I will break this review out into two parts.  Part 1 will focus on the set up process.  Part 2 will focus on the reporting.  One major caveat: I am approaching this tool from a marketer’s perspective and not a technical perspective, so please bear with me.

“1. Choose the page you would like to test.

2. Choose your page sections.

3. Review desired page sections with your technical team.

4. Identify your conversion / success / goal page.”

Google leads with these instructions when you start your experiment.  This seemed pretty straightforward so I tried this out on my own.  I must admit that given my technical limitations, I was surprised at how easy it was to set up a simple multivariate test.  The instructions are easy to follow.

I successfully tagged the sections that I wanted to test, e.g. the headline and the main hero image.   GWO guides you step-by-step and checks to see that you copy and paste the code correctly onto your html (see screenshot).

I wanted to try something a bit more complex, such as swapping out an entire section.  I consulted our technical lead, and he was able to implement this quickly.  If you are a tech-challenged marketer (like me), I recommend that you work with a technical resource because you may run into some challenges based on the different variables that you are trying to test.  Based on our experience with GWO, we recommended it to one of our clients.  We executed the test based on a strategy that we developed.  I worked with our technical lead to set the test up quickly, and we launched the test without a glitch.

Pros

• FREE
• Easy to use
• Easy technical implementation

Cons

• Cannot control traffic split between variations
• Cannot reset data pool — must stop the test then copy it as a new experiments (this at least allows you to keep a record of all the tests that you have run in the past with data integrity
• Can only track one conversion point.  You can tag multiple conversions, but these will not be tracked separately.

Stay tuned for Part 2 where I will delve into the reporting features of Google Website Optimizer.

I have been asked so many questions about the effectiveness of online videos. Does talent matter? Does the production of the editing matter? To be honest, these questions are missing the point. Your video can have the best production value or the best talent, but if you do not address the reason to the watch the video on the page first, you can actually hurt conversions.

Why should your visitors watch?

The truth is none of your visitors start with a reason to watch your video. You are kidding yourself if you think otherwise. Your page must give a value added reason for every action you ask your visitor to take. The same applies to video.

Rule #1: Never assume that viewers will automatically be drawn to your video.

Keep in mind that videos can and often do present potential annoyances to your visitors. Understand that your visitors are likely asking themselves these questions when a video is present:

• How much time will this take?
• Will this video have any good information?
• Will it slow down my system and lead to technical difficulties?
• Will it be too loud (for the office)?

So what is the best way to get a visitor to watch your video? Simple, give them a value added reason to do so. For example, maybe the value of the video is that visitors can get all the information of a page in less than a minute without having to read anything. Or perhaps the value is that you can see and hear a demo of the product or testimonials from other people who have used it.

Rule #2: Always be testing (videos too)

I understand it takes time, energy and money to redo videos. It’s not as easy as testing buttons, or headlines, trust me I get it. But I assure you it’s worth it.

In an effort to answer all of these questions, I’ve create a comparison chart with two leading heatmaping tools: Clicktale and Crazyegg.

Tracking Capabilities	Main tracking mecanisim: The Confetti. This tool provides user details for each click on a page through a visual dot that represents a user click. Clicks are tracked on a single page only.	Tracks user keystrokes, mouse clicks and the time it takes for users to move around a web page. There is no permanent access to recordings.
Heatmap capabilities	Heatmaps popular locations of clicks on a page, lists and overlays.	The heatmap display red hot zones where most users spend longer periods, and blue or cold areas where users spend the least amount of time.
Analytics/Reporting	Reporting features include: - the location of the click on the page, - referrer information including search terms - operating system - day and time of visit	Reporting features include: - time of field completion - the number of entries - which form fields have the highest abandonments - which form fields  take the longest to complete - which form fields have the most back-tracks due to errors or confusion.
Implementation	Easy to set up. Uses JavaScript which you place on each page you wish to have tracking on.	Easy to set up. Uses JavaScript which you place on each page you wish to have tracking on.
Pricing	Priced on a monthly basis: $9 per month for the basic plan $19 per month for their Standard plan $49 per month for their Plus plan $99 per month for their Pro plan As you move up in plans, you increase the number of trackable visits, and you can track more pages.	Priced on a monthly basis: Free plan $99 per month Bronze $290 per month Silver $790 per month Gold Each comes with specific support options, number of pageviews, domains tracked, and recording history time. The Free plan is very bare-bones and does not, for example, allow playback of all of the pageviews a user visits during a session.

So, which tool is best? Both are fairly competitive but Clicktale offers you more reports than CrazyEgg. Unfortunately, their customer service is not quite as strong as CrazyEgg.  I think both tools are worth trying out for yourself. A small investment ($9/month or free) for improving overall usability for your site.

In search marketing, our mission is not to seek out new life and new civilizations, but rather the largest number of profitable dollars. For many online enterprises, this prime directive boils down to just:

That’s it. The simple truth is that the only ways for most companies to increase monthly profit are to increase the number of orders placed each month or the average profit per order (or both). The number of online orders per month is the number of searches times your impression share (IS) multiplied by the clickthrough rate (CTR) multiplied by your conversion rate (CR), so:

I call this The Drake Equation of Search Marketing. To some extent, it represents the actual mechanics of an online conversion. First, a search occurs. Some fraction (IS) of these result in an impression. Another fraction (CTR) of those impressions result in clicks, and some other fraction (CR) of those result in orders.

Every action we take as online marketers is intended to increase, directly or indirectly, one or more of these variables (without detrimentally impacting any of the others). But, of these factors, only the last two happen at your website. There, marketers apply landing page optimization (LPO), the purpose of which is typically considered: “to maximize the conversion rate (CR)”. However, we can see from the equation that there’s another facet of LPO whose purpose should be: “to maximize the average profit per order”. (Alternatively, one can simply combine these two factors, CR times ‘average profit per order’, to get the ‘average profit per click’, which is the overall metric by which the efficacy of various LPO efforts should be compared.)

The first three of the steps in this equation (searches, impressions, and clicks) occur on the search engine, where we do have some influence. Many people know that rank (a.k.a., position) strongly affects CTR, but so does the relative attractiveness of a listing.

PPC marketers experiment with the title, description text, and display URL in ad creatives to boost the CTR [Though again, they should really be maximizing CTR X 'profit per visit', which is 'profit per impression']. Similarly, SEOs influence organic results, since the title of a natural listing is often taken from the page’s title tag and the description from the meta tag or from text on the page. Online marketers often define the purpose of SEO to be something like “to get pages ranked as highly as possible for terms that are key to a site’s business”, but from the graphic above we can see that another facet to SEO is to make natural listings more attractive to searchers irrespective of any efforts to affect the listing’s position.

The primary factor which determines position in natural listings is ‘relevance’, which is partially found at the time of the query based on the page content’s quality and congruence with the search intent, but which is also partially determined by measures of the page’s ‘popularity’ which are calculated long prior to the query. We desire inbound links since each inbound link can be thought of, in some sense, as a vote by other website authors for our page, which boosts our PageRank. However, clicks at a search engine can also be viewed as votes for the relevance of our site, in this case, votes by the users of the search engine. Thus, click traffic becomes a self-reinforcing cycle, with highly relevant pages receiving more clicks (thus, a higher historical CTR) and therefore being treated as relevant in future searches.

The variables we probably influence the least are those at the beginning of the chain: the number of searches per month and our impression share. A massive off-line advertising campaign might drive additional searches for key terms, but as Frank Lee pointed out in ‘2012: We Weren’t Warned, Only Teased‘, even this is not guaranteed to produce traffic, let alone conversions. And, adding unique content to our site could increase our impression share, since it makes us more relevant to additional queries. But other than those, our best options are simply to promote good architecture to make our site easy to navigate (read: easy for search engines to spider) and to avoid hosting malware, or appear spammy or any of the multitude of reasons for search engines to switch our impressions off entirely.

Although modern, attractive, cool, hip, funky with a touch of drop shadow obsession, the site lacked a basic component of any successful online presence. Usability.

Fortunately, my colleague is not a designer with hyper-stimulated maternal instincts who tend to snap as soon as you mention that their labor of love is actually an ugly stepchild.

Luckily he was open to some constructive critique and took the book I offered him, a classic, not so modern, cool, hip, funky read (with no drop shadows what-so-ever) “The Big Red Fez”

Though certainly dated, the book’s main premise, that every site should have an easy to find “banana” and not a whole bunch of fruity choices, resonated with my colleague who popped his head back around the door jam after 5 minutes to say “I learned a helluva lot just from the first page!”

Though accused of being a Seth Godin groupie, I have to recommend this book to anyone and everyone who has a website. It’ll make it better.

Final word. SEO may drive visitors to your site, but if they can’t find the banana you might as well be targeting monkeys!

You’ve got a PPC campaign that has done its job.   Its driving quality traffic to your landing page, but your page abandonment rate is really high and people are bailing almost as soon as they get there. Sound familiar?

If it does, then it should beg the question what are you doing wrong?

The best way to answer this is to take a look at it from the user’s perspective. When they click on a PPC ad there are certain things they are looking for when they hit the landing page. If you don’t meet those expectations, I can almost guarantee they will bounce.

So then, what are your visitors expecting to see when they reach your landing page?

Continuation. I’m sure your creative is well-written and includes an irresistible offer that convinced the user to click on your ad instead of your competitor. Make sure that this content is given proper real estate on the landing page. I’m talking front and center so that the user sees it quickly when they first arrive. If the offer messaged on the ad text is hard to find or if this promise is broken, they will lose faith in your product, your brand and ultimately bounce.

Credibility. Are you working with a landing page that looks shady or doesn’t have guarantees or point-of-sale assurances? If yes, then fix it. Fix it immediately.  If they’re not familiar with your site, most users will need to be convinced to trust you.  There are a number of ways to improve credibility to your landing page.  I’d recommend testing different security affiliations, partnership affiliation, as well as how you message your tagline.

Call out the call to action. Seems obvious, right? You’d be surprised at how often this is hidden, difficult to access, or missing completely from a landing page. Be completely transparent in the next step to the conversion path. This will encourage a feeling of trust and they will be more easily moved down the buying cycle.

Before investing too much more in advertising, be sure to implement landing pages that take these best practices into consideration. A well-constructed landing page will often make a dramatic difference in your success rate.

Ultimately, CPO (Conversion Path Optimization) is all about user experience.  If the user is not comfortable with your web design, content, or conversion path, then they will not be comfortable with converting on your web page.  So how do you determine the user friendliness of your website?  Fortunately for data junkies like you and me,  nearly every action a user performs or does not perform can be measured.  You do not need to spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on focus groups to gather this information. Rather, let the data that you have gathered so diligently drive your decision.

You should be constantly testing.  What works now may only be applicable for the time being.  The market is constantly shifting, and so are the moods and perspectives of your target audience.  Instead of guessing what works best on your webpage, let the user tell you.  Test and find out!

There is no greater buzz-kill than going through a frustrating search process (type, click, click, narrow, type, click, click, narrow etc.) and once you’ve finally found the result you were searching for, you discover that the form is 6 pages long, with invasive, meaningless fields that are *required, no privacy policy, no assurance that your information won’t be sold to a 3rd party, or worse that the site is not secure.

What will your customer do? That’s right, BOUNCE quicker than a jack rabbits’ wink.

A form that doesn’t work the way you expect, is too long, or too invasive will send your valued customer running to the awaiting arms of your competition. So here are few best practices to ensure your forms are the best they can be:

1. It’s a form, make it look like a form – Keep it simple

Many sites crowd the page with too many distractions. It’s important to remember to keep it simple. Do not overdress form fields by adding a lot of design elements. Do not blend design elements like photographs or illustrations with the form fields as this tends to camouflage the form.  Make the form standout by using simple areas of color and contrast.

2. Stay focused – Ask only what’s necessary

We’re all naturally cautious about giving out our personal information, so your form should focus on obtaining only the information that is absolutely necessary. If forms ask too much from a user, it sends the signal that you may be more interested in spamming them, or selling their information to a third party.

If it’s a complicated form like those to do your taxes or one that requires a lot of information from the user, do not show all fields at once. Rather only show fields that are applicable based on previous entries. If it’s a really complex form it may be worth turning it into an application.

3. How long is this going to take? – Keep ‘em posted on progress

Time is valuable and users like to know what they are in for when beginning a new process. If it’s a complicated form, it’s important to inform the user how long the process will take; a time scale, ie 2 – 5 mins, or a half-hour to complete the process. And if it’s going to take a while, offer them the ability to save their information and come back and finish the form later which can done using code like Ajax.

In addition, it’s important to tell the user where they are in the process. If it’s a multi-page form, a progress bar can be used to tell the user that they are on “step 4 of 5″ and nearly complete. Reassuring the user where they are in the process acts as an incentive for the user to complete the process.

4. Don’t frustrate – Pre-populate

This plays into the above point of keeping it simple but in addition it’s important to make the experience user-friendly. Don’t make the user think. Make fields and functions operate the way they should. Allow tabular navigation instead of point and click navigation, and pre-populate fields with the user’s information whenever possible. Also use field sets for different types of content (as in the case of separating personal information from billing information, etc.) so it’s easy for a user to understand.

It’s also a good idea to make the first field of the form active, denoted with a blinking cursor so that the user can immediately begin entering their information rather than clicking the field to enter the information. Airline and hotel search engines do a good job of this as they know a lot of people do comparative searches for the best travel deals. Users want to search a few sites very quickly so having the destination field or date fields active and pre-populated as needed allows them to get results quickly.

Have you ever filled out a form and clicked submit, only to be warned that you haven’t entered all the required fields and realize that all the information you just entered has been erased? It’s a big deal breaker. So make sure the form is coded properly to retain the users information, as well as make it extremely obvious what field is needed. Use color or circle to call out the required field.

5. Show them you’re legitimate – Offer assurances

Reassure your users that they are on a secure site by signing with a security service and displaying the appropriate seal of approval. Include and link to your privacy policy, the BBB logo, and display security seals and certificates in subtle but obvious ways near the conversion button.

6. Know your audience – Make your forms accessible

It’s important to consider that your form is accessible and usable by everyone, including people with disability, so be sure that the page is coded with these standards in mind.

It is also important to consider the users’ location when asking for certain types of information. Imagine a user from the U.K. filling out a form from a U.S. based company and being asked for a mandatory zip code. The user would either make one up, or worse leave the process completely. In either case you’ve lost that client.

Follow these steps and watch your conversions start rolling in. And remember, if you don’t plant a seed, you won’t get a crop. : )

Some additional resources:

Web Design Tuts – How to Design the Perfect Form

ParticleTree – 10 Tips to a Better Form

FormAssembly.com – Web form creation service

Simply Accessible.org – technical information on creating form fields