The CLM Blog

Multivariate Tests and the Creative Process: A Shout Out to the Number 2 Pencil

2008-11-20T17:11:11Z

I recently overcame a design block with a quick, hard smack to my forehead. No, I’m not a freak — let me explain.

There I was, sitting in front of the computer, Adobe Illustrator on one screen, Photoshop on the other — both art board and canvas, completely blank. My task: come up with not one, but several design concepts for a Landing Page. An added twist, the design concepts were for a single element of a 4×4 Multivariate Test (MVT). Being the first round of MVT for this Landing Page, each concept had to be well differentiated in order for the data to be meaningful afterward.

The MVT was set to follow an A/B test that was already live and collecting data. Of course in my head, the growing A/B data was starting to feel more like a countdown to embarrassment. I needed ideas and my creative gears were locked up and starting to smoke. With several iTunes tracks yielding no inspiration I had to make a change — and fast! And so it was out of this desperation that it hit me — or I hit me — as the story goes. You see; I smacked my forehead when I realized I knew better. I just needed to find my sketchpad and pencil.

The Number 2 Pencil Saves the Day

OK, so perhaps I’m giving a little too much credit to an inanimate object. Truthfully, this should have read “Doris Harrison Saves the Day”, but the Number 2 pencil title had a little more edge to it and helps with my point. Doris Harrison was an instructor of mine at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and she was relentless about following the creative process. Starting on the computer was a cardinal sin according to Doris, and every major assignment had stage-gates where she reviewed each step of the creative process as we progressed. At the beginning it seemed overkill and felt like a terrible waste of graphite and paper. But as the class progressed and the assignments became more intense, I was converted. My final design project for Doris was selected from more than 3-dozen concept sketches, of which nearly a dozen were solid contenders, each of which was unique in how it communicated the message.

So why should this project be any different?

Had my time in the working world transformed me into a man with unstoppable creative genius that transcended the need for rudimentary tools? Was I above the law? Any evidence from previous lucky moments was now being burned out of my memory by the blank white computer screens glaring back at me. It was time to get back to basics.

The Creative Process — Approved for Use with Multivariate Tests

1. Research

Find out all you can about the product or subject — know what makes it different. Learn the history of the subject and its competitors. Understand the audience and market. Gather pictures of the subject or go give it a try — anything that will help to make it as tangible as possible. This step is also where the designer learns the context and constraints they will need to work within (i.e., size of the finished piece, download speeds, etc.)

2. Define the Challenge

What are you trying to communicate — what’s your point? In corporate speak — what’s the value add? In laymen’s terms — why should I care? During this step you’re building the success criteria for your design. “For this design to be successful, it must communicate X, Y, and Z.” These points can be a lot of things; building brand image, key product differentiator, conveyance of a feeling or level of sophistication. After Steps 1 & 2 are complete, I typically have a few pages of notes written out. These notes are not overly organized, but I do like to make sure that the challenge is well-identified and as concise as possible. If you’re working with other designers, consensus on the challenge is very important.

3. Attempt to Answer the Challenge/First Ideas

Brainstorm first solutions — get those first ideas you had down on a sketchpad. I use a battery of questions to help me get started. For instance:

What would the world be like without the product or subject (your “Got Milk” solution)?
How was the task done before the subject or product was invented?
What does using the product or subject make you feel like?
What action describes the product vs. its competitors (fast vs. slow, nimble vs. cumbersome)?
How does the product make life simpler for the audience (is there a process “before and after” you can contrast)?
Does the subject look like or act like something in nature?

These ideas should be sketched out on paper as quickly as possible. They don’t need to be neat or well articulated. We’re talking quick and dirty thumbnail sketches no larger than necessary — a typical thumbnail sketch for me is about 2×3 inches.

4. GET AWAY!

Perhaps the most important step, take time away from the design process to let your subconscious work on solving the problem. For some people this is taking a walk or a bike ride — for others, it’s working on something completely unrelated. Regardless, getting away from the project at this stage is essential.

5. Let the Ideas Flow

I’m always amazed when I come away from Step 4 at how quickly the ideas start flowing. Again, quick and dirty — get all the ideas down on paper.

6. Select and Refine the Best Ideas

Now you should have perhaps a few dozen concepts from the previous steps. It’s now your job to determine which of these concepts should move on to the next level of refinement. Depending on your own internal processes, at this point you should be willing (or it may be required) to share your concepts with members of your team or your client (again, depending on your process). At Closed Loop Marketing we have an internal review process at this point to determine which concepts will be taken to a “client-ready” level of refinement. We will typically present 3 to 4 unique concepts per element variation to the client. These are presented in rough form (sketches for illustrations). I prefer scanning sketches in and using the computer for any frame/line or text elements (though it’s not required).

7. Produce to the Appropriate Level

With approval to continue, you’re now ready to execute the design. Depending on the requirements of the project, you may deliver a Photoshop file, a Flash movie, or GIFs and JPGs. Regardless, you should feel confident that you have concepts that are well thought out and differentiated — you’ve got the best of the best to utilize during your MVT.

Prediction: Pencil shortage by 2010

As the creative medium becomes more and more online, the pull away from the creative process becomes greater and greater. After all, why not begin on the computer since that’s we’re you’re ending up? And, truth be told, there are plenty of successful designers who haven’t picked up a sketchpad in years. If you’re able to move as quickly as your brain does in this format — by all means, stylus/mouse away. But as more and more marketers leverage MVT in their optimization efforts, the demands on creative resources will increase to match the resulting need. Consider that 49% of marketers surveyed at AdTech at the end of 2007 said they planned to use MVT during 2008 and we start to see how steep the demand curve is going to get. And this is a great thing for designers. Not only will there be more opportunities to exercise your creativity, there’s a direct (and real-life) feedback loop as a result of the platforms currently available (such as Google Website Optimizer, WideMile or Omniture’s Test&Target).

Putting Pencil to Paper

Knowing your own creative process and sticking to it is the first step — especially as the complexity of projects increases. The second step is getting buy-in with your team, management and/or client. I’m lucky — at Closed Loop Marketing we have a creative process that accommodates a high level of quality and we work with clients to ensure that the MVT’s are afforded the time needed to create compelling and unique variations. Our clients like the ROI from the MVT as well, since the best of the best variations rise to the top – rather than the best of the mediocre.

If you’re a designer, hopefully this has struck a chord or provided some inspiration to return to your creative beginnings. If you’re a manager, hopefully you’re building time into your projects to take full advantage of the creative process. And finally, if you happen to make #2 pencils – thanks for keeping graphite alive!

The 8 Things Every Web Team Should Know - #1: Kick Ass or Suck!

2008-11-15T02:04:57Z

I had the good fortune of delivering a keynote address at the Web Design 2.0 conference in Las Vegas last month. The conference organizers courageously said I was welcome to talk about whatever I wanted (suckers…). So I gave it some thought, brainstormed a number of things I’ve always wanted to say at a Web conference and came up with the session title and description below. The talk seemed to go over well, from my admittedly biased perspective. So I thought I’d share a summary of what I discussed here on our blog. It’s a little edgier than the stuff I normally write, but I’m hoping you won’t mind. I’ll cover one topic at a time at a completely random schedule dictated by my mood and bandwidth. I hope you enjoy them…

Here’s the session description, for background:

The 8 Things Every Web Team Should Know: Lessons From a Grumpy Web Consultant
Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing
Anyone who has worked in the online space for long realizes that many of the obstacles web teams face have little to do with technology, and everything to do with the damn humans. Why are web projects so easy for some organizations to get right but so excruciatingly difficult for most? Veteran web guru Lance Loveday knows and it makes him grumpy that everyone else doesn’t. Join Lance as he reveals the dark side of web team interactions, the damage it can wreak and the toll it can have on an organization’s success. He’ll share humorous anecdotes based on in-the-trenches experiences and, most importantly, practical tips on how teams can work smarter and more effectively.

#1 Kick Ass or Suck

Either path is OK. But you have to choose.

My experience has been that most web projects produce mediocre results, at least relative to their potential. That’s always frustrated me, especially when self-inflicted wounds are to blame for underperformance. I’ve struggled to find a solution for this recurring phenomenon for years. I think I may have found something.

I saw Jason Fried from 37signals speak a few years ago, and something he said about web projects has stuck with me ever since, and provides a good introductory framework for the point I want to make. He said there are only three components to web projects: Scope, Budget and Time. He then said they told their clients “Choose two” (this was back when they still did client work). Clients then had to consciously choose to flex in one area in return for making a change in one or more of the other areas. As most clients opted for a fixed budget (shocker), they’d then trade off increases in scope for extensions to the project timeline. I always thought this was an enlightened, if not always realistic, approach to client management.

While that approach works for maintaining an equitable relationship between client and agency, it doesn’t address the ultimate success of the project outcome. The bigger question I’ve always struggled with is:

What’s the right way to scope a web project to maximize the potential for success?

Conventional wisdom and the American work ethic assumes that your success in any project is directly related to your effort level. In chart form:

How We Wish Things Worked

I subscribed to this philosophy for a large part of my life. But my experience with web projects over the past 10 years has led me to believe that this curve actually looks more like this:

How Things Actually Work

Suck By Design

Under this scenario, the incremental effort between the first and last points is substantial, but the incremental gain is minimal – meaning a poor ROI on that incremental effort. In this case, you’d be much better served by consciously choosing to limit your effort to the first point, and freeing up your resources to focus on higher ROI activities. I’ve labeled this area of the chart “Suck” because it represents a relatively low effort level. “Suck” usually refers to something that, well, sucks. If you try to kick ass and end up sucking, then you’ve failed, and that truly does suck. But sucking in the way I’m describing can be good if you do so by design. I actually recommend sucking in this scenario, because sucking will get you the best return on any reasonable level of effort.

While effort in my example could be comprised of both Scope and Time, I advocate bounding effort with Time. Why? Because there’s nothing like a hard deadline to achieve focus. When you have to deliver a project under pressure, it becomes a LOT easier to prioritize features, focus on what’s truly important and ignore the less important stuff. The reality of most web projects is that you rarely know ahead of time exactly how things are going to turn out. There are thousands of little subjective decisions made along the way, any one of which could cause to you to see the project in a new light and/or give birth to a new idea that has the potential to make a huge difference in the success of the project. Attempting to rigidly control a web project’s scope based on an early assessment of what you think you need runs counter to the exploratory nature of web development. It’s also no fun. Many of the people who work in the web space do so because it fulfills their need to be creative in some form. Rigidly adhering to a fixed scope takes a lot of the creative joy out of projects. It also limits the ability to integrate user feedback obtained along the way, assuming user testing is a part of your development process (still a rarity, sadly).

I acknowledge the difficult balancing act involved in keeping a project on track while still enabling some freedom and flexibility. It’s very difficult to suck successfully. But not impossible! I’m encouraged by the examples I’ve seen of companies who do this well.

Can’t Suck? Then Kick Ass!

Sucking just isn’t palatable for some organizations. Tradition or company culture may require you to go big on all projects. And that can be OK if you can truly afford to invest at the higher cost Kick Ass level. Planned and executed well, big projects can achieve the higher success associated with Kick Ass status. These projects can also be a lot of fun. But because they usually involve more people, they tend to involve more politics and lack the camaraderie of a sucky project. Still, I’d always rather engage in a Kick Ass project than get stuck with the last kind of project – the dreaded Mediocre Middle.

Avoid the Mediocre Middle

Notice that I qualified my comment about Kick Ass projects by saying they can be good IF you can afford to invest at that level. The problem is that most organizations can’t afford to invest at that level. But they won’t settle for sucking and they want the Kick Ass results, so they fool themselves into thinking they can get there by cutting a corner here or there and end up investing at a level that puts them somewhere in the middle – essentially guaranteeing mediocre results. I argue that most companies set themselves up for failure from the start by having unrealistic expectations and improperly scoping projects.

If this is the source of the problem, how do we fix it? The easy answer is to plan better, be more realistic, be militant about avoiding the Mediocre Middle, suck by design when it makes sense, and adapt project management processes to embrace the semi-anarchic nature of web work. But that just isn’t realistic in most organizations. Until the company leadership and culture can support this type of approach, your best bet is to try sucking on a small scale. That’s right: Go rogue. Choose a side project, dedicate a small team to it, lay out a vision and requirements, set a hard deadline for completion and turn them loose. If that shows success, socialize the results internally and try to get more small focused teams dedicated to short-term projects. Call them Tiger Teams, Strike Teams, War Room Teams, whatever works. You have to start somewhere.

What do you think? Is this realistic? Too radical? Managing projects in this way requires a whole new approach. Some within the agile development community are already doing this. And a number of organizations are dabbling with some of these concepts. Will it ever go mainstream? Probably not. But my gut feel is that those organizations who adopt this approach to project management are going to seriously outperform.

I’ll address some of the leadership and culture issues that play into this issue in future posts in this series. Next up: Don’t Hump the Shark.

For more on 37signals and their approach to agile development (the concept upon which these principles are loosely based), see their fantastic book “Getting Real.”

Designer, Test Thyself - Five-Second Usability Tests

2008-11-10T23:47:54Z

These days, most web designers know the value of testing designs with representative users. And most have heard that there’s a lot to be gained from conducting even small, informal usability tests to validate page layout, branding ethos, and messaging. But the logistics of usability testing can get in the way. Even if a test is easy to do and doesn’t require a huge number of test participants, it’s still difficult to set it up, run it, and gather results properly. This challenge has driven the development of numerous remote usability testing tools, including this new entrant in the field.

A Five Second Background

In early October I had the pleasure of chatting with Matt Milosavljevic of MayhemMethod.com about their cool little usability testing tool, “Five Second Test.” At that time, the tool had just launched and was already receiving thousands of visits a day. The test itself was devised by Jared Spool, but it was a comment by Robert Hoekman, Jr. that sparked the idea for the online version.

“Robert mentioned the test, how useful it was, and also pointed out the difficulty of gathering people in one place to conduct the test,” Matt said. “We thought the web was the perfect answer to the problem.” And so the idea was born, and initial coding was completed in under two days.

Since its inception, the Five Second Test has grown to include an administrative area, nifty downloadable reports, two new variations on the original test, and, coming soon, Premium tests.

What It Does

The Five Second Test focuses on those crucial first few seconds of a visitor’s interaction with a web page. It’s during this time that visitors decide

am I in the right place?
can I trust this site / company?
does it look as though what I want will be here?

If a web page fails to pass this initial few seconds of scrutiny, the visitor is gone.

The premise of the test, then, is simple: Have test participants provide reactions to a design after viewing it for five seconds. What’s great about having this test online is that it greatly simplifies the test logistics. The timing is automatically taken care of. Test participants can be located anywhere with a web connection. Results are compiled into a neat, downloadable .csv file.

The tests currently include:

The original test - now called “Classic” - asks participants to list what they remember seeing.
The Compare test shows two design variations and asks participants which they prefer.
The Sentiment test asks participants to list their most and least favorite elements.

There’s also another new feature, the “do a random test” button that allows anyone coming to Five Second Test to become a test participant and, in the words above the button, “help out a designer”.

For each of the tests, you simply upload an image (two for the Compare test, of course), such as a screenshot of your web page or interface design. Five Second Test stores your image, provides you with a unique URL to send out to test participants, and handles all the display timing for you. There is more information about each test, as well as some good references for further study, available on the Five Second Test site.

Randomly Testing the Tests - Some Observations

I couldn’t help but do a number of Random Tests myself, and I looked at perhaps 20 different designs and interfaces. About five tests in, I had these epiphanies which the remainder of tests bore out:

For most web pages, all I remember is the company name and the main image.
Therefor, all the pages I saw essentially failed the five-second test.
Why did they fail? First, the web pages were all far, far too busy to truly capture and hold visitor attention.
Second, the web pages all tried to do far too many different things.

This small experiment reinforced for me the need to simplify, simplify, simplify. It should be the web designer’s mantra. If it’s not crucial, remove it. If it’s unclear, thrash it mercilessly until it is.

It’s Not the Violin, It’s the Violinist - Getting Truly Useful Results

So now it’s time for a curmudgeonly reminder: As with any tool, the Five Second Test will be most valuable in experienced hands. Talking about formal usability research and testing procedures may sound grumpy and obsessive amongst all the user experience enthusiasm, but there are reasons behind the “how” of running tests. Quite simply - the better your tests are, the cleaner and more useful your results will be. Poorly-designed and poorly-run tests, on the other hand, produce undependable, misleading results that can make your interfaces worse, not better.

For example, here are just a couple of foundational practices to include in any usability test:

Get the Right Audience: The participants must be part of the intended or target audience. Otherwise the feedback you get is at best muddled, at worst biased and completely irrelevant. Yes, there are some issues that will be common across all types of users, but as a user experience designer you should already know and address most of these as part of your best practice. For more information on recruitment, see Jakob Nielsen’s post on recruiting participants and UIE’s “Recruiting without Fear” report.

Assign a Meaningful Task: What you tell the participant to do prior to the test will change their behavior. For example, a classic eye tracking study conducted by Alfred Yarbus showed differences in how participants look at a family photo depending on the task they were given. What does that mean for you? If you’re using the Five Second Test, the primary “Classic” task is to “Remember what you see.” While this can provide helpful insights into what elements are memorable, remember that it primes the participant with a specific intent, which in turn influences his or her behavior.

What Next?

It’s exciting to see how tools like the Five Second Test are making usability testing easier than ever to do. That’s a good thing - testing is crucial in today’s pressurized, competitive business environment. But it makes it more important than ever for designers and developers to learn how to get the most out of these tools, with a solid grounding in usability methodology.

Google Analytics Profiles and Filters Part 1: The Must-Haves

2008-10-31T00:36:59Z

Google Analytics (GA) is quickly becoming the analytics package of choice for many companies.

This is not surprising. I mean, it’s FREE!

But that aside, some of the more intricate functionality and customizable components of GA hold real value, and should be utilized. This article is part 1 of a two-part series on Google Analytics Profiles and Filters.

GA filters do just what their name implies. They filter out data so you can more easily find the pertinent information.

Profiles allow you to create different data sets with varying filters for separate reporting. Incorporating these separate profiles and filters into your GA setup can help you analyze data more accurately and efficiently.

Then, if you actually act on your analyses, you can potentially increase your site’s conversion rate.

Profiles and Filters Work Together

An important concept in GA is the idea of separate profiles. You should create a separate profile for each set of data you want to analyze, and then apply the appropriate filter(s) for each profile. It is easier to explain by example, so the rest of this post is a list of what I consider to be must-have profiles & filters, and how to enable them.

Creating Profiles

To create a profile you simply go to your Analytics Settings and click on Add a New Profile:

Create the following profiles:

1. All Raw Data Profile

This is the easy one. It’s your original profile. You don’t have to apply any filters. You should always keep a profile that collects all data. This can act as a sort of safety-valve if you accidentally filter out the wrong data on other profiles.

2. Filtered Data General

In this profile add filters to exclude all of your internal IP addresses and to change all data to lowercase. (See Create the Filters below.) You really don’t need to know (usually) data on how your internal team is using the site. You want to change all data to lowercase because some servers will allow products.html and Products.html, and GA will count them as separate data.

3. New Visitors and Returning Visitors

Create these two separate profiles and add filters to track only new visitors and only returning visitors. This easily lets you pull reports and check data on these two types of users which can help you ascertain how new visitors use the site (or perhaps more importantly, how they leave it), and can also help shed light on what returning customers are interested in.

4. Paid Traffic and Organic Traffic

This really only applies if you are running any paid search campaigns. If you are, you should create profiles and filters to track only Paid Traffic and only Organic Traffic. Again, this lets you easily track the behaviors of these two types of visitors which can help you make informed decisions on how to increase your conversion rate.

Create the Filters

To create the filters go to Analytics Settings and click on Filter Manager.

Then you can click on Add Filter.

Now you can name and create the filter and choose which profiles to add it to:

Exclude Internal IPs

Name the filter. Choose “Exclude all traffic from an IP address” from the Filter Type drop-down menu and enter the appropriate IP. Be sure to include the backslash before each period as GA filters use regular expressions.

Make All Lowercase

Name the filter. Choose “Custom” from the Filter Type drop-down menu. Click the “Lowercase” radio button. Choose “Request URI” from the Filter Field drop-down menu.

New Visitors

Name the filter. Choose “Custom” from the Filter Type drop-down menu. Click the “Include” radio button. Choose “Visitor Type” from the Filter Field drop-down menu. Type “new” as the Filter Pattern.

Returning Visitors

Name the filter. Choose “Custom” from the Filter Type drop-down menu. Click the “Include” radio button. Choose “Visitor Type” from the Filter Field drop-down menu. Type “returning” as the Filter Pattern.

Paid Traffic

Name the filter. Choose “Custom” from the Filter Type drop-down menu. Click the “Include” radio button. Choose “Campaign Medium” from the Filter Field drop-down menu. Type “cpc|ppc” as the Filter Pattern. The “pipe” character is part of a regular expression that means “or”. For this feature to track your Google Adwords paid traffic correctly, auto-tagging much be turned on in Google Adwords. Linking your Adwords and Analytics accounts will enable auto-tagging. For it to work with other paid search platforms, you must use link-tagging.

Organic Traffic

Name the filter. Choose “Custom” from the Filter Type drop-down menu. Click the “Include” radio button. Choose “Campaign Medium” from the Filter Field drop-down menu. Type “organic” as the Filter Pattern.

You can see that profiles and filters work hand-in-hand to help you segment pertinent data.So, set up the profiles, add the appropriate filters, and ANALYZE THE DATA! I guarantee you will find some surprising information that will lead to informed changes which will lead to more conversions. Good luck.

(Look for Part 2 of this post soon where I will cover Advanced Filters.)

Travelin’ Light: SEO Tools to Have in Your Back Pocket

2008-10-27T16:18:03Z

As SEO consultants, we're asked a variety of questions. Many of them are strategic questions like: "How do you know if a page is optimized for the right terms?" or tactical questions like: "How do we structure our site to be more SEO-friendly?"

But just as often, the questions are fundamental ones: "How do I know if one keyword is searched on more than another?" or "How do you know what type of redirect is being used?"

And whether you're a seasoned SEO expert, or an in-house SEO manager new to your position, having a few SEO tools in your back pocket can help answer some of those fundamental questions.

A Little Background:

The impetus for this post came from a current client who is getting ready to "step into the spotlight" for SEO within her company. She's relatively new to SEO and is feeling the pressure of needing to be The Expert, so I was going to send her a few quick (and free) SEO tools for her to keep in her back pocket as she fully assumes this role.

Then I thought there might be others out there who'd be interested in this info.

And here we are.

So here’s a short collection of free SEO tools and tips I often reference to help answer some of those fundamental questions – or sometimes, just to make the job a little easier.

Enjoy.

Keyword Research Tools – Use 'Em Wherever You Go

In general, keyword research tools are best considered to be relative indicators of keyword search volume. Some tools use a form of "panel" research and extrapolate the data to make search volume projections, while others represent volumes that include "automated queries" and thus can skew the results (e.g. making the search volume for a term appear much higher than it is). As a result, any tool being used should be thought of as a general guide, rather than an indicator of absolute numbers.

Below are four free tools that I've found helpful when conducting keyword research for SEO – and the best part, beyond being free, is that you can access them wherever you've got an internet connection – which makes them useful for answering questions 'on the fly':

1 - Keyword Discovery (free version):

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

Note: There is also a subscription version of Keyword Discovery, which can be purchased for as little as one month at a time for about $50, along with the option of testing out their service via a free trial. The subscription version gives much more robust data but the free one is good for indications of relative search volume.

2 - Google Adwords: Keyword Tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Note: Google's free keyword research tool recently began including search volume numbers. However, some experts caution relying on those numbers because they can include searches that come through automated queries and from "parked domains". If using this tool, I’d recommend at least setting the Match Type to "Exact" when reviewing the search volume results.

3 - Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trends

This is a great tool for comparing the relative search volume between keywords. For example, if you're trying to decide between "training materials" and "training documentation", this can illustrate which term has higher relative search volume.

4 - WordTracker

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Note: WordTracker also offers a free 7-day trial.

A note about tool comparisons:

Between WordTracker and Keyword Discovery, I'd recommend Keyword Discovery because its database and methodology are generally more robust. Also note that WordTracker reports volumes for one month, while Keyword Discovery reports volumes over 12 months, so the volumes can seem radically different when using both tools for the same keyword.

On-Page SEO: Where To Start?

Very often, we're asked to prioritize SEO recommendations for sites in order of importance – or, more bluntly, we're asked what recommendations will get the most bang for their buck.

And while SEO recommendations should be implemented as part of a complete website strategy for strategic online marketing goals, if there are only a few SEO changes you can make to a page's content and code, I'd recommend these, in priority order:

Title Tag
Keep it around 65 characters to avoid truncation in search results
Meta Description Tag
This should be around 150 characters to avoid truncation
Meta Keywords Tag
Arguably, this tag carries very little weight in the SEO world, but we've seen it used heavily by the internal search engines of some sites, so don't discount it entirely
HTML body copy
Very often, we see website pages that are simply a collection of links, which is a missed SEO opportunity to more effectively convey to the search engines what the page is about. Even if you can only add 250 characters of actual text on a page, it can help with SEO
Page Title
The page title on many website pages is often represented as an H1 tag. If your page has a Page Title, but it isn't an H1 tag, make it so. If you don't have a Page Title, add one, and make sure it's an H1

Of course, there are many other areas of a page in which to incorporate targeted keywords, such as H2 and H3 tags, image ALT text, and strategies such as bolding or italicizing targeted keywords to give them additional emphasis.

However, if you take a web page that has not been optimized and incorporate targeted keywords into each of those 5 areas listed above, you will be well on your way to having a well-optimized page.

If you're the one actually writing the Title Tags and Meta Description tags, below is a character and word counting tool I've found to be very useful:

Keyword Counting Tool - Free
http://www.fwointl.com/FWOFormatter.html

This is a great little tool to use when writing Title Tags and Meta Descriptions. I stumbled across it years ago and keep coming back to it. It makes it easier to quickly determine how many characters are in a Title Tag (one should generally keep them to 65 characters) or Description Tag (they get truncated in search results after about 150 characters), without having to take the time to do the "Word Count" function in a Word doc.

Redirects and Indexation – The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

I was on a phone call with a client last week who was asking about SEO for a new online marketing initiative. In a nutshell, the objective of the initiative was to increase natural search visibility for a series of partner pages, that would subsequently increase traffic to my client's site – but she couldn't figure out why none of those partner pages were showing up in search results.

So, first of all, I thought we'd check to see if those partner pages were getting indexed.

A quick and simple way to check if a page is indexed is to simply paste the URL of the page into the SEs search box (in this case, I'm using Google):

As you can see, the particular page we were discussing was not indexed. And if a page isn't indexed, it's not going to rank at all for any search query in the world.

Digging a little deeper in this example, we discovered that this page was the product of a redirect from a vanity / marketing URL that was being used in my client's promotional efforts.

Ahhhh.

So we went to one of my favorite tools for determining what redirects that are in place:

SEO Browser

http://www.seo-browser.com/

In order to check for redirects using this tool, I recommend selecting the "advanced" option in the upper right hand corner.

And this is what we found:

A Meta Refresh was in place, which was also most likely contributing to this page's lack of natural search visibility, because search engines don't effectively follow Meta Refreshes. For optimal SEO benefit, the most effective redirect is a 301.

Checking Rankings

Another common question people ask is: “how do I know if my page is ranking in natural search?” There are a number of software programs available, such as Advanced Web Ranking and WebPosition, which automate the rank checking process. These programs are very helpful when you're managing a large set of keywords.

However, if you have a relatively small set of keywords you need to check, nothing beats a quick "live check." Just type your keyword into a search engine’s search box, hit enter and check to see if your page is ranking. I’d recommend only checking the first 4 pages of search results, aka the “Top 40″. Rankings after page 4, even after page 3 really aren’t going to garner much natural search traffic, if any.

Wrapping It Up and Hitting the Road

Certainly, this isn't meant to be an exhaustive list of SEO Tools. There are many excellent collections of SEO resources available. In fact, if you're interested in taking a deeper dive, SEOmoz is one that does a nice job of providing a comprehensive set of SEO tools. Some of them are free, but many require a subscription.

But at the end of the day, the tools listed above are the ones I come back to the most. And if I were new to SEO and seeking the answer to some fundamental questions, I'd start with knowing more about keyword search volume, indexation, redirects and rankings for my key pages and targeted terms.

Happy trails!

Google AdWords Continues to Excel in Transparency & Accountability

2008-10-24T21:54:01Z

Google recently released a new version of its interface that allows advertisers to now see stats split by Google vs. Search Partners (AOL, Ask, Google Product Search, Earthlink, Shopping.com, etc) vs. Content. Until now, advertisers have had visibility to the Content aspect, but not to the Search Partners.

Why is this helpful? For this particular client below, for example, I was able to see that the traffic driven from the Search Partners is converting at a much greater cost per conversion when compared to the traffic driven from Google itself. Armed with this new knowledge, I’ve turned off the Search Partners for this client and am focusing efforts primarily on Google.com:

Some advertisers ponder whether Google Adwords is shooting themselves in the foot by providing this level of visibility. In my opinion, no they are not. AdWords ongoing commitment to providing advanced levels of reporting, such as Search Query Performance reports and Placement Performance reports for example (which the other PPC engines do not currently provide), has yet to cause our clients to spend less with Google.

I mean, sure, the Search Query Performance reports provided us with some startling insights into the pitfalls of Broad Match, resulting in us tightening up our match type strategies and applying more negative keywords in our account. And, yes, Placement Performance reports have shed light on underperforming sites within the Content Network, resulting in us setting up more Site Exclusions. And yes, now we are even excluding Search Partners in this instance highlighted above.

But do these exclusions mean that we are ultimately going to spend less each month with Google? No way! We’re not going to spend less, we’re just going to spend smarter - by shifting funds to better performing keywords, better performing Content sites and better performing distribution channels within AdWords, in turn increasing our clients’ ROI.

In fact, I’d strongly argue that in the long-run the added visibility that these reporting enhancements provide will actually result in many advertisers spending more with AdWords. Why? Because, Increasing ROI = Increased Justification for More Search Budget.

Kudos once again, Google! As far as I’m concerned, this is brilliant and your feet are quite safe (as if you were concerned). Much thanks for providing this level of transparency and accountability, and for giving advertisers the tools we need to manage PPC intelligently.

User Interface 13 Conference - A Must-Attend Event

2008-10-24T19:40:59Z

Last week I had the pleasure of hopping on an airplane and flying 3000 miles to attend the User Interface 13 Conference.

Guess what. It was well worth it, so I wanted to write a quick post thanking Jared Spool and his exceptional team at UIE for putting on such a valuable and efficient event. All of the sessions I attended were top-notch, but I just want to call out a few.

Jeremy Keith from Clearleft gave a home run seminar on “Bulletproof Ajax”. I’ve been to all-day Ajax seminars in the past, which were good, but Jeremy is a step above the rest in his knowledge, experience and seminar structure.

Luke Wroblewski’s “Content Page Design Best Practices” and Scott Berkun’s “Why Designers Fail and What to Do About It” I found especially motivating. These guys back up what they preach with tons of experience and are very entertaining as well. If you get a chance to attend one of their sessions at a conference, take it.

Then, of course, there is Mr. Spool. I could write a book about him. Don’t worry. I won’t. Jared’s vast knowledge gleaned from research in the field of User Experience is the core reason this conference is so worth it. Any team would walk away with new ideas on how to better serve their customers/users after attending Jared’s talks.

He’s pretty damn funny too.

All in all the UIE conference was terrific. I strongly recommend you check out next year’s event.

SEM for ROI - Top 10 SEM Checklist

2008-10-21T18:58:40Z

In the past couple of years, Closed Loop Marketing has had more and more companies contact us who were actually already running pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns - some managing in-house, some outsourcing to other agencies. So if they were already active in PPC, then why were they contacting CLM? Because by-and-large, these companies were quite disappointed in their PPC campaigns, with results ranging from mediocre to downright dismal, and they were searching for SEM guidance.

CLM was hired to audit and essentially ‘make over’ these accounts, and the results across-the-board have far surpassed even our expectations. At the Web Builder 2.0 conference last week in Las Vegas, I had the pleasure of speaking to this at a session called Extreme Makeover: SEM Edition. In this session, I shared the common pitfalls that we see companies fall into time and time again, the strategies that CLM applies to successfully remedy these common PPC-killers and the final outcomes of our clients’ Extreme SEM Makeovers. In that same spirit, CLM has created ‘SEM for ROI - Top 10 SEM Inspection Checklist’. This checklist represents what we consider some of the most impactful elements to critique first within your PPC campaigns to find areas for improvement.

#1

Download a Search Query Performance Report from Google AdWords (note that such a report is not available in Yahoo or MSN - only Google). Mine this for more keywords to add, as well as more negative keywords to add.

#2

Calculate your ROI from Broad, Phrase and Exact matched iterations of your keywords to determine profitability for each and adjust your match type strategy accordingly. This can parsed from the Search Query Performance report.

#3

Download a Placement Performance Report from Google AdWords (this report is not available in Yahoo or MSN). Use this to identify which Content Network Sites are not converting well, and set up site exclusions accordingly.

#4

Find out what your coverage levels are for your keywords. Download an Account or Campaign level report and choose Exact IS (Impression Share) as a metric to be included in the report (this metric is not available in Yahoo or MSN). If your Exact Impression Share is low, consider either increasing your budget, tightening up your match types, pausing less targeted keywords or a combination of the above.

#5

Check your ad copy. Are you A/B testing at least 2 ads? If not, write additional ads. This is a super-easy, yet powerful way to increase campaign performance. Bonus tip: Check your campaign settings and make sure your ads are set to rotate evenly, for a true A/B test. The engines are not set to do this by default, you have to manually specify this.

#6

Do some searches for your keywords. What are other competitors touting in their ads? Whatever they are saying, make sure your ads say something better. If your ads are comparatively weak, create new ads based on your company's most concrete, compelling differentiators.

#7

Check your keyword list. Do you have all singulars, plurals, stems, reversals, synonyms, permutations, etc? If not use the Google Keyword tool and permutation tools to fully flesh out your keyword list. A couple permutation tools include SplutWeb.com and Closed Loop Marketing’s own beta-release keyword permutations tool, shown here:

#8

Apply the PPC engines' conversion tracking codes, if you have not done so already. These are the single most important variable in refining a campaign. The ability to view conversions within the PPC engines' bidding interface is instrumental in increasing ROI over time.

#9

Are your landing pages directly relevant to the keywords you're bidding on, and are they optimized for conversion and usability? If not, consider building custom landing pages designed specifically for Search. When done right, landing pages can provide at least a 2X lift in conversion.

#10

Review your bids and cost/conversion at a keyword-by-keyword level. Are bids set to maximize ROI? Or are you guilty of ego bidding? Dial your ROI winners up, and turn your losers down based on your key metrics.

This short list of 10 is just scratching the surface, though it certainly represents some of the more common areas to address. While there are many aspects of a campaign that could go awry, the good news is that campaigns can be madeover and completely turned around with a critical eye - we’ve seen it time and time again! If you do find yourself frustrated with your current PPC campaigns, take a step back and dig into the main elements - account structure, keywords, ad copy, landing pages and bidding. When SEM is done right, the results more than likely will far surpass your expectations.

Finally! Tracking Phone Leads with Google Analytics

2008-10-17T17:59:51Z

One of our clients – Ifbyphone - just announced some new functionality that will make it a LOT easier for advertisers to track phone leads by advertising campaign and pull the data into Google Analytics. We're especially excited about what this means for Search Engine Marketing campaigns, although it can be used to track calls from any kind of advertising.

We've always been frustrated when our SEM campaign ROI has been underreported because we didn't have an easy way of telling what phone calls originated from Search. Even in those cases where we had a sense for how much call volume our Search campaigns were driving, we could never attribute the calls to the originating Campaign or Ad Group so we could adjust bids and spending to ensure we were getting the most out of the campaigns.

Some advertisers have developed a basic multiplier they apply to their web leads/sales to account for the lift from phone sales we all knew was happening even though we couldn't measure it. That's better than nothing, but not very precise or actionable.

Some more advanced advertisers have set up custom 800 numbers for various campaigns so they could get more granular call data. But in most cases they had to manually marry up the web data with the phone data, usually weeks or months after the fact. This enabled some better intelligence, but still fell short of having one system tracking everything in real time.

But with Ifbyphone's new system, now we can achieve the vision of having web and phone lead data reported in ONE system. And not just any system, but the very popular Google Analytics. See Thomas Howe's review of this new capability from Ifbyphone here: Simple and Brilliant.

More on how it works on the Ifbyphone blog here: Phone Mashup for Tracking Call Data in Googe Analytics.

More detailed information will be coming out shortly.

As with many things, it will take some good planning and upfront work in order to get the most out of this new capability. But the bottom line is that this solves a big problem for a lot of advertisers. If you drive a decent amount of call volume from your campaigns, you owe it to yourself to check out this new tool. It's an easy and low-cost way to make sure you're spending your advertising dollars more intelligently. Who can argue with that?

Take the Customer Experience Survey

2008-10-04T01:13:29Z

During her crazy adventure to Finland for the Persuasive Technology conference (more on that here), CLM’s Amy Greer met a fascinating gentleman from the UK named Richard Sedley. Richard works at a UK-based agency called cScape managing the Customer Engagement group. Amy introduced me to Richard when she returned and, in an attempt to brush up on my transoceanic diplomacy skills, we’ve been conversing ever since.

Recently, Richard graciously asked CLM to participate in the Customer Engagement Survey he runs in conjunction with E-Consultancy. Having seen the people who participated in the past surveys (like Andy Beal and Avinash K), we jumped at the chance. You can see the summary report from the previous surveys here.
So I’m putting out the call to all companies (including agencies) to take the survey. It only takes a few minutes. I found it to be an eye-opening experience.

Take the survey

$150 Discount to SMX East

2008-09-23T19:21:20Z

SMX East is happening Oct 6-8 in NYC, where I’ll be speaking on SEO & Usability. This promises to be one of the biggest and best Search conferences.The friendly folks who run the SMX events are letting speakers offer a $150 discount off all-access passes. Just comment on this post or email info (at) closed-loop-marketing.com if interested and we’ll send you the discount code. Please look me up if you’ll be there. SMX East site

Searching the Invisible - Advances in Video and Audio Search

2008-09-19T20:22:05Z

The Iceberg’s Tip

Since their inception, search engines have relied on the visible to locate relevant content. Visible text, to be precise. And not just any visible text, either - the text had to be accessible and readable to a web crawler. That is, it couldn’t be inside an animation, image, script, video, or a wide assortment of other file formats. It couldn’t be stored in a ‘deep web’ database such as the CDC or USGS, one that was reached only via an active user query. And it certainly couldn’t be spoken.

This meant that, for all the blow-your-mind number of visible web pages out there on the web, all this time only a tiny fraction of the available content has been indexable and searchable by search engines. In 2001 the company BrightPlanet estimated in their white paper “The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value” that public search engines made only 0.03% of the total web content available to searchers. That’s tiny. And this estimate wasn’t even considering content hidden in images, audio files, and video. Like a giant iceberg of data and content, the majority of the web remained - and still remains - invisible to search. But this is all changing.

Making sense out of sound

Google’s beta release of Gaudi, its audio indexing tool heralds to the wider public a profound shift in the search environment. Why? Hasn’t audio search been around for years now? Actually, no. Not this way.Yahoo’s audio search tool and video search tool have been around for quite a while, yes, along with Google’s video search tool. But these tools merely help you locate audio and video files - they don’t index the meaningful content within those files. Words that are spoken inside these files couldn’t be indexed. Neither could faces, locations, or other visual content information. Which means in order to attach real meaning and searchability to the files they had to be tagged with identifying information or else have an accompanying summary. Text, in other words.

Instead of relying on tags, meta data, or transcripts, Gaudi is capable of indexing the actual spoken content within audio and video files. If a speaker says the word “orbit” in a video, a search for the word “orbit” using Gaudi will be able to locate that video file, even if it has no tags, meta data, or nearby text containing that word.Why is this important? Aren’t tags, meta data, and transcripts good enough?

A Question of Quality

It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that most images, videos, and audio files on the web have insufficient or inaccurate information associated with them.Here are some of the reasons why:

It takes time, effort, money, and planning to add ALT properties to images
Same goes for adding meta data to videos
attempts to leverage “crowd intelligence” to tag these files often results in inaccuracies or less-specific information (i.e. “dog” instead of “poodle”)
tagging and meta data can only summarize content
Many sites don’t have room for - or don’t want to display - complete transcripts or even text summaries of video and audio files

So, to summarize, we humans are fairly messy, lazy, and careless when it comes to identifying things - at minimum, underfunded - and that’s not going to change. Much better to develop an automated process to make sense of it all for us, calculate relevance, and serve it up in a familiar search results environment.

But Can You See Me? I Mean, Really See Me?

Behind the scenes, Google, Yahoo, and a wide range of other organizations have been hard at work figuring out how to crack the visual, as well as audio, indexing challenge. Google foreshadowed their visual video indexing capability in a blog post on June 14, 2007, saying,

“The technology extracts key visual aspects of uploaded videos and compares that information against reference material provided by copyright holders.”

The main purpose of this effort was to identify copyright violations on the YouTube platform, and it followed on the heels of Google implementing audio fingerprinting technology on their AudioSwap platform. Once developed, however, the technology has far-reaching capabilities and implications for extending visual search capabilities.

One intriguing recent development on the visual search side of things - and there are many - is the creation of face-recognition software that works even with low-quality images and video clips, like those found all over YouTube and the web. Developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, this face-recognition system solves one of the challenges of extracting information from image and video files - that of file resolution, poor lighting, non-controlled subject aspect (which way the subject’s face is turned), and overall image quality. Combined with other visual recognition software and image annotation methods, this technology will likely lead to widespread automated indexing of at least a portion of that other 99.97% of the web.

OK, We’ve Got the Kitchen Sink - Now What Do We Do With It?

But information is one thing — making it meaningful is another. With access to more data from more sources than ever, the question is what good will it do us? How do we tie together related information that’s stored in a variety of formats, locations, and languages? How do we not only locate and index this data but correlate it in useful and intelligent ways? Well, now we’re talking about the semantic web, called by some - especially those like myself who’re really tired of talking about Web 2.0 - “Web 3.0″. And that, my friends, is the topic for a whole other blog post.

Match Type Strategies - [Lessons Learned], “Lessons Learned”, Lessons Learned

2008-09-04T00:15:11Z

Let me share with you how one PPC advertiser achieved…

An ROI increase from 77% to 323%
A conversion rate increase from 6.15% to 8.39%
A CTR increase from 6% to 8%

…solely through match type testing and refinement.

But first some background…Match types have come under more and more scrutiny in the past 2 years, given the coming of Google’s Expanded Broad Match and Automatic Match types. In fact, the unmonitored wreckless use of Broad Match was the subject of a presentation I made this year at SMX West’s Avoiding PPC Pitfalls search session.

The fact that I presented Broad Match as a ‘pitfall’ actually does not mean that I am adamantly against the use of Broad Match. It can be a powerful tool for exploiting the long-tail and increasing sales and leads. But Broad Match (and Yahoo’s Advanced Match for that matter) can all-too-easily become a major pitfall, if left unchecked.

Like any other PPC lever at our disposal, match types do not lend themselves to any sweeping generalizations - ‘always broad match’, ‘never broad match’, ‘only use exact match’, etc. Instead, like any other element of PPC you should continually test, monitor and adjust with the end goal of improving ROI and in turn increasing the lead or sales volume for your company.

Even though my SMX presentation was over 6 months ago, this issue of match types has resurfaced and spurred me on to write this blog post for 2 closely related reasons. First, we’ve followed our own test-monitor-adjust advice and discovered some more interesting match type learnings since SMX West that I’d like to share with our readers. I’ll get to that in a bit…

The second reason I revisit this topic now is that PPC Hero (one of my favorite PPC blogs which I HIGHLY recommend subscribing to, by the way) posted 2 match type related articles in the past month. The first, A Poor PPC Account Structure Will Make Your Campaign Suffer, described some oddities that Hanapin Marketing discovered upon inheriting a PPC account. One of these oddities (which turns out not to be an oddity after all) was that the campaigns were broken into ad groups according to Broad, Phrase and Exact match types.

The second major offense, and this strategy puzzles us, is that they had match types separated into different ad groups. For example, one keyword would appear in three different ad groups; one for broad, one for exact and one for phrase. Using match types can help determine user intent and you can use this data to focus on the match type that works best for your audience. But separating the match types doesn't make much sense.

This account structure is actually the same highly effective manner in which Closed Loop Marketing has conducted some of its match type testing! In fact, apparently other PPC Hero readers have tested similar tactics and alerted the author that separating different match-typed keywords into unique ad groups was in fact a viable match type strategy.

Admirably, Joe posted a 2nd article less that a week later: Two Match Type Strategies That Can Enhance Your PPC Performance:

Last week I wrote an article about an account that we inherited that had been constructed and managed poorly. One of the strategies I called into question was separating keyword match types into unique ad groups within Google AdWords. However, we had quite a few comments from our readers stating that this is a strategy that they employ frequently with great results.This is one of the best things about our blog: I'm always learning how different people manage their PPC campaigns! After conversing with our commentators I thought I would give everyone a summary of what has been discussed.

So, in light of all of this — our match type testing results and the recent PPC Hero’s articles that directly tied in — I would like to share with you how one of Closed Loop Marketing’s clients has increased its ROI more than 4X by refining its match types (finally, you’re thinking).

One of our clients that we provide PPC auditing services for had historically been broad matched across-the-board for nearly all of their search terms. Upon auditing their campaigns in search for areas of improvement, we discovered literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of wasted spend that had resulted from irrelevant broad matched iterations. It was the worst case of broad-match-gone-bad that we had ever seen.

In the midst of all of this poor broad matching that had occurred within their account, their coverage levels for their most strategic keywords averaged only 30-50%! So essentially, this client’s ads were dark over half of the day for the keywords that were their largest revenue drivers, because their budget was being eaten up by keywords that had nothing to do with their offerings!

Needless to say, one of our many recommendations was to test other match types, tracking each for revenue and ultimately ROI. Couple this with building out a robust negative keyword list and we’d be on our way to seeing some major improvement.

Curiously, this was met with a lot of resistance by those actually managing the campaigns in question. They felt quite adamantly that everything should remain Broad Matched. So being responsible advertisers, we all agreed to put it to the test.

Much like what is described above by PPC Hero, a subset of keywords were chosen, all 3 match types were applied to each keyword and then those keywords were split into Broad, Phrase and Exact match ad groups. Aside from the match types, all else was equal - same ad copy, same landing pages, same bid strategies.

During the first half of the test, with all bids set to target #1 positioning, the results were as follows:

As you can clearly see, the ROI, conversion rates and CTR for the Exact and Phrase matched keywords are significantly higher than their Broad Matched counterparts. The first thought is to toss out Broad Match all together. But…

During the 2nd half of the test, in order to see if Broad Matched keywords could be salvaged and still prove some value (i.e. be made to be profitable), the Broad Matched keywords were bid down to position 3. Exact and Phrase Matched keywords remained in position 1.

The results:

The Broad Matched keywords increased from a measly 14% in the #1 position, to 261% in the #3 position! In essence, even though the Broad matched iterations of the keywords weren’t as valuable as the Phrase and Exact matched terms, by placing lesser value on them (i.e. placing lower bids) they were capable of producing revenue at a profitable level.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is not the end of the story. The next task is to apply this to a larger set of keywords and continue to refine. In fact, the client is now on Round 3 of this match type testing and has since found that Phrase Matched terms needed to be bid down to position 2 in order to maintain profitable ROI. For the time being, the strategy stands as Exact Match ad groups being bid to position 1, Phrase Match position 2, Broad Match position 3.

This particular position-based, match type strategy is just one match type lesson learned for one of our clients. Many of our other clients aren’t using Broad Match whatsoever because it just simply hasn’t proven to be advantageous for them at their current budget levels.

And this is why we need to avoid making any sweeping generalizations. All campaigns are individual - test, monitor and adjust. I highly encourage all PPC advertisers to conduct similar tests on their keywords, as match typing is an often overlooked strategy that if refined can be a dramatic source of increased revenue and ROI.