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The blogosphere has been buzzing with news of ConversionUniversity.com, Google’s recently-launched site on how to make your website perform better — in SEO, SEM, PPC, Analytics, website testing, and more. So what’s the deal?
What’s Google up to?
Why do they want to give all this free information on how to make your website make you more money (even if it’s not an e-commerce site)? Why aren’t they charging for this info?
Here’s my take.
Google — for as long as they’ve been in business — has been all about giving users the best possible experience. It’s been the secret to their success.
Every time Google changes their algorithms — the infamous ‘Google Slap‘ — it always works out in the favor of the website owners who are already giving a superior customer experience, and punishes those who diminish the customer experience.
They really want you to have a good customer experience on your website — and one way for you to do that is to have increased traffic, and increased conversions. Increased traffic means your site is more relevant to visitors — it appears to fill their need when it shows up in the search engine (either paid or organic). If Google shows searchers sites that are more relevant to what they’re searching for, Google’s doing their job, and they’re happy.
Another way to improve your customer experience is actually to sell more — increase your conversion rate. Here’s how this works. If you’re converting more of your website visitors into customers, that means a higher percentage of website visitors actually found what they wanted when they visited your website. If Google directed them to the site where they could find what they wanted, then Google did their job, and they’re happy.
Similar to selling more and getting more traffic, just keeping traffic on your site longer with more and better content keeps Google happy — again, if you’re keeping the people who found your site through Google happy, then Google is happy too.
And finally, the hidden profit motive.
Google knows that if they educate you about how to do better in SEO, SEM, PPC, Analytics, website testing, and everything else they have their fingers in, that you’ll be more likely to use their paid services such as AdWords.
It’s an old law of persuasion and selling — the law of reciprocity. When someone gives something to us without an obvious motive of getting something in return, we feel obligated deep down to actually return the favor. It’s the secret behind all educational marketing (and it’s something you can use too).
Google’s flooding us with information on how to profit more by using their services. This, in turn, encourages us to use their services. And they profit more.
Anything wrong with this?
I don’t think so. They’re using these persuasion principles in an honest and ethical manner. And if you ask, they’re pretty open about why they provide so much education.
Maybe there’s something we can all learn from this…
Take a look inside everything that happens on your site. This free service lets you track where website traffic comes from, where it goes, and how long it stays. If you do nothing else I suggest, use this free service!
Tracking your traffic is one of the first steps you have to take if you want to have success online. Google’s made it easy with a free tool that someone with even mere hours of web development experience could install. Do it!
Pay for how much traffic you want. If you want a flood of traffic to your website and can afford it, you can get it very quickly. If you want to test a new idea cheaply, you can do it. AdWords lets you pay per visitor, for a price you set (you compete with other people bidding on the same traffic). (This is called pay per click, or PPC.)
All online advertising experiments should start with an AdWords campaign. It should be one pillar of your overall marketing strategy. Google just has too big a share of the search market to ignore. This is how you can capitalize on their traffic and make it yours.
Once you have traffic to your website, you need to get visitors to do what you want. You can guess, or you can know with scientific certainty how well different parts of your ad influence the conversions. Google Website Optimizer (another free tool!) lets you know with scientific certainty.
Use this tool to improve conversions and profits from your website. It’s easy. It’s powerful. And it pays off in spades.
Conclusions
Are these the only three tools I use? No.
Are they the three best? Maybe.
Are they essential? Yes!
Try them out. And if you can’t quite figure out how to use them, you have two options:
1. I’ll provide more how to info soon — register on the right to get it.
2. I offer consulting on each of these tools — call me: 541-543-1438.
I watched the first video on this. I do feel like I can accomplish this now. In fact, it seems easy all of a sudden.
Funny how ‘SEEING & HEARING’ something helps versus just reading…
Regards,
Garrett Todd
I’m really excited about pointing you to this resource — I’m a huge proponent of marketing testing and think Google has been a big help in this by releasing this tool. As Garrett said, the videos make it easy to get started. Why don’t you watch them (they’re free) and get started today?
I hope the videos are helpful to you. Soon I’ll be posting more how-to videos on Google Website Optimizer. If you have questions you’d like to have answered, leave them in a comment on this post. Thanks!
GrokDotCom — one of the most prolific publishers of useful information about marketing, advertising, copywriting, marketing testing, and the like — has published a blog post that links to dozens of resources on Copywriting and writing effective advertising.
Here are some of the topics covered:
Writing headlines
Readability
Customer-focused copy
Copywriting techniques
Trust & relationship building
Email marketing
Copywriting blogs & resources
Transcription services
Copywriters
Public relations
Blogging
Persuasive online copywriting
If you haven’t seen it, it’s a resource worth looking at and studying in depth.
GrokDotCom has published part 2 of this article. The topics in part 2 include:
Copy length (long copy vs. short copy)
Word choice
Formatting
Usability
Active vs. passive voice
Writing for customer personas
Branding
Advertising brain food
Monetizing content
Inspiration & fun
This is good stuff. It includes links to some very valuable resources. They call it “Copywriting 101″ but if you really dug in and learned everything included in the articles they referenced, it’d be as good as a Bachelor’s in Advertising Copywriting.
Did you know if you choose a skill or process, and improve it just 1% every week, in just 70 weeks (about 16 months) you’ll be twice as good at it then as you are today.
It doesn’t take much to improve a skill or process 1% in a week. And through the power of compounding (what makes a little investment grow HUGE through time) your skills grow quickly.
This works for playing piano. This works for marketing and copywriting. This works for business processes. This works for manufacturing. It works in any skill or process you can imagine!
Toyota is the perfect embodiment of this process. Check out this article about how they constantly refine their manufacturing process. If you ask me, it’s why they’re one of the — if not THE — strongest car companies in America right now.
If you do the same in your business, you’ll experience incredible results (it’s not just for manufacturing — the same principles apply in marketing, product creation, customer service, etc.).
Continuous improvement is serious business. It’s how you get — and stay — ahead of your competitors. It’s something worth starting right now.
How can you improve an important aspect of your business 1% this week? How about next? And the week after that?
If these two videos don’t get you started using Google’s Website Optimizer, I don’t know what will. The second is the one I referenced in my Insiders Secrets to Google Website Optimizer blog post. Both are very revealing, and worth the 1 hour each.
Introduction to Website Optimizer Webinar:
Website Optimizer: Creating and Launching Experiments
In these (especially the second one) you’ll learn some pretty innovative ways of using Google’s free Website Optimizer tool, including how to do:
Split tests
Multivariate (MVT) tests
Split-path tests
Multi-page multivariate tests
Time-on-page goal tracking
Click-based goal tracking
It’s some really cool, really exciting stuff.
As an aside, I heard that at a recent get together of some high-level internet marketers, they asked everybody who did regular, everyday testing on their website to stand. Then they asked how much each was making online per year. The lowest was $12 million. The highest was much, much higher. The average internet marketer in the room was earning less than the lowest person doing testing every day. Doesn’t that make you want to test, especially when you can get a tool like this for free?!
I’ve kept my finger on the pulse of Google’s Website Optimizer since the beta was first announced. By my book, the more people that use marketing testing tools, the better. And Google is helping by making their Website Optimizer available to anybody with an AdWords account — for FREE. (But I’ll bet only a small fraction of people are actually using it — stupid, stupid, stupid!)
Anyways… I thought that Website Optimizer was pretty limited in what it could do — either split traffic between two pages and track who gets to a conversion page, or rotate components on a single page and track who saw what and who got to a conversion page.
Well I was wrong!
Yesterday I sat through a 1-hour webinar on Google Website Optimizer. In it, they explained all sorts of advanced features and approaches to using Website Optimizer. The webinar revealed all sorts of insiders’ secrets to maximizing your use of this tool.
These included:
Split tests
Multivariate (MVT) tests
Split-path tests
Multi-page multivariate tests
Time-on-page goal tracking
Click-based goal tracking
It really revealed to me that this is a much more powerful testing platform than it appears at first (or second, or third, or fourth, or fifth) look.
What really struck me was the last three: the multi-page multivariate tests, the time-on-page goal tracking, and the click-based goal tracking.
Multi-page multivariate tests. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see how one element on one page interacts with another element on another page, and yet another element on another page to effect conversions? Now you can figure that out.
Time-on-page goal tracking. Want to determine what combination of elements keeps people on your page for longer than 5, 10, or 15 seconds — because you know the longer they stay the more likely you are to get a conversion? Now you can figure that out.
Click-based goal tracking. Running an affiliate site and want an effective way to track when people click through from your site to the product page for the seller (but you can’t put tracking information on the seller’s site or on their conversion page)? Now you can track that too.
It’s really amazing what you can do.
They said they’ll be posting the webinar recording on the webpage for Website Optimizer within a couple weeks — maybe sooner. I’ll look out for that recording and make sure I link to it from here.
For now, here’s the page for Google Website Optimizer: click here.
Need help making sense of Website Optimizer or implementing on your website? Don’t hesitate to contact me: 541-543-1438.
(I say that with a sense of humor, knowing, 1. It’s true, I won’t lie… I love it! And, 2. I look like a jerk if I make too big of a deal out of it. So I digress…)
David Bullock is somebody I respect greatly. He’s an expert when it comes to testing advertising. He taught me almost everything I know about Taguchi multivariate testing. And beyond that, he can innovate and solve business problems like nobody else.
So what he thinks of me matters quite a bit.
Just today he sent me this testimonial through email:
“Roy Furr understands power of words in the sales process. I’ve worked on several projects with Roy. He is an excellent copywriter, and understands HTML, design, and marketing. More importantly, he excels at capturing the voice of his client. I look forward to continuing to work with Roy, as he is responsive to the ever-changing communication demands of business. Working with Roy will improve your bottom line.”
My latest project with David is a coaching group called Testing Tactics — teaching how to quickly increase profits by implementing advanced marketing testing methods. Registrations are currently closed, but if you go to the site at www.TestingTactics.com you can download an interview I did with David about Taguchi testing. All we’ll ask for in exchange is your email address.
I hold the hard-headed opinion that if advertising doesn’t generate trackable results, then you might as well burn your money.
Okay, that’s harsh. But I really care about advertising that’s measured on results, not creativity. So in that vein, I like it when I get the chance to compare ads and see which worked better.
I got excited when I discovered this Advertising Game…
There’s 12 ads — 6 print and 6 TV ads — where you see two options, select which you think worked better, and find out immediately if the one you picked got more or less response than the other.
It’s pretty cool. I don’t agree 100% with all their analysis, or that the ads they show are the best possible ads for the products they’re selling… but the results let you know which actually worked better — both in sales and consumer recall.
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