PPC – When Testing Defeats Sound Logic
June 22nd, 2009 by John LynchToo many marketers take a ‘good enough’ approach when it comes to their Google Adwords campaigns.
I recently had a phone call with a client who had over 4,000 words of unorganized content on his landing page and couldn’t understand why no one was purchasing his service. When I encouraged him to change his landing page, he quickly interrupted, insisting it was a waste of time and consumers “will get the gist.”
Web visitors are not your friends and family. They are the most fickle, impatient bunch that will ever come in contact with you or your brand.
Web users, in mass, seem to have one enduring mantra: when in doubt, click out. And why shouldn’t they? Your website is not the only circus in town. In any industry, it’s possible to have between 20 and 20,000 competing sites. This puts a premium on creating tight, well organized, and engaging content that will lead customers to the call-to-action.
You don’t have to be a wordsmith to create compelling content. You don’t even have to speak the language.
I used to work with a software company managing their English speaking campaigns. After producing very positive results, I mustered the courage to see if I could handle their overseas campaigns as they were heavily engaged in Germany and France.
They were slightly confused by my request (I speak neither German nor French), but I quickly explained that despite speaking neither language, it was quite obvious that they were making some serious mistakes.
In my opinion, the greatest infraction of all was that they weren’t performing ad or landing page testing. I quickly pulled their ads, wrote new ones using a free translator, and shipped them off to the German office for review.
I know what you’re thinking: I embarrassed myself in the process and probably should have been fired. That might be true and, yes, some of the ads were enormous failures. But, within a matter of a couple days, I could quickly determine the duds and discard them. After another three weeks, I had enough of a statistical sample to determine which ads were the sale-producing gems. These became my go-to ads and, from an experimentation standpoint, my control ads that would be predominantly used throughout the campaign.
I adopted a similar strategy with their landing pages and, after two months, their cost per lead plummeted from $9.75/lead to $1.50/lead.
Don’t think for your customers. Let your customers think for you.
Coincidentally, I worked for another software company that was truly excited to test landing pages. After spending hours building graphics for their new product, I got a note from the client inquiring “What if we just show a woman typing on her computer?”
After rolling my eyes, I figured I would build the page and include it in the testing. I knew the page would fail, and when it did, my authoritative rule over the campaign would go unchallenged and my status at the company would undoubtedly elevate to all-knowing Zen master.
When the page launched it not only succeeded, but beat every other campaign by a conversion rate of at least 15%. To this day, I have no explanation for the success of this page. It was dull, uninspired, and hands down the most effective landing page.
The lesson from this is simple: testing your ad copy and landing pages will allow your visitors to tell you what they want. You might not understand why visitors behave in certain ways, but the patterns will be impossible to ignore. The key to improving an Adwords campaign is embracing these patterns and using these trends to increase the likelihood of conversions in the future.
Don’t Cater to Conventional Testing Standards
Common industry logic dictates that it typically requires 300 conversions before you can make informed decisions regarding a new landing page or specific ad copy.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this logic and think many exceptions exist.
Instead of testing conversions, let’s imagine we’re testing the effectiveness of guinea pig food. We have 300 guinea pigs in our lab. After feeding the first 5, they all tragically die within a few short minutes.
Do we really need to feed the other 295 guinea pigs or can we make a reasonably well-informed decision right now? Personally, I think it’s in the best long term interests of the laboratory to discontinue testing and develop a new product. Sure, these results could be anomalous and the food could actually be fine, but that’s beyond the point. It’s about using your resources as prudently and effectively as possible.
Let’s alter the example. What if after feeding the first five guinea pigs, one dies? We have less information and our ability to delineate causation versus correlation is greatly impeded. In this case, it’s wise to continue testing until there’s enough data to make an informed decision.
Look at your companies objectively, unemotionally, and always test the premises and strategies on which your marketing campaign is built.
Related posts:
