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boorishamerican
Yeah I would also ask a ton of technical questions. Who makes the test varaiations? What is the difference, advantages, and disadvantages of AB v. MVT? What are limitations on testing? I would ask questions the sales guy cant answer. All sales guys can answer the question in this article...
"There is always a slight chance of lowering conversion rates, although it is a small risk with well known companies."
LOL more than a slight chance. There are of course ways to soften the blow and minimize the short term impact.
I guess it depends on how you look at it. With AB and especially MVT there are always losers in the test and you are going to be stuck with negative short term results. Long term is always positive with testing but I find drops on teh first wave of optimization tests to be very frequent. If for example I am testing 9 versions of an SEM Landing page 1 or 2 are always going to perform worse than the control.
Interesting. I graduated on 07 with a marketing degree from a top 50 B school and only one of my classes touched on the concept of search engine marketing.
Lots of good tips on their GWO 101 tips report. But increasing my conversion rate is not more excited than sex.
Come on really? I am not impressed. Drink a beer for every hour starting 6 hours in and I will be imrpessed.
Cool - one thing I have to add is to analyze your conversion rates by screen resolution. You will see oppurtunities and you can optimize accordingly.
Story: Why I Don’t Like Sphinn
I couldnt agree more and had a similar reaction when I saw this post was going hot. But you know I choose just to ignore this stuff now. Sphinn for me is still a good source of news that I am looking for so I just look past all the social media fluffers.
Story: Why I Don’t Like Sphinn
NickWilsdon - my honest answer for not desphinning is I just didnt want to stir the pot. Meh, I mean I have no idea who that women is. When I saw that submission upcoming it was clearly going to go hot so no reason to fight everyone I guess.
I really agree with you guys thoguh to some extent. If its on or two lower content submissions that go live every now and again I will probably be ok :) I stand behind my sphinn though because I wouldnt want to see stufff like this all the time.
- Stop duplicating terms in your paid search accounts
- It never ceases to amaze me when clients are using the same keyword in multiple ad groups with the same geo-targeting and timing. Don’t do this
Generally this is true. One tactic I tried out a couple months ago that has proved useful on Y!SM is to create an AdGroup on advanced, and then copy that AdGroup to the same campaign but on standard match. In many cases this has lead to increased Quality Index and also increased conversions.
I guess technically different match types are different keywords but Yahoo is weird so who knows :)
As mentioned testing variations of your page will lower bounce rates and improve conversion rates. Simple A/B tests and also now multivariate tests can be conducted for free through google website optimizer so you are really losing out by not testing diferent variations. Testing really proves the usability of your site.
Anyone have any comments on the Microsoft analytics package? Gatineau?
Couple of things to add
When A/B testing make sure your two variations have distinct differences. This increases the chances that you will see very different conversion rates and decreases test time by increasing confidence levels that one version is providing X% lift or decrease over the other version.
The one big disadvantage of A/B testing however is that you will not know with certainly what value is providing the biggest lift or decrease in conversion rates. As an example if you are testing two different pages with different headlines, images, layout, etc what specifically is causing one page to perform better than the other? You dont know. Often times in the early stages of testing one value is the difference.
Enter MVT - you can pin point which values are making the difference. As mentioned the big hurdle is traffic and tiem constraints.
I would like to also stress the importance of never stopping your tests. Outside variables such as changing traffic sources, seasonal trends, publicty etc will all effect conversion rates. This changing landscape means your users will be responding differently.
Also the author mentions Test & Target, GWO but leaves out Optimost? weak...Full factorial is flawed, taguchi is also flawed. But thats another subject for another day.
Sphunn because of the great Tiger Woods analogy. :)
Story: Seth's Blog: Email checklist
#20 - Have I included the line, "Please save the planet. Don't print this email"? (If so, please delete the line and consider a job as a forest ranger or flight attendant).
Ha awesome
Story: Keyword Best Practices: Part II of the Seven Habits of Highly Successful Search Engine Marketing
Negative matching is super important if you use a lot of dynamic keyword insertion in your titles. One other way I add to my negative lists is by simply searching for keywords in my adgroups.
Understand what you client wants to hear. There is no standard reporting practice. Just ask them what they what and gauge what they can handle...
Can someone elaborate on #8 for me?
"Too many files in one directory makes things hard to find. Use subdirectories."
This is just an internal thing right? I guess I am just looking for the signifigance here...
On a related note:
What about all the stupid 'OMG social media dad XXXX just had baby!'
Do those belong on the first page? I think not...
This is a very solid article. Full factorial designs are ideal in my opinion but as Jonathan mentions time and amoutn of traffic really has a huge effect on your experiment. My company currently uses OPtimost as our MVT solution and the results have been astounding.
Cool find. I think Eric is probably right on the money with mCPC but Pscore and thresh could be based on almost anything.
Higher CTRs are great but it would be interesting to see what those clicks are doing once they get to the page. I feel like they would need a huge cheesy heart rate monitor graphic to keep everyone from insta-bouncing
His online strategy in general has been great from the beginning. If you looked at his PPC campaigns for all of 2007 it was obvious his team was clueless - yet they garnered more contributions from more donors than any campaign ever.
I didn't read this article yet - but I encourage you to read this article recently submitted. Probably a much better read...
What I Hate About the Internet - Everyone is a "Social Media Consultant"
Story: Seth Godin Wants to Cheat Advertisers with Fake Clicks