We published a brief on this topic back in 2004 and decided it was time to run a new series of tests to find out what kind of ROI you can expect to achieve with the smaller PPC engines. That is to say, not Google, Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN.

We felt that with increasing competition for top keywords in the major engines, there might be some new opportunities available through their smaller competitors.

We tested seven different engines with four different research partners and generated some very interesting, and surprising data.

If you would like to know exactly what we discovered, sign up for our September 6th webinar on Small PPC Engines Revised. As always, there is no charge.

Here are a few examples of what we feel are great viral videos:

1. Terry Tate, Office Linebacker

We like this (maybe we can relate) but why in the world did Reebok take the page on their site down that it points to?

2. The German Energy Drink Commercial:

Make sure your volume is turned WAY up.

3. What are You Thinking About?

We laugh every time we watch it!

Following is a PDF of the Presentation from yesterday's research call:

Video for the Web 3.0 - Research Project Overview

It will give you an overview of what we went over, in case anyone missed it.

Also, you can click here for the audio:

Video Research Project Audio

We do not know exactly how many times these videos have been viewed or passed around. They are (in our opinion) great examples of large corporations creating and then using them to market virally over the internet.

Making a video, even one of these professional commercials, is not that hard (it just takes money). Making one that is good enough to get passed around, is hard.

Here are some of our favorites:

Learn a New Language

Buy Nike Shoes

During the course of our upcoming video research project we'll be looking specifically at what makes a good video, and what causes it to spread on the internet.

Here's a test of your online marketing skills…

The topic of our free webinar this Wednesday is “Optimizing Free Trial Offers”.

We thought it might be interesting to give you a preview of two of the pages. One page is before optimization, and the other is after.

Can you tell which page performed best? Can you estimate by how much? And can you list eight reasons why?

You can see the pages and complete the survey here.

Be sure to register for Wednesday's webinar…and all will be revealed.

We recently conducted our first conference call to introduce the upcoming video research project. The goal of this projec is to answer the questions:

1. How can video be best used to sell a product or service?
2. How can video be used as a way to market virally online?

It is clear that there has been a huge growth online for the 'amateur' video producer and consumers, however to date it is not clear what the commercial use of online video is, specifically how marketers can use video cost-effectively.

During the first call, we looked at a short clip that a creative Jerry Bader's creative firm Jerry Bader, of MRP Web Media put together called "Battle of the Blizzard", which was a creative approach for building brand awareness for Blizzards.

Jerry expressed that “in the sterile and untrusting environment of the internet today, video can communicate trust and visual validity when promoting a business’s services or products.”

We all agreed. It seems, at least at first glance that video adds an entirely new dimension to web.

Next, we heard from Alan Mathias, marketing executive for NDC Infrared Engineering, which sells high-end industrial control equipment through a sales team and distributor network.

He created this video as a tool for his sales team to use as a way to 'communicate a consistent message' to customers. The response was that it is a useful tool, but he has not been able to quantify the impact of the video.

This conversation highlighted the need for qualitative research in this area. We are even more enthusiastic to answer these questions.

If you missed this call, or if you would like to partcipate in this study, please register online:

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/video-call.html

P.S. To date we have had over 50 applicants for this research. If you are interested in participating, please contact us soon.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Lee Gomes describes his search through 2.27 gigabytes of search data from AOL.

According to his research, the single word which appeared most frequently in searches on AOL over the period covered was “free”. The second most popular word was “now”.

It’s curious how some words and short phrases become clichés when over-used, while others, like Free, retain their meaning and punch. It seems that however often we see “Free”, whether on product packaging, TV ads or the web…we still find the word compelling.

However, simply including the word in your headline is not enough to maximize conversions.

Currently we are working on our next webinar…which happens to be free…and the topic is “Optimizing Free Trial Offers”.

We will be sharing test data collected from tests with two of our research partners. In both cases we show how a free offer page can be optimized to deliver far better results, without having to change the offer itself.

In fact, in both cases, conversions were almost doubled simply by making careful changes to the design and copy.

The webinar is being held on Wednesday, August 23rd at 4:00PM EST. You can sign up here.

If you work in the online world you can hardly have missed all the latest talk about using video and video clips to promote products and services.

Suddenly, video clips are the way to go. And every marketer’s dream appears to be based on magically going “viral” on YouTube.com or some other video-sharing site.

Based on some of the comments from this recent article in the Chicago Tribune, online agency executives are eager to invest in this emerging “medium”.

We have a feeling that most of the money going into “video clip marketing” will be wasted. It will be clutter. Just like the last round of rich media investments.

This doesn’t mean to say we don’t believe in the potential of video online. Far from it. In fact, we are currently looking for research partners to explore this further.

However, it is our guess that agencies and companies will rush into video marketing with sales-centered clips, and be disappointed by the results.

While further research will reveal more, some initial testing indicates that there are three basic ways to go with video.

1. Use video to deliver information and add a depth to your web site content in a way that is either hard or impossible to achieve with text and static images alone. (Here is an example from one of our partners, National Alert Registry.)

2. Use video as a “how to” demonstration tool. (How to install a video card in your computer, how to make a Caesar Salad, how to install a dish washer etc.)

3. Or use video to entertain.

This third option will be hard to achieve for most companies. There are countless hundreds of thousands of video clips fighting for attention already, most of them made by enthusiastic amateurs. And the chances of any one clip going “viral” in a big way are very slim.

As we learn more about what really works with video clips, we’ll share our findings here and, in time, in the form of a full report.

What are the best ways to prepare for and take advantage of the upcoming holiday retail season?

In preparing our five-month merchandising calendar, we asked ourselves the following questions:

• While every online retailer knows that the eight weeks before Christmas is the busiest buying period of the year, are they prepared...right down to individual product promotions?
• Are fast growing companies certain that their technologies and platform are ready for a significant spike in sales?
• Are additional customer service people going to be available?
• Are marketing groups preparing promotions and PPC campaigns to take special advantage of this unique period in the year?

>> Preparing for the major retailing seasons, and understanding the advantages and disadvantages faced by online retailers.

Traditional shopping seasons have a significant impact on sales, and the industry or sector in which you do business will determine which seasons are most important to your business.

For instance, if you sell flowers online, you know that Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day are important dates on your marketing calendar.

However, for most online retailers, the eight weeks before Christmas are absolutely key.

If your business can take advantage of the pre-Christmas buying season, then you should be preparing and budgeting for your marketing plans now.

What is the busiest shopping period?

Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving and is traditionally the day that retailers emerge out of the red and into the black (profitability).

While there have been years when Black Friday has been the largest-volume buying day before Christmas, the latest figures, from 2004, show us that it’s the last Saturday before Christmas Day that takes top position as the busiest shopping day.

However, even if Black Friday takes second spot, we should take heed of the fact that a very significant amount of holiday shopping is taking place from the last week of November onwards.

Here are the figures for the top 10 shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas:

What You Need To understand: The Top 10 Shopping Days before Christmas are spread out over an eight week period, starting at Thanksgiving.

Source: International Council of Shopping Centers

While online shopping mirrors the same seasonal fluctuations experienced by their offline counterparts, e-retailers face some unique challenges and advantages.

• Shipping costs and final shipping days before Christmas may limit or add costs to last-minute online shopping.
• Concerns about the complexity and possible cost of returning unwanted gifts may present a barrier to some buyers.
• The ability to send e-Certificates in advance or at the last moment provides e-retailers with a tremendous advantage. These gift cards can be sent by email at no cost and minimal effort.

>> Case Study – ExteriorAccents.com

As an example of how seasonable fluctuations can impact marketing activities, costs and sale during the pre-Christmas shopping period, we looked at the experience of one of our research partners, ExteriorAccents.com. Exterior Accents serves the consumer gardening market, offering a variety of garden decorative items.

What You Need To understand: Key Pay per Click Metrics can vary a great deal between seasons. It is essential that you keep an eye on your cost per sale and profitability – and adjust your seasonal PPC strategies accordingly.

>> Merchandising Calendars

During the course of our research we developed our own merchandising calendar. This may be a useful tool and we suggest you use it to more efficiently plan your marketing strategy this year.

If you do not have the calendar, you may download it here.

Online giant eBay has also published a merchandising calendar that allows their seller community to know of trends in advance and prepare for specific seasonal promotions:

http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/calendar.html

Even if you do not sell on eBay, this may be a good resource to monitor what is selling online, and when to promote specific products.

KEY POINT: By planning specific email, search engine, and site promotion campaigns around peak consumer spending periods, you can maximize your online sales.

>> Guidelines

We've compiled 15 suggestions for optimizing natural buying trends online:

1. Plan ahead. Use a merchandising calendar to help plan your marketing.
2. Use "downtime" to get ready for the peak season. Often we have seen major retailers encounter site problems, customer service snafus, or major fulfillment problems during November and December. Plan ahead during your slower months to make sure you will be ready. If you want to build a new site or implement some new software plan to do it during the slower summer months. Don't wait until August to begin a major site overhaul.
3. Pay attention to product-specific seasonal trends. In addition to monitoring when online sales are peaking, try to determine which types of items are selling when. Focusing your marketing efforts around what consumers are looking for can be one of the best ways to improve conversion.
   • eBay provides a unique snapshot of what is selling in their Marketplace at http://pulse.ebay.com
   • By the same token, you can also research Amazon.com’s Top Sellers by category.
   • Finally, keep an eye on future areas of potential growth by paying attention to web sites like TrendWatching.com.
4. Take a walk through your local shopping center during the next holiday. Notice how they are displaying sale information, getting shoppers into their stores and working to increase the average purchase amount. Many of these tactics can also be applied online.
5. Watch the big online retailers. Visit their sites often and note how they adjust their product selections, promotions, and offers throughout the year.
6. Do not forget about the general "best practices" of web marketing. Often, making just a small change to your order process or changing the text on your home page can yield significant new revenues and should always take priority over a seasonal marketing campaign. Review our research brief archives for ideas.

   Be sure to review our recent 2006 Marketing Blueprint, which outlines a 15-step process for optimizing your marketing efforts all year long:

7. Test critical product or service landing pages well in advance of uploading them to your site. Once those pages are live, you want to be certain that they have been full optimized to increase conversions and sales. See our brief, Optimizing Landing Pages 2006
8. Understand that even minor changes across a number of pages in any purchase or subscription process can compound to have a significant impact on your final revenues and profits.

   See our brief, The Compounding Effect of Micro-Gains Tested

9. If you have an affiliate program, be sure to provide your top affiliates with all the resources they need for the key shopping seasons. They are important marketing partners and you need to keep them informed to ensure their best performance during the days and weeks that matter most to your business.
10. Diversify your offer(s) so that you always have product that is in season. Even non-retail products are subject to seasonal buying fluctuations. If all you sell is snow skiing equipment, you may be missing out on valuable purchasing activity during your off-season. For example, you might consider also carrying mountain bikes or water skiing gear.
11. Update the main sale or offer on your website to match the current season. This should be done on a regular basis, perhaps monthly. Shoppers who notice that your site and offers change frequently will be encouraged to return often.
12. Create a Gift Registry. This will ultimately spur holiday gift shopping. If you have merchandise that is suitable for a wedding registry, implement this as well. You may be able to use this registry technique to create a natural, viral sales attractor for your site.
13. Offer Electronic Gift Cards. This will dramatically increase your ability to sell during the holiday season, even at the last minute. They can be delivered via email in seconds and are perfect for last-minute shoppers.
14. Develop email and newsletter campaigns to support and drive your web site sales, and take full advantage of the attention and loyalty of your subscribers.
15. While retail businesses often benefit the most from holiday seasonal spikes, even service-oriented businesses can take advantage of seasonal trends by creating offers suitable for gift-giving. Tailor your own offers to meet the unique needs of your customers.

During a preliminary study of the use of video as a marketing tool, we have found that the use of video to market a product or service may actually help increase conversion. In addition, we are finding that using short video clips to distribute on sites like YouTube.com, Google Video and MySpace may be a unique way to drive inexpensive traffic to your website.

Over the course of the next 6 months we will be working with several online marketers to understand exactly how video can best be used to:

1. Drive inexpensive traffic to your website.
2. Increase sales conversion of a product or service.

To find out more about this project, and how you can participate, you can click here.

One of the students from our Online Split-Testing Certification Program recently asked us for some clarification on the meaning of the term, Selection Effect.

If this sounds like a bit of a gray area to you as well, here is the answer we sent him:

Selection Effects is one of the 4 primary threats to test validity and represents the effect on a test variable, such as conversion rate for instance, that occurs as a result of having the sample that is collected be unrepresentative of the actual audience. For example, if you wanted to survey the New York City population about their support for tax reform and took your sample exclusively in the lobby of the Tiffany jewelry store, the results would be skewed due to Selection Effect.

Now, that is an extreme example using a mistake that most of us would be unlikely to commit. In the online world, though, you could have your sample skewed by Selection Effects in a more subtle way. An example occurred for us when we were working with a major news publisher. We had radically redesigned their subscription offer process for the electronic version and were in the middle of testing when they launched a new text link ad campaign from their main website to the electronic product.

This changed the mix of traffic arriving at the subscription offer process from one where virtually all traffic was coming from paid search engines to one where much traffic was arriving from a link internal to their website (highly pre-qualified traffic).

The average conversion rate increased overnight from 0.26% to over 2%. Had we not been monitoring closely, we might have concluded that the new process had achieved a 600%+ conversion rate increase.

This is an example of a Selection Effect validity problem that was not a mistake of design, but one of execution and process control.

We are working right now on our next free teleconference call, scheduled for August 9th at 4:00PM EST.

We’ll be presenting a merchandising calendar for the last five months of this year, with particular emphasis on the last eight weeks before Christmas.

In preparing the calendar, we asked ourselves just how well prepared online merchants are when it comes to the major retail buying season later in the year.

- While every online retailer knows that the eight weeks before Christmas is the busiest buying period of the year, are they truly prepared...right down to individual product promotions?

- Are fast growing companies certain that their technologies and platform are ready to handle the holiday spike in sales?

- Will they have sufficient customer service people trained and ready to serve by the time the first backorder or product availability problem occurs?

- Are marketing groups preparing promotions and PPC campaigns to make the most of this essential time of the year?

Our own research indicates that while a handful of online retailers have become quite sophisticated at merchandising for the holidays, many other companies have yet to put in place a marketing blueprint and merchandising calendar specifically designed for this perennial opportunity.

In this brief we will help you to develop such a blueprint and calendar, customized to your specific industry and target markets, and prepare you for what should be your most profitable period of the year.

If this topic interests you, please sign up for the MEC Merchandising Calendar for the Fall and Holiday Season 2006 webinar.