Bookclub: One book you should be reading

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain

One of my favorite parts about working in post-click marketing is the quality of people in the field. They are passionate, intelligent, and open to the exchange of ideas. One of the best examples of this is Ion Interactive’s CRO book club; a group of their post-click marketers pick a book to read each month, then meet to discuss and debate the topics presented in the text.

I mean, how much more passionate can you get?

With that, I would like to recommend a book by Tim Ash titled Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions (not an affiliate link).

As Tim says in the introduction, “If you are involved in any way with making your company’s Internet marketing programs more effective, this book is for you.” Ash’s book presents a holistic view of post-click marketing filled with real-life examples. Tim Ash is a recognized thought leader in conversion rate optimization.

If you are new to post-click marketing, this books provides an excellent overview of the industry. It gives you everything you need to know to create compelling landing pages and test their effectiveness using Google’s Website Optimizer. It even provides action plan frameworks so you can develop a standardized optimization process.

If you are more experienced, there are still valuable lessons. Being a former math teacher, I was particularly drawn to his Chapter 7 – The Math of Tuning (it even starts with another Mark Twain quote). Most conversion rate optimizers are primarily marketers, but here, Ash makes the case that we must also be mathematicians. The general mantra of the post-click marketer is: test, test, test (my personal mantra is a little more passionate). If you cannot analyze your test results, why perform it in the first place?

Some specific items I enjoyed in Chapter 7:

• A strong admonition against cherry picking your data. When you’ve been optimizing pages long enough, you know in your gut which test should win. Many, many times test results go against this instinct (which is why we test). The most recent test on Anne Holland’s WhichTestWon.com shows this. Fully 80%  of respondents guessed the wrong page and the comments are full of excuses of why the data is wrong. Don’t just pick the data points that support your hypothesis.
• An excellent overview of probability theory. Ash highlights that our statistical analysis of web trends should accomplish two goals: it should accurately describe what is happening on your site (descriptive) and it can be used to predict or reach conclusions outside of your data set (inferential).
• Building on the above point, Ash states that conversion optimizers should test themselves by making inferences on the data and then seeing if it comes true. His point is that if you cannot predict the future trends accurately then you really don’t have a clear, descriptive statistical model either.

Avinash Kaushik’s review of this book (incidentally, I’m currently reading his Web Analytics 2.0), sums it up nicely:

The days of HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) driven websites are well behind us. Landing page testing finally enables experimentation so customers can better shape their own content. The beauty is that this is a true win-win- customers get the experience they want and companies get improved conversion rates .Landing Page Optimization will help you accelerate your very own win-win journey.

Have you read this book? Are there others you would recommend? Please leave a comment below!

Vincent Ammirato

I'm the internet marketing strategist for Alter Imaging in Charlotte, NC. I direct all of the SEO, SEM, and CRO for our marketing clients. My primary focus is improving the visitor experience through A/B and multivariate testing.

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