Best of 2005

Since its the end of the year, I thought I would post a review of what I thought were the "best of" blog posts in Optimize It! this year. If you haven't read these, you should make a point to have a look at them. In no particular order, here are my top 5:

1. New GPS for web design, tells you how to build your site

2. 3 Things that will improve your conversion rate

3. Time your tests to get best results

4. Why testing with Google Adwords yields flawed results

5. What is Taguchi Multivariate Testing

Look forward to more great posts in 2006. I hope to have at least one or two more "best of" type posts before the end of the year!

Blog Layout Updates

If you view our blog on the web using Firefox, you'll know there have been some formatting issues in the last few months. With the 1.5 release of Firefox, the problem got significantly worse. The cause? An unknown change to the way Blogger publishes pages that inserts an empty "clear" div tag was being added automatically. Since I write most of my posts using the excellent w.bloggar software, I never saw that Google had added a new option to revert back to the old way of posting pages.

After a little poking around in the blogger interface, I stumbled on the config setting and now everything works great! I also added my profile information finally.

More on Google Landing Page Relevancy Algorythm

Affiliate marketing expert Jeremy Palmer, of QuitYourDayJob.com just posted an analysis of the new Google Adwords algorythm. Of particular interest is how using dynamic keyword insertion to make your landing pages more relevant appears to actually result in higher costs:

* The ad group that used dynamic keyword insertion recommended a minimum bid of $5.00!
* The ad group that used static keyword insertion recommended a minimum bid of $0.40.

Read the post here.

SES Chicago Slides

I have just put online my slides from the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago. You can download the powerpoint by clicking here.

Optimize your PPC by improving your landing page?

Google quietly announced a modification to the Adwords quality scoring system last week, that could have far reaching implications for anyone using landing pages. The algorythm purportedly looks at the "relevance" of the landing page as part of the score. A more "on topic" landing page should facilitate higher PPC position, and lower costs per click. For more information see the Google Landing Page Guidelines

Does this mean we'll soon see keyword stuffing and other nefarious tactics on PPC landing pages?? I don't know, and I kind of doubt it would help anyways, but who really knows how sophisticated this algorytm is.

If you are running Urchin Analytics, Google could actually measure your conversion rate, and include it as part of the score! This is kind of scary, and another reason we'll never recommend using Urchin to anyone. But then again, if you are actively testing and optimizing your landing page content for conversions, you'll have a leg up on most of the competition.

MEC Labs (MarketingExperiments.com) Webinar on Multivariate Testing

Last week, MarketingExperiments.com held their long awaited webinar on multivariable testing. I was invited to participate to bring some real expertise onto the call. It went well, with a couple of great questions. Unfortunately, I had a bit of a tough time because I had so little sleep after my quick trip to Chicago for the Search Engine Strategies Conference.

SES Chicago Wrap Up

This past week was the 2005 Chicago Search Engine Strategies Conference. Once again, I was invited to speak on the Landing Page testing and tuning panel. I found out that the session achieved "4 Star Rated" status after the first ever production in San Jose, which was cool to hear. It showed because the room was pretty packed, probably with 400-500 people attending. We had a few techical glitches with the handheld voting devices, but overall the session went well. For my portion of the presentation, I gave the results from our Live Taguchi Optimization, along with a couple other case studies.

My main take away from Chicago was that it was so cold there. This actually was good for networking, because I don't think anyone dared leave the building. I made a number of great contacts and got to meet a couple customers face to face for the first time. Not only that, but the Reverend Jesse Jackson was in the bar tuesday night! I could hardly beleive it, but there he was. WebmasterRadio.FM was there and got a great sound bit from him.

I would have liked to stick around for longer, but I was up at 5AM wednesday morning to get my flight back in time to participate in Marketing Experiments.com webinar on multivariate testing. Unfortunately, by the time I got on the call with them I was so exhausted by answers were not all that coherent. Oh well....