I’m very pleased to announce Closed Loop Marketing’s partnership with Widemile, Inc. Closed Loop Marketing is one of thirteen leading agencies invited to use the beta-release of Widemile’s new multivariate optimization platform.

Designed and developed with partners in mind, Widemile’s new optimization solution will allow Closed Loop Marketing to offer our clients a robust, enterprise-level multivariate testing platform that integrates smoothly with our Paid Search, Conversion Optimization, and SEO services.

As long-time advocates of site testing and optimization, we’ve helped a wide variety of clients improve the effectiveness of their landing pages, sales funnels, and other key site areas. When we combine testing with SEM campaign optimization, the result is a dramatic, end-to-end improvement in quality traffic, conversions, and ROI for our clients.

About Widemile

Based in Seattle, Washington, Widemile is a leading provider of site testing and optimization technologies. Widemile’s third-generation software-as-a-service (SaaS) multivariate optimization system is based on open standards, includes proprietary testing and analytic techniques, and is designed to exceed mission-critical enterprise standards for security, stability, scalability and performance.

And I can also say, having worked with them in the past, that the Widemile team is a group of super-smart, high-quality people. We at CLM are excited to participate in this beta-release, and look forward to a long and rewarding partnership with Widemile.

More information:

• See Widemile’s press release
• Coverage on ClickZ

View related topics: multivariate-optimization, mvt, widemile

We’ve all experienced it at some point; the sneaking suspicion that those we’ve chosen to trust may not be entirely worthy.

Take web sites, for example.

We visit a web site, look around and like what it has to offer. We want to believe that the site”"and the company behind it”" has our best interests at heart. Perhaps we’ve even had a good experience with the site before.

But then the oddities begin to creep in, the strange little inconsistencies that make us wonder… is it me?

Suspicion…

It doesn’t take much to plant seeds of doubt in a visitor’s mind. Small broken promises and misunderstandings can suffice, such as:

• We click on an ad, then don’t find the promised item on the landing page.
• We carefully click on a product link, only to find something different highlighted on the next page.
• We start a registration process, only to encounter many more steps than the site indicated.
• We try to complete a specific task quickly, only to find our progress slowed by questions, ads, and confusing page layouts.

What’s going on here? Don’t these companies know what their visitors want?

In many cases, the answer is yes”"perhaps too well. They know exactly what we want, they just choose to use that understanding in a way we don’t expect. In a way that serves their business goals, not necessarily those of their visitors.

Let’s take a look at a couple examples I’ve run into over the past few months.

Example 1 - GeoTrust

Recently it came time to renew the GeoTrust secure certificate I’d installed on a personal server. The email notice contained a convenient link which led to the following page (I’ve enlarged and called out the product list for clarity):

So far so good, this looked like exactly what I needed. I wanted the first item on the list, the “QuickSSL” product, so I clicked on the first dark-blue “Renew” button.

And came to this confusing page:

Here’s where the doubt crept in. The page title is what I expected, but the content on the page seems to be all about the “QuickSSL Premium” product. Did I make a mistake? I didn’t want the Premium product, I wanted the less expensive “QuickSSL” product.

At first glance (and most visitors won’t give the page much more time than that), the only available action on this page is the huge orange “Upgrade to QuickSSL Premium” button:

Yikes! How do I purchase the plain “QuickSSL?” Ah, there it is, a visually de-emphasized link in small blue text:

This is a great example of evil usability at work. Notice all the factors that contribute to this link’s obscurity:

• Unclear design - Compared to the orange button, this option does not look much like an action item. It’s smaller, in a darker color, and doesn’t look like a button at all.
• Unclear wording - the call to action, “Stay with QuickSSL,” isn’t what visitors to this page expect to do next. What they expect to do”"what I expected to do when I came here”"is to “purchase” or “renew,” not “stay with” the QuickSSL product.
• Unexpected positioning - visitors interested in purchasing the QuickSSL product don’t expect the next step in the process to be hidden down at the bottom left-hand corner of a page, outside the shaded area that contains the emphasized text, and after a bunch of unexpected content. The orange button, on the other hand, IS in the expected position on the page for a next step.

Why would GeoTrust design the page this way? Those not as cynical as I may say it’s incompetence, poor audience task modeling, or a loose-cannon designer.

I think not.

It’s an example of a business goal overriding the visitor’s clearly stated intention. Now, we can debate the company’s intention. Perhaps they truly believe the basic “QuickSSL” product is inadequate for most customers and see this as a way to helpfully guide customers to a better solution.

What’s more likely is that this is a pure and simple upsell that disguises its intent by twisting well-understood usability principles such as:

• Web visitors don’t generally read text. So all that verbiage that tries to make this sound like an option, instead of the only available action? Ignored by most visitors. But great cover.
• Buttons get clicked. Visitors arrive on a page looking for the next step. What’s clickable? they ask. And on this page, that clickable item is the big orange button. It’s not a carefully considered thought process, it’s a trusting response to what appears to be clear guidance. “There’s a button!” Click.

Let’s look at another example.

Example 2: GoDaddy

Another task I undertook recently was registering a domain name through GoDaddy.com. Let me preface this by saying I’ve had a decent customer experience with this company, overall, so I came into this with a fair amount of goodwill.

I’d just found the domain name I wanted, and clicked the “Continue” button. Below is the page I saw next.

Take a look: What’s the one item that looks most clickable on this page?

If you answered, “The huge green button,” you’re right!

But if you click that button, you add two additional domain names to your order, just like magic! What if that’s not what you wanted to do? What if you want to register only the domain name you picked on the previous page?

To do this, you’d have to click the small text link under the huge green button:

This annoys me every time I go through the GoDaddy checkout process. I’m used to it now, but each encounter incrementally diminishes the store of goodwill I have for the company. I never send friends to the site without detailed caveats along the lines of:

“It’ll be very confusing and they’ll try to sell you extra stuff, but just ignore all that. Look for the tiny little text links that say “No thanks” and keep on going.”

Again, it’s remotely possible GoDaddy truly believes they’re doing customers a service here. Or that they’re incompetent or don’t understand their audience.

Again, I think not.

You’ve Got to Change Your Evil Ways… Baby

It’s easy to shake an accusing finger at these and other sites who deliberately lead visitors into unintended actions. But waiting for them to change their ways isn’t the answer. As long as the rewards of this approach are greater than the downside (customer complaints, blog rants, etc.), they’ll keep right on down the same path.

What can we do about it? How about starting here:

• Complain to the company, often and annoyingly.
• Warn and educate everyone you know about tactics like this.
• Avoid companies that consistently use these tactics, and spread the word about them.
• On the flip side, reward companies who treat visitors with respect. Visit them, buy from them, and spread the word about them.
• Help those who are less internet-savvy than yourself through the minefields.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep doing my small part, here on the CLM blog. If you run across a good example for this series, post it in a comment, I’d love to hear about it!

View related topics: evil-usability

When did the web site design process become a roadblock to launching a site, rather than helping it along?

When did the details of site design and function become a site owner obsession, more important than becoming visible, more compelling than getting a business online, spreading the word and making money?

And yes, before you say anything, we’re fully on board with the concept of details making a difference. We even wrote a book about it (Web Design for ROI). But there’s a point at which the details paralyze the process, preventing real action and forestalling any benefits.

Seth Godin wrote a post along these lines entitled “How to Create a Good Enough Web Site” in which he describes a simple”"some web designers would even say heretical”"process for quickly developing and launching a new site. Start with a design that’s “good enough,” Seth says, and focus on what’s important. By doing things in a practical order, not over-thinking the design, and getting signoffs at the right junctures, a web site can go from concept to launch in much less time and with much less trauma than usual. That’s the agile development approach.

From there, we’d add, it’s time to begin iterating and improving your site based on feedback and metrics. By making and testing small changes to design, copy, supportive advertising, and so forth, you can create an exceptional site that has incorporated valuable input”"real, live, authentic input you had no access to during development. And you’ll be online a lot longer than otherwise.

What inputs matter?

To complement an agile web site launch, we recommend tracking and responding to your selected key metrics. That is, measurements that actually matter to your business goals. But most businesses are swamped with stats and measurements. Which ones matter, which metrics are “key?”

Here are a few to start with:

• Your ‘landing page’ conversion rate. This is the page or pages where you send marketing traffic, whether paid search, natural search, email blast, or offline advertising. Track and watch how effective this landing experience is for you over time. Consider doing A/B or multivariate testing to narrow down what works for your site, company, and audience.
• Your shopping cart completion rate (for e-commerce sites). It’s really not OK to have more than half your customers drop out of your checkout process, despite most sites averaging 60% dropoff. Check your analytics for trouble spots in your checkout, to pinpoint which steps are the worst offenders.
• Your RFQ / Registration process completion rate (for lead generation sites). As with a checkout process, there may be multiple steps, and a few of those steps may be bad apples as far as your prospective customers are concerned. Focus your update attention on those steps with the worst issues, and keep a constant, detailed eye on your stats.
• Your home page abandonment rate. If your home page is visible and receives traffic, then track how effective your home page is at drawing visitors deeper into your site. If your ‘bounce’ rates are very high, this may mean you need to clarify your identity, what you do, or improve your visual credibility. Or it may mean you’re using an advertising source that drives low-quality traffic. Either way, it’s important to know.
• Your end stats. By this we mean sales, contract signings, membership agreements, and so forth. Where things get real, in other words. Can you track your traffic, downloads, and lead through to what really matters? If not, you’re missing the full picture. You won’t know what traffic source is your most valuable, where to focus your iterative site improvements, or what’s actually delivering the best ROI for you, you’re working blind.

If you’ve found these tips valuable or at least intriguing, it’s not too late to register for the Voices that Matter conference in San Francisco (Oct 22-25) where Lance Loveday and I are lucky enough to be speaking alongside web greats such as Dan Brown, Jacob Nielsen, Kelly Goto, and many others. Hope to see you there!

View related topics: seth-godin, Web Design

There’s nothing I like better than when Google AdWords decides to make our lives as search marketers just a bit easier. If you’re interested in working smarter and improving campaign results, be sure to check out two of the more recent reporting roll-outs - Google’s new Placement Performance Reports and Search Query Reports.

Google Placement Performance Reports – Finally… We now have visibility and CONTROL over where our ads display in the Content Network given Google AdWords’ relatively new Placement Performance Reports.

For the sake of providing some historical context, there definitely has been an evolution in terms of Google’s Content Network offerings. We were granted some control years back when Google decided to let us set separate bids for Content v. Search (and by the way, if you aren’t bidding separately for the Content and Search Networks, you really need to make this change – these really should be viewed and managed separately, as they are entirely different beasts).

The ability to bid separately for Content and Search was definitely a big step towards more control.

Then, another not-so-small victory came about when Google decided to let us exclude sites – nice feature, and another step towards more control. But given that most account managers don’t take the time to dive into their log files, this didn’t help much for those who were clueless as to the source of their traffic in the first place.

But now with Google’s new Placement Performance report, we’ve got quick and easy visibility coupled with control. These reports allow you to see exactly which Content sites are sending you traffic and conversions, and therefore make the right decisions to improve your campaign’s ROI from the Content Network (as opposed to throwing your hands up in the air in frustration and pausing the Content Network all together as many of us did in the past).

For those sites that are driving costly traffic yet few or no conversions, go to your Tools link and choose the Site Exclusion option to eliminate future clicks from these lower performing websites.

For those sites that show up in your Placement Performance Reports as top performers, consider maximizing your exposure by setting up a Site Targeting campaign. With a Site Targeting campaign, you can explicitly choose which sites you want to appear on and therefore maximize exposure on your most effective placements. However, note that I say ‘consider’ Site Targeting because there is one major caveat – you end up paying on a CPM basis if you do this and in my experience thus far, this is a big downgrade in ROI. I’m personally willing to give up the increased control in order to keep my coveted CPC pricing model.

The Placement Performance Reports combined with Site Exclusion is definitely a great combination for increasing ROI on the Content Network… though I have to mention one big flaw. Domain ads. You’ll notice in your Placement Performance Reports that there are line items that say ‘Domain ads’, which refer to Google ads that show up on parked domains. In our experience, these parked domains drive lots of clicks and few conversions… yet currently, Google will not allow advertisers to opt out of domain ads, as you can with individual sites.

Overall though, a thumbs up to Google for granting us this increased level of visibility.

Google Search Query Reports – If you are using Broad or Phrase Match, then Google’s new Search Query Reports will definitely be your friend. Downloading a Search Query report will allow you to pull statistics including conversion information for the specific search queries that were used by the searcher who clicked through on your ad – as opposed to seeing metrics only for the term you were explicitly bidding on in AdWords.

I definitely recommend pulling this report ASAP if you have not already. You will be quite shocked at the terms that you are phrase and broad matching to currently. Many are so completely and totally off the mark it is not even funny - which in turn is creating a whole lot of buzz and well-warranted discontent regarding Google’s Expanded Broad Match (check out Expanded Broad Match Hurting AdWords Advertisers and Up The Creek With Google AdWords Broad Match).

Here are some suggestions for taking the Search Query report data and converting it into a positive in terms of ROI.

For those terms that are driving traffic yet not converting, set up negative keywords in your campaigns and/or ad groups; thus eliminating this ineffective traffic.

For those terms that are driving effective traffic and conversions within your ROI benchmarks, yet you aren’t explicitly bidding on them (the broad or phrase matched terms), go ahead and add these terms to your campaign. Even though you’re already showing up for these terms, you can maximize exposure and control by bidding on them individually.

Learn more about Google Placement Reports:
How to Use Google’s Placement Report and Site Exclusion to Cut Your Customer Acquisition Costs by 20%
Google Content Placement Performance Report Rollout

Learn more about Google Search Query Reports:
My Newfound Love: Google AdWords Search Query Reports
Searching Beyond the Paid: Google AdWords’ Search Query Report …

Bravo to Google for giving us the tools to increase ROI from our online campaigns!

The ability to perform A/B tests on ad descriptions and landing pages in paid search is truly a beautiful (and powerful) thing. If you are not testing ad descriptions against one another for conversion and ROI, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity to gain more sales and leads for your company within your given budget.

However, a lot of times it is tempting to throw 4, 5, 6 or more different ad descriptions into the search engines’ systems and test them all at once. Yet the key to drilling down to conclusive evidence of what does and does not work in terms of driving more leads or sales to your website is testing 1 element at a time. There IS a reason why they call this A/B testing – not A/B/C/D/E/F testing!

Take this example. Say you set up 3 different ads for testing in Google AdWords:

Suppose that at the end of 2-3 weeks the 1^st ad significantly outperforms the others in terms of conversion rate. Was it the ‘5 Diamond’ designation? Was it the fact that the rate was included? Was it that it stated ‘downtown’? You really can’t know for sure because no single variable was isolated. Each ad differs too much from the others and therefore you simply can’t draw any great conclusions from this test.

Instead, what if you were set this up on a ‘testing schedule’ of sorts. For testing in Week 1-2 (assuming this is enough time to gain actionable data… but definitely run the ads for longer if needed):

(note that the only variable tested is the use of a room rate in ad description)

At the end of Week 2, say the first ad with the rate emerges as the clear ‘winner’. You can now conclude that the inclusion of rates in the ad description is a factor that contributes to more online sales.

Week 3-4? Stick with the rate in ALL descriptions now that you know it is important for sales, but move on to a new isolated variable. Say that this particular hotel has a number of honors to work with as key differentiators and now you’d like to see which resonates best with searchers:

Week 5-6? Perhaps the hotel wants to test the use of special offers such as ‘Free Breakfast’ v. ‘4^th Night Free’. Week 7-8: maybe 2 different landing pages.

By patiently remaining systematic in this approach and letting the numbers provide the proof, you’ll have solid evidence of which ad elements and landing pages produce the highest ROI for your company.

One important last word of note though! In Google AdWords, much to the conversion marketer’s chagrin, Google will by default start delivering the ad that has the highest click-through rate – not the ad with the highest conversion rate. If your goal for paid search is to drive the most leads or sales, not the most clicks, then I HIGHLY recommend that you turn off the setting that so-called ‘Optimizes’ your ad distribution.

To do so go to your Google Account and:

1. Select ‘Edit Settings’
2. Under Advanced Options select the radio button to ‘Rotate: Show ads more evenly’

Happy Testing!