---

---

Adding Ongoing Value Through Testing

Now we’ll look at the final tool in our network that supports the final step of our three stage process: Google’s Website Optimizer.

At this point, we’ve achieved a highly accountable, highly targeted campaign with an analytics setup that works in harmony with your site and business goals. Now it’s time to take all the information we’ve uncovered and find ways to make the outcomes better.

Just having the first two systems in place is not enough to add increasing value over time. The launch of the targeted PPC campaign will bring initial value - for example, improving the cost-per-acquisition (CPA). But it should not be treated as a system that maintains and fixes itself. Likewise, the high level implementation in our web analytics will do a fantastic job of capturing the activity of your site. Unfortunately, no analytics package is sophisticated enough to analyze its own data in order to test and implement new changes/designs. Ongoing improvements require thorough testing and experimentation by someone familiar with the site’s data and goals.

Testing Webpage Variations - An Example from Oceanic Airways

Fictitious airline company Oceanic Airways developed a landing page for booking flights to Japan. This makes booking a flight the macro-goal of the site. Like many other online sales processes, the booking process is a multiple step/multiple page process. After combing through the data, a potential bottleneck in the online booking process was identified. For Oceanic Air, this was getting someone from the PPC landing page to begin the process of booking their flight. The data tells us only 2% of visitors who saw the landing page began the process of booking their flight. While it’s tempting to quickly label this 2% as “good” or “bad,” we treat this micro-goal as nothing more than a benchmark to test and improve.

While there was a wealth of information available on the landing page, the link to the Book Your Trip page (i.e. the one action we want the visitor to take), was camouflaged among all the other links on the page.


The testing hypothesis was simple: develop a new landing page with an increased emphasis on the desired action and more people will begin the process of booking their flight. Here’s the process to develop, test and optimize this micro-goal in the conversion process.

We could easily just upload the new changes to the site and monitor the number of visits to the "Book Your Trip" page and see how the new page performs. However, with most businesses there are outside forces that affect business on a daily basis. Any changes we experience in flight bookings could be as much a factor of outside forces as it is a change in the page design. The experiment of running different page versions at different times lends itself to too many outside influential forces, ultimately tainting whatever results we see reported in Google Analytics. This is where we introduce Google’s Website Optimizer tool to test both pages fairly against each other at the same time.

The concept is simple: select a page, identify the goal of that page and upload different variations to test against each other. After configuring the test and adding the proper code to the test pages, Google will display the different page variations to a percentage of traffic (determined by us). It measures the success rate for each page, then after it has accumulated a large enough sample size, it declares a winner. In our Website Optimizer experiment with Oceanic Air, here's what we saw:

Both pages received nearly 800 visitors over the course of the test. Of all the visitors to the original page, less than 2% clicked the link to book a flight (consistent with what we saw originally). On the new landing page, visitors began booking a flight at a rate of 21%. We went from getting 1 in 50 visitors to take the desired action to 1 in 5 visitors.


It's important to note we did not increase the booked flight conversion rate from 2% to 21%. We've only reduced the bottleneck for a very important micro-goal of the macro-goal action. Having said that, this is still a VERY significant result and a shining improvement over what originally existed. More testing needs to be done, but we have seized a very low hanging fruit. Everyone speculated the new design would perform better, but now we have the data to back it up.

Conclusion

The Right Data Combined with Ongoing Testing Makes PPC Marketing a Winning Strategy

Pressure to generate faster returns on investment and ever-increasing competition put greater pressure on marketing campaigns to produce results. With the trends showing “eye-balls” going online, marketing dollars are being re-allocated to the internet. Companies in all sectors should embrace this movement and establish an internet marketing strategy.

Having a good web analytics tool and configuring it to measure macro-and-micro-goals is the starting point. PPC marketing can be a source for significant customer traffic to your website, but can also end up being an unbearable expense if not managed well. Constant testing is the main strategy to ensure your PPC marketing dollars pay off and sales continue to improve.

Utilizing many of the tools made available to us such as Adwords, Mobile Optimization, Merchant Center and Website Optimizer, online marketing can become a significant means to increased sales and profits.