Search Marketing Sage

Following my session today on retargeting was Chris Goward featuring the top ten conversion optimization mistakes. This is fresh stuff from Chris — he added many new points just last night!

Chris started with a sample from BabyAge.com. The goal was to lift ecommerce sales with their product page template. The test involved simply swapping the right and left columns, with image on left v. right. Variation B won with a 22.8% sales lift — which was surprising to the room because the image was on the left.

Now, the top ten mistakes!

The last session of the day that I attended Tuesday was a presentation by NYTimes Best Selling Author and SES Advisory Board Member, Bryan Eisenberg. Eisenberg took this time to give insight about pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and revealed his secret tips that will help improve PPC campaign performance.

I sat down at my desk this morning and opened my daily e-mail from Ad Age News.  As I skimmed the headlines I immediately gravitated to “Why Metrics Are Killing Creativity in Advertising: Viewpoint: When Marketing Decisions Are Based on Numbers, We Lose the Desire to Be Creative” by Patrick Sarkissian of Sarkissian Mason.  I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him, but our companies work together for a mutual client and I really like his team.

However, I can’t resist whole-heartedly disagreeing with his premise.  He’s absolutely wrong.  Because if anything it is the exact opposite and strangely the reality is he stands to make much more money in creating online by designing for improved metrics.