In this article, I will share a new formula and Landing Page Test Calculator that will tell you how many test versions your landing page can support, and therefore which test methodology is right for you.

Test everything

Marketing Sherpa research shows that testing your landing pages can improve conversion rates by 40% or more. Think about it: getting 40% more conversions for the same spending is a lot smarter than spending 40% more!

Michael Egan of Yahoo! Search Marketing further emphasizes the value of testing, even for the best marketers:

It’s hard to argue that Tiger Woods is pretty darn good at what he does. But even he is not perfect. Imagine if he were allowed to hit four balls each time and then choose the shot that worked the best. Scary good.

That’s the value of testing.

Too Many Tests?

There are some great high-end software tools on the market to make it easier for marketers to create landing page tests and measure results. Perhaps the best known are Offermatica and Google Website Optimizer. My company, Marketo, provides software that helps marketers both create and test landing pages.

The high-end tools promote the ability to test multiple elements at one time. Google Website Optimizer creates a different test "recipe" for each and every possible combination, while Offermatica uses the Taguchi method to reduce the number of recipes. The argument in favor of multivariate testing is that testing multiple things at once results in faster overall learning since each conversion yields insight into more than one test element. Also, it can provide insight into how different elements interact to improve conversion.

For example, say you are testing the headline, image, caption, call to action, and form (five elements) and each element has four test variants. Using Google Website Optimizer, this would create a total of 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 = 625 test variants. Using a Taguchi test array might reduce the number of recipes down to 10 or 20 versions.

Reducing your test variants to ten is great, especially if you have a high-volume website that generates hundreds of conversions a day. However, it is still too many for any site that would not be considered "high volume."

How Many Tests Can You Run?

To understand this, we need something that tells us how many tests a given landing page can support. The Landing Page Test Calculator lets you enter how many conversions your landing page gets per day and returns the number of test versions you can support.

The calculator uses the following formula (see Landing Page Testing – The Ultimate Guide to Test Statistics for a derivation and more):

Where

• T = number of tests you can have

• D = number of days to get results (e.g., 14 days)
• a = resolution of test, as a % of p (e.g., 25%)
• p = your average expected response rate (e.g., 10% conversion rate)
• R = responses / conversions per day for this landing page (e.g., 20 per day)
• z_a = confidence level z-value (use 1.2816 for 80% confidence)
• z_ß = confidence of detecting a real result (use 0.84 for 80%)

We can also calculate a "rule of thumb" by making some simplifications. Using typical values such as a=25%, p=10%, z_a =1.28, and z_ß =0.841, the formula gives T = 0.0077 x D x R. Divide D by 7 to turn it into W (weeks). This gives T = 0.052 x W x R. Now, 0.052 is almost the same as 1/20, so simplifying gives the following rough formula:

# Test Versions = (Responses per Day / 20) x (# Weeks In Test)

In other words, to get the number of landing page versions you can confidently test, take the number of conversions your page gets per day and divide it by 20. Then take your testing period in weeks. Multiply the two results together, and you’ll estimate the number of test versions that your page can support.

For example, assume your landing page gets R=20 conversions each day. How many landing page test versions can you run if you want significant results within 2 weeks (W=2)? Plugging this into the rough formula gives 2 x 20 / 20 = 2, meaning you can test two versions and get significant results within two weeks.

Be careful not to over-test

So far, so good. But how long will it take to get valid results if you have 8 test versions and get 20 conversions per day? Entering this into the Landing Page Test Calculator gives 52 days (which is probably longer than most marketers are willing to wait for results).

Worse, even 20 conversions per landing page per day is higher than most small- and mid-size companies get. At Marketo, I spend about $100 a day on one of my ad groups. The landing page has a great conversion rate (17%), but even this page only gets about five conversions a day (e.g., $20 per conversion). If I wanted to test 10 versions, I’d have to wait 239 days (or at least 87 if I’m willing to accept Type II errors). Instead, I test only two versions—one champion and one challenger—at a time and act on the results every 18 days.

Summary

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a fan of multivariate approaches to testing for sites that can support those volumes. Further, doing any testing is more important than arguing about what kind of testing to use. The trick is to pick the right approach for the volumes your landing pages receive. To help, here’s a table that tells you how many test versions you can support, given your test period and your conversions per day.

What this means is that high-volume pages near the bottom right-hard corner of this table can and should use multivariate testing to test 5 or more variants at a time. However, landing page tests that don’t support more than 5 variants at a time will be better off with a more straightforward approach such as A/B testing.

Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve marketing accountability. Jon’s blog, Modern B2B Marketing, explores best practices in business marketing, ranging from pay-per-click management to lead nurturing to marketing accountability. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Passing these early stage inquiries to sales only serves to annoy the buyer (who doesn’t want to speak with a sales person yet) and to hurt the relationship between sales and marketing (since sales reps don’t want to waste their time on leads that are not in an active buying cycle).

Of course, there will always be some leads that are truly “hot,” so B2B marketers need a way to find the hot leads and pass them to sales before a competitor contacts them or they go cold. At the same time, the majority of inquiries will require further lead nurturing before they become sales ready, so marketers also need the ability to know when to try to nudge the prospect to the next stage and when to pull back and give the prospect some space.

Enter lead scoring

This is where lead scoring comes in. Lead scoring is the process of determining a prospect’s level of interest in your solution (engagement), as well as your interest in a prospect (demographics targeting). When used effectively, lead scoring means you will pass fewer, but higher quality, leads to sales. By not wasting sales time on low quality leads, reps can focus on just the high quality leads—meaning wins rates and sales productivity go up. In fact, as little as a 10% increase in lead quality can generate a 40% increase in sales productivity. In a world where the sales department costs 20 or 30% of total revenue, this kind of improvement means a dramatic impact on the bottom line.

How can you use lead scoring to achieve this kind of benefit for your organization? Here are some practical tips you can use to get started with lead scoring today.

Define your ideal target

As I wrote in B2B Marketing: Blind Date to White Wedding, the job of building relationships with prospects has many parallels to the world of building relationships in the “real world” via dating. Just as in dating, you need to start by identifying your ideal target. You might decide that you are looking for a doctor between 35 and 40, in your geographic area, with his own practice and privileges at several hospitals. It would also be nice if he likes dogs, since you have two prize labradoodles. Over the course of your first couple of dates, your goal is to find the answers to these questions.

In B2B marketing, you must also identify (and document) your ideal target. However, unlike dating, you need to build consensus across the company—especially with sales—about your ideal target. This profile will typically include basic demographic and firmographic information such as company size (or other metrics to indicate potential deal size), industry, and job title or job role. The source of the lead can also tell you a lot about the quality of a lead (g.g., inquiries who click on a PPC ad are more likely to be hot than ones who came from a purchased list). Since you can’t always control who is going to respond to your demand generation programs (though good targeting can help), you can use lead scoring to float the top respondents to the top. Among other things, this can help your telequalification team know who to contact first.

The most common method for lead scoring is to use a basic points system. For instance, this might look something like:

• Lead source = PPC: +5

• Job Function = IT Manager or Director: +5
• Job Function = sales or account manager: -2
• In the US or Canada: +4
• More than 100 employees: +3
• Healthcare or pharmaceutical company: +3

Note that you don’t necessarily need to get all this information during the first visit. Remember, each additional field on a form reduces your conversion rate. Instead, just collect the basic information up front, and then buy the additional data or use “progressive profiling” to fill in the blanks. Progressive profiling uses smart forms to recognize existing contacts in your database. Forms are then automatically completed when the answer is already known so a longer form can be presented. This lets you learn about the prospect over time, just like in dating.

Identify BANT criteria

In addition to demographics and firmographics, it’s often important to identify where the prospect is in their buying cycle. This information is often called the “BANT” criteria, meaning Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. In other words, does the inquirer have money to spend, can they make the purchasing decision, do they have an identified need that will lead to a purchase, and will they be purchasing soon?

This type of information is notoriously difficult to collect via a basic online form (though that doesn’t stop many misguided companies from trying), but it usually works to have a basic telequalification process that tries to connect with early stage inquiries to collect this information directly.

Measure engagement and interest

As important as demographics and BANT criteria can be, there are serious limitations to relying on them alone. In particular, they tell you only how interested you are in the prospect—and nothing about how interested the prospect is in you. Just as in dating, unrequited interest usually ends badly.

What’s needed is the ability to measure prospect interest and engagement. This is done by tracking their behaviors and assigning a value to each one. For example;

• Clicks link in email: +3

• Completes form: +5
• Attends webinar: +10
• Visits product benefits page: +3
• Visits any company web or blog page: +1

You can also subtract points if a prospect’s engagement goes down. For example, if the prospect has visited the website in 30 days, then subtract 5 points. Over time, this simple approach to lead scoring is great way to find which prospects are really engaging with your brand, and which ones aren’t.

Bringing it together

You can combine all these ideas into a single unified lead score, which is the simple sum across all the demographics and behavioral scores. For example, a total of 25 might determine a “warm” lead, while a 65 is “hot.”

However, you may want to create more than one category of score. For example, consider separating the score into “fit” and “engagement” categories. That way, you can separate the ones that are highly engaged but not a fit for your company, as well as the ones you really want to sell to but are not yet engaged.

Also, companies with multiple product lines may want to create separate scores for each major category, so you know which product the buyer will be most interested in based on lead source and behaviors. Finally, don’t forget that for B2B companies, the average sales cycle involves interacting with somewhere between six to 21 individuals in the buying company. Therefore, if you start seeing multiple contacts from the same company, that alone is another sign of engagement. So, you might want to increase the score for each of the leads up by a certain amount, as well as tracking a “company score” that is the sum of scores across all contacts in the company.

Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of B2B marketing software that automates lead management processes including lead nurturing and lead scoring. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Shorter forms reduced cost per conversion by $10.67

For context, my company provides on-demand marketing software including lead management and landing page optimization. One of my jobs is to generate qualified leads for the sales team by sourcing prospects using Google AdWords (as well as other channels) and nurturing the prospects until they are qualified leads. In this sense, my job is similar to that of any other business-to-business marketer.

I have a variety of ad groups, but for now let’s focus on the one that talks about my company’s ability to create landing pages with no code or IT involvement. In general, this ad group performs quite well. Across the 160 keywords in the group (including various match types, misspellings, synonyms, and so on) the average CTR is 5.15%, position is 3.7, CPC is $4.18, and conversion rate is 12.5%. This yields about three conversions a day at an average cost per conversion of $33.43.

For this ad group I used the landing page testing capabilities of our software to send the clicks to one of three different landing pages. Here’s a screenshot of one of the three:

The only difference between the three pages is the form. As we’ve all heard before, simple forms convert better, but the question is, how much better? Is the extra information worth the reduced conversion rate? Are certain types of information more costly in terms of conversion rate? I decided to use a landing page testing to find out.

First, I had to determine how many test versions I could have. As I wrote in Landing Page Testing: How Much Is Too Much?, it’s easy to create tests that are too complicated to achieve statistical significance in a timely fashion. So, I used the Landing Page Test Calculator to calculate that this ad group could support three test versions in the time I wanted to run the test.

Next, I created three different forms, appropriately named "short form" with five fields, "medium form" with seven fields, and "long form" with nine fields, and used these on three different versions of my landing page.

Finally, I let the system automatically rotate between the three versions and report the results in terms of conversions. Here’s what I found:

• Short Form: Conversion rate 13.4%, cost per conversion $31.24

• Medium Form: Conversion rate 12.0%, cost per conversion $34.94
• Long Form: Conversion rate 10.0%, cost per conversion $41.90

The difference in the cost per conversion between the short and medium forms is $3.70, between the medium and long forms is $6.96, and between the short and long forms is $10.67. One way to interpret this is that each additional piece of information costs $1.85, and that asking for a phone number (the most invasive of all the fields) costs more than $5.00. At these prices, the conclusion was obvious: keep only the short form and turn off the other two versions.

As much as my sales team and I would like some of that information, it is not worth paying that much for these extra fields. Instead, we just needed to find a different way to get it. Fortunately, this type of information is available from a variety of data cleansing and augmentation vendors, usually for as little as $1.00 for all the information you need.

Landing page metadata improved quality score

Another question I wanted to test was "What impact does the metadata of the landing page have on determining quality score"? To figure this out, I used my "lead management" ad group. To begin, I created a targeted ad and landing page that focused on the concept of lead management and offered a free lead management eBook. A sample text ad was:

Here’s what the landing page looked like:

Clearly, this page is all about lead management, but I left the page metadata (title, keywords, and description tags) generic. Based on this, when this ad group was brand new, Google assigned the following quality scores:

Next, I updated the page metadata (set the title tag to "Lead Management Best Practices") but did not change any other element of the ad group or landing page. And you know what? It turns out just this small change had a real impact on the quality scores. Here’s what they looked like a few days later:

For most words, the minimum bids went from $0.15 or $0.20 down to $0.10. Interestingly, the only word that didn’t get a quality score improvement was "prospect management", which makes sense since I didn’t include that term in the title or description tags for the page. Perhaps that term would work better in its own ad group.

The implication of this is that each ad group should have its own landing page, specifically targeted to the keywords in that ad group. Even if the content on the page is the same or similar, just tweaking the metadata can have a positive impact on quality score.

Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of marketing software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve accountability. Contact Jon at jon@marketo.com. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Everything that comes in between is the interesting part. You’re learning about each other: what you like to do, the things he doesn’t eat, the stuff she does on Saturdays. And you’re discovering the things that you do well together.

It’s no different when it comes to B2B marketing.

You need to deepen your relationship with prospects over time, interacting in a variety of settings, learning more about each other’s needs and capabilities while progressing seamlessly from one interaction to the next. And you need to know when to commit more resources to the relationship, as well as when to pull back and give the prospect some space.

As in life, B2B marketing can be described in five stages:

• The introduction

• The first date
• Dating
• The proposal
• The wedding

The introduction

The introduction is the first time your future betrothed hears of you. It is up to your friend, online profile, or matchmaker to make you seem interesting and attractive. You don’t have direct control over the introduction, but the more you can do to influence it, the better.

Discover your ideal prospect. The first step should be to determine your ideal prospect. Just as you know you like tall, dark, and handsome, you should also know that the best prospects for your products and solutions are companies in the United States with 100 or more employees, in the pharmaceutical and healthcare verticals. It’s not usually this simple, but having an idea of what your ideal prospect looks like will help you focus your marketing. If you know that tall, dark, and handsome is often at your alma mater’s tailgate parties, you’ll probably want to be there, early and often.

Build your brand with thought leadership. Brand matters because B2B buyers are still people, and emotions impact economic decision-making. B2B buyers are overwhelmed with choices and information—more than any buyer could evaluate rationally. This means that no matter how disciplined a buying process is, emotional brand impressions do influence vendor selection. One way B2B companies can build their brand is by helping buyers research early in the sales cycle, demonstrating they are trusted advisers who understand the prospect’s problems. By using thought leadership to engage prospects early, you build awareness and increase your chances that the prospect will respond to future demand generation efforts.

The first date

The first date is all about making a good first impression. Don’t come on too strong or you’ll scare your prospect away. And don’t talk only about yourself. Use the first date as an opportunity to learn more about your prospect’s wants and needs, as well as to share some relevant information about yourself.

In B2B marketing, this means you should deliver some form of premium content that is worth registering for. While thought leadership content should influence and guide people before they are in a formal buying cycle, the content here should be targeted to those who are just beginning to look for solutions, such as self-running video demos and customer case studies. Either way, they should be short and to the point. You’re trying to make a good first impression.

Dating

In the B2B marketing world, the dating process is called lead nurturing, defined as the process of building a relationship with qualified prospects who are not yet sales-ready, regardless of budget, authority, or timing—and of ensuring a clean hand-off to sales at the right time.

Your prospect has shown at least some interest in you. You don’t want to ruin a good first impression by calling too often or asking for too much commitment too soon. Instead, develop the relationship by sharing additional information at the right time. If tall, dark, and handsome responds to your overtures, you want to talk to him and try to gather more information: Is he single? Is he interesting? In B2B relationships, it’s much the same: make offers of more information at respectable intervals and determine the level of interest at each stage. The goal, of course, is to date exclusively.

Two tips:

Share relevant third party information. You don’t need to create all the lead nurturing content yourself. You can demonstrate how well you understand each prospect’s wants and needs by sharing relevant third party content with them. This can be as simple as emailing a news article and saying "Based on our conversation last week, I thought you’d find this interesting."

Make it personal. Remember, the goal of dating is to build a relationship with a real person. B2B buyers are people, so the human touch matters. Lead nurturing is a conversation, not a series of disjointed campaigns. Personalize email responders and landing pages. Make sure each step connects with the prior one. And except for webinar invitations, don’t make the same offer twice in one email flow.

The proposal

When creating your ideal customer, marketing and sales must work together to determine the best indicators of success, in terms of what the customer looks like (demographics, etc.). During this discussion, you should also determine the lead score that results in a sales-ready lead. For instance, if a prospect fit your demographic target, clicked on one of your pay per click ads and watched a short demo, then downloaded an eBook from your email follow-up, you might consider him to be moderately qualified (a 7 out of 10, for instance). But if he then attended a webinar from an invitation you sent and went to the "pricing" section of your website, you might consider him a 9 out of 10, which tells you that he’s ready for a contact by your sales team. Your sales team would then go to work (with your help, of course).

The wedding

The deal. The close. The win. Ultimately, making the sale is up to your sales team, but by implementing a sound nurturing and scoring process, you have helped them by establishing a relationship and positioning your company as a leader with the prospect.

The tools

Just as a nice haircut and a manicure prepare you for that first date, every marketer should prepare for that introduction. You’ll need easy to use tools to help you nurture leads, including email, landing pages, forms, and lead scoring.

Triggered emails. Send a series of emails as part of a drip marketing campaign, or triggered based on specific prospect activities. Each email offers a document (or webinar, or trial software, etc.) that helps move your target along in their decision-making process.

Custom landing pages. Don’t forget that custom landing pages can increase conversion rates by up to 48% during your lead nurturing as well as your lead generation activities. You only have eight seconds to get their attention, so use bullets, short forms, and no external navigation. And have only one call to action!

Smart forms. Why use the same form with the same fields over and over? Just like you wouldn’t ask your date for his or her name every time you see them, you shouldn’t ask for contact information again and again. Smart forms recognize known visitors and can fill in the fields you already know. Since you don’t have to ask for this, ask for other info, such as company size, time until decision, etc. Building the profile over time will help you in scoring the lead.

Lead scoring. Knowing which pages your prospects visit on your site can be very beneficial to determining their interest as well as their level of engagement. Being able to connect anonymous visits to actual prospects? Priceless.

Automate and measure. As busy marketers, we need to automate the everyday tasks of building and managing lead generation and lead nurturing campaigns. We also need to more objectively score leads according to their company demographics, as well as their activities on our websites, landing pages, emails, and other campaigns. And a single lead source doesn’t cut it when lead nurturing. It’s great to know where we first encountered the prospect, but knowing what happens between that first meeting and closing the sale is imperative in these days of marketing accountability.

Finally, as you work through the nurturing process, you’ll probably discover that some of the assumptions you made are incorrect; for instance, that downloading a particular white paper means that they are close to buying or that sending a particular email would elicit a good response. Don’t forget that lead nurturing—and marketing in general—is constantly changing. You’ll want to stay flexible and be ready to change your lead nurturing process as you experiment with new tactics and learn what works.

Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of marketing software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve accountability. Contact Jon if you want to learn more or sign up to participate in a free beta of Marketo’s lead management software. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Hello Sarah, my name is Brian, and I’m your sales rep from Widgets Inc. I noticed you recently clicked one of our ads and registered to download our paper “10 Ways to Better Profits through Widgets.” I’m calling to see if you have any questions… You haven’t read it yet? Oh, OK. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions anyway? Do you have a Budget approved to buy widgets? Are you the Decision Maker? When do you expect to purchase a Widget solution?…. Oh, I see, you’re just researching right now. OK, I’ll call back next month. Bye!

Most of these questions are entirely inappropriate at this stage of Sarah’s buying process (and a little rude if Sarah is a gatekeeper but not the final decision maker). As a result, Sarah is left with a negative impression of the company.

At the same time, Brian is compensated for driving revenue this quarter, so this lead is useless to him. As a result, he’ll be more likely to ignore the next marketing lead he receives. Lastly, unless Widgets Inc. has a good process for recycling Sarah back into marketing, she may never hear from the company again and will end up buying from a competitor.

Unfortunately, search engine marketing makes this problem worse, not better. As today’s customers increasingly use online channels to research purchases, Marketing meets prospects earlier than ever in the buying process. Ironically, this means the success of search engine marketing has actually increased friction between Sales and Marketing!

Lead management to the rescue

The fundamental issue is that Sales executives don’t care about raw leads. They wants winnable opportunities in their pipeline. This means they care more about quality (defined as likely to drive revenue this or next quarter) than quantity.

In response, companies should use lead management to cross the chasm between the time marketing first captures a lead and the time a prospect is ready to engage with a sales representative. Lead management requires the following capabilities:

• Lead scoring to identify when prospects are ready for sales

• Lead nurturing to build relationships with qualified prospects who are not yet sales ready
• Lead distribution to pass the customer to the right sales channel seamlessly (and to recycle the lead back into marketing if necessary)

Lead scoring

Lead scoring is the process of using explicit demographic information and implicit behavioral information to identify which leads are ready to engage with sales, which are disqualified, and which require further nurturing.

A survey in RainToday.com’s report, “What’s Working In Lead Generation,” found that for most companies, only 10-30% of marketing-generated leads were sales-ready. Respondents also reported an average of 25% of leads should be disqualified, but that the remaining 50% require “further nurturing.”

You can identify which category your leads fall into with lead scoring. Lead scoring should use three types of information:

• Explicit information is the information the prospect gives you when he fills out one of your online forms. It can include company size, buyer role, industry, and timeline. The closer this is to your the ideal customer profile(s), the higher the score. (Explicit information can also include any data you purchase about the prospect to augment their lead record.)

• Implicit information is everything you can collect by observing lead behavior. It can include lead source info (some sources and offers drive better leads) as well as behavioral or activity-based information, such as email opens and clicks, visits to high value web content (HVWC) such as your pages with pricing information, and additional searches with more exact keywords.
• Time reflects the fact that leads go stale with age, so a brand new lead is hotter than an older lead, and leads with recent activity are more valuable than ones with older activity. (This is the concept of “Recency” in Recency-Frequency-Monetary, aka RFM, analysis used by database marketers.)

A key value of implementing a lead scoring system is that it forces Sales and Marketing to formalize the way they define the potential value of leads and when a lead is ready to be distributed to sales. This process alone is critical to building sales-marketing alignment.

However, it is important to recognize that lead scoring needs to be a dynamic process. Depending on your market conditions, you will want to modify definitions and move the needle dynamically to meet your company’s current needs.

Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of using the Web, e-mail, phone, social media, and other online and offline channels to build relationships with qualified prospects who are not yet sales ready.

Lead nurturing is not just sending a monthly email newsletter to your entire database, or calling prospects every few weeks to see if they are ready to buy yet. It is your opportunity to build a relationship with a real person and progressively understand more about his needs. It is about demonstrating the value your company can provide by showing the prospect how he might be treated as a customer. The end goal is to stay within the buyer’s awareness so that when he is ready to speak with a sales person, your company is an obvious choice.

Beware: Many demand generation applications will let you design complicated programs that in theory automate the entire process, but in reality leave you with something that’s difficult to change and adapt without additional professional services. You can’t predict future challenges and opportunities, so make sure your marketing programs can adapt as you review results and evolve goals.

Lead distribution

When it is time to pass the lead to sales, a few best practices can make all the difference between success and failure.

• Give sales detailed information to ensure a seamless hand-off. Don’t just toss the lead over the wall and leave it up to the sales rep to create a continuous experience for the customer. Give sales email templates and call scripts to guide them during their initial contact with the lead, and indicate which product the customer is most likely to be interested in based on his responses to date.

• Track sales follow-up and recycle leads as appropriate. Since lead scoring can never be perfect, make sure sales has a process for recycling leads back to marketing that turn out not to be sales ready. Also, to help ensure follow-up, report on which leads get NO activity and aren’t being touched by sales, and try to make sure sales management looks at those reports.
• Let sales tell you which leads are good. Talk to sales to close the loop on lead quality, and use that information to refine your lead scoring criteria.

What’s the value?

Prospects who are nurtured before being passed to sales tend to buy more, require less discounting, and have shorter sales cycles than prospects who bought but were not nurtured. Companies that use lead scoring pass fewer leads to sales, which means greater sales efficiency, but since the leads are higher quality, win rates and revenue can actually increase. And, these companies have better alignment between marketing and sales, which means marketing actually is valued and gets the respect it deserves.

Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of affordable, easy-to-use marketing automation software. Contact Jon if you want to learn more or sign up to participate in a free beta of Marketo’s lead management software. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

In this article, I will share a new formula and Landing Page Test Calculator that will tell you how many test versions your landing page can support, and therefore which test methodology is right for you.

Test everything

MarketingSherpa research shows that testing your landing pages can improve conversion rates by 40% or more. Think about it: getting 40% more conversions for the same spending is a lot smarter than spending 40% more!

Michael Egan of Yahoo! Search Marketing further emphasizes the value of testing, even for the best marketers:

It’s hard to argue that Tiger Woods is pretty darn good at what he does. But even he is not perfect. Imagine if he were allowed to hit four balls each time and then choose the shot that worked the best. Scary good.

That’s the value of testing.

Too many tests?

There are some great high-end software tools on the market to make it easier for marketers to create landing page tests and measure results. Perhaps the best known are Offermatica and Google Website Optimizer. My company, Marketo, provides software that helps marketers both create and test landing pages.

The high-end tools promote the ability to test multiple elements at one time. Google Website Optimizer creates a different test "recipe" for each and every possible combination, while Offermatica uses the Taguchi method to reduce the number of recipes. The argument in favor of multivariate testing is that testing multiple things at once results in faster overall learning since each conversion yields insight into more than one test element. Also, it can provide insight into how different elements interact to improve conversion.

For example, say you are testing the headline, image, caption, call to action, and form (five elements) and each element has four test variants. Using Google Website Optimizer, this would create a total of 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 = 625 test variants. Using a Taguchi test array might reduce the number of recipes down to 10 or 20 versions.

Reducing your test variants to ten is great, especially if you have a high-volume website that generates 100s of conversions a day. However, it is still too many for any site that would not be considered "high volume".

How many tests can you run?

To understand this, we need something that tells us how many tests a given landing page can support. The Landing Page Test Calculator lets you enter how many conversions your landing page gets per day and returns the number of test versions you can support.

The calculator uses the following formula (see Landing Page Testing – The Ultimate Guide to Test Statistics for a derivation and more):

Where:

• T = number of tests you can have

• D = number of days to get results (e.g. 14 days)
• a = resolution of test, as a % of p (e.g. 25%, for example)
• p = your average expected response rate (e.g. 10% conversion rate)
• R = responses / conversions per day for this landing page (e.g. 20 per day)
• z_a = confidence level z-value (use 1.2816 for 80% confidence)
• z_ß = confidence of detecting a real result (use 0.84 for 80%)

We can also calculate a "rule of thumb" by making some simplifications. Using typical values such as a=25%, p=10%, z_a =1.28, and z_ß =0.841, the formula gives T = 0.0077 x D x R. Divide D by 7 to turn it into W (weeks). This gives T = 0.052 x W x R. Now, 0.052 is almost the same as 1/20, so simplifying gives the following rough formula:

# Test Versions = (Responses per Day / 20) x (# Weeks In Test)

In other words, to get the number of landing page versions you can confidently test, take the number of conversions your page gets per day and divide it by 20. Then take your testing period in weeks. Multiply the two results together, and you’ll estimate the number of test versions that your page can support.

For example, assume your landing page gets R=20 conversions each day. How many landing page test versions can you run if you want significant results within 2 weeks (W=2)? Plugging this into the rough formula gives 2 x 20 / 20 = 2, meaning you can test two versions and get significant results within two weeks.

Be careful not to over-test

So far, so good. But how long will it take to get valid results if you have 8 test versions and get 20 conversions per day? Entering this into the Landing Page Test Calculator gives 52 days (which is probably longer than most marketers are willing to wait for results).

Worse, even 20 conversions per landing page per day is higher than most small- and mid-size companies get. At Marketo, I spend about $100 a day on one of my ad groups. The landing page has a great conversion rate (17%), but even this page only gets about five conversions a day (e.g. $20 per conversion). If I wanted to test 10 versions, I’d have to wait 239 days (or at least 87 if I’m willing to accept Type II errors). Instead, I test only two versions—one champion and one challenger—at a time and act on the results every 18 days.

Summary

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a fan of multivariate approaches to testing for sites that can support those volumes. Further, doing any testing is more important than arguing about what kind of testing to use. The trick is to pick the right approach for the volumes your landing pages receive. To help, here’s a table that tells you how many test versions you can support, given your test period and your conversions per day.

What this means is that high-volume pages near the bottom right-hard corner of this table can and should use multivariate testing to test 5 or more variants at a time. However, landing page tests that don’t support more than 5 variants at a time will be better off with a more straightforward approach such as A/B testing.

Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve marketing accountability.The Paid Search column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

I spend my days helping B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve marketing accountability, so naturally I got to thinking about how they could take advantage of mobile search in their demand generation efforts. My conclusion: mobile search (especially mobile paid search) is basically irrelevant for most business to business marketers.

Take a breath

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as excited about the explosive growth in mobile devices as the next guy. And there are plenty of reasons to be excited: almost 3 billion of them worldwide. Plus, consumers tend to feel a stronger connection with their mobile device than they do with their computer.

Mobile is clearly the killer application for local marketing. Plus, mobile devices bring new ways to interact with consumers, which leads to creative options to build brand and engagement. How exciting is it that we can watch YouTube and TV on our mobile devices?

Net-net, I’m bullish on mobile marketing in general. Even in B2B, there are some exciting opportunities for mobile marketing. For example, Marketing Sherpa found that 64% of B2B decision makers read their email on mobile devices. This means that every B2B marketer must be designing and testing their lead nurturing emails for how they work on mobile devices, especially the BlackBerry.

There are also some interesting opportunities in mobile for B2B publishers—and as a result, B2B brand advertising as well. Every B2B publication should ensure that its content is optimized for mobile devices, and brand advertisers can use mobile display ads to increase awareness. (Just don’t expect mobile browsers to click through very often.) As social networks make their way into business-to-business, mobile will play a role as well.

But what about mobile search?

The promise of mobile search is access to information whenever and wherever you need it, not just if you happen to be at your desk. For consumers, this is incredibly powerful. Personally, not a day goes by where I don’t use Google Mobile Maps on my Treo to get directions or look up an address or phone number.

According to iCrossing’s report, How America Searches – Mobile, a mobile searcher’s top priority is his or her immediate needs. The most popular searches are maps and directions, weather, and local information, followed by news, entertainment, sports, and finance.

But consider how B2B buyers use search. As I’ve discussed before, B2B search is quite different from B2C search. The majority of B2B buyers use search early in their buying process, typically a few weeks to a few months before the actual purchase. By far, their intent is to research a industry, product, or service.

This is typically not something the buyer does when he or she is out and about. When’s the last time you thought "I really need to put together a short list of vendors in the application integration space" while you were walking down the street? This is especially true since most mobile phones are personal devices; even if the "prosumer" uses the phone at work, when he is out of the office he won’t want business advertising intruding on his personal life.

Also, mobile searchers tend to use fewer keywords (three max), making it harder to target the more complex keywords in B2B. These keywords just doesn’t match how people use mobile search.

Even if the buyer were to use their mobile device to search for a B2B keyword, the way the searcher interacts with the browser is very different. On the computer, the searcher will click on multiple links as they look for the most relevant information; on the mobile phone, the searcher clicks on one link. Again, this makes it difficult for B2B marketers to leverage mobile search as a demand generation tool.

Perhaps most importantly, consider the goal of B2B search marketing. Because search happens early in the buying cycle, most B2B marketers want to use search marketing to capture leads in this early phase so they can nurture those leads until they are ready to speak with a sales rep. This means that the landing page is a critical component of a B2B search process —and the lead capture form is one of the most important pieces of the page.

But how should the B2B landing page adapt to mobile? It’s nearly impossible to capture a lead from a mobile landing page since almost no searcher will go through the effort to fill out a form on their mobile device. My tips for a B2B mobile landing page: ask only for an email address, and be sure to include your phone number (or even better, a custom phone number tied to the campaign) since mobile phones usually have "click to call" functionality.

I hope I’m wrong

I would love to be wrong about this. I hope that as technology evolves, mobile devices will get better (better screens, voice recognition, etc) and B2B mobile search will become a possibility. I’d love to hear examples of B2B advertisers who are successfully using mobile search, especially mobile paid search. I’d also love to see hear your thoughts about what makes a good B2B landing pages for mobile —I haven’t been able to find any. I welcome your comments.

Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve marketing accountability. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

The goal of search engine marketing is to get your pages to show up when target customers make relevant searches. As search engines get better at finding relevant content and preventing SEO-spam, search engine marketing success comes not from tricks known to only a few, but from basic common sense.

These are the things I’ve learned about search engine marketing:

• Share links.

• Don’t spam people.
• Keep your ad groups organized and tidy.
• Match types and negative keywords are your friends.
• Don’t bid more than you can afford.
• Bidding for position is about ego, not lead generation.
• Traffic for traffic’s sake is pointless. Relevant traffic is what matters.

• Measure conversions, not clicks.
• What you say is as important as what you pay.
• The landing page doesn’t need to sell your product, it just needs to sell your offer.
• Every element of your landing page should sell or reassure the prospect.
• Don’t ask for more information than you need.
• Flush.
• Tests are hard, but important.
• Use web analytics.
• Quality matters.
• Protect people’s privacy.
• Give credit where credit is due.
• Play fair.
• Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
• When you go out in the world, watch out for click fraud, hold hands and stick together.
• Live a balanced life—learn some and think some and blog some and play and work every day some.

Everything we need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and SEO and SEM and basic manners. Pay per click and social media and Web 2.0.

Think what a better internet it would be if we all followed these rules. If everyone created quality content, shared relevant links, and regularly took some time off from online marketing. If spam wasn’t a problem and everyone had a policy to put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how high your page rank, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve accountability. Download Marketo’s new eBook, Building Effective Landing Pages. Jon’s blog, Modern B2B Marketing, explores best practices in business marketing, ranging from pay-per-click management to lead nurturing to marketing accountability. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

However, just because you are pressed for time doesn’t mean that you can just "set it and forget it" when it comes to PPC. I believe that with the right routines and an investment of just four hours a week, anyone can be on their way to optimizing their B2B pay per click campaigns.

Part 1 covered how to spend two hours a week to find your best performing ad groups and make them even better (put more wood on the fire). Here, in Part 2, I cover methods for finding—and fixing—your underperformers in the other two hours.

Block Two—Find and Fix Your Losers (2 Hours)

There are a variety of optimizations and improvements you can make to your campaign, depending on where each ad group is lacking. Here are some ways to find out where to focus your time.

Low click through rates (45 minutes). Having a low click through rate (CTR) is bad for two reasons. First, it means missed clicks and second, a low CTR hurts your quality score, so you need to bid higher to get the same position and clicks. Since your expected CTR varies by position, deciding what is low needs to be relative to how your keywords rank. To find the losers, sort your ad groups by position and look for any ad groups that stand out with CTRs lower than its neighbors. Using this method, pick one or two ad groups to work on each week.

A low CTR might be caused by your ads, your keywords, or both. For ads, do a search on Google for a few of your highest impression keywords and look to see if your ad stands out among the competition. Which ad would you click on? Would you click on yours? Do your ads have a strong enough call to action? Use testing to improve your ad, and consider experimenting with dynamic keyword insertion (which inserts your keyword into your ad headline and/or text to help make it look more relevant).

Next, look for keywords that get lots of impressions but have a low CTR. These are the ones that are dragging you down. Consider pulling the words into a new ad group so that you can write ads that are more targeted to those words. Also, if you are using broad match, perhaps your ads are showing up for irrelevant queries. This suggests you should switch to using phrase or exact match and/or you need to add negative keywords. To find potential negative keywords, enter the low-CTR keyword into your keyword tool and see what comes up. For example, if you enter SEM, a common abbreviation for Search Engine Marketing, you see that SEM also means Scanning Electron Microscope. This suggests that "-microscope" is a good negative word to add.

Poor conversion rates (45 minutes). Once you’ve gotten the click, you’ve already paid for it regardless of whether or not the prospect converts. So a low conversion rate literally means you are throwing your money away. It’s easy to find low conversion rate ad groups: simply sort by conversion rate and find the losers. (Just be careful to make sure you are looking at enough data; if the ad group doesn’t have at least 10 conversions, the calculated conversion rate won’t be statistically significant.)

Using this approach, pick one ad group to work on each week. Since the most important factor in conversions is the landing page, your goal should be to have (at least) one optimized landing page for every ad group. If you don’t have a custom page, create one. If you do, try to make it better. For tips on how to do this, see Better B2B Landing Pages—A Case Study.

Also, make sure that the clicks you are getting are the right kind of clicks, i.e. ones where the keyword the prospect is using is actually relevant to your landing page. To do this, make sure that your match types and negative keywords are set properly, and that the call to action in your ads is attracting the kind of searchers you are looking for.

Very few impressions (15 minutes). In some cases, you have ad groups and/or keywords that you believe should work, but that get too few impressions. Pick one ad group a week that you think should be getting more impressions, and figure out why it’s not. It could be that it only has low-volume words that people don’t actually use when searching. This is not uncommon when a company uses their own jargon when picking keywords instead of researching how their customers talk about their needs. In this case, try using your favorite keyword tool to add additional keywords to the ad group.

A more subtle cause can be that you have a duplicate or overlapping keyword (perhaps in another ad group). For example, if you bid on "network security" and "network security software" but your bid for "network security" is much higher, then it’s likely that "network security software" won’t get any impressions. If you have absolutely 0 impressions, it could mean you have a negative keyword that’s preventing your keyword from showing up. Finally, it could simply be that your bids are not high enough to get sufficient impressions, which can happen with very competitive words. See the next point for tips on what to do about that. Regardless, the AdWords "Ads Diagnostic" tool (found under "Tools") can be help you to pinpoint the reason for low or no impressions.

Very low positions (15 minutes). Sometimes, especially for competitive words, you simply get outbid and your ad doesn’t even show up on the first page of results—which pretty much counts as not showing up at all. This can be frustrating, especially when you believe (or worse, your boss or CEO believes) that you should be showing up for those keywords.

There are two ways to respond to this. The first is simply to bid higher until your ads do show up. If you take this approach, be sure to measure the results meticulously—you can easily use up a significant fraction of your budget on a few high volume, expensive words. However, if the word is as important as you think it is, perhaps you can make the business case for the higher spend based on ROI or branding value.

The second (and I believe better) approach is to bid smarter by thinking of the words in your campaign like a portfolio of stocks. Your job when bidding is to allocate your spending across all your keywords in the way that will drive the best results. Mathematically, this is the point where the marginal return of spending more on any given word is the same across all your keywords (this is know as the "Pareto Optimum"). In other words, if you take $1 of monthly spending away from word A to give it to word B, you’ll lose more from A than you get from B. If you take this approach to bidding, then ultimately position doesn’t matter—what matters is finding the position where your marginal return is the same across keywords. (Clearly, finding this point is a complex calculation, but that’s where PPC bid management tools can help.)

Other optimizations to make

There are two other basic optimizations I recommend making. These are not weekly activities, but can be an important part of optimizing your B2B pay per click campaigns.

First, consider turning off the Content Network (Google AdSense), especially if you are budget constrained. Many B2B marketers get poor quality traffic from the Content Network, yet the clicks from the Content Network can use up 80% or more of their budget. I’ve seen this at some of Marketo’s clients, and the instant results from turning it off and letting the budget go to Google Search are dramatic. If you believe you should use the Content Network, I recommend creating a separate campaign for it. This lets you manage how much of your budget goes to it, and lets you write ads that are better suited for people who are browsing rather than searching.

Second, I recommend that you manage your PPC spending with bids, not budget. Using the AdWords budget control to manage spending can result in fewer clicks and higher cost per click, since the way that AdWords ensures you don’t exceed your budget is by limiting the number of times your ad is displayed (which limits clicks).

Conclusion

Many others have shared useful tips for optimizing pay per click campaigns. Here are some of my favorites:

• Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Pay-Per-Click Advertisers

• How to Lower Your AdWords Minimum Bid

• 5 Tips For Stagnant PPC Ad Groups

• Things You Shouldn’t Care About in PPC

I’m sure there are additional tips and best practices for quickly finding and fixing common pay per click problems. If you know of any, please use the comments to share any additional tips or resources.

Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of affordable, easy-to use-marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve accountability. Jon’s blog, Modern B2B Marketing, explores best practices in business marketing, ranging from pay-per-click management to lead nurturing to marketing accountability. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

This challenge is getting worse as the "program-to-people" ratio at B2B companies continues to grow and marketers are asked to do more with less staff. In this environment, how can a busy demand generation manager find the time to manage their pay per click campaigns on an ongoing basis?

For some companies in this situation, it makes sense to outsource their pay per click campaign management to an agency that will be able to spend the time required to optimize their campaigns. This is especially true if the company’s monthly pay per click spending is high enough to attract an agency’s attention and they can find an agency that specializes in the unique challenges faced by B2B pay per click.

But for other companies, the right answer for a variety of reasons is to manage their pay per click campaigns in-house, as part of the overall demand generation strategy. How can those marketers find the time to optimize their B2B pay per click campaigns?

Establish a routine

I believe that with the right routines in place, a B2B marketer can optimize their pay per click demand generation campaigns in just four hours a week. By following my routines, you can be confident that your PPC campaigns are getting better over time AND that you have most of the week left over to attend to all the other parts of your job.

The other plus of these routines is that you will learn which parts of your campaigns need attention and which are performing well. Over time this will develop into the intuition and confidence to know when your campaigns need a little more attention, and when you can take a week or two off from checking in.

Getting started

In order to follow the routines, I’m assuming that your campaigns are performing somewhat OK. Make sure that you are following the basic best practices of B2B pay per click marketing. For example, your ad groups should be tightly focused around a theme. Don’t mix multiple concepts together into the same group. If you have more than one concept in a group, split them out. Also, you should also be using targeted landing pages for each ad group. If you aren’t, you should be. See my prior article Four Steps to Better Business Leads From Search.

The other thing you need to get started is the right pay per click tool chest. At a minimum, make sure you are using some sort of conversion tracking. You may also want to invest in some pay per click software tools to help with bidding, keyword management and discovery, and perhaps landing page creation.

Routines to optimize B2B PPC in four hours a week

The routine breaks the week into 2 two-hour blocks, one focused on finding and improving your winners, the other on optimizing your poorly performing ad groups. In today’s column (Part 1), I’ll cover the first part, how to do even better with your winners. In Part 2, coming next month, I’ll give tips for finding and fixing common pay per click problems. It’s up to you whether you spread each block across two days or do both at the same time.

Part one – improve the winners (2 hours)

Begin by finding the areas where you are doing well. Although it’s not obvious, you can usually drive a bigger improvement in your overall results by putting more into your top performers than by spending time tweaking your poor performers.

Take a look at the performance statistics for one of your campaigns, and sort the results by descending number of Conversions. (For B2B advertisers, I recommend using the last 30 days of data, unless you have very high volumes.) These are the ad groups that are really driving your business. For each of these hot ad groups, here are some ways you can add more fuel to the fire.

Find New Keywords (60 min). Take the keywords in your winning groups that are performing well, and drill into them to find additional keywords. You can do this using Google’s Keyword Tool, or for more powerful capabilities, use the keyword management tool of your choice. Some tools can find and email new keywords to you automatically. Depending on what keywords are suggested, you will probably need to create new ad groups (and perhaps new landing pages) to get the best results from your new keywords.

Ad Testing (20 minutes). Get more rigorous about A/B testing on your ads. First, check to see which of your ads is performing best. Make that your "champion", get rid of any clear losers, and create new "challengers" that might beat the champion. This creates a continuous improvement process for your ads.

Two notes about ad testing. First, your ad serving should be set to rotate through the ads evenly so that you get fair results. Second, be careful not to over-test. This is especially true for B2B advertisers who may not have the same volumes as B2C companies. As a rule of thumb, you should have one ad for every 20 clicks your ad group gets per day. This will help ensure you get statistically valid results after about 1 week. You should always have a minimum of two ads, so if your ad groups gets less than 40 clicks a day you should wait longer to make decisions. (For example, if you get 10 clicks a day, then have two ads and pick your champion once a month.)

Landing Page Testing (20 minutes). Similarly, make sure you are continuously improving your landing pages through testing. Multivariate tools such as Google’s Website Optimizer are overkill for the needs of most B2B companies, especially since most B2B pay per click campaigns do not have the volumes of conversions required to get valid results from multivariate tests. Instead, good old-fashioned A/B testing will drive plenty of value for most B2B marketers. Try working on the landing pages for one ad group each week. Begin by creating a new Challenger by cloning your Champion landing page and changing something (e.g. the headline, the form, the offer, etc.). Next, create two copies of each text ad. Use the champion for the destination URL for one ad and the Challenger for the destination of the other. That way, you can easily see which landing page drives better conversions.

Bidding (20 min). Lastly, you can add fuel to top-performing groups by raising your bids, which should drive more traffic. Don’t over-use this tactic. Increasing bids is a "blunt-force" way to increase results – meaning it has its place, but it should be used only after you’ve followed the other steps. Also, it can be time-consuming to set and tune the bid for each word manually, so consider using bid management software to help you out.

Stay tuned for my column next month, "How To Optimize B2B Pay Per Click In Four Hours A Week, Part 2", in which I’ll share the routines for the other two hours each week. In the meantime, please comment to share any other tips you find useful.

Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of affordable, easy-to use-marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve accountability. Jon’s blog, Modern B2B Marketing, explores best practices in business marketing, ranging from pay-per-click management to lead nurturing to marketing accountability. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.