In the Sytropin case study, we showed you the highlights. Now, if you want to learn more, register today and learn precisely how Sytropin management was able to break out of a ‘conversion rate plateau’ and generate a quantum leap conversion rate lift to their AdWords landing page.

- Tuesday, November 10, 2009 2:00 pm EST

- Webinar registration here.

- Limited Capacity — Only 150 seats available

- Length: 50 minutes

- Cost: Free – But you need to reserve ahead by registering

Bonus: Attend the webinar and win a FREE Custom Landing Page evaluation

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Hair Club is the world leader in personalized hair loss solutions, providing surgical and non-surgical restoration treatments to men and women in more than 95 Hair Club Treatment Centers across North America.

Although Hair Club’s paid search strategy was successful at driving highly targeted traffic to the site, the number of visitors who completed the online form was below expectations, resulting in a higher than desired cost per lead.

By working with WiderFunnel to develop and execute a conversion rate optimization strategy, Hair Club accomplished a 20% increase in visitors completing the call-to-action form in the winning test Variation.

You can read the case study here.

Sales conversions are crucially important to business (you knew that) so what is really interesting to me is that the study revealed once again (we have blogged about it before) the gap between what clients think is important and what agencies think is.

On the client-side, overall site conversion-to-sale was the top metric used by 68% of respondents. Other site metrics clients value include:
• Conversion to response
• Lead conversion rate
• Basket conversion rate

The study also reports that 39% of companies are not satisfied with their conversion rates.

To improve their conversion rates, clients report using A/B testing as the most valuable way to improve conversion, with more than one-half of companies saying it was ‘highly valuable’ and another 42% saying it was ‘quite valuable’.

Other methods valuable for improving conversion rates, according to client s and in descending order, include:
• Customer journey analysis
• MVT
• User testing
• Cart abandonment analysis
• Segmentations
• Event-triggered behavioural email
• Online survey/customer feedback
• Copy optimization
• Pinch point analysis
• Expert usability reviews/consultancy

And here comes the interesting part: agency-side respondents in the report did not always know what their clients thought about the best ways to improve conversions!

When asked ‘what worked’, agency-side responses listed A/B testing farther down the list, plus they overestimated the value of expert usability reviews for their clients.

So when it comes to conversion rate improvements, better to work with experts.

If you run a single-product eCommerce site, as opposed to multi-product niche stores, you know you face unique challenges.

Most marketers, even multi-product eCommerce marketers, aren’t aware of the unique complexities you face:
• Market must be created
• Product must be seen to be appreciated
• Prospects are not aware of product capabilities
• No one searches for a product they don’t know about
• Sales tend to be one-shot with the potential for repeat sales
• The chances of a web visitor to purchase on website tend to be low to moderate since, by definition, there is only one product to select from

Plus, and this is huge, all the marketing costs must be carried by single product and cannot be spread over many products.

So when we started to optimize the conversion rate for Sytropin, a product of Speedwinds Nutrition (a Portland, OR-based business focused exclusively on developing top quality nutritional supplements), we knew we had a big challenge in our hands.

As most single-product eCommerce websites, management knew it needed to improve the sales conversion rate and had reworked its Pay-per-Click landing page and conducted extensive testing – both A/B and multivariate. But their visitor-to-buyer conversion improvements had reached a ‘conversion rate plateau’ and now they needed expert help.

By working together with WiderFunnel, management was able to break out of the ‘conversion rate plateau’ and generate a quantum leap conversion rate lift to their AdWords landing page: 50% more sales conversions from the same traffic.

If you manage a single-product eCommerce site you should read the case study and then attend the by-registration only webinar (and take a peek behind the scenes on how the test was designed and executed).

Find the Sytropin Case Study here and register for the in-depth webinar to be presented November 4, 2009 here.

To read more Conversion Optimization case studies, go here.

Last week WiderFunnel Marketing again had the pleasure of attending the Google Analytics and Website Optimizer Partner Summit at Google’s headquarters in Mountainview, CA.

At the summit Authorized Consultants got a sneak peak at the newest features to be bundled into Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer starting today.

Here is a look at some of our favorite new Google Analytics features.

Mobile reporting

According to the Nielsen Company the total number of smartphone (iphone, Android, Blackberry) subscribers grew from 15 million in Q2 2008 to 26 million in Q2 2009. That’s a 73% increase in just one year!

In response to this fast-growing trend Google has expanded its Mobile Reporting feature by tracking applications built for iPhone and Android devices.

Now using GA you can gain an understanding of how users engage with their mobile apps, such as what actions are taken within an app and what features are used.

The Nielsen Company also reports a 34 percent year-over-year increase in mobile Web visitors from 42.5 million in July 2008 to 56.9 million in July 2009. In particular women, teens and seniors are helping to make this growth happen.

Nielsen Company’s mobile media guru Chris Quick comments, “Now that the technology is more mainstream, women are quickly embracing the benefits as ‘connected consumers,’ tapping the convenience of Web access on mobile phones to network, browse the latest shopping deals and get ideas for dinner, all while on the go.”

If you are currently running a mobile web site, GA can help you track traffic to from all web-enabled devices whether or not the device runs JavaScript.

In the coming weeks, site owners building on PHP, Perl, JSP or ASPX will be able to add a server side code snippet to their mobile websites to enable this tracking.

Availability: Mobile Apps tracking available week of October 21, 2009. Users can download mobile tracking snippet instructions from the Google Analytics blog or wit for the code snippet to be published via the Setup UI over the coming weeks

Expanded Goal Tracking

The Expanded Goal Tracking feature is an obvious favorite of ours. Gone are the days of creating multiple profiles in your GA account if you have more than 5 goals.  Google now allows you to define up to 20 goals per profile.

Google has also introduced a new goal type measuring site engagement and branding success on your site.

Web traffic and conversion rates alone do not tell the full story. Measuring engagement and branding success is key in understanding the lifetime value of a customer.

The new goal types allow you to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit.

Availability: Available to all users the week of October 21, 2009.

Multiple Custom Variables

Initially Google offered us a single User Defined Variable in Google Analytics.

If you wanted to know if your visitors were male or female, you could collect this information in the single GA User Defined Variable and then segment web site activity to learn if Males purchased more than Females, or if Female shoppers purchase different items from Male shoppers and so on.

Or, if you wanted to know whether visitors to your site who purchased something returned to the site to shop again, you could set the User Defined Variable to a value such as “customer” on the receipt page and then segment your GA reports to learn about repeat customer activity.

But what if you wanted to know how Female Repeat Customers used your site? A likely question if you are examining customer loyalty, and the lifetime value of a customer.

Up to now tracking multiple values in a single User Defined Variable in GA has been difficult to implement and has produced complex reports. The problem is that you don’t always collect the same information at the same time.  If you capture a visitor’s gender at one point in their session and then capture the “customer” value indicating that they made a purchase, the second value would overwrite the first value that you set.

With the release of GA’s latest features, you can now set multiple custom variables.

With this feature, users can classify any number of interactions on the site into  trackable segments. Multiple custom user segments can now be collected at the page, session, and visitor-level concurrently. For example you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged-in or not), and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports
section).

Availability: Phased rollout through the coming weeks starting the week of October 21, 2009.

Managing your custom reports and advanced segments

Being able to share segment definitions, custom reports and report templates is a huge time saver when it comes to distributing GA reports throughout the company.

With the latest changes in GA you can:

• Create a custom report or custom segment for a particular profile and make it available to any user who has access to the profile.

• Share the URL link for a custom report to anyone who has an Analytics account and a pre-formatted template will automatically be imported into their account.Once the other person receives the link and clicks it, a template of your custom report or advanced segment will load in his or her own account. Your profile’s data will not be included in the template.

Availability: This feature is currently available to all GA users for more information see the Google Analytics Help article.

For a complete list of the new features released this week see GA Blog

Apparently, there are researchers questioning the value of the click as a metric of success.

comScore and Starcom USA have followed up a July 2007 study conducted with Tacoda that segments Internet users into heavy, moderate and light clickers and found that a decreasing percentage of users are making up an increasing portion of all click-throughs.

Here are the researchers’ findings:

• Heavy clickers only accounted for 4% of all Internet users in March 2009, but they were responsible for more than two-thirds of click-throughs that month.

• Both moderate and light clickers decreased in number and in share of clicks.

• Non-clickers rose as a proportion of all Internet users by 16 percentage points.

As a result, researchers asked themselves, ‘With just 16% of Web users clicking on ads in March, how informative are click-through rates?’

And answer themselves they did: “A click means nothing, earns no revenue and creates no brand equity. Your online advertising has some goal—and it’s certainly not to generate clicks,” said John Lowell, Starcom USA SVP and director, research and analytics, in a statement.

Are these people for real?

These researchers have suggested other metrics, such as the view-through rate, gross ratings points (GRPs) and dwell time as more appropriate gauges of success.

This is certainly not what we are seeing happening today.

Especially in this economic environment, marketers desperate to create demand for their products and services are relying very heavily on click-throughs as well as conversion rate (the “post click experience”) as key metrics.

It seems to me these researchers should have spoken to actual marketers, right down in the trenches, working hard and succeeding under very difficult conditions.

What we are seeing is that now, more than ever, click-through and conversion rate are the key metrics driving decisions around advertising and marketing spend.

While I acknowledge these researchers are talking mostly about advertising metrics and not direct-response metrics, it seems to me irresponsible of eMarketer to decry “More Trouble for the Click-Through” at a time when click-through as a metrics is more important than ever to marketers.

Perhaps the real question these researchers should be asking is, “What is the future of Advertising?”

Chris Goward, the WiderFunnel Marketing CEO, will be presenting a detailed case study on how the BabyAge.com test was developed.

Attend this webinar and get lots of practical advice on eCommerce testing.

-> Live Wednesday, October 21, 2009 2pm Eastern

-> Live Q&A

-> Get a chance to win a complimentary landing page evaluation

(Note: Attendance is limited to 100 seats.)

Sign up to attend for free here.

Gillian Shaw published a good web strategy article today in the Vancouver Sun based on her interview with me and Avinash Kaushik at IMC Vancouver a few days ago.

She captured classic Kaushik zingers like:

• “HITS is his acronym to describe it: How Idiots Track Success”
• Definition of bounce rate: “I came, I puked, I left”
• Rule number one? “Don’t suck. If you suck nothing matters – no amount of data can make up for the fact you suck.”

Gillian did a great job outlining WiderFunnel’s six conversion optimization factors, and also quoted Alexandra Samuel on social media measurement.

You can read the full article here: Successful Web strategy is in enticing visitors to stay awhile

Born in 1999, BabyAge.com, Inc. is the premiere online retail distributor and manufacturer of pregnancy, infant and juvenile products. BabyAge.com offers the largest assortment of infant and juvenile products on the web, carrying over 25,000 items of both durable and consumable goods.

In May 2009, Pennsylvania -based BabyAge.com was recognized by Internet Retailer Magazine as number 280 of the Top 500 websites in the United States based on annual sales revenues.

Recently, BabyAge.com management recognized that redesigning their product pages without using statistically valid testing methods would not deliver reliable improvement. They needed a way to decide, without relying on ‘gut feeling’, which changes would actually deliver improved and measurable results.

So, instead of ‘gut feeling’ BabyAge.com embarked on a strategy of Conversion Optimization – and immediately attained outstanding results!

Read the case study here.

It’s not too late for you to test your Ecommerce pages and have a very merry optimized Christmas selling season ahead!

We received great feedback on the case study – as well as some excellent questions, including:

• The case study is too short. Can you share more insights?

• How do you decide when to do and MVT and when you do an A/B test?

And (my favourite):

• What on earth *is* a multivariate test anyway!?

So we decided to answer these (and many more) questions, as well as provide an in-depth show-and-tell on the case study, during a live webinar and we are grateful that Peter Novotny, W3i’s Marketing Manager, agreed to join us to present.

On Wednesday, September 23, 2009, Peter, together with Chris Goward, WiderFunnel’s CEO, will present a live webinar so you can get an in-depth look at the intricacies of multivariate testing and learn the mechanics of designing and executing an MVT test.

Here are the details:

- Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 2:00 pm EDT/11 am PST

- Only 100 seats available on first-come, first- served basis

- Length: 50 minutes

- Cost: Free — But reservations required due to limited space

Register here – and learn how a multivariate test gets put together.