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

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… Read more…

I was impressed by the clarity of the headline and imaging of RealGoodsSolar’s landing page and later provided suggestions for testing their various sources of traffic to build dedicated landing pages for distinct levels of motivation.

Today, I wanted to add one last piece of analysis: the thought sequence effected by the page. “Eye path” is a concept often invoked by usability and user interface (UI) specialists. However, “eye path” is passive. What we want to optimize is the thought sequences in the mind of page visitors to lead them to the desired action, and to do that we must deliberately position content in the clearest and easiest-to-absorb sequence.

The rest of this post is presented in the general order of the expected thought sequence of a visitor to RealGoodsSolar’s webpage. 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…

“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…

If you have hung around this blog long enough, you know that we like to occasionally test and reward our audience’s
intuition. We do this by asking you to predict the outcome of a recent experiment from our labs. We might say we do it for the sake of science, but personally, I think we just enjoy stirring the pot. We have yet to reveal an experiment that the majority of our audience guessed correctly, yet some followers of this blog seem to have just a little more marketing genius than others.

So here we are again with a new experiment and a new opportunity for you to finally be recognized as the brilliant marketer that you are…. or weren’t last time. Read more…

It’s the same problem, every time…

Someone new to online testing, excited to get started, eager to begin crunching numbers and reporting amazing results:

• They decide on a few things that they instinctively think will raise conversions
• They make all the changes on one page, maybe two
• Setup all sorts of tracking that they’re not sure what to do with
• And push the start button thinking that their one page will see a major increase

Rarely does a test actually perform the way we expect it to, though. We believe that one set of pages will completely outperform another, when the reality is that some performance is all over the place.

When the test is complete, what will you report upstream? That the test was a wash? Or did you learn something that will bring you closer to the key insights that will have an effect on your bottom line?

Most beginners run into a test without being able to tell you what they are really testing.

They typically say, “I’m testing to see if this page increases conversions!” The problem with this statement is that it doesn’t do anything for you if the page, well, doesn’t.

In addition, if it does raise conversion, you don’t really have the slightest idea why. Instead, you get a false sense of confidence about what works on your site and what doesn’t. Then you get yourself into much deeper trouble, making assumptions for other parts of the site or customer segments that end up costing you revenue in the long term. Read more…