During my vacation, I was visiting Paris (France) with my family. I was surprised and delighted to see a quick response (QR) code in a brochure/metro map (photo below). I got curious, mostly because I hadn’t seen these codes so much in Finland. We had a fast Wi-Fi connection in our hotel room, so I just had to download a bar-code reader to my phone.

First I did a Google search on my mobile phone and found a related post from a Nokia 5800 forum. On the next page, I found the download link, and very quickly I had a bar-code reader in my phone. Later on I found an even better reader called UpCode.

The QR code, which you can see on the right, guided me to Cinéaqua’s mobile site. I learned that Cinéaqua is not just a very big aquarium but also has a movie theater, workshops, and different kind of shows for kids. They almost converted us to customers, but this time we promised our kids the Euro Disney experience.

Unfortunately, Cinéaqua didn’t repeat the very good offers from their mobile site that they had on their “good deals” page. There are some really good calls to action, although some of the content is in French. These offers could have changed our plans so that Cinéaqua would get new visitors from Finland.

The company has two promotional codes on their website. I’m not sure if these codes are unique, but you should have unique and maybe campaign-specific promotional codes to track visitors from mobile or website visitors to physical point of sales. I couldn’t find (JavaScript) tracking code on either their mobile site or website. It would be very easy to add campaign tags for QR code and URL. Here are two examples of software/online services used to create QR codes: Morovia.com is free, and QR Stuff is very cheap.

I tested Morovia’s services, and if you have a reader in your mobile phone, you can scan the QR code below. It should open my blog’s URL with campaign code (for Yahoo! web analytics system). And yes, you probably know that all mobile devices don’t execute JavaScript, so if you want more accurate data, maybe you can use Bango or another mobile analytics vendor.

Even if you don’t have a mobile site, you can test this hyperlink in your marketing. Maybe you can have a landing page designed for mobile users on your website? Then create a QR code for print ads/magazines, business cards, signs/outdoor ads, and even shirts to guide people to this landing page. The possibilities are endless.

If you’re selling (big) products in a physical store, you could have a code next to price information, perhaps guiding the customer to a mobile site or website to get more information and a value proposition such as free delivery. Then you may want to know how people are moving from offline channel (store) to convert online.

Or let’s say you see an interesting outdoor ad and you want to find the closest store where you can purchase the advertised good. You scan the code, go to mobile site/website, and use “find the closest store” feature. Maybe you can have a mobile coupon or discount code, so you can learn and measure outcomes from each campaign?

One nice example of using QR codes is from the city of Helsinki. Some public transportation stops have a QR code, and scanning gives you real-time information about next trams (in this case – picture below). In addition, you can see if there’s extra news about traffic (white text on red background). Convenient, isn’t it?

This technology has been around for several years, and I’m just wondering why I haven’t seen these codes in Scandinavia and Europe that much. Feel free to leave a comment if you have seen or used these codes somewhere. Please also let me know whether this post gave you an idea of how and where to use these kind of codes.

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Petri Mertanen has worked in the Internet industry for 10 years. Clients for which he has worked vary from small to large international companies. Currently he is the managing director of Naviatech, an Internet marketing, web analytics, and concept design company. He is also chairman of Web Analytics Association Finland.

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In our work in Conversion Optimization, I’m often asked what the most surprising test results are. The reality is that we learn something from every test we run.

If we knew for sure which design, image, headline or value proposition would perform best, we wouldn’t need to test them. But each test scenario is unique. A tactic that wins on one website may under-perform on yours or, worse, could even hurt results!

Some e-commerce and lead generation consultants tell me that testing is a waste of time. They think they already know which variation will win before we run a test. But I have yet to meet someone that can guess the winners of our test results with even 50% accuracy. The obvious conclusion is: if you’re not testing intelligent variations, you’re leaving money on the table.

Test Your Gut Instinct

If you think your gut is trustworthy, I encourage you to visit Anne Holland’s new site at  WhichTestWon.com. Each week she posts a new conversion optimization test result that you can vote on. It’s a fun idea and always an interesting learning opportunity.

The most surprising test results are usually the ones where the winner does not match the commonly-accepted ‘best-practices’. We’ve often seen ‘best-practices’ design or copy elements lose against less common variations. In fact, in a few cases we’ve seen page designs that the client would bet money to beat the original page significantly decrease conversions!

Surprising Result #1: Should You Minimize the Clicks to Act?

One example of a common surprising test result is with landing page forms. A lot of people will tell you to include the call-to-action form directly on the landing page. Many believe that minimizing the number of clicks required will always improve conversions.

We’ve tested many variations of lead generation funnels and have found that there’s no blanket rule on this. In some cases, forms on the landing page lift the conversion rate and, in other cases, a two or three step funnel works better.

The best option can be influenced by the length of the form, product decision-cycle, page wireframe layout, among other factors.

Surprising Result #2: Do Security Icons Work?

In another recent example, one of our e-commerce clients tested adding a third-party security logo to their site-wide shopping cart area and saw their conversion rate decrease by almost 2%. That’s certainly not a finding you’ll see advertised often.

So, don’t just follow what experts tell you. Test it!

Some of our most interesting test results are published as Conversion Optimization case studies and discussed in the Conversion Optimization blog.

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Chris Goward is Co-Founder and CEO of WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization. WiderFunnel is the full service conversion optimization services firm that provides a conversion rate lift guarantee. Using learning from thousands of e-commerce and lead-generation tests, all of their retainer clients have seen conversion rate lift of between 10% to 290%.

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