Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Relevance

  • Choice Kills Conversion

    Too often websites, landing pages and even ads decrease the odds of conversion by presenting considerations to users when they are already past the consideration stage and ready to buy. When confronted with choice user response will slow, users become unsure of themselves and many times they will fall off their task. As soon as…

  • R.E.M. Reshaping E-Metrics (or Revolutionizing E-Marketing)

    Marshall Sponder’s blog WebMetricsGuru had a post with comments from a recent Eric Peterson’s e-consultancy interview that caught my attention. The conversation is about the present difficulties for analytic vendors and display advertisers in the face of rich-internet applications (RIAs) and feeds as they continue to proliferate on the web. Sorry if I don’t shed…

  • Social Media Optimization & Branding

    Pathways to Experience Your brand value is in large part made up of the many different experiences your users have with it. The value increases as more new users have good experiences and your existing user’s expectations are met. Our job as marketers is to create the awareness and expectations that feed user desire to…

  • Optimizing Your Content Pages

    https://s3.amazonaws.com:443/slideshare/ssplayer.swf?id=3622&doc=omma-new-york-when-every-page-is-a-landing-page-14215 This past week at OMMA New York I spoke to content providers. The session was titled “When Every Page is a Landing Page.” This indeed is the case and exemplifies the power of digital marketing (namely search) to deconstruct traditional forms of media and the long held practices around them. The idea of presenting…

  • Landing Page Optimization Part 2: Search Ads

    Marketers optimizing landing pages often neglect to look at a key element in that optimization equation. The ad. The Reason: Testing results recently showed a 61% impact on conversion rate In Google for a particular ad with the first description line having the greatest impact on that performance. Display ads are being tested as well.…

  • Delivering Contextual Relevance Through Segmentation

    Mass marketing in the digital age means marketing to many segments of the entire mass. In fact, we all know the very idea of “mass marketing” is road kill. Technology allows us as marketers to understand the individual segments of our audience and deliver messages contextually relevant to each segment. In fact, segmentation is the…

  • Rocket Up Your ROI with Contextual Relevance

    Once you figure out how to deliver relevance to one of your key market segments I guarantee you’ll want to try again. And when you try it again you’ll wonder why you didn’t try it sooner. From beyond the universe to the planet OTTO, I present the ASTRO rules for delivering contextual relevance. 1. Analyze-Numbers…

  • Is it Real? YouTube’s “lonelygirl15”

    Brilliant Hoax, Marketing Genius, or UGC Savant? Whatever ends up happening with “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=lonelygirl15 “>lonelygirl15” it will be a fascinating study of online marketing prowess in the nascent world of user generated content (UGC) and social-media. If you’ve become a fan of YouTube as I have then you probably know who she is. Her two-minute…

  • Landing Page Optimization Part 1 (cont.)

    The Keyword Query and Transactional Landing Pages Picking up where we left off in Part 1 we’re now heading downstream and focusing on experiences where the user lands closer to completing their goal. I refer to these as Transactional Landings. Here the keyword driver can be anything from a general query like “mortgage” to a…

  • Landing Page Optimization

    Leading up to my panel participation Monday September 25th at OMMA New York on Search and Site Design: When Every Page is a Landing Page; I’ll be sharing a deep dive into some methodologies for landing page optimization. This post begins to explore the role of the keyword query and how that informs landing page…

  • Viral Vidiocy: The Agency.com Video

    So I finally watched the agency.com viral debacle. What struck me was that all the smart people that used to work there must have left. Agency.com seems like…well, not the sharpest tool in the shed. While they were spending their time learning how to make sandwiches and use a cash register, a smart agency would…

  • The State of the State: Afterthoughts on SES San Jose

    Online marketing and in particular search is still very much a nascent insurgency. I try to remember that. But at the end of this latest SES, after I had the chance to talk with the leaders in strategy, technology, analytics as well as reps from the engines themselves I walked away (once again) with a…

  • The Quality of Web Analytic Data. Or, why you need to be doing High Impact Segmentation

    Avinash Kaushik of Intuit had a great post recently on the poor quality of web analytic data. A side story to me was how much better the amount and quality of data we have for online marketing is over every other measured medium. As we look more and more towards this data and the quality…

  • Testing and Optimization for the Holidays

    It’s over 100 degrees today in New York City however my mind is thinking about freezing cold mall parking lots that don’t have a parking space. What does that mean? It means that now is the time to start optimizing for what will likely be the largest online shopping season ever. So, where and how…

  • Branding & Search – Part 2

    Branding Optimization through Search The words optimization and branding have rarely been seen together in a sentence on search engine marketing. I’m out to change that (in fact I just did). Let’s start this conversation by understanding that Search marketers are finding a number of ways to measure branding impact in search. Myself, and others…

  • YouTube’s need for Contextual Relevance

    TechCrunch has a piece on YouTube reaching the 100 million videos served a day mark. I guess this is good news for YouTube however, as much as I love YouTube I fear they are bound to fail as a revenue generating business. Online advertising success is predicated on what I refer to as contextual relevance.…

  • Website Optimization Advice

    I had the privilege to spend my day today doing something I love, observational research. I observed ten users spending 45 minutes each on a website. The site was a prototype that a client plans to launch soon. This is a very important launch and one that plenty is riding on. It didn’t go well.…

  • Synopsis of my July 11th Presentation at SES Latino

    At the heart of what we do online we need to create relevant experiences. It doesn’t matter what vertical you are in. Users will engage when they are presented with data that is relevant to their goals and objectives. When we begin to look at creating relevant experiences for an International audience this becomes more…

  • Microformats and Marketing 3.0

    Microformats may be the most exciting and important project currently being advanced in the next generation of the web. This is beyond Web 2.0 to 3.0. Yet, like many of the great web 2.0 advances it is rooted in ideas that have been around for a long time and microformats are already in practice. Technorati…

  • Google’s Landing Page AdsBot

    Since when has Google become landing page experts? Google is claiming that their artificial intelligence AdsBot will determine what users will think about a landing page. This determination will impact your rank and cost-per-click that until now have only been affected by your own bid settings and searcher interest in your ads. Really they are…