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

In today’s Web clinic, “What Your Customers Want: How to predict customer behavior for maximum ROI,” Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will present a recent PPC experiment from our lab in which you, the MarketingExperiments blog reader, helped create the treatment.

But before we do that, we wanted to give you a chance to predict which PPC ad received a higher clickthrough rate.

The marketer with the best answer will win a copy of Kristin Zhivago’s book, Roadmap to Revenue.  Kristin is a speaker at the upcoming Optimization Summit 2012 in Denver.

The background

In one of North American Spine’s recent PPC tests (designed in part by Amy Harold), they wanted to see which ad would generate more clicks. The goal here was to learn enough about the audience to be able to plan a content strategy that would pull in more prospects to their offer.

Here are the details:

How to win

To win the book (and the respect of your peers), you need to tell us two things in the comments of this blog post:

1. Which treatment won
2. Why it won

The marketer who guesses the correct treatment and gives us the best reason why they think that treatment won, will win the contest and be featured on this blog post as having near-psychic levels of marketing intuition.

So go ahead and study the slides embedded above and then leave a comment below. But do it quickly because the deadline is 4:00 EDT today.

P.S. To be among the first to know whether you were right or not, you can tune into today’s Web clinic at 4:00 pm EDT (hence the deadline) where we’ll reveal the results and dive into how you can predict your customers’ behavior.

***UPDATE***

Congratulations to Tanith, who gave the nearest thing to a correct answer of any of the commenters!

If I wasn’t diagnosed, but wondered if I had the condition, I’d go for T4.

Technically, Luke Thorpe was the only one who gave the absolute correct answer, but because he works in this office, I’m not sure I believed him when he told me he hadn’t seen the winner beforehand.

So I can’t in good conscience make him the official winner.

Tanith will be receiving a copy of Roadmap to Revenue in the coming week or so.

Thank you to all of our commenters, and thank you especially to Tanith for having great marketing intuition!

Related Resources:

What Your Customers Want: How to predict customer behavior for maximum ROI – Wednesday, March 28, 4 p.m. EDT

Online Advertising Forensics: We investigate how and why a text-based PPC ad produced 47% more conversions

How to Test Your Value Proposition Using a PPC Ad

Search Engine Marketing: Finding appeal for your PPC Ads

Pay-per-click advertising is a mysterious subject. A lot goes on behind the scenes at Google that they simply won’t let us in on.

Because of that, marketers often struggle to get their PPC questions answered.

In our most recent Web clinic, “Online Advertising Forensics: We investigate how and why a text-based PPC ad produced 47% more conversions,” we had several great questions from our audience. But we didn’t have time to answer them in the clinic. So, to help them (and you), we wrote this post with answers to the most pressing questions.

Hopefully you can find questions similar to the ones you have so you can apply it to your own PPC campaigns …

Read more…

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:

  Read more…

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.

- Read more…

@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…