other words, how does technology change our culture and how we interact with media, the web and each other - and to what end? This was a major realization for me a few months back and you have probably noticed it in my writing, which is less channel focused. These days, I am far more interested in what people do with technology rather than on what the latest new “shiny object” is. … [read the post]
By the way, I know where Rubel got that great monkey picture he used for the post.
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
Hitting the Landing Page Optimization Wall
Have you ever found yourself in this situation: you’ve done tons of testing and optimization and you’ve tweaked your website and your landing pages to the point there’s almost nothing else you can do. You’ve made progress, then SPLAT! You’ve hit the optimization wall.
I was speaking with a client about this very point: What do you do when you reach a plateau in the optimization lifecycle? The problem is, you’ve tested everything that’s there, but what you don’t know is what’s missing.
I was trying to come up with a metaphor as to why Persuasion Architecture™ delivers better results than traditional optimization. So, here’s a perfect metaphor–you’ll have to grab a spoon and go with me on this one…
What happens if, an avid ice cream lover (read: qualified visitor), I walk into your ice cream store (read: website), and you offer me vanilla ice cream. Take it or leave it. I might take it if I like Vanilla. If I don’t, I leave. You notice a lot of people are leaving your store without buying the vanilla ice cream (read: you have a high abandonment rate). You do market research and realize chocolate is a favorite flavor for many people. So, you decide to see which your customers like better; vanilla or chocolate (you A/B test). Turns out, chocolate is more popular (your ‘B’ version of the test resulted in a higher conversion rate). But there are still lots of people who aren’t buying from you. I’m certainly not. I like strawberry.
The problem with many optimization projects is that you’re testing what’s there but you don’t know what’s missing. Many companies are turning to technology to help find the answers, but there’s a limit as to what technology can tell us.
Howard Kaplan wrote a very insightful post about the combination of web analytics and advanced behavioral targeting technology (be sure to read Jim Novo’s comment at the end). Personalization based on past success is certainly promising, but Howard digs deeper with these key questions:
- Does automating “taking action on analytics data” replace planning for success in advance?
- Does Behavioral Targeting atop Analytics provide any real analysis, or generate any true customer insights?
- Is past performance an accurate predictor of success, if the past performance happened by accident?
- If you optimize cowpaths, how do you know how high the ceiling for ROI can go? (How do you know you’re not simply measuring local maximums?)
- What value does targeting bring if you don’t understand the motivations driving the visitor’s search, and the angles of approach they take?
- Who will be taking the time to plan and create intelligently and thoughtfully designed variations.
Testing can help you optimize what is (i.e., taking action on existing analytics data). But how do you take into account what could be (i.e., planning for success in advance)? How do you decide what to test (where do you get your true customer insights)? You’re testing vanilla and chocolate, and you see chocolate performs better. Now you can test pricing, different cones, extra toppings, and other variables that can increase conversion incrementally (i.e., measuring local maximums). But what if a lot of people just want strawberry?
And while we’re at it, why are people who like vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry all forced down the same pathway? Why can’t they each choose the flavor they want and take a different pathway based on that preference (i.e., thoughtfully designed variations)?
This is where Persuasion Architecture™ comes in.
Optimization is based on what is known about your customers. But are there things about your customers/business/competition that you don’t know? Uncovery is all about making more of that information known.
Analytics will tell you what people do, but not why they do it. If you don’t understand the “why,” how do you know what improvements to design and test? Personas give you the customer insight you need to know what to plan and test. They give you insight into your visitors’ motivations and angles of approach. For example, you can test different headlines, but how do you know what verbiage to use in those headlines? Personas will give you that insight.
Planning scenarios allows you to plan for success in advance. You are mapping out the customer experience based on how your customers want to buy. And you are creating different pathways to accommodate different preferences or buying modalities. You’re thus creating intelligent and thoughtfully designed variations.
While most testing optimizes what is, Persuasion Architecture™ takes into account and optimizes what could be by creating hypotheses about who your customers are, what they need, and–ultimately–how you’ll address those needs.
Some customers want to start by picking out their ice cream flavors, some customers want to start with toppings, like asking for a hot fudge sundae first, then picking ice cream flavors. Other customers want soft serve. Some want low-cal options. Is it more work to plan for all these different buying preferences? Sure it is. But if you’ve hit the optimization wall, this is the next logical step if you want to continue to see improvements.
Sure, it’s great that you’ve optimized for chocolate; you may be selling chocolate better than all your competitors. But imagine the results if you planned persuasive scenarios for all the different ways people want to buy their ice cream.
Persuasion Architecture™ is about planning entire experiences, not just testing individual interactions.
What are you testing? Are you measuring the entire customer experience? Or are you just testing individual interactions? How are you deciding what to test? Are you planning what could be? How much more successful could you be if you knew what it is your customers want that they aren’t getting. Are you so busy optimizing the chocolate you haven’t thought about the strawberry? Whatever you do, keep asking bigger questions.
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
Search Engine Marketing and the 2008 Election
All politics aside, observing the 2008 US Presidential election from a marketing perspective alone will be quite fascinating.
How effective will the candidates be at using the the web and all it’s mojo? techPresident is a blog set up to do just that, check out this post about how the current candidates are utilizing (or not) Google Pay Per Click (PPC).
It’s time all candidates recognize the power of search to drive highly-targeted traffic to their fledgling websites. Get cracking, everyone! We’re watching.
We’ll be watching as well, and I am sure we can find a few great lessons to share with you about online persuasion.
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Written by:Anthony Garcia
Some Google Advertisers Cutting Spending
From Dow Jones MarketWatch…
Keyword inflation, low conversion rates sending merchants elsewhere
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — A growing number of online advertisers are bidding a partial goodbye to Google Inc.
Frustrated by the soaring price of Internet-search advertising and diminishing returns from the ads they buy, mid-sized advertisers say they plan to reduce how much business they do with Google this year — in some cases, significantly.
Last year, for example, eBags.com co-founder Peter Cobb spent between $5 million and $8 million to peddle suitcases, handbags and other carrying cases online. Google got 75% of that amount.
But this year it will get “significantly less,” Cobb said. “The Google percentage has got to go down,” he said.
In many cases, the cost of an eBags.com ad placed on either Google’s own Web site or one of its affiliates now equals 45% of the price of the product it promotes. That’s crimping the company’s own profit margins and forcing it to look elsewhere to market its bags.
“We’re testing print ads right now,” said Cobb, whose company will spend up to $8 million on ads in 2007. Read the rest of the article
The article continues…
Keyword search prices on many terms rose between 40% and 60% last year, according to advertisers like Dan Sackrowitz, chief executive of Bare Necessities, which sells lingerie online. He saw his Google ad budget soar 50% last year.
The problem is obvious, traffic costs are puffing up like a marshmallow in a microwave and advertisers are having a hard time finding ways to increase traffic and lower costs. Simply put, Google advertisers are hooked.
Instead of looking for ways to increase return on traffic investment, the average marketer will look for another traffic fix. We’ve said before that the marketing battleground of the future is not traffic acquisition, it will be traffic conversion.
The exceptional marketer is looking for ways to optimize their keyword and landing page conversion rates.
Optimizing landing pages is something we’ve been doing with our clients for quite some time. We are a premier channel partner with Google and their new testing platform Google Website Optimizer beta. If you are interesting in our landing page optimization coaching service, we are going to take on a few testers over the next few weeks to participate in this beta with us. Contact us if you want to know more.
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Written by:Anthony Garcia
Delete Your E-Mail List
Do you have a successful e-mail list?
How do you determine its success:? Total subscribers? Number of weekly sign-ups? High open rate? Click-throughs? Comments generated?
All those numbers are important, but often the real value of a good list is the participation it stimulates between the subscriber and your business.
Too many businesses shell out too many dollars and resources to up their number of subscribers or to improve the demographic quality of their e-mail lists, while too few consider the quality of subscriber participation.
Don’t confuse participation with interactive technology. I’m not talking about keeping customers entertained with bells and whistles. Worthwhile interaction truly engages your audience.
So when we decided we wanted to improve participation quality with our company newsletter subscribers, we pulled up our list — and hit “delete.”
We wiped out a list of over 40,000 addresses, built organically and through co-registration. A list we’ve been mailing to since 2000. Before you conclude my book tour drove me mad (and it may as well have), read on.
At the end of the day, we don’t care much about the number of subscribers we have, we care about reader engagement — the quality of the relationship readers have with us. We don’t expect subscribers to read every issue, but if they haven’t read our newsletter once in three months, we assume they’re not interested, or don’t have the time to invest. Making any other assumption risks the quality of our subscriber interaction. The last thing we want is for the newsletter to degrade into a perception of opt-in spam.
Continue reading my column on ClickZ…
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
The Death of the Web Page
The Web page was pronounced dead on October 9, 2006, after a long bought with chronic irrelevance. A large group of marketers attempted CPR and other heroic resuscitation techniques. Witnesses present at the scene told reporters that despite a few minutes of chaos, the Web page’s last moments were largely serene and peaceful.
"She was a quiet and powerful beast, and she died doing what she loved," states one observer.
"While Web 2.0 technologies and persuasive scenarios were certainly contributing factors, we have determined they were not the cause of death," said a spokesman for the Web page’s care provider. "She was just too irrelevant, and she never quite recovered. She just couldn’t keep pace or serve the needs of today’s marketers any longer."
Read Bryan’s Entire Article over at Clickz.
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Written by:Anthony Garcia
Internet Killed the Radio Star?
Contrary to popular belief radio is not dying. It is, however, changing drastically. What we are witnessing is the medium of ‘audio broadcasting’ being molded and morphed at the hands of a populice in more control of their choices.
Radio isn’t radio anymore, it is now ‘terrestrial’ radio and it sharing more of it’s audience (and revenue) with it’s offsping; internet radio, podcasting, and satellite radio.
Even as the populice is having influence on the radio universe many broadcasting sites remain irrelevant and downright yucky. And of course ‘terrestrial’ radio is struggling to remain viable. The answer to this?
From Audiographics.com
Today, consider a few terms that will help; radio personas, predictive modeling, and persuasion architecture. Combining the three allow stations to build an online presence that delivers better results.
Building a radio persona will let you create predictive marketing that gives clues to how you should build your web site with persuasion architecture. Read the entire article.
Interestingly enough, this conclusion came as a result of Bryan Eisenberg’s 2 part rant over at ClickZ about the state of satellite radio’s online efforts. Read part one, then part two.
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Written by:Anthony Garcia
Stay tuned, for more PAPR news…
Today’s leading story on ClickZ:
http://clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623082
Anyone doing PR just may want to take 5 and read the article.
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Written by:Howard Kaplan
Conversion versus Persuasion: What’s Your Challenge?
Persuasion takes you beyond linear conversion funnels to help you achieve your conversion goals.
Conversion is no longer the biggest problem facing online marketers; persuasion is. However, a misconception about the nature and value of linear conversion funnels persists. Some say the linear conversion funnel is dead. Others still conceive of their efforts as entirely based on linear conversion funnels.
This misconception about linear processes has been a pet peeve of mine for years. Fortunately, misperception is an opportunity for clarification. So please allow me clarify.
The linear conversion funnel has its place. Though rudimentary and limited, it’s a great blunt-force beginners’ tool for online marketers with few or no metrics in place (and there are far too many of those left). But the linear conversion funnel won’t take sophisticated marketers very much further in their optimization efforts. No conversion funnel will, 2.0 or otherwise.
Instead of considering the conversion funnel by itself, we should think of it as living at the bottom end of the buy/sell process. Let me say again, conversion is no longer the biggest problem facing online marketers; persuasion is.
Without persuasion, there’s no incentive for visitors to walk through your linear sales process. Unlike conversion, persuasion isn’t linear. The conversion funnel is smooth and simple, but the persuasive reservoir that feeds it is as complex and non-funnel-like as your visitors are.
Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 133
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Stray cats barking throughout the office!
Well forgive the shameless plug, but we’re finally 100% publicly shipping our latest book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing. Amazon, BN and Sam’s Club jumped the gun a bit, but we forgive their exhuberance. After all, there’s probably no better time to start shipping than when a book is recommended in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. We couldn’t be more proud of it, and the reception we’ve received thus far. There’s been far too much feedback to share here, but a random sampling shows podcasts, newspapers, tv & radio stations, and online reviews getting into the mix. Here’s a few of our personal fav’s: (feel free to add your own 
- Craig Danuloff from Commerce360, leads an insightful chapter by chapter discussion of the book.
- Mike Grehan recently podcasted his fireside chat with Jeffrey & Bryan, and wrote about it on ClickZ
- The good folks behind 800-CEO-READ offer their thoughts (and free books)
- WonderBranding’s own Michele Miller donating her own charitable dollars to inspire future readers
- Chuck McKay, of Advertising Made Simple, offers the Small Biz take on the value of Cat
There’s been plenty of pub for the release, I gave you five, and in a variety of formats. I hope there’s something in there for everyone. Our heartfelt thanks to everyone who’s enjoyed the Waiting for Your Cat to Bark experience, and to those of you who haven’t… what are you waiting for?!
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Written by:Howard Kaplan
