Tips and Ideas for Landing Pages and Sites

Altima's Guerilla Campaign Fizzles Online

If you read my post last fall about Blackberry's 10-second ad in the 30-second spot, you may understand why this landing page just kills me.

On the face of it, it's a nice page. Good colors, crisp imagery, nice little National Sales Race logo, useful roll-over technology that allows a visitor to explore key features of the Altima.

But. I happened to read yesterday of an out-of-home marketing campaign that Altima is putting into effect this week. The company has hired a guerilla marketing firm to "lose" 20,000 sets of keys in bars and hotspots across the country.

The key rings include three keys and two tags. The first tag directs finders to AltimaKeys.com, a website where they can enter the tag number to win a gas card or some other freebie. The second tag tells finders not to "return" the keys - they are no longer needed because the Altima has push-button ignition technology. That second tag directs people to a different website, NissanUSA.com/Altima. The landing page on that site, seen above, doesn't mention a single word about the contest. It doesn't even specifically point out the push button technology, except in half a sentence, in small text, halfway through a generic paragraph about the car.

Now, I'm trying to imagine that I have found a set of keys with a tag that says I shouldn't bother to return them. Even in today's age of increasingly weird marketing stunts, I'd probably be interested enough to go online to explore what I have found.

I might go to the sweeps page first, enter my tag number, and perhaps win a prize. But what if I went to the Altima page in the hopes of finding out more about push button ignition? Assuming I go there, what do I find? No mention of the very thing I'm looking for, and in fact the very thing the campaign meant to get me looking for. After all, isn't that the point of the whole campaign?

So why, why, why doesn't the Altima home page at least have a visible link that mentions the push button ignition?

Once again, it is clear that the disconnect between the "site" guys and the marketing guys is broad, wide and deep.

Let me back off a bit. Let me cut Altima some slack, seeing as this is an offline campaign. Because the people who have found the keys will be visiting the site by typing in the URL directly, as given on the tag, there is no way for Altima marketing folks to target any of that page's web content specifically for those visitors, right?

On the other hand, a small amount of real estate on that genearl Altima page, geared for those visitors who have found the keys or have heard about the campaign, shouldn't have been too much for the marketing team to ask.

There's hope, though. Maybe, just maybe, Altima is targeting content specifically to people who find keys (or hear about the campaign), want to learn more about the keyless ignition, but don't type in the URL.

If I use search terms based on the campaign, will Altima direct me to a site that perhaps has a small bit of content targeted to people who have typed in the words (for example), keyless ignition?

In Google, I type in the phrases "Altima push button ignition," "Altima keyless ignition," and "Altima pushbutton ignition." Although there are a few organic listings that lead me to an interior Altima page, there are no paid search results. Again, it is clear that the marketing folks and the web folks just aren't connecting here. Cool campaign, lousy follow through.

Of course, you might be saying, there IS a website devoted to the keyless ignition - AltimaKeys.com, the site that the first tag directs people to. So let's look at that:

Nice, right? It says thanks for returning the keys and mentions that, because the car has push-button ignition, "I haven't really been paying attention to my keys."

Then, there's a link to find out more about the Altima, and...

You guessed it. That link goes directly to the same Altima home page as seen above, once again with only the tiniest mention of the push-button ignition.

If Altima's marketing folks had thought to ask the web folks for a small bit of real estate on that page (or if the web folks had granted it), it would have been incredibly, immensely, crazily easy to target content specifically to visitors who clicked through from AltimaKeys.com.

By designating a spot - perhaps the spot where the National Sales Race logo is - as a "content slot" (at Offermatica we call them Mboxes), the content could have been rotated depending on the originating source. Anyone coming from AltimaKeys.com could have seen a small box that shouted, "Learn more about push-button ignition!" with, perhaps, a link to the internal page that talked about that feature.

Anyone else could still have seen the National Sales Race logo.

Would it have improved the results of the campaign? At the least, it would have kept the momentum of the campaign going for one more click. At the least, it would get visitors to the page that talks about the interior of the car, rather than just the exterior. At the least, it would have kept them engaged for a bit longer. So, would it have improved the campaign? You bet it would.

Marketers, we need to raise the bar. I'm not, actually, surprised by this campaign - though I am disheartened by it. It seems to be the norm, to be accepted by marketers that the campaign and the site are different entities.

But in order to take our marketing to the next level, this has got to stop.

Until our campaigns carry through the user experience to the point where the user - not the marketer - says the experience is over, our users will continue to be disappointed. They will find the two or three marketers who are out there who are targeting content specifically to them, on an individual basis, and they will stick with those marketers. The rest of us will be sucking wind, wondering what happened.

Google - Testing using Offermatica won't harm SEO

Updated: Check out Is It Cloaking on searchengineland.com.

One question we get asked at Offermatica is whether conducting tests (A/B, multivariate, and other) will affect SEO ranking.  Our response has always been:

1. We do not alter the underlying HTML that is spidered, and Google has assured us that this is not forbidden provided that the underlying HTML is a legitimate page viewed by a portion of the visitors.
2. Google used Offermatica to test its own AdWords interface in September of 2005, and supported our mbox implementation on their own properties.

I was very comforted today to see this response from the GWA group:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Website Optimizer Beta Advisor <WOBetaAdvisor@google.com>
Date: Mar 21, 2007 10:43 AM
Subject: [Website Optimizer] Does Website Optimizer affect my organic search rankings?
To: Google Website Optimizer Beta <websiteoptimizer@googlegroups.com >

We've recently noticed some confusion about whether Website Optimizer
affects organic search rankings, so we wanted to take a moment to
clear things up.

Website Optimizer is designed to keep your original content visible in
the HTML source code of your page at all times. As a result, your
original content is visible to crawlers, which means there should be
no major impact on search engine ranking.  However, if you implement
changes to your content after using Website Optimizer, they'll have
the same effects as any content changes that you would typically make
to your website.

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Website Optimizer Beta" group.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to websiteoptimizer-unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/websiteoptimizer?hl=en

I trust this will settle the issue.  The GWA mechanism and the Offermatica mbox operate the same way.

note: I am not subscribed to the Google Website Optimizer beta.

Experimentation and Testing Exposed - Optimization Approach #1

Last week's post on Optimization was my most popular post ever.  In it, I outlined four main types of experience optimization: Experimentation, Targeting, Predictive, and Social.  All have very high value. All can improve relevance and results. And they are not out of reach.

In this post, we will explore experimentation in more detail. In case you are curious, experimentation also goes by the names of A/B testing, multivariate testing, experimental design, and a number of known aliases. It is the "wise old man" of optimization, because its methods and math are well-established and are the basis of many newer automated approaches.

Testing is a "white box" approach that offers confidence and transparency.  When done thoughtfully, it gives feedback you can trust about what your consumer actually responds to.

And frankly, knowing what the customer responds to might be one of the most strategic parts of marketing.

(One note to consider when reading: if any of this sounds complicated or slightly intimidating, remember that the benefits of testing far outweigh the slight challenges involved in getting testing up and running. Plus, there are tools that allow marketers to rapidly create and deploy different tests - tools that handle all the elements I outline below - so that the marketer can concentrate on discovering what is most effective in helping them reach a stated goal, rather than on constructing a useful test.)

What is it?

Experimentation has a long and storied tradition in Western scientific thought.  You pose a hypothesis, design an experiment that isolates the effect you are investigating, and measure the results.  If the data supports your hypothesis, then you go with it.  If not, you re-think and try again.  The power of testing is in its simplicity - we intuitively learn through observation and experimentation.

In online testing, the objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of various elements of an online offering based on response.  Whether you are testing ad creative, navigation, or promotion, the basic approach is the same.  We explicitly vary certain elements while controlling for others so we can clearly identify what has influenced a consumer. 

In the example above, we show four different form pages from a multivariate test we ran a while back. We varied layout, imagery, and messaging.  (Can you guess which one had the highest conversion?)

Talking to the Monkey-Brain

Testing/experimentation are valuable for one simple reason: you are not your consumer (even in B2B). As a result, you cannot intuit what they want, even if you ask them. That's because focus groups (and other approaches where the consumer is aware of the experiment) lead to misleading results. Testing gives the ability to learn who your customer really is.

When you are doing simultaneous testing, you are measuring unconscious response to different marketing approaches: "Do you like more copy or more images", "Should we do more interactive merchandising?", or "Is a two page or one-page form easier to execute?". 

I like to call it "Talking to the monkey brain". When the consumer is unaware, and giving token attention, you are likely marketing to the older, reactive part of the brain -- the monkey-brain -- not our high-consideration conscious self. The fact is that the monkey brain decides faster, and we use it intuitively when we consume information. So having a dialog with your consumer's unconscious is likely a great way to get usable answers.

Since you are dealing with the monkey-brain, you don't ask for a considered opinion, you just show different versions to different visitors *at the same time* and measure which version leads to a response that is favorable to the outcome you want.

As one scientist put it "The reptilian brain has managed to FOOL the subconscious into believing that IT is in control... when all along it is the reptilian brain that is doing the basic controlling." I don't know that I totally agree, but start testing and you will see that what we consciously predict is infrequently true.

Succeeding with Testing

The real advantage of testing is that most of us have been trained to understand the basics of experimentation, and almost every company already does it to some extent. Think of any page of your site — the home page, a category page, a page that requests more information from the user. Now think of all the times you have tweaked copy, changed images, tried something new. Every time you have done that, you have been experimenting with optimization.

Unfortunately, too many folks are constrained by resources and do it in a relatively sloppy way. They run one version for a week and another for the next week. They change a page and they measure the results against some other day. Or they continually vary elements of a site, ad, or email and do not isolate the variants.

The keys to testing successfully are fourfold:

1. Be able to Set Up Content Quickly - You cannot test with just a reporting tool. You must have the ability to change the web page/ad/mobile phone image that different people see to create the test data. The heart of any testing service must be a content serving and routing system that you can use.
2. Traffic - Testing is the most rigorous approach, and seeks precision.  As such, it requires traffic to achieve results.  Traffic does not have to be massive, but if the population of consumers who experience a test is too small or too varied, then it may be hard to find signal.  Running tests to larger groups or running to more well-defined segments can help.
3. Things that Matter, Matter - Signal is a word for a measurable effect. If it doesn't matter to your consumer what color the button is, there is no signal. If using a video on a landing page cuts conversion 30%, there is a lot of signal. You are searching for signal when you test, so you need to think about alternatives that are sufficiently different.
4. Confidence - The heart of testing is statistics. Regardless of your approach, you must measure statistical confidence or you cannot trust results. High statistical confidence (95% or above) means you can trust that if you ran the same test again you would have the same lift. Low confidence means that results will vary or are entirely random. If you are not measuring confidence, test results are really useless.
5. Frequency - The amount of experimentation you do is just as important as (if not more important than) the things you test. Finding "signal" can be elusive, and reducing the cost of running a test makes it more likely that you will try newer and riskier ideas - the very ideas that are transformative to a marketing organization.

This screen cap shows some of the basics - what are you measuring, traffic, which version offers the best outcome, and what confidence. Note that only the third recipe  has high confidence when compared to control (four bars). This means the changes in the other recipes really didn't have signal. Luckily one branch really nailed it.

With Offermatica, our approach is to simplify the presentation of content across different channels like ads and the site. Our Mbox allows us to change content elements on a page, and the AdBox allows us to change ads out in the network. This simplifies the creation of simple tests (A/B) or complex multivariate and non-orthogonal approaches.

From our perspective, it is critical that marketers be able to rapidly create and deploy different experiences and that the tool manage segments, confidence, and population. 

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Testing can provide significant feedback to a marketer through its transparency, and can be applied almost universally to any type of offer, layout, content or messaging. Simple testing can provide instant feedback on decisions and should be an element in *every* decision a marketer makes online.  There are a broad range of approaches (A/B, A..n, multivariate, and others), but they all share the discipline of controlled experimentation and can provide invaluable insight to guide future marketing.

However, testing is rigid by design and is less suited for environments with high variability or where environmental "signal" cannot be controlled. Running a/b tests to figure out what product to offer a given visitor or which article would be tedious, ineffective, and likely impossible.

Testing also requires participation by a marketer or agency - if version A of a test wins and there is no one there to listen, it may as well not have happened.

Testing can be an integral part of the ongoing marketing experience, not simply a project you do periodically. Testing can provide instant feedback on decisions and that it can (and should) be an element in every decision you make online.

Next Post - Targeting