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

Seth Godin is a strong proponent of big ideas. He likes it when smart insights takes a company into territory that is way beyond the ordinary. So it was interesting to see his post this morning about the value of process. He argues that…

There’s an interesting article in Advertising Age which looks at the failure of large companies to use keywords in their broadcast and print campaigns. The ideal scenario is that a TV commercial would repeat a certain keyword sufficient…

In her opening remarks at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Chicago Anne Holland put up a few slides to show how email marketing continues to be a force online, in spite of the much publicized problems of deliverability and spam. Dr.…

At Marketing Experiments we have done plenty of research on the topic of click fraud. Companies hire low-wage surfers to click on competitive ads, thereby spending the competition’s budgets on useless clicks. Software is developed to do…

If you ask the question among a group of web designers and developers, the most frequent answer you are likely to get is, “Not me.” A recent piece in emarketer waxes lyrical about the continuing growth of broadband. Here is an excerpt from…

There’s a piece on the BBC site about a recent survey by Jupiter Research and marketing firm iProspect. They came to some not very exciting conclusions about how people use search engines. The basic finding was that if people don’t find…

As some of you know, Session 1 of the Marketing Experiments Online Split Testing Certification course takes place tomorrow, Thursday April 13th, at 4:00PM EST. Dozens of people have already signed up for the course, including online…

Here’s a question that was sent to us by one of our subcribers: “I listened to your value proposition segment online. I found it very helpful as I have been struggling with my value proposition for quite some time. I have read books on…

One of the problems with Google’s results-found figure is that it includes a vast number of trash content sites. So when you enter the keyword “online marketing” in Google, you can be sure that a huge proportion of the 48,300,000 results…

Benjamin Edelman, a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Economics at Harvard University, has been doing some interesting work on detecting click fraud. For a while he has been tracking the obvious frauds...clicks by competitors and clicks…

I came across an interesting set of statistics in an article by Jim Barnes. Here’s an excerpt from his article: A study by Bain & Company found that 80 percent of companies surveyed believed that they delivered a "superior experience"…

NOTES: These are the notes from our interactive March 29 teleclinic on Click Fraud. If you missed it, the recording will be posted here a few days after the event. Specifics of these first three tested campaigns included: All three…

There was an interesting article in USA Today a few days back. They quoted, among other points, the following from a study by the Nielsen Norman Group. “Individuals read Web pages in an "F" pattern. They're more inclined to read longer…

This Wednesday at 4:00pm, EST, we'll be conducting our 60-minutes call on how to fight click fraud. You'll learn how to identify click fraud, and how to minimize the chances of being targeted. Reserve you place on our click fraud call…

When you are making a purchase online and come to a page in the shopping cart where they ask you to enter a discount code or coupon code, how do you feel? If you have a code, you probably feel quite good. If you don’t, you’ll likely feel…

One of our subscribers wrote in with this question about page layout: "We are at the early stages of building a new site. Of course, we've looked at all our possible competitors' sites. It seems like most companies follow the same plan.…

An MEC reader wrote in response to The Power of Small Changes: I enjoy reading your newsletter. I'm new to A/B testing (and the math too)...what confidence interval do you accept as reasonable? I wanted to point out that Test #1 is not…

How can one combat click fraud when running PPC campaigns? How can you minimize the chance of being targeted? And how can you find out if you have already been paying for fraudulent clicks? Suspecting we had been a victim of click fraud…

Authentic blogging can bring you extraordinary exposure and rewards. Contrived, sneaky blogging probably won’t. What is authentic blogging? In the case of company blogs, a simple way to picture it is like this: Lock all your PR and…