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

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Relevance is not born on your landing page. Relevance starts with the ad that the visitor clicked. With SES New York right around the corner (hope to see you there!), I wanted to discuss how your ads effectively shape your site visitors’ motivation. When you understand motivation, you can build ad-page pairs that maximize relevance, and consequently conversion.

Recently, I discussed how clarity helped RealGoodsSolar landing page keep visitors on the page. Today, I wanted to take a closer look at the different motivations that their landing page meets from paid Facebook, LinkedIn and AdWords traffic. Read more…

Having worked both in the Landing Page Optimization (a.k.a., Conversion Optimization) and Social Media sides of marketing, I am amazed how quickly the latter stole our hearts and minds, while the former continues to be a mystery for most marketers.

When I set out to write the LPO Benchmark Survey for MarketingSherpa this January (publication date: May 4), I naturally—and erroneously—assumed that just like all the past research partners I worked with at MarketingExperiments, and our workshop attendees, and our webinar audiences, the marketers that hear about our survey would be at least accustomed to LPO as a category.

The survey is out now (Editor’s note: the survey closed on Mar 1), but what has surprised me is the response rate, compared to the response rate to the Social Media Marketing benchmark survey, which was fielded only a month earlier. Read more…

This week marks the fielding of MarketingSherpa’s third annual Social Marketing Benchmark Survey. Looking back, I am fascinated at how far our practices have advanced in this channel in the past three years.

One of the most significant advances has been the materialization of the social marketing architecture.  This systematic redesign of how social media sites individually contribute to overall marketing performance, has also brought attention to the significant need to incorporate landing page optimization as an important element of a social marketing strategy. Read more…

In Flint McGlaughlin’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 session, our Managing Director (CEO) presented our well known and researched Email Messaging Optimization Index. I enjoyed the tweets that included the heuristic, eme = rv(of + i) – (f + a).

In a session on day three, Boris Grinkot, Associate Director of Product Development, MECLABS, moderated a panel — “Case Study: How to Track ROI for Social Media Campaigns” –where he announced that he is beginning to conduct research with Radian6 that will eventually serve as the basis for a social media marketing optimization methodology similar to the Email Messaging Optimization Index. Read more…

Here’s why I like “tweet count” as the ultimate metric for a blog post. It’s basically a resounding “yes” to the oft-asked marketing question, “would you refer this to a friend?” Sure, you can look at “visits,” but that may be a better indication of a
good headline than a good post. Even “time on site” only tells you that someone stuck around longenough to kick the tires, but it doesn’t mean they got enough value from a post to take action.

As with any analytics tool, the Topsy Retweet Button isn’t perfect. Based on our traffic through TweetDeck, it seems to undercount the retweets on many posts. I’m pretty sure one of the posts below has some serious over-counting issues. And there has been a hanging chad or two.

Nevertheless, it remains the best way for us to gauge what posts have value for you. So, without any further ado, here are the 10 posts you told us were most valuable in 2010, along with a quote from your peers about each post… Read more…

I read print publications pretty much the same way that I read digital media – keywords constantly pop out at me and help me decide whether an article is worth my time or not. So, I was flipping through BtoB Magazine, past the usual suspects…online ad spending, digital media, marketing automation…and then, a truly novel grouping of words stuck out to me – Chief Listening Officer.

That title was appended to Beth LaPierre of Kodak. On her Twitter profile, she describes herself as “Air traffic controller + advocate for the masses.” I’m a big fan of using social media for listening and anyone who advocates for their audience, so I just had to find out more. And Beth was kind enough to answer a few questions… Read more…