Three Search and Conversion Marketing Tools You Can't Live Without

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.

by David Booth
Founding Partner at WebShare, LLC

In the world of Ecommerce, those of us who have been involved in conversion marketing and statistical testing know just how big an impact even the smallest of details can make to website performance and the bottom line. Some buttons just work better than others. Some product images provoke more purchases time and time again. Some colors are more likely to cause newsletter signups than others, and even details like punctuation and capitalization can have an effect on the rate at which your site converts visitors into monetized customers.

For some time now, the timeliness, breadth and depth of analytic data available about an array of usage metrics for websites has created a statistician’s dream – the capability to test virtually any aspect of a website and observe its relationship on conversions, time spent on a website, or any other measurable aspect of the visitor’s experience. Well, thanks to tools like Google’s Website Optimizer, you don’t have to be a statistician to reap the benefits of statistical conversion testing and ensure that you’re constantly improving the performance of your online activities.

We caught up with Google’s Website Optimizer Product Manager Tom Leung to talk about the new set of Website Optimizer features that was released yesterday, and here’s what he had to say:

A good conversion marketing strategy includes consistent experimentation of every aspect of your website. With tools like Google’s Website Optimizer available, it’s now easier than ever to set up tests and find out what aspects of your website can be changed to improve your bottom line. If you’re not converting at 100%, then you should have a test running!

Take a look at the following two sets of text, and as you read them try to gauge which you think would be more likely in converting a website visitor into a website customer:

1) “Have you been looking for the perfect blue widget to outfit your home or office? Then you’ve come to the right place at bluewidgets.com. We have lots of blue widgets in stock and you’re sure to find the right one for your needs.”

2) “Are you searching for absolute perfection in blue widgets for your residence or business? Let us cater to your widget requirements and provide all that you ardently desire. We maintain a full selection of blue widgets for your perusal.”

What do you think? Does the second version sound much more sophisticated? Does the first version describe a product that would fit your needs? Well, as Bill Nye the Science Guy says, “one test is worth one thousand expert opinions” – and THAT is conversion marketing.

The major differences between the two sales copy versions is the reading level that they represent. According to the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level calculation, the first version is written at a 5^th grade reading level, and the second at a 9^th grade level. The way to find out which is better at selling product is to set up structured tests and measure the results. In this example, a set of standard A/B split tests could be used to measure the effect of reading level alone on different variations of sales copy.

Well, here’s the result:

When we pit sales copy at the 5^th grade level against copy written at a high school level in conversion tests, we find that - almost without exception - the 5^th grade copy will get more visitors to purchase the product that’s being described.

Why is this? Well, it’s not because your potential customers are all 5^th graders, or because all of your potential customers read at a 5^th grade level. The truth is that they’re not dumb, they’re just in a hurry! You have less than 8 seconds to convince a website visitor to stay once they’ve hit a page of your website, and 5^th grade level reading material is just plain faster to digest. A visitor can absorb the information much more quickly, and in a day and age where 1,000 more results are just a Back button click away, no one wants to read a white paper when they first hit your site.

So what other action items can we take from this result? We have another hypothesis to test: the more information a user can absorb in a shorter period of time, the more likely they are to convert. Let’s use the principles of conversion marketing to think of some more tests that could help us increase our conversion rates.

• How about bullet points versus paragraph format product descriptions? We know bullet points are easier to digest!
• How about instructional images (i.e. product demonstrations) instead of standalone product images? Tell the user how the product will meet their needs without writing a word!
• Number of sentences or word count in your product descriptions, use of whitespace, location of pertinent information, the list goes on and on.

These variables can be tested one version against the other in A/B split testing or page version testing, or you could even measure interaction effects by designing and running a multivariate experiment.

The Benefits of Multivariate Testing Over Traditional A/B Split Testing

We all know it’s easier to convert more of the visitors you already have on your website than it is to go out and get more traffic - it’s what we call Conversion Marketing. If you’re already running A/B split tests on your website’s pages, paid ad campaigns, and landing pages, congratulations – you’re doing the right things right. If your web marketing plan calls for, and implements, multivariate testing then you’ve moved on to the next level and are very likely enjoying the benefits of multiple variable conversion testing.

Multivariate testing provides us a way to statistically evaluate the immediate effect that certain variables (small changes to your website) have on any measurable goals of your website, as well as the effect that these variables exert upon one another (interactions).

To illustrate the power of multivariate testing, here’s an example:

As many of us know, “trust logos” can have a significant impact on the performance of a website. Let’s assume, for example, that in an A/B split test we tested the condition of A) having a particular logo against B) not having that logo using an appropriate sample size. Let us further assume that we found a statistically significant higher overall conversion rate for scenario A.

Another variable that we might consider is background color. For example, we can compare a blue background with a navy background, and find that the navy background color provides us yet another incremental gain in our overall conversion rate.

Logically, we would want to implement the two conditions that performed the best – having the logo on and using a navy background. When we do, however, we might notice that our overall conversion rate plummeted! What happened?

Well, the two individual winning conditions, when used together, did NOT constitute a winning combination. For whatever reason (and that could be something as seemingly small as even a slight clashing of colors) using the logo with a navy background provided unfavorable results even though using the logo or navy background alone gave us the boost we were looking for.

Design of Experiments (DOE - also known as fractional factorial designs) can help us to identify the main effects and the interactions of an array of variables on a control signal (or in this case, conversions). Let’s continue with the example we just ran, and explore the various combinations of this two-level factorial design:

• Variable setting/combination 1: Logo ON, Background BLUE
• Variable setting 2: Logo OFF, Background BLUE
• Variable setting 3: Logo ON, Background NAVY
• Variable setting 4: Logo OFF, Background NAVY

By measuring the overall conversion rate (or average page views per visit, or virtually any metric you may be tracking), we can find which of these combinations works best together. Now, this particular method calls for 4 tests to evaluate just 2 variables, and you’re probably thinking ahead. Three variables would require 8 test runs (2^3) – and what if I wanted to test, say 7 variables? That’s 128 individual tests I’d have to run!

The good news is that tools such as Orthogonal Array Testing Strategy (OATS) and fractional factorial designs can help us set up our test runs in a way that reduces the number of runs while allowing us to obtain statistically significant estimates of all main and interaction effects. When implemented correctly, our test of three independent (two-state) variables using OATS would require not 8 but 6 test runs, and at the expense of confounding the main effects with our two-factor interactions, if we wanted to try 7 variables at once we could cut our test set from 128 to just 8 runs. It’s certainly possible to try more variables – just remember that the more variables you introduce the more difficult the tests will be to keep track of, the more your results will be diluted, and the longer you’ll have to wait to introduce any other changes to your site (while these tests are being run everything else on your website must remain constant).

Multivariate testing and DOE can be a powerful way to understand how changes you make to your pages affect the goals of your website, and a good website should always be testing submit pages, funnel pages, landing pages, and product pages to make sure you’re making the best of the traffic you already have.