But none of that explains what COVID-19 really is.

What is a coronavirus? How does it work? What does it do to the body? Let’s take a look.

What are Coronaviruses?

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses. They’re called “corona” (latin for “crown”) viruses because of the spiky projections on their surface.

Coronaviruses can infect birds, mammals, and sometimes humans. They’re a very common type of virus.

In fact, if you’ve ever had a common cold (and who hasn’t?), there’s a good chance that you’ve been infected by a coronavirus before. About 20% of common colds are caused by coronaviruses.

However, this isn’t the first time this family of viruses has caused major problems. If you remember the SARS pandemic of 2002-2003 or the MERS outbreak of 2015, those were caused by coronaviruses, too.

In fact, there are so many similarities between COVID-19 and the SARS coronavirus that it’s technically called SARS-CoV-2. You won’t hear anyone refer to it that way on the street, but it just goes to show how closely related these two viruses are.

Thankfully, though, the mortality rate of COVID-19 is much lower than the mortality rate of either SARS or MERS. If those coronaviruses had spread as widely as COVID-19, the death toll might have been 2-5x higher.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that while COVID-19 might not be as deadly as some of the other coronaviruses out there, it’s a heck of a lot deadlier than the common cold…and just as contagious.

This unique blend of traits that have made COVID-19 particularly hard to control. As a result, this novel coronavirus isn’t just affecting a country or small region—it’s affecting the world.

How COVID-19 Works

Coronaviruses are lipid-enveloped viruses. That means each individual virus is like a little self-delivering package surrounded by the same sort of membrane that protects our own cells.

Now, if you remember your high school biology, viruses aren’t technically “alive”. They reproduce, but they can’t do it on their own—they have to hijack living cells to replicate.

To watch the process in action, check out the video below.

To put it simply, the spiky projections—or “crown”—on the outside of the coronavirus are proteins that respond to specific proteins on the outside of human cells.

You can think of it like a lock and a key. When the “key” on the outside of the virus (called a “spy protein”) finds the right “lock” on the outside of a cell (called an ACE2 receptor), it clicks into place.

Once the virus locks into place, it merges with the host cell, releasing its genetic material (called RNA) into the host cell. The RNA then takes over the cell and forces it to produce new coronaviruses.

Eventually, it all proves to be too much for the host cell and it dies, releasing all of the new coronaviruses it just manufactured. From there, all of those new viruses are free to infect new cells and start the whole process over.

How COVID-19 Affects Your Lungs

Since you usually get COVID-19 by inhaling airborne droplets of water with the virus in them (released when an infected person breathes, coughs, or sneezes), the virus is designed to go after your lungs. It is a respiratory disease after all.

COVID-19 vs Your Lungs

The ACE2 receptors that COVID-19 targets seem to primarily show up on goblet cells (which produce mucus) and ciliated cells (which clear away dirt, much and…you guessed it, viruses) in the lungs.

Both of these types of cells are important parts of how your lungs protect themselves. For your lungs to work properly, they need to stay moist. That’s what your goblet cells are for.

Your lungs also need to stay clean, which is why you have ciliated cells to move stuff out of the lungs and into the throat where it is swallowed and destroyed by your stomach acid.

When these types of cells don’t do their jobs, it creates an ideal environment for COVID-19. The cells in the lungs start to dry out—making them more vulnerable to invasion—and the viruses released after a host cell dies don’t get cleared away by the cilia.

Instead, the virus has plenty of time and opportunity to infect new cells and continue the cycle of destruction.

Your Immune System vs Your Lungs

To make matters worse, once your body discovers that your lungs are infected, it goes on the warpath. However, it takes time to develop and replicate white blood cells that can specifically target COVID-19.

So, your body does what it can in the meantime. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have antibodies to tell it which cells are infected and which ones are healthy, so it just attacks everything in the area.

You can think about it like this. Antibodies are like a covert ops expert lighting up a building for a laser-guided missile. In this scenario, you can blow up the target building and leave the ones next to it standing.

But, to do that, you need a covert ops expert on the ground.

For your body, that expert is your antibodies. They light up infected cells and tell your immune system “kill this now!”

Without that covert ops expert, though, you’re shooting blind. You just have to bomb everything and hope that you hit your target.

This is what your body does to your lungs early on. It can’t distinguish healthy cells from infected ones, so it bombs everything in the area and hopes for the best.

Unfortunately, since COVID-19 is already doing a number on your goblet and ciliated cells, there isn’t a good way to clear all of resulting debris away. Your lungs get congested and you may end up with pneumonia.

If your body can’t get things under control, COVID-19 and your immune system end up punching holes in your lungs. When this happens, you develop respiratory failure and may, sadly, die.

COVID-19 Symptoms

Now that we’ve talked about how COVID-19 affects the body, the symptoms of COVID-19 should make a lot of sense.

Generally speaking, the most common symptoms will be:

• Fever (the result of your immune system ramping up)
• Shortness of breath (due to all of the junk in your lungs)
• Cough (from body trying to force all of the junk in your lungs out)

If you’re under 60 years old and aren’t at high-risk for severe illness (no lung disease, serious heart conditions, asthma, severe obesity, diabetes, kidney failure, liver disease, pregnant, etc and not immunocompromised or in a nursing home) and develop these symptoms, you’ll probably be just fine.

However, if things get really bad, you may develop the following symptoms (call your doctor if you develop any of the following):

• Trouble breathing
• Persistent pain or pressure in the chest
• Bluish lips or face

All of these symptoms are due to your lungs filling up with fluid. As a result, you can’t get enough air.

In addition, you may also experience other symptoms due to an exaggerated immune response, like unusual confusion, grogginess or increased pain sensitivity. Up to half of COVID-19 patients experience nausea, vomiting, and/or diarrhea, so that’s a possibility, too.

By the way, as a quick aside on fever, you can actually have a lot of variation in your body temperature based on time of day, where and how you are measuring, and what your personal baseline temperature is.

So, if you have a temperature of 99 degrees Farenheit, you don’t necessarily have a fever. If it pops above 100.4 degrees, though, it’s definitely something to pay attention to.

If you have manageable symptoms and you’re worried that you might have COVID-19, call your doctor—don’t go into the office without talking to a healthcare professional first. Showing up unannounced is a surefire way to spread it to other people.

If you’re experiencing more severe symptoms, call the hospital. As with visiting the doctor’s office, it’s best to give them warning in advance. That way, hospital staff can protect themselves and their patients.

All in all, COVID-19 isn’t something most people need to be scared of.

Our bodies have handled this sort of respiratory illness before. They know what they’re doing. They’ll beat this virus and many viruses to come. You may notice some symptoms if you catch COVID-19, but you’ll probably be fine.

The Problem with COVID-19

So why is COVID-19 such a big deal? Our bodies beat rhinoviruses, coronaviruses and influenza viruses every yea. Why are we so worked up about this one?

Well, the simple fact of the matter is that while you may get this coronavirus and do just fine, this virus could be a death sentence for many people—and you might just be surprised by who it claims.

For example, I’m a fit, physically active guy in my mid-thirties. Most people would look at me and think, “He’s definitely safe.”

However, I’m actually at high-risk for severe illness. I’m immunosuppressed and have an immune system disorder. Casual exposure to COVID-19 could kill me.

But no one would ever expect that.

To make matters worse, you can have COVID-19 and not even realize it. You may infect, hospitalize and possibly kill people—all without even realizing that you’re a carrier for the disease.

We’ll cover all of the potential implications of this in a future article, but it makes things pretty dangerous for people at high-risk for severe illness—and it’s part of the reason why we are seeing such rapid spread of the disease here in the USA.

Like SARS—its parent virus—catching COVID-19 can have lifelong consequences. So, if we aren’t collectively careful, our negligence can put people in the hospital…or worse.

Conclusion

All of this information is why doctors, businesses, and governments worldwide are taking COVID-19 so seriously.

As a virus, COVID-19 is incredibly good at its job. It’s highly contagious, survives for prolonged periods on surfaces, and can be transmitted to a new host before the original host is even aware that they have the virus.

Couple all that literal virality with a disease process that can maim or kill the host, and is it any wonder that we have a global pandemic on our hands?

Now that the USA has more reported cases of COVID-19 than any other country in the world, this isn’t a disease we can take lightly. COVID-19 is here to stay and, if we aren’t wise about how we respond, the effects of this novel Coronavirus on our communities, economy, and nation will be profound.

The post Understanding COVID-19: How It Works appeared first on Aden Andrus.

It’s taken me years of training to learn how to get inside my audience’s head, but the conversion rates I get are simply out of this world.

Now, you may not be able to read your visitors’ minds (let’s face it, the Force isn’t strong in everyone’s family), but that doesn’t mean you can’t be an expert in psychological warfare.

The truth is, business empires aren’t built on logic.

People rely on a variety of emotional cognitive biases to make decisions—online or otherwise—and with a few simple tricks, even the Force-insensitive can influence people do their bidding (er, convert on their page).

So, join with me and experience the full power of conversion rate optimization!

1. Color Usage

While most people know that specific colors can create different emotional responses, they often don’t know how effective they can be.

The Sith know better…why do you think our lightsabers are red?

Red is the color of passion, anger, hate, power…but I digress.

Color has a powerful influence on your audience’s ability to connect with an idea visually and emotionally. In general, warm colors like red, orange and yellow are typically associated with happiness, optimism and urgency (and power…).

Neutral colors give your pages a clean and open feel to balance out the other hues that may be competing for attention.

For example, I have all of my stormtroopers wear white. This is a stupid color for an army—it’s hard to keep clean, creates so much glare that it’s impossible to shoot straight and makes you an easy target for the enemy.

But, believe me, the white armor is totally worth it, because when I step out of my shuttle with my legions, you know every eye is going to be on me and my sweet red lightsaber.

Make sense?

So, warm colors for power, neutrals to make sure you (or the most important thing on your page) get noticed. And then, we have the cool colors like blue, green and purple.

Sure, people find these colors calming and soothing, but who wants that? If you ask me, cool colors make you look like a wimp.

I mean, have you ever met a Jedi and thought, “Oh, that blue lightsaber is so scary!”

Okay…I take it back. That is scary.

In any case, depending on how you want to influence your audience, you can pick different colors to evoke specific emotions. For more information, check out this article.

2. Social Proof

Social proof is important. You may say that you have a world-killer weapon, but most people will think you are just posturing.

On the other hand, actually blow up a planet and social media will go nuts!

@reyintraining @EmoKyloR3n The Death Star blew up my home planet! #sadday #wherewereyou #deathstarwannabe pic.twitter.com/vWj7Ans4D2

— Aden Andrus (@AdenAndrus) June 24, 2016

Once people start saying, hey, “the Empire blew up my planet!” you can use those sorts of testimonials to make your landing page more compelling.

Another great way to make your business seem more credible is to link your business to a bigger, better-known person or company.

For example, I do this with Darth Vader’s mask.

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t struggle with short man syndrome…no really, I don’t!

I parade Vader’s mask around because it makes me more credible. Darth Vader was a bad dude—he killed a lot of people.

Therefore, if I keep his mask in my bedroom and whisper sweet nothings to it, I must be a pretty bad dude too.

It’s just simple psychology…not short man syndrome.

Make Your Social Proof Compelling

Now, you might tempted to only include perfect, unbelievably wonderful reviews of your product or business, but people want to feel like your reviews are genuine.

Sure, I’ve got trillions of reviews and testimonials like this:

Oh my gosh, Kylo Ren is the absolute best! He’s so powerful and awesome. I love his mask and his lightsaber with the mind-blowing mini-crossguard.

Yes, that’s a real testimonial, but for some reason, people seem to resonate better with a testimonial like this:

I used to be part of the Rebellion, but then I realized that the Empire just wants to make the galaxy a better place for everyone. That’s a cause I really believe in.

Now you know why I keep the rebellion around. Nothing sells like a redemption story!

Putting “authentic” reviews (okay, I admit that getting that testimonial took a bit of Force persuasion) like that in a prominent spot on your landing page creates a natural trust between you and your customer. And, if they trust you, they are much more likely to convert.

3. Scarcity

Fear is a powerful motivator. In fact, I think we need to add that to the Sith code…

Anyways, to create fear, all you have to do is make people think they are about to lose something. For example, it’s a lot more effective to say, “Tell me what I want to know or I’ll kill you” than “Would you mind revealing the location of Luke Skywalker to me?”

In other words, answer me or you’ll soon have a scarcity of life…

See? Isn’t that motivating?

Using this tactic in selling a product or service can be a great way to get people off the fence and into action. Depending on your audience, though, you may not want to threaten them with death.

Instead, phrases like “limited time offer” or “act fast before they’re all gone!” can be a surprisingly effective way to get people to convert on your page. In addition to creating a sense of urgency, this can also increase the perceived value of your product or service.

The moral of the story? Whether you’re interrogating a prisoner or crafting a landing page, scarcity is your friend.

4. Visual Cues

Finally, people follow visual cues. Why else do you think we Sith gesture when we manipulate people’s minds?

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to make certain gestures to pull off a “Jedi mind trick.” However, waving your hand in front of someone’s face lets them know that you are about to manipulate their mind.

Since they are expecting to be psychically pushed into doing something, they are much more likely to do it (to be honest, half the time I don’t even use the Force…I just wave my hand and people think I’m using the Force, so they do what I tell them to).

See what I mean? People follow visual cues.

You can use the same “mind tricks” to get people to convert. For example, a hero shot of someone who is looking at your form or call-to-action directs your visitor to what they should be doing on your page—converting.

Don’t you feel a compelling urge to look at the form…this is the form you’ve been looking for, right?

In fact, you don’t even have to be that subtle about it—try using big arrows on your page to direct people to where you want them to be looking!

If you are clever, you can find a variety of ways to use this technique. For example, if you have an especially long landing page, try using navigational markers to break up the flow and keep the content interesting at the viewer scrolls down.

You may not be Force-sensitive, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play tricks on your audience’s minds.

Conclusion

With these 4 psychological tricks in hand, you might not be a Dark Lord of the Conversions, but you’re well on your way to building your own empire.

Remember, people don’t convert because of logic, they convert because you make it easy for them. And that, my young apprentice, is the secret to the Dark Side…

The post Mind tricks: Kylo Ren’s guide to landing page optimization appeared first on Aden Andrus.

So how do you create the ideal Facebook audience?

To be honest, the perfect Facebook audience will vary from company-to-company and even campaign-to-campaign. That’s why it’s so important to know who your audience is and what tools you can use to target them.

We’ll leave defining your buyer personas and target market up to you (for help with that, check out this article), but in this article, we’re going to teach you how to use that information to build the right Facebook audience(s) for your campaigns.

Creating a Facebook Audience

Thankfully, creating a Facebook audience is fairly straightforward. For anything audiences-related on Facebook, you use the Audience Manager tool.

To access this tool, click on the top right-hand menu on Facebook and select “Audiences”.

Here, you’ll be able to see all of the Facebook audiences that you’ve built and access Facebook’s suite of options for building new ones.

There are three basic types of Facebook audience:

1. Saved Audiences
2. Custom Audiences
3. Lookalike Audiences

Within each of these types of audiences, you have a ton of options that you can use to refine your targeting. So, let’s take a look at each of these audience types and what you can do with them.

Facebook Saved Audiences

Saved Audiences allow you to combine what you know about your target market with what Facebook knows about its users. To put it simply, Facebook gives you a list of user characteristics (location, interests, behaviors, income level, etc) and you tell Facebook which characteristics you want to target.

Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a guessing game, since how Facebook defines which people have which characteristics is often fairly broad and somewhat unclear. Age and gender are pretty straightforward, but how does Facebook know whether or not someone is actually interested in cars…or just liking posts about cars because they have the hots for the poster?

As a result, while Saved Audiences can be a great way to target broad groups of new potential customers, the results can often be a little mixed. It’s all a balancing act between audience size and specificity, so let’s take a look at your options.

Location Targeting

With this option, you can target people based on location. All you have to do is type in the region, place or even address of the location you want to target:

From there, you can either target just that specific location or that location plus a radius around it. Once you’ve chosen your target location, you have a variety of ways to target people relative to that location:

• Everyone in this location. This is the default targeting option. Not very specific, but it allows you to target anyone in your target location.
• People who live in this location. A great option for local businesses or advertisers who are trying to attract locals.
• People recently in this location. Since this option is based on mobile device usage, it can be a bit subjective, but if you want to target people who recently passed through an area, this is the option you should choose.
• People traveling to this location. This option sounds like a great one for travel agencies, but it’s actually based on travel history—not travel plans. Basically, it allows you to target people who set your target area as a recent location…and live at least 100 miles away. Very odd targeting option, but if it fits your needs, go for it!

As you can see, even in simple location targeting, Facebook gives you a lot of ways to get specific. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, we haven’t even gotten to the fun stuff yet.

Demographics Targeting

Demographics targeting is pretty straightforward. It allows you to target people based on “facts” about them and their lives. I put “facts” in quotes here because it’s Facebook—people lie about themselves all the time.

For example, my Facebook profile lists my age as five years older than I actually am. Why? It’s actually an inside joke with my mom (based on my Facebook “age”, she would have had me when she was 15).

So, just because someone says they’re part of your target demographic, that doesn’t always mean it’s true…

But, putting that aside, demographics targeting is actually quite useful and more flexible than you might think. To begin with, you can target people by the basics: age, gender and language.

However, Facebook has a lot more than that. In fact, thanks to the nature of the site, Facebook probably has more demographic information about its users than almost any other advertising site.

Want to target people based on their political views? Job title? Relationship status? Recent life events? Ethnicity? You can do all of that and much, much more with demographic targeting. There are so many options that we won’t get into all of them here, but demographic targeting is a great, fairly reliable way to narrow down your Facebook audience.

Interest Targeting

Interest targeting takes Facebook’s already robust demographics targeting and puts it on steroids. Here, you have the ability to target people based on what Facebook believes they care about.

Now, these targeting criteria are based on the specifically indicated interests listed on a users’ profile, but that’s just the beginning. Because people don’t always list every interest they have, Facebook also looks at user behavior: what sorts of content they engage with, pages that they like, etc.

As a result, interest targeting is something of a complicated blend of fact and algorithmic extrapolation. While interest targeting on Facebook is certainly subjective, it can be used to create surprisingly responsive Facebook audiences, so the algorithms seem to be pretty good at identifying interests.

To target an interest, you can either browse through hundreds of different interest categories or type in an interest directly. The latter option has the added advantage of showing you related interests, so I generally recommend starting with that one.

Behavior Targeting

Finally, we have behavior targeting. Of all the targeting options we’ve discussed so far, behavior targeting is definitely the most subjective.

Rather than grouping people based on demographic data or things they have shown an interest in, behavior targeting tries to group users based on how they act. So, if you want to target people who look like they’re planning a trip, this is a great option to consider.

The problem, of course, is that Facebook doesn’t actually know that a user is planning a trip. They just know that a user is engaging in behaviors that are consistent with planning a trip.

As a result, behavior targeting tends to either be brilliantly effective…or fairly useless. The only real way to know is to create an audience and test it out.

Refining Your Audience

Finally, if all the options above weren’t enough, Facebook also gives you the ability to use AND/OR criteria to refine your audience further.

To use these options, click “Narrow Further” at the bottom of the targeting section.

By choosing the OR option, you increase the size of your audience. A user who meets at least one of your OR characteristics is eligible to be included in your audience.

By using the AND option, you decrease the size of your audience. Users must meet all of your AND characteristics in order to be included in your audience.

In the end, by combining AND/OR qualifiers with Facebook’s demographic, interest and behavior targeting options, you can usually create a targeted, but decently-sized audience for your ads. It won’t be a perfect audience by any means, but it should be a pretty good fit for your needs.

Facebook Custom Audiences

Unlike Saved Audiences, Custom Audiences are primarily based on your data—not Facebook’s. Here, you have the ability to target people based on how they’ve interacted with your business: you can upload a list of emails or phone numbers, track visitors to your site, build an audience of people who use your app or target users who engage with your content on Facebook.

Custom Audiences are incredibly valuable audiences. After all, with Custom Audiences, you aren’t trying to guess at who will be interested in your business. You already know that these people are interested—you’re just building an audience around them.

Let’s take a look at how to create each of these different types of custom audiences.

Creating a Customer File Audience

Want to get your ads in front of your existing customers? If you’ve got their email addresses or phone numbers, creating a Customer File audience is the way to go.

Once you’ve created a customer file with all of your customers, here’s what you’ll need to do:

1. Create a new Facebook Custom Audience and choose “Customer File”
2. Choose the add a customer file option
3. Import your customer data
4. Choose the relevant identifiers (email, phone number, etc)
5. Upload your customer file
6. Name your custom audience

It’s really as simple as that. Now, while email is the most popular identifier for Customer File audiences (with phone number a distant second), there are actually a variety of other identifiers like “mobile advertiser ID” that you can use as well. So, if you’re short on emails, but you have a list with alternative identifiers, you may still be able to create a Customer File audience.

Creating a Website Traffic Audience

Website traffic audiences allow you to build an audience of people who have visited your website (or even specific pages on your site). These audiences are most commonly used for retargeting campaigns.

The great thing about website traffic audiences is that you’re not targeting a cold audience. These people have already visited your site, so you know that they were at least interested enough in what you’re selling to check out your content in the past.

To build a website traffic audience, you’ll need to install the Facebook Pixel on your website. This will drop a “cookie” into the browser of everyone who visits your site and allow Facebook to identify their user profile.

Once your Facebook Pixel is up and running, all you have to do is create a Custom Audience and choose the website traffic option.

Here, you have a variety of targeting options to choose from:

• Anyone who visits your website
• People who visit specific pages on your site
• People who visit specific pages but not others
• People who haven’t visited your website for a while

You can also create custom combinations of criteria for your audience, but we won’t get into that here.

In general, the main goal of website traffic audiences is to stay in front of people who have visited your site. They might not have been ready to buy the first time around, but if you can stay on their radar and address any concerns they might have, you may be able to get them to come back and convert.

Creating an App Activity Audience

If you have an iOS or Android app and you want to target your users with ads on Facebook, this is the option for you. Otherwise, you can skip to the next section.

To target Facebook users based on app activity, the first thing you’ll need to do is register your app and set up app events. Then, create a Custom Audience on Facebook and choose the app activity option.

From there, you’ll be able to specify specific events in your app (last login, purchase event,  etc) that you want to use as criteria for your audience. So, if you want to target people based on how long it’s been since their last purchase on your app, that’s actually fairly easy to do with this type of Custom Audience.

App Activity audiences are fairly specific, but if you have a large audience of users and you want to advertise to them, this is a great option to try.

Creating an Engagement Audience

Finally, you can create an audience based on how people have interacted with your content on Facebook. Generally speaking, this type of audience is useful for one of two types of situations

1. You have a strong organic presence on Facebook and want to capitalize on it.
2. You are building a marketing funnel and want to move people to the next stage of your funnel after they show an interest in your ads.

If you don’t get a ton of engagement on your social media posts—which is fairly common for businesses these days—you probably won’t get a lot of value from pursuing option #1 above. However, option #2 is actually a great way to build out a marketing funnel.

These days, Facebook is basically pay-to-play for businesses, but with engagement audiences, you can run top-of-the-funnel ads and then build an audience around people who respond to those ads.

With this audience type, you can target people who have:

• Checked out your Facebook Page
• Engaged with your Facebook Page posts or ads
• Clicked a call-to-action button
• Messaged your Page
• Saved your Page or posts

These options give you a variety of ways to reach out to people who are engaging with your upper-funnel content. It’s basically remarketing…but for people who engage with your brand on Facebook, not the ones who visit your website.

Engagement audiences are much more niche than customer file or website audiences, but if they’re a good fit for your business, they’re a great option to try.

Facebook Lookalike Audiences

In many ways, Lookalike Audiences are almost a hybrid between Saved Audiences and Custom Audiences. One of the big problems with Custom Audiences is that they are often fairly small. Many businesses only have a few thousand customer emails, so the reach of their customer file campaigns is pretty limited.

With Lookalike Audiences, however, you can target people who are similar to your Custom Audiences. It will still be a cold audience, but ideally, these people should be as interested in your business as the people in your Custom Audiences.

Essentially, Lookalike Audiences are like creating your own custom behavior or interest grouping. Using your Custom Audience, you show Facebook what characteristics you want their algorithm to look for and then Facebook builds an audience around those traits.

To create a Lookalike Audience, you’ll need to select the Custom Audience you want to Facebook to build off of and then choose which countries you want to target. From there, you’ll be able to select what percentage (1-10%) of those countries’ Facebook users you want to reach.

As you can probably imagine, the lower the percentage of users you target, the more your audience will resemble your Custom Audience. The higher the percentage, the loser Facebook’s inclusion criteria will be.

Like many of Facebook’s Saved Audiences targeting options, Lookalike Audiences can be a bit hit-and-miss. For certain niche businesses, they can be a great way to create hyper-focused campaigns. For other companies, they can be a waste of money. To see how they work for you, you’ll just have to test them out.

Narrowing Down Your Audience

Given all of these targeting options and Facebook’s massive userbase, it should come as no surprise that sometimes your audiences can end up rather large. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but since specifics sell, it can often be helpful to narrow down your audience a bit.

In addition to all of the options listed above, Facebook also gives you the ability to refine your targeting using exclusions.

To exclude people with certain characteristics from your audience, click on “Exclude People” at the bottom of the “Detail Targeting” section. From there, you’ll be able to choose which audiences you want to exclude from your targeting.

Conclusion

Your Facebook audience can make or break your advertising campaigns. You can have the most brilliant ads ever created, but if you’re trying to market nursing bras to 60-year-old men, you won’t get the results you’re looking for.

But, if you take the time to create the right Facebook audience, you can set your ads up for success. Your content will show up in front of the right people at the right time—which is at least half the battle in marketing.

Have any Facebook targeting tips to share? Stories of Facebook audiences gone wrong? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

The post How to Create the Right Facebook Audience for Your Ads appeared first on Aden Andrus.

While that’s what many marketers and business owners believe, they couldn’t be more wrong.

Email marketing is still alive and thriving. Though it’s certainly true that email marketing isn’t as new and exciting to your customers as it once was, it’s now a time-tested marketing approach that most people accept (and even invite) in their inbox.

So, should you invest in email marketing? Well, only you can answer that question, but to help you find the right answer for your business, let’s take a look at the current statistics surrounding email marketing.

Market Penetration

As with any marketing channel, if you’re trying to decide whether email marketing is worth the investment, the first thing you need to look at is market penetration. Is email marketing a good way to reach your target audience?

To answer that question, let’s take a look at some numbers.

First off, in 2020, there will be an estimated 4,073,000,000 email users—that means half of the people on Earth (and keep in mind that 26% of the Earth’s population is under 14) have at least one email account. Better still, 99% of consumers check their email at least once per day, so email marketing is perhaps the only way to get in front of 50% of Earth’s population every single day.

To put it simply, if your target audience is online, they have an email account…and they check it every day.

But what about the younger generation? Sure, Generation X grew up in the era of email, so they’re probably still using it, but what about millennials?

As it turns out, 73% of millennials prefer to receive business communications via email. 56% of millennials sign up for marketing emails to learn about on-going deals…wheras just 28% search for deals on Facebook. So, if you want to promote your deals to millennials, what’s the best channel to use? Probably email.

And if you’re specifically targeting women? Yeah, it’s pretty hard to beat email marketing.

67% of women sign up for emails to get access to deals and promotions (vs 57% of men). 88% of women subscribe because of some sort of promotion (vs 70% of men). 65% of women have signed up for email marketing in return for a “free” product (vs 44% of men).

To really make this point concrete, here are just a few more email marketing statistics to help you get a sense for just how significant email marketing is.

Where and when people check their email:

• Formal events like a wedding (6%)
• While driving (14%)
• Working out (16%)
• Middle of conversations (18%)
• While watching TV (69%)
• Commuting to/from work (32%)
• Eating dinner (32%)
• While walking (34%)
• While on the phone (38%)
• In bed (54%)
• While using the toilet (43%)

Long story short? With email marketing, you can reach your target market—anywhere and at any time.

The Problem with Email Marketing

Male, female, old, young…they all use email, and they all are interested in email marketing to one degree or another. So why, then, does email marketing get such a bad rap?

To answer that question, we need to look at some statistics about the actual emails people are getting.

In 2020, there will be an estimated 306.4 billion emails sent every day. Compare that to the 4.073 billion email users worldwide and the average person is receiving 75 emails a day!

Now, 56% of those emails are spam, so if we assume that none of those emails are ever seen (not true), that still means that the average email user is getting 33 emails a day…and that’s worldwide.

However, there are a lot of assumptions in that statement. To get a better estimate of just how many emails people have to filter through each day, Radicati ran a study on office workers worldwide. Since this is probably a decent sampling of your target market, their data is probably more indicative of the email load marketing emails are competing with.

According to Radicati’s findings, the average office worker receives 126 emails a day. 30 of those emails are blocked by spam filters, which means that most office workers have 96 emails a day to get through.

That’s a lot of clutter.

When you’re competing against almost 100 emails, it can be hard to stand out and get noticed. And it gets worse. Just 75% of US consumers find email marketing annoying.

This presents a conundrum. As of 2016, almost 72% of US consumers subscribe to email from 4 or more brands. However, 57% of consumers unsubscribe because they don’t like the emails they’re getting…and over 75% of US consumers find email advertising at least “kind of annoying”.

What does all of this mean? Well, to put it simply, people want to get marketing emails in their inbox—they just don’t like the emails that they’re actually getting.

Does Email Marketing Actually Work?

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “I know you said at the beginning of this article that email marketing works, but I’m not seeing any evidence here.” And, you’re right…email marketing doesn’t work. At least, it doesn’t work if you approach it the wrong way.

Email marketing is full of untapped potential and unmet expectations. After all, how many online marketing channels can you think of where people actually deliberately ask you to market to them?

Paid search? Only 18% of people who recognize text ads as ads actually click on them and 41% active avoid clicking on them.

YouTube? Nope. So many people dislike YouTube Ads that Google even offers people the option to pay to remove ads.

Facebook? You can argue that people follow business Pages because they want to be marketed to, but with the death of organic reach, it’s clear that most people don’t want to see business content on Facebook. And, the fact that Facebook Ads have a lower average clickthrough rate than Google Display Ads just proves that people don’t actually want to be marketed to on Facebook.

But email? As we’ve already pointed out, people intentionally sign up for email marketing lists because they want to hear about discounts and promotions. They’re asking businesses to market to them!

The problem, then, must be with the businesses themselves—not email marketing in general.

Email Marketing Works

Want proof? The average return-on-investment for a decent email marketing program is 38:1. Yes, you read that right. That’s $38 in return on every $1 spent on email marketing.

Here are a few other statistics that show just how effective good email marketing can be:

• 27.1% of American adults said they purchased a product from a retail store after receiving an email about it.
• 72% of people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media.
• Email marketing is a 40x more effective way to acquire new customers than Facebook or Twitter.
• You are 6x more likely to get a click from an email campaign than you are from a tweet.
• Email subscribers are 3x more likely to share your content via social media than visitors from other sources.

So yes, when done correctly, email marketing absolutely works. In fact, it’s easily the most effective and profitable online marketing channel out there. The problem isn’t that email marketing doesn’t work, it’s that businesses don’t do what it takes to make it work.

Where Businesses Struggle

The real problem with email marketing isn’t that your potential customers don’t like it. The real problem is that good email marketing takes work—a lot of it.

For example, relevant emails sent to segmented lists get 14.64% more email opens, drive 59.99% more clicks and drive 18x more revenue than broadcast emails sent to all subscribers. Why? Specificity sells.

But the problem is, specificity also takes a lot more work.

Segmenting your lists and creating specific emails targeted to those lists takes a lot more time and effort than simply writing one basic email and blasting your entire list. And, the more work something is, the less likely businesses are to do it.

As a result, while 81% of online shoppers who received emails based on previous shopping habits were at least somewhat likely to make a purchase as a result of targeted email, just 39% of online retailers send personalized product recommendations.

In fact, this applies to every aspect of email marketing. Emails with personalized subject lines generate 50% higher open rates, but how often do you actually get a personalized email? Not often. Sending 3 abandonment cart email results in 69% more orders than a single email, but most of the time, businesses only send one email at best.

And, ultimately, an unwillingness to invest the necessary time and effort into email marketing keeps 44% of businesses from even getting into email marketing.

Now, that reduces the number of emails we have to compete with, so it’s actually good for the rest of us. But, it just goes to show how many businesses would rather throw more money at driving traffic than actually building a meaningful email marketing strategy—even when the ROI is 10x higher.

The only question is, are you one of them?

The data is clear: email marketing is one of the best ways to grow a business. However, like anything worth doing, email marketing takes thought, work and planning. If you aren’t willing to make that investment, you’ll just end up frustrated.

Conclusion

So does email marketing work? Perhaps a better question should be, are you willing to work? As marketers, we’re all looking for shiny new solutions—exciting ways to produce a quick overnight “win”.

Email marketing doesn’t work that way.

If you’re looking to get a ton of new people to your site in the hopes of saving your business, email marketing is the wrong choice for you. But, if you’re looking for a proven, long-term, sustainable way to grow, email marketing may just be the secret to success. It will take time and effort, but if you keep at it, email will usually become your most profitable online marketing channel.

By the way, if you don’t want to tackle email marketing on your own, let us know here or in the comments. We’d love to help you get your email marketing set up right!

How do you feel about email marketing? Do you agree with this article? Did any of these statistics surprise you? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

The post Should You Be Investing in Email Marketing? Statistics for 2020 appeared first on Aden Andrus.

Instead, you’ve probably run into a problem with your site…one that you hope optimizing your website speed will solve.

Maybe your bounce rate is high. Maybe your online marketing results are poor. Maybe your friend (or worse, a client) sent you a text saying, “I tried to check out your site and it took forever to load.”

Regardless of why you’re here reading this article, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’re going to go over what you can do to evaluate and improve the speed of your website—without hiring a developer to go over your site with a fine-tooth comb.

Why Does Website Speed Matter?

These days, we all expect instantaneous gratification. We want our food to be ready now, groceries (and pretty much everything else) delivered to our door, packages to arrive in two days (or less)…and web pages to load in less than a second.

In fact, according to Google, simply increasing the load time of a page from 1 second to 3 seconds increases the bounce rate by 32%. And that’s just a difference of 2 seconds! At a 10 second load time, bounce rate goes up by 123%.

Since Google’s goal is to connect people with the web pages and sites that they’re looking for, they pay a lot of attention to things that increase bounce rate. After all, a high bounce rate indicates a poor user experience. Since Google doesn’t want a reputation of sending people to frustrating, poor-quality websites, sites with slow load times get deprioritized by Google’s algorithms.

This is true for both organic search results and paid search results.

So, if you’re looking to improve SEO performance, SEM performance or just your overall user experience, increasing your website speed is a great place to start.

What is Website Speed?

There are a lot of different ways to evaluate website speed, but the most important is user experience: how long does it take before your users feel like your page is loaded?

This is actually an important question, because many pages continue loading elements (ads, scripts, tracking codes, etc), long after your users believe the page is done loading. That’s why Google reports that the average mobile landing page takes 22 seconds to “fully load”, but most of us rarely run into a page that actually takes that long to appear.

What your users care about is the perceived load time.That’s very different from your full load time.

So, tossing Google’s “22 seconds” number out the window, what’s a normal load time for a page? According to MachMetrics, the average perceived load speed is about 8.66 seconds.

Here’s how the data breaks down across industries and countries:

These numbers are all based on mobile landing pages, but since over 50% of web traffic is mobile(and pages tend to load more slowly on mobile than desktop), we’re going to focus on mobile load times in this article.

Now, all of these numbers are well under the 22-second mark that Google reported. That’s a good sign, but there’s a problem.

Going back to Google’s study of website speed, Google reports that 53% of people will leave a mobile page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Do you see any perceived load times below 3 seconds on that chart? Neither do I.

That’s actually good news for you. The bar really isn’t set that high. Since most websites load slowly on mobile and slow loading times result in poor marketing performance, if you can drop the load time of most of your pages to less than 3 seconds, there’s a real opportunity here to stand out from the competition.

What is Your Current Website Speed?

At this point, you’re probably wondering what your website speed actually is. How do you measure up?

Well, there are a few ways to check this.

The first is to pull out your phone and use your stopwatch app. Open your page on a new, private browser tab and time how long it takes for your page to load.

This is good for checking your practical user experience, but it may not always be the most accurate way to measure site speed. Depending on the speed of your internet and a variety of other factors, your page could load faster (or slower) for you than it does for most of your customers.

Still, if you’re looking for a good gut-check, this isn’t a bad place to start. For example, I’ve compared dozens of websites and noticed that certain platforms—like Shopify—do a great job of optimizing for perceived loading time. Their full loading time might not be all that great, but from your users’ perspective, it doesn’t matter.

The other, more official way to check loading times is to use a website speed testing tool. These tools load your page using specific servers in specific countries and use that data to evaluate the speed of your site. They provide you with a lot more information, too, like details about what elements on your page are slowing things down.

There are a lot of site speed tools out there, but here are a few of my favorites:

1. Google’s PageSpeed Insights

Honestly, while a lot of the more technical people that I know have complaints about PageSpeed Insights, for a quick, direct-from-the-source analysis, Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a great resource.

As a quick example, let’s use this website. Right after I built it, I took some screenshots of my PageSpeed Insights results, and they’ll give you a good feel for the sort of information you can get from Google’s tool.

First off, Google shows you how your site compares to the rest of the sites that Google has seen:

All in all, it’s not too shabby. Not the fastest site in the world, but not terrible, either.

The good news is, Google gives you a lot of information about how fast your website loads and what you can do to improve things:

Many of these suggestions are fairly technical advice for developers, but some of them you can probably handle yourself. We’ll get into those in a bit.

2. GTMetrix

GTMetrix is another great place to look for insights. In many ways, the information is more approachable than what you get on Google PageSpeed Insights, so it’s usually my number 2 go-to resource.

To show you how it works, let’s take a look at a website I recently built for a company called New World Viking:

Here, you can see that the website is in great shape. It loads in 1.4 seconds and has a PageSpeed score of 95%. Could they improve a few things? Sure, but compared to most sites, this website is really fast.

The great thing about GTMetrix is that it also includes your YSlow score, which uses Yahoo!’s web page performance criteria to give you an alternative measure of your site speed. Nobody uses Yahoo! anymore, but if you’re looking for ways to up your website speed, it’s nice to have another set of criteria to look at.

Here, you can see that there are a few additional ways to improve website speed, but most of them are fairly technical. Again, we’ll get into ways to improve your site on your own, but if you have a developer handy, you may want to ask them to take a look at your GTMetrix score and give you their input.

3. Pingdom

Finally, for a really in-depth, on-going analysis of your website, you might want to give Pingdom a try. In addition to helping you evaluate the speed of your website, Pingdom will also monitor the speed of your pages over time.

Of course, you have to pay for their page-monitoring service, but with rates starting at $14.95, it isn’t too expensive.

That being said, if you aren’t very technical and don’t have ready access to someone who is, Pingdom may be more than you need. It all depends on you, your resources and the demands of your website.

How to Increase Your Website Speed

Now that we’ve talked about how your website speed affects your online marketing performance and a few tools you can use to check your load time, let’s look at a few easy ways to improve the speed of your site.

Maximizing your website speed is a massive topic that requires a good deal of technical know-how. That’s probably more than you want to tackle on your own, but there are several simple things you can do to improve performance without hiring a developer. Let’s take a look.

Decrease Image Size

Unfortunately, images are something of a double-edged sword. While high-quality images are an important part of creating a compelling website, they can also slow your load time down a lot.

Remember, most people will only tolerate a page load time of 2-3 seconds, so if those beautiful images don’t load quickly, they could end up killing off potential sales instead of aiding them!

As a general rule of thumb, most of your images should be less than 100 kb.

But that poses a problem. Most high-quality photos are a lot bigger than 100 kb, so you’ll probably need to resize them. Fortunately, if you know what you’re doing, that’s actually fairly easy.

For example, to resize your photos in Photoshop, open your image in Photoshop and click File > Export > Save for Web:

From there, you can play around with a variety of settings until you find the right balance between file size and image quality (color-coded to match where they show up in the image below):

• Quality. Lower numbers = lower image quality and lower file size.
• File format. In terms of file size, JPEG < GIF < PNG. But, the same rule applies to image quality.
• Optimization. Checking the box tells Photoshop to optimize your image for web use (decreases image size).
• Color. Fewer colors = lower image quality and lower file size.
• Image size. Allows you to choose the actual number of pixels in your image. Fewer pixels = smaller image and lower file size. Keep in mind that if you save an image at a smaller size than it will be shown on your page, your image may be stretched to fit your page, resulting in heavy pixelation and/or image distortion.

You can see the file size in the bottom left-hand corner of the window. This number—along with a preview of your final image—will update as you make changes to your export settings.

Photoshop’s “Save for Web” tool makes it fairly easy to balance image quality and file size. That way, you can make sure that your pictures really sell your products without compromising on load speed.

If Photoshop is out of your price range, give GIMP a try. It’s free, and GIMP has a tool that does the same basic thing as Photoshop’s “Save for Web” tool.

Honestly, of all the website speed optimizations you can do on your own, optimizing your images will have the biggest impact on your site speed. The fewer kilobytes (kb) of data that the server has to process to display your page, the faster it will load.

Clean Up Your Plugins

Speaking of plugins…they aren’t all helpful when it comes to site speed. While plugins are a great way to modify your site and make it unique, they add extra, non-native code to your theme. That code can create issues that make your site load more slowly.

While running their websites, businesses add all kinds of plugins. But, over time, a lot of those plugins fall by the wayside. They are no longer needed, but they remain in the system—active, but useless.

Actually, worse than useless.

As mentioned earlier, those plugins burden your website down. That isn’t a big deal if you are actually getting value out of the plugin, but if it’s not a plugin that you need, leaving it on your site can slow your load time.

The solution? Go through your plugins and delete any plugins that you don’t truly need. If you end up wanting it later, reinstall it then—don’t leave it to muck up your load times.

Minify CSS

Every website uses cascading style sheets(CSS) to manage the look and style of the site. While most website platforms and builders offer a user-friendly interface that automatically adjusts the code of your site to match your preferences, CSS is always in the background doing the heavy lifting.

Unfortunately, if the backend CSS used to create your website isn’t well-designed, it can really slow down your site. To load your site, browsers read and interpret your CSS. So, the more complicated your CSS is, the longer it takes a browser to figure out what it’s actually supposed to be showing.

The good news is, this is such a common problem that there are a variety of plugins out there that you can use to “minify” (aka, optimize) your CSS. It isn’t free, but if you’re using WordPress, WP Rocket is a good option to consider.

For example, after minifying my CSS with WP Rocket, here’s how my rank on Google PageSpeed Insights changed:

A 15-point difference in loading speed is nothing to sneeze—especially when it only took 5 minutes to set it up. WP Rocket costs a bit of money ($49.95), but it’s incredibly easy to use and I’ve had good experiences with it to date.

Conclusion

Optimizing the speed of your website might not be the most exciting thing you do this year, but it can have a big impact on the success of your online marketing. Your website experience will be more attractive—to Google and your potential customers. That means more traffic, conversions, and sales.

While your site might need more tweaking than what we’ve covered here, this article is a great place to start. Learning the basics of how loading speed works and what you can do to keep it under control will improve the performance of your site for years to come.

What’s your site speed like? Did you find this content helpful? Have any questions that we can answer? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

The post A Quick-and-Dirty Guide to Website Speed Optimization appeared first on Aden Andrus.

We can all see the results of viral marketing: millions of views, countless likes and shares, media buzz and, most importantly, lots of additional sales.

But what is viral marketing? Is it actually a viable marketing strategy?

Or, as my friend Daniel Harmon (one of the creators of the “Squatty Potty” ad) likes to put it, is virality like “catching lightning in a bottle”? Let’s take a look.

What is Viral Marketing?

The term “viral marketing” stems from the way that viruses (the germs responsible for illnesses like chickenpox, the flu and AIDS) spread.

Unlike bacteria or fungi, which can also cause infections, viruses are self-replicating machines. They’re not even technically alive. A bacteria finds a hospitable environment, eats and reproduces like a good little living thing.

But viruses? Viruses inject themselves into a host cell, take over the cell’s functions and force the cell to create hundreds, thousands or millions of copies of the virus.

Then, the cell explodes, sending all of those copies of the virus out to infect other cells. It’s kind of a scary process.

So what does all of this have to do with marketing?

Well, viruses are able to spread quickly and efficiently because they hijack the body’s cells and use it to replicate and spread. Viral marketing effectively does the same thing. However, instead of using cells to spread disease, viral marketing uses people to spread a marketing message.

How Does Viral Marketing Work?

The idea behind viral marketing is pretty simple. Ideally, you create a piece of marketing content and show it to Person #1. Person #1 loves the content so much that they share it with 5 people. Those 5 people love the content so much that they each share it with 5 people, and pretty soon, everyone’s seen your content…

The appeal of viral marketing is pretty obvious. Conventional marketing is like bacterial replication—it takes a lot of time, effort and a hospitable environment to make it work.

With viral marketing, however, other people do the work for you. Once something becomes truly “viral”, it becomes a self-propagating system. You don’t have to put time or money into spreading your message. All you have to do is sit back and collect the profits.

For example, remember Hotmail? Hotmail was actually one of the first viral marketing strategies to succeed online.

Back in 1995, web-based email was kind of a new thing. So, to help spread the word, Hotmail made their service free…with one caveat. At the bottom of each email, Hotmail added a message that said “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.”

Today, the tactic seems pretty obvious, but a quarter of a century ago, it was marketing gold. Pretty soon, people were signing up for Hotmail in droves…and all for the price of a simple piece of code.

Where Did Viral Marketing Come From?

Of course, the idea of “viral marketing” is hardly new. Marketers have been “creating a buzz”, “network marketing” and “leveraging the media” since, well, the beginning of marketing.

The difference between conventional word-of-mouth marketing and viral marketing is the internet.

Fueled by the reach and accessibility of the internet, viral content can reach millions of people overnight. For example, in the early nineties, the Chewbacca woman video wouldn’t have been anything more than a favorite family home video.

In 2016, however, that video pulled in over 140 million views. Why? It went viral.

But this begs a question. Is there a difference between “going viral” and “viral marketing”? Personally, I’d argue that the answer is “yes” and that the difference is critically important to marketers.

“Going Viral” vs “Viral Marketing”

Unfortunately, viral hits like the Chewbacca Woman have created a lot of confusion over what viral marketing truly is. These days, when most business owners or marketers say “I want to do viral marketing”, what they really mean is “I want to go viral”.

However, these are two fundamentally different ideas.

“Going viral” is usually the result of a complex blend of factors—many of which are impossible to predict or control—that make something a cultural phenomenon. Sometimes that’s a piece of marketing content, but if it is, it’s more random chance than anything else.

Like my friend Daniel Harmon likes to say, “Going viral is like catching lightning in a bottle.” And he should know. Daniel and his team have created some of the most popular and shared marketing videos in the history of the internet.

But only a couple of them have truly “gone viral”.

And that highlights the difference between “going viral” and “viral marketing”. If you recall, viral marketing is just like word-of-mouth marketing. The goal is to get people to talk about and share your content. Becoming a cultural phenomenon isn’t technically part of viral marketing.

You can’t control whether or not your marketing “goes viral”. But, you can create marketing content that gets people excited enough that they want to share it with others—which is what viral marketing is all about.

How to Do Viral Marketing

So, if “going viral” isn’t a feasible goal, is viral marketing even a worthwhile marketing tactic? Absolutely.

Viral marketing is all about creating value for your target audience. Most marketing is like cafeteria food: bland, predictable and safe. And, people enjoy most marketing just about as much as they enjoy cafeteria food.

Contrary to popular belief, people aren’t tired of marketing—they’re just tired of cafeteria-style marketing. They want something fresh, interesting and exciting. Give them that and they’ll be happy to pay attention. More importantly, if they like your content enough, they’ll share it with their friends.

With all that in mind, let’s take a look at 4 key elements of effective viral marketing. Even if your goal isn’t to “go viral”, viral marketing can still be tricky, so you’ll need to take all of these elements into account as you plan out your marketing strategy.

1. Give Something Valuable Away

Want to know the biggest secret to viral marketing? Provide value—and don’t ask for anything in return.

Every successful viral campaign gives something valuable away for free. The classic Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercial makes people laugh:

Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” video helps women realize that they underestimate their true beauty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=litXW91UauE

Blendtec’s video series, “Will It Blend?”, satisfies people’s curiosity and love for watching expensive things get destroyed:

But, while many viral campaigns are based on videos, not all viral marketing has include video content. Take the Hotmail campaign we mentioned earlier, for example. Hotmail was offering something rare and valuable—a web-based email service—for free, so why wouldn’t people want to share that with their friends and family?

The important thing is to offer people something valuable—so valuable, in fact, that they want to share it with the people they care about. That can be an entertaining commercial, membership in an exclusive club, early access to a video game or almost anything that your target audience will care about.

Many businesses struggle with this because giving away something truly valuable is expensive. Creating great content takes a lot of time and money. Giving away products or services isn’t cheap. But, that’s why viral marketing stands out. It provides more value than most marketing, so it gets people interested and excited enough that they want to share it.

2. Make It Easy to Share

No matter how valuable your content is, if it isn’t easy to share, most people won’t share it. The simple truth about humans is, the more work something takes, the less likely we are to do it.

Fortunately, in addition to increasing the potential reach of your campaigns, the internet also facilitates viral marketing by making it easy to share things online. Your job as a marketer is to put that to work for you.

Whatever it is that you want people to share, you need to keep it as short and simple as possible. Video ads are a classic viral marketing channel because it only takes a few button clicks to share them. Links or “share” buttons with pre-filled content are another great way to simplify the sharing process.

If you’re worried that people won’t think to share your content, ask them directly (unless there’s another, more important call-to-action that you want to make, like “Buy Now”). The point is, the easier it is to share your content, the more likely people will be to share it.

3. Take Advantage of Common Motivations

One of the reasons why viral marketing works is because we all want to feel special, valuable and important. When someone says, “Have you seen this video?” We want to be able to say, “Yes!”

Better yet, we want to be the ones to discover the video, offer or other treasure and share it with others. It feels good to bring joy, insight or opportunity into the lives of people we care about.

There’s also a special feeling that comes with being part of the “in crowd” of people who know about something new and exciting. For example, during the early days of Pinterest, the platform was invitation-only. As a result, being on the platform gave you a sort of mystique that you didn’t get from a plain old Facebook account.

To be honest, it didn’t really matter whether or not Pinterest was the best social media platform. What mattered was that only some people were aware of and using it Those who were, were in the “in crowd”. They were cool and “in the know.” Everyone else was on the outside looking in.

Simply put, if you want your marketing to succeed, people need to feel good about sharing your content. If you can tie your marketing to one or more of the motivations we’ve discussed here, your campaign with be a lot more likely to succeed.

4. Get the Word Out

Finally, good viral marketing doesn’t occur in a vacuum. While the ultimate goal is to get people to share your content, you usually have to get the ball rolling on your own.

In fact, the best viral marketing is usually supported by a variety of different marketing tactics. Paid advertising, press releases, influencer marketing, email marketing and more can all go a long ways towards building the momentum your campaign needs to succeed.

Ideally, your campaign should be so well designed and feature such compelling content that you don’t need people to share it for it to be a success. It takes a lot of time, effort and money to create viral content, so your campaign should be able to deliver profitable results regardless of whether or not people start sharing it.

Viral marketing isn’t a cop-out for good marketing strategy. You can’t just build a campaign and assume that you’ll get the results you want. Instead, create something that is designed to encourage sharing and word-of-mouth, but can stand on its own even if that doesn’t happen.

Conclusion

So, what is viral marketing? In a nutshell, it’s the internet version of word-of-mouth marketing. You create something valuable and exciting and then hope that people will share the word about your business for you. It’s a sound, time-honored marketing tactic—with a digital twist.

Where people get confused, however, is when they confuse “viral marketing” with “going viral”. While the latter is certainly great when it happens, it’s a random event—not something you should plan your marketing strategy around.

In contrast, viral marketing is actually marketing at its best. Viral marketing content is stand out content—content that’s so good that it actually makes people so excited that they actually want to share it with their friends. Ideally, that’s the sort of content that every business should be creating.

Do you agree with my take? Have any questions you’d like answered? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

The post What is Viral Marketing? Is It a Viable Tactic…or a Trap? appeared first on Aden Andrus.

After all, it’s only natural to spend your time trying to improve your traffic. In fact, PPC platforms like Google and Facebook make it so easy to test new bidding strategies and compare ads that it isn’t hard to get stuck endlessly tweaking things.

All of that is well and good, but it doesn’t really answer the question, “What happens after someone clicks on your ad?”

The fact of the matter is, no matter how good your ads and targeting strategy are, if your website and landing pages don’t convince people to convert—they won’t convert. Your post-click experience is just as important as your pre-click experience…or perhaps even more important.

However, despite that fact, most businesses have a hard time investing in their post-click experience. There are lots of reasons for this, but they all basically boil down to the following 3 reasons:

1. “It’s too expensive”
2. “We don’t have the time”
3. “Our site experience is already working well enough”

In this article, we’re going to take a look at each of these arguments against doing site testing and see if and/or when they really make sense. Let’s dive in.

1. “It’s Too Expensive”

Now, I won’t argue that conversion rate optimization (CRO)is cheap. Depending on your site and needs, it can definitely feel like a big investment—especially when your budget is limited.

But does this argument hold up?

At first blush, it’s easy to see why people have a hard time investing in their post-click experience. No site experience will work for everyone, so isn’t PPC advertising something of a numbers game? Isn’t it better to invest your money into driving more traffic to your site?

Perhaps, but only up to a point. See, the thing is, PPC advertising can only get you so far. At a certain point, you’re reaching the majority of your audience and you have to look for other ways to get more bang for your buck.

The easiest place to do that is your post-click experience. Conversion rate optimization is a great way to get more out of your PPC campaigns. After all, if you can get twice as many sales from the same investment, that’s a huge win!

A Quick Example

To show you how this works, one of our clients runs a large commerce website where they sell 371 products that fit into about 12 different categories.

Shortly before we started working with the client, they had redesigned their home page. Putting their heads together, the marketing team had come up with a collection of products that with high margins and/or high sales volume and decided that would be a good lineup to place on the home page.

Since the page was new and unproven, we theorized that many of the products on the page were not the perfect fit for a consumer, and the overload of possibilities decreased the likelihood of purchase.

So, we decided to test removing different elements from the page to see how that would affect the performance of their home page.

To the client’s astonishment, this test revealed six winners and increased their revenue by thousands of dollars in just 2 weeks. And that was just a small test!

So, if you think that you don’t have enough money to invest in CRO, I would argue that you can’t afford notto invest in your post-click experience.

Are You Solving the Wrong Problem?

As a general rule, most businesses use PPC advertising like a fire hose. To save their business from burning down, they turn up their budget and hope that more water—er, traffic—will solve the problem.

However, if the water can’t get to the fire, pumping more water on the blaze won’t actually make a difference.

In the same way, if your site or landing pages aren’t converting well, pushing more traffic at them just means more wasted money. In this situation, choosing to push more budget into PPC doesn’t really help your business. However, putting that money into CRO could help you get a lot more conversions out of your existing budget…and your future budget, if you choose to increase it in the future.

When Budget is a Factor

The only time that budget should really influence your decision on whether or not to optimize your post-click experience is when your budget is so small that you aren’t driving much traffic to your website.

To get meaningful results from your CRO, you have to have at least a few thousand visitors a month. Otherwise, it will take so long to get useful datathat it simply won’t be worth the effort.

If you’re in this situation, CRO probably isn’t right for you…yet. Unless your website is truly, obviously horrible, work on getting your traffic, revenue and marketing budget up to the point where it makes sense to start optimizing your post-click experience.

But, if you have a decent amount of site traffic—either organically or via PPC—budget really shouldn’t be a reason not to do CRO. Optimizing your website almost always makes every aspect of your marketing work better, which just means more money in your pocket, not less.

2. “We don’t have the time”

When most people think about optimizing their site or landing pages, they immediately assume that it will take time—a lotof time.

After all, if you’ve ever put a website together, you probably still have PTSD from the process. Creating a website takes a ton of time and effort. It’s not a task for the faint of heart.

So, it’s natural to assume that redesigning your website will take a ton of time and effort. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

While it can take time to get results—depending on how much traffic you’re getting—actually putting together your tests is surprisingly quick and easy.

A Quick Example

One company that we work with gets millions of dollars a month in online revenue. But, they knew their website needed work, so they came to us for help.

So, for our first round of tests, we decided to try something we call existence tests. Like the test discussed above, with an existence test, you don’t actually create anything new. You simply remove various elements of the page to see how that content was influencing your conversion rates.

If the content was helping people convert, the conversion rate will go down when you remove the element. If the content was hindering them from converting, the conversion rate will go up when you remove the element.

For this particular client, we ran 5 variations, each one with a different element removed. How long did it take us to set up this test? About 5 minutes.

Then, we hit the go button, and waited. Over the course of 6 days, the winning variation increased sales by 14% from the control, increasing the sales by $70,000 per week!

When Time is a Factor

Generally speaking, time concerns shouldn’t prevent you from optimizing your post-click experience. With software services like Optimizely, VWO or Convertize, you can get a variety of tests off of the ground in a matter of hours.

However, if you’re running a small business that you’re trying to get off the ground, even that kind of time investment can be more than you can afford.

In addition, learning new software takes time, effort and know-how. So, trying to wrap your head around CRO on your own can take quite a bit of time in and of itself—even if setting up the actual test itself is fairly quick.

In this situation, it’s often easier and quicker to simply hire someone to help you out. Here at Disruptive, our clients barely have to invest any time into their post-click experience. We take care of all the legwork for them, so all they have to do is sit back and enjoy the results.

3.”Our site experience is already working well enough”

For many businesses, it’s easy to assume that their website is already well-designed. They’re getting a decent number of conversions from their site and their PPC campaigns are profitable. What more could you ask for?

If anything, though, these companies could benefit more from ongoing CRO than almost anyone else.

After all, if your marketing and website are already working, optimizing your post-click experience can take your campaigns from good-to-great. You just need some fresh ideas and new concepts to get you going in the right direction.

A Quick Example

One of our clients is a college that was looking to increase their prospective student base. As a college, they were fairly well-established and had a polished website.

Or, at least, they thought they did.

To help them get even more out of their website, they asked us to run a few tests on their site. Here’s one of the key pages that we worked on:

The page certainly isn’t bad, but “Get Started on the Right Path: Prepare yourself for a better future by earning your degree from Pioneer Pacific College” isn’t the most compelling value proposition. It sounds very academic, but it’s not the sort of content that gets someone excited to apply.

To explain Pioneer Pacific’s value proposition in a more compelling way, we decided to focus their copy on the benefits of earning a degree (more money) and minimize the perceived costs by pointing out that college tuition is an investment:

This simple change increased form completions by 49.5%. The forms themselves weren’t any easier to fill out—50% more site visitors were motivated enough to complete them.

Now, Pioneer Pacific had spent countless hours working on their website and marketing themselves, so why hadn’t they figured this out before?

The simple answer is, they hadn’t tested this aspect of their post-click experience. Sure, their site was good enough, but it wasn’t nearly as good as it could be with a little testing.

When Good Enough is Good Enough

All that being said, sometimes there are times when testing your site or landing pages isn’tthe right decision. If you’re in the middle of some other massive marketing optimization push, throwing CRO into the mix can cause more problems than it solves.

For site testing to work well, your marketing needs to be fairly stable. So, if you’re revamping your PPC campaigns, building out a new marketing automation strategy or overhauling your site content, it’s probably best to wait on CRO.

However, if your marketing is generally stable at the moment, testing your site can be one of the best ways to improve your results. It doesn’t matter if your marketing team has been working on your site for years, a little CRO can give you a ton of insight into your audience. You may even discover things that improve your marketing campaigns themselves!

Conclusion

To be honest, if you’re going to put time, money and effort into your pre-click experience, you should be investing in your post-click experience, too. While there are times and situations where CRO isn’t the right choice, most of the time, optimizing your site is one of the best things you can do for your business.

Do you think your post-click experience is important? Is it worth investing in? Any arguments for (or against) CRO that you’d like to add? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

The post Why Aren’t You Paying Attention to Your Post-Click Experience? appeared first on Aden Andrus.

Well, this article explains exactly how to find the answers to all of those questions. Stick with me and you will become the guru of online optimization. Your name will be whispered in hushed and reverent tones around the office.

This article discusses in plain terms one of the least understood and most important aspects of digital marketing: statistical interpretation.

Now wait, give me a minute before you hit the back button. I’m not going to drone on about equations or theories. This is nuts and bolts information—statistics for the real world.

Believe it or not, your math teachers were right when they told you math would important after graduation. In today’s data-driven world, math is central to business success and online profitability. However, while most of the calculations are now done by computers, most people still don’t know how to really make the most out of their data.

Why statistical significance matters

To optimize your digital marketing, you have to conduct tests. More importantly, you have to know how to evaluate the results of your test.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen marketers (including conversion rate optimization experts!) point to a positive result and say, “Look at what I figured out!”

Unfortunately, in the long run, the promised results often don’t pan out.

Optimizing your marketing is about more than just getting a little green arrow on your screen. It’s a balance between human intuition and statistical data that drives the kind of results your digital marketing needs to succeed.

At this point you’re probably thinking, Okay, I get it. Testing is important. But a test is only as valuable as its interpretation—how do I know if I’m getting meaningful results?

That’s a good question. Actually, it’s an incredibly important question. To answer it, though, we need to ask the question a bit differently.

The real question is, “How do you know if you have statistically meaningful results?”

To get actionable information out of your tests, you need to understand 3 key aspects of your data: variance, confidence and sample size.

1. Variance

The first thing you need to understand about your data is its inherent variability. In a nutshell, variance is how much your numbers will change without any intervention from you.

That’s nice, why should I care?

Let’s look at a practical example. Since conversion rate is one of the most important measures of digital marketing success, we’ll use conversion rate optimization as our model scenario.

Say your average quarterly conversion rates for a year are 3%, 2%, 2.4% and 2.6%. That means your conversion rates vary between 2% and 3%.

This variance could be due to changes in competition, economic factors, seasonal effects or any other market influences, but your average conversion rate always hovers between 2% and 3%.

Now, imagine you eliminate the sidebar from your website.

For 3 months, you send half of your traffic to the original page and half to the sidebar-less page. 2% of the traffic sent to the original page converts. 2.8% of the traffic to variant page converts.

Wahoo! Getting rid of the sidebar increased your conversion rate by 40%! That’s great, right?

Well, maybe (we’re talking statistics here, so get used to that answer).

Unfortunately, both numbers fall within the normal variance of your data. Yes, a 2.8% conversion rate is 40% higher than a 2% conversion rate, but maybe the people you sent to the sidebar-less page just happened to convert 40% better due to external factors.

After all, up to 3% of your traffic normally converts anyways.

Let’s try that again…

Now, say you try adding a lightbox to your page and run the test again. Same parameters: send half of your traffic to the original and half to the variant for 3 months.

This time, the conversion rate for the original is 2.5% and the conversion rate for the variant is 3.5%.

It’s a 40% improvement again. This time, though, the conversion rate is 17% higher than the highest 3-month conversion rate you’ve ever seen with your site.

Is the difference potentially meaningful? Yes!

We usually define variance in terms of wobble around the middle. In this example, our average conversion rate varies from 2-3%, so our variance would be 2.5 ± 0.5%.

Add 0.5% to 2.5% and you get 3%. Subtract 0.5% from 2.5% and you get 2%.

Make sense?

A word to the wise

There are a lot of ways to determine variance.

One easy way is to run an A/A test. You just send half your traffic to a page and the other half of the traffic to an identical page and measure the difference.

Unfortunately, while you’d think that a lot of software packages would have a built-in way to track variance, they usually leave such things up to you.

Running an A/A test is an important way to both determine your site variance and check to see if your software is working properly. For example, if your conversion rate is significantly higher for one arm of your test, you probably have a problem.

Overall, you need to know your variance so that you can decide the value of your results. No matter how much money you might make off of a 40% increase in conversion rate, if it falls within normal variance, you don’t have any evidence that your change actually made a difference.

2. Confidence

Now that I’ve made you nervous about the validity of your results, let’s talk about confidence.

In statistics, confidence is an estimate of the likelihood that a result was due to chance. It’s possible that you just happened to send a bunch of more-likely-to-convert-than-normal visitors to your lightbox page in the previous example, right?

So, the question is, how confident are you in your results?

I have a feeling we’re going to talk about standard deviation…

In statistics, we look at populations (like the visitors to your site) in terms of standard deviation.

Standard deviations cut populations into segments based on their likelihood to convert. Remember the Bell curve from school? Well, that’s basically what’s happening on your site.

If your site from the previous example gets 2,000 visitors in 3 months (hopefully not actually the case, but it works for the example), here is how their likelihood of converting breaks down:

As you can see from the graph, the majority of your visitors (1364 or ~68%) convert 2-3% of the time. That’s your first standard deviation (SD).

There are also other 2 other main groups of visitors to your site. Some (272 or ~13.5%) convert 3-3.5% of the time. Another 272 convert 1.5-2% of the time.

That’s the second standard deviation, which represents about 27% of your traffic (544 people).

All told, these two standard deviations represent about 95% of your site traffic. In other words, out of the 2,000 visitors to your site, approximately 1,900 of them will convert between 1.5% and 3.5% of the time.

Okay, but what’s my confidence?

Since only 44 of your 2,000 visitors convert more than 3.5% of the time (and on the other end of the spectrum, 44 convert less than 1.5% of the time), it seems unlikely that the lightbox page would average a 3.5% conversion rate simply by chance.

As a result, you can be about 70% confident that the lightbox page did not convert better by mere luck.

Where did you get that number?

To understand how confidence is calculated, we need to look at the situation we created with our test.

By sending our traffic to two different versions of our page, we created 2 traffic populations. Population A (1,000 visitors) went to the page without the lightbox. Population B (the other 1,000 visitors) went to the page with the lightbox.

Each population has its own Bell curve and is normally distributed around its average conversion rate—2.5% for Population A and 3.5% for Population B.

Now, if you notice, both populations actually cover some of the same conversion rate range. Some of the traffic in Population A and some of the traffic in Population B converts between 2% and 4% of the time.

That means there is overlap between the 2 populations.

If there’s overlap, there’s a chance that the difference between the populations is due to luck.

Think about it. If the two populations overlap at all, there is a possibility that Population B randomly has low converting people in it and/or Population A is randomly made up of conversion-prone visitors.

Remember, Population A and Population B are just samples of the total population. It’s completely possible that they are skewed samples.

But what are the odds of that? Let’s look at the overlap of the 2 populations and add up how many visitors fall into the overlap.

In this case, about 632 of your 2,000 visitors convert between 2% and 4% of the time—no matter which page you send them to. As a percentage, this means that 31.6% of your traffic could have belonged in either group without changing your results.

Therefore, you can only be about 70% confident that your results indicate a true difference in conversion rate between the lightbox page and the lightbox-less page.

In practical terms, 70% confidence means our 40% improvement in conversion rate could occur randomly 1 out of every 3 times we run the test!

Say what?

Despite the fact that we’ve never converted this well before, we still have a 31.6% chance that our results were produced by nothing more relevant than a cosmic hiccup. How could that be?

This is a perfect example of the importance of confidence and variance.

Your results might look impressive, but if you have a lot of variability in your baseline results, it’s hard to have much faith in the outcome of your tests.

So, how do I get results I can use?

To demonstrate the effects of variability, let’s change your average quarterly conversion rates from 3%, 2%, 2.4% and 2.6% to 2.75%, 2.6%, 2.4% and 2.25%. This drops the variance from 1% to 0.5%.

What effect does that have on our results?

We still have a 40% improvement in conversion rate, but now our 2 populations have a lot less overlap.

Now, only about 84 of our 2,000 visitors fall into the 2.75-3.25% conversion rate category, leaving us with a 4.2% chance our results were a random twist of fate.

In practical terms, that means we can be 95.8% confident that adding a lightbox improved our conversion rate.

95.8%? It doesn’t seem very likely that our lightbox did better out of luck. Now we can “Wahoo!” with confidence!

Is 95% confidence good enough?

After knocking their heads together for a while, statisticians decided to set the bar for confidence at 95%. You may also see this reported as ρ-value (a ρ-value < 0.1 is the same thing as > 90% confidence, a ρ-value of < 0.05 is the same as > 95% confidence and so on).

As we’ve just discussed, there’s always some chance that your results are due to luck. In general, though, if you’re confident that at least 19 out of 20 tests will yield the same result, the statistical deities will accept the validity of your test.

That being said, confidence is a very subjective thing.

You might want to be 99.999% confident that your bungee rope isn’t going to break, but you might try a restaurant that only 30% of reviewers like.

The same idea is true for business decisions. Wasting money on a marketing strategy you are only 70% confident in might be acceptable where going to market with a drug you’re 95% confident doesn’t turn people into mass murders might not be such a great idea.

Now that you understand what confidence is and where it comes from, it’s up to you to decide what level of confidence makes sense for your tests.

While calculating confidence is usually a lot more complicated than what we showed here, the principles behind confidence are fairly universal. That’s good, because you can leave the calculations to the computer and focus your time on making the right decisions with your data.

3. Sample size

Still with me? Awesome! We’re through the worst of it.

Now that you’ve seen the interplay between variance and confidence, you’re probably wondering, How do I get low variance and high confidence? 

The answer is traffic. Lots and lots of traffic.

Traffic increases the amount of data you have, which makes your tests more reliable and insightful.

In fact, the relationship between the quantity and reliability of your data is so consistent that it’s a bit of a statistical dogma: With enough data, you can find a connection between anything.

Here we go again…

Looking back at our last example, if you have 2,000 visitors per quarter and quarterly conversion rates of 3%, 2%, 2.4% and 2.6%, your average conversion rate for 8,000 visitors is 2.5%.

There’s some variability there, but your average for the year is still 2.5%.

But what would happen if you looked at your yearly conversion rate for four years instead of your quarterly conversion rate for four quarters?

Well, assuming that everything in your industry remained fairly stable, every year, your conversion rate would be fairly close to 2.5%.

You might see 2.55% one year and 2.45% another year, but overall, the variation in your yearly average would would be much smaller than the variation in your quarterly average.

Why? Bigger samples are less affected by unusual data.

Consider the following:

The average net worth in Medina, WA was $44 million in 2007. There are only 1,206 households in Medina, but 3 of the residents are Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Craig McCaw.

If Bill moved, the average net worth would drop to $6 million. If all 3 moved, average net worth would only be $224,000.

Source: Hair JF, Wolfinbarger M, Money AH, Samouel P, Page MJ. Essentials of business research methods. Routledge. 2015. p. 316. [print].

When you only look at the small population of Medina, WA, these 3 men have had a huge effect on the average net worth.

However, the average net worth in Washington is only $123,000.

In other words, even though these 3 men are worth $53.1 billion, in a state population of 7 million, their wealth barely affects the average net worth.

So, the bigger your sample size, the less your averages will be affected by extreme data.

What does that mean for my marketing?

If the populations you test are small, unusual groups like Bill and company will have a big effect on your variance.

For example, if 50 of your visitors are lightbox addicts who troll for lightboxes and compulsively convert whenever they find one, that’s going to have a dramatic effect on your conversion rate if you are only sampling from 2,000 visits.

Since you normally only get 50 conversions from 2,000 visitors (2.5% conversion rate, remember?), adding another 50 will have a huge effect on your variance.

Now, all of a sudden, your quarterly conversion rate is 10% instead of 2-3%.

On the other hand, if you have 200,000 visitors per quarter and the League of Lightbox Lovers shows up, the difference will be much more subtle.

Normally, you would get 5,000 conversions from 200,000 visitors, but this time you get 5,050.

Big whoop. Your conversion rate for this quarter is 2.525% instead of 2.5%. That falls well within your expected variance.

Do you see how sample size affects the reliability of your results?

The more data you have, the easier it is to tell if your change made a difference. Most people tend to orbit around average (back to the Bell curve, right?), so large traffic samples balance out the outliers and reduce the variance in your data.

Less variance means more confidence, so it’s an all around win!

How much traffic do I need?

It’s usually best to set up your tests based on conversions rather than overall site visits (unless that’s one of the things you’re testing, of course). That way, you know you’re getting enough conversions to make your data meaningful.

Just to give you a ballpark figure, it typically works well to shoot for at least 350-400 conversions per testing arm.

However, this range will change dramatically depending on your overall traffic volume.

I’ve seen companies that blow past this number in 20 minutes. Other sites take months or years to get that many conversions.

Scale your tests to the traffic volume that works for your site. If you’ve been testing for 3 months and have a consistent 40% improvement in conversion rate but only 60 conversions between the arms and 70% confidence, that might be enough to convince you to declare a winner.

After all, your data might look better after a year, but is that worth missing out on an extra 20 conversions per quarter while you wait?

Unfortunately, sample size can be one of the trickiest aspects of your tests to optimize. Depending on your goals, you can often best-guess things or just run your tests until you get what you need.

However, if you find yourself in a pinch, there are online calculators for determining what sample size you will need.

The most important takeaway from this section? The more data you have, the more reliable your results will be.

Conclusion

Variance. Confidence. Sample size. To truly understand your data and its implications, you need to understand each of these aspects and how they interact.

Variance acts as the gatekeeper for your data. To even be worth considering, your results need to exceed the normal variance of your website.

Once you’ve hit that benchmark, you need to determine how confident you are that your results aren’t simply due to chance.

Finally, if you want to minimize variance and maximize confidence, choose a sample size that’s big enough to be truly representative of your traffic and small enough to be achievable.

Okay, you made it! Let’s wrap up this post.

Now that you’ve got this knowledge under your belt, you’ll be surprised how often it comes in handy.

Just a word of warning, though, once you start saying things like, “Well, that data looks good, but what’s our normal variance?” you are likely to evoke awe in those around you. Might even land a promotion.

Like I said, math really is valuable…

The post Statistical significance: Is it significant to you? appeared first on Aden Andrus.

Ask most marketers or business owners these questions and you’ll usually get a lot of very specific answers. “We have the best prices”…“Our product has more features than the competition”…“Our customer service is incredible”…

Now, all of these answers are great, but most of the time, they don’t answer the real question: why do your customers buy from you?

What do your customers really care about?

When someone clicks on an ad and visits your page, it’s true that they might be looking for the best price or a certain set of features. It’s even possible that they might be looking for testimonials about customer service.

But how do you really know that your customer service testimonials are why people convert on your site?

Maybe you think it’s your testimonials, but it’s really your price…or your features…or that cute puppy in your hero shot. When you get right down to it, most of the time you don’t really know why people decide to buy from you.

However, that doesn’t stop us from assuming that we know why people buy from us. Humans have this funny tendency to believe that “if it matters to me, it must matter to everyone!”

So, if you value your customer service, those testimonials about your awesome customer service reps must be why people convert, right?

Well, maybe.

But what if you change your site to emphasize your testimonials and your conversion rate goes down? What then?

Was it a bad month? Did you use the wrong testimonials? Or did you change the wrong thing on your site?

Testing your website

As any good scientist will tell you, if you really want to prove something, you need to run a test! In online marketing, we call this conversion rate optimization, but it’s really just the art of creating hypotheses about your website and testing them.

To show you how this works, let’s use SurvivalLife.com as an example. When Survival Life set up their site, they used a clean, minimalistic site design—you know, the kind web designers rave about.

The team at Survival Life loved the design, but they were smart enough to realize that what they loved might not be what their audience loved. So, they decided to test an “uglier” design against their award-worthy template.

To their surprise, the ugly design far outperformed their original template.

But why? Most web designers and even conversion experts would tell you that a clunkier, uglier site will get worse results than a simple, beautiful template. In fact, that’s what the team at Survival Life believed, so why did their uglier site design work better?

The answer is fairly simple. The “ugly” site design was what their audience resonated with.

Although website design best practices can help improve the performance of your site, your site traffic is always unique to your site. That means no one—including you—can completely predict which site elements or changes will improve your conversion rates.

However, just because you can’t predict how your audience will respond to a change in your site doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try out new ideas. The key is to test them. That way, you can tell which changes make a difference…and which ones don’t.

How to effectively test your website

So, if simply making tweaks to your site that you think will improve performance isn’t a great idea, how should you test your website?

Once you’ve come up with a few testing ideas, here are a variety of tools you can use to test your site (VWO, Optimizely, Google Experiments, etc). Each of these tools has different strengths, but they all serve the same fundamental purpose: they allow you to compare the performance of different designs and site elements.

Since the specific tool isn’t as important as the tests you’re running, we’ll focus on how to run and analyze your tests in this article (for more info on testing tools, click here). To run an effective website test, you need to understand 3 basic testing concepts:

1. Your traffic changes over time

As any good marketer knows, your traffic changes over time. You have good months and bad months. As a result, your conversion rates are constantly changing.

Why is this important? Well, say you added a bunch of testimonials about your customer support team to your website. You run your test and conversions increase by 15%!

That’s awesome, right?

Well, maybe (this statistics, so get used to that answer).

What if a competitor just went out of business and all of their former customers came to your site and made a purchase? That’s great for your business, but it doesn’t mean that the change you made was the reason why your conversion rate improved.

This is part of the reason why it’s always important to include your original, unchanged design as a control in your test. That way, you can directly compare the conversion rates of both pages—even if your traffic changes.

So, if that competitor goes out of business and the conversion rate on your new design goes up by 15%…but the conversion rate on your old design goes up by 20%, you know that your new design actually hurt your conversion rate.

2. Confidence

Yes, I’m about to get statistical on you. But, before you hit the back button, give me a chance! This is critically important information and I promise I’ll explain things in the simplest, most painless way possible.

Still with me? Good.

In statistics, confidence means the same thing it does in everyday life. The only difference is, in statistics, confidence comes with a number.

So, if you were married to a statistician, you might tell your spouse, “I’m confident that I’ll be home by 5:30.” Your spouse might reply, “When you say you’ll be home and when you’re actually home are different 68% of the time, so I’m 68% confident you won’t be home by 5:30.”

Then, your spouse might text you the following image…

…followed by the statement, “I’m about 84% confident you’ll be home by 6:30, so I’ll have dinner ready then.”

As you might imagine, being married to a statistician could be a bit harsh…

That being said, this is exactly how confidence works in statistics. Essentially, confidence describes the likelihood that two groups or situations (when you say you’ll be home vs. when you actually get home) are not the same.

The more overlap you have between your two groups, the less confident you can be that they are different. Case in point, the more often you are home when you say you’ll be home, the less confident your spouse will be that you’ll be late.

Similarly, if you create a new version of your homepage with a 50% better conversion rate than your original design, but your confidence is only 50%, that means it’s even odds that your improved conversion rate is solely due to chance.

As you might imagine, more statistical confidence is always better.

In website testing, most people shoot for at least 95% confidence. At 95% confidence, there’s only a 1 in 20 chance that the difference in your conversion rate is due to random chance, so you can feel both emotionally and statistically confident in your results.

The good news is, most website testing programs calculate confidence for you. All you have to do is use it to decide your winner.

3. Traffic volume

At this point, you’re probably thinking, Okay, I get it. External changes can affect my conversion rate and I need high confidence…but how do I get those?

The answer is fairly simple: traffic volume.

If your normal conversion rate is 15% and you run a test on 10 visitors and one of the visitors to your new design converts, guess what, your new conversion rate is 20%!

Your confidence, however, is probably around 0%.

In this scenario, there’s a very good chance that your one converting visitor would have converted on your old page design, too. There’s really no way to know.

But, if you run that same test on 10,000 visitors and 20% of the visitors to your new page convert while the old page keeps converting at 15%, you’re looking at a confidence of over 99%. With that much traffic, you know you’ve got a winner on your hands.

The exact amount of traffic volume you need to get meaningful data from your test will vary from test to test. With that in mind, it’s usually best to keep running your tests until you get to a confidence level you’re comfortable with. Otherwise, your test is basically useless.

Conclusion

Website design doesn’t have to be a guessing game. I’ve seen site tests that have increased clients’ profitability by millions.

The key is knowing how to run an effective test.

If you’re willing to challenge your own preconceptions about your traffic and test all your ideas, you can identify exactly what your potential visitors want from your site. All it takes is a little time, effort and statistical know-how.

Have you ever made a site change that didn’t work out? What happened? How do you improve the performance of your website?

Note, this article was originally published on Duct Tape Marketing.

The post What your customers really need is…more site testing? appeared first on Aden Andrus.

But what does this mean for you and your business? Let’s take a look.

Paid Search and Keywords

Since the beginning, paid search has been a keyword-focused PPC platform. As a business, you try to figure out what sorts of words people use to search online for what you’re selling and use those keywords to target potential customers with relevant ads.

It’s a simple, straightforward approach that works great…on paper.

In practice, it can be incredibly hard to figure out which keywords you should be targeting—and which ones are a waste of time and money. In fact, in our audits of Google Ads accounts, we found that only 6% of keywords actually produce conversions and sales. The rest are just advertisers’ best guesses as to how people will find them online—guesses that are ultimately wrong.

But fortunately, to help us improve the performance of our keywords, Google has given us keyword match types. With keyword match types, we can decide exactly how closely we want an online search to match our keywords. This will become important in a minute, so let’s take a moment to review the three basic match types (broad, phrase and exact) and how they work.

Broad Match

With broad match keywords, Google treats your keywords a bit like the pirate code—as a general guideline for the searches you want to appear in. If you enter the keyword “chew toy,” your ad could be shown to people searching for everything from “no-stuffing chew toy for dogs” to a teething ring for babies.

We’re not kidding—we’ve actually seen that range of ads before.

As another example, let’s say you live in Florida and want to go back to school to become a nurse practitioner. You don’t want to move or take courses online, so you search for “local nurse practitioner program.”

You might see the following:

Only one of the ads that pops up actually offers a local program—the rest are all online. Google theoretically could have caught this since you entered “local” as a search term, but because most of these ads were likely using broad match keywords, so you saw multiple ads that don’t really match your search intent.

And that’s the problem with broad match.

Fortunately, you can control the range of queries that broad match keywords apply to by using broad match modifier keywords. Essentially, by putting a “+” sign in front of keywords, you can tell Google that you only want your ads to show up for searches that include words that are very similar to your keyword.

Broad match effectively multiplies the effective reach of your campaigns—which can be a good thing if you’re looking for an “automatic” way to increase search volume—but you need to keep a close eye on your search terms report to make sure that you aren’t wasting money on irrelevant searches.

Phrase Match

Phrase match guarantees that your ad will only be shown if users search for specific keyword phrases as you’ve entered them into your campaign.

Traditionally, phrase match keywords will only be shown if users enter in the phrases exactly with no words in between, though additional words can be added before or after the keyword.

For the keyword “pink salt lamp”, for example, you may appear in searches like:

• Himalayan pink salt lamp
• Small pink salt lamp
• Natural glow pink salt lamp
• Pink salt lamp glow

Your ad will not appear in searches like:

• salt lamps that are pink
• Himalayan salt lamps

Phrase match keywords allow your ads to show up for a lot fewer types of search queries than broad match keywords do, which is great for helping advertisers focus their ad copy on just a few relevant searches.

Exact Match

With exact match keywords, your ad will only be displayed when searchers type in your exact keyword or an exceptionally close variant. So, if you bid on the keyword [pink salt lamp], your ad will only show up for people who enter in that exact phrase.

Historically, exact match has always given advertisers the tightest control over which searches their ads appear on. However, if you don’t include all of the right exact match keywords in your campaigns, you can miss out on valuable search queries, which is why many advertisers like to use exact match in combination with other match types.

As you can see above, each of these match types provides advertisers with a different way to control who sees their ads. This is important because the better you know who is seeing your ads, the more targeted and effective your ad copy and landing pages will be.

Unfortunately, Google’s announcement today has the potential to unbalance this whole system. Now, instead of only showing your ads based on your keywords, Google is taking your fate into their own hands. By including close variants of your keywords as part of their targeting algorithm, Google is basically saying, “Trust us, we’ll get your ads in front of the right audience.”

How Did We Get Here?

To be honest, this announcement really isn’t that big of a surprise. Given Google’s various moves in this direction over the past few years, it’s been pretty obvious that Google has been headed in this direction for a while.

In fact, in its crudest form, close variants were initially introduced clear back in 2014 when Google began allowing exact match keywords to match things like accidental plurals and misspellings. Then, a couple of years ago, Google coined the term “close variants” and expanded their definition to include queries with additional function words or out-of-order words, like the following:

Generally speaking, while these changes caused a few minor headaches, they were generally fairly helpful. With the release of close variants for exact match keywords, you could choose a keyword like [washington dc tours] and still show up a variety of relevant searches like:

• “Wahsington DC tour” (mispellings)
• “Washington DC tour’s” (grammatical errors)
• “Washington DC tour” (singular/plural forms)
• “Washington DC touring” (stemming variants)
• “DC tours” (common abbreviations)

But then, about a year ago, Google threw everyone for a loop when they further expanded the definition of close variants to include same-meaning words. Now, the exact match keyword [yosemite camping] could triggers ads for searches like “yosemite campground” and “camping in yosemite.”

According to Google, the main motivation behind this change was to save advertisers time and help them reach a broader pool of customers. That’s great, but we already had a couple of ways to do that—broad match modifier and phrase match—so the move was confusing, to say the least.

With all of these changes, it’s been pretty clear that Google is trying to make paid search advertising easier and more accessible, so this latest move is hardly surprising. However, close variants have definitely caused some real headaches for some advertisers—especially when small variations that seemed irrelevant to Google were actually big intent signals for their business—so expanding them into more match types does give cause for concern.

In the past, because they only affected exact match keywords, close variants were fairly limited in scope. As a result, they didn’t significantly affect most of us. This time, however, by throwing phrase match and broad match modifier into the picture, things could be very different.

What All of This Means for You

So, what does all of this mean for you and your business? Well, as you have probably guessed from the rest of this article, you can expect to see some changes in what search queries your ads show up for.

In the coming weeks, search queries will begin to match to close variants of your keywords. As a result, you can expect your ads to show up for more words with similar meanings: synonyms, paraphrases, etc.

As a quick example, here is the level of keyword range expansion you can expect from phrase match keywords:

As you can see, Google has interpreted “lawn mowing” to be synonymous with “grass cutting” and “lawn cutting”. That’s all well and good…unless you wanted to run different ads for “grass cutting”, “lawn cutting” and “lawn mowing”—which very well might be the case.

You see the same sort of thing with broad match modifier:

Here, Google has picked “grass cutting and gardening” and “cut your grass” as synonyms for “lawn mowing”. If you don’t happen to offer gardening services, that could lead to some real problems.

To make matters worse, what if you happen to be bidding on both “lawn mowing services” and “gardening services”? What then?

Google assures us that they’ll take all of that into account and prioritize the semantically relevant keyword (along with its relevant ad), but if that’s the case, why roll out this change at all?

To be honest, it seems like this move is primarily aimed at simplifying Google Ads for new users. For established advertisers, it potentially creates as many problems as it solves.

With all that in mind, you’ll want to keep a close eye on your account over the next few months. Hopefully, since Google reports that 15% of all searches are new queries, you’ll discover a variety of new keywords. But, if that doesn’t pan out (and based on our audit findings, there’s a good chance that it won’t), you’ll need to manually corral your keywords using your negative keyword lists to keep your campaigns on track.

Conclusion

When it comes to online advertising, change is the name of the game. We’re all kind of at the mercy of big platforms like Google and Facebook, so when a big change like this is announced, there’s not much you can do but watch, wait and adapt.

Fortunately, as dependent as we are on the whims of Google for our advertising success, they’re dependent on us, too. So, every time Google makes a big change like this, it’s either for the better…or they’ll have to fix it fast.

All that being said, this new announcement does feel something like an execution notice for keyword match types. It might not be the final blow, but the writing’s on the wall. The lines between match types are getting very blurry now and it probably won’t be too much longer before Google asks you to identify your target keywords and leave the rest up to them.

By the way, if you’d like help adapting your campaigns to this new change, let us know here or in the comments. We’d love to help!

How do you feel about this most recent announcement? Do you think it’s a step in the right direction…or a step backward? How do you think this will affect your campaigns? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

The post Are Keyword Match Types Dead? appeared first on Aden Andrus.