In the near future you will use voice commands to ask for actionable stories to be related to you from raw data. It sounds like Star Trek but it’s months away, not years.

Today is the start of IBM’s SmarterCommerce Global Summit 2013. As part of the program IBM invited several industry influencers to attend the event. Last night, I spent some time chatting with Sandra Zoratti, author of Precision Marketing, Stratigent‘s Bill Bruno and Triberr‘s Dino Dogan.

I shared with them how I was first exposed to real data driven marketing online in the early 1990s. I was managing banner ad placement ads on sites like Yahoo!, Excite and AltaVista for a consumer focused software company.  We could measure by each ad creative and placement how much usage and revenue they generated from their software download. From the start we developed hooks into the software to marry up the acquisition data. We could then ask the analysts to run queries for us and send us Excel spreadsheets. We used them to decide where to keep investing in banner ads.

So, of course, when Jeffrey and I started focusing more of our time on online businesses we expected people to do similar things.  Where we ever surprised!

Excel became the de-facto tool for analysts. Do you remember the days of running web logs files in excel to analyze them? This was before tools like WebTrends log analyzer became popular and of course well before any of the javascript based web analytics tools even launched. Excel is still a great tool for analysts as Chief Evangelist for Bing Ads, John Gagnon has shown in his last couple of columns. It is not however, the best tool to share data  and collaborate with the entire organization. How many times have you seen Excel spreadsheets and charts go straight from the inbox to some digital black hole, never to be used again?

The only way to get people to use the data, is to make it more accessible to them. - Tweet this

This past week, we saw data visualization platform Tableau, enjoy a  successful IPO. I love what you can do with their platform, but  it still doesn’t pack the punch it needs to in order to get an organization to act on the data. As Robbie Allen, the CEO of Automated Insights points out ”most visualizations require the user go through the mental exercise of interpreting the results.”

This past February, I cautioned analysts that they have to up the value of their game to move up the value chain of their organization. At the time, I shared technology from NarrativeScience that transforms data into stories. They currently have a private data that I shared at eMetrics San Francisco that plugs in Google Analytics into their platform.

This morning, Automated Insights launched an impressive, similar service, Site AI. You can currently plug-in either Google Analytics or Clicky into their platform and receive daily emails that provide you with a cliff notes version of your analytics. The service is free to try and they are planning on pricing it based on how many people sign up. The more that sign up now, the lower the price is going to be. The technology is not perfect yet, but I see where it is going and I believe this is just what millions of website owners need today.

What really excites me  about the Big Data scene is where the new interfaces for data are headed. Turning data into a story is awesome and having an computer discover insights and patterns is more efficient than having humans do it. However, if you look into the crystal ball, you may imagine the day that we have a Google Now voice interface into our data sources. Where you, I or your mom could go in and ask the data any question, to look for any pattern and make accessing data as simple as doing a voice search on your iPhone or Android device today. We’ll have predictive cards that inform us to look at new data points that should be of interest to us to further explore.

How far away do you think this might be? How will this lead to smarter commerce, smarter cities, smarter consumers? How else do you think we can humanize the data interface?

The post The Next Generation of Data Analysis appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.

In an email exchange, Tom Grimes, the owner of a Culligan dealership in Amarillo, TX and a brilliant friend, shared with me what he’s thinking about in terms of business choices.

I thought about it and based on his thoughts, here’s a list of the many high-level choices businesses typically make every day. It may help you make some more conscious choices of your own:

• Select or solicit? Do customers select you or your products, or must you solicit them? Amazon.com is an online destination, so it’s selected. Offline, Walmart is too. Customers select Amazon and Walmart. If you sell a water-treatment system, you must solicit. Your marketing must proactively find customers. That’s why Amazon can effectively invest its marketing budget in customer experience (free shipping), while Culligan of Amarillo uses local search and local selling techniques.
• Tangible or intangible? Do you sell something people can taste, touch, smell, or hold, or do you sell a concept, service, or idea? Amazon mostly sells tangible stuff; A.G. Edwards sells financial gain and security, largely a service. Infuse tangible products with intangible qualities: “This soap will make you smell sexy,” and intangible products with tangible qualities. This is why lawyers and stockbrokers wear suits. The costume makes the idea of knowledge, power, and trust appear more tangible.
• Transaction or relationship? Is this a one-night stand or a long-term relationship? Buying a conference table from a conference room specialty store is more transactional, as you likely need only one or two tables and won’t be in the market for another anytime soon. As a transaction seller, your focus is on the sale and on optimizing driving points and funnel points and your conversion funnel. But if the buying cycle is short or your product is complex, you must build a relationship. You must optimize several persuasive scenarios, for early-, middle-, and late-stage buyers and repeat-buying scenarios.
• Speed or quality? Does the customer demand delivery speed, or is quality more important? The higher the product’s quality, the higher the bar on the customer experience both with the buying process and the actual product itself. The good news is the customer is willing to wait a little. Would your Starbucks coffee be as special if it was handed to you immediately after you ordered it? If you sell speed, customers are willing to trade some quality for quickness.
• Price or prestige? Is it all about the customer saving money, or does she pay a premium for prestige? BMW is about prestige. Overstock.com is about price. When buying prestige, customers are likely interested in what others think of their choices. Shopping for clothes at a warehouse or clearance outlet is about price. If you sell a prestige product, never advertise or sell on price. If you’re an Overstock, sell on low price. Price isn’t king, but it is important; to a few, it’s their master.
• Lifestyle or utilitarian? At its core, an automobile is utilitarian, but car manufacturers have worked long and hard to turn their products into a lifestyle choice. Underpants were once utilitarian (especially for guys), but today it’s a lifestyle choice, particularly for women. Look at how Martha Stewart has transformed a utilitarian requirement, fixing up your home, into a lifestyle.

In some cases, a business doesn’t want to make the choice. It does its best to blend and balance the seesaw, hence the term “affordable luxury.” This is why a lot of fast-food restaurants now offer premium menu items. It doesn’t always work out.

Making conscious choices improves your ability to build and communicate value. When these choices are made unconsciously you confuse both employees and customers.

There are many more choices we make, and I’d love to hear what other choices you make, but this is a good beginning. I hope it starts some conversations at the office.

The post Choose Not to Confuse appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.

1. Clean up your lists. This is a great time to send out an email to reactivate emails that have either never purchased from you or haven’t clicked on a link in one of your emails in a while.

2. Verify your offers. Review your popular pages to make sure your older offers align with your current offers. It may also make sense to try one of your newer offers (ebooks, white papers, sales, etc.) to your inactive list.

3. Update your autoresponder emails (thank you for your order, request for information, etc). Take a look at these emails and try to rewrite them in a friendlier tone. Add social media profile links into the email.

4. Update your thank you pages. There are many cool things you can do on your thank you page. Everything from embedding a thank you-style video that offers extra value to social media sharing options, as well as additional offers. Try something.

5. Check for broken and expired links. Use the following tools:

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider
• Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors
• WordPress Broken Link Checker Plugin
• Majestic SEO

6. Tags and pixels.

• Ensure your tags are working properly/data is being passed correctly.
  • Take inventory of existing and intended tag implementations and carefully assess all use cases and which tags should be active. Visit all key pages of your site and use your browser QA tool of choice, such as Firebug, Ghostery, and WASP, to confirm all tags are executing as they should.
• Ensure your tags are loading in the best order.
  • Async when you can. All tags that can be loaded asynchronously, should be. Place async tags higher in the page to maximize data collection without risk of page interference.
  • Sync when you have to. Some tags must be loaded synchronously. Place sync tags at the bottom of the page to prevent a tag error from blocking the page.
  • Confirm that any tag dependencies are being met. For example, if an event-tracking tag in an analytics tool calls a library, the library tag must fire first.
• Remove unnecessary tags, make tags “lighter,” and ensure they’re updated.
  • Make sure you’re not “over-tagging.” Evaluate your analytics planning and remove tags that are collecting improper or unused data, or feeding data into a system you no longer use.
  • Make your existing tags more lightweight by removing redundant utility code from tag markup or adjust the way the tag is called.
  • Vendors will make changes to their tags and release new versions over time. Site owners should have a system in place to document and manage tag versioning and updates.

Thanks to the folks at TagMan for these tips.

7. Update your social profiles. Make sure bios, links, photos, and videos are up to date. Use tools like ManageFlitter.com to clean up your Twitter followers, etc.

Bonus: If you had an extra 5 percent marketing budget, what would you experiment with? Find it by cutting your worst performing efforts.

The post A 7-Point Spring Cleaning Checklist appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.

In it he shares this tidbit:

“Our heavy investments in Prime, AWS, Kindle, digital media, and customer experience in general strike some as too generous, shareholder indifferent, or even at odds with being a for-profit company. ‘Amazon, as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers,’ writes one outside observer.

But I don’t think so.

To me, trying to dole out improvements in a just-in-time fashion would be too clever by half. It would be risky in a world as fast-moving as the one we all live in.

More fundamentally, I think long-term thinking squares the circle. Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align.”

The reason many companies struggle is because of the metrics they choose to focus on. Since the early days of online marketing, people have been obsessed with traffic and H.I.T.S. (how idiots track success, as it is often called). If you’re shaking your head about this one, so am I.

Roy Williams, the “Wizard of Ads,” shared a similarly brilliant insight from one of his fastest growing retail clients in his Monday Morning Memo:

I asked, “How is traffic trending? Are we ahead of last year?”

“Roy, I don’t measure traffic.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Last week one of my salespeople made 63 sales presentations and closed only 24 of them. That tells me 39 people bought somewhere else. And right now they’re telling all their friends why they bought where they did. They’re showing off their purchases and explaining why they didn’t buy from us.”

“Good point.”

“That salesperson is no longer with us.”

“You’re really serious about this.”

“Today’s close rate is the most reliable indicator of tomorrow’s traffic. When close rate is high, traffic increases. When close rate begins to slide, traffic soon begins to slide as well.”

The same applies online!

How is your conversion rate trending?

Please allow me to make a suggestion to you. You don’t have a traffic problem, you have a conversion problem!

I have been advocating since the mid-90s, and in this column since 2001, that “conversion rate is a measure of your ability to persuade visitors to take the action you want them to take. It’s a reflection of your effectiveness and customer satisfaction. For you to achieve your goals, visitors must first achieve theirs.”

When a visitor comes to your website prepared to buy – not everyone will buy right away, of course – and isn’t converted by your sales process, she is likely to buy from one of your competitors. When she brags to her friends about what she bought and who she bought it from, it won’t be you she raves about. It’s the customer experience that matters.

Can you tell me why the consumer shouldn’t have bought it from you if she came to your website?

P.S. If you want to improve your customers’ experience and increase conversion rates, please check out how to master your conversion rate optimization, and why it must be your CEO’s responsibility to increase conversion rates.

The post Jeff Bezos’ Secret to High Conversion Rates appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.

“Almost any question can be answered cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign.  And that’s the way to answer them – not by arguments around a table.  Go to the court of last resort – buyers of your products.”

“Scientific Advertising” was published in 1923 by Claude Hopkins, who began to evangelize the need for testing and experimentation in marketing and advertising. 40 years later David Ogilvy a huge disciple of Hopkins was quoted as saying that “Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yet, some 50 years after Oglivy attempted to popularize the need for experimentation “Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward” finds Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational.

In my last column, I shared how Scott Cook, co-founder and chairman of Intuit, shared in his presentation at SXSW how he has been successfully moving his traditional research and intuition based company of 30 years to a culture of experimentation. What stands in the way of getting our companies there? The longer the tenure of leadership the more likely they are to stay entrenched in their ways.  Dan Arielly points out that leadership stays stuck with their “overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition”.

One way to change the organizational issues that handicap a corporate culture from experimenting is getting the corporate leaders to take responsibility for evidence gathering and to “remove the speed bumps in the experimenters’ way!” according to Scott Cook, co-founder and chairman of Intuit.

A traditional company that has been famous for it’s quantity of testing is Capital One, in fact it did a reported 80,000 tests in 2003 – on everything from marketing copy to price points. Of course many of us know the success Amazon has had doing a reported 200+ tests at any given moment and with their constant focus on data driven optimization on every aspect of their business from merchandising to promotions to warehousing and logistics. They are just two exemplary examples of analytically rigorous, knowledge-driven business success, but there are many more. That is not to say that creativity and intuition don’t have their place, but we must find a proper balance.

How does Capital One drive this level of experimentation in their organization?

They claim:

“it differentiates its marketing operations on three dimensions: 1) state-of-the-art technology; 2) rigorous testing and analysis of products, segments and consumer behaviors; and 3) flexible operations and services that enable the organization to capitalize on the intelligence it generates and pursue new opportunities.

This fits with what I shared were the three traditional stumbling blocks that keep most organizations from experimenting:

• Technological limitations imagined and real

• Legal limitations imagined and real

• Organizational culture

To change an organization’s culture to being customer focused you must remove the data & work silos. Then you need leadership that supports and rewards risk because they themselves use data to support assumptions & hypothesis and to steer the company in real time.

Next week, I am headed to the Monetate Agility Summit in Philadelphia. I am excited because their testing and experimentation platform has enabled companies to go from the industry average of 2-5 tests a month to a client average of 59 concurrent tests in a month. They have obviously removed the technological limitations many companies experience when trying to adopt testing online. I am looking forward to speaking to many of these companies as they are transforming into analytically rigorous, knowledge-driven business successes. For example, one client jumped out of the gate and started running a staggering 600 test campaigns in their first 60 days on the platform. Let me know what would you like to learn from them?

Not everyone can be or should be a Monetate client. There are other ways for an organization to remove the technological limitations. However, when technological and legal issues are overcome, the organization’s culture issues may hold them back. Why is that?

Why do you think people and companies fail to experiment? Do you think they don’t understand what an actual experiment is? Do you believe they think that they might already be doing experimentation? Are they too afraid of risk and failures? Why do companies fail to adopt a culture of experimentation? I have some ideas but I’d love to hear what you think.

The post Adopting a Culture of Experimentation appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.

Nobody worth arguing with argues whether search, social, and mobile technologies have impacted customers’ minds and changed buying behavior over the last five years. Today while companies worry about keeping ahead of their competition; the truly critical issue is keeping pace with their customers. Technological and social advances are forcing companies to embrace authenticity (hint – you can’t fake this), dramatically improve customer experiences, or suffer the inevitable.

We all embraced the mantra that advertising only accelerates the inevitable. Today we must add that social and mobile dramatically increased the velocity of that inevitable outcome. Unfortunately, few companies have embraced the structure that allow a strategy and agility to leverage this need for real-time marketing. Certainly events like Oreo’s “you can still dunk in the dark” campaign in the SuperBowl highlight the impending transition to real-time marketing, while the rest slept through it.

After so many years of evangelising the use of data to get a better understanding of your customer so that you can create delightful experiences for them, of why you need to create a culture that believes that they should “Always Be Testing” and that uses their analytics data to function as a digital nervous system, I realize that in order for this to succeed at a grand scale, the executive leadership of a company needs to buy in wholeheartedly to this worldview.

Big organizations get committed to the way things were. The traditional corporate structure virtually mandates the status quo. However, visionary leaders like Scott Cook have the authority to kill the giant speed bumps in the way to success in today’s marketplace. I frequently call these speed bumps – BPUs; business prevention units. They include:

• Technological limitations imagined and real
• Legal limitations imagined and real
• Organizational culture

This is why I was so excited to see Scott Cook’s presentation at SXSW “Innovation & Leadership in the Agile Age.” Curious as to what he would share about the transformation of Intuit, the company he founded thirty years ago after his stints at P&G and Bain & Co. He shared how the traditional role of leadership’s (Avinash Kaushik, a former Intuit employee,  would call them HiPPOs) job was to make decisions based on their experience and predictions. Intuit has transitioned into a more entrepreneurial organization whose goals are to get their “leap of faith assumptions” into an experiment in front of real customers as fast as possible. He shared multiple internal examples out of their 1,800 ongoing experiments and several other examples from government experimentation and concluded with the same premise that Coca-Cola Company’s global boss of advertising and content excellence Jonathan Mildenhall preaches:

“It’s not what data you have access to but what you do with it,” he said, citing one of his favourite quotes from Harvard University’s John Kao. “Creativity is the crucial variable in the process of turning knowledge into value.”

Research for research’s sake is dead; what matters is using the “lean experimentation loop” to turn an idea with “leap of faith assumptions” into an experiment and then learn and adjust from there.

He also shared a bit on how they have removed the barriers to experimentation. From legal they received a one slide document that everyone could understand.  That slide outlined what didn’t need legal review for an “experiment.”

They have been able to overcome some of the cultural barriers by making sure leaders and teams are super clear on what the team’s goals are and they all understand the problems everyone is trying to solve. They have also shifted the internal language of the organization to begin asking leaders questions such as “what were the experiments you can point to that prove your thinking?” or “what are the leap of faith assumptions and when can you start running experiments to prove or disprove them?” By shifting the focus and having the courage and commitment to say no they are seeing some great success and avoiding major failures. As he summed up Intuit’s results in their Indian Fasal business where they have tried 14 experiments. 10 were failures, 2 were successes, 1 was in a pivot and the last one was too early to tell.

I have always heard great things about Scott Cook from several of my friends who work or have worked at Intuit. I’ve highlighted in my book “Always Be Testing” how they embraced testing failures with “Stinkies” but the highlight for me was the opportunity to spend some one-on-one time with the legend after his session. The most amazing thing was to see him in action with a customer in the field. There he was asking a customer what he missed from the old product he was using and what he would like to see in Quickbooks while he jotted down notes. I am sure those notes will go into a list of things to test and experiment so they can use that data to delight the customer.

What have you done in your organization to remove the barriers to experimentation and to become more agile?

The post Leadership in the Age of Agility & Experimentation appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.

Consider these two examples:

1) Web analytics vendors replaced the need to analyze log files because using Excel was way too time consuming and painful.

2) Testing and personalization technology vendors came along because the standard ecommerce and CMS platforms didn’t make it easy to do any kind of website testing or optimization.

However, the needs and goals of these tools have shifted over the past few years. For instance, with web analytics, you can discover key performance metrics based on what visitors are doing on your website in real time, while testing and personalization vendors are going beyond testing button colors or headlines on landing pages.

Whenever I evaluate any new technology I am always concerned on how it impacts resources, time spent, and how it incorporates into the processes and workflow of an organization and its individuals. I am a self-confessed marketing tool junkie. I look at a lot of new technology every year, but of course the technology I am closest with are testing and personalization tools and web analytics/big data solutions. That is why I wrote a buyer’s guide to enterprise testing and optimization technology.

I was shocked, however, when I saw the The Forrester Wave™: Online Testing Platforms, Q1 2013 report. I should point out that all of the tools there are solid platforms and any of them should be able to meet the needs of your organization. What you want in order to make a correct evaluation is not theoretical models of what might be, in an analyst’s office, the best solution for you but more practical advice as to what will deliver on vendor promises and advice from real users. What concerns me is how Forrester came up with their “criteria” for rankings. I wonder if it’s a coincidence that the author, Joe Stanhope, left Forrester right after the report was published!

Here are some of my specific concerns:

• Technology platforms in the Wave report were rewarded for the number of unique MVT algorithms they allowed teams to use. I have never seen an instance where that actually made a difference.
• The report also penalized Monetate (full disclosure, I am on the Monetate Advisory Board) because it uncovered a way to deploy its technology with one simple asynchronous tag to track all your data, understand who your customers are by aligning the data with your CRM and other systems on the back end, and then change the website experience in the DOM of the browser by defining sections on webpages and identifying customer segments.

The point of any testing or optimization technology is to enable you to accomplish more and improve your results with as little additional resources as possible. This is why I became a Monetate advisor; the ability to give companies an opportunity to do more, faster and with fewer resources.

While the average team that is doing any online testing or experimentation is getting three to five tests out the door a month, Monetate’s clients average 59 concurrent live campaigns every day. There have customers who have in one year launched over 1,000 test campaigns and have seen incremental revenue gains of over $125 million in revenue. That’s also why Monetate influenced approximately 20% of ecommerce traffic during the 2012 holiday season; that was about $3 Billion in revenue influenced in December 2012.

Aren’t these the kind of tools you want to learn about, and see how they are used in the field to help you get more with fewer resources?

This is exactly why I’m excited to be sharing an updated Conversion Optimizer’s toolbox workshop at the WhichTestWon live event in my hometown of Austin in May. Come join me. In fact, get an additional $50 off a ticket for the entire two-day conference. Jeffrey and I will both be there. Just use the coupon code: EisenbergRules for your exclusive discount.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for testing and optimization technology, make sure you are asking and evaluating based on the right criteria. If you need a list to start from, take a look at the sample RFP questions that I put together based on what I have seen as best of breed and best practices from actually working with companies of all shapes and sizes rather than hearing vendors pitch and believing every word they say.

The post Technology should support your goals, NOT slow you down! appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.

I just finished reading this article about an EBay study that questions the value of Google’s main Adwords service. I’ve been really impressed with eBay’s performance as of late, especially their mobile efforts. But, I am concerned how this news will be interpreted by others.

I agree with them that any investment that is sub-optimal should be questioned about the value that is being returned. However, the first question they should be asking is, if their team’s efforts are really putting in the real value added efforts needed to make Adwords work most effectively.

Tell me you haven’t seen this silly dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) ads from eBay while you have searched for things. Do you think they are doing a fair evaluation?

What’s the silliest dynamic insertion ad you have seen?

The post How Can You Evaluate This Kind of Performance? appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.

In this column, we’ll take a look at 3 landing pages:

1. https://squareup.com/
2. https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/credit-card-reader
   
3. http://intuit-gopayment.com/free-gopay

Since they all pretty much sell the same thing, I thought it would be interesting to show several processes we use to review each of these landing pages based on:

• The anatomy of a landing page and the key design elements found.

• The prioritization of elements based on eyetracking studies using Feng-Gui.

• The Conversion Trinity

It might help to review this short video on how your designer and you should be working together to set the priorities for your page:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here is my analysis of the conversion design of these 3 landing pages (the video takes less than 14 minutes):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Square has focused on simplifying their messaging and conversion process (that appeals to the Competitive and Spontaneous types) over Intuit’s and PayPal. Even the look of the card readers in the product presentation had a great impact on people’s decisions to sign up on these pages or not.

It would appear, if you were to truly dig into the details that both Intuit (for Humanistic types) and PayPal (for Methodical types) might have better offers. However, I am a Square customer and many of the people I asked about the pages agreed Square seemed to be the most effective landing page for converting visitors.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Please give me your feedback.

In addition, I asked several experts for their opinion of these landing pages (without seeing my analysis).

Jeff Sexton,copywriter teacher and messaging consultant shared:

Squareup does a commendable job of pushing their primary sales message, but makes it way too obscure to get more info if you want it. You have to click on the text that reads “2.75% per swipe…” and that text does not appear to be clickable unless you look REALLY hard.”  I would recommend they at least test making the text look more clickable, either by turning it blue or underlined or 3-dimensional, or just by making the little horizontal triangle bigger.

Also, because Squareup changes the picture from iPhone to iPad when going from home page to the page on “Square Register,” I half thought that you could only use square register with an iPad. I had to read to figure out that it could be used on an iPhone too.  Something to think about

Paypal — If you’re going to have a demonstration video, you should show a miniature video player instead of a button as the clickable call to action.  Also the video takes too long to get going — the first 10 seconds or so almost feel like pre-roll. Oh, and I think whoever designed their card reader should be shot — the thing looks fragile and I could never quite figure out if there was a slot in the reader that you swiped the card through, or if you just swiped the card along the back or something. Just look at the hero shot: what’s that blue thingy behind the card? It doesn’t appear in any other picture of the reader does it? Just… distracting really.

Finally, what no one mentions — not square up or paypal or intuit — is that you can take a payment BEFORE you get your reader thingy in the mail. People procrastinate, and they might very well be reading this page because they need to take a payment like, now. I know this because it was exactly the case with my wife Deanie’s photography business. She wanted to take a payment that day and it took me some serious research to figure out that, yes, you could do that with Squareup. Why do they keep it a secret?

Tip: Never underestimate the power and pull of immediacy in today’s world.

P.S. Paypal’s menu at the bottom was nicely done and their “Multiple Ways to Get Paid” tab was brilliant. I think they may want to test bringing more of that messaging into the landing page, if possible, as it’s a solid differentiator between them and Squareup.

Intuit had the best pricing table once you got to it — they at least gave you the “keyed in” card payment charges up front. Of course, they’re relying on you to understand the difference between swiped and keyed in card payments, which isn’t a great assumption, but… why not put some of that data up front? In fact, I think their “How It Works” page might even convert better as a landing page than their current landing page, as it quickly differentiates them from everyone else. Might be worth a test?

Nick Usborne, online copywriter, author and coach:

Intuit:

I can see why they used “Never Miss a Sale”. It’s a benefit, not a feature. That said, during a time when early adopters are trying this technology, I think the direct statement of “Accept credit cards anywhere” might work better. Also, the list of features on the chalkboard in the photo is cute, but breaks a cardinal conversion rule – Put nothing in the way of your message. It’s harder for me to read the text on the chalkboard. Finally, this is a two-stage process. I have to click the ‘Give it a try’ button to get to a page where I can sign up.  BTW – ‘Give it a try’ is really lame compared to the line on the Square button – ‘Get a Free Card Reader’. ‘Give it a try’? That’s what I tell my kids when they won’t eat their broccoli.

PayPal:

This is a bit of a mashup of messages, and not in a good way. The headline says ‘Get paid anywhere’, the service is called ‘Paypal Here’,and the button says ‘Get PayPal Here’. The button message is unfortunate, because if I skim over the name of the service and just read the button, I might think, “Get PayPal here? But I already have Paypal.” Interestingly, PayPal offers a free card reader when you download their app. But they hide the offer in small, gray text. Are they afraid every teenager with ask for one? Either make the offer, or don’t. Also under the heading of ‘make up your mind’, PayPal needs to make up its mind whether they want me to ‘Get PayPal Here’ or ‘Watch how it works’. Ask me to choose and I’m likely to choose neither and go back to watching dancing squirrels on YouTube.

Square:

Very simple, and follows that basic conversion rule of “Put nothing in the way”. Simple and direct. And, for once, the visual is not just decoration, but provides the second half of the story. One thing I might do is test the “sign up” line as an alternative headline: ‘Sign up and we’ll mail you a free Mobile Card Reader’. By giving them the card reader, Square is removing another obstacle to conversion.

Conclusion:

All other things being equal, I would vote for Square. Hands down. But all other things aren’t equal. (Are they ever?) Both Intuit and PayPal have huge brand awareness and a ton of customer trust. That trust alone could compensate for weaker messaging and design and lead to higher conversion rates.

Alex Harris, a landing page & conversion focused designer we have worked with for over a decade gave his input:

Square – This is the best design of the three. Within a few seconds my eyes identify with the photo and I do not need to read any text to know what they are selling.

• The slider ARROWS should may be hidden until you hover over the slider, when clicking the left one I the slide removed the main form area and shows “Text me a link” call to action.
• Or just make each of the slides consistent, keeping the main “Get Free Card Reader” form area on each slide.
• Test adding a signup button in the top right of the page.
• Before signing up for the form or buying this product, I do have concerns about security for my business. Design should demonstrate confidence with security seals & text.

Paypal – The photo is more confusing than the square one, maybe because I know what square is and paypal is known as a different type of version.

• On the left side of the page, the main call to action area seems confusing, even after reading I am confused. Is this an app or hardware?
• I am not ready to give you my mobile number, why is that the conversion action?

Intuit – while the first photo is not necessary, I like the other photos that rotate in the main area. I think the device photos are clear and easy to understand.

• The secondary content that is just above the fold is very intuitive. The middle aligned phone + device + card image reinforces that top photos and easy to understand.
• The call to action text on the button isn’t focused on committing right away so user may feel more comfortable on click it more.
• The subtext using “FREE” is worked into each areas of the content, then a large FREE headline is below. FREE is everywhere, but not done in a cheesy/scammy way.
• The yellow button is the focal point and my eyes are forced to go there.
• All the hyperlinks on the page are not underlined or bold. Savvy web users looking to learning more are the ones that will click these links, others will click yellow button.

How do you think these landing pages compare? Let me know in the comments below please.

The post Comparing the Anatomy of B2B Landing Pages appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.

Maybe they didn’t think people could see that they could buy their friends gifts when you go to wish them a happy birthday from the birthday notifications and below each person they tell you what to buy them:

Yes, I am sure my friend Matt, the cofounder of a startup called OneSpot, wants me to send him a Facebook Game for his birthday. Great targeting Facebook. You sure you understand his social graph?

Or maybe they are afraid we can’t see these big adds after we post a birthday message on a friend’s timeline:

Facebook, are you that desperate to prove your ads work or just simply don’t care enough about our experience?

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