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 its money from advertisers (sellers) but is forced, like every media company, to think primarily about the experience of its audience (buyers).

When buyers “buy naturally,” and sellers “sell effortlessly” you have the ideal human-computer interaction. Interaction occurs in a non-linear system that delivers exactly what prospective buyers need, when they need it, so they can accomplish their goals in the manner most comfortable to them. That’s a user experience we (everyone from IAs to designers and even marketing folks) can all buy into if our interests were truly aligned. Google needs to train advertisers to do a better job while maintaining its revenues. So how is Google “training” advertisers?  With sticks, not carrots.

Quality Score: The Grand Equalizer

Theoretically at least, advertisers and searchers interests should be aligned. After all, an advertiser pays for an ad placement based on context. If Company A is advertising for widgets, when people search for widgets they should be able sell tons of widgets. That’s the theory. In practice, the user experience of paid ads is tragically broken; just go ahead and see how many paid searches send you to a home page or a generic landing page. That hurts Google‘s reputation for relevance. Google suffers when advertisers fail to deliver a good user experience. Google’s solution to this problem is Quality Score (“QS”).  QS acts like a tax for those advertisers too lazy, too structurally rigid or just too misinformed to deliver relevant answers to searchers queries.

QS is based on an algorithm that scores the value of the user experience the advertiser is creating from clicking on the ad to the target page. QS weights the value of a bid in the auction for ad placement and forces the advertisers delivering the worst user experience to pay more than those with better user experiences competing for the same query. The penalties are substantial; we’ve seen advertisers penalized more than 60% of their paid advertising budget; sometimes they weren’t even aware.

Google’s Enforcing Great Experiences

Bryan and I have been thinking a lot about Google’s Adwords program, QS and it’s consequences. It’s encouraging us to think that designers, developers, content creators and marketers may wind up on the same page someday soon.

Substantial penalties piled on top of large budgets have a way of forcing even those most entrenched in status quo to cat. You might also find it as encouraging as we do if we explain how we perceive the difference between conversion — which is mechanical — and persuasion that is based on a holistic user experience.

Conversion has only recently become the must-have piece of the pie. You could see it gaining interest when Call To Action, our second book, hit the NY Times bestseller list in 2006. In the last few years it’s become mainstream. When we started our former company in 1998 we never imagined that it would take so long. Unfortunately we’re not all on the same page yet.

The ability to achieve truly dramatic improvements in conversion rates still requires a shift in “conventional” thinking. Design teams need to understand that while the goal may be conversion, the practice must be persuasion.

Conversion is all about “the click.” We all understand the macro-level conversion, which is the business’s site objective. But it is important to realize that conversion also takes place at the micro-level — every single relevant click pulls the user deeper into the buying decision process. It’s imperative for sites to persuade prospects with each and every click.

Knowing What To Do Is Not the Same as Being Presented A Reason Why

Conversion is what the user does; it’s the “take action” part of the buying decision process. At the macro-level, the visitor converts from prospect to buyer. Helping prospects convert involves making it easier for them to buy by getting out of their way. Getting out of the way usually entails a copy, usability, or information architecture adjustment.

As we worked with clients in the early days of our business, we began to realize we could remove the obstacles to conversion, but that would only take us so far. If conversion is fundamentally about completing your linear scenarios, and people rarely go about accomplishing their goals in a linear fashion – how are you designing to address the buying process behavior of the majority of these non-linear prospects?

Consider this example: A site selling seminars, a complex selling scenario successfully funnels a majority of its traffic to a registration form, but few prospective attendees who land on that page complete the form and click through. The page rejection rate is staggering. Thinking they have a conversion problem, the company performs a variety of A/B tests on the form page with little success. Nothing they do to “fix” the conversion problem yields significantly improved results. They imagine themselves at a conversion dead-end.

In this situation, the problem isn’t always the form; assuming the seminar is a good one it’s the scenario visitors participate in before they reach the form. Perhaps prospective attendees haven’t acquired enough information or developed sufficient confidence to feel comfortable completing registering yet. Hopefully they would realize that this linear sales process is undermining their prospective attendees’ non-linear buying decision process – the  site is failing to persuade before it attempts to convert.

Persuasion is about meeting the buying needs of your audience. It’s a non-linear, multi-branched, integral part of your selling process – you present relevant information for your buyers in a way that suits you as the seller and hopefully allows you to make the case for buying from you.

Non-linear scenarios are the ones visitor segments create as they navigate your website. In this type of scenario we measure conversion differently, from where people enter to where they complete the intended scenario and whether or not they hit our key value pages.

Improving an Average Conversion Rate Produces Average Results

The goal is to focus on cumulative conversion rates for the website instead of simply an average conversion rate. This is accomplished by explicitly planning these non-linear scenarios, or persuasive design. When we dissect the buying process into its component parts for each persona, then measure those micro-conversions in the click-stream, not only can we better understand how well we are persuading but we can also segment our conversion rates by persona segment.

Persuasion is the next step in conversion rate marketing’s evolutionary chain; it’s the stage where we evolve beyond primitive relevance and weave into the user experience a compelling force that delights users. You may clear every last one of your conversion hurdles, but you will still face the question of how you move your prospects from click to click, how you orchestrate persuasive momentum.

Building persuasive, persona-based scenarios that allow prospects to “buy naturally” is the only way to achieve the dramatic results that are possible when you think beyond conversion.

From a conversion perspective, the designer now asks, “How do I build a single pipeline, or experience, that gets me the highest conversion rate?” From a persuasion perspective, the designer will ask, “How do I build multiple experiences that give me the highest conversion rates overall? It’s the difference between trying to increase your conversion rate from 2% to 4% (a 100% increase) and imagining what small percentage of all your visitors you will have to write off because they are simply “unconvertible.” Reach for only 4% or 100% of those intending to buy?

The Future of User Experience Driven by an Algorithm

The future is not about optimizing conversion, nor about maximizing conversion, it’s about spectacular user experiences that convert effortlessly from the users point-of-view. We are among the small community advocating that point-of-view for years but that future will most likely be driven not by people like us but rather by how an algorithm determines the quality of user experience. We’re feeling confident change is on the way and if it wasn’t for Google’s algorithm you might call that naïve.

Join us Thursday, August 26 at 1:30pm ET for a webinar with UIE – Produce a More Persuasive Site: Where Design & Marketing Meet.

Last week, I had the pleasure to present a webinar sponsored by Compete titled “How to Legally Spy on Your Competition.” Many people on that webinar requested a list of the tools that I mentioned on the call. I thought I’d share them here as well. For specific examples on how to use each of these tools, please check out the recording of the webinar.

1. How are your competitors doing now?

One of the most common questions heard across boardrooms, this question is much easier to answer today than ever before. This is a list of tools to provide you with an overall benchmark to do market research and provide validation of your marketing efforts:

Google Trends: With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s or segment of the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. This is a great way to compare your website, category, brand, or product lines and your competitors’.

ComScore: ComScore provides syndicated and custom solutions in online audience measurement, e-commerce, advertising, search, video, and mobile and offers dedicated analysts with digital marketing and vertical-specific industry expertise. This is great when you want a custom report benchmarking your transaction rates last quarter to several of your competitors’ and want to understand what factors influenced them.

Compete: Compete has a diverse sample of 2,000,000-plus U.S. Internet users that have opted in to have their online click stream behavior monitored. Compete normalizes this click stream data and is then able to determine the behavior of all U.S. Internet users. Compete.com is the only online competitive intelligence service that combines site and search analytics in one site. Compete will allow you to benchmark your site to your competitors’ by a number of standard metrics such as: unique visitors, visits, page views, Compete rank, average stay, visits/person, pages/visit, attention, daily reach, and daily attention. It offers a free trial and customized reports as well.

UserTesting: Sometimes you see the quantitative numbers in these other reports but you can’t understand whyyour competitors are getting the results they are. This is where I find UserTesting.com very helpful. UserTesting lets you “look over the shoulder” of people in your target audience while they use your website. You get a video of their session on a website as they talk out loud about their experience as they try to accomplish the task you set out for them. I often use this for PPC (define) campaigns. I’ll specify a term and have three users look at several ads (including my clients) and the landing page and ask them to evaluate the experience on each.

If you’re interested in running user tests for yourself and your competitors just send me a note and I’ll send you the task sheet I use for these tests.

2. Find out what is on your competitor’s roadmap.

Would it help to know what your competitors are planning so you can maneuver appropriately? These tools can give you some good indications.

Google search and News Timeline: There are several searches you can do to see if any of your competitors’ future plans have leaked online. They include searching for :

• site:competitor.com “roadmap” or “plans”
• Plan filetype:pdf site:competitor.com (there are many file types you can search for)
• Key employees
• Product lines and rumor

I also like looking at my competitors’ press releases for a year or two years at a time to see if I can spot trends in what and when they make certain releases.

LinkedIn: It has recently added a feature that allows you to follow companies, but you should be following key employees (especially HR) and spend time monitoring the groups they are in for clues to what they may be looking for in talent (just like when Apple was recently looking for several antenna engineers). You should also be looking for any job postings there and on other job boards.

SlideShare: This is another great place to find competitor roadmaps and plans.

Twitter Search: It doesn’t matter if you search from the website or have custom searches set up in tools such as TweetDeck, Twitter provides some incredible competitive intelligence opportunities. Search for tweets such as:

• hashtags of products, category, competitors, etc.
• Key influencers
• Competitors’ employees
• Conferences
• Industry associations

Facebook: Follow fan pages for interesting discussions with your competitors’ key advocates and early-to-market announcements.

Next time we will look at how to identify who your competitors are and your brand influencers. We’ll also explore how to find top media contacts and how to find out what untapped search marketing opportunities exist.

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 sites that volunteered to have our students work with them. In fact, 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.

Listen to What They Learned: Live!

After 12 weeks learning “at the knee” of some of the industry’s best and brightest, these Internet marketing students are set to graduate… if they can just earn their faculty’s endorsement.

Four times a year, Market Motive offers intimate, faculty-led web-based courses in Internet marketing from All-star faculty members teach the certification courses: Dave Szetela, Matt Bailey (Fundamentals), Jennifer Laycock (Social Media), John Marshall (Web Analytics), Avinash Kaushik (Web Analytics), Greg Jarboe/Jamie O’Donnell (Online PR and Video marketing), Bryan Eisenberg (Conversion Optimization), Michael Stebbins (Email Marketing) and nailing down PPC Advertising. This time around, final project defenses are open to the public.

Since January, the all-star faculty has been shepherding this semester’s class through the latest in cutting edge trends and tools for SEO, Web Analytics, Social Media and Conversion Optimization.

But receiving a Master Certification from Market Motive requires more from students than just watching streaming videos and passing online quizzes. It also requires hands-on projects that reflect the kind of work they’ll do in the real world.

Those final projects are presented to the faculty in live screen-sharing webinars by students studying SEO, Conversion Optimization, and Social Media. This semester the public is invited to listen in by webinar.

In the space of a few weeks I’ve had my material “ripped off” twice. One instance was OK by me, but one instance was not. The differences open up important questions at the forefront of the new rules involving content, sharing, social media, and copyrights.

Today, ideas spread quickly. Volumes of great information are shared through Webinars, e-books, and social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and SlideShare. Tracing an idea, insight, or fact back to its original source can be challenging. This is an even bigger issue when these exchanges are occurring among marketing professionals, especially because creating and sharing content has become practically the go-to strategy for driving business and lead generations for many companies. Take creative professionals who make their living from their ideas and content, give them an incentive to share that content openly, and you have a near perfect environment for undue influence and sticky copyright issues.

Like me, I’m sure you have your sphere of influencers. I’ve been fortunate to surround myself with people much smarter than me to nourish my brain. Being influenced by others is a good thing and it’s the reason my peers and I have been sharing our thoughts through (in my case) 300+ columns like these, presentations, and countless conversations. So far, the benefits have far outweighed any dangers or concerns. But as I mentioned, recent events have got me pondering the best ways to manage my future content sharing strategies.

The first instance happened when a student of mine asked me what I thought of their brainstorming session for banner ad ideas. When I saw the list, I asked my student if they were aware of where these ideas came from – or what influenced their ideas. As soon as I asked, they were embarrassed because it was a collection of disjointed ideas grabbed from past and future presentations and concepts I had written about in past columns and had shared with them in conversations we’d had together.

My students felt as though they’d ripped me off and I assured them that they hadn’t. What they had done is something our brains do naturally as we take in, process, and assimilate ideas. I shared with them this fabulous video of Derren Brown and his use of “Subliminal Advertising” to influence the kind of logo and branding advertising execs would come up with for a business he was starting. By manipulating barely conscious cues he provided ad execs, he predicted precisely the kind of logo they came up with. As soon as my students watched the video, they understood how their assembly of my ideas was unconsciously done and felt better about the situation. In turn, I explained how flattered I was, as my goal for the last decade has been to inspire others by sharing my ideas.

Influence Gone Bad

The next instance was not as comfortable for either me or a friend who I “influenced.” Here’s what occurred: This friend shared a presentation on March 1 titled, “15 Secrets of High Converting Websites.” (Follow along and you’ll see why the presentation has since been removed.)

When I saw this presentation, I immediately asked my Twitter and Facebook friends: “What would you do if someone you thought was a friend ripped off one of your presentations without asking or attribution? http://ow.ly/1cOgi”

Here’s the backstory: In just two weeks, I’ll be presenting my “21 Secrets to Top Converting Websites” at SES New York. It’s a presentation that took me the better part of a decade to put together. The presentation had received rave reviews as a keynote speech at SES London, including this tweet from @Liz_Gray: “#seskey Unbelievable keynote this morning from @thegrok! Action-oriented, clear and concise. Everyone with a website – test something today.”

I first delivered this presentation in December 2009 at SES Chicago and then recorded it in January as a Webinar for my conversion optimization students. This is where my friend was “influenced” by my presentation. No other copies of these slides were shared anywhere.

I have shared presentations in the past, but since I am now focused on being a professional marketing speaker, these slides are a good part of my livelihood, and my paying clients don’t want them shared all over the Internet. So when I reviewed this person’s newest Webinar presentation, it was a shock to find that “his” slide titles and content, including many of the images, were essentially the same as mine. That’s when I tweeted the question.

The tweet led to quite a firestorm on Twitter and Facebook as people responded. My friend RSS Ray, a.k.a., Brian Offenberger, who had committed this act, was inundated with e-mails and comments on Facebook. You can read some of the discussions on Facebook here. Two of my MarketMotive students who really studied my presentation shared these comments on Twitter:

Gene Gerwin wrote: “Judging from the slides, it’s such a direct lift that I wonder if mere attribution would have been sufficient…”

And Noran El-Shinnawy wrote: “Hey, @rssray here’s my comment on your blog since you won’t approve it (@TheGrok ) http://tweetphoto.com/12949589.” In a follow up tweet, Noran added: “INCREDIBLY UNPROFESSIONAL: @rssray rips off @TheGrok ‘s 21 Secrets presentation and passes it off as his own http://ow.ly/1cOgi.”

The next morning, Brian pulled the slides he shared from his Web site, posted an apology on his blog, and explained how items from my presentation unintentionally ended up in his. We subsequently spoke on the phone.

I asked him to share with me a list of what he learned from the experience. “I had the importance of checking and re-checking work re-taught to me in the most painful of ways,” Brian wrote.

The Future of Sharing

Some people suggested I sue for damages. I’m not an attorney, but from past legal advice I know that you cannot collect damages for material that is yours unless you have filed for the copyright with the Library of Congress. You can have them remove the duplication just by placing the copyright notice on your material and you can prove it was yours first.

These two situations have left me with more questions than answers:

• Do I feel comfortable sharing my slides any more? I have shared many presentations in the past. Do you?
• How do we prevent ourselves from being overly influenced by others?
• Let’s say someone shares a presentation online through sites like SlideShare and copies a slide or two from others. During the presentation, the speaker gives verbal attribution to the original source of information, but written attribution is not placed on the slide. Is that ok?
• What would you do if you were accused of “copying” someone’s slides? I think Brian handled it as well as anyone.
• How will copyright laws evolve with the times?
• How would you have handled this situation?

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%, but many websites convert at 10% or higher. What do they do that you may not be doing? Bryan Eisenberg, who has been helping companies improve their conversion rates since 1998 will reveal 21 of his most valuable tips that will help you increase your conversion rate. In this fast paced session you’ll find relevant examples from retail sites, B2B sites, publishers and everything in between. You’ll learn the key principle of GTC – Get the Cash! Guaranteed you’ll never be able to look at a website the same way again.

Why is this webinar free?

1. My good friends from MarketMotive and I want you to kick off 2010 the right way by focusing in on improving your conversion rate. They gave away all their workshops in December, but I pushed them to give this one for free as well.

2. This is my last presentation for MarketMotive before we begin our Certification in Conversion & Landing Page Optimization course on January 11. We want people to see the caliber of information we provide monthly in our workshops, so please invite others to check it out. They may decide that learning internet marketing online from MarketMotive’s esteemed faculty may be just the edge they need in 2010.

3. If you want to find out more about how you can improve your conversion rate after learning the 21 Secrets to Top Converting Websites, you can always sign up with MarketMotive to have me be your hands on instructor  for the Conversion & Landing Page Optimization certification, so you can do it yourself or you can reach out to me and I’ll help you find someone to help you in your efforts.

It’s now been almost 2 years since I last did my training session “Call to Action: Conversion Optimization Training”  publicly. If you are looking to improve your conversion optimization efforts you’ll want to be there. I’ll be teaching a Search Engine Strategies Training course on November 5th, at the Downtown Conference Center in New York.

The other course I haven’t offered in almost 2 years is Persuasive Online Copywriting. Well you’ll be hearing more about the availability of that course from your desktop. Copywriter and copywriting teacher extraordinaire Jeff Sexton and I will be teaming up to bring you this course virtually. We’ll meet once a week for 3 weeks, you’ll have exercises and you’ll come out a much improved copywriter, even if you never wrote copy before. Let me know if you want advanced details before they come out later this week.

As many of you know, I have been a faculty member of MarketMotive and have been doing training and workshops for members – well we are getting ready to launch a certification course in conversion optimization in January. They currently offer several certifications in web analytics, search engine marketing and social media. If you are interested in a conversion optimization certification shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to hook you up with a juicy discount.

One of my favorite parts of working with MarketMotive is working with my good friend Avinash Kaushik, author of Occam’s Razor, Web Analytics: One Hour a Day and Web Analytics 2.0. He’ll have some part in this certification course as well. Last time we were together at SES San Jose 2009, the folks from MarketMotive grabbed a video camera and found some people who had questions for the two of us. Check it out! Do you have some questions for us? Let’s also wish Avinash a speedy recovery on his broken arm.

On November 4th, I’ll be at the Ad:tech conference doing some roving reporting and interviews for WebMasterRadio. If you are going to be there, let’s try and catch up. If you’d like to be interviewed by me, send me an email and I will try to get it set up.

If you couldn’t join us last Wednesday, you can join us with this recorded version of Recession Marketing: Pre-Click to Post-Click. Join Craig Danuloff, from ClickEquations and David Brussin from Monetate as we explore using personas to create better pay per click or paid search ads and a better persona-lized experience all the way to conversion.

Click here to view the embedded video.