Winning Results with Google AdWords Second Edition_13 ppt

300 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 ■ There was a form that you needed to fill out that didn’t include “District of Columbia” as one of the available states, or Canadian provinces, or in some other way made it impossible for you to “exist.” ■ The credit card security system didn’t like the fact that you were traveling, so your purchase was declined, but there was no alternative means of purchasing. These and countless more issues are the worst kinds of problems because they deter even eager prospects from completing a transaction or forming a relationship with you. If there are serious barriers to people doing business with you, they usually won’t. As Amazon.com chief Jeff Bezos frequently stated on his way to becoming a billionaire: “We’re trying to make it easy for people to buy.” It helps to know what business you’re in, a degree of self-awareness Bezos always brought to his task. Gas stations, I’ve found, generally don’t make it hard for you to pump the stuff into your tank. Extending the analogy to your business, since you’re not Amazon.com, you can’t create “1-click ordering.” You probably don’t have the user’s credit card already on file. You may be constrained in how much free shipping you can offer. You might not be able to create a site that is quite as smooth as Amazon’s. But by making people really want to buy from you (by persuading them mainly through the relevance of the offer to what they searched for, and through the smoothness of the path, with just the right touches of info-candy and brand image to seal the deal), you reduce the need to be 100% perfect in your site architecture, shopping cart, or other elements of the sales process. Given the sorry state of so many websites today, pure plumbing will lead to most of the significant increases in ROI. People will be far less likely to buy from you if your site is hard to use or literally broken. There are probably already people who want to do business with you. If you do nothing else, at least don’t put roadblocks in their way. That means taking users to appropriate landing pages (instead of the wrong ones). It means ensuring that your web hosting is adequate, that your shopping cart works, that your pages load into all major browsers, and so on. Unclog. Renovate. Declutter. Then, improve your overall level of communication where appropriate, if you have additional budget. You don’t have to do it in the middle of the buying process, but somewhere underpinning your marketing (maybe in a lot of places), it helps if you have a “story” to help your customers make sense of why they are buying. Persuade, Convince, Use Psychology (Persuasion and Storytelling) Getting rid of barriers to commerce may not be enough. In a sea of conflicting commercial messages, the one that inspires may be the one that gets the sale. To use a dating analogy, sure, removing major barriers is the first step, since getting a date is nearly impossible if, say, you never get out of the house to meet anyone. Removing the obvious impediment of hermit-hood (with online dating, even that barrier is reduced) might be a first and necessary step to getting a date, but it doesn’t change the fact that at some point, somebody has to like or be inspired by you. You have to convince! You need to make an attractive offer, even if that’s only making sure you have fresh breath when you say, “I know a great coffee shop near here.” Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 CHAPTER 11: Increasing Online Conversion Rates 301 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 The same goes for your business. The fact that you sell jewelry, and that your shopping cart isn’t broken, is definitely not going to be enough to convince a high percentage of prospects to buy jewelry from you. There are a lot of jewelers. Why should prospective buyers buy a particular product? Why should they buy from you? If your landing page or site as a whole doesn’t provide the answer to that question, then only a small percentage of prospects—those in an enormous hurry, for example—are going to take the plunge and buy. Let’s put it in terms that your ego will hate. But they’re important terms, because it’s what I and every other prospective customer is probably thinking. “So you’re another jewelry store online. I don’t give a @#$@!” There are two primary elements to persuasion online: copywriting and design. Writing good copy is the most obvious of these. Beyond that, web credibility and brand cues are indirect persuaders. Copywriting Great sales copy doesn’t grow on trees. Like anyone else in this business, I’ve tried to mix and match a variety of areas of expertise, grabbing insights wherever possible. If you don’t have the budget to hire an experienced sales copywriter for your site, you’re going to have to develop a little bit of expertise yourself. The most basic requirement (don’t laugh) is that you have copy. I’ve seen far too many sites with basic three-word product names and pictures of products and little else. Some amateur sellers appear to believe the Web is just an order-taking system, a big catalog that will attract plenty of eager buyers no matter what. I’ve come across some mind-bogglers: for example, a successful offline sports apparel business from near Kalamazoo, Michigan, that set up shop online under an entirely different name. They chose a domain name that evoked nothing more than that they were some kind of generic online seller of sports apparel. The site, too, was generic. They had terse product descriptions and little else. No mention was made of their successful bricks-and-mortar presence. What if they had chosen a catchy name like Kalamazoo Sportswear and populated the site with not only full-fledged product descriptions, but an engaging story about the business, including the positive local PR they’d received in newspaper articles? So don’t be shocked when I tell you that the worst kind of copywriting is no copywriting. There are tens of thousands of online businesses out there with virtually no copy on their sites. As a result, they have virtually no online presence. Is a lack of copy also bad for organic search referrals? Don’t even get me started. Believe it or not, some of the advice that is useful for writing small AdWords ads also comes in handy for pages of sales copy that might go on for many paragraphs. It seems to be something of a universal law that in spite of wide variation in industry-specific terminologies, most readers—even prospects of a complicated niche business—get turned off by jargon. Sure, you do have to pay some attention to your prospects’ reading level and degree of expertise to avoid talking down to them. But even for the niche reader, wading through jargon-laden presentations can be tedious. Moreover, copy that is too dry can actually suck the enthusiasm out of a prospect. Not every line of business can be “fun,” but your potential customer shouldn’t approach her relationship with you as if it will be pure drudgery, either. 302 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Don’t hesitate to tell a bit of a story, provided the story quickly turns to focus on the benefits of your product or service to the customer and, above all, to the offer you’re making and the action you hope the prospect will take. Be clear and direct in your language. Inject emotional appeal and even sex appeal into your copy wherever that’s appropriate. For a software product, you’ll want to talk about ROI (money is emotional) and problem solving (alleviating headaches is very emotional). For a motorcycle jacket, referring to a celebrity that once bought one from you would add sex appeal. Certain adjectives like racy, heavy-duty, or vintage would also add sex appeal, for those who wanted to infer it, or at the very least a sense of status or authenticity. Let me give you an example from my own portfolio. An enterprise software company was experiencing poor conversion rates on their AdWords campaign, even though they were an industry leader in their human-resources-related field. What was needed was a rescue operation on the landing page copy. The rescue required two steps. First we eliminated the landing page list of cold, unemotional bulleted points. Next we tackled the industry jargon. In the end we turned a sterile, confusing landing page into an appealing and informative tool to motivate visitors to take action. Here are a few brief “clips,” if you will, of before-and-after copywriting from that landing page: Before: “performing regular talent inventory gap analysis of your human capital assets” After: “identifying talent gaps in your current workforce” Before: “unparalleled level of domain expertise” After: We eliminated this, along with a variety of other empty boasts, replacing them with concrete information. Before: “largest group of customer references in the industry” After: Here, we asked either that they provide a list of testimonials or delete this boast. At first, the only testimonial that appeared on the site was jargon-laden and lukewarm, which was inconsistent with this claim of customer satisfaction. Before: “ facilitates the end-to-end process of identifying ” After: “facilitates the process of identifying ” (eliminated redundant buzzword) Over time, the longer, more detailed sales presentation is likely to hold more interest than bulleted points would for serious buyers. Moreover, the clearer version should convert better than the initial pass with the jargon-laden long copy. Writing product descriptions that appeal to a target audience in retail is often driven by demographic research or persona research. It might be difficult to prove that one adjective beats another in writing descriptions for Chanel purses, but it’s probably safe to say that experienced fashion writers would do a better job at injecting flair into copy for such products than the average person off the street. In a small business, the owner or owners must absolutely become directly involved in communicating with customers and writing sales copy. If you sell designer purses or complicated home renovations, is it realistic to expect your 21-year-old webmaster Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 CHAPTER 11: Increasing Online Conversion Rates 303 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 (for example) to feel the necessary intimate connection with the audience? Yet I’ve seen businesspeople delegating the task of writing website copy to just such an uninformed person. It depends on your budget, but at some point, customer profiles need to be researched, and someone’s going to have to put words on some pages. Target, but Don’t Stereotype Overprofiling is a pet peeve of mine, and I tend to rant a bit against persona research when it is misused. 9 Marketing is about real customers, not stereotypes; that’s why keyword-based search marketing is so powerful. We can remain a little more neutral in our assumptions and tone while leaning heavily on the keyword search itself to segment users. Think of all the money that’s wasted in media that can’t lean on search keywords. The Holy Grail of the young male is pursued to foolish extents by old-school ad execs and their clients, pitching the product to the “mode” (statistically the single highest-buying age and sex) rather than figuring out how to reach disparate customers across the entire distribution graph. Ever seen a 50-year-old woman driving a “guy” car like an Infiniti G37? Ever seen a young male financial adviser scooting around in a “chick” car like a BMW 1-series, a well-used Miata, or a “vintage” Fiero? Sure you have! In your online marketing, do a gut check to ensure that while targeting appropriate audiences, you’re not using imagery and wording that alienates prospects who fall outside the “mode.” Sure, marketing to “everyone” is a classic rookie mistake. Then again, you can’t possibly be marketing to everyone if you sent people to an appropriate landing page from their initial search for BMW 128i reviews or tax consultant Arizona. By definition, much of what you do with search marketing is already narrow. Is there a need to splinter that market by making silly additional assumptions? (Perhaps that’s why less presumptuous page images, such as the androgynous couple appearing on the Skype offer page discussed later in the chapter, can outperform stereotypical images in landing page tests.) Design Cues: It’s about Communication, Not “Hidden Persuasion” In large part, persuasive design comes back to the improved focus, reduced clutter, standards- based design, brand cues, and other elements I address in this chapter. As entertaining as I find hypnotism as a spectacle, subtle responses to design aren’t necessarily “hypnotic” or “creepy.” Human cognition and emotion are part of direct response—always have been. Testing can turn up a lot of interesting responses, but your tests will likely stop somewhere short of magic. Many conversion enthusiasts like to experiment to discover emotional responses to certain layouts, colors, shapes, images, and much more. The complex and allegedly subliminal psychology of design has long been studied by a few experts. Especially in an offline environment, for larger companies with a lot of capital investment at stake, like mall owners and store designers, such studies are indispensable. 10 Be wary of overestimating the hidden benefits of details such as punctuation, font color, button shape, and imagery. Some of these matters, indeed, could be summed up in a key credo offered by researchers on web credibility: get a site that “looks professionally designed.” Unless you have very high sales volumes, you won’t be able to test “red versus blue,” “triangle vs. oval,” for every 304 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 few pixels on the screen of your landing page. You’ll often be working with a professional who can offer you a holistic page concept, and your test will have to be among two or three versions, each of which sort of hangs together with its own internal logic. And speaking of coherent design logic, sometimes a site wins because it looks “folksy”—or not quite professionally designed. That’s something you have to test. One client I recall had a terrible-looking site. He said it was on purpose, because a “tactile” site was soothing to his customers in that it seemed to belong to a “real person and not a big company.” Then again, he refused to prove it through testing. Although imperfect, it’s often pretty effective to test two completely different versions of an important landing page, each with a distinct design “logic.” One of my clients, FourOxen Corp., tested their main landing page by completely overhauling it, stripping out clutter, changing many visual elements, adding a person’s face, and more. This was A/B tested against the old page; no complex multivariate testing was tried. The new page converted significantly better (most of the time), but FourOxen didn’t come up with that page by studying every variable over a three-year period. The design team put together a new page that would best be described as “completely different” from the old page. Many elements of the new design probably counted as basic professional competence in the field of landing page design; FourOxen was just staying contemporary and appropriate to their industry vertical. Professional competence and emerging standards that are shared among professionals can frequently offer useful shortcuts that allow us to achieve the results we need without starting from square one in the lab. That said, FourOxen has enough volume that they should now test versions of the winning page with more involved multivariate testing, in order to refine and improve conversion rates even more. To sum up, your site designs and landing page tests will be built around an appropriately holistic combination of plumbing and persuasion. No need to take hypnosis courses or to hire the “world’s best copywriter, Dr. Evil.” Unless you’re in some niche direct-response area, you can’t win with “hypnotic writing” alone. The cartoonish image of advertising and marketing as somehow being able to force or hypnotize intelligent consumers into doing things they wouldn’t normally do has persisted since the original advertising critiques came down the pike in the 1950s. But remember what the real leaders were saying in those days. David Ogilvy was telling you to “test the headline,” and make it sell! Test the headline. How tricky is that? So I side with Bob Garfield, a critic of many modern ad campaigns. Garfield insists that many campaigns are so poorly executed that advertising is often not persuasive at all. 11 If you can’t get your overt message out there, what value could there possibly be in contemplating subliminal techniques? Testing Protocols: Best Practice; A/B/C; Multivariate Most companies design and redesign their sites and important pages based on a wide range of implicit assumptions. Most do not pay much heed to the art and science of response testing. Extensive user testing experiments (such as focus groups and other laboratory studies) are outside the scope of this chapter, but are recommended for those considering pursuing more Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 CHAPTER 11: Increasing Online Conversion Rates 305 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 advanced paths to insight about user behavior. Here, I’ll summarize some prominent approaches to testing that are being used successfully by many response-oriented online companies today. To begin with, we know that any data collection process requires you to have an eye for statistical significance and validity issues. Most of us in this field are not professional statisticians, and the accuracy of our efforts may not be 100%. But we can do much better if we just stop making silly, unfounded assumptions, and go out seeking really obvious, provable differences in response to different versions of our pages. “Testing” Method #1: Be a Lot Better from the Start Web professionals of various stripes, and interactive shops that specialize in user-centered design, should get you part of the way along the path towards constructing higher-response landing pages just based on their past experience, conscientious approach to keeping current with user experience trends, and data about response they may have collected in their firms. Any professional approach to site design and landing page design needs to integrate top-level architectural and brand feel concerns with nitty-gritty layout and copywriting issues. Iteration from “ground zero” will take a very long time if you don’t start with something reasonably compelling in the first place. Unfortunately, many design shops and so-called marketing agencies still trade in trends and fads, or are bent on selling you on a particular gizmo or two based on a strong conviction they have about some element of user engagement. A minority of conversion-focused agencies take revenues and testing protocols more seriously. You can either hire them or learn from them (us) to attempt to incorporate smart principles into your page tests. A good place to start is to ask yourself what kind of offer page, and what kind of targeting, you are dealing with. Should it be: ■ A lead-generation page? Will it offer an incentive or white paper? ■ A standalone product page? Should it offer related products? ■ A product category page? ■ A compelling “long copy” information page? How long is long? ■ An introductory page, such as a home page, that neatly segments prospects into the correct category? Depending on which type of page it is, and what other supporting elements are already built into the site, you’ll want to begin with a compelling layout. A web producer or web product manager certainly has enough expertise to provide direction, but a qualified design pro might do a better job of creating the layout for the offer page. There’s nothing wrong with looking for strong examples around the Web as a starting point, as long as the tone and objective-setting are appropriate to your business. Let’s say you settle on the fact that you’re designing a page around a single product but that it is important to increase conversions to the most expensive version of the product. Consider how you will incorporate: ■ A relevant headline (and assume that relevance may trump “salesiness”). ■ A product description (brief but not too brief). 306 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 ■ A brief (but not too brief) statement that differentiates your company. ■ Benefit statements (more, or fewer, and where on the page). ■ Testimonials, if appropriate. ■ Pricing strategy—plan the best psychology, or whether trial offers are preferred. ■ Image or images. Consider whether you need high-quality, high-impact, human, or product-based images. Have a designer consider the “flow.” ■ White space. Is the page too busy? ■ Navigation. Is the page “orphaned”? It shouldn’t be. But nor should the navigational elements be excessive. ■ Call to action, and how it is worded. ■ The shape and look of your action buttons or links. This isn’t a test yet. It’s just one page. Most companies won’t be able to test very well at all, because they’re not even working smart enough to plan that single, first page. 12 A/B, or A/B/C, Testing If you want to make some major advances or test key differences in page layouts, but don’t have enough sales or lead volume to reach statistical significance in a hurry, you should still test something: two or three different versions of a key landing page, for example. Only five years ago, A/B testing of landing pages online was still new enough that it blew people’s minds when a test worked. A few entrepreneurial-minded web professionals managed to lead such processes in their organizations rather than sitting back and leaving it to a few experts at larger companies to reap all the benefit. One such professional was Lee Mills. Mills, a marketing consultant who has alternated between independent consulting through his firm Beyond Clicks and in-house marketing roles, has conducted a number of landing page tests for clients seeking improved conversion rates. One such test, for Anonymizer.com, showed surprising results. The first landing page (see Figure 11-7) had fairly brief sales copy, a clear offer, and was attractively laid out. Mills and the client didn’t believe that the conversion rate of 3.2% could be improved upon very much. Indeed, this does seem to be a nice page, and 3.2% was a fine result. Nonetheless, a much longer page was also tried (see Figure 11-8). It included more sales copy, more education about the dangers of spyware and threats to Internet privacy, and more information about the benefits of the product. It even included screen shots. This page did far better than the first attempt—it converted at a rate of 9.6%! In his presentation at a conference in August 2004, Mills said he and his team were surprised by the result because they’d always assumed it was important to minimize scrolling—to keep all the vital information “above the fold.” The result doesn’t surprise me. We often hear nonsense about the fact that people don’t like to read a lot of information—“Keep it simple, stupid”—that sort of thing. Obviously, with a result more than three times better than the short page, this longer Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 CHAPTER 11: Increasing Online Conversion Rates 307 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 page had something going for it. Having extensive sales copy does not necessarily conflict with the need to maintain a singular focus on converting the prospect into a buyer. You can do this, too. What will you be testing for? First, of course, you need to decide on which outcome you’ll count as a conversion: an order, a lead, or even a soft goal such as reaching the beginning of a signup process. You’ll then need to decide how pages will be rotated and identified so that you have a method for measuring which page led to which conversion rates. A handy, but slightly imperfect, way of doing this in the past would have been to use Google AdWords itself. Set up an ad group with two identical ads (which, as you know, should rotate evenly if you have ads set to “rotate”), but send traffic to two different landing pages. If you had AdWords Conversion Tracker installed, you might even be able to read the results right in AdWords. According to some analysts, such as Scott Miller of Vertster, a vendor of multivariate landing page testing solutions, this methodology can lead to skewed results. Long story short, returning visitors are not always shown the same page recipe they were shown on a first visit. They may be seeing two or more versions of the page. It’s a complicated argument and Miller doesn’t prove his point with hard data, but the upshot is, this is a rough and imperfect method to split traffic. FIGURE 11-7 Good landing page: 3.2% conversion rate 308 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Today, with the available third-party tools, it seems awfully tempting to use tools tailor- made for testing and reporting on the outcomes of tests. Yes, you can relatively easily custom- design a split-testing protocol in-house with the right programming and/or the right attention to your analytics stats. But the available solutions make it easier. I’ll discuss these more in the “Multivariate Testing” section. To run an A/B test, think in terms of two or three major theories you’d like to test, and test them all at once. This is far from a statistically perfect way to do it, but remember, you’re trying to get better, not be perfect. It’s an absolute myth to believe that you can make meaningful progress by isolating two page elements and testing those, then two more, and testing those, over time. Variable interactions mean that as you pick winners in some areas, you have changed the playing field for the next test. And running all of these small, sequential tests may take forever, because the impact can be so minimal on some test elements as to be trivial. It’s better, in most cases, to think in terms of big drivers, and layout approaches—almost like a composite sketch of two or three different “page types.” A perfect example is put forward by Avinash Kaushik in his admonitions to marketers to “just start testing.” 13 Skype wanted to test an offer page. Two major kinds of pages were tested. FIGURE 11-8 Great landing page: 9.6% conversion rate Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 CHAPTER 11: Increasing Online Conversion Rates 309 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 One, a stylish-looking page with a slightly cheeseball image concept: a hopeful-looking male chatting in proximity to an attractive female. The second page tested showed a female with a slightly obscured friend who might be female, talking in a café-like setting. (Subsequently, I’ve noticed Skype testing a similar couple hanging out on a boardwalk. Sometimes, one of the partners wears rollerskates. I’d have to guess that they’re trying to give us cues of “fun” and “freedom,” smart thinking that runs counter to the first instincts of a typical software or telecommunications equipment company.) The key was to determine if the typical cheeseball telecommunications-company sales pitch page would perform better or worse than the understated, but still image-rich, San Francisco-café-chic page. To offer some added perspective, a new page idea entirely, with much more white space, a bold blue-and-white “paint splash” design, and less imagery, was also tested. Reaching statistical significance on a high volume of sales, the verdict came in: the pleasing white-space page (the upcoming Figure 11-10 shows an example) didn’t convert as well as the image-rich pages. And by a significant margin, androgynous freedom-loving friends (see Figure 11-9) beat the earlier-generation cheeseball telco guy-meets-girl trapped in a less evocative white-space layout. The bottom line improvement for Skype, in the form of tangible sales revenue increases, would soon run into six figures. A simple, elegant, and yet reasonably scientific example of an A/B/C test in action. Take note: the specific outcome in the Skype example is not what is important. The process is something that any qualified designer and marketer, working in tandem, can try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. In Figures 11-9 and 11-10, you can see that Skype is clearly continuing the testing process they began some time ago. Even after ruling out hackneyed telco imagery, they carry on with new tests. Here, they appear to be segmenting tests by nation and language, FIGURE 11-9 This image-rich offer page moved the needle for Skype. This advertiser looks to be testing small refinements at this stage, such as heart balloons and a “no adware” benefit statement. [...]...310 Winning Results with Google AdWords FIGURE 11-10 Anecdotally, the “white space plus screen shots and icons” approach wasn’t as successful But it looks like the advertiser is still keeping it in their testing mix for the time being and may well be testing smaller variations in an advanced multivariate test, as they should For example, does the image sell more or less with the green rainbow... into the mix here This is not intended to be an exhaustive study of the GWO product,14 but I’ll show you how a typical small business can benefit from using Google s tool for multivariate landing page testing 313 314 Winning Results with Google AdWords FIGURE 11-12 A glimpse at one of my own early GWO tests It involved four page elements of my e-book offer page, totaling 16 page combinations The planning... potentially high In that case, you might consider lowering prices if you can see a significant volume increase at that lower price point 319 320 Winning Results with Google AdWords If They Don’t Buy, Get Them to Do Something Many businesses sell products and services with a price point that is just so high, the conversion rate is too low to gain any measurable feedback for many months If your business is... a variety of Timex watches, simply because most watch makers have hundreds of individual models and it would usually be impractical to build a campaign with several thousand ads all going to separate landing pages 321 322 Winning Results with Google AdWords Most of the experts I’ve talked to lean towards category pages, but none of them rely exclusively on them A category page, as long as it looks inviting... “better persuasion.” Thinking deeply about customers and their mindset is one thing we tried to do The easier work was drilling in on elements of the page we thought clearly sucked 315 316 Winning Results with Google AdWords Page Elements Chosen After arbitrarily eliminating some page clutter and moving some other things to reorient priorities, we selected four page elements to test Depending on your... change Finally, we decided to learn more about the “clutter boxes” above the text Conversion rates were about the same when we eliminated them What if we added three more of the pesky 317 318 Winning Results with Google AdWords little critters? My wife looked at this in action before we ran the test and exclaimed “yikes, that’s just wrong I’d leave the site immediately.” Her concern proved to be more or... winner earlier than the rest The second- best headline, for example, may wind up being CHAPTER 11: Increasing Online Conversion Rates in the winning overall recipe, when combined with certain other variables on the page, due to a phenomenon known as “variable interactions.” This is like saying: this is only the secondbest sermon, but when delivered in a stone church with a flower garden, by a bald pastor,... rethinking your communications strategy so that you’re making big leaps forward in performance Those leaps are the ones that make you feel confident about making permanent changes 311 312 Winning Results with Google AdWords Beware of Taking “Soft” Events as Gospel in Testing If you happen to be using a lead or other nonrevenue event as your conversion event for the purposes of testing landing pages,... like Amazon) will do a good job of suggesting related items FIGURE 11-14 While singular in focus, this page offers the shopper an easily navigated selection of director’s chairs 323 324 Winning Results with Google AdWords Goldilocks and the Three Soup Ladles Consider a “good, better, best” attitude when working on related product layouts, to encourage users to opt for the “middle” or “top end” product... professionally designed The site lets you search for past content The site is linked to by a site you think is believable The site has articles containing citations and references 325 326 Winning Results with Google AdWords ■ ■ ■ ■ The site lists authors’ credentials for each article The site provides a quick response to customer service questions The site was recommended by a friend The site represents . 300 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords /. every 304 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords /. brief). 306 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 11 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords /