Whatever you call it the most obvious thing to put on a page like this is a thank you message or receipt that tells your customer that you processed their order successfully. For many online stores, that’s where the discussion ends. Given this page’s position at the end of the conversion funnel, it often does not get much attention.

In this post, we’ll discuss ways to use your confirmation page effectively to do a number of important jobs, such as:

1. Increase the size of the just completed order by offering last-minute “upsells”
2. Encourage your customers to share your website with their social networks
3. Reduce returns, chargebacks and other expensive customer problems
4. Encourage return visits
5. Get valuable feedback

Selling On The Confirmation Page

By the time your customer lands on your confirmation page, you’ve already done a TON of work just getting them to this point. The sales process doesn’t end on the confirmation page, though. This is especially obvious if your landing page is serving as a lead generator or just the first step in a longer close.

On e-commerce platforms, however, the confirmation page is almost always an after thought. Have you ever purchased a product online and found your self unceremoniously dumped on a mostly empty page, perhaps with the sentence “Thank you for order.” pasted without formatting in the corner? In fast-moving e-commerce companies, parts of the site that don’t have a specific and measurable impact on The Funnel™ are often given short shrift. These same sites tend to have About Us pages that just say “Put the About us stuff in here.”

It’s understandable that peripheral components of a site will get less attention than the core sales flow. The same thing happens in offices too. The sales staff can ask for a helicopter and just be asked to pick the color, while the “cost center” parts of the company have to turn on the printer with a 7 iron.

The confirmation page isn’t just somewhere to drop off your customers when you’ve had your way with them. It’s your last chance to talk to your customers on their way out the door.

The confirmation page is unique in that you only show it to your most qualified prospects – the ones that have already converted. I find it unlikely that you have nothing more to say to those prospects. They have not only shown a propensity to buy your products, you know exactly what they bought and  (hopefully) the trail of referrals that brought them to a conversion. Given that advantage, I hope you can understand how valuable the confirmation page real estate really is.

So what can you sell? It’s impossible for me to list all the possibilities in a general article like this. It depends on your business model and how you develop customers. It might be upgrades, add ons, support, warranties, accessories or similar products.

An important caveat: you are not trying to change your customer’s mind about the sale that was just completed! If you just sold a golf club, the confirmation page is where you sell golf balls and ugly pants, not where you show them what they didn’t buy. Select your upsells with care. It’s tempting to just let a plugin or algorithm do the tedious work of selecting likely upsells (at least if you have a large catalog.) However, unless you have enough sales to be able to make statistically significant guesses, you’re better off using your results to inform a human editor.

On a technical note, most credit card processors will have a system in place for recapturing an additional amount on the same transaction. If this is difficult or impossible with your current vendor, switch. There are so many new options on the market now that are revolutionizing payment processing. With that level of innovation and pressure, it is an ideal time to find a modern and flexible partner.

Social Network Sharing

A couple of years ago, when working on a medical lead generation app, I suggested that we add a “Tweet This” widget to the confirmation page. “Do you think people will use it?” a colleague asked.

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “I know that I wouldn’t, so that’s a good sign that other people will.” It was hard to imagine why a lead would want to announce to the world that they had just requested information about a medical condition – but they did.

Since that time social media and the urge to “share” has become only more prevalent. Today it’s hard to find a page on the web that isn’t littered with buttons encouraging your to “like” or “share” or “pin” the content. Your customers love to share the most banal events of their day. It is important to capitalize on that.

Adding social sharing features is as easy as copying and pasting a bit of JavaScript from a third-party service, or installing a plugin on your CMS.

When possible, I prefer to make a customized and more compelling widget for the confirmation page.  Similar to “Banner Blindness” the common collections of buttons and icons are increasingly easy to ignore.

Some tips on using social media actions:

• Use large and customized CTA buttons
• Show the user the message that they will be sharing in a text area
• Only provide options for the social media sites that your customers actually use. Cut out the obscure ones as they are just a distraction.
• Write your suggested message in a way that makes the customer look good
• At the same time, make the copy express the one core benefit you are providing. Remember, this is an advertisement!
• Follow up with your own action – friend or follow the customer, retweet them and like their comment on Facebook.
• Make the URL they are sharing a readable and public url! There’s no use sending traffic to your confirmation page directly, they need to be directed to your landing page.
• Include campaign and tracking strings on the shared url. This is valuable data that you can use to measure and improve your marketing.

Fix Problems Before They Blow Up

If you’re smart, you keep logs of your customer service interactions. If you’re very smart, you sort that data and use it to understand how your customers are having problems and how you can optimize your product to address those concerns.

If you can’t improve your product in a way to solve some common issues, your next best bet is to explain the situation as clearly as possible.  The confirmation page is a prime location to include tips on how to use your product, solutions to common problems and links to your support forums or helpdesk.

If you have a product that requires training, get your customers started immediately. One effective practice is to make your confirmation page the first page of a “product tour” that will engage your customers and validate their purchase decision. My favorite type of product tour is one that doesn’t just show the customer what to do, but guides them as they actually start using the product.

Build A Relationship

Your relationship with this particular prospect has just undergone a massive change. They’ve gone from an interested prospect to a converted customer! Outside of funeral homes and vasectomy clinics, it’s rare that a business is only interested in selling to a customer once.

Relationship building features like subscribing to your newsletter, following you on twitter or just bookmarking your site are valuable tools to turn a new convert into a lifelong customer.

First impressions are important, but deep and satisfying relationships take time and attention. Use your confirmation page as an opportunity to start your relationship with your customer on friendly terms.

Listen To Your Customers

Look at a receipt. Check your pockets or purse, I’m sure there’s one nearby. Chances are there is a phone number or web address on the bottom of that receipt. Often you are promised a free order of fries or entry into a sweepstakes for participating.

Smart businesses listen to their customers. Your confirmation page is a great opportunity to open up for feedback. Whether it’s just a freeform text area asking for a comment or a multi-step survey, you can gain valuable and actionable information if you just ask.

If you have a landing page, you have a confirmation page. It might not be a page at all – it could be no more than a notification after an ajax call. In whatever form it takes, it is a prime opportunity to engage your customers and grow your business. Use your confirmation page to sell, share, teach or listen – the important thing is to not waste it!

The post Don’t Waste Your Thank You Page appeared first on muddylemon.

“For those who think business exists to make a profit…think again. Business makes a profit to exist.” Ray Anderson, founder of Interface.

I ran a small web dev shop that failed because I didn’t understand how much I should have been charging my clients. I started my business with a lot of assumptions that proved to be dead wrong. I was young and had a lot to learn.

If you want to have a successful business you have to learn to be a successful business owner. The most important thing you have to learn to think about is money. Business owners think about money differently than employees.

How Employees Think

The problem often arises when the new business owner is leaving a lifetime of regular employment. Employees, in a r

ational market, get paid just enough to sustain a standard of living commensurate with the value of their skills.

If you want to make more money as an employee, you have to either gain additional skills or improve the skills you have. In some jobs the skills are measured roughly by seniority, with regular pay increases. The implicit agreement is that the employer should pay more because the work you are producing is of greater value than before.

When you transition to a freelance business, it is understandable that you will try to address the mystery of how much to charge for your services based on the same formula. The new entrepreneur I was talking to this past evening was basing her price point on what she felt her services were “worth” to her clients. Her estimation was based on how many hours it took to produce her work (content writing and social media services) and how much she valued her time.

For example, she felt that if she worked for a big corporation she’d expect to be paid about 30-40k a year for doing this sort of work with her level of experience. Of course, that salary doesn’t include benefits like healthcare or vacation time and she knew that self-employment taxes were important to budget for. Also, that salary is assuming a 40 hour work week, while her clients wouldn’t require that many hours.

Using those assumptions she figured she would need to bill $25 to $30 an hour. However, she was afraid that figure wasn’t competitive, especially compared to the hourly rate of her model salary, $15 to $20 an hour. She decided that she would initially charge the low hourly rate and hopefully increase her rate as she gained experience and more clients.

A Business Can’t Live Paycheck To Paycheck

Her reasoning sounded familiar. When I was first starting out on my own as a freelance developer I had made the same calculations and set my rates at about what I felt was competitive with the alternative – a full-time employee. In order to make ends meet I had to do billable work at a full-time employee’s schedule.

What I didn’t understand was that my business was not an employee of my client. I, as a one person shop, was the employee of my business. If I thought a fair market rate for the services I was providing my employer was, say, $40 an hour, I was welcome to draw that amount as a salary from my business. However, I wasn’t considering the fact that as a business owner I was getting screwed by my sole employee. It wouldn’t make sense for me to employ a programmer for the same rate I was charging clients, but since the employee was me it felt like I was coming out even.

I even had a plan for growth! I hired a junior developer who I paid quite a bit less than I was charging for his billable hours. For awhile, things were great! He put in a lot more billable hours than I ever had because he was afraid of getting fired. I wasn’t afraid of getting fired because, well… I was the boss, right? To make matters worse, still thinking like an employee, I saw the net difference between his pay and my invoice as an increase in my salary.

If I had been thinking like a business owner, the idea that you should devote the profit generated by the new employee entirely to giving the old employee a raise would be absurd. Instead, I thought like an employee and redid my initial calculation of how much value the work I, as the company, was giving my client and gave myself a raise.

I was naive enough to think that this was how people got rich.

How Business Owners Think

Owning a successful business is, statistically, the most likely path to getting rich. Owning a failing business is, unfortunately, a different journey entirely.

It’s really easy to understand how to think like a business if you just consider the simplest businesses around you. Take your dentist, for example. It’s obvious how he makes money. You go in with a sore tooth, he charges your insurance company $900 for two hours work, the insurance company pays half that and you’re done. So is the dentist making $225 an hour? No, he has to pay the lovely hygienist who handed him stabby bits and the crabby receptionist up front. He has pay for the x-ray machine, the x-ray film, the lead blankets, the metal that went into your teeth, the electricity, water, health insurance premiums, business insurance premiums, lawyer fees, license fees, taxes, accountants, rent, office supplies, stamps, dixie cups, rubber gloves and a million other things.

Employees are prone to think that dentists, doctors, lawyers and the like charge a lot of money for their work because they possess specialized skills that make their time more expensive than regular folks. Business owners know they charge those rates because x-ray machines and lawsuits aren’t cheap.

Competing On Price Is A Miserable Way To Live

What if your business doesn’t require expensive machinery or fancy offices? Should you pass all the savings on to your clients? The more important question is – how much money do you need to invest in your business? Do you need to budget for advertising? What about learning materials to keep up on your area of expertise? What about your vacations or training new employees?

Often when I talk to new freelancers about this, they object “Why would I expect them to pay for my supplies and education?” The answer is: Who do you think is going to pay for those things? If you are thinking like an employee, you see that doing your taxes and advertising for new clients doesn’t provide value for your client. How can you make them foot the bill for those things?

As a business owner, you know that those things are part of the cost of doing business. Making a profit is not a sin or a scam. If a business providing me services doesn’t make a profit, it will either fail or stagnate. Neither of those results is helpful to me.

An employee thinks of price as “how much what I’m getting is worth,” while a business owner thinks of price as “How much it will cost me to get what I need.” As an employee, I think that if something I bought isn’t worth what I paid, I’ll just return it. As a business owner, I am more focused on the lost opportunity, time and profit that a defective purchase will cost me. Price is one of the least dynamic attributes.

The key difference between the two is that the employee is a consumer and the business owner is a producer. An effective tool in the hands of a consumer will bring enjoyment; in a producer’s hand it will bring money.

Grow Your Business Not Your Work Week

One of the entrepreneurs I spoke with this week expressed frustration that his clients would get a bill for 10 hours and then complain that he was not giving their project enough attention. “They don’t understand that I bill them for the hours I work for them, but not for the hours I spend learning, invoicing and all the other things!” He complained.

I told him it sounded like he wasn’t charging enough. If your clients are pushing you to bill them more hours in a week then they obviously think they’re getting a really good deal.

If you can’t make a living without billing 40 hours a week then you are too cheap. If you can’t find clients that will pay you more, it’s possible that you are providing a service that simply isn’t sustainable as a stand alone business. In that situation, you have two choices: learn more valuable skills or learn to delegate and automate your work so that you can make a reasonable profit.

Recipe for Burnout

It is possible for a cash-starved business to stumble along without ever crashing. Is that what you went into business to achieve? It is impossible to grow a business without generating the cash needed to tune your business model. A business that doesn’t have time to pursue new clients or the money to hire new employees is just waiting to die.

Eventually, you will hit a snag with a project that doesn’t work out or an unexpected sickness or expense that will strain your budget until it snaps. Your clients will then grow impatient. You will find yourself staying up late, frustrated and tired. You’ll look at the work you have lined up as a burden that is pulling you down. You will begin to resent the business that you thought was your opportunity to escape the rat race.

Instead you’ll be in a race against time and bill collectors, just trying to get by until it’s just not worth it anymore.

Give your business the best chance of success by charging what it takes to grow. Drop the cheapskate clients that needle you for unsustainable rates. You’ll be surprised at how agreeable your clients will be to your professional rates when you approach them with confidence. Finally, you’ll have the pride of doing the best work you can instead of just good enough to be worth paying for.

The post Think Like A Business And Raise Your Rates appeared first on muddylemon.

Forms do a lot of jobs on landing pages. Jobs like:

• Asking for contact information
• Qualifying a lead
• Segmenting leads to different sales funnels
• Initiating a purchase
• Subscribing to a newsletter
• Downloading a white paper or free trial

All of those specific jobs are implementations of every landing page’s one main goal: to advance the visitor down a path that leads to that visitor becoming a customer.  How you define customer depends on your business model and goals. It may mean becoming a user of your product, a subscriber to your publications or a new player of your online game. It is important for you to understand what your customers look like if you want to design a conversion funnel that produces customers and not something less useful like .

Focus Your Funnel

Once you understand what your customers look like, figure out the quickest and simplest way to get them crammed into the mouth of that funnel. Your landing page is not a place for contemplation, distraction or anything other than directing your visitors to what they are looking for. A conversion funnel is nothing more than a series of steps that your visitors have to take to reach a goal. It could be adding a product to a shopping cart followed by the checkout process and culminating on the receipt page where you thank your new customer for their business. In other contexts it is a one step quickie like signing up for a newsletter or clicking an ad.

Many times a business owner will insist that his landing page offer an option for any possible whim of his prospects. That’s when you see rambling videos, welcome messages, comprehensive navigation and all the other traps that can catch your visitors before they reach the lip of that funnel.

When a visitor lands on your landing page they have a highly predictable goal in mind. Usually it’s getting whatever you promised them in the ad copy that led them here. Otherwise, if they came from search results, links from other sites or links in email, it would be wise for you to investigate those sources and decide if you’re providing what those visitors are looking for. Making the next step to obtaining that goal the most prominent thing on the page is the best way to get those visitors into the funnel.

The Back Button

When visitors don’t immediately see what they are looking for the almost always reach for the back button. Have you ever gone to a store and found finding and purchasing what you’re looking for a serious hassle? If you’ve ever been to a Wal-mart you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. Brick and mortar stores have an advantage over your website. The “back button” at a big box store involves abandoning a half full cart, getting back to your car, fighting traffic and parking sociopaths until you find another store that will treat you better.

Website customers just have to click a button. Poof! To make it worse, that action will indicate to search engines that you’re not all that great a search result for the term that led that visitor to you. If you are using Google Adwords™, you’ll see your quality score fall with an increase in bounces.

Keep It Short

It is almost universally true that the shorter the form, the higher its conversion rate will be. Removing elements from the landing page form almost always results in a better completion rate. Form completion results must be weighed against lead quality, goal conversion and the value of the information you request from the visitor. You also have to consider what other information you’re going to have to ask before a conversion is recorded. A series of short steps can convert worse than one or two bigger steps. It really depends on your target market and how they react to your user experience.

To find your balance, ask yourself honestly what information to you absolutely need to know to get the visitor to the next step. The least is “this visitor is interested in what you have to offer.” For that lead, a single button is enough. When a visitor clicks the call to action button, the information you have now includes:

1. The referral source and, if they came from a search engine, hopefully the search keywords they used
1. I say “hopefully” because google has recently defaulted all searches by logged in users to https, eliminating the search term that led your visitors to your site. Google promised it wouldn’t have much of an impact, but in my experience, a good third or more of the search terms that used to appear in my analytics have disappeared into the black box of “(not provided).”
2. If the traffic source is a paid ad, whether through search or a content network, what keywords they searched or what contextual keywords triggered the ad display. Most ad networks will have substantially more information available as well.
3. If the referral source is not a search engine or paid ad, you will have to make more of a judgement call about what the click means. Social bookmarking sites like Reddit can deliver a lot of visitors who are not looking to buy or sign up. A link from a good review on some random blog is a surprisingly rich source of leads. I once got a link on a yahoo answer to one of my sites that led to a startling increase in traffic and conversions. I traced those visitors back to a question that had nothing whatsoever to do with my products, but an answerer had mentioned my site in a tangent that led to some healthy but rarely repeatable sales.
2. That they are apparently persuaded enough by your landing page to click your CTA button
1. This information is especially useful to inform your A/B tests on specific landing page elements, including the form (which in this example consists solely of a button.)
2. That first click deeper into your site is a lot more valuable than just any click. It gets them one step further away from the back button. As I mentioned earlier, that click can improve your quality score in a way that can make the difference between a positive and negative ROI.
3. Passive metrics like:
1. Their browser, browser version and operating system
2. The device they are using
3. How long they spent on the landing page
4. The time of day, day of the week
5. Their general location, language preferences

As you can see, with a form as minimal as a button, you’ve already learned a great deal about your lead. The information listed above, as incomplete as it is, is full of actionable information.

For example, the device they are using can hint at their income level as can the zip code connected to their IP address.

Combing through the search keyword logs is a valuable practice as you learn the myriad ways your customers will stumble upon your site.

Some of that information comes too late to do anything about on your landing page, but can set up a grand slam of a follow-up page.

The post How To Build High-Converting Landing Page Forms appeared first on muddylemon.

me to kiss you

but instead you went back to your room
and i paused, only for a second
and saw myself in third person
as a movie star
in some passionate melodramatic
nineteenforties black and white
tv-dinner special

I walked back slowly
fantasizing about how I’d
call you Doll
and you’d be quite a dish
and I’d smoke a cigarette
in every scene

and when I kissed you
you’d throw your leg up

– Lance, circa 1996

The post more angst in wowsville appeared first on muddylemon.

Do you remember when Dustin Curtis ran an experiment trying different way of wording a link to his twitter account? He noted that writing “You should follow me on twitter” had a greater conversion rate than just “I’m on twitter.” In response, blogs and websites all over the world began demanding I follow them on twitter in increasingly imperative tones. Did that trick increase the twitter followings of anyone because of this method? I have no idea and neither do the majority of the people who tried it. It really seems like a “tip” that you can easily port to another context and have similar results. However, there is no way to predict what results any change will have – either positively or negatively.

Incremental changes that lead to huge jumps in performance are rare. To be more specific, incremental changes that lead to statistically valid jumps in performance are rare. Most websites do not get anywhere near enough traffic for the data collected in such an experiment to mean anything. It is easy to claim that no two snowflakes are identical when you’ve only looked at a few. It will take a couple of blizzards before you can really say so with confidence.

Even sites that do have significant traffic have difficulty conducting valid experiments. If you don’t come from a math or statistics background, one of the first things you’ll notice about the literature around optimization and testing is how fussy everything is. If you are going to run successful experiments you have to acquire a fussy sensibility.

By knowing what kind of mistakes and weaknesses that have caused other experiments to fail, you can develop a sixth sense for the traps and how to avoid them. Below I’ve listed several common traps that can obscure your real results and leave you spinning like a cat chasing a red laser dot across the floor.

Improperly segmenting traffic

To run a valid experiment you have to isolate the variable(s) that you are measuring. Differences in the time of days, the referral source, browser characteristics, bandwidth and other variables can skew your results in unpredictable ways.

To counter that noise it is important to first “test the Null hypothesis.” To test the Null hypothesis you construct an experiment that divides your web traffic into segments but provides the same experience to each visitor in either segment. The Null Hypothesis states that if you don’t change anything than nothing will be different.

If you divide your traffic and see significant differences in your metrics you have rejected the Null hypothesis. As the wikipedia article and an astute commenter on Hacker News point out, you will never “prove” the Null hypothesis. You can either reject it or fail to reject it.

It is important to understand that the null hypothesis can never be proven. A set of data can only reject a null hypothesis or fail to reject it. For example, if comparison of two groups (e.g.: treatment, no treatment) reveals no statistically significant difference between the two, it does not mean that there is no difference in reality. It only means that there is not enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis (in other words, the experiment fails to reject the null hypothesis). le wikipedia

If you have rejected the Null hypothesis, you may suppose that you have either somehow up-ended the laws of causality or screwed something up. No offense, but my money is on you being a screw up. Finding the leak is a matter of combing through the observations to look for unusual results and combing through your code to see if there is a logical failing or hidden dependency that is favoring one result over another.

If your logic is sound yet there are still unexplained differences between the control and treatment, you may want to look at the outliers and see if there is a common thread.

For a web application, browser differences are common culprits. From rendering issues to JavaScript execution quirks, the mix of browsers accessing your site are a mass of conditions that you have to control. Using services like browsershots.org are essential tools for spotting obvious visual differences and errors. You should use your own traffic analysis to see what browsers are worth optimizing for.

Another hotspot is bandwidth issues. The speed of a page load is a more significant variable than most people assume. Google and Amazon have both published reports that show how even sub-second delays can results in outsized lost conversions. The best way to address this issue is to make your site run as fast possible.

Use caching, CDNs, asynchronous scripts and the other tools available to mitigate this factor. You may still wish to collect page load speed results to measure the impact and possibly control for time-bound anomalies like a slow loading 3rd party script or slow and unreliable user connections.

Misunderstanding Randomness

“That’s so random.” is one of the more annoying clichés in recent circulation. In popular parlance the word “random” often means something between “unexpected” and “unusual.” For our purposes we will stick with the more rigorous definition “selected without aim or reason.” Randomness is hard to understand but easy to fake. Our brains are very good at picking up short patterns. Recognizing long patterns, however, is an understandable failing. Our stone age brains tap out a few digits into any jumbled-up looking string.

For a small experiment, fake randomness is likely impossible to detect simply because its effects are less significant than margin of error. In the same way a ship with a broken compass can get across a harbor without getting off track, but could end up in the wrong hemisphere if it sets out for a trans-oceanic journey.

Pseudo-randomness often occurs when the random assignment algorithm uses a value like the visitor’s id to seed the decision. If you assign a visitor to a treatment based on an algorithm like: $treatment = $visitor_id mod 2, you are introducing outside information that will synchronize the treatments in an unpredictable way. What you are then testing is not a random group A vs random group B but a selected group A against the resultant group B. The selection criteria may seem meaningless but it will invariably warp your results.

Solving the randomness problem, as you can see, is very difficult. Fortunately there are plenty of mathematicians, computer scientists and careful coders out there who have built tools to deal with it for you. It’s well out of the scope of this article to describe specific implementations but I can say that the one you wrote sucks. Randomness, like encryption, is best left to a well-supported library.

Mixing Experiment Factors

It is hard enough to test one variation, mixing multiple factors and trying to divine actionable intelligence is a task that requires an enormous amount of data and a mastery of math and statistics that is rarely seen outside research universities or the Googleplex.

That’s not to say you can’t test widely varying treatments against each other. The comparison you can make is between the treatments as a whole, not specific elements.

For example, let’s say you are selling widgets online. You have a landing page that has produced mediocre results. You and your team sit down and brainstorm to come up with a list of changes that you could try. Perhaps rewording the headline? Changing the button text? What about adding a picture near the form? What if we removed the last question on the form? Why not Zoidberg?

Having produced such a prodigious list it is tempting to get in there and really mix things up. If you have a list of 100 things to change, hearing that you only have enough traffic to call for one experiment a month is depressing. “If we’re clever,” you may think, “and really careful, we could make a matrix of all the variations mixing a headline from column A to the button color of Column D…” Before you know it your sifting through piles of data with no clear direction. At worst, you’ll find a real winner but have no idea what it is about that treatment that is responsible for the improvement or if the improvement is just a fluke. To solve this problem, insist on writing a hypothesis for each experiment.

Data Dredging

When you design an experiment, you have to make a hypotheses. Trying to throw everything against the wall and hoping to figure out what makes some parts stick after the fact is a recipe for disaster.

I was in a meeting once where a well-meaning team member was pointing out a peak in a chart. He had discovered that visitors from a particular source who checked a certain option on the form and were also in the 45-65 age range had significantly higher conversion rates than other segments. He proposed a plan to auto-check that particular option for people coming from that source and to segment the incoming traffic to favor older visitors.

What that product manager was doing is data dredging. Another form of this mistake can be seen in the people obsessed with looking for patterns in the stock market or lottery and then attempting to implement a strategy that would have worked had they been using it in the past. It’s an enticing mistake. It seems perfectly logical that if a pattern appeared in the past it likely will repeat in the future.

To picture the problem with data dredging in a more concrete fashion, imagine you own an ice cream store. One day you ask your employees to write the color of the shirt of each customer that comes in today on that person’s receipt. At the end of the day you compile the numbers and find that people wearing red shirts buy nearly twice the amount of ice cream compared to people wearing other colors.

In hopes of capitalizing on this discovery, you research locations and find that people in St. Louis wear red shirts much more than other cities (at least in the summer during baseball season, which as an ice cream maven is the only season you’re concerned with.) Can you guess how well moving all of your operations to St. Louis will help your profits?

You can’t guess, because it is outrageously unlikely that the color of the shirts your customers are wearing has anything to do with your sales figures. To use a cliché, you’ve confused correlation with causation. Even if the correlation is a very high number it doesn’t mean anything unless it’s repeatable and falsifiable.

Later in this series, I’ll be discussing the scientific method and how proper experiments rely on it.

Comparing the results of different and unrelated experiments

A similar mistake is comparing the results of independent experiments with each other. Often this takes the form of comparing the results of a recent experiment with one that ran earlier but not consecutively. Another form of this mistake is comparing the results of experiments that have run for different lengths of time or on different traffic sources. The worst, but surprisingly common, variant is when you compare the results of your experiment with the results of someone else’s – like the published results of another site’s A/B tests.

The only valid comparison is between the control and the treatment(s). Also, that comparison is only valid for metrics that are measuring the same thing. The bounce rate of a squeeze page with one prominent CTA button might be shockingly better than a treatment that asks for an email address in a form on the landing page. That difference in bounce rate tells you something, but if the difference washes out in lead quality, revenue per lead or other metrics that translate more directly into dollars, it’s not telling you anything useful.

Inconsistent or Unimportant Metrics

One thing the web does not lack is things to measure. Never has it been so easy to collect and compare so many attributes of your customers and their actions. Not every metric is equally important.

How to evaluate metrics:

• Is the metric measurable? Is it a discrete value that doesn’t need subjective interpretation?
• Is the metric dependent on something not being measured?
• Is it meaningful? Does it correlate directly with something you want to improve?
• Can you improve it by doing anything on your site? If you can’t do anything about it, why bother measuring it?

You should have core metrics that directly represent your business goals. For many commercial ventures this would be a revenue per X number. In other contexts it might be email newsletter sign ups, social sharing or some other action.

By focusing your attention on the same metrics for each experiment, you will have a context to your learning. Also, you will avoid being led down the rabbit hole of paying attention to misleading or irrelevant measurements.

An example of a misleading measurement is an abnormally high or low result on one metric that isn’t reflected or explained in related metrics. Noise and outliers are expected. Not every anomalous result is significant. You can tell which are significant by testing again (or letting the current test continue) and see if the spike continues to grow or regresses back to the mean.

Another class of misleading measurement is the “Vanity Metric.” A vanity metric is a number that seems significant but has little to no effect on results coming out of the conversion funnel.

Unique visitors and page hits are the most common examples. Those are often the biggest numbers you have but are easy to pump and hard to keep. Your site might get a runaway link on Reddit or a write-up on Techcrunch which will result in a massive influx of visitors. However, they’re not likely your target market and are notoriously adverse to clicking ads or buying things.

Changing the mix of traffic to each treatment is dangerous. If you are running an experiment split between treatment A and B at a 60/40 split and decide to even it out to 50/50, your old data is worthless. You are including people who should have been As in your B group, thus invalidating the earlier data. You can change the mix, but you have to keep the proportions the same.

Naive Analysis of Results

In a later article in this series I will describe concepts like the G-Test, the Z-Test, statistical significance, confidence and other implementation details. For the purposes of this article I’ll summarize it like this: Numbers don’t lie but you can misinterpret the hell out of them.

The best way to combat misinterpreting your data is to figure out what numbers are important and design easy to understand reports that display that data. Automation of these reports is essential.

When you have a set of consistent numbers you can then apply standard analytical tools to understand your experiments. Don’t make the mistake of pulling numbers in an ad hoc fashion. As a human you have millions of years of evolution encouraging you to see patterns in everything.

Define what success means to your business and what numbers represent that. If a number you are using, perhaps the unique visitors per product page, varies more widely than the other numbers you are measuring that is a sign your metric is not tightly correlated with your conversion funnel. The granularity of your metrics needs to match the unit you make decisions. That might be visitors, sessions, events or another metric.

When designing your reports, you have to make sure you are comparing the same metrics. If you compare page views with conversion events and find a strong correlation, you have discovered nothing useful. You can’t just force your current visitors to view more pages. Even if you change your site in a way that encourages more page views, you don’t have any results to suggest that increased page views are causative or an effect of some other unrelated visitor attribute.

Substituting Testing For Creativity and Common Sense

Once you begin to see actionable results from your testing you’ll probably notice your approach to business problems shifting. You’ll find yourself speculating less and proposing experiments more. You’ll be quicker to dismiss fuzzy thinking and un-testable conjectures.

However, you would be amiss to skip the other parts of customer development and marketing. Talking to your users will give you insights unavailable on any chart or graph. Writing clear and compelling copy is an art that pays real dividends. Attractive and persuasive design can put your far ahead of your competitors.

Testing and experimentation are powerful tools that are remaking online and offline business. You must remember that they are tools for refinement and decision-making. What you are testing is still the behavior of people. That behavior is erratic and irrational. No amount of testing will make up for being insensitive to your customers, providing bad service or shoddy products and other marks of a failing business.

Make It Easy On Your Developers

No matter how you design your experiments, the process of deploying and removing the treatments must be simple and safe. If your process is not simple you will be constantly chasing bugs due to bad deployments. If deploying an experiment requires pushing a lot of code to production, you are going to get constant push back from the developers and sysadmins and will be in a real tight spot when a bug takes down the site.

If the process of setting up an experiment is easy and painless, you will create more experiments and find the data they produce more reliable.

Next In The Landing Page Series

I expected to cover the implementation side of A/B testing in this article, but the topic is very deep and I think it deserves its own piece.

So, next time I’ll discuss the data and programming side of A/B testing, using statistical tools and libraries, using third-party services like Website Optimizer, developing an experiment release flow and other implementation details.

If you have any questions, please feel free to hit me up on twitter @muddylemon.

The post Introduction to A/B Testing for Landing Pages appeared first on muddylemon.

It’s high time to give someone else a crack at it, and what better way than to transfer it off to a good home?

I mean you could just let it expire. Maybe there’s a budding entrepreneur out there looking for that exact domain!

However, you and I know that it will probably end up in a spam farm in eastern europe churning out mechanically spun content interspersed with links to erectile dysfunction pills.

There is a better way – host a Domain Name Key Party.

The price of entry is one domain name and the transfer code. There are a few options for distributing the domains. I like the idea of hosting a contest where groups or individuals can bid on specific domains by giving an elevator pitch describing what they would do with it. The best pitch wins that domain. If the winner has already won a domain they have to put it back into the running. That will encourage some interesting sharing of ideas and alliances.

You definitely want to have some rules.

• .com only unless it’s really clev.er or short
• No hyphens
• No useless numbers
• Nothing listed on every bot list and spam blacklist on the internet
• If it’s on GoDaddy, it’s coming off. For the elephants.

Finally, if there are any ugly domains standing awkwardly in the corner at the end of the night, be a sport and alias them into a threesome with something with a lot of keywords in the right places, if you know what I mean.

What domains do you have that need a bigger yard to play in?

The post Domain Name Key Party appeared first on muddylemon.

I imagine you’d feel a bit confused. Our image of car salespeople is that of the consummate closer. In fact, many people avoid car salesmen because of their reputation for aggressive pursuit of the sale.

You walked into the dealership to find information. Having found that information you’re now in a position to take the next step. The fact that the salesperson just walked away instead of suggesting a next step is something akin to malpractice.

While that situation seems absurd in the context of a car dealership, it is surprising how many business people aren’t bothered that their website is doing that every day.

When a visitor comes to your website the very first page they land on is the “landing page.” This is not always your website’s home page. In fact it is very rare that the home page will be very good at converting prospects to paying customers. The best landing pages are specific to the visitor’s interest and intent. Your landing page should answer your visitor’s questions and invite them to go further.

In this article series, we are going to analyze:

1. What makes a great landing page?
2. How do we measure the results our landing pages are producing?
3. How do we optimize our landing pages for maximum engagement and ROI?
4. What are some best practices and things to avoid when creating a landing page?
5. What about the confirmation page?

What makes a great landing page?

When we think about building a landing page, the parts that come to mind immediately are things like a compelling headline, scannable copy, interesting images and perhaps even streaming video or other multimedia. While these features are important and challenging, the single most important part of a landing page is the call to action.

What is a Call To Action?

The call to action is the part of the page that asks the visitor to take the next step. For the subset of landing pages called “squeeze pages” that action might be as simple as clicking a link or button. A lead generation page will usually have a form that begins the qualification process. Other landing pages might invite the visitor to download a file, share the page on social networks or email their representative.

One important thing to note is that we are talking about “the” call to action. There are many things a visitor can do when visiting a webpage. One of the most common things they do is click the back button on their browser. Some visitors will do things you could never predict like view your source and attempt to backwards engineer your page or stumble on your contact form to request information on donating her body to an online college (true story)!

The action that you are calling for, or the action you most want your visitor to take, is the call to action.

There is almost never a good reason to attempt to offer more than one action. Visitors prefer to not think too hard about what to do next. Presenting a choice might seem like a great way to serve all types of visitors. Usually, you just end up serving fewer visitors altogether. It is better to have a separate page for that secondary call to action.

For example, if your primary call to action is completing a lead qualification form, asking the visitor to sign up for a newsletter on the same page can only serve to lower your action rate on your primary CTA while muddying your analytics. It is far better to present that secondary action on the confirmation or encore page after the visitor has completed the primary action. If there is a segment of visitors that are responsive to the newsletter form than your primary call to action, you may wish to split that traffic and send them to two different landing pages to get the most out of your visitor flow.

Anything you add to your page besides the call to action has to have a good reason for being there. It’s better to not have a headline than to have a confusing headline or a headline with an irritating grammatical mistake. Skip the stock photo if all you have is a careless or distracting picture. Every element on the page has a job to do and that job is to direct the visitor toward the call to action.

So how do you know which parts are helping and which are hindering conversion on your CTA? You test. You test ruthlessly and objectively. Headlines don’t have baby sub headlines to feed, so you don’t have to feel bad about firing a poor performer.

Parts Of A Landing Page

In order to properly test a landing page, you must be familiar with the parts of the page that you can experiment on. Below you will find a list of the important parts of a landing page. Not every landing page will use each part, but these are the most common elements.

1. URL or Web Address
1. The first thing to consider when looking at your landing page URL is all the stuff at the end. Query strings are the accepted way to pass campaign tracking information from an advertising publisher to your analytics. Make sure your links are passing the right information and that your analytics system is consuming and associating that information correctly.
2. Another purpose your URL serves is to subtly pass information to the visitor about where they’ve landed and that you are trustworthy. Use a domain that doesn’t seem shady or unprofessional.
3. Requiring an SSL connection is becoming much more common and is necessary if the information you collect is sensitive. 
2. Title
1. If SEO is part of your marketing strategy, the titles you use are extremely important. For one, the visitors will be selecting which link to click based largely on what the title is promising. If the visitor is looking to buy new headphones the title “How to select the best new headphones” is likely more attractive than “BobsSuperStore.com – Home of the best deals on everything from coffee to band aids!” If the CMS you are using does not allow you to make a unique title on every page of your website, you should fix it or find another.
2. The meta-description is important for the same reason. It should clearly state what a visitor to your page will find.
3. Also, your title will show up in the “tab label” area and often in the top bar of the browser. The visitor will be able to see even less of your title here than in the search results. Having your important keywords early in the title is helpful to getting the visitor’s attention back when they wander.
3. Headline
1. Your headline is often the only part of your page a visitor will read. When I talk about a “headline” I mean the most prominent text immediately visible when visiting your page. The headline should use short action words that state what you are offering your visitor.
2. If your visitor came to your site by clicking on an ad they are almost certainly looking for whatever you promised in the ad. Your headline has to repeat that promise to show the visitor that they made the right click.
4. Sub-headline
1. A sub-headline exists to say what you weren’t able to fit in the headline. Often it is an offer of proof or an extra guarantee.
2. Consider using your sub-headline to explicitly tell your visitor what to do next. For example, suppose you have a landing page with the headline “Free Cookies.” You might follow that with a sub-headline that says “Sign Up for our newsletter and receive a box of delicious cookies for free!” That sub-headline clarifies the headline and instructs the visitor on what to do next.
3. If you can’t express your thought in a just a few words it’s not a sub-headline, it is copy. Put it in a P tag.
5. Copy
1. Use short words and short sentences.
2. Rely on bullet points that are easy to scan. Use action words, not adjectives.
3. Show don’t tell. In other words, describe the benefit don’t explain its specs.
4. The copy is there to support the CTA. Your copy should focus on talking the visitor into taking the next step. Rambling, dense copy or shallow fill are both worse than not having copy at all.
5. Relevant content makes Google happy. Google assigns quality scores that are partly based on the usefulness of the content you offer.
6. Hero Shot
1. The big picture of your product (or the box it came in) is often called the “Hero Shot.” Humans are strongly influenced by visual information. Putting your product on a pedestal on the top of your page is a great way to persuade your visitors of its value. Humans ascribe a lot more value to something they can see.
2. Use crisp pictures devoid of compression artifacts or gimmicky filters. Yes, you should use aggressive compression to lower the file sizes and speed up your page, but you have to apply compression correctly. The jpg format is great for photographs, PNG or GIF files are best for images with text and clear lines. There are a lot of free and cheap image tools that will compress your images in the optimal way.
7. Video and Multimedia
1. Video has seen an explosion in popularity in the last few years. Combine high quality digital video recorders and sites like YouTube and you have made video accessible to anyone with a smartphone and a little hustle.
2. There are just as many rules and hints for producing decent video as for landing pages. I don’t think I could adequately cover video in this post. Here are a few valuable tips:
1. Record outdoors or in a room with lots of open windows. The light from the sun is brighter than any lamp you can afford.
2. It is tempting to use the webcam attached to your computer. That’s fine for casual v-logging but as a pitch often it just comes off as lazy.
3. Straightforward and honest is a lot easier to pull off than zany, gimmicky or high-tech. Don’t underestimate the power of looking someone in the eyes and just talking.
8. Pictures and Photographs
1. If you have people in your pictures, you might try to edit and place them in a way that makes it appear their eyes are looking at your call to action. You may want to avoid photographs of people who are too attractive or sexy unless that’s part of your offer.
2. Free stock photo sites are useful, but everyone else uses the same images. You don’t want your landing page associated with the scam ads and hokey sites that your visitors have gotten lost in before.
3. Having an eye-catching or weird photo can attract attention. You will see that in action in Facebook ads and the mini-display ads on news sites. Those ads are attempting to compete with the content on the page where they are embedded. That’s why they use ambiguous, alarming or just plain weird pictures. However, on your landing page, distraction is not what you are after.
9. Forms
1. Aim for small wins, especially at the top of your funnel. Asking for personal information like and email address or phone number right off the bat will scare off a big chunk of your visitors. That’s not to say you absolutely can’t ask for that sort of information on the front page, just that you will have to explicitly explain what you’re going to do with it.
2. Don’t ask for anything you don’t need to know. It might be interesting to find out their job title, or home address but if you don’t have an immediate business use for that information it will just serve to depress your conversion rate. Data you don’t use is worthless.
3. In the same vein, try to make each step in your conversion funnel the smallest possible commitment available.
4. Asking the visitor to check a judiciously worded checkbox along the lines of “Yes! I’m ready to [RECEIVE BENEFIT] can unconsciously commit them to progressing through your entire conversion funnel.
10. Buttons
1. The most important thing to know about buttons is that they work best when they look like buttons. Google has recently begun using buttons without bevels or shadows. That’s fine for Google, but I wouldn’t recommend that on a landing page. Your visitors have likely never been to your website. Expecting them to learn new conventions is too much to ask. Make you buttons easily recognizable as buttons.
2. The text you use on the button is something worth experimenting with. My rule is to always make it clear what the button is going to do when you click it. “Sign Up”, “Log Out” and “Subscribe” are great examples of clearly communicating what the visitor should expect upon clicking your button.
3. On multi-page forms the verbs “Continue” and “Next” are common. They can also be used to push the visitor through optional pages after the initial conversion.
11. Call Outs
1. Make your strongest point and answer the most objections in a way that draws the eye. Remember, visitors just scan and rely on your design choices to focus their attention.
2. Call outs are a great place to put a link or button that advances your visitor down the funnel. Perhaps you have a call out that addresses a common obstacle to conversion. That’s a great place to put a link or button.
12. Testimonials
1. Don’t use stock photos and fake testimonials. Everyone can smell that artifice from 3 clicks away.
2. Do ask your customers how they like your product and ask to use the more enthusiastic responses on your website. It’s as simple as writing a personal email. Pull the most active customers from your analytics database and get in touch with them. A happy customer who gets attention is the best salesman you can hire.
3. Details like their full name, an authentic picture and their website or contact information go a long way in giving your prospects the confidence to convert.
13. Navigation
1. If you can avoid it, don’t include it. Build your landing pages to convert. Curious visitors are welcome to poke around your site after they complete your CTA, but a visitor that wanders into other parts of your site is very hard to get back on track. They are much more likely to leave unconverted than visitors who stay on the landing page.
2. There’s no law that every page on your site has to look like all the others. Remove your cruft and navigation and widgets, anything that a visitor can interact with that doesn’t advance him or her down the funnel is a waste.
14. Analytics
1. Before your landing page ever sees a visitor you should test and re-test your analytics software. Google provides a free analytics product that is popular and well made. There are many other providers like getClicky.com, crazyEgg.com and Piwik.
2. Google analytics also integrates with your google webmaster account, which can give you an even deeper look at your data.
3. There are so many powerful features and tasks involved in managing analytics that it can seem overwhelming. Start with constructing a conversion funnel. A funnel is simply a view of the data that shows you where in the process your visitors stopped. A successful conversion is a visitor that makes it all the way to the end. You can have multiple funnels for describing different conversion events and the different paths your visitors take to get there. I will discuss this topic in detail in a future post in this series.
15. Fine Print
1. You absolutely need a privacy policy with a clear and easy to see link. Advertising networks will not sell you traffic without one. There are a number of web applications that will help you create a valid privacy policy.
2. Terms and Conditions are also important but vary depending on your business, how you use personal and business information and what types of activities people can do on your website.
3. Put a link to an unsubscribe page in your footer (or where appropriate.) Even if you don’t send email, people will think you do and will feel better if you give them an easy way out. If you do send email, remember that being marked as spam has much higher consequences than making it easy for your visitors to unsubscribe.

Coming Up Next In The Landing Page Series

Designing and executing A/B tests, whether using a 3rd party service like Google’s Website Optimizer or Optimizely or a custom system either architected or tossed together in a heap, is a great skill to have.

In the next part of this series, I will discuss the testing tools available, what to do with all that data and how to be certain the conclusions you draw are statistically significant and objectively measured.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment or tweet at me @muddylemon.

The post Creating Effective Landing Pages appeared first on muddylemon.

Last night on twitter I started this series based on the hashtag #PHPConfessions

I’ve never gotten the order of arguments right for str_replace without checking http://php.net first  #PHPConfessions

I’m always afraid I’ll be seated with the Perl people at programmer gatherings  #PHPConfessions

I like PHP because I like always having the option to blame my tools #PHPConfessions

Sometimes I go to github just to browse python repos #PHPConfessions

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Productivity has skyrocketed in the past three decades, but all of the surplus has been captured by the top 1%. Wages have been flat. The workforce has lost a lot of leverage due to the cost savings of machines, labor competition with the third world and the migration of women into the workforce.

All of these extra workers are fighting for fewer and fewer jobs. The only solution is to create many more jobs or reduce the number of available workers. In the past that balance has been restored by things like disease, war, genocide and shipping people to Australia. Given our current sensibilities, we would probably do better to use the tax code.

Taxes are controversial. Conservatives argue against taxing income, saying that it is a disincentive to work. Liberals argue against taxing consumption as it disproportionately affects the net consumers – the poor and middle class. Libertarians argue against taxing anyone because they don’t understand math.

What if instead of taxing based strictly on income or consumption, we set tax rates based on age.

How it works: 

From age 0 to 40 your tax rate is 10%.

Starting at 40, after a standard deduction at just above the poverty line, your tax rate is your age. ie. A 40 year old pays 40% of his income above the deduction, a 60 year old pays 60%.

Why Tax The Old?

Not taxing the young incentivizes them to work and to save. It’s the cheapest money you will ever get so it makes sense to sock it away now. It discourages the young from frittering away years in college. Instead they will want a degree or certification they can use now.

Taxing the old disincentivizes them to work. It encourages early retirement, except for the very highly skilled who can be compensated highly enough to offset their extraordinary tax burden.

It encourages job growth as it reduces the pool of workers, but reduces it at the top not the bottom. So young workers will be highly sought after as they are less expensive and more eager to work.

This also encourages older workers to leave the work force and spend their time creating value either by helping their working children with home life, volunteering or starting businesses that pay in equity and investment income, not salary.

If nothing else it will force the accumulation machines we call corporations to push profits back into the hands of the workers by tightening the labor market and raising the price of expertise closer to its true value to the employer.

Just so we’re clear: What is Satire?

The post Tax The Old appeared first on muddylemon.

I couldn’t find any usb drives tonight so i brought out an old external hard drive. That picture is one of the first “mastheads” of muddylemon.com circa the late 90s.

I also found this poem from the same time period:

Different Person

i used to be a different person, I used to have different thoughts
I’m not sure if i changed characters, or merely shifted plots;

I used to be a different person, I was someone I once knew
I don’t remember changing, I doubt I really grew;

I used to be a different person, I lived in another place
I died, I disappeared, I barely left a trace;

I remember my former self, in flashes at times
I see myself speaking as if i’m reading lines;
I can’t remember my old motivations
I can barely sense those old sensations
I was who I would be, without knowing why
and now I wish I were who I was, or was it just a lie?

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