#Part of this was inspired that Thanksgiving Fatality

[jaydraw209]

'We can't even have a meal in peace.'

[stolethekey]

we could be a beautiful miracle, unbelievable

for @johnny-and-dora; sorry your assigned gifter couldn’t write you a fic! hopefully this is some consolation. i was dying at the idea of a soulmate au but the turnaround time was so short i couldn’t really gather inspiration for it, so here’s some peraltiago fluff + pre-relationship pining!! happy summer hope you enjoy

and shoutout to the crew at @b99fandomevents for putting so much work into this event!! thanks for giving me the opportunity to write an extra fic ;)

read on ao3

If Amy Santiago has a fatal flaw, it is not hubris.

It may seem like she is overly proud, at times—she can be prone to excessive humble-bragging, and Gina is the first to point out that she slips mentions of her achievements into daily, mundane conversations—but underneath the veneer of confidence lies a crippling self-doubt that refuses to let go of her thoughts. It’s the same anxiety that keeps her up at night, wondering whether she truly earned her promotion to detective and whether she should actually still be a beat cop. It’s the one that whispers remember when Jake beat you in arrests? at random times throughout the day, even though that bet ended almost an entire year ago and Jake’s fake date wasn’t nearly as terrible as she thought it was going to be.

Apparently, it’s called “imposter syndrome,” and she has it bad.

But Amy is nothing if not practical, and she’s mostly learned to manage it. She flaunts her achievements publicly so that the doubt stays buried in her mind, and her colleagues are none the wiser. In a way, she thinks, the uncertainty is helpful—it means she’s constantly pushing herself, constantly trying to be better, and that’s a good thing.

It’s a good thing, which is why she doesn’t question her decision to throw a New Year’s Eve party for the Nine-Nine.

Last year’s Thanksgiving fiasco is still fresh in her mind, and even though she knows that it is objectively questionable to be so hung up about a party that she tried to throw a full year ago, she can’t help feeling like she needs to make up for it, like she needs to prove she can organize a fun event for her co-workers that doesn’t end in eating takeout at the precinct.

Plus, everyone at the Nine-Nine is closer now, which is evidenced by the fact that Jake barely bats an eye when she asks him to dress up.

“Why, got a hot new boyfriend you need me to make jealous?”

She winces slightly, but the regret that appears immediately in his eyes is enough to make her force a smirk. “Yeah, it’s that flasher I arrested last week.”

“Ew—”

“What can I say? He really made an impression.”

Jake laughs, and she determinedly ignores the way her stomach jolts at the way the corners of his eyes crinkle.  

“So, six-thirty then? You can bring Sophia.”

His amusement fades into a soft smile that definitely does not make Amy feel warm and jittery inside. “I’ll be there. Sophia’s out of town, though—she’s spending the holidays with her parents.”

“Oh,” Amy says, trying not to sound too cheerful. “That’s too bad, seeing as I was planning on making my famous roast turkey to impress her.”

Jake snorts, but before he can say anything, Charles has somehow appeared at the edge of their desks, his face full of panic. “Amy, I love you, but please let me cook that turkey, please—”

“I was kidding,” she protests, trying to shove him away. “I’ve admitted defeat in the culinary world, okay? I’m gonna go get pasta beforehand.”

“Yeah, Charles, relax,” Jake says, grinning widely. “But you should still bring those octopus balls. Santiago loves those.”

Amy throws her stapler at him.

 ---

“Is this New Year’s-y enough?” Amy asks Kylie in the dressing room of the mall Express.

Kylie sighs. “Yes. It’s beautiful and you look beautiful wearing it, just as you have in the last ten dresses you’ve tried on. It’s just a house party for you and your coworkers, whom you see literally every day. There is no need to be this anxious.”

“I’m not anxious, I just want to make a good impression. If I’m asking everyone else to dress up, I have to look the part myself.”

“Mmmhmm,” Kylie hums, reaching over to unzip the back of Amy’s dress. “Well, whatever you’re not anxious about is going to lose his mind when he sees you in this. Seriously.”

“He has a girlfriend,” Amy snaps, shimmying out of the dress and snatching her leggings off the wall. “And this isn’t for him.”

It’s not, really, but as she walks out of the store with a shopping bag in hand, she wonders if it maybe is, just a little bit.

Her excitement is completely gone the morning of, as she wakes up with what feels like a throat full of sawdust and a sledgehammer pounding away at her head. She groans as she forces herself out of bed and into the shower, where she stays until the water runs cold and her shivering has gotten undeniably out of control.  

She steps out of the tub, wincing as the cold air hits her skin, and dries herself off as quickly as possible. The kitchen seems indomitably far away but she somehow manages to make it, pulling her sweatpants up as she walks down the hallway. It takes her what feels like an hour to make some tea and force some oatmeal down, and by the time she swallows her cold medicine her body feels like it has already run a marathon.

Ordinarily, her frustration at the situation would be more than overwhelming, but her head is throbbing, and as she types out a long, apologetic text message the only thing she can muster is a faint sense of defeat. Her eyes are already closing as she presses send, and she crawls back into bed with no more than a twinge of regret.

When she wakes up again, two things register in her mind: it’s dark outside, and her doorbell is ringing off the hook.

She gives a slight whimper of frustration as she slides out of bed, grabbing her sweatshirt and her phone on the way into the hallway.

“Unless I ordered some extra-strength Tylenol in my sleep,” she grumbles, yanking the door open, “I don’t want—oh.”

Jake’s eyes widen as they travel up and down her body, taking in her old T-shirt and disheveled hair.

“Sorry I’m late, I got stuck on the phone with my mom—um, did you prank me? Was this a pajama party?”

“No, I—I texted,” she manages to croak out, wincing at the sting in her throat. “Look—” She unlocks her phone and thrusts it halfheartedly at him.

“Oh,” Jake says, glancing at her open messages tab. “Um—you only sent it to Boyle.”

“What? Fuck—”

“It’s okay,” he says quickly, handing her phone back. “You’re sick, you were obviously just sleeping, I’m sorry—”

“No, it’s my fault,” Amy mutters. She wonders dimly how everyone but Jake somehow knew not to come, but the pounding in her head overpowers her brief curiosity. “Sorry, you could’ve made other plans—”

“Nah, I would’ve just been watching Die Hard.”

“Okay,” Amy says numbly. She tries to say something else, but neither her mouth nor her brain seems to be working properly. “I’m cold.”

Jake laughs softly, then steps inside, setting his eight-dollar bottle of wine on the floor. “Come on,” he says, turning her gently by her shoulders. “I’ll guide you back to bed.”

He watches her shuffle across her bedroom floor, drink a glass of water, and crawl back underneath the covers before backing out of the room. The gentle smile on his face as he closes the door is the last thing she sees before she drifts off again.

--

She wakes to the smell of chicken soup.

It’s wafting through her bedroom door, so she gets up and opens it, noting with some relief that the pain in her throat has lessened somewhat. Taylor Swift’s New Year’s Day plays softly as she walks down the hallway, and as she emerges into her kitchen, she sees Jake bent over the sink, his jacket lying on her couch.

“Hi,” she says softly, ignoring the way her heart skips at the sight of him washing dishes in her kitchen.

“Hi,” he smiles, pausing the music and turning to look at her. “How’re you feeling?”

“Better,” she says honestly, noting that a mini pharmacy now sits next to a glass of water on her kitchen counter. “You—um, you’re still here?”

“Oh—uh, yeah, I hope that’s okay—I was going to leave, but you seemed really sick, and I just—”

“No, I’m glad,” she mumbles, and he grins. Her stomach flips a little, and she clears her throat. “Is that soup I smell?”

“Oh, yeah.” He gestures at the pot on the stove. “It’s an old family recipe—my mom used to make it for me whenever I got sick, so I figured—”

Her eyes land on a bag on the counter and she freezes, her hand in the utensil drawer. “And those potato pancakes?”

“Um, I bought them,” he says, and he’s definitely blushing. “Just in case you didn’t like the soup.”

She can hear Kylie laughing at her as she makes her way over to the stove, trying to hide her smile. “I can like two things.”

He laughs, then grins at the noise she makes as the soup hits her taste buds. “Good?”

“This is incredible,” she says, pouring herself a hefty serving. “I can’t believe you can cook.”

“Well, I can’t, really. But I made my mom teach me that recipe after I moved out. Just feels like home, you know?”

She smiles as she brings the bowl to her lips. “Yeah.”

Jake puts the plate he was washing in her dish rack, and as he wipes his hands on her dish towel she feels a sudden surge of completely unwelcome affection. “So,” he says, wiggling his eyebrow at her, “feeling up to a game of Go Fish?”

She rolls her eyes as she brushes past him, grabbing the glass of water as she goes. “I’m sick, not an eight-year-old child.”

He snorts, but produces a deck of cards anyway, and as they settle onto Amy’s living room rug she tries her best not to get comfortable.

It doesn’t work, even as he has a girlfriend he has a girlfriend he has a girlfriend keeps parading through her thoughts, and she completely loses track of time as they laugh their way through every card game in the books and multiple rematches.

She has just triumphantly laid her final cards down in their game of Speed when something explodes outside, sending Jake shooting to his feet.

“Fireworks!”

She takes his offered hand and stands up. “It’s already midnight?”

“Guess so.” Jake pulls the curtains back as a shower of green bursts spectacularly through the sky. “Sorry you did all that work for a party that didn’t happen.”

“It’s not a big deal,” she says, and she finds that she means it. “There’ll always be more chances. There are plenty of holidays for me to torture people.”

He chuckles. “Still—it sucks that you got sick today, of all days. It’s kind of a shitty way to start the year.”

She gazes through her window, her eye catching his reflection in the glass. “Oh, I don’t know,” she says softly. “It’s not so bad.”

Amy can feel his eyes on her, and for some reason she turns to meet his gaze. She thinks there are flecks of gold in the brown of his eyes, and as the fireworks continue to explode the gold morphs into blues, then greens, then reds and yellows. She feels no desire to tear herself away from the kaleidoscope of color in front of her, and she swallows as a massive cheer arises from the ground beneath her window.

Jake clears his throat and looks away, his fingers playing at the hem of his shirt. She follows his lead, turning to watch the crowd beneath her building dance drunkenly down the street. A slight disappointment works its way into her gut, but there is a sliver of hope along with it—misplaced optimism, maybe, but a brief glimpse of something that could be.

And despite all the planning, all the agonizing and dress-buying for a party that imploded so suddenly, Amy feels mostly at peace. Her therapist would be proud, she thinks. She wonders how much of it is thanks to the presence of the man standing next to her, gazing at the explosions of color outside with an almost childlike wonder in his eyes.

There are times she thinks she missed her chance, but today is the first day of a new year. And what are new years for if they’re not for second chances, anyway?

Her voice is soft when she speaks. “Happy New Year, Jake.”

It takes only a moment before he answers, a slightly wistful smile on his face. “Happy New Year, Ames.”

[vvivacious101]

Re-rewatching S05E16 - Dark Side of the Moon

Oh god, this episode totally floored me. There is so much happening in this one but despite the information overload, this episode is phenomenal. I can already tell this is going to be a long post.

So, in “Dark Side of the Moon” Dean and Sam die and go to Heaven where Cas tells them not to let the angels find them yet because he sees this as an opportunity to talk to Joshua. Joshua is an angel who resides in the garden at Heaven and is rumored to talk to God, so Cas needs Sam and Dean to find the garden and talk to Joshua. Meanwhile, Zachariah is looking for the boys so he can put them back into their meatsuits so they can play their parts in the apocalypse but not before he gets some time to play (read torture) with them.

Zachariah is an interesting character. I have somehow always liked his character. He reminds me of Crowley.

Zachariah is an overacheiver, a teacher’s pet who thought his job would be so easy. Getting two monkeys to play their part, how hard could it be? He, of course, had never met the Winchesters and I get how he feels. Even though he is a dick, I understand the place where his anger comes from but I guess he does a pretty good job of illuminating that place himself.

Let me tell you something. I was on the fast track once. Employee of the Month, every month forever. I’d walk these halls, and people would AVERT THEIR EYES! I HAD RESPECT! And then, they assigend me you.

And the rest as they say is history. His downfall is so total that it’s almost comedic, but he was an interesting piece of this apocalyptic puzzle.

This dialogue of his from this epiosde is one of my favourites.

Wow. Running from angels... On foot... In heaven. With out-of-the-box thinking like that, I'm surprised you guys haven't stopped the apocalypse already.

Zach catches up with the boys and just as he is really getting started, Joshua arrives on the scene and tells Zach to let Sam and Dean go as God demands it and they get rescued.

This entire season especially after the Colt didn’t pan out, finding God was the only way they had of averting the apocalypse and Joshua basically tells them ‘sorry, no dice’.

But he also mentions other interesting facts about God that I didn’t pay attention to earlier like the fact that he is on Earth and that the amulet wouldn’t enable them to find him, which is an interesting way to put it because in season 11 we will learn that the amulet was basically turned off and thus doesn’t actually work the way it’s supposed to.

So we get that God doesn’t want to intervene. He feels like he has done enough which brings me to another realisation - why did he intervene in the first place why did he put Sam and Dean on the aeroplane, why did he bring Cas back?

The first one is easy to answer when Sam and Dean are in the convent as Lucifer’s cage is opening two things are clear, number one, an archangel going supernova could probably be fatal and since Dean and Sam are critical to what comes next having them killed does no good, number two, considering what had just happened no way was Sam going to say yes to Lucifer on the spot. So Sam and Dean would have to be broken down gradually like we have been watching all season, so even if God hadn’t interevened on the first count nothing major would have changed. But the second question isn’t that easy to answer.

Why did God bring Cas back? In season five, Cas has done very little to influence events. He could easily be written off. The problem is that when Cas came back I immediately felt it was because he still had a part to play but the problem is Cas doesn’t come back to do something Cas comes back because he surprised the hell out of God. Things become really clear when you realise that God is Chuck. Chuck who sees Cas rip up the ending and still be brave enough to stand up to an archangel. Chuck who sees Cas and is inspired beyond belief because for the first time the omniscient has found his blind spot and he is intrigued by Cas and that’s why Cas comes back because of the story he changed, the story that didn’t go the way it was supposed to.

But now God is done, after all what he wants is to see his favourite story end the way it was always meant to and Sam, Dean and Cas are no longer interesting as they increasingly fall into the ruts of his story. In this very episode, both Cas and Dean lose their faith and things look very bleak. So in God’s POV the story is going where it’s supposed to and he wants to play his part in making sure that it ends the way it is intended to go. Famous last words.

I can’t believe I have typed this much and there is still so much more to go.

In their trip to Heaven, Sam and Dean meet Ash and Pamela. Ash is amazing, he was one character I would have loved to see more of and he is still as cool as ever and it was amazing to have him back on the show.

But what I want to talk about is Pamela’s conversation with Dean. She tells Dean that the worst case scenario is Heaven and Heaven is all about reliving life’s happiest moments, so really how bad could things be. Even if the apocalypse kills a bunch of people they get to come to Heaven which is not so bad and Pamela definitely sees it as a better place. When I initially watched the show this made a lot of sense to me and I didn’t exactly get Dean’s POV and this time around I am totally on Dean’s side. Heaven is run by angels, you are in their control and more importantly the fact is that you aren’t alive. We can‘t just all kill ourselves even if the evidence points to the fact that Heaven is a better place because free will only exists on Earth, the place where your decisions can actually make a difference. Living beats dying even if Heaven trumps Earth and I’m on Dean’s side.

The most important thing to come out of this episode is the loss of faith. Cas’ loses his faith in God when it becomes clear that all the efforts he put into finding God were for naught and the righteousness that was the wind beneath his wings falls away. Cas believed that God wouldn’t want the end of the World especially when he brought him back. Cas believed he was brought back to stop the apocalypse and he puts all his efforts into it, buoyed by the fact that God wants it that way and now that hope is all but dashed as Cas crumbles under the rubble of his faith in his father.

The second person who loses faith is Dean. Dean comes to Heaven and sees two memories one of him and Sam as they spend one 4th of July lighting up firecrackers in an empty field and one of him and his mother when she is in the middle of a bad fight with John.

Dean’s heaven is memories of his family while Sam’s best memories are spending a Thanksgiving Dinner at a friend’s place, about living two weeks by himself and about the day he left his family behind to go to college. And as Dean comes to realise this truth he wonders whether he and Sam were ever on the same page.

Dean: Your heaven is somebody else's Thanksgiving, okay? It's bailing on your family. I mean, what do you want me to say? Sam: Man, I never got the crusts cut off my PB&J... I just don't look at family the way you do. Dean: Yeah, but *I'm* your family. We're supposed to be a team, it's supposed to be you and me against the world, right? Sam: Dean, it is. Dean: ...Is it?

What I found most heartbreaking is when Sam reminds him that going to Stanford was a happy memory because he finally got away from Dad and Dean reminds him he wasn’t the only one Sam got away from.

At the end of the episode when Dean drops the amulet that Cas returned into a garbage bin, the message is clear. Dean’s lost faith in Sam. The amulet is an interesting artifact in this context when they had faith the amulet was invaluable to Cas and Dean but as soon as they lose faith Cas doesn't want it any longer and neither does Dean. It's interesting how faith is the difference between something being indispensable and something being garbage.

I can’t believe I have talked so much and I still have more to say. This epsiode is a treasure.

So, I couldn’t end this post without talking about John. John is prominently brought up twice in this episode. Once when Dean tells Sam that their parents' marriage was only perfect after Mary died. This made sense. Every marriage has tough spots and this was a particularly bad one for John and Mary. But John loved Mary and after her death it was easy to remember the good memories, it was easier to put her on a pedestal and fight a war in her name, so of course their marriage was perfect, immortalised forever in John’s heart. But the thing that got me was when Mary, stressed after her fight with John, is soothed by Dean. Dean who is what four years old and Sam has this to say about this - I didn’t know how long you have been cleaning up Dad’s messes. This makes more sense especially in light of another memory. It’s the memory of Sam running away from his family on Dean’s watch and Dean can’t even verbalise what happened when John came back. This is one piece of dialogue that is imcomplete but the words that aren’t spoken are practically engraved on your heart and the pain is hard to overlook. Sometimes, it's easy to forget how traumatic Dean's childhood was while Sam got to rebel, got to be who he wanted to be because John wasn't the only one raising Sam, Dean was too and Dean taught Sam that he was important, he was loved and valued something that John couldn't instil in Dean.

Dean is broken in the aftermath of this episode and if “My Bloody Valentine” had aired after this episode Dean being dead inside would have made a lot of sense, because presently Dean is dead inside. He has lost all faith and their every chance at averting the apocalypse has been dashed.

[passionforfic]

For someone whose love for reading was awaken by Little Women, knowing more about its author is a given. At least, for me it was. I've always been fascinated by her story. I have not read all  her works but I have read some: Little Women, An Old Fashioned Girl, A Fatal Love Chase, Inheritance, An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving and other short stories, Work, "Taming a Tartar," Selection of her journal entries, letters and poems.  I have anthologies of her pulp fiction and her other books for younger audiences which are part of the long list of books to read. . . 

I think that the documentary produced by Reisen and this biography really gave me a  deeper view into the life of an extraordinary woman and writer. Now I look at her work in another light. I always liked her way of thinking out-of-the-box in terms of women and marriage. Like her, I too value my freedom and  independence. Her stories  explore themes of power and struggle between the sexes that reflects her struggle in  life.  I do think that it's important to look at her life and decisions,  in order to appreciate how she turned her life experiences and thoughts into stories. 

If you like to learn about people's lives and  be inspired by their lives and thoughts, this is a biography worth reading.  I think that Louisa May Alcott's fans will enjoy this reading and will find  it insightful.

[financialsmatter]

Saturday Rant…Tragedy for Political Gain

If a tragedy cannot be exploited for political gain, leftists quickly lose interest. Huh? Such is the case with Anderson Aldrich allegedly walking into Club Q in Colorado Springs and opened fire, killing five and injuring 19 others. As to be expected – and without any detailed information – leftist journalists and activists immediately accused "MAGA" Republicans of inspiring the killings. And they cited pro-gun advocates and people opposed to drag queen performances for children as the culprits. Aldrich – adding bizarre to his already “non-Binary” disturbed state – has asked the court to use his preferred pronouns, They/Them.       LOL! You just can’t make this up. And with that in mind we’re turning over today’s rant to a familiar Financial$Matter reader, Scoob Martin. Ruh, Ro! Take it away Scoobie. This is a case that probably would have become a non-stop media circus for the next several months had the shooter been an actual conservative against the trans agenda.   And with gender ideology and conservative principles being mutually exclusive, it’s all but impossible for corporate journalists to place the blame on the right-wing.   As a result, the event will be buried much like the Waukesha Massacre perpetrated by BLM supporter Darrell Brooks…one year ago. Translation: they can't pin it on whitey as a hate crime. We already know this person is crazy because they committed a mass murder... So "it" stating that it is non gender binary (wtf ever that really means?) is just a reaffirmation of this fact...no? Maybe Biden will now classify all homosexuals as terrorists like he did for Maga supporters.  And then call it homocide. LMAO!    Political Gain   The sick part is how these stupid journalists are faced with a self-identified trans person being charged with mass murder and they’re jumping at the chance to dismiss his subjective gender. And then we also had the Walmart manager go berserk in Chesapeake, Virginia, killing at least six people and wounding several others before fatally shooting himself. I guess this means we’ll never know his/her real gender or pronouns. But he was the kind of guy you want to send Karen to when she insists upon seeing the manager…LOL! So, just in time for the holidays we’re seeing more people ‘snap’ and it makes me wonder how many others are feeling the stress and near ready to pop...? Black Friday may need a new name... And for those who legally carry guns, shopping at Walmart should remind you of the American Express slogan to “don’t leave home without it.” Thanks again, Scoob for that rousing rant. As always, if you – our Dear Readers – have a rant you’d like to share then send it to us. You never know whose life will be affected by it. And if you want to see some NSFW rants then go (HERE). Remember:  We’re Not Just About Finance. But we use finance to give you hope. P.S.  Don’t forget our Black Friday Special for our “…In Plain English Newsletter” at the ridiculously low annual price of $76.85 (normally $145) or monthly rate of $7.95 (normally $15) CLICK HERE. Be sure to use the code word Thanksgiving at the checkout in order to get the discount. ************************************ Sincerely, James Vincent The Reverend of Finance Copyright © 2022 It's Not Just About Finance, LLC, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Read the full article

[sanctuaryforalluniverses]

not. enough. speed/delco! blanket permission for more headcans please!

Oooooh. :D You are now officially my favorite person EVER, anon. 

- So, in the magical land where the gunshot in 3X01 isn’t fatal, Eric finds out that Speed STILL isn’t cleaning his gun. He decides this means that Speed doesn’t care enough about staying alive, and decides to solve this problem by caring enough for both of them. 

- He shows up at the hospital EVERY chance he gets to hang out with Speed, skipping all his usual favorite things to do what he normally considers tantamount to death, which is sitting still in a small room. But being with Speed is better than everything else.

- This drives Speed CRAZY. Not in the “you’re bugging me” way, but in the “you’re adorable and it’s getting harder and harder to remember you’re straight and I can’t have you” way. Since trying to push him away proved really traumatic last time, Speed takes the coward’s way out and checks himself out of the hospital early. Once he limps home everything will go back to normal, right? 

- Haha no.

- Eric is now frantic with worry, since he sees this as yet another confirmation that Speed is determined not to take care of himself. He corners Speed at home, there’s yelling, and Eric ends up admitting that trying to take care of Speed has nothing to do with his Superman complex. That having Speed in his life is what makes it so he can do everything else. Eric tries hard never to need anything, but he needs Speed.

- Speed breaks a little bit. He is Drowning In Feelings and yet can’t say any of it because he’s still 100 percent convinced of Eric’s straightness, so he manages to be self-sacrificial and a little bit of a jerk at the same moment and drags Eric forward into a KISS. With full tongue. Both because he’s dead certain he’ll never have another chance, and because then Eric will finally be convinced that he needs to stay away from Speed for Eric’s own good. 

- Then, of course,he bolts. Out of his own apartment. His crappy furniture and very nice computer equipment is extremely lucky Eric has a key. Also, that Eric remembers to lock up even though he’s losing his mind a little bit. 

- Because Eric was raised a Good Catholic Boy, and knows intellectually that this should kind of be freaking him out. But it’s not, because Speed is Eric’s favorite person in the world and that was a damn good kiss. He’s pretty sure anything more complicated would be just as good, and the more Speed he gets the happier he tends to be. 

- The thing is, though, he’s a heck of a lot more worried about the running (and the fact that Speed is 100 percent not answering his calls, and didn’t even come home at any point) than he is about the kissing. Because Speed tried to push him away before, and what if the kiss was just another weird way of doing it again? Eric knows that a kiss doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything, and no matter how much love Eric has to give it might not even be something Speed wants.

- This is where the ladies come in and basically say “you are the stupidest people alive. TALK TO EACH OTHER.” Alexx and Calleigh probably go yell at Speed after they see Eric’s kicked puppy face, and Marisol is stubborn enough to pry what happened out of Eric.This, of course, has the added benefit of informing Speed that Eric is kicked puppy-level miserable, which is not what he’d been going for AT ALL.

- So they talk, and as soon as Speed manages to stumble out a version of “I was being kind of a dick because feelings” then Eric happily jumps right back on board the Sexuality is Fluid train. He basically moves Speed into his place for the rest of the recovery process, and there is much kissing and sex. 

- The rest of the team are 100 percent cool about the new development, though they have to be careful at work because Stetler is a jerk who will use whatever he has to in order to bring the team down. This leads to Eric using Russian endearments, which are far less easily immediately translatable than Spanish ones. 

- Also, he says “I love you” in Russian the first several times, because it comes bursting out of him before he thinks Speed’s ready to hear it and he kind of wants to ease him into it a little. 

- This is mostly because Speed still kind of can’t believe all of this is happening, and why someone like Eric would choose to get on the Sexuality is Fluid train for someone like him. 

- Especially because Eric’s parents essentially disown him when they find out (because they’re dicks - they weren’t even there for Marisol’s cancer AT ALL). They have a huge fight when Eric ends up telling them - Speed says he doesn’t have to, but Eric doesn’t want to hide something that makes him this happy - and he basically gets kicked out of the family. Marisol is so furious at this that she refuses to speak to their parents until they let Eric back in, but the two oldest sisters only talk to them both when the parents don’t know. 

- To try and make up for this, Speed sort of gives Eric HIS parents. This means that he talks to them WAY more often than he used to, and actually takes Eric up to New York for the first Thanksgiving after his parents disown him. 

- Speed’s parents aren’t great cooks,but they LOVE ERIC SO MUCH. Their son has been distant, away and somewhat shut down for more than a decade, and then Eric comes into his life and suddenly they can see the sweet, playful kid he was in high school. They are happy to parent the crap out of Eric any and every chance they get. 

- Once his recovery time is over, Speed confuses and upsets his co-workers who don’t know him as well as the team by being cheerful at work. Not all the time, of course, because that would be a sign of the apocalypse, but he’ll actually smile sometimes or, gasp, ask them about some random thing in their lives (which Eric inevitably told him about, because he immediately buddies up to every single tech in the building). He’ll even help some of them out, sometimes, though there’s nothing that weirds them out more than watching him get all soft and affectionate with Eric (they’d never get mushy in FRONT of any but the most trusted techs, but it’s easy to overhear things sometimes). There’s actually competing rumors at one point that the real Speed has been replaced by 1) an alien 2) a clone or 3) someone who’s had extensive plastic surgery and has taken over Speed’s life for nefarious purposes. The rumors later inspire a betting pool. 

- Speed and Eric love to watch TV sprawled together on the couch, usually with Speed on the bottom and Eric pretty much draped over him. While they watch, Eric will idly run his fingers back and forth over whatever parts of Speed he can reach, because I get the feeling he’d be SUPER tactile in a relationship. Speed starts wearing a lot more shorts and t-shirts,solely so that more of his skin is available for Eric to do this. 

- I feel like Eric would propose after one of the many times he miraculously didn’t die in the show (though in their era it would be a commitment ceremony, since marriage wasn’t legal in Florida back then) because he’s a little bit of an impulsive idiot and he has a lot of good memories associated with hospitals when they’re both alive and conscious. (My personal favorite is the one in season 5, though I wouldn’t make it a brain shot because there’s stretching the truth and then there’s doing the can-can on top of it, and though I loved Miami to death that show could never tell the difference). 

- They hold the commitment ceremony on a beach, because they’re like that, and they both have open collars and bare feet (Eric’s probably in white, because he’s drawn to that, but Speed is in black because he clearly can’t emotionally handle wearing light colors). The team is there, which by this point includes Ryan (who in my universe replaces Megan, not Speed) as well as Marisol and Speed’s parents. 

- They both write their vows, though they refuse to tell me what they are. The rings are classic bands - titanium, though, because it’s stronger than gold - and they both cry a little even though they pretend they don’t. 

And now I need to wrap this up so I can go to bed, but if you send me another one of these asks I’ll tell you all about Speed and Eric’s adopted daughter, Milagros. 

[bethestaryouareradio]

'Tis the Season

“Down came the rain and washed the spider out!” Toddler song

Halleluiah! It is raining…and raining, and raining. It was indeed a blessed Thanksgiving weekend as the heavens finally opened and life-giving tears spilled from the sky. Our grounds have been so parched that even the amended clay soil is as hard as cement. The start of the rainy season means it is time to get garden work completed.

On the first day of rain, I donned my rain gear to fertilize the lawn and re-seed the grass with my homemade “lawn patch”. The recipe is simple: In a wheelbarrow or five-gallon bucket, mix potting soil with lawn seed. Sprinkle the combination in areas where your lawn is bare, making sure that there are at least twenty seeds per handful. Since the patch needs to remain moist to stimulate growth, doing this chore when it is raining is optimum.

On the second day of rain, I realized that this was not a light shower, but the beginning of a deluge. As soon as there was a break in the weather, I cleaned patio furniture, moved lounge pads to storage and wrapped the furniture in plastic to endure the winter under a patio cover. Large containers of Birds of Paradise and palms that are frost tender were transported to protected areas.

After three days of continual downfall, it was time to plant my bulbs and transplant perennials. The bulbs had begun to sprout and as I dug holes, I realized that about five inches down, the earth was still very hard and dry. Rain…we will need so much more.

On day four, I was raking the piles of colorful liquid amber leaves when I felt a sting in my leg. Then another shot of pain whisked through my jacket to my arm, followed by my neck feeling on fire. Before I knew what had transpired, I was attacked by a swarm of yellowjackets. What? Yellowjackets in December? After tending to the painful and swollen sites with ice, a paste of baking soda and water, vinegar, and imbibing antihistamines, I called Vector Control. The rain needed to stop to effectively treat and destroy the nest. What I learned is that yellowjackets are the most aggressive at this time of year because the queen is laying eggs that will become more queens in the spring. Protecting their queen and future queens, the yellowjackets attack ferociously. Be cautious when raking, digging, or pruning.

When day five arrived, I was ready to start my Christmas decorating. I cut branches from my redwood trees, clipped Chinese pistache, cotoneaster, and pyracantha berries, sprayed painted my autumn gourds, and started creating holiday arrangements.

We had a morning of sunshine on day six so I pruned the deadwood from my fence perimeter oleanders. Don’t let the pretty flowers fool you. Although these Mediterranean specimens are easy to grow in almost any climate, every part of the oleander is poisonous to both animals and humans. Wear leather gloves when working with oleanders as the sap can cause severe allergic reactions and clean shears with bleach. Do not add the flowers, leaves, or branches to compost piles. Dispose of them to your trash secured in a plastic bag.

Day seven dawned dark, dreary, cold, and wet. It was time to bring in my weathered wood, make a cup of hot cocoa, light a fire, and read a book. Growing up on the farm without central heat, our only source of warmth in winter was a roaring fire. ‘Tis the season to be jolly and cozy!

The rain continues to wash the spiders out!

Happy Holidays! Happy gardening! Happy Growing!

Cynthia Brian’s Gardening Guide for December SAVOR the final days of fall foliage on your deciduous trees. As the temperatures drop, the colors become more intense, especially on maples, crape myrtles, liquid ambers, and pistache. STOMP mole runs to encourage those burrowers to move on. PRUNE euphorbia to the ground or if it has become invasive, dig out the roots. BE ALERT for yellowjacket nests in the ground. Call Vector Control for eradication. (925) 685-9301 REPURPOSE Thanksgiving gourds by spray-painting them in metallic colors of gold silver, bronze, copper, red, green, or blue. Use in your holiday décor. MAKE your own Christmas wreaths and garlands with boughs from your redwood, cedar, pine, or other conifer trees. Add berries of holly, cotoneaster, Chinese pistache, or pyracantha for a homemade creation. DON’T mow your lawns when it is raining. Wet grass bends over and you’ll end up with uneven cuts. Also, mowing when your lawn is soaked will cause ruts, compaction, and even uproot the grass. SEASON wood for at least a year before burning in fireplaces or wood-burning stoves. Green wood is heavy and smokes, doesn’t provide heat, and can build up large quantities of creosote which can cause a fire in your chimney. Have your fireplace and chimney inspected and swept at least once per year. Enjoy a fire only on safe days, never on spare-the-air notifications. NEVER burn oleander wood. The smoke is toxic and poisonous. Never use oleander as skewers for meat as this practice can be deadly. Place cut oleander branches in a plastic bag and put it in your trash bin. Remember that all parts of the oleander can be fatal to humans and animals. ADD a whimsical statue to your garden to bring a smile to your guests during inclement weather. PLANT bulbs for spring. CLEAN rain gutters. Add the debris to your compost pile. SCATTER poppy and lupine seeds. COME to 5A Rent-A-Space in Moraga on Saturday, December 14th from 11-3 pm with your children for a Visit with Santa. Be the Star You Are!® volunteers will be on hand to help kids write a letter, and take their photo with St. Nick. Crafts and treats included at this FREE event. For more information visit: https://www.bethestaryouare.org/events PICK Meyer lemons to add zest to your celebratory menus. COMBINE containers of Christmas cactus and cyclamen for a pretty holiday display.

Photos and more at https://www.lamorindaweekly.com/archive/issue1321/Digging-Deep-with-Cynthia-Brian-Tis-the-Season.html

  Cynthia Brian, The Goddess Gardener, raised in the vineyards of Napa County, is a New York Times best-selling author, actor, radio personality, speaker, media and writing coach as well as the Founder and Executive Director of Be the Star You Are!® 501 c3. Tune into Cynthia’s StarStyle® Radio Broadcast at www.StarStyleRadio.com. Buy a copy of her books, Growing with the Goddess Gardener and Be the Star You Are! Millennials to Boomers at www.cynthiabrian.com/online-store. Hire Cynthia for writing projects, garden consults, and inspirational lectures. Cynthia@GoddessGardener.com www.GoddessGardener.com

keywords:#Christmas, #holidays, #winter, #December ,#gardening, #cynthiabrian, #starstyle, #goddessGardener, #growingwiththegoddessgardener, #lamorindaweekly

[goddessgardener]

'Tis the Season

“Down came the rain and washed the spider out!” Toddler song

Halleluiah! It is raining…and raining, and raining. It was indeed a blessed Thanksgiving weekend as the heavens finally opened and life-giving tears spilled from the sky. Our grounds have been so parched that even the amended clay soil is as hard as cement. The start of the rainy season means it is time to get garden work completed.

On the first day of rain, I donned my rain gear to fertilize the lawn and re-seed the grass with my homemade “lawn patch”. The recipe is simple: In a wheelbarrow or five-gallon bucket, mix potting soil with lawn seed. Sprinkle the combination in areas where your lawn is bare, making sure that there are at least twenty seeds per handful. Since the patch needs to remain moist to stimulate growth, doing this chore when it is raining is optimum.

On the second day of rain, I realized that this was not a light shower, but the beginning of a deluge. As soon as there was a break in the weather, I cleaned patio furniture, moved lounge pads to storage and wrapped the furniture in plastic to endure the winter under a patio cover. Large containers of Birds of Paradise and palms that are frost tender were transported to protected areas.

After three days of continual downfall, it was time to plant my bulbs and transplant perennials. The bulbs had begun to sprout and as I dug holes, I realized that about five inches down, the earth was still very hard and dry. Rain…we will need so much more.

On day four, I was raking the piles of colorful liquid amber leaves when I felt a sting in my leg. Then another shot of pain whisked through my jacket to my arm, followed by my neck feeling on fire. Before I knew what had transpired, I was attacked by a swarm of yellowjackets. What? Yellowjackets in December? After tending to the painful and swollen sites with ice, a paste of baking soda and water, vinegar, and imbibing antihistamines, I called Vector Control. The rain needed to stop to effectively treat and destroy the nest. What I learned is that yellowjackets are the most aggressive at this time of year because the queen is laying eggs that will become more queens in the spring. Protecting their queen and future queens, the yellowjackets attack ferociously. Be cautious when raking, digging, or pruning.

When day five arrived, I was ready to start my Christmas decorating. I cut branches from my redwood trees, clipped Chinese pistache, cotoneaster, and pyracantha berries, sprayed painted my autumn gourds, and started creating holiday arrangements.

We had a morning of sunshine on day six so I pruned the deadwood from my fence perimeter oleanders. Don’t let the pretty flowers fool you. Although these Mediterranean specimens are easy to grow in almost any climate, every part of the oleander is poisonous to both animals and humans. Wear leather gloves when working with oleanders as the sap can cause severe allergic reactions and clean shears with bleach. Do not add the flowers, leaves, or branches to compost piles. Dispose of them to your trash secured in a plastic bag.

Day seven dawned dark, dreary, cold, and wet. It was time to bring in my weathered wood, make a cup of hot cocoa, light a fire, and read a book. Growing up on the farm without central heat, our only source of warmth in winter was a roaring fire. ‘Tis the season to be jolly and cozy!

The rain continues to wash the spiders out!

Happy Holidays! Happy gardening! Happy Growing!

Cynthia Brian’s Gardening Guide for December SAVOR the final days of fall foliage on your deciduous trees. As the temperatures drop, the colors become more intense, especially on maples, crape myrtles, liquid ambers, and pistache. STOMP mole runs to encourage those burrowers to move on. PRUNE euphorbia to the ground or if it has become invasive, dig out the roots. BE ALERT for yellowjacket nests in the ground. Call Vector Control for eradication. (925) 685-9301 REPURPOSE Thanksgiving gourds by spray-painting them in metallic colors of gold silver, bronze, copper, red, green, or blue. Use in your holiday décor. MAKE your own Christmas wreaths and garlands with boughs from your redwood, cedar, pine, or other conifer trees. Add berries of holly, cotoneaster, Chinese pistache, or pyracantha for a homemade creation. DON’T mow your lawns when it is raining. Wet grass bends over and you’ll end up with uneven cuts. Also, mowing when your lawn is soaked will cause ruts, compaction, and even uproot the grass. SEASON wood for at least a year before burning in fireplaces or wood-burning stoves. Green wood is heavy and smokes, doesn’t provide heat, and can build up large quantities of creosote which can cause a fire in your chimney. Have your fireplace and chimney inspected and swept at least once per year. Enjoy a fire only on safe days, never on spare-the-air notifications. NEVER burn oleander wood. The smoke is toxic and poisonous. Never use oleander as skewers for meat as this practice can be deadly. Place cut oleander branches in a plastic bag and put it in your trash bin. Remember that all parts of the oleander can be fatal to humans and animals. ADD a whimsical statue to your garden to bring a smile to your guests during inclement weather. PLANT bulbs for spring. CLEAN rain gutters. Add the debris to your compost pile. SCATTER poppy and lupine seeds. COME to 5A Rent-A-Space in Moraga on Saturday, December 14th from 11-3 pm with your children for a Visit with Santa. Be the Star You Are!® volunteers will be on hand to help kids write a letter, and take their photo with St. Nick. Crafts and treats included at this FREE event. For more information visit: https://www.bethestaryouare.org/events PICK Meyer lemons to add zest to your celebratory menus. COMBINE containers of Christmas cactus and cyclamen for a pretty holiday display.

Photos and more at https://www.lamorindaweekly.com/archive/issue1321/Digging-Deep-with-Cynthia-Brian-Tis-the-Season.html

  Cynthia Brian, The Goddess Gardener, raised in the vineyards of Napa County, is a New York Times best-selling author, actor, radio personality, speaker, media and writing coach as well as the Founder and Executive Director of Be the Star You Are!® 501 c3. Tune into Cynthia’s StarStyle® Radio Broadcast at www.StarStyleRadio.com. Buy a copy of her books, Growing with the Goddess Gardener and Be the Star You Are! Millennials to Boomers at www.cynthiabrian.com/online-store. Hire Cynthia for writing projects, garden consults, and inspirational lectures. Cynthia@GoddessGardener.com www.GoddessGardener.com

keywords:#Christmas, #holidays, #winter, #December ,#gardening, #cynthiabrian, #starstyle, #goddessGardener, #growingwiththegoddessgardener, #lamorindaweekly

[celebritylive]

WARNING: This post contains spoilers from Tuesday’s episode of This Is Us.

This Is Us just answered the question: If Jack Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia) had lived, how different would life be?

Tuesday’s episode, titled “After the Fire,” presented scenarios, through Randall’s (Sterling K. Brown) perspective, of the patriarch surviving the house fire that caused a fatal widowmaker heart attack due to smoke inhalation.

Two versions starred two different Jacks after wife Rebecca (Mandy Moore) confessed to knowing the identity of their son’s birth father. The rose-colored account saw teen Randall (Niles Fitch) immediately find William (Ron Cephas Jones) and get him drug-free. Jack and Rebecca’s marriage survived her lie and William became part of their future. Randall still attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he met Beth and produced the same stable relationship. In his adult years, Randall detected William’s stomach cancer early and worked with Jack to put Rebecca into the Alzheimer’s clinical trial.

In stark contrast, the version that scared Randall the most saw William once again rejecting his biological son; Rebecca’s lie affecting her trust with Jack and increasing his drinking; his parents’ marriage being rocky at times; a mother-son relationship growing estranged. Thus, Randall attended Howard University early, becoming a professor at his alma mater and philandering with his female TAs. Oh, and Kate (Chrissy Metz) was a mother to twin girls with husband Ethan — who’s Ethan? — and Kevin (Justin Hartley), who wed Sophie, took over the Big Three family construction business instead of becoming an actor.

All the while, the one trying to understand Randall’s imaginative outcomes was his therapist Dr. Leigh (Pamela Adlon), who tried to advise him to acknowledge that “even if had lived, your life could’ve gone a million ways.” To put it simply: Randall can’t control the outcomes of his life.

That realization made him want to put Rebecca in the nine-month St. Louis clinical trial even more, knowing that he couldn’t save Jack and tried with William. “I lost my father and I couldn’t stop it. I lost a second father and I couldn’t fix that either. Now my mother is sick and there are options,” Randall told Dr. Leigh. “I already lost three parents, losing my mother would break me. I will do anything to keep that from happening, I’ll do whatever it takes.”

In the end, he was able to convince Rebecca — over the phone by reminding her how good of a son he has been — to sign up for the trial, without consulting Kevin and Kate.

Before fans start dividing into team Kevin and team Randall after finding out the possible cause of their upcoming rift in the season 4 finale, find out why Ventimiglia “loved” filming the penultimate episode as he tells PEOPLE about putting on future Jack’s “slight little belly” and being in storylines that even viewers never imagined for his character.

“On episodes like this, I was excited to work with everybody else,” Ventimiglia says, laughing. “I’m the most isolated on the show, usually it’s just Mandy and I. So when all of a sudden, I’m in a scene with Justin, Sterling and Chrissy, even Susan and Sulli , it’s kind of exciting to me. I never get that chance.”

Adds the actor, 42: “I knew it was coming down the pipe. It wasn’t anything I was asking for but it was definitely something I was looking forward to when I knew the scripts were coming out.”

Along with being in scenes with most of his costars, Ventimiglia also enjoyed being in the makeup chair next to his onscreen wife as they underwent aging transformations.

“Actually, the best part of it was looking over and seeing Mandy. And I’m like, ‘Oh, Mandy’s going through the same thing and I’m right here with her and she does this all the time.’ I applaud her for that,” he says. “The process and the artistry behind it is really incredible. The effects team and Zoey Hay, our head of department, had two guys that were working on me and one’s an Academy award-winning makeup artist and the other one’s an Emmy-winning makeup artist. So it’s fun to sit in a chair and really watch and feel the way their process when makeup is happening, the process of their job is happening. I don’t mind it, I don’t mind it at all.”

The Emmy-nominated star wore prosthetics to show him all the way until age 74. “I like taking on another persona and another side of Jack, really embracing it. From the makeup and the clothing and the slight little belly that he has, I love it,” Ventimiglia says.

Through Randall envisioning what life may have looked like if Jack were alive, fans were able to see a world in which Jack became a grandfather for the first time, toasting to his sons at their wedding rehearsal dinners and celebrating Thanksgiving in Randall’s Philadelphia home for the first time ever.

“It’s a question that everybody really may think about often,” Ventimiglia says. “It crossed over into our own lives. There’s always desire again to have the things that we can’t have, or to want the things that we can’t have. So knowing that we only have limited time with Jack in Jack’s lifetime, getting a glimpse of what could have been, I think it’s going to be pretty satisfying to a lot of people.”

If Jack were alive today…#thisisus pic.twitter.com/dSBAapwsJg

— Mandy Moore (@TheMandyMoore) March 18, 2020

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

“We played both sides of the coin all through Randall’s point of view,” he adds. “So I think hopefully people will take the more positive path with Jack and hope that they would have seen him in a better capacity than maybe the latter, the second situation that we saw him in.”

Of the second half of the episode, Ventimiglia explains it was a “different approach from Randall,” one in which he was “being really hard on his mom and really distant from his mom, just not quite as forgiving.”

“It takes her illness for him to forgive. I think a lot of people are like that in life,” he says. “They’ll go hold on to something until really it’s like you realize that life is really short and it’s best not to hang on to anger or hatred or anything like that.”

All in all, Ventimiglia hopes fans learn to take a “positive approach” in their lives.

“People wonder what would’ve happened to have other decisions been made. This was one of those episodes, a good reminder for people to think about the decisions that we’re making and the commitments we’re making to those decisions, to our future and what’s really going to be the end results of it,” he says, later adding, “The great part about This Is Us is it sparks a lot of conversation.”

“So I go back to that practical application of learning from the show and know that maybe we’re influencing people to positively move past their differences with someone, or to just be more positive in their decision-making process,” he says. “So hopefully, that’s what I really want the takeaway to be is that a person is going to take the positive approach in their lives and things that are relative to their lives that inspire by the show.”

As for what to expect in the season finale, Ventimiglia couldn’t choose just one word to describe it.

“I don’t know if there’s a word so much as just get ready. Just get ready,” he teases. “It’s heavy, it’s beautiful and it’s really incredible.”

This Is Us airs Tuesdays (9 p.m. ET) on NBC.

from PEOPLE.com https://ift.tt/2x7HtfC

[jjonassevilla]

Marketers Need an Easier Way to Optimize Landing Pages [Introducing Smart Traffic™]

Want to capture more conversions with your landing pages? (Silly question, right?)

The received wisdom is that you should A/B test and optimize until you’re converting as many visitors as possible. For years, you’ve been told by industry leaders (and, yes, by Unbounce) that A/B testing is essential to your digital marketing practice. 

And why not? There’s plenty of evidence that shows A/B testing works by letting you squeeze more conversions from your existing assets. Brilliant.

But if you’re on a small marketing team—heck, you just might be that proverbial “I” in a team of one—then running tests also demands time, high volumes of traffic, or CRO expertise that you might not have.

For some marketers, a typical landing page converting at 5% might see 50 visitors a day. To see a lift of 20% to your conversion rate in these circumstances, you’d have to run an A/B test for 304 days (to reach 95% significance, according to our A/B test duration calculator). Waiting for almost a year for a test is not viable, especially since these tests don’t always produce useable insights.

Plus, what happens while you wait for the results to roll in? Your time-sensitive campaigns (like that big Black Friday sale) begin to wither on the vine before you can optimize them. Your offers can expire. And you’re potentially delaying decisions you could make about updates to your positioning until you crown a winner.  

It’s something of an open secret that, for marketers with limited resources, the experience of A/B testing can be disappointment and frustration. Like cardio, it’s something you know you should be doing on the regular—people keep telling you that you should be doing it—but the reality is that you’ve got too much to do already. 

Can anyone blame you for accepting a certain flabbiness to your landing pages? (Not when the current, most standard way to optimize can be so complex, no.)

Despite all the hard work it requires, the truth is that…

A/B testing isn’t your only option.

At Unbounce, we’ve been advocating for A/B testing for a long time. (For as long as there’s been an Unbounce.)

It was easy to obsess because it works: marketers who optimize landing pages in this way see significant lifts in their conversion rates. They’re able to experiment with different layouts, offers, and content to find the most effective approach for their visitors. 

Today, we still stand behind A/B testing as a great tool for confirming an informed hypothesis. It totally works when you’ve got the traffic volumes and expertise to interpret your results properly. But we’d be remiss not to address the fact that plenty of marketers have felt left behind by the A/B testing revolution.

Even its devotees will admit that A/B testing isn’t perfect. 

For all its good, A/B testing has a fatal flaw.

As we explored new ways to help you convert more, Unbounce kept running up into the limitations of A/B testing. Even if your business gets boatloads of traffic and can sustain long test durations, optimizing with A/B testing helps you serve up a single landing page that appeals to as many visitors as possible. 

By trying to create a champion landing page that tries to target most people, you’re actually just targeting the average person. That means that you end up not converting to your potential.

This “one-size-fits-all” approach to optimizing means you’re letting potential customers slip right through your net: the people who’d never convert on your so-called champion.

You know your customers aren’t all the same. They come from different places, use different devices, have different motivations, respond to different offers, etc. So why send them all to the same page?

No matter how easy Unbounce makes it for you to A/B test, optimizing only works under the right circumstances and with the right goals. 

So let’s recap. If we’re being real, A/B testing can let you down in three big ways:  

It’s very complex. If A/B testing inspires imposter syndrome in you, you’re not alone. While 95% of marketers recognize A/B testing has value for their business, 42% think it’s too difficult. From the initial hypothesis, what to test, isolating just one item to test, calculating the duration of time you need, and interpreting results, it’s no joke and definitely not for everybody.

It can devour your time and demands tons of traffic. It’s the small and medium businesses—ironically, marketers who need to move faster and smarter than the big guys—who tend to hit this obstacle hardest. If you’re a David looking to topple a Goliath, you’ve got other things on your mind.

It leads to “optimized” pages that aren’t actually optimized for each and every visitor. Sure, you can personalize in other ways—even manually—but that just leads to more headaches as you further split the crucial traffic that you need to run A/B tests. 

If you’ve been vigorously nodding your head as you read along, it probably feels easy to shrug your shoulders and accept that conversion optimization isn’t right for you. As a small biz, you may feel like you’ll never have the time, the traffic, the expertise, or the resources to make it happen.

But… 

What if Unbounce taught a machine to optimize your landing pages for you?

Today, we’re proud to bring you Smart Traffic, a proprietary landing page optimization tool built on machine learning. 

Powered by AI, Smart Traffic automatically optimizes your landing pages by sending each and every visitor to a page variant where they’re most likely to convert. It avoids the problem of optimizing for the average visitor with a “one-size-fits-all” champion.

It’s also dead-simple to use. And it starts optimizing quickly, after as few as 50 visits, without the need to babysit or manually apply your learnings. 

Best of all, customers in our beta saw an average 20% lift in conversions compared to an A/B test. (We don’t call it an easy button, but it’s an easy button.)

Here’s how it works:

1. You create landing page variants.

You’re not constrained to just one change at a time—or just one variant—so get creative. Just want to make a small tweak? Do it. Looking to get wild? Heck yeah. Your team can’t decide between two options? Why not both? You can even add new variants at any time—which is perfect for people who’s best ideas come to them in the shower, or in traffic, or during the duller moments of Thanksgiving dinner.

2. Set a conversion goal, then turn on Smart Traffic.

Make sure your variants have a conversion goal so that the tool understands your desired outcome. Then just publish (or, if you’re adding Smart Traffic to an existing campaign, republish) your landing page. Our machine will immediately begin a short learning phase where it explores the possibilities.

3. Smart Traffic optimizes automatically.

Here’s the best part: you’re done.

You’ll start to see better conversion rates once Smart Traffic starts applying its learnings about your visitors. With the magic of machine learning, the tool will also continue to adapt and improve over time. This way, it better understands where visitors will convert—even if your traffic sources change. In other words, you’ll see a lift in your conversions, no further actions required. This thing’s pretty clever.

Oh, and it’s available to Unbounce customers right now—as you read this very sentence. So if you want to quit reading and go flip that switch, I wouldn’t blame you. 

For CRO aficionados or those who already have the benefit of tons of traffic, Smart Traffic has potential as a hands-free way of setting up your already optimized campaigns for progressive, long-term improvements. By using Smart Traffic alongside classic A/B tests, you can see the benefits of both worlds. (We’re very excited to see what the experts can do with it.)

But for small yet scrappy marketing teams—or really anyone tight on time and resources—Smart Traffic is a freakin’ game changer because it lets you optimize your pages without the stresses associated with A/B testing. 

Create your variants. Turn it on. See results. 

Speed up your time to results. If you build landing pages with Unbounce, you can start using AI-powered Smart Traffic today to optimize for better visitor experiences and more conversions. Find out more about how Smart Traffic helps marketers reach their conversion potential.

A Smarter Way to Optimize

Everything you’ve just read is all you need to know to get started. For the curious, though, let’s go into a little more detail about how Smart Traffic makes optimizing your landing pages easy.

Smart Traffic knocks down the barriers to entry.

As Carl Schmidt, CTO and co-founder of Unbounce, describes it, “Smart Traffic is the first step on our journey towards turning the tides for small businesses by enabling [you] to achieve unprecedented results using the power of AI.”

You don’t need an unrealistic amount of visitors to start seeing results. (It definitely won’t take 305 days.) But there’s also another time gain worth noting. Because, unlike traditional A/B testing, there’s no lengthy exploration phase in which you’re sending 50% of your traffic to the eventual loser (potentially missing out on yet more conversions). 

By design, A/B testing splits all your visitors randomly between multiple variants.

With Smart Traffic you’re off to the races and optimizing (almost) right away. Compare it to traditional A/B testing, and the difference becomes very clear:

On the left, you see the explore/exploit pattern of a typical A/B test. Protracted periods of random testing are required before each learning can be confidently applied via manual intervention. (And there’s no guarantee any given A/B test will produce significant results.) 

On the far right, you can see how Smart Traffic uses machine learning to conduct continuous (contextual multi-armed bandit) optimizing for you. It begins applying its learnings to your conversion rates with a sample as small as 50 visitors, so you can boost your conversion rates on campaigns of all sizes. Every subsequent visit represents another chance to learn and optimize.

You’ll see better results than an A/B test in less time and with less work. Some beta testers saw incredible gains with little time or effort when they applied it to existing pages.

The fact we got 10% more conversions without doing any work is a big deal. You can’t ignore that.

Kyle Carline, Brand Manager at Salem Web Network

Smart Traffic matches visitors with the variant most likely to convert.

Instead of optimizing for the average person, Smart Traffic starts matching each and every visitor to the landing page variant that’s right for them, based on the unique attributes that set them apart from the crowd. 

You win more conversions because the experience will be more relevant. So Sally from Brooklyn and Peter from Kansas City will each see the landing page that right for them—instead of one “champion” page that appeals to the masses. There’s no guarantee they’ll convert, but Smart Traffic gives you the best possible chance of converting as individuals.

Finally, Smart Traffic frees you to do great marketing.

It took a team of data scientists—including a literal string theorist—and three years of research, but Smart Traffic’s patent-pending machine learning algorithm puts the complexity back where it belongs: behind the scenes. It’s all kinds of automagical that way. By crunching data and dynamically matching visitors to variants, it’s doing something that no human being could.

But Smart Traffic has value beyond the technology: it frees you to do things that machine learning algorithms simply can’t. It frees you to engage with the human part of marketing—the better part of marketing, I’d say—like creating innovative campaigns and strategy, smarter and more engaging content, and more compelling visitor experiences. 

So go ahead and leave the complex stuff to us.

Carl Schmidt (Unbounce Co-Founder & CTO) points out the creative drawbacks of A/B testing at this year’s Call To Action Conference.

The World’s First AI-Powered Landing Page Product

It’s easy to get over-hyped when it comes to AI and machine learning, but that’s not why we’re so proud to bring Smart Traffic to you today.

You see, Unbounce was founded on the idea of helping businesses of all sizes achieve better marketing. We strongly believe that insights and actions drawn from data will be the key.   

The goal behind introducing machine learning into our product is to enhance your capabilities as a marketer.

You may not have time to learn the nuances of A/B testing. You may not currently see the traffic volume you need to split test successfully.  And you may have a hundred other things on your plate.

But now, you too can optimize. (And really, you should optimize.)

By reducing manual hassles involved with optimizing, AI helps you deliver better, more relevant experiences, connect with your customers in personal ways, and—yep—score more conversions. (I’d love to teach the machine to bring me my coffee in the morning, but the team assures me they have bigger, better plans.)

Just in case you were wondering, we’re just gettin’ started. 

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/marketing-ai/smarter-approach-to-conversion-optimization/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[samanthasmeyers]

Marketers Need an Easier Way to Optimize Landing Pages [Introducing Smart Traffic™]

Want to capture more conversions with your landing pages? (Silly question, right?)

The received wisdom is that you should A/B test and optimize until you’re converting as many visitors as possible. For years, you’ve been told by industry leaders (and, yes, by Unbounce) that A/B testing is essential to your digital marketing practice. 

And why not? There’s plenty of evidence that shows A/B testing works by letting you squeeze more conversions from your existing assets. Brilliant.

But if you’re on a small marketing team—heck, you just might be that proverbial “I” in a team of one—then running tests also demands time, high volumes of traffic, or CRO expertise that you might not have.

For some marketers, a typical landing page converting at 5% might see 50 visitors a day. To see a lift of 20% to your conversion rate in these circumstances, you’d have to run an A/B test for 304 days (to reach 95% significance, according to our A/B test duration calculator). Waiting for almost a year for a test is not viable, especially since these tests don’t always produce useable insights.

Plus, what happens while you wait for the results to roll in? Your time-sensitive campaigns (like that big Black Friday sale) begin to wither on the vine before you can optimize them. Your offers can expire. And you’re potentially delaying decisions you could make about updates to your positioning until you crown a winner.  

It’s something of an open secret that, for marketers with limited resources, the experience of A/B testing can be disappointment and frustration. Like cardio, it’s something you know you should be doing on the regular—people keep telling you that you should be doing it—but the reality is that you’ve got too much to do already. 

Can anyone blame you for accepting a certain flabbiness to your landing pages? (Not when the current, most standard way to optimize can be so complex, no.)

Despite all the hard work it requires, the truth is that…

A/B testing isn’t your only option.

At Unbounce, we’ve been advocating for A/B testing for a long time. (For as long as there’s been an Unbounce.)

It was easy to obsess because it works: marketers who optimize landing pages in this way see significant lifts in their conversion rates. They’re able to experiment with different layouts, offers, and content to find the most effective approach for their visitors. 

Today, we still stand behind A/B testing as a great tool for confirming an informed hypothesis. It totally works when you’ve got the traffic volumes and expertise to interpret your results properly. But we’d be remiss not to address the fact that plenty of marketers have felt left behind by the A/B testing revolution.

Even its devotees will admit that A/B testing isn’t perfect. 

For all its good, A/B testing has a fatal flaw.

As we explored new ways to help you convert more, Unbounce kept running up into the limitations of A/B testing. Even if your business gets boatloads of traffic and can sustain long test durations, optimizing with A/B testing helps you serve up a single landing page that appeals to as many visitors as possible. 

By trying to create a champion landing page that tries to target most people, you’re actually just targeting the average person. That means that you end up not converting to your potential.

This “one-size-fits-all” approach to optimizing means you’re letting potential customers slip right through your net: the people who’d never convert on your so-called champion.

You know your customers aren’t all the same. They come from different places, use different devices, have different motivations, respond to different offers, etc. So why send them all to the same page?

No matter how easy Unbounce makes it for you to A/B test, optimizing only works under the right circumstances and with the right goals. 

So let’s recap. If we’re being real, A/B testing can let you down in three big ways:  

It’s very complex. If A/B testing inspires imposter syndrome in you, you’re not alone. While 95% of marketers recognize A/B testing has value for their business, 42% think it’s too difficult. From the initial hypothesis, what to test, isolating just one item to test, calculating the duration of time you need, and interpreting results, it’s no joke and definitely not for everybody.

It can devour your time and demands tons of traffic. It’s the small and medium businesses—ironically, marketers who need to move faster and smarter than the big guys—who tend to hit this obstacle hardest. If you’re a David looking to topple a Goliath, you’ve got other things on your mind.

It leads to “optimized” pages that aren’t actually optimized for each and every visitor. Sure, you can personalize in other ways—even manually—but that just leads to more headaches as you further split the crucial traffic that you need to run A/B tests. 

If you’ve been vigorously nodding your head as you read along, it probably feels easy to shrug your shoulders and accept that conversion optimization isn’t right for you. As a small biz, you may feel like you’ll never have the time, the traffic, the expertise, or the resources to make it happen.

But… 

What if Unbounce taught a machine to optimize your landing pages for you?

Today, we’re proud to bring you Smart Traffic, a proprietary landing page optimization tool built on machine learning. 

Powered by AI, Smart Traffic automatically optimizes your landing pages by sending each and every visitor to a page variant where they’re most likely to convert. It avoids the problem of optimizing for the average visitor with a “one-size-fits-all” champion.

It’s also dead-simple to use. And it starts optimizing quickly, after as few as 50 visits, without the need to babysit or manually apply your learnings. 

Best of all, customers in our beta saw an average 20% lift in conversions compared to an A/B test. (We don’t call it an easy button, but it’s an easy button.)

Here’s how it works:

1. You create landing page variants.

You’re not constrained to just one change at a time—or just one variant—so get creative. Just want to make a small tweak? Do it. Looking to get wild? Heck yeah. Your team can’t decide between two options? Why not both? You can even add new variants at any time—which is perfect for people who’s best ideas come to them in the shower, or in traffic, or during the duller moments of Thanksgiving dinner.

2. Set a conversion goal, then turn on Smart Traffic.

Make sure your variants have a conversion goal so that the tool understands your desired outcome. Then just publish (or, if you’re adding Smart Traffic to an existing campaign, republish) your landing page. Our machine will immediately begin a short learning phase where it explores the possibilities.

3. Smart Traffic optimizes automatically.

Here’s the best part: you’re done.

You’ll start to see better conversion rates once Smart Traffic starts applying its learnings about your visitors. With the magic of machine learning, the tool will also continue to adapt and improve over time. This way, it better understands where visitors will convert—even if your traffic sources change. In other words, you’ll see a lift in your conversions, no further actions required. This thing’s pretty clever.

Oh, and it’s available to Unbounce customers right now—as you read this very sentence. So if you want to quit reading and go flip that switch, I wouldn’t blame you. 

For CRO aficionados or those who already have the benefit of tons of traffic, Smart Traffic has potential as a hands-free way of setting up your already optimized campaigns for progressive, long-term improvements. By using Smart Traffic alongside classic A/B tests, you can see the benefits of both worlds. (We’re very excited to see what the experts can do with it.)

But for small yet scrappy marketing teams—or really anyone tight on time and resources—Smart Traffic is a freakin’ game changer because it lets you optimize your pages without the stresses associated with A/B testing. 

Create your variants. Turn it on. See results. 

Speed up your time to results. If you build landing pages with Unbounce, you can start using AI-powered Smart Traffic today to optimize for better visitor experiences and more conversions. Find out more about how Smart Traffic helps marketers reach their conversion potential.

A Smarter Way to Optimize

Everything you’ve just read is all you need to know to get started. For the curious, though, let’s go into a little more detail about how Smart Traffic makes optimizing your landing pages easy.

Smart Traffic knocks down the barriers to entry.

As Carl Schmidt, CTO and co-founder of Unbounce, describes it, “Smart Traffic is the first step on our journey towards turning the tides for small businesses by enabling [you] to achieve unprecedented results using the power of AI.”

You don’t need an unrealistic amount of visitors to start seeing results. (It definitely won’t take 305 days.) But there’s also another time gain worth noting. Because, unlike traditional A/B testing, there’s no lengthy exploration phase in which you’re sending 50% of your traffic to the eventual loser (potentially missing out on yet more conversions). 

By design, A/B testing splits all your visitors randomly between multiple variants.

With Smart Traffic you’re off to the races and optimizing (almost) right away. Compare it to traditional A/B testing, and the difference becomes very clear:

On the left, you see the explore/exploit pattern of a typical A/B test. Protracted periods of random testing are required before each learning can be confidently applied via manual intervention. (And there’s no guarantee any given A/B test will produce significant results.) 

On the far right, you can see how Smart Traffic uses machine learning to conduct continuous (contextual multi-armed bandit) optimizing for you. It begins applying its learnings to your conversion rates with a sample as small as 50 visitors, so you can boost your conversion rates on campaigns of all sizes. Every subsequent visit represents another chance to learn and optimize.

You’ll see better results than an A/B test in less time and with less work. Some beta testers saw incredible gains with little time or effort when they applied it to existing pages.

The fact we got 10% more conversions without doing any work is a big deal. You can’t ignore that.

Kyle Carline, Brand Manager at Salem Web Network

Smart Traffic matches visitors with the variant most likely to convert.

Instead of optimizing for the average person, Smart Traffic starts matching each and every visitor to the landing page variant that’s right for them, based on the unique attributes that set them apart from the crowd. 

You win more conversions because the experience will be more relevant. So Sally from Brooklyn and Peter from Kansas City will each see the landing page that right for them—instead of one “champion” page that appeals to the masses. There’s no guarantee they’ll convert, but Smart Traffic gives you the best possible chance of converting as individuals.

Finally, Smart Traffic frees you to do great marketing.

It took a team of data scientists—including a literal string theorist—and three years of research, but Smart Traffic’s patent-pending machine learning algorithm puts the complexity back where it belongs: behind the scenes. It’s all kinds of automagical that way. By crunching data and dynamically matching visitors to variants, it’s doing something that no human being could.

But Smart Traffic has value beyond the technology: it frees you to do things that machine learning algorithms simply can’t. It frees you to engage with the human part of marketing—the better part of marketing, I’d say—like creating innovative campaigns and strategy, smarter and more engaging content, and more compelling visitor experiences. 

So go ahead and leave the complex stuff to us.

Carl Schmidt (Unbounce Co-Founder & CTO) points out the creative drawbacks of A/B testing at this year’s Call To Action Conference.

The World’s First AI-Powered Landing Page Product

It’s easy to get over-hyped when it comes to AI and machine learning, but that’s not why we’re so proud to bring Smart Traffic to you today.

You see, Unbounce was founded on the idea of helping businesses of all sizes achieve better marketing. We strongly believe that insights and actions drawn from data will be the key.   

The goal behind introducing machine learning into our product is to enhance your capabilities as a marketer.

You may not have time to learn the nuances of A/B testing. You may not currently see the traffic volume you need to split test successfully.  And you may have a hundred other things on your plate.

But now, you too can optimize. (And really, you should optimize.)

By reducing manual hassles involved with optimizing, AI helps you deliver better, more relevant experiences, connect with your customers in personal ways, and—yep—score more conversions. (I’d love to teach the machine to bring me my coffee in the morning, but the team assures me they have bigger, better plans.)

Just in case you were wondering, we’re just gettin’ started. 

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/marketing-ai/smarter-approach-to-conversion-optimization/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[kennethmontiveros]

Marketers Need an Easier Way to Optimize Landing Pages [Introducing Smart Traffic™]

Want to capture more conversions with your landing pages? (Silly question, right?)

The received wisdom is that you should A/B test and optimize until you’re converting as many visitors as possible. For years, you’ve been told by industry leaders (and, yes, by Unbounce) that A/B testing is essential to your digital marketing practice. 

And why not? There’s plenty of evidence that shows A/B testing works by letting you squeeze more conversions from your existing assets. Brilliant.

But if you’re on a small marketing team—heck, you just might be that proverbial “I” in a team of one—then running tests also demands time, high volumes of traffic, or CRO expertise that you might not have.

For some marketers, a typical landing page converting at 5% might see 50 visitors a day. To see a lift of 20% to your conversion rate in these circumstances, you’d have to run an A/B test for 304 days (to reach 95% significance, according to our A/B test duration calculator). Waiting for almost a year for a test is not viable, especially since these tests don’t always produce useable insights.

Plus, what happens while you wait for the results to roll in? Your time-sensitive campaigns (like that big Black Friday sale) begin to wither on the vine before you can optimize them. Your offers can expire. And you’re potentially delaying decisions you could make about updates to your positioning until you crown a winner.  

It’s something of an open secret that, for marketers with limited resources, the experience of A/B testing can be disappointment and frustration. Like cardio, it’s something you know you should be doing on the regular—people keep telling you that you should be doing it—but the reality is that you’ve got too much to do already. 

Can anyone blame you for accepting a certain flabbiness to your landing pages? (Not when the current, most standard way to optimize can be so complex, no.)

Despite all the hard work it requires, the truth is that…

A/B testing isn’t your only option.

At Unbounce, we’ve been advocating for A/B testing for a long time. (For as long as there’s been an Unbounce.)

It was easy to obsess because it works: marketers who optimize landing pages in this way see significant lifts in their conversion rates. They’re able to experiment with different layouts, offers, and content to find the most effective approach for their visitors. 

Today, we still stand behind A/B testing as a great tool for confirming an informed hypothesis. It totally works when you’ve got the traffic volumes and expertise to interpret your results properly. But we’d be remiss not to address the fact that plenty of marketers have felt left behind by the A/B testing revolution.

Even its devotees will admit that A/B testing isn’t perfect. 

For all its good, A/B testing has a fatal flaw.

As we explored new ways to help you convert more, Unbounce kept running up into the limitations of A/B testing. Even if your business gets boatloads of traffic and can sustain long test durations, optimizing with A/B testing helps you serve up a single landing page that appeals to as many visitors as possible. 

By trying to create a champion landing page that tries to target most people, you’re actually just targeting the average person. That means that you end up not converting to your potential.

This “one-size-fits-all” approach to optimizing means you’re letting potential customers slip right through your net: the people who’d never convert on your so-called champion.

You know your customers aren’t all the same. They come from different places, use different devices, have different motivations, respond to different offers, etc. So why send them all to the same page?

No matter how easy Unbounce makes it for you to A/B test, optimizing only works under the right circumstances and with the right goals. 

So let’s recap. If we’re being real, A/B testing can let you down in three big ways:  

It’s very complex. If A/B testing inspires imposter syndrome in you, you’re not alone. While 95% of marketers recognize A/B testing has value for their business, 42% think it’s too difficult. From the initial hypothesis, what to test, isolating just one item to test, calculating the duration of time you need, and interpreting results, it’s no joke and definitely not for everybody.

It can devour your time and demands tons of traffic. It’s the small and medium businesses—ironically, marketers who need to move faster and smarter than the big guys—who tend to hit this obstacle hardest. If you’re a David looking to topple a Goliath, you’ve got other things on your mind.

It leads to “optimized” pages that aren’t actually optimized for each and every visitor. Sure, you can personalize in other ways—even manually—but that just leads to more headaches as you further split the crucial traffic that you need to run A/B tests. 

If you’ve been vigorously nodding your head as you read along, it probably feels easy to shrug your shoulders and accept that conversion optimization isn’t right for you. As a small biz, you may feel like you’ll never have the time, the traffic, the expertise, or the resources to make it happen.

But… 

What if Unbounce taught a machine to optimize your landing pages for you?

Today, we’re proud to bring you Smart Traffic, a proprietary landing page optimization tool built on machine learning. 

Powered by AI, Smart Traffic automatically optimizes your landing pages by sending each and every visitor to a page variant where they’re most likely to convert. It avoids the problem of optimizing for the average visitor with a “one-size-fits-all” champion.

It’s also dead-simple to use. And it starts optimizing quickly, after as few as 50 visits, without the need to babysit or manually apply your learnings. 

Best of all, customers in our beta saw an average 20% lift in conversions compared to an A/B test. (We don’t call it an easy button, but it’s an easy button.)

Here’s how it works:

1. You create landing page variants.

You’re not constrained to just one change at a time—or just one variant—so get creative. Just want to make a small tweak? Do it. Looking to get wild? Heck yeah. Your team can’t decide between two options? Why not both? You can even add new variants at any time—which is perfect for people who’s best ideas come to them in the shower, or in traffic, or during the duller moments of Thanksgiving dinner.

2. Set a conversion goal, then turn on Smart Traffic.

Make sure your variants have a conversion goal so that the tool understands your desired outcome. Then just publish (or, if you’re adding Smart Traffic to an existing campaign, republish) your landing page. Our machine will immediately begin a short learning phase where it explores the possibilities.

3. Smart Traffic optimizes automatically.

Here’s the best part: you’re done.

You’ll start to see better conversion rates once Smart Traffic starts applying its learnings about your visitors. With the magic of machine learning, the tool will also continue to adapt and improve over time. This way, it better understands where visitors will convert—even if your traffic sources change. In other words, you’ll see a lift in your conversions, no further actions required. This thing’s pretty clever.

Oh, and it’s available to Unbounce customers right now—as you read this very sentence. So if you want to quit reading and go flip that switch, I wouldn’t blame you. 

For CRO aficionados or those who already have the benefit of tons of traffic, Smart Traffic has potential as a hands-free way of setting up your already optimized campaigns for progressive, long-term improvements. By using Smart Traffic alongside classic A/B tests, you can see the benefits of both worlds. (We’re very excited to see what the experts can do with it.)

But for small yet scrappy marketing teams—or really anyone tight on time and resources—Smart Traffic is a freakin’ game changer because it lets you optimize your pages without the stresses associated with A/B testing. 

Create your variants. Turn it on. See results. 

Speed up your time to results. If you build landing pages with Unbounce, you can start using AI-powered Smart Traffic today to optimize for better visitor experiences and more conversions. Find out more about how Smart Traffic helps marketers reach their conversion potential.

A Smarter Way to Optimize

Everything you’ve just read is all you need to know to get started. For the curious, though, let’s go into a little more detail about how Smart Traffic makes optimizing your landing pages easy.

Smart Traffic knocks down the barriers to entry.

As Carl Schmidt, CTO and co-founder of Unbounce, describes it, “Smart Traffic is the first step on our journey towards turning the tides for small businesses by enabling [you] to achieve unprecedented results using the power of AI.”

You don’t need an unrealistic amount of visitors to start seeing results. (It definitely won’t take 305 days.) But there’s also another time gain worth noting. Because, unlike traditional A/B testing, there’s no lengthy exploration phase in which you’re sending 50% of your traffic to the eventual loser (potentially missing out on yet more conversions). 

By design, A/B testing splits all your visitors randomly between multiple variants.

With Smart Traffic you’re off to the races and optimizing (almost) right away. Compare it to traditional A/B testing, and the difference becomes very clear:

On the left, you see the explore/exploit pattern of a typical A/B test. Protracted periods of random testing are required before each learning can be confidently applied via manual intervention. (And there’s no guarantee any given A/B test will produce significant results.) 

On the far right, you can see how Smart Traffic uses machine learning to conduct continuous (contextual multi-armed bandit) optimizing for you. It begins applying its learnings to your conversion rates with a sample as small as 50 visitors, so you can boost your conversion rates on campaigns of all sizes. Every subsequent visit represents another chance to learn and optimize.

You’ll see better results than an A/B test in less time and with less work. Some beta testers saw incredible gains with little time or effort when they applied it to existing pages.

The fact we got 10% more conversions without doing any work is a big deal. You can’t ignore that.

Kyle Carline, Brand Manager at Salem Web Network

Smart Traffic matches visitors with the variant most likely to convert.

Instead of optimizing for the average person, Smart Traffic starts matching each and every visitor to the landing page variant that’s right for them, based on the unique attributes that set them apart from the crowd. 

You win more conversions because the experience will be more relevant. So Sally from Brooklyn and Peter from Kansas City will each see the landing page that right for them—instead of one “champion” page that appeals to the masses. There’s no guarantee they’ll convert, but Smart Traffic gives you the best possible chance of converting as individuals.

Finally, Smart Traffic frees you to do great marketing.

It took a team of data scientists—including a literal string theorist—and three years of research, but Smart Traffic’s patent-pending machine learning algorithm puts the complexity back where it belongs: behind the scenes. It’s all kinds of automagical that way. By crunching data and dynamically matching visitors to variants, it’s doing something that no human being could.

But Smart Traffic has value beyond the technology: it frees you to do things that machine learning algorithms simply can’t. It frees you to engage with the human part of marketing—the better part of marketing, I’d say—like creating innovative campaigns and strategy, smarter and more engaging content, and more compelling visitor experiences. 

So go ahead and leave the complex stuff to us.

Carl Schmidt (Unbounce Co-Founder & CTO) points out the creative drawbacks of A/B testing at this year’s Call To Action Conference.

The World’s First AI-Powered Landing Page Product

It’s easy to get over-hyped when it comes to AI and machine learning, but that’s not why we’re so proud to bring Smart Traffic to you today.

You see, Unbounce was founded on the idea of helping businesses of all sizes achieve better marketing. We strongly believe that insights and actions drawn from data will be the key.   

The goal behind introducing machine learning into our product is to enhance your capabilities as a marketer.

You may not have time to learn the nuances of A/B testing. You may not currently see the traffic volume you need to split test successfully.  And you may have a hundred other things on your plate.

But now, you too can optimize. (And really, you should optimize.)

By reducing manual hassles involved with optimizing, AI helps you deliver better, more relevant experiences, connect with your customers in personal ways, and—yep—score more conversions. (I’d love to teach the machine to bring me my coffee in the morning, but the team assures me they have bigger, better plans.)

Just in case you were wondering, we’re just gettin’ started. 

Marketers Need an Easier Way to Optimize Landing Pages [Introducing Smart Traffic™] published first on http://nickpontemktg.blogspot.com/

[annaxkeating]

Marketers Need an Easier Way to Optimize Landing Pages [Introducing Smart Traffic™]

Want to capture more conversions with your landing pages? (Silly question, right?)

The received wisdom is that you should A/B test and optimize until you’re converting as many visitors as possible. For years, you’ve been told by industry leaders (and, yes, by Unbounce) that A/B testing is essential to your digital marketing practice. 

And why not? There’s plenty of evidence that shows A/B testing works by letting you squeeze more conversions from your existing assets. Brilliant.

But if you’re on a small marketing team—heck, you just might be that proverbial “I” in a team of one—then running tests also demands time, high volumes of traffic, or CRO expertise that you might not have.

For some marketers, a typical landing page converting at 5% might see 50 visitors a day. To see a lift of 20% to your conversion rate in these circumstances, you’d have to run an A/B test for 304 days (to reach 95% significance, according to our A/B test duration calculator). Waiting for almost a year for a test is not viable, especially since these tests don’t always produce useable insights.

Plus, what happens while you wait for the results to roll in? Your time-sensitive campaigns (like that big Black Friday sale) begin to wither on the vine before you can optimize them. Your offers can expire. And you’re potentially delaying decisions you could make about updates to your positioning until you crown a winner.  

It’s something of an open secret that, for marketers with limited resources, the experience of A/B testing can be disappointment and frustration. Like cardio, it’s something you know you should be doing on the regular—people keep telling you that you should be doing it—but the reality is that you’ve got too much to do already. 

Can anyone blame you for accepting a certain flabbiness to your landing pages? (Not when the current, most standard way to optimize can be so complex, no.)

Despite all the hard work it requires, the truth is that…

A/B testing isn’t your only option.

At Unbounce, we’ve been advocating for A/B testing for a long time. (For as long as there’s been an Unbounce.)

It was easy to obsess because it works: marketers who optimize landing pages in this way see significant lifts in their conversion rates. They’re able to experiment with different layouts, offers, and content to find the most effective approach for their visitors. 

Today, we still stand behind A/B testing as a great tool for confirming an informed hypothesis. It totally works when you’ve got the traffic volumes and expertise to interpret your results properly. But we’d be remiss not to address the fact that plenty of marketers have felt left behind by the A/B testing revolution.

Even its devotees will admit that A/B testing isn’t perfect. 

For all its good, A/B testing has a fatal flaw.

As we explored new ways to help you convert more, Unbounce kept running up into the limitations of A/B testing. Even if your business gets boatloads of traffic and can sustain long test durations, optimizing with A/B testing helps you serve up a single landing page that appeals to as many visitors as possible. 

By trying to create a champion landing page that tries to target most people, you’re actually just targeting the average person. That means that you end up not converting to your potential.

This “one-size-fits-all” approach to optimizing means you’re letting potential customers slip right through your net: the people who’d never convert on your so-called champion.

You know your customers aren’t all the same. They come from different places, use different devices, have different motivations, respond to different offers, etc. So why send them all to the same page?

No matter how easy Unbounce makes it for you to A/B test, optimizing only works under the right circumstances and with the right goals. 

So let’s recap. If we’re being real, A/B testing can let you down in three big ways:  

It’s very complex. If A/B testing inspires imposter syndrome in you, you’re not alone. While 95% of marketers recognize A/B testing has value for their business, 42% think it’s too difficult. From the initial hypothesis, what to test, isolating just one item to test, calculating the duration of time you need, and interpreting results, it’s no joke and definitely not for everybody.

It can devour your time and demands tons of traffic. It’s the small and medium businesses—ironically, marketers who need to move faster and smarter than the big guys—who tend to hit this obstacle hardest. If you’re a David looking to topple a Goliath, you’ve got other things on your mind.

It leads to “optimized” pages that aren’t actually optimized for each and every visitor. Sure, you can personalize in other ways—even manually—but that just leads to more headaches as you further split the crucial traffic that you need to run A/B tests. 

If you’ve been vigorously nodding your head as you read along, it probably feels easy to shrug your shoulders and accept that conversion optimization isn’t right for you. As a small biz, you may feel like you’ll never have the time, the traffic, the expertise, or the resources to make it happen.

But… 

What if Unbounce taught a machine to optimize your landing pages for you?

Today, we’re proud to bring you Smart Traffic, a proprietary landing page optimization tool built on machine learning. 

Powered by AI, Smart Traffic automatically optimizes your landing pages by sending each and every visitor to a page variant where they’re most likely to convert. It avoids the problem of optimizing for the average visitor with a “one-size-fits-all” champion.

It’s also dead-simple to use. And it starts optimizing quickly, after as few as 50 visits, without the need to babysit or manually apply your learnings. 

Best of all, customers in our beta saw an average 20% lift in conversions compared to an A/B test. (We don’t call it an easy button, but it’s an easy button.)

Here’s how it works:

1. You create landing page variants.

You’re not constrained to just one change at a time—or just one variant—so get creative. Just want to make a small tweak? Do it. Looking to get wild? Heck yeah. Your team can’t decide between two options? Why not both? You can even add new variants at any time—which is perfect for people who’s best ideas come to them in the shower, or in traffic, or during the duller moments of Thanksgiving dinner.

2. Set a conversion goal, then turn on Smart Traffic.

Make sure your variants have a conversion goal so that the tool understands your desired outcome. Then just publish (or, if you’re adding Smart Traffic to an existing campaign, republish) your landing page. Our machine will immediately begin a short learning phase where it explores the possibilities.

3. Smart Traffic optimizes automatically.

Here’s the best part: you’re done.

You’ll start to see better conversion rates once Smart Traffic starts applying its learnings about your visitors. With the magic of machine learning, the tool will also continue to adapt and improve over time. This way, it better understands where visitors will convert—even if your traffic sources change. In other words, you’ll see a lift in your conversions, no further actions required. This thing’s pretty clever.

Oh, and it’s available to Unbounce customers right now—as you read this very sentence. So if you want to quit reading and go flip that switch, I wouldn’t blame you. 

For CRO aficionados or those who already have the benefit of tons of traffic, Smart Traffic has potential as a hands-free way of setting up your already optimized campaigns for progressive, long-term improvements. By using Smart Traffic alongside classic A/B tests, you can see the benefits of both worlds. (We’re very excited to see what the experts can do with it.)

But for small yet scrappy marketing teams—or really anyone tight on time and resources—Smart Traffic is a freakin’ game changer because it lets you optimize your pages without the stresses associated with A/B testing. 

Create your variants. Turn it on. See results. 

Speed up your time to results. If you build landing pages with Unbounce, you can start using AI-powered Smart Traffic today to optimize for better visitor experiences and more conversions. Find out more about how Smart Traffic helps marketers reach their conversion potential.

A Smarter Way to Optimize

Everything you’ve just read is all you need to know to get started. For the curious, though, let’s go into a little more detail about how Smart Traffic makes optimizing your landing pages easy.

Smart Traffic knocks down the barriers to entry.

As Carl Schmidt, CTO and co-founder of Unbounce, describes it, “Smart Traffic is the first step on our journey towards turning the tides for small businesses by enabling [you] to achieve unprecedented results using the power of AI.”

You don’t need an unrealistic amount of visitors to start seeing results. (It definitely won’t take 305 days.) But there’s also another time gain worth noting. Because, unlike traditional A/B testing, there’s no lengthy exploration phase in which you’re sending 50% of your traffic to the eventual loser (potentially missing out on yet more conversions). 

By design, A/B testing splits all your visitors randomly between multiple variants.

With Smart Traffic you’re off to the races and optimizing (almost) right away. Compare it to traditional A/B testing, and the difference becomes very clear:

On the left, you see the explore/exploit pattern of a typical A/B test. Protracted periods of random testing are required before each learning can be confidently applied via manual intervention. (And there’s no guarantee any given A/B test will produce significant results.) 

On the far right, you can see how Smart Traffic uses machine learning to conduct continuous (contextual multi-armed bandit) optimizing for you. It begins applying its learnings to your conversion rates with a sample as small as 50 visitors, so you can boost your conversion rates on campaigns of all sizes. Every subsequent visit represents another chance to learn and optimize.

You’ll see better results than an A/B test in less time and with less work. Some beta testers saw incredible gains with little time or effort when they applied it to existing pages.

The fact we got 10% more conversions without doing any work is a big deal. You can’t ignore that.

Kyle Carline, Brand Manager at Salem Web Network

Smart Traffic matches visitors with the variant most likely to convert.

Instead of optimizing for the average person, Smart Traffic starts matching each and every visitor to the landing page variant that’s right for them, based on the unique attributes that set them apart from the crowd. 

You win more conversions because the experience will be more relevant. So Sally from Brooklyn and Peter from Kansas City will each see the landing page that right for them—instead of one “champion” page that appeals to the masses. There’s no guarantee they’ll convert, but Smart Traffic gives you the best possible chance of converting as individuals.

Finally, Smart Traffic frees you to do great marketing.

It took a team of data scientists—including a literal string theorist—and three years of research, but Smart Traffic’s patent-pending machine learning algorithm puts the complexity back where it belongs: behind the scenes. It’s all kinds of automagical that way. By crunching data and dynamically matching visitors to variants, it’s doing something that no human being could.

But Smart Traffic has value beyond the technology: it frees you to do things that machine learning algorithms simply can’t. It frees you to engage with the human part of marketing—the better part of marketing, I’d say—like creating innovative campaigns and strategy, smarter and more engaging content, and more compelling visitor experiences. 

So go ahead and leave the complex stuff to us.

Carl Schmidt (Unbounce Co-Founder & CTO) points out the creative drawbacks of A/B testing at this year’s Call To Action Conference.

The World’s First AI-Powered Landing Page Product

It’s easy to get over-hyped when it comes to AI and machine learning, but that’s not why we’re so proud to bring Smart Traffic to you today.

You see, Unbounce was founded on the idea of helping businesses of all sizes achieve better marketing. We strongly believe that insights and actions drawn from data will be the key.   

The goal behind introducing machine learning into our product is to enhance your capabilities as a marketer.

You may not have time to learn the nuances of A/B testing. You may not currently see the traffic volume you need to split test successfully.  And you may have a hundred other things on your plate.

But now, you too can optimize. (And really, you should optimize.)

By reducing manual hassles involved with optimizing, AI helps you deliver better, more relevant experiences, connect with your customers in personal ways, and—yep—score more conversions. (I’d love to teach the machine to bring me my coffee in the morning, but the team assures me they have bigger, better plans.)

Just in case you were wondering, we’re just gettin’ started. 

from Digital https://unbounce.com/marketing-ai/smarter-approach-to-conversion-optimization/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[roypstickney]

Marketers Need an Easier Way to Optimize Landing Pages [Introducing Smart Traffic™]

Want to capture more conversions with your landing pages? (Silly question, right?)

The received wisdom is that you should A/B test and optimize until you’re converting as many visitors as possible. For years, you’ve been told by industry leaders (and, yes, by Unbounce) that A/B testing is essential to your digital marketing practice. 

And why not? There’s plenty of evidence that shows A/B testing works by letting you squeeze more conversions from your existing assets. Brilliant.

But if you’re on a small marketing team—heck, you just might be that proverbial “I” in a team of one—then running tests also demands time, high volumes of traffic, or CRO expertise that you might not have.

For some marketers, a typical landing page converting at 5% might see 50 visitors a day. To see a lift of 20% to your conversion rate in these circumstances, you’d have to run an A/B test for 304 days (to reach 95% significance, according to our A/B test duration calculator). Waiting for almost a year for a test is not viable, especially since these tests don’t always produce useable insights.

Plus, what happens while you wait for the results to roll in? Your time-sensitive campaigns (like that big Black Friday sale) begin to wither on the vine before you can optimize them. Your offers can expire. And you’re potentially delaying decisions you could make about updates to your positioning until you crown a winner.  

It’s something of an open secret that, for marketers with limited resources, the experience of A/B testing can be disappointment and frustration. Like cardio, it’s something you know you should be doing on the regular—people keep telling you that you should be doing it—but the reality is that you’ve got too much to do already. 

Can anyone blame you for accepting a certain flabbiness to your landing pages? (Not when the current, most standard way to optimize can be so complex, no.)

Despite all the hard work it requires, the truth is that…

A/B testing isn’t your only option.

At Unbounce, we’ve been advocating for A/B testing for a long time. (For as long as there’s been an Unbounce.)

It was easy to obsess because it works: marketers who optimize landing pages in this way see significant lifts in their conversion rates. They’re able to experiment with different layouts, offers, and content to find the most effective approach for their visitors. 

Today, we still stand behind A/B testing as a great tool for confirming an informed hypothesis. It totally works when you’ve got the traffic volumes and expertise to interpret your results properly. But we’d be remiss not to address the fact that plenty of marketers have felt left behind by the A/B testing revolution.

Even its devotees will admit that A/B testing isn’t perfect. 

For all its good, A/B testing has a fatal flaw.

As we explored new ways to help you convert more, Unbounce kept running up into the limitations of A/B testing. Even if your business gets boatloads of traffic and can sustain long test durations, optimizing with A/B testing helps you serve up a single landing page that appeals to as many visitors as possible. 

By trying to create a champion landing page that tries to target most people, you’re actually just targeting the average person. That means that you end up not converting to your potential.

This “one-size-fits-all” approach to optimizing means you’re letting potential customers slip right through your net: the people who’d never convert on your so-called champion.

You know your customers aren’t all the same. They come from different places, use different devices, have different motivations, respond to different offers, etc. So why send them all to the same page?

No matter how easy Unbounce makes it for you to A/B test, optimizing only works under the right circumstances and with the right goals. 

So let’s recap. If we’re being real, A/B testing can let you down in three big ways:  

It’s very complex. If A/B testing inspires imposter syndrome in you, you’re not alone. While 95% of marketers recognize A/B testing has value for their business, 42% think it’s too difficult. From the initial hypothesis, what to test, isolating just one item to test, calculating the duration of time you need, and interpreting results, it’s no joke and definitely not for everybody.

It can devour your time and demands tons of traffic. It’s the small and medium businesses—ironically, marketers who need to move faster and smarter than the big guys—who tend to hit this obstacle hardest. If you’re a David looking to topple a Goliath, you’ve got other things on your mind.

It leads to “optimized” pages that aren’t actually optimized for each and every visitor. Sure, you can personalize in other ways—even manually—but that just leads to more headaches as you further split the crucial traffic that you need to run A/B tests. 

If you’ve been vigorously nodding your head as you read along, it probably feels easy to shrug your shoulders and accept that conversion optimization isn’t right for you. As a small biz, you may feel like you’ll never have the time, the traffic, the expertise, or the resources to make it happen.

But… 

What if Unbounce taught a machine to optimize your landing pages for you?

Today, we’re proud to bring you Smart Traffic, a proprietary landing page optimization tool built on machine learning. 

Powered by AI, Smart Traffic automatically optimizes your landing pages by sending each and every visitor to a page variant where they’re most likely to convert. It avoids the problem of optimizing for the average visitor with a “one-size-fits-all” champion.

It’s also dead-simple to use. And it starts optimizing quickly, after as few as 50 visits, without the need to babysit or manually apply your learnings. 

Best of all, customers in our beta saw an average 20% lift in conversions compared to an A/B test. (We don’t call it an easy button, but it’s an easy button.)

Here’s how it works:

1. You create landing page variants.

You’re not constrained to just one change at a time—or just one variant—so get creative. Just want to make a small tweak? Do it. Looking to get wild? Heck yeah. Your team can’t decide between two options? Why not both? You can even add new variants at any time—which is perfect for people who’s best ideas come to them in the shower, or in traffic, or during the duller moments of Thanksgiving dinner.

2. Set a conversion goal, then turn on Smart Traffic.

Make sure your variants have a conversion goal so that the tool understands your desired outcome. Then just publish (or, if you’re adding Smart Traffic to an existing campaign, republish) your landing page. Our machine will immediately begin a short learning phase where it explores the possibilities.

3. Smart Traffic optimizes automatically.

Here’s the best part: you’re done.

You’ll start to see better conversion rates once Smart Traffic starts applying its learnings about your visitors. With the magic of machine learning, the tool will also continue to adapt and improve over time. This way, it better understands where visitors will convert—even if your traffic sources change. In other words, you’ll see a lift in your conversions, no further actions required. This thing’s pretty clever.

Oh, and it’s available to Unbounce customers right now—as you read this very sentence. So if you want to quit reading and go flip that switch, I wouldn’t blame you. 

For CRO aficionados or those who already have the benefit of tons of traffic, Smart Traffic has potential as a hands-free way of setting up your already optimized campaigns for progressive, long-term improvements. By using Smart Traffic alongside classic A/B tests, you can see the benefits of both worlds. (We’re very excited to see what the experts can do with it.)

But for small yet scrappy marketing teams—or really anyone tight on time and resources—Smart Traffic is a freakin’ game changer because it lets you optimize your pages without the stresses associated with A/B testing. 

Create your variants. Turn it on. See results. 

Speed up your time to results. If you build landing pages with Unbounce, you can start using AI-powered Smart Traffic today to optimize for better visitor experiences and more conversions. Find out more about how Smart Traffic helps marketers reach their conversion potential.

A Smarter Way to Optimize

Everything you’ve just read is all you need to know to get started. For the curious, though, let’s go into a little more detail about how Smart Traffic makes optimizing your landing pages easy.

Smart Traffic knocks down the barriers to entry.

As Carl Schmidt, CTO and co-founder of Unbounce, describes it, “Smart Traffic is the first step on our journey towards turning the tides for small businesses by enabling [you] to achieve unprecedented results using the power of AI.”

You don’t need an unrealistic amount of visitors to start seeing results. (It definitely won’t take 305 days.) But there’s also another time gain worth noting. Because, unlike traditional A/B testing, there’s no lengthy exploration phase in which you’re sending 50% of your traffic to the eventual loser (potentially missing out on yet more conversions). 

By design, A/B testing splits all your visitors randomly between multiple variants.

With Smart Traffic you’re off to the races and optimizing (almost) right away. Compare it to traditional A/B testing, and the difference becomes very clear:

On the left, you see the explore/exploit pattern of a typical A/B test. Protracted periods of random testing are required before each learning can be confidently applied via manual intervention. (And there’s no guarantee any given A/B test will produce significant results.) 

On the far right, you can see how Smart Traffic uses machine learning to conduct continuous (contextual multi-armed bandit) optimizing for you. It begins applying its learnings to your conversion rates with a sample as small as 50 visitors, so you can boost your conversion rates on campaigns of all sizes. Every subsequent visit represents another chance to learn and optimize.

You’ll see better results than an A/B test in less time and with less work. Some beta testers saw incredible gains with little time or effort when they applied it to existing pages.

The fact we got 10% more conversions without doing any work is a big deal. You can’t ignore that.

Kyle Carline, Brand Manager at Salem Web Network

Smart Traffic matches visitors with the variant most likely to convert.

Instead of optimizing for the average person, Smart Traffic starts matching each and every visitor to the landing page variant that’s right for them, based on the unique attributes that set them apart from the crowd. 

You win more conversions because the experience will be more relevant. So Sally from Brooklyn and Peter from Kansas City will each see the landing page that right for them—instead of one “champion” page that appeals to the masses. There’s no guarantee they’ll convert, but Smart Traffic gives you the best possible chance of converting as individuals.

Finally, Smart Traffic frees you to do great marketing.

It took a team of data scientists—including a literal string theorist—and three years of research, but Smart Traffic’s patent-pending machine learning algorithm puts the complexity back where it belongs: behind the scenes. It’s all kinds of automagical that way. By crunching data and dynamically matching visitors to variants, it’s doing something that no human being could.

But Smart Traffic has value beyond the technology: it frees you to do things that machine learning algorithms simply can’t. It frees you to engage with the human part of marketing—the better part of marketing, I’d say—like creating innovative campaigns and strategy, smarter and more engaging content, and more compelling visitor experiences. 

So go ahead and leave the complex stuff to us.

Carl Schmidt (Unbounce Co-Founder & CTO) points out the creative drawbacks of A/B testing at this year’s Call To Action Conference.

The World’s First AI-Powered Landing Page Product

It’s easy to get over-hyped when it comes to AI and machine learning, but that’s not why we’re so proud to bring Smart Traffic to you today.

You see, Unbounce was founded on the idea of helping businesses of all sizes achieve better marketing. We strongly believe that insights and actions drawn from data will be the key.   

The goal behind introducing machine learning into our product is to enhance your capabilities as a marketer.

You may not have time to learn the nuances of A/B testing. You may not currently see the traffic volume you need to split test successfully.  And you may have a hundred other things on your plate.

But now, you too can optimize. (And really, you should optimize.)

By reducing manual hassles involved with optimizing, AI helps you deliver better, more relevant experiences, connect with your customers in personal ways, and—yep—score more conversions. (I’d love to teach the machine to bring me my coffee in the morning, but the team assures me they have bigger, better plans.)

Just in case you were wondering, we’re just gettin’ started. 

[itsjessicaisreal]

Marketers Need an Easier Way to Optimize Landing Pages [Introducing Smart Traffic™]

Want to capture more conversions with your landing pages? (Silly question, right?)

The received wisdom is that you should A/B test and optimize until you’re converting as many visitors as possible. For years, you’ve been told by industry leaders (and, yes, by Unbounce) that A/B testing is essential to your digital marketing practice. 

And why not? There’s plenty of evidence that shows A/B testing works by letting you squeeze more conversions from your existing assets. Brilliant.

But if you’re on a small marketing team—heck, you just might be that proverbial “I” in a team of one—then running tests also demands time, high volumes of traffic, or CRO expertise that you might not have.

For some marketers, a typical landing page converting at 5% might see 50 visitors a day. To see a lift of 20% to your conversion rate in these circumstances, you’d have to run an A/B test for 304 days (to reach 95% significance, according to our A/B test duration calculator). Waiting for almost a year for a test is not viable, especially since these tests don’t always produce useable insights.

Plus, what happens while you wait for the results to roll in? Your time-sensitive campaigns (like that big Black Friday sale) begin to wither on the vine before you can optimize them. Your offers can expire. And you’re potentially delaying decisions you could make about updates to your positioning until you crown a winner.  

It’s something of an open secret that, for marketers with limited resources, the experience of A/B testing can be disappointment and frustration. Like cardio, it’s something you know you should be doing on the regular—people keep telling you that you should be doing it—but the reality is that you’ve got too much to do already. 

Can anyone blame you for accepting a certain flabbiness to your landing pages? (Not when the current, most standard way to optimize can be so complex, no.)

Despite all the hard work it requires, the truth is that…

A/B testing isn’t your only option.

At Unbounce, we’ve been advocating for A/B testing for a long time. (For as long as there’s been an Unbounce.)

It was easy to obsess because it works: marketers who optimize landing pages in this way see significant lifts in their conversion rates. They’re able to experiment with different layouts, offers, and content to find the most effective approach for their visitors. 

Today, we still stand behind A/B testing as a great tool for confirming an informed hypothesis. It totally works when you’ve got the traffic volumes and expertise to interpret your results properly. But we’d be remiss not to address the fact that plenty of marketers have felt left behind by the A/B testing revolution.

Even its devotees will admit that A/B testing isn’t perfect. 

For all its good, A/B testing has a fatal flaw.

As we explored new ways to help you convert more, Unbounce kept running up into the limitations of A/B testing. Even if your business gets boatloads of traffic and can sustain long test durations, optimizing with A/B testing helps you serve up a single landing page that appeals to as many visitors as possible. 

By trying to create a champion landing page that tries to target most people, you’re actually just targeting the average person. That means that you end up not converting to your potential.

This “one-size-fits-all” approach to optimizing means you’re letting potential customers slip right through your net: the people who’d never convert on your so-called champion.

You know your customers aren’t all the same. They come from different places, use different devices, have different motivations, respond to different offers, etc. So why send them all to the same page?

No matter how easy Unbounce makes it for you to A/B test, optimizing only works under the right circumstances and with the right goals. 

So let’s recap. If we’re being real, A/B testing can let you down in three big ways:  

It’s very complex. If A/B testing inspires imposter syndrome in you, you’re not alone. While 95% of marketers recognize A/B testing has value for their business, 42% think it’s too difficult. From the initial hypothesis, what to test, isolating just one item to test, calculating the duration of time you need, and interpreting results, it’s no joke and definitely not for everybody.

It can devour your time and demands tons of traffic. It’s the small and medium businesses—ironically, marketers who need to move faster and smarter than the big guys—who tend to hit this obstacle hardest. If you’re a David looking to topple a Goliath, you’ve got other things on your mind.

It leads to “optimized” pages that aren’t actually optimized for each and every visitor. Sure, you can personalize in other ways—even manually—but that just leads to more headaches as you further split the crucial traffic that you need to run A/B tests. 

If you’ve been vigorously nodding your head as you read along, it probably feels easy to shrug your shoulders and accept that conversion optimization isn’t right for you. As a small biz, you may feel like you’ll never have the time, the traffic, the expertise, or the resources to make it happen.

But… 

What if Unbounce taught a machine to optimize your landing pages for you?

Today, we’re proud to bring you Smart Traffic, a proprietary landing page optimization tool built on machine learning. 

Powered by AI, Smart Traffic automatically optimizes your landing pages by sending each and every visitor to a page variant where they’re most likely to convert. It avoids the problem of optimizing for the average visitor with a “one-size-fits-all” champion.

It’s also dead-simple to use. And it starts optimizing quickly, after as few as 50 visits, without the need to babysit or manually apply your learnings. 

Best of all, customers in our beta saw an average 20% lift in conversions compared to an A/B test. (We don’t call it an easy button, but it’s an easy button.)

Here’s how it works:

1. You create landing page variants.

You’re not constrained to just one change at a time—or just one variant—so get creative. Just want to make a small tweak? Do it. Looking to get wild? Heck yeah. Your team can’t decide between two options? Why not both? You can even add new variants at any time—which is perfect for people who’s best ideas come to them in the shower, or in traffic, or during the duller moments of Thanksgiving dinner.

2. Set a conversion goal, then turn on Smart Traffic.

Make sure your variants have a conversion goal so that the tool understands your desired outcome. Then just publish (or, if you’re adding Smart Traffic to an existing campaign, republish) your landing page. Our machine will immediately begin a short learning phase where it explores the possibilities.

3. Smart Traffic optimizes automatically.

Here’s the best part: you’re done.

You’ll start to see better conversion rates once Smart Traffic starts applying its learnings about your visitors. With the magic of machine learning, the tool will also continue to adapt and improve over time. This way, it better understands where visitors will convert—even if your traffic sources change. In other words, you’ll see a lift in your conversions, no further actions required. This thing’s pretty clever.

Oh, and it’s available to Unbounce customers right now—as you read this very sentence. So if you want to quit reading and go flip that switch, I wouldn’t blame you. 

For CRO aficionados or those who already have the benefit of tons of traffic, Smart Traffic has potential as a hands-free way of setting up your already optimized campaigns for progressive, long-term improvements. By using Smart Traffic alongside classic A/B tests, you can see the benefits of both worlds. (We’re very excited to see what the experts can do with it.)

But for small yet scrappy marketing teams—or really anyone tight on time and resources—Smart Traffic is a freakin’ game changer because it lets you optimize your pages without the stresses associated with A/B testing. 

Create your variants. Turn it on. See results. 

Speed up your time to results. If you build landing pages with Unbounce, you can start using AI-powered Smart Traffic today to optimize for better visitor experiences and more conversions. Find out more about how Smart Traffic helps marketers reach their conversion potential.

A Smarter Way to Optimize

Everything you’ve just read is all you need to know to get started. For the curious, though, let’s go into a little more detail about how Smart Traffic makes optimizing your landing pages easy.

Smart Traffic knocks down the barriers to entry.

As Carl Schmidt, CTO and co-founder of Unbounce, describes it, “Smart Traffic is the first step on our journey towards turning the tides for small businesses by enabling [you] to achieve unprecedented results using the power of AI.”

You don’t need an unrealistic amount of visitors to start seeing results. (It definitely won’t take 305 days.) But there’s also another time gain worth noting. Because, unlike traditional A/B testing, there’s no lengthy exploration phase in which you’re sending 50% of your traffic to the eventual loser (potentially missing out on yet more conversions). 

By design, A/B testing splits all your visitors randomly between multiple variants.

With Smart Traffic you’re off to the races and optimizing (almost) right away. Compare it to traditional A/B testing, and the difference becomes very clear:

On the left, you see the explore/exploit pattern of a typical A/B test. Protracted periods of random testing are required before each learning can be confidently applied via manual intervention. (And there’s no guarantee any given A/B test will produce significant results.) 

On the far right, you can see how Smart Traffic uses machine learning to conduct continuous (contextual multi-armed bandit) optimizing for you. It begins applying its learnings to your conversion rates with a sample as small as 50 visitors, so you can boost your conversion rates on campaigns of all sizes. Every subsequent visit represents another chance to learn and optimize.

You’ll see better results than an A/B test in less time and with less work. Some beta testers saw incredible gains with little time or effort when they applied it to existing pages.

The fact we got 10% more conversions without doing any work is a big deal. You can’t ignore that.

Kyle Carline, Brand Manager at Salem Web Network

Smart Traffic matches visitors with the variant most likely to convert.

Instead of optimizing for the average person, Smart Traffic starts matching each and every visitor to the landing page variant that’s right for them, based on the unique attributes that set them apart from the crowd. 

You win more conversions because the experience will be more relevant. So Sally from Brooklyn and Peter from Kansas City will each see the landing page that right for them—instead of one “champion” page that appeals to the masses. There’s no guarantee they’ll convert, but Smart Traffic gives you the best possible chance of converting as individuals.

Finally, Smart Traffic frees you to do great marketing.

It took a team of data scientists—including a literal string theorist—and three years of research, but Smart Traffic’s patent-pending machine learning algorithm puts the complexity back where it belongs: behind the scenes. It’s all kinds of automagical that way. By crunching data and dynamically matching visitors to variants, it’s doing something that no human being could.

But Smart Traffic has value beyond the technology: it frees you to do things that machine learning algorithms simply can’t. It frees you to engage with the human part of marketing—the better part of marketing, I’d say—like creating innovative campaigns and strategy, smarter and more engaging content, and more compelling visitor experiences. 

So go ahead and leave the complex stuff to us.

Carl Schmidt (Unbounce Co-Founder & CTO) points out the creative drawbacks of A/B testing at this year’s Call To Action Conference.

The World’s First AI-Powered Landing Page Product

It’s easy to get over-hyped when it comes to AI and machine learning, but that’s not why we’re so proud to bring Smart Traffic to you today.

You see, Unbounce was founded on the idea of helping businesses of all sizes achieve better marketing. We strongly believe that insights and actions drawn from data will be the key.   

The goal behind introducing machine learning into our product is to enhance your capabilities as a marketer.

You may not have time to learn the nuances of A/B testing. You may not currently see the traffic volume you need to split test successfully.  And you may have a hundred other things on your plate.

But now, you too can optimize. (And really, you should optimize.)

By reducing manual hassles involved with optimizing, AI helps you deliver better, more relevant experiences, connect with your customers in personal ways, and—yep—score more conversions. (I’d love to teach the machine to bring me my coffee in the morning, but the team assures me they have bigger, better plans.)

Just in case you were wondering, we’re just gettin’ started. 

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/marketing-ai/smarter-approach-to-conversion-optimization/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[josephkchoi]

Marketers Need an Easier Way to Optimize Landing Pages [Introducing Smart Traffic™]

Want to capture more conversions with your landing pages? (Silly question, right?)

The received wisdom is that you should A/B test and optimize until you’re converting as many visitors as possible. For years, you’ve been told by industry leaders (and, yes, by Unbounce) that A/B testing is essential to your digital marketing practice. 

And why not? There’s plenty of evidence that shows A/B testing works by letting you squeeze more conversions from your existing assets. Brilliant.

But if you’re on a small marketing team—heck, you just might be that proverbial “I” in a team of one—then running tests also demands time, high volumes of traffic, or CRO expertise that you might not have.

For some marketers, a typical landing page converting at 5% might see 50 visitors a day. To see a lift of 20% to your conversion rate in these circumstances, you’d have to run an A/B test for 304 days (to reach 95% significance, according to our A/B test duration calculator). Waiting for almost a year for a test is not viable, especially since these tests don’t always produce useable insights.

Plus, what happens while you wait for the results to roll in? Your time-sensitive campaigns (like that big Black Friday sale) begin to wither on the vine before you can optimize them. Your offers can expire. And you’re potentially delaying decisions you could make about updates to your positioning until you crown a winner.  

It’s something of an open secret that, for marketers with limited resources, the experience of A/B testing can be disappointment and frustration. Like cardio, it’s something you know you should be doing on the regular—people keep telling you that you should be doing it—but the reality is that you’ve got too much to do already. 

Can anyone blame you for accepting a certain flabbiness to your landing pages? (Not when the current, most standard way to optimize can be so complex, no.)

Despite all the hard work it requires, the truth is that…

A/B testing isn’t your only option.

At Unbounce, we’ve been advocating for A/B testing for a long time. (For as long as there’s been an Unbounce.)

It was easy to obsess because it works: marketers who optimize landing pages in this way see significant lifts in their conversion rates. They’re able to experiment with different layouts, offers, and content to find the most effective approach for their visitors. 

Today, we still stand behind A/B testing as a great tool for confirming an informed hypothesis. It totally works when you’ve got the traffic volumes and expertise to interpret your results properly. But we’d be remiss not to address the fact that plenty of marketers have felt left behind by the A/B testing revolution.

Even its devotees will admit that A/B testing isn’t perfect. 

For all its good, A/B testing has a fatal flaw.

As we explored new ways to help you convert more, Unbounce kept running up into the limitations of A/B testing. Even if your business gets boatloads of traffic and can sustain long test durations, optimizing with A/B testing helps you serve up a single landing page that appeals to as many visitors as possible. 

By trying to create a champion landing page that tries to target most people, you’re actually just targeting the average person. That means that you end up not converting to your potential.

This “one-size-fits-all” approach to optimizing means you’re letting potential customers slip right through your net: the people who’d never convert on your so-called champion.

You know your customers aren’t all the same. They come from different places, use different devices, have different motivations, respond to different offers, etc. So why send them all to the same page?

No matter how easy Unbounce makes it for you to A/B test, optimizing only works under the right circumstances and with the right goals. 

So let’s recap. If we’re being real, A/B testing can let you down in three big ways:  

It’s very complex. If A/B testing inspires imposter syndrome in you, you’re not alone. While 95% of marketers recognize A/B testing has value for their business, 42% think it’s too difficult. From the initial hypothesis, what to test, isolating just one item to test, calculating the duration of time you need, and interpreting results, it’s no joke and definitely not for everybody.

It can devour your time and demands tons of traffic. It’s the small and medium businesses—ironically, marketers who need to move faster and smarter than the big guys—who tend to hit this obstacle hardest. If you’re a David looking to topple a Goliath, you’ve got other things on your mind.

It leads to “optimized” pages that aren’t actually optimized for each and every visitor. Sure, you can personalize in other ways—even manually—but that just leads to more headaches as you further split the crucial traffic that you need to run A/B tests. 

If you’ve been vigorously nodding your head as you read along, it probably feels easy to shrug your shoulders and accept that conversion optimization isn’t right for you. As a small biz, you may feel like you’ll never have the time, the traffic, the expertise, or the resources to make it happen.

But… 

What if Unbounce taught a machine to optimize your landing pages for you?

Today, we’re proud to bring you Smart Traffic, a proprietary landing page optimization tool built on machine learning. 

Powered by AI, Smart Traffic automatically optimizes your landing pages by sending each and every visitor to a page variant where they’re most likely to convert. It avoids the problem of optimizing for the average visitor with a “one-size-fits-all” champion.

It’s also dead-simple to use. And it starts optimizing quickly, after as few as 50 visits, without the need to babysit or manually apply your learnings. 

Best of all, customers in our beta saw an average 20% lift in conversions compared to an A/B test. (We don’t call it an easy button, but it’s an easy button.)

Here’s how it works:

1. You create landing page variants.

You’re not constrained to just one change at a time—or just one variant—so get creative. Just want to make a small tweak? Do it. Looking to get wild? Heck yeah. Your team can’t decide between two options? Why not both? You can even add new variants at any time—which is perfect for people who’s best ideas come to them in the shower, or in traffic, or during the duller moments of Thanksgiving dinner.

2. Set a conversion goal, then turn on Smart Traffic.

Make sure your variants have a conversion goal so that the tool understands your desired outcome. Then just publish (or, if you’re adding Smart Traffic to an existing campaign, republish) your landing page. Our machine will immediately begin a short learning phase where it explores the possibilities.

3. Smart Traffic optimizes automatically.

Here’s the best part: you’re done.

You’ll start to see better conversion rates once Smart Traffic starts applying its learnings about your visitors. With the magic of machine learning, the tool will also continue to adapt and improve over time. This way, it better understands where visitors will convert—even if your traffic sources change. In other words, you’ll see a lift in your conversions, no further actions required. This thing’s pretty clever.

Oh, and it’s available to Unbounce customers right now—as you read this very sentence. So if you want to quit reading and go flip that switch, I wouldn’t blame you. 

For CRO aficionados or those who already have the benefit of tons of traffic, Smart Traffic has potential as a hands-free way of setting up your already optimized campaigns for progressive, long-term improvements. By using Smart Traffic alongside classic A/B tests, you can see the benefits of both worlds. (We’re very excited to see what the experts can do with it.)

But for small yet scrappy marketing teams—or really anyone tight on time and resources—Smart Traffic is a freakin’ game changer because it lets you optimize your pages without the stresses associated with A/B testing. 

Create your variants. Turn it on. See results. 

Speed up your time to results. If you build landing pages with Unbounce, you can start using AI-powered Smart Traffic today to optimize for better visitor experiences and more conversions. Find out more about how Smart Traffic helps marketers reach their conversion potential.

A Smarter Way to Optimize

Everything you’ve just read is all you need to know to get started. For the curious, though, let’s go into a little more detail about how Smart Traffic makes optimizing your landing pages easy.

Smart Traffic knocks down the barriers to entry.

As Carl Schmidt, CTO and co-founder of Unbounce, describes it, “Smart Traffic is the first step on our journey towards turning the tides for small businesses by enabling [you] to achieve unprecedented results using the power of AI.”

You don’t need an unrealistic amount of visitors to start seeing results. (It definitely won’t take 305 days.) But there’s also another time gain worth noting. Because, unlike traditional A/B testing, there’s no lengthy exploration phase in which you’re sending 50% of your traffic to the eventual loser (potentially missing out on yet more conversions). 

By design, A/B testing splits all your visitors randomly between multiple variants.

With Smart Traffic you’re off to the races and optimizing (almost) right away. Compare it to traditional A/B testing, and the difference becomes very clear:

On the left, you see the explore/exploit pattern of a typical A/B test. Protracted periods of random testing are required before each learning can be confidently applied via manual intervention. (And there’s no guarantee any given A/B test will produce significant results.) 

On the far right, you can see how Smart Traffic uses machine learning to conduct continuous (contextual multi-armed bandit) optimizing for you. It begins applying its learnings to your conversion rates with a sample as small as 50 visitors, so you can boost your conversion rates on campaigns of all sizes. Every subsequent visit represents another chance to learn and optimize.

You’ll see better results than an A/B test in less time and with less work. Some beta testers saw incredible gains with little time or effort when they applied it to existing pages.

The fact we got 10% more conversions without doing any work is a big deal. You can’t ignore that.

Kyle Carline, Brand Manager at Salem Web Network

Smart Traffic matches visitors with the variant most likely to convert.

Instead of optimizing for the average person, Smart Traffic starts matching each and every visitor to the landing page variant that’s right for them, based on the unique attributes that set them apart from the crowd. 

You win more conversions because the experience will be more relevant. So Sally from Brooklyn and Peter from Kansas City will each see the landing page that right for them—instead of one “champion” page that appeals to the masses. There’s no guarantee they’ll convert, but Smart Traffic gives you the best possible chance of converting as individuals.

Finally, Smart Traffic frees you to do great marketing.

It took a team of data scientists—including a literal string theorist—and three years of research, but Smart Traffic’s patent-pending machine learning algorithm puts the complexity back where it belongs: behind the scenes. It’s all kinds of automagical that way. By crunching data and dynamically matching visitors to variants, it’s doing something that no human being could.

But Smart Traffic has value beyond the technology: it frees you to do things that machine learning algorithms simply can’t. It frees you to engage with the human part of marketing—the better part of marketing, I’d say—like creating innovative campaigns and strategy, smarter and more engaging content, and more compelling visitor experiences. 

So go ahead and leave the complex stuff to us.

Carl Schmidt (Unbounce Co-Founder & CTO) points out the creative drawbacks of A/B testing at this year’s Call To Action Conference.

The World’s First AI-Powered Landing Page Product

It’s easy to get over-hyped when it comes to AI and machine learning, but that’s not why we’re so proud to bring Smart Traffic to you today.

You see, Unbounce was founded on the idea of helping businesses of all sizes achieve better marketing. We strongly believe that insights and actions drawn from data will be the key.   

The goal behind introducing machine learning into our product is to enhance your capabilities as a marketer.

You may not have time to learn the nuances of A/B testing. You may not currently see the traffic volume you need to split test successfully.  And you may have a hundred other things on your plate.

But now, you too can optimize. (And really, you should optimize.)

By reducing manual hassles involved with optimizing, AI helps you deliver better, more relevant experiences, connect with your customers in personal ways, and—yep—score more conversions. (I’d love to teach the machine to bring me my coffee in the morning, but the team assures me they have bigger, better plans.)

Just in case you were wondering, we’re just gettin’ started. 

Marketers Need an Easier Way to Optimize Landing Pages [Introducing Smart Traffic™] published first on https://nickpontemrktg.wordpress.com/