It’s not often I get to leave the confines of my screens, where I always see the world through the eyes of a marketer, but I have been in the real world for the past couple of weeks on a well-deserved vacation in New York City, my hometown. I moved to Austin, TX this January so I got a new perspective on things I saw and virtually ignored or took for granted my entire life. We are staying in an…
In the column, “Claiming your Unfair Advantage, I describe four types of “Big Data” tools. Before I elaborate on these tools, I want to share a lesson from my friend Mark Huffman of P&G. When Mark joined the world’s largest advertiser in 1984, it was all about data analysis. “In God we trust,” one P&G marketer told him, “all others bring data!” Today, Mark is executive production manager at Procter & Gamble and is responsible for all integrated marketing. At…
In my recent column, “E-Commerce Moneyball: Chasing the Market Leader,” I briefly discussed how Amazon built tools for its own use that leverage the big data available to it. Let’s explore the types of tools that are available for you to leverage big data today. There are many reasons one can point to as to why Amazon.com has become such a dominant e-commerce player. Here are a few to highlight: It leveraged social commerce and the voice of the customer…
A couple of weeks ago, I had the honor to speak at the exclusive Acceller Summit in Miami. Some readers may remember Acceller from the case study I wrote about them and their CEO Steve McKean in my book Always Be Testing. Steve is the CEO who explained: “A culture of testing and optimization cannot happen in a vacuum, nor can it be mandated. You need a team that understands and believes in the principles. You need to communicate a…
People tend to break down their websites’ traffic mix by the channel that brought the visitors. Analyzing traffic mix is a great way to develop a better sense of who your visitor is and how your marketing efforts are performing. However, that only tells your marketing story from your traffic generation effort but it doesn’t tell you much about your marketing efficiency. Instead of looking at your traffic by what marketing efforts bring the most amount of visitors and convert…
Join Carlos Del Rio, Director of Conversion Analysis & Digital Strategy at Unbounce, and Monetate’s Adam Figueira and I, who will present case studies from the different tools that I reviewed in my Website Testing & Optimization Buyer’s Guide for the Enterprise and help explain the difference between self-service and full-service website testing and optimization. Register today to learn the best practices for effective website testing & optimization.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is not at all like a Ronco Grill! If you just set it and forget it you can also kiss your money goodbye. We have been telling clients this for the last several years. So I was fascinated by the research my friend Larry Kim, founder of WordStream, shared with me from the data his free AdWords Performance Grader had accumulated. The key findings that WordStream is seeing through thousands of accounts grading profiles are very low…
There are way too many companies that have set up pricing tables with “packages” for their products without a solid understanding of the psychology behind package design. One of the first e-commerce companies to do this well was Dell. Nevertheless, while often imitated, many companies that offer software or services and offer it in different packages are simply playing monkey see, monkey do. Dan Ariely explains in his excellent book “Predictably Irrational” that, “Humans rarely choose things in absolute terms.…