Content Optimization – A Best Practice That Few Practice

By Robert Rose (@robert_rose) Oct 13, 2010 Comments

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There’s a term in scientific research called “social desirability bias”. It’s a term that’s used to describe the tendency of a respondent to answer a question in a way that will be viewed favorably by society. Its effect on research is usually an over-reporting of good behavior and/or an under-reporting of “bad” behavior. In short, if you ask people if they are willing donate their organs after death (as one organization did) 72% will say yes. Yet, only 38% actually do so.

There’s a similar trend in optimizing web content for conversions.

In September of this year, conversion management solutions provider, Maxymiser, conducted a study of marketers looking at their Web site and Web content. A huge majority — at 79% — strongly agreed that testing content is a critical aspect of web site design and content decisions. Additionally, 42% said that the number one priority for their Web site was “converting visitors”. However, only 27% actually make changes to their Web site content based on testing results.

This result matches well with a statistic from Forrester, cited by Web analytics vendor WebTrends, that only 26% of marketers actually test Web content for conversion metrics.

And if content testing and optimization is such a huge priority for marketers, it’s not showing up in application usage trends either. Data from BuiltWith.com – the site that analyzes technology profiles from millions of Web sites – shows that Google Website Optimizer usage has flatlined for the last two years with no appreciable growth. The data is similar with applications like Adobe’s Test & Target and Autonomy’s Optimost as well.

http://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Google-Website-Optimizer

So What’s the Challenge?

Interestingly, there seems to be a disparity here as well. Again, according to the Maxymiser survey, while a large percentage of marketers believe that content optimization strategies are most important, only 37% plan to allocate any dollars to conversion management strategies. “Budget constraints” are the most often cited barrier.

Forrester, however, identifies other challenges to adoption. In the Q3 2010 Forrester Wave report on Online Testing, analyst Joe Stanhope identifies “four critical factors” that marketers need to consider before choosing a vendor. These include “Services”, “Integration Support”, “Testing Algorithms” and the dreaded “Application Usability”.

At least two of these come up often when speaking with Web content optimization vendors and their challenges with selling or retaining customers. One senior executive with a leading content testing and optimization software company (who chose to remain anonymous) pointed out the challenge with adoption in the marketing department. “The problem is twofold,” he said. “The first challenge is that it’s often very hard to get the testing code of the application into the customer’s Web site. Whether it’s integrating with some existing CMS system, or delegating it to IT — setting up tests with existing Web sites can often be more time consuming and difficult than it’s worth to the marketer.”

“The second challenge”, says this executive “is that marketers just don’t’ know what or how to test. The concept of testing and optimizing content is very appealing to marketers. But, actually sitting down, creating a test plan, executing it and gleaning meaningful results from that test is, again, time consuming and requires patience. And, pressure for ROI in today’s ‘real-time’ world it makes it difficult to be patient for statistically meaningful data.”