Divide and Conquer

When I talk to my Southern friends, my voices changes. I speak slower. I tone down my New York accent. I ditch the East Coast sarcasm.

When I talk to my CEO, I always speak with confidence. I talk professionally but concisely — he never has time to spare. When I talk to my 12-year-old cousin I become highly animated. My sentences are short. My words are simple.

I seem to encompass many different personas. We all do. Why?

In each situation we deal with different audiences. We try our best to be effective communicators. To do this, we cater to each unique audience by changing our talk, walk and style accordingly. Landing-page optimization is no different.

It's called persona targeting. By dividing your traffic based precisely on the audience's common characteristics and optimizing that way, you're maximizing response rate and revenue. How you divide your site's traffic will vary depending on the type of site you have. For example, this segmentation could be by demographic, location, operating system, keyword, day of week, time of day or even mobile device. You will be surprised how differently each unique persona responds to the same changes on your site.

Much research has been done on the different search engine user demographics. Last year, Nielsen/NetRatings ran a study for Marketing Sherpa; it suggested that Google and Yahoo users are somewhat more affluent than other search engine users. It also revealed that Ask.com has the highest percentage of visitors among “maturing families,” defined as any household with children 6 to 12 years of age or with kids both under 6 and above 13.

Recently a large lead-generation site segmented traffic by search engine and found that some values which were successful for Google users had no impact on Yahoo users. Changing the location of the registration form increased Google user conversion to the “thank you” page by 8.8%. This same change didn't cause a ripple in the Yahoo traffic.

KEYWORD-BASED TARGETING

Every six months, Jupiter Research runs an executive survey of search engine marketing advertisers and agencies. When asked “What problems do you encounter with search engine marketing?” the most popular answer has been, “Desired keywords are too expensive.”

As the price of keywords skyrockets, it becomes increasingly important to show visitors exactly what will make them convert upon landing. The only way to maximize your marketing budget is to segment by keyword and target your audience.

Not long ago Optimost tested a popular flower retailer's e-commerce site. We noticed that visitors who found the site by searching for “late delivery” converted very differently than those who searched on “free shipping.” This makes perfect sense. “Late delivery” says that speed of delivery is a higher priority than price, while “free delivery” indicates the opposite.

The experiment showed that sending each persona to a page emphasizing their priorities was more effective than sending them to the same page. Multivariate testing produced a higher conversion rate when the personas were split than when all the keywords were tested in one group.

WEEKDAY/WEEKEND-BASED TARGETING

We all behave differently on the weekends than we do during the weekdays. On the weekends, we're usually more relaxed, less sleep-deprived, and generally in a better frame of mind. Weekdays we have a lot of things to do, no time to do them, and are more easily irritated. This disparity in mood affects all aspects of our lives, including how we shop on the Internet.

Optimost observed this trend while working on Delta Air Lines' site. We noticed that weekday and weekend flight bookers responded differently to the same content. Perhaps the no-nonsense weekday customers were likely to be booking business travel. They were more interested in finding a time that was convenient for them. But on weekends, site visitors were booking for leisure and had time to really shop around for a deal.

When we tried removing the words “Flexible travel plans can save you money” from the page, conversion decreased 2.6% for the weekend bookers yet had no impact on the weekday customers.

Appealing to each customer's needs, and targeting appropriately, proved an effective optimization strategy.

Divide and conquer. Segment and optimize. Create and test content that'll trigger an impulse to buy.

Just as my 12-year-old cousin responds differently to a lollipop than my CEO, all personas will respond differently to your site. Persona targeting teamed with landing-page optimization and multivariable testing is an incredibly fruitful approach for finding out what makes each visitor group convert.

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AUDREY RASIZER (Audrey_Rasizer@interwoven.com) is a senior analyst at Web site optimization firm Optimost, New York.