MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

A test is a great way to settle arguments. The highest-paid person in the room thinks he has a better headline? No problem. Just test it.

But, to truly optimize, sometimes it helps to start a few arguments as well. Get some key people in the room, question your landing pages, question your value proposition, and let everyone (Sales, Customer Service, Product Development, Consulting Services) come up with test ideas to really push the envelope on your marketing.

The way we do that at MECLABS is with a series of meetings called Peer Review Sessions. It gives everybody – from the most senior to the most junior members of the team – a chance to jump in, question the status quo, and come up with test ideas.

Because, as marketers, optimizing by ourselves is hard work … even for the experienced optimizers at MECLABS. No one can truly optimize in a vacuum. We need other minds to broaden the horizons of our creativity and give us ideas for what to test and how to test.

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Find your peer group

Sometimes it also helps to find optimization peers who work at other (preferably non-competitor) companies to break away from the groupthink in your organization (“Our product is the bestest ever!”) and throw some tests against the wall for a little brainstorming.

This is why we at MarketingExperiments are trying to build a community of marketers around the field of optimization. Because the more people there are sharing ideas, the better we can all get at optimization. And, the better we can get at optimizing, the better we all become at performing our jobs.

You can find that peer group in a few places:

• Among the 4,610 optimizers on the MarketingExperiments Optimization group on LinkedIn
• Local marketing events
• Optimization Summit 2012 in Denver
• The comments section of this blog post

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Win a $397 MarketingSherpa Benchmark Report

That’s right, I said the comments section of this blog post.

You see, as I said earlier about the MECLABS way of optimizing, we seek to get as many ideas as possible for the tests we run with our Research Partners. For an upcoming test we’d like you to suggest the best PPC ad copy in the comments section of this blog post.

So scroll down. Take a look in the comments. Find some PPC ad copy you like. And reach out to that marketer to see if you can form a peer relationship, helping each other produce better tests.

To make it worth your while, once we have several submissions, we will choose one lucky marketer’s ad treatment to run in our experiment. And, to sweeten the pot, we’ll also give that marketer a free PDF copy of MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – PPC Edition (a $397 value).

So let’s get to the challenge (if you choose to accept it)…

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The challenge

As I said, to make us all become better optimizers, we need your ideas for a real PPC experiment we are going to run for one of our Research Partners: North American Spine. We’re going to have you, dear marketer, write PPC ads to help us discover some things about North American Spine’s ideal customer.

At the end of this post, you can submit your ad treatment in the comments.

So, now that you know what you’re in for, sit back, and get your thinking caps on while you read the background of the experiment.

Please read it carefully as there are some very specific things we are looking for to make this test successful. The closer you read and understand, the more likely you are to win.

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Experiment Background:

North American Spine (NAS) is the inventor and sole provider of a fascinating (in my opinion) minimally invasive spine surgery called the Accurascope procedure. They essentially provide people who are suffering from serious, chronic back pain with an alternative to open back surgery.

Right now, with ROI Revolution managing their paid search advertising campaigns – NAS is doing an impressive job of getting people who are already shopping for back surgery solutions to buy the Accurascope procedure.

However, as probably all of us know, there are likely potential NAS customers out there who aren’t shopping for back surgery. Instead they are shopping for more information so they can make an informed decision about whether they need surgery or not.

We know this because there are several medium-to-high-traffic keyword terms centered around certain back conditions:

• Lumbar Bulging Disc
• Sciatic Nerve
• Degenerative Disc Disease
• Etc.

It also happens that NAS is looking to implement a content strategy to help position them as an authority in the back pain treatment space.

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Experiment Goal:

The trouble with a content strategy is that it is very difficult to create content, and very difficult to predict what content will resonate with your customers.

You could spend a lot of time creating high-quality content only to find out later that another approach would have been more profitable.

To help provide clarity to NAS’s content strategy, we are going to run some PPC ads to “take the temperature,” in a sense, of the people who are searching for the following conditions:

• Lumbar bulging disc
• Sciatic nerve
• Degenerative disc disease
• Herniated disc
• Pinched nerve in lower back
• Lumbar back pain

So the goal of this experiment is to learn which types of content resonate with the largest audience of condition-based searchers. This way, NAS can tailor a content strategy around those motivations and start building content they know will be effective.

But the ultimate goal is to have prospects come in for a needed Accurascope procedure, as shown in the chart below:

Experiment Hypothesis:

It wouldn’t be an experiment without a hypothesis. Here’s what we think these condition-based searchers are really after:

• May be experiencing back pain symptoms and are simply searching online or asking around
• Have come across this condition and now want more information on it
• May have already seen a doctor and been diagnosed with this condition and now want more information on it and possible treatments
• May be a friend or loved one searching on behalf of someone

Therefore ads that cater to these motivations will likely receive a higher clickthrough rate.

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The Research Question:

It’s hard to ask a research question without also having your treatments in mind, but I’ll go ahead and pitch one here, assuming your treatments will be flooding in soon after:

Which condition-based ad template will receive a higher clickthrough rate?

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The Treatments: What we need from YOU

If you didn’t notice above in the research question, the treatments we are looking for will be templates. Each PPC ad will be a different approach for more information that we can simply drop a back condition keyword into. So, to give you an example, I’ll show you my submission:

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Have [Condition]?
Learn 3 treatments with the highest
success rates in this free report
NorthAmericanSpine.com/[condition]

However, you might take an angle like this:

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[Condition] Info
5 things you need to know to give
your loved one the care they need.
NorthAmericanSpine.com/[condition]

Whatever you decide, be sure to keep the goal of this experiment in mind: to learn which types of content resonate with the largest audience of condition-based searchers.

Also, keep in mind that PPC ads have character limits, if you don’t know them, you can use this tool to help you stay within those limits and not be disqualified from the contest.

Because you’re writing ad templates and not ads, it’s going to be difficult to fit each of the conditions above in a single template. But we know you’re very smart, and if there is a way that you can think of to get around that problem we’re open to suggestions. Just leave them in the comment below your submission.

The Call-to-Action:

So with that, I’ll let you get writing. When you’ve written an ad, all you need to do is post it below in the comments. Once we have enough submissions, we’ll sort through them and choose one ad that we think will best help us answer the research question.

The writer of that ad will get:

• A free PDF copy of MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – PPC Edition (a $397 value)
• The opportunity to brag about how they were included in a real MECLABS experiment
• A shot at having their treatment actually win the experiment (more bragging rights)
• A mention (and link) on this blog as a marketing expert (yes, even more bragging rights)

Go ahead and post your ad in the comments and we’ll announce the winner during our next Web clinic: Online Advertising Forensics: We investigate how and why a text-based PPC ad produced 47% more conversions (Educational funding provided by ROI Revolution)

Happy writing!

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Related Resources:

Blandvertising: How you can overcome writing headlines and copy that don’t say anything

Banner Blindness: Why your marketing messages are hiding in plain sight

The Ultimate Click: How to get what you pay for with pay-per-click advertising

PPC Ads: What is search engine marketing best used for?

Categories: Paid Search Marketing (PPC) Tags: ad, benchmark report, click, contest, optimization, PPC, writing

Sometimes great products can be hard to sell on a website. The market is so saturated with mediocre goods and services that when a truly great one comes along, the same old marketing tactics simply don’t work anymore. Excellent products need excellent websites to communicate their full potential.

And that’s the main problem with this website submitted for live optimization by the makers of the Npower PEG on a past Web clinic.

Click to enlarge

The product is essentially a battery you can hook to almost any device. But the fun part is that it charges with the kinetic energy you produce while you go about your daily life.

I personally found it fascinating. And I want one.

Unfortunately, (as the owners of the site probably know) the website doesn’t effectively communicate the prodigiousness of the product.

Perhaps you’re in the same boat as the Npower PEG. Maybe you’ve got a great product but you feel like your website doesn’t live up to it. Don’t tune this post out because it’s about someone else’s company.

To help you, I talked to Adam Lapp, Associate Director of Optimization and Strategy, MECLABS, about Npower’s website. From his years of optimization experience, you can hopefully glean some wisdom for your own site.

There are eight main test ideas that Adam highlighted in our conversation about how to improve this website.

Test Idea #1: Make the homepage more like a landing page

One thing Adam noticed was that this entire site is for a single product. Because of that, you could potentially make the homepage a lot more like a landing page with most of the information they need to make a buying decision right there on the first page.

Generally, a homepage like the one they currently have is used to funnel different segments of the audience to the correct sections of a site so they can further engage with the products and services they need.

But it’s not needed here, because you have a single audience looking for a single product.

• Transferrable Principle:

Determine the correct use of your homepage based on the number of audience segments and products/services you have. Many segments and products need a homepage that reflects a high number of offers. But single product homepages can generally be thought of as a landing page.

Test Idea #2: Make the entire site more like a micro-site

Another thing Adam mentioned along the lines of idea #1 was that the whole site might benefit from more of a micro-site look and feel.

“Don’t make a complex traditional website for the sake of making a complex traditional website,” Adam said. “You don’t have to have a big elaborate 10-20 page website with dropdown navigation. Keep it simple. Determine what your objective is and make it as simple as possible to accomplish that objective.”

One way to do this might be to create a navigation that is made up of four (or so) key benefits. So for instance, the links might be:

• Compatibility
• Battery Life
• How it works
•  FAQ

No dropdowns needed. Just four key sections, four single clicks.

• Transferrable Principle:

Sometimes you don’t need a website in a traditional sense. What you need is a way to effectively sell a product for the most profit. A website is just a means to an end. With that in mind, think of what your customer needs to know to make a decision and give it to them in the simplest and clearest way possible.

Test Idea #3: Communicate your credibility

Because of the novelty of the product, there might be some credibility issues in the visitor’s mind. Someone looking to purchase the product may be thinking about how reliable it is and what kind of track record it has.

To correct this, Adam proposed using the testimonials that are currently on the blog and moving them to a more appropriate place on the homepage to boost credibility. There is also the issue of who is giving you credit. It might also help to have some statements like, “Used by all the members of xyz hiking club in Portland, Oregon.”

Associations or organizations that use your products can be great credibility sources.

• Transferrable Principle:

Consider whether your ideal customer is questioning your credibility (Hint: they almost always are). If so, cite reliable and well known sources who like or use your product.

Test Idea #4: Optimize your buying process

Currently, the funnel for the buying process appears a little over-complicated. The site asks visitors to reserve a Powerpeg, then wait for it to be manufactured, and then pay if they’re still interested by the time it’s done. But it seems like it would be a lot simpler to go ahead and get the payment up front.

Once that’s in place, Adam pointed out that he would “make it clear that they are made to order. Tell the visitor how long it will take to build it and have some specific money back guarantees to reduce anxiety.”

If the reason for reserving the product ahead of time instead of a purchase was to get leads, there may be alternate means of achieving that goal. For instance, you may try testing an offer like: “First-time customers sign up for our newsletter and you’ll receive a coupon code for 10% off your first order.”

That way if they don’t order the same day, they have a coupon code to come back and complete the order, and you have an email address.

You might even lead the checkout page with a coupon code link under the code box that says: “Don’t have a coupon code? Get yours here.” And collect the lead that way.

• Transferrable Principle:

Friction in the buying process is one of the easiest things to reduce for large conversion rate lifts. Make your buying process as easy as possible and don’t ask for a lead when you should be asking for a sale.

Test Idea #5: Consider an up-sell

As Adam astutely observed in our conversation, an up-sell for this kind of consumer electronic product might also be a great idea. This is the kind of product that people might want two or three of for each member of the family. So depending on how many items people are currently buying per order, you may want to offer something like, “Buy two, get 10% off the second,” or “Buy 20, get one free.”

• Transferrable Principle:

If your product is something people may want multiples of or you have auxiliary offers, test having an up-sell or cross-sell in your purchase process. You may be leaving money on the table because someone wanted to buy more, but you didn’t offer it at the right time.

Test Idea #6: Lead with a clear headline

One of the main problems with this page that Adam pointed out was the lack of overall clarity about what the product is and what it can do.

As Adam said, “I see this image of people hiking. Although there is a description of what this image means, and since its small text, I’ll probably overlook this headline. So you’re wasting about 200px of space here with an image that doesn’t really communicate where I’m at or the value of the product.”

To fix this, lead with a clear headline at the top of the page, rather than the middle, that clearly states the name of the product and the primary benefit. Your sub-headline could then state the different uses or some secondary benefit of the product.

• Transferrable Principle:

The purpose of a headline is to drive the reader into the sub-headline or first paragraph. In doing that, it should help the viewer understand immediately that they are in the right place and they should stay on the page.

Test Idea #7: Use relevant imagery

Another problem Adam mentioned was the actual image used on the homepage.

“Instead of a picture of hikers, I’d use an image that more clearly communicates what the product is and how it works. The current image doesn’t connect the dots for me yet.”

One idea for a better image might be a diagram of how the product works. A video may also be a great idea here.

• Transferrable Principle:

Images should be as relevant as possible to the offer on the page and should communicate the value of the product in a way that copy cannot.

Test Idea #8: Move the call-to-action into the eye-path

The right side of the page looks like ads … which wouldn’t be so bad if the primary call-to-action (CTA) wasn’t there. The last thing you want your website visitors to think is that your CTA is an ad.

To fix this, simply drag your call-to-action to the bottom of the page after the viewer has been guided through the value of the product.

• Transferrable Principle:

As Flint McGlaughlin says in almost every Web clinic we’ve ever aired, keeping the CTA above the fold is like asking for a kiss before you’ve even had a conversation. What’s worse is putting the CTA among things that look like ads. Generally, a CTA should always be directly in the eye-path and after the visitor has been convinced of the value of the product.

Related Resources:

Website Optimization: Landing page test leads to 548% increase in conversion

How to Increase Conversion in 2012 — Web clinic replay

Website Optimization: How your peers increase their conversion rate…quickly

Categories: Landing Page Optimization Tags: buying process, call to action, credibility, headlines, landing page optimization, reducing friction, website

I’ve got a research question. Now what do I do with it?

A few weeks ago, Daniel Burstein wrote a blog about writing research questions. In that blog post, we emphasized the importance of asking “which” rather than “what” questions because a “which” question is clearly testable.

You might ask, “Which page format results in the most lead submissions?” or “Which price point generates the most revenue?” Both questions are clearly stated and include two key pieces of information:

• An independent variable you are going to test
• The dependent variable you will use to measure your results

To know if something is better, first you must know if it is different

With the research question on paper, we can easily create a hypothesis. For the former question: “All page formats will result in the same number of lead submissions.” This type of hypothesis is so famous in research circles that it has a name: “The Null Hypothesis.”

In general terms, the null hypothesis states that varying the independent variable will result in no change to the dependent variable.

In other words, you’re testing to see if changing the page (the independent variable) will change the number of leads (the dependent variable). After all, if there is no change, one cannot be any better than the other.

Why not “The new layout will result in the most lead submissions,” you ask. Because there is no concrete reason to know that there will be a change. Besides, if you already knew the effect of A on B, why would you need to test it?

Control vs. Treatment(s)

In most cases, there will be an existing page that all new versions will be compared to. This page is termed the “Control,” and all new pages are dubbed “Treatments” to guide comparisons later.

The next step in testing your research question is to decide on the most appropriate test structure. This will depend on the number of variations you will be testing, and on the amount of traffic your site receives. At MECLABS, our research analysts do this visually using a small flowchart to represent the flow of traffic to the control and treatment pages.

Take your latest research question and write it down. Below it, write out the following until you have listed all the variations to be tested.

Click to enlarge

At the right hand side of the page, write “All Traffic.” At this point, you need to determine if your traffic should be evenly split between all the tests or if you will pull only a small portion of  traffic into the treatment pages and maintain most of the flow to the existing Control page.

At MECLABS, our analysts use the Test Protocol document to determine how many site visits are required to achieve valid results given a set of treatments and typical conversion rates on the existing page. This process is covered in our Online Testing Course.

Split tests

Draw lines between “All Traffic” and the pages to the left showing the split and mark each with a percentage of traffic to be sent in that path (See below). This design is called a split test. It is very important that traffic is randomly split between the treatments and control. In a high traffic site, the percentage sent to the control can be higher than what is sent to the treatments, as long as you will easily meet the required minimum sample size.

Click to enlarge

Multi-factorial tests

The split test design works for tests of only one step, but sometimes we need to test more than one step in a process. We have two independent variables that we will manipulate separately. For example, if your research question is, “Which checkout process generates the most revenue?” you might want to test several variations of cart layout and payment page layout at the same time.

If you were to test [Cart and Payment Treatment 1] against [Cart and Payment Treatment 2], your results might tell you that [CT and PT 1] produced 15% more revenue than [CT and PT 2], but you would never learn that Cart Treatment 1 paired with Payment Treatment 2 would have yielded an even higher lift!

Essentially, you have two research questions: “Which cart design will generate the most revenue?” and “Which payment design will generate the most revenue?” This means you have two independent variables and one dependent variable.

To test multi-step processes, researchers use a research design called a factorial test. Each variation in each independent variable is tested together so that all combinations are tested. A typical factorial design is represented below.

Click to enlarge

Because the traffic is sent evenly to each pairing, the factorial research design accounts for the natural dependency between steps 1 and 2. If a viewer does not like Cart Treatment 1, they will not proceed to the Payment step, but since you have also tested other combinations of Cart and Payment, you can assume the effect is balanced out.

A factorial test requires a lot more traffic than a split test to achieve validity, but it also gathers a lot more insight. From the results of a factorial test, you can infer not only the winning combination but also which treatment of each step was most successful. This subtle distinction comes in handy if you then wanted to test further refinements of the process.

Click to enlarge

There are some situations that cause problems with research design. It may not always make sense to pair all the possible combinations together, in which case a factorial design is not possible and a split test should be used instead.

Don’t make the mistake of forming all but one or two pairs of the factorial design. An asymmetrical design does not neutralize the dependency of the second step on the first. In other words, if every factor isn’t matched with every possible other factor, you could overlook a potentially big lift.

Traffic volume is crucial for factorial tests

One common reason some marketers don’t run multi-factorial tests is a low-traffic page. For example, with only 3,000 hits a month, a 7% historical conversion rate, and six treatment pairs (2 payment designs x 3 cart designs), it could take as much as three years to validate the factorial design shown above!

When faced with an unreasonable completion time, you have a few choices to make. You can test fewer treatments, resulting in quicker accumulation of hits on each treatment, or you can test one step of the checkout process at a time.

You also have the option to test pairs of pages in a split test, losing the additional insights given by the factorial design. All of those options will reduce the time needed to validate the test.

Sequential tests

Some marketers try to learn about which treatment works best through sequential tests. Essentially, one page was live, or one email was sent, and then the page was changed, or another email was sent. One treatment is left online for a set period, followed by the next treatment, and so forth. This is usually because there was no test design to begin with, and marketers are comparing results after the fact.

This could also be because marketers do have a test design but are unable to split traffic. After all, if you can only direct traffic to a single page design at a time, you can only test pages sequentially. (However, with the wide availability of both free and paid optimization tools, this situation has become quite rare.)

Sequential tests are extremely prone to history effects, where an outside event or phenomenon affects the viewers’ behaviors on the site from one moment in time to another (see our Online Testing Course for more information on History Effects).

For example, an email sent out to the mailing list will increase traffic to whatever homepage treatment is currently online, distorting the actual effect of the design changes. This effect is usually noticeable as a sudden rise on an analytics traffic or conversion chart. Although it is not an optimal research design, this type of study can distinguish between a control and a treatment page. Results should only be interpreted if the possibility of history effect has been considered and found insignificant.

Related Resources:

Marketing Optimization: You can’t find the true answer without the right question

Artificial Optimization: Why at least 40% of marketers shouldn’t test

Marketing Optimization: How to determine the proper sample size

Categories: Analytics & Testing Tags: A/B split, multi-factorial testing, online testing, sequential tests, traffic volume

Great things happen … when you extend your manufacturer’s protection right away!

I recently wrote a blog post about the audacity of hype – how companies can overreach with their advertising claims … and the potential customers who just don’t believe them.

So today, on the flip side, let me address the copywriting that doesn’t say anything at all. Take the above headline, for example. For lack of a better word, let’s call this …

Blandvertising

Blandvertising is a wishy-washy marketing claim. Like the italicized headline above, it wants to mean something … but it just doesn’t mean anything.

Maybe because the marketer didn’t want to have to deal with Legal. Or maybe because the marketing manager or copywriter had an empty text box in InDesign and just had to throw something in there.

This background noise, this elevator music copywriting is a total waste of your marketing budget. If you’re paying for the opportunity to say something, whether with a direct mail piece, a PPC ad, on product packaging, or just on your website … then actually say something.

But what exactly? You’re crazy busy. Perhaps you’re not a writer. And you have an empty text box staring you in the face. What do you put in there?

Through our testing, we have found that …

Categories: Copywriting Tags: advertising, copywriting, headlines, specificity

Your customers may be flat out ignoring your latest news, offers, and ads. Don’t blame them. It’s simple human nature.

Take a quick look at your surroundings – your cubicle, your office, your solarium – wherever you’re reading this. How much do you notice what’s around you? I mean…really notice?

Not as much as you think you do, I’m guessing. Take a recent experiment run here in the labs. And by “experiment” I mean “practical joke run by our Associate Director of Optimization, Adam Lapp.”

Adam Photoshopped a picture of one of our Research Analysts, Ashley, posing with a friend. It’s the picture in this blog post. Perhaps it looks normal at first glance, but if you take a closer look, you can see that the blonde woman on the right looks a little, well, masculine.

That’s because Adam Photoshopped the face of a male Research Analyst over the face of Ashley’s female friend. He then replaced the photo she had hanging in her cubicle with this photo.

And, Ashley didn’t even notice her friend’s metamorphosis until someone pointed it out to her. Even though it was right in front of her face all day. Why?

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People don’t notice subtle changes in familiar environments

Now I don’t want to throw Ashley under the bus. I fully admit, I’m no better (and neither are you…or our customers).

For example, we recently moved the official offices of MarketingSherpa from Rhode Island to right here in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. I’ve been very cognizant of the need to look for where changes of that address need to be made on our many Web properties.

But I didn’t notice that the change wasn’t made on the MarketingSherpa Twitter page – even though I look at it at least five times a day.

However, when I was interviewing Ryan Amirault, Digital Marketing Manager, Whole Foods Market, for his case study at Email Summit 2012, he instantly noticed the location and started talking about Rhode Island.

So while being new to, say, a landing page, makes the customer more likely to notice the discreet marketing message, even novelty may not help…

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Invisible Gorilla Test

What we’re really talking about when we say “banner blindness” is a phenomenon scientists refer to as “inattentional blindness” or “selective attention.” The typical person is overloaded with visual stimuli and inputs of all sorts, making it simply impossible to focus on everything. So, people often overlook things that are right in front of their face.

One of the most famous examples of this is the Invisible Gorilla Test…

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Now, I may have already primed you to see the gorilla in the above video. However, when Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University ran this test, they found that, in most test subject groups, 50% of the subjects did not report seeing the gorilla.

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How can you get your customers to see your ads?

So if a gorilla doesn’t work, you might be thinking , “I need to go one step further. From now on, every ad I run will have a tap dancing chimpanzee with a neon tracksuit.”

Easy, big fella. You need not become a carnival barker to grab your audience’s attention. All I want to draw your attention to is the fact that what is obvious to you (since you likely eat, sleep, and breathe your marketing message) is not always readily apparent to your audience. And don’t take for granted that your message got across just because you put it at the top of your homepage.

Here are a few common sense thoughts to keep in mind as you seek to overcome banner blindness:

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Contrast: The more an object can stick out, due to bright colors, crazy patterns, or motion, the more people are likely to notice it. (Keep in mind, if you are running a pay-per-click ad, you want more than attention and curiosity clicks … you want quality clicks.)

Here is an example from the MarketingSherpa site. There is a clear contrast between the ad and its surroundings, thanks to the different color, the bright visual, and even in how “Reserve Your Seat” interrupts the “Limited seating still available” rectangle (please note, it comes out a little brighter on the screen than it does on the screen capture below).

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Click to enlarge

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A Multichannel Approach: Don’t think that just placing a message at the top of your homepage, smack dab in the middle (especially in a similar font as its surroundings), is enough to get your message across. I’ve made this mistake myself before. “What do you mean we didn’t tell people? It’s right there at the top of the homepage.”Most people won’t even see it. Especially if they visit your site often.

That doesn’t mean you can’t put your message there, it just means to reach your potential customers in as many way as possible with the message – email, social media, dedicated landing pages, offline communications – and not take for granted that the message was received just by placing it on your homepage.

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Get in the Middle: There are certain areas of webpages that most people usually relegate to background noise – the top and bottom headers, the right and left columns. When placing an ad, or putting information on your own site, try to get right into the middle of the content.

If you aren’t able to, try to make sure your information is at least at a natural stopping point for the content – for example, just to the right of or below the end of a blog post or article.

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Break out of the Box: Many marketers place information in a box on their homepages or landing pages that doesn’t necessarily need to be in that box…and therefore their audience is overlooking it.

From a headline on a homepage that is placed in a box (and therefore ignored) to testimonials that look like text-based ads, this mistake is all too common. When you’re on your own website, make sure you are not inadvertently making important information look like a banner ad that will be — you guessed it — totally overlooked by your visitors.

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Related Resources:

The Ultimate Click: How to get what you pay for with pay-per-click advertising

Banner Blindness: Optimize your online display advertising to stick out (or blend in)

Online Advertising: The 3 obstacles you must overcome to create an effective banner ad

Banner Ad Design: The 3 key banner objectives that drove a 285% lift

Banner Design Tested: How a 35% decrease in clicks caused an 88% increase in conversion

Categories: Internet Marketing Strategy Tags: banner, blindness, contrast, invisible gorilla test, marketing, message

What do you get when you divide Jacksonville Beach, Fla. by Arden Hills, MN? I’m sure there’s a punch line in there somewhere. However, if you were tracking your customers’ ZIP codes in a database you would have 32250/55112, or 0.585.

Never mind that it doesn’t make any sense to you and me to divide one ZIP code by another, but a statistical software package is happy to do exactly that for us. Most software just isn’t smart enough to realize that each ZIP code holds a discrete meaning from the next. It sees them as numbers: values which can be sorted in order and used in any type of calculation.

That is why researchers and statistical software packages classify variables into four main types: Nominal, Ordinal, Interval and Ratio.

In this post, I’m going to describe each type of variable to help you understand how they should be used, let you know how this can help improve your data collection…and, while we’re at it, help you sound sharp the next time you’re chatting with your data analyst at the water cooler.

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Nominal Variables: Used to describe categories

Variables are classified by the structure of what they represent. For example, ZIP codes are an example of a Nominal variable, a categorical name which simply allows us to differentiate between groups.

Gender and Ethnic group are other common examples of this type. Only a limited number of statistical analyses are valid for this type of variable. We can count how many customers have each ZIP code, and compare the counts to see what is most common (Statisticians call this most frequent value the Mode).

We cannot “average” their ZIP codes to determine a population center, or calculate correlations between ZIP code and a customer satisfaction index because there is no real meaning to a “higher” or “lower” numerical ZIP code.

If we wanted to know about geographic patterns in customer satisfaction, we would have to take the average satisfaction index for each ZIP code and compare those averages to one another. Browser type and operating system are two other common Nominal variables.

Word of Caution – This first one seems obvious, but keep in mind it is an easy oversight to have a number in a spreadsheet or database inadvertently become part of a calculation.

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Ordinal Variables: Used to rank preference

The next level of complexity is represented by the Ordinal variable. Ordinal variables are sequential; they advance in a direction but the increments on the scale are unknown or uneven.

For example, the organizational chart of a company might show that the mailroom attendant is below the marketing analyst, and he in turn is below the vice president, who is below the president. There is a clear direction, but the relationship between ranks is not consistent.

In marketing research, consumers sometimes rank new products in order of preference. They do not necessarily like product 1 twice as much as product 2, or 3 twice as much as 4. So when analyzing the data from the test, a researcher can find the Mode, or calculate the middle ranked item (the Median), but it is not valid to calculate the “average rating” given to an item. Because the distance between items on the scale is unknown it is not possible to really tell an average value.

Calculations such as addition and multiplication can be done with ordinal data, however any calculation made on one must be consistently made on all items in the data set, in order to maintain the proportions and order of all members of the data set.

Word of caution – One common survey scale is the Likert scale, which allows respondents to rate their agreement with statements on a 5- or 7-point scale from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree.” Because there is no way to know the difference between “Strongly Agree” and “Agree” in the mind of each respondent, or to ensure that each respondent is consistent in their judgments, these results are Ordinal data.

Many research studies treat Ordinal data as Interval data (more on that next), making a basic and sometimes flawed assumption that the scale represents a consistent interval between one ranking and the next. While each individual will be relatively consistent in their ratings, there is no consistency between individuals. This creates a limitation on the generalization of the results of the calculations, but this type of analysis may still offer significant insights into your data. It is important to understand that the results from such an analysis are imprecise and should only be interpreted generally, rather than by comparisons of small differences.

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Interval and Ratio Data: Now we can get into the valuable number crunching

Both Interval and Ratio variables possess not only a sequence, but an even interval. Here’s where it gets tricky: the difference between the two types is zero. Yes, 0.

Interval variables may have a point which we designate “zero,” however negative numbers are theoretically possible.

A Ratio variable has a real zero point, a point which nothing can be below.

For example, an item’s price can be zero, or “free,” but price is not a Ratio value. Why? Because -$1.99, or a negative price, is conceptually possible. Take German government bonds. In a recent auction, the bonds yielded negative 0.0122%.

We try never to pay our customers to purchase our products, but theoretically, negative price has meaning. Therefore, price is an Interval variable.

Many true Ratio variables are found in marketing research. “Number of Page Visits” and “Time on Page” are common Ratio variables. The good news is that almost all statistical techniques used in marketing research can be applied to both Interval and Ratio data. Mean, Median, Mode, Correlation, Standard Deviation and ANOVA are all equally valid with both types of data.

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So what does this mean for you?

When you design your experiments, think about the type of variables you will be collecting data for. Interval and Ratio variables allow the most flexibility in statistical analysis, so whenever possible try to use them rather than Ordinal or Nominal data. A survey question could ask “which of the following tasks have you undertaken in the last 24 hours?” which produces a multiple choice, Nominal, answer.

It could also ask, “Please rank these tasks from most to least recently undertaken,” which produces Ordinal data and allows some additional analysis.

Finally, the survey could ask, “At what time and date did you last undertake these tasks?” producing concrete Interval data which will allow you to compare between respondents and run in depth statistical functions.

In the design phase of your marketing tests, think about the statistical data you would like to produce, and what variable types are required to calculate the results you need in order to answer your research questions. When you enter your data into a statistical software package, be careful to designate the correct variable type in the software so that the program can prevent you from dividing Florida by Minnesota.

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Related Resources:

Marketing Optimization: You can’t find the true answer without the right question

Research Update: The state of email marketing testing and optimization

Marketing Optimization: What your peers learned this year about Adwords, the inbox, and telling the truth

Evidence-based Marketing: How your peers protect against bad marketing data

Categories: Analytics & Testing Tags: interval, marketing, metrics, nominal, ordinal, ratio, software, testing, variable