New bourbon crush. This has got to be some of the smoothest we've ever had. @orphanbarrel #rhetoric #23year
Friday, June 30, 2017
New bourbon crush. This has got to be...
New bourbon crush. This has got to be some of the smoothest we've ever had. @orphanbarrel #rhetoric #23year
New bourbon crush. This has got to be...
New bourbon crush. This has got to be some of the smoothest we've ever had. @orphanbarrel #rhetoric #23year
Come on out, Michigan...tonight's gonna be a good'n 🎸...
Come on out, Michigan...tonight's gonna be a good'n 🎸 🍻 🎶 #lansing #michigan DON'T MISS THIS!
Come on out, Michigan...tonight's gonna be a good'n 🎸...
Come on out, Michigan...tonight's gonna be a good'n 🎸 🍻 🎶 #lansing #michigan DON'T MISS THIS!
Happy Holiday Weekend!!! Download Fix a Drink...
Happy Holiday Weekend!!! Download Fix a Drink for your 🎉 party! The Fix a Drink - EP by Chris Janson http://ift.tt/2u76qBx
Happy Holiday Weekend!!! Download Fix a Drink...
Happy Holiday Weekend!!! Download Fix a Drink for your 🎉 party! The Fix a Drink - EP by Chris Janson http://ift.tt/2u76qBx
Kansas!!! You Rock!! Thanks for a great Night #fixadrink
Kansas!!! You Rock!! Thanks for a great Night #fixadrink
Kansas!!! You Rock!! Thanks for a great Night #fixadrink
Kansas!!! You Rock!! Thanks for a great Night #fixadrink
How Content Can Succeed By Making Enemies - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
Getting readers on board with your ideas isn't the only way to achieve content success. Sometimes, stirring up a little controversy and earning a few rivals can work incredibly well — but there's certainly a right and a wrong way to do it. Rand details how to use the power of making enemies work to your advantage in today's Whiteboard Friday.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today, we're going to chat about something a little interesting — how content can succeed by making enemies. I know you're thinking to yourself, "Wait a minute, I thought my job was to make friends with my content." Yes, and one of the best ways to make close friends is to make enemies too.
So, in my opinion, I think that companies and businesses, programs, organizations of all kinds, efforts of all kinds tend to do really well when they get people on their side. So if I'm trying to create a movement or I'm trying to get people to believe in what I'm doing, I need to have positions, data, stories, and content that can bring people to my site. One of the best ways to do that is actually to think about it in opposition to something else, basically try and figure out how you can earn some enemies.
A few examples of content that makes enemies & allies
I'll give you a few examples, because I think that will help add some context here. I did a little bit of research. My share data is from BuzzSumo, and my link data here is from Ahrefs. But for example, this piece called "There Are Now Twice as Many Solar Jobs as Coal Jobs in the US," this is essentially just data-driven content, but it clearly makes friends and enemies. It makes enemies with sort of this classic, old-school Americana belief set around how important coal jobs are, and it creates, through the enemy that it builds around that, simply by sharing data, it also creates allies, people who are on the side of this story, who want to share it and amplify it and have it reach its potential and reach more people.
Same is true here. So this is a story called "Yoga Is a Good Alternative to Physical Therapy." Clearly, it did extremely well, tens of thousands of shares and thousands of links, lots of ranking keywords for it. But it creates some enemies. Physical therapists are not going to be thrilled that this is the case. Despite the research behind it, this is frustrating for many of those folks. So you've created friends, allies, people who are yoga practitioners and yoga instructors. You've also created enemies, potentially those folks who don't believe that this might be the case despite what the research might show.
Third one, "The 50 Most Powerful Public Relations Firms in America," I think this was actually from The Observer. So they're writing in the UK, but they managed to rank for lots and lots of keywords around "best PR firms" and all those sorts of things. They have thousands of shares, thousands of links. I mean 11,000 links, that's darn impressive for a story of this nature. And they've created enemies. They've created enemies of all the people who are not in the 50 most powerful, who feel that they should be, and they've created allies of the people who are in there. They've also created some allies and enemies deeper inside the story, which you can check out.
"Replace Your Lawn with These Superior Alternatives," well, guess what? You have now created some enemies in the lawn care world and in the lawn supply world and in the passionate communities, very passionate communities, especially here in the United States, around people who sort of believe that homes should have lawns and nothing else, grass lawns in this case. This piece didn't do that well in terms of shares, but did phenomenally well in terms of links. This was on Lifehacker, and it ranks for all sorts of things, 11,000+ links.
Before you create, ask yourself: Who will help amplify this, and why?
So you can see that these might not be things that you naturally think of as earning enemies. But when you're creating content, if you can go through this exercise, I have this rule, that I've talked about many times over the years, for content success, especially content amplification success. That is before you ever create something, before you brainstorm the idea, come up with the title, come up with the content, before you do that, ask yourself: Who will help amplify this and why? Why will they help?
One of the great things about framing things in terms of who are my allies, the people on my side, and who are the enemies I'm going to create is that the "who" becomes much more clear. The people who support your ideas, your ethics, or your position, your logic, your data and want to help amplify that, those are people who are potential amplifiers. The people, the detractors, the enemies that you're going to build help you often to identify that group.
The "why" becomes much more clear too. The existence of that common enemy, the chance to show that you have support and beliefs in people, that's a powerful catalyst for that amplification, for the behavior you're attempting to drive in your community and your content consumers. I've found that thinking about it this way often gets content creators and SEOs in the right frame of mind to build stuff that can do really well.
Some dos and don'ts
Do... backup content with data
A few dos and don'ts if you're pursuing this path of content generation and ideation. Do back up as much as you can with facts and data, not just opinion. That should be relatively obvious, but it can be dangerous in this kind of world, as you go down this path, to not do that.
Do... convey a world view
I do suggest that you try and convey a world view, not necessarily if you're thinking on the political spectrum of like from all the way left to all the way right or those kinds of things. I think it's okay to convey a world view around it, but I would urge you to provide multiple angles of appeal.
So if you're saying, "Hey, you should replace your lawn with these superior alternatives," don't make it purely that it's about conservation and ecological health. You can also make it about financial responsibility. You can also make it about the ease with which you can care for these lawns versus other ones. So now it becomes something that appeals across a broader range of the spectrum.
Same thing with something like solar jobs versus coal jobs. If you can get it to be economically focused and you can give it a capitalist bent, you can potentially appeal to multiple ends of the ideological spectrum with that world view.
Do... collect input from notable parties
Third, I would urge you to get inputs from notable folks before you create and publish this content, especially if the issue that you're talking about is going to be culturally or socially or politically charged. Some of these fit into that. Yoga probably not so much, but potentially the solar jobs/coal jobs one, that might be something to run the actual content that you've created by some folks who are in the energy space so that they can help you along those lines, potentially the energy and the political space if you can.
Don't... be provocative just to be provocative
Some don'ts. I do not urge you and I'm not suggesting that you should create provocative content purely to be provocative. Instead, I'm urging you to think about the content that you create and how you angle it using this framing of mind rather than saying, "Okay, what could we say that would really piss people off?" That's not what I'm urging you to do. I'm urging you to say, "How can we take things that we already have, beliefs and positions, data, stories, whatever content and how do we angle them in such a way that we think about who are the enemies, who are the allies, how do we get that buy-in, how do we get that amplification?"
Don't... choose indefensible positions
Second, I would not choose enemies or positions that you can't defend against. So, for example, if you were considering a path that you think might get you into a world of litigious danger, you should probably stay away from that. Likewise, if your positions are relatively indefensible and you've talked to some folks in the field and done the dues and they're like, "I don't know about that," you might not want to pursue it.
Don't... give up on the first try
Third, do not give up if your first attempts in this sort of framing don't work. You should expect that you will have to, just like any other form of content, practice, iterate, and do this multiple times before you have success.
Don't... be unprofessional
Don't be unprofessional when you do this type of content. It can be a little bit tempting when you're framing things in terms of, "How do I make enemies out of this?" to get on the attack. That is not necessary. I think that actually content that builds enemies does so even better when it does it from a non-attack vector mode.
Don't... sweat the Haterade
Don't forget that if you're getting some Haterade for the content you create, a lot of people when they start drinking the Haterade online, they run. They think, "Okay, we've done something wrong." That's actually not the case. In my experience, that means you're doing something right. You're building something special. People don't tend to fight against and argue against ideas and people and organizations for no reason. They do so because they're a threat.
If you've created a threat to your enemies, you have also generally created something special for your allies and the people on your side. That means you're doing something right. In Moz's early days, I can tell you, back when we were called SEOmoz, for years and years and years we got all sorts of hate, and it was actually a pretty good sign that we were doing something right, that we were building something special.
So I look forward to your comments. I'd love to see any examples of stuff that you have as well, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Thursday, June 29, 2017
Which band member is havin the best...
Which band member is havin the best vacation? This guy. #orangejacket #caughtit #jakeowenwho? @jakeowenofficial
Incredible first time playing in LA! #troubadour #tbt #honored
Incredible first time playing in LA! #troubadour #tbt #honored
Which band member is havin the best...
Which band member is havin the best vacation? This guy. #orangejacket #caughtit #jakeowenwho? @jakeowenofficial
Incredible first time playing in LA! #troubadour #tbt #honored
Incredible first time playing in LA! #troubadour #tbt #honored
We're still over the moon. Thanks so...
We're still over the moon. Thanks so much to our peers and the @acmawards for this. We're eternally grateful.
We're still over the moon. Thanks so...
We're still over the moon. Thanks so much to our peers and the @acmawards for this. We're eternally grateful.
Playing a show with my pals for @thebig98’s...
Playing a show with my pals for @thebig98’s Guitar-B-Que benefitting @stjude! Tickets on sale now! [Link in bio]
Playing a show with my pals for @thebig98’s...
Playing a show with my pals for @thebig98’s Guitar-B-Que benefitting @stjude! Tickets on sale now! [Link in bio]
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
MozCon: Why You Should Attend & How to Get the Most Out of It
Posted by ronell-smith
MozCon 2013 (left to right): Greg Gifford, Nathan Bylof, Nathan Hammer, Susan Wenograd, and myself
I remember my first MozCon like it was yesterday.
It’s the place where I would hear the quote that would forever change the arc of my career.
“The world is freaking complicated, so let me start with everything I don’t know,” said Google’s Avinash Kaushik, during the Q&A, after speaking at MozCon 2013. “Nine hundred years from now, I will fix what’s broken today. …Get good at what you do.”
Though I didn’t know it at the the time, those were words I needed to hear, and that would lead me to make some career decisions I desperately needed to make. Decisions I never would have made if I hadn’t chosen to attend MozCon, the Super Bowl of marketing events (in my opinion).
Walking into the large (gigantic) room for the first time felt like being on the Space Mountain ride at Disneyland. I hurriedly raced to the front to find a seat so I could take in all of the action.
Once settled in, I sat back and enjoyed the music as lights danced along the walls.
Who wouldn’t want to be here? I thought.
Once the show started and Rand walked out, I was immediately sold: The decision to attend MozCon was the right one. By the end of the show, I would be saying it was one of the best career decisions I could have made.
But I almost missed it.
How and why MozCon?
I discovered MozCon like most of you: while reading the Moz blog, which I had been perusing since 2010, when I started building a website for an online, members-only newsletter.
One of my friends, an executive at a large company, had recently shared with me that online marketing was blistering hot.
“If you’re focusing your energy anywhere else, Ronell, you’re making a mistake,” he said. “We just hired a digital marketing manager, and we’re paying her more than $90,000.”
Those words served as an imprimatur for me to eagerly study and read SEO blogs and set up Twitter lists to follow prominent SEO authors.
Learning SEO was far less fun than applying it to the website I was in the process of helping to build.
In the years that followed, I continued reading the blog while making steps to meet members of the community, both locally and online.
One of the first people I met in the Moz SEO community was Greg Gifford, who agreed to meet me for lunch after I reached out to him via DM on Twitter.
He mentioned MozCon, which at the time wasn’t on my radar. (As a bonus, he said if I attended, he’d introduce me to Ruth Burr, who I’d been following on Twitter, and was a hyooge fan of.)
I started doing some investigating, wondering if it was an event I should invest in.
Also, during this same period, I was getting my content strategy sea legs and had reached out to Jon Colman, who was nice enough to mentor me. He also recommended that I attend MozCon, not the least because content strategy and UX superstar Karen McGrane was speaking.
I was officially sold.
That night, I put a plan into action:
- Signed up for Moz Pro to get the MozCon discount
- Bought a ticket to the show
- Purchased airline and hotel tickets through Priceline
Then I used to following weeks to devise a plan to help me get everything I could out of the show.
The conference of all conferences
Honestly, I didn’t expect to be blow away by MozCon.
For seven of the 10 previous years, I edited a magazine that helped finance a trade show that hosted tens of thousands of people, from all over the world.
Nothing could top that, I thought. I was wrong.
The show, the lights, the people — and the single-track focus — blew me away. Right away.
I remember Richard Baxter was the first speaker up that first morning.
By the time he was done sharing strategies for effective outreach, I was thinking, “I’ve already recouped my expense. I don’t plan to ever miss this show again.”
And I haven’t.
So important did MozCon become to me after that first show, that I began to plan summer travel around it.
How could one event become that important?
Five key reasons:
- Content
- People & relationships
- Personal & career development
I’ll explore each in detail since I think they each help make my point about the value of MozCon. (Also, if you haven’t read it already, check out Rand’s post, The Case For & Against Attending Marketing Conferences, which also touches on the value of these events.)
#1 - Content
You expect me to say the content you’ll be privy to at MozCon is the best you’ll hear anywhere.
Yeah, but…
The show hand-picks only the best speakers. But these same speakers present elsewhere, too, right?
What I mean by "content" is that the information you glean holistically from the show can help marketers from all areas of the business better do their work.
For example, when I came to my first MozCon, I had a handful of clients who’d reached out to me for PR, media relations, branding, and content work.
But I was starting to get calls and emails for this thing called “content marketing,” of which I was only vaguely familiar.
The information I learned from the speakers (and the informal conversations between speakers and after the show), made it possible for me to take on content marketing clients and, six months later, head content marketing for one of the most successful digital strategy agencies in Dallas/Fort Worth.
There really is something for everyone at MozCon.
#2 - People & relationships
Most of the folks I talk to on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis are folks I met at one of the last four MozCons.
For example, I met Susan E. Wenograd at MozCon 2013, where we shared a seat next to one another for the entire event. She’s been one of my closest friends ever since.
MozCon 2015: I'm chastising Damon Gochneaur for trying to sell me some links — I'm kidding, Google.
The folks seated beside you or roaming the halls during the event are some of the sharpest and most accomplished you’ll meet anywhere.
They are also some of the most helpful and genuine.
I felt this during my first event; I learned the truth of this sentiment in the weeks, months, and years that have followed.
Whether you’re as green as I was, or an advanced T-shaped marketer with a decade of experience behind you, the event will be fun, exciting, and full of new tips, tactics, and strategies you can immediately put to use.
#3 - Personal & career development
I know most people make decisions about attending events based on the cost and the known value — that is, based on previous similar events, how much they are likely to earn, either in a new job, new work, or additional responsibilities.
That’s the wrong way to look at MozCon, or any event.
Let’s keep it real for a moment: No matter who you are, where you work, what you do, or how much you enjoy your work, you’re are ALWAYS in the process of getting fired or (hopefully) changing jobs.
You should (must) be attending events to keep yourself relevant, visible, and on top of your game, whether that’s in paid media, content, social media, SEO, email marketing, etc.
That’s why the “Is it worth it?” argument is not beneficial at all.
I cannot tell you how many times, over the last four years, when I’ve been stuck on a content strategy, SEO or web design issue and been able to reach out to someone I would never have met were it not for MozCon.
For example, every time I share the benefits of Paid Social with a local business owner, I feel I should cut Kane Jamison (met at MozCon 2014) a check.
So, go to MozCon, not because you can see the tangible benefits (you cannot know those); go to MozCon because your career and your personal development will be nourished by it far beyond any financial reward.
Now you know how I feel and what I’ve gleaned from MozCon, you’re probably saying, “Yeah, but how can I be certain to get the most out of the event?”
I’m glad you asked.
How you can get the most out of MozCon
First, start following and interacting with Twitter and Facebook groups to find folks attending MozCon.
Dive in and ask questions, answer questions, or set up a get-together during the event.
Next, during the event, follow the #mozcon Twitter hashtag, making note of folks who are tweeting info from the event. Pay close attention to not simply the info, but also what they are gleaning and how they plan to use the event for their work.
If you find a few folks sharing info germane to your work or experiences, it wouldn’t hurt to retweet them and, maybe later during the show, send a group text asking to get together during the pub crawl or maybe join up for breakfast.
Then, once the show is over, continue to follow folks on social media, in addition to reading (and leaving comments on) their blogs, sending them “Great meeting you. Let’s stay in touch” emails, and looking for other opportunities to stay in their orbit, including meeting up at future events.
Many of the folks I initially met at MozCon have become friends I see throughout the year at other events.
But, wait!
I mentioned nothing about how to get the most out of the event itself.
Well, I have a different philosophy than most folks: Instead of writing copious notes and trying to capture every word from each speaker, I think of and jot down a theme for each talk while the speaker is still presenting. Along with that theme, I’ll include some notes that encapsulate the main nuggets of the talk and that will help me remember it later.
For example, Dr. Pete’s 2016 talk, You Can't Type a Concept: Why Keywords Still Matter, spurred me to redouble my focus (and my learning with regard to content and SEO) on search intent, on-page SEO, and knowing the audience’s needs as well as possible.
Then, once the show is over, I create a theme to encapsulate the entire event by asking myself three questions:
- What did I learn that I can apply right away?
- What can I create and share that’ll make me more valuable to teammates, clients or prospective clients?
- How does this information make me better at [X]?
For the 2013 show, my answers were…
- I don’t need to know everything about SEO to begin to take on SEO-related work, which I was initially reluctant to do.
- Content that highlights my in-depth knowledge of the types of content that resonates with audiences I’d researched/was familiar with.
- It makes me more aware of how how search, social, and content fit together.
After hearing Avinash’s quote, I had the theme in my head, for me and for the handful of brands I was consulting at the time: “You won’t win by running the competition’s race; make them chase you.”
MozCon 2013: Avinash Kaushik of Google
This meant I helped them think beyond content, social media, and SEO, and instead had them focus on creating the best content experience possible, which would help them more easily accomplish their goals.
I’ve repeated the process each year since, including in 2016, when I doubled-down on Featured Snippets after seeing Taking the Top Spot: How to Earn More Featured Snippets, by Rob Bucci.
You can do the same.
It all begins with attending the show and being willing to step outside your comfort zone.
What say you?
Are you MozCon bound?
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
Polaroid posing with @soundslikenashville at @lakeshakefest
Polaroid posing with @soundslikenashville at @lakeshakefest
Polaroid posing with @soundslikenashville at @lakeshakefest
Polaroid posing with @soundslikenashville at @lakeshakefest
6 CRO Mistakes You Might Be Making (And How to Fix Them)
Posted by lkolowich
You just ran what you thought was a really promising conversion test. In an effort to raise the number of visitors that convert into demo requests on your product pages, you test an attractive new redesign on one of your pages using a good ol’ A/B test. Half of the people who visit that page see the original product page design, and half see the new, attractive design.
You run the test for an entire month, and as you expected, conversions are up — from 2% to 10%. Boy, do you feel great! You take these results to your boss and advise that, based on your findings, all product pages should be moved over to your redesign. She gives you the go-ahead.
But when you roll out the new design, you notice the number of demo requests goes down. You wonder if it’s seasonality, so you wait a few more months. That’s when you start to notice MRR is decreasing, too. What gives?
Turns out, you didn’t test that page long enough for results to be statistically significant. Because that product page only saw 50 views per day, you would’ve needed to wait until over 150,000 people viewed the page before you could achieve a 95% confidence level — which would take over eight years to accomplish. Because you failed to calculate those numbers correctly, your company is losing business.
A risky business
Miscalculating sample size is just one of the many CRO mistakes marketers make in the CRO space. It’s easy for marketers to trick themselves into thinking they’re improving their marketing, when in fact, they’re leading their business down a dangerous path by basing tests on incomplete research, small sample sizes, and so on.
But remember: The primary goal of CRO is to find the truth. Basing a critical decision on faulty assumptions and tests lacking statistical significance won’t get you there.
To help save you time and overcome that steep learning curve, here are some of the most common mistakes marketers make with conversion rate optimization. As you test and tweak and fine-tune your marketing, keep these mistakes in mind, and keep learning.
6 CRO mistakes you might be making
1) You think of CRO as mostly A/B testing.
Equating A/B testing with CRO is like calling a square a rectangle. While A/B testing is a type of CRO, it’s just one tool of many. A/B testing only covers testing a single variable against another to see which performs better, while CRO includes all manner of testing methodologies, all with the goal of leading your website visitors to take a desired action.
If you think you’re "doing CRO" just by A/B testing everything, you’re not being very smart about your testing. There are plenty of occasions where A/B testing isn’t helpful at all — for example, if your sample size isn’t large enough to collect the proper amount of data. Does the webpage you want to test get only a few hundred visits per month? Then it could take months to round up enough traffic to achieve statistical significance.
If you A/B test a page with low traffic and then decide six weeks down the line that you want to stop the test, then that’s your prerogative — but your test results won’t be based on anything scientific.
A/B testing is a great place to start with your CRO education, but it’s important to educate yourself on many different testing methodologies so you aren’t restricting yourself. For example, if you want to see a major lift in conversions on a webpage in only a few weeks, try making multiple, radical changes instead of testing one variable at a time. Take Weather.com, for example: They changed many different variables on one of their landing pages all at once, including the page design, headline, navigation, and more. The result? A whopping 225% increase in conversions.
2) You don’t provide context for your conversion rates.
When you read that line about the 225% lift in conversions on Weather.com, did you wonder what I meant by "conversions?"
If you did, then you’re thinking like a CRO.
Conversion rates can measure any number of things: purchases, leads, prospects, subscribers, users — it all depends on the goal of the page. Just saying “we saw a huge increase in conversions” doesn’t mean much if you don’t provide people with what the conversion means. In the case of Weather.com, I was referring specifically to trial subscriptions: Weather.com saw a 225% increase in trial subscriptions on that page. Now the meaning of that conversion rate increase is a lot more clear.
But even stating the metric isn’t telling the whole story. When exactly was that test run? Different days of the week and of the month can yield very different conversion rates.
For that reason, even if your test achieves 98% significance after three days, you still need to run that test for the rest of the full week because of how different conversion rate can be on different days. Same goes for months: Don’t run a test during the holiday-heavy month of December and expect the results to be the same as if you’d run it for the month of March. Seasonality will affect your conversion rate.
Other things that can have a major impact on conversion rate? Device type is one. Visitors might be willing to fill out that longer form on desktop, but are mobile visitors converting at the same rate? Better investigate. Channel is another: Be wary of reporting “average” conversion rates. If some channels have much higher conversion rates than others, you should consider treating the channels differently.
Finally, remember that conversion rate isn’t the most important metric for your business. It’s important that your conversions are leading to revenue for the company. If you made your product free, I’ll bet your conversion rates would skyrocket — but you wouldn’t be making any money, would you? Conversion rate doesn’t always tell you whether your business is doing better than it was. Be careful that you aren’t thinking of conversions in a vacuum so you don’t steer off-course.
3) You don’t really understand the statistics.
One of the biggest mistakes I made when I first started learning CRO was thinking I could rely on what I remembered from my college statistics courses to run conversion tests. Just because you’re running experiments does not make you a scientist.
Statistics is the backbone of CRO, and if you don’t understand it inside and out, then you won’t be able to run proper tests and could seriously derail your marketing efforts.
What if you stop your test too early because you didn’t wait to achieve 98% statistical significance? After all, isn’t 90% good enough?
No, and here’s why: Think of statistical significance like placing a bet. Are you really willing to bet on 90% odds on your test results? Running a test to 90% significance and then declaring a winner is like saying, "I'm 90% sure this is the right design and I'm willing to bet everything on it.” It’s just not good enough.
If you’re in need of a statistics refresh, don’t panic. It’ll take discipline and practice, but it’ll make you into a much better marketer — and it’ll make your testing methodology much, much tighter. Start by reading this Moz post by Craig Bradford, which covers sample size, statistical significance, confidence intervals, and percentage change.
4) You don’t experiment on pages or campaigns that are already doing well.
Just because something is doing well doesn’t mean you should just leave it be. Often, it’s these marketing assets that have the highest potential to perform even better when optimized. Some of our biggest CRO wins here at HubSpot have come from assets that were already performing well.
I’ll give you two examples.
The first comes from a project run by Pam Vaughan on HubSpot’s web strategy team, called “historical optimization.” The project involved updating and republishing old blog posts to generate more traffic and leads.
But this didn’t mean updating just any old blog posts; it meant updating the blog posts that were already the most influential in generating traffic and leads. In her attribution analysis, Pam made two surprising discoveries:
- 76% of our monthly blog views came from "old" posts (in other words, posts published prior to that month).
- 92% of our monthly blog leads also came from "old" posts.
Why? Because these were the blog posts that had slowly built up search authority and were ranking on search engines like Google. They were generating a ton of organic traffic month after month after month.
The goal of the project, then, was to figure out: a) how to get more leads from our high-traffic but low-converting blog posts; and b) how to get more traffic to our high-converting posts. By optimizing these already high-performing posts for traffic and conversions, we more than doubled the number of monthly leads generated by the old posts we've optimized.
Another example? In the last few weeks, Nick Barrasso from our marketing acquisition team did a leads audit of our blog. He discovered that some of our best-performing blog posts for traffic were actually leading readers to some of our worst-performing offers.
To give a lead conversion lift to 50 of these high-traffic, low-converting posts, Nick conducted a test in which he replaced each post’s primary call-to-action with a call-to-action leading visitors to an offer that was most tightly aligned with the post’s topic and had the highest submission rate. After one week, these posts generated 100% more leads than average.
The bottom line is this: Don’t focus solely on optimizing marketing assets that need the most work. Many times, you’ll find that the lowest-hanging fruit are pages that are already performing well for traffic and/or leads and, when optimized even further, can result in much bigger lifts.
5) You base your CRO tests on tactics instead of research.
When it comes to CRO, process is everything. Remove your ego and assumptions from the equation, stop relying on individual tactics to optimize your marketing, and instead take a systematic approach to CRO.
Your CRO process should always start with research. In fact, conducting research should be the step you spend the most time on. Why? Because the research and analysis you do in this step will lead you to the problems — and it’s only when you know where the problems lie that you can come up with a hypothesis for overcoming them.
Remember that test I just talked about that doubled leads for 50 top HubSpot blog posts in a week? Nick didn’t just wake up one day and realize our high-traffic blog posts might be leading to low-performing offers. He discovered this only by doing hours and hours of research into our lead gen strategy from the blog.
Paddy Moogan wrote a great post on Moz on where to look for data in the research stage. What does your sales process look like, for example? Have you ever reviewed the full funnel? “Try to find where the most common drop-off points are and take a deeper dive into why,” he suggests.
Here’s an (oversimplified) overview of what a CRO process should look like:
- Step 1: Do your research.
- Step 2: Form and validate your hypothesis.
- Step 3: Establish your control, and create a treatment.
- Step 4: Conduct the experiment.
- Step 5: Analyze your experiment data.
- Step 6: Conduct a follow-up experiment.
As you go through these steps, be sure you’re recording your hypothesis, test methodology, success criteria, and analysis in a replicable way. My team at HubSpot uses the template below, which was inspired by content from Brian Balfour’s online Reforge Growth programs. We’ve created an editable version in Google Sheets here that you can copy and customize yourself.
Don’t forget the last step in the process: Conduct a follow-up experiment. What can you refine for your next test? How can you make improvements?
6) You give up after a "failed" test.
One of the most important pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten around CRO is this: “A test doesn’t ‘fail’ unless something breaks. You either get the result you want, or you learned something.”
It came from Sam Woods, a growth marketer, CRO, and copywriter at HubSpot, after I used the word “fail” a few too many times after months of unsuccessful tests on a single landing page.
What he taught me was a major part of the CRO mindset: Don’t give up after the first test. (Or the second, or the third.) Instead, approach every test systematically and objectively, putting aside your previous assumptions and any hope that the results would swing one way or the other.
As Peep Laja said, “Genuine CROs are always willing to change their minds.” Learn from tests that didn’t go the way you expected, use them to tweak your hypothesis, and then iterate, iterate, iterate.
I hope this list has inspired you to double down on your CRO skills and take a more systematic approach to your experiments. Mastering conversion rate optimization comes with a steep learning curve — and there’s really no cutting corners. You can save a whole lot of time (and money) by avoiding the mistakes I outlined above.
Have you ever made any of these CRO mistakes? Do you have any CRO mistakes to add to the list? Tell us about your experiences and ideas in the comments.
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Monday, June 26, 2017
Just announced Nashville Show August 23 @ascend_amphitheater...
Just announced Nashville Show August 23 @ascend_amphitheater @thebig98 Tickets go on Sale Thursday #fixadrink #buymeaboat @stjude
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