test

There are 9 posts tagged test (this is page 1 of 3).

Reading Adobe’s Digital Marketing Blog (Part 1)

Another reading session. This time it’s the Adobe Digital Marketing Blog. One of the first posts are from the omniture blog which is now that blog.

Getting your daily dose of dashboards?

  • “feel good reporting” = long reports nobody reads
  • Instead of reading 50 pages, provide fast 30 seconds overviews
  • Daily monitoring helps you to fix problems fast

Industry benchmarks: everything you need to know

  • Problem with benchmarks: things are measured differently
  • Metrics vary between days, geography, etc.

More on conversion benchmarks…

  • How should I act based on trends in benchmarks?
  • E.g. conversion rate down – what does this mean?
  • CTR for emails up – which mails, which basis?

Got Alerts? Don’t let this happen to you!

  • Wanted to buy a new graphics card
  • While checkout a message said “your shopping cart is empty”
  • Check but couldn’t add anything to the shopping cart
    • Activate alerts for your most critical metrics!

The Dark Side of A/B Testing: Don’t Make These Two Mistakes!

  • Example: New home page with special offers and cleaner design
  • 90/10 split test, i.e. 10% to new design
  • KPIs: home page conversion rate and revenue per home page visit
  • both increased
    • Problem: Which helped increasing the KPIs – Clearer design or special offers?
  • Solution: Don’t change more than one element on a page – it helps you understand your customer’s behavior
  • Alternatively: use MVT
  • Example: tested new thing but CV lowered dramatically
  • Look at your customers – are the new or old?
  • Especially old, frequent customers can be unreceptive to changes
  • Solution: Segment your customers, better on RFM metrics

How to Spend Fewer Dollars, Smarter and Faster, during Tight Times

  • Search: real-time, easy measurable
  • Email marketing: fast, easy measurable
  • Online video: expensive but measurable

The Challenges and Value of Digital Marketing Integration

  • Customers are
    • Better Connected – more information, can easy switch channels
    • Bombarded – tons of information
    • Empowered – can publish reviews, write on their blog, etc.
    • Savvy – higher expectation for relevant and personalized experience
  • Harder to track customers on different platforms but possible

User-generated Content and Word of Mouth Marketing

  • Conventional marketing
    • Intercept – target and expose your message
    • Inhibit – make it difficult to compare your product to other
    • Isolate – remove all third parties
  • Digital marketing
    • Attract – create incentives for people to seek you out
    • Assist – be helpful and engage with people
    • Affiliate – mobilize third parties to become more helpful
    • Analyze – find out what’s working and where you can improve
  • Not only conversions matter, they rest of the people do too!

Reaching the Individual: Site Surfers Becoming People

  • Each visitor is unique
  • Provide relevant content if possible
  • Understand the behavior of visitors – how can you improve their experience?
  • Personalize as much as possible

Don’t Do This! 7 Pitfalls When Deploying Analytics (Part I)

  1. Neglecting key stakeholders – websites touch all facets of an organization!
  2. Focusing on tactical requirements – what are your strategic business requirements?
  3. Believing data equals requirements – don’t ask for KPIs ask for strategic goals
  4. Having too many KPIs – select these KPIs that are strongly tied with your goal

Don’t Do This! 7 Pitfalls When Deploying Analytics (Part II)

  • Get too much into detail – don’t neglect the global picture
  • Mul­ti­ple ver­sions of the truth – there are differences between measurements in tools. Get over it and start looking at trends!
  • Isolate yourself – Start teaching how to use analytics and bring power users into your circle for more innovation
  • Ana­lyt­ics suc­cess is all about build­ing a base­line for per­for­mance (your KPI trend), and try­ing new things to improve on this base­line. That’s it!

How to Make Testing Successful

  • Do it right the first time, so you have accurate data
  • Start testing the important stuff and act on your findings
  • Start with politically easy things first
  • Be excited about testing and evangelize

Answers to Practical Questions about Targeting

  • Test site elements, content bits, CTA, etc.
  • Targeting helps to feel your customer at the right place
  • You can practically target everything
  • First-time visitor can be targeted by referrer, keyword, time of day, day of week, geography, browser, OS, etc.

Do You Have an Automated Response and Lead Nurturing Program in Place?

  • Strategy for lead nurturing / drip marketing
    1. Send email from your real sales staff with phone number
    2. Send relevant content for your prospect – e.g. shopping cart abandonment -> send email with reminder; different emails for different industries in a B2B setting
    3. The timing should be right – first contacts to leads should be within five minutes(!); try emails for longer periods
    4. Follow up quickly and then back off slowing – don’t spam your prospect
    5. Automate everything

The Art and Zen of Testing for Success

  • Don’t just take lift as a goal
  • Start witch question: e.g. should be button be blue or red? Is the navigation on the left or right more effective?
  • Try to answer ‘why’
  • Advantage: It isn’t about the goal anymore, it’s about insights

#94/111: Don’t Just Roll the Dice

What is it about?

Pricing is highly critical and an in-depth topic. Can such a short book fulfill your needs? We will see. Neil Davidson is also famous for hosting Business of Software.

What can I learn?

Know your market segment: People work with relatives. If your competitor’s products cost between $10 and $20, you have a hard time sell yours for $2000. The first thing is to learn about your market segment. How high are competitor’s prices and why are they what they are. Learn about your customers. For example, software that cost less than $10 will be easily bought  by nearly anybody. If your software costs more than $50 some personal customers may get nervous. If you product costs more than $1000 your customer probably needs to talk to his superior. Even $1, $999 vs. $1000 can make a huge difference! Ideally, you should know about this by customer development.

Think about presentation:  Pricing is not just about setting a price. It’s also about product presentation, e.g. bundling. Do you sell other software? Which alternatives are there? Maybe you could sell with an complementary product? There are lots of different possibilities. Generally, selling just one product will produce a higher price.

Test, Test, Test: The most important thing, like expected, is testing your pricing. The best way to do so is by features. Take a look at software from 37signals or Microsoft. They got different product packages. For small and large businesses or personal users. You should avoid to charge different prices for the same product. This can really annoy users. One idea is that you sell your product for $x but display $x resp. $(x+y) as price. If enough users were willing to buy for $(x+y) you can increase your price and use this event as a nice marketing tool.

Conclusion

Firstly, you can read Don’t Just Roll the Dice for free! I liked the book, however it is just 80 pages or so. I think it got some nice ideas and is more to get a overview over the topic than really learning about it. You will find lots of articles on pricing on sites like Hacker News. In conclusion, great book for learning the basics but later you should look for other resources.

#73/111: The Checklist Manifesto

What is it about?

There’s a instrument to decrease deaths rates and infection rates in hospitals significantly. It costs near to nothing. It’s a checklist. Atul Gawande, who is a cancer surgeon, talks about introducing checklists in the medical sector.

What can I learn?

Simple and critical: There’s a lot of research on checklists predominately for aircrafts. These researchers found in over 30 years research that checklists have to be simple and critical. They shouldn’t be detailed instructions. The aim of checklists is to remind the users of critical actions. Like closing the cargo hold on an aircraft or disinfect the working area on a human body before surgery.

Test it: Nobody can think of everything, therefore testing is necessary. Observe your checklists in action and try to improve them. If you checklist is too long, only a few people will use it. If they don’t understand how your checklist will improve anything, they won’t use it. Observe and improve.

Empowering people and discipline: Checklist aren’t about bureaucracy. They empower people and make them more disciplined. You help the practitioners to improve their work.

Conclusion

The Checklist Manifesto is terrific. The stories are thrilling and he got great story telling skills. You can feel how checklists improved their lives and lives of others. Furthermore, it’s pretty short and concise. A similar book on checklists in business is The E-Myth. Recommendation!

#66/111: Advanced Google AdWords

What is it about?

This year online advertising expenses overtook traditional marketing expenses. A lot of this money is invested into Search Engine Marketing. Brad Geddes explains how to market your product/service with Google AdWords.

What can I learn?

Be user-friendly: This mantra applies to SEO as well to Google AdWords. Write relevant ads and landing pages. If someone searches for buy ipod nano, you should display an ad about buying an iPod nano, not about buying an iPod or buying a MP3-Player. Why should you do this? Firstly, it increases your conversion rate because people actually find what they are looking. Secondly, you position gets better if your maximum CPC remains constant.

Use thank you pages: After subscribing to a newsletter or buying a item, you often get these thank you pages. Don’t miss this opportunity to strengthen your relationship with your customer. You can provide white papers, offer them subscription to special deals or recommend other products.

Test everything: Everything. Test your headlines, your ad copy, your landing page and different keywords. Google AdWords offers you tools for testing your ads. So how do you test? A simple method is to write three headlines and three ad copies and combine each with another. Therefore, you got nine different ads. If you got enough conversions on the ads. Go with the winner and look for an other keyword to optimize.

Conclusion

Advanced Google AdWords is such a great book. It covers nearly everything you want to know about Google AdWords and SEM. There is so much to learn about in only about 500 pages. There are even plans for starting and running your AdWords campaign. Great book. If you want to learn about Google Adwords, buy this book!