As time went by and as I learnt more, and learnt quickly, I received more in-depth answers on Big.TOE but they were still vague; it was never defined to me in the simple terms of ‘Big.TOE is this’. But over time I built a picture of what Big.TOE is or – more to the point – what it is going to be.

Big.TOE is going to be the best use of the data from VITES. Specifically it’ll be a reporting tool.

So, recently, Big.TOE was kicked off by inviting most of the guys for a meeting to discuss the ideas and goals of Big.TOE and to push it into production, I raised my hand to be the ‘project sponsor’, and I was selected. As this is my first project it was suggested that I write a diary… so here we are. The diary will follow in weekly installments.

I don’t think it needs to be that complex. True, most organisations will have some specific needs but 90% of the needs of most marketers should be simple to provide in an easy-to-digest application as most really only need to know:

# Which traffic streams generate what business and how much does that cost

# What is the conversion rate for each of the traffic streams and calls-to-action

# What’s the availability of the web service like and how does the outside world see it’s performance

# How are my A/B tests going, winners and losers please

# If I am using profiling on the web what are the relative performance metrics for each of the profiles

# Some historical reporting on overall performance

Google does indeed do most of this and if you had the time and inclination you could learn how to use the systems and pick out the 10 or so important metrics. Many marketers don’t. This is further hampered by the self-serving approach of most GA Authorised Consultants, as we all know that the first recommendation a consultant makes it order more consultancy!

This has been bugging us (and our clients) for a while so we’re in the process of developing a simpler web performance tool that focusses on the needs of marketers. We’re not suggesting you dump GA quite yet, merely that you consider a simpler, clearer approach to understanding web performance. KISS.

Ideally, marketers need to see the whole journey and therefore every visit – we need “multi-touch”. Usefully, our VITES platform records just such activity and gives a rather unique insight into the type of searches and clicks a visitor makes during her journey to conversion and beyond. There are some challenges using anything but last touch but with a bit of education and learning it can very illuminating.

So don’t get stuck looking at the very end of your clients journey and focus on the whole of the journey and discover every route and method to conversion. Contact us to find out more.

It does, between 15 and 25% better conversion was seen when the image of a person on a landing page was looking “towards the form/CTA”. Must always keep up your guard when executing new campaigns to make sure that you don’t re-make the mistakes of the past. Basic items like red buttons, high-up CTA, pre-filling forms and light-weight pages are easier to remember but some of the more obscure one are easy to forget. As a result we’ve re-awakened our 64Monkeys programme which was designed to document and store the results of every test we run. We might even release the information into the public domain if we can get permission from our clients.

China is seeing the rise of online “Gold Farming”

This is the practice of hiring a group of mainly poor kids to ply their way through the myriad of online games (Everquake, World of Warcraft et al) collecting things of value to other gamers such as gold, potions, weapons etc. These items are then traded, via a broker, for real money to players that really can’t be arsed to go collecting or alternatively want to short-cut the tedious lower levers of these games.

The online gaming community really don’t like these “gold farmers” and tend to hound them pretty hard and even kill them (virtually) if the game allows it.

It’s quite a step to think that an online game has such a black economy, especially as most games are not actively policed that hard and rely on crowd-policing to deal with problems.

So what’s this got to do with the commercial world?

At the moment very little except to say that this is an example of entrepreneurship in terms of brokering items of value. As we start to see the rise of proper interconnected social networks who’s to say that “information farmers” cannot carve out their place in the information economy.

The more we live our life in public the more this information is freely available but time consuming to acquire.

Related articles by Zemanta

• China will ban minors from virtual-currency trading sites (sunbeltblog.blogspot.com)
• World Of Warcraft Gold Farming Guide (pctechmojo.com)

Too bloody many! All of them purport to offer the answer to the holy grail of advertising landing page design.

Most of the advice is re-regurgitated, old, unproven and bloody obvious if you have more than an ounce of common sense. What would be more useful would be a real guide to what has worked, why and how well.

The reality is that landing pages are very often the real “heavy lifters” on a web-site in terms of generating enquiries, sales, data and actions. That is a good thing as at least we know where to start when in comes to optimising performance as PART OF AN OVERALL STRATEGY.

Let’s not get bogged down in the fine detail of what to try, where and why as this does vary from site to site, person to person and market to market. Let’s start where we should do, at the beginning and from the visitor’s point of view.

1. The visitor arrives at the landing page after consciously clicking on a sponsored link. They want something, you know what they searched for. Give them what they want. If they search for a brand term then give brand options, if they search for a product then show a product, if they search for a place then give then location-based information.

Focussed landing pages have performed 150% better than generic landing pages. In real tests, with real visitors, this year.

2. Don’t make ‘em wait, impatient or frustrated people don’t convert as well. That means a fast loading page (ever wondered why Google’s home page is just 16k in size?). Speed of loading is dependent on small pages, fast servers, good connectivity and few outside “includes”.

Frequent testing with our clients show a direct correlation between logical size of page and performance. A recent test saw a 25k page perform 50% better than a 100k page and 75% better than a bloaty 150k page. The pages were identical aside from logical size.

3. Visitors want to do something, such as buy, apply, find, request or contact. Make those options clear, visible, easy and fast to do.

Above the fold can make a difference but only if the page is uncluttered. A recent test on a cluttered page showed no difference in above and below the fold for a conversion point.

4. No clutter. Less is more. Reduce choices to keep the visitors decision process simple. No need for complex navigation (or any real navigation at all?). Big text, small words, white space, compelling reasons for an action and no bloody clutter. Everything on the landing page is there to drive the conversion, everything else is dead-weight that WILL hamper conversion rates.

Testing a series of landing pages recently saw a dramatic increase in on-page, in-session and intra-journey conversion when the navigation system was removed as the page was de-cluttered.

5. Everyone makes mistakes. Most of the time. And that includes your carefully crafted (call to action) form so make sure the error handling is world class. It’s a trick called “soft-erroring” and works by never actually producing a traditional error. When an error occurs the visitor is gently guided to a “thanks but” page which gently tells the visitor we need a little more information and the reasons why and maybe makes a suggestion or two. With testing you’ll produce better forms in the first place.

This IS a killer. You can easily see a doubling in first-time conversion if the information you require is difficult to acquire (telephone number, for example) or the question is complex.

In a word, screwed. The great downside of client-side analytics such as GA is simply that, the tracking is done directly on the visitors’ machine and not at the heart of the web-site and whilst this makes it easy to deploy it also allows it to be easily circumvented. The ideal solution is server-side recording but that’s more involved, more tricky to deploy and requires wider skills and (usually) a, paid-for, commercial solution.

Why journey management?

Change management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organisations from a current state to a desired future state. The current definition of Change Management includes both organizational change management processes and individual change management models, which together are used to manage the people side of change [Wikipedia]

Organisational change is carried out as a policy handed out from on high and normally has the highest moral, ethics and intentions. This policy then has to be implemented at the people level and all people respond to change differently and at a different pace. It’s quite clear that moving an individual working in a manner type A to type B requires a number of processes, systems, feedback loops and measurement systems together with an infrastructure to deliver this change.

Change often equates to loss and forward-thinking organisations are seeking to use psychological / Neuro-linguistic programming approaches to dealing with, sometimes, huge upheavals that occur in organisations. Examples of these methodologies include the traditional grief cycle and more focused models such as Lewis-Parker and John Fisher.

Each of these methodologies is based on a journey from A to B via a number of personally significant stages such as denial, depression and acceptance. This journey can easily be mapped in an online environment with personal delivery of content, actions, assets, applications tailored to each of the various steps in the process. Rather than being a fixed-time linear process, journey management allows the visitor to move around the cycle and the system recognises what stage the visitor is at and deals with them in a way specific to the stage they are in, all automatically, all seamless and with the ability to report on the flow of individuals and groups.

It’s quite a fascinating subject and a particularly good use of a journey management platform.

The reality is this is really no different from a traditional sales cycle, consumers engage at different parts of the cycle and move around to completion (sales) or drop out of the cycle with lots of additional helpers along the way to make the transition as smooth as possible for as many of the people as possible. In the commercial model as many as 30% of the final sales comes from people who actually dis-engage during the process to re-engage later either by themselves or brought back into the cycle via other communication mediums such as email, direct mail, forums, twitter, facebook etc.

Theoretical in practice (example)

Take a traditional organisation that is moving to flexible working, striving to get more agility and performance from it’s staff and at the same time reduce the cost of space and communications. This is a fairly common scenario and a great deal of resource will have been spent designing the “new” shape of the organisation and how it will operate. Now it comes to start to deploy this change process and this requires the buy-in of hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of individuals – all with different agendas, ideas, motivations, fears and engagement.

Enter “My Journey”. An application designed for all the people in the organisation, available 24×7 online and with the ability to assist the psychological and emotional needs of the transitioners as well as the basic nuts and bolts operational stuff.

The online application has a unique login for every person and starts with a simple series of questions to establish where on the transition curve you currently are. Once established, the individual then has access to the most relevant information and applications to support him or her or their journey. A set of rules will dictate when the user is “tested” again to establish if they need to move onto the next stage. This would normally be based on a set of behavioural rules applied to what the user is doing and how they are interacting with the application.

Very often mentoring is a powerful aid to assist people during times of change and a forum would provide this mentoring, targeted to just the stage that the individual is in, so people who have been through the process before or professional coaches and mentors can help the stages as a targeted segment.

There would a hierarchy of change agents overseeing and engaging with the users, providing online guidance and help through community-type functions and also uncovering people that need that little extra help along the way. This help exists outside of the online environment to include classroom/workshop and team-building activities at one end of the spectrum, to one-to-one personal mentoring at the other end.

Each stage is truly multimedia-enabled and assets available to participants could include information, pdf libraries, images, video shorts, training courses, forums, webinars, booking systems, technical support areas, purchasing/ordering, time and holiday management, tests & evaluations, video conferencing, IP telephony, live assistants, FAQs etc. The list goes on and on.

These assets do not (and should not) be all contained within the journey management application; the key here is use the journey management system as a way to access these resources, applications and information. This avoids duplication, out-dated content and the need to have a huge, complicated, system to manage the thousands of assets that would be needed.

Some key pointers

To successfully deliver this needs engagement from all the change agents and also a really friendly and easy-to-use environment for the application to work inside. Engaging the thousands of potential users of the system is very much like a snowball, so requires key people to engage first and then spread the word and, importantly, the community to the other individuals.

The application needs to constantly evolve to improve – much of this could be self optimising and also should provide the framework to test the efficacy of all the elements in all of the steps (people in the commercial context call this conversion rates).

How VITES™ provides journey management

Designed as a platform to recognise who you are and what stage (in life/sales/change) you are at and then with the ability to deliver custom content, applications and information VITES™ is ideally placed to provide this framework. With a track record of successfully delivering personalised content since 2003 you are safe in the knowledge that you can access a highly sophisticated, stable, scaleable and flexible platform pretty much off-the-shelf.

Talk to us to take the next step.

The results were stunning (for 2001) and showed that 80% of the advertising spend was pretty poor indeed. Not surprisingly our client was over the moon with this new-found transparency and their business exploded when they invested in the right online advertising and had faith in the value of it. It was a real way to measure the actual return on advertising investment.

VITES™ 1.0

Born in the middle of 2003, this was the first time page content was linked to data recorded. It was clear that first time visitors to a website needed to be encouraged to return to generate revenue, and that returning visitors to the website needed to be treated differently to first timers. So a simple “tunneling system” was implemented that established where the visitor was in the sales cycle by understanding their previous activity on the website and also by interrogating the offline CRM system.

By doing this, VITES™ dropped people into the most appropriate tunnel and fed them tunnel specific content, imagery and, most importantly, applications.

Conversion rates rocketed. We had stumbled across a killer application for the web. In much the same way as Sergey Brin devised a method at Stanford University to “rank” sites in importance based on inbound links – which then became the basis for Google – we stumbled upon the link between recording and behaviour and predictive purchasing or behavioural targeting was born.

VITES™ 1.5

The original version was a killer. It doubled conversion rates overnight but it was very cumbersome to build sites around it and the clunky tunnels were flawed when it came to bookmarking and search engine maps. This needed addressing so a specification to improve the whole system was hastily put together in 2004 to meet these shortcomings.

This was a simpler beast to operate, more flexible, more powerful but still required hand cutting of the tunnels. We had tunnel vision!

VITES™ 2.x

A huge step in development was identified in late 2005 and the move to visitor profiles is set in stone. The whole system needed to be rewritten and was completed by the middle of 2006. This included a number of innovations including profiles, rules and confidence ratings (how confident the system is that a person fits a profile).

The latest platform is developed was the established LAMP platform and the task of rolling it out to the first handful of clients started.

The tool

Soon after VITES™ 2.x was launched it was realised that customers were coming up with great ways in which to use this tool. It became a very natural and easy tool to customise web content so sites could change at the weekend or overnight or when the call centre was busy or any other internal or external event.

Market leading online advertising companies became exposed to the technology and started sharing their data with VITES™ allowing it to make better decisions. We’ve only just scratched the surface with the VITES™ tool – there are a hundred or even a thousand more uses for it that we are yet to find.

We are all different. No two groups of people have the same aims, thinking, attention span, decision process, fears or barriers to interaction. On-the-ball organisations are starting to realise a new approach and methodology is required in order to better manage visitors and to out-think their competitors.

The “one size-fits all” web that we see today has worked pretty well for the first 10 years of the web. It is, however, a rather poor fit for most business models with it’s rigid structure, resource intensive deployment and general-purpose operation.

Long gone are the days of simply creating a web assets and leaving them untouched, the drive for continual and relentless improvement now haunts most web and marketing departments. The current crop of 1990′s tools and old-world marketing thinking is proving to be a very expensive and flawed route for many organisations.

The role of web-site traffic in generating a successful site is starting to change, organisations now plan “multi-touch” campaigns across a wide range of complimentary media using a range of methodologies. Consolidating this understanding into a single, client-centric, view of traffic that is integrated into the heart of client systems and decision-making processes has become critical to success to competitive marketplaces. Say good-bye to collating reporting from page-based analytics, old-fashioned traffic and conversion reports : Say hello to integrated business intelligence. A new dawn? You betcha

A unified platform

The idea was to create a platform that allowed organisations to optimise their operational functions, brand messaging and information flow in such as way as to create a substantial competitive advantage. Whilst all of these features can be found in different platforms you quickly realise the benefit of integrating all of the key elements into a single, easy-to-use, platform.

This turned out to be a pretty big job, from a seed of an idea in 2002 the early prototypes released in 2004/5 showed promise but were hampered by relatively high deployment costs, limited performance and high R&D costs. In 2006 the the decision was made to re-write the platform from scratch using the learning from the previous years. A new roadmap was created and approximately £250k was invested in the development of V2.0 which turned out to be far easier to deploy, much higher performance and added crucial new features such as proper A/B testing and great API support.

Now on version 2.4 (released June 2009) Connected have re-defined the next generation; a flexible and powerful web platform available commercially to all. The platform provides a simple system to provide tailored, adaptive & personalised content; A/B and multivariate testing; platform independent inbound/outbound traffic management and integrated business inteliigence.

Key features & benefits

Personalised delivery : Right message, right time

Benefits: Visitors will stay longer, engage better, convert better, convert cheaper, convert faster and spend more money

Features: Break your visitors into groups of any size (1-1,000,000) and serve them their own version of the web-experience, now and every time they visit. Personalised calls-to-action (CTA), web 2.0 functions, layout, navigation, content and design. Automatically move your visitors from group to group using simple rules. Restrict what the groups see and can do. Communicate via email, ICQ, dmail & social networking according to the needs of their group.

A/B Testing : Continual experimentation and improvement

Benefits: Reverse falling conversion rates, reduce your traffic budget, be sure about successes, applied learning is cheaper next time round, beat your competitors, stay ahead of the game

Features: Simple, fast and accurate testing of the effectiveness of pages, functions, copy, Calls-to-Action, layout, design, brand messaging and profiles. Automated 2, 3 or 4-way testing with statistically correct reporting. Encourages the test, test and test again philosophy of continual improvement.

Whole of life visitor management : Business intelligence and simplified brand messaging

Benefits: Accurate information = good decisions, cut wastage, better customer communications, agility in messaging and brand communication.

Features: Supports over 50,000 landing pages with uniquely tracked codes for simple RoI reporting. Visitor value measured across single session, multiple session, multiple session/computer and whole of life. Full duplex API to back-end CRM systems allowing any piece of data or function to be synchronised online, near line or off-line in call-centres, fulfillment centres, logistics and customer services. Move data using XML, FTP, SQL and email. API to fire actions to third-party systems for data capture, processing enquiries and on-line booking systems.

Advertising RoI tracking : Simple management of traffic sources

Benefits: Race different agencies and media companies to get the best bang for your buck, simple overviews allow for quick and accurate decisions, no need to trust/question/review your media partners

Features: Fully featured APIs for Google, AOL/Advertising.com/Platform A, Yahoo!, Blue Lithium. End-to-end, click to sale reporting. Supports multi-network touch points, variable post-impression. Provides matching and synchronisation for real cost per acquisition and cost per sale. [find out more]

VITES is currently available under a license & support contract starting from £195 per month based on traffic volume and also as a complete turnkey service.