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

After our recent Web clinic, How to Increase Conversion in 2012: The last 20,000 hours of marketing research distilled into 60 minutes, we received this question from Veronica Cisneros, lead Web designer and developer at websonalized.com …

Question

1.            Assertion:

• If I remember correctly, the ad excluded the product, or description of the product, and only made reference to awards received. The presenter indicated that the ad was only competing for clicks and position? Which I understood to mean that the vendor did not care to make a sell, but simply wanted traffic to website.

2.            Question:

• Was my interpretation correct?
• If not, what was meant by “competing for clicks and position”?
• If yes, what did the vendor achieve by increasing the traffic to this landing page?

Answer

The point is that many people try to flat out sell with a PPC ad. The only thing the PPC ad should sell is the value of the customer clicking.

Once the customer clicks, then the landing page should sell the value of the next step (which may be lead capture, a sale, or some other objective, perhaps even just getting to the next stage in the funnel).

So for example, no one is going to buy business accounting software because of a PPC ad. However, you might be able to sell them on the value of clicking that ad to learn more. It is essential to understand where the buyer is in the process, and speak to the potential customer with value that resonates at that stage in the process.

So what is search engine marketing best used for? To communicate the value of a click to your landing page, not to get a sale.

You can hear Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, discuss our discoveries about search engine marketing and pay-per-click ads further in the free How to Increase Conversion in 2012: The last 20,000 hours of marketing research distilled into 60 minutes Web clinic replay.

Related Resources:

Optimizing PPC Ads: How to leverage the full potential of 130 characters by clarifying the value proposition

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

Search Engine Marketing: Finding appeal for your PPC Ads

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

The Small Business Website: Response Time to Internet Generated Leads - via websonalized.com

It’s the latest trend in print ads and TV commercials – drive customers to a landing page on Facebook instead of the brand’s own website or microsite. So, for example, a Toyota print ad with a contest might include Facebook.com/Toyota as the call-to-action this year when last year it was likely Toyota.com/contest.

So I can see the benefit to Mark Zuckerberg for you paying good money to drive all of your traffic to his site, but is a Facebook landing page the right call-to-action for your campaigns?

As with many marketing questions, there is no one correct answer, no one-size-fits-all solution. However, if you are thinking of using a Facebook landing page in your marketing, here are some factors to consider. Read more…

At the West Coast leg of the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco this week the first case study of the day featured IBM’s homepage redesign and the overall approach IBM uses in its redesign process. Joan Renner, Content Manager, Corporate Marketing Digital Initiatives, IBM, presented on how Big Blue engages in site redesign.

But they don’t stop at the landing page. They go the next step into the funnel and test landing pages, as well.

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Landing page testing

Joan says, “Having great landing pages is very high value to the company and these tests wouldn’t be difficult to perform.” These two attributes made landing page testing a high priority in their testing backlog, which is their list of tests they’d like to run, ranked on three factors to determine priority:

• Internal visibility
• Difficulty
• Value

And she added, “We’re putting into our organization the ability for any division to come forward and ask for help.”

In this case a test was created to improve the landing page for the IBM X-Force Internet security and threat report landing page and led to a dramatic improvement in the page’s performance.

- 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…

 “Less is more…”

Whether it’s at MECLABS or my mother’s kitchen, I’ve heard people spout this phrase throughout my 35 years. And when hearing this, more often than not, I’ll thank the person that said it, dismiss it as a trite platitude, and resume my knitting.

Joking aside, in a world that constantly bombards us with promises of “bigger,” “better,” “faster” and “more,” it’s sometimes tough to accept that time-honored practices are often still the best course of action. Yet, as we’ve learned numerous times on these pages, even the most basic marketing tenets still apply, even in an increasingly terse, staccato, digitally communicating world.

And, after a few months of really absorbing the impact of our successful webpage tests, I now know that when it comes to landing pages, less is not only more, it’s often the difference between conversion and abandonment. 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…