As I’ve said in previous columns, marketers can no longer rely on their communication skills alone to get the job done. They must become scientists of a sort, skilled at measuring and reporting on their digital properties. The tools now exist to help us learn so much about our visitors. But, to paraphrase a famous […]
Frustrated by your bounce rate? Does it stay stubbornly high at 60% or more? I was frustrated, too — until I realized that Google Analytics doesn’t track bounce rate fairly. A bounce is any visit for which the visitor only looks at one page and does not interact with it. If you’re publishing a blog, […]
Analytics platforms. Split testing software. User testing tools. This is starting to sound expensive. And it is. What if it were more expensive not to have these things in your online business? It might very well be. Your business may be one of the many that is hobbled by a “launch and hope” approach to […]
As “power” marketers, our work can look more like scientific experiments than creative campaigns. More and more, power marketers make decisions with data. The collection and interpretation of this data requires a new set of skills. Nonetheless, the goal remains the same for our online initiatives. We want to get a reaction from our visitors. We […]
We were contacted this week by a company that offers hundreds of online games all on one site. The site’s home page displayed dozens of colorful tiles, each linking to a game. To find out how we might improve on this, I went straight to our online gaming expert: my 13-year-old son. I sent him […]
Learn how to use images and copy to control your visitors’ attention. Websites are an important part of most businesses these days. They are essential to communication, providing cognitive clues to the authority of the business and providing sustaining methods of completing transactions that correspond directly to the bottom line of the companies that use […]
Like so many online shoppers, we sometimes have trouble making buying decisions here at Conversion Sciences. However, most online shoppers don’t have access to the special tools we have here in the lab. This is a story about how we used our optimization tools to tell us which website we should buy from. There are […]
This is another article in a series I’m calling “Power Processes.” Power Processes not only make marketers better, they demonstrate their contribution to the bottom line visibly and measurably . Ignore Open Rates & Click-Through Rates If there is one theme in our Power Process series it is this: Measure results to the dollars. Open […]
As marketers, we are dealing with a power crisis. We have more channels than ever to get our message out, and yet have fewer resources with which to utilize these channels. We must be proficient in a variety of skills to even manage our teams. This is a huge challenge when change occurs faster than […]
You’re being tested. Right now. You’re being probed and compared and measured and documented. Would you like to know your results? Having spent the past week in two foreign (to me, at least) cities — Frankfurt and Stockholm — I’ve tackled the challenges they presented with a mix of science and creative abandon. I’ve been […]
I was recently asked, “What do you think the landscape for targeted conversion optimization will look like in five years?” A number of things came to mind, including: Automated personalization technologies that essentially eliminate the need for conversion optimization The end of the website due to the rise of apps The end of the website […]
The folks at Search Engine Land spend a lot of time trying to divine the Google search algorithm from Matt Cutts’ words like reading tea leaves in the bottom of a cup. All the while, several of my brilliant colleagues and I from the Search & Conversion column have been talking about what to do […]