A guy walks into an airport bar and asks the bartender if he can just take a look at the phone.  ”You don’t want to make a call?”  ”Nope, just want to look at the phone.”  I know it sounds like the beginning of one, but this is not a joke, and I actually did this a while back.  Why?  Well, I needed to call Southwest Airlines to reschedule a flight – and I knew the number was 1-800 -I-FLY-SWA.  Which is great, except for the fact that at the time, I didn’t know how to figure out what numbers all those letters mapped to, and I was staring at a Blackberry dialpad full of numbers – not a letter in sight.

Fast forward a few years…

I spend a fair amount of time on airplanes, and every once in a while a past occupant of the seat I happen to be in leaves something interesting to look at between the all-electronics-better-be-off phase until 10,000 feet.  Recently, I picked up a copy of the in-flight duty free magazine and found this little gem:

See what’s going on here?  The person who scribbled this out on the in-flight magazine was desperately trying to figure out what the phone number for Macy’s shop by phone service was.  Yes, they knew it was “1-800-45-MACYS”, but without a phone that actually *has* the letters over the numbers of the dial pad, that phone number is pretty useless.  This person actually drew out a telephone dial pad and tried to put the letters where they thought they should be…and incorrectly at that (the “ABC” starts over the “2″, not the “1″).

Alphanumeric phone numbers are great in 30 second TV spots or 60 second radio ads – they’re easier to remember than a string of numbers, and since the ad will likely be over by the time you reach the telephone, these are helpful for getting the phone call response to the ad itself.  But if you’ve ever tried to actually call one, well, we all have to admit alphanumerics are just plain harder to dial than numbers.

The web is a different animal

If you’re looking at an ad or a website that entices you to call a phone number, it doesn’t just “end” after a matter of seconds.  You don’t have to engrain an alphanumeric phone number into someone’s head with a catchy jingle, because odds are they’re going to punch those numbers into the phone while those numbers are right in front of them…and it will be easier for them to dial without having to look for letters.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of abandoning alphanumeric phone numbers for your online marketing pursuits is that you can use either dedicated phone numbers or pools of phone numbers to track the performance of virtually any advertising campaigns you use to drive traffic or phone leads.  If a goal of your website or your online marketing strategy is to get your phone ringing, then you need to be able to source an offline conversion (like a phone call) back to the click, the ad, the keyword, the email, the site, the content, the version, or the campaign in order to focus your advertising dollars on profitable advertising efforts with measurable ROI.

Many phone tracking solutions out there integrate directly with your web analytics solution.  One very nice solution is Mongoose Metrics, which integrates with Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends, Coremetrics, Unica, and more.  You can even use phone tracking with your conversion testing strategy – here’s a case study from a while back showing an integration between a phone tracking solution and Google Website Optimizer.

Summing it all up

Those easy-to-remember alphanumeric phone numbers do have their place, and they can provide some really nice advantages, especially in the offline world.  But online, not having to rely on a single, hard to dial number lets us gain so much from a measurability standpoint that you might want to think about leaving your alphanumerics off of your online initiatives.

So back to the in-flight magazine scribbles… even if Macy’s did eventually get that phone call, I’ll bet they’ll never know what ad campaign was responsible for it!

By the way, if YOU were the one who drew that picture in the airplane magazine, I’d love to hear from you in the comments ;-)

After our recent blog post, WebShare readers may already be familiar with Optimizely, a brand new A/B testing platform that’s currently in private beta. Today we’re pleased to announce that WebShare readers can gain access to the private beta by signing up and using the invitation code WEBSHARE.

To sign up, simply head over to www.optimizely.com/beta and fill out the sign-up form. And remember: if you ain’t testing, you ain’t trying.

One of our most popular services at WebShare is to critique ecommerce sites, and one concept that comes up often is perceptual blindness.  This is the tendency to overlook something that is right in front of you because it’s not where you expect it to be.  Think of the internal site search box on a website.  If you moved this to the very bottom some customers may conclude the site is missing the ability to search because they are not used to looking for the search box at the bottom of the page.  This is why we say it’s often better to “Dare not to be different” in certain areas of website design.

I just recently experienced the perfect example that illustrates our point.  A friend of mine in Germany found out she is pregnant, and so I just had to send her two books right away.

I logged on to Amazon.com like I always do, entered her address and was about to pay when I saw that Amazon was estimating it would take over a month for her to receive the books, plus the shipping was more than the cost of one of the books!  At this point I was beginning to rethink buying these books from Amazon.  On a whim I decided to check out Amazon.de (the German version of Amazon).

One thing to point out is that I don’t speak a lick of German, but with Amazon you don’t have to!  I searched for the titles in English, the pictures of the covers confirmed I was ordering the right books.  So now it was time to add them to my cart.  While the text on the “add to cart” button was in German, the buttons and checkout process was so intuitive that I knew exactly what to do without even reading the text.  Since the spelling of the months are extremely similar to English, I was easily able to see that the delivery time was much more appropriate and since I was buying on the German site and shipping to Germany I was able to get Free shipping!  (which I knew because the location of the shipping charges are in the same place as on the US site—right where you would expect them).

By now you should be picking up on a consistent theme.  I was able to make this purchase without knowing any German because Amazon understood the value of consistency and meeting expectations.  While it is important to make your company stand out from the rest, be careful to ensure that you don’t actually make it harder for people to do business with you.  People abandon shopping carts for lots of reasons—don’t let a frustrating UI be one of them.

One of the cooler things about working at WebShare is the fact that we regularly get our hands on the newest, most exciting tools in the analytics and testing industry. One tool we’re especially excited about right now is Optimizely, a brand new (it’s still in private beta) A/B testing platform designed to make testing easier than it’s ever been before.

At the core of Optimizely’s promise is its WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) variation editor, which allows you to create variations of your original page with drag-and-drop simplicity. You can easily edit text, rearrange your content, re-size images and buttons, etc., all without having to do any coding whatsoever. Below is an example of a variation of our Seminars for Success microsite: I moved the “Reserve Your Seat” button, our major call-to-action, to a more central location. Then I moved our dates and locations information, which we know is among the most important information on the page, to a more prominent location. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it could be different enough to show a significant difference in performance, and it took me a grand total of about 45 seconds to do.

Original:

Variation:

This core benefit strikes at one of the biggest hurdles to efficiently testing your site: the creative process. Many small to medium-sized businesses simply don’t have creative resources in-house, which makes developing variations a major challenge. Optimizely minimizes that issue by allowing non-creative resources (such as myself) to quickly and easily generate variations that are significantly different from the original.

When you’re ready to launch a test, all you have to do is install one compact block of JavaScript into the <head> of the page you’re testing. This simple, streamlined implementation process adds even more weight to Optimizely’s claim that they provide “A/B testing you’ll actually use.” With your test running, Optimizely will measure user engagement with each variation, and report back you on the winners and losers.

As you might expect with any raw, beta-stage product, Optimizely is missing some things we hope it’ll incorporate in the future. There’s no word yet on whether Optimizely will handle multivariate testing. The WYSIWYG editor can be clunky and unpredictable. It’s difficult to save your variations while you work. There are no undo, copy, or paste buttons. But all in all, the concept behind Optimizely is clear and compelling. There’s a huge market for a simple A/B testing platform, and we think Optimizely could be well-suited to serve that need. To sign up for the beta, head over to www.optimizely.com, and to stay on top of all the latest news in the analytics world, don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

The half-life of a Tweet is extremely short (estimated by some to be as little as four minutes).  We usually worry about this as content creators wondering how long our message  will be visible to our readers, but it can be a problem on the consumer side as well.  Many times I’ve wanted to reference a particular tweet that I vaguely remember reading a while back that has long since scrolled off my screen into relative obscurity.

Most Twitter clients don’t easily offer this type of focused search and the Advanced Search on Twitter is highly unreliable and limited to very recent tweets (in other words, not much better than CTRL+F on the profile page!)  However, we can easily accomplish a search that is restricted to a particular user or set of users via a simple method and the fact that Google *does* have a long memory.

To take advantage of the power of a Google search focused on a single Twitter account, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the user’s twitter profile and copy the address.
   For example:  http://twitter.com/avinashkaushik
2. Do a Google search using the SITE: operator in this format:
   {keyword} SITE:{twitter profile address without the http}

Which would look something like this:

Happy searching!

Google and WebShare’s David Booth are teaming up to offer a free webinar on Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 10:00 am (PDT):
Planning and Running your First Website Optimizer Experiment.

Sign up for this webinar!

This 90 minute webinar is targeted at anyone who’s ready to get started with A/B and Multivariate testing using Google’s free Website Optimizer tool.  The topics we’ll cover are based on trainings we’ve delivered at Google offices across the country and as part of the live Google Seminars for Success training series that continues to hit cities across North America.  Join us for this live webinar and learn:

• Landing page testing basics – what is it?
• Identifying test pages and planning for your first experiment
• How to set up and run A/B and Multivariate tests
• Live demos of both A/B and MVT experiments
• Reading the reports and understanding the test results

There will be 30 minutes of questions and answers with Google’s Trevor Claiborne and Andrew Gomez.

Hope to see you there!

It is every online marketer’s question; “Which will result in a better ROI, search or display advertising?” Traditionally the two were measured independently and with little regard for how the two advertising methods interact with one another.  However, a recent study by The Atlas Institute set out to “…determine what role display media plays in combination with sponsored search.” (read the study here).

The results of their study were quite interesting.  The concept of “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” is one we are all familiar with and dates back to Aristotle.  But the Atlas study has proven it to be true when it comes to online display and search marketing.  When a single advertiser exposed searchers to both display and search ads the conversion rate jumped 22% over search alone.  That is an impressive conversion rate increase that most any advertiser would be thrilled with.

The study also discovered that 44% of internet users who clicked on a sponsored search ad had also seen display ads from the same advertiser.  The display ads often act as a brand building tool that seem to make users more inclined to click on and convert on search ads.

So now that you have the “which is a better ROI” question answered (you need to be using both) you have to be asking yourself “what does this mean to my online marketing strategy?”

It means:  Optimize, maximize reach, measure conversions, test and test again, track and analyze data…a lot of work.  If that is more work than you have room on your plate, you are not alone.  But results like these cannot be ignored.  A consulting firm like WebShare can be a great resource to get your online marketing strategy on course and your conversions well on their way to seeing numbers like this study has proven possible.

Are you using the best tools for your search marketing and conversion marketing programs, and are you using them to the best of your advantage? There are a variety of applications offered by various vendors, however Google leads the pack with three applications in particular: Analytics, Adwords and Website Optimizer. It may not be perfectly clear as to how the Google applications work together and what the function of each one is. So let’s demystify the situation. Below we highlight a few Google applications, and each one can be used to help you create, manage and implement your search and conversion marketing program. Best of all, these applications are free or are available at very reasonable costs. As an added bonus, these applications are web-based, which means you don’t have to host them on your server.

Information is power, and from that perspective Google Analytics, Google Adwords and Google Website Optimizer together are a nuclear power plant! Together, these three applications can help you answer more than just how many visitors were on you site yesterday. They can help you answer as specific of a question as, “How many visitors from Chicago who speak Spanish clicked on my pay-per-click advertisement and actually converted?” And “Which version of the specific advertisement I showed them was more effective?” Furthermore, the tools can help you use the information from those questions to identify and create tests with your site to further improve your conversion rates. Now, that’s powerful stuff!

Google Analytics houses all of the information collected about your site’s visitors, and allows you to view it in hundreds of different reports. It costs nothing (other than your time) to open a Google Analytics account for your website. Think of Google Analytics as a giant database that allows you to collect loads of data about your site’s visitors, and perform highly specific queries to slice and dice visitor data in just about any way you desire. Google Analytics can be even more powerful when used in conjunction with another Google application (Adwords or Website Optimizer) to help you manage your search and conversion marketing programs. If you’re serious about increasing your site’s traffic and conversion rate, you should be incorporating Google Analytics into just about everything you do.

Google Adwords is Google’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) program, and its interface allows users to manage the campaigns that drive traffic to Web sites on a cost per click basis. Opening an Adwords account is easy, and only requires $5 and a few minutes. In Adwords, users can implement new PPC campaigns, edit keyword lists, change ads, and manage their PPC budget. Additionally, Adwords gives you access to a number of tools than can give you insights into everything from seasonal trends across industries to keyword research. Adwords also provides a number of reports to view your PPC campaign statistics and progress, and your Adwords account can be linked to Google Analytics to give you even more data about your ads and paid traffic. The data available in Adwords are certainly extremely useful, but any organization serious about improving their search and conversion marketing program should be exploiting the wealth of information that a solid analytics package (like Google Analytics) provides in addition to the Adwords reports.

Google Website Optimizer allows users to conduct statistical tests on their site’s pages to determine which variables will improve the probability that a visitor will convert on the website’s goals. Website Optimizer is free, but as it is accessed through the Adwords interface, it is only available to users who have an Adwords account. So technically Website Optimizer costs you the $5 you need to open an Adwords account. The variables you can test are virtually unlimited – they can range from changing the page background color, testing different ad copy, different images, different headlines, different positioning, and different layouts and designs to the combination of size and location buttons, trust logos, affiliation links, and anything in between. Website Optimizer offers two statistical analysis methods (A/B split testing and full factorial multivariate testing) to help you design and implement tests that will determine what changes on your site affect the probability of visitors converting on your site’s goals. Website Optimizer uses Analytics-like tracking code to run the tests, and you can use Google Analytics to see the long term trends that result from your Website Optimizer testing. If you’re not converting 100% of your visitors, then you should be testing your website right now.

Still not sure where to begin? WebShare offers consulting and training services to help you make the most of your search and conversion marketing programs. Webshare is one of a handful of companies in the world that is an authorized consultant for Google Analytics, Adwords and Website Optimizer as well as a certified consultant for a number of other tools including Yahoo! Search Marketing. Without a doubt, Google Analytics, Adwords and Website Optimizer can be intimidating, and they do take time to master. However, if used to their fullest potential these three applications can help you improve your search and conversion marketing programs by leaps and bounds.

by David Booth
Founding Partner at WebShare, LLC

If you’re doing conversion marketing and statistical testing on your website and you haven’t explored trust logos yet, then you’re missing out. It’s no accident that you see the same logos appearing on more sites day after day – it’s because they’re working.

These little trustmarks have the ability to get more people to push the button, sign up for the newsletter, enter their credit card information, or even pick up the phone and call the number. We do quite a bit of testing with trust logos, and one of the most successful ones we’ve come across is the HACKERSAFE logo, an image that by now you surely recognize:

Want to try Hackersafe for yourself? Get started now at a discount!

We asked HackerSafe Senior Director of Business Development Cresta Pillsbury to talk about what’s new at HackerSafe and why this logo and program have been so successful in increasing website conversion rates:

One way to test out if the HACKERSAFE logo works for you is to get it at a discount through WebShare, and then use Google’s new Website Optimizer tool to set up and run a conversion marketing test. Whether you’re looking to increase leads, sales, downloads, signups, or clicks, it’s very likely that this little logo can help you make better use of the visitors you have on your site.Statistical experimentation can tell you if you gain anything (and how much) by making small changes to your website, and can be the most powerful tool in your search marketing arsenal.