magnify360 Blog

Ever wonder why the rearview mirror on the passenger side of your car is distorted?

As the driver, your eye is further away from it. In order for you to still see the images, the mirror is given a convex shape, which shrinks the reflection. The images are there, but they’re not exactly accurate. 

The same can be said for behavioral targeting and web site optimization. With traditional multivariate testing, you can look back on results to see what made your traffic convert, but the data has been distorted with a little thing called time. 

The investment community puts it succinctly: past performance is no guarantee of future results. I like to say, “The right experience for yesterday isn’t necessarily the right experience for right now.” 

Your customer base is constantly changing. Just because a certain landing page performed the best last month or even last week doesn’t mean it’s going to be relevant to your existing flow of visitors.

Take social media, for example. It’s extremely dynamic, with a high volatility over winning pages. This begs the question: how can an online marketer effectively adapt to these constant changes?

Again, we come back to time. REAL time. To ensure the best performing page is always being served, you must be able to evaluate an individual in the moment, and predict what’s most relevant to them.

It all goes back to the driver’s seat. Ask yourself: are you staring at the rearview, looking back at past results? Or are you facing forward, shifting gears and preparing for the curves ahead…

 

magnify360’s ceo and founder, Olivier Chaine, has been invited to participate as a panel member at the upcoming Online Market World (OMW) conference in San Francisco, this coming October 1-3.

He’ll be on two panels, one of which is entitled The Seven Deadly Sins of Website Design. Working with the producer, Lisa Morgan, we were asked to provide a few of the top line sins we’d like covered during the discussion.

Even to our own surprise, our primary suggestion had very little do with this business’ core functions: personalization, behavioral targeting, multivariate testing, analytics, lead scoring, pURLs or predictive modeling—none of it. Instead, our main contribution focused on marketing culture.

The biggest sin of website design is the idea that a website is a project with a beginning, middle and end. Instead, a website should be perceived as a living entity, requiring continual nurturing. At magnify360, we refer to this as Continual Marketing, and we practice this by updating our own website and those of our clients each and every day.

Sometimes, this is the roll-out of a big flashy update but most days, it’s just a small test and improvement to a button color, a brief re-write to a paragraph or a small tweak to how website resources are managed—baby steps to overall progress. Generally, these updates take only a few minutes but added together produce enormous results.

This idea is based on the Japanese practice of Kaizen or Continual Improvement, which dictates that large-scale pre-planned project scheduling should be replaced by smaller experiments, which can be rapidly adapted to produce large-scale results. It’s also a focus on the method, rather than the goal.

Borrowing from Kaizen, because there is no such thing as the perfect website, there is no end goal, just a continuous series of small improvements, implemented every day for overall improvement. The benefits of adopting this type of approach include:

-  Time & Resource Efficiency

-  Far Less Risk in Launches

-  Ability to Measure Results in an Uncluttered Environment

-  Encouragement of Creative, Out-of-the-Box Ideas & Experiments

-  A Company Culture in Which No One Fears Failure

We had very big day here at magnify360.  This morning we launched a project with Citrix Systems that we’ve been working on in stealth mode for a very long time.  The project is a website, called OneGreatPartner.com, and it’s a site dedicated to fostering the long-standing alliance between Citrix and Microsoft.  Not coincidentally, the site launched on Monday, the first day of Microsoft’s World Wide Partner Conference in Houston, Texas, where every year Microsoft crowns its favorite partner.

The site includes some social networking functionality, private product access and information on current and upcoming Citrix-Microsoft initiatives and is primarily geared towards sales and tech executives at both organizations.

We integrated the magnify360 Platform to improve visitor engagement and return visits.  Essentially, our platform profiles or analyzes the implicit and explicit behaviors of each user to the site and in real-time serves the most relevant on-site experience to each accordingly.  In the case of OneGreatPartner, the explicit information can include a Microsoft or Citrix exec’s self-published information, like title, group, age and department and implicit data, such IP geo-location, click speed, how long they take to move from one page to the next, etc.

Real-time customization of the on-site experience includes varying messaging, graphics, media, layout, page flow–you name it.  For Citrix, the greatest bi-product of our solution is the data on what information the Microsoft executives are gravitating towards, to indicate areas of strength, improvement or even to spark new ideas for product and marketing.

SoCalTech was nice enough to write up a brief article about it too: magnify360 Gets Win at Citrix

Read the press release we issued.