Where To Start Optimization Testing On Your Website

If you're just getting started with web optimization testing or have limited testing resources (hey that's like everybody), which pages you test is the most critical decision you have to make. At today's WhichTestWon's Conference I learned from Justin Rondeau that our optimization instincts are probably wrong on where to start testing.

Page Requirements for Optimization Testing

Before you can test a page, it must meet these two requirements:

• Does the page get enough traffic to reach statistical significance in a reasonable time frame (1-5 weeks)?

• Does the Page Directly Impact Conversation? If Yes, what is the current conversion rate? If No, what is the long term value of the conversion that this page lifts?

Start Lower in Your Funnel

For an eCommerce site, start as late in your conversion funnel as possible. Here's a typical eCommerce funnel:

• Entry Pages: These are politically charged since many people may be involved in creating these campaigns, skip optimizing these first.

• Category Pages

• Search Results

• Product Pages

• Cart & Checkout: START HERE. Few people will challenge you to improve the cart because carts are just carts. You can create a lot of lift here.

• Receipt/Thank You: Rarely tested! Try an up-sell or cross-sell here instead of during checkout.

Next, Where Is Your Landing Money?

Don't start with high bounce rate pages. We know–they're sinking ships that you'd like to save. Not worth your time. Try landing pages for your highest conversion traffic. Or landing pages for your most expensive (PPC) traffic.

Next, Test Your Conversion Path

Now that you've improved the beginning and end of the funnel, now you can test the middle. This means testing your category pages, search result pages, product pages, and so on. Find everything that is stopping people from buying in your funnel and test how to fix it.

Next, PPC Traffic

If you're paying for customers to click on your links, you need to nail the landing page. At a minimum, your page needs to feature what your ad claimed. You'll be surprised at how many people screw this up.

Next, Referral Traffic

Know who is sending you traffic and where they are sending them. Make sure you're meeting the standards that people expect.

Am I Done Yet?

Of course not! Follow WhichTestWon for more testing ideas or get you butt to Austin for the Live Event. 

Get Free Press For Your Startup With Original Data

Getting traditional PR coverage is hard! As new startups flood journalists with lame press releases, how do you stand out from the pack? Will Flaherty of SeatGeek taught "Data Driven PR" at General Assembly today.

Startups have a treasure trove of valuable, propriety data regarding some aspect of their given vertical. When packaged in a digestible and usable format to the right journalists, it will get you mentioned. Although it may not be a love story about your company, it will get you more free press.

What kind of data do you have?

• Demographics about your audience

• Trends in your marketplace

What Your Data Can Lead To

• Print: Stories were created from data sent to individual writers.

• Radio

• TV: Since television is a visual medium, they place the highest value on giving them someone who is immediately available to be on camera. This means you need someone who can talk knowledgeably and is willing to meet a camera crew wherever local news crews are.

• Infographics: These are produced by SeatGeek and take about 15-20 hours to produce. You'll notice in their Final Four infographic that they partnered with Seamless to get even more interesting data.

How to Pitch Data

1. Create a couple of hypotheses around a topic that your audience might find newsworthy. SeatGeek picks a type of event and location to focus their analysis on based on which news outlets they want to attract. It's faster to chase existing stories in news (like the Super Bowl) and provide data to earn mentions. SeatGeek has also done well digging up deep data on an original story to get higher quality mentions.

2. Pull the raw numbers into something like Excel and analyze it while keeping an open mind for new findings.

3. Synthesize the trends you're seeing in the data. What are the changes over time, locations, etc. Write compelling punch bullet points.

4. Create a visual element (graph/infographic) to convey your data in a different and powerful way. (Don't forget to include your logo & URL on the graphic)

5. Push the pitch out to interested journalists, bloggers, and media members.

Building Your List of Media Members To Pitch

• Find the media members who are writing stories in your locale/vertical/etc. If you know one site that perfectly epitomizes the readership you're looking for, copy their URL. Then do a Google search for "related:URL.com" to see the sites that are similar to them.

• Most of the time, their email address will be listed on their stories or website. If not you can use a few tricks to find it.

• If they work for an organization with a common email structure like first.last@company.com you can use that. You can use Gmail tools like Rapportive to confirm your guess.

• You can search the journalist's tweets for their email address using sites like Snap Bird. Just enter the target's Twitter name and the search term "email".

How to Contextualize Your Data Points

• Comparison: How do prices/demand/profits compare to others or past? How do customers in your area compare to other areas?

• Superlatives: Most expensive/popular thing in X years.

• Trends: How is prices/profits/demand changing over time.

• If Statements: If you bought all components individually would it be cheaper than buying them individually? If you had bought this widget it the past, what would it be worth now?

• Use Google Alerts to track what are popular story topics in your industry.

Writing Your Pitch

1. Punchy, description subject line. Use an actual data point that will stand out to a journalist drowning in story pitches.

2. Personalized opening paragraph. Make it clear this isn't a stock email to hundreds of people. Mention your specific relationship with them whenever possible.

3. Crisp, clear data points. Write in complete sentences (that the journalist can copy) and bold the numbers you're pitching.

4. Always provide a link. Encourage the journalist to link to your site by providing a landing page that supports the story (hopefully a page that puts readers a click away from a transaction with you).

5. Give them a method to follow up. Make yourself available to provide more data or provide a quote. Will uses a Google voice number that forwards to his cell phone (which I thought would be great for scaling later on, if you want to have different folks answer at different times).

Check It Out

• OkCupid (a dating site) pulled aggregated data on their users to create buzz-worthy blog posts and earn press mentions in the New York Times.

• Yipit (a daily deal aggregator) has become the go-to source on daily deal industry metrics. They produce detailed data reports that they sell to the other daily deal sites and the financial community.

7 Reasons You Should Focus on Women in Your Advertising & Your Business

Cindy Gallop opened the second 3% Conference in San Francisco, named because only 3% of Creative Directors in advertising are women. Gallop's keynote is required watching for men and women, as she teaches us how businesses are missing out on innovative ideas and ultimately profits by staying male-centric.

Key Takeaways

• Women ARE your target audience. Women are no longer a "niche" marketing target. They make the majority of purchases in almost every sector and are key purchasing influencers in every sector (even traditionally male-dominated ones). Women influence 60% of car purchases and 90% of technology purchases. Women are even the majority of gamers today, if you include social gaming.
• "Women share the sh*t out of everything." At any social gathering listen to the men talk about sports scores while the women share their experiences. Women have shared their experiences to build intimacy since the world began so it's no mystery why today they are the majority of social media users.
• Women get stuff done. Even if your product is aimed at men, Ms. Gallop recommends targeting your advertising at women. Women are the norm. Men are now the niche audience. There is a ton of money to be made by taking women seriously.
• Marketing done with women through the male perspective is no longer acceptable. When the 97% of Creative Directors are men, you gets ads that don't feature women in dynamic, engaging, and aspirational roles – instead you only see women as mothers, girlfriends, and sidekicks. We need a new approach to creativity – created by women, presented to female Creative Directors, for female clients.
• "Women challenge the status quo because we are never it." Women innovate and women disrupt. If you want your company to be innovative, find every department run by an all-white-male team and add women to it.
• "Women notice things that men don't." They notice relationships. They notice how people communicate. They notice how to get people to work together more cooperatively naturally and intuitively. Women notice the things that will make your company run better than it does today.
• "Women get sh*t done." How many women do you know that support men by doing the things they don't want to do? From the laundry to Sheryl Sandberg operating Facebook so Mark Zuckerberg can do what he really wants to do. The men who recognize this can still be the stars of the show but have a much smoother operation behind the scenes.

Your To Do List

Cindy Gallop implores men and women to do the following things to help change this culture, and ultimately make a ton of money.

1. Call It Out. If nobody says anything, nothing will change. Every time you see a conference with an all-male line-up – say something. Every time the junior male account rep tries to take over a meeting you should be running – say something. It doesn't require being angry, it just requires pointing it out, because gender bias is often unconscious. You have to "break the closed loop of white guys talking to other white guys about white guys."
2. Put Yourself Forward. Women who don't promote themselves help this male-dominated cycle continue. Gallop cites how there's been a ton of outrage over Twitter's lack of female board members but women she knows (and are highly qualified) hesitate even nominating themselves to advise a new startup.
3. Redesign the Business. Business has been built for centuries around a male model of command and control, which is perfectly logical because, for centuries, women weren't allowed to work. The Future of Business is about complementing that with female values – collaboration, consensus building, and community. The system of business today is based around men going to work and women staying at home to support them. The reason we don't have enough women in leadership is because the very system is built to work for men and not the women who shoulder an unfair amount of the home support work. When women look up at the men running their organizations and see the grueling hours, they opt-out. But why have we designed every position at the top to be so unbearable? It doesn't have to be. Gallop challenges us to redesign a bite-size chunk of how something is done at your company. Redesign it the way you want to work and point to it as an example of how a redesigned business process makes work better for everyone.

Gallop believes the business model of the future is "shared values + shared action = shared profit (financial & social)". This is the business model she urges brands to adopt. Go beyond "co-creation" and pursue "co-action" between brands and people to benefit everyone. This business model also applies to men and women working together to create a world that we will all love working and living in.

Watch It!

2014's Hot Homepage Design Trend: Mega Images

Justin Rondeau examines tests from over a thousand brands every year, as Chief Editing & Testing Evangelist for WhichTestWon. Justin explained the Mega Image trend he's seeing across the industry and some tips on doing better testing at WhichTestWon's Live Event in Austin today.

Do Mega Image Homepages Work?

You know those giant brand images filling up new home pages? Looks great but does it work? Justin presented a case study from KinderCare, which had been fine tuning their home page for years but was looking for a big lift. After the redesign with a Mega Image, they experienced a 17% lift in conversion. That's a huge lift for an established homepage but the resources required to pull this off are also huge. Unlike changing the color of a button, you've got to coordinate fresh creative that blows your brand out of the water.

Mega Image Tips

• Make sure your photo scales with the browser window size.
• DON'T use stock photos: make it genuine, make it your brand! At one company we spend about $30K a year shooting photography of our employees and our customers. (If you're looking for a team to do the same for your business, I use Meier Brand's creative team.)
• If you're using faces, try to make sure the person in your photo is looking where you want the visitor to look. Faces grab a lot of attention and will be the first place your visitors look. If they compete with your main message you probably won't see a lift.
• Don't implement blindly, make sure to test this. Although there are lots of instances of this working for other brands, your experience may be different.

Mega Image Homepage Designs With Movement

I don't have testing data on these, but was intrigued but two Mega Image homepages that use movement to complement the design. Click through the images so see one very common and one not-so-common movement implementations.

How To Start Testing

Many marketers say they don't have the resources to start testing but tools like Optimizely make testing easier than ever. Here's a few tips on getting started.

• Education is #1: The tools are great, but it doesn't replace a sound education in testing fundamentals. I personally recommend WhichTestWon's Live Events to start. You can also download their report on testing trends.
• Hire a Proper Team: Optimization requires people. If you have no one, push for a part-time resources. If you have part-time resources, push for full-time, and so on.
• Push for an Ideological Shift: If your organization doesn't believe in a data-driven testing, you're going to have to push for that from the top down. That means constantly communicating how your testing, the learnings and your results (good and bad). Showing the improvements you're making constantly will build trust in testing.
• Stay Curious - Question Everything: If there is one thing to look for in your testing culture, it's insane curiosity. Do you question everything? Great! You're doing to go well here.

Stop Sporadic Testing

Many organizations are testing as they like without a methodology.

Why It Doesn't Work

• No Long Term Gains: You may be small lifts but you won't be able to scale that effect.
• No Test Learnings: Just because changing a button color created a conversion lift, doesn't mean you know why. If you can't figure out why, you can't apply that learning going forward.
• Higher % Failure Rate: Your tests are much less likely to be correctly formulated if you don't do this very often.

Why We Don't Test More

The majority of organizations only have one person dedicating half their time to testing. It's your job as an optimizer to build the case for more testing resources with a proven track record of successful lifts. If you're not reporting back on your successes and continually proving your contribution on the bottom line, start now!

The Rise of the Design Executive Officer

To solve the world's problems: we need to think like designers, feel like designers, and act like designers. Whether you think of yourself as a designer or not, design is what leads change. Maria Giudice, spoke about her book, The Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design today at Webvisions in NYC.

Defining the Designer CEO

A creative leader that places the importance of design at the center of the company. It's a combination of creative problem solver and strategic business leader.

Why Do We Need a DEO?

The world is moving faster. In 1937 large companies had a life expectancy of 75 years. Today, the expected longevity of those companies is 15 years. Plus only 1 in 4 employees believe in their company's leadership to sustain their organization.

What Makes a DEO Different?

Design executive officers are:

• Change Agents: They lead revolutionary changes.
• Risk Takers: They take smart risks as opposed to avoiding risk.
• Systems Thinkers: They see patterns and can solve problems by connecting unrelated issues.
• Socially Intelligent: They are people focused.
• Intuitive: They make decisions based on more than just numbers.
• GSD: They get shit done.

 5 Steps to Improve Your Organization with Design Thinking

• Change Your Mindset about Design and Designers: Design should not be thought of as an expense but as an investment. Design is not a noun, it's an active verb. Design is about radical change.
• Value "We" not "Me": We are no longer in the culture of "me". A lone rock star in the corner being worshipped by interns is outdated. The best solutions will come from multi-disciplinary teams. Once you respect everyone on the team has something to bring to the table, you'll create better work. This also means celebrating diversity, whether job experience, life experience, race, culture, or gender.
• Live in People's Shoes: When you experience and witness the real lives of your customers, you go beyond what you can find out in an interview. Inform your intuition by trying out the lives of your employees and your customers. You will need empathy to figure out how to improve lives in ways that focus groups won't reveal.
• Champion Creative Work Cultures & Make Work Fun: You'll work 90,000 hours in your lifetime so why not create a culture that everyone wants to be a part of. Nailing a creative and fun culture from the top to bottom increases your organization's chance for success. This can also mean getting folks to put away their devices and talk to each other. Try sharing a meal together or meeting during a walk.
• Iterate and Evolve: Be open to constant change. Stay humble by soliciting feedback from your organization continuously. Embrace failure as a way of learning.

*Bonus Tip* Treat People Equally

The success of all businesses lie in people and how we can make powerful connections to each other. When people feel like they're being treated as equal, great things can happen. Instead of treating people based on their status, focus on being present with the people you encounter every day.

How Google Plans to End Repressive Censorship by 2024

The role of the internet in recent revolutions, from Tunisia to Egypt, has put technology at the center of fighting oppression worldwide. Yasmin Green, Head of Strategy and Operations for Google's Ideas team, spoke at the Women Techmakers summit today about how Google is helping end repressive censorship.

"If you aren't tech savvy, you aren't effective, because you aren't safe." ~Slim Amamou, Tunisian Blogger.

Ending Repressive Censorship by 2024

The Ideas team goal is to end repressive censorship within 10 years. Yasmin spoke about how her birth country of Iran censors information online. The Iranian government blocks sites and slows access to the internet to slow the spread of information. The most terrifying technique Iran is using are man in the middle attacks. For example, the Iranian government created a fake version of the BBC news site with pro-Iranian stories. Anyone within Iran trying to access the BBC were redirect to this site instead of the actual BBC (often without knowing the difference.)

Fighting In-Country Internet Censorship

Proxies allow users to bypass local servers to access the internet outside a repressive country. Yet, finding a reliable and trustworthy proxy can be difficult. The rumor is that the majority of the proxies available in Iran are from the government itself. So how do you find a proxy that you can trust? Google found that many people within a repressed country have contacts in other nations, so they initiated uProxy.

uProxy is a browser extension that lets users share alternative more secure routes to the Internet. It's like a personalized VPN service that you set up for yourself and your friends. uProxy helps users protect each other from third parties who may try to watch, block, or redirect users’ Internet connections.

Stopping DDoS Attacks Silencing Organizations

One of the most common ways to repress access to websites is a DDoS attack (distributed denial of service). Very simply, attackers overwhelm the servers hosting a website so that no one can access the site. DDoS attacks have become a common way to silence others. Google initiated mapping of the attacks on a Digital Attack Map.The Ideas team launched Project Shield, a free service for sites serving news, elections monitoring, and human rights organizations that are being attacked. If their site is attacked they are able to use Google's infrastructure to continue serving content.

Want to Help?

The Google Ideas team is hiring.

Changing Behavior With Persuasive Technology

I attended Behavior Change: As Value Proposition, given by Chris Risdon (@chrisrisdon, #behaviordesign) at SXSW Interactive in Austin.Changing behavior is hard:

• Why do you drive short distances when you could easily walk and be healthier?
• Why do you avoid going to the dentist when you know waiting longer will make your dental problems worse?

Using Opportune Moments

In 2004, you see a story about a Tsunami while waiting in the airport, which is followed by a commercial to donate to the Red Cross. You're moved to donate but then you have to take a flight, get home, unpack, and feed the dog. Maybe you remember to go to the Red Cross website but now you have to decide how much to donate, figure out your credit card billing information, and so on.In 2010, you saw the Haiti Tsunami story at the airport. You could text "Haiti" to 90999 and donate $10 via your cell phone bill to the Red Cross. This much simpler process matched the timing of the trigger and took advantage of your motivation in the moment.

Behavior Design

Design with the intent to change someone's behavior or attitude.

A bitter nail polish makes your finger nails taste bitter so you don't chew your nails. A study of countries by how many people volunteered for organ donation showed that countries had radically different rates because of the how they designed the sign-up process. Countries where you had to opt OUT of organ donation, had the majority of people registered for organ donation. Countries which made you opt IN to organ donation had the lowest rates. Just by changing the form process, you are able to design for your intended result, these are called "good defaults".

Persuasive Technology

Technology designed to persuade the user to use a system or platform in a desired way.

Amazon one-click is an example of a process designed to make purchasing easier. Instead of building a cart and comtemplating shipping charges, you're one click away from making a simple purchase. In the product space, software and services make it plain that you are trying to help the user organize their travel plans (TripIt) or finances (Mint). More and more of these sites use highly personal data to help you change your own behavior.

The New "Me" Generation

Products and services designed and marketed on the premise that their befits – the value received – are specific behavior-based outcomes.

• Data collection is a primary feature: Nike FitBand collects data on your physical activity throughout the day.
• System makes recommendation or guidance: Mint recommends credit card with less fees based on your purchasing data.
• Behavior is measurable: Users can see their progress.
• Prescriptive/Constrained self-determination: Service narrows options to guide user to their chosen outcome.

Sensors & Data

If it can be connected, it will be connected in the Internet of Things.

Sensors using GPS, Accelerometers, RFID, etc., measure everything from where we go to how fast we can bounce a basketball. Consumers are becoming less and less afraid of giving services access to personal data. Mint has convinced thousands of users to give them the login information for all their financial accounts.

Feedback and Feedforward

The progression from weighing at your weekly WeightWatchers meeting to a WiFi-connected scale that tracks you daily, illustrates how personal sensors can provide better timed feedback. Feedforward is proactive service design that gives you information before you make the decision instead of just showing you the results. Chris spoke about how at Subway sandwich shops he always intends to each a healthy sandwich but ends up buying the cookies at the end. What if a service detected he's entering the Subway and tells him how many calories he'd have to burn to get those cookies?

Framing & Profiling

Not everyone is motivated in the same way. Some folks need a cheerleader to "ra-ra" them up the hill, others need a drill sergeant to scare them into running harder. This is called "Persuasion Profiling," which means each one of us has a different set of triggers that will persuade us to act differently. Just in the wording of a choice, you can guide behavior.

Collection > Visualization > Story

We understand how to use the technology to show users their behavior but do we understand that every design decision influences the user? Documentaries demonstrate that HOW we tell a story changes people's perception, and eventually their behavior. Next stop let's go beyond the graph and show people how to change their word.

More Resources on Behavior Design

• Robert Calidini 
• BJ Fogg
• Dan Lockton
• Dan Ariely

6 Ways You Haven't Used Social Media To Improve Your Blog

No matter how long you've been doing social media for, there are new tricks and tips coming out every day. Tip #1 and #5 were well worth the price of admission for my organization. Here are my notes from Austin Gunter's (Brand Ambassador, WPEngine) presentation on "Developing Digital Marketing (Social Media) In Your WordPress" at WordPress Camp NYC.1. No One Cares About What You Just Said On TwitterThink about your site from the perspective of a first-time visitor, they're looking for a reason to trust you. Stop using the standard Twitter widget to show the last few tweets you've sent (which could be awesome or random rants). Instead reconfigure your Twitter widget to display your account's favorites. Favorite great tweets about your organization and re-label your widget something like "140 Character Testimonials".2. It's Time To Make Sharing Your Content AwesomeUsing the standard Facebook & Twitter share links are LAME. It's time to do some custom development for elegant sharing solutions. Instead of a tiny Pinterest button above every post, Wedding Chicks does an elegant job of encouraging pins. Every image you mouse over has a "Pin It" badge appear in the lower right.3. You Can't Fight On TwitterThere are going to be customer support issues and people are going to complain. You need to take it off Twitter. Generate a support ticket for the customer and email them or reach out another way. 140 characters is not enough to be logical and really help.5. Facebook is for Developing Your Existing Fans, Not First-Time CustomersYour customers aren't going to follow you on Facebook until they've already experienced your brand. Liking a brand on Facebook is akin to putting that brand's bumper sticker on your car. Use Facebook to develop deeper conversations with your biggest fans, not sell to first time customers. Austin likes integrating Facebook with his blog post comments so the comments on his site spread to Facebook too (and vice-a-versa).5. The One Thing To Use Google+ ForGoogle is now using Google+ profiles to determine who is writing what online for SEO with rel="author". People who have been writing quality content for years will benefit from this move (which fights SEO cheating). To do this, follow these instructions to update your Google+ profile with what sites you write for (or guest post on). This will allow your headshot to appear next to your content on search results (which may increase your click throughs) as well as possibly raise your general rankings.6. Turning Twitter Conversations Into Real StoriesYou can use Storify to collect tweets around a topic or conversation. It allows you to comment and expand on what was said. We've seen great summary posts on conference, news events, and locations.Bonus: Check out Buffer for a super easy way to share what you've read online into scheduled posts that are even faster to use than HootSuite.