MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

There’s something about putting a video on YouTube and watching the view count climb as more and more people find your message and click play. Think of all that time you wasted hitting the refresh button over and over on your last video.

It’s thrilling because there’s always a chance it will go viral and reach one million views and you’ll finally be able to buy that yacht you’ve always wanted from the bonus you’ll get.

Of course, it never turns out that way. But, according to a recent experiment we ran with a Research Partner, there is one thing you can do to ensure that more people who see your video will actually click the play button.

It’s simple really — almost too simple. But it works. All you need to do is adjust your first frame to something somewhat interesting.

Here’s the test we recently ran on one YouTube video with two different first frames …

“There are no expert marketers; there are only experienced marketers and expert testers.” – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin

Once upon a time, marketers could claim they knew what marketing collateral would generate the highest response from the customer. Now, with the advent of online testing, it has become more challenging to “make definite assertions” about which treatment will perform better.

The best we can do is pose  a hypothesis.

Of course, it never hurts when your hypothesis turns out to be absolutely right.

So to give you a 50/50 chance at gloating (even over a lucky guess), you can hypothesize which call-to-action performed better in the slides below.

Once you’ve studied the slides, go ahead a leave your hypothesis for which call-to-action won (and why) in the comments.

The commenter with the best hypothesis will get the recognition of his or her peers and be featured in the body of this post with a link to their site.

Here is the test we will highlight in today’s 4:00 p.m. (EST) Web clinic: Minor Changes, Major Lifts: How headline and call-to-action optimization increased conversion 45%.

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Pay-per-click advertising is a mysterious subject. A lot goes on behind the scenes at Google that they simply won’t let us in on.

Because of that, marketers often struggle to get their PPC questions answered.

In our most recent Web clinic, “Online Advertising Forensics: We investigate how and why a text-based PPC ad produced 47% more conversions,” we had several great questions from our audience. But we didn’t have time to answer them in the clinic. So, to help them (and you), we wrote this post with answers to the most pressing questions.

Hopefully you can find questions similar to the ones you have so you can apply it to your own PPC campaigns …

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If you’ve been running PPC campaigns for longer than a month or so, there have probably been at least a few times when you’ve hit a wall.

You know what I mean … those points when it seems that no matter how much effort you put into testing and optimizing your ads with the right keywords or copy, the incremental returns are minimal and you just cannot seem to beat your star performers.

It may be you are hitting one of those walls right now … and unlike Jim Morrison would have you believe, you can’t just break on through to the other side.

So what do you do in that situation?

At MECLABS, we experiment with a lot of PPC campaigns, and we’ve seen our share of walls when it comes to optimizing them. In a recent experiment, with the help of PPC managers at ROI Revolution, we were able to help North American Spine, a minimally invasive spine treatment center, break through a “wall” to achieve 47% more leads from a PPC campaign.

We’re going to share the details of that experiment with you on our Web clinic today at 4:00 p.m. EST – Online Advertising Forensics: We investigate how and why a text-based PPC ad produced 47% more conversions.

But, before we give you the full scoop, we want you to get some practice in so you can start preparing to break through your own walls.

We’re going to let you test your marketing intuition and tell us in the comments of this blog post which PPC ad you think produced the 47% lift … and why.

If you choose the correct PPC ad and give us a good enough reason for why you think it won, you will be featured on our blog as a marketing expert and win the respect of your peers and superiors.

So without further ado, here are the treatments:

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A test is a great way to settle arguments. The highest-paid person in the room thinks he has a better headline? No problem. Just test it.

But, to truly optimize, sometimes it helps to start a few arguments as well. Get some key people in the room, question your landing pages, question your value proposition, and let everyone (Sales, Customer Service, Product Development, Consulting Services) come up with test ideas to really push the envelope on your marketing.

The way we do that at MECLABS is with a series of meetings called Peer Review Sessions. It gives everybody – from the most senior to the most junior members of the team – a chance to jump in, question the status quo, and come up with test ideas.

Because, as marketers, optimizing by ourselves is hard work … even for the experienced optimizers at MECLABS. No one can truly optimize in a vacuum. We need other minds to broaden the horizons of our creativity and give us ideas for what to test and how to test.

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Sometimes great products can be hard to sell on a website. The market is so saturated with mediocre goods and services that when a truly great one comes along, the same old marketing tactics simply don’t work anymore. Excellent products need excellent websites to communicate their full potential.

And that’s the main problem with this website submitted for live optimization by the makers of the Npower PEG on a past Web clinic.

Click to enlarge

The product is essentially a battery you can hook to almost any device. But the fun part is that it charges with the kinetic energy you produce while you go about your daily life.

I personally found it fascinating. And I want one.

Unfortunately, (as the owners of the site probably know) the website doesn’t effectively communicate the prodigiousness of the product.

Perhaps you’re in the same boat as the Npower PEG. Maybe you’ve got a great product but you feel like your website doesn’t live up to it. Don’t tune this post out because it’s about someone else’s company.

To help you, I talked to Adam Lapp, Associate Director of Optimization and Strategy, MECLABS, about Npower’s website. From his years of optimization experience, you can hopefully glean some wisdom for your own site.

There are eight main test ideas that Adam highlighted in our conversation about how to improve this website.

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