Conversion and Communication: Measurement's Missing Variables

A colleague recently quipped, Wow! It's been a long time since you've blogged. She was right, and yet I have so much to say.

So let me start by simply communicating.

A few months ago I started using google optimizer. What a tool! Your ability to quickly set up a/b or even multivariate tests is absolutely amazing considering it cost you absolutely nothing.

So great, you can test and if you are smart, you might even consider integrating GWO with BT Buckets. Fantastic! Its easy enough to change buttons and alter button styles, but to truly communicate? Now that's hard.

If you've been testing for any length of time you know that messaging truly matters. Try changing even one active verb in a simple button test and you'll understand precisely what I mean.

And to compound the problem, consumers don't all respond to the same communication. So how should I vary my communication style based on visitor profile? How would my testing take that into account? It can quickly become painfully obvious that the real difficulty of testing is finding what to say.

and fundamentally when we fail to communicate, we fail to convert.

About a year ago, I had an opportunity to work with touchclarity, which is now test and target or something.

Without getting into a lot of trouble, the solution was very powerful, but spendy. We had very little trouble in configuring the application and staging mock tests. But the thing that continuously plagued our marketing department was that they had nothing to say to their consumers!

Marketing would reschedule meetings or ask me to leverage existing paid search ads, but could never develop new, meaningful copy to get the project off the ground.

It's true. I had reams of data demonstrating powerful insights into unique consumer behavior, but no messaging strategy. The a-ha moment was now clear.

As analysts, we hold a great many responsibilities, including configuration, data transformation, reporting, analysis, stakeholder management, etc.

So now I have a new challenge; working through planning, content managers, legal departments and strategists to create a viable messaging matrix that maps back to a measurement, media and a segmentation plan. Easy enough right?

There are amazing technologies out there, but if you are truly interested in making testing work for you, be ready to communicate.