The term above the fold originated from the days of the newspaper—remember those?  Newspapers are delivered folded up and the half on the front that is visible is referred to be above the fold.  It’s the first thing people see when they pick up a newspaper.

It’s also put on display at newsstands where often the cover story is what converts people into buying the paper, so the front page story is always what the editor thought would catch the most attention.

In terms of our landing pages, “above the fold” refers to the area of the webpage that can be seen without scrolling.  If you haven’t heard, in the age of internet ADHD and a million flashing lights pulling our internet visitor’s attention, above the fold still matters when the visitor makes a split second decision: To stay, or not to stay?  Is my nanosecond of patience up, or does this interest me enough to click and find out what’s behind door #1?

Wait, but everyone has different screen sizes though, so how do you make sure it’s above the fold for everyone?  You don’t.  You’re simply trying to make sure what you consider above the fold is the same as the vast majority of people out there.

To help you do that, here’s a nifty Browser Size tool from Google Labs, whose data is gathered from people who visit Google (so everyone who uses the internet).  Here’s a quick video on how to use this tool properly…

The most important elements that will get the visitor to click through and convert need to be above the fold.  This doesn’t mean jam as much information into the fold as possible.  User experience is equally important.

Make sure at least that the required, most pertinent information is there for the visitor to easily absorb and make a decision.  Take a few steps back from your screen, see if the general layout of your landing page is too cluttered, and see if you can make out what your landing page conveys.  If it’s not easy to make out the headline or decide where you should look first, it probably doesn’t bode well.

Here are some elements that I think are essential:

1. Actionable Navigation.  Is it easy for the visitor to know where he is supposed to click on one glance?  If you have a simple navigation panel, is it laid out in a coherent manner and highly visible to the visitor?  If you have a panel that really doesn’t add much value, take it away and stop distracting your visitor.  More is not better.
2. Brand/Theme.  Does the content above the fold convey a theme that’s based around the brand you are trying to promote?  Does it have a logo of any kind?  The visitor doesn’t want to be taken by surprise and won’t go further if there’s nothing that seems trustworthy.
3. Adding Social Proof.  Are there elements above the fold that make your page more trustworthy?  If your offer has appeared in magazines or has been talked about in television, you place their logos on your page.  If your offer has a 1-800 customer service number, place it on your page to add credibility.  If your offer has Twitter or a Facebook fan page, place those Follow and Like buttons and show the number of people who follow them.
4. Call to Action.  Does your above the fold content follow a sequence that ends in telling your visitor what to do or where to go?  If your call to action is below the fold, move it up.

Conversion is the goal of the page (whether you’re getting them to fill out the offer there or clicking them through).  You want to have just enough information so that people can quickly do what you want them to do.  If you have extra content such as testimonials, reviews, articles, or anything else, you can set them below the fold so that the visitor has the option to read through if they so choose.  All content should be driving the visitor to the same action.

The name “Pivot Table” somehow makes it sound like it’s some advanced gizmo only reserved for the Excel wizards.  It’s actually quite the opposite.  It’s an easy, fast, yet powerful, way for marketers who are not familiar with Excel to quickly be able to analyze large amounts of data.  So, if Excel gives you a general headache overall, I promise, this will be a lot more pain free.

Mobile marketing gets bigger, more popular, and more interesting by the day.  As we get into it, we discover that there are a lot more parameters and variables to be tracked and analyzed than traditional traffic sources.  Pivot Tables should provide you with a versatile way to handle these extra columns that you have to deal with in your reports.

The sample report in the tutorial is a real report sent to me from one of our subscribers today.  He wanted to take a look at the report and help him drill down and optimize conversion rates for his campaign using Pivot Tables.  The report used is from his Neverblue account.

While you may track your data a lot differently, I hope you still learn from this video and apply the methods to all your data tables.  This tutorial only teaches the basics of analyzing data from one table.  Look out for more tutorials in the future for data analysis across multiple tables!  Enjoy.

Say you decide to target younger females with a specific angle.  You might want to target females age 18-29 but split it up into 3 age groups: 18-21, 22-25, and 26-29.  Further, you might also decide to split test Caucasian and everyone else.  With 3 age groups and 2 ethnicity groupings, you would be required to create 6 campaigns total to cover all the permutations of your split tests.

Can I sum up ad data across campaigns?

Since the age range of your target audience is somewhat similar, you might decide that you can get away with testing the same creatives in all 6 campaigns.  Can you then aggregate the data from all 6 campaigns to gauge the performance of the same creative that is in these campaigns so you can arrive at a decision on those creatives faster?  The short answer is yes.

To be clear, in order to properly split test your age groups and any other targeting via multiple campaigns, you must set the same CPM bid.  In theory, there is absolutely no difference between running our 6 campaigns at the same bid and running 1 campaign targeting all females 18-29 in terms of ad serving.

Obviously, the advantage that creating 6 separate campaigns does give us is the ability to see the performance per segmentation.  This splitting of the campaign into multiple parts, however, reduces the volume received per sub-campaign.  That is, the traffic is split into 6 different segments.  Therefore, you may want to add up the impressions, clicks, cost, revenue, etc., across the campaigns for the same creative if you feel that you’re gathering your testing data too slowly.

When doing so, however, you should check for and keep the ads that are actually doing well for particular sub-campaigns.  For example, just because an ad is doing poorly across 6 campaigns, it doesn’t mean it isn’t killing it in 1 of them.  That’s the whole benefit of splitting into sub-campaigns in the first place.  Another benefit, of course, is the ability to see if an entire sub-campaign is unprofitable.

How do we track the data?

To track your data for a specific creative across multiple campaigns, you just need a code to identify the creative.  As an example, a code I might come up with looks something like this:

CampaignName_0000001[002]-123

In the above example, “0000001″ is an image code that I might use to keep track of the images I’m using, while “002″ is a copy code that I might use to keep track of the copies I’m testing, and finally, the “-123″ are merely random numbers appended to ensure that every keyword I pass to Prosper202 is unique.

In our 6 campaign example, then, you would have a “0000001[002″ that identifies the exact creative combo (image and copy) in each of the 6 campaigns, but the appended “-123″ would be different to keep those 6 ads identifiable through unique keywords.

If you’ve gone through the basic Excel tutorials, then you would have learned how to isolate the “0000001[002″ in the POF Daily Creative Delivery report into its own column.  You can then sum up the performance data via that column (hint: use the SUMIFS function).

If you haven’t done so, please run through the  Excel tutorials, as well as check out the POF 7-Day Mastery Guide, where I go through my overall campaign tracking methodology.  You might also want to check out the Basic Campaign Viewer and use it as a base to build additional functionality such as creative tracking as described here.  The Campaign Viewer is for subscribers only, so if you haven’t, simply enter your email on the right sidebar of the blog and get your copy!

If you are confused about anything in the article, please post in the comments!