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Ghostbusters was a touchstone for us. Seven years ago, we were launching into a new marketplace – conversion optimization. Like the Ghostbusters, many didn’t understand the value of what we did. Like the ghosts of the movie, the goblins in a website were invisible and ethereal. So, we turned up the volume, donning lab coats…

Hear the Marketing Land article The staff was assembled, the stage was set. Representatives from every department plus some of the big brass were sitting around the long conference table. I was about to present the data that showed how successful my marketing campaigns had been for the past month. This was important, because it…

Color preferences are deeply rooted emotional responses that seem to lack any rational basis, yet the powerful influence of color rules our choices in everything from the food we eat to the clothes we wear to the cars we buy.      One study found that magazine readers recognize full-color ads 26% more often than…

The Strongest Online Persuader You’ll Ever Encounter: Yourself The things that make us effective marketers or stand in our way often aren’t external, but internal. Being a good marketer, copywriter or Conversion Scientist means coming to terms with our own demons, limitations and neuroses.Dr. Aaron Balick maps out how our overburdened Ego does it’s best…

I have to admit, I was a little more nervous than usual presenting in front of an audience of psychologist-marketers. You’ll see what I mean in the video. Why would a Conversion Scientist be invited to speak at a Psych conference? Because our testing is designed to tell us things about your visitors that they…

Here we thought we were the only ones who loved a good periodic table. Data collected from LOGMyCalls’ millions of phone calls analyzed in the first quarter of 2014 answers the critical question: what are the differences between a converted call and a non-converted call? McKay Allen shared the results from this study in this…

The audience for any website is unique. In fact, it would be presumptuous to conclude that two websites selling the same or similar product are going to have equal successes. If this were the case, where would the challenge be? And what would we be doing for a living? This is why we let your…

In this presentation, I talk about predicting the future. The problem with predicting the future, even using CRO, is that our visitors are very unpredictable. Here are some of the assumptions we use to predict the future that just don’t work. Because, really, all of us are predicting the future. When we’re building our sites…

Monopoly is the quintessential game of American capitalism. For better or worse, it focuses the player on one goal: maximizing the number of dollars in your pile. Everyone has their own strategy and their preferred properties to own and build. Your little sister may only buy properties if she likes the color. Excellent monopoly players…

Brian Massey posed a great question to me the other day: If you could ask your site visitors only one question, what should it be? I love this question because it distills pre-conversion user research down to its essence: how can you best glean the “why” motivations behind what your users are thinking – and,…

This is a guest post by Ryan Farris. According to a study conducted by Bain and Co., the cost of acquisition for a new customer can be 600-700% more expensive than retaining an existing customer. This is not surprising to anyone. So, why is that so many companies still struggle with high rates of attrition….

As scientists, we like to break things down to their essence, to understand the things that make them work. This works well when we’re optimizing websites. Now it’s St. Patrick’s Day. What are the components of this rowdy holiday? We decided to create our own website optimization holiday modeled on St. Patty’s Day. Our analysis…

Subscribe to see what we’re reading at Conversion Sciences. 11 Steps for Creating the Best Converting Registration Forms I recently went to a website to buy a new keyboard for a laptop. I found the site with the right price and delivery and put the keyboard in my cart. When I went to checkout, the…

Women’s Bay, Alaska – 98% of Shoppers abandon their full shopping carts. In an event termed, “Reality imitating the Internet,” a trove of shoppers left shopping carts full of merchandise at the checkout counters of this small Alaskan discount retailer. “Everything seemed fine, “ said store owner Edsel “Mac” Jones. “They were shopping, comparing prices,…

Valentine’s Day is an emotional time, even for a Conversion Scientist. It is a time in which we, like so many people in love, celebrate beautiful relationships. It’s a time to stop seeing our visitors as “traffic,” “visits,” “bounces,” or “conversions.” We dispense with talk of hypotheses and statistical significance and turn instead to those…