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My maintain a 10% PPC conversion rate challenge: Validating test results - ow yes so boring….mumble mumble mumble

Posted on November 12, 2008
Filed Under Landing Page Optimization, Managing Pay Per Click, Case Studies | Leave a Comment

Last month I was able to present a client with a new form recipe that saw a 159% lift against the control recipe. The majority of the traffic that came to this landing page was from PPC since we were still growing their SEO presence over the last few months. We gave priority to PPC as a channel to optimize due to the recurring cost involved in both running and maintaining it. All of the variables where the same, same adcopy, average CPC for the keywords belonging to the same adgroup were relatively the same, no new keywords were added nor removed. Needless to say that the only variable in the equation was optimizing the landing page, specifically on how the form was positioned and placed. Since the traffic for this Landing Page, coming from PPC, was low we opted for a simple A/B split test using the Google Web Optimizer Tool. The winning recipe with a 99.3% level of confidence was now shown at 100% on current landing page.

Conversion rate for October 2008

This month we wanted to validate the results shown by the Google Web Optimizer tool by setting our targets at a 10% conversion rate - considering that it will supposedly provide a 159% lift from the previous month’s conversion rate performance. For September 2008 (baseline), the conversion rate for this landing page was at 3.33%, when the control recipe was still in place. We launched the A/B split test during the last week of September in anticipation for a long test period that lasted until the last week of October. During this period the conversion rate was at 6.23% (note that the test was already running during this period).

Currently,on its second week into implementation, the results have been promising with a 12.82%! conversion rate, seems its standing up to its 159% (currently at 284.98% from 3.33%) conversion rate lift promise.

Conversion rate for the first week of November 2008

I’ll be posting next weeks conversion rate update and see if the promising first week performance is maintained or will I start designing a new one. At the end of this month I’ll be showing most of the techniques and possible logic on the optimization process done.Those keen on numbers would have observed that the budget for the whole campaign is also relatively low - thats what makes running campaigns for SME’s challenging. Working with a limited budget makes you look for more “creative” ways to improve site performance.

Landing Page Optimization Case Study:Test on the Placement/Position of Forms leads to a 158% lift for a lead generation site

Posted on November 1, 2008
Filed Under Landing Page Optimization, Case Studies | 2 Comments

Landing page optimization has become so important as an online initiative for most sites as this provides the best value for your money. Small to Medium business are greatly to benefit from Landing Page Initiatives initiative as most have limited budget and would like to maximize their investment. Well all businesses would like to do the same but SME’s don’t have the luxury of ten of thousands of dollars for their paid channels. Most SME’s I have worked with have less than US $2k/month budget for their Pay-Per-Click and other paid initiatives. Knowing how expensive certain keywords are right now, you would be lucky to get a significant amount of traffic with that budget. This is exactly what I will show on this case study for a SME company providing appointment setting services to the US. The objective was to raise the number of leads coming from their online website.

We initially started fixing their PPC structure and started doing some analysis on which keywords we will start targeting given the budget at hand. I love working with SME’s because they raise a different level of challenge and approvals are relatively faster compared to those corporate-process-driven businesses. One job interview I had before saw me walking out of the HR office when a Marketing Officer was annoyingly mocking the results I had done for SME companies. The company was the largest credit card services provider in the world, and her point was simply that I was working with businesses that had small online marketing budgets as compared to their budget. Possibly pennies to what they manage but I seriously doubt if she can drive the same results to businesses that have limited budgets where ironically every penny counts.

When the landing page optimization initiative phase started we simply did a simple redesign of the site layout and placing a form on every page. Since we optimized both their organic and paid campaigns towards pushing their strongest product which was appointment setting, it already gave us an idea on what type of people needed the service. We understood that people needing these services would like to touch base with an account manager or supervisor after they have read the page’s content.Like any other SMEs we had worked before, they provided very limited content and that we needed to optimize the trigger keywords. We even created a simple value proposition for the site which technically was difficult since there were hundreds of companies providing the same service they had.

On the next phase of the landing page optimization test, we moved the placement of the forms from the left column to the bottom of every page where ideally “eye flow” would focus. The results, using Google’s website optimization tool was an impressive 158% LIFT on the number of leads versus the control at a 99.3% level of significance. The site ran for 30 days before reaching a significant level, at 80% it already showed how the new version of site was winning over the control but wanted the tool to confirm this.

If the client had a 10% success rate on closing their leads that would be 2 more new clients a month for this service alone. Just to extrapolate some figures, their start up fee is at $US 1600 for a 100hr initial campaign with a 3-6 months contract. Assuming they where earning a 30% net revenue for each successful lead, the value of each lead they would close is at around US $1440 ($1600 x.30 (estimates revenue) x 3months) x 2 = US$ 2880. Currently their site has a  1.02% total conversion rate which can simply double when the new form layout is implemented across the site.

Now who doesn’t want to double their revenue?

Landing Page Optimization Case Study: Optimizing Forms for a Lead Generation Site shows significant Lift.

Posted on October 28, 2008
Filed Under Landing Page Optimization, Case Studies | Leave a Comment

A/B split testing is relatively the path to take when a site has low traffic, were heuristic evaluation initially becomes the basis for the changes recommended. One client of mine who was providing telemarketing services to US clients had a very modest budget, nothing close to how FutureNow Inc. charges per hour, wanted to improve their site’s performance for both paid and “non-paid” channels (aka organic search). We initially checked the existing tracking metrics and the necessary technical site development. We found out that the previous consultant placed the Adwords Conversion Snippet on the actual lead generation form page and not on the thank you or confirmation page. Did I miss something here? I don’t personally know if the previous consultant did it intentionally (sad) or he was just purposely tracking the number of people reaching the lead generation form page. The initial “registration process” involved 2 steps were a typical visitor was initially directed to a Landing Page then had the option to click a “send me a quote” link somewhere on the main navigation.

The registration page had some 13 or more fields which we needed to filter out and reduce relative to what the client needed most. We could have opted to break down this page into 2 short pages where the first page was directed to capture the essential information such as email and related contact information and the next page will be asking the more detailed information. The client gave us a summary of the basic information they needed to consider a lead viable or for them to start an interaction. We were able to strip down the form into 5 short fields with a “send me a quote” call to action button. Friction, according to the Marketing Experiments people, was a state of mind the visitor/user is under when trying to accomplish a particular action or event. The complexity/difficulty and length of a form hypothetically triggers anxiety and was a good starting point in optimizing the site. Historical data from their web metrics also shows the previous registration page having above 50% exit ratio.
The results:

Total Conversion Rate

The new form with its shorter number of fields and its presence on the landing pages provided the visitors and easy access to form where they can post their inquiries. No longer will it take them 2-3 more clicks to request for quote for the sites services. As you can see there was 685.49% lift on the total number of conversions this site was making. A 426.71% LIFT was observed for paid channels and a 1192.60% LIFT conversion rate was observed for unpaid channels.

426.71% LIFT on conversion for paid keywords

1192.60% LIFT on conversion for unpaid keywords
A simple redesign and placement of forms on the landing pages has generated an astounding lift on the site’s conversion rate.

Clicks - Site events that should not be taken lightly: Lessons from the Eisenberg’s latest book

Posted on October 27, 2008
Filed Under Understanding Analytics | 1 Comment

I was voraciously consuming the knowledge being shared by Bryan Eisenberg on his latest book “A/B always be optimizing” which was launched few months ago. This coincided with a new client’s need for Landing Page optimization on his current site. The problem was that the site was using a third party reservation services provider, where the checkout flow or transaction process where served and developed by from a different site. Unless that provider allowed you to add third party tracking cookie snippets on their site, even with that provided , any information you will gather and report  shared will not guarantee and immediate action on their part (the 3rd party service provider). For Google Adwords, with certainty it will track any information regardless if the conversion snippet is embedded to a third party site as long as cookies are not blocked. So what about conversions that were done through organic search ?  A common approach would be to request a redirect from a third party services provider site back to your main site with the necessary information added as parameters to be capture by your thank you or confirmation page. The other option, and more meticulous way would be to request a regular report of all orders or reservations/bookings made. The problem with the latter option is, without a proper way to pass a value to “flag” that a particular conversion came from an organic source - you will end up deducting conversions made from Google Awords with the aggregate total. Not exactly a reliable way to derive  the sites  conversion performance.

AdWords Conversion Optimizer Expands Eligibility

Posted on October 16, 2008
Filed Under Managing Pay Per Click | Leave a Comment

Landing Page Testing has no effect on your website’s SEO or does it?

Posted on September 29, 2008
Filed Under Landing Page Optimization | 1 Comment

Months ago, while conducting a technical review on Offermatica, I stumbled upon a logical question on whether serving multiple pages of relatively the same content will have an effect on the sites SERP. Usually landing page optimization test involve testing placement and presence of certain elements  pages, while having the same content. I am not saying that this is the case in most landing page optimization test but for those  who have been doing “low-hanging fruit” approaches, content is usually not the first element to test.

The primary issue would evolve around serving the same content to multiple pages which can still be harmful to your site’s SERP. The technical staff of Omniture Test & Target (formerly Offermatica) sent us an email explaining that such a mechanism will not have an effect on our site’s SEO since the default page is the one being served to the spiders and that other pages and is served via javascript events. Theorectically, search engine bots don’t crawl Javascript codes or snippets thus the explanation. Those familiar with Mboxes (snippet used by Omniture Test & Target) will see how can this be true. Basic implementation of these Mboxes involve placing the default content or elements inside a capsule  or area. This area is then randomly served by different variations relative to those set by “offers” configure on the Offermatica console. The default content is not set inside a javascript “shell” nor is it internally or externally embedded.

Google’s Share of Voice - New Google Adwords Metric to show you where you are at a your Market

Posted on September 26, 2008
Filed Under Understanding Analytics, Managing Pay Per Click | 1 Comment

“Share of voice” is a metric often used in the advertising industry to represent the relative portion of ad inventory available to a single advertiser within a defined market over a specified time period.

Reading a new post on the Google Adwords Blog, I saw this interesting new metric they are incorporating with the Adwords report - primarily the new Impression Share (IS). Google currently modified (rather than improved) the Quality Score (QS) computation, and this metric could be tied up to that implementation in more ways than one. The metric is supplemented by three other metrics mainly Lost IS (Rank) , Lost IS (budget) and Exact IS.

Lost IS (Rank) - The percentage of impressions lost due to Adrank (CPC x QS).

Lost IS(Budget) - The percentage of impressions lost due to budget constraints.

This new metric technically just shows you how much opportunity (room for improvement) there is for your campaigns both on performance and budget. Which from a consultant’s or Adwords manager’s perspective is very crucial not only on explaining to a client or boss on improving performance initiatives but more importantly budget initiatives. Budget, Expense, Cost or how you would like to coin it is the most difficult variable to push.

New Hackers Safe Logo - Will this affect conversion?

Posted on July 28, 2008
Filed Under Landing Page Optimization | Leave a Comment

Some weeks ago the new Hackersafe logo was replaced by a McAfee Secure Logo.

PPC Bid Management: How changing your PPC adcopy headline can grow your CTR by 100%

Posted on March 4, 2008
Filed Under Managing Pay Per Click, Case Studies | Leave a Comment

We have read studies focusing on the effect content headers on conversion rates. This particular case study talks about my experience on improving CTR by doing a simple split using Google Adword’s optimized ads feature. There will be missing information, such as screenshots , to present the actual split test result as I was not able to save this documents after my unit crashed some years ago. What I was able to salvage,and will show you, are the actual screenshots of the campaigns results from February 2006 - June 2006 , where February was the baseline information .

The hypothesis was based on the studies conducted on the effect of “headlines”

INTERNET MARKETING EXPERT - 35k up

Posted on February 25, 2008
Filed Under SEO jobs | Leave a Comment

We are looking for someone who is passionate about internet marketing (search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, affiliate marketing). The ideal candidate will have 5+ years experience in a similar role.

Job profile:
- Analyse website content, and make optimisation recommendations.
- Develop improvements to new and existing sites that result in high natural search listings.
- Optimise various site components including copy, meta tags, page title/descriptions, internal linking, site map, etc.
- Develop target keyword lists and match up to targeted content pages.
- Clearly communicate progress updates to clients and provide answers to any questions related to their SEO program.
- Improve knowledge of current SEO practices to develop and recommend new SEO strategies.
- Maintain awareness of various SEO resources and tools.
- Optimise PPC advertising
- Clearly communicate the strategies with the client

Requirements:
- Must be able to demonstrate knowledge of SEO and pay per click strategies.
- A strong understanding of search engine trends and search engine algorithms.
- Possess excellent communication skills and be a team player.
- Ability to manage multiple assignments and meet scheduled due dates.

You will be continually rewarded for your skills, ambition and experience with a competitive salary.