Matt / July 29, 2008, 12:38 pm
I came across a great metaphor describing why multivariate testing of ad campaign landing pages (with a tool such as Google Website Optimizer) makes for a much more effective use of the money in an advertising budget.
The traditional way to do this is as follows:
- Agree campaign budget
- Build and sign off creatives (PPC ads, key words/phrases, landing page, offer details)
- Take a sack of money
- Move to top of building
- Shake money out of sack
- Sit back and hope
The better way to do this:
- Agree budget
- Brainstorm all the things we’d like to test (buttons, text, call to action msgs etc.)
- Take 5% of budget and finalise *multiples* of these elements to test
- Spend the 5% sending traffic to a multi-variate test
- Find the ideal creative (based on conversion data)
- Put this live
- Spend the other 95% of the budget
Jason / June 27, 2008, 10:10 am
Jason Jeffries, Blenderbox CEO, was a featured panelist discussing web marketing and social media for a Small Business Networking Event sponsored by the Alliance for Downtown New York.
The Panel was moderated by Peter Shankman, and also featured Robert Hordt, Managing Editor of Crain’s New York Business and Charlotte Eichna, Executive Editor of Our Town and West Side Spirit, part of Manhattan Media.
Matt / June 9, 2008, 8:46 am
Courtesy of the Google Analytics blog, an introduction to website optimization and how (and when) you should use it on your site.
In summary, here’s how to optimize a poorly performing page on your website:
- Find your high value landing pages
What pages on your site have high entrances and high bounce rates? These are the “high value” pages that are begging to be optimized.
- What’s the desired goal (or conversion) for the site?
In other words, what is the ideal outcome of a visit to your site? Some common online conversions include account signup, new lead generation, joining a mailing list, or purchasing a product.
- Set up a goal in Google Analytics to track how well your landing page is funneling people toward your desired conversion
- Create a new design for the landing page you want to test
- Test it!
We were told at the LunaMetrics training session that you can expect actionable results within about a month, depending on the traffic to the page being tested. You could see statistically significant results in as little as two weeks in some circumstances.
Talk to Caleb or me if you want to know more about website optimization or if you have questions about the jargon. We’ve been scouting a few pages on our sites in need of optimization and could always use more practice.
Finally, the Website Optimizer team has a blog that’s worth a look. I recommend starting with this case study, in which conventional wisdom about the use of imagery on the homepage is tested.
Caleb / March 13, 2008, 8:33 am
I was recently viewing my friends list on flickr and was once again it was taking to long to load each page. In my frustration, I went looking for a firefox add-on to ease my pain and I found quite possibly the best add-on ever.
Pic lens.
It’s an add-on for popular sites that use images - google image search, facebook, myspace, flickr, etc. - that searches on all the related images and loads in just the images. Although its taking over your entire screen is a little intrusive, it’s extremely fast, and that’s what I was looking for. Now when I go to my friend’s photos page, I can view all the photos at once.
The only thing I would like to see added is the ability to go to the page where it found the image or at least give some data on where the image is coming from.
Caleb / March 11, 2008, 8:36 am
I’ve recently stopped using javascript to do rollovers when reasonable. It’s much nicer because you don’t have to write onmouseover or onmouseout events, and it works without javascript. It’s also prevents a weird ‘blink’ (especially in IE) when rolling over if the image isn’t loaded in cache.
The trick is to create one image that has both states and assign the background-position of the hover state.
Using the following image and css, you don’t have to worry about javascript.
a.seeMore {
background: #dce1e4
url(/images/icons/arrowFull.gif)
no-repeat top right;
}
a.seeMore:hover {
background-color:#4f5a62;
background-position:right -18px;
}
Matt / February 29, 2008, 10:05 am
OK, this is a pretty boring tip but it’s saves me a few minutes of tracking down URLs every time I want to compare something across several websites.
I use the “Bookmark All Tabs” functionality in Firefox to save the state of a competitive audit. This allows me to return to it later (or after Firefox crashes) by using “Open All in Tabs,” which loads all competitors’ websites at once.
Here’s how to do it:
- Open a new window in Firefox, create a new tab for each competitor you’re examining
- Go to
Bookmarks > Bookmark All Tabs... and save the set of tabs
- When you need to re-open a competitive audit, navigate through the Bookmarks menu to your saved tabs and select
Open All in Tabs
- Happily resume auditing
This method has the added benefit of recording for posterity the sites you audited for a project.
