By Gaby Diaz
Strategy Analyst,
Marketing Experiments

The home page is probably one of the most complicated pages of any website. It is the face of your company, the starting point of sales, a way to connect visitors to customer support or your corporate site.

Many companies struggle with their home page design. Usually, home pages are managed by more than one department. This results in internal battles of what goes on the home page and what department owns what space. But, what do customers want? Is the design friendly and effective enough to capture sales?

When designing or re-designing your home page, here are a couple of thumb-rules you should consider:

• The header and footer. These two sections are usually devoted to company information. In the header, Internet users expect to see company logo, search tool, and links to login, shopping cart, and customer support. In the footer: links to corporate site (“About Us”, “Careers”, etc), contact information, policies, advertising options, a site map, and help.
• Navigation bar. The location of the navigation bar is probably not as important as its structure. Usually, bars are located either at the top or left side of the page. It is important that you do customer research and find out how your customers will organize your products. That will give you a better idea about organizing the bar in a friendly way.
• The 20-80 rule. Give priority to the 20% of your products/services that drive 80% of your revenues. You want to make sure visitors have quick access to your most popular products.
• Value proposition. Compare your home page against your top competitors and ask yourself: Why should someone buy from my website? Do you tell visitors what you sell? What does your company do? What do you offer that others don’t? This sounds obvious, but you need to remind visitors (especially new ones) what is special about your site.
• Motivation. Do you have any special customer service policies like free shipping, money back guarantee, loyalty program, etc? Make sure you have them on a highly visible area like the top of the page.
• Credibility indicators. If your website has commercial transactions, make sure you place secure certificates and 3rd party certifications in a visible area.
• Search Engine Optimization. Try to use text links as much as possible. Pictures are pretty but very inefficient when it comes to good rankings with search engines.

By Jimmy Ellis
Director of Optimization Research,
Marketing Experiments

1. Build a new headline for a high traffic landing page.
2. Build a new ad in a high volume PPC campaign ad group.
3. Take one larger keyword group in a PPC campaign and split it into multiple, more specific ad groups
4. Sign up for Google Analytics (it’s free). If you already have it, take a look at your top exit points and figure out why customers are leaving on those pages. (http://analytics.google.com)
5. Add a new testimonial to a high volume landing page. If you don’t have any, send a personal email to some of your repeat customers and ask them about their purchasing experience or about the product/service they purchased.
6. Build a new button for your site (a call to action such as “buy now,” “buy,” “add to cart,” ). In many of our tests, “add to cart” out- performs “buy now” and similar buttons.
7. Add an incentive to subscribe to your email list (discount, special report, gift, etc). If you already have one, test a new incentive to try and improve your results.
8. Run a website speed test on your site (maybe your home page). You can do it free right here: (http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/). Take a look at the results and try to reduce the size of your site by cleaning up your html, your css, or optimizing your images for optimal load times.
9. Drop or increase your prices. If you have never price tested, then you have never maximized the revenue of your current sales. Pick a high volume product or service, mark it up or down 10%, and watch those numbers. We prefer a/b split tests but if you don’t have a way to do it, a sequential test will usually give you enough information to tell if it’s having an impact on your revenue.
10. Place an order on your own site. When is the last time you did that? I can almost guarantee you won’t love it. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask yourself, “How could that have been easier?“ Then have your designer test changes based on your input.
Posted by Jimmy Ellis on April 13, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2)

By Carlos A. Espitia
Analyst, Marketing Experiments

This is a topic that I always thought of as online marketing common sense. Just like in any other marketing effort, we always (or should) want to know who our customers are, what they are buying, and how they are finding us. Much to my surprise, many online merchants do not have proper analytics in place, and those that do, often don’t understand what to make of them.

I was at a conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, speaking to about one hundred online merchants concerning ways to optimize their home pages, offer pages, and purchase paths. My presentation included Marketing Experiments’ best practices, principles of online testing and our conversion formula (C = 4M + 3V + 2(I-F) – 2A) . When I finished my first presentation, I quickly realized that I had wrongly presumed that everyone in the room understood the importance of understanding their site’s metrics. I had been talking about A/B split testing, sequential testing, conversion, and other rudimentary online marketing topics, not realizing that more than half my audience didn’t have a solid analytics package built into their site. In fact, for most, the only numbers that they were concerned with was how much they were spending on PPC and what their revenue was each month. While these two numbers are important, alone they do not help us squeeze more profit from our websites.

I don’t want to alienate the folks from the conference because I also hear it every week when I’m talking to companies applying for research partnerships with MEC. One of the most erroneous misconceptions people make is that to increase revenue they must increase traffic, and thus increase their paid search advertising costs. This couldn’t be more off the mark. Let me use an analogy that we often use around the MEC offices to drive a point home: The water pressure in your house is low because you have several holes in your pipes. Buying more traffic to your website is like opening the faucet further to get more water output. You are wasting water and you’re wasting money. What you should do first is seal the holes in your pipes and the flow of water will increase. Water, in this case, is a metaphor for revenue. A strange coincidence that we should have a formula for this optimization sequence too: Opr > Oprn > Ocnn. This is our Optimization Methodology. All it means is this; the first thing we should optimize is the product (Opr), then the presentation (Oprn), and finally the Channel (Ocnn).

Let’s get back to why understanding metrics is important. Understanding the metrics on your site will help you understand where your “leaks” are; where are people falling out of the purchase path. Let’s take a look at an example to illustrate this point. Let’s say you have 10,000 people arriving to any given offer page on your site each day. Of those 10,000 visitors, only 100 of them (or 1%) start the purchase path. This is your conversion from page A to page B (offer page to beginning of purchase path). Now, let’s say that of those 100 people that start the purchase path 50 of them finish it. Your conversion from page B to page X (beginning of path to completed purchase) is 50%. If you were only looking at the bottom line and nothing else, you’d conclude that your total conversion is at an abysmal 0.5% (50 buyers out of 10,000 visitors). Furthermore, you wouldn’t know what to fix on your website to increase conversion, so you would probably pour more money into your PPC campaigns. What you wouldn’t realize is that the majority of your losses or “leaks” are found on your offer page. Moreover, optimizing this page alone would increase conversion to your order path without the need of additional paid search traffic. This would ultimately yield higher profits for you. And after all, isn’t that the main objective?

The next series of questions would involve the topic: How do I optimize an offer page? I have good news for our readers; we have many free online journals describing in detail how you can optimize your offer pages.

By Bob Kemper
Director of Operations,
Marketing Experiments

Usability video testing involves video recording a user going through a specific process for a website (e.g. an order). The aim is to observe how people behave in an actual site encounter situation, so that developers can recognize design and/or usability problems with the website. Techniques popularly used to gather data during a usability video test include eye tracking and capturing user narrative as they “think aloud”.

An effective interative usability study using recorded video can reveal a wide variety of problems, such as confusing or contradictory signals, off-page links or other elements that interrupt the primary objective flow, invalid assumptions about prior familiarity with technical or product-related terms, or page elements that increase customer anxiety or friction.

There are many excellent information sources on usability testing methods and tools. One we have found especially thorough and useful is the “Testing Methods and Tools” page hosted by the University of Maryland.

You can learn more about website optimization for conversion, using usability testing and a host of other testing methods, at the MarketingExperiments Journal through the Site Conversion collection of Journal Research Briefs (categories in the left navigation bar).

By Mike Clowe
Research Analyst,
Marketing Experiments

How important is it to provide credentials on the Web? The Web is an essentially anonymous media. Businesses claim to be whatever they want, many times without any proof at all.

In the wake of the Wikipedia scandals, where two of their top contributors were found to be grossly misrepresenting themselves, it is becoming increasingly important to provide credentials to prove what you claim to be is actually who you are. The Wikipedia incident was just an example of what is happening throughout the internet. As the online world and the off-line world come closer together, people are starting to check claims made on the internet against the facts.

Wikipedia will come out of this just fine. They will ask their authors to identify themselves, but other than that nothing will change. Now imagine if this had happened to an online retailer. They would be out of business. The biggest fear many online consumers have is getting cheated. This is why many businesses use credibility indicators and have live operators to address customers' fears -- to build trust. All of that trust can be destroyed by one false claim.

It all comes down to Transparent Marketing. As businesses we need to represent ourselves fairly and honestly to our customers. Not only that but we need to provide clear and concise proof that what we say is true. The age anonymity on the web is coming to an end.

We have written an article on Transparent Marketing with additional examples and information about how you can convey trust with your customers. Click here to read more about Transparent Marketing.