In this article on imediaconnection.com, Lance Loveday weighs in on the tools currently available for landing page testing, and why companies aren’t making more use of them to increase conversion rates and business results.

Article Highlights:

• Advertisers often spend countless hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars only to direct traffic to a sub-par landing page
• Landing page testing leverages technology to test various design combinations in order to find the best recipe for success
• These platforms are not easily interchangeable and have different capabilities that might or might not be in line with your marketing philosophy

Read the full article here: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/27475.asp

Who’s responsible for your site’s error messages? Who decides what they say, when they appear, and how they look? It’s a key question—because if you haven’t paid attention to how your site treats visitors when things go wrong, their experience is much more likely to be negative—and talked about.

This article is second in a series I began in July. In that first article, I examined some ways to not only improve the effectiveness of error messages, but even go a step further and optimize them for conversion. Here, I’ll take a look at why so many sites have terrible error experiences, and who should be in charge of fixing it.

(Read the full article here, on Search Engine Land > )

In this video interview, conversion expert Lance Loveday explains the pros and cons of simple A/B split-testing vs. the much more complex multivariate testing:

We’ve found, says, Loveday, that A/B testing tends to deliver the largest gain. Of course, he adds, that this could be A/B/C/D testing - 4 variations of a single factor -as opposed to testing a large number of different factors at one time.

The advantage of A/B testing is that it tends to cause you to rethink the entire user experience as you look for elements to test — layout, visual hierarchy, messaging, etc. Multivariate testing, on the other hand, often leads to testing smaller incremental variations that don’t make as much difference. A/B testing forces you to be more creative about what you’re testing.

Loveday explains that his firm’s process is to start with some A/B testing to find an effective layout for a client. Once that’s established, they’ll do multivariate testing to get some additional incremental gains.

See the original full post here, on Web Marketing today >

On the web, errors are seemingly inevitable, and there are plenty of best practices for minimizing their negative effects. But what if we treated errors as an opportunity? What if we deliberately designed our customers’ error experience—not just for basic usability and clarity, but with conversion in mind?

In this article I’ll take a look at the concept of error experience design, why it’s important from a business perspective, and a few ways to turn an error into a conversion opportunity.

Why focus on errors?

I have to admit that part of my motivation here is purely selfish, as usual. I, personally, want a better, more enjoyable web experience. And errors, as the myriad stinging gnats of the web environment, should be made better so I can be happier. Simple as that.

I’m tired of seeing ugly, unfriendly errors like this one: …

[CONTINUE READING the complete article on Search Engine Land, HERE > ]

[Excerpt from the podcast notes:]
As the VP User Experience and Creative Director at Closed Loop Marketing, Sandra Niehaus is a passionate advocate for usability and design and she brings it all together to create, test and measure conversion-focused experiences for a long list of interesting companies. Sandra is also the co-author of Web Design for ROI with Lance Loveday, and you all know he’s a cool conversion dude as well.

I think you’ll find Sandra as fascinating as I did. She just knows how to create effective experiences. Listen in as she shares her thoughts on how to sell conversion optimization, why you need to know the numbers and what makes for a successful test.

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You’ll find the full recorded podcast here:  Conversations on Conversion podcast with Sandra Niehaus >