Does order matter? It’s an eternal question that is asked in so many walks of life. Take birth order, for example. Earlier this year, much ado was made about a landmark study that showed that older siblings have higher IQs than younger siblings (of course, we younger siblings could take heart in an earlier study that showed that 23 of the 28 greatest scientific discoveries of the last 400 years were made by younger siblings). In yet another study, it was found that presenting information in a “bad news, good news” order left a more positive impression than the same information presented with a “good news, bad news” ordering. Even batting order in baseball matters. In an interesting analysis done a few years ago, it was determined that at least for the Toronto Blue Jays, they would have been better served by rearranging their batting order and making their cleanup hitter, Carlos Delgado, their leadoff hitter.

So does order matter? Clearly, the answer is unequivocally “yes” in many different situations. Yet when it comes to web design, the decision about what order to present copy, products, prices, and other key information is often made arbitrarily. From the many optimization projects we’ve conducted over the years, we’ve seen time and time again, that on the web, the order of information can have a very profound influence on response rates.

For example, in a test we conducted for The Motley Fool, we found that simply switching the order of the copy in the main area of their Rule Your Retirement subscription page had a major influence on response. In this test, we broke the main copy area into four parts and explored what was the best performing version out of the 24 different possible arrangements. There was a 19% difference between the best performing version and the worst performing version. We did a similar type of experiment for Bankrate, in which we changed the order of several key sections on their mortgage landing page. In this case, the optimal ordering yielded a 35% improvement in clickthru rates.

Both of these projects involved top-to-bottom ordering, but left-right ordering matters too. This month’s Customer Success Story highlights a project we did for New Scientist on their subscription landing page. On this project, we helped New Scientist increase the conversion rate from their landing page through the order process by 26.7%. One of the key factors was the location of the form. Conversion was significantly higher when the form was on the left side of the page than when it was on the right side of the page.

The benefits of optimizing order in web marketing are not limited to web pages. The same phenomenon can be seen with ad copy. In last month’s Optimal InSites, we ran our own test in which we took three key components of our Optimization Summit ad, and rotated the order to see which performed best. The three elements were the submit button (“Click Here to Register”), the benefits copy ("Hear a keynote presentation from Anne Holland..."), and the notice about early bird registration ending on August 31st. In our case, conversion was highest when the benefits copy came first. Of course, one might expect that this could change over time. As it gets closer to August 31st, perhaps the prominence of the early bird registration expiring will become more important (we’ll find out...we’re testing it again in this email ).

But does order always matter? Well, as Freddie Mercury of Queen fame once said, “Rod Stewart, Elton John and I were going to form a band called Hair, Nose and Teeth after the three of us. But it hasn't happened because none of us can agree on the order of the words!” So order may not always matter, but in web marketing it’s always worth evaluating. You’ll be surprised how often it does.

Launched in 1956 and part of Reed Elsevier plc group, New Scientist is the world's leading scientific current affairs magazine with a worldwide readership of over 730,000 and a growing online audience of over 1.6 million unique users.

In the UK, Optimost was appointed by New Scientist's team of subscription marketers to firstly determine whether a proposed new subscription funnel would perform better than the existing one, and secondly to conduct multivariable testing on the landing page to improve visitor and subscription conversions. In the first phase of testing, Optimost was able to establish that the new subscription site was 36% better than the original in converting visitors.

“There would obviously have been no point launching the website if it was less effective than the old one,” said Paola Van Den Brande of New Scientist. “Optimost enabled us to prove that the new one would convert more subscribers and that further improvements to conversion rates were possible.”

Once the new site was approved, Optimost then moved on to the more complex task of testing multiple variations of the crucial first landing page creative. Multivariable testing was conducted on various elements of copy and graphics on the page, adding up to 24,196 possible template permutations that were analyzed using Optimost's Optimal Design methodology and live visitor traffic.

Optimost was able to prove that the winning page recipe generated a 26.7% increase in conversions from the landing page through the order process, which in turn led to a 10.7% increase in subscription revenue.

In past newsletters, we have often highlighted Optimost partners who help marketers drive traffic to their site. These companies work hand in hand with Optimost as they optimize your search, email, and other lead generation campaigns, while Optimost maximizes the percentage of those visitors who convert to customers.

One of those companies is SEMDirector™, which provides its clients with Search Marketing Automation Solutions to manage and optimize their online brand presence, paid search advertising campaigns, organic search engine optimization efforts, co-op advertising programs and automated data integration. SEMDirector software provides global enterprises with robust, proven, and scalable solutions that maximize Return-On-Investment (ROI) and Return-On-Ad-Spend (ROAS) for all online advertising and marketing programs.

SEMDirector’s Search Marketing Automation Suite includes the following solutions:

• SEMDirector Paid Insight
• SEMDirector Organic Insight
• SEMDirector Competitive Insight
• SEMDirector Channel Insight
• SEMDirector Marketing Action Platform

For more information about SEMDirector’s solutions, please go to www.semdirector.com or call them at 858-397-1500.

Click here for a complete listing of Optimost Partners.

If you are an Optimost partner and you are interested in either having your company featured in our Partner Spotlight or your upcoming events listed in our newsletter, please send an email to partners@optimost.com.

Optimost just released its new and improved corporate website! The new website format contains additional resources that will provide more information on Optimost services and the advantages of multivariable optimization.

Check out the new site at www.optimost.com!

The Optimost headquarters and Optimost Bay Area offices have moved to new, larger locations! Our new contact information is below:

Optimost U.S. Headquarters
300 East 42nd Street, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10017
Phone: +1 (212) 488-1548

Optimost Bay Area Office
1065 East Hillsdale Boulevard, Suite 416
Foster City, CA 94404
Phone: +1 (650) 432-6071

Read more in the press release featured in Internet Retailer.

On August 15, 2007, Optimost will be hosting a joint educational webinar with Stratigent on “Optimizing Online Marketing with Web Analytics Value Creation Tactics.” The webinar is open to everyone, and will focus on utilizing web analytics value creation tactics in order to optimize online marketing programs.

Read the Stratigent press release on the joint webinar. Register for the webinar today!