Oct
30
We all know about the power of the negative - reverse psychology, as experts like to call it. The fact that you’re reading this despite the title just illustrates the point perfectly (and by the way, the kitten’s happily lapping up a bowl of milk so fear not for her).
David Meerman Scott blogs about the fact that the web is the perfect place to try out such tactics to see if they could work for you to bring more visitors to your website. For example, when he relabelled a link ´For Executives only’, the traffic to that link suddenly shot up. I wonder why!
Still, the main point here is that your website gives you the freedom to make changes instantly and see their effect within a few days - or even hours - something you simply cannot do with a printed ad or a brochure.
In the so-called old media - traditional media like print, radio, and television - testing and improving your advertising is time-consuming (often something that takes months or more) and despite the huge benefits, few companies actually do it. On the Internet it’s a snap, but still very few businesses actually bother, either because they don’t know they can, or because they imagine it’s a waste of time.
And yet it has been demonstrated time and time again that even a minor change like tweaking a headline or replacing an image can have a huge and disproportionate impact on the performance of your website. The thing is that there is no way to know what works best without testing.
We see this all the time with the Pay-Per-Click ads we run for our clients - changing a couple of words in a headline, or even changing the order of the two lines of ad text - often results in a considerable boost in the ad’s performance. Just the sort of thing that you’d never know unless you tried!
At Sorted Sites, we already offer you this kind of service, where we tweak various elements of your website and track performance, to make incremental improvements that could double your conversions, triple them, or more! And we are also looking into advanced software technology that will allow us to speed up the process further by running multiple tests at the same time.
Watch this space!
Comments
5 Responses to “Don’t read this post or the kitten gets it!”
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View John Beckley's profile
Yikes! I was worried about the kitten. Thanks for expanding on my ideas,
Best - David
I only read this because I HATE CATS!
- Ryan
Well, sorry to disappoint you Ryan. And the kitten says ‘Hi’
Andrew
Sometimes we have a theory, like Executives only, appeals to status or need for self esteem, but as you rightly say, it’s only in the testing that you get your results. I tweaked my site a lot - headline and contact girl image to get improved results and returning visitors. Test, test..
What on EARTH is a CAT doing on a marketing blog :). Of course the post is good as well.
- Chris