The Wolfram Alpha team typically updates the site every week in order to produce better functionality, and when you’re a site that people depend on for statistical data and differential equations such updates are expected. Late yesterday afternoon, though, the Wolfram Alpha team teased at something bigger on the horizon:

In the accompanying blog post, the Wolfram Alpha team was mum about any details but it’s enough to create intrigue about what could be coming down the pipes. All they teased was that the change will be a “dramatic enhancement of functionality” and that you’ll be able to “personalize your interaction” with the site.

The post assures users that, although these changes are going to be huge, it won’t change any of the ways in which people use Wolfram Alpha. Any Wolfram users out there got any ideas about what kind of changes could be in store for the website? Maybe applications that can be applied against previous search results? Anybody? Pipe in below with your comments.

The rules for Kickstarter are simple.  Projects are be submitted through the service for funding.  The funding is raised by ordinary people, all across the world.  Say you want to make open source software for nuclear radiation detection?  Or you want to make a short independent film on monarch butterflies?  Or lets say you want to open a small restaurant selling only bacon flavored pastries?  Kickstarter is for you.  Really, the possibilities are massive, bordering on limitless.

When you donate to a creative project on Kickstarter, you aren’t buying a piece of the project and don’t expect to be paid back.  You are simply helping to fund someone’s dream, and with thousands of people donating to the same project, little donations can fund an entire project.  It is truly a great concept.

Kickstarter reports that $7 million was pledged to projects in March.  That is up from $5 million in February and a little over $1 million last March.  Over 2,100 unique projects launched in March, and they project April will turn out to be much bigger.

In the two years, Kickstarter has seen just over $53 million pledged.  $40 million of that has been collected, meaning the project was successful.  That’s right, Kickstarter works on an all-or-nothing basis.  If you don’t reach your total goal in the allotted amount of time then you don’t receive any of the pledged funding.

That being said, $7 million of that $53 has been uncollected due to unsuccessful projects and $6 million is tied up in current projects.  This gives Kickstarter a collection rate of 85%.

In the two years just over 20,000 projects have been launched, with 7,500 of them finding full funding success.  This success rate of 43% might not seem too great, but remember – all of Kickstarter’s projects are funded by the online community.  Regular people.  And going by the current projects just on the home page of Kickstarter’s website you will see that the project goals range from about $3,000 to $15,000.  Kickstarter thinks 43% success is great, as they had projected a 5% rate before the service went live.

Other interesting facts:

• Projects that reach 30% funding have a success rate of 90%.
• Only one project has ever been unsuccessful once it reached 90% funding.
• By category, film projects have received the most funding with close to $20 million total.  Next is music, then design.  Of the 13 categories Kickstarter uses to classify projects, 10 of them have received over $1 million in funding over the past two years.

If I seem overly excited, it’s because I am.  I have personally seen local bands and indie filmmakers find success for projects through Kickstarter that they never dreamed they could begin.  It proves that there are a bunch of people out there who truly care about funding creativity.

"This Google resource brings together the latest industry facts and insights," says Google’s Selina Rennie. "These have been collected from a number of third party sources covering a range of topics from macroscopic media trends to how consumer behaviour and technology are changing over time."

You can choose from the categories like broadband, devices, mobile, community, entertainment, information, eCommerce, changes in media usage, etc. You can also look at specific verticals like automotive, business and industrial markets, entertainment, finance, Google, Government and public sector, etc.

Google Internet Stats is part of Google.co.uk. So there are some UK-specific elements, but there’s no reason people in other countries can’t use the site to find interesting stats.

Google updates the site on a weekly basis with the latest stats.

Categories covered on the site include technology, consumer trends, media consumption, media landscape, and macro economic trends. Each of these has several sub-categories. For technology, you can see data on broadband, devices, mobile, and speed. For consumer trends, you can look at data for community, entertainment, information, and eCommerce. For media consumption, you can look at changes in media usage, demographic usage, media consumption rates, media multi-tasking, personalized media, and experiences. For media landscape you can look at either all media or just online, and for macro economic trends you can look at the UK or the rest of the world.

The site is only available in English, and covers mostly UK statistics at this point. Google says the information will be updated regularly though, and users can submit stats.

The site uses data provided by: B2Bonline.com, BARB, BusinessWeek, Coke, Commission of the European Communities, Comscore, Core Metrics, Datamonitor, Deloitte, The Economist, eMarketer, Enders Analysis, Eurostat, Film Distributors Association, Financial Times, Forrester, GFK, Google Insights for Search, Greenbee.com, Guardian, HarvardBusiness.org, Hitwise, IAB, IFPI, IMF, Internet Retailing, Internetworldstats.com, JP Morgan, KMPG, Media & Marketing, Mediascope Europe, Mindshare, Motorola, Net Imperative, New York Magazine, Nielsen, NMA, Ofcom, Ipsos MediaCT, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, QuickPlay Media Inc., Retail Week, Reuters, TGI Net, Times Online, TNS, Verdict Research, Wall Street Journal, WARC, YouTube, ZenithOptimedia, and GM.

"We think the Consumer Trends section will be particularly useful…" says Evelyn O’Keeffe of the Google Analytics Team. "Take a look at what your website visitors and customers are doing online and think about adapting your site design/advertising to suit their behaviours."

She also throws out a reminder that Google has an Insights for Search tool, which can keep marketers and webmasters up to date on the latest search trends. We’ve talked about this tool in the past here.

Unless you do some sort of controlled, measurable testing, you will never know what changes in copy, titles, calls to action, color schemes, layouts, etc. increase your conversion the best. Simply put, you should test variations of your content elements in different combinations to see what achieves the highest conversion overall.

It may be helpful to picture the structure of journalism, the formula for writing a news story – “who, what, when, where, how and why.” When you are testing new content elements, defining and controlling for the first four W’s (and the H) just might offer you the answer to the last one – “why” your changes get the results they do.

The elements of change

Before we look at the elements individually, you should get a feel for the number of variables involved in this undertaking. First of all, of course, there is the copy itself. You will need to consider not just the individual words in the copy, but its tone, purpose, goal, and of course audience.

If you are a good writer, you can do the writing yourself. If you are not, then get a professional to assist you. Even if you feel you can do it yourself it may profit you more to hire someone else to do it. Not many business owners or employees have an extra 1-2 hours in their day, nevermind 4-6 hours, to write the content needed to succeed. Plus there are large opportunity costs – time spent writing is time stolen from focusing on core business objectives.

There are lot more elements to test than just the copy and more kinds of “copy” (words) than just the main sales message. Besides the main copy you will have title tags, article titles, headlines, subheads, calls to action, etc. Besides the sales message there is informational content to help visitors educate themselves to their decision. A change to any one of these is a separate test.

What you’re testing

Making copy variations might include changing the wording to create more engaging phrasing or language, changing the format from short description to comprehensive information, or changing the tone from hard to soft sell or from technical to layman terms, etc. It depends on your situation and industry. Headline and subhead variations may involve wording, placement, font, even color. With the calls to action, you may be rewriting, or repositioning, tweaking aesthetics, or all the above. If you cannot define what you are testing, you simply cannot test. Determine which elements are relevant to your situation and goals.

After you have defined your points, there is one crucial point to always, always keep in mind: only change and test one thing at a time. If you change more than one thing it is impossible to know which change actually impacted the results.

How now?

You should decide up front whether you are doing open- or closed-end testing, that is, testing that is always ongoing versus testing done for a certain period of time. Although, generally speaking, you always want to be testing and improving, it doesn’t have to be one, long, unending one. You may get better results doing a sequence of short-term tests.

Before you change or test anything you need to establish a control and a baseline. Put together what you feel is a solid page to be your control, then gather statistics on it for a period of time to get a baseline number from which you can judge your progress.

The number of elements and their variations you are testing will help decide which what testing method you use. Let’s take a look at two testing approaches: A/B testing and multivariate testing.

In A/B testing you compare alternate versions of an element against each other to see which one is more effective. If A/B’ing one element you can see which version works best and move forward. If A/B’ing only a few elements with limited variations, combining and testing them against one another is pretty straightforward (e.g. two elements, each having three variations, gives you six possible combinations). If you are testing multiple elements that each have multiple variations, you are going to have a huge number of combinations, so you will have to be very methodical about making one change at a time and tracking the results.

A/B testing is good because you can typically do it in-house with resources you have on hand, and it doesn’t require complicated data analysis, so ease and low expense put it within the reach of most companies. However, testing multiple elements requires diligence and significant time expenditure.

Another way to test multiple elements is multivariate testing. Multivariate testing involves blending multiple variations of multiple elements in various combinations, then collecting and analyzing the data to see which combinations work best. Different elements impact conversions in different ways, so multivariate testing helps you see both which specific elements impact conversions the most and which combinations produce the highest conversion rates overall.

Multivariate testing requires more technical savvy, planning, and upfront work, but can save you time and cover more ground by testing more items in a given testing period. It also gives you a very scientific approach to your conversion improvement and establishes a system for open-ended testing. On the downside, it focuses on one page at a time and doesn’t take into account the pages before or after your test page that may significantly affect conversion rates.

The “who” matters, too

You probably have at least a few demographics, and each demographic contains various subdemographics. Certainly you can test with your visitor population as a whole, but it may benefit you even more to target specific people with specific recipes to see what works best with each particular audience. You can do this using identifying markers, such as IP addresses, referring URLs, unique IDs, etc., or behavioral characteristics, such as frequency of visits, pages viewed, time between return visits, previous purchases, and so forth.

Some visitors you really want to pay attention to are the search engine spiders. When you are doing A/B split testing or multivariate testing you don’t want the search engines to see a different page each time they come by. Be sure your system can identify the different spiders and show them the same consistent page. After you have finalized your changes, remember to channel them to the new page.

The “when” of it

You could do an A/B test of your body copy, with Copy A for a month and Copy B for a month, and accrue and analyze those figures. Or you could set up A/B split testing, whereby Copy A and B are called up on successive page landings. Split testing is efficient because you can run the test in half the time and you lessen the impact of seasonality in the comparison. Whether doing A/B or multivariate testing, you want to make sure you allow enough time to gather sufficient data to draw useful conclusions.

Timing is also important in establishing controls for your testing, particularly when making a succession of changes in A/B testing. Put the best, most creative effort first, which often (but not always) means the new body copy. As you monitor performance over a set amount of time and proceed from change to change, having a regular timing schedule will put you in a better position to tell what change had what effect.

Also, be mindful of any seasonality when it comes to your industry. For example, if you sell flowers, data spikes around Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day will naturally skew your results, so you have adjust for them or avoid those times. On the other hand, if your business can allow for it, you may want to target those days for specialized testing precisely because the high volumes and focused environment give you excellent data.

The “where” factor

It is not just the makeup of your elements that effects conversion rates, but also their position the page. Where is the copy most effective on the page? Do you place your lead form or products above the copy, below it, in the middle, or somewhere along one of the sides? It all depends on your industry, your situation, your audience, and what you want visitors to do. You have to try different formats and layouts to see what works best.

The “where” factor may affect the call to action more than any other element. Whether it is a button to click, a product to buy, a lead form to fill out, or something else, the placement of the call to action and how many times it appears on the page can impact conversion rates tremendously.

Don’t be shy about putting it in several places on the page. The call to action has both incentive and convenience aspects. You want it to be compelling enough to entice people to take action just by viewing it. But you also want it in several places so that no matter where the visitor is on the page they can take action if your copy compels them to do so.

Another “where” is where the test page exists on your site. The pages that visitors saw before they got to the test page will impact your conversion. If the pages pointing to your testing page have misleading messages, no amount of changes on your test page will give you a clear picture, fix your problem, or give you the optimal conversion rates you want.

Summing up

The wildcard in all this is that your visitors are becoming more sophisticated every day, that is, they are constantly changing. You are working with a moving target. In addition to all the other business reasons, this in itself is reason enough to be continuously testing and improving.

There is an art and science to all testing: an art in composing creatives and changes, a science in analyzing the data, and both in making the adjustments. The fact remains that you are dealing with humans and human emotion – how people perceive your pages (and thus your site) and whether they are compelled to follow your call to action. What visitors do may be tracked statistically, but why they are doing it is based on very human factors.

Despite the qualified, quantified results you will get from testing, never overlook your own instincts and insights. Don’t go horoscope on it; just remember that your mind works in more ways than you know. While you are testing, test your own hunches about copy, placement of page elements, title tags, or calls to action. When you consider results, you must also allow yourself the freedom to make unexpected connections among data points, as well as the leeway to challenge preconceived notions about what the results “might have” or “should have” been.

Gather and analyze the hard numbers and facts, but also include the art and psychological side, because it is emotion that drives people to take action (and thus convert). Remember, we are dealing with human beings, not robots, and people are nothing if not unpredictable, fickle, and confounding. Control your tests as closely as you can, identify and define your elements, run clean and clear tests, review the results, analyze the data, but also use your insight and intuition to figure out how to trip those emotional switches in people. Don’t use statistics only to force human emotional response into tidy rows, neat columns and pre-defined boxes. One of the advantages of “thinking outside the box” is that you won’t paint yourself into any corners.

Among the interesting things is how much Generation X and Generation Y use the Internet, likely because both generations grew up with it. The data holds on fairly well until you hit age 71, when Internet usage drops significantly.

Internet usage by age is clear. But Internet usage by gender is a little less clear, with men (78%) slightly outpacing women (75%). Internet usage by ethnicity shows that whites (78%) are pretty similar to Latinos (75%), with both exceeding usage among African-Americans (68%). Not surprisingly, Internet usage increases with education and income.

All the other data I’ve seen shows that numbers across the board continue to climb, and even if you’re targeting older Americans, there are sites such as Eons and Third Age that do a great job targeting older people for social media marketing.

Comments

Gruber, the senior product manager of myAOL, writes, "I know it is only one month but it is a heck of a start to a new year and it is tough to not to at least be intrigued by the positive start."  So let’s head to the data.

The most spectacular growth, percentage-wise, took place at the AOL property called Asylum; page views are up 158 percent, according to Gruber, and growth in unique visitors isn’t far behind at 110 percent.  Moviefone, for its part, saw an increase in page views of 81 percent.

Meanwhile, some of the things more closely tied to AOL’s name also did well.  "AOL Music took the top stop in the music category in both total unique visitors and page views which grew 32% to 427 million," writes Gruber.  As for AOL Money & Finance, "In December we moved to 2nd place in the finance category, from number 3, where we remain and are moving closer to catching the top slot."

And, even if we prefer Intentional Foul, "AOL Sports . . . had the 4th month of consecutive growth in Page Views as it grew 23% to 175 Million, while uniques are up 11%.  Since redesign, has moved from 6th overall into 4th overall in the category."

Once again, we’re not looking for AOL to overtake Google anytime soon.  But these numbers appear to demonstrate that AOL’s doing all right, and – perhaps with a bit of a "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" to any multibillion-dollar corporations who are watching – might not be a terrible acquisition target, either.