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

The thing about pay-per-click ads is … well, you’re paying for every click.

So how do you maximize the value you get out of this online advertising?

In this Wednesday’s Web clinic – Online Advertising Forensics: We investigate how and why a text-based PPC ad produced 47% more conversions – MECLABS Managing Director Flint McGlaughlin will share our top discoveries on increasing the ROI of your PPC ads.

First, let’s look at some top advice we received from your peers …

Always run two ads

Whenever I create a new campaign or a single group, I always run with two ads. I run with words that I think will generate interest and flow into the landing page that I create. I generally start with two similar ads but, every now and again, I will try an ad that is not similar at all just to see what the market likes and dislikes.

Sometimes I look at the competitive nature of the keyword in the search results, and then look at who is in first place, then try to match my words to the similar ones.

This all depends on if I have worked in this area or not … if I know the targeted niche, I stick with what I know has worked in the past.

When creating the ad groups, I will use a small number of keywords and nine out of 10 times use these keywords in the title of the AdWords ad itself. Now that Google doesn’t allow capitals in the URLs, I have started using the URLs with capitals in the body content on the AdWords ad, this has definitely helped keep the CTRs higher.

Say, for example, I am selling Organic Cat Food … and own the URL … I will paste this URL with caps between the words in the second line of the AdWords ad …

For example:

Your Cat Loves This?
www.OrganicCatFood.com
Freshly Made & Delivered For Free
organiccatfood.com/LoveCats

You also must consider not just clicks but conversions.

As I said, always have two ads running for the same ad group.

Set the account to rotate your ads evenly so that you can see what ad converts higher or has higher clickthrough.

You may have an ad that has high clicks but small conversions compared with an ad that has lower clicks but higher conversions. This is important to measure. It may mean that your ad, even though it is generating great clicks, is not returning the conversions. So instead of just changing your ad content, have another look at what keywords are converting and refine if necessary to ensure your quality of visitor is high.

After you have made these tweaks, test again for another period and then measure the success of the two ads running for this group.

Having the correct keywords is as important as having the two sample ads running. Keep testing and adjusting to fine-tune your account.

– Dave Lemmon, Director, Redcow Marketing Limited

3 key factors to PPC success

1. As far as performance of ads is concerned, A/B tests are the best way to check and optimize. Run different variations of images, text and calls-to-action to zero in on what is getting the best response. Study the ad analytics well because optimizing ads is a continuous process as long as your campaign is running.

2. Targeting is the key to PPC Campaigns. Have a clearly defined audience, and design ads according to their preferences. Engage directly with your prospects – don’t show your ad to people who don’t need to see it. Online advertising has this huge advantage over traditional print and TV – so make use of it.

3. Never forget the bigger picture – landing pages and conversions. The objective of an ad campaign is not to just “drive traffic” to a particular webpage but to secure business from it. To assure you are getting value or a good ROI out of online advertising, have a well-designed landing page to make sure that a decent conversion rate is in place, or else, the campaign is just wasting dollars.

– Nivesh Jain, Senior Marketing Executive, Invensis Technologies Pvt Ltd

Get everyone involved

Here’s sort of a “different” answer …

I have my co-workers write ads to test. I give them the parameters and the ammunition (landing pages, features, benefits and other good stuff for ads) and run a little contest with a prize for the winner.

What’s the point? Many times “professionals” and those closely associated with marketing can get too “markety.” We start using fancy words and lose sight that there’s a real person searching with questions they want answered.

Getting others involved that don’t know so much about the campaign can lead to some great ads as they use different language and come at the problem and solution from different angles. Plus, it’s a lot of fun!

Don’t get caught thinking that these ads can’t be winners. You might be surprised!

– Mike Fleming, PPC and Analytics Manager, Pole Position Marketing

Great minds think alike, Mike! Right now, we’re running our own PPC ad writing contest right here on the blog, because, as you suggest, we too think it is critical to case a wide net. The winner receives a free PDF copy of MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – PPC Edition (a $397 value).

Related Resources:

Online Advertising Forensics: We investigate how and why a text-based PPC ad produced 47% more conversions – Free Web clinic, Wednesday, February 1, 2012, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. EST

PPC Ad Writing Contest: Win a $397 Benchmark Report while building your optimization peer group

This Just Tested: How PPC specificity drove 21% more clicks and cut costs 66%

Converting PPC Traffic: How clarifying value generated 99.4% more conversions on a PPC landing page

PPC Advertising: 5 winning display ad tactics that increased paying customers by 2,900% and dropped cost-per-lead 37%

This time of year, many marketers are beginning to execute on their new marketing plans. However, sometimes you have to deviate from the plan and just need a sale or lead generation lift… RIGHT NOW!

When your boss or client challenges you to gain a quick conversion increase on your landing pages, what tools do you turn to in your marketing toolbox?

In Wednesday’s Web clinic – Rapidly Maximizing Conversion: How one company quickly achieved a 53.9% lift with a radical redesign – MECLABS Managing Director Flint McGlaughlin will share our top discoveries around how to quickly improve your conversion rate.

But before we share what we learned, we wanted to hear from you. Here are a few of our favorite “quick hit” tips from your peers …

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Headline optimization

I have found that headline and subhead optimization works well for the B2B SaaS clients I typically work with. Even after I think I have tested my way to the perfect headline, I run more tests and get more lift. I regularly get 10% lifts from this tactic. If I have more time to gather data, I will multivariate test headline, CTA button and benefit/bulleted text.

Finally, if you haven’t already, make sure there is just one key CTA button which is huge and obvious. I’m always surprised at how many sites don’t do this.

– Chris Neumann, General Manager, TextMarks

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5 Quick Tips

A few quick things come to mind:

1) Drop prices and provide free shipping: This one is pretty obvious, but nothing converts like low prices and free shipping.

2) Add security/trust logos and other “credibility” links (security policy, etc.) to checkout process: These types of additions have proven to immediately bump the conversion rate by providing a visual feel of safety and security, even if the users never do anything besides see the presence of the icons or links.

3) Simplify checkout process, including NOT requiring users to create an account in order to checkout: A simple checkout process reduces the likelihood users will drop-off.

4) Increase frequency of targeted email campaigns: There is so much email going around these days, from so many different sources, for so many different purposes. Research and testing has shown that sending a single email campaign up to 9 times can continue to provide incremental benefit in sales, with very little subsequent downside in customer satisfaction. The truth is, most people don’t see a very high percentage of their email.

5) Implement abandoned cart targeted emails: Enticing users to complete the checkout process can be very effective because you are targeting shoppers that you know are already interested in some of your products.

The above items are all proven to increase conversion – some are more quickly implemented than others.

– Todd Stalter, Senior Visualization Analyst, OneSpring

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Contests and chatting

For quick results I would implement the following:

1. An online contest where all the visitor needs to do is provide a name and email address, Facebook “like,” and/or Twitter follow, depending on what kind of lead capture you want. Online contests with enticing prizes can go viral and get you many followers quickly.

2. Implement a live chat feature on the site to make it easier to interact with visitors. However, I have found that live chat software with the standard popup window do not convert as well as the newer live chat programs such as Zopim and Olark that have a more social feel to them. Another option is to implement a video live chat program so customers can see the site representative on video, which helps even more with building trust in your company.

– Shai Atanelov, CEO & Founder, BigtimeWireless.com

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Related Resources:

Rapidly Maximizing Conversion: How one company quickly achieved a 53.9% lift with a radical redesign – Web clinic

Most-Tweeted Posts of 2011: Social media marketing, copywriting, email testing and more …

Landing Page Optimization: How to plan a radical redesign so you get a lift AND a learning

Marketing Campaign: Landing page optimization can help improve the return on your media spend

“No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I sure hope I get a lot of great email marketing messages today.’” This was one of  Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s more clever quips at our recent B2B Summit.

And it hits close to home, because we all know how hard it is to get attention in those crowded inboxes, where your recipients are quickly sorting through messages mostly focused on deleting and unsubscribing, not diligently reading every word of your marketing messages.

This Wednesday at 4 p.m., Flint, our managing director, will share some of our discoveries about increasing response to email marketing promotions and campaigns in our next free Web clinic – Email Messaging: How overcoming 3 common errors increased clickthrough 104%.

But first, we wanted to hear your peers’ top tips for increasing the effectiveness of email messaging. Here are a few of our favorite responses …

  Read more…

A few years ago the idea of dedicating a landing page for a certain segment of traffic to a website was a novel idea. Then, with the rise of Google, PPC started becoming more popular.

When that happened, marketers realized that if they made keyword-specific landing pages, they achieved better results from the traffic they were paying for.

Marketers started to realize that they could make custom landing pages for other channels as well, like display ads and email campaigns.

There are other channels that most marketers haven’t capitalized on yet with a targeted landing page. One of those is organic search.

Take a look at the data on SEO landing pages in the following chart from the MarketingSherpa 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition. For advanced marketers, SEO landing pages is an extremely effective tactic, but for the rest, it’s left untouched.  Read more…

Here’s one of the things I love about working with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CMO, MECLABS – he routinely looks at the most vexing marketing challenges and creates an entirely new paradigm; a new lens through which to approach these challenges.

Take the marketing funnel for example. Flint says that the traditional view of the sales and marketing funnel is, essentially, upside down. Literally.

In fact, you should take the traditional funnel and flip it. Prospects aren’t just falling into this wide net, waiting for someone to sell to them. Rather, you must keep pushing them up through the funnel, against the constant tug of gravity, which slows down and often stops your sales process. The force that pushes them up through that funnel and overcomes all the forces that can easily stop that sales is a powerful value proposition.

Flint spoke extensively about value proposition at MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in Boston, and I grabbed him just after the Summit ended to ask a few questions about value prop for B2B marketers: Read more…

On Monday, we showed you two landing pages and asked you to vote for which one received the highest conversion rate in a split test. The actual test was done by Michael Aagaard, and there was a very clear winner.

In today’s post, I’m going to talk about how Michael got his results. First, the test …

Background

As I mentioned in Monday’s post, this test was for a free trial of a forex trading platform from Denmark’s Saxo Bank. After trying a few different strategies with their page, nothing worked to improve conversion on their PPC landing page for the trial. They had essentially hit a wall with their page. Unfortunately, the money they were making from the product was looking fairly bleak compared to the amount they were spending on PPC.

So when Michael Aagaard offered them a landing page audit through his consulting site, Saxo Bank was willing to give him a try. Read more…