Tips and Ideas for Landing Pages and Sites

New York Times and Social Media

Recently I was talking with a bunch of editors about their role in choosing editorial content. How much of a role should the editor have, and how much should the consumers of the media be allowed?

Near as I can tell from recent visits to NYtimes.com, the "Gray Lady" is humoring the mob, but is not impressed.

Editors, of course, know better than almost anyone else what their readers want to read. On the other hand, I would argue that there's always something to learn from the mob.

Take this example from The New York Times, for instance. The NYTimes.com includes a page that lists the terms that are searched for most often on the website (the voice of the mob).

 

Now look at the list of topics that NYTimes.com editors believe are of highest interest to readers (as evidenced by the Times Topics list):

Now compare the "Most Searched" list to the "Times Topics" (the list of People, Subjects, Organizations and Places that Times editors put together for easy searching by their readers). Interestingly, you'll find that the two lists barely overlap.

Not only that, but some of the keywords that people were searching for, such as "China," don't easily fit into one of the Times Topics categories: would you find China under the Places heading? Or would it make more sense to search for it under Subject?

In other words, it would seem - from looking at the Most Searched page and the Times Topics page - as though people are searching the Times in different ways than the way the Times editors assumed they would.

Don't get me wrong: I believe in the role of the editorial voice, and I believe that an editor is likely better than any other given individual at picking which content is most relevant to readers. However, I also believe that the editor is not better than every other individual.

 

Case Study: How Monster Scored Millions through Multivariate Testing

About a year ago, we ran some exciting tests with Monster.com to see if we could help the company improve revenue per visitor. The tests played with a number of variations:

--promotional copy (default or existing copy vs. stronger offer copy)
--copy for the job posting button
--"learn more" link (link present vs. link not present)
--"Search and Buy Resumes" button (existing copy vs. "Search Resumes" new copy)
--"Search and Buy Resumes" test drive ("Take a free test drive" present vs. not present)
--main button design (depth added to buttons vs. no depth)
--layout of top 3 boxes (button at the top of the boxes vs. button at the bottom).

By testing different combinations of all those elements, we were able to help Monster.com improve revenue per visitor by 8.31 percent, on that page alone.

Another test, on the jobs page, improved revenue per visitor by 11.6 percent.

For a website as large as Monster.com, such a revenue increase means millions of dollars of additional revenue per year -- for very little effort.

What's more, Monster learned important behavioral insights about their customers that they could use in future marketing tests.

To read the entire case study, as well as to view screen shots of various "recipes" we tested, check out the Offermatica newsletter, here.

Giving Customers What They Want... Without Hype

I've been thinking about customer relationships this week. We love our customers, and we're in the relationship for the long haul. And we want them to love us back. Right?

But, we lie to our customers, and they lie to us. We hype features, we hide feedback, and in focus groups or surveys, they tell us what they think we want to hear. How do we get around the "infidelities" of the relationship to find out what they really think, and to give it to them without hype?

Connect the Dots for better response rates

Check out this article in MarketingSherpa about a promotion test on peets.com, the ecommerce site for Peet's Coffee and Tea.  It highlights the critical importance of making your site responsive to the source of traffic and what that source is responding to.

It is one thing to create multiple versions of an email to test response, it is quite another to make your site reflect the different messages so that critical aspects of relevance and repetition increase effectiveness. Offermatica helped connect the dots.