Magnesium — not something you hear about everyday, huh? It’s not really the product with the most “sex appeal.” As Patrick Sullivan, co-founder of Jigsaw Health which focuses on selling these wonderful magnesium supplements, explains:

“Magnesium is involved in over 300 enzymatic reactions in the body. It works in tandem with calcium — calcium flexes muscles, and magnesium relaxes them.  Thus, muscle relaxation is one of the many benefits of magnesium.  But you just don’t hear about magnesium as much as you hear about calcium.  And no surprise, up to 80% of Americans are deficient in magnesium.  We recognized a large void in the marketplace to make an uncool mineral, cool.”

Roy Williams consistently shares this piece of advice with business owners: those companies that try to appeal to everyone tend not to appeal to anyone. It pays to have a “sword in the stone.” Says Roy:

Advertisers rarely abandon campaigns that revolve around their Swords in the Stone. And sword campaigns tend to perform much better than those built merely upon clever ideas. A company’s Sword in the Stone embodies its core values and defines its essence, and from these flow their non-negotiable standards and their customers’ positive experiences.

Patrick Sullivan explains on his blog the 5 step process he went through to increase his search rankings for the main index page on Jigsaw Health for the term magnesium supplements. He shares his results too:

In about 4 days, Lord Google bumped us from outer-space to 27th for “magnesium supplements”.  About 10 days later, we were the second listing on page 2 (position 12)!!

Today he is #11. Obviously, something is working.

Being this focused is not only good for Google but for your visitors as well. Sites that work to clarify their sword in the stone wind up with much lower bounce rates and, more importantly, increased sales and conversions. Just ask Patrick at Jigsaw, who finally put the magnesium pieces together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Words ‘Marketing Automation’ are Like Music To Our Ears

According to one definition:

Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI), and campaign management. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient, and makes some new processes possible.

In plain English, marketing automation uses data (like your web analytics) to do some of your marketing tasks for you. Herein lies the problem I keep running into: Your decisions and those of your marketing automation platform are only as sound as your data.

I’ve seen marketing automation software that helps your email marketing, your ppc bid management, segmentation and personalization, and others. As Jeff Sexton recently pointed out, if you have the wrong analytics it could cost you 30% of your sales. Can you afford that today?

A few weeks ago we were helping a client optimize her website and we wanted access to her historical data. All she had was the analytics from her marketing automation vendor. Now the fact that you could only access these analytics using Internet Explorer (we are mostly on Macs) was one failure, but the main failure was that it looks like the analytics was an after-thought by the vendor. Anyone can throw up some reports on a screen — but the issue is, do they tell you anything meaningful? There was virtually nothing to make you smarter as a marketer. Today’s smart marketers understand the value of data-driven decisions. Unfortunately, this vendor’s reports provided in an abstract way what happened but did not provide the vital statistics to diagnosis and prescribe any sort of optimization to the company’s efforts.

Marketing Automation Must Make You Smarter Not Lazier

I was talking to friend who is a superstar B2B marketer. He was telling me about this new enterprise PPC bid management software he was evaluating. He deals with thousands and thousands of terms so automating the bidding would be a huge help. He told me about the slick interface and the bidding rules, etc. Then I asked him the question that made him stop like a deer in the headlights.

“Have you checked out the data reporting behind the algorithm? What actionable insights does your ppc automation vendor provide you?”

Of course, vendors will shout “proprietary formula” and we marketers fall for this marketing B.S. We don’t need the complex details behind it but we do need to get a sense of what and how they look at data, keyword attribution, etc. What metrics do they value most? If you fall for the “black box” how do you and the system continue to learn? How do remove it if you are unhappy with the vendor? How do you create your internal best practices unless you have a clear picture into what is happening?

Without good data at the core, you may just end up with a mechanical turk. You need data to share in your organization and data that tells you details of what you’re doing and how to improve it. Also, beware of bad software that takes what you need done and tries to completely automate it. Just because it is automated won’t guarantee it is optimal for the way a good marketer works.

Don’t Forget Your Job Is to Make More Money, Not to Make Your Job Easier

The point of marketing automation is to free you up to do more of what you are really good at by letting the glorified calculator do what it is really good at. Good marketing automation lets you use your insights about your customers in ways you couldn’t before; bad software takes those decisions away and prays that the computer will do it for you. Keep in mind we have created a computer that has barely beaten a great human chess player, despite its intricate and complex algorithm –  and we’re still far off from a computer to beat the best human poker players. Do you really believe that some algorithm is going to be better than you at creative marketing insights?

Without solid data, scientific method and reporting, how does your marketing automation software show you it is making money? Whether or not you are using marketing automation, you still need access to great metrics. In the case of marketing personalization, how do you know if the efforts are working if there aren’t control groups to measure against? How do you control for other external factors?

The Marketing Automation Future, Now

Don’t get me wrong — I am an advocate for marketing automation. But only if there is a core focus on the insight derived from data, not the automation, first. Analytics must be at the foundation and not an afterthought. You can identify first generation automation tools by their focus in on automation first and reports second. Today’s next-generation state-of-the-art tools have to have great metrics and analysis at their core and are focused on helping you optimize your business; that is, making you more money and proving their value to you.

Please feel free to tell me more about your marketing automation love fest or worries.

P.S. Full disclosure: like my good friend and analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik, I work for and sit on several advisory boards of companies that use data as their foundation for marketing optimization and automation.

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?

Don’t do Search Engine Optimization!

At SMX last week Google’s Matt Cutts, basically explained that “Google does profile SEOs. They’re identified as “high risk” and so are all of their associated projects.”

This wouldn’t be the first time Matt’s comments are a pre-cursor of Google cleaning up their index and rankings. Will this be the next Google Florida type update coming?

Lisa starts her post asking if we can stop talking about nofollow and PageRank sculpting; might that just be one of Google’s SEO profiling techniques?

Google publishes a set of suggested Webmaster guidelines to help Google find, index, and rank your site. No where on there do you see any talk of “nofollow” attributes or PageRank scultping. Has this been a trojan horse that many SEO’s have tried to leverage?

Google views Search Engine Optimization as dangerous, because in many cases it is used to manipulate relevancy of their results. Does that mean there aren’t some things you can and should do to make your content easier to find and index – absolutely you should. Should they be the things that Google specifies in their guidelines – maybe. Should you be very conscious of all your SEO tactics – without a doubt!

We know Google is considering new signals to make search relevant.

I’ve always said SEO shouldn’t be an acronym for Search Engine Optimization (because now if you optimize for search engines you may be profiled as dangerous), but for Searcher Experience Optimization. I recommend that you do great marketing primarily. Then focus on making sure you publish the best content for the person doing a search. When that person has a list of options to choose from in their search engine results page, your content provides them with the best experience.

Is Google likely to find you and your Search Engine Optimization activities criminal? We’ll find out if you are exiled from their listings soon.

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

According to the Omniture survey:

• Marketers picked cost per click and click through rate as among their top metrics to optimize search campaigns instead of deeper metrics such as return on ad spend, cost per customer (or sale) or profit per order
• 43 percent of e-commerce respondents do not know how to accurately measure profit per customer (or order)
• 67 percent of respondents indicated not having enough time to effectively manage campaigns as their top issue in search marketing, while only 35 percent use an automated bidding solution

Are you surprised? We aren’t; check out the 7 Deadly Sins of Web Analytics.

Every day leading companies strut their James-Bond-cool stuff, showing off their sophisticated tools and fancy talk about ROI.

It’s hard to take them seriously knowing that underneath that James Bond tuxedo their diapers are soiled.

In 1998 we were frustrated because companies didn’t understand their conversion rates. In 2009 we remain frustrated.

Much less than 1% of the thousands of companies we’ve spoken with are the exception.

Do you have any insight as to why marketers remain enamored of the shiny new object but reject focusing on the fundamentals?

___________________________________

P.S. Josh James, the CEO of Omniture, in January of 2005 said “Web analytics can pay for itself with a single business improvement — so the real question is how quickly can companies make data-driven decisions? This willingness to change will ultimately dictate time to ROI.”

I recently had the pleasure to ask Rebecca about her new book, The Truth About Search Search Engine Optimization.

1.  With so many SEO books out there, why is this one different different than all others?

Most of the books dealing with search engine optimization cover the topic from a pretty geeky, practical aspect. They’re written for coders, developers, webmasters and other technical types who are up to their elbows in the plumbing, so to speak, of web sites.  I wrote “The Truth About Search Engine Optimization” for the rest of us right-brained people. We’re marketers, advertisers, bloggers, small business owners, publishers and business people who don’t necessarily build and maintain complex web sites, or write code, or any of that other geeky stuff. What we do want to be able to do is wrap our heads around the ideas and concepts behind SEO — many of which are not technical in the least. If you’re running your own site, this book will help you to understand how to make it more ‘findable’ on the web. If you’re running a marketing program, or have hired an outside agency to manage SEO for your site, the book will help you understand what your role should be in the process, and how to have meaningful conversations with your vendors or SEO staff. In fact, a bunch of my SEO friends have told me they’re buying this book for their clients!

And finally, the book isn’t intended to be a dry, instructional manual, but a pretty good read as well. It won’t hurt a bit to read it — and you may just learn a thing or two! Moreover, it’s not written to be read in a linear fashion. You can dip in and out, and skip around the short, bite-sized chapters to easily get to the bits you want (or need) to read. Someone told me it makes for a great bathroom book.  I’m gonna choose to take that as a compliment!

2.  The majority of books are by SEO practitioners. This one isn’t, so why is it such a critical read?

There are plenty of good SEO books out there by practitioners, but they aren’t necessarily for everyone. First, these can tend toward the technical and tactical, rather than the conceptual. Second, it’s important to bear in mind that a book by a practitioner could very well be by someone with a certain agenda. They’re likely trying to sell you something, right?

As an editor and journalist, it’s part of my DNA to present a broad palette of information on SEO objectively, but with a bent for best practices. And these are gleaned from the dozens and dozens of SEO practitioners I’ve dealt with over the years (and count among my friends) while I was running both the largest marketing, and the largest search, news and information sites on the web. This fairly unique perspective has also put me in unusually close proximity to every development in search, major and minor, of the past 10 years.

On top of that, I am a practitioner of sorts. I run web sites and I certainly do have occasion to practice what I preach. In fact, I’ve been accountable for the findability of some pretty major web sites!

Finally, and as a writer/editor (albeit one with a pretty deep background in marketing), what most attracts me to search is that in the end, it really does all come down to the content, more specifically, to the written word. That’s something I definitely have a pretty darn deep affinity with.

3.  What are some takeaways people will get from the book? What priorities do they need to focus on for the next quarter?

Content, content, and yet again, content. You want to get found? Think like an editor and a publisher. You need a strong content strategy to run and maintain a findable web site. What kind of content can you get onto your site? How often, because the more frequently you update, the more often you’ll be visited by search engine spiders. What kind of editorial calendar can you design to keep content — relevant content — flowing through the pipelines? And I’m not just talking written copy here, though that’s certainly the most important thing. Links are content, too. So are images, videos, audio streams, and auxiliary supplements to your site, such as a social media presence. What’s going to be important in the next quarter is the same thing that’s been important since Creation: In the beginning was the Word!

4.  What other books should they be reading now?

I’m going to go out on a limb here. Yes there are plenty of other good SEO books out there, and I don’t hesitate to recommend them. But this is a conceptual book, so I’m going to recommend conceptual reading. Bone up on reading about digital marketing in general. Understand what you’re doing. In addition to that, immerse yourself in books, articles and ideas about your particular subject matter. That’s where you’re going to get ideas and inspiration for all the content you’re going to have to generate to make your site fresh, updated and findable going forward. Really, SEO is more about strong ideas and communication than about coding and building web sites. Keep those ideas coming and you’ll be on the right track.

I know we are all busy out there, but I can’t think of a reason you wouldn’t benefit from picking up a copy of The Truth About Search Search Engine Marketing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Crandall in his iMediaConnection SEO column explains “why the traditional thinking on ‘cheap’ no longer applies”. I think he’s right for several business categories but not all.

Our new service OnTarget is by far the least expensive and most effective proven system for companies to continually improve their conversion rates.

So why don’t we just call OnTarget cheap?

Hmmm… The answer is simple.

We never want the type of client who is looking for “cheap” analysis and recommendations.

Does your business need clients who are looking for cheap?

• Early means that the visitor has a problem, and is looking for a solution.  They may not know who you are, or that your product/service solves their problem.
• Middle means that they have an intention to buy a product or service that solves their problem, but not necessarily from you.
• Late means that they’re persuaded to buy from you, and intend to close the deal.

Sometimes, websites seem to be doing everything right, but the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) just aren’t as high as everyone expects.   Their sites are functional, accessible, usable, and intuitive.  Their look and feel is credible, and their content is high quality.  So why do their visitors not behave as we expect? Why do well-planned and well-executed scenarios (e.g. PPC ad, to landing page, to lead generating form, to thank you page) not always convert?

You guessed it: Buying Stage Schizophrenia.

Buying Stage Schizophrenia is when our selling process doesn’t jive with the visitor’s buying process.  It’s when our conversion funnel is designed for a buying stage that the visitor isn’t in.  Take a look at your site’s conversion funnel…it’s most likely designed for Late Stage buyers, right?  Take a look at one of your PPC campaigns…are you showing Early Stage keywords a Middle Stage ad that sends the visitor down a Late Stage funnel?  Poor visitor

The key point is to be aware that multiple buying stages are traversing your designed scenarios.  It’s fine if your funnel is fine-tuned to Late Stage buyers, but do you have easy navigation paths to let an Early or Middle stage visitor branch out and get more information?  It’s fine if your PPC landing pages are perfect for a Middle Stage searcher, but can an impatient Late Stage searcher “Buy Now”?

How do I identify buying stages to improve my scenarios?

A few ways, using basic analytics tools and skills, are:

• Look at your keyword lists (in-site search, organic keywords, and paid keywords) and start segmenting by buying stage.  Guessing is OK.
• Look at click paths and navigation (which pages would be attractive/informative to the various stages?)
• Look for those who bail out of conversion funnels (it could be that they’re not ready to buy)
• Look at entrance sources (organic vs. PPC vs. referrals vs. direct visits)

Coincidentally (read: not coincidental at all ), we just launched a subscription service that can help with this very issue, you can start improving your conversion rate for as low as $1,000 a month.

We were originally only going to have this private webinar available for OnTarget clients only, but I convinced Craig to let me share it with everyone. Thank you Craig.

High Resolution PPC Webinar Description:

A few years ago, managing paid search campaigns was simple. All you had to do was pick the right keywords and set reasonable bids. Those days are long gone.

Today paid search management is complicated. Competition is tough, prices are high, the rules and algorithms keep changing, and you have to contend with issues like quality score, impression share and revenue allocation.

So what’s the best way to build and manage paid search campaigns in 2009? How should you spend your time and your money to get the best return-on-investment?

In this webinar, Craig Danuloff introduces High Resolution PPC – a new framework for understanding and managing PPC campaigns.

• High Resolution PPC starts with the assumption that we haven’t had a clear enough picture of how paid search really works. Or exercised control with fine enough precision.
• It’s based on the idea we’re no longer willing to take actions, configure settings, and set options without knowing the specific implications and possible interactions.
• And it presumes that we need meaningful and informative performance measures on an ongoing basis in order to intelligently and consistently make changes to improve our results.

High Resolution PPC breaks the process down into three clear steps – target, value, satisfy – and provides a step-by-step approach to building and optimizing campaigns. You’ll learn how to use your time more efficiently, avoid costly mistakes, drive past your competitors, and increase top and bottom line revenues.

Join us for this informative webinar, and learn a new approach to delivering great PPC results.

The description of this final project–a live panel review gauntlet–reads like a wild fusion between American Idol, a PhD dissertation defense, and a lightning-round news roundtable show.  Candidates will vie for faculty endorsements under the scrutiny of a live audience and a few surprise marketing critics like George Michie, Mary Huffman & Mark Evans.

Taking their concept a step further, Market Motive has opened up the event to the public for free—and not just for passive onlookers.  You may choose to absorb the dissertation on the latest standards or opt to have your website evaluated by the graduating consultants.  For event information and free registration, visit http://www.marketmotive.com/master-certification-graduation.php .

The endorsing faculty panel is truly a who’s who of Internet marketing and includes:

* Bryan Eisenberg on Conversion Optimization
* Greg Jarboe & Jamie O’Donnell on Online PR
* George Michie, Mark Evans on Paid Search / PPC
* Matt Bailey on Social Media
* Avinash Kaushik & John Marshall on Web Analytics
* Todd Malicoat on SEO
* Michael Stebbins on Email Marketing

Candidates who pass the final challenge will receive certification status for one year from graduation and a listing on the Market Motive site.

Registration Is Open for the Next Master Certification

Market Motive is accepting applications for the next round of Master Certifications, slated for a February 2009 start, at http://www.marketmotive.com/internet-marketing-certification.php.

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.

When I fall off the wagon, every so often, I’ll go ahead and pick a keyphrase and start clicking through PPC ads and their landing pages and take screenshots of the whole entire experience. You can’t imagine how often the experience from keyword to ad to landing page is broken. I want to call them and yell at them to subscribe to OnTarget. I don’t do it. Instead a few weeks or months will pass and the same advertisers drop those ads.  I can just hear their internal discussions as they analyze their metrics and rationally conclude that keyphrase X doesn’t convert for us.

(Maybe we should start the Internet Marketing Darwin Award for PPC ads.)

Keywords Don’t Fail to Convert… we fail to convert visitors for that keyword.

Do you believe the keyphrase you chose is relevant to your business? If it is, then your responsibility is to show every visitor how that keyphrase is relevant to their needs. Every visitor that comes to your site is not completely unique. They have various mostly foreseeable motivations persuading them to buy and various foreseeable objections that would keep them from buying. Ask yourself:

• What is their intent in usingthose keywords?
• What need or desire are they trying to fulfill?
• What is their goal?
• How do we align our goals to meet theirs?

PPC ads are just like tapping someone on the shoulder. PPC ads are only meant to grab attention not convert. If you want to convert your visitor you need to work on the rest of the experience (the conversation) beyond the click.

Do you make any money when a visitor just clicks your ad? No.

So instead of thinking of PPC as pay per click start thinking of it as pay per conversation.

Devote some resources to optimizing your conversations.

How to Get Started Optimizing your Keyword Marketing

1. The first thing you need to do is bucket your keyphrases. Start with the first 100 or so top phrases that drive traffic to your website. For each one of those classify the terms by phase in the buying process. Does the keyphrase apply in the early, middle or late stage of the buying process?

If the term is driving traffic to your site but not really relevant to your business put it in a disqualified bucket for now. For FutureNow one of those terms is “convertion rate.” It may be a harmless typo but time has shown that if they can’t spell conversion they aren’t likely customers.

An example: Someone is planning to buy a new television set. Early in their buying process they might use phrases like LCD tvs, best LCD tv, or LCD tv reviews. As they progress to the middle stage you might see keyphrases like compare Sharp and Sony LCDs, LCD tv 1080 dpi and then move on to specific models in the late stages like Sony KDL-52XBR6.

2. Define and realign your goals with your visitors. Would you expect every person you went out on a date with to marry you at the end of the first date? So why do we expect every keyword to convert visitors to our ultimate goal, the sale or the lead? Our job is to get them there, but based upon their buying preferences, they may not be able to be moved any faster than they are prepared to.

Start planning micro-goals along the way to your macro-goal (sale or lead). Someone earlier in their buying process might not be ready to commit on their first visit. Plan smaller milestones or micro-goals that may lead that person to convert at a later point in their process.

Why don’t many more early or middle stage landing pages have some easy way to capture a visitor’s email address with some kind of offer? 

If your web pages were sales people, how many of them would you fire or at least get trained?

Don’t pay for a keyphrase or a date if your only expectation is a  full commitment at the end.  You need to romance them and show them all your best moves. (Warning – this is conversion advice and it works but I’m no dating expert, just ask my wife.)

Some examples: Maybe you can offer them a buyer’s guide download, a coupon for their first time purchase, an offer to see a webinar about how to choose the product/service they are considering or a price alert notification if this item goes on sale.

Every keyphrase should have a goal that is in alignment with the visitor’s stage in their buying process.

3. Measure your success and build confidence. Respect and support your customer’s journey along their buying process by pulling them along instead of trying to push them to commit too fast. That is the friction that is caused by your sales process colliding with, instead of aligning with, their buying process. This is what creates cognitive dissonance. What you need to build is confidence. Your visitors need confidence that you are there to support their buying process and confidence in your ability to address all their needs and wants in order to convert visitors at all stages.

Start tracking and evaluating your keyphrases and landing pages by how well they support moving visitors through the buying process.  Analyze these micro-goals and continuously optimize the experience to move further and further along so that you keep them on target. Every step closer to the macro-goal is a success, every visit that just bounces is a failure.

Take these 3 steps now and you’ll enjoy a more confident and lucrative 2009.

P.S. This post was inspired by my presentation at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago. Read about it on the AimClearBlog.

I was also lucky enough to get a signed copy of my friend Andrew Goodman’s updated book Winning Results with Google AdWords, Second Edition.The first was was great and I am looking forward to reading this one over the weekend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

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

2. Customer Focus Calculator – will analyze the words on your page and determine if your copy is more about yourself or your customer. This tool will measure if you are we-we-ing all over yourself.

3. BT Buckets – Engage your users with a free segmentation and behavioral targeting tool.

4. 4Q from IPerceptions – developed with web analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik. When evaluating how you website is doing obviously it helps to get your customers’ opinions. This free tool helps you answer four important questions:

* How satisfied are my visitors?
* What are my visitors at my website to do?
* Are they completing what they set out to do?
* If not, why not?
* If yes, what did they like best about the online experience?

5. What’s the Buzz? – a keyword research tool with one simple aim: to find out who’s talking about a certain keyword. To do that, it does five things:

* It displays the Technorati Blog Popularity Chart, showing how popular the keyword has been blogged about in the past 90 days
* It displays the Google Trends chart for the keyword
* It finds blog posts tagged with the keyword
* It finds blog posts containing the keyword (a straight-forward search)
* It finds social bookmarks tagged with the keywords

6. Bad Neighborhood Link Checker – scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas.

7. Backlink Social Celebrity SEO Tool – discover who bookmarked a webpage and who linked to that webpage. The bookmarks are searched for in the various social bookmarking services, such as del.icio.us, Raw Sugar, and others. The backlinks are found using Google and Yahoo!.

8. Webbed-O-Meter 2.0 – can help track how effective you are at inspiring consumer generated content online, call it buzz marketing, social media marketing or viral marketing.

9. Website Grader – provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

10. Spider Simulator – help you find out for yourself how a search engine reacts to your pages and what can be done to boost your visibility.

11. Spider Test – Shows the source code of a page, all outbound links, and common words and phrases.

12. Google Analytics – web analytics with new “enterprise features” and a ton of plugins and hacks.

13. Google Website Optimizer – Free A/B and Multivariate Testing

14. Yahoo! Analytics – still in beta, but incredibly powerful. It is currently available with Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store plans.

15. Microsoft adCenter Analytics – by invitation only, but you can apply at the link provided.

16. Piwik – This is an open source web analytics solution.

17. Linkscape – allows access to link information on more than 30+ billion web pages across 200+ million domains.

18. BacklinkAnalysis – Get a look at what keywords websites are linking to you with.

19. Trifecta – Measures metrics to estimate the relative popularity and importance of Page, Blog or Domain.

20. Firebug – this plugin for Firefox provides a number of development tools. For the purposes of analysis, Firebug will allow you to monitor and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from within your browser.

21. YSlow for Firebug – YSlow will analyze your page to make suggestions for how you can speed up the page. YSlow is integrated with Firebug.

22. Google Webmaster Tools – see which phrases your ranking well for, what pages are causing problems for Google when crawling your site, which pages are getting the most links, rss subscribers, etc.

23. Morgue File – offers free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.

24. OpenAds – for sites that want to serve and track advertising.

25. Sitescore – analyzes the quality of incoming and outgoing links, keyword density, page titles, plagiarism, popularity rank, the usage of popups and the effectiveness of site’s structure. Sitescore also grades the printability, readability, spiderability and usability of the page as well as spelling and W3C compliance. This is no longer available for free, sorry.

26. mon.itor.us – use this to monitor uptime, website performance and other hosting abnormalities.

27. Orangoo Spell Check – spell check your website.

28. The Scrutinizer – offers 283 tools to test your website in one place.

29. Product Indexation Check – use this handy tool to check how many of your category or product pages are included in the major search engines.

30. Kamplye – allows your visitors to give feedback on your site, via a little button that sits at the edge of each webpage.

31. Google’s Free Custom Search Engine – create your own custom search engine, indexing your website or add additonal websites as well.

32. Feng-GUI – generates heatmaps for your website (upload a screenshot) by simulating human vision during the first five seconds of viewing your website.

33. Scrutinizer browser – a web browser, based upon the Adobe AIR toolkit and the WebKit browser, that offers a simulation of the human visual system. Using this simulation, you can get a better idea of how users interact with your site design.

What are some of your favorite free tools to make websites better?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9:00 am – 9:20 am

Seth Godin on how to get your ideas to spread:

Click here to view the embedded video.

9:30 am – 10:00 am

Avinash Kaushik on how to create a data driven culture:

Click here to view the embedded video.

10:00 am – 10:10 am

Mike Grehan on the future of Search.

Click here to view the embedded video.

10:11 am – 10:15 am

CommonCraft on social media in plain english.

Click here to view the embedded video.

10:15am – 10:30 am

Please take a 15 minute networking break. Find some great people on twitter or friend some fine people on Facebook. On twitter you can follow me @TheGrok or on FaceBook @Bryan Eisenberg.

10:30 am – 11:10 am

Doug Mack, Carrie Johnson, David Daniels on Web 2.0 and what it means for retail from Shop.org.

Click here to view this presentation.

11:10 am – 12:00pm

Mitch Joel & Carrie Johnson on Social Shopping: How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Customer Control

Click here to view this presentation.

12:00pm – 1:00pm

Enjoy your lunch break.

1:00pm – 1:20pm

Ze Frank on …

Click here to view the embedded video.

1:30pm – 1:45pm

Gary Vaynerchuk on building personal brand within the social media landscape

Click here to view the embedded video.

1:45pm – 2:00pm

Rand Fishkin on SEO for branding and blogging for higher rankings.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-SEO for Branding from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Blogging for Higher Rankings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

2:00pm – 2:05pm

Chris Anderson on Free! why $0.00 is the future of business.

Click here to view the embedded video.

2:05pm – 2:50pm

Bill Tancer on Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters.

Click here to view the embedded video.

2:50pm – 3:00pm

Chris Brogan on new media’s necessary evolution for progress. Rated R for language.

Click here to view the embedded video.

3:00pm – 3:30pm
Please take a break and speak to some real people

3:30pm – 3:35pm

Andy Beal on how to monitor your competitors.

Click here to view the embedded video.

3:35pm – 4:30pm

Adaptive Path staff on customer experience and how it integrates with marketing efforts.

Click here to view the embedded video.

4:35pm – 4:45pm

Chip Heath on making ideas stick.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There were several topics we wanted to include but didn’t make it in because either;  there we no presentations of it online, we weren’t thrilled with the content available, or Iweran out of time in trying to keep this virtual conference to one day.

Some of the important topics we wanted to cover:

1. the importance of good copywriting online
2. comparing search, display, ppc, cpm, cpa, etc.
3. creating efficiencies in your marketing
4. marketing in a recession
5. Integrated Brands & Interaction: connecting your online to your offline channel
6. preparing your organization for social media
7. why organization must adopt a continuous improvement process for their marketing efforts

What topics would you like to have seen?

P.S. We made the decision to leave any of our presentations/interviews out of the agenda to eliminate any bias, but if you want to watch some of our presentations, here you go:

1. How to get your organization to start testing

2. How to use personas to increase sales

Click here to view the embedded video.

3. Using Persuasion Architecture to improve your online results

How much are you investing in analytics? My friend Mel Carson is asking on the Microsoft AdCenter Analytics blog.

In the UK last week Brand Republic reported that UK spend on search engine marketing would reach £2.75bn this year.

However, just a tiny fraction of that cash – £330m – was spent on the art of SEO or search engine optimisation. The lion’s share of web site owner’s budget went on paid search solutions like Google AdWords or Microsoft adCenter.

SEO is an essential and vital route to improving usability and search engine visibility of web sites. So with what appears to be a disproportionate amount of  time and money being allocated to this fine discipline, it made me wonder how much was being invested in web analytics.

When I say investment, I mean investment in people. Although many web analytics tools cost money to run, some are now free but you still need people to make sense of the data they provide.

Mel makes some great points and there are many reasons resources are not allocated to website optimization. In website optimization I am including search engine optimization, content optimization, making changes to the experience and testing.

Some of the issues are:

• Advertising is sexy and fixing websites in not.
• They haven’t yet bought in to how important good rankings are.
• They haven’t yet bought in to how important converting those visitors is.
• Web Analytics is viewed as a shared resource.
• There aren’t enough analysts around to interpret the data collected.
• Teams haven’t been set up to make changes based on the data received from whatever analysis exists .
• Budgets for making changes are considered capital expenses not operational expenses (Thanks @timlb).
• Companies have not realized the leveraged ROI that continuous optimization provides.
• Many corporate cultures prefer to throw money at a problem than do the hard work it takes to make improvements. Feel free to throw money my way
• The fact that many of the web analytics tools are free.  Managers can check off a little box on their list saying they do web analytics.

These are just some of the reasons. What are some of the other reasons? Please comment below.

It was the CEO of Omniture, Josh James, in January of 2005 who said “Web analytics can pay for itself with a single business improvement — so the real question is how quickly can companies make data-driven decisions? This willingness to change will ultimately dictate time to ROI.”

That is the point I will be addressing this week at New York University to the new students entering the Master of Science in Integrated Marketing. How quickly companies and make and act on data-driven decisions will be the main competitive edge over the next 10 years. Should it really take 11 months to respond to a YouTube video by one of your brand advocates?

Amazon has this culture of optimization.  If Borders or even Barnes and Nobles ever truly want to compete then they need to adopt it too. They need to get quick at making data-driven decisions and have a  process for continuous optimization.

What are you doing to change the speed of optimization and communication in your company? I’d love to chat with you about it.

Success on the web involves adopting a culture of continuous improvement. Which means plan (but remember good enough really is good enough), measure (get good at free then invest in more robust tools and analysis) and most importantly improve (transform your thinking from always being right to always be testing).

Let’s try selling optimization as the need for speed.  Moving fast is sexy and very profitable.

Our good friends at Think Eyetracking recently completed an eyetracking study and compared it with an eyetracking study they did in 2005 for people looking at a Google search results page.

In this is a case a picture is worth a thousand words:

As seen in the heatmap above, fixations are studded around the top 5 results and the majority of clicks are upon the top 3 results (discounting the sponsored link). The sponsored link was actually not well attended to due to the fact that searchers are now familiar with advertiser placement within Google. The 2008 heatmap supports the recent trend observed by Cornell University (Their study found that the top 3 Google results get 79% of all clicks) and by AOL (Findings were that 63% of clicks were concentrated upon the top three search results).

What do you do when you don’t find your results right away? The same as 86% of the respondents who replied that they would modify the search terms or refine the search by category.

What do you think will change over the next 3 years in searcher behavior?

One thing is for certain you better still rank at the top and then be sure you can covert them to sales, leads, etc.

If you’re highly optimized website ranked at or near the top for your primary key words/phrases, would you be interested in advertising (via PPC) on those same keywords?

Sounds like a crazy question, right? I mean why would you bother paying for a click that would have come to you anyway?

Well, according to this Microsoft adCenter follow up blog post to the SES San Jose conference, showing up in both organic AND paid results can highten your prospect’s intent to buy your product. In other words, the two “channels” can work together to provide better results than either alone. In fact, you can increase brand association by 16% if the top search ad and the top organic listing are from the same brand.

What do you think? Would you be willing to buy the PPC cow if you were already drinking the free milk of organic search results?

Immediately after the session, Brett (who wrote the foreword for Always Be Testing) joined me while Google gave away 500 copies of the book and we signed them for everyone who waited on line (it took over an hour). Thank you to everyone who had the patience to wait. The experience was quite surreal.

There is no question that optimization is top of mind today. There were several sessions on landing page optimization and web analytics.

Google also announced some changes to Google Website Optimizer at the conference. You can hear a bit about those changes and also a bit about my good friend Avinash’s presentation by watching the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I also had the opportunity to spend time with Tom Leung, Product Manager for Google Website Optimizer and my co-host for our Always Be Testing Webinar series at the Google campus. We spent some time getting ready for our next webinar on August 27th. Have you registered for it yet?

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

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

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

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

These are some of the questions I discussed with Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO of Enquiro Research.

More and more studies are showing there are differences in how men and women use websites.   Is there a difference in how they use search as well?   Let’s find out.

Take a listen.

Click here to listen to Holly’s interview with Gord Hotchkiss

To download Holly’s interview with Gord Hotchkiss the MP3 to listen to on your ipod click here.

However, my big concern came when I searched for broader terms like “conversion rate,” “web analytics,” “Search Engine Marketing” and then did searches for things like “airlines” and “marketing blogs.”

What was apparent in every one of those searches was that Cuil was using images from another website next to a listing for one of the competitor’s websites. For example, on the “conversion rate” search, the conversion rate squirrel stood next to Widemile. In the “search engine marketing” search, an image for search-optimization.com was next to our friend Gord Hotchkiss Enquiro’s listing.

The only “marketing blog” out there seems to belong to my friend Lee Odden as his Online Marketing blog dominated the results. Lee your blog is good, but there are many others that are also worthy. Finally, searching for “airlines” brought me competitors’ planes next to American and Delta Airlines results.

If Cuil is not going to bring back images that are directly tied to brands in their blended search, I believe they will have negative word of mouth for a while. It also probably won’t help to attract advertisers if that is their intention.

Are you seeing some of the same things happening in your initial searches on Cuil?