Here are the Conversion Optimization Posts I found most valuable last month.

Can You Catch 4 Ping Pong Balls? – How Too Many Messages Can Kill Your Conversion Rate

by Oli Gardner

From perhaps the best bloggers in the Conversion Optimization world, comes another great post.

Testing Woes 101: Lessons From a Messy Test

by Melissa Burdon

Nice to see others are doing conversion optimization testing in the real world too, and not some idea world where everything can be easily tested perfectly.  Good on you Melissa!

Top 10 Outrageous Web Analytics Myths..Debunked!

By Key Web Metrics

Here is a grain of salt!  Now we just need these guys to make a slide show I can show before every time before I present my findings!

How to track conversions without a “conversion page” in Google Optimizer

By Conversion Voodoo

I’m so glad these guys published this for everyone!  Obviously they had to figure it out how to track downloads and other file events that are considered conversions.  This is something I had to muddle through and wish it was as easy are reading their post.  Well, it is now.  This is going in my personal manual.  Thanks guys!

Ask the Scientist: MarketingExperiments Optimization Sequence

By Marketing Experiments

Marketing Experiments helps again with keeping any eye on the basics. This time, how to optimize a campaign effort.  Sorry its a bit geeky with the formulas, but get the gist, its critical!

How to Get More Views for Your On-Site Video

By Todd Follansbee on Wilson Web

Like a lot of folks, I’m teeing up and placing video on websites.  This article was great confirmation of the things I’m doing right and got me thinking (and will have me testing) other stuff.

Secondary Calls to Action: Unsung Heroes of Persuasion

By Brendan Regan

Here are some great examples of how to structure a Secondary Call to Action with the Primary.  I loved it when the author wrote

I hear ya Bren. (90210 ref)

Evil Conversion: When Optimization Goes Too Far

by Sandra Niehaus

Read this after the above post and see if you can pick up a contradiction between that article and this one.  I’ll give you a hint, unless you say “No Thank You”.  Great article, but shows how two experts Sandra Niehaus & Brendan Regan can have different thoughts on Conversion Optimization.  I say, it depend, and is worth testing, and not settling on the best converting offer, but also considering LONG TERM conversion rates, brand, business development, Customer Experience (leading to customer loyalty) etc.

PS(I met both authors at the Conversion Conference in San Jose earlier this month and think both are worth listening to).

Take This “Internet Sales” Test For Your Site

Take a look at your website, now pretend that each word on the homepage is being said to one of your prospective customers after they said “I might want to buy from you”. Would what was being said to them be relevant?

When was the last time you thought that spending money on Internet Marketing such as Pay-per-Click or SEO was going to increase sales?  It will if the people are sold, but getting them to a bad website that is not relevant to their needs (think of a sales guy babbling on  while you want him off the phone so you can work again, thats a bad website.)

A great sales person has an elevator pitch, knows how to summarize his solutions, he listens to peoples needs, he handles objections and helps people (even if they are not ready to buy at that moment).  A company website needs to be a great sales guy, not a great marketing guy (he did his job already by getting people to the site).

Kill the Brochure Site

I cut my “Internet Business” teeth in an “old school” manufacturing company. It was an $8 Billion company and at 1st did not look to the Internet to do anything more than have brochure materials online.   As the person in charge of the company’s Internet strategies and initiatives,  I knew I had to lead the company in the paradigm shift that was happening in driving B2B lead generation (people were going online 74% of the time to source a new supplier etc), and I knew this meant speaking the “old school language”.  A website had to be more than the digital equivalent of a brochure holder.  It had to be a digital sales person.

Emulate the Sales Group Online

My internal clients at this big old company were in “Marketing”.  I soon realized that the information I was missing the most was from Sales.   Each division of the company had a “Sales & Marketing” group, however I was only ever speaking to 1/2 of my client. Each of 300 or so sales people for the company knew how to present the company’s value to a prospect in less than 1 minute, they had the relevant materials with them to present and knew when someone was a qualified buyer.

In the end, I created a B2B website that acted like a Sales person, qualifying a person as a lead before closing it (the sales people still closed the sale, and made me feel like a hero every time I met them).

The company had a very strong brand in its industry, and the website got some decent traffic, but proportionately few leads were driven from it.  Marketing people spent lots of time with excellent interactive marketing agencies running Internet marketing campaigns that drove online leads, however the company’s website was left largely untouched by Marketing as a lead generation tool.  That was till I spoke to Sales.

Websites are Internet Sales, not Internet Marketing.

Websites perform the same job as a sales person. Think about it.  Marketing is generating traffic to sales, and sales is converting that traffic.

The Internet is so new that people have not realized the two functions are still there, its just the medium that has changed.  Companies today need to step back to traditional marketing and ask if something is a Sales or Marketing function, then approach it as such. Here are some typical “Internet Marketing” mainstays.  Lets look at them and classify them as they really are.

1. PPC – Marketing
2. SEO – Marketing
3. Websites – Sales
4. Social Networks- Both
5. eMail Campaign- Marketing

You can see that I’m calling Websites “Sales” and not Marketing.  I firmly believe this and there is a company with $350K/month in additional sales to prove it.  A website recieves traffic to to from Marketing which generates it online or off.  It is now the websites job to receive people looking for information and answers and convert them into buying customers.  Sounds like sales to me.

Lets Talk Resources

I love marketing people, but they are not normally sales people.  I have also seen sales people come back to “corporate” and fail in marketing.  The reason is the two functions are separate and involve separate strengths and talents.  The Internet is new, so if ou have not figured it out yet, let me be clear.  It is the same online as offline. When you have someone great at producing traffic for your website, don’t put them in charge of converting leads or online purchases.  If you have someone great at increasing conversion rates on your site/s, don’t assume that they can manage Google Adwords or Banner Ad campaigns.  Some people can do both, just don’t assume.

Another factor is specialization.  There is a lot to profiting online.  No one person can be at the top of their game in both Sales & Marketing skills and techniques.  PPC is a full time specialty now, as is SEO, as is web design etc and so forth.

Social Media in Sales & Marketing

I’m not saying that there is not some cross-over.  Social media is a place where a company can both drive r.  Social media is a place where a company can both drive traffic and build relationships that “Sell”.  I’m just pointing out there is a distinction and the sooner a company stops expecting a sales tool or person to do marketing and a marketing tool or person to so sales, the better we are.

80% of websites have adequate traffic to achieve their goals, they just don’t handle it well.

My last post was about the Internet Strategy Checklist my firm uses to “cover all the bases” with clients when brainstorming their Internet Strategies (albeit a useless list if I don’t already know the client’s audience, objectives and opportunities).  The list is arranged with the most important Internet marketing strategy components first, from the perspective of priority and hierarchy of what needs to be done 1st.  The 1st category on the list is Website Optimization.

Don’t Throw Money at a Bad Site

Without a website that can handle traffic, there is no sense of giving it any.  So often companies get caught in the idea that sending more traffic to a site will result in more sales, and they are normally right, but not normally making profiting off of it the way they could be. The 1st thing we do for clients is audit their incoming traffic.  If they are paying for clicks, we figure out the return on investment and estimate how they can better convert these “paid for” visitors once on the site.  This is a minor step in the big scheme of things, but it does “stop the bleeding” so we can get to the point of getting sites on a path towards optimal health.

You Know Where to Find the Yogurt.

A good website is like a grocery store. People coming in have a sense of where items they want might be located and easily follow directions and conventions to getting what they want.  This is no accident.  Retail Strategists lay out stores be easy to navigate and promote.  Sound familiar?

Website Optimization is getting the most out of people visiting an online property.  This might be apply to a landing page, micro-site, website, online catalogue, online slide deck, Interactive tool etc.  If your web presence is not handling visitors well, then paying to sending qualified traffic to it in large part a waste of money.

Good website optimization often starts with the website homepage strategy and how site visitors handle people once they arrive at it.  I wrote a post on this a while back, click here to read it.  The best place to start is to look at your website analytics and see were the top “landing pages” are (what pages people are entering your site) and then optimizing your landing pages (another previous post).

Keep Your Promises

When I look at a site for the 1st time, I look at its “Promises”.  What is the site promising the site visitor?  Then, is the site delivering on its promises.  This starts from the ad or search result that got the user to the site.  Do they arrive on a page that fulfills the promise of the search engine (This shows why SEO without strategy is worthless, as it can just create “broken promises”.  If you have a decent landing page and are getting more than a 20% bounce rate on it, it is likely caused by “broken promises”.  I don’t want this to be an SEO post, but having an integrated SEO strategy is part of Website Optimizing (sending qualified traffic in any way is part of it).

Focus on Website Optimization

Focus on website optimization as your primary web focus.  This starts off by making sure the site is simple and well organized from the user’s perspective.  Then it goes further into “giving people what they want”, when they want it and how they want it.  It also means spending time on statistics and testing out different things (check out

Achieve your Customer’s Goals, Forget Your Own

Your customers have their own goals when they are your site (forget about your site’s goals for a minute).  Once your site is organized from your site audience’s perspective, you need to set up analytic goals and track the “Goal Funnel” to see where visitors are falling off in trying to achieve THEIR goals.  Once see where they are dropping off, you can critically look and very likely see why.  Then you can fix it.

Now lets talk about your company’s and its site’s goals.  These are really just the goals of the site visitor.  If you achieve their goals, you will achieve yours.  (This needs to become your mantra.  Design it from your visitor’s perspective, give them what they want and help them achieve their objectives, you’ll profit from it, have faith).

Try User Testing

It is so easy these days to get user testing (See Get Tested) there is no excuse not to watch people trying to achieve their goals on your site on a regular basis.  This is the catalyst to website optimization because after watching your target audience trying and failing at core basic stuff, you will be compelled to do something about it.

Measure Progress

Your site needs “Core Metrics”. These are what you need to measure.  These metrics need to be from analytics, sales (or leads) figures, feedback data, and anything else that you could measure that would show that website optimization is working.

A Website Core Metrics Example

Website Optimization Summary

Give people what they want, do it from their perspective, make it easy and test test test. You likely have an SEO program.  Now you need a Website Optimization program.  They two have a lot in common.  Neither give immediate results, seem simple but are not, and require a strategy and lots of work.  There are there are website optimizing companies that provide such services, and even pair them with an SEO company.  I suggest getting  website optimization services before sending paid clicks at your site.  So many companies build something and leave it.  In reality, you can often get 100% better performance out of a page or navigational path through optimization.

User Testing Times, They are a Changing.

Website user testing is now cheap on a per user test basis.  Every website should undergo interface testing.  If you need user experience testing, and at a great price, read this review.

I have been recommending User Testing for years.  It used to take a lot of time, a lot of work, and be a royal pain in the butt .

That Was Then! When User Testing involved;

1. Convincing the Client of the value of User Testing.
2. Convincing the Client of the cost.
3. Convincing the Client’s boss of the value and cost.
4. Booking a User Testing Facility (Computer Lab or Training Room).
5. Recruiting other eMarketing Folks to Monitor.
6. Recruiting Target Audience
7. Developing handout materials
8. Conducting and Overseeing User Tests.
9. Keeping users focused on goals.
10. Compensating users.
11. Going home and kissing the kids goodnight.
12. Reviewing notes as interpreted by monitors.

There is a lot of pain in there. 1st, finding the right audience and getting them to actually show up is always a challenge.  The part I hated the most was the time of day user tests were held, since most users groups are held after work to allow for people’s schedules.  Well, that was then.

This is now! When all you need to do is;

1. Developer a User Testing Brief (Demographics, Goals)
2. Submit new user testing session to UserTesting.com
3. Review Videos.  See Example Here .

That’s it!

UserTesting.com

UserTesting.com is simple and effective. No, I am not being compensated in any way here, they don’t even have an affiliate program (although I would love to set up an affiliate strategy and program for them!).  They are the real thing.  A service that makes a difference.  Refreshing really.

How it works – Tell them what you want users to try and do, making sure your target demographic is clear.  Typically it takes about 3 days to get the 10 user testers I want, as opposed to about 7 business days for setting up a User Test.  It also costs $30/user test (see coupon below) as opposed to about $150/user test the old way (My client’s costs have been cut in half as a result).

Here is a screenshot of my account , the test you see are for a client of mine (sorry I had to blur out their name etc for confidentially reasons) that really needed to improve their website. In fact, it was completely insane to throw paid traffic at their site, which they were to the tune of $6K/month, with the site in its current condition. In order for me to illustrate how much their eCommerce site needed a major revision (I don’t believe in redesigns, but that is another post), I conducted a simple 10 user test session with UserTesting.com.

After watching bit of 3 tests, the company stakeholder through up his hands and said "WE SUCK".

Here is what I suggest , get user testing for your site right away.  Start with 3 Tests just to get a feel for it and identify the big issues.  I even have a coupon making it $19/user instead of $30/user (if you use it before the end of May).

Get excited, your about to make discover you site’s biggest issues.

By the way , the service I use is www.UserTesting.com , and to my knowledge they are the only such service.

Coupon

Here is the coupon , good till the end of May, 2009.  Enjoy!

What is a Landing Page?

A Landing Page is the 1st page you intend a site visitor to see 1st.  With search engines indexing every page of your site, any page can be a landing page, so each page has to be designed with that in mind. For our purposes, a Landing Page is a page designed as an entry point into a website.  We all know that the Homepage is one of these, but it can’t be everything to everyone.  No, really.   It can’t!

Why Does a Niche Need a Landing Page?

Your Niche product or service needs a Landing Page so you don’t lose business. 80% of business websites receive adequate traffic, but few handle the traffic very well.  This leads most businesses to believe they need more traffic, ironically to just lose more business.  What most businesses need to do is stop focusing on getting prospective customers to their site, and start focusing on getting real customers through the site.  You can focus on increasing traffic after your site is optimized, and biggest factor in optimizing for converting customers online is Landing Page Design.

Toddler Syndrome – To get visitors through your Niche website, you need to keep them FOCUSED.  That means lessening distractions like navigation.  Think of the visitor as a 2 year old.  They want what they want, when they want it, how they want it, and they want it now!  That is an online visitor’s mentality, and this is what Landing Pages are designed to do.

Keep the Promise.

Website success often boils down to keeping promises.  If you tell a customer that there is a sales rack at the back of your store, it better be there right?  Same with online.  Lets break down the typical Internet Marketing “Promise”.

Offline or Online Ad –> Website –> Form or Shopping Cart .

Simple enough right.  Now think of each stage as a promise.  When a customer finds you online via a search engine, the customer is being promised you have what they searched for, especially if it is a paid result.  They expect to see what they are looking for right away, and expect all the information they need will be one the page the result link takes them to (or else they would not have clicked it). Today’s Internet users additionally wants the information they are expecting to be well laid out for them and from their perspective.

This is why you don’t send everyone to the homepage (unless your niche is so narrow, you only sell one product).   Homepage are meant to offer transparency to an entire site, for information and navigation purposes.  Homepages are not meant to handle a site visitor on a mission, with the attention of a… well, toddler.  When it comes to visitors expecting information on SOMETHING, having information on EVERYTHING is going to confuse , delay and frustrate them, all of which means they leave (bounce) right away.

Keep ‘em Focused

A landing page is about one topic, and has one obvious way to navigate, that is towards the “objective” you set.  For a niche product or service, you need to lay out a landing page that provides all the information a customer wants, and in a way they they are willing to consume it. Here is an excellent Landing Page “Wireframe”  This layout has excellent psychology, and keeps the user focused well on what they want.

Tell The Web Designer

Before you engage a web designer to create a Landing Page for your Niche, you need to determine a few things;

• The Landing Page’s business objective (There should really be only one)
• The copy and content for the page.
• The Branding for the Page (if it will help with the sale, use your website header, if it doesn’t, don’t)

The free Landing Page design wireframe shown below is a “how to” of how to approach laying out a Landing Page.  Don’t worry about images and making it look good yet, that happens at a later phase with a designer (see Crowdsourcing Web Design )

Download the wireframe shown above in PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress .

Once you have a final draft of the above wireframe, take this to your Webdesigner so he can create the web page, add images and complete the look and feel, making it consistent with the rest of your site (if they don’t do this, get a new web designer ).

You have 5 Seconds

Online vistors SCAN.  Write your landing page for scanning, not reading.  Within 5 seconds a Landing Page visitor knows if they are going to stay.  keep it simple and relevant.

Embrace the Space

White space can be used to bring emphasis to areas of a page you want a visitor to have their attention focused on.  Make sure your page does not look crowded, especially around your form or call to action button.

Always Be Relevant

A Landing Page needs to be extremely relevant to the visitor, especially the headline. For example, if you have products for women and men create a separate Landing Page for each sex. You need to be as targeted as possible, even if that means having dozens of landing pages. If you do search engine marketing, you more likely need to create landing pages at the Ad Group level, not the Campaign level.

Sell the Offer

Landing Pages promote offers, not products. You don’t need product details, company information or more about your services. You just need to confirm that they are on the right track, get them excited about it, and give them a clear path to go down.

Lose the Navigation

A Landing page needs to be without Top and Sidebar navigation. You want to keep them focused. You can have footer navigation which tells the user the page is part of a greater site, a must for some and key to search engines, especially when evaluating the quality score that determines your cost per click, should be be doing paid search. You should also have your logo linked back to your site.

Image a Better Life

Images can help or hurt. A fantastic image can lure people away from your objective. Imagine using a celebrity wearing your type of product only to have people leave in pursuit of more information about that celebrity. You images need to promise a better life if they purchase from you, leave it at that.

Also, the image needs a caption These captions are more likely to be read more than any other text on the landing page.

Write for Scanning

Writing Copy online is a bit of an art. Here is a basic formula to follow;

• Headlines are to capture attention.
• Bylines (Secondary Headline) are to expand on the Headline, fitting in what you could not say with a Headline alone).
• Write in point form as much as possible, and keep each point short
• The 1st few words of each point should be focused on selling the offer, and be in bold.
• Use Video when you can, and keep it short

Test with Constraint

I spend far more time testing what I have, then making more new stuff. That is because time spent testing pays off more than time creating new online content.

Test the following (Ordered by importance).

• Headline
• Image Captions
• Call to Action Button or Form
• Graphical elements.

Test one thing at a time, its the only way you will really know what caused improvement or damage. Also, don’t stop a test till you can be sure the results have meaning.

Make a Template

If you are going to have several, even dozens of Landing Pages, don’t pay a Web Designer for each one. Have the first one created as a template, where text and images are easily swapped out. Make this need clear to your web designer.

No Example?

We debated for a while on including some examples of the Landing Page wireframe discussed here and in the end concluded that people would just copy the pages and end up with what they saw, not what they need.

Work with your web designer and this wireframe to get something for your business niche. If you are looking at paying more than $500 for the Landing Page Design, I highly suggest looking at crowdsourcing the web design instead.

I have every confidence if you present a good set of requirements, and ask for the wireframe to be followed above (plus your site’s footer links, and header if appropriate), you will end up with an extremely strong Landing Page, ready for testing to further capitalize on it.

If you’d like to know more on the subject of Landing Pages, check out the excellent Blog Unbounce

Crowdsourcing Web Design Changes Everything

It used to be that designing for a site meant selecting a web designer and being limited to the talents, ideas and inspiration of that web designer. Then came crowdsourcing . According to Wikipedia.com , crowdsourcing is taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an “open call”.

This works great for web design! You can also use it for Logos, Stationary, and even T-Shirt designs!

Before you start Crowdsourcing Web Design

1. Decide which design crowdsourcing site to use. The choices right now are 99Designs.com or CrowdSpring.com . Browse through each site, checkout the categories you will be listing in and see where you think you can get the best value for what you are looking to get.
2. Be ready to go public. This is a public process. 99Designs.com allows you to set up a private contest, but it costs more. Ask yourself if your competitors really have nothing better to do than find your contest, and if they don’t, will they actually do anything about it after they see it?
3. Have a clear vision of what you want your design to convey. You should also be clear the objective of what online presence. The key here is for you to be clear on what you what to convey through the design.
4. Make sure you have the time to write a good design brief. The design crowdsourcing site you use will walk you through this, you just need to make sure you take the time to fill it out thoroughly. Remember, designers will only give you what they think you want, so that is what you need to communicate to them. If you have a Marketing Summary already, use it!
5. Research how much you should spend. Take a look at contests similar to the one you will be creating. How much are they offering to the designer. You will notice that the greater the reward, the better the contest entries. This is already the “cheap” way to go, don’t be cheaper!
6. Know there will be additional “middle man” charges of around 20% on top of what your set the contest for. You need to factor this cost in when you set the amount the design contest winner receives.

Create a Design Contest

Now let’s walk through the design crowdsourcing process I used to get the eMarketing Matador web logo and header image you see in the header area of this site. For just over $200, I got 7 very talented designers to submit 27 designs, and compete to win the design contest.

In this case, for the logo/header contest, I used 99Designs.com . At the time, I was more impressed with the logo/header designs I saw on 99Designs.com , and they appeared to be going for about $50 cheaper.

In submitting my contest, I did not select a lot of the options available, which all cost extra. Some of these make sense, such as promoting the contest in the forum area of the site, especially if you are in a hurry and want the attention of the best talent. For me, I give the design period about 5 days, ensuring me time to work with the designers through feedback etc. You can also highlight the contest etc and make it stand out. All these things might work, but how much more than just throwing the additional costs into the contest reward is debatable. I personally would rather see the extra money go to the Designer.

Here is my Design Brief for the eMarketing Matador Web Logo/Header

In the Design Brief , there was 4 key points I wanted to make;

#1 – I gave the address of the site so they could see where the logo/header image would live.

#2 – I “sweetened” the pot by offering to recognize the designer and link to their site. You can see this in the footer of this site.

#3 – I wanted the design or part of it, to have good icon appeal. If you look at the address bar, you will see the icon for this site.

#4 – I pre-paid the prize money. This showed I was serious and that someone was going to win.

Once published, a Design Brief looks like this to prospective designers

You can see that the summary is just that. I used it to give the basic and vital information, as well as provide the incentive related information of what I was going to do above and beyond just the contest.

Below are the different entries I received.

You can see I got a lot of variety to select from. It is amazing what 7 different designers will come up. Each has their own style and interpretation of your design brief. This is where crowdsourcing design excels. With a single designer, you get one set of “vision” and “talent”. A single designer also does not have brainstorming access with other designers trying to achieve the same task. Let one talented designer see anothers work, and the clients feedback to that work, the quality and direction of their own work will end up being more targeted and what you want. This is where you win!

Tips to Getting the Best out of Design Crowdsourcing

1. Give Timely Feedback – I try to check my contests at least twice a day and provide feedback for each design. I rate the ones I don’t like and the ones I do like, I let them know. If I see something with potential, or going in a direction I like, I let the designers in the contest know so they can all go down the right path together. Design feedback is crucial.
2. Get a good start – If you don’t see at least 5 designs submitted after a couple of days, review other contests and see what the bids are there. You might need increase your bid a bit. For this contest, I raised the bid by $20 once and saw better results after.
3. Build a relationships – If you see someone with talent, keep in touch. You may want to go direct to them in the future, cutting out the competition and middle man. Going direct to the designer will easily cut costs by 2/3′s. Worse case, you can let the designers know of your next competition and have them “raise the bar” a bit.

The Winner

In the end, the winner of the contest was UaLz, a university senior taking time out of studying for finals to made some much needed money to pay rent etc. If you’d like to use him, his email address is duffu_duff@yahoo.com.

Here is a close up of my Logo. It is not what I thought I wanted. Its a lot better.

Visit the Contest

To visit the contest I hosted for the eMarketing Matador logo/header image, simply visit 99designs.com here.

Related Article on Landing Pages

I recently wrote a post on Landing Pages, which are perfect for Crowdsourcing. One page, simple goal. Its a good place to start!

Listen to Seth

I’m a big Seth Godin fan. He’s a great Marketing author, blogger and Entrepreneur. He wrote an article “How to live happily with a great designer” that captures the essence of working with a designer, web or not, crowdsourcing or not. I recommend reading it before working on any Web Design Brief to any Web Designer.

Remember: You can do this!