New website design still not winning over old one

Here’s the results after another week of testing
(results of new design compared to the old design):

  • Downloads: down 4.22%
  • Sign ups: up 1.50%
  • Sales: down 19,11%
  • Profits: down 11,52%
  • Average First Purchase Value: up 10%

Something’s not right in the new design, but it’s hard to determine what it is.
Yes, I know, that is because we changed too many things at once.
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Our first iPhone app: Clz Movies

This week we submitted our first iPhone app to Apple for approval.

It’s a companion app for our Movie Collector software, not a stand-alone product. Users can catalog their DVD collection using Movie Collector, then export their collection to the iPhone viewer app, so they can always have their collection with them (e.g. at the DVD store, at friends, etc..).
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New website design, take two

Last week, I told you about the A/B split test I started, comparing my old website design vs a radical new design. I was planning to let it run for 2 weeks, unless the results after 1 week would be dramatic. Well, they are:

These are the results after 7 days (A is the old design, B is the new design):

  • Downloads: About the same
  • Sign ups: 20 percent more for design B
  • Sales: 19 percent less for design B
  • Profits: 10 percent less for design B
  • Average First Purchase Value: 10 percent higher for B

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Email Sending Capabilities disabled

Last Friday, I received the following email from InfusionSoft, the email service I am using for our newsletters and auto-responders:

We have received notification from several Internet Service Providers that your recipients are reporting your emails as spam at a rate which exceeds their allowed thresholds. In order to prevent any further spam complaints from your contacts and to protect your email sending reputation, we have temporarily disabled all email sending capabilities.
To restore email sending service to your Infusionsoft application and learn how you can prevent future spam complaints, please contact the Infusionsoft Customer Care Staff at the information listed below.

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Testing a new website design

The design of our website is being changed almost continously. I am always trying to improve its conversion power, by making small optimizations to the layout, the design and the copy.

But this time I am implementing a more radical change: a completely new layout. In the next couple of weeks I will be testing the new layout vs the old layout using an A/B split test. That is, fifty percent of new visitors will be seeing the old layout, the other fifty percent will get the new layout. Then we’ll be measuring sign-ups, downloads, sales and profits in both groups.
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Speaking at the SIC : The Art of Ignoring

I just received confirmation that I have been accepted as a speaker at the 2009 Software Industry Conference, in Boston (July 16-18).
The organizers were able to squeeze me in, even though I submitted my paper way too late (sent it in last week, deadline was February 28).

I will be speaking on Saturday afternoon (July 18), in a session about micro-ISV Issues.

Here’s what I will be talking about:
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Content Network – Keyword Targeting vs Placement Targeting

Here’s a quick update on my Content Network adventures.

Up till now I have been using keyword targeting only. And I have been running Placement Reports to find “bad” sites, so that I could exclude them using site exclusions.

But now my campaigns have run for a few months, my ads are being shown on thousands of sites. There is no way I can go through and exclude the all bad ones.
I have removed the high volume bad sites which helps a bit, but there’s load’s of bad ones in the long tail too. Some of em even generating lots of clicks and thus costing me money.

(BTW: when I say “bad sites”, I mean “somewhat relevant” sites that are not performing plus sites that are simply not relevant.)

So now I am trying placement targeting. I am using the Placement Report for my keyword targeted ads to find good sites (based on relevance, number of conversions, clicks and impressions). Then I create new placement targeted ad groups to target just those sites.

Here’s my findings on both methods:
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