Here’s a shorter version of an article that was published by Electronic Retailer Magazine in their Online Strategies Summer 2008 that we feel is worth sharing:
Increase Search Ad Returns with Multivariate Testing and Optimization
Smart advertisers don’t guess – they test. David Ogilvy famously said “The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST.” Today, that message should resonate even more for two key reasons.
1. Testing is easier now with the growing shift of media spending to online forms from more traditional, harder-to-measure media types, along with significant advances in testing and optimization technology.
2. As our economy slows and all budgets come under increasing scrutiny, especially marketing budgets, we need to become hyper-diligent regarding accountability and returns on ad spend. How often are you now being asked “what’s the return on that ad spend?
Listen to your Customers
Every second of every day, your online customers are telling you what they like and don’t like. All you have to do is listen and act. The advances in testing technology and methodologies make this much easier and permit continuous testing for ongoing campaign performance improvements.
The discipline of “test and know” is especially critical for paid search, since it’s possible to track the entire sales funnel, from key word to conversion event. If you want to protect and grow your online ad budget, you would be well served to test and optimize the entire process.
Test Where It Delivers
Most marketers have become adept at advanced search engine marketing tactics, such as optimizing key word buys and text ads. However, many still ignore or pay only passing attention to the actual web pages upon which search traffic lands . A recent survey of 540 search marketers by Search Marketing Now and Widemile revealed that only 40% were doing any landing page testing at all, most of which was manual simplistic A/B testing.
While search engine marketing tactics are an important first step, they are only part of the answer. Beyond SEM lies the real payoff – the conversion event. By going beyond traditional SEM tactics and turning your attention to the next critical step in optimizing the user experience, you can optimize your whole sales funnel, for improved returns on your search budget.
It’s Easier with Multivariate Testing
Optimizing ad campaigns and the linked landing pages for peak performance is now much easier and efficient with the advances in multivariate testing, which provides a scientific approach to testing hundreds or thousands of possible page variations very quickly to determine what optimal combination of factors is most likely to generate customer conversions.
Multivariate testing enables you to modify key areas of a web page – experimenting with multiple versions of an offer, image and copy, call to action button, for example – to determine the best-performing combination under actual user conditions. You can even test different landing page combinations in conjunction with specific traffic sources, including search engines, key words, and text ads. Testing also increases the “relevance” of landing pages, which can have a positive impact on your Google quality score and search engine results page (SERP) ranking.
Testing Delivers Higher Ad Returns
Multivariate testing and landing page optimization is still a relatively new discipline, but is rapidly becoming an essential part of top performing search campaigns. Like SmartSheet, which realized a 100% increase in the number of new customers generated by its PPC campaign, marketers who leverage multivariate testing generate higher ad returns and can justify larger key word budgets.
David Ogilvy would be pleased. Heed his advice: “Never stop testing and your advertising will never stop improving.”
