Blogs about marketing from Pew Pew Laser Blog

Las Vegas Barkers Are the Best in the World.

My daily commute includes a 4 or 5 block walk right to my office in the core of downtown Seattle. Through years of these downtown walks, I've honed my techniques for dealing with signature collectors, beggars, and other petitioners. Most folks get eye contact, a forced smile, and a "Not interested, thanks." which covers a huge variety of their opening gambits.

But in Las Vegas, they have the best barkers in the world. In a mall, one made direct eye contact and excitedly asked "Have you seen it?!?" She went on "The new hair straightening system from blah blah blah?" I was so surprised that I busted out my pointer finger in my defense to add to my firm "Not interested, thanks!".

What Testing and Optimization Can't Do.

Last time, I talked about what optimization testing can do for your site. Now, I'll talk about what it can't do.

• It can't generate new traffic for your site. But optimization testing can help you do more with the traffic that you do get.
• It can't get your web site / IT organization / content management system in order. Testing will require at least one change to the page; and optimization testing can't make a web development team more responsive.
• It can't clarify your web site's marketing objectives. It can tell you how well existing objectives are being met.

What Optimization Testing Can Do.

Optimization - testing to find out which elements drive desired visitor actions - can do a lot for your web pages.

• One of the most obvious benefits to optimization testing is to find out what your page's conversion rate is. And you can find out when that conversion rate drops or increases.
• A good optimization tool can can tell you what segments - specific niches of visitor traffic - exist within your overall traffic.
• Testing can tell you if those expensive Flsh pieces are, in fact, more effective than their static counterparts. Wouldn't it be nice to justify those costs, or to know if you could get better results with something cheaper?
• Most importantly, testing will tell you what is most appealing to visitors; what content changes will drive visitors to conversion actions. How can you possibly know what your visitors like without testing your assumptions?

Ready to start? Very good. If you've got no money, Google has a free optimization tool. Of course, my company has an optimization tool too.

Rich Media Advertising.

Here are some advertising techniques in rich media (video clips) that irritate me.

• Don't show the same advertisement multiple times during a single video. By the end of the clip, I'll hate your product.
• Don't show ads on top of the video that I'm trying to watch. They often appear over subtitles or something else that I'm trying to look at.
• Keep an eye on the playback experience. Give me an option to switch to a low resolution version of the video - not everyone has a good broadband connection. And if the playback chugs, take a good buffering pause to ensure that one pause for buffering is enough.

GoDaddy's Superbowl Ads.

GoDaddy's Superbowl ads are a 4 year old incident turned into a multimedia campaign. I really wish they'd just get over it.

Outlandish CEO Bob Parsons has said these ads are effective at driving traffic to the GoDaddy site. But I wonder how much of that traffic is converting traffic. How many of those folks who came to the site to see boobies also end up registering a domain or buying web hosting services? Is there really a large segment of the population who wants to see boobies and buy domains, but aren't satisfying their boobie-seeing-desires elsewhere on the internet?

I also find the ads tasteless and irritating. The only values these ads promote are traditional beauty; often at the cost of intelligence. What cachet is there to being a GoDaddy girl?

GoDaddy had better hope that irritated female web developers are a small segment of their actual customers. As a current customer, I'm considering voting with my wallet. What domain registration, and very cheap hosting, can you recommend?

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