Electronic Retailer - July 2011 - 32

LET THE DATA DO THE DRIVING
The nitty-gritty details of site optimization concern matters such as using multi-variant testing to determine the best color and screen placement for the “buy now” button, and whether the button’s characteristics ought to change depending on various circumstances. Ken Osborn, founder and CEO of Liquid Focus Direct, an interactive marketing agency in Bridgeport, Conn., cautions that some online marketers should step back to ensure that they’ve got the big picture right before they get too preoccupied with the details. “I’m a big fan of multi-variant testing, but if you’re in triage bleeding to death and you’re fussing with the red and green buttons, you’re in trouble,” he says. Referring specifically to websites constructed to sell “as seen on TV” products, Osborn says that the most valuable, state-of-the-art optimization advice he can offer has to do with basic site design. If you are running a direct-response TV campaign, then presumably you have carefully crafted and tested a TV commercial. If so, Osborn says, then that commercial should run on the landing page of the product’s website along with an order form — and very little else. “You don’t need page after page of information on the site,” he says. “Let the video do the heavy lifting.” And put the order form “above the fold,” he says. “If I come to your site from a TV commercial, I want to reinforce what I saw on TV and I want a way to buy the product. That’s all. … If you give consumers a lot of choices, they get lost.” Keep it simple, he says. “When it comes to the Internet, people lose their minds. Because you can put so much information on a site, everyone wants to put their two cents in. But if you hide that order form behind other information, your conversion rate will suffer, I guarantee it.”

DRTV Meets SEM
Optimizing an e-commerce site is one thing. Optimizing the process by which visitors find the site in the first place is something else. The desire for more effective and efficient ways to manage search engine marketing and optimization (SEM and SEO) is at least as keen as the desire to improve conversion rates on the site itself. Suppose, for instance, that a direct-response television campaign is prompting customers to use search engines to look for the advertiser’s website. If the advertiser asked the right questions and employed the right analytics, could the DRTV campaign be used as a tool to optimize the advertiser’s SEM efforts? Direct response marketing agency E+M Interactive of New York is pursuing that line of thought. As Shannon Smith, senior vice president of business development, puts it, E+M is “trying to help clients get smarter” about the relationship between DRTV and SEM. In highly competitive categories such as financial services, travel and dating services, Smith says, it is hard to do paid-search marketing economically because the best search terms are hotly contested and therefore very expensive. But if you can use DRTV to “plant” search terms that are not contested, “then you can pay less for terms that actually may work better for you.” Proprietary brand names are the most obvious example, but E+M is testing many other possibilities for clients, he says. The process can work in the other direction as well, with an analysis of people’s search habits helping to direct the media buying and even the creative of a DRTV campaign. In broad terms, marketers already know, for instance, that ESPN viewers are different from Lifetime viewers, that men are likely to buy different products than women, that older viewers are different from younger ones, and so on. But what marketers don’t know, Smith says, is that “these different audiences often use different search terms, as well.” By monitoring a website’s traffic during certain time periods after a DRTV commercial airs, a marketer can tell with a fair degree of accuracy which search terms the viewers of that particular ad were using. “We’re just getting started with this,” Smith says, “but eventually we want to reach a point where we can see what people are searching on and say to our client: ‘Here’s what’s important to your buyers. Why not emphasize that in the next creative you do on TV?’ ” Might studies of paid-search patterns tip off some marketers that they are stressing the wrong features in their DRTV commercials? E+M hasn’t made such a recommendation yet, Smith says. “But we’re seeing results that have us thinking this way.”

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electronicRETAILER | July 2011

5/26/11 2:49:17 PM

Electronic Retailer - July 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Electronic Retailer - July 2011