MarketingExperiments - Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

It’s a good time to be in the ultra-personal, targeted ad business: Sexy, sultry behavioral marketing has AOL, Time-Warner, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft all digging deep in Nomex-lined pockets to ensure they have a zaftig-share of…

Local newspaper ad revenue is shrinking dramatically. Ask any sales executive at any old style paper and they’ll confirm it. If they’re a friend, I suggest you have a hanky, a shoulder, and maybe a martini ready for them before you ask.…

Ultra-personal ad floggers promise to push hand-crafted, micro-targeted messages to all of your subscription media, whether you want them or not. Local, mobile search, “LoMo” for short, is the other side of the coin in this new,…

“Extremely targeted advertising will become indistinguishable from content.” Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, 1995 Targeted ads are in your email, on your search pages. Companies already track your habits and push selected ad content…

If you have any of the latest versions of SKYPE installed on your computer you may have noticed a little feature that converts any phone number on any website you may be browsing into a clickable phone number. The way it works is that it…

In a recent article over at Adotas, they take a hard look at how changes in algorithms at Google can have a painful impact on sites that depend on the giant search engine for organic search results. And if you think this applies just to…

MarketingExperiments has always maintained that the display URL is a very important part of creating an effective ad. Our research over the years indicated that simply adding a www to the beginning of the display URL or capitalizing the…

Let’s suppose you have taken a few marketing courses and have created a fundamentally sound webpage with all the bells and whistles . . . clear headline, natural eyepath, low friction, credibility indicators, etc. And let’s suppose with 2%…

HTML vs. Plain Text has long been among the most hotly debated email-oriented topics. HTML format offers a visually pleasing design that 1) affects readers’ ability to process and benefit from the information and 2) provides marketers with…

We recently received an appreciative note from a professional certification course graduate that makes us feel that our efforts in providing the latest in education about online efficacy helps people discover what really works across an…

Eric Stockton, VP of Education at MarketingExperiments, recently flew down to sunny Miami to teach Affiliate Summit attendees how to apply and optimize subtle changes to their landing pages. The Power of Small Changes Tested was excerpted…

Monitoring conversion rate for your subscription products is as important as monitoring the subscription path itself. There are two key metrics to use when analyzing your subscription path: unique visitors and click-through rates. Funnel…

The most underused and powerful incentive is free shipping. People hate to pay shipping and always think you’re making money on those costs. Our upcoming brief on incentives shows you the science, the math, and the art of using incentives.…

We’re all familiar with friction as the force that tends to slow down moving objects. The amount of friction an object experiences is a factor of the medium through which it is moving. Well, we can think of the movement of visitors…