You may be in a test cell right this moment. Go to Amazon.com, search for a book and look at their add to cart button, ready to buy area. Is the background of the box white or blue? Amazon is doing a significant test to their add to cart button and the area surrounding it, what I call the “ready to buy” area. This is the first major test of this area I have seen in years. In 2008, I…
“An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.” – Jack Welch Fifteen years of working with many organizations (it is an impressive list) has taught us most organizations have not yet achieved a point where marketing analytics is like financial reporting: simplified; fairly universal; with a clear line of sight to business financial statements and tied to specific goals and objectives. If everyone had a simple marketing analytics framework that made reporting simple, then everyone…
“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…
Here’s the punchline; The role of today’s leadership is to “remove the speed bumps in the experimenters’ way!” ~ Scott Cook, co-founder and Chairman of Intuit 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…
On Twitter, I shared a link to this article from Smashing Magazine, Pricing Tables: Examples And Best Practices. When I shared it, I said that while many of these were beautiful there was still plenty of room for some conversion optimization. This won’t be as tricky as my first Conversion Optimization 101 post that you needed to pick up on the nuance that corporate culture trumps any conversion optimization tactics. Even so, we had some fabulous suggestions in the comments. For my…
Last week, I published my first Conversion Optimization 101 post and asked you if you could look at a particular screenshot and also to tell me: What’s wrong with this picture? How would you fix it? Here is the image: There were some very good suggestions on what you would do to improve this picture: Dennis Moons said: The three buttons: Previous, Process and Cancel all have the same colour and visual weight. I would change the Cancel & Previous buttons…
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…
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…