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. Baloney! I told him I couldn’t agree and that I was very impressed with the number and quality of people in attendance.

Nevertheless, I told André the biggest obstacles his conference and his company face when focusing on conversion. How many people in the room actually have “conversion” in their title? For search conferences, you have directors and managers of search; PPC managers. At social media conferences, you have those whose titles include social media or community. At web analytics conferences, you have marketing analysts.

But who owns “conversions” in your organization?

Do a search on Indeed.com for a job listing with:

“search” – 165,252
“search engine”- 11,467
“SEO” – 7,966
“SEM” – 4,592
“PPC” – 1,996
“social media” – 29,170
“online community manager” – 17,401
“web analytics” – 16,691
“conversion optimization” – 2,348
“landing page optimization” – 907
“multivariate testing” – 885

E-commerce managers may be responsible for revenue; merchandisers for the product selection and presentation; user experience and development teams for the experience; and analytics for measurement, but it’s unclear who owns the crucial multi-disciplinary function of conversion.

I have seen a handful of companies with individuals who have conversion in their title but they are quite rare. In those companies that do, their conversion people have access to tools and resources that demonstrate a very different corporate metabolism than those that don’t have them. These companies are also passionate about being customer focused and data driven, testing continuously, understanding lifetime value, and are quick to act. Most companies aren’t structured to make conversions a core responsibility. They may assign “conversions” to the PPC manager or even the director of analytics, but they only look at it from their narrow vertical and they aren’t given the resources needed to gather the insights, to create and modify landing pages, and to set up personalization and go beyond landing pages into complex testing of customer paths.

An Econsultancy study found that 48 percent of companies do not think they have direct control over conversion. In fact, this is why most companies spend about $92 to drive visitor traffic but less than $1 to convert them.

When my brother Jeffrey and I first began evangelizing for conversion optimization in the late 1990s, most companies had dreams of the “new economy” and accompanying fantasies of “eyeballs” being the most important metric; we naively saw this as a C-suite responsibility. Today, most organizations have many people responsible for driving traffic but virtually no one responsible for converting that traffic into revenue. In the offline world’s equivalent, there is an executive responsible for sales (conversions) and an executive responsible for marketing, but online marketers have no counterpart.

We do know how and why this responsibility has escaped the C-suite’s notice – they don’t understand that they can control conversion. How else can you explain the average e-commerce conversion rate at 3 percent while market leaders consistently convert 15 percent and upwards?

The C-suite doesn’t know how to get their organizations there, and there aren’t really a lot of people out there with the skills and experience to train departments to become masters of the various disciples required of conversion optimization. Most are afraid to raise their hands and ask the right questions out of fear of demonstrating ignorance. It isn’t all their fault.

Online success and the meteoric growth rate the online channel has enjoyed masked the need to “grok” conversion. But as today’s paid traffic experiences cost inflation and as traffic continues to fragment with the growth of social media channels, companies are coming to the realization that conversions can’t be ignored.

In my first ClickZ column on January 8, 2001, I wrote:

For all that’s being written about various marketing strategies, success in e-business, as in any business, isn’t about marketing or about design; it’s about sales.

Ultimately, it’s about the conversion rate: the percentage of visitors your site can turn into buyers. Lots of dot-coms have turned into dot-bombs because even though they spent tons of money on “sexy” designs and tons more driving traffic to their sites, they overlooked the tiny fact that they needed to sell to visitors once they arrived at the site. The sad thing is, many of those visitors would have bought happily and could have left delighted.

Many struggling dot-coms would be successful if they woke up to e-sales, and many failed dot-coms would still be around if they had done the same. Don’t get me wrong. Marketing is an essential part of the e-commerce equation. Marketing paves the way for sales. But it’s only where sales and marketing overlap that buying happens.

Are conversions and sales your job? If so, please introduce yourself.

If not, what are you doing to increase your conversion rates, and do you wish your company would and could do more? Please let me know in the comments below.

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 speed affects business results, then why would you add a second to a page’s load time?

The Google +1 button and the Facebook Like button add over one second of load time to your page, according to a recent research study by TagMan, a tag management and acceleration company. Of course, visitors clicking on +1s will impact rankings. That’s why you’ll want to add the code to your website.

To complicate things further, Google for years has been telling anyone who will listen that website speed is as an important factor in determining rankings. “One of the 10 things we hold to be true here at Google is that fast is better than slow. We keep speed in mind in all things that we do, and the +1 button is no exception,” according to a post published this week on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.

It’s not just buttons. There are many other things affecting load times on your website. It doesn’t matter if you are an e-commerce website, a major publisher, blogger, or a straightforward lead generation site. Site speed increasingly has an impact on your business, especially as the share of mobile traffic increases as a percent of visitors to your website.

Several influential people (SEOs and marketing execs) have shared with me that getting load time under the two-second load time mark, as Google recommends, has improved rankings significantly. So it’s bewildering that nearly half (49 percent) of the top 500 online retailers have page-load times exceeding three seconds, according to Internet Retailer.

So how do you get your site and these plug-ins to load faster?

First, ensure that your organization is tracking and caring about site speed.

Google Analytics offers the ability to track actual site load times directly into Google Analytics. However, few sites add the simple line of code that enables them to add the data into their analytics report. All that needs to be done is:

Where you have your Google Analytics code (most probably in your header file), insert the code

_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);

under the line

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

If your Google Analytics code is in the footer you are most likely slowing your performance as Google Analytics released new code optimized to run asynchronously.

You can also use external tools to measure individual page load time. My favorites include:

a. The Web Page Speed report, developed by Andy King, a friend and author of Website Optimization (you should own a copy). This calculates the speed based on all the objects referenced on your page and provides you results and recommendations as well.

b. Yahoo’s YSlow plugin: This will be essential if you want to check out more dynamic pages.

c. Google’s own Page Speed plug-in.

d. Loads.In: This tool lets you see actual load times from various locations and with different browsers.

e. WebPagetest: An open source tool that provides detailed waterfall charts to identify third-party performance issues

As the popularity of the Google +1 plugin grows, even Google made sure to tweak it to load faster this week.

There are many things you can do to optimize your web pages and this list is far from exhaustive but it should get you started.

Redoing CSS and JavaScript

Andy King devoted an entire chapter on how to optimize CSS and another on JavaScript. However, for a quick fix you can use an online CSS compressor tool to shrink the code and shave off some time.

TagMan CEO Paul Cook said there are many things you can do to optimize JavaScript. “Converting page-blocking synchronous scripts to execute asynchronously is the cornerstone to improving performance at the JavaScript layer. This minimizes scenarios where the entire browser is waiting for scripts to download and unable to continue rendering the rest of the page. All scripts should be minimized using a compressor like Google’s Closure Compiler and script headers should be set to cacheable in most circumstances. TagMan provides a script loader that can accelerate both synchronous and asynchronous scripts and there are several free open source script loading frameworks such as LABjs. Steve Souders’ blog is a good place to start for further tips around how and where to position JavaScript and CSS.”

Optimizing Images

When you get your report from one of the page speed tools above, copy the list of all the images and paste the urls into Smush.It (for bloggers there is even a WordPress plug-in version). Of course it would be better if you could also minimize the number of graphics called and use the right graphic format for the type of images. Also be advised of Flash load time issues.

Optimizing Your Code

To speed up HTML you can make sure your code validates, minimize the amount of code and stay away from tables and iframes if possible. You should also enable gzip compression. Of course this can be handle as part of the W3 Total Cache WordPress plug-in. You can also leverage a content delivery network (CDN) like Akamai, Amazon cloud services, and yesterday Google just got in the business to speed up your pages. A content delivery network is a system of servers placed strategically around the world which host many of your site’s files. Here is a fantastic walk through for every blogger on how to use the W3 Total Cache plug-in and Amazon’s free S3 CDN.

You should obsess over how long it takes your cart and checkout pages to load. How long it takes tools to return search results, or key functionality. There are so many more opportunities to optimize your page speed.

For some additional tips check out the Yahoo Developer Network’s best practices and make sure to read through the Website Optimization book for more technical enhancements.

Adding Hardware

If you don’t have the time or resources to get your code optimized, you can install a hardware appliance available from several companies that can optimize your code for your website or mobile application or website in real-time using the above techniques and more.

How fast can you make your pages go?

P.S. Infographics courtesy of Strangeloop Networks.

If you are getting visitors to your FaceBook fan page and they aren’t converting into fans follow these 7 steps to get them to like you. Continue reading my post on the hubspot blog: 7 Steps to Increase Facebook Fans.

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 of course getting remarkable results for themselves or for clients. I am sure you would love to know the secret to their success?

I went back and analyzed thousands of tests and improvements we made for clients in my 10-plus years running our agency and the success that my early students had, and I was able to narrow it down to what I call the “conversion trinity.” This is also the same formula I have shared to help people find big ideas for testing and to ensure they are testing smart variables that won’t waste resources but will provide them a lift in click-through rates and conversions.

So What Is the 3 Step Formula of the Conversion Trinity?

• Relevance. Are you relevant to my wants/needs/desires (search query)? Have you maintained scent?
• Value. Do I know why you are the right solution for me? Have you explained your value proposition/offer well?
• Call to action. Is it obvious what I need to do next? Have you given me the confidence to take that action?

Every successful test or ad or landing page improvement has come from enhancing one or more of the trinity factors.

My former student Noran El-Shinnawy did a great job explaining how to use the conversion trinity with email marketing. I’ll be sharing with you how to use it to improve the ideas you test and some examples from PPC advertising.

Former student Patricia Hader had her test, which she performed as part of her MarketMotive Master Certification course work, published on WhichTestWon.com. We’ll look at this test as a great example of using the conversion trinity to improve conversion rates.

Let’s start by analyzing Patricia’s 52.8 percent boost in newsletter subscriber rate for the New York Public Library.

Here is the before page:

Let’s see how she improved the page:

How did it improve:

• Relevance. The new headline let’s people know that this is how to stay up to date with the NYPL instead of just telling them to subscribe to newsletters.
• Value. A bulleted list of what visitors would get when they subscribe was added, as well as an image and link to a sample newsletter.
• Call to action. The form was simplified to one field from three fields and a list of check boxes to choose from. Also, the point of action regarding NYPL’s privacy was simplified.

The Conversion Trinity for Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Above you have seen an example of how to improve a landing page. Now let’s look at a PPC ad and see how we can apply the conversion trinity.

Let’s analyze this before and after the PPC ad rewrite from BoostCTR that resulted in a 326 percent increase in click-through rate.

Before:

After:

• Relevance. The new ad focuses in on the need of wanting better PPC ads versus a headline that just said “boost CTR.”
• Value. The new ad includes a specific value of clients seeing a 30 percent higher CTR.
• Call to action. By adding the word “get” to the guarantee of better ad creative, the phrase was turned into a call to action.

Try a Conversion Trinity Analysis Yourself Now!

Do a search on “cheap hotels NYC” and look at a couple of the ads and landing page combinations. Using the conversion trinity, what would you suggest that these advertisers improve? Share it in the comments below.

Now try it for your top three to five terms.

Look at yours and your competitors’ ad/landing page. What could you improve based on your conversion trinity analysis? Feel free to email me what you found.

Looking for more proof that most successful improvement comes from leveraging the conversion trinity? If you look at what MarketingSherpa found as the top four page elements having a significant impact on testing, I think you will see that they are all part of the conversion trinity.

Headline and images are about relevance, body copy is about value, and form layout is about call to action.

Are you focused on using a successful formula or are you just fumbling around hoping to get lucky?

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 of the hard work required. If you bought any of these gimmicks before and are tired of their sugar-coated promises and lackluster results, then maybe you are ready to get on the marketing optimization fitness plan.

Here are four exercises that should help you on your way. Don’t worry if you don’t execute perfectly on the first try; the key to this plan is to continuously improve day after day.

Exercise 1: Tweet VP

In 140 characters or less, tell me the value of doing business with you. What makes you different than your competitor? This is like writing your unique value proposition or unique campaign proposition, but you are limited to the number of characters, as if you were going to post it on Twitter. If you do a good job of this, you could lower your bounce rates by putting this on every landing page.

You should revisit this regularly and try to improve the power behind each word.

Exercise 2: Reflexive Response Time

Choose one of the following:

A.) If you are an e-commerce retailer, take 10 mystery shoppers and time how long it takes from customer order to fulfillment. Then have each of them contact customer service via e-mail, phone, and Twitter/FaceBook and time how long it takes for them to get a resolution. How did you perform? Were there any breakdowns in operations? Did each channel respond equally? How can you improve? How did you compare to your competitors?

B.) If you are a lead generation business, take 10 mystery shoppers and have them complete your lead generation forms. How long until they got their first real response – not an automated one from an e-mail auto-responder? Keep in mind that a lead loses its effectiveness by six times in the first hour. Now have these “leads” well-prepared to respond to a sales person’s questions. How long does it take for them to get a real price for your product or service? Then have these leads break into groups and ask tough questions by phone, e-mail, and Twitter or Facebook. How did you perform? Were there any breakdowns in operations? Did each channel respond equally? How can you improve? How did you compare to your competitors?

C.) If you are a publisher – pick a unique story line. How long does it take for your article to be researched and published? How long does it take until they get promoted and socialized on each of the social sites that you participate on? Have some pretty specific new information or corrected information to the article ready and ask your team to revise their article. How long does it take for it to be revised? Have “subscribers” ask a question each by phone, e-mail, and Twitter/Facebook. How long did it take to respond? How did you perform? Were there any breakdowns in operations? Did each channel respond equally? How can you improve? How did you compare to your competitors?

Exercise 3: 25 Interesting Things About You/Your Customers

You may have seen this pass-along on Facebook a while back as people started to list 25 interesting things about themselves. Do the same thing for your business and have several people involved in your business do the same. Then find the most interesting ones and use them on your about us page. This will enhance your credibility by adding transparency into your company.

Exercise 4: Metrics Madness

Have each of your team leads in a meeting room with you as you open up your marketing dashboard with your KPIs (key performance indicators). Go through each one and ask them what the team’s plan and role is as each one of those metrics changes by 20 percent up and by 20 percent down. Do they have clear action items? How long would it take for them to respond? Do you have too many KPIs or are your KPIs not clear enough? Can they prioritize these changes effectively?

There are plenty of other exercises you could perform on your way to becoming a marketing optimization fitness fan. Living the lifestyle that performs under pressure, responds to changes rapidly, and serves your customers and business in real-time fashion is just one way to improve your corporate metabolism fitness levels.

What else are you doing to stay fit?

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 and if she can’t complete her task in the allotted time, she is out of there.

How are you wasting your visitors time?

• Does it take a while for your pages to load?
• Do your database lookups take so long your visitors can go and get a snack before the results are returned?
• Do you have important content that is hidden away?
• Is your most important copy buried among a bunch of filler copy?
• Does it take your visitors too long to find the product they are looking for?
• Do you force visitors to pogo-stick between a category page and product pages because your category page fails to provide enough information to confidently select among the choices.
• Is it difficult to sort among choices by the factors or qualities that your visitor feels important? Or do you only allow sorting by price?
• Does your registration or check out process have too many steps and take to long to complete?
• Does it take several steps for your visitor to figure out their total cost including shipping?

Here is another classic way of wasting your visitors time that could easily be avoided.

Placing your out of stock messaging on the category pages will prevent your visitors from repeatedly finding that the product they clicked on and started to desire is – upon their arrival on the product page – suddenly unavailable for purchase.

So while I’ve given you a valuable list and a good examples to get you started, every site has its own unique challenges, and it’s worth asking your team: how many different ways can you find to shave valuable seconds during your visitors journey to become a lead or sale?

How can you help your vistors beat their own internal clocks in order to win more business?

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 the direction of your tests better than 50 percent of the time. Imagine that, we’ve arrived at the point where we believe that conversion optimization should be less predictive than a coin toss – how sad!

With all the noise, the signal is hard to detect; oversimplification and overcomplication are leaving businesses confused about how to take optimization past the first few tests. The conversion optimization process is simple but not easy; the devil is in the details. The details involve a continuous improvement process that takes into account the realities of your organization and those of the real-time marketplace.

Only the most basic testing is about what variation(s) beat the control, because then all you know is what won. Testing needs to be about why something won. In order to learn, duplicate, and evolve, you need to understand your customers within their context and become more efficient at the real-time marketing tactics that today’s competitive marketplace demands.

Let’s start by better-defining conversion rate so that you’ll realize why the typical two to 10 tests in a month are not good enough and why you should be running dozens of tests a month.

Conversion rate = The number of people who take the action you want them to take divided by the total number of potential people who could have intended to take that action.

Not everyone will convert. Nevertheless, with the exception of bad traffic, everyone has some intention to convert. Our job is to offer every visitor an experience that fulfills their needs and leaves us a measurable conversion, even if it’s not a macro-conversion.

Please follow these steps:

Step 1 – Let’s Understand “Number of People”

Your conversion rate is influenced by how effective you are at attracting the right traffic and then helping them engage with your “funnel” to convert.

How are you bringing these “number of people” to your website? Do they all come by directly typing your URL in their browser? Do some search for your brand? Do some search for your category? Do some search for your products? Do some of those people come from organic search; paid search; e-mails; affiliates? Do these people come from different websites: Google? Bing? YouTube? Wikipedia? Twitter? Facebook?

Who are these people? Are they all the same? Do they have different characteristics, needs, questions? Do all these people have the same amount of product/service knowledge that you do? Are they all at the same stage in their buying process? Do they know you already? Or have they never heard of you before? Do you know your customer segments?

Do you launch new marketing efforts regularly? Are the efforts last week different than this week? Last month versus this month? Is there an important calendar event occurring (Christmas if you’re a retailer; Fourth of July if you’re a seller of flags; Mother’s Day if you sell flowers; etc.)? All of which may induce a “spike” in traffic that is different than usual.

There is no such thing as an “average” person. There is also no “average” marketing campaign. That’s why your average conversion rate is a rough indicator but also virtually worthless as a way to focus your conversion optimization.

You have lots of segments who come to your website. They differ by demographics, psychographics, behavior, or because they came in through very different marketing efforts. You can calculate a conversion rate for each one of these segments/marketing efforts and you should prioritize each one based on impact and value.

Step 2 – Let’s Understand the “Action You Want Them to Take”

If you are in retail, you want them to purchase a product.

If you are in lead generation, you want them to become a lead.

Are there no other actions that are valuable and contribute to the bottom line?

In retail, even in they don’t convert now, would it at least be more valuable to know if they added an item to your wish list, or subscribed to your newsletter, or looked up your retail store hours, or added items to their cart versus just bouncing off the site right away? What are you doing to turn that one-time customer into a repeat customer? Do they only need one product you sell or might they need different ones over the course of time?

In lead generation, if they don’t give you all their information and request to be contacted by sales, is it valuable to have them sign up for a whitepaper, or a demo, or your newsletter? Is it better to download specification sheets, engage in calculators, or print or forward pages rather than just bouncing off the website? These are all steps that move people through their buying process.

These are just some of your macro-actions. What happens when someone comes from one of your ads and gets to a landing page? Sometimes the action is one of those listed above, but what if that page is only meant to help your visitors to choose the right product or service and they still need to actuallyclick on the right one for them? What do you do to help them take that action and not bounce away? These are the micro-actions that need to happen from step to step in the potential customer’s journey.

All of these are actions we need to optimize. You can calculate a conversion rate for each one of these macro- and micro-actions, and you should.

Step 3 – Let’s understand “Total Number of Potential People Who Could Have Taken That Action”

What happened to the majority of visitors who didn’t convert? Have you asked and answered why they didn’t?

Did they land on your site incorrectly? For example, they typed in “shingles” into a search engine and they were looking for roof repair and not a skin condition related to chicken pox. This is obviously a disqualified visitor. Did they try to purchase from your website and something went wrong? Did they have problems accessing the information? Could they not figure out how to take action on your website? Did they not trust you? Did they leave with questions that were not answered? Did you answer their questions, but they weren’t ready to buy? Did you not instill a sense of urgency or desire in them? Did you not make them a great offer?

First , you need to optimize your website experience for these potential buyers through the hierarchy of optimization.

There are thousands of potential improvements to choose from. You need to prioritize these based on the level of impact that improvement can have and the resources available to execute them. If you don’t have a copywriter available at the moment, you shouldn’t focus on copy changes, even if it would be the most impactful. That may sound like common sense, but whenever I say it, it seems to catch many companies like a deer in headlights.

Your average conversion rate is the aggregated conversion rate of how well your website performs for each of your customer segments, and each of your marketing efforts for each of the actions you want them to take. You optimize your conversion rate by first focusing in on the elements that impact as many of these as you can, and then you have to work on these “micro-funnels.”

While you work on conversions, market conditions, competitive forces, and ad copy, your customers’ needs are changing. This is why you need to continuously optimize your marketing efforts. You can’t afford to have a “set it and forget it” mentality to your marketing.

If you only focus on improving a few landing pages here and there, testing a few variations here and there, and tweaking creative here and there, you will never reach your highest potential conversion rate!

Don’t worry, your customers won’t go unsatisfied. I guarantee that sooner or later your competitors will figure out how to satisfy your visitors’ needs. Hopefully that will motivate you to start getting your conversion goals on target by investing in a true continuous improvement process that asks “Why?” as much as “What?”

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 visitor mix as a starting point.

There are 3 types of visitors who can come to your website:

1. Buyers – you know who they are because they converted to a sale or lead.

2. Potential Buyers – these are visitors who are in the market for what you offer, but for any number of possible reasons, don’t buy. They may be at earlier stages in the buying process, doing research to sell it internally, not adequately persuaded, driven away by bad usability, etc. The upshot is, there are countless number of changes/improvements you can test and make to bump these visitors from potential into actual buyers.

3. Disqualified Traffic – these are visitors who wouldn’t buy no matter what (maybe they arrived to your website by accident – they typed shingles and were looking for the medical condition not what you put on roofs, or maybe they don’t have the type of budget your product or service needs, etc.).

On a typical website, 3% of visitors are Buyers and the other 97% is distributed among the Potential Buyers and Disqualified traffic.

You should be asking yourself these 2 key questions:

1. Of your non-buyers what percent are potential buyers? And how can you increase those?

2. What marketing efforts are bringing ample amounts of traffic, but with poor quality traffic – i.e., what’s driving a disproportionate amount of disqualified traffic?

Your marketing analyst should be able to tell you the answers to these questions.

The opportunity to increase revenue is in:

• understanding that 97% of non-buying traffic better,
• bringing in less Disqualified traffic and more Potential Buyers, and
• More effectively turning those Potential Buyers into Buyers.

Do you have a plan for doing so? If not, will you continue to target ineffectively?

P.S. if it helps to think about it, GoDaddy.com Super Bowl commercial drives lots of traffic to their website to see the continuation of their ads (well maybe not this year – sorry Joan), how many of those are not qualified buyers?