There is an insidious voice speaking to your visitors from the moment they click through to your site. It camps in the back of their minds, setting up a tent and proceeding to talk your visitors out of taking action. While there are many angles this voice can work to fill visitors with doubt, there […]
We online marketers can get a little full of ourselves. Those of us who strive to educate others about our craft can get preachy about the “right way” to bring traffic to websites and optimize that traffic for conversions. However, like those we are educating, we ourselves have evolved (and are still evolving) throughout our […]
When faced with creating a conversion-focused SEO landing page, what should our copy focus on? 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 […]
As you might guess, we QA a lot of Google Analytics installs. It is often a maddening task that makes you want to “gaq.” However, there are some nice tools that go a long way toward making life easier. If you are questioning the data you’re getting out of Google Analytics; if your e-commerce reporting […]
You may find the subject of this column a bit self-serving, since I am a conversion optimizer. 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 […]
We model our online prospects with a number of different funnels, paths, flows and journeys. 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 […]
I am a landing page. My job is to greet you when you click on ads, email links and social media posts. You will find me by scanning a QR code. You come to me because you want something. You have requested my presence on your screen by taking a very specific action, and you […]
There is nothing more important to your search success than your value proposition. Go ahead. Click away. I know you probably don’t spend much of your time on such things. It’s all keywords and copy, copy and keywords. Yet, keywords and ad copy only get you so far. For your visitors, these answer the question, why am […]
Are we hiding from science? As I write this, we have all let our breath out having learned the outcome of a presidential election and countless congressional races. Now that the task of getting elected is behind us, it is time to examine a bastion of political debate: bashing science. Shawn Lawrence Otto writing in […]
Engagement is a magnetic “measure” of online effectiveness. You might call it an “engaging” metric. This is because it is a nice stand-in when real measures of sales, leads or subscriptions are too difficult to track or deliver disappointing results. “No, we didn’t increase sales, but look at the engagement!” is the mantra. The definition […]
Which video recipe will make your cash register ring more often and more loudly? It was the end of a 12-hour video shoot. We had heard the same song over and over, about 200 times. Our model had just finished dancing in 24 outfits, having completing over 150 identically executed squats as part of her routine. […]
The ellipsis, or “…” is a written construct that means “you fill in the missing part.” In a quote, it means “something is missing here.” The Chicago Manual of Style states, “Ellipsis points suggest faltering or fragmented speech accompanied by confusion, insecurity, distress, or uncertainty.” Compare this to the period, or “.”. A period says, […]
Joel Harvey is, among other things, the Video Scientist at Conversion Sciences. Over the past four years, he has developed video strategies for a large number of online retailers. We’ve found that video is great for drawing and converting qualified search traffic, so I asked Joel to tell us his tricks for getting video ranked […]
As search marketers, your job is to generate traffic. More traffic means more sales. As we become more wise to the math of conversion, we begin to realize that it may make sense to shift some attention away from the unending search for higher click-through rates and toward getting higher conversion rates on our sites. […]
They are out there, and they are not nice. They seek to take food from the mouths of your children and to put your career at risk. They are your online competitors, and they won’t think twice about leaving you crying helplessly as they eat your ice cream cone. In every industry, at least one […]
There are a million rules for search landing page design. You have to optimize the content and decide whether more stuff is better or worse for conversion. But it’s all moot unless your focus is on getting into the head of your customers. Searcher personas are the tool that delivers clarity as you develop ads […]
I was recently asked by a prospect to help them complete a website design questionnaire, the document utilized by design firms that drives the design of a website. The company doing the redesign of this site specializes in e-commerce sites, so I had expected their questionnaire to focus on conversion, business goals, etc. I was […]
My partner Joel Harvey is fond of saying, “My favorite part of a design is the money.” He’s been part of many a web design project. His perspective comes in response to the number of times he’s heard things like: “I want the design to pop!” “I want my site’s design to be groundbreaking like […]
The one thing all of your search traffic brings with it is a human brain. It’s easy to think that our search visitors aren’t coming with any brain at all. How can they possibly decide against what we have to offer? If they weren’t going to take action, why click on the ad? It turns […]
There is a certain sound a teenager makes when confronted with a choice they aren’t interested in making. It is a sonic mix of indecision, ambivalence, condescension and that sound your finger makes when you pet a frog. It is less committal than a shrug, less positive than a “Yes,” less negative than a “No” […]
The Conversion Rate is calculated as the number of conversions – leads, sales, subscriptions, trials, etc. – divided by the number of visitors to the site from organic search traffic, paid search, referrals, email, etc. Thus, your conversion rate can be improved in two ways: get more of your visitors to convert (the top), or […]
Dan Harmon is the creator of the quirky quirky TV show Community (NBC). Harmon uses a unique circular device he calls an “Embryo” that defines the story arc of every show he writes. It maps the “hero’s journey” of the primary character through his or her 22 minute sitcom quest. It ensures that each episode of his […]
The conversion rate for your site is the number of conversions divided by visitors. Quality traffic is half of the equation (the bottom half). No matter how well optimized a site is, if the traffic isn’t qualified, conversion rates will falter. I recently commented to Chris Robino* of SearchRanking.net that companies rarely get our conversion […]
How many links are there still floating around the Internet pointing to old, outdated content? How many links are now returning 404 errors because the content has disappeared altogether? What can you do with your webinar registration links once the webinar is over? The obvious answer is to change where the links point. While this […]
In my column on the Landing Page Battles of the Flat Fore Headed, I deride stock photography as the result of lazy designers. I was asked on LinkedIn by a reader if all stock photography was bad. Obviously, the answer is “No.” So how do you determine what images are going to be effective and […]
If you run into a marketer with a flat forehead, odds are that they have been working on landing pages. Landing pages are are a fantastic conversion tool. Because they are so often tested, we know a great deal about what is likely to work on a landing page. Unfortunately, managers and designers prefer their […]
We frequently hear about the consumer brands that dominate their markets. Amazon controls 25% of all Internet commerce. Zappos grew to a billion dollar company in ten years with its Web-friendly business model and rule-breaking culture. But who holds the dominant Internet-driven position in your slice of the economy? Is it you? It could be. […]
Hint: You gave it to him. It’s a familiar story: businesses finally getting their search optimization stratgy down, putting in SEO the hours, and creating the content that draws links and Google love. They’ve paid the SEO experts. They know their keywords. And when the traffic comes, they send it off to Facebook and Twitter […]
This is an open letter to all of those services that host our webinars, sell tickets to our events, let people buy our products, manage our appointments and almost everything else we do as online marketers. In each of these categories, we have many choices and there are more entrants every month. I say we […]
Gather close, dear friends and hear my words of warning. Gird yourself, for my tale would make any enlightened man or woman stagger back in disbelief. I do not share such news with you lightly. It is not my errand to harm or discomfort your mental or psychological wellbeing. Resist the urge to sever the […]
With one persona, copywriters and designers will gain a better understanding of Googlebot and do a better job of creating a site that will appeal to him.
If we want our children to grow up healthy and happy, we can’t be squeamish about addressing issues of conversion scenarios, analytics packages, value propositions, storytelling, split testing and personas. We must arm our children with these tools, or the Web will continue to bore and repel us.
With some simple analytics in place, you can pretty easily establish the ideal frequency of your B2B email campaigns. Based on the results from this experiment, we confirmed that we should be sending email more frequently. You will probably come to a similar conclusion.
It is 2:00 a.m. The deadline for the column passed hours ago. And yet, I have spent the last two hours watching 30 Rock reruns and playing Angry Birds. Sometimes you just dry up. FTC disclosure: A deadline was provided to this author free of charge and may influence the content of the piece. I’m […]
A conversion lab equipped with powerful content marketing and analytics tools, free of organizational obstacles and site politics will give marketers and business owners a quick way to begin experimenting.
Every marketer needs their own marketing laboratory, that place that they go when they really want to understand something about their audience. This laboratory is their Bat Cave, their Fortress of Solitude. For the next few columns, I’m going to help you setup your own conversion laboratory.
We’ve identified a way to reliably measure the conversion rate of our social media efforts using Google Analytics. Here are the results of our experiment.
It's possible to automate and centralize the measurement of social media marketing efforts, in part thanks to a wireless tracking device that we attach to each status update, tweet and email that ties conversions to specific social conversations. Here's how.
Unlike its counterpart, the social media landing page isn’t focused getting on one action from a visitor; it has to manage four different kinds of conversion. Do your social landing pages manage all four?
You can significantly increase both your conversion rates and the quality of your prospect list by using some of these risk reversal strategies on your lead generation web pages.