Optimize & Prophesize

Category: A/B & MVT Testing

  • Two Days in the Facebook Gold Rush

    I spent the past two days in Silicon Valley immersed in the world of Facebook Application Developers (I can’t resist the temptation to call them FADs) and Venture Capitalists. This culture shock was courtesy of being invited to speak on Metrics & Targeting at the awesome CommunityNext Platform Conference. Congrats to Noah Kagan and Andrew…

  • Landing Page Resolution: 800×600 vs. 1024×768

    While not one of the eternal questions of our time, what screen resolution to build your landing page is nevertheless always a key design consideration. Many factors weigh into this decision. What are the browser resolution settings for the majority of your users? How does the page appear on different resolution setting (e.g. where is…

  • Optimization of Ads & Landing Pages by Keyword Match Type

    Exact Match, Broad Match, Phrase Match – Understanding Relevance and Unlocking Higher ROAS With the advent of quality scoring for ads understanding of match type has never been more important. I’m not referring to understanding how match type works from an ad serving perspective but understanding how match type drives clicks with different goals and…

  • Afterthoughts on SES San Jose

    SES San Jose 2007 started for me during the one-hour delay waiting for the gate to be fixed so I could board the Sunday night flight from Newark Airport. With all the Search knowledge waiting to get on board it was easy to kill the one-hour delay talking with Kevin Lee, Barry Schwartz and Tamar…

  • Microsoft says Brand Search Ads a Waste of Money – Show Me the ROI!

    I have to chime on this since the timing of this Microsoft release and SES is not coincidence. It’s certainly attention grabbing but I think it’s almost irresponsible to make these claims without the right data to support them. In an article backed with little ROI data Microsoft/ Atlas is saying that it is a…

  • Ad Testing

    Ad testing can lead to huge increases in conversion rates. I don’t care if it is text based search ads, rich display and banner ads or video ads – all benefit site-side from advanced testing techniques done on the ads leading to these landings. We know marketing messages have a tremendous influence to persuade action.…

  • A Digital Marketing Lesson from Wall Street’s Woes

    As the New York Times points out in Sunday’s Business section the recent collapse of the stock and bond markets has much to do with the automated black-box systems of hedge funds whose algorithms are seeing behavior that despite all their statistical modeling has no precedent. The automated systems have failed and it’s now people…

  • Testing & Personalization Kill Best Practices

    Back in October of last year I wrote about lazy marketing or deciding to implement creative and design strategies based on so called best practices. Last week MarketingShepa published a case study of work we did with a client on button testing that once again proved that even for buttons, best practices need to give…

  • 7 Facts About On-Site Behavioral Targeting

    In advance of my speaking on Tuesday July 24, 2007 at MediaPost’s Behavioral Targeting Forum in New York City along with OTTO Digital’s Chief Creative Officer Paco Vinoly, I thought I would share some of the things we’ve learned to be true in doing Behavioral Targeting (BT). Fact 1: Behavioral Targeting isn’t new, nor is…

  • Test Design Advice for SEOmoz on their Landing Page Competition

    I’m incredibly excited about the SEOmoz landing page competition. Not only did they chose to use the Offermatica platform but because of the awareness, education and information that this test will provide, countless marketers will experience the fun and excitement of testing. What is testing if not a competition? Testing is also an ongoing learning…

  • Bud.tv: Anheuser-Busch Cracks a Cold One

    As prophesized here upon launch and reported yesterday and today elsewhere, Bud.tv is officially a failure. The next time your business or agency wants to throw money at a digital marketing initiative it is probably a good idea to do some testing and optimization of your offering first. A lot of egg on the face…

  • Skype Boosts Homepage Conversion Rate with Radical Simplicity

    Thanks to the informational heavy handedness of 1.0 design we have the opportunity at OTTO Digital to employ our Radical Simplicity™ methodology quite frequently to improve the performance of pages and enhance brand value. The way it works, simply, is to segment users and then strip the page to a single consideration and call to…

  • How Brand, Product & Community Influence Intention

    In my last post I wrote that all user intentions can be boiled down to one of two goals, discovery or recovery. To create marketing strategies for these intentions we must begin by understanding the way users think in the course of trying to achieve these goals. Users respond to what they know. This can…

  • Flash Forward: Six Examples of Optimizing Flash Video for User Engagement

    As engagement becomes a more valuable and measurable metric (and we know through many test across verticals that increasing engagement leads to increased conversion and page views) optimizing flash video movies and other rich Internet applications (RIA) like Ajax become critical. I’ll explore Ajax optimization in an upcoming post. This post was prompted by a…

  • 5 Lessons From Multivariate Tests on Buttons

    Conventional wisdom from the Information Architecture and User Experience gurus tells us that buttons and calls to action should be the same across the user experience. The thinking is that messaging, shape, size and color are all elements that if consistent will allow users to locate and click buttons and calls-to-action more easily and more…

  • Buy Branded Keywords? A Case Study on Traffic, Conversion and RPV

    Part 3 of 3 This is the last part of my deep dive into a question that is asked quite often. Brand keywords have seemed to be a conundrum for many in the Marketing and Brandings worlds. This series of posts and research has yielded some interesting data. Like any good testing and optimization they…

  • 5 Lessons from Multivariate Tests on Google PPC Ads

    Search ads are the bridge of relevance between the keyword query and the landing page. They are a key factor in your Quality Score, affect the traffic to your site and thus your spend and budgets. They set user expectations for the landing page and influence conversion. At OTTO Digital we’ve been working with clients…

  • Marketing Bout: Data vs. The Gut

    There is a reason that humans will always be better marketers than algorithms. The human mind can process information and data and spit out predictive models based on the tangible and intangible person-to-person experiences that make up life. It is this knowledge that allows our minds to triumph over machines anytime a measure of creativity…

  • Do I Purchase My Brand Keywords or Has Google Improved So Much I Don’t Need To?

    Part 1 of 3 Recently Google has changed the way search results on brand queries appear for many businesses. They have provided them with added real estate at the top of the SERP by listing four links to internal sections below the main result and description (interestingly it seems for everyone but Amazon & their…

  • Afterthoughts on SES Chicago

    SES Chicago had a very different vibe from the six other SES shows I’ve participated in. The show was packed with first time attendees and lots of in-house folks. I actually think this is a really good sign. SEO/M has reached a turning point. On one level it has matured. Early practitioners now have years…