Psychological copy test

Psychological copy test: 2009-09-13: Marketing by numbers: If you are marketing, you should always be testing. That was the mantra when I was doing direct marketing twenty years ago and it's still true today. So every website, even every web page, should have two or more versions, one where you're running your normal page, and another where you've changed a headline or photograph or the copy or whatever to see if it helps.; The way it works is the visitor always sees one version of the page, but the version they see is determined randomly when they first arrive. OK, they may see the different page on their home computer to the one at work, but it's good enough.; Once the 'experiment' proves one page is better, you keep that one and try another test. In that way, you're always gaining.; Except, that's not how my latest test went. Remember the psychological profile work I did on taxi drivers? My g/f (who is a work psychologist) did a fabulous psychological profile on taxi drivers based on some questionnaires I sent out and some other data (trade publications and so on), and based on that I wrote new page copy designed to appeal to them.; 140 visitors went to the two pages. 6 converted off the original page, and .. wait for it .. 0 converted off my spanking new psychological taxi copy.; So what went wrong?; It certainly wasn't the psychological profile. That was breathtaking.; It was my interpretation of it. In my excitement, I wrote it too quickly. I didn't really, really, take the profile on board. I didn't think enough about it. Didn't really, really put myself in their shoes.; What's exciting about those figures is the power of copy. Remember, the other power of copy is to draw visitors through the search engines by containing keywords people are searching on. Ignoring that hugely important thing for a moment, here we have an awesome demonstration of the power of copy. Two pages. Equal in every way except for the text. One converted at 8%, the other at 0%. Isn't that something? Does that mean if I actually got the psychological text right I might be able to get it to 16%?; And .. just think about those numbers. 8% versus zero. Zero! I've never had results as absolute as that. Copy, then, is probably the most important thing on the page.; So .. without testing .. who knows what state the other (many) pages on this website are in. Let's say they are at the 4% level. That means, through testing, I could improve all of them to at least the 8% level (via a few 0% waypoints, admittedly). And what about beyond 8%? Why not? If 8% is just what it was, unoptimised, untested, where's the ceiling? What enormous potential! I could carve a career out of just that.; My rage is building. Because the discussion between client and web developer is always about how the page looks. And web developers who have a portfolio of nice looking websites get more business and yes, they may even have happier clients because our main sense is our eyesight and the thing the client can judge is how it looks.; My contention is always .. you've a limited budget. Spend that on what matters. I'm also testing some different graphic designs atm and afaics the implementations I've put in place make almost no difference, yet they take hours to implement. Copy is just copy, you can make changes instantly.; I'm almost at the point of saying "screw how it looks". I'm sure there are great graphic designers who can make a really big difference, and maybe the fact that clients can get stuck in and say "move that over there and make this bit more purple" turns any design into a committee decision. Maybe that's what's wrong. I mean, the big design and brand people just turn up and say "here's your new logo". Lesser designers turn up with a choice for the client to pick from (oh yes .. how to make friends and influence people, JA style). But honestly I would rather launch a page of black text on a white background saying something useful than have something pretty that said nothing much of any use.; John Allsopp Web Design - "screw what it looks like". It's kinda catchy don't you think?; The other thing about it is .. writing is hard to sell. Anyone can write. Yet .. just look how important it is. It really needs to be done right by someone who knows what they are doing.; It's perfectly possible that the reason I know what I know about Internet marketing is I've made more mistakes at it than most. I certainly get the strong impression that there are 99 ways of doing this stuff wrong for every 1 that's right. Hopefully I can spot more than your average bear of those 99 ways of doing it wrong before we reach implementation. It's a tough job though, if you're brought in to make a nice lovely website and all you keep saying is 'no'.; The beautiful thing about this is .. if I hadn't tested it, I wouldn't have known how wrong it was. So .. how much of your website is wrong without you knowing? If you're not testing .. how can you know?; The numbers are your clients and prospects talking to you. There's not much that's more important than that. Much as I might (do) come across as cocky sometimes (always) here, there's only one God. It doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter what you think. Seriously. It only matters how your clients interact with your website, and you get to peek at that through the numbers. The numbers settle all arguments and answer all questions, uncomfortable though that may be sometimes. The numbers are God.; The alternative, test version of this blog is a lovely one about kittens, obviously.

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