The Big Wave Blog

Landing Pages and Multivariate Testing

The most important element of optimizing any landing page is understanding the client’s goals and intentions. Every page on every website needs a goal, and landing pages are no different. In fact, it is probably more important to clearly define your objective or goal for a landing page, because the goal of each landing page is to attract -> engage -> convert -> retain.

Many different types of landing pages are commonly used today, including:

• Static landing pages - coded in HTML
• Dynamic landing pages - coded in .js application
• Application landing pages: allow the user to refine their intentions without leaving the page

What Needs to Be Tested/Optimized:

• Headlines - emotional vs. direct
• Calls to action
• Buttons vs. links
• Hero image - photo vs. illustration
• Copy - emotional or direct
• Bulleted list vs. copy
• Tables, charts
• Lead generation forms

Remember to test only one thing at a time. In addition, the landing page must be kept consistent through all Ad Groups to ensure that it is the landing page, not the keyword set, that is resulting in higher or lower conversion.

Be careful which metric you use to determine which page is most successful. Some landing pages bring in a greater number of leads, but fewer sales. Be sure to track each customer from beginning to end.

There is a host of good products out that allow for multiple landing page testing. One of the best is Google’s free landing page optimizer: www.google.com/WebsiteOptimizer. It allows marketers to perform split A/B testing and multivariate testing on landing pages.

SEO & Social Media Marketing

I was not very impressed with this session. There was very little unique knowledge. Randy Fishkin gave a history of social media and the major social media sites. Neil Patel provided some case studies from his work with social media marketing for major brands. Barbara Boser provided some tips for getting started in social media marketing, and how to be come a top StumbleUpon user.

Top Social Media Tips:

• Use the same profile for each social media site you use. This allows users who use many different social media sites to easily remember you.
• Don’t continually Digg or Stumble your own site. This will easily get your buried, and will have a major negative affect.
• In order to be a great at social media, you have to interact with the community.
• Don’t just target the top users. They will notice this and bury your stories.

Michael Gray presented on Twitter. Major brands are using Twitter as an update for specials and packages on their products or services. It can also be a valuable reputation management tool.

Branding and Search

This was an informative session highlighting important aspects about Branding and Search and how they interact. A marketing program in which they work together has a very positive outcome on brand-building and ROI.

Here are some highlights:

1. Sheer Volume of Searches

• 60% of all in-store shoppers are researching the product online.
• 86% of online shoppers are researching the product online.

2. Brand Advocates

• Learn to embrace them. They talk about your brand without you having to pay them to do so. 50% of this group writes about their purchases online. They have major influence on others buying similar products and services.
• Search can be used to reach this group and harvest their marketing power.

4. Passionistas

• This was an interesting term for people who really love 1. Themselves and 2. Love the product that loves them back.
• Reaching Passionistas through search can result in building tremendous buzz and getting the marketing message across.

3. Awareness – Consideration – Purchase

It was pointed out that search marketers are heavily focused on the last stage of the cycle by going after people ready to buy. One explanation I can give on behalf of the search marketer is that short-term ROI is top priority for a lot of clients.

It is our job to convince our clients that they should be focusing on building the brand in conjunction with ROI.

Reporting from Santa Clara, where Big Wave Bloggers are having a radical time! We’ve attended some very education sessions, toured Yahoo, socialized with fellow searchers… and we’re just getting started. Here’s a recap of the official experience so far.

Keynote:
Search in the Past, Present and Future

The event was off to an exiting start with AC/DC blaring from the speakers. Danny Sullivan began SMX West 2008 by focusing the keynote on how search, searchers and SERP pages have evolved over time.

Here is the breakdown according to Danny:

Search 1.0 focused on keyword research and including targeted keyword phrases in meta tag and website content.

Search 2.0 introduced the importance of off-page factors, such as link analysis and user click-through rate (CTR).

Search 3.0 (which we are currently in) displays blended results on the SERP, meaning that search engines are now including images, video, blogs, and product search listings for every search.

Search 4.0 will be the era of personalized search, with results based on your past and present search history, as well as CTR history.

Session 1:
Blended Search Results

Blended Search was up next. Blended search results are a combination of video, images, blogs, and news listings displayed on the SERP. Traditional SERPs offered only traditional webpage listings. Blended search, together with local search, changes the scope of traditional SEO campaigns.

Each engine has unique elements associated with its blended search results. Here are the tips given by each search engine on what to do to gain maximum exposure:

Google:

• Caption website images
• Submit sitemap to Google video
• Create a local business listing
• Upload inventory into Google Product Search
• Use Google Blog Search

Yahoo:

• Create Local Business Listings
• Use Yelp.com to boost local search rankings
• Upload inventory into Yahoo Shopping, Travel, etc.
• Caption website images

MSN/Live:

• Create a local business listing
• Upload product catalog

Session 2
Pay Per Click: Decrypting Quality Score

PPC has matured beyond setting up an AdWords account and getting clicks. Google is not only controlling spam in web results, but also is serious about cleaning up PPC spam.

Here are some of the Quality Score highlights we picked up from this session:

• Reasons for low quality score are page factors, such as misleading content or irrelevant pages.
• Placement and CPC are based on quality score.
• Your minimum bids are determined by your ad quality and relevance.
• Google can “kill” your campaign by increasing your CPC to unbearable levels.
• AdWords sandbox is here! Your campaign is not going to take off if it is not set up and maintained properly.

Google is serious about its SERP quality on both the organic (SEO) and paid (PPC) sides. Ways to game the system using PPC are getting fewer by the day.

Google has to defend their online revenue and keep search results healthy. Shareholders want results, dammit! What would you do in a situation like that?

Session 3:
Creating Personas to Better Target Clients

This session concentrated on creating personas for paid search and website conversion.

Since emotions are the major driving force behind human search patterns, creating personas is increasingly important in determining the psychographics of a client’s target market. Personas include detailed information about your potential customers. The following is a simple example.

Persona Code Name: Jane
Jane is middle-aged mother of 2 living in the Midwest. She works full-time as an Account Executive for a medium-sized ad agency. She makes $55,000/year and needs to find balance between family and work. Her children attend public school and are very active in after-school extracurricular activites, which include basketball, music lessons and church groups.

Here is a list of sites that will help you create client personas:

• compete.com
• quantcast.com
• adlab.msn.com
• prizm: charitas.com

Next week, The Big Wave Blog team will be flying to Santa Clara, CA, for the Search Marketing Expo (SMX). For those of you who will be in attendance, you’ll see us sporting these t-shirts:

It’s easy to spot The Big Wave Blog team… we are kinda like the Odd Couple (Trio) of search engine marketing.

Vikram is most easily noticed: he’s one of the biggest Indian guys I have ever seen; be sure not to trip over his size 15 feet!

I’m a little harder to find. Look for a guy with really big hair roaming around the paid search presentations.

Melanie, the fairest of The Big Wave Bloggers, you will probably spot with Blackberry in hand, clunking Vikram and Ronnie’s heads together.

Be sure to check The Big Wave Blog all next week for updates from the SMX conference. We will be giving a nightly summary of each day, recapping sessions and summarizing the daily keynote presentations. It should be a very busy and exciting week.

Hope to see you there!

Yesterday I had the opportunity to address a group of international dignitaries on behalf of the US Department of Commerce. My audience comprised government officials and business owners from several Eastern European countries, including Russia, Georgia, and the Ukraine. The day proved to be highly educational for all of us.

I have to admit that being translated into 4 languages while speaking was possibly my favorite part, and definitely a new experience for me. However, I also enjoyed this group’s receptiveness, and their thirst for basic knowledge about search marketing. I was able to give them simple strategies to take home and implement in their businesses. At the same time, I shared with them why fast growth makes search engine marketing in Europe and Asia so exciting and profitable.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:

• Opportunity Abounds. There is tremendous opportunity for growth in Europe and Asia in the field of search engine marketing. While internet marketing is still in early stages, there is a huge population of consumers steadily migrating to the online marketplace. Now is the perfect time to enter and dominate the market.
• Competition… Not Really. In international (non-US) markets, the lack of competition in search marketing is a major strategic factor. Delivering this message to a group of Eastern European business owners was sheer pleasure. I got to see that light bulb go on above their heads: “Every small effort I put into the search marketing is bound to generate a great return on investment.”
• Choices, Choices. International marketing presents the opportunity to work with search engines outside the US search trinity of Google, Yahoo and MSN. For example, the Yandex search engine in Russia takes Google.ru’s lunch every day by securing 70% of the national market!
• Learn From Our Past. Trends in US internet marketing provide very good foresight into what international marketers can expect as search engine marketing and online consumerism begin to take off in eastern countries. While it’s not entirely safe to assume that search trends are moving from West to East, businesses that learn from US companies’ past successes and mistakes are bound to flourish online.

It’s great working for Uncle Sam, and even more fun to get paid for it.:) (Although, tax season is here, so I’d better refrain from celebrating too much.) Even better than cash, though, is the feedback I’ve been receiving from the attendees. Because my main passion is educating, I was gratified to hear that they found my session to be the most informative and exciting of their two-week-long US-DOC program.

Now that is what makes all this flying around worth it. An educated group of people walking out of an Evision seminar with a list of things to do when they return home. Mission Accomplished!