Despite indications that the U.S. economy is starting to turn around, low consumer confidence will undoubtedly have an impact on retail sales this holiday season, making every consumer’s online search, browsing and buying experience more critical than ever. The challenge for online retailers is not only to get shoppers to your site, but keep them there and entice them to make a purchase.

Niraj Shah recently gave helpful search marketing tips for the holidays, and Stephan Spencer shared advice on SEO during the upcoming shopping season. Both stress the importance of strategic search engine marketing to help with the first step: driving shoppers to your website. But once they get there, what if your website takes too long to load? The images in your product catalog don’t appear, or your checkout page times out? Delivering a poor end-user experience will leave all your SEM efforts wasted.

Delivering a great user experience when shoppers are on your website is the best weapon that online retailers have to convert holiday visitors into loyal shoppers and customers. Given that consumer expectations on the responsiveness of your web pages and applications have increased drastically, testing web performance in advance can help ensure that every shopper can navigate through the site quickly and successfully.

Here are five suggestions for online retailers to ready their website for the holiday rush.

Measuring, measure, measure. Just as the old saw “location, location, location” means everything in the brick-and-mortar world, measurement is the key to success in the online realm. Proactively measure your web performance to get an understanding of how your web store is performing at all times. Synthetic monitoring tools regularly check website and application performance around the clock.

Continuously monitor store functions, including the home page, site search function, product catalog checkout process, login and order confirmations. Analyze the performance and availability of these website features during peak periods to gain insight into how well your site will perform during high user demand.

Don’t rely on your customers to point out web issues. If customers are calling to tell you there is a problem on the website, it is already too late. Consumers want a seamless web experience, and errors, especially during the checkout process, can cause cart abandonment and lost customers.

Deploy a website performance monitoring strategy that comprehensively checks your site from different locations around the world and generates instant, real-time alerts when page errors or performance issues occur. That way, you can get ahead of the problem and proactively identify a solution before it impacts the end-user experience and store results.

Test the visitor capacity limits of your website. In addition to performance monitoring, load testing is another critical step in preparation.

Performing a load test prior to the start of the holiday shopping season will allow you to test your site’s limits and make the necessary adjustments to support anticipated shopper levels.

If you are preparing for Black Thursday or Friday, introducing new functionality to your website or launching a new advertising or promotional campaign and expecting an increase in traffic, it is imperative to determine how many users your site can handle in advance.

Take time to role play. One of the best ways to gauge your customers’ experience is to experience it for yourself. Look for a web performance monitoring service that lets you simulate user activity at every stage of the online experience. Walk through users’ typical click streams from searching, to shopping cart, to checkout, constantly checking to make sure each element is functioning properly.

For the most value, combine this effort with regular, detailed reporting and monitoring from a variety of locations to ensure total website performance.

Have a back-up plan in place. Even with the most dedicated planning and efforts, unexpected problems can occur. That is why it is a good idea to have a plan in place to handle website errors and downtime. One way to do this is to have a personalized downtime message ready should you need it.

Rather than having an error message appear with language that the majority of consumers will not understand, create a branded message that lets your customers know you are aware of the issue and it is being worked on. You can never go wrong with adding a bit of humor to the message as well.

The holiday season offers a huge opportunity for online retailers to capture sales and new customers, even in a tough economy. Website testing, monitoring, and performance measuring are the keys to unlocking a successful user experience for customers and successful conversion rates for retailers.

Can you apply the spirit of social media to other marketing channels?

At this year’s SMX East, after my presentation on Landing Page Usefulness—emphasizing a “usefulness” mission over “usability” tactics—it struck me: great landing pages can bring many of the ideals of social media to paid search marketing campaigns.

Here are five principles of social media marketing that can energize your landing page program:

1. Engage in specific conversations, not generic one-size-fits-all talk.

When a company engages in social media, the worst thing it can do is echo canned, cut-and-paste responses to every incoming comment. It’s painful just to imagine! Yet many paid search marketing campaigns commit that very faux pas: a user clicks on a keyword/ad combination with a specific promise, and then they are unceremoniously tossed to a general-purpose page. Such “message mismatch” between keywords/ads and their associated landing pages damages brands and hobbles conversion rates.

The reason I advocate deploying dozens—or even hundreds—of landing pages is because doing so lets you deliver focused and well-matched introductory dialogues with respondents, framed in their terms. As I said in my presentation, the goal is have respondents exclaim, “thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for!”

It’s not about optimizing one page to rule them all—an illusory, marketer-centric fantasy—but deploying many separate pages that each speak authentically to their niche. That’s the kind of respect that honest social media marketing shows to people reaching out to you, and a good landing page strategy can live up to the spirit of that goal.

2. Embrace “constant content,” continually releasing new ideas out into the world.

From blogging to tweeting, the engine of social media is the frequent generation of content. Hopefully it doesn’t take a committee or half a dozen pairs of hands to put up a new blog post or to update your Facebook fan page. The incentives in social media are to be fast, prolific, experimental, relevant and real.

The same tenets should apply to landing pages.

Sometimes, when I suggest that people should publish dozens or hundreds of landing pages, I get a look of incredulity: how could we ever create so many landing pages? Yet organizations who embrace social media marketing produce 10-times as much content without breaking a sweat. The resistance to such agile production of landing pages is often a hang-up from the bygone days of long-cycle web development. Today, deploying new landing pages should be as easy as—maybe even easier than—posting to your blog.

If you have a good content management system (CMS), a nice collection of page design templates, a shared library of images, maybe a few reusable Flash components, and a standardized mechanism for data collection and analytics tracking, then you’re ready to crank out landing pages on demand. And if you don’t have all of those pieces yet, none of them are particularly difficult to put in place.

3. Harness fast feedback to learn about your audience.

Arguably the best feature of social media is that it lets you tap into candid and immediate feedback from your market, albeit in an unstructured manner. It’s a wonderful environment to put ideas out into the community and quickly gauge reaction.

However, you can also solicit a different kind of feedback—more quantifiable and more directly connected to sales—through rapid experimentation with landing pages and keyword buys. Participation is more predictable with such PPC experiments, and the results can be easily benchmarked against your e-commerce or lead funnel metrics. It’s a small, low-risk investment that can help you discover big wins.

Struck with a novel theory about an unaddressed customer segment over your morning coffee? Don’t just hypothesize about it or file it for the next quarterly planning meeting. Launch a targeted search ad and tightly matched landing page for it before lunch and have real-world feedback by the next day. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You can test and tweak as you go along—an ongoing feedback loop.

Ads and landing pages also lend themselves to A/B tests, in a more controlled fashion than variations in social media tactics. If you structure your tests with good hypotheses, you can learn a lot about audience preferences and personas.

4. Open up a dialogue by asking relevant questions—and respecting the answers.

Social media is a conversation, not a soliloquy. People can ask questions, usually quite informally, to help identify the content or information that’s most relevant to their interests. This allows a single discussion to adapt itself to many different participants.

A similar dynamic can be achieved with landing pages. Sometimes, you have to field clicks from keywords/ads that appeal to several different segments of respondents. Instead of reducing the specificity of your content to a bland common denominator—the ill-fated, one-page-to-rule-them-all approach—start by offering them a few meaningful choices. Are you more interested in A, B, or C? Based on their one-click selection, you then deliver more detailed content that’s tailored to their needs.

This technique is known as multi-step landing pages or conversion paths. It can be a tremendous source of feedback, especially when you test different types of choices. However, it’s crucial that the choices genuinely help respondents find what is most useful to them—you want segmentation that benefits users, not just marketers. Remember, we’re striving for that “thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for” effect.

5. Champion transparency and authenticity over cleverness and technology.

The essence of social media is its authenticity, plain and simple. You can try to manipulate it with gimmicks and complicated machinery, but such machinations tend to fall flat. People love what’s real in social media, not what’s artificially crafted to appear real. Human trust is more important than plastic perfection.

Certainly this holds true with landing pages as well. There’s no shortage of sophisticated software you can use to dynamically alter your pages to users based on their IP address or behavioral profile. You can layer rules upon rules to calculate the optimal offer for each respondent. But inevitably, such overly processed experiences lose their authenticity.

Similarly, you can play UI tricks to try to force people to engage with your page (e.g., you must fill out this form before continuing!), but it’s almost always more of a turn-off than a successful hard-sell tactic. If you’re going to remove your regular navigation choices from a landing page, do so because it helps eliminate clutter for a respondent in that context—but still always give them an option to easily jump to your main site.

Be genuine, creative, open, and enthusiastic in your landing pages, and you will win more converts.

Landing pages, like social media, are something that you get better at by doing. So release your inhibitions and make more landing pages.

Although it’s been around for years, pay-per-call advertising may be finally hitting its stride. Greg Sterling, a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, recently wrote:

We’ve long known that calls are much more valuable than clicks to small businesses in particular, but also to many larger entities with call-center sales operations. However… it’s taken PPCall much longer to get going than I originally anticipated.

Sterling sees pay-per-call growth in traditional media and mobile. He also notes that pay-per-call programs are now increasingly being used in print Yellow Page directories such as AT&T which just announced pay-per-call programs via the YPmobile App for iPhone and iTouch . Merchant Circle also recently announced pay-per-acquisition pricing – including pay-per-call.

And it’s not just AT&T and Merchant Circle. Other traditional yellow page publishes are renewing interest, and venture rounds by MojoPages, Balihoo, RingRevenue, as well as the TechCrunch50 launch of Redbeacon and Yext show that there is a growing supply of pay per call offerings coming into the mobile local search market.

In fact, I just read a blog post lamenting the poor service delivered to a pay-per-call advertiser. The merchant—who was irate that he received wrong number calls and was charged inappropriately—reminded me of what can go wrong with an advertiser’s pay-per-call campaign.

All of this brings home a point: as more and more search engine marketers, publishers and others in the mobile local search ecosystem are discovering, pay-per-call is not as easy as it appears on the surface. If your local business is being pitched by a provider who just provisions a few tracking numbers, begins charging for calls and then expects to roll in the dough, you need to be prepared to ask a few hard questions.

Five rules for every local merchant interested in pay-per-call pricing

Make a good first impression. If the first calls received from your campaign are wrong numbers look out. Despite best intentions, assigned numbers (necessary of course for pay-per-call), are never entirely clean. Before a number is assigned, your provider should be monitoring for wrong number calls.

Be selective. Pay-per-call can succeed for local advertisers focused on phone lead generation, but it may not be right for your business. Your business should not rely on walk-in traffic (retail); the cost of sale cannot be too low, or too high; and sales generally need to be closed every few calls (high sales to call ratio). You are an ideal pay-per-call advertising candidate if you have advertised in the yellow pages, newspapers, FSIs, Valpak or other mailers, radio or local TV. Business-to-business (B2B) advertisers or niche merchants are not typically good candidates for pay-per-call.

Be prepared to serve your callers. I founded my company on the premise that pay-per-call must benefit the consumer, merchant and publisher. Ten dollars per call may be a great deal for you, but your business needs to be properly staffed and trained to answer the phone. Without a connection to your helpful, available staff, the consumer is not served. If your business does not have the infrastructure to serve clients by phone, pay-per-call may not be for you.

Be able to close a sale or make an appointment by phone. I had a client—a direct mail publisher—whose advertiser complained that they did not make any sales as a result of the pay-per-call leads. We were recording the calls (with permission) for the client and discovered that the leads from the publisher were good, but the advertiser’s staff couldn’t sell.

Calls prove return on advertising investment (ROI) even without pay-per-call pricing. If pay-per-call isn’t right for your business, don’t give up on the numerous benefits of tracking and routing calls.

Look for innovators and leaders when comparing pay-per-call offerings. Yext demonstrated an example of this innovative thinking at TechCrunch50. Leakage and dirty calls are a real problem with pay-per-call. Yext is using analytics to examine key words for relevance and filter out junk calls.

The TechCruch50 winner, Redbeacon—while not focused on pay per call, or calls at all—is trying to solve the problem of merchant availability. This is closely related to pay-per-call (see Rule #3). If your staff is not available to respond to a call, the consumer is not served. The merchant who answers the phone is generally more available than the merchant that does not—especially over a series of calls.

Successful implementation of pay-per-call requires bottom up thinking with the same new product development rigor as any major new advertising or lead generation product. The next generation of Pay-per-call 2.0 insures a high level of satisfaction with the quality of your callers (consumers) by including detailed analytics and reporting to identify repeat calls by caller ID and other calling patterns; category management to deliver the best leads to the right merchants; pricing models that optimize value; and finally advanced, real-time call routing applications to deal wrong numbers, vendors and other unwanted calls.

Despite several years of building expectation, pay-per-call is still a relatively new pricing model within mobile local search. Providers entering this market must be prepared for a fairly steep learning curve and merchants need to be prepared to ask the right questions.

Google’s Sidewiki is here and it’s not hard to see that it could be big, that it could change the way we use the internet. However, it has some frankly scary implications for website proprietors. People can visit your pages and leave messages, whether you want them to or not.

Dell Homepage with Google SideWiki – Image credit: Flickr

I think the best description I’ve seen to date was on Econsultancy, describing it as “a way to graffitti websites.”

How can we web marketers respond? Have we lost control of our own websites and those of our clients? There have already been several instances of rude, insulting comments being left on the pages of major corporations.

So how can we make the best of Sidewiki? Here are my thoughts, and I welcome your comments. Haven’t yet seen Sidewiki? You’ll need to install the Google Toolbar and enable Sidewiki to do all of the things I describe below.

Leave a page owner comment

Sidewiki allows brands to leave special Sidewiki entries on their own pages, entries that are distinguished by a green background.

These entries rank above comments made by other users. They are another way of engaging with your audience via a platform they have chosen and can be really useful.

You could leave some general information about your organization, leave contact details for your customer services department, encourage people to visit your forum or blog, even include some comedic lesser-known facts about your business.

Anything you do engages with readers and shows you aren’t afraid of the power of Sidewiki.

Why not regularly update your Sidewiki with new information, links to press releases, podcasts, blog posts and so on. View it as a chance to speak to your visitors in a whole new way, rather than open season on your site.

Know your rights

Of course, having said that, you do have rights and Google has to recognize them. It would be unfair and illegal to introduce a tool that allows competitors to spam your pages or trolls to leave slanderous comments dotted about your website.

There are some raised eyebrows over whether Sidewiki is even legal and Google has to show some concern over spammers, flamers and so on. It has a ban process that allows people to complain about content.

For example, one of the first Sidewiki comments I saw was on the Daily Mail website. It berated the content and linked to the Guardian.

Now it’s gone and there’s a message from another user that explains: “I reported your post, using ‘other’ as the reason and explained you were simply redirecting traffic to competition.”

While I enjoyed the original description of the site, it is good to know that there’s a simple procedure for complaining about posts.

Don’t be afraid to use this facility in the face of spamming, slander and redirecting.

Be helpful

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice? Google has said repeatedly that the purpose of Sidewiki is to allow people to “contribute helpful information next to any webpage.”

Its vision, it says, is for a tool that allows people to share useful information and insight. Perhaps doctors can leave informative comments on websites advertising treatments, maybe finance experts can proffer guidance on how competitive a credit card is next to the page advertising it.

While people will try to exploit Sidewiki, others will use it to be helpful and social—just like Twitter, Sphinn or any of the other social tools we’ve seen.

So be helpful. Leave useful comments (not advertising) across industry pages and make sure people know where you’re from. Sidewiki could be yet another way to enhance your online industry profile, which can only help your business.

Offer alternative feedback options

Inevitably, at some point someone will be less than happy with your service. Make sure you give customers plenty of ways to offer feedback to you that aren’t Sidewiki.

Ensure you leave contact information on your site, don’t block blog comments, add a feedback form… Do everything you can to ensure people bring their complaints to you rather than scribbling them on the sides of your web pages.

Of course, you then need to take action to make your client happier with your business—otherwise, frankly, they have every right to leave comments for others to see.

Respond to negative criticism

I hope Sidewiki doesn’t just descend into a maelstrom of abuse and criticism, but it’s sensible to plan for dealing with any negativity. You should treat positive and useful comment as a bonus. However, it’s really important for any business to respond to negative criticism. Do you search Twitter for mentions of your company? Do you respond when those mentions are negative and try to resolve them? Then you’re a fine example of a company that listens and acts, which people respect.

Do the same with Sidewiki. If there are legitimate complaints about your product or service then address them. Your business will improve and customers will know you care.

Want to learn more about how Sidewiki works and how to use it effectively? See Danny Sullivan’s Google Sidewiki Allows Anyone To Comment About Any Site.

In a previous post, I wrote about how to get started with website testing, both choosing which pages to test and how to define which elements will contribute the most to profits. However, there are quite a few testing methods to choose from. In this post I will delve into the two most common testing methods: A/B tests and multivariate tests (MVT). What is the difference between them? How can you choose which one best fits your needs?

Below is a comparison between the testing techniques mentioned, taking into consideration the overall use of the testing technique, coding needs, design needs, granularity of results and other considerations.

Most testing tools provide these options, but since Google Website Optimizer is a free tool that provides both options, it is a good place to start and try the examples I provide below.

A/B Test

An A/B test is the most common and easiest type of landing page test to conduct. It consists of creating alternative pages for a specific page and showing each of them to a certain percentage of visitors. For example, if you create 4 different variations of a landing page, 20% of visitors to the website will see each version (4 variations + original). Cookies are used to maintain a consistent user experience—if a visitor sees one version, they will see it again and again when visiting the website as long as the cookies are not deleted. Below is a representation of how this technique works.

Image created by Yam Designs. For a high res version of the image go to A/B test scheme.

To implement the test with Google Website Optimizer, scripts need to be included on the pages to be tested. These include:

• Two JavaScript codes on the original page: one that performs a redirect to the additional variations (head of the page) and one that measures the number of times the page was seen (this can be placed anywhere below the redirect code).
• One JavaScript code on each variation page to measure the number of visitors viewing each page.
• One JavaScript code on the conversion page to measure which visitors converted; this will measure the success of each page variation.

Advantages of A/B tests

Design freedom. A/B tests are often used to experiment page design options that vary dramatically, including position of text and pictures, background colors, number of pictures on the page, use of icons and navigation structure. Implementing such tests using the multivariate technique is possible, but it is technically challenging (but if you really want to do it, and you are technically savvy, see this post on the Google Website Optimizer Tricks blog.

Less JavaScript coding. as described above, the codes necessary to implement an A/B test are very simple and can be added to the website in a matter of minutes.

Faster results. A/B tests usually involve fewer combinations with more extreme changes; multivariate tests involve many more combinations and variations. In addition, since A/Bs show significantly different designs, the expected improvement of the page is usually higher, diminishing the time the test will run.

Multivariate test

Rather than testing different versions of web pages, as we do with A/B tests, Multivariate tests experiment with elements inside one specific page (for purists, we are referring to full factorial experiments, which is the method used by most testing tools). Basically, we define elements inside a page (e.g. a picture, a text or a button) and provide different alternatives of each element. The testing tool will show each element combined with all other elements to visitors. The resulting combinations are derived from the number of elements multiplied by the number of element variations. Just as with A/B testing, however, each visitor sees only one particular combination of elements regardless of how many times they view a page. Below is a representation of how this technique works.

Image created by Yam Designs. For a high res version of the image go to Multivariate test scheme.

In terms of coding, the programming a multivariate test is slightly more complex than a simpler A/B test. A few pieces of JavaScript code need to be implemented: one opening the test, one for each tested element and one closing the test. In addition, a JavaScript will be added to the conversion page to measure combination success.

Advantages of multivariate tests

Granularity of results. Since it is a full factorial experiment, multivariate tests show which elements are the best performing separately, as well as the correlation between the elements. This can be very useful when projecting the results to other parts of the website.

No redirects required. Since all elements tested are inside the page, there is no need to redirect from the original page to the tested pages. Although redirects can be performed smoothly, I believe it is better not to use them whenever possible, as they can slow the flow and affect user experience.

Fewer design resources required. Since we will be testing different designs with existing elements on a page, this will not require too much design effort.

Concluding, both types of testing have their own advantages and disadvantages. Each can be a perfect technique, depending on the needs of the website. They should always go hand-in-hand, using one to test completely different designs and the other to optimize the current design. The important thing is to understand that testing is not a one-time effort It is an ongoing exercise that should be part of the mindset of an organization. As Avinash Kaushik once wrote in his blog, Experiment or go home!

Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) technology allows advertisers to track the specific search engine, web page or keyword that generated an inbound phone call using tracking numbers. Advertisers are using DNI to measure the performance of their online advertising campaigns and the impact on call volume. At the most basic level, DNI seamlessly replaces select contact phone numbers on a web page with call tracking numbers, which allows advertisers to measure volume. Combined with pay per click programs, DNI can help complete the online advertising performance picture by clearly outlining the results of advertising campaigns both online and by phone. Advertisers using DNI to measure and report phone calls driven by web activity use two different methods: a server-side method called reverse proxy, and a client-side method that uses Javascript tracking codes. While each approach is different, both offer advertisers unique benefits and value.

Reverse proxy method: Best suited for local advertisers

With the reverse proxy method, instead of web requests going directly to an advertiser’s website, the user request is routed to an intermediary server which determines what content should be displayed. This proxy retrieves the content from the advertiser’s website and transforms the output by inserting and/or replacing specific phone numbers on the page with call tracking numbers based on keyword or search engine triggers. This is done via cached copies of an advertiser’s website or in some cases, in real-time, for every request through the proxy so that any dynamic content included on the advertiser’s page is reflected ensuring that data is always current and up-to-date.

As reverse proxy capability is more readily available from SEM or other third party resellers, this approach is very effective for local advertisers or SMBs that do not have sophisticated internal technology resources easily available to make modifications to their existing websites. However, because a service provider is involved, it is typically more expensive. Also, reverse proxy is a better option for advertisers that use third party website functionality for shopping carts or email forms.

A disadvantage of the reverse proxy method is that it is not well suited for tracking organic search activity. Reverse proxy sites are invisible to search engine spiders, so organic searchers would never reach a reverse proxy site and online organic search activity is not captured. Also, larger advertisers with complex websites that are considering this approach should ask the reseller about their reverse proxy method as some require the advertiser to share control of the websites as they continuously make duplicate or updated copies of the page. This “carbon copy” approach would be a complication for advertiser sites that include real-time data such as news feeds, RSS or stock quotes, as it risks serving static or old data.

Javascript tracking codes: Best suited for national advertisers

In the Javascript tracking code method, user requests are routed to the advertiser’s actual website rather than through a third party intermediary. Similar to Google Analytics, a piece of Javascript code containing a unique identifier is inserted into an advertiser’s webpage which links to the SEM provider’s servers via a web service. When an ad click or organic search result routes a user to the advertiser’s website, the Javascript takes the parameters used to perform the search along with the advertiser’s unique identifier and passes them to the SEM provider to be processed against predefined keyword, ad group and browser triggers. The result is a series of phone number substitutions returned to the advertiser’s page where it is used to dynamically update the content with the designated call tracking numbers.

Since the coding is performed client-side, this method requires HTML design and maintenance expertise—something typical SMBs lack. It is best suited for larger, national advertisers with committed monetary and technology resources or which have access to specialized agency resources that can perform such maintenance.

A benefit of the Javascript tracking code method is that advertisers can use it to track organic search activity. This method uses an advertisers’ primary website and domain names, which are easily visible to search engine spiders and enable advertisers to compare the organic traffic from a keyword or ad campaign on Google versus Bing. As such, Javascript tracking code is the best method for tracking full search engine optimization and marketing results. Also, because this method uses traditional or primary domain names, such as macys.com, rather than a third-party provider URL like provider.macys.com, national advertisers have more control over their branding standards.

One minor pitfall of this method is that some browsers disable Javascript tracking code. It is a small percentage but does represent a data loss.

The overall benefits of DNI—through either method—are simple: DNI provides advertisers greater visibility to the source of inbound calls and allows advertisers to track the performance of specific ads and/or keywords. With the ability to capture the full value of online advertising initiatives adding call counts to the traditional click count approach to online campaign performance, advertisers can optimize their spend and move underperforming keyword-search engine ad buys to more successful combinations.

All landing page tests are not created equal. What you test on your pages—and what you learn from those tests—can better inform tactics and strategies throughout your entire marketing program. Here are four kinds of landing page tests that can help you learn about your market.

Beware butterflies and magic bullets

How much can you learn from landing pages?

Some landing page optimization experts will warn you about reading too much into the results of a particular landing page test. There are often multiple factors at play in a given experiment, and it can be difficult to precisely separate the different effects.

It’s a valid point, but taken to an extreme it becomes an argument for the “butterfly effect”—that a butterfly flapping its wings in Thailand might trigger an elaborate chain of events that dramatically alters the outcome of your experiments.

While that’s a fun philosophical debate, it’s not a practical position. As marketers exploring new ideas, we always have to deal with uncertainty—the secret of success is making educated guesses based on empirical—albeit imperfect—information.

On the opposite extreme, other folks claim that there are universal recipes that improve conversion rates in all situations—so-called “magic bullets.” These aren’t general best practices, such as “employ good visual design,” but rather specific formulas such as “use a green background,” “have an image of a smiling person”, and “include three one-line bullets.”

Warning bells should go off in any marketer’s head when they hear such one-size-fits-all recommendations without regard for the particulars of audience, market, or brand.

Rational landing page optimization

The middle ground between those extremes is what I dub the “rational” school of landing page optimization. There are three premises behind this approach:

• Different audiences, markets, brands, and campaigns have different characteristics
• All tests are not equal: different kinds of tests reveal different kinds of insights
• All confounding variables are not equal: some are more controllable, some have more influence.

The first premise dismisses the magic bullet approach. Selling a subscription to a pop music service is different than generating leads for a network storage solution. Even the network storage solution is—or should be—marketed differently to small-medium businesses (SMB) versus large enterprises. They have different desires, pain points, demographics/firmographics, etc.

As you dig deeper, you identify more and more segments in your market that respond to different marketing messages and presentations.

In rational landing page optimization, you embrace such segmentation in your marketing programs. After all, the big advantage of targeted search marketing with matched landing pages is that you can authentically engage different audience segments at the very top of your sales funnel.

This leads to three rules of thumb:

• Treat each segment as its own experimental space—look for learning within a segment.
• Don’t try to create “one page to rule them all”—pages are cheap; customers are valuable.
• Iteratively narrow your segments as long as doing so produces ROI—the digital world often rewards deep segmentation.

With such segmentation in mind, you can then consider four different kinds of tests—trivial, contextual, tactical and strategic—categorized by how much reusable learning they can provide:

Trivial tests. In this model, tests of different headlines or page colors are mostly trivial as far as reusable learning is concerned. That’s not to say that such elements might not have significant impact on a specific test—I’ve seen headline changes generate 50% lift—but rather that such factors are hard to reliably adapt from one set of circumstances to another.

Contextual tests. It’s at the next level up—with contextual elements—that you can start to form meaningful hypotheses. How much impact do seasonal themes have on your conversion rate? How much does the degree of specificity between the ad and the landing page impact the outcome?

To a certain extent, contextual tests are about discovering what would otherwise be confounding variables and systematically testing them. There’s still circumstantial sensitivity here, but useful and reusable patterns can emerge. For instance, is it worth tailoring your landing pages for seasonal factors?

Tactical tests. Higher yet are experiments to identify winning tactics within a segment. Tactical tests include things such as different offers, different levels of “depth” in the format of the landing experience (one page? a multi-step path? a microsite?), different data collection requirements in forms, etc.

These differences often have economic implications for both the respondent and the marketer—such as trading off the value of collecting additional information with the friction that a longer form imposes on the conversion process. In my experience, these type of tactics—when winning ones have been discovered—have a relatively high degree of portability from one landing page to another, at least within a segment for a particular company. You can learn what works here.

Strategic tests. At the highest level are strategic tests to identify new audience segments, the overarching value proposition for each segment, and the granularity of sub-segments within them. In multi-step landing pages, these tests may be conducted with different segmentation choices.

Often, however, strategic testing is about determining how many completely separate pages are optimal within a marketing program, each matched to a different slice of the audience. Honing in on new segments is possibly the greatest payoff from structured landing page testing, as those insights are useful not just in future landing pages but in other marketing vehicles as well.

If you disagree with what I’ve put in each category, feel free to adjust them to your own hypotheses—perhaps in your case color is a tactical choice? My overarching point is to construct tests with these different learning objectives in mind.

Measuring success

With a nod to the butterfly effect folks, it’s true that the reusable learning from these tests is hard to quantify precisely. However, rigorous dissection is not really your goal.

In rational landing page optimization, I would assert the following:

• Most tests are hypothesis-driven—you’re testing an idea from the start, not trying to fit explanations to the data after the fact. This is an important distinction.
• Especially with tactical and strategic tests, the number of simultaneous elements varied in any one test should be minimized, reducing interaction effects.
• Ideas that are believed to be applicable from one landing page to another will, by that belief, be tested repeatedly in a variety of circumstances; if they continue to correlate with high conversion rates over time, that belief is rationally reinforced.
• Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding—with rational landing page optimization, you expect to sustain improved conversion rates across many pages in many programs over time. If you’re successful by that metric, does it matter if the weights of contributing factors are somewhat fuzzy?

People in general, and marketers in particular, are very good at intuitive pattern recognition—in ways that are, frankly, hard to capture in oversimplified mathematical models. To be sure, this sometimes leads us astray, but more often than not it gives us a competitive edge.

Rational landing page optimization helps develop that intuition within relevant contexts and segments. What you learn won’t always be perfect, but it will give you momentum that can be measured in the net results.

The rise of the web has revolutionized the simple press release, which has gone from being copy you post to journalists to being yet another form of online information, accessible by both the media and the public.

However, while this means press releases can be extraordinarily useful, it also means the world is utterly swamped with them and it can be hard for them to rise above the general clamor. That’s true despite the huge number of sector-specific online magazines and news sources that include press releases in their offerings.

If a company succeeds with a sound online press release strategy, though, it can enjoy free publicity, a reputation as an authority within its industry and potentially a wealth of inbound links to its website.

So, how can businesses ensure their press releases have the best chance of being seen? Here are a few hints and tips. Many of these are also relevant to corporate blogs, so keep an eye out for tactics you can use for social media campaigns.

Pick a point

Make sure your press releases have a story, a point and—ideally—an obvious news angle.

Try to make your news as relevant as possible to the general public as well, as this increases the chance it will be picked up by multiple journalists or news sources. For example, if you want to report that your business’ turnover has increased by X amount then try to fit this in with information about the current economic climate.

For example, writing that “online sock selling defies recession” is more compelling and potentially newsworthy than “LetsTalkAboutSocksBaby.com sells 70 pairs in a day.”

Look for the news point that would interest you if the press release was not about your own company and you stand a much greater chance of success.

Release responses

An increasing number of firms are sending out general opinion pieces as press releases, but I do not think this is useful—after all, that is what your blog is for. That does not mean your company cannot publish press release reactions to wider industry news, for example: “Our company commends Google’s decision to…”

Releasing responses like this works really well for the personal finance sector and yet does not seem to have spread elsewhere.

If a busy journalist is writing about the news and needs a quote from an industry insider, if yours is already in their inbox, using it will be easier than phoning around trying to find someone else’s.

Target your distribution

There are tons of press release distribution sites and they can be good places to simply get your content out there.

However, getting a journalist to take interest in the story and write about it is far more useful and will add considerable credibility to your efforts. With all the industry-specific websites out there—everything from Building.co.uk to sites like NetMoms&Mdash;there is likely to be a niche or topic-specific site which is an ideal fit for targeting your release. So make sure you use the online PR distribution industry specific categories and location options to help ensure your press releases reaches a relevant, targeted audience.

The effort put into finding a newsworthy angle and fully preparing a press release to create something worth discussing is vital for a truly successful promotion. With a few minutes research and a couple of friendly emails you have a much greater chance of seeing your story do well.

Don’t forget bloggers—targeting a few key figures could be a useful way of spreading the reach of your release. Also, links from really niche websites and blogs will strengthen your site’s industry relevance and drive up your rankings.

Follow up

It is a tough time for journalists, and the majority are working to incredible deadlines and managing enormous work loads. They are busy, so realize your release may not have even been read once it landed in journalists’ inboxes.

After sending a press release, wait a few hours and then follow it up with a friendly phone call. Did they receive it? Do they anticipate writing about it? Can you help them with anything?

Ideally, you want to make writers think they are being offered something that no one else is. A great hook is to offer them the chance of some unique quotes from the CEO or a few minutes chatting to the client you’ve highlighted in your release.

Don’t risk your credibility

Since the web became awash with press releases, quality standards have taken a hit. It’s crucial to impress the reader and protect your firm’s reputation by ensuring the quality of the release is high. This will make it seem more credible and make it more likely to be published.

Make sure your spelling and grammar are flawless. Where a typo in a blog post is regrettable but understandable, an error in a release is horrible.

Ensure your quotations are succinct, punchy and intelligent—these are often the only bits that will make it into a news story.

Devote some time to detail

All releases need certain key points of information, regardless of the subject of the release. These key points include a name and number to call for more details, the address of the company, a brief description of the firm (and of the client if your release is about another organization too).

The more information you hand a journalist on a plate, the more likely the poor, overworked hack is to use your release. If they have to look around the web to find a description of your company, they may choose not to bother.

Optimize your links

Undoubtedly one of the main reasons firms distribute press releases is to build up inbound links to their webpages. Many sites will just republish the release on their pages.

So, if you link to your pages in the release, you’ll increase the number of links to your site, which is good for SEO. What is great for SEO is relevant wording, so use your chosen keywords as the hyperlinked anchor text where possible. That reiterates to the search engines that your pages are relevant and authoritative sources for information on those keywords.

Are your landing pages feeling tired? Is your conversion rate stagnant? Not quite sure what to try next? To re-energize your post-click marketing, it can help to step back and evaluate your approach from several different perspectives.

Here’s a quick exercise, the Landing Page Wonder Wheel—as in, “I wonder how to improve my landing pages?”—that can give you fresh inspiration.

The Landing Page Wonder Wheel consists of eight dimensions on which you rate your current landing page creative and management capabilities, on a scale of 1 to 10. A 1 means you’re not doing very well there, while a 10 means you may be the best in the world at it.

1. Message match. How tight is the continuity between your adverting and your landing pages? If you run lots of ads across different keywords, but you’re driving everyone to the same few landing pages, then your message match probably isn’t very good. For example, if someone clicks on an ad for home refinancing, but they’re sent to a page that generically talks about mortgages, that’s not as tight as a page exclusively on refinancing.

Message match explicitly connects the dots for your respondents, instead of counting on them to hunt for and infer your relevance to their goal. Achieving good message match usually requires more specific landing pages and a process to keep them in sync as your advertising changes.

2. Visual design. How good do your landing pages look? From the high-level concept and layout, down to the details of execution such as fonts and image cropping, are your pages attractive? For most people who click on your plain text search ads, the landing page is where you will make your real first impression. Just as you probably shouldn’t show up to a job interview looking as if you rolled out of bed five minutes ago, tossed something on, and stumbled out into the world, you don’t want your landing pages to looks disheveled or uninspired either. This is a quintessential branding moment.

You may not be a graphic designer yourself—and if you aren’t, I wouldn’t recommend buying Photoshop and trying to fake it. Instead, find a great graphic designer who can make your pages beautiful. It doesn’t have to be a full-time position: a little quality design effort can go a long way, with page templates and a library of reusable image assets. Don’t downplay this though: in a competitive landscape, landing pages are in a beauty contest.

3. Depth. How much substance do your landing pages have? Depth is about delivering meaningful content rather than fluffy marketing-speak. Landing pages shouldn’t be superficial—otherwise they’re a waste of time. You want to share real information, tailored to the search that respondent was pursuing. Just pasting a dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) into your headline isn’t sufficient.

Depth doesn’t mean you should shovel a ton of content on to a single page though. Multi-step landing pages, where respondents drill down to the content and offers that are best aligned with their interests, can be highly effective. The key is to make sure that with each extra click, you live up to expectations, providing a deeper and more relevant experience. Microsites focused on a particular topic or idea can work well too. But ultimately depth is more about quality than quantity.

4. Freshness. How frequently do you revisit your existing landing pages to update them and inject new life? If you have stale pages out there from a year or more ago, then your freshness score is low. If, on the other hand, you systematically check your pages each month, your score should be climbing. This is more about landing page management than landing page design.

The basics of freshness are making sure that content and offers are current. There’s no surer way to damage your brand than to proudly present someone with an expired offer or a stale fulfillment piece (e.g., “fill out this form to receive our hot-off-the-presses 2006 research on the state of social media”). But freshness is also keeping your messaging up to date, recognizing that as your market evolves, your customers acquire new baseline knowledge, nomenclature, and shared cultural references. Even the look-and-feel of your pages can signal how on top of things you are, as the “fashion” of leading websites progresses from year-to-year. Bottom line: to keep respondents engaged with your landing pages, you need to stay engaged with them too.

5. Interactivity. Are your pages flat text and images, or do you provide interactive ways to capture a respondent’s attention? In the age of YouTube, a video can be a compelling way to build rapport. A Flash or AJAX widget that lets respondents click on tabs or thumbnails—or perhaps play with an animated diagram of your key benefits—can get them involved with a low hurdle. The secret is to incorporate these features as part of your design and messaging, not something garish or slapped on as an afterthought.

Social media is another way—albeit more experimental in this context—to add interactivity to your pages, such as bringing in Twitter feeds or Facebook Connect applications. You have to be careful about reinforcing your message and not distracting from it. But if you can use social devices to humanize yourself early with a new prospect, and coax them into a conversation, then you’re ahead of the curve.

6. Launch speed. How long does it take you, concept-to-completion, to launch a brand new landing page? Maybe there are technical or administrative hoops you have to jump through. Maybe you get held up waiting for someone to take the URL live, or add a tracking code to your checkout page. Maybe you just don’t have the time or resources. But whatever the reason, if you can’t deploy a new landing page as quickly as you can publish a new AdWords ad, then there’s room for improvement.

Landing pages should have the advantage of being quick, nimble, and inexpensive—a lightweight way to address niches across your market. As you build long tail (or even mid-tail) search campaigns, you want to follow through with message matched post-click marketing. But to achieve this, your per-page overhead needs to be low. If it’s not, track the time at each step along the lifecycle of your next landing page and start brainstorming: how could we speed this up?

7. Non-conversion value. How well do you do with the respondents who don’t convert on your landing pages? This may seem counterintuitive at first, but if your conversion rate is 20%—which would generally be quite good!—then what are you doing with the other 80%? After all, if they clicked on your ad, they demonstrated non-trivial intent. Just because they weren’t ready to convert on that specific offer at that exact moment, doesn’t make it a throwaway experience.

There are several ways to increase your value to non-converters. Maintain good brand standards—this is your chance to start building up neural pathways. Deliver useful content before the conversion point, telling people something meaningful that is relevant to their search. Always provide an “escape hatch”, even if it’s a subtle link at the top or bottom of the page, to let people jump to your primary web site. (These are good principles for conversions too.) Have them leave remembering you in a good way.

You can also derive value from non-converters by analyzing what they do. For instance, in the context of multi-step landing pages, you can track which choices people click on as a simple type of behavioral segmentation. Learning which segments aren’t converting gives you the insight to make targeted improvements.

8. Boldness. Do your landing pages charge forward with bold, new ideas—or are they tepid and formulaic? Landing pages can be a fantastic sandbox in which to experiment with gutsy offers, spirited language, and vivid presentations. Since any given landing page handles only a sliver of your traffic—and because it’s usually easy to do A/B testing in this context—you can push the envelope without taking big risks. If a daring idea doesn’t pan out, you can quickly pull it down. If it catches fire (in a good way!), then you can expand its reach.

The case for boldness—aside from the timeless proverb that fortune favors the bold—is two-fold. First, in a competitive situation, where respondents are also clicking on rival ads, you want to stand out from the crowd. Not in a freakish way, mind you, but in a confident and creative way. Second, as you move further down the long tail, you end up outside your company’s well-worn messaging. The only way to discover what resonates with new market segments is to try some new ideas. Don’t be afraid to be creative—be more afraid of being dull.

How good is your wheel?

Now that you have your self-assessment scores, mark them on the wheel on each corresponding spoke, moving outwards for higher scores. So a 1 would be placed near the center of the wheel, while a 10 would be placed on the outer rim.

Next, connect the dots. What does it look like?

If your connected wheel doesn’t look very round, or if it’s rather small, then you should at least have a clear idea of what you can do to improve your landing pages. If you’re committed to tackling those challenges, then you can redo the wheel in 30, 60, or 90 days to see your progress—and correlate it with your conversion rates.

Might not hurt to do this exercise on some of your competitors either.

I hope this helps you launch some wonderful post-click marketing.

It is not uncommon for businesses to find that the relationship they have with their affiliates is one of the most difficult to handle. On the one hand, affiliates can be valuable partners that provide leads and sales for your company. But on the other hand, they are independent entities which require compensation for their services and have their hearts equally divided between your best interest and their own. But if you stop and think about it, this is not an unusual situation: your business probably relies on a number of providers and suppliers with whom it has built a relationship of trust based on mutual dependence.

One of the most common points of conflict is perceived to be the moment when a business is asked to decide whether affiliates—for example, providers of voucher and coupon services or cash back sites—should be allowed to bid on trademark brand words. If they are allowed to do so, consumers entering “M&S” in the search engine, for example, will not only find the link to www.marksandspencer.com displayed on the search page, but also links to a number of websites offering discounts and vouchers for the purchase of Marks and Spencer’s products. If you use affiliates, it is up to you to ensure that your site comes out on top in search rankings, and affiliates are unlikely to bid on your brand so intensely that they knock you out of the top ratings.

If affiliates really are more popular than your company’s own ecommerce site—and they feature higher in the page rankings than the company’s own website—customers searching specifically for your brand are very likely to end up purchasing the product via a website other than your own. The lead gained will then have to be paid for by your company, somewhat reducing its value, even though the consumer would have clicked on your site and not the affiliate’s had the rankings been more favourable.

A burning issue for businesses that have experienced this shift in attribution of sales leads: are the high-ranking affiliates cannibalising sales or is it simply a case of improving the traffic to the brand’s own ecommerce site? Improving your paid-for search results as well as your natural results should be the pressing issue for a business whose affiliates are attracting more traffic than the main site. If the consumer typed in a specific brand term, they almost certainly have been influenced to some extent by the brand’s own marketing and advertising; failing to optimize search lets these efforts down in the last lap. Understandably, however, businesses feel that affiliates should not charge for leads generated on the back of promotional activity that is not their own.

Because the acquisitions made through affiliates carry an associated cost, marketers tend to devalue them. First, they deduct the cost per acquisition (CPA) charge for affiliates, then the cost for the brand’s own marketing effort—which often drives the consumer on to the search engine—and finally the extra bidding cost of trying to keep the brand at the top of the search results page. Most of the leads, however, are entirely new, so they do represent added value in spite of the cost.

There is, however, another important aspect to consider before letting fears of cannibalisation and plummeting return on investment (ROI) damage the relationship with affiliates. Google has recently relaxed its regulations against bidding on competitor trademark names in most countries. For example, when M&S bid on the term Interflora, M&S appeared on the same search page as the brand. Since Google currently has no regulations against competitor trademark term bidding, affiliates can bid on key brand terms in to keep competitors out of that all-important first search page. While affiliate bidding may add a fractional cost to the process of customer acquisition, competitors really are driving business away with their aggressive bidding.

If relationships with affiliates are managed more openly, concerns over the cannibalisation of traffic can be quelled. Last-minute solutions such as lowering commission budgets and suspending programmes are simply unacceptable and feed into the climate of “every man for himself” on which mistrust is based. Some businesses have even gone as far as making up excuses to legitimise suspension of affiliate programmes over Christmas, a time of the year that affiliates have been gearing up to as much as your own business.

A practical solution that prevents the unease sometimes associated with affiliate relationships is to suggest different rates of commission depending on the different type of lead or customer acquired. This way, for example, if the consumer provided by the affiliate turns out to be a returning customer who has previously bought through the ecommerce site, the payment can be set at a lower rate than if the consumer is an entirely new lead or a person whose custom is only available to the business through the intermediation of affiliates.