Archive for February, 2009
Boost your Online Testing Results for Impact: 3 Areas to Review
Posted by: | CommentsIf you are new to online testing and not sure what page or area to test on your website or just need that kick-start to get those testing adrenaline rushes back…
Here are 3 important areas to start pulling data for to get you going (or going again) on the forward path to optimization success.
1. The most visited pages on your website. Things to think about for each page – what’s the pages purpose, what’s the conversion rate, what’s the bounce rate, where are the leaks, what’s the average time spent on the page by your visitors, any coding errors hindering performance, page load time, special plug-ins needed for visitors to get full functionality.
2. Your Conversion points – Pull conversion data for each of your sites conversion points, how much revenue does each conversion point contribute, order each conversion point by revenue from producing the most to the least and look at the opportunities starting at the top of the list – a 100% increase in conversions on a page that only produces $50 won’t produce the same result as a 5% increase on a page that produces $10,000 in revenue – it’s a good place to start.
3. Your most popular visitor paths – Review data for your most popular visitor paths. Where are the leaks that visitors are exiting or straying from your desired end goal that you have designed for them? What are the opportunities to optimize and keep your visitors on the desired path? Can you shorten the path if need be, work on your call-to-actions, add a newsletter signup box, and so on.
4. Bonus – Combinations of the above, i.e the most popular visited page with a conversion point, sorted by lowest conversion percentage with theoretical greatest chance for improvement.
Of course this is not the be all end all of what to look for or what to test in each area, but merely a good refresher for those who need it, or a guiding hand for those confused with all the potential places to start testing first. But remember, it’s important to consider the opportunity costs in testing one area, page, path, etc. versus testing another.
Tracking Visitor Downloads with Google Analytics
Posted by: | CommentsYou’re probably curious to know what content your visitors are downloading the most on your website. I bet you’re also interested in knowing this data for multiple reasons including gauging interest, popularity of each downloadable file, and to learn what the best page and the best page position for the links to each download are. Of course there are a multitude of reasons for your interest, but no matter the reason, it all boils down to wanting to learn more about how your website visitors interact with your downloadable files.
Example: Tracking PDF Media Kit Downloads
You just completed your PDF media kit for potential advertisers to download and you can’t wait to start getting all that advertiser revenue. You put the media kit online and three weeks later you can’t believe it – what’s happening? Three weeks and you have no phone calls or emails of interest. Is it the media kit itself, the information presented in it, or maybe no one has downloaded it yet? You’re confused because you know that people are visiting the page that the link to the media kit is on, it’s your most popular page. If only you were tracking the number of downloads of the media kit could you narrow down what just might be wrong.
Or maybe you would like to:
- Track your MP3 or Wav Podcast downloads across your web site
- Track to learn what your most popular .doc, or excel .xls file, or .zip file is
- Track your Catalog downloads
- Track clicks of links to external sites
Since your links are directly linked to a file and there is no actual page to put analytics tracking code on, you have to track it differently than you would a webpage itself. Luckily, most analytic software packages offer simple ways to get to track and extract this data.
With Google Analytics, it’s as simple as adding some additional JavaScript code to the link that goes to the downloadable file:
For example, if the link to your Media Kit was:
< a href=”http://www.example.com/mediakit.pdf”>
You would add the trackPageview() JavaScript code to it as follows:
< a href=http://www.example.com/mediakit.pdf onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/downloads/mediakit’); “>
You could change /downloads/mediakit to whatever directory names that you would like, but clicks to your Media Kit would be found in your Google Analytics website profile in the Content Section under /downloads/mediakit in this example, or whatever directories you place in the code – each link that you want to track, if you want to track each downloadable file individually (which you would), you would name uniquely such as /mediakit1, /mediakit2, and so on.
Deconstructing a Marketing Test Hypothesis
Posted by: | CommentsA marketing test hypothesis is a powerful and necessary part of your marketing optimization program when running tests. I am going to take you through creating a simple hypothesis.
A hypothesis clearly states:
- What you are testing
- What your control and experimental groups are
- What outcome you predict will happen (based on an educated judgment)
- What is the alternate outcome
- What you will need to track specifically in order to prove or disprove your test prediction.
Let’s look at a hypothesis more closely.
A hypothesis is clear and specific, testable, and can be proved right or wrong.
Look at these differences between a prediction, a question, and a hypothesis:
A Test Prediction: Not asking for a phone number on my registration form will increase registrations.
A prediction is the outcome you expect – more or less your educated guess of what will happen.
A Test Question: Will not asking for a phone number on my registration form increase registrations?
A Test Hypothesis: Paid Search traffic reaching my registration form that does not ask for a phone number will produce more registrations than Paid Search traffic reaching my registration form that asks for a phone number.
A hypothesis states with conviction what results you expect to see from your test, both from your control and your experimental group – it is here that you will state your test prediction. And since we know that a hypothesis has to be able to be proven either right or wrong, we only have 2 possible outcomes – either my registration form that does not ask for a phone number increases registrations over my control that does ask for it, or it doesn’t produce more registrations(or a tie).
And finally, let’s break down the above marketing test hypothesis to show specifically what it explains:
- Paid Search traffic reaching my registration form that does not ask for a phone number is the experimental group
- Produce more registrations is the outcome we expect from the experiment and what we want to track
- Paid Search traffic reaching my registration form that asks for a phone number is the comparison or control group.
If you wanted to run this test with multiple panels each having a different form field requirements (size), you could in reality replace phone number with less fields:
Paid Search traffic reaching my registration form that has less than 7 fields will produce more registrations than Paid Search traffic reaching my registration form that has 7 fields. “
You are still testing your hypothesis of that less fields will produce more registrations than your control of 7 fields, but you will determine from your testing which length is optimal to rollout with if your hypothesis is true.
With your completed hypothesis you can now execute your marketing test to your website visitors and let them prove or disprove it. If they prove your hypothesis to be true then you did a great job with your hypothesis’s prediction, if they disprove it, you still have learned something (make sure you take away lessons from each test!) – The test is not a failure, just try again after formulating a new hypothesis.
Best Practices & Implementation in Web Site Optimization
Posted by: | CommentsBest practices by definition are ways to do “things” that are more effective or efficient than the other existing ways in order to reach the desired outcome. Every industry has best practices, and almost every task seems to have one as well. Usually they become best practices because a large group has reported that they are following that particular process or procedure and have more effectively or efficiently reached their desired outcome, or even that they have implemented that best practice with no lesser outcome. Many times, best practices are reported and shared by industry associations, seminar speakers, books and reference materials, or even from special reports from your favorite blog or author. From here they spread even more so and become in many instances common place almost as a required implementation to do.
But, this article isn’t really about best practices themselves though, best practices do serve a very import role – even alerting you to what others are currently trying and to foster idea and innovation generation, but rather this is about best practices and marketing optimization – making sure that you don’t blindly implement them and possibly become part of the minority that they didn’t work for and ultimately move further away from your desired goals.
What you’ve heard, read, or been told is a best practice, might not produce the best results for your own website and the traffic that is visiting it – but how do you know?
For example, a certain best practice may be a best practice for 78% of your industry peers, but then this would leave 22% who either didn’t implement it, never heard of it, or it didn’t work for. Not to mention that out of the 78% who did implement it we have no proof of the level of effectiveness it proved to be for each -and are they well versed in reading the results, did they have the right tools to read the results, did they have unknown problems with their tracking, and so on. Now, this isn’t saying that out of that 78% all of them are wrong for using it; maybe 77% were correct in doing so. The point being is that we need to determine how this best practice will work for us and what we are attempting to do and achieve. The proper way to do this is to test the best practice just as you would test anything else.
ColonialCandle.com, according to quotes that appeared on Internet Retailer by Internet marketing manager Katie Fernands, recently ran a multivariate test on a page from their website using Google’s Website Optimizer. This winning page combination was different than their marketing and design departments’ assumptions of not requiring a visitor to scroll down a page too much to view content. In fact their longest page combination increased page conversions by 20% and produced $20,000 in incremental revenue.
Had they not tested (or maybe this was a blind discovery, not sure as I am not aware of the actual test hypothesis they had) the best practice of limiting scrolling on an ecommerce site Colonial Candle would have not discovered that for them a longer page that required scrolling produced better results in producing more conversions resulting in more revenue.
Bottom Line: It’s important to test the best practices for your website rather than just implementing them as gospel in order to make sure that they produce the same results for you that made them known best practices in the first place.
The Value of Upper Funnel Keywords in PPC
Posted by: | CommentsUpper Funnel Keywords in paid search (or even in organic search by definition) are those keywords that do not bring in visitors that convert in a traditional sense into an immediate purchase or lead, but rather are the keywords that convert the potential customer to the next stage of the “interest cycle”. These Upper Funnel Keywords typically bring potential customers or leads into your website that have not made up their mind to make a purchase (or fill out a form or take a trial) because they are still in their “considering their options stage” of decision making and are possibly not yet familiar with you or in some instances not familiar enough with you to complete a conversion during that visit.
Example:
You are going on vacation to a cold climate (let’s say the North Pole). You know you need to buy something to keep yourself warm, but you’re not sure exactly what options are out there because you live in a year round warm climate. So you do a search on the keyword phrase extreme cold weather coats. You end up at a website by clicking on a paid search ad that appeared when you typed in the phrase and notice that they have a section for cold climate coats and even list the temperatures they can withstand. You think to yourself, wow this is great, now I have a better idea of what’s available and I kind of like Brand X Model 4567, but I am not going on the vacation for another 4 months so I am not going to purchase anything today because I don’t have the extra money. Forty-five days later you win $200 on a scratch-off ticket that you found and decide that you are ready to purchase a coat with your extra money, you do a search on Brand X Model 4567 since you knew the exact coat you wanted to buy now and end up back on the same website as before and purchase the coat.
The difficulty in measuring the value of these Upper Funnel Keywords is that they don’t produce single visit conversions -you can’t see the whole picture of entrance to conversion in your analytics data in a linear fashion.
For instance, a single visit conversion would show start to finish in one visit from entering your site to making the purchase. Here you easily have the whole picture from the PPC keyword that triggered the ad that they clicked on to enter your website and their entire path to the purchase.
With Upper Funnel Keywords, a typical scenario would be that the visitor arrives at your site from these keywords or phrases, looks around, leaves, comes back another time reads more information, exits your site again, then finally comes back a 3rd time and makes a purchase.
Most only know how to measure the keywords that produce single visit conversions and thus deem these Upper Funnel Keywords more or less valueless because their value isn’t easily seen in a typically known fashion. The ROI isn’t easily visible.
In the example given earlier, the keyword phrase you searched on first, extreme cold weather coats, was the Upper Funnel Keyword phrase. You didn’t purchase during that visit of your initial search, but you did eventually go back and purchase based on the information you learned during that first visit. Had another website come up with a different but possibly similar featured coat that you liked, you would have purchased from there and a different coat. So there was definite value in that first search as it gave you the information you needed to make a decision, but you just didn’t purchase then. Now imagine if you were only looking at single session conversions, you would only be able to confirm that Brand X Model 4567 was a valuable keyword because a sale was associated with it. But in reality, without having a presence in paid search for extreme cold weather coats a sale wouldn’t have been made – thus showing the importance of being able to look at multi-session conversions to contribute back value (and ROI) to the Upper Funnel Keywords.
Avinash Kaushik on his Occam’s Razor blog this week made a powerful and very instructionally clear post on how to measure the success of Upper Funnel Keywords and I suggest you read his post for the details on how to do so.
