2 posts tagged “website testing”

The Financial Times reports today that Central Office of Information (COI), the UK Government's "center of excellence for marketing and communications," has put a moratorium on advertising on social media sites like Facebook.   COI organizes marketing campaigns to promote issues of public importance (education, health, welfare, etc.) for various UK Government departments.  The organization announced that it is reviewing how it handles advertising on social networking sites fearing that its ads could appear on innapropriate user generated sites.  Alan Bishop, chief executive of the COI, explained the decision to the FT saying:

"We always have to keep a very close eye on the context. People are still getting to grips with this. We don't want to exclude the use of any of the new social media but we do have to have a very clear idea of what the context is going to be like."

COI's decision comes one week after New Media Age reported that Vodafone, The AA, First Direct, and others were pulling their ads on Facebook because they appeared on the Facebook page of the British National Party, a highly controversial political organization.  Last week, Vodafone released a statement saying:

"We advertise our products and services across a wide range of on and offline publications... In the case of online, bundles of space are purchased across a number of sites including the social networking sites. As a result we were not aware that a Vodafone ad would appear next to a British National Party group on Facebook.

Our Public Policy Principles state that we do not make political donations or support particular party political interests and therefore to avoid misunderstandings we immediately withdrew our adverting as soon as this was brought to our attention.

We are working with our media buyer OMD to ensure that more robust controls are in place before we agree to any potential re-investment," the statement added."

The concerns raised by organizations like COI and Vodafone are understandable and highlight the need advertisers to have greater control over when and where their paid ads appear.  As far as I'm aware, thus far, website optimization solutions and content delivery platforms are only helping advertisers and marketers understand visitor behavior, segment visitors into groups, and deliver targeted messages that are relevant to specific segments. I'm not aware of any optimization solutions or content delivery platforms that helping advertisers optimize ads and website content so that they're not only relevant to various segments of website visitors but that they're also blocked from appearing on pages that promote or discuss controversial topics.  I'm interested to see who will be the first to make this happen.

Marketers can already test and optimize ads and web content so that relevant messages are delivered to different audiences i.e. (Audience segment A "High value customers" sees Ad #1, Audience segment B "First time visitor" sees Ad #2, etc.).  Similarly, search technology makes it easy to identify controversial key words on web pages (i.e. "BNP," "Political Party," etc.). I can't imagine that it would be too difficult to combine these two technologies to create an ad optimization and delivery network that allows advertisers to deliver blank ads on social media pages that have potentially dubious content, or 'sublease' that ad space on controversial social media pages to less discerning advertisers. 

Instead of simply segmenting users, the ad publishing optimization solution I'd like to see would also segment content.  The ad delivery platform would scan social media pages at regular intervals for controversial words.  If dubious words or phrases that go against a given advertiser's rules of engagement appear, the ad slot could display nothing at all or an ad from another, less discriminating advertiser, who subleases the ad space in cases where the primary advertisers chooses to bow out.  Having a solution like this would allow social media platforms like Facebook to offer a two-tiered advertising platform that offers the ultimate control to Tier 1 advertisers who are willing to pay for it and exposure to Tier 2 advertisers with a smaller budget.

Could this work?  Post a comment with your opinion, and if you don't have a Vox account, email me with your comment, and I'll post it manually.

Today, on Webpronews, Steven Bradley addresses some interesting questions raised in a couple of other blogs - namely:

• Is there an optimal post length?
• Will shorter posts help to retain readers and even lead to more links?
• What makes you unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed?

Bradley’s ultimate conclusion is that the best blogs have a mix of long, medium, and short posts.  He’d “prefer to focus on quality and let the length of the post be what it is… to find [his] blogging voice than consciously attempt to stifle it.”

I struggle with the same questions when writing my own blog.  Plenty of my readers tell me that they appreciate my more in-depth (translation: really long) posts.  But, I seem to get just as many comments (if not more) on short posts as I do on long posts.  Bradley’s blog made me realize that we still have a lot to learn about social media and web 2.0 optimization:

• What are the best ways for companies to engage customers through social media?
• How should individual bloggers and social media mavens (i.e. those who set up social networks/ groups on sites like Ning, Vox, Gather, etc.) structure their content to best engage with their peers around areas of mutual interest?

There are certainly a lot of assumptions to test.  So far, it seems that marketers and bloggers are throwing ideas against the wall and seeing what sticks. In time, there will more scientific ways to answer these questions.  Marketers are only beginning to understand the "science" behind web 2.0, social media, and targeted delivery of information to customers.  As web 2.0 and social media evolve, there is a growing buzz about:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO),
• Social Media Optimization (SMO), and
• Website Analytics/ Testing/ Website Optimization, which includes things like A/B Split Testing and Multivariate Promotion Testing, Targeted Content Delivery based on the profile of a specific visitor, Landing Page Optimization, and Predictive Delivery / Cross Selling, etc.  

These three topics are closely intertwined...  When a company spends money on SEO to ensure that their websites and/or corporate blogs/ social media properties are well placed in search results pages, their efforts won't result in customer conversion if the person who lands on their site can’t immediately find relevant information they’re looking for.  Similarly, if corporations are writing blogs that are too long or too short for their desired audience, they’ll lose that audience.  With that in mind, I think that concept testing, website optimization and analytics are the key to answering the key questions about the value of social media.  These topics will be of growing importance in the coming years as marketers strive to better understand and target customers to capture greater returns on web-based investments.

There are a some interesting players in the testing and optimization spaces (Offermatica - which, in the interests of full blogging disclosure, is a company that I recently interviewed with; Optimost; Touch Clarity, which was recently purchased by Omniture; Kefta; to some extent Google; and others).  If you are a marketer with experience working the products/services of any of these (and similar) companies, I'd love to hear your thoughts on their usefulness.  In my opinion, web marketers are only just starting to realize the value of testing and web optimization.  It will be very interesting to watch this space as web 2.0 and social media continue to grow. 

If you're interested in web optimization and testing, the following are links to blogs that you might like: Optimize & Prophesize, This Site Is Dead, Out of My Gord, Thinking Aloud.