What bores me about The Oscars is the very predictable acceptance speeches.  The event would be far more entertaining and educational if they only allowed the losers to speak as well.

“The script was terrible,” we might hear. “The first act created no suspense and by the third act a crackhead would be asleep.  The only good acting was by the main character’s dog, and the sound track tried too hard to create suspense and instead sounded so out of place we became aware of how boring the film actually was.”

Similarly, one of the most dangerous traps a marketer can fall into with LPO is disproportionate concern with the winner. If you pay attention to the losers, they’ll tell you what went wrong with them so you can avoid those mistakes as well.

SEM’s look to the winners for page elements or themes that boost performance, while not simultaneously looking to these pages for what may decrease results.  This oversight, and many others, can be overcome by a story-line, incremental test plan.

What do I mean by that?

I think of the HBO series, “The Wire”, for which Wikipedia has six notations citing it as the greatest television series of  all time, for it’s spectacular long-arch, chaotic yet coherent storyline.

LPO can also sustain an impressive run of valuable tests if the test planner understands the fundamental page elements at play, the messaging and aesthetic themes that may play them out, the precise production requirements to pull it all off, and the end audience’s anticipated processing of all the work.

Incremental knowledge gain is not a hot run on a craps table.  A well-designed test plan builds evolutionary paths that are both flexible and coherent.

Ok, another thing I hear marketers at the conventions I have been attending talk about with great obsession is conversion analysis, and rightly so.

But we do so to the point that we limit our analysis to the conversion zone at the expense of overlooking an equally common cause: usability.

If you reflect on your personal experiences with websites you have abandoned for reasons other than irrelevant content, you’ll probably agree with me that the #1 (or #2) reason you did so had to do with usability.

You couldn’t find something.  The site was too busy and difficult to scan.  The look and feel just kind of annoyed you.

These are the “first touch” reasons that will send most users away from your site before they get to point of considering your value proposition.

And so I have found myself increasingly interjecting, “you don’t have a conversion problem, you have a usability problem”.

The take-away is that scrutiny of landing pages and “conversion” pages should be complemented with studies on usability.

Tomorrow I am speaking at SMX West tomorrow. I am going to present my “Motive Analysis”, which is a process I created to identify thematic motive disconnects” between what a visitor is looking for, and how you are messaging to them (this is a very simplistic explanation).

Anyway, in order to comprehend what a Motive Analysis is, it’s important to be familiar with my “10 Motives of Search”.

The “10  Motives” is a list of recurring search motives.

You can download the PDF of the slide I will present tomorrow that has my 10 Motives of Search.

We’ve all heard about the many cost-cutting measures companies are taking to survive in what I call “The Post-Bush Economy”.

One measure we haven’t heard enough about is analytics tuning.

We hear about budgets being re-allocated or slashed. Traditional is moving online, viral and buzz are being questioned, RFP’s are going out in hopes of finding less expensive vendors, and so on.

But can an organization truly optimize its channels if it hasn’t made the most of its web analytics data?

As our analytics guru Micah Fisher-Kirshner said in a recent newsletter, “Ironically, most of the large companies we have worked with have such nascent analytics practices that their requirements barely scratch the surface of even GA’s capabilities.”

This leads to the question: how can a company know what to cut, and by how much, unless they have a highly optimized analytics practice?

The first step in budget re-allocationis investing in the enhancement of your analytics practice.

If you are reading this and thinking that your analytics practice is probably not what it should be, contact us, we’ll give you an “analytics check-up” that will ensure your organization can make wise budget decisions to survive in the Post-Bush economy.

This will be an interesting year for paid search.

Last year there was about $10B spent in paid - this year could be as much as $12B.

You don’t hear as much talk about viral and buzz campaigns.  Too risky?

I began doing SEO in late 1999.  It took me about 18 months to really get the hang of it, as back then there was very little information on SEO.

I was solely responsible for the marketing of my small company (eight people).

The economic collapse hit in 2001, just as the great revenue gains I was generating were kicking in.  And as the economy got worse, my SEO achievements accelerated.  I built many different websites so that each of the four salesmen could operate their own brand.  By doing so, the company would have not just a number one rank for our keywords, but often four.

Our revenue grew and grew, seemingly immune from the economic downturn.  As the overall market decreased for our industry, our market share increased faster.

An article in today’s NY Times describes a merchant who is doing the same, but with paid search.

The merchant has increased  his revenue by doubling his conversion rate, his bid, and his marketing budget.

Think of all the companies out there spending significant amounts on brand campaigns, yet are budget constrained in paid search.

The right move for these marketers is to drastically cut, or eliminate, their under performing non-search campaigns and maximizing their investments in search.

American marketing agencies are soon going to find out that no matter how good their campaigns are, how many tests they do, or how much money they spend, a surprisingly high number of their performance driven campaigns in China are going to fail.

Why?

There is a lot of talk about China’s economic growth.  American companies are excited to have a Chinese presence.  But the truth is so many companies want to be there but don’t really know why.  There is a sense that something is about to erupt, and not being there equates to missing out.

But is China really that promising?  Sure, China has had double digit growth for years.  But it wasn’t the Chinese who were consuming.  So, before American companies rush over there to sell the Chinese products and services that were selling well elsewhere, let’s stop for a moment to recognize that the Chinese are not a consumer culture.

Stephen Roach, the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, called Americans, “the most over-extended consumer in world history.” And now that Americans are no longer buying so many Chinese exports, China will have to find another consumer base for its enormous production machine. And they know it won’t come from within.

As Thomas Friedman wrote:
“China has no real Social Security, health insurance or unemployment insurance. Without that social safety net, it’s hard to see how Chinese don’t end up saving most of their stimulus.”

In the SEM agency world, having a presence in China is important to prospective clients.  This presence represents the gateway to a huge, seemingly untapped market.

The problem, however, is that these agencys’ clients are going to realize that the Chinese will require, according to Fred Hu, chairman for Greater China for Goldman Sachs, a huge “cultural and structural” shift before they start consuming the largely unnecessary products that Americans love.

China will prove to be the largest market, but so frugal that some marketers will realize that it isn’t worth trying.  For example, Adobe Systems essentially ignores the market, recognize that pirating is out of control there, the Chinese government is not helping police the piracy, and that the Chinese consumer doesn’t have the money or mindset to pay for the software.

A wave of companies are about to discover what Adobe knew ten years ago.  China is more stingy than it is large.

Here’s a great piece of advice.

Treat people online the same way you would in person.

Think about it.

I have had to speak to large companies about SEO 101 for years.

The more I do, the more I realize enterprise SEO is more about version control than anything else.

Nearly every enterprise site I have worked on has had my SEO work undone - either entirely (complete obliteration) or partially.  These acts have never been intentional, but rather the result of a lack of process in web dev teams.

I have incorporated this message into my training classes.  But I haven’t enforced a policy, which is why teams overwrite SEO work.

As I prepare an SEO training next week for a F1000, I am realizing that in the one hour I am scheduled to present, I should spend about 30 minutes on this issue.

This post is meant to give you a high level view of how to best use GA.  Subsequent posts will tell you how to implement.

What I love about GA are the profiles.  Unlike other analytics packages, you can create a profile and use filters - this removes the needless exercise of “drilling down” to a particular channel to explore KPI’s- which, far too often (with other analytics packages) have a dead end.

I recommend setting up profiles for:

• All of your website (”all in”, as I call it)
• Organic
• PPC
• Mobile (my next post will be SOOOOO cool for you analytics geeks.  Get prepared for some advanced regular expressions stuff)
• Brand terms - most SEM campaigns report on performance without recognizing that brand terms are a “given”.  Create a filter to see how brand terms perform - this profile will also give you insight into the performance of channels like display, radio, television (awareness) perform - if you see a spike in brand terms, this is likely due to another channel that is otherwise difficult to track.
• Non-brand - create a profile that filters out brand terms so you can track the performance of your marketing efforts without the noise from other channels.
• Affiliate / partner - did you sign a partnership and want to see its performance?  Set up a filter.  Easy to report on.
• International - does your company report by region or by country? Align your marketing reporting with your company’s financial ones.  You can do this by country, region, or language.

That list is just a sample.  Come back for more details on HOW to set these up (particulary mobile!)