Contrary to common opinion, David Ogilvy didn’t have a preference for long copy.

What he had was an overwhelming bias towards anything that had been proven to work (which included long copy).  Ogilvy’s real, professed preferences were for consumer testing, research-driven techniques, and performance-based advertising in the truest sense of the term.

Based on those things, the conclusion he came to was that messaging and relevance had to have highest priority. Everything else – creativity, design, layout – should be subordinated to the end goal of conveying a salient message in as persuasive a manner as possible. In print, this took the form of what has come to be known as “The Ogilvy Layout.”

Understanding Ogilvy’s Layout and Why it Still Works

There are three main parts to the Ogilvy Layout, with a corresponding and crucial quality for each element:

1. The picture, which should have “story appeal”
2. The headline, which should tie into the “story appeal” of the picture
3. And the body copy, which most be placed in the right relationship to both the picture and the headline as to anticipate the reader’s visual preferences and enhance readability.

I’ve dealt with Story Appeal in previous posts, but let’s talk about headlines before diving into why Ogilvy’s favorite arrangement continues to stand the test of time.

What I’ve Noticed About Ogilvy’s Headlines

In his book, Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy writes about the importance of captions no less than 4 times, urging the reader to include captions underneath all of their photographs each and ever time.  According to the research Ogilvy cites, 4 times as many readers read captions as body copy and 10 times as many people read headlines as body copy.

So while it may seem obvious that the headline and the main picture (or “hero shot” in today’s lingo) should be related, it also seems that you can grab even more reader-grabbing power for your headlines if you make use of some of the compelling “what’s this picture all about” draw of captions.  Here’s a perfect example of this:

Pretty difficult not to read a bit more about that story, isn’t it?

Let’s Talk Layout and Arrangement

Here’s the thing: because of his attention to research, Ogilvy knew what many online copywriters are still learning:

**People scan and skim first and read second

and they only read IF their scan turns up something worthwhile.**

Now, in magazines, which are mostly read as a diversion, the first thing to get scanned are pictures.  We are visual creatures and pictures typically convey a lot of information (and emotion) fast, so a strong visual is almost always going to be the first thing the eye fixes on when the reader is engaging in general browsing for interest.  Please note, though, that this scanning order changes for task oriented individuals interacting with a website.  People scanning a web page redefine “worthwhile” by relevance to their task, and therefore focus on the headlines first.

Getting back to magazine ads, if the picture is intriguing, the next thing a person will scan is the headline and possibly the caption.  After that, and only after that, the person in question will skim (or read) the body copy.

For emphasis, this is THE order in which an audience will scan a magazine ad/page:

1. Picture first,
2. Headline second,
3. Copy last.

To quote Ogilvy himself:

“Readers look first at the illustration, then at the headline, then at the copy. So put these elements in that order – illustration at the top, headline under the illustration, copy under the headline. If you put the headline above the illustration, you are asking people to scan in an order which does not fit their habit.”

And to paraphrase Steve Krug, don’t make the reader think; it’s just as easy to stop reading or engaging with the ad as it is to expend the extra effort navigating an oh-so-creative-but-against-the-grain layout.

Eye Tracking Heat Maps Prove the Power of Ogilvy’s Layout

The brilliant people over at Think Eye Tracking recently put three different car ads to the test: one Ogilvy-inspired 1-page layout compared to 2 new-school double-trucks (aka 2-page spreads). You can see their blog post about  their tests here, but I’ve also posted the Ogilvy-inspired heat map below. Check it out:

Notice how the headline and body copy receive most of the attention.  The picture draws the eye, but the messaging gets the most time and attention from the viewer/reader.

Unfortunately, a direct comparison of heat maps isn’t possible, because Think Eye Tracking only posted the heat map from the Porsche add and not the ones from the Mercedes and BMW ads.  But they DID give percentages of each ad’s ability to create reader retention of various elements within the ad, including the  call to action.  Assuming that the call to action was made within or at the end of the body copy (a fairly safe assumption), we can see how the ads stack up in terms of getting people to read the copy/pay attention to the messaging:

• Ogilvy Layout/Porsche Ad: 59% of readers noted the call to action
• Mercedes Ad: 29%
• BMW Ad: 11%

The Ogilvy Layout doubled readership of the copy while using half the ad space!

Incidentally, the use of a 1-pager instead of a double-spread was also recommended by Ogilvy, as the double-spread cost much more but didn’t increase readership in proportion to its cost.

And for those of you who read this far, or who doubted Ogivly’s performance-based bias, enjoy this short video of Ogilvy addressing the Direct Marketers of his day:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Just for the record, while I DO draw some distinctions between the online world and old-school direct marketing, I also think that online “marketers” who stray too far from direct marketing principles end up producing websites like this:

www.porsche.co.uk/innerstrength

In case you’re wondering, yes, that is the URL used in the Porsche ad’s call to action.  Just the sort of thing you’d remember after flipping through the ad isn’t it?  Not.

Anyway, go ahead and frustrate yourself by interacting with that “piece of work” for awhile.  You’ll undoubtedly find yourself wishing that the same, sane approach to design and layout had been used in creating the website as had been used in designing the ad.

P.S. I’m not advocating a literal use of the Ogilvy layout to a digital format, but rather an intelligent application of Ogilvy’s subordination of design, creativity, and layout to messaging. More about that in a follow up post…

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

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?

Cost Per Visitor (CPV) – How many advertising, marketing, SEO, etc. dollars do you need to spend to bring in each Website visitor you’re getting.   Don’t look at conversion just yet – it’s your website’s job to convert the visitors; marketing’s job is to get them there in the first place.  So Cost Per Visitor is the best starting point for measuring your return on marketing spend.

Also, feel free to break this down by channel: SEO, e-mail marketing, PPC, conventional media, etc.  Some channels are easier to track than others, but give all of them your best shot.  Now plot your CPV performance from the beginning of the year till now and see how you’re doing.

Revenue Per Visitor (RPV) – Top line revenue is usually easier to calculate and track, so we go with RPV, but if you’ve got the metrics to figure out bottom line Profit Per Visitor, all the better.  So basically you’re looking for how much money you are bringing in per Website visitor, and you’re looking to see how this metric is changing from the beginning of the year until now.

CPV should be decreasing and RPV should be increasing

What to do if these metrics aren’t moving in the right direction:

1. Take a look at your marketing spend. What’s working?  What’s not working?  Look at differing channels, keywords, time of day, etc.  Get accountability from the tactics you are using to drive traffic.
2. Focus on improving your conversion rate.  Your Website’s conversion rate can act as a lever to both CPV and RPV.  By examine keywords and marketing campaigns in terms of scent and scent trails, you can improve the performance of your campaigns and drive down CPV.  By improving micro-conversions throughout the buying process, you can increase macro-conversions, average order value, repeat customers, etc – thereby improving RPV.  For tools on how to do this, take a look through our archives, read Always Be Testing (or any of our other books), or give us a call.

Feel free to let us know how you’re doing, or to post any questions you have on these metrics and improvement tactics.  We’d love to hear from you.

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

We thought we’d share some insights so that if you’re thinking about an optimization program, you can avoid the pitfalls and reap the rewards.

There are many, nuances of course, but I’d boil it all down to 4 basic steps.

Step 1 – Get Help

Those who get a personal trainer are more likely to accomplish their fitness goals.  In the world of online marketing, those who get expert help are far more likely to achieve their business goals than those who try to “DIY.”  The help you need is cross-disciplinary: you need expert eyes looking at aesthetics, usability, copywriting, marketing strategy, split testing, personas, pay per click, search engine optimization, and more.  Of course, we’d like to be considered when you go looking for outside help.  But if you don’t hire us, do hire someone!  Even if we don’t get your business, we’ll take solace in knowing that the Web is getting better for customers, little by little.

Step 2 – Get Out of Project Mentality

There is a tendency to think about improving a website, or any marketing, as a one-time project with a beginning and end.  We believe this is the wrong approach to optimization.  You may think you can join a gym for 3 months, lose some weight, then cancel your gym membership and still maintain your improvements.  But only a true lifestyle change can help you accomplish fitness goals.  Same goes for Optimization, also known as Continuous Improvement.  The shift out of project mentality needs to be addressed within your organization (culture), with your vendors, and especially with those who are going to “own” the implementation of your continuous improvements.

Step 3 – Budget For It

Closely related to Step 2, Step 3 is to budget for a process of ongoing optimization.  Since it’s not a project that ever should “end,” it should always be in the budget, right?  We’ve written before about our opinion that in a recession, optimization is the last thing that should be cut from marketing budgets.  If you join a gym and see improvements (you drop a few pounds, keep them off, and feel better in general), why wouldn’t you budget that gym membership for at least the next couple years?  Also keep in mind that “budget” doesn’t just mean a line item in a spreadsheet.  Budgeting your internal resources time is important, too.  OnTarget clients budget 10, 20, or 40 implementation hours for their team per month, for example.

Step 4 – Celebrate the Wins, Learn From the Losses

I’ve already written about celebrating the wins, even if they’re small.  Part of the celebration process is stepping back from the day-to-day process of Optimization and acknowledging that the process as a whole is effective.  And publicizing wins is probably the most effective way to make sure Optimization costs stay in the budget no matter what! As far as losses go, we define a “loss” as a tested optimization change that decreased a KPI.  One of the great things about digital changes is that if they don’t work, un-doing them is pretty quick and painless.  But, too many clients back away from testing, changing, and optimizing because of a loss or two.  Again using the weight loss analogy, weight fluctuates, and just because you gain back a pound that you lost, doesn’t mean you quit exercising.  The key is to learn from the failed change, and inform your next round of optimization.  That way, it just feeds back into your cycle of continuous improvement.

Hope this is helpful, and would like to hear your thoughts in the comments on if you think there are other Steps to Optimization that deserve a future post.

Here’s my take on some of the stages in developing an optimization culture:

• Acceptance – this is the stage where a business realizes that Optimization has value, and in order to reap the rewards, the status quo isn’t going to work.  Something additional has to be done, which calls for some combination of the following: a shift in focus, additional resources, new tools, and working with outside experts.
• Testing the Waters – this is the stage where the business starts testing and optimizing, and often gets some big wins just by making minor changes to their site, or removing basic conversion roadblocks.
• Infatuation – after getting some wins from “low hanging fruit,” our clients sometimes become fixated on testing and optimization.  They check their test dashboards multiple times a day, they cheer when they see Google Website Optimizer’s green bar, and they wring their hands when they see any yellow or red indicators.  The less-disciplined business will often lose focus at this point and miss out on all the fun/profit.
• Thinking About Resources – after things have settled down, there have been a few wins, and a few inconclusive tests (inconclusive changes still give you incredibly valuable data and piece of mind), the business starts to think about how to support an optimization process long-term.  They realize that this process isn’t free; it takes hard work and resources to create and administrate tests.  They evaluate their current teams and whether they can properly support a culture of continuous improvement.  This is a magnificent stage to witness, and once a business knows their resources, it’s much easier to stay OnTarget.
• Getting Analytical – once in the habit of optimization, we start to see clients question their assumptions, their vendors’ assumptions, and generally why the data is the way it is.  This is when things get fun.  Often, clients write me with test ideas or analysis of their very own, and I know that the training wheels have officially come off.
• The New Way of Doing Business – this stage shows our clients becoming calm and nonchalant when a site change gives them double or triple-digit improvements.  They are equally happy when a test has a negative or inconclusive impact, because it’s all part of the continuous improvement process.  They realize that even single-digit increases achieved on a regular basis will have incredible effects on their bottom line, like compounding interest in a bank account.

I hope this proves helpful, and I hope that more and more of our readers will develop an optization culture. Just please let us know if you need any help.

While I can’t help but shake my head at the elevated nose and depressed intelligence of a dying attitude that associates “performance-based advertising” with creative shabbiness, that’s not what really bothered me about this piece.

What bothered me was two-fold:

1)    The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s confusion about the very medium it claims to represent.

2)   The implied motivation behind the IAB’s attempt to bring branding to the web.

Let’s deal with the first point and how it relates to branding via Internet Advertising.  Basically it boils down to this:

“You can close your eyes but you can’t close your ears.”

If I’m watching TV or listening to the radio and I’m interrupted by your ad, I can’t help but overhear your message, even if I look away and suddenly switch my attention to getting that last bit of salsa onto my Frito or avoiding the bumper of the car in front of me.

Since I’m at least half paying attention, great creative can cause me to redirect my attention back to your ad, thereby allowing the ad’s message to sink in.  Given enough repetition, the ad gets absorbed to the point where it can sway my decision when I’m actually in the market for the advertised product or service.

It’s a seemingly inefficient process that’s made shockingly effective through intelligent use of mass media.  The required repetition and non-targeted nature of your audience is more than overcome by the sheer number of people you reach and the amount of times you reach them.  As listeners and viewers convert over time, your mass media campaign can potentially create dramatically more traffic and sales on a per-dollar basis than targeted direct response methods.

So for intrusive or interruption-based media, great creative plus reach & frequency all go hand in hand for an effective ad campaign.  And I’ve said before that offline branding efforts can pair especially well with a solid online web presence.

So the takeaways are:

1. Branding almost always requires repeat exposure – this is why frequency matters.
2. Branding only becomes efficient when you can reach a lot of people cheaply – this is why reach matters.
3. The end goal of branding is to implant enough good associations about your product/brand/offer in the mind of the prospect to get them to buy from you once. You get one shot because actual experience either reinforces or destroys branded associations after the first purchase.  Lot’s of recent brands have been built on extraordinary customer experience and very little to no advertising, but almost no brands have made it with mediocre experience and lots of branding campaigns.

Unfortunately, the Internet is NOT an intrusive or interruption-friendly media.  It’s an interactive or “engaged medium” precisely because you need audience permission and participation to make it work.  Attempts to shortcut the “permission and participation” part usually meet with dismal results: we’ve become extraordinarily good at concentrating on the active window while ignoring banner and right-hand column ads. That means great creative stands very little chance of grabbing attention from an Internet user’s task at hand.

Other than adolescent boys staring at Lamborghinis and viewers of the rarely successful viral video, people who aren’t in the market for what you are offering have no interest in voluntarily exposing themselves to your ads.  And, for a participatory medium like the internet, that leaves only people actively interested in your market/offer.  People who, I don’t know, might indicate that interest by, say, typing keywords into a search engine or something…

Nor is the Internet a medium where there’s usually any significant space or time between being engaged by an ad to buying the advertised product.  If I click on a search-generated ad, I’m pretty much already at some stage of the buying process.  You don’t have to repeat the ad to make it sink in or design the ad so that its message is memorable; you just have to make it salient to my task-at-hand and I’ll click.  This is why ad relevance or “scent” has generally displaced the importance of “great creative” for PPC ads.

Yes, it helps to make more concerted efforts at grabbing people earlier in the buying process, but they still have to BE in the buying process to begin with.

So despite his protest at the misapplication of reach and frequency models to Internet advertising, I suspect that IAB President Rothenberg wants to similarly misapply an interruption-based model of branding to a permission-and-participation-based medium.

Brand builders plan around reach and frequency because reach and frequency are intrinsic to the mechanics of branding. You might be able to do branding on the web through viral videos or other entertainment-based efforts, but you’ll still have to ensure you reach a large number of people with enough repetitions to make your message sink in.

Will a fully engaged audience require less repetition than a more passive one?  Sure, but less might mean 5-15 times vs. 156 or more repetitions.  Other than planes hitting the World Trade Center or your wife saying “I Do,” very few messages are burned into your memory the first time your experience them.  And I don’t care how “great” your creative is, your actual business message (vs. the novelty you wrap around it) will never reach that level of impact.  This is why viral campaigns work better than single videos.

And this brings me to my last point and what bothers me most about the IAB’s push for “great creative” over “performance based” advertising:

They never once said that performance based advertising wasn’t making the wisest and best use of their clients’ ad budgets. They never seemed to indicate that their clients would be selling more and gaining more market share if they were actively branding on the web.

What they said was: “it was time for online publishers to reclaim some of the premium advertising turf vs. general market media, especially network television.”  Followed up by a statement that the Internet’s emphasis on performance-based or direct response advertising, “does little to elevate the perception of online’s premium communications value.”

Hmmm.  Does this sound like Randal and the IAB are most concerned for what’s best for clients or in what’s best for Internet Advertising Agencies?

If you’ve been to one of our trainings over the past few years, or seen any of us present at a conference, you’ve probably heard the line about the average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer being less than the gestation period of an elephant.  Well, it’s time for some new material.  New research from executive search firm Spencer Stuart shows that CMOs are making it into their 3rd year with the same organization, on average, based on a review of the 100 most advertised brands in the U.S.

The CMO Strategy column in Ad-age does a good job postulating why CMO tenure is rising, and soliciting feedback from the folks who put together the research for Spencer Stuart, as well as a few who currently hold the position of their firms marketing top dog.  I’m encouraged to see most interviewed recognizing the (necessary) shifting role towards more accountable marketing- establishing hard measures of success and utilizing Analytics tools to help achieve the organization’s underlying objectives:

“Elisabeth Charles, who starts a new post as CMO of Petco in mid-February, also credits analytics and measurable results for the increased tenure. “You see a lot more folks doing marketing ROI studies, using more direct marketing that can be measured and shows a payback, as well as really scrutinizing the balance of brand investment vs. traffic or sales driving initiatives.”

Ms. Charles goes on to point out an area that has improved but “is still highly underleveraged”, that of utilizing technology & tools to better tap into consumer insights- listening to the voice of the customer.  Interesting she brings that up, as it dovetails with a another piece of research on CMOs, seemingly far more negative.

Bestselling author Scott McKain (@scottmckain) points to a new study by the CMO Council, and opines:

“While we often first point the finger at the Chief Financial Officer as being disconnected from customers, the truly shocking part of the study is that it is the Chief Marketing Officer who fails to listen to, and learn from, the very people they are marketing to!”

Now before you get all hot and bothered by Scott’s comments, he’s simply reacting to the CMO Council’s published statistics.  MediaPost spoke with the Executive Director of the CMO Council, Donovan Neale-May, and when you understand the lens through which he views the role of CMO, it makes sense why he’s led Scott to the conclusion above.

Donovan defines the CMOs most critical role as “owning every facet of listening, learning, interacting, engaging, and optimizing the relationship with the customer, and understanding where the attrition, pain and aggravation is, and doing this in real time.”  I like that definition, although I’d offer we need to add an explicit benefit/outcome- optimizing the relationship with the customer, to what end?  As long as it’s help them achieve their goals, and by extension, our business goals, I’m on board.  Doing so also reminds ourselves of our responsibility to our organization to be new age accountable marketers   I digress.

“Neale-May argues that the study shows that marketers tend to view customer services reactively, as a function for resolving a problem, not enough as an opportunity to engage or interact. Only about 37% of companies surveyed gather customer insight from customer engagement situations, per the firm. Only 15% use such situations to identify and cultivate potential customer champions and advocates. Only a third reported that they look for ways to turn problems into new sales opportunities, and only 16% introduce new products or services to further monetize the relationship.”

Apparently this research seems to validate what Elisabeth Charles expressed in her Ad-age quote, underleveraged indeed.

However, I think these two pieces of research, taken out of context, simply show (or aim to show) extremes on a continuum.  This shouldn’t be a sky-is-falling blog post, there’s good news and opportunity here.  As a marketing community as a whole, there’s still plenty of room for growth, but collectively *I think* we’re improving.  I look at brands like Comcast (with Frank @ComcastCares), Dell (@RichardAtDell), JetBlue (@JetBlue), Southwest Airlines (@SouthwestAir) as signs of a positive trend.  I look at service providers like BazaarVoice, who not only get it themselves, but can be legitimate resources to helping their client organizations improve their efforts to better listen and serve their customers.  I look at CMOs like Barry Judge (BestBuy), Sam Decker (BazaarVoice), Patrick Moran (Mzinga) who are clear examples of accountable marketers, who know the value of (and have the discipline to) measure success and continually optimize, not to mention constantly listen, learn & interact with their customers.  These signs point me to this trend accelerating in the future, despite the current research.  I choose to see the glass half full, although I know, hope is not a strategy.

All that said, I can be as optimistic as I choose to be, but I’d much rather listen to the marketing practitioners themselves, you guys out there with your feet on the street.

• Do you see a shift in your organization towards aligning your business objectives with your customers?
• Do you see the Marketing group and the Sales groups breaking down silo walls and collaborating on the same performance goals?
• Are you finding service providers and tool makers who help you leverage the social web to get closer to your audience, to better understand them, and to better service them?

If so, we’d love to listen and learn from you, so please share with your community here and don’t be a stranger.

I keep telling people this. I don’t think that optimizing a site for conversion is a “Call to Action” science. It’s a usability science. People aren’t going to click something because its big round and yellow, and says “Click Me”. The reason people click this types of links is because they’re already looking for where to click, and you’ve just made it easier for them.

I don’t disagree; a button that is big, round, and yellow can make it easier for a visitor to follow that call to action. But optimizing a site for conversion is not just a usability science.

Usability is its own discipline and science. And, of course, the science of usability is an important part of the broader scope of conversion optimization.

In this 2005 column, I described how usability fits into the overall Web site optimization picture:

Usability examines the site’s interface and process barriers that keep visitors from accomplishing a conversion task. Usability is:The ability to effectively implement knowledge concerning the human-computer interface to remove any obstacles impeding the experience and process of online interactions…

A usability test can’t measure two key factors in the conversion process: persuasive momentum and individual motivation. A visitor’s willingness to click through to a site and participate in its conversion processes is directly tied to her intent and motivations and the relevance of the product or service to her needs.

The ability to use a Web site to accomplish a task valuable to a business goal is, no doubt, both a usability issue and a conversion optimization issues. But that doesn’t mean every experience the visitor encounters on a site is a usability issue. That would be like saying merchandising and packaging at the neighborhood Target are usability issues.

Most sites want to sell more or increase leads, and that requires the application of several disciplines and sciences. Here are just a few:

Web Analytics and Analysis

Here is more from the same 2005 column:

According to (Jakob) Neilson, “In usability studies, participants easily pretend that the scenario is real and that they’re really using the design.” However, it’s much harder for participants to fake a need they don’t have. If you disliked pungent cheese and were asked to shop for the best Roquefort, could you simulate the actions a true cheese lover would take?Web analytics, on the other hand, track actual actions taken on your site from very large sample groups. They provide a true measure of activity and persuasive momentum.

Couple usability testing with Web analytics for a more holistic picture of what is (or isn’t) happening on your site.

Web analytics provide the most accurate and objective measure of how individuals interact with a site. Usability studies provide insight into what’s happening in particular instances.

Copywriting and Direct Marketing Techniques

I have already written a book and several columns (like “The Complexity of Closing a Sale,” and “Gr8 Web 2.0 Copy” about the craft of writing persuasively online.

Psychology

My firm retains a consulting psychologist to advise in the science of human behavior. Florida Design’s comment above read that ‘they’re already looking for where to click”. And that is true in some cases, but how did the visitor come to know what they were looking for? Who or what sold them to hit the “buy now” button. What are they broadcasting they really need when they click on “learn more.” Do they just want more data, or can we write that data in such a way that will move them to buy?

Testing

What header persuades more? What big yellow button moves more people to take a profitable action? What lead form fields work best for my visitors? These are all questions that cannot be answered by usability studies, but rather by some sort of A/B or multivariate testing. And any effective testing requires some sort of scientific rigor.

Marketing and Selling

These are also disciplines that are established and several proven methodologies existed long before the Internet age. The prominence of social media today and the baby giant of search engine marketing are beginning to gel into tougher and more accountable disciplines.

The Lesson

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Web site optimization is way too broad to be a subset of another honorable science like usability or information architect. If you are struggling in your optimization efforts, it might be time to examine your tools. You could be trying to solve a copy issue with design tool. Or you could be using a design tool to solve a persuasion problem.

Take the time to learn a little bit about all this disciplines so you can be sure you are using the right tool.

And of course, the end of the year is always a good time to talk the fundamentals. This week, I want to discuss another conversion rate optimization basic: the call to action (CTA).

Two Types of Call to Actions

The most common thing that jumps to mind when we think about CTAs is the big CTA button. The less obvious, less famous is the textual CTA.

CTA buttons are those in-your-face buttons that excitedly point the way to your visitors taking a profitable action on your site. Their subtler sister, the textual CTA, usually shows up in the body of active window copy. Often it’s simply a standalone hyperlink; sometimes they show up as part of headers. Other times, they’re snuggled up against a product picture or a hero image, even in navigation.

Improving Call-to-Action Buttons

• Shape variations. There are rectangles, squares, ovals, circles, and irregular shapes (like Amazon, which blends an oval and a rectangle). Corners can be pointy or rounded. Is there a shape that works better for you?
• Colors. You have a world of colors to choose from; there’s really no wrong color.
• Non-graphical buttons. There are also non-graphical “add to cart” buttons created from plain text or simple HTML with the traditional gray background. These can be styled somewhat using CSS (define). Would plain and simple be the best way to go?
• Style variations. Two-dimensional or three-dimensional? With or without shadowing? Does your audience have a preference? Does the CTA stand out from other content on the page, or do other (less profitable) elements dilute the page?
• Icon variations. Little images of arrows, carts, baskets, or bags may help distinguish your buttons from the other elements around them. Is there an icon that makes sense for your business and improves conversion?
• Size variations. Larger isn’t always better. Will size matter?
• Legibility. The previous factors work in combination to affect the legibility of an “add to cart” button. Font choice, font size, and text/background contrast will also affect how readily a visitor identifies the CTA and acts on it. The possibilities are limitless.
• Location variations. Where to put your button: Above the fold? One above and one below? On the right or left or in the middle of the page? How far should you place it from neighboring elements?
• Wording. Just think about all the possible ways you can say “add to cart.” Or “contact me.” Or “sign up.” The words matter. For example, years ago we influenced Dell to change the words in its configurator from “Learn More” to “Help Me Choose,” which had a significant impact.

Improving Textual Call to Actions

A ClickZ column I wrote in 2003 offers a quick guide to get you started:

The clearer the explicit benefit of clicking on a hyperlink, the more likely a visitor will click.

[CTA links] should be constructed with an imperative, an implied benefit of what visitors can expect when they click, and a clear sense of the information on the landing page. Which link best conveys what the visitor will find after the click?

• Find out which after-school program is best for your child.
• Find out which after-school program is best for your child.
• Find out which after-school program is best for your child.

The first link implies the landing page lists programs. The second tells you the landing page probably lists after-school programs. The third tells you the landing page contains content that will help you decide which after-school program is best for your child.

Research has shown that the best links are between 7 and 12 words, but I prefer four to seven words for SEO (define) purposes.

While textual CTAs are all about the copy and the words, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to consider the copy on your buttons. Effective button copy and effective textual link copy have the same characteristics. So don’t forget to apply these CTA copy tips to your button copy as well.

Do You Have an Eye for Good Call to Actions?

Let’s see how you fare. Take a look at this page on IconFactory.com. These guys aren’t clients of ours, but we can safely deduce that the two primary CTAs are “buy now” and “download.” How well are these guys doing with their CTAs? What would you do differently? What would you like to test? Would you lay out the page differently? If so, how?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below, then get to work on your own call to actions.

What simple statement about your business or brand — just a quick, clear sentence or two at most — tells your prospects that you are the only alternative for them? Sounds like a response should just jump out at you. Yet most businesses (on- and offline) cannot provide an answer that simply rolls off their tongues or, even more appropriately in the case of e-commerce, appears on their home pages.By USP, or unique selling proposition, I don’t mean a slogan or a phrase that will appear in your advertising, although that’s one potential use for it. Rather I mean the concise and memorable phrase that answers your prospect’s always-implicit question, “Why should I do business with you and not somebody else?”

A unique selling proposition is mucho importante. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. Linda Bustos, an e-commerce consultant at the Get Elastic blog wrote:

Why should your ideal customer purchase from you rather than from anybody else?I would even go so far as to ask yourself, what one thing about your company, your product selection, your customer service or your customer loyalty is so compelling, that even if a product was out of stock, or some functionality were broken on your site, a customer would stick around and buy something?

The folks at Marketing Experiments believe so strongly in the importance of the clarity of the value proposition that Dr. Flint McGlaughlin was bold enough to say if you get your value proposition right, you can get many other things wrong on your landing pages and still improve conversion dramatically.

Several years ago at our company, we adjusted the term a bit by replacing “selling” with “value.” What we didn’t change was our work with clients, helping them clarify or even create a unique value proposition for use on their site (among hundreds of other factors).

I was reminded of this recently when our newest conversion analyst and one of his clients turned in their most recent optimization success story. A single test on this client’s unique value proposition increased overall conversion rate by 33.8 percent. What did this client do that worked so well? It hired a good writer (at our suggestion) who wrote several suggested unique value propositions, as this company didn’t have one at all. Then we tested the several unique value propositions, until we had a clear winner. Not only did our client see a conversion rate increase, it gained customer insight that can be used to optimize other site areas.

Every Landing Page Needs One

In recent years, I’ve even started suggesting clients use unique campaign propositions (UCP). These are meant to reinforce your offer from banner ad or PPC (define) campaigns by enhancing the landing-page scent. When visitors take their precious eight-second first impression, you want them to know why they should buy from you and not your competitors.

Strengthen Your Unique Value Proposition

Creating a unique value or campaign proposition isn’t for chumps or posers. Your value proposition must be clear, relevant, and easy to understand. Here’s a quick, easy process for writing a more powerful unique value proposition:

• Ask your personas what they value most about your product/service/campaign; make a list. (If you don’t have personas, you can ask a few dozen of your most faithful customers. Yes, you can ask both if you want).
• On your list, look for repeating themes and list those separately.
• Hand the list to a good writer. Ask that person to write 5 to 10 versions of a potential unique value proposition based on the list.
• Test three to five of the most promising unique value propositions.
• Pick the best-performing unique value proposition.

How strong is your unique value proposition? It could be the key to a better conversion rate.

Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true.

And this sage Homerism is hard to beat:

Oh, so they have Internet on computers now!

The lovable Homer Simpson can be held up as an example to the kids for many things, but probably not Homer on a diet. He isn’t the diet-and-exercise type. His strict regime of beer and donuts and babysitting day after day a nuke reactor does not a healthy lifestyle make.

So what does this have to do with Web site conversion rate optimization?

More than you would think.

Optimizing a Web site or campaign is shockingly similar to dieting and getting fit. Let’s spend a few moments evaluating how your conversion rate diet is going.

Are you having success? Or are you on the Homer Simpson diet? Doh!

Getting Fat and Tipsy on the Data

This is something we are seeing increasingly more of, as analytics tools are now mainstream. Data are flowing from a keg and everyone is taking a mug. Some take several mugs. Many companies are data happy and mistake data for insight or, even worse, for optimization success.

Data can be abused like a keg of Duff beer. To make sure you aren’t doing this, remember those numbers are people, not lifeless data. Learn to get insight into customer behavior, or those data will go straight to your midsection and not contribute fully to your ability to move more visitors to take a conversion action.

Sometimes, these folks don’t take their eyes off the scale, celebrating conversion rate increases that are well within the standard deviation (and thus likely meaningless). They are get depressed about minor losses (again, all within the standard deviation).

Chowing Down Empty Calories

Anthony Garcia, our lead consultant, likes to joke that he never met a donut he didn’t like. I can relate. Thing is they have little nutritional value. Donuts are the poster child for empty-calorie foods. (Sorry, Homer and Anthony, they aren’t one of the four food groups.)

A high-donut diet is similar to living on cheap (sometimes not so cheap) traffic. The high is temporary, and before you know it you need more and more traffic until you can’t survive without it.

The good news is you can work off some of that excess traffic by trimming the fat on your Web site and increasing your conversion rate.

Engaging in Lightweight Lifting

Can you imagine Homer Simpson at the gym? Can you imagine him jogging? He probably couldn’t make it out of the driveway without getting winded. Still, if he did jog halfway around the block or lift a small weight for one or two reps, he would claim an exercising victory. A lot of companies do this, too. They run a test, optimize a single landing page, or even give full-force optimization a try for a month or two. Then they stop, winded and weary.

Usually these companies say they don’t see the value. Well, how could they? Still, some expect a miracle conversion-rate increase with very little work. Or they believe that trying a few things will get them a huge return, and if it doesn’t come right away they give up. What a shame.

Homer on diet would do the same, saying he tried dieting and exercise and got no results. But was Homer every truly on a diet?

Optimizing and dieting are both simple in principle. Dieting is about taking in fewer calories and burning more. Optimizing is about getting customer insight, applying a change based on that learning, and starting the process over again, like running on a treadmill.

Optimizing and keeping off the donuts take work and a commitment to get results. Is a lack of work or commitment keeping you from getting the results you want?

I’m a big fan of dieting Homer’s way. I love food, and my exercise regimen consists of carrying my MacBook Pro from the desk to the sofa, then back again. Still, I don’t want to optimize Homer Simpson-style. If you want actual results you shouldn’t, either. Let me know if you need some additional diet or optimization advice.

• 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.

When Michael Lewis wrote his article on Coach Leach and the Texas Tech Football program, that program was known as an offensive powerhouse that relied on sheer scoring power to outgun opponents.  Its defense wasn’t mentioned in that article, and one can only guess the omission was intentional.  Just look at their game results against Texas and OSU for 2005-2008:

What you can see is that up to 2007, Texas Tech continually increased it’s offensive scoring, but to mixed results – because Texas and OSU still outscored them.  Texas Tech’s defense was losing these big games.  So immediately following his team’s 2007’s bitter loss to OSU, Coach Leach changed defensive coordinators.

And after that, well, you can see for yourself: Texas Tech is undefeated this season and the major game-changing difference in their match-ups against Texas and OSU wasn’t the ability to score more points, but to hold those other teams’ offenses to significantly fewer goals.

So what does this have to do with Web Optimization?

In tougher times, most companies reinforce their strengths; doing what’s worked well before.  But few are really willing to look at their organizational assumptions and weaknesses head-on.

In terms of web optimization for hard times, it might not be just a matter of improving website performance, it might be a matter of changing the offer.  Or changing the emotional appeal behind the offer.  Or the guarantees and risk-reversals that you’re using.

Roy Williams has addressed this issue over several Monday Morning Memos and I think his analysis and advice has only grown more relevant as the months have passed by:

• Expect more people to be hardheaded in judging value.
• Be willing to expand beyond your current comfort zone and offerings/marketing in order to reach and convert these skeptical, hard-nosed value shoppers.
• Expect stories and long copy to make products and services more saleable (faster to sell and more easily sold), but test very carefully before concluding they’ll allow you to sell them at higher prices.

So what about you and your Website: are you looking beyond what you’ve always done well?  What assumptions are you changing and what competitive weaknesses are you looking to shore up?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve also been watching many self-proclaimed marketing gurus speak of social media’s role in filling in the gap during the economic downturn. While social media should be a part of any forward-thinking and transparent company, I would urge caution if you believe that you can monetize it easily or quickly. It’s also not a magic pill for traffic building.

But for those who think I’m a naysayer, I must admit I am a social media addict. I will also go on the record to say that you can successfully use social media for marketing.

The biggest problem I have with the term “social media” is that it isn’t media in the traditional sense. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the others I don’t have the word count to mention aren’t media; they are platforms for interaction and networking. All the traditional media — print, broadcast, search, and so on — provide platforms for delivery of ads near and around relevant content. Social media are platforms for interaction and relationships, not content and ads.

To be truly effective using these interaction platforms, you must understand why we use them.

Real-Life Example

Before Halloween I teamed up with Chris Brogan to play a game using Twitter. We called it Trick or Tweet. Here were our rules:

1. Send a tweet to someone and ask, “Trick or tweet?”
2. If they say, “Tweet,” you must provide them with a couple of interesting people they should follow. If you don’t provide them with someone new, then you owe a trick.
3. If they say, “Trick,” send them a link where they will have to contribute to charity using the ChipIn widget. The maximum we ask anyone to donate is $20 for the day. Every cent we collect will be sent to charity.

We raised $282. Not too bad. But more important, we learned more about what moves people to take action. We learned that people loved to play but are less willing to pay.

As of this writing, Twitturly shows there were 150 tweets with an estimated reach of more that 165,000. This only measures the number of people who sent the link around, though there were many others playing. Clearly it was a successful game, but the metrics didn’t translate into the big money I had hoped for charity.

While this is an anecdotal example, it demonstrates social media’s power to reach and engage people — on their terms, not yours. People are attracted to people. People used the game mostly to connect with other people.

Social media isn’t an advertising and branding platform; it’s a hyper-interactive relationship-builder. Social media isn’t a magic pill for traffic woes; it’s used to deepen longer-term relations.

When you engage in social media, you enter into an unspoken social contract. You are in a relationship; it goes both ways. There are boundaries. Respect and trust must be earned.

Tips for Using Social Media

Here are a few ways to view and use social media:

• Be transparent. Share the good and the bad.
• Be yourself. People want to connect with real people, not with plastic packaged images.
• Don’t breach the social contract by doing nothing but selling your wares.
• Take interest in others and share valuable information, even if it doesn’t benefit you directly.
• Listen. You can learn a lot.
• Be patient. Let things grow organically.
• Viral campaigns can and do work, but they are the exception to the rule. (In other words, only the masses have the power to deem something viral).

I look forward to meeting and tweeting and Facebooking with you about marketing and social media, or anything that we both find interesting.

P.S. As an update to the Trick or Tweet event, thanks to the Twitter community and an anonymous matching donor, we raised $200 each for Epic Change, Florida Borderline Personality Disorder Association, and e-Mail Our Military.

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.

My goal is never to be a doomsayer, but rather to be prepared for the reality of the market — good or bad. And that includes recommending common sense actions to shore you up and provide a bullet proof vest for more difficult times.

Reality is, when down times arrive, most companies first look to the marketing department to trim costs. This is not because marketing has the least value; it’s typically because marketers usually do a poor job of tying marketing to direct revenue. This is easily fixed.

Conversion rate optimization should be the last thing you should consider trimming. Here is why.

Shot Across the Bow

We are already beginning to see signs of the economy slowing, “The New York Times” reports on brick-and-mortar sales:

Sales at Dillard’s dropped 12 percent, compared with a 7 percent decline last year. J. C. Penney’s same-store sales fell 12.4 percent, compared with a decline of 3.7 percent for the period a year ago. Sales at Kohl’s decreased 5.5 percent, compared with a 3.2 percent decrease last year. At Bon-Ton Stores, same-store sales decreased 4.6 percent, and they declined 3 percent at Target.

And, here is Heather Daugherty, research director at Hitwise, discussing the Web economy:

At Hitwise, we have been tracking these various economic indicators very closely and are now seeing a similar trend in visitation to the websites of retailers, particularly during the past few weeks where the economy has become top-of-mind for the majority of Americans. Last week, traffic to a custom category of 500 retailers (excludes auctions, classifieds, DVD rentals, and book/music/DVD of the month clubs) declined 5% from the same week during the previous year.

The number above that is causing online marketers to lose sleep is the 5 percent decline in visits. For most of us, a decrease in traffic means an equal decrease in sales.

So what happened to this traffic? Did all of these retailers decide they needed less traffic? Did they stop buying ads? A few perhaps, but not all 500 retailers. This is direct result of consumer’s behaving differently due to economic concerns.

Could your company survive a steep decline in traffic? A 10 percent or 20 percent decline?

Take Control of What You Can

For starters, marketers must acknowledge they have far less control than they think. They must also get a firmer grasp on what they do actually control.

You do not have control of the economy. While you may have some influence on the search engines, they are not under your control either.

So now is a good time to get serious about what you do control: the customer experience. By optimizing the experience you reduce the risk of taking a steep incline.

If you need to understand the math or you are trying to get buy in from your organization have them read this column.

Tying Efficiencies to Dollars

Last but not least, you should not be using traffic or even conversion numbers exclusively. Everything you do should be tied to a dollar value. Not only will this show the value of your work, it could also help you sort out priorities.

What are you doing differently in light of the economy? Let me know.

*Cross posted in ClickZ.

Overall, conversion rates are starting to trend downward.

Almost everyone I speak with is looking for areas to cut expenses in and approaching spending from a more frugal mindset. Some are beginning to make drastic cuts, including personnel. While I’m not a financial expert, I can safely predict that this financial mess will likely get worse before it turns around. This isn’t another dot.com bust but a larger crisis that will leave few untouched.

So what does this mean to you, your company, and your conversion rate? Can you come out of the other end of this with little to no damage? Anyone who has been in business through a recession knows it’s absolutely possible to survive and, sometimes, even grow a bit (or a lot as competitors fold under pressure).

They will also tell you that it’s never easy.

For online marketers wishing to thrive, a down economy brings two big-picture lessons. First, now is the not the time to stop being innovative. Second, efficiencies are not an option.

Innovate Your Way Through

In a good economy, the rising tide lifts all boats. In a down economy, you’ll quickly know how good you really are. And let’s face it, we could all get a little better, right?

Conversion optimization basics may no longer be working or working less well. You must innovate your way through.

For example, I was recently asked in an interview about creative use of personas. The interviewer and I were talking about a retailer who was worrying about cutting inventory on hand. I was asked if the retailer could use marketing personas to help people buy more effectively or target more profitable buyers. The answer is absolutely yes.

Creative merchandising, creative buying, creative offers, creative marketing, creative cost-cutting, and creative customer-relationship-building will make a difference between who thrives and who dives.

When I say “create” or “innovate,” I’m not talking about a crazy sock puppet ad or simply redesigning a logo. Instead, I’m talking about offering customers more perceived value at less cost to them and you. I’m talking about finding innovative ways to cut through the clutter of our media-crazy environment and the pain people are feeling from this crisis by increasing message relevance and spending less. True innovation always stretches those limits. And that involves much more than screaming louder, telling a funnier joke, or changing the color of the “buy now” button.

Work harder and more creatively at answering the question: what can we do for our customers today? There are only two things riskier than being innovative: being gimmicky and doing nothing. Neither is acceptable.

Offer your customers something better — or your competitor will.

Bow to the Throne of Efficiencies

The more you master the craft of doing more for less, the more secure you’ll be in the coming months. Don’t try to do three jobs with one person until that person begs for mercy. Instead, make marketing dollars go much, much further. That includes cutting fat from marketing budgets and creating a culture of marketing optimization that leaves no penny unturned. It takes work, but it will bulletproof you internally with the bosses and externally with the customers.

Your customers are already acting more efficiently. You should, too. Recently I noticed a pattern in the top 10 retailers by conversion rate. Last month three big florists made the list, but FTD.com fell off the list. More important, The Children’s Place made the list in September, but not in August during the back-to-school shopping season. That raises the question: is this a sign of early holiday shopping? Could this be a sign that people are looking for a better value by shopping earlier and earlier?

You must start optimizing now.

Need help? Refer to my latest book, “Always Be Testing.” There are reasons why I chose to write a book about Google Website Optimizer, even though there are other, more sophisticated tools. And for many looking for efficiency in marketing, Google Website Optimizer is the right price — free to get started with. This is a first step your company can take to get focused on continuous improvement.

A Few Tips for Rocky Times

Finally, a few tips as we head into the storm:

• People will still buy what the need and want; they’ll just buy slower and more methodically. Expect longer sales and lead-generation cycles. Customers won’t ask you for more value, they’ll just search for it elsewhere.
• Don’t be shocked by changing patterns in your metrics. Your customers may behave differently based on newfound attitudes. Ask why they are doing what they are doing. Use personas to find ways to persuade them and calm their fears. Test to find the answers.
• Don’t cut back on optimization.
• Consider visiting or revisiting price-point- and shipping-cost-related offers. They are at least worth a test or two.
• Stay focused on your customer first, not on the market.
• Even though you can, don’t blame the economy. It likely won’t hear you, and if it does, it won’t do anything about it.
• Don’t think you’re immune. I don’t want to see you in the ash heap.

Is the economy affecting you yet? How? Let me know.

* cross posted from ClickZ

Editors Note: You can also download our white paper titled Grabbing Market Share: Marketing in a Recession.

99 bottles of beer on the wall,
99 bottles of beer!
Take one down, pass it around
98 bottles of beer on the wall
98 bottles of beer…

I don’t really remember why I was thinking about this song, but it reminded me of how optimization is oftentimes a lot like singing “99 Bottles of Beer.”

Repetition

Online marketing optimization isn’t sexy; often, it’s downright homely.

It’s not like “Mad Men,” where some Madison Avenue suit is sipping scotch and brainstorming glam ideas a mile a minute. Much of it is tedious and repetitive. Some of the best in the conversion business do many of the same things every day, over and over. We:

• Analyze reports.
• Try to identify areas of improvement.
• Plan how we can make those improvements (oftentimes fighting resistance in the organization).

Over and over the continuous improvement cycle goes. It’s very much like trying to lose weight.

Gotta Know Where You’re Going

If you come in halfway during a recitation of 99 bottles, you only need to hear a few verses to know exactly where the song is going. The song is part of an overall plan that will get you down to zero bottles of beer on the wall. Just picking any old random beer bottle in any random order breaks the song and confuses the singer.

Same with optimization. You need a high-level plan that starts at your macro-conversion. So if your goal is to get more leads, you must devise a plan.

Start by brainstorming everything you can think of that will get more leads. Then sort your list based on effort, resources, and ability to impact conversion. You can then divide up the work into phases. Then you prepare to drill down into creating specific optimization tasks and tests. If you’re struggling with the order, use the hierarchy of optimization.

Often, most folks start with the tasks while overlooking the need for an overall strategy. Start with conversion optimization, then move on to persuasion scenario planning. There’s a big difference.

No Fun Singing Alone

If you’re optimizing online, you aren’t doing it alone. Even if you’re the lone person analyzing the metrics and constructing the test, you likely aren’t the person doing the design, or developing the code, or writing the creative. Optimization works better when everyone is working together toward a specific goal.

To do this, use a dashboard that you can share with everyone on your team. I also recommend that your marketing dashboards show a tie to revenue. Too many marketers don’t know the financial impact they’re making (or not making) because they neglect to fill out something simple like the dollar value of a conversion in their analytics software.

Numbers Matter

Someone must pay attention to the details. I remember singing this song as a kid and there was always one person who had an ear on the numbers. Inevitably, we would lose our place in the song, and that detail-oriented kid would get us back on track.

Who watches the numbers for your marketing optimization? Would someone notice if you were on a downtrend in lead conversion? What are you tracking and focused on improving on?

Numbers are wonderful little beasts, they keep us all accountable.

99-Plus Items on the Optimization List

The list of things you must optimize on your site can be menacing.

When you take down the first beer off the wall it seems like the song will never end. But eventually, when you whittle down the list, you’ll see light and, more importantly, better conversion.

So yes, like the song, online optimization can be repetitious, but it can also be rewarding as you start moving your needle.

And lastly, when you’re doing it right, you never run out of things to optimize. The same can’t be said about beers on the wall.

If you need help with any of those beers or optimizing your marketing to get better results contact us.

*Cross posted on ClickZ

Editors Note: Don’t forget to register for our Always Be Testing webinar on how to improve your design and layout for your landing page.

It won’t be easy. Being good at something never is.

A few weeks ago I gave a keynote at the Shop.org online merchandising workshop and had an opportunity to chat with several online retailers of all sizes. Each shared the challenges it faces as it tries to adopt a culture of optimization.

Last week, I shared with you what I learned from Raul Vazquez, CEO of Walmart.com from his keynote at the conference. Unlike many retailers, Walmart.com has a culture of optimization and embraces a process for continuous improvement. Even with its process in place, however, it doesn’t do any A/B or multivariate testing.

An executive from another multibillion dollar online retailer told me an all-too common tale of how it began testing with the help of a vendor. After seeing no lift and investing all the resources, the retailer cut the vendor loose and let testing fall by the wayside. Like so many others in these tight times, it axed testing as a budget item. Can anyone afford to stop optimizing?

The fact that optimization and testing challenges are rampant shouldn’t surprise anyone. In its “Guide to Retail and Web Site Design,” Internet Retailer’s research unwrapped the fact that over 76 percent of online retailers don’t test.

It’s not that online markets have a violent opposition to testing. It’s a combination of things. Many don’t know where to start; others may have started and had limited or no success. Here are some other common challenges that online retailers and online marketers face:

• Simple slice-and-replace testing/optimization. This is the process of Web teams slicing and replacing an element, a page, or a portion of the visitor experience and finding little or no lift in the numbers. So they move on and try another. This is a challenge because this method has no way of determining if the original hypothesis was incorrect (the reason they made the change) or if it was an execution issues.
• Resources. Testing well is hard work and uses resources: time, effort, and cash. And because teams are unsure, they resist or don’t give their best effort.
• Platforms. Some site platforms make it difficult to test. Ultimately, you must determine what costs the company less: lost opportunities, platform upgrades, or changes to allow for easier and more efficient testing.
• Lack of a process. Most retailers test randomly, just selecting something in the conversion funnel or their least favorite page. Others perform large-scale tests and may break or fix many things along the way. In both cases, they have no method for gleaning insight so they can successfully repeat the process.
• Persuasion or brand perception issues. Often time the issues that keep visitors from converting aren’t as simple as a button color, an element’s position, or a form improvement. We recently worked with a big-name financial institution that wasn’t committed to taking the time to test these subtle issues. Instead, they went with another vendor that tested more simplistic conversion issues. Needless to say those efforts didn’t move the needle.

Most of these challenges are related to companies not setting a solid (i.e., more scientific) testing process in place. None of these challenges is a reason to give in.

If you have testing challenges, you should know two things before you throw your hands up. First, you aren’t alone. Second, don’t stop testing — instead stop testing badly by adopting a cycle of optimization and a smart process for doing so.

I will be launching (and signing) my new book, “Always Be Testing,” at Search Engine Strategies San Jose on August 18. The book is based on my 10-plus years of experience helping companies that struggle with testing and giving them practical guidance and tools to deal with these challenges. If you plan on attending, let me know. I’d love to meet up with you and talk about your challenges.

*Cross-posted on ClickZ. 

No doubt, these are exciting times if you love Web tools. For the many folks who are dizzy trying to sort out conversion optimization tool choices, it might be a little frustrating.

In “The Interactive Marketer 2.0,” I made the case for improved optimization in interactive marketing and to think outside the campaign. I listed several steps to get started, including the first step: Get good at free tools, then pay for them. Tools aren’t the indicator of success, but having a process and the people in place to take action are.

The good news in this barrage of 2.0 goodies is that many believe we’ve finally reached tool parity in the Web analytics space. JupiterResearch states the following:

“Despite some small skirmishes over capabilities like video and audio measurement, the Web analytics feature race is largely over,” explained John Lovett, Senior Analyst and lead author of the report for JupiterResearch. “Leading vendors will forge ahead by making data accessible and actionable while expanding offerings into adjacent marketing technologies.”

I agree.

Several people have accused me and my firm of having a Google bias. (Full disclosure: FutureNow is an authorized Google Optimizer consultant.) This simply isn’t true. A sizable percentage of our clients use other tools like Omniture, WebTrends, and Coremetrics. Our policy has always been to work with the analytics/tool vendors of the client’s choice. For many who are just getting started or are experiencing a marketing budget squeeze, the free and robust Google offerings simply make sense. Others have found a need for features available in other tools, and we’re happy to help them use those tools better.

A tool is just that, a tool.

A tool doesn’t persuade your visitors to take action, nor is it exclusively responsible for a company’s success in optimization. So when a client approaches me requesting a tool suggestion I always answer the same. If you have a tool in place now, use it better. If you don’t, start with something free and get good at using it.

A free tool may be all you need. While certain analytics vendors offer what are considered enterprise-level tools, the free and lower priced solutions are typically labeled for use by small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Still, you’d be surprised at the number of large clients who are satisfied with free or cheaper tools. And, we also have several SMB clients that have more sophisticated needs.

Bottom line: don’t get hung up selecting a tool. Any business, no matter the size, that isn’t optimizing today can extract great value from any tool on the market today. The important thing is to get started optimizing and measuring more effectively. There are no more excuses, not even a lower optimizing budget.

Which brings me to my next point. How does one use a tool effectively? You must operationalize it. Your process must lead your team to take an action, e.g., make a change that you can measure. Lastly, you must be able to gain insight about customer behavior from the data. And, you must do this over and over again. Without those three things in place, no tool will usher in the success you seek.

You must always do the work of optimization. A better treadmill won’t, all by itself, trim your love handles. Likewise, a cheap camera in the hands of a skilled photographer will always take better pictures than one used by a clumsy newbie.

A tool is a tool is a tool. Pick one, learn how to use it effectively, and you’ll see optimization success. Then we can talk about what other tools you might need.

Then we can all afford drool worthy gas grills in our backyards.

*Cross-posted on ClickZ.

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Editor’s Note: If you’re buried in data and looking for a better process to keep your campaigns customer-focused, accountable and metrics-driven, contact us today for a confidential and free consultation.

Today’s interactive marketers face and make these types of decisions several times a day. At a glance, my bud’s decision seems sound. But does it hold up if the company’s goal is to maximize sales, increase conversion, increase return on marketing spend? Or even realize a speedy return on the new Web site’s cost? Probably not.

I’m sure the new site will perform better, but a significant amount of customer insight can be gained in six months, especially when comparing to the control of the old site. Are elements and pages on the site doing what they’re supposed to do? Can changes be made to move the needle even higher? How do they document that design changes were increasing revenue?

How many opportunities to improve business will be missed for six months? How much money will be left in wallets?

This story demonstrates the challenges today’s marketers face. What follows are some tips I shared during my keynote presentation at Search Engine Strategies Toronto.

You can view a sneak preview by watching the video below, and then continue with the post right below it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Traffic and Campaigns are the Means, not the End

For decades, marketing has existed in silo-centric tubes called campaigns. Today’s interactive marketer is managing and creating more campaigns than ever, and has to keep on top of delivery and analytics technologies while juggling third parties and internal staff just to move a campaign out into the real world. Many have become quite good at this, mining for keywords, launching landing pages, and adjusting for SEO (define). The better ones are neck deep in analytics, constantly adjusting, tweaking, and chasing mostly small traffic increases.

But the marketing game isn’t playing nice and refuses to remain static. It’s morphing fast. Campaign costs are rising, and the needles are moving less for even the most effective marketers. Profitable customer behavioral insights are few. And interactive marketers are running out of ideas. So they move on to the next campaign and repeat.

Some marketers’ budgets are being choked. And optimization is the first line item to get slammed up on the butcher block.

To top it off, visitors are expecting more and paying attention less.

Pay Per Conversation, not Pay Per Click.

We recently searched for “pink roses.” The results page looked promising, with several relevant ads above the organic listings, several ads that looked enticing, and several organic links of interest. Sadly, we had to click through three ads and the top organic listing before we landed on a page that included a prominent image of pink roses.

Again, this is the result of the silo mentality. Marketers are experts at directing traffic to the front door, but lack the insight to get visitors to the products and then to the register. This results from failing to plan a persuasive scenario. I’m not saying this is easy with the long tail (define) of terms we’ve become responsible for. This is the minimum required if you expect to convert visitors.

I wonder how many of these marketers would slow down or turn off the traffic on this term and assume that the term “pink rose” doesn’t convert.

They’re thinking about campaigns, not people. And conversion rates remain flatlined. They think of the volume of click and the ad CTR (define), but forget that an ad’s objective is to initiate a conversation with a visitor. That conversation begins on the Web site.

Process, People, then Tools

This is tragic considering how many tracking, implementation, testing, and measuring tools are now available (even for free).

The interactive marketer 2.0 will understand how to optimize and plan for visitor intent, not just traffic. This marketer will spend less and get better conversions. This marketer will know what spikes the needles and how to duplicate it. A few of these marketers already exist.

Amazon is the benchmark example of embracing an optimization culture. They have good people, and testing is ingrained into the organization.

Look at the evolution of its “add to cart” strategy. This evolution reflects better attention to the customer (improved, visible and usable buttons in prominent positions) and reflects a tie-in with Amazon’s overall strategy. Rest assured, there was a cycle of optimization, testing, and customer insight that contributed to each improved element.

click to enlarge

Pay attention to this space on Amazon. Chances are it will get even better. Look at how many times Amazon paid attention to this one area over the course of years, while many companies have never reexamined it. In fact, an Internet Retailer 500 study showed that nearly 76 percent don’t test.

The key is to have a process. One such process, persuasion architecture, is based on asking three questions:

1. Who are we trying to persuade?
2. What action(s) do we want them to take?
3. What action do they want to take (not always identical to No. 2)

Can you see how these questions are answered in Amazon’s strategy?

Interactive Marketing Optimization: Eliminate Risks, Reap Rewards

There’s almost no downside to optimization and testing. It’s easy to make a case for keeping optimization in the budget. Throwing up things to test (a.k.a., the infinite monkey theorem) isn’t effective. You must optimize your conversations.

In conclusion, follow these steps when thinking outside the campaign.

• Get good at free tools, then pay for them. Tools aren’t the indicator of success, but having a process and the people in place to take action are.
• Set up a system for content planning and optimization. If this isn’t a top cultural priority, expect tomorrow’s customer to keep finding ways to ignore you.
• Take more time planning experiences for how people gather information and make decisions. Don’t take your content lightly or your customer will click the back button.
• Take less time idling on execution. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing wrong.
• Invest in continuous optimization. If it isn’t right, you can fix it quickly, easily, and cheaply with tools like Google Website Optimizer.
• Have better conversations, make more sales, leads, subscriptions, etc.

*Cross-posted on ClickZ.

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Editor’s Note: If you’re buried in data and looking for a better process to keep your campaigns customer-focused, accountable and metrics-driven, contact us today for a confidential and free consultation.

Viral videos are, by nature, non-targetable. The message can be targeted, but the delivery is meant to spread in an out-of-control and, well, viral manner. But that’s OK since optimizing the message (e.g., with persona-based messaging) is usually far more effective than trying to control who actually ends up seeing your viral video.

We also need to be careful with the term “successful”. How are we defining success? If a video spreads virally but delivers no benefit to the creator or business, should that be considered a success? I would say no, it’s not. Accordingly, the only successful viral videos I have seen are the “Will it Blend?” videos by Blendtec.

But don’t take my word for it; watch this video to see if an iPhone will blend:

Impressive, isn’t it?

Not only did these videos go viral, but, according to Blendtec’s founder, they brought qualified buyers to the company’s website and drove sales.* Now that’s impressive.

So, here are three must-do ideas to consider before trying this at home:

1.) Viral Videos Must Remain “On-Message.” Yes, they have to be funny, amusing, insightful and wow-inspiring to “go viral,” but the those qualities have to be organic or intrinsic to the commercial message. The humor can’t be gratuitous.

The great Bill Bernbach once said…

Be provocative. But be sure your provocativeness stems from your product. You are not right if in your ad you stand a man on his head just to get attention. You are right if [it’s done to] show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.

Merely to let your imagination run riot, to dream unrelated dreams, to indulge in graphic acrobatics is not being creative. The creative person has harnessed his imagination. He has disciplined it so that every thought, every idea, every word he puts down, every line he draws, every light and shadow in every photograph he takes makes more vivid, more believable, more persuasive the original them or product advantage he has decided to convey.

Exactly. The Blendtec videos are ABOUT the product: blenders.

2.) Videos work better as part of a campaign… rather than as a single, one-off event. There are at least 10 Blendtec commercials that I’m aware of, and, when they first came out, I probably watched five or six of them. That repetition of message compounded the effectiveness of both the viral spreading and the intended message. If you’re planning a viral campaign, do yourself a favor and plan it as an actual campaign, i.e., as a series of videos.

3.) Know WHERE and HOW your videos fit into the customer’s buying process… and plan accordingly. Watching the “Will it Blend” videos probably isn’t enough to get anyone to immediately buy the product, but it will put Blendtec on a customer’s short list the next time they’re in the market for a high-powered blender. That means their website has to pick up where the videos left off. That means the website has to be findable.

Notice that Blendtec also has a willitblend.com domain set up and has done the SEO work to be the first organic result when the titles of their videos are typed into Google. Notice that Blendtec has not assumed that anyone will be paying enough attention to learn the name of their company. (Viewers are most likely remember the name of the videos themselves. Prepare for that.)

The Microsoft campaign that Dave wrote about doesn’t play by these rules, and almost certainly isn’t as effective as the Blendtec series. Try it for yourself: Google “The Break Up” or “Inspiration, Anyone?” You’ll find the videos, but not any websites where Microsoft even has a chance to convert interest into business.

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*UPDATE: Word of Mouth marketing expert Andy Sernovitz reports that Blendtec’s sales increased 500% as a result of their “Will it Blend” campaign.

Now that Borders has total command of its site and controls its customers’ online experiences, I have some questions:

What does it expect? What is it trying to do?

Of course, we can’t discuss selling books online without talking about Amazon’s dominance. Does Borders expect to go head to head with Amazon? Or does it have a different strategy?

While we don’t know all the answers to these questions, we can make guesses, even learn, as we look at the new Border’s site.

We see some exciting selling and marketing opportunities for Borders.com.

Amazon’s Vulnerability

Borders shouldn’t take on Amazon head to head, at least not now.

Readers of this column are aware of my regard for Amazon’s optimization culture. And there’s no doubt it does many things right, as evidenced by the company’s consistently high conversion rate.

But as you dig an inch beneath the surface of its success, you’ll discover Amazon has some weaknesses. While it’s the master of selling to those who know exactly what they want, it offers a horrible experience for anyone browsing for books and hoping to discover something new and unique.

This is no surprise. Amazon owns the search on unique identifiers, but with unique identifiers you deal with mostly middle- to late-stage buyers who know approximately or exactly the item they want. Amazon does a more than respectable job making product suggestions and increasing average order value (AOV) through up-sell, but it’s practically impossible to enjoy an experience if you are just browsing, looking to discover new books or authors.

By creating an unparalleled experience for book browsers, Borders can create a strong niche. Already Borders has changed tactics in stores, reducing shelf inventory, featuring more books face out, and allowing customers to see and discover more books. This change has increased brick-and-mortar sales by double digits. Our senior persuasion architect, Anthony Garcia, shops at Borders stores almost exclusively because he claims he has found dozens of new book and authors he had never considered before.

Borders needs to take this mojo online. If its new site is any indication, it’s already making that attempt.

Borders, King of Book Browsers

All of us at my company are book junkies. We buy more books than we can read, and we are always looking for unique business and history books. Many of us are on a never-ending hunt to find great new (or unfamiliar) fiction authors. With that in mind I gave Anthony a handy sum of Borders Bucks to see if he could find a few new books or authors using the new site.

Overall, he gave the site a solid “C” grade and came away buying nothing. But he did report some promise.

His first encounter was with the “Magic Shelf,” which turned out to be a little more than eye candy. His attempts to edit the shelf to better reflect his tastes proved difficult. He was repeatedly sent to his account and given a few radio buttons to choose categories. If there’s a way to place specific titles on his shelf, he couldn’t find it. And the books on his Magic Shelf were difficult to navigate or drill down into for more information. We are optimistic this feature will improve. When it does, it will be a powerful browsing tool, as it introduces more relevant new books and authors based on the visitor’s taste.

On listing pages like this one, the visitor is presented with two ways to display lists of books. The default list is an icon view that displays nothing but thumbnails of book covers. When you mouse over a thumbnail you get a box with more details on that particular book. We like the idea because book covers can be interesting and intriguing, but the thumbnails were too small and we had difficulty seeing the titles. Borders should increase the thumbnail size and offer at least a little detail underneath it, like the title, author, price, and availability. What would be even better would be an ability to “pick up the thumbnail,” thereby enlarging it and possibly even being able to flip it and see the back side. It would also be great if we could just drag and drop books onto the magic bookshelf.

The other listing option is more traditional, along the lines of an Amazon listing page.

There were also no clear calls to action (e.g., add to cart, add to wish list) on each view. The listing page offers a “want it?” action, but it’s a vague call to action and visitors will be unsure what happens when they click it.

Product detail pages also need some work. We found it hard to find the review tab, and once we did several of the books had measly and unhelpful reviews. We assume this will change as the site generates more traffic and sales. The book descriptions themselves were skimpy in comparison to Amazon’s. Compare the description for Scott McClellan’s book “What Happened?” on Borders and Amazon. Which page gives you more buying confidence? (It would be interesting to hear your thoughts here, list the reasons and send them to me.)

Some Tips for Borders

Borders has clearly done an amazing amount of work, and the site looks great. Our guess is it knows it needs to do much more. Here are few things it can do to outflank Amazon and own book buyers who are early in their buying phase:

• Continue to work on the magic bookshelf. Find ways to make it easier to navigate and customize so the books on the shelf are more relevant to the visitor.
• Make it easy to engage the magic bookshelf from anywhere on the site. Right now, we constantly had to go back to the home page to see it.
• Continue to leverage the cross-channel opportunities using Borders Rewards.
• Introduce more social Web 2.0 elements: allow visitors to share lists, chat, and discuss what they’re reading. Allow visitors to communicate with each other on your site about books they have read or are considering. In short, turn visitors into a de facto sales force.
• Introduce a user tagging system that will allow visitors to tag books using their own terms. This will allow visitors to sort and interact with items on their terms, not just the terms/categories you’ve assigned. Is Heller’s “Catch-22″ a classic, fiction, or both?
• Improve Borders Rewards e-mail marketing. It shouldn’t be about offers but about real content.
• Partner with or acquire Facebook apps, like Visual Bookshelf, and become active in social networking forums.
• Don’t spend time on long-tail strategies. You’ve too far to go to catch up with Amazon.

We’ll continue to monitor Borders and its unique opportunity. We hope you will, too. In the meantime, tell us what you think about the site and what you’d do to help it.

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Cross-posted on ClickZ.

Success in testing doesn’t necessarily indicate success in customer insight. For example, you can test landing pages, determine the best landing page, and enjoy an increase in conversion. But do you know why it converts better? Oftentimes marketers gain knowledge of customer behavior, which is inferior to customer insight (defined as learning why customers are behaving the way they are).

While it’s possible to optimize and see increases without customer insight, you’re chasing diminishing returns. Exclusively chasing better numbers gives the marketer a weaker 2-D approach in a rich 3-D world. Gaining customer insight is more efficient and typically more powerful in maintaining an upward trend toward your goals.

Gaining Customer Insight

How do you gain this customer insight? Customer surveys are one means.

Web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik collaborated with iPerceptions to give marketers the 4Q survey platform. 4Q is a free, permission-based on-exit customer survey. It’s delivered post-conversion and asks customers four powerful questions:

• What is the purpose of your visit to our Web site today?
• Were you able to complete your task today?
• If you were not able to complete your task today, why not?
• If you did complete your task, what did you enjoy most about the site?

At the recent eMetrics Summit in San Francisco, iPerceptions shared some early results of using 4Q. For retailers, it learned that 39 percent of visitors went to learn about products, while 27 percent went to buy. Of the 27 percent who went to buy, roughly only two-thirds actually completed that task. Visitors also told why they did not convert: 31 percent wanted better product selection, 24 percent desired better shipping options, 17 percent cited problems with the online shopping cart, and 14 percent said prices were too high.

Analytics will only tell you what people are doing, but knowing why they are doing it is a powerful optimization tool.

In this case, the retailer can make much better optimization decisions. While a retailer may already be working on an initiative to offer more shipping options, it now has data to support accelerating the project. Knowing that 17 percent said they had shopping cart problems, the retailer can dig into the analytics and gain better insight into what is happening.

You can also use this data to create personas to help your marketing initiatives.

Customer Insight and Product Reviews

Another simple means of customer insight are customer product reviews. Here’s how you can optimize using them:

1. Look for products with low look-to-book ratios and reviews with 3 to 4.5 stars out of five stars.
2. Pull the trigger words from each review.
3. Plot them as “logical” or “emotional.”
4. Modify your product descriptions based on the results.

For example, here are two bullet points from the product description for a lady’s watch before optimization:

• Contemporary style adds bold look to any wardrobe.
• Water resistant to 30 meters.

Now, here are two snippets from “emotional” customer reviews for a lady’s watch:

• It’s like wearing two silver chain bracelets with a beautiful watch centerpiece.
• I’m a constant hand-washer, and I don’t have to worry about “time stopping” just because I have to have clean hands.

Now here are the optimized bullets:

• This unusual double chain bracelet band and watch is an instant attention getter.
• No worries while washing hands, because this watch is water resistant to 30 meters.

Which description do you think converts better?

Conclusion

With customer insight you can more easily duplicate your successes, create more effective campaigns, and apply that insight to other site areas. And with our current economic situation, you can better budget and prioritize your optimization efforts.

Now go and learn what your customers are saying about you and your Web site.

*This article is cross-posted on ClickZ.

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About the Author: Bryan Eisenberg is co-founder and Chief Persuasion Officer at FutureNow. Join Bryan on June 3rd in Manhattan at the Call to Action seminar, the popular one-day course based on his New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Call to Action: Secret Formulas for Improving Online Results. Not only will you learn the most effective online persuasion and website optimization techniques, you’ll get a chance to chat with Bryan over hors d’oeurves and cocktails at our “Happy Hour with the Experts” reception.

Marketers often get so worked up about the prospect of website optimization that we forget an important step. Before we can pursue optimization, we must convince those in our own company about optimization’s value.

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

Get the Math Right

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

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

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

• 3,030
• 4,000

Translate All Numbers Into Dollars

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

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

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

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

Leverage Your Reach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is There a Catch?

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

The Bottom Line

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

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

*Article cross-posted on ClickZ

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Editor’s Note: At FutureNow, we insist on measurable ROI for our clients. That’s we start by identifying the areas that will make the most difference to your conversion rate and other vital performance metrics. Please contact us to learn how we can help you, or an executive team you know, market better.