What is My Spin | Internet Marketing Blog » Web Conversion Testing

Which Test Won? Testing to Increase Conversion

Rob Metras — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:30:45 +0000

Testing to Improve Conversion- Yes

Testing is one of the most important concepts that an internet marketer can learn.

There is a very helpful site that I have found that is operated by Anne Holland, the founder of Marketing Sherpa. Anne and Natalie Myers provide a weekly test to test your skills on testing and judgement of various presentations of information.Which test Won is very engaging and draws you in for more. It is not a site for testing and analytic geeks but a site primarily for marketers who want to improve their craft and conversions.

The current week testing post compares headlines,subject lines in emails and copy in order to determine a winner, in terms of revenue.

You can also find very useful Testing-Free PDF’s, and Testing Videos to assist you in your testing practices. They will help you learn how, why and when to do your testing as well as yield valuable tips on what to test. You can learn a great deal from this site and from 66 past tests that will help you better optimize your site(s) for revenue creation.

You can always learn by testing.

Marketing Sherpa Founder Anne Holland

Do You Know Your Numbers?

Rob Metras — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 02:08:34 +0000

Do You Know Your Numbers: The Whats and the Whys of Analytic Data

No, I am not talking about your Social Security Number or your telephone numbers. I am talking about your Web Analytics. What numbers are important and what are the keys to understanding your site and its visitors.

I will give you a brief overview below but I would encourage you to get into the habit of reading the blogs of the masters in this field and the books that they have published . My first and foremost leader and teacher is Avinash Kaushik author of the blog Occam’s Razor and books under the Sybex imprint, Web Analytics in an Hour a Day and Web Analytics 2.0 The Art of Online Accountability & The Science of Customer Centricity. To get a scan view of the best analytics blogs subscribe to Alltop’s Top Web Analytics which might be like asking you to sip from a firehose.

The others I would encourage you to follow are Bryan Eisenberg and Mitch Joel Eisenberg is the author of the New York Times bestseller Call to Action and co-author of a/b always be testing- The Complete Guide to Website Optimizer. Mitch Joel, a prominent thought leader in digital marketing is the author of the book Six Pixels of Separation :Everyone is Connected Connect Your Business to Everyone. He also has a podcast with the same name where the “cool guys” like Chris Brogan, Julien Smith,CC Chapman,Mitch and others do sort of a weekly call “Media Hacks” as well as a number of interviews. I include Joel who is not an analytics maven but who is very very good at the insights and creative dimension of the Why? side of Web 2.0 and who Google calls in to consult on marketing.

I describe analytics in two camps the What Has happened and the Why It Did and What You Can Do About It. The former being more quantitative and the latter qualitative.

There are a number of tools you can use that are free for the quantitative view.

If your site has a Cpanel installation you can use Awstats . It provides counts on who has visited,where did they come from, what kind of browser did they use,what kind of operating system, what search engine bots have visited and a lot of other specific data.

You can place Google Analytics Code, Clicky Code Code on your site for more detailed analysis at no cost. Both tools have reporting interfaces that are customizable to your needs.

For the qualitative side Google’s free Website Optimizer Tool allows you to to a variety of tests on the landing pages and content you have placed. You can do simple A/B testing, where you test two variations of content, for example changing the content of a headline or the colour of the type separately to find what converts better . You can do multivariate testing also on various variables and variations and see and test them to maximize your returns. The video below explains it’s use for you:

The 4Q tool by iperceptions is a free tool which provides you answers directly from your users and their experience with your site. This can yield valuable Voice of the Customer Information and your users can rate their experience. See below as Avinash Kaushik introduces it to you.

PPC Management- Avoid Mistakes and Profit

Rob Metras — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:18:46 +0000

PPC Management requires you to be on top of your game. When you make mistakes you may not achieve the conversion results and end up wasting money.

Here are some ideas to avoid the mistakes

1. Not doing good keyword research. Good keyword research using free tools like Wordtracker, Wordstream or Google’s own Keyword Tool will provide you the right words to target. See what successful and long standing advertisers are doing and emulate their keywords that should be in Line1,Line2, and Line 3 of the ads.

2. Having a slew of keywords,Organize your keywords into ad groups of one per keyword, with the three variations broad,phrase and exact. Have (2) separate ads in each grouping. This will give you the maximum granularity to discover the winners and improve your ads.

3. Lackluster Ads. Write compelling ads that are not about your business or product but about the exact item the searcher is looking for. For example:
{Pilgrim’s Pride Turkeys}
{ Pilgrims Have the Best Birds}
{PilgrimsPride.com}
is an bad example where the ad
{Premium Turkey at Discount Prices}
{Succulent Turkey for Your Family}
{ premiumturkey.com }
would be better as it addresses the solution that the consumer is looking for.

4. Experiment with Variations of the Ad in each ad group with small changes. Perhaps add a? mark at the end of the First Line.

5. Deliver what you promise in the ad by matching it with the copy on the landing page you are sending it to. Make it easy for the consumer to buy from you by providing clear navigation. Do not send them to a general information page when they are looking for a specific item,. When you deliver what you promise your quality score should be optimal, improving your position and lowering your costs while you are meeting the searchers needs.

6. One Campaign for all. Split your campaigns into search campaigns and Content Network Campaigns. They behave differently and reach different targets. Maximize your effectiveness by crafting different messages for each network and testing the results.

7. No Negative Keywords.Use negative words to weed out and refine your campaign to buyers. For example in these examples the word Free, Chicken,Fowl,Pheasant,Recipes,Gravy, or the country of Turkey which might come up may qualify the buyers you want versus general interest.

8. Test,test and Test. Always be Testing your copy,offers, fonts,colors and positioning. Be aware of your conversion metrics. Free tools such as Adwords conversion testing or Google Analytics and Website Optimizer make it relatively easy to use.

These are just a few tips you can use to save you time, money, and give you the best bang for your Adwords dollars. Pay Per Click is a dynamic advertising tool so you cannot afford to stop learning in the world of Pay Per Click marketing.

Avoiding mistakes is the key to better PPC campaign management. I advise you to constantly be aware of your buyers view.and would invite you to continue learning cool tips and better techniques for your Adwords management tasks and constantly be learning about PPC Management Strategies to keep you at the top of your game.

Related Blogs

KISS- Keep It Simple Stupid : Find Where the Money Is

Rob Metras — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:29:17 +0000

Pay Per Click Management

I just came across a post by one of the leading thinkers in the Analytic World, Avinash Kaushik. The post was on his blog Occam’s Razor and is an excellent summary one should focus on for PPC and Organic Search ROI improvement.
ppc-sem-analytics-5-actionable-tips-improve-roi

Avinash is well worth listening to and adding to your feed readerGet OccamsRazor. He takes the complex and distills it down to the simple. He is also a pretty funny guy in his writings on some subjects that could induce sleep in the weak.

He is also author of the best selling book Web Analytics: An Hour A Day from which all his profits are donated to the charities Smile Train and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).

Twitter and Analytics

Rob Metras — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:45:45 +0000

For those marketers who are using analytics packages as a tool in managing their businesses I have come across several items of interest that deserve your attention. This post is on Twitter analytics. This post by Anil Batra outlines some Twitter Analytic strategies.

“There is a lot of discussion recently about how to measure authority, influence etc. on Twitter. There are a lot of tools popping up which claim to give some kind of score to help you measure you (or anyone else) against everybody else. This post is not about those tools and which ones I like (more on that later). This post is about things that we can track for sure.

There are millions of Twitter users who are tweeting every day, hoping and assuming that there tweets are being read by their followers. We can’t track all tweets and find out if they are being read but if you are one of those who post a link in your tweets then you are in luck. This post will show you how to track URLs posted in your tweets so that you can determine for sure if anybody is reading those tweets and also what kind of tweets from you are getting the most attention.

There are two types of URLs you post in Twitter

1. URL to your site
2. URLs to third party sites

1. URLs to you site – When you post a link to your site on twitter, you can treat it as a campaign just like a banner or search campaign. Add the campaign tracking codes compliant with your web analytics tool so that you can see the visits, page views, conversions and other web analytics data when a visitors clicks on your tweeted link and arrives on your site.

Example:

I use Google Analytics (GA) and you wanted to post a link to http://AnilBatra.com/, instead of just posting http://AnilBatra.com/ in my tweets, I add GA campaign parameters to the URL being posted.
utm_campaign, utm_medium and utm_source are three query parameters that GA uses for campaign tracking.

Link to Be Tweeted: http://AnilBatra.com

Adding GA Parameters: http://AnilBatra.com/?utm_campaign=watweets&tum_medium=twitter&utm_source=011909tweet

Now when I use WebTrends for Web Analytics then I use something like

Adding WebTrends Paramater: http://AnilBatra.com/?wt.mc_id=011909tweet. Where WT.mc_id is the Webtrends campaign tracking paramter.
You can use which ever web analytics tool you like, the key is adding the campaign tracking parameters the URL to be tweeted. It is that simple.

2. URLs to third party sites– Quite often tweeters post links to sites for which they don’t have access to the web analytics reports. For example, you posting a link to my blog http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/, you don’t have access to my Web Analytics Reports. As a results you have no idea how many people click though to the link that you tweeted.
For such tracking I like a utility called CLIGS http://cli.gs (Note: I have no affiliate with this tool). This tool creates a short URL for any URL that you want to tweet. It than also provides you the clicks on that links as well as other stats such as
* Geo Locations of visitors

* Social media monitoring Cligs keeps track in real time of who tweets your link, who shares it on Friendfeed, who links to it, who blogs about it, who writes a blog comment about it, and more. Not just that, Cligs does that for the destination URL too!

For the sites that I have access to the web analytics data, I create a tracking url as I showed above (1) and then use CLIGS to shorten the URL (2), this provides me both CLIGS and Web Analytics data for analysis.

Apart from tracking on links the other ways to determine if your tweets are getting attention is to see the number of Retweets you get, direct messages and @replies you get. I will cover those in my future blog post.”

Another excellent site for tweaking of websites, especially wordpress is Joost de Walk’s Blog. He also has a post on analytics and Twitter Yoast on Twitter-Analytics