1. Getting blinded by your own knowledge and preferences
If your conversion optimization efforts are largely based on what you like and how you behave, then you are more likely to fail. Not everyone is like you; there are at least three other temperaments to consider.

According to renowned psychologist David Keirsey, everyone falls into one of sixteen temperaments. The temperament of the buyer influences what will convince them to buy a specific product, and what will make them buy it specifically from your company or website.

Which temperament are you trying to sell to? To learn about how to sell to people who may be different from you, read the work about temperaments done by Keirsey and the interpretations made by firms like Future Now, Inc.

My own consultancy firm, inUse Insights, has also done similar work, grouping visitors into four types that are illustrated by different birds: owl, penguin, swallow and peacock. The lesson here is that you should learn as much as possible about your audience, and don’t fall into the trap that they are just like you. Besides that, you know a lot more about your company, product or service than your visitors, and you may therefore make the mistake of assuming that your visitors know more than they do. Don’t get blinded by best practices, either; they are not always silver bullets. Your audience and context may differ.

2. Optimizing for the wrong visitors
The assumption that all visitors to your website are there to convert is wrong. When analyzing why visitors are dropping out without converting, you need to know what they came there to do in the first place.

Some visitors end up on your website by chance, some because you cater to their interests or needs, and others because of a mistake. You will rarely convert those who came to visit your site by accident. If you combine a survey (attitudinal data) with your Web analytics tool (behavioral data), you’ll be able to ask for the intention of your visits upon entry and analyze their success rate.

It’s not unusual to find out that the group you have a reasonable chance at converting constitutes 10 percent or less of your visitors. With that new knowledge, you can focus your conversion analysis on the segment that came to your website to convert but never did. Work hard to make that group convert, and forget about the rest — for now.

3. Focusing on only one metric or goal
Testing and conversion optimization is often based around the idea of increasing the rate for a specific metric, a specific goal. Nothing wrong with that, but you may forget to check how your efforts are impacting other goals and metrics.

Maybe you are increasing one goal at the expense of others? Maybe your conversion rate has gone up, but your average order value, margin or return on ad spend has decreased? Always make sure to look at the big picture. If you’re just looking at — and optimizing for — one metric, there’s a risk that you’re fooling yourself.

4. Making testing a goal in itself
I’ve come across organizations that have set goals on how many A/B or multivariate tests they should run in a set period of time. That’s a bad idea.

Think about what incentives do to people, particularly if there is a reward involved. If the goal entitling an employee to a bonus is the number of tests executed, be prepared for lowperforming tests and maybe even ones that decrease rather than increase your conversion rate.

A good goal is not addressed as the number of tests run. Instead, focus on the monetary goal you want to reach, or actions that you want your visitors to take, and run as many tests as you can based on hypotheses and traffic volume. Your goal should be to increase something (purchases, downloads, etc.) or decrease something (visits to the contact page from visitors who have read the FAQ, etc.), not to run a certain number of tests. If you focus on the number of tests, chances are that you will be too eager to test that you forget about building a solid hypothesis, and run tests that don’t have enough traffic to complete within a reasonable amount of time.

5. Coming to the conclusion that nothing works
Have you run tests and not seen any improvement? Rather than conceding that there is no way to make a difference and simply giving up, it is more likely that you overlooked something. There may be something further you could do to collect more relevant data.

Has your Web analytics tool been implemented properly? Have you integrated attitudinal and behavioral data in your analysis? Have you done usability testing? Have you used a tool such as ClickTale that shows behaviors that are not necessarily linked to what you can actually do on the website? One way to quickly get new ideas is to ask your non-tech Web-savvy friends to perform a task on your website without your guidance.

Conversion optimization is for everyone
Keep in mind that conversion optimization is not just for e-commerce. It’s for everyone. It does not matter whether you’re selling a product, a service, information or an idea. We all have specific actions in mind that we want website visitors to take. Conversion optimization is about making a larger share of visitors do those actions. It could be about making a donation, becoming a member, changing an opinion about something, or many other actions.

As long as it’s measurable, it’s a candidate for conversion optimization.

What are you going to talk about?

I will share techniques and insider tips on how to work with web analytics to understand your audience better. It will help you increase your conversion rate.

I will show you how several non-profit organizations do it, for example Operation Smile and Doctors Without Borders.

Is your presentation only for non-profits, or who should listen to it?

Any organization wanting to boost online efforts can learn something from the presentation. Non-profits are under a continuous pressure to increase online conversion with limited resources, so I believe they make a perfect example of how you can be smart without using expensive technology. It’s all about people and process.

This will be your second time speaking at eMetrics Stockholm, what do you like best about the conference?

The engaged and enthusiastic people that I meet there. The attendees at the conference come from different industries, so I find it really inspiring to mingle and discuss web analytics with them.

What’s the first thing anyone new to web analytics (non-profit or not) should do?

Define your business objectives, goals and needs. Then look at how they can be applied to your website.

Start analyzing and optimizing!

Dennis is the guy in the white shirt, Don Draper style.

In 2007, you were one of the key people interviewed about web analytics in Europe for a long podcast, and in 2010 you were asked some follow-up questions. How does 2011 compare to 2007 and 2010 so far?

In retrospect, I believe it would be fair to say that the technological focus back in 2007 was on custom reporting and segmentation on large volumes of data, and the organizational insights that could be derived from it.

By 2010 it became clear that insights without action was of little meaning and focus shifted slightly towards the hiring of Analysts and forcing action any way possible. However, I think it would be fair to say that most organizations are moving towards this goal, but some are yet to execute in full on this promise.

In 2011 the current buzzword in analytics seems to be real time. I certainly agree that data needs to be current and as up to the minute as the organization need it, but I am not sure this is truly the next step in analytics. If you ask me, I would suggest that we are moving in the directions of proper decision support systems that provide truly actionable recommendations on what to do right now—accompanied by the future value of such actions.

You were the head of IndexTools in 2007, and later a Director at Yahoo!, who acquired IndexTools and renamed in Yahoo! Web Analytics. This year, however, you are doing something new. Please tell us more about your new venture, and why it seemed like a logical step for you to take.

Given my attitude from above about the future value of data being in actionable recommendations towards the point of automation, it seemed very natural for me to seek out the media industry with an offering of proper decision support systems.
The team spent the last good year on our data modeling efforts and our predictive analytics systems and launched our initial product, Front Page Content Recommendation Platform, early 2011.

We created a model where we can predict the future performance of any given piece of content on the front page, and taking advantage of that information, we provide direct recommendations on what content to push on the front page, exactly where it is supposed to be, and for how long it is expected to stay put.

This is a decision process already in place and editors are taking hundreds, if not thousands, of front page content placement decisions everyday already—we simply want them to be empowered. Think about it, how do you actually decide if the “News of the World” story goes into the hero position? And if not in the hero position, where? And finally, for how long does it stay there?

What we provide is by any definition a revolutionary decision support system for editors. It is unmatched by any solution in the market.

You’ve worked for organizations of various sizes, and you’ve done more than one exit. What’s the most exciting aspect about business for you? Do you prefer coming “out of nowhere”, being bootstrapped and having to prove something, over working for a large organization that has much stronger financial muscles?

Personally, I love the pure joy of our team having produced a product that our customers want and actively use every day, and potentially a product they truly cannot live without! There is certainly “entrepreneurial bliss” in seeing a company being created from nothing but an idea enabled by science and raw engineering.

We are well capitalized this time around from both our previous successes, but also from our recent financial backers. Pairing that with our historical data and analytics credentials, I think we have all the muscles we need!

When you left Yahoo! I couldn’t help but think about the moment when the leaders in hit TV series Mad Men left to start Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. It felt refreshing when they left the big, fancy, office and started working out of a small hotel room. How did you feel when you got the first office, and your first core team, for Visual Revenue?

I like that picture Lars. Thanks! I truly admire anybody who is willing to leave the safety of a corporate job and become part of a founding team. In the case of Visual Revenue it was not an office out of a hotel room, but out of a shared room in my Manhattan apartment building. That first period is romantic, and a difficult emotion to capture in any other way than describing it as jumping into the deep end of the pool!

Visual Revenue’s current view is not too shabby.

Some of the topics discussed in this podcast:

• Where should someone new to testing begin?
• Does method matter?
• Is suboptimization a risk?
• Can we trust the statistics behind tools?
• What test result has been the most surprising?

Download the podcast

The panel in this podcast about testing:

Bryan Eisenberg is the co-author of several best-selling books: Call to Action, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?, and Always Be Testing. He is also the co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Web Analytics Association. Bryan serves as an advisory board member of several venture capital backed startup companies (such as Bazaarvoice, iPerceptions, UserTesting.com, and ClickEquations) and is on the board of trustees of the Direct Marketing Education Foundation.

Lance Loveday is the founder and CEO of Closed Loop Marketing. His company has become highly sought after, serving a wide array of clients—from startups to big brands such as Hewlett-Packard, Brocade, and Lockheed Martin. Lance is co-author of the book Web Design for ROI.

Anne Holland is the publisher of WhichTestWon? and president of Anne Holland Ventures Inc, an online business media company. She is the founder and former president of MarketingSherpa, and has for more than 20 years been conducting tests and research into what works best in marketing.

Chris Goward is the CEO of WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization and an expert in website conversion rate optimization. Chris has been optimizing online and offline marketing for companies such as eBay, Epson, SAP, Getty Images, BabyAge.com, Rudder.com, Outrigger Hotels, and Google.

1. Free Google Analytics Plug-In for Microsoft Excel (GA Client/Add-On for Spreadsheets)
2. How to View Event-Tracking Reports in All Google Analytics Accounts
3. A Fun Game: Guess the Outcome of 15 Tests
4. Interview With Alex Yoder, CEO of WebTrend
5. 15 Google Analytics Resources (Plug-Ins, Tools, Blogs, and Hacks)
6. Study of the Web Analytics Market in Sweden
7. Interview With Joe Davis, CEO of Coremetrics
8. Google Analytics App for iPhone (Analyze This!)
9. Quick Response Codes Help Cross-Channel Measurement
10. Webtrends, Widemile, Web Analytics, and Website Optimization — Interview with Alex Yoder, CEO, Webtrends

The 3 most read old posts in 2009

1. Measuring a Niche Website
2. Data Visualization (Resources in the Form of Blogs, Posts, Books, Presentations, Examples, Services and a Test)
3. A Review of Tapefailure, RobotReplay and ClickTale

My 2009 favorites

1. Prioritize Pages to Optimize Based on Monetary Contribution
2. A Fun Game: Guess the Outcome of 15 Tests
3. Free Google Analytics Plug-In for Microsoft Excel (GA Client/Add-On for Spreadsheets)
4. Infidelity Rate and Google Infidelity Share for Web Analytics Vendors
5. Google Analytics Opt Out (Block Tracking)

Avinash, have you noticed any effects on the web analytics industry due to the financial difficulties on markets?

Of course. It’s a mixed bag. Some of my dear friends have been laid off, breaks my heart (both for my friends as well as for companies that are being shortsighted).

Decisions around investing in tools are getting pushed off, or in a number of cases people have called their paid analytics vendor to see how they can reduce the code on pages or sample in order to reduce the “pay per page views” cost. As you can imagine, this is not a great strategy.

Yet companies are investing more marketing and sales dollars online (or decreasing it at a much less accelerated rate compared to offline) because of the sheer accountability the channel brings with it.

I think of the current challenging environment as an opportunity for analytics (tools, vendors, professionals) to step in and earn their wings. Let’s stop producing reports; let’s become analysis ninjas and add value to the business today. Not next month. Today. We have data; we are smart; we are supremely placed to ride this wave on top.

If you were to give some advice to companies facing a downturn, what would that be?

For individuals, see the last sentiment above. For companies, now’s the time to move away from “faith based initiatives” and exploit the sweetness of data-driven decision making. Save money (reduce cost). Improve revenue (profitability).

What do you think it will take for all organizations to adopt an analytics-driven business culture?

A crisis (like this one). Embarrassment (seeing their competitors shame them).

What insight gleaned from data has surprised you the most?

One of my greatest was how astonishingly monetizable the Long Tail of Search was. It was this magnificent intersection of marketing strategy and a surprisingly hidden data manifestation. So sweet. If I might add another, Voice of Customer (VOC). I have yet to read a hundred open text survey responses on any site and not find something actionable.

What’s the biggest mistake made by web analysts, or analysts in general?

Focusing too much on giving decision makers what they want, rather than giving them what they need. Sure it is hard. But at the end of the day, the analyst is smartest about the data and the hidden insights. So start with adding 10% Need to the Want. Over time add more (remember you are in the right; it will get easier over time).

Being a Google Analytics Evangelist, you are a big fan of giving people equal opportunity to act on data. If you could democratize data one step further than today, what would you do?

There is a subtle difference in my role at Google. It is not Google Analytics Evangelist. It is Analytics Evangelist, Google. The reason I mention that is my focus internally at Google is to help us create better customer facing data products, be they web analytics (Google Analytics), web optimization (Google Website Optimizer), or competitive intelligence (Insights for Search, AdPlanner, Software Based Keyword Tool, etc). My focus externally is to help the grander ecosystem be a lot more data driven by using tools in those three areas, to recognize value, and to execute.

That context will help me answer your question better. What I would do is to integrate more/faster. There are great opportunities to integrate to give marketers and analysts a more holistic view of their data, and provide much better insights faster. There are a couple of areas I am very passionate about, very tough problems we are working to solve, but if I tell you what they are, I might have to send an NDA to your entire audience and that would just be too hard.

Bonus questions for this blog:

You’re a busy guy. You run ZQ Insights, help Google, write long and insightful blog posts, act as Chief Education Officer for Market Motive, speak at events around the world, and sit on several boards of advisors. What’s your secret to being so efficient and productive?

1) Sleep is optional.

2) Love what you do. And I do.

3) Have an incredibly supportive wife (I have one and she is the wind beneath my wings).

What are your ambitions with Market Motive?

John, Michael and I are quite blessed that Market Motive is doing well and delivering value to its customers. Our suite of products at the moment includes self-driven marketing education, certification courses, and topical actionable workshops. That is a result of listening to our customers and identifying market niches where Market Motive can deliver unique value.

Our near term goal is to keep on that path.

Have you noticed whether the current global economic crisis is having any effect on Internet marketing?

I think we are all seeing the effects. Some companies are cutting back, but there are some that are going full force into digital. I do believe that this is normal and a good strategy. The Internet can—without question—give companies the efficiencies they need and demand in times like this. The ability to also cut what is not working and to amp up the volume on what is working makes the Internet evermore interesting. In times of struggle, all people (and this includes businesses), must focus on building and nurturing their community. Because of the many social media channels, this digital world can now deliver on that promise as well.

If you were to give some advice to companies facing a downturn, what would that be?

Get smart. Define your long-term strategy. Establish how your business connects online, and make every effort to maximize on the more low-hanging fruit (search engine marketing, database marketing, etc.). On top of that, there is no better time to give total value. Become a content publisher (text, images, audio, video—your call), and build a trusted community with consumers.

What’s the biggest mistake made by online marketers in general?

Trying to take the traditional marketing and advertising channels and tactics, and turning them into digital marketing programs. Instead of adapting your ads for the Web, figure out what the brand is really trying to do and create something very unique online.

Where would you tell someone new to Internet marketing to start?

Without a question, it would be search engine marketing and starting to build your own inhouse database. Search marketing will bring the people who are already looking for you closer, and building a database will help you understand the types of consumers interested in whatever it is that you are selling.

What’s the most amazing moment you’ve had on the Internet?

Every time I have a thought, type it up, and hit the publish button, it amazes me. Some people think blogging is dead. The ability to think, type, and publish is a brand-new concept, and we have not even begun to really understand the huge ramifications this is going to have on society and marketing.

I’d like to share this with those of you who didn’t manage to attend this year. This is a start. I hope to see you next year!

Some blog posts:
Liveblogging
Miss 604′s Live Blog
Usability Testing Without the Lab Coats
Writing for the Web Panel
Top 10 SEO Tips
Search Engine Optimization Panel
Anil Batra
William Azaroff
Writing for the Web Nuggets
Warren Sukernek
Social Media Success Stories
Enage Your Community
Monitoring Website Performance
Panel Day
More Panel Goodness
Website Monetization
Eric T. Peterson Keynote
Social Media Marketing Success Stories
Enterprise 2.0
SEO-Browser Demo
Website Grader Demo
Vovici
Reflections
Conference Summary
Quick Notes

Some of the speakers:

Eric T. Peterson
Gary Angel
Anil Batra
Jason Burby
Tom Leung
Bob Page
Frans Keylard
Mark Wachen
Eric Hansen
Pedro Sostre
Xavier Casanova
John Hossack

.. and many others!

(See if you can spot something interesting a few pictures ahead. Hint: It has to do with our printer and how you read texts.)

More: Chris Goward’s photos

Shane Stahl: The best conference this year!

I am now officially an Omniture Certified Professional. Yay!



The people who got certified in Copenhagen in April. Viktoria at H&H is missing in this photo. I think she was temporarily lost in the world of smørrebrød. I think everyone else, except for the kind photographer, are in there.

IMC New York is the smallest, and most experimental, of our IMC events. The focus for IMC New York 2008 (and IMC New York 2007, for that matter) was on everything relating to mobile marketing. Since mobile Internet is still in its infancy, this is still a fairly small niche conference.

IMC was part of Internet Week New York.

The Internet Week New York commercial.

IMC was co-marketed with Future Now’s seminars.

Hotel Pennsylvania, straight across from Madison Square Garden, was the venue for the conference.

HOPE, a conference sponsored by 2600 The Hacker Quarterly, has also been held in Hotel Penn.

Hotel Penn has the phone number that has had the longest continuous use. The number, Pennsylvania 6-5000, inspired Glenn Miller to write a song. The phone number was also asked for in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

The lobby of Hotel Penn. Bands like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Dorsey Brothers have played in Hotel Penn’s Cafe Rouge Ballroom.

Panelists at IMC had a stunning view of New York as their backdrop. The conference was held in Penntop North on the eighteenth floor. A curious fact is that some elevators will continue for three more floors despite the hotel claiming to be just eighteen stories.

The view from the conference room included MetLife and the Chrysler Building.

Also part of the view.

Panelists and speakers could look to their left to see a spectacular view of Empire State Building.

Bryan Eisenberg spoke about testing at IMC and gave everyone a sneak peek at his upcoming book.

Watch a short clip of Bryan’s presentation.

Ethan Dreilinger spoke about how CBS distributes mobile news.

Jeff Weitzman spoke about mobile coupons.

Location Services Roundtable with Peter Olfe (Yojo Mobile), Dan Melinger (Socialight), and Bob Page (Yahoo!). Moderated by Lennart Svanberg.

The panel.

Networking during one of the breaks.

Read the program in its entirety.

All of the photos and videos in this blog post were taken by yours truly, Lars Johansson.

Professional photos by Michael Berggren of Blink Photography will be available shortly.

Some videos featuring (in order) Jeff Weitzman (Coupons, Inc.) , Alan Levy (BlogTalkRadio), Ethan Dreilinger (CBS Mobile News), Wil Tan (Moji Labs), the mobile web analytics and testing panel (Phil Kemelor of Semphonic speaking), and the mobile marketing strategy workshop.