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

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet;

William Shakespeare lived in what can only be defined as the pre-Google era. Sure, Juliet didn’t care what a rose was called. She wasn’t searching for rose vendors since she chose a guy from the other side of the tracks and would never have a proper wedding. And she certainly wasn’t selling roses online with a site that relied on organic traffic for two-thirds of its revenue.

However, names do matter if you’re searching for optimization or A/B testing vendors, or if you’re offering those services yourself. Even more important, words matter because they hint at the approach you’re taking to your marketing efforts. That’s why I was so intrigued by two marketing research charts in Boris Grinkot’s 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report… Read more…

Professional infiltrator should seriously be added to my job description. Because once again, I gathered some marketing “intel” from somewhere that I wasn’t quite, how do I put it…invited to?

This time, I stepped out of the MECLABS classroom and into a beautiful, oceanfront hotel in Jacksonville Beach for a MarketingExperiments Landing Page Optimization Workshop. There, I blended into a crowd of about 70 marketers; listening to the presenters, Director of Training, Chuck Coker, Senior Optimization Manager, Adam Lapp (Mr. Lapp when class is in session) and MECLABS Managing Director (CEO), Dr. Flint McGlaughlin.

As I sat there taking notes, one subject really stood out to me, and that was testing. It seemed as though many questions were geared towards that. “How big does your sample size have to be in order to know your test results really worked?” “How long should you test for?” “What should you test?” etc… Read more…

We usually share tests on this blog that our optimization research analysts conduct in our labs with our Research Partners. Sometimes we share tests from our audience is well, but rarely do we share our own tests.

In today’s blog post I wanted to share a recent email test from our own marketing team. Not because the results were impressive. If you’ve followed MarketingExperiments for any time, you’ve certainly seen us share results from 162% lifts and 59% gains. Today, we’re going to discuss what to do when you get something entirely different. Read more…

One of the biggest problems our audience tends to struggle with understanding is – what do their tests actually mean? And sometimes, frankly, they see a result, any result, and are overly confident about what they’ve learned from it.

So recently, here on the MarketingExperiments blog, we discussed statistical significant and validity as well as confidence and probability.

When he read those posts, MECLABS Data Analyst, Phillip Porter made a good point, “Significance just tells us if there’s a difference, not if it’s important.”

Since Phillip dives into data like Greg Louganis off a springboard, I wanted to find out more…and learned a lot from him in the process (Phillip, not Greg Louganis). Let’s begin by backing up a bit… Read more…

Whenever I work with a Research Partner that is involved in e-commerce, I always come across problems with the product details page. A potential customer’s experience here should not be much different from the moment you pick up an item at a store and look at it. Imagine it:

• You’re browsing the aisles of your favorite store, going from category to category
• Finally, you see something that gets your interest
• The price doesn’t stop you from picking it up – you could buy it today, or come back next week when you get your paycheck

This is it…

• Do you put it in your cart or put it back?
• If you put it back, why? Does the price now start to look expensive seeing what you actually get compared to what you’d pay?
• Do you put it down and pick up a competing brand? Or do you look at both at the same time?
• Or do you decide it’s worth the money? Do you see yourself using it, feeling good about the purchase?

This happens on e-commerce sites just as much as it happens in stores. The only difference online is that the website is usually the one responsible for the final packaging/presentation of a product, whereas in a retail store they are mostly just responsible for placing the already packaged product on a shelf. Read more…

“Is this test statistically significant?”

“Yes.”

That one word answer, “yes,” can be highly misleading. In Friday’s MarketingExperiments blog post, I discussed statistical significance and validity and why it is so important to getting the most from online testing.  And while it is reassuring to know that a test is valid, what exactly does that “yes” answer mean? To find out, let’s take another look at why I’m alive, even though my mother never put me in a “fancy, new fangled car seat,” Helicobacter pylori, and the importance of understanding probability in marketing tests. Read more…