This time it's Yahoo-noia!

The guys at startup Trulia.com can't be real happy with this: Yahoo Real Estate Search. Great commentary over at Commerce360 Blog about the likelihood your site may be competing with the "hand that feeds you" sooner than you think.


Warm Regards,

Scott Miller, CEO

Author of "The ConversionLab.com," The worlds first "How to" guide to testing and optimization. Visit http://www.conversionlab.com/ for a special offer!

Are your test results *really* that proprietary?

One of the things I constantly see is clients treating their test results as if they're the secret recipe to time travel or something. Thing is, are they really that proprietary?

There is no doubt that a well optimized offer page, e-commerce system, etc. can be an incredible competitive advantage. But let's rewind for a moment and consider what a perfectly optimized offer is...

As I said at SES three weeks ago, optimized offers combine the perfect benefit, perfect amount of risk reversal, perfect amount of scarcity, and perfect unique value proposition for the state of mind the customer is in at the moment they see they offer.

Now unless your offer is identical to your competitors, and your customer's are the same, your "optimized" offer is going to be different than theirs. The only time offers truly converge is in a commodity marketplace, where nearly every competitor is identical and everyone competes on price.

Now I am not saying to go posting your secret optimized recipes for the world to see, but its food for thought. Do you really need to be paranoid? I think not.


Warm Regards,

Scott Miller, CEO

Author of "The ConversionLab.com," The worlds first "How to" guide to testing and optimization. Visit http://www.conversionlab.com/ for a special offer!

SES San Jose 2006 Slides

Its taken me a week of "getting back to normal" time to do this, but you can now download my slides from the 2006 Search Engine Strategies San Jose conference. Use the link below. I suggest "right click -> save as..." because the PDF is 1.5 Mb.

http://www.vertster.com/SES-SanJose-2006.pdf


Warm Regards,

Scott Miller, CEO

Author of "The ConversionLab.com," The worlds first "How to" guide to testing and optimization. Visit http://www.conversionlab.com/ for a special offer!

SES Wrapup

If you didn't make it out to SES San Jose last week, you missed it. Yup. It was another great conference, met a lot of great people, and had a lot of fun.

Our session on Landing Page Testing and Tuning was great. We filled the room again, and got some great feedback.

Perhaps the worst part was when the presentation laptop failed (for the 2nd or 3rd time) just before I was about to promote my new ebook, the first ever on testing and optimization. I guess they really mean it when they say no promotional talks during the speaking slots!

By the way, this is the new ebook that is getting rave reviews, and is sure to change the way you think about testing.

So back to SES. It was kinda hot in San Jose this year. Blame it on global warming, I guess. My friends in the S.F. area have been complaining all summer. I think they should just move to Salt Lake where I live where we complain EVERY summer.

Then the flight out was extra fun. Thursday was made up of me being transfixed by MSNBC showing the lines in the hub airports, and then waiting in the (usually 5 minute) line at San Jose for 1 hour. Overall, not too bad, but I missed the burger at the Expedia Bar and Grill this year.

The show itself was typical. I saw a couple great sessions, including a preview of the Panama platform from Yahoo. The best part of the whole week was the networking, nothing new there. Had fun with a bunch of customers, previous customers, and future customers. Not to mention friends, competitors, and new people I just met for the first time.

I had a great time sitting down with Dr. Ralph Wilson, of wilsonweb.com fame. I am going to be writing a couple articles for his newsletter as his "expert" columnist on site testing. Then got some dinner with my friend Matthew Roche of Offermatica fame. You might be thinking we compete with each other, but really we're both just Red Sox fans :)

Overall, a great trip!


Warm Regards,

Scott Miller, CEO

Author of "The ConversionLab.com," The worlds first "How to" guide to testing and optimization. Visit http://www.conversionlab.com/ for a special offer!

The Cookie is Dead... Long live the Cookie!

The Cookie is Dead...

Traditionally, web tracking has been done with a third party cookie. Within the last couple years, third party cookies have come under increasing criticism due to privacy concerns.

Consider the tracking cookies you certainly have on your system. Owners of these cookies can essentially track and archive every site you visit on the web that contains their scripting (if you let them.) Every single move you make is recorded, and stored for eternity. This is kind of scary if you ask me.

Check out our friends at Google for instance. Genius aren't they? Google is best known for being the king of search. Rightly so. I think they are also the king of the cookie. They have code on many, many, MANY websites that they are using to spy on us, and log every move we make. In fact their analytics program is reportedly used on 400,000 sites now.

It’s no wonder that anti-spyware makers and vendors of internet privacy software have begun a “seek and destroy” campaign against third party cookies. With the resulting war on third party cookies, they no longer represent a viable way to track test results or any results.

Long Live the [1st Party] Cookie!

First party cookies do not suffer the same challenges of being deleted or rejected that the more common third party cookie faces. The reasons are as simple as they are compelling.

The first party cookie can only be viewed by scripts on the domain that set it, making it nearly impossible to track a users movement from one website to the next. This is good for privacy as well as conversion tracking. As users, we get the peace of mind that big brother is not looking down on us. As web experimenters, we get more accurate results.

Long Live [Testing]

It turns out that third party cookies are horrible for testing, because they are deleted so frequently. Depending on what you are testing, this could really throw your stats off.

I recently tested a homepage, all the way to a purchase (not recommended by the way.) A full 50% of users converted latently, many after two weeks. If you were using a third party tracking cookie, that would mean losing 50% of your data. Or even worse. This makes getting a statistically reliable result impossible, especially when the difference between the pages may be as small as .5%.


Warm Regards,

Scott Miller, CEO

Author of "The ConversionLab.com," The worlds first "How to" guide to testing and optimization. Visit http://www.conversionlab.com/ for a special offer!