I get calls from time to time from ad salesmen who want me to spend $10,000 (or more) in display ads on their sites. They promise to give me a great deal and they say their site is a great fit for my products, so I ask them if they’ll take the risk and charge …
Continue reading ‘Using Google’s ad network to pre-qualify a website’ »
A friend sent this along. Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn’t Tweet I continue to suspect that Twitter is over-rated — almost certainly for most businesses, and possibly just plain over-rated. I don’t see how it adds much to life. If you want to keep in touch with Friends, Facebook is better. If you …
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Good marketers know that their opinion on a particular color or design or choice of wording doesn’t matter. What matters is how the market responds. So marketers like to test things. Which headline works best? Does a starburst announcing a risk-free trial help or hurt response? Is it better to offer a special report as …
Gerry McGovern is an interesting fellow with good ideas about web design and testing. I recall a MarketingProfs seminar he did a few years ago about “customer care words” that was very good, although the title was slightly confusing. It’s not about words for your customer care department, but words your customers care about. His …
Continue reading ‘The “evidence-based” future of marketing’ »
Technology makes it easy to do all kinds of cool things with emails and landing pages, but cool things aren’t always helpful. Simplicity is usually your best bet. When designing new email creative, consider the following. Don’t use too many images. Use “html lite” — mostly text with some color and simple formatting. Avoid columns …
I worked with Bob on some of this material. It’s good stuff. See Bob Brady’s 10 Google Website Optimizer Best Practices
I don’t know how Google’s website optimizer picks the winning combination on a multivariate test. It’s some complicated statistics that I don’t know and probably don’t want to know. The trouble is that the margin for error on a complicated experiment (i.e., an experiment with a lot of options) sometimes overwhelms the results. For example, …
Continue reading ‘Error bars and conversion rates in optimizer experiments’ »
When you run a landing page test in Google’s Website Optimizer, one thing to consider is how long it’s going to take to get meaningful (“statistically significant”) results. If you have too many variables, or if a small percentage of your visitors actually make it from the test page to the goal page, it’s going …
Continue reading ‘Trimming complicated Optimizer experiments to make them more efficient’ »