Heatmapping tool Feng-GUI helps graphic design and conversion optimization professionals gain that much-needed distance from their work. The tool lets you upload an image and the software returns an attention heatmap overlaid on the image—even without any people having seen the image!

This is called predictive heatmapping. So how does it work and what good is it to you? The answers to that plus some real case studies, after the jump.

What is an attention heatmap?

An attention heatmap is a combination of two elements: eye-gazing, and predicted attention.

Eye-gazing simulates the sequence of extremely rapid and involuntary eye movements (”saccades”) that happen as your eye scans a scene. This is overlaid on a heatmap of the attention represented by different colors which predicts where the brain will focus. Hotter areas indicate a more intense focus, while cooler areas show a lower level of awareness and importance.

What factors are considered in generating a predictive heatmap?

As Feng-GUI’s neat “how we do it” page explains, their algorithms are based on recurring themes detected via eye-tracking. These are things like color contrast, orientation of an object, etc.

How can it be used?

The description continues:

“It can be used to refine landing page designs for existing or new pages, and to improve conversion rates. It can identify which page elements are being looked at and which are being ignored. This allows the designer to focus attention on the correct parts of the page and increase the likelihood of conversion. Attention heat maps can be created several times during the design or re-design process to ensure that the refinements are having the intended effect.

“A ‘busy’ eye-gaze path and scattered heatmap with many hotspots is usually an indication that visual priorities of the page are not clear, and will likely result in confusion and a higher bounce rate for your landing page. Relatively simple eye gaze paths and a small number of clear hot spots (centered on the desired conversion-related areas) are a good indication that the page will be more effective.”

Another way these can be used is in improving the effectiveness of print ads. My friends in the Community Law club at McGill Law are putting on an event dealing with depression in law students. Here’s their ad:

And here’s the heatmap:

Notice how little attention goes to the upper right call to action? When I first saw this posted on a bulletin board, I didn’t notice it at all. I thought it was strange someone would just post a random fact, so I looked around and only then did I notice the call to action.

A better ad would have probably made the call to action larger and placed it somewhere below the main copy.

Indeed, this bottom-left to forward-right layout, which I’ll call the forward slash layout ( / ), is very confusing to Western readers, because we’re accustomed to reading from left to right and top to bottom. As my fellow fans of Gord Hotchkiss and Enquiro B2b SEM and usability know, study after study has confirmed this pattern.

Now let’s see these heatmaps in practical web action. Let’s see what we can use them for!

Some sample heatmaps

Suppose you’re SpyFu. And you’re curious to find out your competitors’ conversion rates—for example, AdGooroo. Here’s AdGooroo’s landing page.

What jumps out at you? Personally, the toolbox in the middle grabbed and held my attention, which is bad news for the copy. Feng-GUI seems to agree:

So if you’re SpyFu, you might think that you’re laughing all the way to the bank. The problem is SpyFu’s landing page…

… isn’t so hot either.

The main call to action above the fold looks like some support link because of its placement near the login link, and the areas of the page that are emphasized are secondary (Live Help) and a fake button (Top Secret) that isn’t actually clickable!

For people considering media buys, and what creative to use, I have the [untested] belief that Feng-GUI can predict the best creative. How?

Have the graphic artists mock up a screenshot with your various banners in place. Then put each screenshot through Feng-GUI to see what draws the most eyes, and you might have found the ad that will draw the greatest CTR for you.

As an aside, I’d like to point out that the faces in the heatmap aren’t highlighted, yet eye-tracking reveals that faces tend to draw our eyes. Feng-GUI has an option to let it know there are faces in the image, and it does slightly better with this feature enabled. But nonetheless, the resulting heatmap isn’t great. So be aware that the tool isn’t 100% accurate; Feng-GUI itself only claims to accurately assess 75% of what actual eye-tracking would capture.

Ironically, Feng-GUI doesn’t seem to have used its predictive mapping on its own site. When I first tried buying credits for Feng-GUI, I went crazy trying to find the “buy now” button. Beside the fact that “buy now” is not in the main navigation, it’s not obvious on the products page either. Looks like I’m not alone in my frustration—I used the tool on the page and ended up with this result:

The order button is one of those small, unimposing white jumplinks at the top of the page. Exactly in that negligible row of links above the active window that gets no attention. And because Feng-GUI couldn’t be bothered to add a simple buy now button with Paypal, you need to email them to request to buy. Only then will they send you a Paypal money request.

By the way, there is a competing predictive heatmapping tool, Attention Wizard, currently in beta. I’m not spending time reviewing their tool because it currently only allows you to generate one heatmap a day.

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!

Search marketers can learn a lot from scientists. Scientists spend their life testing things, one after the other, incessantly trying to discover new interactions between atoms, molecules, viruses, bacteria, etc. One of the greatest scientists of all time, Albert Einstein, said, “A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.” Want everyone to believe in your website? “Experiment” with it—in other words, test it and tune it for optimal performance.

Websites are laboratories, not sculptures

This is the first principle when it comes to website optimization. People tend to think of their websites as a finished product, which was built taking into consideration customer needs and stakeholders requests. But isn’t the world changing? Isn’t it important to tap into new markets, new customers, new opportunities? Isn’t it always good to improve conversion rates?

The website should not exist solely to serve the needs and desires of the designer or the CEO of a company. It should serve the purpose of the customer; otherwise the CEO will be the only one visiting the website in the long run. In a recent two-part paper I wrote with Avinash Kaushik we propose a framework for Web Analytics 2.0: Empowering Customer Centricity (full pdf of Part II, to be published on Vol. 2 Issue 2 of SEMJ). We write about the benefits and best practices when it comes to testing. We believe that “the web analyst must try endlessly and learn to be wrong quickly; learn to test everything and understand that the customer should choose, not the designer or the website manager.”

How to choose a page to test?

With hundreds, thousands, or even millions of pages, how should you decide where to start? Which page, if tested, will bring the biggest increase in revenues? A good way to start is to perform a motion charts analysis on the Top Content report on Google Analytics. The following three metrics (which can be found in all web analytics tools) are highly useful when choosing pages to test:

Contribution to revenue. This metric can take different forms in different web analytics tools, but it basically tells you the contribution of each page to the overall revenue of the website. If the website has an ecommerce platform, this value should be some kind of purchase value divided by the pages seen before a purchase. If the website does not have an ecommerce platform, each goal should have a value linked to it so that we can calculate the contribution of each page to conversions.

Exit rate. This is the percentage of visitors that abandon the website from a specific page. A high exit rate shows that a page is not engaging enough and can be driving your customers away—unless the page is the “thank you for ordering” page, where it’s a good sign. If the objective is to test landing pages, the appropriate metric is the bounce rate, the percentage of visitors that leave the website without interacting with it. A high bounce rate shows that a landing page is performing poorly and should be optimized.

Average time on page. This metric can be an indication that visitors are having difficulty completing a task. For example, if you notice a very high time on page for one of the steps of a registration process, it might be a hint that users are having difficulties understanding what they are supposed to do—though this might not be true for content websites, where you do want your visitors to spend more time reading content.

These are the most common measures of success and failure of a page for most websites. It is important to consider all three metrics (and others that might be specific to your website) and prioritize pages to test. Once you know which pages are the most important, check which ones can be tested quickly. Go for the easiest! Once the first test is running and you tune the pages to improve results, management will implore for you to keep testing.

How long does testing take?

When choosing a page to test, it is also important to take into consideration what elements affect the time it will take in order to receive significant results. Basically, the variables that will affect the duration of your test are:

• Number of combinations tested: As the number of combinations increases, the duration of the test increases.
• Volume of traffic on the page: As the traffic of the tested page increases, the duration of the test decreases.
• Conversion rate of page: As the conversion rates of the page increases (as defined by the tester when planning the test), the duration of the test decreases.
• Expected improvement (the percentage by which you expect to improve the website): As the difference between the pages tested increases, the duration of the test decreases.

To estimate the duration of your test, you can use the Website Optimizer Duration Calculator, a very handy calculator provided by Google.

What should be tested?

As a web analyst, I feel the urge to say the magic words it depends! It depends on the type of website, it depends on the targeted public, it depends on your budget and it depends on that totally unscientific factor, the mood of your boss. Here are three things to test that can bring high benefits with low costs.

Calls to action. Too often calls to action are hidden, by a loaded page with too many graphic elements, by appearing below the fold or by a bad design choice (too small, faint color, or a button that does not look like a button). By improving the call to action and making it prominent on the page, you can sometimes boost your conversion rates drastically

Look and feel. Pages must be visually comfy, i.e., people should feel at home in your website. This way they won’t feel threatened and maybe they will become your friends, register for your newsletter and even buy something in the website. One way to do this is to test different images. Sometimes using a baby picture works; sometimes using a couple at the beach; sometimes even using something creepy, like an insect—depends what people are looking for on your website.

Copywriting. For visitors to seriously consider buying your product, signing up for your newsletter, whatever—you must have a good unique selling proposition. And people should see it as soon as view a page or they will leave. So make your unique selling proposition simple and prominent. Depending on the page you are testing, you should adapt the length of your text: for landing pages, short text usually works better; for product pages, go longer, telling visitors all the reasons why your product is the best in the market.

For a comprehensive list of testing elements and methods, you might take a look at the excellent book written by Brian Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar: Always Be Testing.

Testing tools

The online testing market is growing at a very fast pace, and there are quite a few players offering comprehensive solutions. Here are the biggest players—each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Check their websites to find the most suitable one for your needs.

• Google Website Optimizer
• Amadesa
• SiteSpect
• Autonomy Optimost
• Omniture Test & Target

Testing can bring huge benefits to any website. So start testing today, and don’t stop!

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.

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.

Over the past year, the term “post-click marketing” has come up more frequently in search marketing discussions, especially in the context of improving conversion rates and overall search ROI. At SMX West earlier this month, Gordon Hotchkiss of Enquiro unequivocally declared that post-click marketing moves the needle for their clients more than any other aspect of search marketing.

So what exactly is post-click marketing and how can you leverage it in your search marketing program? Here’s a brief introduction.

Post-click marketing > landing pages

The simplest definition of post-click marketing is this: it’s how you engage with respondents after they click on your ads.

Of course, since the entire customer lifecycle happens after the click, post-click marketing is usually narrowed to mean the experience a respondent has between click and conversion—particularly an experience tailored to a specific ad and/or a specific group of respondents, rather than general site optimization. (Lead nurturing and re-marketing campaigns are good too, but they’re further down the funnel—call them post-conversion marketing.)

Landing pages are the most common kind of post-click marketing.

However, one of the motivations for coining the term post-click marketing was to encourage people to think outside the box of a single page. Traditional 1-page landing pages—I call them “plain old landing pages”—usually have a predictable, and frankly boring layout and structure. What a wasted opportunity, especially when you consider that text search ads are all pretty much visually homogeneous. The design and flow of the first few pages after that click are a marketer’s best—and often only—chance to establish a compelling brand and differentiate themselves from the pack.

Post-click marketing embraces a continuum of creative possibilities for the experience served to respondents: landing pages, 2-step landing pages, branching conversion paths, microsites, mobile nanosites, contextual applications, etc. These experiences can include Flash objects, videos, interactive widgets, social media interfaces and more. You’re constrained only by your imagination in crafting an experience that will “wow” your audience.

But post-click marketing is about more than any one great experience.

Post-click marketing emphasizes segmentation

If there’s one overarching strategy in post-click marketing, it’s audience segmentation: identifying the distinct strata of respondents in your market, with as much granularity as possible, and serving them post-click experiences tailored to their needs and perspectives.

The post-click marketing mantra is: all clicks are not created equal.

Unlike traditional landing page optimization, which usually focuses on testing which pieces of content work best across all respondents, post-click marketing aims for segment optimization—”determining how many different landing pages are optimal for a given campaign, and determining how each should be different from the other.”

Search marketers often thrive by using long tail strategies in keyword bidding. But if you’re not segmenting respondents to different post-click experiences, then the long tail of keywords and ad creatives ends up crashing ignominiously into a short tail of a few landing pages and deep links. This causes message mismatch, where the relationship between the ad and the landing page is unclear to the respondent—probably the single biggest reason for triggering the back button bailout.

Post-click marketing employs a variety of methods for segmenting respondents, ranging from the keyword phrase a user searched on, to geo-location and domain information implied by that user’s IP address, to behavioral choices made by the user on those first several pages after the click. Note that behavioral segmentation dovetails nicely with deploying multi-page landing experiences to engage in productive up-front dialogues with respondents, to quickly move from the generic to the specific.

Post-click marketing encourages systems thinking

In online marketing, we talk a lot about the funnel—how respondents start with impressions, then clicks, then engagement, then conversion, and so on. This progression has a clear directional flow, from the keyword to the ad to the landing page to post-conversion fulfillment.

However, this one-way flow of the user experience can cause marketers to overlook feedback loops in the opposite direction—using information revealed from later stages of the funnel to optimize activities at the top of the funnel. Good post-click marketing tracks and analyzes different conversion rates by segment, mapping conversion rates back to behavioral choices and then back to the original ads and keywords.

This helps identify which niche audiences are driving real ROI in a campaign, and it suggests specific ad/segment combinations that are ripe for improvement and experimentation. Instead of a one-way funnel, your search campaigns and corresponding post-click marketing become a circular ecosystem.

In the spirit of systems thinking, post-click marketing also elevates post-click experiences, such as landing pages, from being ad hoc, under-the-radar productions to being executed with a more efficient and integrated process. Instead of treating each landing page as its own one-off experiment, which tends to be slow and costly, an organization with good post-click marketing capabilities can rapidly deploy dozens or hundreds of segment-specific landing pages.

This scalability is achieved by putting in place a certain amount of post-click marketing infrastructure—or leveraging your web site infrastructure for this mission: content management, a digital asset library, re-usable page design templates, defined proof/approval workflows, standardized data collection and analytics, ready-to-roll testing frameworks, etc.

You know your post-click marketing is firing on all cylinders when your average concept-to-completion deployment cycle for a new landing page is less than 1 day—which is what it needs to be to be able to keep pace with the inherent fluidity of search marketing.

You’ve always known that landing pages and other after-the-click tactics were important. The reason post-click marketing has been gaining traction is because it’s a way to frame the discussion of those tactics at a higher and more strategic level.

If you don’t yet have a structured post-click marketing program in place, this could be one of your big wins for 2009.

My earlier article, A Completely Different Kind of Landing Page Optimization, discussed the rationale for delivering segment-specific landing pages to different niche audiences in your search marketing. Instead of having a one-size-fits-all landing page that you try to continually optimize ad nauseum with different variations of content (headline, body copy, image), segment optimization focuses on building separate pages for each distinct group in your audience.

Having segment-specific landing pages is straightforward when you can identify segment-specific keywords. But what if you can’t unambiguously determine the segment from the keyword?

The example we used was a hypothetical language learning company that might attract students, business travelers, and vacationers — where the real value proposition for each of those segments is actually quite different. In that case, they can probably assume that a search for [french exam prep] pulls in a student segment and give those respondents a student-oriented landing page.

But what about people searching for [learn french]?

When handling respondents from more generic keywords — or really any keyword that appeals to more than one audience group — there’s still tremendous value to be gained from segmenting them and delivering them more relevant content. However, to do this, you must segment after the click.

Segmenting with 2-step landing pages

Let’s carry on with our language learning company example, with its three key audiences of students, business travelers, and vacationers. It’s likely that [learn french] is a popular keyword phrase. Those ads garner a lot of clicks, but from the keyword alone it’s impossible to guess which segment a respondent belongs to.

One way to deal with such generic keywords, of course, is to simply drive people to generic landing pages — in this case, talk about learning French without targeting the pitch to any one particular segment. But, as we discussed last time, it’s hard for generic landing pages to reach their full potential because they try to please everyone and offend no one, a relatively low common denominator. These can easily become “milquetoast landing pages”.

An alternative is to use a 2-step landing experience, where the first page a respondent lands on is primarily a segmentation page: it gives respondents several one-click choices to let them pick what is most relevant to their search query. The second page then delivers on that promise by providing content and/or offers that are tailored to that segment.

In our example, a person who searches for [learn french] and clicks on a corresponding ad might receive a page that gives them the following one-click choices (usually presented as clickable images):

• French for college/high school students
• French for business travelers
• French for vacationing and pleasure

After a respondent clicks on a choice, they would be presented with more traditional landing page content — making a direct connection between the ad the respondent clicked on and the products/services that the company has to offer — but with the added benefit of being crafted specifically to that audience segment. So a French student learns how this product can improve his performance in class, a business traveler reads how to fit this into her schedule and observe proper business etiquette, and a vacationer is seduced with the lure of a very authentic travel experience.

But will they click?

Some old-school search marketers may object to this 2-step landing page methodology on principle, in the belief that respondents don’t like to click. If you ask people to take an extra step, you will lose more of them, so conventional wisdom goes.

However, that’s not necessarily true. Fewer clicks may be better — other things being equal. But other things rarely are.

The underlying dynamic here is that respondents don’t like to waste time or effort. If an extra click actually saves them time, by quickly navigating them to the content that’s most relevant to their needs — if you can properly set those expectations and then fulfill them — many will indeed make that click.

It’s about keeping people in a flow that serves their interests.

Empirical evidence from our experiments with hundreds of these 2-step landing experiences — in circumstances where they make sense — is that on average 60% of the respondents will take that extra step. Compared with the traditionally high bounce rates associated with landing pages in general, this is quite good.

The benefits of this approach can be significant:

• respondents are quickly routed to segment-specific content and offers that can directly increase your conversion rate — break free of the generic landing page trap
• respondents become incrementally more engaged with your site, moving from a quick click on an ad, to a relatively click on a segmentation choice, to targeted and authentic content — the extra cycle of setting an expectation and fulfilling it builds trust and indirectly can increase your conversion rate
• 2-step landing experiences can signal to respondents that the marketer cares explicitly about their segment, which can also indirectly improve your conversion rate
• even if respondents don’t convert, their segmentation choice tells you which ads are attracting which segments and how well you’re converting (or not) each of them

This format isn’t a panacea and should only be used where it makes sense. But when you have multiple segments responding to generic keywords, it can be highly effective — and is well-worth testing against the control of a single-page, plain old landing page.

A few real world examples

If you’re wondering what these 2-step landing pages can look like, here are a few examples from real companies that have used them to significantly increase their conversion rate.

A high-tech company that sells data management solutions to both small businesses and large enterprises:

A hotel group that caters to both business and leisure travelers:

A professional journal that attracts subscribers at different stages in their careers:

As you can see, these 2-step landing pages can be easy to engage with — a guide, not a barrier. And nothing makes it clearer to you (and your audience) that your customers are not viewed as a commodity, but are thoughtfully engaged with according to who they are and what they’re looking for.

What exactly is landing page optimization? For most search marketers, optimizing landing pages means A/B testing and multivariate testing (MVT). It means using tools such as Google Website Optimizer to experiment with different arrangements of a page – or different variations in the content of a page – to maximize its conversion rate.

We may ask questions about many different elements of a page. Which headline works best? Is the offer button better with “complimentary shipping” or “free shipping”? Does a picture of the product compel more people than an image of a friendly customer service representative, or the other way around? What about a blue color scheme versus a green one?

This is landing page optimization as most people know it. And for what it does, it is a good approach. Let’s call it content optimization – finding the best presentation of content on a particular landing page.

But content optimization is not the only way to optimize landing pages. In fact, when it comes to boosting your conversion rate, it may not even be the most effective method.

Segment optimization offers a new approach

Segment optimization is about determining how many different landing pages are optimal for a given campaign, and determining how each should be different from the other.

Instead of stretching one page to try to please everyone, which is quite hard to do – segment optimization breaks out several specialized landing pages that each focus on pleasing a particular segment of your audience.

For example, say you’re marketing language learning software. Although everyone who clicks on your ads wants to learn a language, there are different motivations among them. Students hope for better grades in their classes. Vacationers crave more authentic trips. Business travelers are most concerned about efficiency.

It would be difficult to have one page that speaks passionately to all of those distinct audience segments simultaneously.

Just consider the headline. If you were deploying one page to fit everyone, you might try lots of variations (content optimization) to discover that “Learning French is easy!” is the best headline (on average) for all respondents.  Let’s say it achieves a 5% conversion rate, not bad, but not earth-shattering either.

But if you had three different landing pages, one for each of these segments – you might find that “Ace your French exams!” works best for students, “Experience France as only a French speaker can!” works best for vacationers, and “Business French in 10 minutes per day!” works best for business people. These might achieve conversion rates of 12%, 11%, and 14% respectively for each segment, a tremendous success that more than doubles your overall conversion rate.

You could never achieve this using one page for everyone. “Ace your French exams!” would perform disastrously for vacationers and business people. If you tried that headline for all respondents, content optimization would throw it out as suboptimal because 2/3 of the audience would think it was awful. But when it’s presented to students (and only students) – it is the indisputable champion.

In that example, segment optimization was achieved by deploying three different pages instead of just one. Content optimization was then used to determine which headline was most effective for each separate segment.

How can you begin using segment optimization in your campaigns?

Start by making a list of possible segments within your audience. Who are the different types of people who look for you online – and why? Don’t restrict yourself to the way you may have segmented people in your database or your business plan. Brainstorm what’s important and relevant from the respondent’s point-of-view, by considering any or all of the following issues:

• the specific “problem” the respondent wants to solve
• the demographic/psychographic “persona” of the respondent
• the respondent’s stage in the buying process
• the role of the respondent in their organization
• the respondent’s geographic location
• the respondent’s industry or the size of their organization

These are your initial buckets into which respondents could be segmented. Don’t worry if there’s overlap between buckets, as these won’t necessarily be either/or choices.

Next, review the keywords and ad creatives you’re running in your search marketing campaigns. For each keyword/creative pair, ask yourself – is there a particular segment that its respondents would clearly belong to? If the answer is yes, add it to that bucket along with the number of clicks per month it generates. If there answer is no, leave a question mark next to it – perhaps with a handful of segments it might appeal to.

For instance, in our example above, the keyword phrases “french exam” and “college french” are obvious candidates for the student segment. Phrases like “business french” and “executive french” fall into the business traveler bucket. But “learn french” can’t be segmented just from the keyword.

Now, look over your segment buckets and see which ones have the most number of clicks per month. These are your best targets for segment optimization.

For each one, create a dedicated landing page that is focused on the needs, wants, and characteristics of that particular segment. Here you can use content optimization such as A/B testing or MVT to find the best headline, imagery, layout, etc. for each page.

You can almost be guaranteed that these segment-specific landing pages will outperform your more generic ones. With your first few big segment wins in place you can move further down The Long Tail, to less popular, but still easily identifiable keywords to meet each segment.

What about keywords that you can’t automatically associate with a particular segment? In those scenarios, you can use techniques such as multi-step landing pages and “directed behavioral segmentation”. But that’s an article for another day.

Scott Brinker is the president and CTO of ion interactive, a leading provider of post-click marketing software and services. He is also a co-editor of the Post-Click Marketing Blog.

One of the reasons that “local search” has struggled in some quarters has been the challenge of tracking the internet’s influence on in-store or local transactions. This is a theme I heard raised by large retailers at a ShopLocal partner event a couple of weeks ago and one that came up several times in various contexts at SMX Local-Mobile.

Marchex is seeking to address that challenge with the integration of the company’s various advertiser-facing assets and technologies in a single toolset that offers enhanced tracking capabilities. The company is calling this a next-generation local advertising platform.

Using the company’s VoiceStar call platform and tracking, smart landing pages, as well as forms, map clicks and other methodologies, Marchex is seeking to provide much more information to advertisers (large or small) around intent to buy offline.

The inability of larger advertisers to clearly evaluate the ROI of local or geotargeted campaigns with offline sales has been a stumbling block for the entire local marketplace, despite the fact that a broad range of studies over the past couple years have repeatedly confirmed that consumers shop/research online and buy offline:

–Nielsen: 80% of consumer electronics buyers bought from a store whose Web site they visited first (5/08) –comScore: 92% of Internet/search influenced consumer electronics purchases happen in local stores –TMP Directional Media/comScore: 82% of the people using local search sites followed up with offline action (in-store visit, phone call)

According to SEMPO’s recent “State of Search Marketing” survey, about 36% of agencies (respondents included agencies and advertisers) were enthusiastic about the current state of geotargeted search marketing. The rest had mixed reviews. The percentages were largely unchanged from the previous year.

Yet geotargeting tools and capabilities are still fairly rudimentary in terms of their accuracy, although getting better. Also according to the SEMPO survey, marketers would pay a premium for improved (”optimal”) geotargeting capabilities:

SEMPO also found that marketers would pay an even larger premium for demographic targeting. But what few recognize is that local and demographic targeting merge when location awareness gets down to the neighborhood and zip level.

The Marchex tools, however, aren’t about improved location awareness, they’re about capturing more consumer behavior — intent to buy offline — and making it more visible to marketers to get a better sense of the true ROI Of their campaigns.

Driving prospects to your website is only half the battle. What can B2B marketers do to entice visitors to take desired online actions…and improve conversion rates? Here are eight easy-to-implement tips designed to improve landing page relevance, persuade action, build credibility, and maximize response rate.

Improve relevance. Searchers like nothing more than to see an ad or a natural search listing that exactly matches their query. And it’s even better when these same words are visible on the page they click through to. A tight alignment between a searcher’s query, the search listing, and landing page copy conveys—in a word—relevance.

To improve alignment and relevance, marketers must, at a minimum, repeat the searcher’s query (i.e., keyword) in their ad headline, and then again, if possible, in the ad copy. Better yet, repeat the word or phrase in the headline on the landing page.

This strategy requires a large number of finite ad groups and multiple, unique landing pages, but I think you’ll find the results are worth the effort…especially for your most important search words and phrases.

Use persuasive calls to action. Just because someone clicks on your ad or listing, it doesn’t mean they are going to take the desired action on your landing page. Marketers must continue to give prospects compelling reasons to engage. Don’t stop “selling” on the landing page. Here are three specific ideas on how to persuade visitors to take action.

Focus on benefits. Answer the visitor’s question: “What’s in it for me?” “What is the benefit I can expect to receive if I register for this white paper or webinar?” Be as specific as possible. Use benefit statements such as Download our 3-page case study which illustrates how CompanyABC reduced IT expenses by 30% in four months.

Alleviate concerns. People worry about wasting time, the value of what they will receive, and their privacy. So, do all you can to proactively alleviate these concerns. Provide a link to your Privacy Policy. Clearly state the number of steps or the time an online action will take. For example: Qualify for a personalized demo in 3 quick steps, or Take our 60 second Virtual Tour.

Ask a compelling question. Appeal to your audience’s curiosity. Entice people to take action by posing a leading question, such as “Are you spending too much for IT services?, or “Is IT Outsourcing right for your company?” These are great statements which entice people to take action to discover the answers.

Build credibility. Don’t forget, website visitors (especially first-time visitors) don’t know your company as well as you do! The truth is, even large firms and big brands must establish credibility, and landing pages are a great way to do this.

To this end, test landing pages that include product photos, guarantees, customer testimonials, client case studies, team bios, and executive videos. In general, these items boost conversion rates.

Maximize response rates. When it comes to registration forms, test everything! Test what you call the downloadable asset, test where you place the form, and test how many fields are required.

I have experienced dramatic differences in conversion rates based solely on what the asset is labeled. For example, Virtual Tour, Video Demo, and Online Demo can all refer to the same piece of information, but may deliver quite different results.

Also, test placing the registration form directly on the landing page as well as an internal page. Some audiences seem to appreciate the streamlined approach. But, others don’t want to be confronted with a form immediately; they need to learn more about a product or company before they are willing to provide personal contact information.

I’ve previously written about the importance of testing shorter forms, collecting data, and then making an informed decision regarding lead volume versus lead quality. There is no doubt about it…overall, you will collect more inquiries with shorter, simpler forms. Each business needs to experiment and find their “sweet spot” — the registration form that provides the maximum number of inquiries at an acceptable quality level.

Implement both pre- and post-click improvements for maximum results. When it comes to landing pages, I urge marketers to take steps to actively test and improve relevance, persuade action, build credibility, and maximize response rate.

Only by combining pre-click campaign management techniques with post-click landing page improvements can marketers maximize search marketing results.