Optimize & Prophesize

Category: User Experience

  • Convenience Always Drives Online Results, Not Just at Holiday Season

    Despite lots of negative predictions online shopping increased this holiday season by 22.4% according to Visa. That follows a 26% holiday lift in 2006 and 25% increase in 2005. This rise is attributable to <a href="http://www.optimizeandprophesize.com/jonathan_mendezs_blog/2007/05/convenience_mar.html “>the convenience of online that I blogged about back in May. The holiday season amplifies this but it is…

  • Top 10 Multivariate & A/B Testing Results from 2007

    This list compiles the most counterintuitive and therefore most interesting test results from multivariate and A/B (or split) tests I was involved in over the past year. I thought that this would be more valuable, a better read and more modest than just a rank list of tests that had the highest lift in conversion…

  • Webinar, Podcast & Speaking on Personalization, Targeting and Testing

    Over the next week I’ll be doing what seems like a quite a bit of evangelizing — hopefully it is more of a knowledge transfer than anything else. 3 Proven Approaches to Delivering Targeted Content – Webinar This is an Omniture webinar I had the pleasure of doing with Charlene Li of Forrester Research. Charlene…

  • Creating Intent in Digital Media – Part 2 & 3

    Part 1 focused on three types of digital media and cross-media and looked at what the future may hold for intent creation in each. Part 2 looks strategically at creating intent and Part 3 is a case study. Goals and Intentions For the most part, people are consistently in goal or intent (I use these…

  • The Antidote to Chaos – Build & Deliver

    Jeff Jarvis has a post in The Guardian that echoes two key strategic ideas I’ve been harping on the past few months. 1. Companies need to build marketing and communications platforms themselves to connect with consumers. 2. Companies need to serve themselves and advertisers better by delivering more relevance. These strategies are not mutually exclusive.…

  • iPod Touch Commercial – Democratized Creative Hits Prime Time

    In case you haven’t seen it here is the new iPod Touch commercial that was created by an 18 year old Apple fan Nick Haley from the UK, put on YouTube, discovered by Apple and is now being used for a National Television Campaign. Nick mashuped some video from apple.com, added a soundtrack and edited…

  • Creating Intent in Digital Media

    In Part 1 I will look at three types of digital media and cross-media and see what the future may hold for intent creation. Next week in Part 2 I will focus on using creative and technology in synergy to optimize intent creation. The idea of creating intent is one of the touchstones of marketing…

  • Google vs. Facebook – Who Will Know More About You?

    “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?‘” – Eric Schmidt, Google CEO May, 2007 Never underestimate Google. After driving the price of Microsoft’s investment up with what I believe was little real intention of partnering…

  • Your Homepage Sucks – Use Landing Pages for Brand Keywords

    Recently we created and tested five different landing pages for brand specific keywords and ads. The winning page in this A/B/C/D/E test achieved a 148% increase in conversion rate. Taking the customer insights gleaned from the first test our follow-up multivariate was able to add an additional 15% lift in conversion rate and even more…

  • Testing Navigation on Landing Pages

    For many years now a best practice has seemed to be creating landing pages that do not have any form of navigation other than the call to action and maybe a learn more link. The fear of having navigation usually rests in the notion that clear paths off the landing page will lower conversion rates…

  • Don’t Wait for Social Network Ad Models

    Social Networks (SN) are desperate for strategies to monetize and advertisers are desperate for ways to reach this huge highly engaged audience. However, it may be that because of social network behavior that most ad models in social networks will not work or worse, run the risk of destroying what users love about them. Can…

  • 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…

  • Why Mashups are Mandatory for Marketers

    No longer is the web about sites. It has become a database platform with lots of structured information. This change is profound. The strategic and creative use of this structured data (from REST APIs) is changing the way we interact with the web… and for the better. Deeper and more engaged user interactions are taking…

  • 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…

  • The Rise of Widget & Application Optimization

    The opening of platforms has created amazing opportunities to create compelling experiences fueling the rise of widgets, mash-ups and applications over the past year with no end in sight. In this new era of integrated applications at every digital touchpoint, users will have more avenues than ever from which to engage. What seems lost in…

  • The Search Engine Election: 2008 Presidential Campaign Scorecard

    The immense power of search engines to reach people and influence behavior based on information discovery intentions is beyond debate. Still, with the 2008 Presidential Election little more than one year away the ability to quickly find relevant information on the candidate’s views and positions from the search engines, namely Google, is extremely poor. The…

  • Engaging Users on the SERP – How Google Universal Search Changes Everything

    If you haven’t noticed over the past few weeks there has been a sea change on Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Universal Search is what Google calls it but it’s much more than search. At its core it creates an entirely different engagement dynamic and search user experience. Until now the goal of Google’s…

  • Year One of Optimize and Prophesize

    “It’s all one song!” – Neil Young This month marks my first year of blogging. It has been an incredibly rewarding experience that I look forward to continuing with forever. Special thanks to Jamie Roche who encouraged me (actually I believe he forced me) to start blogging. Matt Roche for the friendly page views competition…

  • Convenience Marketing: The Medium is the Message

    As marketers and advertisers we sometimes forget the most basic reason people use the digital medium. Convenience. The user experience online has no parallel in the offline world. The offline experience is optimized in a whole other manner. If you read Paco Underhill’s wonderful insight into offline shopping strategy in “Call of the Mall” you…