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

With pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you pay money every time your ad drives someone to your landing page, so improving conversion is crucial to a healthy ROI. After all, you’re directly paying for this traffic, therefore each bounced potential customer seems to hurt just a little bit more.

Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, will share our discoveries about optimizing landing pages that receive traffic from PPC ads on today’s free Web clinic – Converting PPC Traffic: How strategic keyword placement increased conversion by 144%.

But before we share what we’ve learned, we wanted to hear from you. Here are a few PPC conversion optimization tips from your peers …

Pay attention to regional differences

We market on a regional local basis. Establishing a persona per market has worked well.

Also, messaging by market has worked well. The lesson we have learned is, regional differences do exist, and experimenting to find those differences is  key to optimization.

– Ben Joslin, VP of Marketing, MD Connect

5 tips to optimize Google Product Listing Ads

Here are some tips to improve your Google Product Listing Ad (PLA) program:

1. Reliable Google Merchant Center integration

Continuously maintain and update the product feed and use the resulting performance data as the basis for future optimization.

2. Manage PLAs at the product, category and sub-category level

A combination of broad and more specific product targets will result in the best balance in traffic and efficiency.

3. Leverage text ad performance to improve PLAs

Product-related keywords and queries that have been successful in your PPC program may translate well into PLAs, and vice-versa. Continuous search query mining and expansion of coverage is critical to PLA growth.

4. Match terms to customer intent and negate ineffectual terms

Mine queries for those that are successfully converting, and negate search queries that are not performing well.

5. Optimize and test landing page and PLA ad text

Use Google to promote text and promotional pricing in the feed. Design and test various landing pages on a product-specific level to determine what converts [the] fastest.

– Auburn Rutledge, Client Manager, Adlucent

Read more…

Recently, I went through a value proposition workshop for our upcoming Optimization Summit 2013 in Boston led by Adam Lapp, Associate Director of Optimization and Strategy, MECLABS.

The workshop produced a very simple, yet powerful spreadsheet I’m going to share with you today on the MarketingExperiments blog.

Simple, because it is essentially just a list of different elements or points of value of your products with a rating to determine how valuable they are.

Powerful, because … be honest. With all of the email sends, meetings and campaigns you run, how often do you really step back and try to categorize and rank the value of your products through your customers’ eyes?

So, download the MarketingExperiments Value Proposition Spreadsheet. Here are a few simple tips to get you started …

Get the key people in the same room

And brainstorm. But, this is a structured brainstorm. Start by simply listing all of the different points of value your product might have. Let’s take a car as an example:

• Best-in-class fuel efficiency
• High, but not top, safety rating
• Snazzy new design
• Unique sound system

Then, rate each of these elements of value on a scale of 1 to 5 for the following factors:

• Appeal – How much is this offer desired?
• Exclusivity – Is this offer available elsewhere?
• Credibility – How believable are your claims?

Based on this ranking, you will find elements likely to be more valuable to your audience, and elements somewhat less valuable to your audience.

Plus, using the spreadsheet, you now have a consistent way to communicate the levels of significance for different elements of value to everyone in your organization who is involved with that product.

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We surveyed 1,915 marketers for the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report, and asked them which methods were most effective for testing value propositions. Here is what the data says …

Q: Which methods have been the most effective at testing your value proposition? Select up to three responses.

click to enalrge

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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 a recent PPC test for a MECLABS Research Partner (designed in part by Amy Harold), the Partner 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 a MECLABS Research Partner, 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…