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…

 

Thanks to everyone who was able to attend Mixergy’s Conversion Forum last Friday night. @AndrewWarner can certainly pack a house, and this event was no exception. Thanks also to my contemporary, Tim Ash for providing his thoughts on landing page optimization, and to Jason Nazar of @DocStoc for skillfully warming up the crowd.

Speaking of DocStoc, if you were unable to attend Mixergy or are like me and can’t read your own handwriting, don’t fret. You can download my complete presentation on DocStoc here:http://is.gd/hkZJ In it, you’ll learn common landing page mistakes, best practices for conversion optimization, and other tips for maximizing your online marketing campaigns.

I also spoke with Andrew earlier last year about how to increase your site’s conversion rates now. To hear the interview, click here:http://is.gd/hl4p

Without a doubt, Google has changed the way we live our lives. Whether searching for information, shopping for shoes or comparing deals on your next vacation, there is hardly a time when we don’t just Google it.

While this cultural transformation came on fast, it didn’t come by accident. Since its inception, Google has strived towards one goal and one goal only (and no, it’s not refraining from being evil) and that goal is informational relevance.

It’s this relevance that has made Google the world wide hub for information, shopping, email and all things online. However, this dominance brings with it some pretty unique challenges. How do you stay one step ahead of the marketers looking to game the system to win a lion’s share of traffic for their site? How do you prevent spammers? In general, how do they stay one step ahead and keep everyone pursuing Google’s Holy Grail of informational relevance and premium user experience?

The answer is both simple and quite complex.

Google’s constant optimization and an obsessive commitment to user experience are simple. However, the way that this is executed upon is quite complex.

At the heart of this complexity is Google’s algorithm or the way that they measure relevance. It is a semi – black box mix of information rankings, taking many items into consideration. Keyword density in relation to the search query, URL naming conventions, overall performance and too many other factors to name here, all play into how pages are served when the user queries a search.

It’s this constant pursuit of the perfect experience that has kept Google modifying this algorithm and kept marketers, almost obsessively, asking what is the next step in the progression?

In a recent release, Google is saying that now, their quality score will be calculated in real time, dynamically every time a query is made.

So, it appears that the answer would not only be HOW the quality score is calculated, but HOW OFTEN. I guess it’s only logical. As technology continues to increase, and marketers continue to increase their savvy, this is another way for Google to raise the bar.

This new shift in the process is huge. As marketers scramble to figure out Google’s newest riddle, the firms providing real-time landing page optimization and behavioral targeting will become a marketing necessity.

If you’re landing pages are not providing relevance in real-time, your quality score will decline, along with your ranking and ROI, not to mentioned that your CPC will increase.

So, while real-time optimization is definitely “web 2.0” it may soon be the standard. When looking back at how fast Google went from being a new, boutique search engine to a business and cultural cornerstone, it is easy to envision these real-time optimizers as being another mandatory tool in the web marketers arsenal.