How To Use ACE For Landing Page Testing With Minimal Risk

A common way of testing landing pages is to do a split A/B test. The test setup typically goes like this:

(a)  Identify the keyword/adgroup sets for which the new landing page will be tested.

(b)  Set up identical ad copies in the ad group but with destination URLs pointing to the original as well as the test landing pages.

(c)  Set up the ads to rotate evenly.

Most of the time, this setup requires you to change the account structure to run the experiment. This is seen schematically below.

Figure 1: Original Adgroup structure

Figure 2: Testing Adgroup structure

There are a few problems with this approach:

It is not scalable: If there are M ad copies in an ad group, you have to create 2M ad copies in the new structure to do the A/B landing page test.You cannot control impression serving (beyond a point). By enabling an even rotation, you split traffic evenly across the ad copies. In the above example, each landing page gets 50% of the impressions.

While one can overcome the first problem with automation tools, the second issue is problematic esspecially when testing landing pages in conjunction with high traffic brand keywords.

If the new landing page doesn’t perform well, you run the risk of poor quality of conversions for half the traffic. There are many ways one can over come this, but they tend to be cumbersome to set up and also make the testing process complicated. The ideal solution, would be to:

Not change the mix of ad copies across the impressions that the adgroup gets.Show a user defined percentage of impressions the new ad copy. If you are risk averse, only a small percentage of clicks should be served with the new landing page.Require minimal work on part of the experimenter to set up the experiment.

The Google Adwords Campaign Experiments (ACE) platform offers a nice way to execute these landing page experiments. While detailed instructions on their setup have been provided here, I am going to skim over the mechanics in connection to the landing page experiment. The ACE platform setup has four necessary steps, and one followup action to take based on the results.

1.  Experimental setup

This can be done in the Campaign settings tab under the Advanced Settings option:

The key input here is the Control/Experiment split which enables you to decide what percentage of traffic goes to the experimental landing page vs. control. In this example, I have picked only 10% traffic to the experiment, as I am risk averse.

2. Make  the experimental change

Next, you need to decide the experimental change. In our example, we create an identical adgroup to the one we want to test, and change the destination URLs of the adcopies to the new landing page. Once the ad group is created, you have to choose the original ad group as the control and the new duplicate ad group as the experimental one. To do this, click on the empty beaker next to the adgroup column in the campaign screen.

3. Run the experiment

This can be done manually by clicking on the Settings>Advanced Settings> Experiment> chose Start Running Experiment button or automatically if the start and stop date of the experiment was selected in step 1.

4. Analyze the results

Here is an example of the type of results you would see:

Note that the test ad group got approximately 10% of all impressions which is what we wanted. You can run a test (Z test) to check if the conversion rates are different with statistical confidence.

In this case, the test does show that the conversion rates are statistically different and the test landing page is better than the existing one. Incidentally, the Adwords editor does provide statistical measures of confidence in their reporting itself and you can find details in Google’s help pages.

5. Deploy your results

You can now test the results on a larger sample (50/50 or 30/70 split) to ensure that the new landing page will perform when more traffic is diverted to it. If you feel confident however, you can divert all traffic to the new landing page by going to the settings tab of your campaign and clicking on Advanced Settings>Experiment> Apply: Launch changes fully button.

In this way, you can A/B test new landing pages on high volume keywords without risking significant downside as well as account restricting headaches.

While, ACE is an excellent and flexible platform for advertisers for many types of A/B tests, it would be great to see  more testing features such as multi-variant testing capabilities in the future.

I would like to thank Rob Levetsky, Sr. Account Manager at Efficient Frontier for providing me with several examples and use cases of Landing Page testing with ACE.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Analyze This

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How To Build Multi-Purpose Landing Pages For Small Budget Advertising

For a long time, I thought utilizing a strong Landing Page Optimization program was only available to large companies with large budgets. The software to create landing pages on the fly by keyword is pricey, and the learning curve is significant.

If you have the time, budget and manpower to utilize a design team and software that builds a landing page for every paid, organic, social and email marketing keyword or blast you send — Awesome!

The reality is, most of us do have time and budget limitations. Getting permission to spend thousands on software isn’t likely, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up on the idea. Think a bit deeper and build your landing pages for multiple purposes.

In the past, we would build a website, and send clicks to the homepage of that site. Then we got smart, and sent those same clicks to more relevant pages on the site. Then Landing Page Optimization was invented and we started hearing we needed a new page for every keyword, and the want vs. budget debate started heating up.

Limited budgets don’t mean you have to completely remove LPO from your marketing vocabulary. Think about it this way: if you can repurpose that page to give you Organic, Paid, Social and Email Marketing traffic and conversions, it makes the time investment a bit more manageable.

Then think about the reality that not every keyword needs a landing page. Many keywords are extremely similar, the same words in different combinations. Take this knowledge and repurpose your landing pages across multiple platforms.

Here are five steps to making sure your landing pages can be repurposed for multiple funnels.

There are quite a few schools of thought about how to frame out a landing page. Some blueprints say a large image and a call to action, some do include text. The best advice I can give here is just to simply start somewhere and test what you’ve done.

A great tool to help you mock up pages as you go, and save layouts you’ve done or want to try, is GoMockingbird.com. I use this to wireframe pages for SEO, PPC, Email Marketing, Facebook inclusion, etc. It’s also a great way to show your design/creative department your vision when it comes to page layout. If you know a UX expert, or have someone on your design staff that “gets it” be sure to use their knowledge and experience.

This tactic relies upon you having a very solid AdWords campaign. We’re going to use your AdGroup themes to set up your landing pages. AdGroups generally have very similar “like” terms and you’re testing ad copy and calls to action to see what converts best. Export your AdWords keywords and sort by AdGroup. Use this information to decide what landing pages you need to build for each set of terms. You can then use this information to build your Landing Page.

After you export your keywords by AdGroup, make a list of the landing page content you need. Each “Group” of keywords needs between 150 and  200 relevant words that are themed around those keywords. Do not stuff each keyword into your content verbatim, use synonyms, write naturally – bold your main idea and don’t be afraid to use bullets to list the benefits of your product(s).

Review your PPC ads and use the best performing ad headline as your call to action: “Book your Getaway Today” or “Limited Time Offer”. You can combine on-page testing via Website Optimizer with some PPC ad rotation testing to find the best combination of call to action and keyword group.

Sending multiple clicks to the same landing pages can make your tracking a bit tricky, but if you’re careful, you can see each portion of revenue a segment delivers. You can use a few tactics, Google offers different Analytics options and filters to help you out.

The best way, in my opinion, is to using source codes on the links and building custom segments in your Analytics platform. 

Remember, if you want these pages to rank organically as well, you’ll need to fit it into a logical place in your navigation, add content, build internal links and tie its existence in with the rest of your website. These landing pages aren’t meant to be an “add on” with no place to live in the architecture of your site.

Landing pages are designed to convert traffic, but they don’t need to be a one-hit wonder. You can combine Organic, Paid and Email Marketing tactics with your landing pages to get great results on a shoestring budget.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Beginner | How To | How To: PPC | In The Trenches | Search Marketing: Landing Pages

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3 Dead Excuses For Badly Designed Landing Pages

Landing pages almost have a tradition of bad design. After all, it’s easy enough to slap a headline, a few bullets of text, and an image next to a form and — voilà! — you have a landing page, right? “Landing pages” have proliferated as a check-the-box feature: sure, we do landing pages.

The problem is that most of these are bad landing pages.

By “bad,” I mean three things: (1) they look amateurish, lifeless or downright ugly; (2) they fail to provide holistically compelling content; and (3) they aren’t very effective in winning over customers. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but it’s hard not to infer a relationship between these things.

For instance, take this example I recently showed in a session discussing the new Google Instant Preview for Ads:

Make you want to click? Didn’t think so.

But why are these pages so bad? And why are there so many of them?

One problem is that designers continue to be underutilized in conversion optimization. Part of that is the legacy of optimization, originally more of an analytical discipline than a design-oriented one.

Part of it is that search marketing — which has been a leading domain for the practice of landing page optimization — has non-visual roots in keywords and text ads. Search marketers tend to be more proficient at Excel than Photoshop.

But mostly, it’s because good design takes more time or money. And, unfortunately, it’s all too easy to confound cost with ROI. Just because something costs less up front, doesn’t mean it delivers a better payoff. But the wrong organizational structure or incentives can camouflage that truth.

One excuse for eschewing design talent that propagated through landing page talks for years went like this: “Google follows a minimalist visual aesthetic, Google is the most successful Internet company on the planet, therefore we should have minimalist landing pages.” If Google can get away with mostly simple text on a plain white page, then so can we. “Minimalist visual aesthetic” often became code for “no graphic design at all.”

Of course, that was always a false equivalency — Google’s user experience was designed (quite intently) for searching. It is a neutral, frictionless gateway to a plethora of possible destinations — cleverly crafted to be supported by advertising while not actually looking like it is supported by advertising.

In contrast, a landing page is a single, specific destination, tasked with the Promethean challenge of engaging a skeptical respondent with that company’s particular offering, in that particular context, relative to all the other competitors just a back button and a click away.

As I discussed in Compelling Landing Page Design Is Not Formulaic, good visual presentations have tremendous capacity to communicate a company’s unique value proposition in that situation, in ways that mere words cannot.

Those are two very different missions.

But with the grand unveiling of Google+, even this mistaken justification for avoiding design effort has been shaken.

Google+ delivers an incredibly rich user experience. As TechCrunch reporter MG Siegler wrote, “It looks great — Circles in particular — it was almost as if it wasn’t a Google product!” The Google executives he interviewed proudly responded that it’s because Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original designers of the Macintosh, was given free reign to “flex his creative muscles” within Google. Apparently Larry Page (historically opposed to lavish designs) personally signed off on this bold new direction.

For a dose of Google’s new design wizardry, check out the Google+ demo page:

Now that’s a high-design landing page. Minimalist visual aesthetic it is not. It’s engaging, creative, and ripe with compelling content. As it should be, as the point of Google+ is to move the search giant beyond being a gateway to other sites into more of a destination in its own right.

Google has made clear that this fresh take on design will permeate all their services. Witness the sexy black bar at the top of the Google homepage:

Yes, I just used “sexy” and “Google homepage” in the same sentence. So from now on, the answer to “What would Google do?” is: embrace the contributions of great designers.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for saving money. Budgets are tight, and there are numerous competing demands for your resources, whether you’re a one-person shop or a Fortune 500 juggernaut. And design investments definitely don’t come for free.

You should vigorously optimize your spend. But you should optimize it for the outcome: what are the maximized results that can be achieved with minimized investments. It’s dangerous to drop the first half of that equation and optimize solely for cost reduction without weighing the impact on performance. (“Penny wise and pound foolish.”)

So for years, I’ve advocated investing more time and money in landing page design — one of the reasons I prefer to think of the mission more broadly as post-click marketing. Usually, my key exhibits are real-world cases where design-driven makeovers of landing pages have delivered major increases in conversion rates, such as this example:

In the interest of full disclosure — since my company sells software and services for such post-click marketing, these anecdotal examples are sometimes interpreted as a sales pitch specific to my firm. But we don’t have any proprietary lock on design skills. I’m the first to say that anyone can do this — good design principles can be adopted by any company that values having them.

Need more objective evidence?

Lance Loveday, the CEO of Closed Loop Marketing alerted me to the UX Fund, an investment experiment by the design firm Teehan+Lax. They took $50,000 and invested it in a portfolio of public companies that have demonstrated strong commitments to design and user experience:

The results show that 5 years later, this portfolio has grown by 123.39% — far outpacing the NASDAQ and the NYSE. In other words, at the market level, it pays to be design-driven.

The final excuse that’s held some marketers back is that the CMO doesn’t care about landing pages. They’re too tactical, in-the-weeds. So why invest in making them amazing, when you could, say, launch a high-profile, social media command center instead?

It’s true: any one landing page — or any one ad or email leading to it — is in the weeds. And you probably should have some kind of social media command center.

But these things are all connected to a bigger picture. Increasingly, that bigger picture has converged around two key CMO-level missions: (1) accountability for metric-driven marketing performance and (2) brand development and competitive differentiation through customer experience (CX) management.

CMO.com recently published 10 Great Expectations: What CEOs Want From Their CMOs that emphasizes these two missions. And so it goes from the CEO to the CMO to you. (With more or fewer layers in between, depending on your job title.)

Landing pages (or, more broadly, post-click marketing experiences) address these missions in the top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) and middle-of-the-funnel (MoFu) interactions across display, email, search and social marketing.

What happens after a respondent clicks? That is often the first critical touchpoint for customer experience. If you can’t impress and intrigue your audience after the click, why should they think you’ll do better after the sale?

Directly tied to these experiences, conversion rates for primary actions (e.g., leads, purchases, subscriptions) and secondary actions (e.g., social conversions via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+) are the quintessential metrics for marketing performance measurement.

It’s with these metrics that the value of design can be quantitatively proven in your own business. Before you champion a company-wide stampede to poach designers from Apple, start with a few modest post-click experiences. No need to make new hires out of the gate — work with a freelance designer to brainstorm better ways of presenting your value proposition to those click-throughs. A/B test these new ideas as challengers to your current landing pages.

When you report to the CMO, you can skip the landing page optimization jargon and talk to what really matters: how you’re improving customer experiences with better design and the metrics you have in place to prove it.

Yes, any one experience is in the weeds. But the collection of all the experiences you deliver to prospects and customers — and the operational capabilities you put in place to deliver them effectively — is at the very top of the C-suite’s priorities.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Conversion Science

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