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

Like millions of other NFL fans, I lamented the elimination of my favorite team from playoff contention last weekend. Yes, my beloved Jacksonville Jaguars ended their season at 7-9 and pro football for me will not carry as much passion over the next four weeks as it did for the last 17.

But, like my fellow fans of the 20 teams that didn’t make the cut, I’ll find someone to cheer for during the playoffs and will ultimately enjoy watching a Cinderella make some magic happen in the Super Bowl. And of course, I will enjoy this annual celebration of advertising as millions watch every Super Bowl commercial almost as intently (and sometimes more so) than the game itself.

Watching Super Bowl commercials is fun, but as a marketing researcher I have to ask the question – what is the return on this investment? Are you filling the stadium for your brand or playing to empty seats?

Every day I talk to marketers from all over the world. Companies like Royal Bank of Canada, Johnson & Johnson, and 1-800-Flowers who are asking the same question about their advertising budgets.

MarketingExperiments conducts research to not only help marketers answer this question, but find the most effective use of their marketing budget.

If you never ask, you’ll never know

Sometimes marketers are afraid to question the status quo, but in a time when every dollar counts we must ask the hard questions and find answers with real data rather than just intuition.

So, to my friends in the marketing departments of the national network Super Bowl advertisers, I offer you this: Share your objectives, metrics, and results from your Super Bowl campaign with us and we will help you determine the actual ROI from this media spend by constructing a model, analyzing the data (our specialty), providing short- and long-term ROI projection modeling, and measuring the financial impact to brand value.

All of this we will do FREE of charge and present the results to you and your team in a manner that is both powerful and easily understood. If your Super Bowl campaign was a winner, we’ll make that win easier to socialize. If you didn’t get the value you expected, we’ll help you understand why so you’re more informed next year.

Maybe your favorite NFL team won’t win the Super Bowl. That doesn’t mean that YOU are eliminated. Win the marketing Super Bowl this year by being the hero that brought in the experts (for FREE) to show how big your win really was. Email or call me at (904) 339-0068 and we’ll talk about the details.

You can hear Senior Manager of Research Partnerships Andy Mott answer the question How Can You Make Your Web Site Smarter? on the replay of Omniture’s latest webinar. But in my experience with these events, there is usually an interesting back story. So I cornered Andy in his office at a vulnerable time (his beloved Gators had recently lost the SEC Championship game) and found out what he really wanted to say…

Q: You discussed the 2009 Omniture Online Conversion Survey on a recent Omniture webinar. What surprised you the most?

Well I won’t say this surprised me. Maybe saddened is a better word. The survey asked “How frequently is online marketing testing employed in your company?” About half of the respondents said infrequently or never.

Q: Wow! That is pretty shocking, especially considering that these people are already familiar with testing through Omniture or MarketingExperiments. Maybe I could understand if this were the general population of marketers. But why have testing tools in place and not test? Why do you think half of them are flying blind?

Well people know they need to test. They probably know their competitors are testing and getting results. But the idea of executing a test is such a paradigm shift in the way that they’ve always done things.

Those that are higher in an organization tend to be more experienced. And if they are more experienced, they may be locked into the advertising agency way of doing things from 30 years ago, just like the doctor who overlooks recent findings and does what worked best for him when he went to medical school.

Q: Change is difficult. But still, thirty years ago these same people were also wearing polyester and doing the hustle. I’m a little skeptical that they would still try to shoehorn old media principles into new media.

It’s not intentional. If something has always worked for you, why change?

But what we really have is the tyranny of best practices. I’ll give you a great example. Many marketers still believe that they must have the call to action “above the fold” on a web page. Yet testing has shown this to be an utter myth.

Q: And nothing disproves a best practice better than a test that shows what actually works for their specific situation.

That’s the thing. Once companies start testing and see the ROI they are absolutely hooked.

Q: How do you take that first step? For, say, an email marketing manager reading this, how do you create a culture of testing in an organization?

Business-level executives don’t care about optimization or testing or even online marketing really. What they care about is results. So you need to talk to them in their language.

At MarketingExperiments, we publish all of our research and it is available for free. So go to the research archive and pull some experiments so you can show example results and make the business case for testing. At this point, all you are looking for is a small budget to begin testing.

Those first tests will help you establish a beachhead that you can use to further penetrate the organization. Because once businesses see the results they can gain from testing, it can get addictive. It’s like eating chips while watching a football game, you just can’t stop.

Q: The challenge is to just get the ball rolling. This sounds great in theory. Do you have any real-world examples?

I have countless examples. Since we started this conversion by talking about my recent webinar with Omniture, let me tell you about a Research Partner that first got interested in testing by attending an Omniture webinar that featured Dr. Flint McGlaughlin.

Companies that test usually like to stay anonymous because they view this process as such a competitive advantage. So I’ll just say they are a very large financial institution.

So this marketing manager attended Flint’s webinar and was totally sold. He was convinced that they should begin testing. But he’s only responsible for a very small patch in this giant company. It took him six months to get the approval to begin testing, doing the things I previously mentioned.

Q: Six months? It’s easy to get discouraged in that time. I’m not sure how many people would see it through.

But here’s the kicker. That marketing manager and his boss are now charged with trumpeting this win across the entire organization. He is now in front of his boss’s boss’s boss presenting his test results. In fact, in a few days he will be presenting in front of the SVP committee that advises the CEO.

Q: Well then he must have achieved some really out-of-this-world test results. What did he get…three digits…four digits? I mean, how common is that?

They got a 38% revenue boost over what the agency was doing.

Q: Well, that sounds decent, but a committee of SVPs really cares about 38% in one test?

You say that because you are so used to the power of testing, so you just want to see huge numbers. Let me put this another way – by not testing they would have been leaving 38% more money on the table since the cost of testing was infinitesimal compared to their massive marketing budget.

And that’s the thing. This company has a huge marketing budget. They sponsor the Olympics. They name stadiums. They purchase a ton of media. And since they don’t have space to sell in most of these executions, they’re driving everyone to the website. So if they find they could make more 38% more money without having to increase any of these huge marketing spends, the increase in ROI is humongous. Even a one or two percent increase could make or break a quarter.

Q: I see. I didn’t make the connection to that old media marketing spend. But I would think it goes beyond just old media driving people to a website. Online marketing is growing by leaps and bounds. I would think companies want to make sure they are getting a return on that investment as well. According to Forrester Research, digital spending will nearly double over the next five years at the expense of traditional marketing.

Forget five years from now, even today companies spend more than $25 billion on interactive marketing – things like mobile marketing, social media, email marketing, display advertising, and search marketing. That is 12% of all advertising spending. So when enterprises, like that financial institution I discussed, learn that they can take just a tiny fraction of the spend on this growing segment and invest it in a way that ensures the effectiveness of everything else they do – with real-world, statistically valid data – they get very excited.

Q: And I would think, for the employees that can tell management “I know how to get the best ROI from this” – not think or have an opinion, but know with real numbers – that’s quite a smart career move.

If other people are discussing so-called “best practices” and you’re showing real results, then you become the go-to person. The one who knows how this stuff really works. Because nothing defeats the tyranny of best practices as well as the audacity of testing.

And if you’re the guy that knows the right things to do in an explosively growing field like Internet marketing, while marketing budgets on everything else are falling, you’re in a good place no matter what the economy is doing.

How did you get the ball rolling on testing in your organization? What are your biggest challenges to create a culture of testing in your organization? Share your triumphs and challenges in the comments section below or post them to our MarketingExperiments Optimization group.

We’ve hosted a couple of live optimization clinics in the last month or so, featuring audience-submitted search terms, PPC campaigns and landing pages for analysis and optimization.

I was reviewing the live audience Q&A recently and a comment from frequent clinic attendee Jerry E. caught my eye: “The findings are repetitive. Maybe that is because so many are still doing so many things wrong?”

Jerry is on to something here.

While there are many ways to look at a landing page and an endless combination of elements to be tested, we see a lot of similar problems in the pages we review. Mainly, lack of a strong, clear value proposition and way too much going on with pages (competing objectives, calls to action, the “kitchen sink” approach). And we tend to focus on those same areas because that’s where you can find the biggest impact from testing.

Stake your claim

Many marketers are afraid of defining the one thing that separates their company or offer from competitors — and putting that stake in the ground. We worry that we’ll alienate some of our visitors and send them to the back button. Keep in mind that your potential customer clicked through to your page because something in your search results or PPC ad caught their attention.

Figure out each page’s value proposition and stick with it on the page, as well as in the corresponding PPC ad and search results. If we try to be everything to everyone, we end up being nothing to anyone. Specificity converts.

Choose one ball

Another issue we see often is way too much content on a page, and it’s not unique to landing pages. It’s a big problem in traditional advertising too, and it reminds me of Rethink Communication’s Ping Pong Ball Theory: If I throw one ping pong ball at you, you will probably catch it. If I throw five ping pong balls at once, you probably wouldn’t catch any of them.

It’s the same thing when several marketing and advertising messages are thrown at you all at once. Most landing pages we see have more ping pong balls than any visitor can catch. You are far more likely to absorb the most important message if it’s the only thing coming at you.

This may seem simplistic, but it’s something we all encounter so regularly it’s worth reminding ourselves when we’re at work on our own sites and campaigns. For each page, pick your ping pong ball carefully, and throw just that one.

Our July 30 live optimization clinic on PPC ads and landing pages was our most successful webinar to date. Thank you to everyone who participated, especially those who submitted their campaigns for a real-time review.

You can access that clinic here.

Much of the feedback from the session revolved around the high level of interaction among our presenters and the audience. Although we reproduce and post our clinics in three formats (flash, audio, and text), that interactivity is one key element you only get from the live session.

Due to the positive response, we’ll be presenting a follow-up session: Optimizing PPC Ads, Part II (LIVE) — August 13.

Part II will essentially pick up where we left off, as our team of optimization experts will:

• Expand on the two types of relevance vital to paid-search success
• Optimize a new slate of search ads and landing pages
• Address your specific PPC questions with an expanded Q&A

This will be our final clinic for the year on this topic, as we are gearing up for our new Landing Page Optimization Workshops.

Even if you attended the first session, you’re sure to come away with practical ideas and strategies that will help improve your paid-search efforts. Also, if you have specific questions about PPC campaigns, please post your comments here, and our team will try to answer the best of the bunch here and/or in the live clinic.

At our recent clinic on PPC campaigns, our optimization team critiqued actual landing pages and ads submitted by attendees. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to get to all of them in the hour-long session.

One page we weren’t able to cover was sent in by FreedomVOICE Systems. You can click on the screenshot for a larger view of the page and sample PPC ad. (To avoid skewing their numbers, we won’t use the real URL.)

FreedomVOICE said top performing keywords included “toll free number” and “800 numbers” and that optimization steps they’ve already taken included testing ad copy, using negative keywords, and setting position preference.

The analysis and suggestions that follow are from two of our leading analysts, Jimmy Ellis, Director of Optimization Research, and Aaron Rosenthal, Director of Channels Research.

Jimmy Ellis:

The current page is trying to do too many things at once. The objective of this page is most likely to get someone to “search” for the phone number. And the results page (if they find an available number) should be trying to get them to “start their free trial”.

Some of the obstacles and problems I see include:

• Ad copy starts with 800 numbers and a 15 day free trial and landing page starts with “unmatched reliability” and no “real” headline.
• Design does not flow properly and has multiple competing elements and objectives that are not in the proper sequence. Currently visitors are asked to “order” … then to learn “more” … then to “search for 800 numbers” … then to compare plans… but why are there contracts with a free trial?
• You should never put an “order” section or button on a free trial offer. It instantly increases customer anxiety and makes them second guess the benefit of the free trial.
• The sequence that would likely work best would be: Search for the toll free number, then compare plans, then start the free trial (ordering is removed completely), with links to allow them to learn more if they need more information after their number search.

To reduce friction and anxiety, increase the expression of the value proposition, and improve the clarity from top to bottom, here’s how I would redesign the page:

1. Start with a headline that says something like, “Toll Free 800 Numbers — 15 Day Free Trial”.
2. Subhead: Search for your new Toll Free 800 Number.
3. Then feature the blue phone/search box.
4. Security and credibility indicators go under the blue box (move up from the bottom of the current page).
5. The End.
6. The order info, features, and comparison would be displayed and communicated on the phone number results page — when they are ready to make a decision.

Aaron Rosenthal:

• That incentive “Free teleconferencing for 1 year” at the top of the page gets lost in the design. Most people won’t even see it.
• All the different boxes make the information very difficult to digest.
• As for the ad, you may also want to test using “free” in the headline and in the URL subdomain.
• Also, make sure to test subdomain vs file folder. We have seen that subdomain does not always outperform a file folder; sometimes the file folder format works best. Example: TollFree.FreedomVoice.com (subdomain) vs. FreedomVoice.com/TollFree (file folder).
• If your rates are substantially lower than 2.9 cents per minute you may want to test using this in your ad copy because it would give you an advantage over the advertiser in the number one spot.
• That takes me to your value proposition: If you are the least expensive, or you’ve been doing this the longest, or …? Test that in your body copy.

I concur with all of the above and would reiterate that the eyepath on this page needs immediate attention. We know that your designer will hate our suggestions. Nevertheless …

• Try using heatmaps and clickmaps to see where visitors’ eyes and clicks are going. Then simplify the graphics. There are 18 shiny bubbles on the page, including the keypad and five different call-to-action buttons, splashed from corner to corner, drawing visitors’ eyes all over the place. The different colors don’t provide enough contrast to overcome the similar shapes. Plus, all the shiny bubbles and fish-eye warped stock images convey more of a funky, grab-a-ringtone vibe than a B2B offer.
• I’d also examine the analytics against your sales funnel to refocus those calls-to-action. How many clicks do you get on the live help, “Click to Call” button? Not many? Test a new page without it.
• You could also use stronger calls-to-action on buttons if you broke out of the bubble shape with an oval or rectangle. Example: “Get Your New Number” instead of the “Search” button below the keypad.

The goal is to strip out any elements that get in the way of a clear path to a decision/conversion. By making this a more focused, relevant page that closely matches visitors’ expectations from the ad, you can expect significantly better results.

We hope you find these ideas useful and, just like our clinics, we’d like to hear your feedback as well. Use the comments feature to share your thoughts on the page and/or these suggestions.

Thanks again to FreedomVOICE Systems for providing its campaign information for the live optimization critique.

Would you like to quadruple the conversions from your PPC campaigns? What if you could also cut your cost per conversion by 69% at the same time? Find out how one of our recent workshop participants did just that.

Join us for our free webinar on PPC ads and see what this firm did to revive a moribund AdWords campaign.

You’ll also have the chance to have your own pay-per-click campaigns critiqued in real-time by our optimization team: Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Director, MarketingExperiments; Jimmy Ellis, Director of Optimization Research; and Aaron Rosenthal, Director of Channels Research.

If you’re new to our live optimization clinics, here’s what you need to know:

• This one-hour webinar will provide you with specific tactics and strategies you can apply immediately to improve your PPC ad clicks and landing page conversions.
• You can submit your PPC ads and landing page for consideration when you sign up for the clinic (optional).
• Even if your page is not selected, you’ll come away with powerful ideas that can boost your campaigns. Some submitted pages may also be critiqued and posted here on the blog.
• Attendance is limited to the first 1,000 who join the call, so please dial in promptly at 4:00 to secure your spot.

Please join us on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at 4:00 p.m. EDT and put our methods to the test with your own campaigns. Reserve a spot now.