It reminded me of the negative side effects that certain kinds of tests can have on customers — sometimes your best customers — and the steps that marketers should consider to mitigate those risks.

This is a cautionary tale, but I don’t want to lambast the the company running the test. They ultimately handled the situation fairly. So I will refer to them anonymously as a business software provider named Acme.

Testing One’s Sanity

Acme typically offers three levels of their product: Basic, Advanced, and Super-Duper. Each level adds more features and increases in price. For illustrative purposes, let’s say their monthly subscription prices are normally $100, $200, and $300 respectively.

During a family gathering for Christmas, one of my in-laws asked for a recommendation of such software for his business. Since I knew and liked Acme, I was quick to suggest them. He pulled out his laptop, and I navigated to their website. But when I clicked on their “Pricing” tab, expecting to show him the three different levels, there was just one option: $100.

At first, I was disoriented. I was looking for the Advanced level that I already knew, but it wasn’t there. I could have sworn it was there a few days ago when I looked at it on my computer. Had they rearranged the site architecture?

To check my sanity, I pulled out my laptop, went to their site, clicked the “Pricing” tab… and still saw all three levels with their original pricing.

Huh? I refreshed my page. I refreshed his. He had one option. I had three. Looking more closely, the difference was even more striking. It turned out that for $100 he was being offered all of the features of the Super-Duper level — what was being offered on my screen as a $300 package.

My first reaction was, “Cool, an A/B test!” (What can I say? I’m a conversion geek. And I was relieved to have a rational explanation for the bizarre dichotomy between our two computers.)

But my professional appreciation for finding an A/B test in the wild was slowly replaced by a different sensation. I felt, well, gamed. I had been ready to sign up for the Advanced package myself and would have paid $200 for it.

In fact, that was what Acme was telling me, with a metaphorically straight face, was still “the” price. But on the computer right next to mine, they were telling my in-law that the price was something very different — twice as many features for half the price.

“Hey,” I wanted to chide Acme. “I’m referring you business, and you’re offering them a deal that’s way better than what you’re telling me I have to pay? What gives?”

Testing One’s Patience

I actually did feel a little indignant. This was a pretty big difference in pricing. And my reaction was tempered by a pro-A/B testing worldview. I wouldn’t expect most customers to be so enlightened.

To someone who doesn’t understand the impersonal randomization at work in such experiments — or even that it’s an experiment at all — it would be easy to attribute ill intent to Acme’s schemes.

And that’s not the end of the story.

We eventually signed him up — Acme does have a very nice product — in a browser where we had the special $100-for-everything offer. It started with the first two weeks as a completely free trial.

But when that expired, and he went to add his credit card info for the recurring subscription, the Acme system somehow reverted to giving him the regular three-tier pricing. Confused, he chose the $100 level, but it was the Basic version without all the Super-Duper features.

Technically, I believe this happened because two different computers were used. One had the cookie for the special pricing, the other did not. But however it got mixed up, it caused another round of confusion and consternation.

We opened a support ticket with Acme, explaining the situation and asking for the $100-for-everything package. The first reply we received was a little squirrelly, vaguely admitting that they had been testing new packages with a small customer group — to help them “understand how to better serve all of our customers, like you.” But they didn’t acknowledge us as one of the test subjects and didn’t adjust our package.

Now I was starting to get annoyed. We replied to clarify that, indeed, we had been in that test group, and that we expected them to honor the offer.

After an escalation or two on Acme’s side, they relented and gave us the special deal. They also apologized for the confusion caused by the price test. In the end, I felt they resolved it well. But I was convinced that for other prospects put through such an experience, it easily could have ended badly — lost trust, lost customers, negative referrals, or a social media PR disaster.

Suggestions For Testing Prices

After contemplating the above situation for a while, I have a few suggestions for Acme (and the rest of us).

First, although testing is the bedrock of modern marketing, recognize that price testing is a bit of a different beast. People are unlikely to be offended if they see one headline and their colleague sees another.

Experimenting with different content — such as videos versus images on a page — is very low risk. But if I get told a different price than the person sitting next to me, for no apparent reason, there’s going to be trouble.

Keep in mind how easy it is for people to compare the same site on two different computers. An employee sees one thing, the boss sees another.

A consumer sees one thing, a friend or family member sees another. And, of course, there’s the ever increasing propensity to share what one sees with whomever will listen on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Nonetheless, sometimes you will want to test pricing.

As one alternative, consider testing serially instead of in parallel. Try offer A this month and offer B next month. Such tests have a few characteristics that are less than ideal — such as more potential for confounding variables — but they avoid scenarios where people are getting two different offers at the exact same time.

Or consider limiting tests to particular campaigns — with their own landing pages, separate from your primary site. You can have more control over who receives the offers and the context in which they’re presented.

One option is to explicitly identify something as a special offer, available for a limited time or constrained by other restrictions. Admittedly, this is a very different test than quietly testing two different prices that people assume is the regular price. But if the test is discovered, a special sale price seems more forgivable.

Another factor to consider is how big the price difference is. In the Acme example, they were effectively offering the product at 1/3 its regular price. A difference that big really smarts when the person told to pay full price finds out about it. If the difference had been 10%, maybe even 20%, it would have been less jarring to discover.

But perhaps you really want to test a big price difference, quietly, without identifying it as a special offer or sale. In that case, you may want to keep the ratio of the the “challenger” price low — maybe it only shows up 1 out of 10 times, rather than a traditional 50-50 split test. It doesn’t eliminate the problem, but it does reduce the probability of a collision.

Finally, no matter what, make sure your front-line staff is prepared. If someone stumbles into awareness of both prices, make sure that your team is ready to respond gracefully. You don’t necessarily have to extend the offer to people who just “heard” about it. But if you take that tack, you may be risking relationships that have far more value than the price difference.

Test, test, test. But when testing prices, test carefully.

Image courtesy of U.S. Department of the Treasury.

So in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d begin this column by sharing with you an adapted poem I first started playing with a few years ago, ‘Twas the Moment of Click-Through (also known as A Visit from Saint Click).

My apologies to the original classic.

Image from Wikimedia Commons: Cover of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" (1912 edition) - Project Gutenberg eText 17135

‘Twas The Moment Of Click-Through (A Visit From Saint Click)

‘Twas the moment of click-through, and all through the site
All the pages were crafted to bring visitors delight
The images were placed in the layout with care
Along with the headlines that perfectly paired

The tracking scripts were nestled, all snug in the page
To measure performance at each purchase stage
The variations were ready for a good A/B test
To discover which versions would convert prospects best

Landing pages were added to match ads even more
Leveraging the secret to a great quality score
“Now Facebook, now Twitter,” the marketer cried
Enabling site links to be spread far and wide

Respondents were segmented with a choice and a click
Receiving the right content and offers right quick
Behaviors were noted so the whole team could learn
How to do even better when respondents returned

And as the traffic arrived, through the funnel it went
From pre-click to post-click to money well spent
How the dashboard twinkled as the conversion rate soared
And the marketer knew there’d be joy on the Board

As the conversion rate multiplied, the marketer winked
“Conversion optimization rocks, don’t you think?”
And you could hear her exclaim as she drove out of sight
“Happy click-throughs to all, and to all a good night!”

Ahem. But looking beyond the holidays, 2012 is going to be an exciting year in conversion optimization.

“Customer Experience” Will Be Big 2012 Focus

It’s safe to say that 2011 was the year when landing pages achieved ubiquity. Almost every marketer I’ve talked with this year employs at least a few landing pages in their digital universe — and many have deployed them at scale.

But not all landing pages are equal. With Google Instant Preview, released earlier this year, landing pages now have more visibility than ever in the search experience.

We’re becoming ever more cognizant of a widening “landing divide” — really awful pages that look like they were made in 1996 on one extreme, truly amazing ones that are almost app-like on the other, and enormous variability of user experiences in the middle.

Landing page optimization in 2012 will be focused on moving up this curve. It will go beyond testing message-matched landing pages for different campaigns and keyword buckets. (Although for late adopters, that’s still a good place to start!)

Instead, it will be much more about improving the experience respondents have on those pages, and the paths they then follow deeper into the funnel.

Increasingly, the phrase “customer experience” is becoming the rallying cry of CMOs in all industries, who are recognizing that in the age of the zero moment of truth (ZMOT), customer experience is the new marketing. And that customer experience starts with the very first contact onward — and landing pages are the quintessential first contact.

Mobile Landing Pages Will Be Fruitful & Multiply In 2012

One area that I expect will be particularly hot for experience optimization in 2012 is mobile landing pages.

The continued explosion of smartphone usage will lead to more mobile marketing, which will lead to more mobile click-throughs, which will lead to more mobile landing pages. Sure, most webpages (Flash excluded) render on mobile browsers. But that doesn’t mean they’re usable at palm-sized scale, where users are literally all thumbs.

Efforts such as Google’s GoMo site are bringing much needed attention to this mission. Stats quoted on their site include: by 2013, more people will use their mobile phones than PCs to get online; mobile searches have grown by 4X since 2010; and there will be one mobile device for every person on earth by 2015.

Google also quotes a study from Compuware about the impact on customers: 57% would not recommend a business with a bad mobile site; 40% have turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience; and 23% of adults have cursed at their phone when a site doesn’t work.

In other words, good mobile experiences are becoming an expectation, not just a nice-to-have.

While the stakes will be higher than ever for mobile experiences in 2012, the good news is that there are also more tools than ever to help marketers create compelling — dare I say seductive — mobile landing pages.

For instance, the popular Javascript library jQuery now has an impressive-looking jQuery Mobile release. It supports touch-optimized layouts and app-like UI widgets (toggles, sliders, tabs) with a cross-platform implementation that works on iPhones, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile.

By the way, another motivating force for better mobile landing experiences appears to be the steady rise of QR code usage. Melissa Parrish of Forrester Research has a great post on what marketers need to know about these 2D bar codes.

While there are certainly skeptics out there, I believe that the mobile explosion will drive demand to bridge real-world experiences and digital experiences with greater ease and frequency. Other solutions may appear — such as near field communication (NFC) — but QR codes seem the most accessible in the short-term.

He bluntly told the audience that ad agencies are on the verge of destruction. The old model of buying mass media to sell mass market products is anachronistic in a world where the media “channels” that customers spread themselves across continue to multiply, with those channels serving ever more specific niches. And the products and services being offered are increasingly diversified, customized and tailored to fit.

Seth’s new book, “We Are All Weird: The Myth Of Mass And The End Of Compliance,” presents this as the flattening of the bell curve of what’s considered “normal.”

People’s interests — and the ability to fulfill them — are spreading out, instead of being clumped in the middle.

Things that we now consider to be cool and remarkable are out in the edges; but on different edges for different niches. This phenomenon is exactly what Chris Anderson revealed with The Long Tail; but now, more and more industries and markets are subject to Long Tail dynamics.

“Weird” is good.

In one place in the book, Seth notes that the non-advertising parts of Omnicom — the second-largest ad agency holding company in the world — have grown from 11% of the company’s revenue to nearly 60% over the past 15 years. “That’s right,” he emphasizes, “more than half the revenue at the second-largest ad agency in the world comes from activities that aren’t mass advertising. Game over.”

How Does Being Weird Affect Search & Conversions?

For search marketers and conversion optimization professionals, this is wonderful — and manifestly true in our day-to-day work.

The best way to optimize CPC? Target more specific keywords with more specific ads. The best way to increase conversion rates and optimize CPA? Pair those specific ads with message-matched landing pages.

Our stock and trade is in exploring those edges beyond the middle.

My takeaway from Seth’s new “weird” theme is that we should push our work on those edges even further. Reflecting back on last month’s column, The Art of Seductive Landing Pages, that’s part of what makes them work.

A respondent who lands on one of those pages immediately experiences something different than the generic middle of mass marketing (or their landing page equivalent).

Getting Out Of The IT-Marketing Gap

At first, this might seem like a non-sequitur, but stick with me.

As I wrote in a column a couple of months ago, conversion optimization software — the tools of our trade — are only a slice of an exploding new field of marketing software. I happen to think that conversion optimization professionals are some of the most proficient at understanding how these kinds of tools work across many different facets of the new marketing. But admittedly, I’m biased.

I am continually amazed by what software now enables marketers to do. But the frustration that arises with it — and we see this all the time with website testing software, landing page management software, SEO tools, PPC bid management software and the rest — is that in many companies, it falls into the IT-marketing gap.

You’ve no doubt seen that gap, and probably experienced it firsthand. It occurs when IT is responsible for selecting and operating software, or at least parts of it, but marketing is responsible for getting results out of that software.

Even with the best intentions, that tends to cause things to take more time and effort than they should. Cross-departmental communications and collaboration are important, but they can be costly.

Tying back to Seth’s advantage of being “weird,” this overhead of execution tends to dampen experimentation and the velocity by which marketers are able to generate new and different experiences.

Econsultancy published a recent quarterly briefing where they reported that 68% of marketers consider conversion optimization to be “resource intensive” — and that only 26% are actively using it. It’s too much work to align the marketing and the technology.

How do we fix that?

Reorganizing Marketing To Be Weird, Faster

A new report from Forrester Research, Investing In Marketing’s Technology Future, proposes a major organizational shift to address this. If you work in the marketing department of a company of any significant size, this may be the most important marketing management report you’ll read this year. Seriously.

Forrester recommends creating a “marketing technology office” — enterprise-speak for a team — of technologists who work in the marketing department. This team lives fully in marketing and reports to the CMO (or a VP of customer intelligence) and takes responsibility for selecting and operating the burgeoning portfolio of marketing software.

The report states: “For marketing to build a technology strategy, implement and develop those technologies, and better integrate and act on the customer data it captures, marketing resources must be organized within a central framework that can act at the speed that marketing requires.”

It looks like this:

Note that this marketing technology office still has dotted line responsibility to the CIO. It has to adhere to good IT governance — this is not “shadow IT,” but an official part of a distributed technology strategy.

There is no longer an IT-marketing gap, because everything is now holistically contained within marketing.

Which lets us be “weird” faster.

P.S. If you’d like to read more on this topic, I’ve posted slides and a 4,000-word essay on agencies and the marketing technology revolution that I presented last week at the same event with Seth.

Diagram courtesy of Forrester Research Inc., from the Oct. 24, 2011, report “Investing In Marketing’s Technology Future” by Robert Brosnan, Suresh Vittal and Michelle Dickson.

Yes, seduced.

Being seduced is an exhilarating experience. (If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend it.) Yes, we want to be educated and make rational decisions that optimize our goals. But we also yearn to be romanced, enchanted, in love. We seek brains and beauty. Is that an unrealistic paradox?

It doesn’t have to be.

First, recognize that seduction is not synonymous with deception. Being seduced is fun. Being deceived is not. It’s unfortunate that shady advertisers have conflated the two. But the world’s best brands pursue “honest seduction,” touching us emotionally as a way to begin a genuine, mutually rewarding relationship.

For instance, Apple seduces consumers, and their customers love them for it. There’s plenty of educational content to be found deep in Apple’s website, but their home page, their retail stores, their emails, their advertising — all weigh heavy on the visceral, more than on the cerebral. Their seductive charm has helped make them the most valuable company in the world.

So while I fully recommend incorporating the best principles of content marketing in your conversion optimization — educating, informing, and leading thoughts — I implore you to communicate more than that. Impart the spirit of your organization, your brand, speaking to the heart as well as the mind.

Here are two suggestions to make your landing pages more seductive.

Wear A Sexy Page Design

The Web is a visual medium. Although factors such as search engine readable text and page load time are important, they should not override the primary objective of delivering an amazing customer experience.

To be sure, an amazing customer experience should load quickly, and it should contain meaningful, relevant copy. But it should also impress in ways that are worth a little extra load time and a little more interface love beyond plain text.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, let’s look at an example (click to enlarge):

The above page, from a landing page/microsite offered by the Centre for Arts and Technology school (disclosure: one of my company’s customers), is rich with relevant search engine text.

The page and its assets are a mere 244 KB (in actuality, closer to 143 KB when using common cacheable resources) and a decent Internet connection loads the whole thing in ~443 ms.

Nice. But a normal person (not us conversion science wonks) wouldn’t consciously notice any of that.

The target audience for this landing page is someone who is passionate about fashion design and considering a degree and a career in it. They want to find a program that will inspire them; that requires not just words, but the holistic integration of content and design.

The seductive soul of this page is the background image that underlies the main content area, translucently visible behind the copy and the form. But not distractingly so; it emerges to the foreground in the space between the two sections.

The flow of the blue/green lines and the line of sight of the model lead the respondent from the headline to the call-to-action, providing cohesion and unity. The imagery here isn’t decoration, sprinkled on after the fact: it’s the heart of the message.

Yet the technical implementation of this page is relatively simple, using a couple of CSS tricks. It’s not much more work than the boring “hero shot” cliché that cookie-cutter landing pages are infamous for, but the difference in impact is substantial. Combined with efficient Javascript for overlays and custom fonts, this lightweight page packs a heavyweight punch.

Does it work? In a case study recently published with my company, the Centre stated that their “conversion rates increased from 4% to as much as 19% by moving from single hand-coded page experiences to content-rich microsites” such as this.

Okay, you might be thinking, such seduction is fine for high-end B2C, but is it appropriate for B2B?

Encourage A Little Playful Exploration

This next example of a seductive microsite is by Dell (disclosure: another customer of ours), targeted right at a B2B audience — traffic driven to it from display advertising on The Wall Street Journal.

Here is the landing page that leads into the microsite (click to enlarge):

Respondents are invited to explore seven different vertical B2B interests served by Dell. Marketers: think segmentation.

While it certainly wears a sexy page design, a dynamic and graphic-driven grid layout that visually communicates Dell’s innovation, this example also demonstrates the second suggestion for seduction: an invitation to explore.

Too often, content marketing is reduced to a flat page — a long, top-to-bottom article. That works if your audience is already committed to being educated on a topic, and in the mood to study. But to engage them earlier in the funnel, using a more interactive experience which encourages a little playful exploration, can be much more seductive.

On this Dell microsite, when you zoom in on a particular interest (for example, cloud computing) you are to taken to a topic page that has a number of features to draw visitors into interacting with it. I’ll describe several using this series of three screen shots (click to enlarge):

There’s a topic-specific headline and introductory text in the center left of each page (first screen shot), and then three subtopics along the bottom.

When you hover or click on those subtopics, more detailed information slides up (second screen shot), including a deep link to richer educational content on that subject elsewhere in the Dell ecosystem.

Clicking “What people are saying” in the lower left zoom up a similar layer (third screen shot) with links to articles, webinars, and other social proof content.

There are three keys to making this work:

• First, the discovery process needs to be effortless — the sliding and zooming springs from content already loaded in the page, so it happens smoothly and responsively.

• Second, the things that are being discovered need to be optional choices. You don’t want the user to jump through hoops to read linear content or to complete a series of required steps. On the contrary, these discover-able nuggets need to save the user from sorting through material that isn’t interesting to them. For instance, if I don’t care about consulting services, I never zoom in on that subtopic.

• Third, the discovery needs to pay off. The content that is presented via these zoom-able interactions needs to be meaningful. The novelty of the interface must serve the content, not the other way around.

Now, you may be wondering, this is cool and all, but how practical is it to implement this on a regular landing page budget?

To be sure, this microsite clearly took some work to pull together — the content as much as anything. But technically, it’s pretty straightforward. With advances in CSS, HTML5, and the amazing features in the jQuery and jQueryUI Javascript libraries, these kind of exploratory interfaces are within reach for even modest landing page projects.

And to assuage search engine concerns with this approach: (a) much of this Javascript wizardry can be cached using the Google Libraries API content delivery network, thereby minimizing page load time; and (b) all of the copy can still be plain text, to make relevance easy for a robot to detect.

You can promote great content, meet core search engine requirements, and be a little seductive at the same time — they’re not mutually exclusive.

There’s more than one approach to scaling conversion optimization in this environment, and they’re not mutually exclusive. We’ll examine three.

The Explosion Of Digital Touchpoints

The primary reason for this explosion of touchpoints is the continued migration of advertising dollars into online channels. eMarketer predicts that online ad spending worldwide will grow from 16.1% of total media budgets to 21.9% in 2015.

Given that worldwide advertising spend is expected to be $600 billion in 2015, we’re talking about tens of millions of additional dollars that will be invested online.

Driven by this influx of advertising dollars is an ever-expanding array of places to advertise. If we just limit ourselves to paid media, there’s the growing long-tail of AdWords search buys, an increasingly similar market for targeted display advertising, the rapid growth in Facebook PPC ads, the growing new space of mobile advertising, and so on.

In many cases, this isn’t just more real estate in which to run the same ads. Rather, it opens the door for a wider variety of ads that are tailored to their respective media and the contexts in which users see them.

These more targeted, context-specific ads then naturally have the opportunity to drive traffic to more targeted, context-specific landing pages. (Or, more broadly, post-click marketing experiences of many flavors.)

Testing Multi-Purpose Post-Click Experiences

One approach to dealing with this scale is to make sure your multi-purpose pages are well-optimized, given the variety of traffic that is sent to them.

This is the Google Website Optimizer approach. If you have a home page, or a small number of destination pages, you can run A/B and multivariate tests to find the most effect presentation on average for all users.

The upside of this approach is that you only have to invest optimization effort in a handful of pages. The downside is that you are trying to find the best “one size fits all” experience, and depending on how diverse your audience and traffic sources are, that may be a low common denominator.

For some types of experiences, such as shopping carts and e-commerce check-out processes — this works great. For other, more campaign-oriented or context-specific post-click experiences, this approach tends to hit a wall; it’s hard to serve different constituencies well with the same content and presentation.

There are some advanced technologies out there for optimizing different content on these multi-purposes pages for different audience segments.

In my opinion, however, that can be difficult for marketers to visualize at the campaign level. You no longer really have a shared experience that you can look at, understand, and propose tests and changes to. Instead, it’s more of a shell in which many different content combinations exist simultaneously in parallel universes.

There are powerful opportunities for that kind of personalization, which we’ll cover in a moment, but using it to drive the entire experience seems cool in theory, difficult in practice.

Optimizing Dedicated Landing Pages

A second approach is the “landing page optimization” school of conversion optimization. The essence of this approach is to create specific landing pages (or microsites or conversion paths) for different advertising campaigns and audience segments. You can then test and optimize each specific page, independent of the rest, for its particular audience.

This is probably the best understood approach — you can do a Google search to find hundreds of great articles on targeted marketing with landing pages. The challenge, however, is scaling up. What’s the cost efficiency for each additional landing page you create? How many different pages in total can you manage?

Luckily, those sort of operational challenges can be addressed with software tools that reduce the cost and time for producing new pages, as well as provide an organizational structure for managing a large collection of pages in total.

For instance, many marketing automation systems, such as Aprimo, Eloqua, Hubspot and Marketo, now include landing page features. Other vendors, such as Unbounce and ion interactive (disclosure: my own company), offer dedicated software solutions for this kind of post-click marketing.

However, even though these products streamline production and management of landing pages, marketers must still take responsibility for building out different pages for the different campaigns driving traffic.

This is both a feature and a challenge. It’s a feature because you can guarantee “message match” between the ads that inspire users to click and the experiences they receive after the click — you’re able to perfectly fulfill respondent expectations. It’s a challenge, because it doesn’t happen auto-magically; someone still needs to be guiding the creation of these experiences.

I liken this kind of rapid production post-click marketing to a blend of content marketing and conversion optimization.

Targeting Serendipitous Content & Offers

Finally, there’s a third approach that I touched on earlier — the use of personalization and algorithmic targeting software to dynamically populate specific offers or content elements to different respondents on a page. Although I expressed skepticism for using these technologies to generate the entire page, I think they can be very effective in populating certain pieces of the page.

The way I look at it, there are two types of relevancy in post-click marketing. The first is expected relevancy — when someone responds to a specific ad in a particular context, they expect the webpage that they arrive at to fulfill the promises implied or stated by that ad.

You can test different variations of presenting that expected content, but in all cases the content has to flow naturally and stay on message. In my opinion, that’s hard to do with a black box.

However, there is also room for serendipitous relevancy — where in addition to the main, expected message of a page, ancillary offers and content teasers can be presented around the primary content.

These secondary calls-to-action, cross-sell or upsell blocks, often placed in a sidebar, can afford to take guesses about what the user might like. If they’re wrong, there’s minimal penalty to the brand because the user wasn’t expecting serendipity.

However, if they happen to nail it — something that delightfully surprises the user (“I wasn’t expecting that!”) — it can drive significant lift to your conversion rate.

This kind of conversion optimization is prevalent in e-commerce, where store pages are often “fixed” and their primary content is deterministic, but there’s plenty of opportunity to dangle tantalizing hooks elsewhere on the page. Recommendations on Amazon are a classic example of this.

As I mentioned at the beginning, these different approaches aren’t mutually exclusive. You can employ one, two, or all three together. With more traffic headed your way, and a plethora of marketing technologies available for each of these approaches, your conversion optimization programs have a bright future ahead.

With that in mind, I’d like to share with you two “big picture” stories about the evolution of marketing that reveal just how valuable a conversion optimization worldview has become.

The Marketing Technology Landscape

First, there’s the marketing technology infographic that I published on my blog last week, an attempt to capture the enormous breadth of software applications being leveraged in the marketing department today:

It contains 41 categories of marketing technologies with over 250 representative companies and products. I grouped these into three meta-categories — the orange, blue, and green boxes that represent external promotion, customer experience, and internal marketing management respectively.

Conversion optimization professionals have two boxes of their own right in the center, Landing Pages & Microsites and Web Testing & Optimization. The former is focused primarily on content creation and deployment, while the latter is more about MVT and A/B testing.

Disclosure: I included my company, ion interactive, in both of these categories. I strived to provide a fair sampling of our competitors — some of whom are in other categories, such as Adobe in Integrated Suites — but this chart is admittedly far from exhaustive.

Of course, if you’ve been working on conversion optimization, you’ve almost certainly been deeply involved in many of these other categories: the core website, e-commerce, web analytics, SEO tools, creative tools, customer analytics, call tracking. And that’s a big plus.

Conversion-oriented marketers are particularly adept at seeing up and down the funnel — roughly left to right in this graphic — from ad management and social media marketing through to marketing automation, email marketing and your CRM. After all, conversion optimization is often a mission to provide continuity, connecting the dots along a series of touchpoints that our audience has with us.

It’s this multi-disciplinary, cross-category experience that makes conversion optimization folks typically comfortable working across the gamut of all these marketing technologies. It’s a pragmatic intersection of creative vision and technical implementation.

That positions conversion-oriented marketers who are likely to have had measurable success working within this ecosystem, for greater leadership in the evolving marketing organization.

The Zero Moment Of Truth

The other “big picture” story is presented in Jim Lecinski’s book, ZMOT: Winning the Zero Moment of Truth. Published by Google and distributed for free, it passionately describes the new reality of marketing where consumers are always connected, both to each other and to huge repositories of information on potential purchases.

Procter & Gamble’s former CEO A.G. Lafley popularized the First Moment of Truth (FMOT), when a consumer looks at a shelf of products in the store and decides which brand to buy, and the Second Moment of Truth (SMOT), when that consumer actually uses the brand at home and decides if they like it or not.

Google makes that point that there is now a new Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT), where consumers explore and examine products and providers online — leveraging search and social media channels — to identify what’s most interesting to them before they ever go to the store. And this new ZMOT applies equally to B2B and considered purchases as it does to the consumer packaged goods where the FMOT was born.

Every touchpoint that a prospect has with you online contributes to their ZMOT decision.

An obvious example is when someone searches on a keyword, chooses to click your ad, and views your landing page. Their impression of you from that experience will impact their choices moving forward.

Conversion optimization is therefore critical in winning the ZMOT. Thinking of it this way frames the mission more broadly too — it’s not just about converting a visitor with one specific action in one particular context, but ultimately persuading them across a bevy of touchpoints for the duration of their ZMOT deliberation. It’s customer experience management writ large, from the earliest moments of contact onward.

In fact, when you step back and view the ZMOT as emerging from the sum of all these digital interactions around your brand, you realize that the marketing technology landscape we discussed at the start is what enables and empowers your ZMOT strategy and tactics.

From both perspectives, conversion-oriented marketers are poised to take the lead.

The problem is that most of these are bad landing pages.

By “bad,” I mean three things: (1) they look amateurish, lifeless or downright ugly; (2) they fail to provide holistically compelling content; and (3) they aren’t very effective in winning over customers. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but it’s hard not to infer a relationship between these things.

For instance, take this example I recently showed in a session discussing the new Google Instant Preview for Ads:

Make you want to click? Didn’t think so.

But why are these pages so bad? And why are there so many of them?

One problem is that designers continue to be underutilized in conversion optimization. Part of that is the legacy of optimization, originally more of an analytical discipline than a design-oriented one.

Part of it is that search marketing — which has been a leading domain for the practice of landing page optimization — has non-visual roots in keywords and text ads. Search marketers tend to be more proficient at Excel than Photoshop.

But mostly, it’s because good design takes more time or money. And, unfortunately, it’s all too easy to confound cost with ROI. Just because something costs less up front, doesn’t mean it delivers a better payoff. But the wrong organizational structure or incentives can camouflage that truth.

Scratch The Google-Minimalist-Aesthetic Excuse

One excuse for eschewing design talent that propagated through landing page talks for years went like this: “Google follows a minimalist visual aesthetic, Google is the most successful Internet company on the planet, therefore we should have minimalist landing pages.” If Google can get away with mostly simple text on a plain white page, then so can we. “Minimalist visual aesthetic” often became code for “no graphic design at all.”

Of course, that was always a false equivalency — Google’s user experience was designed (quite intently) for searching. It is a neutral, frictionless gateway to a plethora of possible destinations — cleverly crafted to be supported by advertising while not actually looking like it is supported by advertising.

In contrast, a landing page is a single, specific destination, tasked with the Promethean challenge of engaging a skeptical respondent with that company’s particular offering, in that particular context, relative to all the other competitors just a back button and a click away.

As I discussed in Compelling Landing Page Design Is Not Formulaic, good visual presentations have tremendous capacity to communicate a company’s unique value proposition in that situation, in ways that mere words cannot.

Those are two very different missions.

But with the grand unveiling of Google+, even this mistaken justification for avoiding design effort has been shaken.

Google+ delivers an incredibly rich user experience. As TechCrunch reporter MG Siegler wrote, “It looks great — Circles in particular — it was almost as if it wasn’t a Google product!” The Google executives he interviewed proudly responded that it’s because Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original designers of the Macintosh, was given free reign to “flex his creative muscles” within Google. Apparently Larry Page (historically opposed to lavish designs) personally signed off on this bold new direction.

For a dose of Google’s new design wizardry, check out the Google+ demo page:

Now that’s a high-design landing page. Minimalist visual aesthetic it is not. It’s engaging, creative, and ripe with compelling content. As it should be, as the point of Google+ is to move the search giant beyond being a gateway to other sites into more of a destination in its own right.

Google has made clear that this fresh take on design will permeate all their services. Witness the sexy black bar at the top of the Google homepage:

Yes, I just used “sexy” and “Google homepage” in the same sentence. So from now on, the answer to “What would Google do?” is: embrace the contributions of great designers.

Scratch The It-Pays-To-Be-Cheap Excuse

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for saving money. Budgets are tight, and there are numerous competing demands for your resources, whether you’re a one-person shop or a Fortune 500 juggernaut. And design investments definitely don’t come for free.

You should vigorously optimize your spend. But you should optimize it for the outcome: what are the maximized results that can be achieved with minimized investments. It’s dangerous to drop the first half of that equation and optimize solely for cost reduction without weighing the impact on performance. (“Penny wise and pound foolish.”)

So for years, I’ve advocated investing more time and money in landing page design — one of the reasons I prefer to think of the mission more broadly as post-click marketing. Usually, my key exhibits are real-world cases where design-driven makeovers of landing pages have delivered major increases in conversion rates, such as this example:

In the interest of full disclosure — since my company sells software and services for such post-click marketing, these anecdotal examples are sometimes interpreted as a sales pitch specific to my firm. But we don’t have any proprietary lock on design skills. I’m the first to say that anyone can do this — good design principles can be adopted by any company that values having them.

Need more objective evidence?

Lance Loveday, the CEO of Closed Loop Marketing alerted me to the UX Fund, an investment experiment by the design firm Teehan+Lax. They took $50,000 and invested it in a portfolio of public companies that have demonstrated strong commitments to design and user experience:

The results show that 5 years later, this portfolio has grown by 123.39% — far outpacing the NASDAQ and the NYSE. In other words, at the market level, it pays to be design-driven.

Scratch The CMO-Doesn’t-Get-It Excuse

The final excuse that’s held some marketers back is that the CMO doesn’t care about landing pages. They’re too tactical, in-the-weeds. So why invest in making them amazing, when you could, say, launch a high-profile, social media command center instead?

It’s true: any one landing page — or any one ad or email leading to it — is in the weeds. And you probably should have some kind of social media command center.

But these things are all connected to a bigger picture. Increasingly, that bigger picture has converged around two key CMO-level missions: (1) accountability for metric-driven marketing performance and (2) brand development and competitive differentiation through customer experience (CX) management.

CMO.com recently published 10 Great Expectations: What CEOs Want From Their CMOs that emphasizes these two missions. And so it goes from the CEO to the CMO to you. (With more or fewer layers in between, depending on your job title.)

Landing pages (or, more broadly, post-click marketing experiences) address these missions in the top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) and middle-of-the-funnel (MoFu) interactions across display, email, search and social marketing.

What happens after a respondent clicks? That is often the first critical touchpoint for customer experience. If you can’t impress and intrigue your audience after the click, why should they think you’ll do better after the sale?

Directly tied to these experiences, conversion rates for primary actions (e.g., leads, purchases, subscriptions) and secondary actions (e.g., social conversions via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+) are the quintessential metrics for marketing performance measurement.

It’s with these metrics that the value of design can be quantitatively proven in your own business. Before you champion a company-wide stampede to poach designers from Apple, start with a few modest post-click experiences. No need to make new hires out of the gate — work with a freelance designer to brainstorm better ways of presenting your value proposition to those click-throughs. A/B test these new ideas as challengers to your current landing pages.

When you report to the CMO, you can skip the landing page optimization jargon and talk to what really matters: how you’re improving customer experiences with better design and the metrics you have in place to prove it.

Yes, any one experience is in the weeds. But the collection of all the experiences you deliver to prospects and customers — and the operational capabilities you put in place to deliver them effectively — is at the very top of the C-suite’s priorities.

By social conversion, we mean a social-oriented action that a user takes on one of your pages: clicking a Facebook Like button, clicking a Twitter Follow button, or clicking a new Google +1 button.

For example, any of these buttons:

In some cases, this may be the primary call-to-action for a certain landing page: you deliver meaningful content to a targeted audience, and in exchange, you ask them to socially promote you. In many scenarios, however, these social features will be secondary calls-to-action — an optional (but valuable) way to build engagement.

However, while many people include social sharing buttons on their pages, few of them track their usage. But to optimize something, you need to measure it. We’ll show you how here.

The rest of this article will be a little technical — sample Javascript and links to APIs. If that’s not your cup of tea, you may want to collaborate with a marketing technologist and share this article with them.

Javascript Callbacks & Google Analytics

Most social sharing buttons today are rendered using Javascript. You insert a little snippet of code from the social site of your choice — Facebook, Google, Twitter — and it takes care of displaying the button, perhaps showing an up-to-date counter, and handling clicks from users.

While this is very easy to plug into your page, it does prevent you from directly “listening in” on the user’s interaction with that button. For instance, you typically can’t add your own onclick attribute to the button.

To address this need, most social services now provide a “callback” option in their scripts. You can write your own Javascript function and pass it to their script, which then calls back to your function when a particular event occurs. For instance, Google +1 allows you to specify a callback function that will be triggered when a visitor either adds or removes a +1 vote on your page.

It’s in your callback function that you can insert custom tracking code to record these social conversions in your analytics or conversion optimization platform.

For example, if you’re using Google Analytics, you can take advantage of their event tracking API to record a visitor doing a Google +1 action on the page with something like this in your callback:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Sharing', 'Google +1 On']);

Other analytics and optimization software will have slightly different ways of recording these events. For instance, if you’re using my company’s post-click marketing platform, LiveBall, you would insert a liveballTag("Google +1") line in your callback instead.

Example: Social Conversion With Google +1

Let’s look at an example of tracking conversion for a Google +1 button. Start with the Google +1 your website page that lets you configure your own +1 button. By default, the standard button without any “advanced options” gives you the following code to copy and paste into your site:

<!-- Place this tag in your head or just before your close body tag -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>

<!-- Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render -->
<g:plusone></g:plusone>

The first chunk, with the <script> block should probably go at the very bottom of your page, right above your closing </body> tag. The second chunk — the <g:plusone> line — should go wherever you want the +1 button to appear on your page.

So far, this is a piece of cake. Now let’s add a callback to track these +1 events. We’ll name our callback function plusoneCallback, which we can add to our +1 button tag under “advanced options” in Google’s configurator:

This now changes the second chunk of code — the <g:plusone> tag — to add a callback attribute:

<!-- Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render -->
<g:plusone callback="plusoneCallback"></g:plusone>

Now, let’s implement our callback function, adding it in front of the <script> block at the bottom of the page. For illustrative purposes, we’ll use Google Analytics events to track these conversions:

<!-- Place this tag in your head or just before your close body tag -->
<script type="text/javascript">
function plusoneCallback(plusoneObj)
{
   if (plusoneObj && plusoneObj.state && plusoneObj.state == "off") {
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Sharing', 'Google +1 Off']);
   }
   else {
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Sharing', 'Google +1 On']);
   }
}
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>

Google +1 actually passes a small JSON object to our callback — I called it plusoneObj in the above function — that lets you see what state the button ended up in when the user clicked on it. If a user added a +1, state == "on" — or if they removed their previous +1 endorsement, state == "off" instead. In our example, we track those two events separately.

You can read more about the advanced options available here on the +1 button API page in Google Code.

Example: Social Conversion With Facebook Like

Facebook provides a similar callback mechanism — they call it subscribing to events — that you can hook into to track “Like” social conversions on your page.

Note that for this example, you may need to register as a Facebook developer to work with their code. Once you do so, you can access the like button plugin page to get the code, something like this:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script>
<fb:like send="true" width="450" show_faces="true" font=""></fb:like>

Place this where you want the “Like” button to appear, such as in this example:

You can then track these “Like” actions by subscribing to Facebook events with your own little snippet of Javascript. Continuing to use Google Analytics events, you could add the following to the bottom of your page, right before your closing </body> tag:

<script type="text/javascript">
FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) {
  _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Sharing', 'Facebook Like']);
});
</script>

Example: Social Conversion With Twitter Follow

Of course, no social conversion toolbox would be complete without tracking Twitter-related actions.

Luckily, Twitter offers a very robust API for tracking “web intents” — their nomenclature for when a visitor clicks on a tweet or follow button. Here’s an example for capturing “follow” events and recording them in Google Analytics:

<a href="http://twitter.com/ioninteractive"
class="twitter-follow-button">Follow @ioninteractive</a>
<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  function followCallback(intent_event) {
    if (intent_event) {
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Sharing', 'Twitter Follow']);
    }
  }
  twttr.events.bind('follow', followCallback);
</script>

You can put this entire block of code where you want the “Follow” button to appear on your page. (Simply change “ioninteractive” to your own Twitter account.)

Hopefully this will get you started with tracking social conversions on your landing pages. You may also want to take a look at LinkedIn’s API for Share buttons, as well as the ShareThis API for multiple sharing buttons built into one widget — both of these support callbacks as well.

It may not have received much fanfare, but this is a huge change for post-click marketing.

Until now, PPC marketing and landing page optimization were separated by a gap: the click. The only information a user had to make a decision to click was (1) the text of the ad itself, a mere 135 characters and (2) the position of the ad as a faint signal of quality or value. And, where applicable, any brand equity that the advertiser had previously established. It wasn’t until the user clicked that they could factor in the actual experience that the advertiser would deliver in return.

That structure let a lot of advertisers get away with poor post-click marketing experiences. As long as the ad — just the ad — tempted people enough to click, they generated their traffic, increased their click-through rate (CTR), and had a shot at snaring some fraction of those respondents in a conversion.

But the game has changed. Poor post-click marketing experiences can no longer hide behind the click.

Now, upon entering this “preview mode,” a user can hover over any ad — or organic listing — on the search results page (SERP) to see what its landing page looks like. They can read snippets of text from the actual page to see how closely it relates to the text of the ad. And by effortlessly moving their mouse around the SERP, they can quickly compare all of the different advertisers before they decide to click on any.

Pre-Click & Post-Click Marketing Converge

To appreciate the impact of this change, imagine that you’re thinking of touring of some wineries in Napa. You do a search for “Napa Valley wineries” and see the following two ads:

Would you choose A or B? Personally, I think A is a better ad, but B is certainly credible. “Sit back and relax. Leave the driving to us.” That’s an appealing proposition, and in your mind’s eye, you can almost see a limo winding its way through mountain vineyards. You might click on both.

Now take a look at these ads with the preview mode enabled:

Changes your perspective immediately, doesn’t it? I reduced the size of these to fit here, but even without reading the details, you can tell at a glance that A is still credible and consistent with its ad.

But B suddenly looks like junk. Its snippets of text are just keyword spam. Its island-themed photo of people in Hawaiian shirts clashes with the mental image of a Napa Valley wine tour. The headline of “Wine Tours in Napa” and the custom URL of www.winecountrytours.com are not enough to save B. Its credibility is shot.

That’s a big change in the laws of the search universe.

Best Practices For Instant Preview Landing Pages

Google Instant Preview for Ads immediately suggests several best practices for landing pages.

First and foremost, design matters. A landing page that looks good can now send a signal of the quality of the advertiser — potentially a stronger signal than the text of the ad or its position on the SERP. Compelling landing page design can now differentiate you before the click, as well as after.

Second, message match matters. In other words, the promises that the ad makes should be reflected in the copy and imagery of the landing page. Here’s a great example by Silverpop, whose ad promises “The Top 5 Questions You Should Ask When Selecting Marketing Automation” — and their landing page preview clearly fulfills that promise.

Third, don’t put long forms on your landing page — unless your conversion offer is extremely persuasive. Users who preview a page with a long form and very little other content are likely to be reluctant to click through. (“Oh, goody, I can’t wait to fill out all those fields!”)

Instead, consider using a short form — such as just asking for name and email address. Or postpone your form to the second page of your landing experience. Or implement “progressive conversion,” just asking one or two fields on page one, and then following up with subsequent questions on page two or three. This becomes an additional benefit of deploying multi-step landing experiences.

For example, consider this landing page to a multi-step experience, with the form postponed to page two:

Fourth, speaking of testing, think carefully about your A/B and multivariate testing when experimenting with significantly different offers on your landing page. Google has not made clear exactly when and how they capture these preview thumbnails. If they happen to capture a thumbnail with a big “40% offer” banner, but then when the user clicks through they don’t see that in their version, that would not be good.

One way to prevent problems here is to test with matched pairs of ads and landing pages. So instead of testing one ad with two different A/B versions of a landing page, test an A version of the ad matched to an A version of the landing page against a B version of the ad matched to a B version of the landing page. (In this case, the A and B landing pages should have separate URLs.)

Click-Through Metrics For Landing Pages

This move by Google now makes the click-through rate (CTR) metric relevant to landing pages. As people become aware of this feature, previews of good landing pages will garner more clicks than previews of bad landing pages. This is certainly easy enough to test with matched pairs of ads and landing pages, as we discussed above.

Which landing page previews have the greatest impact on CTR? What’s the relationship between that new CTR and the subsequent conversion rate (now that people have a clearer expectation of what the landing page will deliver)? These are all excellent opportunities for new conversion optimization experiments.

In addition to winning more traffic, this may indirectly impact your quality score. Although Google says these previews will not effect quality score directly, it’s generally accepted that CTR is a significant factor in quality score. So if great landing page previews increase your CTR, your quality score benefits indirectly.

Congratulations, Conversion Science readers. Google has effectively elevated your post-click mission to the very top of the search marketing funnel.

A brief background: never much into school as a kid, I originally dropped out of college to grow an early online software start-up. It wasn’t until 10 years later that I decided to return as a part-time student at Columbia’s School of General Studies, a program tailored for “nontraditional” students. Being at a school like Columbia in my 30′s actually ignited a passion for education more than anything had before — I was a late bloomer, educationally speaking.

So I finally earned my degree. But what did I really learn?

You Never Know What You Can Do Until You Try

Before Columbia, I had been a C student, and math was my worst subject of all. By 30, I had assumed I was simply bad at it, and it would forever be out of my reach. Yes, a software developer who was bad at math. But truthfully, I had never really tried. Until a required course in discrete mathematics — one of the few hurdles to what I thought would be an easy degree in computer science — captured my imagination.

It took significant effort, starting from square one, but I steadily improved at math. I practiced, and read, and practiced more. I even grew to appreciate its beauty. So much so that by the end of that course, I revised my program to pursue theoretical computer science — essentially nothing but math. I spent most of the next four years thoroughly in over my head, yet loved every minute of it.

Now, six years out, I may not remember how to wrangle a generating function to find a closed formula for a recurrence relation. But I’m fearless about learning things that initially seem out of reach. Which is helpful, because marketing is in its most disruptive period in history. It continually demands that we master new skills and adopt new perspectives. We can resist, clinging to our comfort zone, or we can rise to meet the challenge.

In my experience, fortune favors the bold.

In A Nontraditional World, Being Nontraditional Is A Plus

At many traditional universities, the expectation is that you finish high school, immediately attend college for the next four years, and then graduate. Anyone who doesn’t fit that mold — so-called nontraditional students — are usually not welcome. To my knowledge, Columbia is the only Ivy League school that offers a program for students returning to college from other life endeavors.

But you know what?

I thrived in my nontraditional education at Columbia far more than most of the “traditional” kids in my classes. I was there because I was genuinely fascinated by what I studied, not out of obligation to societal or parental expectations. I leveraged my experience in the classroom and applied what I was learning immediately in my career. Rather than be embarrassed by my unconventional path, I embraced it — and ended up as valedictorian.

And a funny thing happened along the way: nontraditional became cool.

Digital marketers succeeded with nontraditional channels. Entrepreneurs succeeded with nontraditional business models. Google rose as the epitome of a nontraditional company. Writers such as Hugh MacLeoud and Seth Godin encouraged people in all professions to throw off the pall of the traditional and pursue their passions and purple cows.

Modern marketing is largely uncharted territory. The people whom I admire most in this industry are those who adventurously explore unconventional ideas and approaches. There’s good reason that David Meerman Scott had a bestseller with The New Rules of Marketing & PR. We may incorporate certain traditions and traditional media in our work, but we must relentlessly experiment and innovate.

After all, the Holy Grail of “differentiation” begins with being different.

Who You Do Things With Matters As Much As What You Do

Maybe it matters more.

That discrete mathematics course that was so pivotal to my Columbia experience — turning math from a handicap into an inspiration — was extraordinary because of three people.

Professor Jonathan L. Gross, who taught the course, had a well-earned reputation for giving ridiculously hard exams with mind-boggling puzzles. But he led the class with passion, wisdom and humor. He simultaneously conveyed the wonder of pure math while showering students with a wealth of practical insights. And those ridiculously hard exams actually raised our expectations of what we could do. I took every course he offered.

But I wouldn’t have survived his classes without the collaboration and camaraderie of two graduate students taking them with me, Frank Enos and Leo Kim. Gross encouraged his students to do homework together, so Frank, Leo and I spent many an hour at a whiteboard working through problems. One of us would take the lead, madly writing arcane symbols on the board until hitting a conceptual wall. Then we’d step back, until someone else would say, “Ah ha!”, seize the marker and scribble the next step. We went back-and-forth, questioning and explaining as we went, until the solution emerged to great cheers.

I’ll remember the joy of those classes long after I’ve forgotten every scrap of discrete mathematics. And it set the gold standard for the kind of team and working environment that I strive to foster in my company today. Chemistry, drive and a creative spirit are the top three things I look for in new hires. Raw capability is important, but not without those prerequisites. We need to be able to have fun at a whiteboard solving the hardest problems our business can throw at us.

Marketing is a massively multi-player game. Who you choose to work with will tremendously impact your ideas, your approach and your enthusiasm — and ultimately what you are able to achieve. Who you choose to mingle with can open new doors for you, not just in the traditional networking sense, but more so by introducing you to new ways of looking at the world.

Maybe this all boils down to three C’s: curiosity, courage, and collaboration.

At least that’s my philosophy.

Photo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Almamater.jpg. Used under Creative Commons license.