Banner ads are the billboards of the information superhighway. And much like billboards, many of them can be so downright, well, annoying. And much like a garish billboard detracting from the natural beauty of a scenic drive, so many banner ads are so downright … well … annoying.

Or obtuse. I see your big logo, but what on Earth is the value to me to stop engaging with the content on the page (the reason I came here) and give you a click?

So how do you design banner ads that get results?

We’re sharing our discoveries about banner advertising in today’s Web clinic (educational funding provided by HubSpot) at 4 p.m. EDT – Banner Ad Design: The 3 key banner objectives that drove a 285% lift.

But before we share our discoveries, we wanted to hear how your marketing peers handle display advertising. Here are a few of our favorite responses…

Optimization based on data

My perspective comes from the agency side, working with very large/recognizable brands running complex acquisition and awareness campaigns, for which we create very specific goals and use robust measurement and management/optimization tools to attain them.

There are two approaches to banner campaign optimization. The first considers the banner alone as the source of performance; the second considers the banner within the context of the page on which it’s displayed.

The ‘banner alone’ approach assumes a champion design/ad copy combination will perform equally well across the spectrum of publishers and viewer contexts they present – page design, content, number of ad spots, etc. – that exist in a media plan. However, the reality is that while on each publisher you can find a best-performing creative, that banner variant very rarely will deliver those same best results across your entire plan.

The programs I design, therefore, lean heavily on the second approach, which facilitates optimization based on data, not assumptions (albeit informed) about design or copy that will work best. At the outset, we intentionally design multiple banner variants and then, by observing response metrics, let the audience show us the best variants.

The results inevitably surprise us. Banners we think will be dogs wind up doing extremely well on certain sites – or within certain viewer contexts. Ultimately, this approach drives faster optimization and better overall results because we have so much to work with in terms of testing and optimization. Also, based on how we tag our creative, we’re able to create even more granular optimization over time, getting down to performance at the line-item level of our media plans.

None of this is meant to discount the importance of banner design. Obviously, what banners say, the interaction they offer, etc., all impact performance. When we focus on optimizing banner design, we take the same approach as to landing page optimization by changing single elements at a time, measuring, and building on the results.

In summary, we’ve found that by far the most economical approach is to avoid drawing assumptions up front about what will perform best, to instead launch with a broad portfolio of creative, and to let the people show us the way!

– Wesley Picotte, Web strategist, Experience Lab

Banner ad process checklist

1. You have to follow good design principles for anything visual.
2. You have to keep your goal in mind: What are you trying to get the audience to do? Visit the website to learn more information? Sign up for something? Use your service? Buy your product?
3. Customize your ads to your target audiences. It doesn’t make sense to talk about being a mom if you’re showing your ads to college-aged people.
4. Create multiple versions of your banner ad. Change up the position of elements, color scheme and ad copy. Change up your target audience if you must.
5. Track, and TRACK CORRECTLY!
6. Measure against desired outcomes. Back everything into your ROI and optimize based on goal achievement.
7. Find something that works and try to scale it. Ride the working creative as long as you can, because at some point it won’t deliver your ROI anymore. Keep working at it, because marketing is a living, breathing process that never ends.
8. Enjoy the work of the process, because otherwise you’ll drive yourself crazy.

– Aaron Welch, Social media manager, Genesis Today Inc.

Banner ad design checklist

1. Follow a minimalistic approach. Don’t clutter your banner with too much information/objects.
2. Preferably no Flash or gif. But, if that is very necessary, try to be as ‘decent’ with it as possible.
3. The graphic or character in your banner should ideally relate to the service/product you wish to advertise.
4. Caption should be about 3 words, and descriptive text should not exceed two lines (15 words).
5. Very important. Have a strong but not desperate call-to-action in your banner.
6. I understand that you want to attract attention with vibrant color schemes, but make sure it is not unpleasant to the eye.
7. Readability. Shadows, textures, gradients, outlines – all look great as long as I can read the text in your banner.
8. Important related aspect – optimize your landing page so when somebody clicks on the banner ad, he doesn’t “bounce” because of a bad landing page.

– Nivesh Jain, SMO Executive, Invensis Technologies

Related Resources:

Banner Ad Design: The 3 key banner objectives that drove a 285% lift (Today’s Web clinic)

How to Test Your Value Proposition Using a PPC Ad

Search Marketing: Three questions to help you think like your potential customers

This Just Tested: PPC vs. banner ads?

In our most recent Web clinic, Shopping Carts Optimized: How a few tweaks led to 12% more revenue across an entire ecommerce website, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin shared our recent discoveries from our consumer marketing experimentation, set out a strategic approach to shopping carts and gave a few helpful fishing tips to boot.

As usual, we received more questions than we could possibly answer live during the Web clinic. A few were simple and straightforward (to which I say, “Yes,” “Maybe,” “One form field for name instead of three,” and “By the pier in Jacksonville Beach using Mayport shrimp as bait.”)

But one question particularly caught Dr. McGlaughlin’s eye…

How long should a shopping cart be? Is it better to have a long page or many short steps?

I passed this question around the lab, and here’s what our researchers had to say. We’d love to hear what you’re learned from your tests as well…

It depends on your product

I think this really depends on the product.  If you have a very simple product, like a DVD, you know what you’re getting as soon as you click “Add to Cart,” so I would get them through the process as quickly as possible.

If you have a more customized process, like ordering flowers with different vases and greeting card variations, I have no problem breaking them each out to their own special page so we can hammer home the value of each step without over-cluttering the long form. This also allows us to better track which specific step someone is dropping off on so that we can more easily determine the leaks in the funnel.

In the end, you have to test checkout process length.

– Tony Doty, Research Manager

The two optimization factors that you must balance

To the customer, shopping cart page length may be irrelevant unless the length is driven by unnecessary information.

I ran a test and discovered that reducing unnecessary fields on a single page inside the checkout funnel resulted in an increase in finishes, whereas including these fields in a similar process outside of the cart resulted in more conversions.

To the client/site, it is preferable to measure in multiple pages so they can track where the leaks are in the funnel.

If everything is one big page, it makes it much more difficult to track where or what causes a visitor concern enough to abandon.

In this case, showing the customer where they are in the process (progress indicator) helps keep the balance and alleviate the effects of that type of process friction (perceived process length).

– Jon Powell, Research Manager

Reinforce the value proposition

Optimizing the shopping cart path – including its length, sequencing of steps/forms, etc. – should conform to our foundation landing page optimization/conversion index analysis tenets. For instance:

• Not asking for any more information than you need
• Not asking for information you do need before you need it (to complete the process step)
• Managing form length and eye-path
• Avoiding ‘visual barriers’ such as horizontal bars across the page, etc.

The emphasis shifts slightly upon transitioning from ‘offer’ phase to ‘cart’ phase, shifting from ‘expression’ of the value proposition towards ‘support’ or ‘reinforcement’ of the value proposition to sustain (rather than build) cognitive momentum toward conversion.

– Bob Kemper, Director of Sciences

Optimize the page or the path

There are two approaches you can test to see which works best with your customers and products. Either have a clear descriptions of the steps (breadcrumbs) to let customers know how many to expect and where they are in the whole process, or create one longer page that includes all necessary billing and shipping fields.

– Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe, Research Analyst

Test on new and repeat customers

How long should a shopping cart be? It is better to have a long page or many short steps? It depends.

Every retailer should test as many different checkout processes as they can. Retailers need to know what their customer target group responds better to. Some visitors will prefer one single, long step and others will prefer a couple of short steps.

Probably for repeat customers, short checkout process (1-2 steps) will work well because they already trust the retailer and are familiar with the process. But even in this case, it is important to test.

– Gaby Paez, Associate Director of Research

Be brief and be thorough

I personally prefer a short cart, incorporating all of the steps in one with accordion-style sections. With this type of a checkout process, it’s easy to get back to previous steps with an ‘edit’ link and it appears short while still collecting all of the needed information.

My favorite checkout process is Gap/Banana Republic/Piperlime – it’s super intuitive and really easy to get back to any step to make a change

My biggest pet peeve is when a checkout does not work in a certain browser. I use Google Chrome, and the other day I was looking at something on the Hobo International site and I couldn’t select from a drop down in Chrome, but when I went to Firefox it worked. Most customers wouldn’t be that dedicated or might not think to check another browser.

– Gina Townsend, Director of Operations

Related resources

Free Web Clinic, May 18, 4-5 p.m. – Optimization Researched: Latest findings about effective LPO practices based on data from 2,673 marketers

Web Clinic Replay – Shopping Carts Optimized: How a few tweaks led to 12% more revenue across an entire ecommerce Website

E-commerce: How your peers optimize shopping carts and product pages

E-commerce Shopping Carts: How a redesigned checkout process led to 13% increase in conversion rate

Shopping Cart Abandonment: How not being annoying can get you 67% more cart completions

Value proposition is one of the most popular topics we teach about. Getting your value proposition right is maddeningly difficult but highly rewarding. As they say in “The Town” before robbing Fenway Park, “If it was easy, everyone would do it.”

So, it wasn’t surprising that we received an inordinate amount of questions during our recent Web clinic – Do You Have the Right Value Proposition? How to test, measure, and integrate your Value Proposition online.

Unfortunately, we can’t answer every single question we receive. But I passed several of the questions around the labs, and here is what our research team had to say…

Q: What can you recommend for a new business that may not have an established record to say we have the most, best, etc?

– Erik P

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin: Well I’ll tell you what consultants do. They offer to work for somebody at a loss or free or at a reduced rate to get some big names to write your way into it. That’s how you’re trained. Then you go back and say, “We did work for American Express.” Never mind the fact that you offered to do the project for free so that you could claim that you did work for American Express. Then they go back and do two more big brands and they leverage it.

So, the reality is the only thing you can do in the beginning of the company is to justify why you’re in that company to begin with – and often it’s because you spent 20 years working in the industry as the senior vice president of X.

Use your story to justify your place. A proper compelling story – like the team itself.

What does a venture capitalist buy? I’m telling you right now, if you give your business plan to a private equity or a VC group, they’re going to look at your value prop in the front, flip all the way to the back of the book and look at your team. Who are these guys? What have they done before?

And they’re going to base most of what they do with you on the team. And that’s not just my own experience, I read the exact statement last night in a book. They’ll skip all of that to get straight to the chase. Same thing I did.

My point is, a team is a series of stories of the people behind it and you have to leverage it. Especially in a service business.

Q: When you conduct tests, is it necessary to track through to successful sales conversion (i.e. buying) – to REALLY see which messages work for those people who are your customers? Or is it OK to just test through to the action (ie, clicking through on your offer)?

– Amy P.

Spencer Whiting: Certainly tracking it through to the Key Performance Indicator is preferable. We have had situations that this is not possible. In that case, a click can be tracked to get an indication of how pages are performing.

The risk is that a simpler call-to-action, with very little information, may very well produce more clicks, but visitors are actually clicking because they are just curious. These curiosity clickers are not buyers. If you were using the CTR as a measure of success, the simpler page may very well win, but ultimately be the poorer performer.

Q: Can every business find its value proposition?

– Svetlana P.

Bob Kemper: Hi, Svetlana, good question. While every business should be able to express “a” value proposition, that does not mean that it is the company’s “best” value proposition, let alone the (separate) company’s PRODUCT value proposition.

Further, it does not necessarily mean that it is a “compelling” or “effective” value proposition. Here is a more detailed discussion of how to discover your optimal value proposition, with a step-by-step process.

Q: In Step 4, how do you measure which performs the best? Clickthrough? Or final conversion? I am assuming that the audience is always the same across all the tests.

– Randhir V.

Spencer Whiting: Final conversion.

Q: We are an equipment manufacturer. We need the VP defined BEFORE we define and build the product (12-24 months before intro). How can you use this research approach in that context?

– Rice W.

Gaby Paez: This is actually a great case for a value proposition test. Even when the product does not yet exist, you at least know or have an idea of your target segment, how would they search for this new product, and most appealing benefits of the new product.

You can setup your value proposition test with PPC, affiliate, and/or display traffic channels and direct traffic to a landing page that briefly talks about the new product. Also, you could have a short survey to collect additional information that could help the product building process. It is likely you won’t receive many submissions, but it won’t hurt having it. The goal of the test is to see which ad of your campaign collected the most clicks.

Q: Thanks for the chance to ask a question. What is the difference between a value proposition and a university’s mission statement?

– Daryl S., Manager, Media and Communications

Spencer Whiting: To me a mission statement is used to focus the efforts of an organization and the value proposition is a statement of an organization’s value is to its customers.

Q: How did you solve for pre-existing brand awareness among respondents?

– Larry M, CMO

Bob Kemper: Good question. Since the test is conducted using live production traffic, “solving” for brand awareness is secondary to raw relative performance. Once that’s established, then – particularly if there was a comparatively small difference in effect size among multiple treatments – we might study that attribute in a subsequent test iteration.

Q: If different values resonate with different channels, why use PPC so heavily to determine which value to focus on?

– Jon S.

Spencer Whiting: The benefit of determining your value proposition through PPC is that for a relatively small investment you can determine the value proposition for each channel or keyword. Creating a very clear and specific value proposition is the most important aspect of the sales process that you can control.

Related Resources

Value Proposition: How your peers find the most effective value prop

How to Test Your Value Proposition Using a PPC Ad

Powerful Value Propositions: How to Optimize this Critical Marketing Element – and Lift Your Results

Value Prop: Is there true value in your marketing proposition?

Email design always proves to be a hot topic with marketers. And when you have top agencies competing against each other, the fire just gets hotter as we learned during last week’s live web clinic – Maximize your Agency ROI: How adding science to the creative process reveals a 26% gain.

We received a plethora of questions, most which we could did not have time to address during the hour-long clinic. So, as with every Web Clinic Extra, we have picked a handful of the most common questions to address here on our blog. This week we pulled in Andy Mott, the Senior Manager of Research Partnerships, to answer these questions…

Email marketing is a topic that comes up often in the MarketingExperiments community. In fact, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin is delivering a keynote today at Em@il Summit ’10 in Miami as well as teaching a pre-summit Live Email Optimization Workshop. If you couldn’t make it out there this year to get valuable insights from your peers and industry leaders, come back to the blog on Friday for some key takeaways from this year’s summit.

You can view a replay of the clinic or read the latest issue of MarketingExperiments Journal. Our next live web clinic, The Five Best Ways to Optimize Email Response (Part 2): How to craft effective email messages that drive your customers to action, will be taught on February 3rd from 4 to 5 p.m. EST.

Students and alumni of the MarketingExperiments Training and Certification Program often share their questions and concerns with our analysts before, during, and after they take one of our courses. The questions below are an example of the interaction you can expect if you attend a MarketingExperiments course:

Q: Do you know any other resources, except MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa, that are good at providing useful insights from case studies?

Believe it or not, I’ve been in this Internet marketing field for two years (you’re probably here a lot longer) and been through a lot of misleading information until I accidently found you guys and really learned how to test things and see if they REALLY work instead of blindly believing some “gurus” who told me something like…”this is tested and it’s working 100%!” (the only thing that was truthful was that 100% thing…the problem was that almost 100% of what they were telling me didn’t work.

Surely others – for example online marketing consultancies – will offer to advise you on changing your website to improve performance and will use a third-party testing tool to measure the impact. Also, some of the large-scale testing tool vendors offer hosted and/or managed service engagements using their products.

Unfortunately, as you said, most other organizations are not research focused. MarketingExperiments is a research institute dedicated to discovering what really works in online marketing to help our Research Partners, certification program students, and Journal subscribers succeed. So there are very few resources we can point you to.

One notable exception is the award-winning Get Elastic blog written by ecommerce analyst Linda Bustos. Get Elastic provides useful insights about SEO (search engine optimization), usability, analytics, email, shopping cart abandonment, and social media. Linda is also a MarketingExperiments certified optimization professional and knows our methodology inside-out.

Q: I’ve been through your Fundamentals of Online Testing course. You teach about landing page and order page optimization. I was wondering if you have some specific advice/studies where the SEO effectiveness of a campaign was tested (SEO, not paid traffic) because I can’t find any valid way to measure the effectiveness of an SEO campaign.

Regarding testing in which the primary channel is “natural search” or SEO traffic, we do have considerable experience working with companies and organizations for whom SEO is a significant portion of their demand, and we have published some research on the topic. In fact, all of our research is readily available for free in the MarketingExperiments Research Directory.

As you’re already aware, based upon your question, there are a number of challenges associated with the dramatic differences between the key optimization factors over online marketers can control when choosing between PPC (pay per click) and SEO. Specifically, not only is there a relative dearth of information available to search marketers as compared to paid advertising, the search networks are comparatively opaque about their results-positioning algorithms and tend to change them frequently to confound SEO-gamers. Further, the rate at which changes to a site are detected by the networks and “shaken into the mix” is volatile and unpredictable.

Consequently, the MarketingExperiments approach is to evaluate the subject site/page based upon the principles of Offer/Response-Optimization – such as the Conversion Heuristic that you learn in the Landing Page Optimization course – then develop hypotheses about how to improve its performance and test those hypotheses using paid search traffic (which is designed to mirror the motivation profile of their ideal customers through SEO). This provides comparatively rapid and precise evidence about the specific factors of study. Then, those test results are used in concert with the latest SEO-algorithm information to develop the channel-specific page designs and a plan for deploying them to get the largest and most rapid performance gain.

Q: Do you have some advice/case studies about testing the effectiveness of an online service?

For example, a site like Traffic Bug submits your URL to social networks (Connotea, Propeller) automatically and claims that this increases your rankings and indexes your pages.

I want to do a test to see if what they say is true. I would take 10 very obscure pages (to be exact, profile links) that are rarely indexed by Google. I create 10 of those obscure pages on different URLs and do nothing with them. Then I create 10 pages on the same URL and submit them to Traffic Bug. I wait for seven days.

Of course, I make sure everything is satisfied in terms of validity and all that. So I wait for seven days (that’s the first milestone, I then check them again after 30 days but let’s focus on the period after seven days) and then take a look. My sample size is small but what I’m interested in is discovering if this service is highly effective in indexing pages on Google.

So if the first sample (that is not submitted) gets one out of 10 pages indexed and the second sample (which is submitted) gets nine out of 10 pages indexed, and I make sure that this is a valid test (using the MarketingExperiments validation formula from the Fundamentals of Online Testing course), can I assume an online service is very effective?

I wanted to hear your comments on this. What do you think is wrong/right with the above test and what would be some things to do for improvement? Also, do you think that a sample size of 10 is big enough for a test to discover whether an online service has a dramatic effect?

While the approach you described appears sound in principle, you will probably have difficulty actually achieving valid results based upon the circumstances you outlined. And even if the results are valid, they may not really answer your question.

In evaluation of a tool like this, a different approach may serve you better. When building an SEO campaign and links there are other things to consider:

1. Are you sure where all these links are getting posted? Some indexing tools use less-than-kosher link-building strategies that can actually get your domain in trouble with search engine providers. The appearance of link spamming and posting links on flagged sites can cause domains to suffer penalties that can affect the ranking of their sites…occasionally on a permanent basis.
2. Are these links actually driving traffic and revenue? Many indexing services cost money and you need to perform due diligence with an ROI analysis to see if the efforts are recouping their costs.
3. Does the service provide a list of links they have generated for tracking? Not only is this good for tracking but allows you to see the places your links are getting placed. Some business owners consider it (as you should too), important to see the company you are keeping on these sites.  For example, are links to, “Adam’s XXX site” right next to your link or the content on these pages? You can use tools like Yahoo Site Explorer or Google Webmaster Tools to fish out these links, but the service should do this for you.
4. It is important to note that we are not accusing Traffic Bug of doing any of these things, but with any sort of service along these lines you need to do your research first.

From your experience, how would you answer the above questions? Share your advice in the comments section.

Special thanks to Director of Sciences Bob Kemper and Research Analyst Corey Trent for their help in answering these questions.

You can hear Senior Manager of Research Partnerships Andy Mott answer the question How Can You Make Your Web Site Smarter? on the replay of Omniture’s latest webinar. But in my experience with these events, there is usually an interesting back story. So I cornered Andy in his office at a vulnerable time (his beloved Gators had recently lost the SEC Championship game) and found out what he really wanted to say…

Q: You discussed the 2009 Omniture Online Conversion Survey on a recent Omniture webinar. What surprised you the most?

Well I won’t say this surprised me. Maybe saddened is a better word. The survey asked “How frequently is online marketing testing employed in your company?” About half of the respondents said infrequently or never.

Q: Wow! That is pretty shocking, especially considering that these people are already familiar with testing through Omniture or MarketingExperiments. Maybe I could understand if this were the general population of marketers. But why have testing tools in place and not test? Why do you think half of them are flying blind?

Well people know they need to test. They probably know their competitors are testing and getting results. But the idea of executing a test is such a paradigm shift in the way that they’ve always done things.

Those that are higher in an organization tend to be more experienced. And if they are more experienced, they may be locked into the advertising agency way of doing things from 30 years ago, just like the doctor who overlooks recent findings and does what worked best for him when he went to medical school.

Q: Change is difficult. But still, thirty years ago these same people were also wearing polyester and doing the hustle. I’m a little skeptical that they would still try to shoehorn old media principles into new media.

It’s not intentional. If something has always worked for you, why change?

But what we really have is the tyranny of best practices. I’ll give you a great example. Many marketers still believe that they must have the call to action “above the fold” on a web page. Yet testing has shown this to be an utter myth.

Q: And nothing disproves a best practice better than a test that shows what actually works for their specific situation.

That’s the thing. Once companies start testing and see the ROI they are absolutely hooked.

Q: How do you take that first step? For, say, an email marketing manager reading this, how do you create a culture of testing in an organization?

Business-level executives don’t care about optimization or testing or even online marketing really. What they care about is results. So you need to talk to them in their language.

At MarketingExperiments, we publish all of our research and it is available for free. So go to the research archive and pull some experiments so you can show example results and make the business case for testing. At this point, all you are looking for is a small budget to begin testing.

Those first tests will help you establish a beachhead that you can use to further penetrate the organization. Because once businesses see the results they can gain from testing, it can get addictive. It’s like eating chips while watching a football game, you just can’t stop.

Q: The challenge is to just get the ball rolling. This sounds great in theory. Do you have any real-world examples?

I have countless examples. Since we started this conversion by talking about my recent webinar with Omniture, let me tell you about a Research Partner that first got interested in testing by attending an Omniture webinar that featured Dr. Flint McGlaughlin.

Companies that test usually like to stay anonymous because they view this process as such a competitive advantage. So I’ll just say they are a very large financial institution.

So this marketing manager attended Flint’s webinar and was totally sold. He was convinced that they should begin testing. But he’s only responsible for a very small patch in this giant company. It took him six months to get the approval to begin testing, doing the things I previously mentioned.

Q: Six months? It’s easy to get discouraged in that time. I’m not sure how many people would see it through.

But here’s the kicker. That marketing manager and his boss are now charged with trumpeting this win across the entire organization. He is now in front of his boss’s boss’s boss presenting his test results. In fact, in a few days he will be presenting in front of the SVP committee that advises the CEO.

Q: Well then he must have achieved some really out-of-this-world test results. What did he get…three digits…four digits? I mean, how common is that?

They got a 38% revenue boost over what the agency was doing.

Q: Well, that sounds decent, but a committee of SVPs really cares about 38% in one test?

You say that because you are so used to the power of testing, so you just want to see huge numbers. Let me put this another way – by not testing they would have been leaving 38% more money on the table since the cost of testing was infinitesimal compared to their massive marketing budget.

And that’s the thing. This company has a huge marketing budget. They sponsor the Olympics. They name stadiums. They purchase a ton of media. And since they don’t have space to sell in most of these executions, they’re driving everyone to the website. So if they find they could make more 38% more money without having to increase any of these huge marketing spends, the increase in ROI is humongous. Even a one or two percent increase could make or break a quarter.

Q: I see. I didn’t make the connection to that old media marketing spend. But I would think it goes beyond just old media driving people to a website. Online marketing is growing by leaps and bounds. I would think companies want to make sure they are getting a return on that investment as well. According to Forrester Research, digital spending will nearly double over the next five years at the expense of traditional marketing.

Forget five years from now, even today companies spend more than $25 billion on interactive marketing – things like mobile marketing, social media, email marketing, display advertising, and search marketing. That is 12% of all advertising spending. So when enterprises, like that financial institution I discussed, learn that they can take just a tiny fraction of the spend on this growing segment and invest it in a way that ensures the effectiveness of everything else they do – with real-world, statistically valid data – they get very excited.

Q: And I would think, for the employees that can tell management “I know how to get the best ROI from this” – not think or have an opinion, but know with real numbers – that’s quite a smart career move.

If other people are discussing so-called “best practices” and you’re showing real results, then you become the go-to person. The one who knows how this stuff really works. Because nothing defeats the tyranny of best practices as well as the audacity of testing.

And if you’re the guy that knows the right things to do in an explosively growing field like Internet marketing, while marketing budgets on everything else are falling, you’re in a good place no matter what the economy is doing.

How did you get the ball rolling on testing in your organization? What are your biggest challenges to create a culture of testing in your organization? Share your triumphs and challenges in the comments section below or post them to our MarketingExperiments Optimization group.