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

Quality traffic is essential for any marketing campaign. Shoot, it’s essential for any successful business. You could have a highly valuable product (let’s say a real cure for male baldness), at the best price (let’s say for just a shipping address with no strings attached), and the most optimized website presentation on the interwebs (let’s say it has undergone a year of MECLABS testing), but despite these advantages, if there are no address-owning bald men who can find your website, well then your business will look a lot like me trying to drive a stick-shift.

Ok, crazy example, but the point is this: Quality traffic is essential.

The question for marketers is – where can we find the most quality traffic on the Web? Should we work with Pay-Per-Click (PPC)? Is it smart to invest in social media? Will external website banner ads be worth the costs? There are many options out there, but today, I want to bring your attention to an experiment that compared the traffic quality between two of the most common online channels: PPC vs. Banner Ads.

Now, explaining this test will be a little more tedious than usual because it deals with multiple experiments of a unique multi-step conversion funnel. But, rest assured, if you can just get a bird’s eye view of the optimization strategy, that viewpoint will be sufficient for what I am talking about in this post. Read more…

We say in our online courses that every element of a Web page must state or support the value proposition. But, what communicates the value of an offer better – a beautiful image or well-crafted copy? Do people tend to respond better to images or do they prefer copy?

All marketers have to face these questions at one time or another in the creative process, and recently, our research analysts had the opportunity to test this particular issue. You might be, as I was, surprised by the results. Read more…

Product pages are often the moment of decision for a visitor. They may have worked through categories and directories to land on the most relevant product to their needs; or they may have weeded through a sea of search ads to have finally arrived at your page. And now, only one question remains, “Is this product worth its cost?”

Recently, our research analysts were given the opportunity to test varying designs for a given product page. At the end of our experimentation, we had discovered a product page layout that increased revenue by 24%. What follows is an overview of the test and our findings. Read more…

I’m pretty sure I dislike pop-ups. Maybe it’s just a gut reaction to some pre-pop-up-blocker memory of my computer being overtaken by hundreds of pop-ups in mere seconds, but whatever it is, I just don’t like them. Immediately, I think of spammy, over-hyped, flashing messages with really bad clip art.

But am I throwing the proverbial baby out with some really obnoxious and annoying bath water? Well, at MarketingExperiments we test even our most strongly held website prejudges. We constantly challenge, test, and many times find holes in commonly-held “best practices.” And so, feeling a bit adventurous, our analysts took the opportunity to test the effectiveness of that frequently offensive marketing tactic – the popup. Read more…

Homepages are vital to any website. Many times, they can be the first interaction our prospects have on our website and therefore what we do (or don’t do) at that moment can significantly impact our future relationship with them. But this is not anything that most marketer intuition hasn’t picked up already – hence the constant battle lines drawn over use of the homepage.

Where the marketing intuition gets a bit fuzzy is when it comes to strategically actualizing all the goals we have for a homepage with an optimal design. We know what we want a homepage to do, but we just don’t know exactly how to make it happen.

And this is where a recent experiment might give us a little insight on how well we understand home page design. Below are two homepages that were recently tested.

Could you pick the better page on pure gut alone? Read more…

So often, beautiful design gets trumped by marketing objectives – and rightly so from a marketing perspective. The graphical elegance of a Web page might be worthy of an art exhibit, but if it doesn’t sell anything but “oohs” and “ahs,” what service does it really provide to anyone?

True, but it is at this point that we tend to divide. It’s them or us. Are you a marketer or a designer? Whose side are you on? As one popular design blog analyzes its relationship with marketing, “You can spell ‘team’ from the word ‘marketing,’ but I’ve yet to see a sense of it in marketing.”

But I think we (marketers) can and should live in both worlds. I believe design can be done in such a way as to actually contribute to the perceived value of an offer without being a distraction. I think marketing, whether they can measure it or not, is leaving money on the table when design is viewed as optional icing on the cake. Yes, I have a dream…

But, feelings aside, we must always default to testing – not our gut instincts. And so I was glad to see a recent experiment bring a little shimmer of hope to those of us who long for the day when these two often opposing worlds come together. Read more…