A stand against perfection
We’re now in the full swing of 2011 and the new year is unfortunately still carrying lots of baggage from the last decade. This baggage consists of old ideas, principles and standards which are still hanging around causing headaches for developers and more importantly, costing money to clients. The web is a fast moving industry [...]
First time, last time, every-time
Measuring how visitors come to your site and convert is a critical part of understanding the factors that drive success. Traditional methods (such as Google Analytics) uses last touch or last visit to measure how a conversion took place but this is only part of the story. It is possible to hack most of the [...]
Look at me
Testing the efficacy of web-forms and landing pages is so ingrained in what we do that frequently we overlook old learnings when new projects along. Recently we were contracted to build a specific landing page/micro-site campaign for a client and the agency usefully provided a number of images (of people) to be included on the [...]
YouTube embraces A/B testing
Testing small changes can make a huge difference to performance, it’s an approach which rant on about to our clients on a daily basis and they, generally, listen to our ideas and frequently see campaign-changing improvements in conversion rates and corresponding drops in CPA. However, most companies test in secret and don’t reveal the results [...]
Choice architecture : Using intelligent defaults
Supposedly, humans are terribly lazy, easy to manipulate and creatures of habit. That’s great news if you can leverage these traits to help your online campaign. Traditional wisdom states that people should be offered lots of choice. This is plain wrong, too much choice creates procrastination. Some say providing choice is a fundamental part of [...]
Landing Zone : Dealing with PPC Traffic
How Landing Pages have transformed PPC traffic Since the original specification for the world-wide web was drawn up in the 90′s by Tim Berners-Lee there is, remarkably, a ghost still haunting the Internet. It’s called the “HOME” page; we’ve all heard of it, we naturally assume that the page we land on when we click [...]
Quickies : Web forms that work
Probably the most frequent question we are asked is “how can I make my call-to-action web form convert better?”. Here’s a quickie, 10 minute read to get you started. There’s not much we don’t know about web forms. We’ve been designing forms on web sites since 1996 and were one of the first companies in [...]
Rework? We don’t need Rework
I’ve just finished reading Rework as it had been mooted as suggested reading. It sounds trite, but we could have written that book 10 years ago. Amazing! It’s exactly how we have been running the company – almost to the letter, and from day one. Makes you feel quite proud. Related articles Rework by Jason [...]
Quickies : A/B testing in the real world
£200 million button Most web marketers know the story of how Amazon changed their check-out process; the wording on the button was changed from “Register” to “Continue” and a simple message was added (“You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To [...]
ASA annexes t’internet
The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) has announced an extension of the Advertising Standards Agency’s (ASA) remit to include digital advertising from March 2011. This is currently receiving a mixed reaction and is not helped by the ASA’s admission that the extension of it’s remit is going to pose quite serious operational challenges. Thankfully they [...]
