Search Marketing Sage

On August 1, we officially said goodbye to website optimizer and hello to Google Analytics Experiments. One of the most notable differences with Analytics Content Experiments is that A/B test pages are no longer always served 50/50.  Google determines the percent of daily visits allocated to each page based on that pages statistical likelihood of success, a method whose principles are adopted from the idea of the “Multi-Armed Bandit”.

Are you wasting valuable time on leads that aren’t ready to close? Do you have a marketing automation system in place, but feel like it could be doing more? In our upcoming webinar, Set the Cruise Control on Your Lead Nurturing, Janet Driscoll Miller, President & CEO of Search Mojo, will review ways to improve lead generation with marketing automation. This webinar will include the valuable ways to incorporate search, social advertising, and targeted landing pages with marketing automation to engage more leads. Register today for this informative lead generation webinar, Set the Cruise Control on Your Lead Nurturing, on Thursday, June 7, 2012 at 2:00 p.m. ET.

As a Search Marketing Agency, we have a lot of employees that are obsessed about squeezing every bit of performance possible out of our clients Pay Per Click Advertising.  Search Marketing User Interfaces give multiple metrics to help advertisers see how they are doing.  But as an agency that deals with millions of PPC clicks every month, we learn pretty quickly with the scale of the data we get to work with what metrics really make a difference in delivering conversion/lead/sales success and what metrics don’t.

If conversions are the goal of your advertising, then the first rule of managing your PPC account is “Not all clicks are created equal.”  PPC is a “meritocracy”.  The clicks that convert get all of the love, affection, increased max Cost Per Click bids and Budget.  The keywords that don’t convert get minimized with lower bids and eventually even paused.  There is no such thing as a “No keyword left behind” in a successful PPC account.  It’s possible to do a keyword “reclamation project” by improving the post click experience of keywords that historically not converted with custom landing pages, but you still have to rely on the data at your disposal on what you decide to do with your keywords.

Larry Marine (Intuitive Design) covers the 3 most common mistakes of usability and design of your website and how to avoid these:

1. “Selling” the Customer on One Page

There is a sales path that you need to follow and your site should be leading your customer down that path, not offering the call to action from the homepage….that’s waaaay too soon. Take them down the garden path, be aware of the user state on this pathway:

Awareness (understand the problems you customers have to cause them to seek you out)
Attention (the visitor’s mindset is “what’s in it for me?”, your response should be “how can we solve their problem?”)
Desire (your visitor is ready to take action, give them a reason to believe that you are best solution)
Action (they’re finally ready to buy)

Todd Barrs (Webroot) presented a live case study to show how conversion optimization cannot operate in isolation and the risks of a website redesign. Using the example of a new Webroot mobile product, he describes the risk and reward of a redesign. He suggests keeping these key concepts in mind:

1. Align performance metrics (CR) across the entire organization.
2. Get to know your internal customers (get buy-in)
3. Clearly define and agree on testing metrics.
4. Start small, and optimize to impact revenue.