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Shanelle Mullin

High Velocity

Mark Zuckerberg famously said, “Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.”

Since then, startups and growth marketers have latched onto the statement. “Move fast and break things” has become a way of life, an ideal for aspiring entrepreneurs who just want to hustle all day, hustle all night like Gary Vaynerchuk.

But how true is that statement, which Mark made many, many years ago?

Does it apply to testing and experimentation? The philosophy of high velocity testing, made popular by a number of different testing and growth experts, certainly makes the case that it does.

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Buyer Modalities

As optimizers and business owners, you’re striving to better understand your audience. Who visits your site? What are they looking for? What will make them convert to paying customers?

To help answer these questions, buyer modalities were created to help categorize visitors and their purchase behavior. The only problem?

Buyer modalities are meaningless and personality models as a whole are extremely difficult to apply to online marketing and optimization.

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Tornados

Would you rather optimize the path your visitor will actually take or optimize the path you think he should take?

If you’d rather the former, then there’s something you need to know about linear funnels… they’re not a completely accurate representation of reality. The question is, what should you do about it and what is an accurate representation of reality?

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Credibility

Who are you more likely to trust to tell you the truth: a preschool teacher or a used car salesman? A firefighter or a magician? A child or a politician?

Some people are simply deemed more or less credible based on surface-level factors. The same is true for websites. [Tweet It!]

You have to know what makes your site the child or the politician.

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UX Mistakes

Have you ever wished for a tap to call button on a mobile site? Or struggled to tap a tiny link? Have you ever wondered what would happen after you clicked a button on a site? Or, worse, wondered what to do next on a site?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’ve experienced a UX mistake. They’re more common than most people realize. Why? Perhaps it’s the curse of knowledge, ego or laziness. Whatever it is, it’s paramount that you learn to avoid (or fix) these mistakes.

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False Bottom

UX mistakes often go undetected because they are quiet. They aren’t a broken image or a misspelled word or a form that isn’t sending. No, UX mistakes are foundational.

To visitors, UX mistakes are loud, whether they consciously detect them or not. In fact, IBM is credited for the saying, “Ease of use may be invisible, but its absence sure isn’t.” [Tweet It!]

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Transactional Emails

A while back, Seth Godin published a list of things that “every good marketer knows”. Among that list was: “Anticipated, personal, and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.” His conclusion was that there is a very big difference between knowing and doing.

Good marketers continue to send unsolicited junk. [Tweet It!]

Transactional emails are the key every good marketer is talking about, but that few are doing something about.

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Google Tag Manager

As an optimizer, it’s your responsibility to understand the implementation and analysis of digital analytics. Gone are the days of relying on the IT department to help you with basic analytics tracking. [Tweet It!] Fortunately, Google Tag Manager makes it easy.

Still, many optimizers don’t use Google Tag Manager (or any tag manager, for that matter) because it looks daunting. The truth is that once you understand the basics, it essentially becomes a second language.

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PPC Mistakes

In Advanced Google AdWords, Brad Geddes wrote, “Wouldn’t you like your ads to be sought after, not ignored?”

That’s the ultimate goal, right? To craft a PPC ad that’s so compelling people are happy to click it. It doesn’t happen often.

If PPC has been around since 1996, why doesn’t it happen more often? Why haven’t advertisers perfected the process? Because the landscape is constantly changing. What you learned 6 months ago could already be outdated information.

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