Group items tagged

 @chiefmartec "out of 12,000 experiments that Google ran in 2009, only about 10% of them resulted in adopted changes." You are not Google. But you must realize that in every industry, an online leader is going to emerge, and it will be the company that adopts a testing culture.

Intuition is no longer your friend. Your intuition cannot comprehend the variety of ways our visitors are coming at us. Data and testing are your friends, or your online audience will continue to abandon you.

Get excited about testing and taking that leadership role in your marketplace.

 @peeplaja has just saved you a whole lot of time. He's done the research and found the studies that you can use to refute the often poor advice your designers are giving your Web team.

Spend some time with this post and the links he references if you want to consistently create effective, high-converting websites.

In my new book, I talk about the importance of having Marketing Batteries that store visitors attention for you to use over and over. The "Subscriber Battery" is your email list. The "Social Battery" will include your Twitter followers.

The problem with the Social Battery is that it discharges unreliably compared to the Subscriber Battery. As a result I recommend converting your social networks to email contacts. This charges your Subscriber Battery from your Social Battery.

Here is a great set of tactics to get more email subscribers from Twitter.

A parent after my own heart. There are several important lessons about A/B Testing here: Alternate the children so that you eliminate natural differencesAlways declare a control before testing something elseYou must have a knowledge of statistics to do this rightAccurate measurement and tracking are critical

Here's a nice roundup of do's and don'ts for conversion rate optimizers. Even experienced AB testers like us need to be reminded of the "big rocks" of CRO, and this article has them. Process, segmentation, qualitative research, and mobile.

.@ConversionXL: The best UX designers are using low-cost behavioral tools to make better decisions about design on business websites. Here, we learn that the trend in "Ghost Buttons" is probably bad for sites that want conversions.

I love it when designers talk about hypotheses and tests. "I use this process to help teams frame their work as a business problem to solve (rather than a solution to implement) and then dissect that business problem into its core assumptions. We then weave those assumptions into hypotheses. Finally, we design experiments to test our riskiest hypotheses."

@jnmnrd puts it well: "By putting all of your time and effort into one concept that you're confident in, you save yourself time in which you can then apply towards user testing, gathering useful feedback and iterating."

I couldn't agree more.

We have begun using machine learning to optimize client websites. We call it "machine earning". I think that this is going to be common within a year or two. So I was pleased to find this excellent summary that explains machine learning so well.

We test the content of header and footer bars on mobile websites--we call them stickies--and this includes the use of the hamburger menu icon. It doesn't always work well.

For apps and mobile websites alike, "an app's popularity is determined more so by user engagement and retention rather that its App Store ranking."

We use data to drive creative decisions. But never think that data accomplishes anything without creative, human guidance. Applied correctly, data will allow you to be more expansive in your allocation of color, metaphor, absurdities, alliteration, rhyming, pace, timber and all of the other things great communicators apply to make communication truly effective.

@101babich When we isolate the visitors to a website that use site search, we often find a significantly higher conversion rate and average order value. Searchers are great customers.

This does not imply cause and effect.

However, after running tests that improve the visibility of search, we have found that we can increase the number of searchers, and that these new searchers are more likely to buy.

It doesn't work every time, but it is certainly worth a try.

The lesson? Follow Nick's advice here.

I love the phrase "Mystery Meat" for undecipherable icons used in mobile apps. Enjoy the read from Teo Yu Siang.

 @tim_ash It's that magical moment in which a visitor becomes a lead or a sale; when they seek by their actions to start or continue a relationship with us. It is the moment they click a button. Conversion rate expert Tim Ash offers some great guidance on how to get your buttons clicked more and more.

Consistency is key in conversion. Automation helps us stay consistent. That is why I like this article from Christopher S. Penn. Best takeaway: Install "Shortcode Exec PHP"

This is a very geeky look at what makes video go viral. Very geeky. That's why I love it. Dr. Brent Coker introduces us to the Branded Viral Movie Predictor (BVMP). Yes, it even has an acronym. If you've considered doing a video in the hopes that it might "go viral," read this first and be sure you have the appropriate doses of congruency, emotive strength, network involvement and paird meme synergy. Don't you love science?

This is a very geeky look at what makes video go viral. Very geeky. That's why I love it. Dr. Brent Coker introduces us to the Branded Viral Movie Predictor (BVMP). Yes, it even has an acronym. If you've considered doing a video in the hopes that it might "go viral," read this first and be sure you have the appropriate doses of congruency, emotive strength, network involvement and paird meme synergy. Don't you love science?

Key to the many strategies included in The Customer Creation Equation (due out this Spring) is the use of content to charge and discharge marketing "batteries." These strategies involve writing what author Kathryn Aragon calls "Bait Pieces." While I don't see my customers as dumb fish, her process is right on.

Remember: to market on the Web you have to create a Markishing Department, part marketing, part publishing.

Where are we in the mobile revolution? This slide deck does a great job of telling us that we are early, but things have progressed beyond sitting and waiting.

Video has a relatively small part in my book, so I wanted to give you some more depth with this article by Joe Watson.

One of the things that freezes us when we're going to do video is the question, "what will we do?" From a conversion standpoint, the question is, "what will we test?" This implies more than one version of a video. There are ways to cut a video to test for length, style and focus, but testing implies multiple treatments. That's why we've been offering a video piloting service called Video Science.

Storyboarding may be the thing that gets you past considering. I know it works for me.