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

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…

Every marketer is trying to find ways to tap into the traffic-generating beast that is The Google to drive conversions. Or, so I thought. You can imagine my surprise when I cracked open the new MarketingSherpa 2012 Search Marketing  Benchmark Report – SEO Edition and found that just 51% of marketers use SEO landing pages.

And yet, 93% of marketers are using keyword/keyphrase research. Which tells me that marketers are spending a lot of time, energy and resources to drive traffic to a general site, homepage, or other page that isn’t specifically optimized for conversion. Hey, traffic’s great, but a man’s gotta eat.

So why aren’t more marketers using SEO landing pages?

Well, according to MECLABS Research Analyst Kaci Bower’s report, 54% of marketers found SEO landing pages to be very or somewhat difficult (that number hit 92% among marketers only in the Trial phase of SEO). And for good reason. I like to think of Google like the Federal Reserve, as Ben Bernanke once described himself, they are always “purposely vague.”

In essence, there is no scientific process to SEO, it’s mostly trying to figure out what the man behind the curtain is up to. So while we can’t remove all the mysteries that make SEO difficult for you, we can help you determine how to optimize the conversion on SEO landing pages in a way that lessens the chance of messing up an already high SERP ranking, or starting from scratch and creating a page with good SEO potential to begin with that you can also test and optimize to make sure it doesn’t generate traffic, but also converts that traffic.

So in today’s Web clinic at 4 p.m. EDT – SEO Landing Pages: How we achieved 548% more conversions without damaging organic rankings – MECLABS Managing Director Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will share our discoveries about optimizing SEO landing pages to help you overcome some of that difficulty.

Our focus will be more on LPO and less on SEO tactics. And, our goal is to help you determine the basic search engine optimization factors to consider when building a landing page, but mostly how to take all that traffic you can get from Google, Yahoo!, Bing and the like, and turn that into revenue, leads, and donations.

But before we share our discoveries, we asked your peers their top advice about SEO landing pages. Here are a few of our favorite responses, starting with the in-depth, very helpful first response … Read more…

Banner ads are the billboards of the information superhighway. And much like billboards, many of them can be so downright, well, annoying. And much like a garish billboard detracting from the natural beauty of a scenic drive, so many banner ads are so downright … well … annoying.

Or obtuse. I see your big logo, but what on Earth is the value to me to stop engaging with the content on the page (the reason I came here) and give you a click?

So how do you design banner ads that get results?

We’re sharing our discoveries about banner advertising in today’s Web clinic (educational funding provided by HubSpot) at 4 p.m. EDT – Banner Ad Design: The 3 key banner objectives that drove a 285% lift.

But before we share our discoveries, we wanted to hear how your marketing peers handle display advertising. Here are a few of our favorite responses…

Read more…

This insight came to me while conducting live optimization during our most recent Web clinic – Copywriting: How ordinary marketers are achieving 200% gains with a step-by-step framework.

I was optimizing an e-commerce surfboard website, yet I think this lesson applies equally well for many other consumer marketers as well as many in the B2B space. Let’s look at the challenge this surfboard website is facing to understand why…
Read more…

Every once in a while we like to test our audience’s marketing intuition on the MarketingExperiments blog. And we like to sweeten the pot a little bit if we can with a nice prize for three marketers with an uncanny sense for what works. We do this by asking you to predict the outcome of a recent experiment from our lab.

What’s at stake this time?

For starters…your reputation. 

Kidding aside though, if you can correctly predict which copy treatment received the best conversion rate, we’ll not only feature you on our blog tomorrow as a marketing wizard, but the three most intuitive commenters (in our opinion) will receive a free copy of Inbound Marketing, by HubSpot founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. HubSpot is providing educational funding for today’s web clinic at 4 p.m.  EDT, Copywriting on Tight Deadlines: How ordinary marketers are achieving 200% gains with a step-by-step framework, and was kind enough to provide some books to give away in this post. All you need to do to enter is leave a comment stating:

1. Which treatment you think won
2. Why you think that

So, here we go…
Read more…

In a recent Web clinic – Double the Value of Your Online Testing: Don’t just get a result, get the maximum customer insights – Flint McGlaughlin and the MECLABS Conversion Group team conducted the first-ever “Test Strategy Recommendation Session” of audience-submitted campaigns. Looking at the test history of audience-submitted online Web pages, we recommend future test strategies based on a decade of optimization research.

But there was one page on the clinic that we did not have time to get to,  so Flint asked the audience for their take on some test suggestions.

After reviewing  all of the great ideas that participants offered to the optimization of this page, I have selected a small group that demonstrate some best practices to optimizing your own landing pages. Read more…