Sybex.Always.Be.Testing.The.Complete.Guide.to.Google.Website.Optimizer.Aug.2008

Always Be Testing THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO GOOGLE™ WEBSITE OPTIMIZER BRYAN EISENBERG JOHN QUARTOVO NTIVADAR LISA T. DAVIS Wiley Publishing, Inc. Advance praise for Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google™ Website Optimizer I can tell you two things. The first thing is: Testing works. If you’re not doing it well, you’re missing out. The second? Bryan Eisenberg knows what he’s talking about. Time to get started, time to start testing. —Seth Godin, Author of Meatball Sundae Always Be Testing is a very readable and practical guide to landing page testing from an experienced master practitioner. Bryan has emerged from the trenches with actionable advice and detailed testing tips that will make your cash register ring more often. Pick up a copy before your competitors do! —Tim Ash, Author of Amazon’s e-commerce bestseller Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions If you want to become an expert in website testing, this is the place to start. The book’s depth and breadth are particularly impressive, from why testing matters to what and how to test. Bryan and John have com-bined years of experience in persuasive marketing with their deep knowledge of Google Website Optimizer to deliver actionable insights that will make rock stars out of any marketing team. —Tom Leung, Senior Business Product Manager, Google Website Optimizer This is the best collection of practical testing advice that is available today. If you want to get ahead in testing, then you and everyone involved in building and maintaining your website need to read it. Always Be Testing offers basic and advanced testing principles, based on years of experience, that help you opti-mize (with or without Google Website Optimizer) quickly and efficiently. The authors provide practical exercises to help you evaluate your site objectively, tools to help you identify what to test, and resources to expand your knowledge. This book should be required reading for anyone interested in helping online visitors achieve their goals—it easily can save you the time and expense of unproductive results that are due to common mistakes. —Dylan Lewis, Senior Manager, Web Measurement, Intuit By unlocking the secrets of Google Website Optimizer, Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar’s clear prose combined with case studies allows any reader involved in an Internet business to go beyond the typical implementation and redefine their business goals and execution. —Mike Smith, Senior Vice President, Forbes.com This book provides not only valuable insight into the importance of website testing and how to undertake tests that provide meaningful data, but also strategies for dealing with website design and content ele-ments that have a high-ranking advocate but that may be ineffective—or even counterproductive—when it comes to creating sales. —Kurt Peters, Editor in Chief, Internet Retailer Always Be Testing is the essential handbook that gets you testing and keeps you testing. In this game, the difference between Winners and Losers is that Winners take the time to figure out which of their ideas stink. Losers don’t. This book is for everyone who wants to be a Winner!” —Avinash Kaushik, Author of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day Conversion is the Holy Grail for any online business. But testing for conversion—the competitive game changer—has always seemed boring, tedious, and complicated. With Always Be Testing, the job of test-ing your marketing is laid out in a practical fashion that anyone can grasp and do in a way that will practically guarantee your conversion success and blow away your competition. I’m a big fan of Website Optimizer, but this is the first thing I’ve read that really makes it seem practical and simple. —John Jantsch, Author of Duct Tape Marketing This is the 360-degree “firehose” of testing and optimization wisdom. Armed with the knowledge and wisdom in this book, you could run an A/B split between you and your competition and come out the winner. The result-oriented material in here is worth weeks of advanced marketing training. —Sam Decker, Chief Marketing Officer, BazaarVoice Testing has always been a bugbear, because it brings up so much data. And data is cumbersome. So we avoid intense testing. This book points out not just how to go about testing, but more importantly, what to test. And what’s supercool is that you can be up and running in under 15 minutes! That, as you can imagine, is anything but cumbersome—and yes, it actually helps you get clear results instead of another mountain of data. —Sean D’Souza, www.psychotactics.com A: Bryan Eisenberg delivers the What, Why, and How of closing significantly more online sales. B: This is where Eisenberg’s “Call to Action” philosophy gets tactical and you get better results from your website. C: Increase online sales without spending a dime or too much time. This book reveals what it takes and how to use it. D: “Keep on Testin,’” Eddie Kendricks and Robert Crumb. E: All of the above. —Jim Sterne, Targeting.com I have been living and breathing A/B and multivariate testing for the past few years, as illustrated in this book, and I have found that 25 years of experience in this field and best practices still fails in compari-son to the feedback we get from our audience through testing. So many “best practices” mistakes can be prevented by simply putting the subject to a test and letting your audience tell you how they best interact with your product. —Dino Bernardi, Vice President of Customer Experience, Experian Interactive You’ve avoided serious testing on your website because it’s expensive and hard to understand, right? Well, Google Website Optimizer has made testing free, and this book just took away your other excuse. Put this book down now, or you just might double your revenue and give your customers the website they’ve always wanted. Bryan and John tell you why and how to Always Be Testing. If you don’t do it, your competitors will. —Mike Moran, Coauthor of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., and Author of Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules Behind every great sales team is a marketer who understands the power of testing. Let’s face it, sales teams would get no leads without a marketing team that expertly knew how to convert a visitor into a “close.” Always Be Testing by Bryan Eisenberg teaches marketers just that … how effective testing leads to a higher close rate at the very first moment of customer engagement. —Jim Kukral, Internet Marketing Consultant, www.jimkukral.com Everyone talks about the importance of testing, yet few people really do it. Always Be Testing gives you everything you need to become a testing expert. Tools, methods, theory, and practical examples, plus the most important aspect: what to test and why. Keep this book on your desk and use it every day. —John Marshall, Chief Technology Officer, Market Motive Bryan and John have been optimizing websites for over a decade, helping their clients to earn millions of dollars thanks to testing and Persuasion Architecture. They now share their mastery of testing in this practical guide with clear explanations and exercises to ensure an efficient knowledge transfer. Whether you’re new to online testing or a confirmed professional, this is the book you must read on the subject. —René Dechamps Otamendi, OX2 Founder I’m not sure the title does it justice—while a chunk is obviously about Website Optimizer, the book really is so much more since it goes into developing a testing framework, explaining testing methodologies, and suggested testing areas. I guess that’s why it’s called the complete guide! —Maheesh Jain, Cofounder and Vice President of Business Development, CafePress.com Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar take you through not just how to use Google’s free conver-sion testing tool, but continually provide both philosophical reasons and practical tips about why busi-nesses need to test. It’s like having a golf pro take you around a famous course, not just showing you how to play, but also taking you deep into the mental process needed to win the game as well. —Danny Sullivan, Editor-In-Chief, SearchEngineLand.com This book is Eisenberg at his best. Train wrecks in the marketing world can be avoided by performing in-depth analysis of potential interactions with your audience and being open to change. You can avoid the epitome of marketing mistakes, the perfect storm of brand self-love. —Kevin M. Ryan, Vice President and Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch B2B, B2C, or Agency … it doesn’t matter how (or what) you sell, you should always be testing. Bryan Eisenberg (along with John Quarto-vonTivadar and Lisa T. Davis) have done it again! Always Be Test-ing is a great read—even if you’re not using Google Website Optimizer (and, why aren’t you? … it’s free). The insights, strategies, and tactics in Always Be Testing constantly give you the “why didn’t I think of that” feeling. Always Be Testing should come with a cold compress for the many times you’ll be whacking yourself on the forehead. After reading Always Be Testing, you’ll begin wondering why you did any mar-keting campaigns any other way. —Mitch Joel, President, Twist Image and Blogger/Podcaster, Six Pixels of Separation For years companies have tried to develop the best website, even shamelessly copying from the so-called “best of breed.” The reality is that although technology can be copied, although business processes can be inspired from best practices, humans can’t be that easily copied. If one of the distinctive elements of any company is its workforce, the decisive factor is understanding the client. And the only way to know if our website works for our clients is to test, measure, and optimize our Persuasion Architecture®. A continuous improvement process isn’t complete until we reach 100% success. . .in the meantime, read this book, learn a whole lot about testing, see what others are doing, and get plenty of ideas to get going! —Stephane Hamel, eBusiness Strategist and Web Analytics Consultant, Immeria.net ... - tailieumienphi.vn