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

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Lee Gomes describes his search through 2.27 gigabytes of search data from AOL.

According to his research, the single word which appeared most frequently in searches on AOL over the period covered was “free”. The second most popular word was “now”.

It’s curious how some words and short phrases become clichés when over-used, while others, like Free, retain their meaning and punch. It seems that however often we see “Free”, whether on product packaging, TV ads or the web…we still find the word compelling.

However, simply including the word in your headline is not enough to maximize conversions.

Currently we are working on our next webinar…which happens to be free…and the topic is “Optimizing Free Trial Offers”.

We will be sharing test data collected from tests with two of our research partners. In both cases we show how a free offer page can be optimized to deliver far better results, without having to change the offer itself.

In fact, in both cases, conversions were almost doubled simply by making careful changes to the design and copy.

The webinar is being held on Wednesday, August 23rd at 4:00PM EST. You can sign up here.

If you work in the online world you can hardly have missed all the latest talk about using video and video clips to promote products and services.

Suddenly, video clips are the way to go. And every marketer’s dream appears to be based on magically going “viral” on YouTube.com or some other video-sharing site.

Based on some of the comments from this recent article in the Chicago Tribune, online agency executives are eager to invest in this emerging “medium”.

We have a feeling that most of the money going into “video clip marketing” will be wasted. It will be clutter. Just like the last round of rich media investments.

This doesn’t mean to say we don’t believe in the potential of video online. Far from it. In fact, we are currently looking for research partners to explore this further.

However, it is our guess that agencies and companies will rush into video marketing with sales-centered clips, and be disappointed by the results.

While further research will reveal more, some initial testing indicates that there are three basic ways to go with video.

1. Use video to deliver information and add a depth to your web site content in a way that is either hard or impossible to achieve with text and static images alone. (Here is an example from one of our partners, National Alert Registry.)

2. Use video as a “how to” demonstration tool. (How to install a video card in your computer, how to make a Caesar Salad, how to install a dish washer etc.)

3. Or use video to entertain.

This third option will be hard to achieve for most companies. There are countless hundreds of thousands of video clips fighting for attention already, most of them made by enthusiastic amateurs. And the chances of any one clip going “viral” in a big way are very slim.

As we learn more about what really works with video clips, we’ll share our findings here and, in time, in the form of a full report.

One of the students from our Online Split-Testing Certification Program recently asked us for some clarification on the meaning of the term, Selection Effect.

If this sounds like a bit of a gray area to you as well, here is the answer we sent him:

Selection Effects is one of the 4 primary threats to test validity and represents the effect on a test variable, such as conversion rate for instance, that occurs as a result of having the sample that is collected be unrepresentative of the actual audience. For example, if you wanted to survey the New York City population about their support for tax reform and took your sample exclusively in the lobby of the Tiffany jewelry store, the results would be skewed due to Selection Effect.

Now, that is an extreme example using a mistake that most of us would be unlikely to commit. In the online world, though, you could have your sample skewed by Selection Effects in a more subtle way. An example occurred for us when we were working with a major news publisher. We had radically redesigned their subscription offer process for the electronic version and were in the middle of testing when they launched a new text link ad campaign from their main website to the electronic product.

This changed the mix of traffic arriving at the subscription offer process from one where virtually all traffic was coming from paid search engines to one where much traffic was arriving from a link internal to their website (highly pre-qualified traffic).

The average conversion rate increased overnight from 0.26% to over 2%. Had we not been monitoring closely, we might have concluded that the new process had achieved a 600%+ conversion rate increase.

This is an example of a Selection Effect validity problem that was not a mistake of design, but one of execution and process control.

We are working right now on our next free teleconference call, scheduled for August 9th at 4:00PM EST.

We’ll be presenting a merchandising calendar for the last five months of this year, with particular emphasis on the last eight weeks before Christmas.

In preparing the calendar, we asked ourselves just how well prepared online merchants are when it comes to the major retail buying season later in the year.

- While every online retailer knows that the eight weeks before Christmas is the busiest buying period of the year, are they truly prepared…right down to individual product promotions?

- Are fast growing companies certain that their technologies and platform are ready to handle the holiday spike in sales?

- Will they have sufficient customer service people trained and ready to serve by the time the first backorder or product availability problem occurs?

- Are marketing groups preparing promotions and PPC campaigns to make the most of this essential time of the year?

Our own research indicates that while a handful of online retailers have become quite sophisticated at merchandising for the holidays, many other companies have yet to put in place a marketing blueprint and merchandising calendar specifically designed for this perennial opportunity.

In this brief we will help you to develop such a blueprint and calendar, customized to your specific industry and target markets, and prepare you for what should be your most profitable period of the year.

If this topic interests you, please sign up for the MEC Merchandising Calendar for the Fall and Holiday Season 2006 webinar.

During our teleconference call on Wednesday we were talking about how it is becoming harder to maintain a strong ROI with many PPC campaigns. Increased competition is perhaps the major factor in reducing the profitability of campaigns which previously maintained a strong performance.

However, paid search experts are now having to contend with some interesting new changes over at Google.

In a recent article on Search Engine Watch, Jennifer Sleg digs a little deeper into what is happening with Google’s July 10th algorithm update.

It seems that Google is now judging the value of the content on the pages your point your ads to.

Not only is Google increasing bids on ads which target pages comprised mostly of ads and affiliate links, but are also deciding on whether a page’s content is actually of real value, even if it doesn’t carry ads.

According to the Search Engine Watch article:

“They also seem to be targeting advertisers who are advertising something similar or identical to other advertisers. This could get into a dangerous game of Google being the one to determine which competitor is the best and which will be required to pay more in order for their ads to continue running.”

This is where Google becomes judge and jury.

Wherever happens in the months and years to come, this is an important reminder that to achieve long-term success your business and your web site need a strong and unique value proposition, and a significant volume of truly original and useful content.

If your company or organization has a large list of email subscribers, you may find yourself struggling to create email and newsletter content that is compelling for each and every reader.

Big lists tend to include groups who have varying interests. People may have signed up at different times, for different reasons and in response to coverage of different topics.

This is why more and more companies are now segmenting their house lists into smaller groups of names.

Segmenting your list into sub-lists enables you to create content that targets smaller interest groups. The outcome is that you end up being interesting and relevant to each group…rather than writing content that is generic enough to suit everyone, but engages nobody.

If you doubt the wisdom of list segmentation, take a look at the chart in this blog entry at Aweber.com.

In a nutshell, smaller lists achieve higher open rates, and largely for the reasons stated above.