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

Thank you to InterstateBatteries.com for submitting its View All Batteries page for an optimization review. We hope you find this diagnosis helpful for testing new ideas and improving results.

You’ve probably heard of Interstate Batteries, whether it was while getting your last oil change, paying too much for your last set of tires, or even under your hood. Interstate Batteries is one of the premier automobile battery companies in the country.

But did you know they sell batteries for everything? I certainly did not. In fact, “batteries for every need” is what they told us is their value proposition.

Ironically, the biggest problem they may have to overcome is not on the page below, but rather correcting the misconception that they only sell automobile batteries.

THE CHALLENGE: Improve usability of the View All Batteries page by making it easier for visitors to quickly find the battery they need.

Let’s look at the page to diagnose problem areas and provide actionable recommendations (click to enlarge):

Conversion diagnosis: 5 ways to improve this page’s results

1. Optimize your product

If you’re Interstate Batteries, you have several obstacles to overcome:

• Common misconception that you only sell automobile batteries
• Your company name, URL, and logo conveys that you only sell “interstate” batteries
• Huge competition! (Do you also have batteries to power a drum major bunny?)

Outside of the page, you are going to have to make strides to inform consumers that you do have “batteries for every need.” Whether it’s accomplished with your PR, branding, or advertising departments, this is a product problem that this blog post cannot solve. But it is a very important issue to address as indicated by the MarketingExperiments Optimization Sequence:

Our research has shown it is most important to optimize your product first, then the presentation of your product (your web site), and finally your channels, such as PPC ads and natural search. Improving your product may include its name, perception, quality, and so on.

I’m definitely not recommending changing your name or URL as you have a significant amount of brand equity. Interstate Batteries is well known across many demographics, the logo is memorable, and consumers trust the quality of product. But somehow, consumers must simultaneously identify Interstate Batteries with BOTH your flagship product and also your secondary products.

Take Nike for example. Everyone identifies them as an athletic shoe manufacturer. But at the same time, the vast majority of consumers are acutely aware of the fact that they sell clothing, soccer balls, footballs, watches, and even sunglasses.

2. Effectively communicate the page’s value proposition

You have utilized color (red font) to emphasize that you sell every type of battery. You have quantified the word “every” by stating you sell over 16,000 different batteries. These are both good starts to communicating your value proposition, but it’s incomplete.

You need to take a more holistic approach to expressing your value proposition. This means ensuring that every element of your page either states or supports the value proposition:

• Design
• Copy (including font style)
• Images
• Colors (if you sell natural products, use green)
• Logo
• Price

And every element on your page, those listed above and others not mentioned, must be strategically positioned so that you “supervise” the thought process of the visitor. Whether they are at the top, bottom, or side navigation of the page, something should state or support the value proposition.

Recommendations:

• Headline – Place it at the top left where the eyepath starts and make it a larger font.
• Intro paragraph – Use a bold font to highlight key points such as “16,000 different batteries.”  Consider replacing it with three bullet points that are easy to scan.
• Button copy – Do not use “submit”!  How about “Find my Battery”?
• Image – Instead of making a visitor work to see all the batteries (scanning horizontally, moving their eyes closer to the screen to see a small image, scrolling), immediately show an image at the top that has 5-10 diverse types of batteries. This will give someone the picture of what’s available.
• Sorting functionality – Take a look at sites like Best Buy, Amazon, or eBay which are all companies that sell a variety of products. One page element that communicates “variety” is a left column that narrows results by type, function, component, price, and more. If I see that you have batteries that cost $5 and batteries that cost $500, I’ll know that you sell a large variety.

3. Make it EASIER for customers to find the right product

Q: What can I do on this page?

A: Take a long time scanning back and forth to figure out exactly what you sell and if you sell what I need.

That’s not a good answer. Instead you want your customers to say “quickly and easily find the battery I need.” It’s part of our job as marketers to make it as easy as possible for someone to buy from us. That means reducing the difficulty and time elapsed to get from point A (motivation to buy a product) to point B (adding that product to cart).

One way to do this is to add the homepage’s “Battery Finder” selection box to this category page. That will give visitors to this page the same opportunity to narrow their choices with a three-step process, especially if they overlooked this feature on the homepage.

Another option is to emphasize the search box as the primary objective of this page. Currently, your search box is tucked away up in the header. And if that’s not enough to make it difficult to find, there are a lot of heavy images drawing the eyepath away from the search box. Test changes that will make the search feature more prominent, such as moving it or setting it off with visual cues, to see if usage increases.

4. Reduce the number of steps to get to purchase

Current process:

Six steps just to find a simple AA battery!

A six-step process, whether it’s for a battery or a sailboat, gives the visitor too much time and opportunity to exit the process. Don’t turn a sprint into a marathon.

Implementing the recommendations in diagnosis 3 will help reduce the number of steps to get to a purchase. You may also consider adding some JavaScript to each one of the links so that all six steps are located on the first page.

Here is one example to test:

Finally, review your metrics platform to see where people are dropping off. If most people exit on the “chemistry” page, then you can speculate that either that word or concept may be confusing to your average customer. In that case, you may want to add some clarification either in the form of copy on the page or a tool tip.

5. Take advantage of your (empty) shopping cart indicator

This page follows the typical approach of ecommerce websites with regard to notifying customers how many items are in their shopping cart. When there are no items in the cart, the shopping cart says no items.

The customer probably knows when they haven’t pressed an “add to cart” button, so this indicator is not providing any value.  Instead of letting this space go to waste, take advantage of it by communicating information such as discounts, shipping rate, free shipping, or secure shopping.

We’ve found through testing that clarifying shipping information can significantly reduce shopping cart abandonment rate. This is because many online shoppers will add something to the shopping cart and click into it only to see the shipping price. This strategy manages the customer’s expectations. If they expect to see $5 shipping and instead see $10, then you may lose them — not because of product quality, but simply because of shipping.

Here’s an example to help visualize the strategy:

or:

For more tactics and suggestions on how to optimize an eretail website, join us for our Sept. 30 web clinic: Ecommerce Optimization: A holiday playbook for procrastinators.

During our August 26 web clinic on optimizing affiliate marketing, several participants wanted to know more about setting up and measuring their programs. We’ve distilled those questions for the latest edition of our Ask an Optimizer column.

Q: What kinds of businesses are suited to using affiliates?

I think businesses that are devoted to ecommerce or lead collection are going to be exposed to the greatest number of affiliates — especially those that are somewhat familiar for your marketplace.

Q: How do you identify & recruit the best affiliates?

Form a good relationship with affiliate networks/managers. Also, watch forums for affiliates that seem like they are worth approaching. A word of caution: some of the “top contributors” to these forums are not always the most successful. Approach with caution some of the “loud mouths” out there.

Having competitive payouts and reasonable offer terms are a must, and will also be attractive for recruitment.

Q: Are there any options for regionalizing affiliate marketing?

Yes, but traffic is going to be much smaller. Also, some of the bigger affiliates are not going to fool with these restrictions. I would team up with other companies in the same space, and just sell the leads that are not pertinent to your area of service.

Q: Which affiliate marketing tool is most effective? Banner ads, text ads, email campaigns, or mini web sites?

It depends on the offer and the audience the affiliate is trying to reach.  If you are promoting a good offer, you should develop most of these elements. Don’t handcuff the effectiveness of your affiliates and your business with a lack of materials. Make sure that you are tracking the effectiveness for each of these communication methods, as you might find some interesting data.

Q: How do I find niches I can be confident will yield sales? Or how do I test rapidly?

Testing rapidly is a good way to jump to conclusions, and fail. Obviously if the disparity is huge that is one thing, but do not rush to conclusions because we have all seen how internet traffic changes.  Do not ditch your confidence levels and testing best practices.

Q: How do I mix the “best techniques” for landing pages with “Google rules” for quality score?

Part of Google’s rules with quality score are items that you should have anyway. For example, a big part of quality score is how relevant the page is to the target keyword/phrase etc. I often see people suffer by trying to communicate too much within the images on a page. Make sure that good and relevant information isn’t contained in unreadable (to Google) images.

We also talk about having continuity between your ads and landing page. So make sure you have headlines that match keyword/phrases and will reassure the user they are in the right place, plus score relevance points with Google.

Q: What’s the simplest way to track keywords that are converting or predict them?

Talking to your offer company and discussing tracking options can open up true conversion tracking for you.

For prediction, if you are already running traffic, look at your CTR rates and try to estimate with this new traffic (keywords) — is it more relevant or general?  With that, try to look at what you are going to spend with this new traffic, and the conversion rates you are already observing.

Then factor the quality/relevance of the new traffic, and ask yourself: will the spend this traffic requires still allow me to be positive? Prediction really just comes with time and seeing what works. There is no guaranteed formula.

For more info, check out last week’s list of additional research and resources on affiliate marketing.

Have additional questions? Other things you’d like to Ask an Optimizer? Use the comments section below or tweet me at: @ctrentmarketing

At our July 29 web clinic on optimizing PPC campaigns, several participants wanted to know more about using forms and keyword insertion.

We distilled the questions and put them to Corey Trent, our lead research analyst on this clinic.

Q: Which is better: product description and fill-out form on the landing page or promotion on landing page and fill-out form on next page?  Is it important to have a form directly on the landing page?

In most cases, having both the description and form on the landing page is the best approach. When you start adding steps or clicks to the process, a couple of things can happen:

1. When a visitor has to click through to another page, the amount of friction increases. People are always mentally evaluating if the effort is going to be worth the payoff. When more pages and steps are involved, that adds more weight to it not being worth their time to continue.
2. When a form is on a standalone page, detached from the description, people can lose sight of the key product benefits, features and the value proposition that were outlined on page one. It’s better to reinforce your offer to help prospects overcome the anxiety of providing their information.

Q: Where is the best place to put the request form?

The best place to put a request form is where you have already built the case that what the user is getting is not only worth it, but a steal compared to the information they are going to give up.

As for where that form actually resides on your specific page — that’s an element you need to test. Whether it’s in a sidebar on the left or right of the page, or in the main content column, or “above the fold” on the page, or below several long copy blocks, there is no surefire place for a form that will work for every type of landing page and offer.

What’s extremely important is that the form is in the natural eyepath of your landing page’s visitors, and that it fits into the sequence of thoughts from intent to action that the visitor experiences on the page. In other words, be wary of placements such as putting your form above or before important content, or using equally weighted columns that downplay the significance of the form.

Q: What about keyword insertion in the landing page header? If keyword insertion does not match with a custom landing page (using dynamic text to match), is there still value in keyword insertion?

If you use keyword insertion in your ad, you’ll be best served by making the connection in your page as well because it increases relevance between the two.

Recently, we’ve seen instances where the effectiveness of header messages has decreased, so testing this with your pages is worthwhile. If you do not insert keywords on the landing page to match the ad, you should still ensure that there’s a logical, relevant connection early on the page that visitors will be able to understand to maintain continuity.

Either way, make sure that your copy is strong — don’t rely on keyword insertion alone to carry the load. Weak copy gives people a good reason to leave your site.

Additional topics covered in the web clinic and questions that we’ve touched on in past research briefs included: value propositions, relevance and offer pages.

You can hear more from Corey via the full clinic presentation and follow him on Twitter: @ctrentmarketing

Are you all Microhoo’ed out yet? Here’s a shortlist of cool, helpful posts from the past week, covering a range of online marketing topics.

• Social media: Our colleague and B2B pro Brian Carroll shares his thoughts on how to generate leads with LinkedIn without alienating your network.
• Email: ClickZ reminds us that Christmas is just around the corner (sort of) and provides a “must-do now” e-commerce checklist to help you get ahead.
• SEO: Winning the Web provides a list of don’ts to keep you from landing in SEO purgatory.
• Copy: Karen Thackson at Marketing Words Copywriting explores how an effective call-to-action is more than just using call-to-action words.
• PPC: Search Engine Roundtable notices that more advertisers have been granted access to Google’s bid simulator tool in the past week.
• Design: A catalog of e-commerce buttons and iconography from Checkout Optimization to inspire and delight e-marketers.

Note: In August, we’ll be returning to our regular schedule with more frequent blog posts. Look for that starting next week, with upcoming posts covering PPC, lead generation, testing and analytics, new landing page critiques, and more …

Need a shortcut to your weekend marketing reading? Our favorite articles of the week will get you started on your review of online, search and social media marketing. These made it through our feeds and into the idea bin.

Stuck In A Rut? 20 Places to Find Entrepreneurial Inspiration — A roadmap of motivation for when you need a boost. Alyssa Gregory of SitePoint pulls from her list of favorite blogs, success stories and magazines for when your inner entrepreneur needs a shot in the arm.

Top 3 Google Gadgets to SEO Your iGoogle Home Page — Download the tools and gadgets that you’re probably already using to your iGoogle Home Page for quick, easy access. Search Engine Journal points you in the right direction — and I agree with Ann Smarty that the general lack of great iGoogle gadgets is surprising.

33 Ways to Use LinkedIn for Business — LinkedIn is much more than an online resume, and Web Worker Daily shares ways to use LinkedIn more effectively for your business. (The MarketingExperiments LinkedIn group has been growing steadily thanks to tips like these.)

Gmail Offers to Automatically Unsubscribe You from Mailing Lists — Gmail is offering an unsubscribe option for even authenticated mail from reputable senders; Life Hacker has the details.

Beware of Low Bids and Low Budgets When Setting Up Your Google AdWords Account — PPC Hero asks Google about keywords not showing up due to a low keyword bid.

If you’re looking for more PPC advice, join us for our PPC Live Optimization web clinic on July 29. Submit your campaign for review and the chance to win a seat on our Optimization Training Tour.

After a full week of pushing ahead on new marketing initiatives, mapping out your plans through the end of the year and into 2010, and brainstorming new tests — you got through all that this week, right? — you’re probably ready for some weekend reading.

Here are five highly recommended articles from the past week, covering different areas of online marketing:

• Conversion Optimization: When & Where to Address Customer Anxiety — One of our favorite blogs does it again. Linda Bustos of GetElastic shows how ecommerce sites can increase sales by addressing customer concerns, from product pages to cart and checkout pages. The post also links back to the Ecommerce Report.
• PPC / SEM Analytics: 5 Actionable Tips To Improve ROI — The title speaks for itself, but in this post, analytics pro Avinash Kaushik shares five “non-normal” analyses that you can apply to boost your ad revenue.
• Finding and Using Niche Blogs — The tips in this SEOmoz blog post can help you with two frequently overlooked areas related to SEO and PR: your link building and blogger outreach efforts.
• The Ultimate Community Management FAQ — Social media and community-building strategies are still raising a lot of questions for marketers trying to get a handle on how to use them for business. Amber Naslund answers a bunch of those questions, and in doing so, offers several ideas and tools for socializing with a purpose.
• Annoying Consumers with Too Many Emails — A straightforward post that seeks to answer the questions all email marketers should be asking: “How often is too often? When does the frequency of a program start to drive people away?”

Have some favorites of your own? Putting any of the ideas from these articles into practice? Drop a comment.