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Another Ad Blunder

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

ESPN.com Ad Blunder

Once again how important are details? Or better stated, how important is it to pay attention to details? When trying to optimize digital marketing campaigns, I like to look at the whole funnel. Two points of interest are where traffic comes from and where it converts; it’s not just the lead for that matters when optimizing a conversion funnel.

The image to the right is an example of what happens when marketers do not pay attention to detail. The advertisement is promoting an outdated event. I am not trying to cast blame on one party (as both the marketer and ad network could be at fault), but still, this is a waste of valuable ad space that drives me nuts.

Remember with all of your media campaigns to focus on the entire conversion process. Pay attention to where the user ENTERS your funnel (like the display ad seen here). Monitor users as they MOVE through the process, and then optimize the end RESULT. Do this, and you can be sure that you’re always maximizing your media and supporting a holistic conversion funnel.

Michael Bowen is the Performance Analyst at Geary +PMG.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Best Practices, Conversion | No Comments »

Landing a great landing page: some simple ways to get the most bang for your buck

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Landing Page Optimization is always a tricky task for education marketers. Our landing page optimization expert, Mike Bowen passed along these tips.

1. Value Propositions - These are the key to winning over users. The best value propositions will appeal to prospective students’ emotional and logical sides. Answer questions like “What do I need?” or “What do I like?”

2. Call to Action – Don’t confuse students about what their next step is. Instead, aim to direct them to where you want them to go on a given page.

3. Content Simplicity – Content needs to be easy to remember and scan. Your user’s attention span is short, so make the most of it by using bullet points and staying away from long paragraphs. (case and point: this blog post)

4. Form Length and amount of required fields – Sometimes people get carried away with the amount of information that they want to collect. Ask only for what you need. Remember prospective students are providing information before they get anything from your institution. Make it easy.

5. Layout / Style – There are thousands of schools of thought about web design. However in my experience, sites work best with a strong banner headers, text to the left with a form to the right. It’s a classic for a reason.

6. Shuffle Different Promotional Offers – Try different offers to see what converts best.

7. Imagery - Some images work better than others. When selecting a visual for a site, think about how it will make students feel. Can they relate? Does it portray your brand in its best light?

8. Test, Test, Oh Yeah, Then Test Again – After implementing these steps, don’t forget to test everything. What works this month, may be passé next month, and vice versa.

Posted in Conversion, SEM, design | No Comments »

Method, Madness, Execution, Conversions, Shaq?

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

I was watching Blue Chips the other day, the movie with Nick Nolte and Shaquille O’Neill. As an aside, he never should have signed on with the Celtics. Back to the film, it contains one of the most clichéd sports analogies. To paraphrase, it went something like:

“I’ll give them the play book. They can know our offense, they can know our defense, all that matters is how we execute.”

This quote can be applied into many aspects of our professional and personal lives.

By way of example, I’m applying it to conversion rate optimization since it’s what a performance analyst does best.

Typical questions around conversion rate optimization are: “What are your top tips for improving a site,” “Do I need to change my button colors,” “Should I put different images on my website,” or “What font is best?”

What people fail to understand is that it’s not just one thing, it’s about the overall execution. It’s an over simplifaction to think that one can make random tweaks to a site, and have it magically improve conversion rates. There is a method to the madness, and an execution of the method. When I’m working on a client’s conversion rate optimization, I go through the following steps:

1. Make sure tracking is set up, as this is the crux of your data. Without it, you can’t make any educated recommendations on which changes to test.

2. Remember and focus on the user. What brings them to your website? What needs or problems do they want solutions for?

3. Analyze the data and how people found your site. What are the hot keywords that attracted the most visits?

4. Work off of a check list of what you should consider testing on the site. This can include content, calls to action and value props. Then run the tests, and analyze the data before making a test recommendation.

Each conversion professional has his or her own process. This is just my way of channeling my own conversion rate madness into a methodology that delivers the results my clients expect.

Michael Bowen is the Performance Analyst at Geary +PMG

Posted in Best Practices, Conversion, SEM | No Comments »

New York Knicks Landing Page Blunder

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Just how important are details? VERY. Just ask the New York Knicks. In a lobbying effort, the Knicks have been running ads on Bing (and possibly other search engines) that advertise some of the hottest free agents in the NBA. The ad campaign linked visitors to a page where you could by season tickets. Great idea, right? The problem is we’re about to enter the 2010/2011 season and the page was advertising 2009/2010 season tickets. OOPS! Some speculate that the ads may have been running since as early as February. For the full article that was reported by ClickZ click here. Hopefully this goes down as a lesson learned by who ever does the marketing.

Now I can only imagine how much money was wasted. But I wonder if any one ever looked at the conversion rates and asked “Hmm, why aren’t we converting?” I wonder how many people build campaigns and forget about them?

Michael Bowen is the Performance Analyst at Geary +PMG.

Posted in Best Practices, Conversion | No Comments »

A Lesson Learned in Data

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

At the beginning of each week, I build a report to track the conversion rates of all our websites. I do this to ensure that each and every one of our sites and campaigns perform at the highest possible level. It also helps me to see where I need to focus more of my attention.

This Monday, I noticed in my data that two sites had drastically dropped off on lead volume. I began to investigate, and what I found has caused me to go back and look further into sites and the analytics that are in use. I will say it was a little startling; a couple sites had inconsistent link names. As an example my goal funnel would look for school_name-step-1 but at times would appear as school_name_-step-1.