Author Archives: Alex Clemmons
Image credit: www.jonessnowboards.com
It started with 2,600 people packed into a Salt Lake City hotel ballroom eagerly awaiting the show to begin. This was my first year attending, so I didn’t know what to expect. The room looked like it has been set up for rock concert rather than a business conference. As a voice came over the loud speaker letting us know that the show was about to begin, Daft Punk started playing, the lights dimmed and the opening keynote for Adobe’s Omniture Summit began.
The annual event is a three day marathon of training, keynotes, breakout sessions, networking and, of course, partying with some of the best web analysts, advertisers, developers and digital marketers in the world.
The theme for this year’s summit was that digital marketing was the new extreme sport. If you think about it, the concept makes a lot of sense. Digital marketing, similar to extreme sports, is a combination of art and science. Whether you are analyzing a snowpack or spinning 180s over 120 foot gaps in the back country, you can’t (and shouldn’t) do one without the other. Summit takes all that is awesome about digital measurement and crams it into a very short time period. This makes for some very late nights and a lot of early morning coffee. But it is all worth it to spend some time with some of the world’s best and brightest marketers.
So what did I learn from the experience? Lots more than I care to write, but below are my four biggest takeaways.
Image compliments of www.seekyledraw.com.
Alex Clemmons | Critical Mass Chicago
It often takes months to develop a website or digital program. After tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, persona development, creative reviews, usability testing and some long nights, launch date is a huge milestone. But often times after a site goes live the client is ready to move on to the next project. However, it is in the post launch period that we can actually have the most impact and ensure that all the time and money we spent is paying off. Website optimization, the process of making continual improvements to the site in order to increase performance, can help make our clients, and ourselves, look like rock stars.
Part of website optimization comes from reporting. Every marketing initiative should have goals, and it is the Marketing Science Department’s job to define and track progress against these goals. Through reporting, we can identify underperforming areas and make recommendations for improvement. When we combine reporting with testing we can start to understand not only what is working, but why it is working as well.
Almost every aspect of a digital program can come under debate; page layouts, calls to action, image size and page colors are just a few things that can be contested.
A testing program could help settle these debates and optimize the experience to meet our marketing objectives and more importantly our customer’s goals.
In a nut shell, testing is the process by which we test different versions of a web page on the live site environment and then, through scientific methods, declare a winner of the test (the page that has best shown the ability to best convert visitors to do the actions that we want them to do).
The simplest form of testing is an A/B test. We pick a site goal, like conversion from a landing page, and then measure how different versions of this page perform against our goal. With tools like Omniture’s Test & Target or Google’s Website Optimizer we can serve up pages that have different images, copy or other treatments in real time and measure the results against a control page.
Page A is our control; it has not had any changes made to it. On page B, we can start to swap things out; it could be a new image or a different call to action. We run our test and find that visitors who saw page B had a 300% higher conversion rate than those who saw page A!
