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

Pity the poor PPC ad copywriter. Back in the days of the so-called mad men, before Transparent Marketing was a necessity, they could just mix hyperbole, bold fonts, and a handsome fella, and then head out for the three-martini lunch. No one is measuring anyway, so who could prove the ad didn’t work?

Fast forward to the present day. In a PPC (pay-per-click) ad, all you have are a few precious characters and tiny visuals in which to convince a skeptical consumer that will only glance at your ad for a split second that your ad deserves a click. On top of that, with paid search, you’re competing for that click with all of your competitors’ ads, as well as organic traffic, with no visual help at all.

On Wednesday’s Web clinic – Optimizing PPC Ads: How to leverage the full potential of 130 characters by clarifying the value proposition – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will review key PPC experiments illustrating the potential of a clear value proposition to help the humble PPC ad men and women of the world perfect their craft. He will also teach on the components of a properly stated value proposition and how they apply specifically to PPC ads.

But first, we wanted to hear from you. How do you create an ad that stands out from the rest of your competitors? How do you get the click? Here are a few of our favorite answers… Read more…

Quality traffic is essential for any marketing campaign. Shoot, it’s essential for any successful business. You could have a highly valuable product (let’s say a real cure for male baldness), at the best price (let’s say for just a shipping address with no strings attached), and the most optimized website presentation on the interwebs (let’s say it has undergone a year of MECLABS testing), but despite these advantages, if there are no address-owning bald men who can find your website, well then your business will look a lot like me trying to drive a stick-shift.

Ok, crazy example, but the point is this: Quality traffic is essential.

The question for marketers is – where can we find the most quality traffic on the Web? Should we work with Pay-Per-Click (PPC)? Is it smart to invest in social media? Will external website banner ads be worth the costs? There are many options out there, but today, I want to bring your attention to an experiment that compared the traffic quality between two of the most common online channels: PPC vs. Banner Ads.

Now, explaining this test will be a little more tedious than usual because it deals with multiple experiments of a unique multi-step conversion funnel. But, rest assured, if you can just get a bird’s eye view of the optimization strategy, that viewpoint will be sufficient for what I am talking about in this post. Read more…

It has been a while since we have published Pay Per Click (PPC) ad testing. Lately, it can seem like PPC has taken the back seat to topics like social media and mobile. However, PPC remains an integral part of the online marketing campaigns for many of our own Research Partners, so we are still testing to discover the most effective ways to craft PPC ads.

So enough introductions and segues, let’s get down to the test.

Background

This experiment involves a business-to-business (B2B) software provider. They were trying to optimize one of their best lead generation conversion paths. They started by focusing their test efforts on the channel driving traffic through this process, the PPC ad.

At the end of the day, they would end up testing and optimizing the complete conversion path (from PPC ad to form page). And the overall gains this company achieved are going to turn some heads on today’s web clinic, but for the sake of this blog post, let’s just look at how they optimized their paid search marketing campaign. Read more…

We have been quite busy at the labs here, but I wanted to cover a PPC development that blipped on our radar earlier this year. For many of us, PPC is a critical source of traffic, and can be quite the task to manage. Well to add to the list of things to consider, Google is beta-testing the collection of phone lead information directly from SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Google generates roughly 97% of its revenue from online advertising, so it makes sense that they delve into new areas of online marketing – which now seems to include part of the sales process as well.

Given the huge potential (or threat) this represents to you, the Internet marketer, I think this is a vital development to cover on this blog (and even reached out to a search engine marketing firm to get their ideas for you as well.) While this will not affect all verticals, for some niches this might pour some gasoline (or more correctly napalm), on already very competitive areas. Read more…

In Part 1 of our series on bounce rates, we explored how to drill down into your metrics to find the numbers that really matter. But that left us with an unsettling question. For the users that do bounce but shouldn’t…what is missing that would pull them into your site?

Look at where your traffic is coming from and where it is landing
Many people think that a high bounce rate means there is a problem strictly with the content on the page. While that can be the case in part, you should take a step back and look at where people are coming from and the messages they see before arriving to your site to fully diagnosis a high bounce rate. For example, let’s look at the following user interaction…I’ll be the guinea pig.

I’m thinking of buying a new turbocharger for the Subaru WRX I race on the weekends. So I search for turbochargers.

Then I click on a PPC ad that mentions the following items:

• Unbeatable prices
• Turbochargers in stock
• Free shipping

I think to myself, “Great! This is exactly that I am looking for.” I initiate a click and this is the page I am greeted with:

Where is free shipping?
Where are the in-stock items?
And most importantly… WHERE ARE THE TURBOCHARGERS?!

If you just looked at the content of the site in a vacuum, you would find it acceptable. But users being directed to this site from that PPC ad have expectations that this page isn’t fulfilling.

I have seen many people in this situation look at their site metrics and when they see the high-bounce rate, just keep radically changing the page without any real regard to the user’s thought sequence. They get frustrated when the page continues to underperform.

And remember, I am just using my quest to break the local time trial record in my tuned-up WRX as an example. These principles do not only apply to landing pages or companies running paid traffic.

Text links (on other sites directing traffic to your pages), emails, and newsletters set just as much expectation as paid search banners. For external links, use a research tool like Yahoo Site Explorer to investigate the links to your pages along with the messages being communicated. Then evaluate if your page connects with those messages (If you’re uncomfortable with how your page is presented, contact the owner of the page to edit the links. You will be surprised how willing people are to make those edits if you ask nicely.)

Of course, giving customers the information they need is only the beginning. If we really want to address the bounce rates of key segments we are concerned about, we must get them to act…

On Wednesday, Part 3 will examine how you get visitors to act by giving them a clear path for what to do next.

Have additional questions? Other metrics you’d like to look at? Use the comments section below or shoot me a tweet me at: @ctrentmarketing

At our July 29 web clinic on optimizing PPC campaigns, several participants wanted to know more about using forms and keyword insertion.

We distilled the questions and put them to Corey Trent, our lead research analyst on this clinic.

Q: Which is better: product description and fill-out form on the landing page or promotion on landing page and fill-out form on next page?  Is it important to have a form directly on the landing page?

In most cases, having both the description and form on the landing page is the best approach. When you start adding steps or clicks to the process, a couple of things can happen:

1. When a visitor has to click through to another page, the amount of friction increases. People are always mentally evaluating if the effort is going to be worth the payoff. When more pages and steps are involved, that adds more weight to it not being worth their time to continue.
2. When a form is on a standalone page, detached from the description, people can lose sight of the key product benefits, features and the value proposition that were outlined on page one. It’s better to reinforce your offer to help prospects overcome the anxiety of providing their information.

Q: Where is the best place to put the request form?

The best place to put a request form is where you have already built the case that what the user is getting is not only worth it, but a steal compared to the information they are going to give up.

As for where that form actually resides on your specific page — that’s an element you need to test. Whether it’s in a sidebar on the left or right of the page, or in the main content column, or “above the fold” on the page, or below several long copy blocks, there is no surefire place for a form that will work for every type of landing page and offer.

What’s extremely important is that the form is in the natural eyepath of your landing page’s visitors, and that it fits into the sequence of thoughts from intent to action that the visitor experiences on the page. In other words, be wary of placements such as putting your form above or before important content, or using equally weighted columns that downplay the significance of the form.

Q: What about keyword insertion in the landing page header? If keyword insertion does not match with a custom landing page (using dynamic text to match), is there still value in keyword insertion?

If you use keyword insertion in your ad, you’ll be best served by making the connection in your page as well because it increases relevance between the two.

Recently, we’ve seen instances where the effectiveness of header messages has decreased, so testing this with your pages is worthwhile. If you do not insert keywords on the landing page to match the ad, you should still ensure that there’s a logical, relevant connection early on the page that visitors will be able to understand to maintain continuity.

Either way, make sure that your copy is strong — don’t rely on keyword insertion alone to carry the load. Weak copy gives people a good reason to leave your site.

Additional topics covered in the web clinic and questions that we’ve touched on in past research briefs included: value propositions, relevance and offer pages.

You can hear more from Corey via the full clinic presentation and follow him on Twitter: @ctrentmarketing