There are so many things we can do — so many directions we can go — that it becomes hard to know what to choose. Do I go with statistics or stories? Facts or feelings? Data or discounts?

If one of these is good, isn’t a mix of all of them better?

Blending Content Types Doesn’t Work

We know we’re blending when we start adding adjectives to our sentences. “Our solution is the most cost-effective, easy-to-use, colorful, highest-intensity, waterproof, process-oriented available on the market.”

We know we’re blending when we want to put one more “value proposition” on a webpage, even when we don’t have room. “Hey, let’s use a rotating hero image!”

The beauty of it all, though, is that search marketers don’t have to blend. We can use keywords as a guide to help us get started on our copy.

Eugene Schwartz is an old-style direct marketer and copywriter who has demonstrated his knowledge of copywriting with a long string of huge successes. He came up with a model to help answer the question, “What kind of copy do I write?” With his model, we can flip our message and focus it, rather than try to blend what we’re doing (thereby, loosing people in the process).

Schwartz created a scale with five levels of consumer awareness. On one end, we have people that are totally unaware of your company, of the problem you solve. On the other end, we have people who are the most aware — those who already know your products and your company, and in many cases, are already customers.

In between, there are three levels: Product Aware, Solution Aware, and Problem Aware. Different levels of directness will appeal to each group, and each has a specific copy strategy associated with it.

Once we have an idea of where our audience is on this spectrum, we can start to put together a content strategy to market to them.

When Writing For People That Already Know You, Be Direct

On the top end of the spectrum are the Most Aware visitors, with whom we can be very direct. Since this audience already knows your company and its products/solutions, they are likely entering keywords that contain your brand or product names.

When targeting these folks, you can often be as direct as, “You know us, you like us. Here’s the new product, here’s the price, and here’s how you buy it.”

Apple is a great example of targeting the most aware. Apple has spent millions of dollars on marketing; they don’t need to tell us who they are or what an iPad is. When visitors are most aware, companies can simply show off the product and provide a big button to purchase it. That’s all you have to do for this crowd — they already know and love you, they just want the latest version of what you’re offering.

When writing for people that already know you, be direct. Most Aware customers want product and price. They’re already your fans — you don’t need to sweet talk them into liking you or build up more trust with them.

On the other end of the spectrum are the people who are the Unaware. It is rare to direct search ads at those that are unaware of a problem. However, if you’re using a display network, you will want to use the indirect approach with these visitors. We can use things like storytelling to get them in a mindset that will allow us to market to them.

One generic message wouldn’t appeal to both of these groups — what appeals to the most aware would scare off or confuse the unaware.

Creating Copy For Different Stages Of Consumer Awareness

Real estate agency GoodLife Team offers content for audiences at different stages of the funnel. For their Unaware audience, they offer content on topics such as “The Cities Hippest Neighborhoods” and “Our Caffeinated Culture.” The approach is high level and uses stories and secrets to soften up the ground for more direct marketing.

They also offer pages that appeal to the Problem Aware. Visitors that type in terms in the “Problem Aware” category, such as [how to sell your home], would land on a page that leverages benefits and anxieties. Calls to action (relief) are more prominent.

The example above states, “The longer your home is on the market, the less you will make.” That highlights the problem. The followup text, “Learn what we do that nets $9,857 more,” then drives home a specific benefit. Note that they used a specific number here rather than “over $9,000.” Specificity lends credibility to almost any statement.

Searchers that enter search terms hinting that they are solution aware may be more swayed by claims and proof. People searching for keywords such as [home exercise equipment] don’t need to have their anxieties about the gym emphasized. These Solution Aware readers are more likely to respond to claims that your product will deliver.

One Solution Aware landing page exclaims, “Incline training burns 5x the Calories just by walking.” Maybe I should consider an inclined trainer.

At this point, I’m Product Aware. I might type in [home incline trainer]. Content geared toward this audience requires a different approach.

Product Aware visitors generally fall into one of two categories: transactional shoppers and relational shoppers. Transactional shoppers are their own experts, while relational shoppers rely on experts to help them in their decision-making process. Deals and discounts will appeal to the transactional buyers — product ratings and reviews will appeal to the more relationship-oriented buyer.

In both cases, they want you to help them decide. Transactional shoppers are afraid of spending one penny too much, and relational shoppers are afraid of buying the wrong thing.

Someone looking for Web hosting doesn’t need to be told the benefits of a Web host — they need to be told about the benefits of your Web hosting solution. Price, bandwidth, reliability, and disc space are their concerns. We know it’s hard to tell the difference between different Web hosting services, it’s a commodity product.

This brings us back to our Most Aware visitors — those looking for our specific product or service. We need to give them the information they need to (re)order and get out of the way. Trying to handle objections is more likely to introduce doubt rather than reduce it.

When creating copy, we should ask ourselves, what do we know about our audience? Do we know whether they’re going to be in the middle as a product aware customer or if they are already totally aware of our products and services? By considering where on this scale our customers fall, we can create copy that targets their specific needs and converts higher.

However, there are some nice tools that go a long way toward making life easier.

If you are questioning the data you’re getting out of Google Analytics; if your e-commerce reporting doesn’t match your sales; if you really thought there’d be more downloads of your whitepaper on the fonts used in movie credits; then you can use these tools to find out if Google Analytics is broken or if the error lies somewhere else.

This is how we do it.

Things That Go Wrong

Typos

Sometimes we just get things wrong. The Google Analytics developers site references some of the most Common Tracking Code Errors.

Fancy Quotes

We do a lot of our data collection in Microsoft Word. This means the IT departments of our clients are cutting and pasting our code from Word.

If you know what I’m about to say, you’ll have an evil grin on your face.

In its effort to be helpful, Word likes to add fancy quotes to everything you do. Microsoft calls these “Smart Quotes.”

We call them “Fart Quotes” as in “brain fart,” and they turn this:

'product category'

into this:

&rquo;product category&lquo;

You can turn them off after a Dante-like descent into the nine rings of Word configuration, as the MalekTips blog will demonstrate.

Wrong Google Analytics Account

We find all kinds of strange configurations when we start optimizing a website. Often, we’ll be granted access to a Google Analytics account, only to find out that a completely different property ID (as defined by the “UA-#######-#”) is being used.

Viewing Page Source: Two accounts on one page.

Other Google Analytics Accounts

If you use a content management system like WordPress, you might find that some of your plugins also use Google Analytics. The most common one we find is the Disqus comments plugin, which you can only detect with some of the tools I introduce below.

View Source

The most common place to start for debugging your Google Analytics Tracking code is to simply open a key page and view the pages source.

In almost any browser, you simply right click on the page and select “View page source”:

Unfortunately, Chrome’s “Translate to English” option doesn’t help in this scenario.

Once you have the page open, you can search the page just like any webpage (Ctrl+F or F3) for some common Google Analytics strings.

• Searching for “Google” will find the domain that the tracking code uses to download the Javascript files. It will also find all of your AdWords-related tags and code.
• Search for “gaq” to find a common variable found in Google Analytics implementations.
• Searching for “UA-” will help you find out the Property ID found in the tracking code.

You should try this on the following pages:

• Your home page
• Your PPC landing pages
• Your “Thank You” or “Receipt” pages
• Your shopping cart, registration process, or subscription process

Ghostery

An “easier” way to see if Google Analytics is on a page is to use the plugin Ghostery. There is a version for all of the popular browsers.

Ghostery reveals that Google Analytics is on the page. It also reveals other tools that are installed, making it a great way to spy on your competitors.

In the image above, we can see that Google Analytics is installed on the page, but that doesn’t mean that the tool is installed correctly. We can also see that this site has CrazyEgg and Optimizely installed, two tools of the conversion specialist.

If you find these on a competitor’s site, be very afraid.

Generate Data & Look In Google Analytics

Once you feel that you’ve got Google Analytics installed, you can use the tried and sometimes-true method of simply logging in to Google Analytics and seeing if it is reporting data.

If you’re the only visitor to your site, this just might work. Otherwise, keep reading.

Firefox Debugger

I’ve just discovered this debugger for Firefox by Keith Clark, called GA Debugger.

I like the simplicity of this plugin. It shows what Property IDs you come across, which pageviews get generated, Events, Custom Variables and more, even if you navigate across sites. For those new to Google Analytics, you will like the hierarchy of the listing. It shows you how Events and Custom Variables relate to Pageviews in the system.

It doesn’t let you save a log of the data you collect, however, and this can prevent more detailed analysis.

Google Analytics Debugger For Chrome

Google’s debugger is only available as a plugin for the Chrome browser, but it provides the most detailed information of any of the tools I’ve found.

Google provides a debugging version of the Google Analytics Javascript code that generates messages for you as it works. This allows you to see exactly what is being written to your Google Analytics database, and what is not.

Install the plugin and an icon appears in your extensions list bar. This extension works in conjunction with a built-in feature of the Chrome browser, called the JavaScript console, which you can open by clicking the “Customize and Control Google Chrome” button, and selecting the “Tools” menu. See the following figure.

The information you collect is substantial. Every call is logged along with every parameter. The data collected by Google Analytics is also logged. You can see the Property ID, the URL of the pageview, the domain and referring URL.

You can also QA campaign information, such as source, medium, content and term.

You will be given information on Events, including Name, Type, Label and Value.

Your Custom Variables will be listed, complete with Label and Scope.

It’ll disclose what you are reporting to GA Ecommerce Tracking.

Here’s a helpful tip: If you right-click in the console area, you can select the “Preserve log upon navigation” option, which keeps the console area from being cleared with each new page.

Now, you can cut and paste the contents into a text editor and use filtering and regular expressions to zero-in on just the information you want.

But, we’ll save that kind of analysis for another column.

Well, it is.

But, I hope to provide some basic math that will support my claims.

If you’re spending money on a pay-per-click campaign or spending someone else’s money on a pay-per-click campaign, you should give some of your pay-per-click budget to a conversion optimizer.

What We Know

Pay-per-click data gives us things like: how much we spent, how many people saw our ad, how much revenue was generated, and how much those clicks cost. With this dataset, we can then calculate things like cost-per-click or how much revenue-per-click we earned.

All of these numbers are interesting, but only really useful if we know how they impact each other.

How can we use these numbers to improve our sales revenue? If we change one thing — if we do one thing better — how can we expect our results to change?

What Metrics Correlate To Higher Revenue Or Lower Costs?

To make this pay-per-click data useful, we need to look at how different numbers relate to each other. If something correlates well, then the datasets move together. So, we can assume that if we change one, we’re likely to influence the other if it has a high correlation.

• Orders correlate to sales: keywords phrases that generate more orders generate more sales
• Clicks correlate to sales: if a keyword phrase generates lots of clicks, we can be fairly confident of more sales
• Clicks correlate to costs: this is Google, every time someone clicks, we have got to pay
• Clicks correlate to orders: keyword phrases with lots of clicks generate lots of orders

We know if we get more traffic, we’ll get more sales. More traffic equals more orders, which equals more sales. It makes sense without a lot of study.

It’s the reason people focus on driving traffic more than optimizing the page that the clicks go to.

What Metrics Don’t correlate?

I assumed that some of our key conversion-side metrics would correlate to ad-side metrics. As it turns out, they don’t.

Conversion rate moves independently of sales. I can’t say that a keyword phrase with a high conversion rate will necessarily have high sales.

Likewise, Average Order Value doesn’t correlate to sales. An increase in AOV will, by definition, give you more money, but a keyword phrase with a high AOV doesn’t predict higher sales.

Hmmm…

Conversion rate correlates negatively to cost and clicks. In other words, keyword phrases with a high cost or a high number of clicks are more likely to have a lower conversion rate.

The bottom line is: conversion-side metrics, like conversion rate and Average Order Value, move independently of ad-side metrics across keyword phrases. This means we need to optimize them independently.

A high performing ad may actually be hampered by a low-converting destination.

Big Moves In Traffic Yield, Small Moves In Revenue

A certain number of impressions are going to turn into clicks, and a certain number of clicks will turn into conversions. Logic says: if you expand those impressions, you’d get more clicks and therefore, more conversions.

The challenge is that it takes large increases in impressions to yield small increases in conversions. Plus, as we increase traffic, we tend to get lower and lower quality traffic, and our click and conversion rates will actually start to go down.

To see even a small move in conversion, we have to really increase our impressions.

Conversion optimization is more efficient; it goes right to the source. With optimization, we’re getting more conversions with the same number of impressions and the same number of clicks.

With optimization, we go straight to the source. There is no need to increase impressions or clicks.

Focus On Revenue Instead Of Clicks

We have to ignore conversion rate! What? Ignore conversion rate? Isn’t this article all about how awesome conversion is? Well, yes, but we have to put conversion rate aside for a few minutes.

Conversion rate rises when orders increase. If we increase orders and keep revenue the same, we will lower Average Order Size.

Conversion rate has some problems. If we want to increase our conversion rate, we can do one of two things. We can either increase our orders, or we can decrease the number of clicks.

If we focus only on conversion rate, we can just go in and cut our prices by 50%. It will increase our orders and our conversion rate, but we won’t make any more money. That’s not a good thing.

What’s the point of a high conversion rate and no revenue?

We need a metric that controls for changes in Average Order Value when talking about optimization. Conversion rate doesn’t take Average Order Value into account.

If we increase the number of orders, but keep the revenue the same, we end up with a decreased Average Order Value even though we got a high conversion rate. The conversion rate is misleading.

Optimize For Revenue-Per-Click, Not Conversion Rate

It’s important to keep Average Order Value in mind. Using Revenue-Per-Click instead of the Conversion Rate does that.

Conversion Rate and Return on Ad Spend don’t take Average Order Value into account. When we track revenue-per-click instead, we bring both conversion rate and Average Order Value together. We may raise the conversion rate for a given keyword, but we’ll never do it at the cost of Average OrderVvalue.

For leads, we have to optimize for conversion rate because that’s all we have. To calculate Revenue-Per-Click, we’d have to monitor our lead conversion rate.

The Math: How Much Of Your Ad Spend Can You Give Your Optimizer

Let’s look at a 1.0% increase in revenue-per-click. It’s a one-to-one ratio; so, a 1.0% increase in revenue-per-click is a 1.0%, increase in sales.

If we start with $5.45 revenue-per-click, and increase it by 1.0%, we get a new RPC of $5.51. On sales of $500,000 we get a revenue increase of $5,000/month or $60,000/year.

This $5,000 extra is roughly 3.6% of our ad spend. And, our net revenue is the same — $5,000 per month — since we didn’t have to buy any more traffic.

This means we can pay someone up to 3.6% of our ad spend to optimize, and if they generate at least a 1% increase in RPC, we break even.

Maybe a 1% increase isn’t that interesting, but let’s look at a 10% increase in the revenue-per-click. This gets us an average revenue-per-click of $6.00. That’s $50,000 a month or $600,000 per year.

Now, we can pay your conversion optimizer closer to 36% of our ad spend and still break even.

Of course, it would be unrealistic to pay them 36%. However, this gives us a model for deciding how much to invest in conversion optimization.

We’ve got a model where we can say, “You know what, if we took $5,000 or $10,000 a month over six months, and we are able to get a 5.0% or a 10% increase in revenue-per-click, we would make out like bandits.”

There is no increase in ad spend. There are no more clicks needed.

With conversion optimization, we see SEO-like returns on our investment. The improvements we make will keep for a long time so we can benefit from them month after month.

Plus, higher quality scores associated with higher conversion rates mean higher ad placements without raising our bids.

When you invest in conversion optimization, you can use the extra money you make on your PPC campaigns to lower your ad spend, increase your bids or buy expensive cars. The choice is yours.

There is the classic AIDA sales funnel (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). There is the Brad Geddes search funnel (Awareness, Interest, Learn, Shop, Buy).

Joseph Jaffe Flipped the Funnel. Dave Evans added the social cloud to the funnel.

For me, it all boils down to ADD (Attention, Deficit, Disorder). We certainly don’t need another model for generating persuasive website experience.

But, I created one.

I like this new model — the TEES model — because it encapsulates how I look at a visit to a website when optimizing for conversion. I also like the acronym: “TEES.”

Let’s see what it takes to TEES (think “tease”) a visitor into action.

T Is For Trigger

Why is someone typing in a particular keyword at this point in their life? Why now? If you answer, “Because they want to learn more about what I sell,” you are often wrong.

Take the example of a plumber’s website.

Trigger 1 – A woman is having her bathroom remodeled. The remodelers just told her that she has to hire her own plumber.

Trigger 2 – The same woman has a leak under her sink and it is ruining her wood floors.

In the case of a remodel, she will come looking for references, insurance, ability to work with her tile and years of experience. She also may be looking for some understanding of how to pick a plumber.

In the case of the leak, she needs only two pieces of information: can you be here quickly and what is your phone number.

You will create very different ads and landing pages for these two triggers. Different triggers, different experiences.

The Trigger takes place before the ad is seen. An ad can work as a trigger, but we are really interested in what is motivating the search and the click.

There is always a trigger.

In a B2B space, someone looking for a marketing automation system has a specific trigger. Did they miss their number this quarter? Were they given a difficult target for the coming quarter? Have they started a job at a new company? In general, their career or reputation is on the line.

If you sell apparel, your visitors’ trigger may be an upcoming social event, that they stepped on their scale for the first time in a few weeks, or a new job.

If you can get past the thought that, “People come to our site for lots of reasons,” you are going to spend some very important — and fun — time identifying the triggers which your business is uniquely qualified to address — and uniquely qualified to convert.

Does your messaging reflect this? If not, you may not be demonstrating appropriate empathy.

E Is For Empathy

Empathy is a bit of a frou-frou word, but Bryan Eisenberg says,

In order to help you understand what visitors need in order to achieve their goals, you need to have empathy about their journey through the buying process.

Bryan doesn’t choose words lightly.

For search traffic, empathy means starting where your visitor is. Your message can’t assume that they know more than their trigger allows.

Marketers love to start copy with a question, often something like, “Are you looking for a human resources management solution?”

The answer is usually, “No. Why?”

When you understand the triggers, you might start with something like, “Is every department in your company growing except HR?” Here, the trigger is a shortage of resources in HR that is threatening the companies growth. I may not have been looking for an HR management system, but suddenly I understand the payoff.

With a little education, I may find myself needing such a thing.

Empathy means making a promise that you will help them with their problem.

Your ad makes the first promise. Your site needs to keep it.

The promise is the payoff, the value proposition, the reason they need to engage.

Building empathy also means building trust.

Trust is communicated through your design, your copy, your guarantees, and the testimony of others. Trust must be shown more than stated. Do you talk about your company and its products, or do you talk about the problems your visitor is facing?

Given all of this, it’s clear that empathy comes slowly if you don’t understand the visitors’ triggers.

E Is Also For Education

Just because they have a problem doesn’t mean they understand the problem. They can’t understand your solution until they understand it in relation to their problem.

For an online store, a picture of the solution being used may be sufficient. For a consultative sale, an eBook may be required before they get the full scope of their problem.

For a site-as-a-service offering, a free trial is often the best way to educate. The trial doesn’t solve the problem, but gives them practice understanding the problem as well as the solution.

The important thing is that you not educate them about the product before you’ve given the problem its due. Talk about specifications, price, size, color, installation and shipping when they feel confident that they can make a good decision.

Help them understand their problem, and they will make good decisions about buying your solution.

S Is For Solution

Now is your chance to land your company and its products on the runway that you’ve prepared. This entire process is persuasive, but now you get to provide the rationalizations and facts that give visitors permission to act.

The solution is about size, specs, color and effort. It is about price and proof.

The solution can be exclusive, limited time, and desired by others. The company that makes your solution can be trusted since 1953.

The solution can be easy-to-use or the choice of celebrities. It can come in 31 flavors. It can be recommended by 4 out of 5 doctors.

Whatever it is or does, it must keep your original promise. It must solve their problem.

Is All Of This TEE Really Necessary?

If your first impression of the TEES model is, “Hey that seems backward,” you’re right. We usually put the benefits and features first.

It is true that some visitors can figure out how to apply your solution to their problem without your empathy or education. They do it every day.

People buy products and services with little more information than a list of features and benefits. They don’t need you to understand their triggers or feel their pain.

However, if your search traffic isn’t converting, then you probably don’t have many of these kinds of visitors. If you don’t get sales or leads from your visitors, then your competition probably is providing the TEE, which makes their S look sweet.

Basically, you better TEE up your search traffic if you want to kick some serious S. (See what I did there?)

If your website leads with the solution, you better be driving a lot of traffic, because few will buy without a little TEES.

How does your Landing Page see the world?

I am a landing page.

My job is to greet you when you click on ads, email links and social media posts. You will find me by scanning a QR code.

You come to me because you want something. You have requested my presence on your screen by taking a very specific action, and you expect a very specific result.

I try not to let you down.

I want you to know you are in the right place; that I have an answer for you. Your search has not been in vain.

I want you to trust me. I want you to know that others have been here and prospered because of it. I do not fool myself. I may be the first emissary of this website that you have seen, brought here by a promise and expecting that promise be kept.

It is a weighty responsibility I have.

I have seen you through the screen, wide-eyed and eager, but with the telltale signs of skepticism.

I am the butler, the maître d’. It is my job to bring you into the establishment and help you find your place. No, the home page is not equipped to perform this task any more than a pack mule is equipped to drive a race car.

Visitors to your landing page are different from those visiting your home page.

These are not the eyes of a home page visitor, with lids half closed and darting back and forth. Have you seen a home page?

The Schizophrenia Of The Home Page

This poor page is both mumbling and screaming at the same time. She changes her hat every few seconds… just before you’ve finished reading the last.

It’s like those disconnected homeless people pushing a cart full of stuff but talking to no one in particular; or maybe they’re talking to a light post.

And she’s always talking about herself, even more so that that About Us page.

Is your shopping cart all business?

The Shopping Cart

Have you seen the shopping cart? He’s all business, and little in the way of social skills.

“What’s your name?”

“Where do you live?”

“What is on your credit card?”

“Can you choose the right shipping method?”

“When was the last time you had sex?”

“Do you suffer from any rashes?”

I shudder to think that I must send my trusting visitors off to such a sterile and brash group of pages, but what choice to I have?

Splitting My Personality

I am not the same as I have always been. I have had many forms. I have had different headings, longer and shorter copy, a form, a button and different images.

I am regularly cloned and changed.

Split test landing pages to learn more about your visitors.

You might not even notice the difference between me an my cloned “twin.” It’s usually one thing, often sometimes small, but sometimes major. Then my creators pit us against each other, sending one visitor to me and one to the other.

Our visitors tell them which they prefer. They vote with their dollars and with their contact information. They vote with downloads, listens and views. They also vote by leaving, perhaps for a competitor.

My creators use terms like “Conversion Rate” and “Revenue per Visit” and “Bounce Rate” to measure us. And when I win they call me “The Control,” a badge I wear with honor. It means that I’m a better friend to my visitors and to my creators.

A Gift To My Visitors

I have had many forms over my lifetime. Sometimes I’ve been a disappointment to visitors, and a godsend at other times.

I am often most successful when my creators find me ugly. Sometimes they choose the loser because he is prettier.

This makes me sad.

Yet, here I remain, a faithful servant to my visitors. Anticipating their needs, delivering what they want, and making the Web a better place for surfers and my creators alike.

A Note From The Author

There is a segment of almost any search audience for whom relationships are an important part of their decisions. If you have read this far, you may very well be one of them. The Eisenberg brothers call these people Humanists, and they are particularly difficult to serve online because websites tend to be informational in nature. It’s difficult to build relationships with Web pages.

Anthropomorphism is a writing technique that gives animals and inanimate objects human-like characteristics. This approach may be a more effective way of encouraging the use of landing pages than some of the others I’ve written. I think the technique appeals to these Humanist searchers.

Do you agree?

Spontaneous readers may be dissatisfied with the lack of images.

Competitive readers may be dissatisfied without an explanation of why this landing page is so effective.

Methodical readers may be frustrated by the lack of specific steps and instructions.

What do you think? Please let us know in the comments.

Go ahead. Click away. I know you probably don’t spend much of your time on such things. It’s all keywords and copy, copy and keywords.

Yet, keywords and ad copy only get you so far. For your visitors, these answer the question, why am I here?

The value proposition answers the next question, why should I stay?

In the context of a webpage, your value proposition will be effective if it has the following characteristics:

1. Easy to grasp

2. Relevant

3. Clearly presented

I sometimes call this the page proposition.

For search traffic, you have some flexibility. Your page proposition doesn’t have to be the same as the value proposition of your business, unless you’re sending searchers to your home page (those poor visitors).

Instead, think of your destination pages as an arresting picture, like those you find in a National Geographic magazine. The picture captures the eye, and the caption tells you what the point of the photo is.

Likewise, your search ad captures the imagination of the searcher who sees an answer to their problem.

What, then, is the caption of your page?

If you don’t provide one, your visitors will create one, and it may not be the page proposition you would want to communicate.

I’ve written the captions for several pages taken from random searches. I chose some expensive keywords assuming that these would be among the best at communicating a page proposition.

Once you’ve perused mine, you should be able to write a caption for your landing pages.

You should do so with a sense of humor.

One note: these pages are clipped at the fold on purpose, because people can’t process what they can’t see.

Search: [Solar Panels]

Call a pretty girl, or choose from solar panels for homes and boats. We’ll install them. And a frog.

I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out the frog for some reason. The image for the “Commercial” category looks like a house. Such a simple choice essentially changes the value proposition of this page at first glance. The caption “Commercial” may save the day.

I wonder if, like ad blindness, visitors have begun to get headset blindness.

Search: [Womens Shoes]

Shoes! New York Party Shoes. And you don’t have to worry about shipping.

Pretty straight-forward. The fact that their navigation bar is hard to read probably works for them in this context. It almost disappears, which is usually a good thing for landing pages.

Women’s Shoes, and some are on clearance. Shipping is free, and you don’t have to pay for returns, even on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I clicked on Zappos because they have a fantastic value proposition. However, it’s not well communicated here.

“Free shipping and free returns 365-days a year is different from Free shipping and free returns for 365 days after purchase, which is what their return policy is. There is really little else remarkable about their page proposition.

Search: [HR Management]

Get started now doing tedious work in lab coats. HCM: You may not know what it is, but you need ours.

Business-to-business pages are the most fun to review because they make such easy targets. At least they state what they do in something like English in the upper right. What you do is very different from what your value is, however.

Home Pages

“pread the joy! ive soft velour” Oh, and we don’t test in Chrome browsers.

This overlay box is ill-conceived. And how can I get 20% off FREE shipping? Oh. Never mind.

The easiest way to accept payments. Get Started. ‘Nuff Said.

When the visitor can actually use your product online, shut up and get them started.

Search: [Attorney]

Our attorneys are very serious. People don’t put the right information in our blank. Highly rated attorneys look like their clients’ mug shots.

LegalMatch is paying as much as $47 for these clicks. They don’t have any testing software on the page, so I bet it could be improved.

Search: [Loans]

Loan Nirvana! 60 Seconds to apply, answers in minutes and their credit loans are bad.  And what is this girl looking at?!

This page gets my award for best use of stock photography. It just screams Scroll! If this value proposition passes the “too good to be true” test, it probably performs very well.

Search: [Laptop Batteries]

Our laptop batteries make people cheer. Shipping. It’s all about shipping. We like to say “Laptop Batteries” a lot.

 This page gets my award for worst use of stock photography, complete with headset wearing girl. But, if shipping is their differentiator, it is clear from this page.

Search: [Insurance]

Auto insurance. Great Service. Great Coverage. Great Price. We want you to call us.

Most of the insurance sites lead us to landing pages that are to the point. Amica thinks pretty highly of themselves. The call to action is clear and apparently the Twitter likes them, too.

Pay no attention to the asterisk. Start Saving.

Asterisks. They just scream that you’re not going to get this. And why “Double-check?” When was the first “check?”

Search: [Lose Weight]

Medical Weight Loss. You should call because we are very excited. Oh, and there are lots of forms to fill out.

Anything you put below an image is very likely to get read. These folks chose to talk about their forms. And exclamation points do not lend your copy credibility or immediacy, not even three of them.

Lose weight and reduce global warming or feed a starving child or something “good.” We’re so good that we can use a real person on our page. And you will be insured against experts, whatever that means.

This got honorable mention for using a real person on the page. Very rare. Very believable.

We look like a magazine, don’t we? You better act now to get some Raspberry Ketone. There’s a rush on the stuff. And Dr. Oz recommends it.

They labeled this an “Advertorial.” Thank goodness it’s not an advertisement… is it? Nonetheless, I think that this page’s caption is right on. Cialdini would be proud. The two most visible things on the page scream “authority” and the headline is blunt-force scarcity. I wonder if the deadline changes every day…

Ironically, their home page reveals that they are an organization called Health Caption.

Their pages better have a good caption if that’s their name.

Search: [Value Proposition]

Well, no one is advertising on this keyword, so we’ll just summarize what we’ve learned from our examples.

1. The search ad actually establishes the value proposition. Deliver what was in the ad.
2. Images are very effective at communicating value propositions. Bad images are good at communicating the wrong thing. Use them to draw attention to your call-to-action or to make your value proposition believable.
3. The copy below any image will get read. Make the most of it.
4. Ancillary content can destroy your value proposition. Something as simple as an asterisk can be devastating. Keep it simple.
5. Pick one thing. Just as LaptopBatteryExpress.com focused on shipping, you can win if you pick an audience and nail the message to them.
6. If you must serve many visitors with your page, you have two options: admit that you’re doing it wrong, or use space to help the visitor choose. LegalMatch.com gives visitors three ways to search for lawyers, but give up clarity in the process.
7. Use landing pages, not home pages. Exception: Your visitor can use your product online, like WePay.com.
8. Don’t let technical snafus get you.

Your landing page and home page communicate their value at a glance. Does it match your intended value proposition? If so, the right search visitors will stick around and convert.

Are we hiding from science?

As I write this, we have all let our breath out having learned the outcome of a presidential election and countless congressional races. Now that the task of getting elected is behind us, it is time to examine a bastion of political debate: bashing science.

Shawn Lawrence Otto writing in Scientific American (“America’s Science Problem,” November 2012) says that each of the political parties “…demands ideological conformity, even when contradicted by scientific evidence.”

I see evidence that we are doing the same in our online marketing organizations.

To an extent, the search engine marketers among us are the scientists of the Web. Ads are dismissed if they don’t generate clicks. Keywords are retired if they don’t generate searches. Campaigns are stopped if the cost of a click gets too high.

In short, decisions are made based on data.

In the online marketing world, however, things feel a bit more medieval. Myth, superstition, and the endless pursuit of cool seem to guide key online decisions. Despite the existence of amazing tools, there is an anti-science sentiment among marketers.

Like our political world, there is an attack on marketing science, and this is hurting our overall online productivity.

Cell Phones Cause Brain Cancer

Fears about our products hurting us are born from a strong distrust of corporations. However, some simple high school physics will demonstrate why cell phones cannot cause cancer.

In marketing, these are the people who have a distrust of data. Many haven’t even put any measurement software on their websites. The thinking goes like this: if I don’t know the truth, I don’t have to deal with it.

These folks are falling away quickly as inexpensive analytics software is installed across the Web. However, they are being replaced by a new denialist that says, if I don’t understand it, I don’t have to deal with it.

These marketers have the tools installed, but they don’t use the information to their advantage. They distrust anything they don’t understand.

This is not a training issue as much as a confidence issue. Just because you’re not a statistics major doesn’t mean you can’t grasp analytics concepts. And if you are to believe smart people like Scott Brinker, marketers’ jobs will depend on their ability to use and apply marketing tech.

The Theory Of Creation

At the risk of insulting those of you with strong faith, I offer this view from the scientific community: there is no theory of creation that competes with the theory of evolution.

Likewise, the theory that a website is created by a single act of divine intervention is equally misguided. A website is created through evolution.

Every change is an experiment.

For each new ad group, for each new article, for each new design change — there are two important questions to ask:

1. What effect will this have on my business?
2. How will I know what impact it has had on my business?

The first question establishes a hypothesis. The second establishes a key performance indicator that can be tied to your analytics software.

These are the two key components of the scientific method applied to marketing. Applied over time, this process will guide the site to higher and higher performance. It will evolve to a higher and more profitable being.

Vaccines Cause Autism

When we rely on mean-spirited logic that tapes kick-me signs on the backs of cause and effect, we draw the wrong conclusions from the right information. In order to defeat laws requiring vaccinations, it was put forth that, “Some people who have autism were given vaccinations; therefore, everyone who gets a vaccination is at risk of getting autism.”

The error at the heart of this is that if A follows B, then B caused A.

A classic case of this is the assumption that the things our competitors are doing online are the things making them successful. This is often not the truth.

We don’t know if they tested their sites at all. We don’t know if their fancy new site increased or decreased sales. In short, we don’t know anything.

And if your competitors are anti-science, they don’t know anything, either.

Take your competitors’ best ideas as hypotheses, try them, and measure the results. Of course, this requires that you embrace science. But imagine finding out that something they are doing is working against them. Isn’t that juicy little secret worth a test or two?

Global Warming Is A Hoax

Perhaps the most nefarious of the denialists are those that actively campaign against the science because it doesn’t support their agenda. There is no longer any debate in the scientific community that global warming is happening. There is no debate about the role of the human race in advancing it. Yet, a campaign against it has allowed PR to trump scientific consensus.

In marketing, Avinash Kaushik labeled the person responsible for such a campaign the HiPPO, or the “Highest Paid Person in the Organization.” Decisions made for political gain, for expediency, or through raw ego, leave teams to implement marketing programs based on gut or instinct.

The stories used to ignore or debunk marketing data include:

1. Everybody else is doing it.
2. It’s not “on brand.”
3. I wouldn’t respond to that!
4. It’s not creative enough.
5. Give visitors the facts and they’ll figure the rest out.
6. We sell to everyone!

In short, data will not easily overcome these active campaigns of misinformation.

In some cases, you can say, “Great idea. We’ll add that to our test list.” That implies that you have a test list, which implies that you are testing, which implies that you are making decisions based on data and science.

And if you are, you may have wasted your time reading this.

Tell me in the comments about the anti-science beliefs have you seen. How did you overcome them?

Photo courtesy mindfreak

“No, we didn’t increase sales, but look at the engagement!” is the mantra.

The definition of “engagement” changes from channel to channel. On a landing page, it may mean tracking how many visitors scroll the page, click on a form field, or watch a video.

In social media, engagement can be measured by liking, commenting, following, connecting, uploading a photo – almost anything.

On your website, it may be measured by how many visitors bounce, how long they spent on the site or how many pages they saw during their visit.

In general, engagement is a predictive measurement. It doesn’t tell us how much money we’re making or how many new prospects we’ve identified. In general, a high engagement rate is considered a sign that we are more likely to get more sales or more leads.

As it turns out, this is not a very good assumption.

The Fine Line Between Engagement & Distraction

Having just come back from Conversion Conference East, my head is freshly filled with the odd workings of the human brain when interacting with the Web. In particular, Tim Ash’s mantra that rotating headers on an ecommerce home page will kill your conversion rate.

The motion of a rotating header draws visitors’ attention – it engages them – but it does so at the expense of their natural page-scanning behavior. If your constantly changing offers aren’t what the visitor came for, and their scanning is interrupted, then they won’t find a reason to dig deeper into your site.

In this scenario, the rotating header (or rotating logos, or rotating testimonials) on the page tests out as a distraction, not engagement. The primary difference between an engaging feature and a distraction is that one reduces your conversion rate while one increases it.

When doing split tests, it is not unusual for us to see a decrease in engagement for the winning treatment. In situations like this, if we focused on increasing engagement, we would be driving the conversion rates lower and lower.

The bottom line is this: Don’t rely on engagement statistics unless they correlate to a conversion rate. You want to be sure that engagement is predictive of conversion, and not a distraction. Engagement and conversion must move in the same direction.

Don’t assume that better engagement means higher conversion rates.

Unfortunately, this means that you must solve the ROI problem. When ROI is hard to measure, engagement is usually put in the game. But, you may unwittingly be putting in his evil twin, distraction.

YouTube’s Viewer Attention metric would predict that “talking head” video would deliver the lowest conversion rate. In fact, it is the highest converting style of video. In this case, engagement doesn’t predict conversion.

Simplicity Rules For Landing Pages

If you’re driving search traffic to landing pages (as you should) distraction is more common than engagement.

The person who clicked on your PPC ad came expecting something specific. Your ad is a promise that the landing page must keep. If you place “engaging” content on a landing page, you are more likely to add to distraction.

Even things like a description of your company or your products should be well-considered before being added. If they build trust with visitors, they may be engaging and increase conversion rates. If they make the page harder to scan or obscure the key call to action, they are a distraction.

For each component you add to a landing page – or the ecommerce equivalent product page – ask yourself if that component is important to the action at hand. Does it make completing a form easier? Does it remove a barrier to clicking “Add to Cart”?

Even navigation and logos found in your corporate site template will add distractions. Consider the backwards landing page process.

The best way to ensure that you’re adding engagement and not distraction is to track visitors all the way to conversion. This means measuring revenue or lead count for each visitor.

Of course, once you’ve established a correlation between engagement and conversion, why bother looking at engagement at all? I don’t know.

Video Cuts Both Ways

A lot has been written about video and it’s ability to deliver a step up in conversion rates and revenue per visit. Because of the cost in time and money, we don’t usually test video. It’s as if we just don’t want to know.

The truth is that video is full of both engagement and distraction. In my Conversion Conference keynote, I stated that showing visitors video is like breaking a bottle against the back of their skull 30 times per second.

While there is a lot of research on how we watch Superbowl commercials, there has been little done on how we watch video more common to landing pages.

Until now.

In a partnership with Mirametrix Eye Tracking, we tested three kinds of video: talking head, webinar-style and drawn whiteboard. What we found is that video can be a major source of  engagement as well as a distraction.

In this series of frames, a call to action in the video causes the viewer to look at the landing page form. Then, motion in the video seems to steal their attention back.

Our hypothesis was that whiteboard video would engage the viewer more, keeping them on the page and increasing conversion rates. When we looked at eye tracking studies, we saw that participants who viewed whiteboard video spent significantly less time looking at the copy and forms on our landing pages. We thought this might reduce conversion rates.

In the series of images at right, you can see that a call to action in the video directs attention to the landing page form. However, the scene changes and the animation seems to steal the attention away from the form and back to the video. The green dot is where the viewer’s eye is looking.

Tests Will Tell

Fortunately, we combined our eye-tracking study with a split test. As of this writing the talking head video and whiteboard video are outperforming the slide video, the latter of which has the least motion. You can participate here.

So, while eye-tracking data shows that motion will draw attention away from our call to action, it doesn’t seem to have a negative impact on conversions. The low-motion slide video like that delivered by webinars is converting more poorly by comparison.

How To Use Motion To Your Benefit

Motion can be a distraction or can increase engagement depending on how you use it. Based on our preliminary findings, here are some good rules to follow.

1. Minimize motion of all sorts on a landing page. If you use video, repeat the page’s call to action in the video.
2. Use talking head video and whiteboard video to teach or explain concepts. These keep the attention of visitors long enough for you to tell your story.
3. Place calls to action in or near moving components.
4. Test moving components including video to ensure they are increasing engagement (conversion) and not increasing distraction.

You can pre-order a copy of the video eye-tracking report today and get the complete results of the study.

It was the end of a 12-hour video shoot. We had heard the same song over and over, about 200 times. Our model had just finished dancing in 24 outfits, having completing over 150 identically executed squats as part of her routine.

The rest of us were just tired from thinking about that.

From one day of shooting, we would generate 120 different product videos to be tested on an e-commerce website. It was fully expected that these videos would provide a boost for the major fitness apparel manufacturer’s online store.

As is so often the case, things didn’t turn out as expected.

Search traffic is expensive, whether organic or PPC. On a site that already employed Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews, numerous product photos and a favorable product page layout, we felt a product video was the missing piece, and that it would convert more of these expensive searchers to buyers .

Benefits Of Product Video

The primary visitor question we wanted to answer with video was, “How will these products look on me in a fitness class?” Video seemed to be the answer. For our personas, questions about sizing (“Does this run small?”) and quality were addressed in the ratings and reviews, and in Facebook comments.

Only video could answer questions about how the products look in motion.

Similar questions arise in industries such as eyewear, where generous return policies are required to overcome the objection, “How will it look on me?”

Product video has gotten a lot of good press in the conversion world these days. Zappos reported a conversion lift of between 6% and 30% when it added videos to its product pages. They were so impressed that they opened several studios and put 45 people to work creating videos for the thousands of products on the site.

Other sites reporting positive results from product videos are StacksAndStacks.com, Ice.com, and OnlineShoes.com.

The Test

The brand we were optimizing for felt that energy was a key ingredient in their message. They wanted product videos that captured it. That meant music and movement.

Within these guidelines, there were thousands of ways to design the videos. We wanted to understand what length and shot style would generate the most sales. Once we understood the best-performing recipe, we could invest in rolling that style out to all of the products.

There were two hypotheses we wanted to test first:

1. Video length that would impact revenue
2. If inclusion of a wide shot showing the product as part of an ensemble would increase revenue

We chose 24 products with the traffic to complete a video split test in a reasonable timeframe. We defined three video lengths of approximately 8 seconds, 15 seconds and 30 seconds. We created two additional videos that included a wide shot of the model and her outfit.

This gave us a total of five videos over 24 products. In the end, we generated 120 videos from one shoot day.

A simple video icon was added to the product pages along with the existing still photos. The video opened in a pop-over “lightbox” window.

Controlling Other Variables

The challenge then became controlling for other variables, or more specifically, eliminating the other variables’ impact on the results. All other elements of the video had to be exactly the same.

We used the same model for all videos. We used the same music for all shots. Our model was choreographed in exquisite detail to ensure her movements didn’t influence results.

If we didn’t do this, we would really have never known how song choice, model choice or moves had impacted the searchers coming to the site.

We chose a generic white background to make the products “pop” and to keep our test simple.

The other variable that can significantly affect video (and any page for that matter) is load time. We selected a reliable video hosting service with a good reputation to deliver the videos reliably.

Within six weeks, we had planned, shot and rolled out the test videos on specific products. Adobe’s Test and Target software provided the testing platform.

The Results

After several weeks of testing, it became apparent that, overall, video was decreasing revenue per visit. Uh oh…

Our first reaction was, “Well, at least we didn’t invest in video for all of the products.”

But, there was more to the story.

The searcher persona matters. Are they new visitors or returning? Are they instructors or consumers? How did they find the site?

Test and Target offers a feature that allowed us to look at results on a segment-by-segment basis. Being scientists and geeks, we created 198 different segments to watch and found some very interesting results.

Different kinds of visitors like different video recipes.

Visitors who identified themselves as fitness instructors didn’t like video so much, but regular consumers did.

The type of browser used had consistent and significant impact on revenue per visit.

Organic and PPC traffic from Google responded very positively to the right video. This creates a virtuous cycle in which video decreases bounce rates, which makes Google believe your page is worthy of high rankings. Since video also puts more money in your pocket, it can be an true accelerator for your online business.

In the process, we discovered some unexpected segments. For example, new visitors wanted to see the whole model when shopping for bottoms (pants and shorts). For those shopping for tops  (shirts and warm-ups) the wide shot was unnecessary. For most segments, video increased revenue for bottoms more than tops. This may be due to the fact that bottoms are more expensive than tops, so there is more resistance to purchase.

Video is getting these price-conscious visitors across the finish line.

In many cases, gains were significant. For search traffic specifically, video increased RPV across the board by between 25% and 100%, depending on the segment. Overall, choosing six videos and putting them in front of the right visitor gave us RPV increases approaching 50%. That’s a significant increase month after month.

Conversion Rate Vs. Revenue Per Visit

In many cases, conversion rates actually dropped when video was added to the page, but were more than made up for by increases in average order value, a distinction that would have been missed if we weren’t measuring revenue per visit.

Conversion rate measures the number of transactions generated by visiting searchers. Revenue per visit measures the revenue generated by the test product divided by the number of visitors to the product page. This combines conversion rate with average order value (AOV). This is the preferred statistic for the online store equation.

We could probably double your conversion rate by cutting all of your prices in half. However, this would likely have a negative impact on your business by reducing the overall revenue generated. Watching revenue per visit ensures that we’re increasing conversion rate without impacting revenue.

What Should You Do?

For online stores, video is a great bet for increasing revenue. Video can easily pay for itself, but if it is not produced and targeted properly, it can have a negative impact on your business. Every audience is different, and testing is the key.

Do your own tests of video before investing in a catalog-wide video strategy. If you invest in the testing tools that give you the insights you need, be sure to invest in the people who will intelligently pull the levers and dial the knobs. This will be a significant competitive advantage.

Start with specific hypotheses, and control the ancillary variables to confidently find the video recipes that make your cash register ring more often and more loudly.

We’ve just completed eye-tracking tests on three kinds of video: talking head style, webinar-style and hand-drawn video. I will be presenting the results at Conversion Conference East 2012. You should be there.

The Chicago Manual of Style states, “Ellipsis points suggest faltering or fragmented speech accompanied by confusion, insecurity, distress, or uncertainty.”

Compare this to the period, or “.”.

A period says, “This thought is complete.” It is the sign of a complete sentence. There is a subject, a predicate containing a verb and an object. All appropriate adjectives, adverbs and participles have been included. Nothing more is needed.

Are you sending your hard-won search traffic to a …com or a .com?

A Landing Page Is A Complete Sentence

Your B2B search traffic should not be asked to fill in the blanks like a sentence that ends in an ellipsis. You may introduce confusion, insecurity, distress, or uncertainty.

Your home page is often guilty of asking the visitor to figure out what lies between their search and your solution.

A landing page or microsite offers a complete sentence.

There are three main parts to a sentence,and your landing pages should contain them all. Every sentence should have the following form:

You should do a specific thing to get an answer to your immediate questions.

You Are Not The Subject

The first part of your .com sentence is the subject. You are not the subject, your visiting searcher is.

Do your pages start with your company name, your product, or the pronoun “We”? If so, I suspect your page is about you. It’s hard to complete a sentence when you’re talking about yourself.

We are…

If so, you have taken your searchers to a www.oursite…com.

A search for “enterprise business planning” brings us to this page. We learn a lot about Xerox from Xerox on their landing page, but what about my enterprise business planning questions?

The Verb Is The Action

Just because our visitors are the action, doesn’t mean we don’t want them to do something that helps our business. Your call to action should be clear and obvious.

Of course, this can be a problem when we expect searchers in all parts of the sales funnel.

Oracle responds to my “enterprise business planning” query with a lot of features and benefits. Their calls to action are muted, however. If I’m not determined to find the next step toward my questions, I’ll miss the payoff.

A search for “Cognos 10″ brings me to this landing page. DataClarity has three verbs in their landing sentence: request a demo, get a quote, or read a 572-page eBook. Their sentence is

You should do this or that or the other to answer your immediate questions.

This is a page with a period.

You Are Not The Object

The object of your sentence is the goal of the searcher. It is your offer. Your destination, whether a landing page or microsite should focus on the offer, not your business or products.

This may be surprising. It’s hard not to talk about yourself when marketing. It is a waste of pixels for a searcher trying to understand their problem.

If you find yourself with a high bounce rate from your search traffic, you are probably putting desires ahead of your visitor’s questions.

In response to my query “enterprise business planning,” SAP offers a list of resources that could answer my questions. However, clicking on any of them opens a onerous form. It makes me wonder what I’m getting myself into.

You should do a specific thing to get an answer to our immediate questions, and then…

The few leads this experience might generate may be highly motivated, if they are willing to give you their address, phone number, title and more without knowing what they are getting. Those early in their research will be missed.

Are You Completing Your Sentences?

Integrate a subject, action and object into the experiences you create for your search traffic and you will empower your visitors with a complete thought. This is important for business-to-business prospects, who are not looking to save money or get the next cool thing. They are interested in keeping their jobs and careers safe while making difficult decisions.

If you don’t offer a complete sentence…

Thanks to the Grammar Girl for educating me on the ellipsis.