Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg — Professional Speakers, Best Selling Authors, Online Marketing Pioneers

Is Your Traffic Mix Efficient?

May 8, 2012

People tend to break down their websites’ traffic mix by the channel that brought the visitors. Analyzing traffic mix is a great way to develop a better sense of who your visitor is and how your marketing efforts are performing. However, that only tells your marketing story from your traffic generation effort but it doesn’t [...]

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Webinar: Best Practices for Effective Website Testing & Optimization

May 1, 2012

Join Carlos Del Rio, Director of Conversion Analysis & Digital Strategy at Unbounce, and Monetate’s Adam Figueira and I, who will present case studies from the different tools that I reviewed in my Website Testing & Optimization Buyer’s Guide for the Enterprise and help explain the difference between self-service and full-service website testing and optimization. [...]

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Online Advertising in the Age of Agility

April 20, 2012

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is not at all like a Ronco Grill! If you just set it and forget it you can also kiss your money goodbye. We have been telling clients this for the last several years. So I was fascinated by the research my friend Larry Kim, founder of WordStream, shared with me from [...]

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Designing Effective Pricing Tables

April 6, 2012

There are way too many companies that have set up pricing tables with “packages” for their products without a solid understanding of the psychology behind package design. One of the first e-commerce companies to do this well was Dell. Nevertheless, while often imitated, many companies that offer software or services and offer it in different [...]

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Website Testing & Targeting RFP: Questions To Ask Vendors

April 2, 2012

If you’re in the market for a website testing and optimization tool, hopefully you’re not among the unfortunate few whose corporate rules and regulations (or BPUs – business prevention units) require the creation of a Request for Proposal (RFP). But even if you are, your frustration should be directed more toward the lack of insights [...]

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Oh Goody, It’s Free

March 23, 2012

On my way to writing about pricing tables, Jeffrey (my brother and business partner) shared with a client his thoughts on the use of “free.” I insisted that before discussing pricing in this column he should help me cover the phenomenon of free. After all, shouldn’t we discuss price before we discuss value? There is [...]

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21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites – The Webinar 1/7/10 12pm EST

January 4, 2010

Can you spare an hour this week for what took me the past decade to put together? This Thursday, January 7, 12pm EST, courtesy of my friends at MarketMotive, you can join me for this free workshop on the 21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites. The average conversion rate for a website is around 3%, [...]

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Is 2010 the Year of Conversion Rate Optimization?

January 15, 2010

This is not very digital, but even a stopped clock is correct two times a day. My first ClickZ column, “Marketing is NOT Sales” was written exactly nine years ago today I wrote this column. Soon after the dot-com crash, I wrote: “For all that’s being written about various marketing strategies, success in e-business, as [...]

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Free Conversion Rate Consulting

January 27, 2010

Yes, you read it right. I have the opportunity to offer 2 or 3 websites the opportunity to increase your conversion rate. A couple of weeks ago, I started teaching a Certification course in Conversion Rate and Landing Page Optimization course. It has been going great as one of my students just sent me this [...]

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The Ultimate Conversion Optimization Reading List

January 29, 2010

If 2010 is the year of conversion rate optimization, then people are going to have to move beyond today’s simplistic tactical application (pushed mainly by tool vendors anxious to sell technology fixes) of basic landing page optimization and testing, to the strategic worldview that conversion optimization should play in an organization. Good conversion optimization should focus [...]

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What Your Form Design Reveals About You

February 9, 2010

There is no question that improving the forms on your website can improve your conversion rate. In fact, Gavin Doolan, of the Google analytics team, did a wonderful job explaining the basics concepts needed to improve form conversion rates. However, what do the forms that exist in the “wild” tell your visitors about you? Does [...]

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The Biggest Lie of Pay-Per-Click Marketing

August 10, 2010

[standing up] My name is Bryan and I am a screenshot addict. When I fall off the wagon, it happens every so often, I pick a keyphrase and start clicking through PPC ads and their landing pages taking screenshots of the entire experience. It’s hard to imagine how often the experience from keyword to ad [...]

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The Missing Google Analytics Manual

February 25, 2010

Google has done a fabulous job putting together learning materials for their Google Analytics IQ Lessons – where you can follow the lessons in order to pass their GA IQ individual certification test. But the following will help you get the most out of your Google Analytics with this collection of links to implement, configure and [...]

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Get Over The Tool

February 26, 2010

Anyone who has read my “69 Free or Low Cost Tools to Improve Your Website” post knows that I love tools. This past week I was excited to see a new list of tools with the just published “Which Multivariate?” a multivariate testing tool comparison guide. I’m happy they beat me to the punch in [...]

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Bad Decisions Make Good Stories

March 9, 2010

We’ve all made bad decisions. Some personal, some professional. Intelligent people look to find lessons from these mistakes. What is your best “bad decision story” and what did you learn from it? Please share if you think others would benefit.

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Win a MarketMotive Certification Scholarship

March 19, 2010

MarketMotive, which offers internet marketing courses online is allowing each of the faculty to give away one scholarship to it’s certification courses valued at $3500 for the upcoming April 15th semester. Certification courses include SEO, PPC, Conversion Optimization, Social Media, Online PR, Internet Marketing Fundamentals, and Web Analytics. Our faculty believe in giving back to [...]

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Anatomy of a Landing Page: Design Elements Exposed

March 26, 2010

Landing pages have become an important part of the marketer’s toolbox. To create effective landing pages, you should understand the anatomy of a landing page and it should be part of your landing page and optimization framework. After optimizing thousands of landing pages over the years, I want to offer this framework for understanding the 10 [...]

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Will You Be the Next Person to Increase Conversions by 100%?

April 7, 2010

I couldn’t be prouder of my MarketMotive conversion certification students. For example, I had one of my students do a fabulous job critiquing websites at SES New York during a conversion clinic session and many of my students have been doing amazing work increasing conversion rates on their own sites and on several of the [...]

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SEM Intent & Landing Page Conversions

April 12, 2010

If you knew the true intent of a search inquiry (query) and you could respond to that intent perfectly then you’d convert most of the time. For more than a decade Bryan, John and I have been working with clients to determine all the different buying modalities (read “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?“) and [...]

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5 Dimensions of Landing Page Element Success

April 9, 2010

Last time, I shared with you the 10 landing page elements, such as the call to action, that make up the anatomy of a landing page. Once you have identified your elements, there are five dimensions to evaluate if the elements will work at converting your visitors. The five dimensions are: Relevance Quality Location Proximity Prominence [...]

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MarketMotive Conversion Scholarship Winner

April 14, 2010

A few weeks ago MarketMotive, the rest of the faculty and I announced a contest to award a scholarship for a MarketMotive certification training. We received several fantastic submissions and it was very difficult to choose a winner. However, Evan Hinkle, “a 20-year-old, high-functioning individual diagnosed on the spectrum of autism” stood out for his [...]

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The Google AdWords Drama

April 20, 2010

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you might even kiss your money good bye. Google AdWords is one of the most remarkable advertising vehicles in the history of marketing. No matter how simple 95 characters seems to be, there is no denying the complexity of executing well. Of course, the fact that not all the rules or [...]

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7 Form Factors to Increase Conversions

April 23, 2010

My last two columns focused on evaluating the five dimensions that make the 10 design elements of the anatomy of a landing page convert better. A prominent feature found on many landing pages is a form to complete, or at the end of a retail landing experience, forms required to complete a check-out. I haven’t written about designing [...]

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Testing Like an Olympian: An Interview With Janis Lanka, Elastic Path

April 27, 2010

Janis Lanka (@janislanka, manages front-end development for Elastic Path Software and was responsible for testing on the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store. 1. What were the precipitating events that caused your company to start testing? 1) We knew there were areas of the site that could use optimization: our homepage could be less busy; our product details page could [...]

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Free Conversion Rate Consulting 2

April 28, 2010

In January, I was able to offer a couple of websites free conversion optimization consulting from my MarketMotive certification students. Those students had some terrific successes with our volunteer websites. For example, one retailer increased their conversion rate by 132% and one lead generation website increased their conversion rate by 111%. I need more volunteer websites to work [...]

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Want More Actions? Leverage the Point of Action

May 7, 2010

Two weeks of West Coast jet lag while keynoting three conferences means a lot of parties. At a reception, a guy named Peter told me that he read my book “Call to Action” a few years ago and that he used it as the basis to redo his company’s shopping cart. Peter more than doubled [...]

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Measuring Social Media: An Interview with Jim Sterne & Avinash Kaushik

May 11, 2010

Just last week, I had the pleasure of keynoting the fabulous eMetrics Conference in San Jose. While there I had a chance to sit down with my good friends Jim Sterne and Avinash Kaushik to discuss Jim’s latest book Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment. If you are doing anything in [...]

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7 Ways to Increase and Retain Newsletter Subscribers

May 23, 2010

Newsletters continue to serve as an effective way for businesses, from retailers to B2B services, to stay in touch with their customers. In my last column, I shared the simple but powerful technique of using point-of-action assurances to convert more visitors into taking the actions you want them to take – such as using the [...]

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The Secret Behind Successful PPC Advertising

June 4, 2010

When we audit clients’ PPC (define) accounts, we look at their work from two aspects: the technical and the creative. While a 95-character ad shouldn’t be so challenging, common flaws appear in almost every account. Let’s start out by examining the creative aspect. Creating the PPC Searcher’s Journey For visitors to convert, the five steps [...]

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Why I Won’t Buy From You!

June 18, 2010

Actually the answer is pretty simple. You haven’t given me sufficient reason to choose you over your competitors. Today’s customer has more choice, more knowledge, and even tabbed browsing to evaluate you and distinguish you from all of your competitors. In the few seconds they’ll invest in your website, if they can’t decide why you [...]

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PPC Optimization: The Road to Recovery Workshop

June 23, 2010

In a couple of weeks, I will be on the road again to help people optimize their Pay Per Click marketing efforts. From July 7-9th, I’ll be in Boston, Philadelphia and New York City for the Online Marketing Summit tour. Here is a description of the PPC Optimization workshop I’ll be doing: Over $10 Billion [...]

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An Intervention for a PPC Addict

July 2, 2010

In my previous life, I was a social worker who helped mentally ill and chemically addicted adults on their road to recovery. I see many of the same symptoms of addictive behavior in too many pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers today. After all, there’s something terribly seductive about the simplicity of creating a PPC (define) ad; within [...]

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Simplicity: Google’s Secret Pay-Per-Click Tax

July 16, 2010

We want it simple! Given a choice, human beings choose simple over complicated virtually every time. Searching with Google is simple. You type in a few words and Google delivers the most relevant results. So, what could be simpler than Google pay-per-click advertisements? People search for stuff, you craft a 95-character advertisement with a URL [...]

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Free Conversion Rate Consulting – Want Some?

July 27, 2010

I couldn’t be prouder of my MarketMotive conversion certification students. Two semesters ago, one of those volunteer sites, a mobile application provider, increased their conversion rate by over 100% based on the recommendations of one of my students and today I was thrilled to hear about one of our volunteer websites increasing conversion rates by over [...]

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#1 Secret of 21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites

August 6, 2010

Want to know the first secret I share from my 21 Secrets to Top Converting Websites presentation? It’s so simple, so obvious, but yet so many people forget to use it. Do you? Watch the video: Want to know the rest of the 21 Secrets? You can find them out on August 17th in San [...]

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Google, User Experience & Thinking Beyond Conversion

August 25, 2010

Google is a money making machine; that is why it has tremendous influence in the online ecology. Google has a lot to teach the world about relevance, credibility, value & user experience. However, Google isn’t a training company; it derives more than 90% of its revenues from advertising. It’s fascinating that Google makes most of [...]

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Digital Sales in a Mobile App World

September 12, 2010

This cartoon from The Oatmeal blog really summarizes people’s behavior about buying expensive mobile devices but balking at paying $0.99 for an application. Human beings involved in a marketplace are both unpredictably predictable and predictably irrational, which leaves plenty of room for intelligent optimization efforts. Yet much of the research about applications shows people love [...]

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The Future Shopper

September 24, 2010

There is hardly anyone who would argue over the impact that search, social, and mobile technologies have had on the customer buying process over the last five years. However, while many companies worry about keeping ahead of their competition, they actually have a much bigger issue – keeping pace with their customers. Indulge me while [...]

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How to Guarantee Holiday Sales

October 26, 2010

Please share if you think others would benefit.

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A Quick & Cheap Way To Fix Blind Spots in Your PPC Efforts

November 12, 2010

Yesterday, Google announced that all advertisers now have access to product ads. This presents a great opportunity for advertisers. The user tests I have been involved in recently show that searchers eyes are certainly drawn to those ads before they are drawn to the standard blue links. This is just one more recent change Google [...]

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99 Free (and Low Cost) Tools to Improve Your Website

November 22, 2010

1. MobiReady More and more visitors are arriving to websites using mobile devices today. Is your website ready for it? Evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards. 2. Treepodia Other than mobile, video has been the other big demand from customers. Treepodia alows you to submit your XML product catalog feed to them and [...]

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3 Steps to Better Prioritization and Faster Execution

December 3, 2010

Many organizations are challenged by their customers’ increasing velocity of change. They suffer from anemic corporate metabolism. My hope for the new year is that businesses resolve to improve their rate of change and adaptation. Corporate metabolism is the term I use to describe the speed at which organizations can make decisions, adapt, and evolve. While [...]

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Does Your Search Strategy Depend On Customers’ Memory?

December 17, 2010

Men dread these moments: my wife’s errand was to go to the drugstore and pick up…diapers. My little guy was on his last one. I was ready to get him his Pampers when I was stymied by the store selection. The sale was nearly lost! As I stood looking at the row of diapers, all [...]

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Free Conversion Rate Consulting for You?

January 12, 2011

In the past, I was able to offer a couple of websites free conversion optimization consulting from my MarketMotive certification students. Those students had some terrific successes with our volunteer websites. For example, one retailer increased their conversion rate by 132% and one lead generation website increased their conversion rate by 111%. I need more volunteer websites to [...]

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How Small Online Businesses Can Compete with Larger Businesses

January 12, 2011

Dr. Ralph Wilson from Web Marketing Today interviewed me at Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in Chicago: Please share if you think others would benefit.

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How to Prove That Your Designer Is Costing You Money {4:00 video}

January 14, 2011

Often times, marketers approach me to tell me they think something is wrong with their page but they aren’t sure how to convince their designer or management that their are any issues. In this four-minute video, I share a simple technique and how to use attention mapping software like Feng-GUI.com to prove to your designer [...]

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The Future of Publishing and Advertising

January 28, 2011

No one knows exactly when the first advertisement was published on a printing press. We do know: In 1609, a British newspaper published an ad for migration opportunities to America. For hundreds of years, ads and print went hand and hand. Then came the Internet. AT&T was the first to pay HotWired to display the [...]

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How Many “Potential Buyers” Are You Driving To Your Website?

February 7, 2011

Just do It! Stop thinking of your traffic in terms of number of visits or visitors. That metric sucks! All that matters is potential buyers and actual buyers. Everything else just inflates egos. So instead of looking at your traffic by what marketing efforts are bring the most amount of visitors and converting best, look at your [...]

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Optimizing the Conversion Rate Optimization Process

February 11, 2011

Confused about conversion optimization? You should be with all the experts sharing their opinions. After all, everyone is entitled to their own spin on the measure, test, analyze, and repeat optimization cycle. When Jeffrey Eisenberg, my brother and business partner, recently spoke at a WAA conference, he said that you should be able to predict [...]

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The 5 Rs of Search Engine Marketing

February 15, 2011

We came up with 5Rs of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to demystify the process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This 7 1/2 minute video interview with Dr. Ralph Wilson from Web Marketing Today covers how content on your site must be (1) Relevant, (2) build your Reputation, (3) Remarkable, (4) Readable, and (5) of sufficient [...]

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Marketing Keynote: The Future Shopper

February 16, 2011

The Future Shopper: How Offline is the New Online Nobody argues about if search, social, and mobile technologies impacted customers’ minds and buying behavior over the last five years. Today companies worry about keeping ahead of their competition; while the truly critical issue is keeping pace with their customers. Technological and social advances are forcing [...]

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The 2 Minute Customer

February 23, 2011

The seconds pass by in your visitor’s mind as they arrive to your website. If they don’t bounce immediately because of poorly targeted marketing efforts and sucky landing pages, you’ll still be lucky if they’ll stick around for the next 120 seconds. It’s like every visitor to your website has a timer in her head [...]

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Content Marketing: Where’s The Value?

April 13, 2011

After the first dot-com bust, “content is king” was the rallying cry of any competent Web worker. Back then this revelation was novel online. Soon after, this mantra became a cliché. As it often goes with clichés, they start out as something true and meaningful. Eventually, the words become common, outlive their value, and are [...]

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Play the Online Marketing Game Like “Charlie Hustle”

March 1, 2011

With Major League Baseball’s spring training under full force, it inspires me to look at how we approach our “online marketing game.” We can learn a lot about winning “conversions” from how the game is played. Most baseball people will tell you that you can win the game with the “long” ball or with the [...]

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10 Steps to Optimizing Copy and Content

February 25, 2011

If we could spend only a few minutes working together to optimize your website, we’d still get results starting with a process. When evaluating and improving any type of content or copy, there is a quick 10-step process you can use. 1. Headlines. Why are headlines first? They are the critical attention-getters that allow your [...]

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5 Steps to Increase “Qualified” Leads From Your Website

March 7, 2011

When you ask salespeople about their biggest gripe about marketing, they complain about not enough qualified leads. You can often tell that this is an issue just by looking at a company’s lead forms. What you’ll typically see is that the the forms ask for too much information and that can hinder conversions from visitor to [...]

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12 Insider Techniques to Increase White Paper Leads

March 11, 2011

Are you selling your white papers short with poor merchandising? Many sites offering “free” white papers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information utterly fail to merchandise their downloads. Yet if your website doesn’t treat your white paper as containing valuable information, your visitors won’t either. The problem starts by thinking of [...]

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A Marketing Optimization Fitness Plan

March 25, 2011

Is your corporate metabolism a bit sluggish? Are you dragged down by the weight of meeting-itis? Do you need more energy and resources to respond to the ever-increasing demands of your customers? Well I wish I could tell you about the next magical black box, with the persuasive infomercial that promises you miraculous gains without any [...]

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A Tale of Two Publishers: And What Every Business Needs to Know

April 8, 2011

It is the best of times and the worst of times for some businesses. Many look at the world and see the opportunities of being data rich, customer centric, and nimble while others imagine they can bring their old school thinking to the new media, always-on connected customer. They sit cross-fingered hoping that putting lipstick [...]

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Privacy or Convenience: Who Wins?

April 22, 2011

“We keep giving up privacy for the sake of convenience,” was a buzz-worthy quote from my Future Shopper keynote presentation at Gulltaggen 2011 in Oslo last week. Some were uncomfortable about approaching a “Minority Report”-like state where ads are contextually-targeted advertising based on location, tastes, and past history. I quoted former Google CEO Eric Schmidt from his [...]

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FaceBook Advertising – Might it Be Broken?

April 27, 2011

No question FaceBook advertising bears little resemblance to Search Advertising. However, we are starting to see some great success stories of companies success with FaceBook advertising. Nevertheless, FaceBook’s advertising model may be seriously flawed. If you ever accessed Facebook using one of their mobile applications; perhaps you noticed something missing. There are no ads. Most [...]

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We Convert Or Else: Are We Still Struggling to Be Creative?

May 9, 2011

During March’s Conversion Conference final keynote “Confessions of a Conversion Rate Optimizer” I shared this 7 minute video from advertising legend David Oglivy of a impassioned speech “We Sell or Else” he gave to a group of direct marketers in the 1960s. He was a huge student of Claude Hopkins “Scientific Advertising” first published in 1923 and [...]

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Betting on Future Success

May 17, 2011

Let’s play a little game of what if… You have the choice in building your organization; you can: A. Recruit and hire some of the world’s best analytics, customer insight, marketing and testing team members. B. Recruit average team members but provide them with superb technology and processes. Many industry pundits would agree (including myself) [...]

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Testing – What’s the Big Idea?

May 20, 2011

Is yours the typical company launching 2-5 tests a month, struggling to eke out more from your marketing optimization program, and wasting critical marketing resources of your team and website traffic? That’s the result of not focusing in on the Big Idea! How much should you be testing? A mid-size company can easily handle 30-50 [...]

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Landing Page Testing: Testing for Impact Not Variations

June 3, 2011

Last column I shared the following test, which I found “in the wild” and asked readers to identify the variables. Hoping that instead of testing all the variables you could narrow it down to the most meaningful variables so that you minimize the time and resources needed to complete the test. Depending on how [...]

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Marketing & Conversion Optimization Training Online

June 10, 2011

What is it like to get a Master’s Certification in Conversion Optimization? Someone from Spain asked me what it was like to take my MarketMotive Marketing & Conversion Optimization master certification course. I put him in touch with a recent graduate who was also from Spain. It’s not the first time I’ve been asked, so [...]

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The Conversion Trinity: The 3 Step Magic Formula to Increase Click Throughs & Conversions

June 17, 2011

Being able to share a great success you have is a nice thing, but it is even better when you have the opportunity to share your students’ successes. Over the last couple of years I have seen my students shine writing for publications such as ClickZ, speaking at conferences, generating and publishing interesting research about personas, and [...]

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Everything You Wanted to Know About Us…

July 1, 2011

It’s often the most neglected page on your website; if you even have this page. However, if you do, it is very likely among the most visited pages. I may be dating myself but it is the Rodney Dangerfield of web pages. It gets no respect. Do you have an “about us” page? Is it performing at [...]

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W2M: Website to Mobile – A Multi-Channel Retail Opportunity

July 5, 2011

I was recently discussing online retail with a colleague and the challenge online retailers face in proving their value to their traditional brick-and-mortar counterparts. It made me wonder why no ecommerce platform (that I know of) has added the ability to send a shopping cart to someone’s mobile phone. Imagine you are on the Nordstrom website and [...]

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How Your Website Loses 7% of Potential Conversions

July 29, 2011

Download speed matters. And it is time to get serious about it. A one-second delay could result in 7 percent fewer conversions, 11 percent fewer page views, or even a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction. Over the last 15 years, I’ve told that to clients and it’s been confirmed by third-party research. So if [...]

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Conversion Industry Wins, Conferences, Catching Up and All That Jazz

August 5, 2011

Conversion and testing are what Jeffrey and I have predicted would be sexy since 1998. Luckily, even a broken clock is right two times a day and the recent news around companies we’re invested in: BoostCTR.com, Tagman.com and Monetate.com may finally prove us right (see below). We’re also encouraged by the amount of keynote presentations [...]

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Accidental Marketing: Have We Changed in the Last Decade?

August 9, 2011

I originally published Accidental Marketing on ClickZ September 10th, 2001. How much in our world has changed in the last decade? Has your organization changed to make sure they aren’t doing any accidental marketing? What are the obstacles holding organizational change back? Here is the article as it appeared when I first wrote it: —————————————– [...]

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5 Reasons Your Competitors May Be Kicking Your B&^(

August 10, 2011

There are a finite number of ways to stand out and capture significant market share in any marketing category. You can be lowest price driven (a dangerous path), operationally excellent, channel dominant, or focused on customer intimacy. Many companies excel at two or three but it is nearly impossible to excel at all of them. [...]

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Data Rich, Optimization Poor

August 12, 2011

Building an optimization culture is hard and it seems that it might be getting harder. My friend Avinash Kaushik, the analytics evangelist at Google, recently shared an important stat and his observation on Google+: Only 22% of companies have a strategy that ties data collection and analysis to business objectives. Down from 25% last year. [...]

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Optimization Thursday is coming to Dallas 9/8/11

August 29, 2011

Optimization Thursday is a fun, educational, inspirational event and a must for all people interested in optimizing digital experiences. It’s educational networking in a format that provides a monthly forum for people to talk, to debate and to discuss various conversion optimization challenges over beverages and appetizers while networking with other professionals interested in online [...]

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Conversions: Whose Job Is It Anyway?

September 9, 2011

I just presented the keynote at the European Conversion Summit in Frankfurt, Germany. It was the best attended conversion-oriented conference I’ve attended to date. In a discussion with the conference organizer, André Morys, about the number and backgrounds of the people attending, André apologized that Germany was at least two years behind the United States. [...]

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Shouldn’t Analysts be Able to Explain the Narrative?

September 16, 2011

Below is an interview with a Danish reporter asking me for some thoughts about e-commerce. Don’t worry, once you get past the Danish the interview is in English. By the way, I’ll be presenting the keynote at the Danish Distance Selling and E-business Association (FDIH) later this month, so if you attend please come over [...]

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21 Secrets of Top Converting B2B Websites

September 20, 2011

Enjoy this presentation by Jeffrey Eisenberg which was presented at Dreamforce 2011 in San Francisco: Please share if you think others would benefit.

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99 Excuses For Your Digital Marketing

September 23, 2011

Let’s get right to that list…. 1. Online Marketing budgets aren’t allocated to enable you do to the job right. 2. Because of #1, I am sure you could list 98+ more reasons! Too often the C-Suite has not figured out that your digital marketing (I include web, email, mobile & social here) activity is [...]

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Confessions of an Online Tool Junkie

September 26, 2011

As many of my readers know, I have been a tool junkie for a long time. Every year for the past several years I have shared my favorite free and low cost tools to improve your website and online marketing efforts. Last year I published a list of 99 tools and this year I was [...]

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Social Conversions: The Launch Story of BO.LT

October 7, 2011

Nobody in this industry has been in the conversion rate optimization game as long as my brother Jeffrey and I have. Yet, brothers Matthew and Jamie Roche are responsible for many organizations beginning to test. They founded Offermatica (which is today’s Adobe Test & Target). So when the Roche brothers decided that they were ready [...]

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Think Differently – 10 lessons learned from Steve Jobs & Apple

October 10, 2011

There was a surprise last minute addition to the agenda at my last presentation. I keynoted in Oslo for the SEM Konferansen on September 22nd and then was offered an opportunity to present something brand new (lucky I was working on something brand new) to a small group on the last day of the conference. Not [...]

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Does Apple Need a Reminder About Reminders?

October 13, 2011

My iOS5 update is complete. Reminders could become my favorite app. I bet I’m not alone. Who doesn’t need a location aware reminder? So what’s up Apple? As far as I can tell I can only see the reminders in iCal, while I’m on my Mac, but I can’t create or edit reminders. Bryan and [...]

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Need Your Help: Do You Use a Website Testing Tool?

October 19, 2011

I am in the process of putting together a buyer’s guide for a/b testing tools and service providers. I am looking to get additional feedback beyond my experience with the tools and the experiences of my close friends and clients. Would you please take 2 minutes to complete the following survey? Loading… Please share if [...]

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What Makes People Buy? 20 Reasons Why.

October 21, 2011

Our mentor, Roy Williams, described shoppers as operating in either one of two modes: transactional or relational, a few years ago. At that time some of us loafed around virtually, exchanging emails with friends, trying to complete a list of reasons that motivate people to buy things. (Thank you, Tom G. & Brett F.) More [...]

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ROTS: Return on Time Spent

November 4, 2011

Marketer’s are always losing battles to time. Time is all you need to get everything done and to be most effective marketer possible. Marketing operations are more complex than ever before and the demands on our resources are constantly increasing. We need to identify solutions that help us get the most bang for the buck; [...]

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Leadership For The Marketing Optimization Team

November 18, 2011

I rarely get new questions I haven’t written about before in this column – as I approach my 11th year as a ClickZ columnist. Yet, at SES Chicago this week, one of the attendees asked me how you go about building out a marketing optimization team. What kind of people do you need? What kind [...]

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The CEO’s Accountability for Conversion Rates

December 2, 2011

Increasing sales conversion rates offers a greater ROI than what you can get from optimizing your traffic; either from paid or earned media. The math is simple – even if many never do the calculations. Companies with higher conversion rates almost always have better marketing efficiency ratios (net contribution/marketing expenses.) The upside is that these [...]

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How to Go From Suck to Unsuck

December 16, 2011

Your website sucks! Your mobile experience sucks! Your competitor’s website and mobile experience suck too! Guess what? My site sucks too! As is often the case when I speak, I tell the audience that their website is like a leaky old bucket with traffic falling out the holes. I let them know we all know their website [...]

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Who Contributed the Most to Google’s Earnings in 2011?

January 23, 2012

© WordStream, a Pay Per Click and SEM software tools vendor. Please share if you think others would benefit.

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Geo-Personalization: Your Opportunity

January 27, 2012

It was in the mid-1990s when I had my first taste of actionable web analytics. I was working for a telecommunications company that offered a Voice over IP solution (VoIP) and I was part of the team that tracked banner placements on websites like Excite, Yahoo, and AltaVista. I will never forget the cartoonish banner [...]

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Online Form Optimization: 3 Simple Form Problems to Fix

February 10, 2012

I’ve spent almost 15 years of my life helping companies to get their visitors to fill out and submit forms online. Forms to request information, to attend events, to sign up for a service, to complete an order, all sorts of forms. Web forms are a transaction. You need to look at them as an [...]

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The Product Page 2012: 7 Must-Test Elements

February 24, 2012

All retailers have product pages. Some product pages are good in that they help you sell. Some product pages are neutral in that they don’t detract from making a sale. Some product pages – well, they hurt your sales. Is your product page earning it’s keep? Is it attracting and engaging qualified buyers? Does it [...]

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Free! – The Website Testing & Optimization Buyer’s Guide for the Enterprise

February 29, 2012

I’m sure you will find this shocking; occasionally I get frustrated with the corporate decision making processes. A couple of months ago the CEO of an Internet Retailer Top 100 website asked me for my opinion about which testing and targeting tool his team should use. I told him what I recommended based on what [...]

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Effective Selling From Your Non-E-Commerce Product Page

March 12, 2012

In my last column, I told you about seven must-test elements on your e-commerce product pages. I left you with less tangible products and services with a promise I’d follow up in this column. So, if you sell a product or service through untraditional e-commerce or software, or even software-as-a-service as your product, then how [...]

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