Can you tell the difference between the two?  I couldn’t.  Turns out, the difference lies in the amount of white space in the first search result, making the first result in the Picture 2 a bit more visible.  This test is designed to determine if these types of changes help you search faster and if it makes results more prominent.

Here’s another example of a recent Google experiment:

If you can spot the difference in these two pictures, you’re visually astute.  The difference is the the thickness of the plus box next to the stock quote.  It’s difficult to determine if one is “better”, because results of the tests have both positive and negative effects.  Searchers might click on the the thicker box, causing them to possible ignore other helpful results.

So, what?  Subtle differences can make a big impact on results.  Multivariate testing helps marketers to test even the most minute details to determine which has the greater impact.  Without the use of multivariate testing, the findings could take lots of time, man hours or just never be determined.

At WebsiteBiz, we use Omniture Test & Target as well as Google Optimizer.  We have expertise using these tools and are leveraging technology in our partnerships.

Beijing 2008 Olympics - Phelps Wins Gold

This year’s Olympic Games is definitely one of the most anticipated and controversial events in recent history.  With all of the protests occurring because of China’s treatment of Tibet and China’s harsh censorship rules there certainly has been a lot to talk about in the news.  However, much of the buzz has been positive.  Michael Phelps is aiming to take home 8 gold medals and is well on his way to that goal (3 golds and counting as of right now) while breaking records along the way.  With all of this going on, it’s no wonder companies are trying to capitalize on the captive audience through a variety of marketing campaigns.

This year, there has been a huge surge in online advertising for the Olympics.  Marketers are taking advantage of the many Olympic-related online advertising and sponsorship opportunities because they can attach their name to the games at a fraction of the cost compared to actually being an Olympic sponsor.  One of our clients, Ashley Furniture, is even running an Olympic offer.

NBC Universalis running 3,600 hours of Olympic programming, most of it live and recorded on the Internet.  AT&T has partnered with NBC Universal to provide live coverage through PC, mobile phone and TV and will also be offering on-demand content.  Yahoo is also providing display advertising across its Olympics site throughout August, giving primarily large advertisers such as Target, McDonalds and ExxonMobil a unique channel to reach customers.

Although the Olympics is not for all advertisers, mainstream are on board and will be measuring brand interaction and engagement at a minimum.  What’s been your interaction with brands associated with the Olympics?  Please share your thoughts below.

Testing landing pages is a great way to determine what message, experience, and offer our audience best responds.  It’s about “lift” and “improved conversion rates”. By thoroughly testing and optimizing landing pages, marketers have realized exponential returns. 

While an effective, but less sophisticated model of testing, A/B testing tests a single site element against a single control version. For example, two landing pages each with a different headline and hero image.

Quickbooks Multivariate Test

Multivariate testing takes A/B testing to another level by testing multiple elements at the same time. It not only shows you which combination of elements generates more leads, but shows which individual elements generates more conversions, whether it be a call to action, a button, an offer, or even a hero image. Multivariate testing allows you to identify the specific aspects of your campaign elements that have the greatest influence on site visitors.

By using multivariate testing, you will be able to ascertain which elements of your Paid Search landing page yields the highest number of site visitors to perform a desired action such as requesting information or making a purchase.

While many of the champion combinations may seem intuitive, many will also surprise you.

Using multivariate testing accelerates a marketers ability to yield the best results when comparing to A/B testing.  As an example, with one of our clients, we were able to produce a lift of over 11% using multivariate testing in a short period of time.  If you are interested in learning more about multivariate testing we would recommend these:

• Google Optimizer is a free multivariate testing platform but has many limitations.
• Omniture recently purchased Offermatica and have re-branded it: Test & Target.  It’s a much more sophisticated platform for multivariate testing and one we have evaluated and adopted.

What would a 11% or even 1% lift of visitor conversions do for your bottom-line?   In many cases, make it a no brainer decision.  I welcome your feedback and comments.

According to a recent article in The New York Times, Internet sales are expected to surpass $200 billion this year, up from $175 billion in 2007.  Online sales were already growing faster than total retail, but now consumers are cutting down on car trips by shopping on the web.

Busy lifestyles combined with hefty gas prices makes one-stop shopping an extremely attractive option for consumers especially when that one stop can be done without ever leaving your home.  Most retailers offer their products online, with many offering exclusive products available only online.  Some stores, such as The Limited are arriving “fashionably late” to the online trend.  However, due to the tremendous spike in sales, are now rushing to get their wares available in an online forum.

Many online stores have offered discounts on shipping to further entice would-be drivers to shop with a keyboard instead.

Even when stores aren’t offering shipping specials or discounts, often the cost is still less than that of a gallon or two of gas.

As more consumers search and shop online, the opportunity grows.  As online marketers we have the opportunity in a significant way to connect shoppers with the experience and products they expect and want.

Perhaps there is some good from higher gas prices…

I welcome your comments below.

Once again, Yahoo is playing follow the leader with Google.

Google recently announced their capability to read Flash content and Yahoo just announced their ability to do the same. This gives online marketers more freedom to create media rich websites without worrying about creating a separate HTML site. Up until now, Flash developers didn’t need or care about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but that will now change as online marketers evaluate Flash content for SEO initiatives.

#3 player in Search, Microsoft, has not weighed in to date.

You can read further about the news on SEORoundTable.com.

Some of the snags Google is running into include:

• Advertisers are reluctant to put their ads on YouTube due to fear of questionable content of amateur videos. For example, can you imagine a Folgers video ad prior to watching “Coffee causes heart attacks”? Or a Disney family friendly ads displayed before some provocative video of a celebrity?
• Copyright litigation. Viacom Inc. sued Google last year because unauthorized television and movie clips were posted by YouTube users.
• Inefficient sales process. The rapid growth of Google has hindered the sales systems.

Google has launched “Operation Spaghetti” to unclutter the mess that YouTube has been for them. Even if these problems are solved, will advertisers see a benefit to attaching ads to online videos on YouTube? This would be an extremely cumbersome process if we had to evaluate each ad prior to placing a video ad for our clients.

• Will YouTube filter videos for suitable advertisers? Maybe
• Will it rely on the YouTube community? Doubtful!
• Perhaps a combination. We’ll see…

In the meantime, agencies and advertisers running video ads have other options. And knowing Google, they have a plan already in the works to further monetize YouTube. Stay tuned.

Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy: Where to Begin…

Define Your Social Media Marketing Goals. What are the goals of your organization? Do you want to build your brand and increase the number of targeted visitor to your website? Do you want to improve communication among customers, employees and other stakeholders? Do you want to strengthen your relationships and increase profitability? Determining exactly what you want to accomplish through a social media strategy will drive prioritization of your actions.

Define Your Social Media Marketing Initiatives. How can you use social media marketing and social networking to improve how a particular function is performed or how the entire organization performs? List appropriate programs, initiatives and projects that rely on social media and social networking and how they relate to your business goals. For example if you

Implement and Evaluate. Once you have begun your social media marketing and networking strategy, you can begin to evaluate how it is meeting your organizations’ goals. Interaction and engagement are key elements of building trust in a brand. The beauty of social media marketing is the opportunity it offers for the interaction and engagement that customers desire today.

Consider the amazing growth of the following:

FaceBook: In 2007, Facebook had an estimated 65 million users, a 120% increase over the previous year. It was the seventh most visited site worldwide with an average of 250,000 new registrations per day. More than half of active users return daily for at least 20 minutes per visit, racking up 65 billion page views per month.

MySpace:More than 300 million users visited MySpace in 2007, an increase of 4% over the previous year. It is the fifth most visited site worldwide, averaging 320,000 new registrations per day.

YouTube:Every day, more than 100 million YouTube videos are played. Approximately 100,000 new videos were added in 2007. It is the second most visited site worldwide.

LinkedIn:The darling of the business community, LinkedIn has more than 18 million users with more than a million new members joining every month. In 2007, LinkedIn experienced a growth rate of a little over 270%.

Not only should you monitor your own social media activities, your social media marketing strategy should also include monitoring your customers’ and potential customers’ social media activities. Web analytics data, as well as active involvement in key social media sites, will help you collect quantitative and qualitative information in order to understand and adjust to the activities and goals of your customers.

These suggestions assume a “top down” social media marketing strategy model where the organization’s leaders implement and lead the adoption of blogs, wikis and social networking systems. However, you may experience a “bottom up” adoption model where your employees spontaneously engage in social networking and it rises to the level of an organizational initiative. In this case, a collaborative social media marketing strategy process that engages employees already taking advantage of social media can provide tremendous insight into ways to use these tools and techniques to reach your business goals.

What has your experience been with social media marketing? Do you currently have a social media marketing strategy?  Please comment below.

Leave it to Google to work with Adobe (previously called Macromedia Flash) to read the rich multimedia websites developed in Flash.  Now that Google can read Flash, SEO for Flash is going to become a more popular topic.  Of course, online marketers will still want to ensure the content and links are relevant and score well by the Google algorithm for keyword search on Google.com.  Don’t forget… there are 2 other search engines that Online Marketers will still have to work around when considering SEO for Flash.  No word on when Yahoo and Microsoft may jump on the band wagon.

See Adobe Press Release for more info: Adobe Advances Rich Media Search on the Web

Are you looking at SEO for Flash?  Will you begin optimizing your Flash website for Google, or wait until Microsoft and Yahoo jump on board?

Have an opinion?  Please leave a comment below.

In case you were wondering, The Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) is a global community of business owners, all of whom run companies that exceed $1 Million in revenue.  This year, the Global Leadership Conference brought together 600 chapter leaders from around the globe.

The Global Leadership Conference emphasized the idea that as long as there are innovative ideas, there will be entrepreneurial opportunities.  New technology is what spurs new business. 

One of the “hot” areas we at WebsiteBiz believe will continue to grow is around:

• Marketing analytics
• One-to-one marketing, and
• The idea of utilizing the Web as a central hub for measuring integrated tactics

With continued advances in testing capabilities like multivariate testing platforms, there is more focus on website analytics and extraction of the business intelligence that maximizes performance and return on investment.  After all, what marketer wouldn’t want that…?

• View Yahoo’s press release 
• Google’s Blog

• BusinessWeek also commented on the news 

Source: Search Engine Land

What makes this news particularly interesting is that Microsoft has experienced a search query loss of 2.1% from November to December of 2007.  Microsoft Live Search tool bar will now come pre-installed on all HP computers.  According to the press release, “this is the most significant distribution deal for Live Search that Microsoft has ever done.”  These Microsoft search advancements also mark a smaller-scale and less dominating way to grow as opposed to Microsoft’s previous $44.6 billion hostile take over attempt to buy Yahoo earlier this year.

As online marketers, it means greater search engine inventory and market share, which has traditionally been low.  We will be keeping our eye on Live.com’s search results on our clients’ accounts over the next couple of months.

How can you measure Social Media? As we help our clients focus on achieving measurable online objectives and goals, we as online marketers want to ensure that any tactic we employ or test aligns and contributes to meeting goals.  The challenge is that the web analytic standards that we normally use to track campaign performance are different from how we measure Social Media marketing.

Metrics that are more important when measuring social media marketing include:

• RSS subscribers
• Email newsletter subscribers
• Activity of comments added to your blog - BTW, would you please leave a comment?
• Monitoring blogs and forums that reference you
• Monitoring referring links
• Measuing brand saturation
• Monitoring engagement of visitors

Learning to measure Social Media is extremely important.  As Social Media continues to mature, it’s important for marketers to be in the know and include Social Media Marketing in the mix.

 The ASK as I end my post with today is will you take a minute to leave your comments?  Is Social Media on your radar?  Are you already employing it?  Do you know how to measure social media?

37% of the US adult Internet population used online social networking at least once a month. That figure will rise to 49% in 2011. (Source: eMarketer)

Will Social Networking be a tactic to which marketers flock? Well, perhaps for some, others not so much- not to say it’s not driving advertising revenue today and is projected to grow:

eMarketer projects that worldwide online social network advertising spending will grow from $1.2 billion in 2007 to $2.2 billion in 2008, 82%. Worldwide spending will top $4 billion in 2011.

Today it is more prevalent amongst Millenials, but is being adopted by Gen Xer’s and Baby Boomers more and more. As targeting capabilities continue to evolve on Social Networking platforms, marketers will not be able to ignore; especially if social network marketing delivers on its promise of peer recommendations.

In the news recently, MySpace and Facebook have unveiled behavioral ad platforms aimed at mining the voluminous personal data users provide through profile pages and other site activities for the benefit of advertisers.

We evaluate social networking for our clients and help align with their objectives and goals.

Invite me to join your LinkedIn Network today. Eric Dudley’s LinkedIn page.

Is this surprising? Read on…

This is not especially surprising to me; however it depends on your own perspective. TV can be a extremely effective media to drive visitors online although many aren’t effectively “linking” the two. Why? The separation between traditional and online agencies although converging is still significant. Sophisticated marketers will continue to measure the impact of TV to online and ensure a strong call to action.

Check out Kyle’s blog entry on how to get CEO’s on board.

According to eMarketer, $1.2 billion is expected to be spent this year alone on behavioral targeting.

According to senior marketing executives, types of data used to target include:

-> Demographics
-> Geography
-> Past purchase history
-> Past contact history
-> Web data usage
-> Primary research attitudes
-> Channel preference

Our company, WebsiteBiz, utilizes behavioral target for the Biltmore Estate.