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Monday, April 16, 2007

Make Your Content the Star of the Show!

Maxymiser's focus is optimising your website. The unique aspect to our approach is that we don't have a 'little black book' of magical tricks or any other way to preach to you about what will work best on your site. We can certainly make creative suggestions but the crux is that your users decide what content is going to make them most likely to buy your goods or services!

Inside the building we like the analogy that our optimization is akin to a TV talent show like Fame Academy[1]. Our clients take some time designing different messaging, photos and forms for their pages and then we serve the 'contestants' out in equal proportions to web visitors.

As web visitors arrive at the site, we monitor their behaviour. The content that makes them click to buy (or register or any other key metric) gains a 'vote' every time a visitor does this. After we've collected in a statistically valid number of votes, we make sure only the best contestants are displayed in future 'episodes'. Eventually a winner is shown to your visitors; this being the contestant that has the highest chance of turning browsers into buyers.

So let us work with you to find the web content that is going to be your star performer and get your conversions up!

[1] you can also look at it the other way around if you're the "glass half empty" type and say it's like big brother - the content that doesn't get votes gets evicted and isn't shown to future visitors because it was no good at converting them to buyers and making you money.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Turn Browsers into Buyers with Maxymiser – You could be losing 70% of visitors in the first 30 seconds!

A client we met with earlier this year came to us because his marketing guy had just run the stats reports for a new website analytics package their hosting company had installed. It revealed that 70% of visitors arriving at their homepage were leaving the site within 30 seconds, never visiting another page.

This was bad news for the company; 60% of the traffic to their page was coming from Pay Per Click sources so he may as well have been putting 70% of his budget down the drain as those users weren't interacting with his site at all.

The truly worrying thing is that a 70% 'abandon rate' isn't actually that rare. Check out your stats and if you can't view the number of visitors who never click further than the homepage then come and talk to us as our testing can measure this metric as part of the process.

For this particular client, we worked with them to create new variations on their homepage designs ready for multivariate testing. In designing the variations we followed these 3 rules:

1. Make the variations of the homepage to be tested very relevant to what you're advertising. If your PPC campaigns advertise Widgets, make sure you can read about or buy Widgets on the frontpage. Without that, your potential buyers will just hit the back button and go to a competitor.

2. Make each content variant distinct. The bigger the difference in variants for multivariate testing the more likely a difference in conversion rates will be seen and the greater the difference in conversions will be. Using this approach clients also learn a lot more about what affects customers decisions and what keep their attention. Finer testing can take place after these initial learning to refine variants and further increase conversions.

3. Make one of your content variations very "text light". Your company has a lot to shout about but by covering the homepage with text you're likely to confuse visitors and they'll leave because they can't see what they want straight away.

By working closely with the client in setting up their test and during the initial phase, we were able to decrease their abandonment rate four fold and have subsequently delivered an increase in their conversion rate of 63%. That's 63% more revenue through the web compared to what they got just three months ago.

The client is presently undergoing more tests on landing pages, segmenting traffic dependant on referrer (google adword, different banner ads, etc) and optimising accordingly, taking them from one landing page to multiple optimised pages in one easy step. Next stage will be to look at product and checkout pages.

It just goes to show that there's a lot of extra revenue to be generated just by using the traffic you already have more cleverly. Our client could still be incrementally increasing his PPC budgets to bring more traffic but for a similar amount of investment, he now has Maxymiser continuous optimisation making the most of current traffic lowering CPA and providing more money for traffic driving activities.

Please post your comments below, what have you found can help to reduce abandon rates?

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

P&O Ferries, National Express Coaches and CheapFlights.co.uk Come Onboard

Today we're pleased to announce that we've signed up three major new clients, P&O Ferries, National Express Coaches and CheapFlights.co.uk. All of them are keen to see what works best for conversions on their front pages. We're looking forward to working with these new clients to deliver increased conversion rates.

For readers outside of the UK, National Express are our main inter-city coach operator over here, a bit like Greyhound in the States and Austrailia. P&O ferries are one of our main ferry companies whilst CheapFlights.co.uk are a leading flight price comparison site. All of these three have a target of increasing conversions (ticket sales for two and quality clickthroughs to partners for CheapFlights) but as we covered in our last entry, Maxymiser can also be used to optimise other actions such as registrations or even the time spent reading a site. I've hyperlinked each so you can find out more about the kinds of companies we're working with.

Maxymiser isn't restricted to big companies, we have a number of smaller clients too so whatever your web business is, get in touch with us.

We're preparing a press release now with full details so I'll post that as soon as it's available. In the meantime, I'd just like to say that I'm very pleased that we're attracting this quality of client as it really goes to show that what we talk about here is being picked up and recognised by the internet marketing community.

Oh, and the guys over at Wikipedia have posted a definition of Multivariate testing now so you don't just have to take our word for it.

Why Do You Need Multivariate Testing? - 5 Reasons

This is taken from our monthly newsletter, scroll down for 5 reasons why you should be carrying out Multivariate testing!

Optimisation of your website is a frequently overlooked subject, good SEO and PPC bring the visitors while Content Optimisation, often forgotten, makes sure they convert (buy, book, register, click through, etc) and bring you revenue from your website.

Conversion rate is just the technical term for the percentage of website visitors that complete your set goals. If it's an e-commerce site selling widgets, the conversion rate is the number of people successfully buying a widget as a percentage of the total number of visitors, it's that simple! Here's a diagram too:

1. Know What Works (& What Doesn’t) – Never worry about whether particular site content helps people convert or not. Test it and see. If something doesn’t help, remove it, if it helps then do more of it.

2. Increase Conversions Without Increasing Spend – Your existing PPC and banner campaigns might be well tested and giving you good click rates. However, this traffic is wasted if 70% of people abandon your site at the homepage. Multivariate testing keeps people on your site longer and increases the chance they will convert.

3. Customer Loyalty – Categorise your customers and find who responds best to different creative designs. With segmented multivariate testing it is easy to serve different content to different customers. Your 65+ visitors will react to different content to your 18-25s.

4. Stop Guessing – Ask anyone who is involved in running your website (marketing, design, development, management) how to improve it and you will uncover a list of hundreds of ideas, all different. Through using content optimisation it is easy to test all of this with no long implementation timelines and statistically prove what works best for your conversion rates and what doesn’t. You no longer have to test ideas one after the other in a long A/B testing cycle – get results in days, test multiple areas, then move on with increased revenue.

5. Maintain Your Competitive Edge – In a competitive marketplace, it is suicide to stand still. As competitors and new entrants develop and push to lower CPA, the easiest way to beat them is through increasing your conversion rate, giving more money to spend on traffic driving activities and significantly increasing ROI. Through content optimisation we have never found a site we have not increased the conversion of, increases up to 200% and beyond are within your grasp.