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

We’ve been asked this question a number of times: how do you create an effective online banner ad that stands apart from the hundreds of thousands of others out there?

I would like to help answer that question by giving you the three major obstacles all banner ads face and options that you can use to overcome them. Read more…

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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…

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…

At MECLABS, we’ve conducted a lot of research on value propositions. We found this element to be so essential to successful marketing, we included it in our Conversion Sequence, which our researchers use during their optimization research.

Your value proposition is the primary reason a prospect should buy from you. And since it is such a vital building block to successful marketing, you would think every professional marketer would have this down cold. But from past analysis and audience interaction, many are entirely missing the boat on what their “primary reason” should be.

In fairness, once you’ve taken a sip of your company’s Kool Aid, it’s very hard to get truly discover what your value prop should be. So, in today’s free Web clinic at 4 p.m. EST – Do You Have the Right Value Proposition? How to test, measure, and integrate your Value Proposition online – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, will share our value proposition discoveries to help you nail this crucial element of your marketing programs.

But first, we turned to your marketing peers and ask them how they find the most effective value proposition. Here are a few of our favorite nuggets of wisdom… 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…