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Removing the Guess Work from Online Marketing

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Removing the Guess Work

Before I started my own business, I thought of marketing as this wishy-washy thing people in suits do. They wave their hands in the air, use a lot of buzzwords, and present a few slides with pictures and tag lines–anyone can do it. How can we tell if they are good at their jobs anyway? Based on our opinions of their pretty pictures?

For us developers on the other hand, it is easy to tell whether we’re doing a good job. Does our code run fast? Is it buggy? Is it unit-tested? …etc.

I was wrong; marketing is not subjective. We are just not used to measuring it objectively.

Opinions are like belly buttons

…everyone has one.

As I started running my own business, I had to learn how to market. I read best practices and SEO books. I started designing and became more opinionated. I did okay. I even started enjoying it.

But, I still did not like the subjectivity of it. I would iterate on a design not knowing whether I made it better or worse. I could ask 3 or 4 people around me what they think, but their opinions are just that their opinions.

Removing Subjectivity from Design

  • Which landing page is better?
  • Which color scheme is nicer?
  • Which advertising campaign is better?
  • How do I write a killer email subject line?

While better, nicer and killer are subjective terms, as a business you probably have clear objectives that you are hoping to achieve via your better, nicer and killer designs. You want people who come across these designs to do something; it could be purchase your product, sign up for a free trial, book an appointment, subscribe to your blog …etc. Fortunately, those things can be measured!

A/B Testing

…made me feel right at home.

A/B Testing is testing two versions of a design against a defined metric to determine which version is better. Typically version A is your existing design, version B is your new design. You split the traffic between those two designs and measure which of them performs better. The one that performs better is the one you go with.

Steps

  • Know what you want to measure and measure it correctly. Whether it is conversion rate, sign up rate or subscriber rate; make sure your numbers are correct.
  • Test both versions simultaneously. Some weeks perform better than others for various reasons. To obtain unbiased results you must run both versions during the same time and for the same time length.
  • Give it time to run. Your results need to be statistically significant.
  • Always serve the same page for the same visitor How else would you know which page led to the conversion? You need to track based on the IP address and User ID.
  • Don’t hesitate to throw away your new design. Sometimes the old design is better, that is why you ran the experiment!
  • Test only one thing at a time. So to test both the images and button color, you will need to run 2 experiments.
  • Start with the concept and then refine the details. Wondering whether a red or green button performs better? You’ll get to it. Start with the overall concept first, because the details might not apply when you change the overall concept afterwards.

About

Lives in Toronto, Canada. Runs an online task management company--Sandglaz. Used by agile start-ups, small businesses and individuals from 140+ countries.

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{ 14 Responses }

  1. Dave Doolin says:
    As a developer, I can relate to thinking marketing was all pie in the sky. Maybe it was way back when. Now, forget it. A good marketer better be organized, have a excellent head for numbers, and be capable of moving fast, really, really fast.
  2. Al Sefati says:
    I still want to include "gut feeling" and "common sense" as part of my marketing methods. Being data driven is good but if you look at successful companies such as Apple, a lot of the things they did, they just did it!
    • Nada Aldahleh says:
      Hi Al In a sense I agree with you, you have to use "gut feeling" and "common sense" to come up with the different alternatives to test. But from there, it's best to A/B test any "improvements" you do, to make sure they actually increase conversion. Successful companies (e.g. google) do plenty of A/B Testing. Nada
  3. Jeanie says:
    I don't like to guess anything if it deals with business. I always try to put exact aims that I'd like to achieve, think of all the tasks that I have to do. Because I think that everything should be done very seriously and carefully
  4. tushar says:
    this is so simply written and to the point article. guess works, i believe, normally complicates the things and rather than concentrating on the right stuff, we often deviate from the topic. thanks for share Nada
  5. Steve says:
    Nada, You make some great points. There should be absolutely no guesswork when it comes to online marketing. From the beginning marketer should understand what they're getting into with proper keyword research. This should let them know just how hard it is to rank and just how fierce the comp petition might be. Once the site is live, like you said, A/B split testing and increasing conversion will show you what works and what doesn't. For anyone out there "guessing" how to get better, they are doing something wrong.
  6. Jamie Northrup says:
    Testing is the key when deciding size, color, placement and other design elements, small stupid things like increasing or decreasing your font by 1 point can play on your bottom line.
  7. Jym says:
    Great. This point doesn't get made enough! Without testing what you're doing, you're shooting in the dark. And that reduces the odds of hitting your target many times over. I'm still learning how to do this, just can't believe that so many other marketers I know don't do it at all! Thanks for breaking it all down Nada
  8. Ryan Biddulph says:
    Power tips here Nada. Test, to remove the guessing. Thanks for sharing! RB
  9. Raj says:
    A/B Testing is the best way to do it. Sometimes it also helps to look our blogs from an 'outsider's' perspective. If we are visiting that landing page, if we are looking at that design, would we do what we want others to do? That's a tough question to accept, but the realization when we get ourselves to answer it is very important.
  10. Shamelle says:
    "Know what you want to measure" to me, it's one of the important factors in having a successful outcome. In general I test the following on my blogs/pre-sales pages Headline or product description, The call to action’s (i.e. the button’s) wording, size, color and placement, Form’s length and types of fields, Images on landing and product pages, Amount of text on the page (short vs. long) I set these up myself and the initial time investment to get all the analytics done right, really does take time. But after setting it up, it's all smooth sailing..
  11. Cesar Diaz says:
    Good intro to the concept of A/B testing. Article would have been much more useful if it gave ways to actually do the testing.
    • Dianne says:
      I think that Google Analytics enabled publishers to do testing. However I'm not too sure.
    • Nada Aldahleh says:
      That would be a whole new topic on its own. There are so many alternatives and ways to do it. You can do it on the server side (we do) or use a 3rd party service.