Recently Google Analytics was hooked up to Gazator. I’ve been having fun digging through the reports and making sense of them. Tracking data in web analytics is a lot like sorting out a budget revision; there’s something strangely satisfying in it, but it’s hard to say exactly what.

As I mentioned in my previous post, being absolutely clear on what words mean matters. Web analytics are a perfect example of this — mix up visits with views, the analysis of the results will be completely misleading, and life can become difficult. In the interest of living a long, comfortable life, here are some common terms to know when talking about web analytics.

Hit: A hit is the retrieval of any information from the web server. Generally speaking, hits are no longer used as a measurement of a site’s popularity. This is because a visit to a single page doesn’t necessarily register as one hit; it can register as many. For instance, a webpage with five graphics would register as six hits (five hits for the graphics plus one for the page). As a result, hit numbers tend to be inflated.

Page View: A view is registered when a visitor accesses a page on the website. You can have far more views than visitors (because each visitor is likely to view more than one page).

Impression: There seems to be some discrepancy about this. Impression is sometimes used as an alternative for page view, e.g. page A received 100 impressions last month. It can also be used in terms of ad impressions, e.g. ad X received 500 impressions.

The important point to note is that if there are three ads on the page, the page may receive one impression but there will be three impressions for the ads (i.e. one impression for each ad). This can lead to some confusion and is a great example of why everyone having the same definition when talking about web analytics is important.

Visit: A visit occurs when a visitor comes to the website. Even if the visitor navigates around the site, it still only counts as one visit. The visitor is tracked by their IP address. If the visitor is idle for 30 or more minutes and then becomes active again, most software will count this as the start of a new visit.

Absolute Unique Visitor: Absolute unique visits is a count of the individuals who have visited rather than the frequency of the visit, and is looked at over a specific timeframe. So, suppose you looked at a website over the past week. There might be 21 visits but only three absolute unique visits. This would mean that each visitor had gone to your website an average of seven times.

Bounce Rate: The rate at which people visit one page on the site and then exit from the same page without looking elsewhere on the site.

Referrer: Where the visitor came from to arrive at the website. For instance, Google is a common referrer.

The definitions above cover most of the terminology that Google Analytics uses, but you should consider some more research if you want to impress the IT department.

More Information

Web Analytics Terminology — Back to Basics Series: Clear descriptions of commonly used terms.

Data Quality Sucks, Let’s Just Get Over It: An assessment of the limitations of web analytics plus my favorite description of the internet ever.

We all know people who get overly concerned about definitions; they tend to be the annoying ones who are constantly correcting people's usage. Knowing the distinctions between words, though, is actually incredibly helpful. It's a good way to keep communications clear to others, and it also helps to organize thoughts and maintain a clear focus on what needs to be accomplished. I've pulled together quick definitions for a handful of marketing terms.

Advertising, Direct Marketing and Marketing

Advertising is the paid communication of a product or service to a wider community. The individual creative pieces, e.g. banners ads, bill boards, etc., are all called ads.

Direct marketing is closely akin to advertising. Like advertising, it seeks to inform a large number of people about a product. A defining goal of direct marketing, though, is to quantify the affect of the piece through a tracking method, e.g. a priority code. This is accompanied by a call to action.

Marketing encompasses a very broad universe, but covers pretty much anything that has to do with the strategy and tactics for promoting products. It includes everything from data analysis to managing product launches to optimizing websites.

Strategy, Tactics and the Marketing Plan

This brings us to the next set of definitions — the difference between strategy and tactics. Strategy is a long-term plan which is designed to achieve a specific objective. In marketing, it almost always has measurable objectives, e.g. a 25% lift in sales. Tactics are short term and are the individual plans set in motion to achieve the long-term strategy. For instance, if the objective of the long-term plan (strategy) is a 25% lift in sales, then one tactic employed might be to send out a direct mail piece.

Closely related to strategy and tactics is the marketing plan. The marketing plan is a written copy of the strategy for promoting a product or line of products. Typically, the marketing plan covers one or more years. The plan outlines the tactics that will be used to achieve the long-term goals. The marketing plan is not static; as results come in and are analyzed, the marketing plan is adjusted.

These are quick definitions for complicated topics. I will be returning to these topics in future posts.

Marketing Genius posted today about why design is important. While I tend to take Marketing Genius' blog with a grain of salt as it's produced by a marketing agency (and is somewhat self-promotional) they often have interesting posts like this one.

What follows are some notes based on my experience with email layouts. They won't hold true for every email campaign, but will give you some general ideas. As always, though, the best way to find out what will work for your product is to test and then test again.

Over the course of my work experience, I have sent out many email campaigns. When I'm thinking about a new email, the place I like to start is with layout. The critical point to remember with email blasts is that viewers read from the top down so the most important information goes at the top. With that in mind, the following is a rough order for the email blast elements:

Logo

The logo is placed at the top to help the viewer immediately identify who the message is from. This helps to reinforce branding and reassure the viewers that the rest of the message is worth spending their time on. In some cases, though not all, the logo should be linked to the homepage.

Title

The title is the next item on the email and I like to place it at the top as well. A good title will readily and succinctly communicate the message of the email to the viewer, and provide motivation to keep looking at the email. The title needs to be in text, not placed as an image. (Increasing numbers of email systems are blocking images.)

Sidebar

A sidebar can be a powerful addition to an email. I've seen lifts of 35 to 40% produced by the inclusion of a sidebar. It does have to be done smartly, though. One approach is for the sidebar to crystalize the main draws of the product without people having to read the whole email. Alternatively, it could be used to call out a specific feature of the offer, e.g. a free offer or discount.

Including, at the top and the bottom of the sidebar, the phone number and a link to the webpage can boost response.

Text

People don't read as well on the web, and it's easy for the eye to skip. As a result, I like to keep the text short and to the point; in most cases, no more than two to three short paragraphs.

I also like to include a link in the first sentence to the landing page. This allows the impatient to find out more information and sign up without having to go through the whole email.

Images

Images can greatly improve the response to an email. However, more and more email programs are blocking images so don't rely solely on them to get your message across. Also, be sensitive to the sizes (in kb) of the images; if they're too large they will load slowly.

Call to Action

The email should have call to actions throughout. However, at the end of the email, there should be a final call to action clearly stated. The viewer should be absolutely clear on what the next step is that they need to take.

Final Notes

For the strongly visual, here is one possible layout with the elements in place:

When thinking about email campaigns, it is worthwhile to set up an email account and then sign up for every email blast that you can. This is a great way to find out not only what your competitors are doing, but also what you can learn from businesses in other fields.

I've discussed a generic email blast layout, and the suggestions here won't work for every customer base or every product. As I mentioned, the best way to optimize your email campaigns is to test and then test again.

A little earlier this month I linked to an article from Neuromarketing. In the article, Neuromarketing speculates on how avatars could be used to improve the call center experience.

It looks like some companies have taken this a step further and are using avatars on their homepage to boost response. In a March 2007 article, the New York Times mentions Goldfish Software, which has an avatar on their homepage. From the article:

"“We called the character ‘Kate,’ but then our customers started calling it by the same name,” said Judy Thornell, the company’s customer-relations executive. “We didn’t realize that they would develop a personal relationship with it.”

"After “Kate” started telling customers about the “hot deals” listed under a tab on the site, sales for that section went up 50 percent."

The most interesting bit is the 50 percent lift from an avatar. Using avatars obviously has potential for companies to boost response, but I have to wonder how customers would respond to avatars if they become widespread on homepages. Would customers develop a "personal relationship" with them, or would they become one more visual and auditory distraction?

In an earlier post, I wrote about why familiarity with design concepts is important for marketers and went over some design elements.

Design elements are the most basic parts of design. They are the foundation on which any design rests. They are best likened to the parts of speech that make up a sentence. The design elements are not the whole sentence, but language couldn't exist without them.

This post will review the next step up in complexity &mdash principles of design. The principals of design are the structures that designers use to form a whole composition. They are the underlying principals that pull disparate parts together into a coherent whole.

As with design elements, everyone has a different idea as to what should be included, but the following seemed a good place to start. I have also included some links at the bottom of this page for more in depth reading.

Proportion

Proportion is a straightforward concept; it is when relative sizes of the elements in the piece are consistent with one another. For instance, if it is a picture of a tree and an apple, side by side, the tree would be bigger than the apple.

Balance

Balance is when the elements of the composition are equally weighted against each other. Balance is almost easier to understand by thinking of something out of balance. Imagine a banner ad which had all the text and images pressed up against the left side and was just empty space on the right. It would look strange; the piece would not be evenly balanced between the right and left halves of the ad.

There are several different types of ways to balance a composition. I have included examples of a couple here: symmetrical and asymmetrical balance.

Symmetrical balance is weighted evenly on each side. In this case there are two identical ladybugs on each side of the dividing line.

Asymmetrical balance can take more than one form. For instance, a large object could be balanced by several smaller objects. In the example below, I used a large white object and balanced it against a small dark object. The reason this works is because dark objects appear to have more "weight" than light ones and so a small dark object can balance a large light one.

Emphasis (Dominance)

Emphasis is the part or parts of the design that most strongly draw the viewers' attention. In the example below, the flowers in the foreground draw the eye. To heighten the effect, I used red for the flowers and a weaker background. The causes the eye to gravitate to the flowers, the point of emphasis in this illustration.

Unity

Unity is produced by the use of repetitive themes that pull the whole composition together. Common ways to produce unity are through repetitive uses of color or images. When used effectively it creates the sensation that all parts of the composition relate to one another.

This image is an extremely simple example of unity — even though each of the three birds has a different plumage, a feeling of unity for the whole is produced by the repetitive use of the bird image.

Rhythm

Repeating elements in a regular fashion produces a sense of rhythm. Rhythm in a design works in the same way that rhythm in music works: it is a repeating element that gives the brain a framework to understand the piece as a whole.

In design, rhythm can give the eye a path to follow and also helps the brain to understand the overall pattern of the design. Regular rhythm, which occurs when the elements are roughly the same size and evenly spaced, produces a feeling of stability. A flowing rhythm, in which the distance between the shapes is irregular, creates a sense of motion.

Below is an example of progressive rhythm. In progressive rhythm, a shape (in this case trees) changes in a regular manner. As the trees fade from the left to the right, the eye is drawn in that direction.

More Information

Art, Design and Visual Thinking: A useful on-line resource that goes through the basics of design. This is written for a college art class.

The Principles of Design: An article from Digital Web magazine. A good overview, especially for design on the web.

Principles of Design: This page from Picturing Books has some useful and simple illustrations.

The Marketing Experiments blog does a nice job of putting the recent Google algorithm change in perspective in their blog post What would an Alien MBA think of your Online Marketing Plan?

Design helps to determine what the user focuses on. For instance, eMarketers are familiar with the idea that the most important information in most emails should be placed at the top. Because of how emails are displayed on computers, viewers see the top of the email first, and attention needs to be grabbed immediately before the email goes in the trash. While marketers don't necessarily think about it in these terms, placing the information at the top is a decision about the design of the piece.

Most marketers are not designers, but they should be able to talk intelligently to the design team. In order to do this, and to help and not hinder the designer, it is advantageous to have some idea why the designer is making the decisions that s/he is.

Obviously there is a lot to design decisions, but one place to start is understanding design elements. Design elements are the building blocks of a composition. One analogy is that they are like the parts of speech that make up a sentence. Or, for the scientifically minded, they are like the amino acids that make up a protein. Once the elements are arranged together by the designer, they form a composition.

Different people seem to have slightly different ideas as to what should be included in a list of design elements, but these seemed the most useful.

Point

A point has neither width, height nor depth. If you show a person a blank page with a point on it, the natural tendency is to try to make sense of it. People typically connect two isolated points in a line; three points become a triangle. This tendency to connect points is called gestalt.

Line

A line is a connection between points and it can vary in weight, length and direction. Horizontal lines give an impression of stability. Vertical lines produce a feeling of loftiness and formality. Diagonal lines suggest movement.

Form (Shape)

A form, at its simplest, is the area enclosed by a line that connects back onto itself. A form is two dimensional, i.e. it has width and height, or three dimensional, i.e. it has width, height and depth. Some writers differentiate between form as two dimensional and shape as three dimensional, whereas others use the terms interchangeably.

Color

Color and color schemes are fundamental for successful design. The use of color and different color combinations shape the look and feel of the final composition. More about color can also be found in a previous post.

Pattern

A pattern is made up of reoccurring elements. It organizes the appearance of the piece in a regular repetitive way.

Texture

Texture is something we feel. In design, texture can be suggested by an image. For instance, a picture of grass can look rough and a picture of water can look smooth.

Designers take these basic elements and manipulate them to create a finished composition. While there is a lot more to design than knowing the fundamental elements (in the same way there is more to writing a novel than knowing the parts of speech) this is still a vocabulary that is worth developing.

More Information

Art, Design and Visual Thinking: A useful on-line resource that goes through the basics of design. This is written for a college art class.

The Elements of Design: One of a series of articles which looks at design from the point of view of online media.

Recently I've posted on split testing and multivariate testing. While researching these posts, I came across an article by Jakob Nielsen, a web usability expert: Putting A/B Testing in Its Place.

Nielsen's article has been around for awhile (for instance, he only discusses A/B testing, not multivariate testing as well) but it is an interesting read for marketers who are optimizing a website.

Split testing is great: Test version A against version B, watch the results roll in, and choose the winner. Really simple and the rationale behind the testing is transparent: Customers respond better to one version than the other and the winning creative is used in the future.

But what happens when marketers want to test lots of variables? If simple splits are used to test a lot of variables, the construction of the test pages becomes extremely tedious and the testing itself can be prohibitively time consuming.

To address this when optimizing websites, many companies use multivariate (or multivariable) testing. Multivariate testing uses some clever statistical tricks that allow marketers to test many variables more quickly and in a smaller population than would be possible with traditional split testing.

The advantages of testing multiple variables at once are obvious. If marketers can test a lot of variables all at once, they can get the results faster, respond to the market more quickly, and stay competitive. Also, since so many variables can be tested at once, testing is more inclusive because each individual element is less expensive (in terms of time and energy) to test. This allows marketers to test variables that aren't necessarily at the top of the list, but that might still have an impact.

Set Up

As with any test, the place to start is to decide what success from this test will look like. More sales? longer visitor time on the site? more page views per visitor? Deciding this early on will help direct which variables to test and how to analyze the results.

In multivariate tests, marketers can test multiple variables and multiple versions of each of the variables. Typical examples of variables on a landing page are a headline, a graphic, and the background color of the page. For each of these variables, variations are then constructed. There might be two or three variations for each variable. For instance, headline 1 might be tested against headline 2, graphic 1 against graphic 2, background color 1 against background color 2 against background color 3... well, you get the idea.

In a multivariate test, splits are constructed so they combine the variations in unique ways. In order for the results to be valid, the testing protocol with the different combinations has to be followed exactly.

The set up for multivariate testing is complicated as is the analysis. There are multiple companies that will assist with this type of optimization. The current favorite among many, though, appears to be the Google Website Optimizer on the basis that it is free. (This is available only to AdWords advertisers.)

Results

How customers respond to the splits is tracked, and the relative contribution of each change can be sorted out through clever statistical analysis. When all the results are combined and analyzed, a "best" page is derived. This is then back tested against the control.

As with any other type of testing, multivariate testing is an iterative process. While it is almost guaranteed that multivariate testing will improve results, it does not improve them permanently. Constant testing is needed to make sure the page stays abreast of changes on the web and with customers.

More Links

Landing Page Optimization Using the Taguchi Method: A great case study. This is highly recommended for anyone who wants a better understanding of how these tests work.

Multivariable Testing: Marketing Experiments consistently produce interesting and useful articles. This is a good overview of multivariate tests.

Google Website Optimizer

One of the more interesting niche marketing blogs out there is Neuromarketing: Where Brain Science and Marketing Meet. They find the cross roads between neuroscience and marketing and post some interesting articles.

A story in the Wall Street Journal suggests that people are responding more and more to avatars in online social games as if they are having face-to-face interactions. In a recent article, Neuromarketing takes this up and looks at a few ways that marketers can take advantage of this reaction.

English is a funny language; its normal state is to be in flux. Spelling for a long time was a matter of choice and sentence structure has migrated over the years. If you don’t believe this, try reading Chaucer in the original English. Or something more recent — count how many commas (and lines) the average sentence by Jane Austen contains and then compare it to a modern novel.

Since the English language changes so much, I’m always a little reluctant to start pushing grammar rules. What’s true today may look antiquated or even be downright wrong tomorrow. However, the advantage of conforming to current standards of grammar from a marketing point of view is that it makes the piece look more polished and trustworthy. While adherence to formal grammar rules is not always necessary, it’s at least good to know the rules before you break them.

A fairly frequent grammar question is what words of a title to capitalize and what to leave lowercase. Most of us have some idea, but here are some rules for capitalization:

1) Capitalize the first and last words
2) Capitalize nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, subordinate conjunctions
3) Lowercase articles, coordinating conjunctions, “to” when it proceeds a verb, prepositions with fewer than five letters

Got all that?

These sort of lists don’t always help a lot. Some of the parts of speech most people will recognize, but some won't jump immediately to mind.

So I pulled out my trusty English grammar book, The Brief English Handbook (brief at 500+ pages), and started looking up parts of speech. What follows are abbreviated explanations. For more detailed explanations, see any good grammar book.

2) Capitalize nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, subordinate conjunctions

Nouns: Persons, places or things, e.g. Charles Darwin, France, apple
Pronouns: Take the place of a noun, e.g. we, she, he
Adjectives: Modify nouns and pronouns, e.g. the red apple (red modifies apple)
Verbs: Express action (e.g. run, dream) or state of being (e.g. is, are)
Adverbs: Most modify verbs (e.g. run quickly)
Subordinate Conjunctions: Begin dependent clauses
     The foal must learn to walk before it can leave the barn.
     “Before” is the subordinate conjunction; “before it can leave the barn” is the dependent clause. The subordinate conjunction and dependent clause modify the rest of the sentence. In this case “The foal must learn to walk” can stand on its own as a statement, but the meaning of the sentence is modified by “before it can leave the barn.”
     Common subordinate conjunctions are: after, although, because, before, if, since, so that, though, unless, until, when, where, while

3) Lowercase articles, coordinating conjunctions, “to” when it proceeds a verb, prepositions with fewer than five letters

Articles: a, an, the
Coordinating Conjunctions: There are 7 coordinating conjunctions: and, but, or, yet, for, nor, so
Prepositions with fewer than five letters
     Prepositions show the relation of a noun or pronoun to some other word in the sentence.
     He held the food over the cat
     In this case, “over” is the preposition and it shows the relationship of the cat to the food. Some common prepositions are: above, across, at, before, on, over, through, upon, within, between

Hopefully this helps sort out what to capitalize in the title. Often rules can be broken in marketing copy, especially on the internet, but it has to be done carefully and consistently or the piece will look shoddy.

If you want to learn more about grammar, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss is well worth picking up. It's hardly a complete review of English grammar, but it's very funny. Everyone who writes or reviews copy should also have a good grammar book like The Brief English Handbook to hand.

Writing titles is hard. It is especially brutal when dreaming up a title for an online piece. This isn’t surprising; a lot rides on a title and there’s not much room to work with.

When putting the title together for an online piece, there are two main considerations: How well will the title motivate the viewer to read the article? Will the title be ranked highly by search engines?

Or, to put it another way, we have the human reaction to the title and the search bots reaction. It’s hard to keep both completely happy.

The Human Reaction

Viewers often read only the title and then move on if nothing catches their attention. To get the attention of humans, the title should be compelling and motivate people to read the piece; the title has to act as a hook and get the reader involved as quickly as possible.

One option is to write something clever and witty that is less descriptive but more entertaining and amusing. A clever title still needs to relate to the content of the piece and must not only be clever but also correct.

Another approach is to give a descriptive title, one that says literally what the article is about. It’s a bit boring, but if the viewer is looking for something specific and the title promises it to them, then they’re more likely to read the piece. A co-worker once said that how she liked to write titles was to think about the most important idea of the whole piece - the idea behind why the piece is being written in the first place - and write the title based on that.

If this title is for a blog, ideally the title would be in the same tone as the blog contents. For instance, if the contents tend to be slightly goofy, then you’d expect slightly goofy titles. A great example is Cute Overload; the post titles match the content perfectly.

The Search Bot Reaction

Unlike most humans, the search engine “bots” are extremely literal. They are not programmed to understand creativity or wit or goofiness.

To keep the bots happy, the ideal is to write very literal titles that contain key search words. In fact, it’s supposed to be advantageous to place a keyword as the first word in the title. This can lead to painfully boring titles, but good search engine rankings.

Ultimately how you write the title comes down to what you want the title to do and what you want from the piece. Is it a piece for wider distribution that you hope will rank well with the search engines? Is it just for friends and family? The higher the value on search engines, the more the focus should be on a descriptive title that pulls in keywords. If it’s a piece for friends and family, you can go wild with creativity, references and puns in the title.

A Few Final Notes

Whether you decide to take the creative path or the search bot friendly path, there are a few additional points that apply for almost all titles.

Use the active voice. A title in the active voice is more powerful and persuasive. People understand text in the active voice more readily, so it makes a more effective title.

Keep the title short. Three to seven words seems to be the recommended length.

Keep your audience in mind when you are writing titles; the title (and by extension the piece the title is for) should appeal to your audience.

More Information

Writing Effective, Attention-Getting Headlines and Titles on Your Blog: A fantastic, comprehensive piece on blog titles. Well worth the time.

10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work: Headline formulas for the keyword-conscious writer

7 More Sure-Fire Headline Templates That Work: More headline formulas

Learn How to Write Titles to Get Traffic and Links: The Ultimate Guide: A collection of links put together by Improve the Web.

Cliff Notes: In case you found this site when you were actually searching for how to write the title for your midterm. Good luck with the essay.

Pretty much everyone has had at least one meeting like this: A group of co-workers sitting in an overly air conditioned conference room, arguing in circles. The argument stretches on for the foreseeable future because no one has any hard data; they're going on their gut instincts.

The good news is that marketers have a way out of this — they test. The type of test I'm going to cover in today's post is A/B testing. In an A/B test one variable is tested at a time. This is the simplest testing method, but it does take a bit of discipline.

Set Up

The place to start when setting up an A/B test is to decide what you want to track, and what counts as a success. If you're making a change to a website, are you looking for longer view times? Click throughs to other parts of the site? More sales? Identifying the goal will help identify the area to test.

In A/B split tests only one variable is tested at a time. For instance, if you're looking at optimizing an email blast you've run before, you might decide to change the headline. The control version would be the email as it is; the test version would have the new headline. The only change would be the headline.

An altered control will invalidate the results. If the test version outperforms the control, it won't be known whether the test caused a lift or the change to the control caused a depression. A decrease in response for the test compared to the control is also suspect for similar reasons.

Testing

After your test is all set up, it will need to go to the customers to see how they respond. To keep the results clean, the audience for the test and the control should be as close to identical as possible. For instance, if it's a website test, one ideal would be to alternate which version is seen by people who visit the site: The first person to visit gets the control, the second gets the test, and so on.

Results

Once enough data has been gathered to be statistically significant, look at the results and see whether the test or the control won. If the test won, that is your new control for the next round of testing. If the control won, well, you learned something.

Either way, the testing needs to go on. The more you test, the more you'll learn and the better results you'll see. Testing lets you challenge and improve on long-held assumptions about the best way to market a product. It also makes those two-hour long meetings a thing of the past — you'll have the data you need to back up your position.

It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World

Interesting article from the New York Times

In the last post, we looked at colors and some different color schemes that designers use. Prisms also made an appearance, as did school paints. In school, we learned that prisms took white light and turned it into a rainbow, but a rainbow of school paints, mixed together, becomes black.

This observation can help us understand additive and subtractive color, and is why color on a computer screen behaves differently than color on a printed piece.

The place to start when understanding additive color is with the prism. Once the white light passes through the prism, the light separates into the visible spectrum of colors — red through violet. Each color is a different wavelength of light.

We can take just one wavelength, e.g. the wavelength that makes up green, emit it and we'd see the color green. Computers and TVs use emitted light to make color. On a TV, the pixels start out black. This is because no light is being emitted from them. To produce red on a TV screen, red light — and red light only — is emitted. The same applies to green and blue. All other colors are derived from some combination of these colors. White, of course, is all the colors being emitted together. Producing color like this, where different wavelengths are being "added" together, is called additive color. The color we see is the light shining out at us; think of that as you're basking in the computers glow.

Subtractive color is a bit more complicated. Let's start with an example. If you're looking at a red apple, you're still seeing with light. But in this case, the red apple isn't emitting light; rather it's absorbing all wavelengths of light except red, which is bouncing off it. To think of it in another way, it's as if the apple is accepting all comers and absorbing them, except red, which it's throwing back at us.

Printed ads, paintings, most of the items we see around us we see because of subtractive color. When children mix all their paints together they get black because all the light is being absorbed and none of it is bouncing back at us.

So you can imagine getting the inks right on a printed ad is important; if the mix is a little off it will absorb and reflect the wrong set of wavelengths and we'll see (slightly) the wrong color. This is one of several reasons why we see variations in the colors of printed materials — slight differences in the pigment mix.

Sometime during their school career, most people have at least one section on color. It's the really cool section where students get to play with prisms and are told, somewhat counterintuitively, that white light is made up of all the colors mixed together. (This went against all previous school experience; most of us have known since kindergarten that if you mix all the colors together what you actually get is a murky brownish-black.)

Part of the playing-with-prisms lesson included a color wheel. The color wheel is based on the primary colors — red, yellow, and blue — and then all the intermediate colors — orange, green and purple — are arrived at by mixing adjacent primary colors. When you put it all together in a circle, the result is the color wheel.

If you step back and look at the color wheel, the colors can be grouped together by effect. On one side of the color wheel, there are the warm colors — the reds, oranges and yellows. On the other side, there are the cool colors — the greens, blues and purples. And not making an appearance at all on this color wheel are the neutral colors — white, gray and black.

Designers use the color wheel to help them put together color schemes. While there are variations on the color schemes, broadly speaking there are three types: Monochromatic, Analogous and Complementary.

Monochromatic color schemes use only one color with different values. The shade (adding black), tone (adding gray) or tint (adding white) of the base color can all be varied. This is the simplest of the color schemes.

Analogous color schemes use colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. One color is often dominant in this scheme, and other colors are used to enrich the appearance. In this scheme, mixing cool colors with warm colors doesn't always work well.

Complementary color schemes are made up of two colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. For instance, blue and orange or purple and yellow are both contrasting pairs of colors that are complementary. In this color scheme, cool and warm colors are mixed.

This is a fairly broad overview of color and how it's used in design. It's all important stuff from a marketing perspective. Colors help people understand what it is they are looking at and how it is organized. Colors can also be used to help generate a specific emotional response.

Some useful links:

Color Wheel Pro: A general summary of the different color schemes with illustrations. The authors have also included Pros, Cons and Tips for each color scheme.

Website Tips: A great page if you have a lot of time and interest in web page color schemes. The authors included links to many different resources.

Color Design Rules: Don't be put off by the layout - this is actually a very useful page. It's for art students, but gives a good overview of the different color schemes and even includes a section on the psychology of colors.

Color for Coders — Color and Design for the Non-Designer

Color Matters

In this weblog, I'm going to talk about marketing and I plan to cover basic information that all marketers should know.

Design and copy will come up a lot, because it's difficult to be a good marketer without knowing the basics, whether you're the one putting the pieces together or you're giving feedback to the creative team.

Modern marketing also has an analytical side: running comparisons and then analyzing how the changes affect overall response rates. This is one of the funnest parts of marketing; rolling up the sleeves and seeing what worked.

Personally, I'm not happy just observing that something affects the response, though, I also want to know why. Once the whys are known, it allows the will bes to be predicted. With that in mind, I'll also pull the occasional neuroscience or psychology article and see what can be derived about why people behave the way they do, and how all of this relates back to the design and copy.

These topics are a starting point &mdash ideas that all marketers should be familiar with. This weblog will evolve in time, though, and it won't be restricted to the topics outlined here. With that in mind, comments, suggestions and questions will always be welcome.