Optimize - Niche Market Advice, Affirm or Klarna Test Results

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Marketing News

• Launching a new product? This article gives advice on niche markets and determining your target marketing (Link).

• Google March Core and Spam UPDATE - We are one week into Google’s update which will take a month to complete. Google says it will “help reduce the surfacing of low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%”. Results so far are not clear but watch your site’s keyword ranking and continue creating original content (Link). From Google: Spam Update (Link); Core Update (Link).

• Google claims to reduce weight on inbound links. They’re also trying to penalize paid links and links from spam-like content. They have said this before, but let’s see in a month (Link).

• Google Ads now limits the countries you can exclude to 120. As we all know, Google sometimes places your ads in other countries if you do not specifically exclude the country. Sometimes it does this even if you tell it to only show the ad in one country, so the common practice is to exclude all other countries (Link).

AI News

• Which AI platform (OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, Google’s Bard, and Anthropic’s Claud) can write the best poetry? (Link)

• We made mistakes with social media… will we make them with AI? This post talks about the effect of AI on advertising (Link).

• Devin - the latest AI software tool for development scores high in SWE-bench (Link).

• Retail is slow to pick up AI (Link).

• A look at Meta’s AI infrastructure (Link).

• Elon Musk said xAI’s language model will be open-sourced, similar to Meta and Mistral (Link).

• Google’s Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent (SIMA) can follow natural-language instructions to carry out tasks in a variety of video game settings (Link).

Cool Tools

• Strut - Writer’s AI workspace (Link). Will they catch up to Copy.AI’s 10 million users?

• 40 top HR tools (Link).

• Osum - Competitive research tool, SWOT, buyer personas, and more (Link).

• Olyup - AI workout body to track and provide workout and meal suggestions (Link).

• Meetz AI - An AI sales lead generator that creates cold emails and phone calls (Link).

• Mixo - Launch new ideas with an AI-built website (Link).

Which Test Won?

A/B testing is pivotal in conversion rate optimization. Every other week, I share real A/B tests I’ve conducted for clients, you vote, and the following week the actual test result is revealed.

Does having a payment plan like Affirm or Klarna on a category or collections page help or hurt conversions? Below is the text placed under each product image. There are multiple rows of products with five products in each row.

Which variation created more clicks to the product page?

Here are the results from last week’s test.

Newsletter members: 65.52% voted for Variation A

The actual results: Variation B with no payment plan won. Clicks to product page 29% @ 98% statistical confidence.

The reason the payment plan did not work when placed on the category or collection page is…it is too early to talk about price in the sales journey. Shoppers first have to find the product, make sure it is what they want, and then consider price and payment plans. However, having the payment plan on the product and checkout page does work well.

As with all tests, you must test this on your site before implementing it. A test result from one site does not indicate it will be the same on another site due to many factors.

See you next week for another test!