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 that consistently beat out every other banner ever produced. It was counterintuitive, but that alone isn’t what excited me. Here we were in the mid-90s and this company’s web team was able to tell you exactly how many minutes of phone calls were made to Guatemala as a result of banners placed on a particular keyword. They were even able to predict how many people would call Russia after they downloaded the VoIP software from the sports pages on Yahoo. These were the metrics that drove the media buys and placement decisions week after week. This was my web analytics reality and so it set my expectations.

After that, I started working with a startup, a specialty retailer. When I began working with them, I was shocked at how little people were tracking. Not that they didn’t have metrics but they weren’t the type of metrics you could make decisions and take action on. This is still, sadly, the reality for far too many companies today. While today so many companies have sophisticated analytics installed to measure web activity, the organization and planning of their measurement is still poor and the ability to take action on that data is still minimal.

I would like to share just some of what just a handful of companies are doing with their insights today in the hope it will inspire you to analytics greatness.

One of the companies I know, a multi-channel retailer, provides regular reports to their physical store managers of the browsing history from visitors who are geographically located near the store. The reports are not so impressive; it’s the action they drive that impresses me. These store managers often rearrange in-store displays to promote the items visitors are viewing the most online.

You can do a similar thing even if you are an online-only retailer. You could easily change home page, search results, and category promotions based on geo-location data and visitor browsing history. Imagine you are a home goods and hardware retailer and you begin to see an increase in searches for shovels and snow blowers from the Boston area because the weather forecast shows a winter storm coming. If you were a multi-channel retailer, your Boston store would put shovels, melting salt, and snow blowers on prominent display, while your Miami store might still be showing garden hoses prominently. Online you can use segmentation and personalization tools like BTBuckets (which is free) to swap out your promotions for geo-targeted traffic from Boston to see your winter storm promotion. Enterprise tools like Monetate can even leverage built-in capabilities to target geo-location traffic based on local weather or weather forecasts.

Another similar multi-channel retailer collects and analyzes in-store scans of their product shelf tags by cellphones and uses that data to change end-cap displays based on scanning popularity. They can also take that same scanning data and change website promotions to mirror the popular products in those locations for website visitors.

I know several other companies that are monitoring product reviews and changing their local inventory based on how positive and negative reviews are. Again, you can use business rules to change your website behavior and target visitors based on all of these fantastic data points.

Another simple geo-personalization tactic you can use is custom messaging international visitors. It can be as simple as displaying the fact that you ship to the visitors’ countries to changing tag lines or promotions to be localized. Monetate has found that across its significant client base when it personalized experiences based on international visitors’ geo-location, it improved conversion rates by as much as 100 percent.

Are you already using geo-location data to your advantage? If you are, please share how you are using the data with our readers. If not, then can you afford not to take advantage of the geo-personalization opportunity?

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 sucks and mine does too. However, when speaking at ConversionNation (formerly Fusion Marketing Experience) in Antwerp, I was politely shown by my friend Joost de Valk how badly I sucked.

Joost did his presentation after me and decided on the fly, while I was presenting, that he would use my website to show how with a little WordPress SEO (his speciality) and more importantly a little conversion help, I could suck a bit less. I’ll share with you some tips he gave me, but more importantly I’ll share with you why all our sites suck and what you have to do suck less.

As Joost picked through the issues on my blog and speaking page, I didn’t sit back and sulk. I didn’t say that he was wrong. I opened up my WordPress admin and went to work. Before his presentation was finished, 95 percent of his recommendations were in place. I’m always trying to improve. I was thrilled to have the feedback in order to suck less. Like you, I don’t have unlimited time and resources. We all have more things clamoring for our attention that we can ever handle.

However, to be successful today you must adopt a culture like Pixar’s willing to accept sucking and is willing to take criticism from everywhere within and outside your organization. Of course, getting advice from an expert like Joost is priceless and I was getting it for the price of being happily, publicly humiliated.

Your culture gets there by allowing for mistakes, letting people take calculated risks, by having your CEO be the chief experience officer and taking responsibility for your conversion rate, by having an executive in charge of optimization and by putting the tools, people, and processes in place to make quick and agile changes.

So, in order to suck less in 2012, use all the methods and tools available to get insight into your customers’ behavior and purchase processes, gather feedback from them, get some experts to review your efforts, make changes quickly, test, and measure and then respond to make things a little less sucky. According to research, the companies with the highest conversion rates tend to employ the greatest amount of optimization techniques.

Here are some of the tips that Yoast gave me and I’ll keep them general so that you may be able to use them too.

1. Avoid dates in your blog posts. This is especially true if you are not publishing news and your content is evergreen. Or make sure your dates are recent if you want people to click on the links in the SERPs (search engine results pages). In fact, with the release of WordPress 3.3 this week, Joost suggests you remove dates from your permalink URL using a tool to create the redirects for your old posts.

2. Optimize your meta tags not for spiders but to persuade people to click on the result.

3. Ensure that the thumbnails appearing in universal search are the most persuasive. (In the case for my speaking page, he wanted the thumbnail to show me speaking, duh.)

4. Plan for what happens next. I didn’t have a related post plug-in for my blog because when I first set it up, I had very few posts and thought I’d get back to it at some point. I forgot because it wasn’t a priority. So now when people get to the bottom of one of my posts, they are shown two related posts with thumbnails to make them more visually interesting.

5. Don’t make people click to another page to contact you. When I ran an agency, every page of our website had a contact form in the footer. We knew exactly what kind of lift in conversion and data that brought us. However, I didn’t have a contact form on my keynote speaker’s page - it was only on the contact us page. Now that has been added.

I wish you continued success in the coming year. May you suck every day a little bit less!

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 companies make more money and that’s a good thing. The downside is that it’s hard work to accomplish better marketing efficiency ratios. These companies are led differently; they have higher levels of collaboration and higher standards of accountability.

The top performing companies consistently convert visitors to sales at rates in the double digits. They’ve been doing that for years, while the vast majority converts at low single-digit rates. The gap between the top performers and the middle of the pack continues to grow. I have two questions for their CEOs.

1a. If you sell online, do you convert at least 10 percent of your visitors to sales?

1b. If your online efforts are geared toward lead generation, do you convert at least 20 percent of your visitors to leads?

2. So do you know exactly why your company doesn’t convert better?

It can’t be that the company’s already making so much money that it doesn’t matter. It can’t be that the company doesn’t care enough about their potential customers to make sure they get exactly what they were looking for when they visit. It can’t be that someone in the company is already “responsible” for conversions so you stopped worrying about it.

If as CEO, you had a sales force that was underperforming the market leaders by a factor of 500-1000 percent, you couldn’t just point to the VP of sales. As the CEO, you would also be accountable. Of course, this assumes that you have the equivalent of a VP of sales responsible for the marketing efficiency ratio. In my last column, “Leadership for the Marketing Optimization Team,” I explained what kind of people companies need and what kind of backgrounds they should have.

What follows are the more likely reasons that companies underperform online. Perhaps the CEO still doesn’t know what factors of the customer experience impact sales. Perhaps the CEO still doesn’t know what projects or what departments to favor. Perhaps the CEO still simply doesn’t know what truly needs to be done to optimize the marketing efficiency ratio.

I’m disappointed. I feel somewhat responsible after evangelizing about accountable marketing for more than a decade. I suspect if these companies’ shareholders knew just how much money was being left on the table they would be too. Ignorance is not an excuse and in business it isn’t bliss.

Nobody has been involved in e-business for two decades. There are too many not-quite experts, over-promising tool vendors, and self-proclaimed pundits demanding attention. It’s the responsibility of executive management to create an expansive environment where learning in ongoing silos is less important than customers, and optimization isn’t a project but rather a habit of great execution.

Stop paying attention to what your peers are doing (so-called best practices) and start benchmarking against your customers’ expectations. Can you meet or exceed those expectations? Your conversion rate will be a leading indicator. Conversion rates are a measure of your ability to persuade visitors to take the action you want them to take. They’re also a reflection of your effectiveness at satisfying customers, because for you to achieve your goals, visitors must first achieve theirs.

Columnists receive a lot of feedback. As a reader of this column, you’re likely part of the choir I’ve been preaching to for years. I hope you enjoy the column and find it useful. If you agree or disagree with this column, then please direct your comments not only to me, but also to the CEO.

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 of backgrounds should they have? I know I’ve discussed this with clients but I haven’t written about it before.

First, please notice that, I did not call the team the landing page optimization team or the conversion optimization team. This organizational monstrosity is part of the we-work-in-silos-but-pretend-to-cooperate mentality that produces poor and disconnected experiences for customers. For digital marketing efforts to maintain consistency across all channels, traffic generation needs to be intimately connected to your website and if appropriate your offline experience – after all those are the experiences promised. Never forget that your website is the glue that binds all your channels together.

Jeffrey Eisenberg, my brother, likes to remind people that in our increasingly transparent experience economy marketers are no longer paid to make promises that the business has no intention of keeping. If you’re still in an organization that thinks they can promote their way to success, bail now. Experience is what matters and you better deliver better than what you promise or the world will quickly know.

Is building a successful optimization team possible? Yes! Based on my experiences working with and training successful optimization teams and the research I have seen from eConsultancy and MarketingSherpa on the topic I can tell you how to make optimization succeed.

The first and most critical position is to have someone at a Vice President or above level that is in control over conversion rates directly responsible for your optimization efforts. They along with their staff (we’ll discuss shortly) should all be incentivized directly based on their results of improving conversion rates and revenue. The KPI should relate to marketing efficiency. There are a few ways to calculate this but gross margin over marketing expenses is my favorite.

This leader should be the online equivalent of your offline VP of Sales. This executive should have direct accountability to someone in the C-Suite who supports the effort. This person should be both extremely curious and driven. This person should also possess a high degree of empathy for the customer and the customers’ experience. This person is also a competent jack of all trades with significant understanding of online marketing methods including: search engine marketing (SEO & PPC), affiliate marketing, display, social media, etc. They’ve probably been reading a bunch of the books on this list I put together. They will need to work collaboratively with all those teams and the web analytics group to segment and continuously tweak both the traffic driving efforts along with the site experience efforts.

I’m not done. This person should be comfortable working with a variety of methods of identifying insights and optimization techniques. Econsultancy’s 2011 Conversion report found that companies whose conversion rates have improved over the previous 12 months are using on average 26% more methods to improve conversion than those companies whose conversion rates have not improved.

Irrespective of the leader of the team; it is very important that the culture of your organization allow for intelligent risk taking so that this person is empowered to try radical efforts to improve conversions and not simple methodical efforts. A strong analytic background is truly not required. Nevertheless, this person should have the ability to be able to use data to tell the story of what is happening to your visitors based on that data they gather themselves or they get directly from an analyst. I can’t emphasize strongly enough how much more important it is to be connected to the narrative of the experience than the data it leaves as residue.

This is generally why most traditional web analysts don’t make for good optimization team leaders. They love the data diving but not the storytelling and brand value.

This person must also have the authority to draw upon a steady stream of talent ranging from web analysts, creative resources (designers, copywriters, videographers, merchandisers, etc) as well as IT resources in order to be able to execute on a continuous basis. Ideally there are resources dedicated to the optimization team but they can be shared as long as there is a strong value placed on prioritization and execution in the organization. This team should not exist as a vacuum within the marketing organization but should draw upon the knowledge and experience of the media team including search, display, email, affiliates and even offline media. The research shows that organizations that have more people dedicated to improving conversion rates tend to improve their conversion rate the most. Not a big surprise I am sure.

Lastly, in order to be successful you need the tools in place to have the agility to gather insights, create ads and landing pages (or paths), refine marketing campaigns and pages, launch tests, & segment and personalize web site experiences and are not restricted by the company IT department. Allow this person to be trained and train your team in the art & science of marketing optimization and allow them to create a structured approach to conversion and you can virtually guarantee you’ll squeeze a lot more conversions from all your marketing efforts.

The reality is I have only met a few dozen of these individuals who have this experience over the past decade. I’m sure there are some I haven’t met yet but they are a rare breed. These leaders are going to have to be trained and mentored in order for more companies to see the massive traction that these leaders have brought to their organizations. You can’t outsource this core competency or downplay it.  It’s a serious commitment but one that has a high payout over the long term.

P.S. Ever wonder why the leaders in conversion out-perform the average conversion rates by a factor of 500-1000%? Think compounding! For example a 5% improvement every month for a year is an 80% increase. Steady disciplined optimization is not a project it’s a core competence for industry leaders.

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. [Source: Econsultancy Online Measurement & Strategy report http://goo.gl/OGscu]

The problem is not the tool. The problem is you and me and our management.

Think of it another way: 78 percent of companies are just hoping for success by guessing how well they are at providing their customers quality experiences. While we may all be suffering from data diarrhea, making decisions based on analysis of our metrics is just unclear, and they fear failure. Some call this assumption marketing. For over a decade, I’ve called this a symptom of accidental marketing.

One key question is why did the numbers go down from 25 percent last year to 22 percent this year? My answer stems from a simple economic theory that holds true in most marketplaces. The rich get richer! It happens in finance, it happens in SEO with the Filthy Linking Rich, and it happens in data-driven cultures. Companies that have a culture of analytics and testing seem to pull in those individual talented people who show up at the odd company and get frustrated that they have no impact or value there. I have seen this countless number of times with friends in this industry. It’s frustrating, like pushing on a rope.

When leadership’s ability to focus on optimization is dysfunctional, they keep relying on the next “big idea.” They favor long CYA meetings instead of managing to the metrics that impact their business. They continue to do business largely the way they have for the last 20-plus years, even though everything around them tells them the world has changed. Meaningful change is not just releasing a cool mobile app and launching a new HTML5 website. It’s not the medium but a management and business cultural issue that needs reexamining.

As Marc Bruns commented on Avinash’s post:

The fact is becoming an optimization culture is hard. In my experience, implementations of any kind of data-driven metrics, analytics face the hurdle of an ‘irrational exuberance bubble’ when they begin … early on it seems like it will be easy to change the world, the tools seem so powerful … but then people, politics and turf battles enter the picture; [when times get the least bit tough] management tends slips [sic] into old habits, ‘the old shoe is comfortable.’

I’ve harangued many and even written before about what it takes to build optimization into your business culture. What’s the first step?

Focus! Pick your key performance metric and get your team obsessively focused on continuously improving the marketing efforts and time spent achieving those numbers.

Web analytics industry pundits have suggested that the key to success is better investments in people and process and less on tools. That’s wonderful! Nevertheless, neither of these matter if the investment isn’t on changing culture first.

So companies bring in the tools and assign someone inexperienced to start distributing reports and they start to believe that they are data driven. Surprise! There’s no profit from having a web analytics report; you make money from making changes and experimenting based on the insights available from the data. In order to do web analytics correctly, it needs to generate a to-do list for you.

However, as Philip Walford, another commenter on Avinash’s post adds:

You’ve been scrupulously data-driven in identifying where problems and inefficiencies are located, but now you have to switch and start to hypothesise about why those problems and inefficiencies exist. Two entirely different disciplines: rare to find them in one individual, almost impossible to find them in one organisation.

It is this sluggishness of corporate metabolism to change that has allowed many in the retail industry to forfeit their sales to Amazon.com, which now dominates approximately 30 percent of all U.S. e-commerce.

Noted author Stuart Wilde says “Poverty is restriction and as such, it is the greatest injustice you can perpetrate upon yourself.” Are you condemned to be data rich but optimization poor?

I don’t think it is because companies don’t care or haven’t tried. Are the tools to blame? Partially! First and second generation tools flourished by the promises of riches to come by just tracking the data. Many invested significantly in these tools, but couldn’t find the people to support it. Now many free tools exist and more people are used to using these tools. I’ve always said get good at free and then pay. So are free tools the answer? Nope! Just because someone knows how to use the tool, doesn’t mean they can “convert” management into a data-driven culture.

It’s increasingly harder to hire truly qualified candidates; not that many exist in the first place. When my brother Jeffrey and I built our agency, we’d hire young college graduates who displayed tremendous amounts of curiosity and trained them in our processes and they were turning out insights that rivaled their high-priced MBA alternatives. Training certainly is one option, but it doesn’t work if it cannot be evangelized throughout the whole organization. It fails if all it does is make one or two optimization/analyst employees smarter, because in the long run, those employees will find work elsewhere.

Will you commit to optimization riches or will you remain poverty stricken? Isn’t it time to focus on what the numbers are already telling you?

P.S. If you are a business that is committed to driving a data driven/optimization culture, please reach out to me I have a handful of individuals looking for great opportunities to bring their talent. If you are a business that wants to become data driven and optimization focused let me know and I will see how we can help you.

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?

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 his response is worth sharing with you . I provided a translated version first and then the original Spanish version so you can read it in the original if you choose. If you would like to see a sample of the quality of the course videos (my 21 Secrets to Top Converting Websites webinar) and get a special offer on a self paced Practitioner certification course, I’ll share this link – http://mo.am/21secrets. Feel free to share this link with your team.

I studied for the MarketMotive Master Certification from January to March of 2011.  Like you, I am from Spain. The truth is that taking the course was an amazing experience. 

The weekly routine is more or less as follows:
- During the week you’ll watch the videos, fortunately they are not very long so it’s easy to find time to watch them.

- In addition you read the book “Always Be Testing” that perfectly complements the course (in fact it will be your essential guide to the final project)

- Every few weeks there are also live seminars [webinars], not only in optimization but also in other areas of interest, which complement the training very well.

The hours of the webinars are usually convenient [even for Europe] (6 or 7 pm or 12pm – 1:00pm EST) so if you see that you are going to be working late you can watch the seminar from work or you can go home and connect there. All you need is a broadband connection and a headset with microphone. That’s all you need to attend and enjoy the seminars.

Fridays are for office hours with Bryan Eisenberg.  In my case, it was 6pm to 7pm (12pm to 1pm EST), so there were no problems joining them. During office hours we discussed the exercises and the homework from the last week plus the recorded videos you’ve been watching that week. I recommend that you prepare your homework and watch the videos for the week before going to class so you can ask questions to finish them off them during the weekend.

Finally, on the weekends you finish your homework and then on Sunday you upload them to the dropbox for Bryan to review and provide feedback.

As for English, the videos are very easy to understand.  Bryan speaks quickly but he is easy to understand and the audio quality of the videos is good. Those videos that were not as good have been recently re-recorded.

During the office hours call it is easy to understand your fellow students. Many of the students are international so if English is not your forte you will not feel at a disadvantage because so many of them are in the same situation.

Apart from this, feel free to write to Bryan with questions throughout the week as he usually responds quickly.  Sometimes he travels but still you get pretty fast responses.

And besides that if you have the time or energy, you can watch the rest of the contents of the other master certifications.  You can not attend the class but if you want to watch the videos and take the exams you can easily increase your knowledge and without having to pay extra.

For me, I started applying what I learned (even before finishing the master certification) in my professional work and the results are still very exciting.

By improving our landing pages we increased volume of sales, without the need for increased investment .

In Adwords for example the improvement in our conversion rate has enabled us to bid higher for the top keywords:
When you bring more volume of traffic with the same spend the CPL (cost per lead) allows us to raise the CPC (cost per conversion), to the middle position and therefore the CTR which translates into a lot more traffic and lead volume.

You can imagine, we are demolishing our goals and the company is really happy with us

So I not only recommend you take the master certification, because it is an area of ​​knowledge that is essential if you want to do good online marketing, but because Bryan (and his brother) are machines and the videos and classes are going to allow you to learn from the best and it shows.

Anyway if you still any have doubts, please feel free to call me and I tell you more.

Regards,
Diego de Jódar

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Yo hice el Master de Enero a Marzo de este año, igual que tu desde España y la verdad es que ha sido una experiencia increíble.

La rutina semanal es más o menos la siguiente:

-          Durante la semana te vas viendo los videos, por suerte no son muy largos así que es fácil ir sacando huecos

-          Además te tienes que ir leyendo el libro “always be testing” que complementa perfectamente el curso (de hecho será tu guía fundamental para el trabajo final)

-          A veces algunas semanas hay seminarios en directo, no solo de optimización sino de otras áreas, lo cual complemente muy bien la formación.

o   Las horas de los seminarios suelen ser buenas (6 o 7 de la tarde), de forma que si ves que vas a salir tarde ya te quedas y lo ves desde el trabajo o si vas con tiempo vas a casa y te conectas allí

o   Con un adsl normalito y unos cascos con micro tienes más que de sobra para asistir al seminario y disfrutarlo

-          Los viernes hay clase, en mi caso era de 6 a 7, así que sin problemas. Allí se discuten los ejercicios dela semana pasada y el temario que has ido viendo en esa semana. Te recomiendo que ya hayas empezado los deberes de esa semana antes de ir a clase así podrás preguntar dudas para acabarlos durante el  fin de semana

-          Finalmente los fines de semana acabas los deberes y los dejas subidos al dropbox el domingo para que Bryan lo revise y te pase feedback.

En cuanto al Inglés, los videos se entienden muy bien, Bryan habla bastante rápido pero se le entiende muy bien y la calidad de audio de los videos es buena (y los que la tienen más floja los están rehaciendo)

En las clases en general se entiende bien a los alumnos, hay bastantes internacionales así que si el Inglés no es tu fuerte no te sentirás en desventaja ya que muchos de ellos estarán en tu misma situación.

Aparte de esto, puedes escribir a Bryan con dudas a lo largo de la semana y generalmente responde rápido (a veces tiene viajes pero aun así tendrás respuestas bastante rápido)

Y si aparte de esto te queda tiempo o fuerzas puedes ver el resto de contenidos de los otros masters, no irías a las clases pero si puedes ver los videos y hacer los exámenes de forma que puedes ampliar conocimientos de forma sencilla y sin tener que pagar ningún extra.

Por mi parte decirte que empecé a aplicar lo que aprendí (antes incluso de acabar el master) en mi trabajo y los resultados están siendo muy interesantes.

Al mejorar landing pages, sin necesidad de un incremento de inversión estamos logrando mucho más volumen.

En Adwords por ejemplo esa mejora de conversión nos ha posibilitado pujar más alto por las top keywords: Al traer más volumen con el mismo dinero el CPL baja  y eso nos posibilita subir el CPC, por tanto la posición media y por tanto el CTR lo cual se traduce en mucho más volumen.

Te puedes imaginar, estamos destrozando los objetivos previstos y la empresa está realmente contenta con nosotros

Así que no puedo más que recomendarte que hagas el master, no solo porque es un área de conocimiento imprescindible si quieres hacer buen marketing online, sino porque Bryan (y su hermano) son unas máquinas y en los videos y clases vas a aprender de los mejores y eso se nota.

De todas formas si aún tienes dudas,  puedes llamarme sin problema y te cuento.

Un saludo,

Diego.

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.

Version A

Version B

Depending on how you want to define your variables, these two pages have around a dozen changes.

Here is my list:

1. Layout orientation. As I mentioned last time, one is laid out horizontally (A), the other vertically (B).
2. Different taglines (UVP). A) Make every visitor count. B) A marketplace of landing page designers.
3. Call to action headline. A) Improve your conversion rates! B) Get started here!
4. Call to action header background color. A) Darker shade of blue than B.
5. Call to action graphic. A) No arrow pointing down. B) Has an arrow pointing down.
6. Call to action button copy. A) Invite me. B) Create account.
7. Call to action button color. A) Blue to match header. B) Orange for higher contrast.
8. Call to action button size. A) Full size of form. B) About two-thirds the width of the form.
9. Call to action form field. A) Four fields to complete. B) Five fields to complete with added company as optional field.
10. Required text for call to action. A) Has none. B) Has it at top of form.
11. Point of action assurance. A) Privacy guarantee above call to action button. B) Below button.
12. Testimonial. A) To the left of the form on top. B) Across the bottom of the page.
13. Copy. A) Three paragraphs of text. B) Adds fourth paragraph about “A fresh pair of eyes.” Also, the order of the paragraphs is changed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Most of the time, when I see such a list of variations, it would seem that the business is testing for variations first and impact second. Testing has to start with the “why” first. Why will this matter to my customer? Why will changing the layout from horizontal to vertical change their feeling about buying from us?

This goes back to what we all learned in elementary school. You start a test with a hypothesis first. Instead, most companies today throw variables at the wall, sometimes not even aware that they are changing variables and all they look for is what version gave them a lift. This is a great strategy when you have endless resources and time to wait for tests to complete, or when you have a page that is converting at around 70 percent-plus and you want to start fine-tuning it.

So what are the three variables I would test from these two landing pages?

1. Different taglines (UVP). I would want to test at least three or more very different versions to find what resonates most.
2. Call to action form field. Whenever we can reduce a form field by 20 percent from five fields to four fields, that should have an impact.
3. Call to action headline. We want to make sure our offer is clear and this should summarize it quickly.

Did you identify these as the big ideas to test first? Have you been testing intelligently or have you been guilty of slice-and-dice optimization? Testing these three variables first enables us to complete our test in 18 days versus 108, based on the number of variations that need to be tested.

What about testing the call to action button and other variables?

Sure, I would eventually want to test that, but the first goal should be to make sure our offer is viewed as relevant and valuable enough to our visitors to want to complete the call to action. Have you ever stopped yourself from clicking on a button because it was blue and not orange if you found the offer relevant and compelling?