Nick Usborne 92 posts 0 comments

As you may already know, we have been busy working on a series of certification programs. The first one, which started in April – and we’ll be running it again, starting in June – is the Foundations of Online Testing course. During the…

Here’s another question that came out of our last teleconference call on landing page optimization. “How important is it to carry over the image you use on the marketing piece over to a landing page. For example if my print flyer has image…

In response to our teleconference call on landing pages yesterday, we received the following comment: I am most interested in the dynamics of optimizing for organic search ranking vs conversion. Lots of tension there. Is there lots of…

In the world of optimization and the search for increased revenues, it is tempting to create our site pages in a way that deliberately “pushes” readers in one single direction. Our own optimization tests have shown time and again that by…

Our last clinic was on the topic of Landing Page Optimization. The response was extremely positive and after the close of the clinic we received dozens of emails from attendees who wanted us to critique their landing pages. As a result, we…

There’s a wonderful post and image over at the Church of the Customer blog. It points out that the Hilton Hotel online reservations service is not available between 2:00AM and 6:00AM. It seems their computer systems need a little shut-eye…

What are eco-ads? They spring from marketing strategies, often within large corporations, which address the need to present companies as being friendly towards the environment. Companies recognize that many of their customers are concerned…

Here are some interesting figures from a story on InternetRetailer.com Visitors returning to a web site are eight times more likely to make an online purchase than new visitors, according to new data from WebSideStory Inc. During the first…

Here’s another question that came in a few days ago. Someone wanted to know what the best practice is for changing the color or appearance of a text link after it has been clicked. Our Director Optimization, Jimmy Ellis, wrote up this…

This is another question raised during our teleconference call on Wednesday. We were looking at before and after versions of an offer page we had optimized. On both versions the “buy now” button appeared only at the end of the sales…

This question was raised during our teleconference call on landing pages yesterday. It’s a good question. There are times when simply saying “Add to Cart” on the button works just fine. But this is the case only with very simple and…

In a previous post I mentioned that we would be featuring the use of the Hacker Safe seal as part of our Landing Page teleconference call today. During our final edit we decided instead to run a separate call on credibility indicators. As…

According to an article on CNET today, the current boom in online ad spending is well protected from the kind of bust we saw back in 2001. The author argues that the presence and commitment of mainstream advertisers like Ford and Procter…

Recently we received an email from one of our subscribers who is looking for ways to encourage his own subscribers to whitelist his company’s emails and newsletters. He touches on an important topic. Email delivery is a ticklish issue and…

First, a thank you to the editors of 60SecondIdeas.com. They selected the Marketing Experiments Blog as one of their Top 10 Small Business Blogs for the first quarter of 2006. The recognition is much appreciated. Which brings us to the…

As you may already know, every couple of weeks we hold a 60 minute teleconference call during which we share some of our most recent research results. Our next call is on the topic of optimizing landing pages. We have quite a bit of new…

In yesterday's issue of USA Today there is an article about the “risks” marketers take when they try to emulate MySpace.com and open up their sites to include comments and feedback from their visitors. Here is an excerpt from that article:…

In a previous post we had talked about trash content sites and how they publish cheap or syndicated content simply to attract search engine traffic and make money from PPC ads. In that post we anticipated that Google, Yahoo! and others…

So says John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing in a recent interview with Business Week. We agree. All too often marketers stagger from one marketing “event” to the next, without having a clear plan, or integrated system in place. This is…

In response to our teleconference clinic on headline testing yesterday we received numerous emails asking questions about how to determine the validity of test results. (The audio for the clinic is now available here. When listening to it,…