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

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…

One of the frustrations of launching a new web site, or blog, is the time it takes to attract serious organic search traffic. When you launch with a new domain, you know it’s going to take a while before the search engines start indexing…

In response to Wednesday’s teleconference call, one of our listeners, Michael Madden, wrote in with an interesting question: “How do new businesses determine their core value proposition since most of that discovery lies ahead? With my…

In today’s Washington Post there is another article on click fraud, pointing to both Google and Yahoo! This quote gets to the heart of it: ”After analyzing where and when each click came from, auditing firm ClickFacts Inc. estimated that…

Each time we complete a teleconference we feel a little nervous, not knowing how our presentation has been received. So from time to time we ask our listeners to let us know how we did. Without some feedback, we feel we are flying blind. We…

NOTES: To view the notes as they are added, please refresh this page when instructed to do so. Business Success Potential: S = 2V + C + P Where: S is the probability that the business will Succeed. V is the Value proposition. C is…

Some things happen online at a dizzying speed and, unless you have the advantage of being the “first-mover”, it will cost you a lot to catch up. However, other things happen quite slowly. One of these slowly emerging trends is people’s…

If you had just ten words with which to describe why people should buy your company’s products or services, what would you say? You probably remember the “elevator speech” concept from back when venture capital companies were pouring…

I was reading a blog this morning, saw a linked article title that seemed interesting, and clicked through to the site. The site, as you can see below, was the Financial Times. I suppose one should anticipate the likelihood of being…

This morning we received an email with a number of questions on PPC tracking. Our resident PPC expert, Aaron Rosenthal, wrote a lengthy reply which you'll see below. Question: I have read many of your research reports on PPC. It seems to…

In a recent article at DMNews.com, this passage really caught my eye... “Toolbarn.com increased the click-through rate on one campaign by moving the word “free” to the first line of the ad from the second line. And Toolbarn.com turned…

This week the media seems to have been alive with articles and posts about click fraud. I can’t recall when the topic was so much “in the news”. Perhaps the high point of the week was when tempers flared and voices were raised at a session…

NOTES: These are the notes from our interactive March 1 teleclinic on The Power of Small Changes. If you missed it, the recording will be posted here approximately 48 hours after the event. Offer Copy Optimization Micro-TestMetricPage…

Over the last few years Marketing Experiments has conducted thousands of tests with dozen of partner companies. We have learned a great deal, and shared much of our research data through our teleconference clinics and written briefs. But…

Making changes to key web pages can sometimes be a major production, involving a number of people, or groups of people. Once everyone is sitting down together, it’s tempting to talk only about making dramatic changes...if only to justify…

As with all good things, one can go too far when it comes to optimization. A friend of mine was telling me how she regularly receives emails from a company offering a free weekly software download. Quite often she clicks through to the…

I have been following various discussions recently on the topic of trash content sites. What are they? These are sites created with the express purpose of generating Google AdSense income or affiliate commissions. Lone webmasters, and…

This is our first post based on a question from one of our subscribers. The question was emailed in and the writer kindly gave us permission to post both his question and our answer here in the blog. The Question: “Nick's point was that a…