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

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:

Treatment 1:

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Treatment 2:

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Treatment 3:

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And here’s the landing page for all three just for reference’s sake:

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All right, now that you’ve seen the ads, tell us which of them won the test and why in the comments …

And again, be sure to tune into today’s Web clinic at 4:00 p.m. EST to find out the actual results and hear actionable advice about how the discoveries from this experiment can help you improve your own PPC campaigns.

UPDATE:

Congratulations to commenter Gary Kline, for correctly predicting the outcome of the experiment and giving a darn good reason why treatment #3 received the highest conversion rate.

Related Resources:

Today’s clinic at 4:00 p.m. EST — Online Advertising Forensics: We investigate how and why a text-based PPC ad produced 47% more conversions

Online Advertising: How your peers optimize PPC ads

PPC Ads: What is search engine marketing best used for?

How to Test Your Value Proposition Using a PPC Ad

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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Find your peer group

Sometimes it also helps to find optimization peers who work at other (preferably non-competitor) companies to break away from the groupthink in your organization (“Our product is the bestest ever!”) and throw some tests against the wall for a little brainstorming.

This is why we at MarketingExperiments are trying to build a community of marketers around the field of optimization. Because the more people there are sharing ideas, the better we can all get at optimization. And, the better we can get at optimizing, the better we all become at performing our jobs.

You can find that peer group in a few places:

• Among the 4,610 optimizers on the MarketingExperiments Optimization group on LinkedIn
• Local marketing events
• Optimization Summit 2012 in Denver
• The comments section of this blog post

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Win a $397 MarketingSherpa Benchmark Report

That’s right, I said the comments section of this blog post.

You see, as I said earlier about the MECLABS way of optimizing, we seek to get as many ideas as possible for the tests we run with our Research Partners. For an upcoming test we’d like you to suggest the best PPC ad copy in the comments section of this blog post.

So scroll down. Take a look in the comments. Find some PPC ad copy you like. And reach out to that marketer to see if you can form a peer relationship, helping each other produce better tests.

To make it worth your while, once we have several submissions, we will choose one lucky marketer’s ad treatment to run in our experiment. And, to sweeten the pot, we’ll also give that marketer a free PDF copy of MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – PPC Edition (a $397 value).

So let’s get to the challenge (if you choose to accept it)…

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The challenge

As I said, to make us all become better optimizers, we need your ideas for a real PPC experiment we are going to run for one of our Research Partners: North American Spine. We’re going to have you, dear marketer, write PPC ads to help us discover some things about North American Spine’s ideal customer.

At the end of this post, you can submit your ad treatment in the comments.

So, now that you know what you’re in for, sit back, and get your thinking caps on while you read the background of the experiment.

Please read it carefully as there are some very specific things we are looking for to make this test successful. The closer you read and understand, the more likely you are to win.

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Experiment Background:

North American Spine (NAS) is the inventor and sole provider of a fascinating (in my opinion) minimally invasive spine surgery called the Accurascope procedure. They essentially provide people who are suffering from serious, chronic back pain with an alternative to open back surgery.

Right now, with ROI Revolution managing their paid search advertising campaigns – NAS is doing an impressive job of getting people who are already shopping for back surgery solutions to buy the Accurascope procedure.

However, as probably all of us know, there are likely potential NAS customers out there who aren’t shopping for back surgery. Instead they are shopping for more information so they can make an informed decision about whether they need surgery or not.

We know this because there are several medium-to-high-traffic keyword terms centered around certain back conditions:

• Lumbar Bulging Disc
• Sciatic Nerve
• Degenerative Disc Disease
• Etc.

It also happens that NAS is looking to implement a content strategy to help position them as an authority in the back pain treatment space.

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Experiment Goal:

The trouble with a content strategy is that it is very difficult to create content, and very difficult to predict what content will resonate with your customers.

You could spend a lot of time creating high-quality content only to find out later that another approach would have been more profitable.

To help provide clarity to NAS’s content strategy, we are going to run some PPC ads to “take the temperature,” in a sense, of the people who are searching for the following conditions:

• Lumbar bulging disc
• Sciatic nerve
• Degenerative disc disease
• Herniated disc
• Pinched nerve in lower back
• Lumbar back pain

So the goal of this experiment is to learn which types of content resonate with the largest audience of condition-based searchers. This way, NAS can tailor a content strategy around those motivations and start building content they know will be effective.

But the ultimate goal is to have prospects come in for a needed Accurascope procedure, as shown in the chart below:

Experiment Hypothesis:

It wouldn’t be an experiment without a hypothesis. Here’s what we think these condition-based searchers are really after:

• May be experiencing back pain symptoms and are simply searching online or asking around
• Have come across this condition and now want more information on it
• May have already seen a doctor and been diagnosed with this condition and now want more information on it and possible treatments
• May be a friend or loved one searching on behalf of someone

Therefore ads that cater to these motivations will likely receive a higher clickthrough rate.

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The Research Question:

It’s hard to ask a research question without also having your treatments in mind, but I’ll go ahead and pitch one here, assuming your treatments will be flooding in soon after:

Which condition-based ad template will receive a higher clickthrough rate?

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The Treatments: What we need from YOU

If you didn’t notice above in the research question, the treatments we are looking for will be templates. Each PPC ad will be a different approach for more information that we can simply drop a back condition keyword into. So, to give you an example, I’ll show you my submission:

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Have [Condition]?
Learn 3 treatments with the highest
success rates in this free report
NorthAmericanSpine.com/[condition]

However, you might take an angle like this:

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[Condition] Info
5 things you need to know to give
your loved one the care they need.
NorthAmericanSpine.com/[condition]

Whatever you decide, be sure to keep the goal of this experiment in mind: to learn which types of content resonate with the largest audience of condition-based searchers.

Also, keep in mind that PPC ads have character limits, if you don’t know them, you can use this tool to help you stay within those limits and not be disqualified from the contest.

Because you’re writing ad templates and not ads, it’s going to be difficult to fit each of the conditions above in a single template. But we know you’re very smart, and if there is a way that you can think of to get around that problem we’re open to suggestions. Just leave them in the comment below your submission.

The Call-to-Action:

So with that, I’ll let you get writing. When you’ve written an ad, all you need to do is post it below in the comments. Once we have enough submissions, we’ll sort through them and choose one ad that we think will best help us answer the research question.

The writer of that ad will get:

• A free PDF copy of MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – PPC Edition (a $397 value)
• The opportunity to brag about how they were included in a real MECLABS experiment
• A shot at having their treatment actually win the experiment (more bragging rights)
• A mention (and link) on this blog as a marketing expert (yes, even more bragging rights)

Go ahead and post your ad in the comments and we’ll announce the winner during our next Web clinic: Online Advertising Forensics: We investigate how and why a text-based PPC ad produced 47% more conversions (Educational funding provided by ROI Revolution)

Happy writing!

UPDATE: Winner(s) Announced…

The results are in. Unfortunately our team was torn between two submissions from our generous commenters below. We were SO torn, in fact, that we decided to give away TWO 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Reports – PPC Edition to two lucky commenters. Unfortunately, due to validity constraints we are only able to use one ad template in the actual experiment.

So congratulations to both Amy Harold and Carrie Hernandez for their insightful submissions. Both of you should be receiving a Benchmark Report in the next few days. With that said, if you saw yesterday’s Web clinic [Subscribe to be notified when the replay is live], you know that only Amy Harold’s submission will be in the actual test. That is because we needed a template that we could use to test different approaches and hers was the most flexible.

With that said, we found Carrie’s submission incredibly insightful for two reasons:

1. It was short. It wasn’t even close to using all of the characters the ad was limited to. Common sense tells us this is a bad thing. Be we love challenging common sense with experimentation. So we would love to eventually test shorter than required ad copy.
2. The idea of offering a comparative clinical study was a particularly interesting content angle

Again, thank you to all of our commenters. If you need help writing a PPC ad, simply take a look at the comments below for some ideas. And try to get in touch with anyone whose ad you particularly liked to brainstorm. Remember, we can’t optimize in a vacuum.

Related Resources:

Blandvertising: How you can overcome writing headlines and copy that don’t say anything

Banner Blindness: Why your marketing messages are hiding in plain sight

The Ultimate Click: How to get what you pay for with pay-per-click advertising

PPC Ads: What is search engine marketing best used for?

@veronica Thanks for the response!

Editor’s Note: You’ll never find the right answers if you don’t ask the right questions. So my hat’s off to Veronica Cisneros, lead Web designer and developer at websonlized.com, for continuing to push us to dive deeper into the best use of search engine marketing.

After answering her initial question in “PPC Ads: What is search engine marketing best used for?” Paul Cheney takes our exploration of the most effective use of pay-per-click advertising one level deeper today …

In the post, Daniel points out that search engine marketing (PPC Ads) are best utilized in communicating “the value of a click to your landing page, not to get a sale.”

That is his main point. And he’s absolutely right.

What he didn’t mention (probably for the sake of brevity) was the idea that “the value of a click to your landing page” should be a derivative of the “value of the ultimate sale.”

That is what I mean by “the ultimate click.” The ultimate click is the sale. And in many cases, the sale comes after a series of micro-yeses.

So in other words, it makes more business sense to run an ad for toothbrushes when you are selling toothbrushes, than to run an ad for a free car when you are selling toothbrushes.

This is because in the toothbrush ad, the value of the click to the landing page is to get more information about the toothbrushes your company offers.

The toothbrush ad is a derivative of the ultimate value of buying a toothbrush. The free car ad is not.

That is what I mean when I say it’s important to get “the correct clicks” rather than simply as many clicks as possible. If the goal was to get as many clicks as I could, I would obviously want to run an ad for a free car.

But because the goal is sales, not clicks, I need to run an ad for a toothbrush.

Now, while I’d be open to testing it (especially if I’m selling toothbrushes), the copy of that ad probably wouldn’t be:

Buy Our Toothbrushes

They’re really great

Only $45 each!

I’d most likely run an ad along the lines of:

Designer Toothbrushes

Explore our catalogue of

50 brands used by celebs

In the first ad, I tried to sell in the ad. I made it seem like the reader should click on the ad and buy a toothbrush for $45.

In the second ad, I made the value of the click about being able to browse high-quality designer toothbrushes. And hopefully, that’s exactly what they’ll be able to do when they click the ad.

Daniel, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is the point you were trying to get across:

Selling in the ad is usually bad. The goal of an ad should be to get a click.

I’m simply adding that the click should also be as relevant as possible to the ultimate offer.

I hope that clears things up.

Editor’s Note: Spot on, Paul. And might I add that, this is not simply an academic discussion. Remember, these are pay-per-click ads. Why pay for traffic that will not convert?

So while Paul’s examples are purposefully extreme to make a point (although, I’ll admit, he’s got me seriously Jonesing to find out which toothbrush Brangelina uses), it would help you to take a second look at your AdWords account to determine whether your aim is to get a click, or get a click that will convert.

Related Resources:

Banner Ad Design: The 3 key banner objectives that drove a 285% lift

Banner Design Tested: How a 35% decrease in clicks caused an 88% increase in conversion

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

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…

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…

Paying for traffic to a landing page tends to help motivate marketers to optimize that page. Lifts can instantly translate to a tangible decrease in cost-per-acquisition and increased revenue. However, actually getting those lifts on the page is another thing altogether.

Denmark-based Saxo Bank was facing that challenge when they met Michael Aagaard, a MarketingExperiments student. Aagaard, Online Copywriter for LandingPages.nu, is a self-described split-test junkie who is also based in Denmark.  He met the folks at Saxo Bank through his own split-testing audit service.

“They were having trouble converting PPC traffic via their landing pages. In this particular case, they wanted help converting PPC traffic for a sub-site called ForexTrading.com. The business model here is that prospects download a free demo version in order to get a feel for the platform. The goal being that prospects end up buying the full version,” Aagaard said.

With the stage set, Aagaard came up with a treatment based on a hypothesis he had about the original page.

It turns out, Michael got some impressive results. But we’re not going to share them today. Instead, we’re going to test your marketing intuition with the two different pages Michael tested.

Without giving too much away, here are the two creatives:  the original and Michael’s treatment. I can’t tell you which is which or it would spoil the fun …

Read more…