1. Please The Feed

Your Google Shopping product data feed is the most important element of a healthy PLA campaign. It tells Google what information to use for your product ads and helps Google determine where your ads should appear in search results.

It’s better to err on the side of providing too much relevant information than not providing enough. Give Google as many clues as possible to make a relevant ad impression on your target consumer.

Improve your feed in three steps:

• Follow Google’s feed specifications. If you are not proficient with updating and increasing the quality of your data feed to follow Google’s rules, you’ll have trouble competing on Google Shopping, and you’re definitely going to have trouble validating your ad groups. Make sure you understand the technical ability required to get the most out of this channel.
• Send your feed to Google daily. Google favors merchants who send reliable, consistent data signals. If you aren’t sending your feed regularly, there’s a definite chance your information is dated or incorrect.
• Regularly check your Google Merchant Center to make sure your data feed is processing and error free. You can view your searchable products through the Google Merchant Center Dashboard:

You can find out all sorts of information on your Data Feed in the Google Merchant Center dash board, and the Data Quality tab on the left can tell you how healthy your product information is in Google’s eyes.

Additionally, be sure none of your products are restricted for Google Shopping or have product information which Google might flag as restricted. (You can view Google Shopping’s restricted products here.)

2. Suppress Poor Performing Products

You can use negative keywords to limit what terms your products show up for in search, but it’s also important to have an ad group in your product listing ads campaign which is designed to limit exposure to products which convert poorly or have a very high cost of sale (COS).

You can use your All Products ad groups for product suppressions, or you can create a new ad group for products you want to down bid.

The ad group for products you want to suppress should be bid lower than your other ad groups so you aren’t wasting ad spend on products which aren’t selling.

Since PLAs work on a bidding hierarchy, all you need to do to suppress a product is remove it from its current category (e.g., product, brand, etc.) and put it in the new ad group with the lower bid.

Products which aren’t converting are eating into your daily budget — funds which you could be using to promote products that do sell well.

3. Increase Bids On Best Sellers

If you have products that sell well on your site or specifically convert well on Google Shopping, you should increase your bids on them.

Identify which products convert well in Analytics, then create an ad group specific to those top performers. You can use your AdWords label column to identify these products and create an ad group with that same label (e.g. “best”).

Using a best seller ad group with higher bids will increase exposure to products which already sell. More eyeballs on products which sell well means more sales for you.

If you want to take your ad groups to the next level, you can change ad display frequency and bidding amounts for different times and days of the week.

We just released a guide on Product Listing Ads which outlines how to change ads based on day of the week metrics. It also covers 35 other PLA topics & strategies, if you want to continue learning after reading this article.

4. Accelerate

Google actually has an “Accelerated” Delivery Method in the Settings section. This is at the bottom of the settings page, under the “Bidding and budget” tab:

According to Google, the Standard setting will “show ads evenly over time,” while the Accelerated setting will “show ads more quickly until budget is reached.”

In the first option, Google will show your ads throughout the day periodically. If you choose Accelerated, Google will show as many of your ads as possible until you hit your daily budget, so make sure you watch your campaigns carefully after making the switch and adjust your budget accordingly.

We recommend only experimenting with this option if you have a good amount of recent positive campaign data already.

5. Avoid Bidding By Margin

Grouping products by how much you make per sale sounds like a good idea because you can bid up on your high-margin products. But if that product doesn’t sell on Google Shopping, who cares what the margin is?

Your ad groups should be set up so that similar products are grouped together. This will allow you to identify which product groups are performing well (or not), and change bids there.

If your Google Shopping campaign is new, a good place to start is by creating ad groups based on brand or category. Once the ads have been running long enough to gather some good data, you’ll have an idea of how different products convert on Google and adjust bids for that group accordingly. The idea is to collect data on what types of products do well for you on Google Shopping, then increase bids on those over time.

Bidding by margin hurts conversions because you are making an inaccurate assumption about product performance. Let the data speak for itself and optimize conversions from there for the biggest incremental increase to conversions and profit.

If you’re interested in more PLA tips make sure you check out our definitive guide on how to manage Product Listing Ads.

We have all experienced this same truth at the websites we visit. We inherently equate a great design with an upstanding company and a bad design with a company not quite as reputable or as good.

Image via Shutterstock

Because of this reality, building a great user experience across every platform is extremely important for generating leads and conversions. Conversion optimization isn’t just about tweaking campaign landing page design, ad copy and form layout. In order to motivate a visitor to fill out a form or buy something, trust must be established.

The way an entire website looks and how it communicates its message can have a big impact on visitor trust and your conversion volume.

The problem is that most companies rarely have the big budgets or large teams of people to create truly engaging websites that drive lots of customers. Resources are often thin in both IT and Marketing at SMBs; so, let’s look at some things that can be done, without a large team or budget, to easily improve visitor engagement.

Tools For Measuring Visitor Engagement

As in all good testing, you have to measure the impact of changes to be sure you are adapting your website to visitor needs and not simply creating new roadblocks to conversions. The following metrics are commonly used to determine the impact of changes on visitor engagement.

• Page Bounce Rate. Your bounce rate is usually a simple measurement of how many people land on a specific page and don’t visit any more pages during that visit. You typically look for as low a bounce rate as possible. This tells you that people found your content interesting enough to read more pages on your website. If your site is just a blog, though, changing the bounce rate is extremely difficult to do since visitors are usually there just for the one article.
• Site Bounce Rate. This is the average bounce rate for all webpages combined that people visit. Like the page bounce rate, you want this number to be as low as possible.
• Pages Per Visit. Obviously, this reflects how many pages per visit that people read when they come to your site. The goal is to drive this number higher. One word of caution: if you don’t update your site much, returning visitors metrics will drop because there isn’t anything new to read. So, as you change and test, be sure to regularly add new content to keep people coming back for more.
• Exit Rate. This measures the percentage of visitors on any given page that didn’t view more pages. The rate per page is dependent on your goal for that page; but generally, this should be a low number, especially for your popular pages. A high exit rate will show you where people lost interest or failed to find what they expected.
• Average Time On Page. The average time spent on a page is tricky. You would think you want people to spend more time on a page, but if they are given a good experience, they may spend less time on one page and more on multiple pages. For instance, a page that is hard to read but interesting may cause people to slow down and spend more time reading because it is simply harder to read.
• Goal Completions. If you have set up Goals (in Google Analytics, at least), then every page has the ability to participate in affecting goal completions. GA will show you how often a page impacts goal conversions. If it does, your objective is to positively impact that number.

Increase Engagement With 4 Easy Tests

There are a lot of great things you can do to improve visitor engagement. Most SMB companies don’t have the resources to do a lot of the big UX projects that the Fortune 500s can do; but, there are some simple things any company can do that can impact Web conversions really quickly. These tactics will not suddenly skyrocket your lead generation efforts; but, if you haven’t started any effort to improve visitor engagement, this is a good place to begin.

1. Playing With Your Fonts

One of the very first things I look at with new customers that want to increase conversion volume is the readability of their page body copy. If body copy is small or doesn’t have good contrast with the background, it is hard for people to read. I personally find smaller body copy looks better, but that is just my opinion — every time I have increased body font size to 13 or 14px, the bounce rate reduces (average 11%), people spend more time on the site (avg by 17%) and total conversions go up.

Other font changes to test would include the font type and color. A good rule of thumb is this: if you think your mom is going to have trouble reading it, try making a change and see how your visitors respond.

Below is the result of changing the font size from 10px to 13px for one of our customers. The conversion goal was simply the number of people that filled out a particular form on the website.  The Control was the original 10px font and the Variation was at 13px. Even though the overall conversion rate is only 2.22%, this was a big improvement for such a simple change.

2. Increasing Internal Links

Now, don’t go overboard with this; but, creating links between relevant webpages help to keep people on the site longer. The longer you can keep their attention, the more they are typically drawn into your story. It also helps interested readers find valuable content more easily, without having to search your website.

3. Creating Better Page Headlines

A good page headline helps people decide whether to read further or not. Use your Web analytics to determine what your top entrance pages are, not counting your campaign landing pages. Now, look at the headlines for those pages.  Do the headlines match up with the page content?  Do they grab your attention?

Hopefully, your page title is more than simply “About Us” or “Services.” Get creative with your page headlines so they stand out and instill your brand in the mind of your visitor. You may only have a few seconds to capture a visitor’s attention, and your page headline is the first thing they will read.

4. Changing Page Content Structure

Too often, I see pages with nothing but one headline and a bunch of paragraphs. This type of page is difficult to scan for most readers. Break up the content with multiple subheadings that describe the upcoming paragraph, or use bullet lists and graphics to make it visually more interesting. This can make your content easier to read and scan. The headlines define what the section is about as well as capture the visual attention of your reader.

Just The Beginning Of Engagement Testing

These are just a few ways that you can improve conversion and engagement on your website. They are things that even resource-challenged marketing teams can easily implement and have a quick impact on your business.  But don’t just take my word for it.  A winning website must be able to continually adapt to changing customer needs, technology and design trends. Always test and measure changes on your audience to create an adaptable and constantly improving website.

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

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

Blending Content Types Doesn’t Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Writing For People That Already Know You, Be Direct

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating Copy For Different Stages Of Consumer Awareness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image via Shutterstock

Almost three years ago, Google announced that it had begun factoring site speed into their ranking algorithm. Since then, SEOs have debated how significant an effect page speed has on actual search engine rankings. While Google may be using it as a signal, it’s clearly not an overwhelming signal.

Still, regardless of the algorithmic weight page speed has on rankings, we do know that it has a significant impact on site conversions. Every second visitors have to wait for a page to load is a proven loss in sales!

In a recent post titled, Why You Won’t Crush It This Year, Bryan Eisenberg wrote: ”It seems clear that trying to increase sales by driving more traffic to a site with a terrible customer conversion rate is like trying to keep a leaky bucket (your sales funnel) full by adding more water instead of plugging the holes.” It’s a good point, and one that I’ve made more than once before.

Bottom line: optimizing your website for rankings is great, optimizing your website for conversions is better, and optimizing for rankings, traffic and conversions is best! I wish all our clients realized this.

Let’s get back to the topic at hand — losing wait. Below, I’ve outlined a few tips and strategies you can use to increase your page load speeds and decrease the wait your visitors have when navigating from page to page on your site. I’m just a SEO – not a programmer, developer or designer – so forgive my lack of technical expertise in this post.  However, I hope to provide some good (if incomplete) tips on what you can do to make your site run faster.

Get Yourself A Fast Web Server

It all starts here. If your web server is slow, your site will be slow. It doesn’t matter how much you try to speed things up — you’re being blocked by the powers above.

The more traffic your site receives, the greater the need for increased server bandwidth to your site. This is especially true if you have peak seasons or sales where a sudden rush of traffic might end up taking you offline. When you don’t have enough bandwidth for your rush loads, your visitors experience slowdowns, hangups or even an inability to access your site at all. Be sure your allowable bandwidth increases with your traffic rates, allowing enough room for any sudden spikes that may occur.

Talk to your Web host about moving to a faster server or even getting a dedicated server. If you have to, find a new Web hosting company that can meet your requirements. A faster server will definitely cost you more, but then again, being on a slow server is already costing you a great deal.

Streamline Your Code

Most developers will tell you, should you ask, that there are many ways to code Web elements to get the same result. Websites can use “good” or “bad” code and still look the same to the average visitor. However, the performance differences between efficient vs. inefficient coding can be incredible.

Ensuring your website uses clean, minimalist code is a great way to reduce page file size and, therefore, load speed for each page. Many content management systems use bloated code that makes managing a site easy, but doesn’t do you any favors when it comes to code streamlining. And, the more added features or tools you add to your site, the more potential you have at bloating your own code.

Keeping your site code clean and tidy can go a long way toward improving your site’s speed and performance. I offer some specific tasks below that you can do along these lines.

Optimize Your Images

Code is relatively quick to download, provided it’s not overly bloated. Images, on the other hand, are much larger and take more time to load in the browser. Image-heavy sites are some of the slowest loading sites there are, so it’s a good idea to use images only as needed or appropriate.

When using images, be sure to use the correct format for the image type. Different image file types (.gif, .jpg, .png) have different purposes depending on if you are displaying a photo, a graphic, an image with few colors, or an image consisting of many colors. Using the right file type for the right kind of image allows the image to be created in the most optimized format possible, using the lowest amount of megabytes.

You also don’t want to scale images using HTML. If your image displays at 325×550 pixels, then create an image that is exactly 325×550 — no bigger and no smaller. Don’t use a 650×1000 pixel image and display it at 325×500. That forces the full, large image to be downloaded before it can be displayed when a smaller image would load much faster and achieve the same effect.

Move CSS & JavaScript Off The Page To External Files

Using CSS (cascading style sheets) is much more common today than even just a few years ago. Initially, your styling elements were written in HTML and had to be coded in for every styled element on a page. CSS allows you to code all similar elements with a single batch of code, streamlining your HTML significantly.

However, CSS (along with all JavaScript code) should be moved out of the HTML and placed in one or more separate documents. This allows all CSS and JavaScript code to be downloaded a single time and applied to every page of the site, rather than having to duplicate that same code on each and every page.

While there are reasons to keep some CSS and JavaScript on the page, moving it off the page whenever possible makes the most sense when trying to streamline your code and reduce bloat across the board.

It’s also a good idea to place CSS at the top of your code and JavaScript at the bottom.

Image via Shutterstock

Use “Include” Files For Duplicate Sections Of Content

Both CSS and include files can significantly help reduce wait times. On top of that, they also speed up the amount of time invested in making site edits. The time spent developing a CSS-based website with include files alone is worth the time saved on the development end later on. Heck, losing wait isn’t just about your visitors, it’s about using your own time more productively!

Implement CSS Sprites

When you use multiple images together, you can use CSS sprites to combine them into a single image download. By reducing the number of downloads, you reduce the strain on the server and make the downloading process much quicker.

Use Page Speed Optimizer

Google offers a PageSpeed Insights tool that will give you suggestions on things you can do to increase your page speed. Many of the suggestions will cover things mentioned above, plus a whole lot more I haven’t touched on. It’s a good resource if you have a developer who can work on these issues for you.

I’ve offered only a few ways you can increase page speed, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. It should be enough to get you started, though. Depending on how slow your site currently runs, it’s entirely possible that you may see a rankings boosts once you begin curing the slow disease. But even if you don’t, losing wait means increasing conversions, which is always good for the bottom line.

Across our profession, more and more people are talking about marketing science, scientific marketing, marketing as a science (in contrast to an “art”), and so on. In our digitized and data-deluged world of modern marketing, these phrases resonate. “Yes, marketing is more of a science today.” That just feels like a true statement, doesn’t it?

But what do we really mean by it?

What makes an approach to marketing scientific? In what ways does it differ from marketing as an art? And how far should we take this? Is science driving out the art of marketing completely? Or are they complementary worldviews?

After reading many articles on this subject and talking with numerous marketing practitioners, I’ve come to believe that “marketing as a science” can be distilled into four principles — with caveats.

1. Data-Driven Decision Making

Data is at the core of the marketing-as-a-science movement.

Colloquially, the “art” of marketing management in the past can be characterized primarily as decisions that were made from the gut (intuition) based on experience.

In contrast, marketing as a science favors data-driven decision making. When facing a marketing choice – Should we buy top-of-the-funnel keywords? Should we offer a discount in our ads? When is retargeting effective and when is it annoying? — the more scientific approach is to seek data to help answer these questions.

Because the digital environment gives us access to a prodigious amount of data, and because there is a plethora of marketing technologies that can help us analyze and leverage such data, this approach is increasingly practical across a wide range of marketing decisions.

It’s a huge step forward in marketing management and culture.

However, we have to be careful not to overreach, reading more into the data than is actually there. A Harvard Business Review blog post on The Hidden Biases in Big Data cautions managers to resist “data fundamentalism,” the belief that data has all the answers and that techniques such as predictive analytics always reflect the objective truth.

What you’re doing with data is also important, whether it’s mining data for forward-looking exploration or reviewing data for confirmation of past performance:

The real essence of data-driven decision making isn’t merely using data, though; it’s striving to use data objectively. And, that’s harder than you might think, thanks to a psychological quirk known as confirmation bias.

Therefore, ironically, this is one of the places where “art” still remains in marketing management. Are we using the right data? What other factors should we consider that aren’t in the data? How much weight should we give to the insight from certain data? Are we asking the right questions in the first place?

The more experience you have with data-driven decision making, the better you become at answering those questions.

2. Empirical Pattern Recognition & Model Building

The second principle of marketing as a science builds upon data-driven decision making, but aims to use data to organize customers and marketing activities in a much more quantitative — and automated — fashion than ever before.

Marketing science, to quote another 80′s song, has “orders to identify, to clarify and classify” customers, prospects, and influencers. This goes beyond traditional demographics and a handful of bulky customer segmentations. Instead, we drill down deeply into more specific personas and micro-segments with a granularity that has only recently become technically feasible.

Marketers as “scientists” are principal investigators into the phenomena of the marketplace and all the varied species of customers within it. This really emphasizes the exploratory side of data. Marketers are increasingly building models — mental models, data models, software models — the way that scientists would, seeking patterns and empirically validating them.

In addition to being able to target ever narrower customer segments with greater precision — asymptotically approaching a “segment of one” — these models, when embodied in data and software, enable things like marketing automation. Either explicitly or implicitly, we can use rules and heuristics to personalize messaging and experiences for individual customers.

The caveat, however, is that we must remember that the model is not reality. At best, it’s an approximation that can be very helpful to us and our target audiences. But, to paraphrase a famous survival guide, when the model and reality disagree, always listen to reality. Keep a vigilant watch for data that requires us to modify (or outright discard) a model and create a better one.

3. Controlled Experimentation: Hypothesize, Test, Refine

Of course, the real workhorse of a scientific approach to marketing is running good, controlled experiments:

1. Create a hypothesis.
2. Test the hypothesis.
3. Accept or reject (or refine) the hypothesis.

You can certainly run tests without a hypothesis. (For example, Google’s infamous 41 shades of blue experiment.) But having meaningful hypotheses generally helps to direct experiments toward useful business goals and helps build validated learning.

Great hypotheses can come from anywhere, but increasingly, they’re emerging from the analysis of big data. It’s the smart use of hypotheses that helps drive data-driven decision making and validates the kinds of models discussed above.

Marketing as a science also recognizes that the number of opportunities for controlled experiments is large, spanning almost every facet of modern marketing. Therefore, businesses that value a scientific approach to marketing will encourage broader experimentation throughout their organization à la massively parallel marketing.

4. Cross-Pollination Of Ideas From Other Scientific Disciplines

The fourth principal of marketing as a science is simply embracing ideas from other scientific disciplines that are relevant to marketing, such as psychology, biology, sociology, neuroscience, economics, computer science and so on.

Scientific marketers are usually interested in science more broadly. They’re curious and open to new learning. As they read about new findings, theories, and frameworks from other disciplines, they consider how they may be applicable to their own work and are eager to try such cross-pollination — which is another excellent source of hypotheses for marketing experimentation.

What does marketing as a science mean to you?

It’s More About Talent Than Technology

As far as I’m concerned, adopting agile marketing remains the single most valuable thing marketing teams can do to improve their conversion rates.

I can’t emphasize that enough. It beats “best practices” hands down. It’s more effective than any tool by any vendor. (And, I say that as a highly enthusiastic vendor in this space.)

Because, as Avinash Kaushik so famously said in his 10/90 rule for investing more in talent than technology, modern marketing success is more about your people than anything else. Agile marketing is designed to unleash their full potential.

An Introduction To Agile Marketing

I know, the label “agile” is attached to many things these days to make them sound sexy. You might be tempted to lump agile marketing into the same bucket of buzzwords such as real-time marketing and high-metabolism marketing, filtering it out as hyperbole.

Don’t.

Agile marketing isn’t just an aspiration. It’s a family of concrete management methodologies.

If you aren’t yet familiar with agile methodologies and how they can be applied in marketing, you might find the following slides, from a presentation I recently gave at the Marketing Operations Executive Summit, helpful. I’ve also written a 6,000-word accompanying essay that recreates my talk in full, Agile Marketing for a World of Constant Change:

If you’re reading — or clicking through slides — I’ll wait.

Okay, so you’ve got the basic idea of applying agile management in marketing: small, highly-collaborative teams, working in a series of rapid cycles of 1-4 weeks, adapting to feedback along the way, and emphasizing full transparency among all stakeholders to keep priorities up-to-date.

Agile Marketing Helps Organize Big Testing

In my last two columns, I described Big Testing — embracing marketing experimentation on a broad scale — and discussed how to structure such widespread testing with massively parallel marketing. That’s great at scale.

But, the real magic of testing happens where the rubber meets the road: the front-line marketers who are designing and implementing these marketing experiments.

In massively parallel marketing at larger enterprises, that real world implementation happens with teams on the leaves of that big branching org chart tree. However, many companies don’t need to parallelize marketing across dozens or hundreds of people. They may have eight or fewer people — a single agile team’s worth — in marketing in total.

But, in both scenarios, the quality of what is produced comes down to those people who are actually creating marketing experiences. In the context of paid search, that’s AdWords campaigns and their matching post-click experiences. But the principle certainly applies to marketing more broadly.

If they’re invested and passionate and inspired, then you’re going to reap far greater results than if they’re mechanically following dictates from above that are inevitably less connected to the opportunities on the ground.

You want everyone to adhere to the same vision — the same overarching strategy — but at the same time, you want to give them the creative freedom to bring their own ideas and imagination to bear in that mission. You want that — or you should want that — because that’s how you tap their talent to your advantage.

Agile marketing provides a way to balance these two forces — top-down strategy and bottom-up creativity.

“Customer stories” that represent concrete desires for specific customer personas along the buyer’s journey are brainstormed jointly by the team and their manager, who takes responsibility for keeping them aligned with the company’s top-down vision.

The manager exercises influence in the definition of those stories and the prioritization of which stories will be tackled for a particular sprint. But, the team is invested in the co-creation of those stories and makes the commitment for implementing the top-priority stories in that sprint.

Not All Marketing Experiments Are Created Equal

One of the advantages of agile is that it minimizes supervisory overhead while increasing managerial visibility. Because there’s full transparency about the customer stories and tasks that have been prioritized for the current sprint — and their updated progress on a daily basis — there are fewer opportunities for unexpected “surprises” resulting from miscommunication.

This is helpful in Big Testing, because not all marketing experiments are created equal, especially when it comes to deciding how formal your test management process should be:

Some marketing experiments, such as testing different AdWords copy or variations of your landing pages that don’t fundamentally change your offer or the essence of your message, can be run with low formality. The scale of impact on the brand is low, and the likelihood of contention among multiple people testing in parallel is low.

That low formality quadrant in the above diagram is the sweet spot for massively parallel marketing.

However, other experiments — such as tests of significant new offers, especially around pricing — require more coordination, as they can have significant impact on your brand. These kinds of experiments may benefit from more formality, especially if they’re being run in high-contention environments such as your main website’s home page.

The agile marketing framework is flexible enough to handle this range of scenarios.

Customer stories that are going to involve tests that require greater formality can be flagged as such in the backlog or sprint planning process. An “awaiting approval” column may be added to the team’s task board, where such experiments can queue for more formal verification before being launched in-market.

Low formality experiments, on the other hand, can skip that stage of delivery.

Agile marketing teams may also consider an additional column on their task board: “awaiting validation.” When experiments are in-market, they can be queued here, pending their results. Particularly for experiments worthy of higher formality, this mechanism can be used to control the number of tests in progress at any one time to minimize interaction effects.

With its inherent malleability, agile marketing makes Big Testing practical for organizations of almost any size.

One of the most important aspects of that funnel is the “Contact Us” information and page on your site!

Contact Us can have a powerful impact on a site’s ability to generate sales and leads. Not only does it provide a way for potential customers to connect with you, it should also offer multiple contact options and ultimately deliver assurance that assistance is just a phone call or click away if a need arises.

While many websites are smartly displaying their phone numbers on every page of their site, this strategic bit of placement is no replacement for a well-crafted Contact Us page. Unfortunately, too many sites make their contact page (and phone number) difficult, if not impossible, to find.

Sometimes, contacting you is the only way for customers to get the information they need to make a smart, informed purchase. When questions come up, and you don’t answer them, you can be sure your competitors will. And, they’ll get the sale because of it.

A quick search for “contact” related keywords (minus those intended for “contact lenses” shows that there are quite a number of searches being performed each month:

Of course, not all of these are searches for your contact information, and there are quite a number of brands that top the list (Apple, Google, and Norton were some of the top brand “contact” queries), this does show that there is value in having an optimized Contact Us page that does more than make your site search listings in Google, but is optimized to get the conversion once someone lands on it.

The argument against having a contact page is usually that it increases the need for support staff to answer phone calls, email, faxes (joke) and Web forms. This is true, but you have to run the percentages. If the value of increased sales is greater than the cost of support, you have a surefire winner!

When shoppers don’t feel they are able to reach a real person to address their question, problems or concerns because of limited contact options, they are less likely to buy. Below are some options for improving your Contact Us page, increasing your sales as a result.

Site-Wide Contact Links

Placing your phone number in your header is great. Having a “Contact Us” link in your primary navigation is smart. But these two contact options only cover a small percentage of what makes visitors feel secure doing business with you. More is needed if you want to increase your sales and lead generation capabilities.

Add global, site-wide contact options throughout your site. While navigation “Contact Us” links tend to blend in, look for opportunities to add contact buttons or linked text throughout your site.

Try different verbiage such as “request a quote,” “talk to a representative,” “get your questions answered,” “let us help you,” etc. These varying word changes and buttons will not only stand out, but will encourage visitors to seek out support rather than abandon the site for another.

Multiple Contact Options

On your contact page, a phone number is not enough. An email address link isn’t enough. A Web form is not enough. An online chat option is not enough. By themselves, none of these options are significant, but all are a part of a successful Contact Us page.

The problem with visitors is they all have their own preference. Not everyone likes (or even can) pick up the phone and call you. Maybe they are at work, or the TV is loud, or the kids are, well, being kids. Or maybe they are running out the door and want to come back to an answer via email. Maybe they don’t want to make a decision now, which means online chat is the best option for them and the best way for you to get a sale now.

The point is everyone is different. If you don’t have a contact option that works for them, they may skip it, and the sale, too. Sometimes, a contact option is nothing more than security. Having a phone number visible provides the security that someone will be able help them, which makes them feel confident that you’ll also answer your email promptly. To these types, the phone number provides confidence and security.

The more options you provide, the more secure the shopper becomes about your ability to assist them in a time of need.

Various Contact Points

Not every visitor will need to contact you for the same purpose. Some might have questions about your products or services, others might be looking for information on shipping or guarantees, while others may want to talk to the billing or return departments. You’ll also have those who are looking for job information, want to give you verbal pat on the back (it can happen) or need to talk with someone in a specific department. One-size-fits-all contact options are not the best option for your visitors.

Providing multiple points of contact gets your visitors where they want to go without the danger of getting lost in a “general” email/voicemail box or the requirement of listening to a menu tree as large as an Oregon Redwood. Too often, people get frustrated trying to find the right person to help them. Making this easier on them reduces frustration and builds a stronger customer relationship.

Map & Driving Directions

If you are a local business with local customers, or even a national business that has a destination-type location (i.e., ski supplies in Colorado, potatoes in Idaho, steaks in Omaha, etc.), it’s a good idea to display a map with the option to provide driving directions to your store.

Local customers will always want to know where you are, even if they don’t plan on dropping by. It’s a great way to highlight easy access. It also gives the perception that because you’re “there” (local), you might know a bit more than the guys who are not.

A simple map to your store or office can help people relate to you in a way they don’t with large national chains. Many people like to do business with small businesses, provided they feel safe doing so. A map may not make them feel safe, but it can make them feel more at home and at ease.

Hours Of Operation

If you have specific hours each day for doing business or answering phones, returning emails, etc., it’s a good idea to display your hours of operation on the Contact Us page. This information can also be marked up using Schema.org attributes to display this information search results as well. This sets visitors’ expectations regarding when they can expect to reach someone or get a response. In customer satisfaction, expectations are everything!

Online Contact Form

Online contact forms are a great way to allow visitors to reach you without mass interruption. This allows you to respond on your time and to handle multiple responses all in the same block of time. Be sure to respond to all contact requests within 24 hours at the most, though the sooner you do, the better off you’ll be. Who knows, maybe they are posing the same question on multiple sites and the first response gets the sale!

Reduce the contact form to as little information as necessary to handle a request. Name, phone number, email address and comments are the basics. Don’t add anything else unless it’s absolutely necessary. When customers feel they have to submit a survey just to get someone to respond, they are less likely to do it and more likely to move on to another site. Keep the form as clean and simple as possible.

Live Online Chat

Adding a live chat option can be great for keeping customers on your site and getting their question answered before they run off to another site as they wait for your answer. Not everyone wants to chat live, but those that do appreciate the ability to reach a representative without a long delay or a phone menu tree from hell.

Just make sure all your online reps are skilled customer service people who can truly answer questions and not just point them back to the website.

When shoppers are not secure in a website’s ability to respond to their concerns, either before or after the sale, the trust level diminishes. Without a strong level of trust, your ability to get a sale is reduced, as well. By improving your Contact Us page, you increase the trust component that leads to increased leads and sales.

Image credit

Well, it is.

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

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

What We Know

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

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

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

What Metrics Correlate To Higher Revenue Or Lower Costs?

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

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

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

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

What Metrics Don’t correlate?

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

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

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

Hmmm…

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

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

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

Big Moves In Traffic Yield, Small Moves In Revenue

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

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

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

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

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

Focus On Revenue Instead Of Clicks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Optimize For Revenue-Per-Click, Not Conversion Rate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But one question came up several times in the comments: how do you enable many marketers in an organization to run experiments at the same time without interfering with each other?

Massively Parallel Marketing

The idea of empowering many marketers to engage in testing at the same time — not just a small subset — is a case of what I call massively parallel marketing.

Massively parallel marketing is derived from the idea of massively parallel computing in computer science. In parallel computing, you take a large computational job, break it into smaller pieces, and let dozens or hundreds of processors work on those pieces simultaneously. The results from those individual processors are then combined into the final answer.

This is in contrast to serial computing, where one processor works on the large job all by itself, piece by piece, until it’s complete. Parallel computing is dramatically faster because you don’t have to wait for one piece to be done before you move on to the next one; you can compute all the pieces at the same time.

Massively parallel marketing applies that model to marketing, where individual marketers are analogous to processors. Just as certain jobs in computing that lend themselves nicely to parallel processing, certain kinds of work in marketing can be effectively parallelized too.

There are two requirements for work to benefit from parallel marketing:

1. The work must be able to be partitioned in a logical way, so that each “piece” can be worked on at least somewhat independently of the other pieces
2. Each piece must benefit from having a human being working on it: creativity and judgment are valuable to the work being done

Social media marketing is a great example of massively parallel marketing. Many different marketers can split up the work of responding to individual customers or engaging with individual influencers. There’s certainly coordination between them, but not so much that it prevents them from working in parallel.

The challenge in parallelizing marketing experimentation boils down to one overriding concern: you don’t want to subject an individual prospect to multiple conflicting tests at the same time in a way that would lead them to believe your organization is suffering from schizophrenia. This is the age of converged media, after all.

A lesser concern, but still a valid one, is the risk of multiple simultaneous experiments confounding each other’s results in the way they influence the prospect’s action.

Essentially, this is a variation of the “attribution” problem that has plagued marketing analytics since the dawn of time. In practice, as long as you’re not engaging in schizophrenic experiments, this effect is rarely dominant.

Let’s set aside the attribution issue for now, but we’ll address the bigger concern of schizophrenia in the specific context of testing in paid search.

Partitioning Experiments In Search Marketing

Paid search marketing, especially at the top of the funnel, is particularly well-suited to parallel experimentation.

Many brands already partition paid search using campaigns and keyword groups. Often, these represent different sets of touchpoints that lend themselves to being independently optimized — albeit with a bit of light coordination.

As illustrated above, you could split up those campaigns across two different teams. Each team would experiment with the ads and post-click experiences in their partition, seeking to optimize target metrics such as CTR, CPC, CPA, lead quality, revenue, etc.

Many experiments can be conducted in this environment without devolving into schizophrenia in the eyes of the prospects because, by their very nature, each keyword group usually implies a different “conversation.” As long as you limit your tests to messaging, presentation, and offers that apply to that conversation but don’t violate an agreed upon common identity for your business, you can safely run experiments on different conversations in parallel.

For instance, at my company, which sells software for creating and testing post-click experiences, prospects might reach us for a variety of different conversation starters: landing pages, microsites, conversion optimization, A/B testing, demand generation, content marketing, etc.

With most kinds of tests, we can experiment with the ads and post-click experiences for each of those terms independently of each other. We can try very different ideas for how to engage a visitor responding to “conversion optimization,” without worrying about what they might see if they subsequently click through on a “microsites” ad.

The only caveat is that we don’t want either experiment to violate our common identity. In our case, our common identity includes brand standards, product names, product pricing, and an underlying brand vision that will be consistent further downstream in the sales funnel.

Common identity elements can be tested — but they’re more tricky and require considerably more coordination.

Coordinating Parallel Teams

Within any one team, it’s important to have a high degree of communication and collaboration, since tests within a partition are more likely to have interaction effects.

For instance, the post-click experiences for “landing pages” and “landing page software” may very well service the same visitor in the same search session. You want as much synergy between those experiences as possible.

I recommend using agile marketing management within each team, to keep communication high and priorities flexible with sprints and daily stand-ups. One person on each team serves as the lead.

But, what about coordination among the teams?

7 Ways To Coordinate Parallel Marketing

There are many great ways to coordinate across teams. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but here are seven devices for coordination that I believe are particularly helpful in massively parallel marketing efforts.

1.  Internal chat software such as HipChat. This works best when it supports multiple rooms for different topics, on-the-fly group discussions, and a persistent history — so one can always go back to conversations later. In the context of search marketing experimentation, you might have rooms focused on personas, current offers, content pieces, etc.

2.  Lead huddles where the leads of the different teams do a daily 15-minute stand-up among themselves to keep everyone appraised of what’s happening across the different partitions. This helps to quickly uncover mutual challenges and opportunities and coordinate a common response.

3. Centralized wikis where the latest information about the shared “common identity” of the brand can be found, everything from brand standards to image and content resource libraries. (True digital asset management software can be quite helpful at scale.) The latest offers and persona definitions are here for any team member to reference.

4. Shared specialists such as graphic designers or software developers. Any one team may not need a dedicated resource with these talents. But an important side benefit of these shared resources is that they can help to cross-pollinate ideas across teams.

5. Team exchange on a regular basis, where teams swap members. This not only helps to cross-pollinate ideas across teams, it also helps the collection of teams develop a more cohesive culture across the entire massively parallel marketing effort. Consider rotating 10-20% of teams each cycle.

6. Science fair get-togethers, maybe once per months, where the different teams show off their work from the previous cycle, explain some of their rationale, share insights that they uncovered in the process, and help teach others new skills and approaches that they learned.

7. Leaderboard tracking daily, or real-time performance, of the different teams. This is intended to provide a little extra motivation with friendly competition, but more importantly, help identify those teams that are having the most impact. This becomes a fast feedback mechanism for teams to learn from each other — who’s doing what that works best?

Of course, you don’t need all of this structure to engage in marketing experimentation. You can start with a team of one.

But, if the size of your business presents the opportunity to benefit from large-scale experimentation through massively parallel marketing, there are definitely ways to operationalize that.

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

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

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

But, I created one.

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

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

T Is For Trigger

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

Take the example of a plumber’s website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is always a trigger.

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

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

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

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

E Is For Empathy

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

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

Bryan doesn’t choose words lightly.

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

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

The answer is usually, “No. Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

Building empathy also means building trust.

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

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

E Is Also For Education

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

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

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

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

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

S Is For Solution

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

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

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

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

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

Is All Of This TEE Really Necessary?

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

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

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

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

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

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