The broad modifier feature was rolled out in July 2010 in the U.S and was mostly aimed at scaling up those accounts not already using regular broad match type. Search marketers have to then build new broad keywords using “+” signs to effectively unlock the broad modifier feature.

Because it requires some time and effort, not all advertisers have actually implemented this feature – particularly those advertisers already using broad match type. Some of our clients reluctant to use standard broad match type did test broad modifier, and it turned out that it performed surprisingly well – with an incremental revenue volume up to 15% while maintaining efficiency on target.

The new matching behavior for exact and phrase match types announced on April 17th  (and just rolled out last week) is going one step further since it potentially impacts all advertisers by automatically updating the default matching behavior from standard exact and phrase matching to a more lenient matching behavior including plurals, misspellings, and other close variants.

In that sense, it can be seen as a logical sequel to the broad modifier feature. Advertisers have the option to opt out – however, most of them will allow the update to occur.

There has been a lot of speculation and skepticism about the latter one, as it seems it is just another way for Google to generate more ad revenue. Hence the question: what are the first takeaways a couple of days after the new matching behavior roll-out?

Where Can I See The Impact In AdWords?

While I couldn’t find any details in AdWords about those incremental queries corresponding to “plurals, misspellings and other close variants” in AdWords, you can now see that the “Other search terms” section shows impressions and clicks even for exact keywords:

In this particular case (a strong trademark keyword in exact match), we have measured an impressive 18% lift in impressions at a stable CTR. Conversions did follow with a slightly higher conversion rate and a slightly lower cost per order – not significantly though.

Overall Impact On Traffic & Conversion Volume

In this section, I will attempt to answer two questions: what is the average impact on traffic? And what is the average impact on conversion volume?

According to Google: “on average, the new matching behavior increased AdWords search clicks by 3%, with comparable CPCs”. Looking at 15 top brands managed through eSearchVision’s proprietary search query report, early findings show that clicks from queries not containing the actual keywords actually increased by 3.5/4.5% on average with comparable CPCs.

More specifically, the below graph shows that the percentage of clicks generated through exact and phrase without close variants has slightly decreased, while the percentage of “All Other Queries”, i.e. when the keyword is not included in the query, has increased from 23% on average the week before the roll-out up to roughly 26-29% the week after.

In the meantime, conversions have increased by 2.0/3.0% on average. However we can expect this number to go slightly up over time due to the post-click effect – since users who clicked over the last couple of days are likely to convert in the next couple of days or even weeks.

Main Takeaway

The new exact and phrase matching behavior seems relatively promising so far. As expected (and even a bit more than expected) we’re seeing more impressions and clicks at a stable CPC, as well as incremental conversions, even though conversions are not following as fast as the clicks for the time being.

As a result, search marketers no longer need to create additional keywords using the broad modifier feature. The new matching behavior seems to be doing pretty much the same job with no effort. Just keep an eye on search query performance and maybe add more negative exact and phrase keywords if you identify any poor performing or irrelevant queries since this roll-out.

Here, we’ll take a look at the very top of the funnel, to see how three different companies are handling early-stage interest on the same keyword phrase: “big data.”

With all the talk about big data these days, you can picture many people searching on this topic. Even though they’re probably not yet evaluating vendors at first, they may be open to educational materials provided by or sponsored by vendors — if those materials are truly useful, not fluff.

The top three ads when I did this search were from Oracle, SAS, and EMC. So let’s examine their landing pages in order.

Oracle’s Content-First Portal Strategy

Oracle’s ad promises “simplify and put your data to work.”

Their landing page is a deep-link into a topic portal page on their website. The top half includes a couple of paragraphs of introductory copy and links to a number of white papers from Oracle and industry analysts.

The bottom half includes context-specific links to relevant products within Oracle’s portfolio.

Unlike traditional lead generation tactics, which would require a registration to download white papers or analyst reports, Oracle makes the links to these materials freely available — just click to instantly open up the PDFs. Oracle weighs the brand marketing opportunity of distributing that content as more valuable than leads at that moment.

Of course, it can still track the “microconversions” of each of these downloads. That is very likely their primary performance metric on this page, and I expect it’s performing well.

For lead generation, Oracle offers a set of premium calls-to-action on the right column of the page: a webcast center, an online forum, and a big data summit in major cities — all requiring registration — as well as an offer to talk to Oracle on the phone.

Oracle is clearly betting that if you like the free content on the main part of the page, you’ll eventually be ready for these premium content options that convert you officially into a lead. That may not happen on your first visit — which is a risk if you end up being pulled into another vendor’s lead machine before returning.

But with good content, I think this content-first strategy is worth the risk and can be highly effective at this early stage of prospect exploration.

My only beef with this landing page is that it doesn’t do a very good job of maintaining “message match” with the ad.

With such a large collection of educational materials and so many different products presented as applicable to big data, the “simplify” promise doesn’t feel well addressed. This could be easily solved by tweaking the ad copy to more accurately reflect the “everything you wanted to know about big data” nature of the landing page.

SAS’s Traditional Lead Generation Strategy

The ad for SAS leads with “gain insights from big data” and promises respondents: “view white paper to learn more.”

Their landing page takes a more traditional lead generation approach: register to download a specific piece of premium content.

Here, they’re offering an independent survey report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, which I think is compelling. The image of the report in the upper right corner is a nice touch for making the offer tangible.

The registration step on the next page asks for a modest amount of information — name, email, organization, country, state — so I suspect their conversion rate is good.

This strategy gives respondents one clear, simple choice: here’s the best piece of content to start your education of big data with us. If the offer is compelling enough to win a conversion, SAS can then follow up with this lead using marketing automation — guiding and responding to their progress through later stages of the funnel.

Although I think the strategy here is a solid one, I would suggest several improvements to its execution.

First, the message match with the ad should be much tighter. The “gain insight” message from the ad is buried in the copy. The promised “white paper” is actually a survey report. I like the title in the landing page — harnessing a game-changing asset — so I’d try moving that out to the ad.

Instead of promising a white paper, promise an “independent report” — which may be more intriguing to early-stage prospects anyway.

For the registration, since their form on the next page is relatively short, I’d consider moving it on to the landing page. Maybe change the call-to-action from “register now” to “get the report now.”

At the bottom, their claim as the leader of business analytics software at the bottom of the page could probably be presented more powerfully with social proof in a more visual format. This is a great branding opportunity: use it to make a strong impression.

EMC’s Registration Required Portal Strategy

The ad from SAP says big data will “improve enterprise decision making” and offers a free case study.

The landing page is almost a hybrid of the previous two strategies: a portal page with multiple fulfillment items, but a short, on-page registration is required to access them.

If the advantage of a single-piece offer is simplicity, the advantage of a multi-piece offer such as this is choice. Respondents can self-selct the analyst report, white paper, or case study that intrigues them most. As long as one is sufficiently compelling, the chance of winning the conversion is good.

The downside to a multi-piece offer, however, is that it can lose focus, especially if the choices don’t have a clear narrative that relates them to each other.

In this case, EMC clearly has some terrific content, but I feel that this landing page diverges the most from message match with the ad. The emphasis of the page seems to be more on “scale out” instead of “decision making.”

The case study that I was promised is the last item on the page — below the fold for shorter browser windows — and sounds very specific to medical imaging.

I think the first fulfillment piece, the IDC analyst report, may be the best starting point for an early-stage prospect, especially before you know their role or their industry. The top part of the page could probably make a more cohesive presentation around that piece, while better connecting the dots with the ad. (The ad would need to offer to IDC analyst report instead of the case study.)

Also, a small but useful conversion optimization tip: try “Access These Materials Now” (or “Access This Report Now”) as the button call-to-action instead of “Submit.”

Which Strategy Is Best For You?

All of these strategies are viable. Which one is best depends on your solution, your brand, and most importantly, your audience. How does this early stage touch point relate to the rest of your marketing strategy deeper into the funnel?

This also seems like a great scenario for A/B testing. (Hint, hint.)

But whatever you do, please — please — keep an eye on message match with the ads from which you’re driving traffic.

The first point of being relevant to a respondent’s search is fulfilling the promises — explicit and implied — that your ad made to lure them to your landing page. At this early stage of the funnel, living up to your word is one of the best first impressions you can make.

All screenshots were taken by the author on May 7, 2012.

Advanced PPC managers should already know all of these features, but beginners and intermediate level Adwords users can definitely get some new inspiration and ideas from this list to boost up performance. In this article, I will highlight 10 features that I love and frequently use.

1.  Adwords Keyword Tool

The Keyword Tool is a great starting point when starting a new Adwords campaign.  This tool provides global and local monthly searches for the keywords you want. You easily know which keywords people are searching for the most, so you can include this in your campaigns. Also, you’ll find keywords that are not relevant for your products, so you can include these words as negatives.

2.  Insights for Search

With Insights for Search you can compare search volume patterns across different keywords, regions, time frames and categories. With this tool, you can compare e.g. how your brand is doing comparing to competitors. For example, if you would like to know what  the top searches and rising searches are for the US in the travel category, the tool also provides this information.

3.  Toggle Graph Options

This option is great for easily comparing one metric with another. For example, comparing avg. position to CTR, but also you can compare to the date range you select which is a great way to compare different periods and see how your campaigns are performing over time.

4.  Ad Scheduling

This feature you will find under the settings tab of a campaign:

The Ad Scheduling feature lets you bid more or less during certain days and hours. For example, you can see by using the segment options in Adwords (which I will discuss later) that on Monday between 08:00 – 12:00am, you are getting a lot of clicks and also some conversions, but the cost per conversion are way higher than your targets.

You may decide to bid lower between 08:00 – 12:00am on Monday, so you can bid higher on the more profitable days/times to increase conversions and your ROI.

5.  Diagnose Keywords

You can find the diagnose keywords under the Keyword Tab:

With the diagnose keywords, you can quickly filter on Ads that have critical issues and therefore are not showing.

6.  Custom Columns

The columns option lets you select the metrics that you would like to show in Adwords. Click on customize columns and you’ll see five topics to choose from depending on which level. You can easily add and/or remove columns. There is an easy drag and drop function to order the metrics just the way you like it.

7.  Filters

I definitely advise you to check out the filter option in Adwords if you haven’t used it before. It’s a great way to filter quickly on the metrics you select.

As above screenshot shows, the filter option is to the left of the columns option. You can apply filters on campaign, ad groups, ads and keyword level. For some filter inspiration, check out this great post.

8.  Download Report

In Adwords, you can easily download reports directly from the tab you are in. Simple click on  and the download & schedule report option will open.

You have the ability to choose between different formats. Also, you can include any segment you would like. If it’s a report you would like to receive weekly, use the Email and schedule option.

9.  Segment Options

Segment can give great insights as to what’s performing well in your Adwords campaign and what isn’t.

If you are running campaigns on Computers and Tablets, and you would like to know the performance on tablets, just click on segment and choose ‘Device’. You will see the results for Computers and Tablets seperated, so it’s easy to compare the performance of these different devices:

There are many other options like segmenting on day of the week, hour of the day or segmenting the ACE experiment you are running.

10.  Automate

Adwords has an automate function to create rules for campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords. If you have ten adgroups with your top products and you would like to have a minimum avg position of 2 for these groups, you can create a rule for this by selecting the adgroups and click on automate .

Your rule could look something like below:

If you use the automate function, be sure to monitor the results closely. Making rules can be a time saver, but if it’s not giving you the results according to your KPI’s, delete the rule and use manually bidding to achieve your goals.

Adwords is a playground of possibilities which keeps innovating with new features such as the newly released labels. Be sure to regularly visit the Adwords blog and Ad Innovations to keep up to date.

And if you have some spare time, dive into Adwords and play around.

Personas are different from demographics. Demographics tell you valuable things about ages and income brackets that you may or may not be able to influence on your campaigns. But personas tell you about motivations and behaviors that anyone of any income, ethnicity or age might have. Personas are based on how customers make decisions and what inspires them or drives them away.

Of course your products are aimed at a certain demographic. Most of the people who buy insurance, for example, are one kind of customer while those who buy apps to find the most active bar scene are another.

But do they make decisions based on “gut” feelings or tons of data? Do they grab whatever site is at the top of the Google results or spend a lot of time researching? Do they want content that’s just facts or do they want to feel like they know you a little before they give you their money?

Good questions. Personas can help, and because different PPC ads draw different searcher personas, your landing pages can speak specifically to that persona.

Let’s begin by saying that the last thing you want to do is cast a wide net for every searcher. Consider if someone says of a restaurant: “They serve all kinds of food for everyone.” You’re only likely to eat there if you’re too hungry to actually pick a place that serves Texas barbecue, has a romantic ambience or whatever you’re really looking for.

Or if someone says of a service company “They’re a general handy-man company.” You’re only going to hire them if you’re sure they can do the job, are cheap and can come today. Otherwise, you’ll probably look for a specialist.

Searcher Motivation & The Selection Process

It’s the same with landing pages. Before we do anything we should know who we are speaking to and start by asking, “Why would someone come to my site? What are the motivators?”

Take, for example, a tree-trimming company. Why would people search for this company?

• Commercial property managers might need pruning to keep trees healthy to protect the investment of property owners as well as protecting against falling trees that could incite insurance claims.

• Residential customers might hire you to keep their yards tidy, their trees healthy and their kids safe under the branches. But this won’t be just any homeowner. It will be a certain kind of homeowner who is meticulous and attentive to detail. This homeowner will have disposable income enough to maintain the yard.

• Both kinds of customers might call you when a limb has landed on a car or power line.

Those are the motivators. Now, what about the behaviors?

• Competitive customers are goal oriented. They know what they’re looking for and they choose it very quickly.
• Methodical customers are very deliberate and logical. They’ll only call you as a last resort and would rather get all their answers searching online without talking to you.
• Humanistic customers are the hardest to convert. They focus on relationships and how your offering will make them feel.
• Spontaneous customers make decisions very quickly. They don’t want to read a lot, they want all their main questions answered on a top-level basis and to then get on with things.

Now in an emergency like the fallen limb, most customers are going to streamline their decision process. They want to know how to contact you, whether you can solve their problem without creating any worse ones and if you can come today.

For those customers, you might want pertinent information above the fold of your landing pages. Information like 24-hour emergency service and the phone number could be at the top.

But what about for the rest of them? Competitive searchers may want to see a page of what other businesses or neighborhoods you’ve worked in. If you’re hired by Chichi Park in the Best Part of Town, that’s enough for them.

Methodicals want to know everything. They want to know if you’re bonded and insured, what your experience and credentials are, who you’ve worked for in the past, whether your rates compare and a lot of other information that they’ll measure against other information.

This landing page serves a spontaneous searcher with an emergency well:

This landing page would drive a spontaneous searcher with an emergency crazy. This is probably a waste of a click: 

For companies that rely on a lot of data or are results-oriented that have charts to show their increased value or documented results, methodical are the dream persona.

For many creative or humanist businesses, methodical are a nightmare customer and you may not want to focus much attention on creating pages of data or content for them.

Creative or humanist businesses focus more on “I’ll show you my personality and how I will care for your needs” and that’s what humanist customers respond to. If you have a humanistic-focused tree care company, it might emphasize environmental stewardship and safety of children.

Spontaneous customers just need the basic information fast without necessarily looking at data or paying any attention to your attempts to connect with them.

But that’s just the beginning of personas. Analytics can give you an inkling what personas are converting in the largest numbers on your site and help you further hone your design and content.

Choose the navigation, design, content, and images you will use based on the searcher personas you’ve decided are key converters and the biggest supporters of your business.

In fact, every part of your website, right down to the kind of action button you choose should focus on your personas.

For more on the four “Modes of Persuastion” I highly recommend the book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? by Brian and Jeffrey Eisenberg.

Doodling with a new drawing app on the iPad — 53′s Paper, which is a real beauty — I took a pass at illustrating what I consider to be five important ideas in conversion optimization.

The Conversion Funnel

As marketers, we obsess with the prospect-to-customer funnel. Getting more people in at the top. Moving more of them through the middle faster. We talk about top-of-funnel (TOFU) tactics and middle-of-funnel (MOFU) tactics. All of which is good to a point.

But the real art of conversion optimization is crafting our marketing through the eyes of our audience. From a prospect’s perspective, their funnel progresses through four questions of you:

• What do you do?
• Why should I care?
• How do I believe you?
• Where do we begin?

If your funnel aligns with their funnel, answering those questions, good things happen.

Why Landing Pages Are Awesome

I’ve spent 7 years working on landing pages and post-click marketing, yet every day I still wake up amazed and inspired by the possibilities.

Why? Because landing pages are at the intersection of three innovative forces in marketing: content marketing, performance marketing, and technical wizardry.

You need terrific content to be relevant and engaging. You leverage performance marketing principles for testing, analysis, and measuring success. And you use technical wizardry to create remarkable user experiences and to optimize the entire process end-to-end.

Each of these fields is fascinating on its own. The combinations of them are electrifying.

Modern Marketer’s DNA

Bryan Eisenberg said it best: as marketers, we need to Always Be Testing.

Test early, and test often.

A/B testing should be more than a capability. It should be more than a best practice. It should be rooted deeply into the culture of every modern marketing team. Our genetic code — at least metaphorically — should consist only of A-B pairs.

Brand Impact vs. Conversion Rate

There can be a perceived tension between conversion rate optimization and brand impact, which dates back to the early rivalries of direct marketing vs. brand marketing.

But it’s a false choice: you can — and should — do great on both dimensions.

Sure, there are cheesy used car salesman type tactics that you can use to squeeze short-term bumps to your conversion rate. (“I promise you the world, just give me your email address and click ‘Boom!’”) But such chicanery costs you brand equity.

On the other hand, great brand-building content is often published without any direction towards a “next step.” It leaves visitors dangling like a sailboat in the middle of a lake with no wind. Sure, they can paddle their way to a conversion step. But paddling is hard work.

The sweet spot is pushing the Pareto frontier of brand and conversion to achieve both. That’s brilliant post-click marketing.

Eschew Cookie-Cutter Landing Pages

Okay, so this sketch only makes one big point: differentiate.

There’s an art to producing seductive landing pages, and it doesn’t emerge from boring, cookie-cutter webpage layouts that look like they came out of Microsoft Word.

Stand out from the competition. Don’t just be branded — be a brand.

In the end, 100% of visitors to your page see what you produced. What percentage will be impressed? What percentage will find it memorable? And, of course, what percentage will convert?

The result? Maybe 2 or 3 percent of this traffic makes it through your website’s funnel and converts. It’s why we get asked the following question a lot: How can we make all these investments in Search more effective? While it’s not always easy, there are several existing options available.

For example, we are focusing on capturing all traffic (including your valuable search traffic) in very specific remarketing audiences. Yes, there can be a lot of work in the tagging part, but we also found some different, creative approaches to remarking that have really worked. I think a good remarketing campaign is the perfect way to make better use of your search traffic and start with conversion driven display campaigns.

For starters, let me say that I think remarketing in itself is not successful without putting some effort in a good campaign.

You will have to invest time in tagging, building audiences, remarketing lists and smart custom combinations. Equally important, these preparations need a matching follow-up in the display ads you’re using for remarketing. You need to make it more appealing by creating a touchpoint with the website section your audience has visited.

So far, I think this is a well known story for all of us. However, this doesn’t work out every single time and for every type of customer. That is why we tried something else for a couple of our customers.

Think about it and ask yourself the following question: Why should a conversion always take place after the very first click when it comes to remarketing? It didn’t happen before when you sent the visitor from Google to a product specific page either, right? Aren’t there better ways for you to convince people in seeing they want your product?

My answer is it’s very possible and the answer is right in front of you if you look for it. We used YouTube for a successful remarketing campaign and it paid off. And it’s so easy!

You can find all the possibilities to advertise within your Google Adwords account and there’s not one good reason why you shouldn’t use YouTube to share your coolness in video with the whole world.

At a later stage, I will give you some results from one of our cases, but first, here’s what we came up with. Let’s say you are a festival and you’re using remarketing to persuade “non converters” to visit your awesome festival.

What is the real advantage in remarketing these people with your most sexy display banner and sending them to the same pages they already visited before?

Here’s a thought: it will only make very little difference, if none at all! However, there are tools at hand that can make a difference. So we are now selling the experience first, not the product.

So, instead of resending people to the same website pages they already visited, we are now sending them to the branded YouTube page. Not just the branded YouTube page of course, but to a specific video that sells the experience we know people are looking for.

To get back to my example: “Awesome Festival” should remarket people with video’s of new headliners they confirmed, like the video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is exactly what we did for one of our customers selling a similar kind of product, screaming out the cool experience and creating more desire to purchase and get this experience. And it worked.

As you can see below, video is outperforming images and text. Remarkable, because both other remarketing ads are sending traffic directly to the relevant website pages.

I think key to this succesful remarketing campaign lies in a very good Search strategy, sending very well segmented traffic to destination specific pages.

Of course, you can only do so much if it comes to conversion rate, so what’s the next best thing? Capturing your Search traffic, and capture it well! Don’t try to always hit that conversion by sending people to the same pages over and over, if there are more effective ways of converting that customer.

The takeaway: do something different in making your Search traffic more effective. I like to call this Remarketing the long way – it rocks!

I was mistaken.

Rather than be exasperated by this, I saw it as a teaching moment for my prospect and for you.

If you are driving search traffic to an online store, online service, or subscription site, I recommend that you add some hacks to your website developer’s questionnaire (also called a survey or creative brief) so that your business goals are part of their design process.

Here’s how I would change the one I was given.

Know When You Are The Wrong Person To Ask

This is the most important realization you can come to: you are a business person, marketer or something else. You are not a Web designer. More importantly, you are not your Web visitor.

Don’t let your development and design team pass the buck. They should be asking you for information that helps them make a decision. They should not be asking you for that decision.

Don’t try to make decisions. Provide the information your design team needs to make good decisions.

Any time they ask you to make specific recommendations, change the question. All questions should ask you for information that informs their decision. If they are not willing to make such decisions, you best let them go about their business and find someone else.

Navigation Has To Make Sense To Your Visitor

The question of how your navigation should be laid out is not one to be decided by your personal taste or by what you believe is cool. Navigation has the burden of getting people off of the home page and into your site. Once a visitor is in your site, the navigation must anticipate their next question.

As such, you should add some questions to your website questionnaire.

Navigation decisions should be based on your visitors’ needs. How will they research your on your site?

Your main navigation should guide visitors to the things that move your business forward. These are the things you need your visitors to accopmlish to be successful.

Your sub-navigation, or side navigation should numerate the alternative ways of exploring your site. Usually, information on a commercial website can be categorized, so list your categories there. If there are a lot of categories for your visitors, you may need to have some sort of expandable navigation or use “fly-outs.” Otherwise, just list the categories.

When listing your categories, don’t forget “Most popular,” “Featured Items,” and “Editor’s Choice” categories.

If you have more than two pages on your site, go ahead and include site search. Those visitors who know what they want will use this feature and they will have high expectations for it’s accuracy.

Kill The Slideshow

If there is anything that will define your character as an online marketer, it is your ability to do something that is the opposite of what everyone else is doing because the data tells you so. Such is the case with the homepage slideshow.

In test after test, this little bit of interactivity has shown to reduce conversion rates. Yet it is used on websites all across the Web. This simply means that most marketers aren’t testing this feature.

Nonetheless, there are signs that this feature is falling out of favor with traditionally high-converting websites like keurig.com, proflowers.com, Raoman’s, Woman Within, 1-800-PetMeds and the site that never resorted to slideshows, Amazon.

The Slideshow can be expected to reduce conversion rates. Pick one and go with it.

How can something so universally accepted reduce conversion rates?

We think it works like this: The automatically rotating slideshow creates motion on the page. Our brains are designed to react to motion, and just as we’re getting into the other elements on the page, the hero shot moves, breaking our concentration. We can never really digest the home page because we keep getting distracted by motion, and we totally miss what we were looking for.

Don’t be lazy. Do the hard work of picking one message for your site.

Alternatively, change the rotation rate of your slideshow to once per day (that is 86,400 seconds, if that is how your questionnaire asks). A daily rotation offers variety without motion.

Social Media Icons Are For Rock Stars

If you’ve paid good money to get searchers to visit your site, why send them off to a social media network? Are you really so attention-starved that you need likes, fans and followers instead of sales?

Most knee-jerk designers will assume you want social media icons on every page of your site. You don’t, unless you are a rock star, celebrity, or run a social network.

Don’t send your expensive search traffic to some social network. It probably won’t ever come back.

It is the “Thank You” page that is the right place to ask people to pimp you on social media. They’ve just bought your product or subscribed. They’re primed to share their brilliant action with others. Hold off until this point.

The only exception to this hack is this: If you are really good at converting social media fans into record sales, TV viewers, or movie tickets, go for it. Otherwise, keep your hard-won traffic on your site until they buy, subscribe or register.

Sell  Buyers Something Else

When is the best time to sell somebody something? The answer is, “Just after they have bought something.”

That’s right. There is no better time to offer something more than when someone has just “bought” something from you. Clearly, they are “buyers,” right?

Thank You pages are a great opportunity to offer something else to your best visitors: those that buy.

By “buying” I mean that they’ve paid you in money or have paid with their contact information, in the case of a lead.

You don’t have to offer them something more to buy (but why not?). Now is the time you can ask them to share with their social networks; to friend, fan or follow you; to download something; to join a mailing list, and more.

Why bother? You got their money, right? Well, the thank you page is the most effective place to :

1. Increase your average order value by selling related items
2. Open different communication channels for their next purchase
3. Do something extraordinary to put an exclamation point on the purchase
4. Minimize buyer’s remorse and the accompanying returns
5. Teach them how to use your product successfully
6. Get referrals

I could keep going, but that’s for another column. So, how much time are you spending on your “thank you” pages?

Capitalize On Your Errors

It is hard to be perfect. Sometimes we ask searchers to come to pages that just don’t exist; or they existed once, a long time ago. This doesn’t mean that we need to spit in their faces. Perhaps we can still help them with their problem.

This is the job of the error page.

Every error page is an opportunity. Don’t screw up a second time with a lame page.

First of all, the term “404″ should not appear anywhere on your error page. Instead, you should present a helpful resource coupled with a polite mea culpa.

Your 404 page should act like a homepage. If you have a site of any heft, offer a search box. Provide links to the things that you would offer on your home page. However, don’t send these visitors to the home page. You must apologize first.

Nobody Wants To Contact You

If the best thing your design firm can come up with is “Contact Us” just walk away. Instead, look at the question introduced above: “List the three most important things your visitors must do on your site.”

Create a separate page for each of these.

A Contact Us page is the least interesting lead generation page on the Web. Try something else.

They may include things like:

• “Find a store nearby.” If this is the case, a map would be nice.
• “Get a quote.”
• “Ask a question of our knowledgeable experts.”
• “Subscribe to our free newsletter.”

In other words, everyone is trying to solve a problem, and their problem is not “I need someone to contact me.” No one wants to contact you – nor do they want you to contact them.

Ask More Of Your Web Design Firm

In all fairness, most Web design firms are responding to the desires of their clients, who are not focused on their visitors, but on their own egos. The market for websites that are driven by the whim of their owners is hundreds of millions of dollars larger than the market for those who are visitor-centric.

Success and high conversion rates go the to the visitor-centric, not the ego-driven. Which are you?

I like to believe that most designers want to do do well by their customers. If you are the kind of marketer or business owner that asks more of their design firm, you might find yourself with a site that serves your visitors (and your business) well.

• How to organize a paid search program to reflect your site map and product offerings
• How to maximize quality score
• How to categorize queries by user intent (informational, navigational, transactional)

Yet, I have not found any literature addressing how to put those three concepts together.

In a world where more and more campaign management solutions allow search marketers to allocate revenue across impressions and clicks involved in a conversion, it makes sense to organize a paid search program to fully leverage attribution modeling.

With the right structure, you can fully measure the interaction between various sections of a website, as well as the interaction between informational, navigational, and transactional queries; as well as branded and non branded keywords to get a good understanding of consumer behavior and brand awareness.

Taking a step back, user intent can be broken into three categories:

• Informational queries look for a specific fact or topic, and account for roughly 80% of all search queries
• Navigational queries involve locating a specific website, and account for roughly 10% of all search queries
• Transactional queries look for information related to buying a specific product or service and also account for roughly 10% of all search queries

More details about user intent can be found in “Determining the informational, navigational, and transactional intent of Web queries” by Bernard J. Jansen, Danielle L. Booth, and Amanda Spink.

For the purposes of this article, let’s break down a site map into three levels (there could fewer or more levels, but the logic remains the same):

• Category: for instance “office supplies” and “breakroom supplies” are category-level keywords.
• Sub-Category: for instance “binders” and “clipboards” are sub-category keywords within the “office supplies” category.
• Product: for instance “ideastream storage clipboard” is a product-level keyword within the “clipboards” sub-category

It makes sense to differentiate Brand vs. Non-Brand for several reasons: to maximize your impression share, monitor specific KPIs, implement a specific bidding strategy, use sitelink ad extensions, etc…

As a result, with the opportunity to build a paid search program from scratch based on current knowledge and tracking tools it would make sense to organize your paid search campaigns into all possible combinations of site map levels and brand types.

There are 18 campaign types:

1. Non-Brand | Category | Informational
2. Non-Brand | Category | Navigational
3. Non-Brand | Category | Transactional
4. Non-Brand | Sub-Category | Informational
5. Non-Brand | Sub-Category | Navigational
6. Non-Brand | Sub-Category | Transactional
7. Non-Brand | Product | Informational
8. Non-Brand | Product | Navigational
9. Non-Brand | Product | Transactional
10. Brand | Category | Informational
11. Brand | Category | Navigational
12. Brand | Category | Transactional
13. Brand | Sub-Category | Informational
14. Brand | Sub-Category | Navigational
15. Brand | Sub-Category | Transactional
16. Brand | Product | Informational
17. Brand | Product | Navigational
18. Brand | Product | Transactional

Why such a complex structure? What are the benefits of such a structure?

Clarity

The above structure is pretty self-explanatory – you can guess where a given keyword should reside by answering three simple questions: Does it contain a brand term? Does it contain a category or sub-category or product name? Does it contain an informational or navigational or transactional term?

Quality Score Optimization

You can write more specific ad copy based on user intent. It is a valid test to rotate informational ad copy for informational searches, and so on. It can only help the CTR and the Quality Score – while it might hurt the conversion rate. The right balance can be determined via a proper A/B testing procedure.

Regardless, this structure should help determine relevant keywords/ad copy combinations, landing pages at every stage of the search process/buying cycle.

Search Funnel Analysis

A clear structure helps effectively measure all interaction at the campaign level – making it much easier for all major tracking solutions to provide granular insights.

More specifically, we expect informational searches – where most of the search volume sits – to be entry points in the conversion funnel, while navigational and transactional searches are more likely to convert.

Whatever you are expecting or assuming, this logic will help measure what is actually happening in your account.

Budget Allocation & Impression Share Optimization

A clean structure makes it easy to ensure brand campaigns have unlimited budgets and a high impression share – or at least a high exact match impression share, see this article for more information about impression share data.

Also, you can temporarily limit the daily budgets or even pause “Non-Brand | Informational” campaigns if your budget is limited, or if these campaigns are not meeting efficiency goals.

Site Link Ad Extensions

Relevant sitelink extensions can be built across all category and sub-category campaigns (not so much for product campaigns) based on top-selling products, top-rated products, current promotions, and so on.

This structure is theoretical and should be made more specific to every advertiser’s strategy / website / product offering.

For example, you might want to break down this structure even further by platform (desktop, mobile, tablet), or by geo, or both. The point is that your paid search program should be organized in a systematic manner allowing clear and concise insight into the consumer buying cycle and allow easy optimization based on consumer behavior.

1.  How would you approach deciding what to optimize first?

For most businesses, the potential universe of optimization opportunities — from their high-level home page down through highly targeted campaigns that have yet to be conceived — is extremely large. How would the candidate decide what to prioritize?

There are many ways to tackle this. Which e-commerce categories or demand generation campaigns have been most successful? Which have been least successful? Which search queries are generating the most traffic? Which of those have the lowest bounce rate, the highest bounce rate? How do these data points intersect with the company’s strategic direction?

In my opinion, a good answer reveals an analytical approach to identifying opportunities, while at the same time demonstrating an openness to finding the right analytical lens for your specific business — not necessarily a cookie-cutter checklist. A great candidate should ask questions about your existing analytics and other factors driving your business priorities.

2.  How do you think about audience segmentation?

There’s a natural flow of conversation from priorities to audience segmentation. Which audiences are the most important to the business and why? How do you identify them? How do you serve them best?

What are the possible dimensions by which the candidate even thinks to segment people? New customers versus existing customers is an obvious (but important) one. Vertical markets too.

Demographics have a rich legacy in marketing, so segmentation options along that axis can open up some good possibilities. But I’d love to hear a candidate open the door to more modern segmentation approaches too, such as personas or Clay Christensen’s insightful question, “What job are you hiring this product to do?”

Upon brainstorming different segmentations, a good follow-up is to discuss ways in which those segments can be identified. By answers they fill out on a form? Previous purchase histories? The ads they clicked on — and the keywords or site contexts in which those ads were placed? Behavioral choices on landing pages? Data from services empowered by cookies or IP address look-ups? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these different mechanisms?

3.  What was one of the most surprising outcomes to a test you’ve run?

A/B testing and multivariate testing (MVT) are the workhorses of conversion optimization. Experienced conversion professionals should have a rich history of tests to draw upon. Which ones were the most memorable? And why? While this is certainly an opportunity for a candidate to (humbly?) note some of their biggest successes, I think the best answers to this question reveal courage and creativity.

In particular, how bold has the candidate been in trying big and imaginative ideas? Did they push the envelope, or did they play it safe?

What were some of the hypotheses that motivated their testing, and how did their perspective evolve over a sequence of tests? Were there any tests that were spectacular failures? What did they learn from them? If they haven’t taken any risks that have failed — or if they’re uncomfortable admitting them — that would be a red flag.

4.  In your testing, what variables do you try to control? What potentially confounding variables are outside of your control?

There are two alarming answers to this question. One is an unawareness of any variables to be controlled in conversion optimization. The other is the opposite extreme: confidence that their experiments are always perfectly controlled.

The reality is that confounding variables are some of the biggest — yet rarely discussed — challenges in conversion optimization. Sometimes respondents come from different traffic sources — the same ad served for two different search queries can send traffic with very different intent.

The timeframe during which a test occurs might have any number of externalities, from holidays to major events in the news. Other events that are happening with your company or within your industry — especially in our Age of Social Media — can wildly impact your results.

There’s no perfect solution. However, savvy conversion professionals control the variables that they can, within reason, while remaining vigilant to a wide range of external factors that can skew their results.

5.  How do you weigh the trade-offs between brand consistency and experimentation?

There’s no single right answer to this question — it depends a lot on your organization, your brand, your audience. But since conversion optimization usually plays the role of championing change to the status quo — while still leveraging, and hopefully enhancing, the value of your underlying brand — it’s insightful to hear how a candidate thinks about this trade-off.

How far should you experiment with the look-and-feel of your landing pages? When you should engage in special offers (and what kinds of special offers)?

In addition to considering different points along this continuum, a good conversion optimization professional should have suggestions for mitigating the risks of experiments that “poke the box.”

6.  Did you ever have a time when you had to deal with a HiPPO?

Everyone in conversion optimization should be familiar with the HiPPO — Avinash Kaushik’s label for the highest-paid person’s opinion, emphatically presented without regard to testing or analytical data.

In practice, it’s not just an affliction of executives and senior managers. Almost anyone on the marketing team or the company at large may voice strongly-held opinions on the direction of your conversion optimization programs.

The question is how a candidate deals with such situations. A masterful conversion optimization professional is able to gracefully channel such input into productive efforts. It’s important to not give in or give up in the face of thundering viewpoints.

At the same time, a diplomatic touch goes a long way to keeping people engaged in a positive way. Great interpersonal skills are golden here. Listening to a candidate describe their previous experiences managing these dynamics can tell you a lot about what it will be like to work with them.

Are there other suggestions for good conversion optimization interview questions? Share them in the comments.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Traditional design is different from designing for dollars.

My partner Joel Harvey is fond of saying, “My favorite part of a design is the money.”

He’s been part of many a web design project. His perspective comes in response to the number of times he’s heard things like:

“I want the design to pop!”

“I want my site’s design to be groundbreaking like nothing else out there!”

“Let’s turn it up a notch on the design.”

“I want the site’s design to reflect the high value of our product.”

In and of themselves, none of the above statements are unworthy pursuits.

But if your goal is to increase conversion and fill your coffers to the brim, you will fall woefully short if you believe that web design alone can do the heavy lifting of convincing your visitors to take action.

A while back, a client sent us a couple of different mocks of some new designs they were entertaining. They ask which one I liked. The first thing I said is I like the one that makes you the most money. Up until that time their team was arguing over color palettes, white space,and rounded edges.

When I reminded them about the bigger goal, their conversation evolved. In a clock tick, we were all discussing the quality of content on the pages rather than the design elements. When their offer and call to action were right, everyone seemed to forget about the trivia of the actual design.

Designing For Your Ego

Another client brought to us a new landing page campaign they had just launched and were baffled and disappointed in the early results.

They went on to explain that they thought this was the best designed landing page they had ever done. They had just hired a new graphic designer that ‘got it’, and even the CEO was impressed with his work. One problem, their paying customers didn’t seem to agree.

No doubt, the design was gorgeous. Rich colors, curvy rectangles, sexy images, even the header and body fonts were crisp and clean. So why wasn’t this campaign working?

We had them show us their most recent successful campaign. The design was a tad dated, and compared to the new landing page it looked like a high school hobbyist in the company basement eating Cheetos and suckling energy drinks.

Still, by comparing we immediately saw the problem with the new landing page.

The copy on the old page was much better. The headers screamed the product’s value proposition and benefits. The body copy answered relevant questions, and helped the reader imagine themselves buying the product. The call to action button was big, bold, and in your face.

The new page looked stunningly attractive but said very little. To add insult, the hot shot designer was a minimalist and had an aversion to big gawky buttons, so his primary call to action was tiny button that blended in with the hero image, and , by design, was easy to ignore.

We instructed them to use the old page copy on the new design (they had to make a few adjustments to make it all fit), and we asked the designer to create a bigger and bolder call to action button.

They obliged us and that new design finally beat the old landing page, but only slightly.

How Much Time Are You Spending With Your Designer vs. Your Banker?

So my lesson is this. Beautiful, eye-popping design and effective, profitable web design are two different things. And it always seems easier to mistake those eye-popping designs for profitable ones.

Some companies spend more on design than they do on organic SEO, and almost all companies spend more on design than on Conversion Rate Optimization. Search engine spiders don’t evaluate site design, only content and links. And I have yet to see a company design their way into a better conversion rate and better RO.

Some companies spend way more time going back and forth about a design element than they do actually testing it. Makes you wonder how far ahead of your competitors you could get if you spent more time and resources on conversion optimization and testing.

So when considering a redesign of your entire site, of a successful landing page, or even a banner ad, do the following:

• Ask and list what about the page experience(not just he design) works? Keep those in the new design.
• What about the experience doesn’t work?
• Why do we want to change this(especially if it working)?
• Before you launch a radically new design, test what you believe is NOT working about the current design.

Above all, use web designers that deeply understand the web and principles of conversion. Otherwise they are just an artist, and the value of an artists works usually increases only after their demise. Can you wait that long?

Photo courtesy ilco via sxc.hu