Landing Page Testing

Great session full of tips, and excellent advice about how to deal with landing page testing and optimization. Please bare with my gross spelling and grammatical errors, and special shout out to Evan Davies for the use of his laptop.

Mary Huffman kicked off the session by offering 10 aspects to test on your landing pages. These 10 items are great ways to squeeze more value out of the clicks.

Mary recommended testing every aspect of a page in a measured approach if possible. She even said the sometimes counterintuitive works sometimes, and the only way you would know would by testing.

Mary provided examples from WhichTestWon. Her top aspects to test were:

1.) Headline: Keywords in Headlines?

2.) Try Breaking Up Long Forms: Breaking Up a Long Form May Convert Better

3.) Length of Form: Short or Long

4.) Layout of Page: More Copy Can Be a Good Thing?

5.) Placement of security icon: Yay or Nay? Yay!

6.) Button Size: Bigger is Better

7.) Vocabulary: Training vs. Webinar.

8.) Photos: Know Your Target.

9.) Button Color: Make Your Most Important Button Standout.

10.) Photo vs. Video: Video Worked Best for New Users on Landing Page Only.

She followed up with a short stats lesson about data validity, sample size and determining test time. Long story short…..it may take awhile.

Finally, Mary touched on some great resources for marketers to use for testing.

Cameron Cowan from Omniture explained the dilemma most SEM’s run into. The no man’s land between the users and creative.

He highlighted that control of your landing pages is essential to success, as SEM’s agree costs for clicks are going up. He emphasized that not optimizing and testing your landing pages is a waste of money, and more importantly time.

He also spoke about Omniture’s new Test and Target product for landing page testing. It is a robust platform that allows companies to take a measured approach to the creation and testing of landing pages.

Cameron left off by saying SEMs must use their testing to target users. This will improve site experience, and should improve profitability which he mentioned gets lost in the shuffle of conversion metrics.

During the Q&A, Mary invited users to visit Which MVT, a landing page testing platform comparison site.

Well done on both accounts. Their slides are available at http://www.sempdx.org/slides

Speakers:

Mary Huffman – Ionic Media

Cameron Cowen – Adobe

Moderator:

Lisa Williams

Liveblogger:

Spencer Helm of Amplify Interactive, a Portland Oregon SEM agency

Landing Page Testing: Don’t just create . . . test. is a post from: SEMpdx

Making Friends & Generating Business

4 Point Plan for Facebook Domination

Speaker: Will Scott

1st remember to have a good time…and don’t interrupt people having a good time.  Rules:

1. Be real
2. Give to receive
3. Don’t be a jerk

4 Point Plan to Facebook Domination

1. Get team involved
2. Reach out to current fans
3. Give reason to get involved
4. Make new friends

Hold internal competitions

• Ask employees to recommend your brand to their friends
• Make it worth their while (e.g. $200 gift certificate)
• Nothing wrong with bribing your employees

Install Facebook fan box

• Already on site, makes great fans

Hold an external competition

• Ignore Facebook rules at your own risk
• Can hold on-site and off-site

Find fans you don’t already know

• Advanced demographics and kw filters through Facebook ads
• Value of fans
• Target fans
• Target people coming to an event
• Bday targeting
• 1:1 communication with event attendees/maybes

Lion Brand Yarn

Speaker: Ilana Rabinowitz

Facebook is a tool.  Use it as such.

Lion Brand Yarn’s Strategy

Become a valuable source of information and vital community.  Create a place where:

1. People interact with each other
2. Where fans can become brand advocates
3. For people to share stories, ideas, tips, photos, and experiences
4. To listen to consumers
5. For us to answer questions
6. Show appreciation to fans
7. Seen as individuals rather than a faceless corporation (President made video for fans and was joking around)

How do we know what to say on Facebook?

• Surveys (what are you interested in?)
• Looked at peaks in data (what updates are people interacting with?)
• Know customers after years of correspondence

Voice of Lion Brand

• One consistent voice
• Marketing department brainstorms ideas
• Used graduate student
• Maintain calendar but much is ad hoc

Building a fan base

1. Compelling content (e.g. custom comic strips)
2. Promoted through other media (catalog, newsletter, blog, website)
3. Fans get you fans
4. Suggest to friends
5. Advertise on Facebook

Facebook v. Print Ads: Facebook is extremely effective and measurable & can help engage with a younger audience

Facts of Life on Facebook

1. Cannot control conversation (competitor mentions, customer complaints)
2. Requires time and planning (but maybe not too much money)

Marketing with Facebook

1. Solicit Facebook fans wisely (they are earned capital)
2. Promotions can make fans disappear like crazy
3. Keep helping your fan base (continue to provide resources)

Facebook is Measurable

• bit.ly to measure clickthrough on links
• Facebook Insights to measure interaction with fan page
• Google Analytics to measure engagement from traffic from facebook.com

Benefits of Facebook

1. Builds relationships with consumers
2. Drive web traffic
3. Manage reputation
4. Acquire new customers
5. Builds word of mouth
6. Provides customer insight
7. Offer customer service
8. Amplify other marketing efforts
9. Replace/Supplement traditional advertising
10. Generate direct sales
11. SEO benefits on search engines

Q: Facebook Group v. Fan Page

A: Group makes sense where people engage with each other.  Page makes sense where people engage with the brand

Q: Facebook Do’s?

A: Use a company email as an admin.  Include keywords throughout fan page.  Don’t be a broadcaster – it’s not about you

Q: Analytics Used to Measure Performance?

A: Google Analytics to measure on-site engagement, fan behavior, conversions, URL variable.  Image tag to measure traffic on Facebook.  Facebook Insights are useful as well

Q: Tips and Tricks for Facebook Ads

A: Test, test, test.  Think about the venue you are advertising on

Q: Structure of Facebook social media team and requirements

A: LBY: Grad student works 3-4 days per week, knowledgeable of the brand; can do it in an hour a day

Q: Ideal Frequency

A: Rate of update is based on how frequently fans interact.  Test messaging during various days of the week/hours of the day

Q: What Media Gains Fans Fastest

A: Amplify everywhere it makes sense.  Facebook users hate Twitter. Twitter users hate Facebook.

Speakers:

Will Scott – Search Influence
Ilana Rabinowitz – Lion Brand Yarn

Moderator:

Hallie Janssen

Liveblogger:

Mike Nierengarten of Anvil Media Inc., a Portland SEM agency

Session Details

Making Friends & Generating Business (Facebook) SearchFest 2010 Session is a post from: SEMpdx

1.
If you’re thinking about investing in search marketing or other online services, it’s a great place to come meet the talent in person. SearchFest boasts more than 300 attendees and 44 speakers, many of whom are high caliber online marketing practitioners.

2.
You may learn something that can make you a lot of money. One of my clients came to SearchFest 2 years ago and made a single change to their URL structure and saw a 48% increase in revenue.

3.
Your admission price of $259 (between now and 3/8) includes 44 tracks/18 speakers of information that will help you improve your online presence AND you get breakfast/lunch & post show beer.

4.
Your competition may be going.

5.
Added Bonus: If you become a member of SEMpdx now and attend SearchFest March 9th 2010, you’ll get a full day of information from the countries best online marketers AND you can attend our Members ONLY “Ask the Experts” event on April 13th and ask the burning SEO/SEM questions you’ve been dying to ask the pros.

Register for SearchFest today!

Top 5 Reasons You Should Go to SearchFest If You Run Your Own Business is a post from: SEMpdx

David Szeleta will be speaking about “Advanced PPC” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

Online advertising expert David Szetela is Owner and CEO of Clix Marketing, one of the few agencies that specializes exclusively in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, creating and optimizing clients’ Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter advertising campaigns. Clix is also one of the few agencies paid according to their performance – as a percentage of profit or a commission per sales lead generated. Szetela’s 25+-year career working for small magazine publishers as well as Apple Computer and Ziff-Davis Publishing has provided him deep experience in direct response marketing. His articles on PPC advertising have been published in MediaPost, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land, MarketingSherpa, on his company’s blog, http://www.clixmarketing.com/blog.

He is the Principal PPC Editor of the paper and online publication SEMJ.org (http://www.semj.org/editors.html) and the PPC expert faculty member for the online certification company Market Motive. He is also a frequent speaker at Search and Advertising industry events like Search Engine Strategies, SMX, PPC Summit and ad:tech, and he hosts a weekly radio show called PPC Rockstars (http://www.webmasterradio.fm/Advertising/PPC-Rockstars/), distributed by Webmasterradio.fm and iTunes. His book on PPC Content Advertising “Customers Now” was published in November 2009, and his Wiley/Sybex book “PPC Advertising on One Hour a Day” will be published in May 2010.

1) Google’s Content Advertising Network doesn’t have the best reputation with some advertisers. Can you explain why this is?

Many Google AdWords advertisers have tried expanding to the Google content network, only to see their costs soar, while revenue and profits failed to keep pace. Other advertisers shied away from the AdWords content network because they heard it delivered poor quality traffic. Nothing could be further from the truth; the quality of the traffic is just fine.

Content Network Advertising can often lead to excellent results—better than acceptable conversions (sales or leads) that deliver profitable revenue to the bottom line. The secret is for search advertisers to realize that they need to use very different tactics and best practices to control ad placement and attract high-quality site visitors.

2) Outside of Google’s content network, are there others worth using?

Google’s content network has incredible reach, however, there are independent networks and exchanges that also have great reach, and some nifty abilities such as setting the price you’re willing to pay across relevant sites on an auction basis. I wrote Customers Now in collaboration with the folks at ContextWeb who have the ADSDAQ exchange link, and I really think it’s worth taking a look at them if you’re building and testing content network advertising in 2010

3) When it comes to new target audiences, you are heavily in favor of content network advertising as a starting point for test campaigns. Can you extrapolate on that?

Yes, absolutely. It’s much cheaper to test messages and ads on a content network than on search. For instance, you can test new ads on a high-quality content site at the category level (i.e., food section). Or all the way down to the article-content level (i.e., the best imported chocolate). Also, content networks are great opportunities for inexpensively testing dynamic media like flash or video for response rate and conversions.

4) Can you tell me what you think are some of the unique practices for content ad campaigns as opposed to search advertising?

To begin with, the role and function of keywords in a content network ad group is very different than those in a search ad group. Content ad group keywords describe the types of pages where the advertiser wants their ads to appear. The advertiser is literally telling Google, “Show my ad on pages that contain most or all of these words.” For example, a vendor of vacation insurance might target holiday-goers by using a keyword list that contains the words ”Vacation Holiday Cruise Tours.”

Another big difference is content network ad copy must be very different from those used in search advertising. Objective number one of a content network ad is to distract the reader’s attention away from the page’s content. I emphasize in the book that ads need to yell, not whisper, and pop off the page, rather than blend into the surroundings.

In addition, I would recommend advertisers make very competitive offers in order to attract prospective new buyers – for example, free shipping or 20% discount for first-time purchases.
Finally, advertisers have a lot of latitude with ad copy and design, since there’s no penalty if the ad copy doesn’t match the keyword list. So it’s a good practice to test a wide variety of ads and offers.

5) What would be an example of a good image ad as opposed to a bad one?

A good image ad must be eye-catching enough to stand out from the content on the page. This can be a big challenge these days, with site visitors so accustomed to skipping right past banner ads, so a great banner ad needs to telegraph several concepts in rapid succession: “I’m worth looking at”; “I have something – a benefit – that you might be interested in”; “It’s clear what action you should take to find out more.” The benefit must be clear and immediately compelling, like “Save $300 per Year on Home Heating Oil – Starting Now!”

An example of a bad content ad is one that would blend in with the page so that the reader feels compelled to read the content on the page and not get pulled into the ads. In other words, an ad is not going to perform well if it simply blends like in chameleon into the background on a content page for which it’s being served.

6) What does the future hold for PPC advertising? Can you give us some insight for 2010 and beyond?

The trend of conversion optimization and performance-focused marketing are going to continue to gain importance in 2010. With smart phones becoming more prominent and people using their phones to search for information, product and services, mobile search marketing volume will continue to increase. This means if advertisers want to compete in this space, they are going to have to optimize their PPC campaigns for this distribution channel, as well as create mobile-friendly versions of their landing pages and websites. Furthermore, the Google Content Network will continue to expand in 2010. Advertisers wanting to boost their volume significantly need to learn how to take full advantage of this aggressively expanding network. And, speaking of expanding volume, advertisers who have the ability to appeal to an international audience need to start paying more attention to users outside the US. This summer, comScore released its Global Search Marketing report. This report stated that of the 100 billion global searches conducted monthly, only 22% were conducted in North America. Companies with global fulfillment capability need to reach out to a global audience, such as Europe and Asia Pacific (who were at the top of the comScore report for percent of global searches).

SearchFest 2010 Interview: David Szeleta is a post from: SEMpdx

Stefan Weitz will be giving the keynote at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I’m your classic geek. I began writing code at 8 and went downhill from there. Arrived at Microsoft at the impressionable age of 22 and have been here ever since.

People ask me all the time why I’m still here – I’ll pen a blog post about that at some point but in short, it’s because I need to be at a place that lets people go nuts with ideas, has the resources to fund calculated flights of fancy, and lets me do over a dozen very different gigs over my career – all while getting free Fresca.

Today for a living I generally practice respiration and am thankful for autonomic cardiac function. Beyond that my current job is multifaceted: think of me as that guy the King sends out on the battlefield to check on the incoming forces. Only in this case the incoming forces are search technologists, journalists, analysts, academics, startups, and competitors.

The other big distinction is that they rarely carry flaming arrows. I work to understand what people are doing around the world that will lift search from its current model into one that us science fiction geeks read about daily – an intelligent, intent-driven broker for knowledge. Then I get to come and talk to you nice people about that and listen to what you have to say all while maintaining MVP Gold Status on Alaska Airlines (FTW!)

2) In this interview with Gord Hotchkiss, you acknowledged that Bing has yet to differentiate itself significantly from Google in the eyes of web surfers and that 2009 was “setting the table” for the future. When will we be able to see a unique & distinct Bing “flavor of search” and any hints as to what that flavor might be like?

a. Ah yes, Gord and his “gotcha journalism”. (I’m kidding…) We have to reconcile two facts: 1) search as we’ve all grown to know it needs to change. Far from just finding pointers to interesting articles, the web is now the ‘transport’ that enables people to conduct tasks that were previously confined to the physical world in an efficient, near real-time virtual manner. 2) people don’t like change.

When new engines have tried radical approaches to what people traditionally think of as search, audiences tend to abandon quickly. So what we have to do is continually deliver a killer core experience that meets the traditional needs of searchers, but attempt to also provide a non-intrusive ‘hook’ for people to explore what more Bing can do for them.

You can already see this with things like our new Answers for entities (look for Boston, for example, and see the intelligence we pack into the top box) or how we subtly try and direct you to our Travel experience when we see your intent leaning towards travel scenarios.

That is the key for us: we are trying to pivot the user experience based on the expressed intent – either implicit or explicit. But it needs to be subtle so as to not dissatisfy people when they’re just trying to find the nearest Stumptown location. It’s a challenge, but that’s what I like to do.

3) I’m a big Portland Trailblazers Fan and I do a “Bing Search” for them. My first thoughts are…”Wow, this page got way too much going on”; “Related Searches have run amok” & “The results at the bottom are of poor quality.” Please offer your critique of these SERPS.

Well I can tell you that we’re always looking at ways to improve the UX here. In this case, let’s take a look at the SERP with a visual aid. And not to get all defensive, but this is kind of what I talked about above. We’ve become accustomed to search results being austere and simple – when in actuality a query like “Portland Trailblazers” is actually very ambigious and has multiple possible intents.

Our goal is to try and the help the user refine their query or proactively suggest answers to help with those intents. But let’s look at the page to see what we’re doing here:

1. The “Quick Tabs” are actually the most common refinements we see people making after they initially query for “Portland trailblazers”. So we highlight those since they are very common intents and we actually break the results up into those categories. It definitely has implications for SEO since we rerank the results within each ‘tab’.
2. The “Answer” makes an assumption that you probably want to see more than just the official site. Like scores. And how badly you get beaten.
3. The “Core SERP”: We try to put the official site at #1. That worked.
4. Multimedia is one of the top 4 things consumers request (along with speed, relevance, and captions). Knowing we have these in our index, we promote them higher in the SERP.
5. News and real time content pops.
6. The categories I’m talking about. Note how we try and pull results within each of the common refinements to give you a more comprehensive result than a bunch of random algo results.
7. The Reference answer is something I’d like to highlight. When we see a definitive term, we scan our natural language-augmented vertical and pull that content back in.
8. Related Searches at the side and bottom. Yeah, I’m not sure why we do that except that I know people have been trained to look at the bottom by….other….engines. We actually see tremendous interaction with the left-rail placement. But I can see how this is confusing.

All that said, it is a fairly comprehensive – some might say confusing – page. As I alluded to above we obsess about interaction on the page and nearly every pixel is instrumented. You’ll see changes in the future as we get smarter about what’s working where.

4) Google’s “Social Search” initiative seems to suggest that SERPS from people within your social network have added value and relevance. What’s your take on this and how does Bing plan to integrate people’s social networks into search results?

We think about the social graph in a number of ways. First, taken in aggregate the social networks can provide us good clues about spiky queries – when we see the new “Windows Phone Series 7” blowing up Twitter, that could serve as an important signal in query parsing and result ranking.

Second, people are turning to search for more than info, they’re turning for answers (opinions, recommendations) that might not have a definitive. Problem is, computers still aren’t good at this. So they turn to friends.

In the past, they’d use mail or the phone to get recommendations. Now the power of the RTW and social comms enables rapid, trackable, and more dispersed decision making online that does something many of us have dreamed of: augmenting the human capabilities for negotiating ambiguity and understanding relevance with technology that provides instant, simple, and global collaboration. Whether putting them directly into a SERP where people have been trained to ask definitive questions is the right thing, I’m not sure.

So keep watching Bing – we have some interesting takes on leveraging the social network to augment decision making using search coming. If I say more than that, the Windows-branded Ninjas will crash through my window and make me drink Diet Mountain Dew.

5) Bing Cashback was IMO a reasonably creative & innovative way to bring people to Bing. How has that worked out for you and are we going to see further non-traditional ways to increase market share?

We have many creative ways to get people to, what our marketing folks say, ‘drive trial’. It’s important that we get people to Bing and try queries that they wouldn’t necessarily expect to work on an engine where we have a really great experience.

Cashback is a good example of this – how can we get people to come and try our Shopping search and experience the power of things like our aggregated Opinion Ranking (which is a remarkable piece of computer science, if I do say so myself). We do see people who use Cashback more than a few times becoming a more consistent user of Bing.

You will absolutely see us trying new ways to drive awareness of Bing’s differentiation as a decision engine – one of my good friends just got brought over from another group to lead that effort. But that’s really a key point: it’s not a zero-sum game. It’s not about taking share from any one engine – it’s about growing the overall market. It’s about expanding people’s notions of what search can do and then delivering useful experiences that can help people actually get things done in the physical world.

6) Google has taken many stances (e.g. Paid Links) that has made people in the Search Marketing community angry. Matt Cutts has done an awesome job liaising but I doubt Matt has overcome “Google as Big Brother” in minds of many. How would Bing handle similar SEO-related controversies & the fallout they sometimes cause?

When you’ve got something that impacts nearly every web-user on the planet, you’re bound to do things that make at least one of your constituencies unhappy. Our motto is pretty simple: “Tell the truth. Even when it sucks.” That’s why me and my team are always on Twitter.

We’re on Facebook. You don’t have to look too hard to find my work email address and my cell phone isn’t far from there. We’re going to explain our reasoning as best we can in as many places as we can but we’re not going to make everyone happy all of the time. The person in charge of webmaster and ecosystem, Eric Gilmour, is also professing his love for ‘radical transparency’ (in truth, I don’t know what that means – I mean, I don’t really think there are shades of transparency, but I digress). And he has some great plans around this.

So in short think of us as a well-funded startup – one that listens to our customers with a ridiculous level of fanaticism and tries to do the right thing that benefits the most of the people most of the time. And when we screw up, we’ll tell you.

SearchFest 2010 Keynote Interview: Stefan Weitz is a post from: SEMpdx

SearchFest 2010 will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I’ve been working in SEO since 2006, when a marketing internship at Onvia quickly ballooned into blogging and then a full-on search marketing position after their existing SEO left.  Over the years I’ve developed a passion for testing and data-driven decision making.  Currently I’m a Client Manager at Point It, Inc, a Seattle search marketing agency where I specialize in SEO, PPC and local search marketing.

2) Please look over the SearchFest Agenda (http://www.sempdx.org/searchfest/searchfest-2010-agenda/) and give us some of the sessions / speakers you’re looking forward to seeing.

Even though I love landing page testing, I don’t think I could miss the Blogosphere session – with Matt Inman and Rebecca Kelley speaking, it’s bound to be both hilarious and useful! I’ve recently taken quite an interest in Local SEO, so I’m also really looking forward to the Local Search session. Some of the best tips I learn at any conference are invariably at the networking events, so I’m also just looking forward to talking shop with the SEMpdx crew.

3) As someone who recently accepted a new position, can you give us your impression of the search marketing job market for experienced professionals?

When I was laid off in a re-org in late 2009, I had yet another reason to thank my lucky stars that I work in the industry that I do. Being in the market for a new job in a down economy is never a fun prospect – but unlike a lot of other industries, search is still experiencing some growth. An experienced search marketing professional is unlikely to be out of work for long (I was only out of work for about two weeks), whether it’s contract work or a full-time position. It helps that social media is such an increasingly big part of online marketing – I know I was thankful to my network of contacts for tossing contract work my way and passing on job opportunities they came across.

SearchFest 2010 Audience Interview: Ruth Burr is a post from: SEMpdx

SearchFest 2010 will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I’ve been in the search industry for over 6 years. I started in Eugene with TrafficLeader, later to be owned by Marchex. My focus has largely been on Paid Search; but over time, I have become fairly adept at SEO, SMM, and User Experience Design, and will likely incorporate all of these talents in my new job at Portent Interactive. I occasionally write for Fresh Edge Media and the somewhat controversial Syzlak SEM. In my free time I play in the band Donerail, that looks to have a couple new recordings out by the end of the year.

2) Please look over the SearchFest Agenda (http://www.sempdx.org/searchfest/searchfest-2010-agenda/) and give us some of the sessions / speakers you’re looking forward to seeing.

Bing has really made an impression on search over the last year. I can’t remember how many times we’ve been told that a new algorithm, or new search engine, or new layout, or what have you was going to actually change the way people search…6 times? Bing has really done well for themselves, it’s enjoyable to use, has some cool features, their map system is unreal, and they’ve actually gained a little market share. Should be interesting.

PPC for Social Media is my “off the beaten path” session. Facebook is gaining users by the hour, and is certainly appearing as a new venue for PPC. As more companies learn the ways of Facebook, I’m sure users will be inundated with ads. Having 2 pricing models seems to be a good strategy too…for Facebook that is. Oh shoot, I suppose I’m obligated to say that I’m most interested in Reputation Management with Ian Lurie.

3) You’re someone that’s been coming to our events for some time now…can you give your impressions as to the value you’ve received for being a frequent attendee?

I have! I know this probably sounds like the perfectly written plug too, but really…for the money, there is no better conference than SearchFest. Throw in the monthly events that SEMpdx puts on, and the organization is really one of the best in the business. Affordable learning. Can you get any better?

SearchFest 2010 Audience Interview: Josh Patrice is a post from: SEMpdx

Cameron Cowan will be speaking about “Landing Page Testing” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living .

I currently work as Product Manager for SearchCenter, the paid search campaign management and optimization platform which resides in the Omniture Online Marketing Suite.  As a product manager I am constantly talking with customers, prospects, and other industry thought-leaders on what their biggest business challenges are (specifically in the realm of acquisition marketing) and how SearchCenter and the other Omniture products can help them overcome those challenges.

I have been part of the team at Omniture – now an Adobe company – since 2005, over which time I have worked in many capacities: Consulting, Account Management, Training, Sales, and now Product Management.  I have also been heavily involved in our international markets, having spent two years living and working for Omniture in Australia and Taiwan.

With an educational background in finance, I am highly “dollars-focused” and was particularly drawn to search marketing – specifically search marketing built upon the solid foundation of business analytics – due to its high level of measurability as well as its metric-based decision making and accountability.  Combine that with a truly pull (not push) approach to marketing, unique to search, and I can’t think of any other industry I’d rather be a part of!

I can be found on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/cameronrcowan, and followed on Twitter at SEMCameron.

2) What members of an organization’s “team” need to be involved with a landing page testing project?

Everyone who is responsible for the performance of the website.  That is a broad answer, and intentionally so.  Website content owners, user experience & design folks, and technical staff absolutely need to be involved.  But search marketers (and their counterparts in other online marketing channels) need to play a much larger role in landing page testing and optimization than they have historically.

Far too often search marketers are content with saying to themselves, “Well, I got the visitor to click-through my ad to the website – it’s out of my hands now; my job is done.”  Then if poor site conversion does not trend with CTRs feeding the website with traffic the marketers are far too ready to point fingers at the content owners and site designers.  If your performance as a search marketer is tied directly to actual campaign conversion and bottom-line profitability – which I strongly believe it always should be – then you have no choice but to be intimately involved with website testing, both on the landing page and throughout the visitor conversion process.

3) Is revenue / ROI the only important metric in determining landing page testing success or are their others?

Certainly not.  In fact I’d say that it’s not even the most important metric in determining landing page performance.  Anyone familiar with a basic income statement can tell you that revenue is the rawest top-line figure, with many other factors below it that can significantly affect the final figures.  A company can be generating tons of revenue and still not be profitable.  If you really want to add value to your organization, you need to be a “bottom-line search marketer”.  Hone in on profit.

The other metric that far too often gets ignored (or cannot even be measured, depending on the technology you are using) is Bounce Rate.  It’s a simple enough metric, but it can really help you in identifying where the problem exists to begin with.  A landing page may have a terrible reported ROI, but there’s a big difference between one that has a high bounce rate and another that has a low bounce rate which is instead losing visitors further down in the conversion funnel.  It’s a fairly basic measurement – are visitors going just one step further in engaging with your website and brand – and yet it can be incredibly insightful.  The unfortunate truth, however, is that an embarrassingly small number of search marketers are even measuring it.

SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Cameron Cowan is a post from: SEMpdx

Michael Cottam will be speaking about “Landing Page Testing” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

Was at STEP Technology, a leading Microsoft Solution Provider, for a number of years working on online banking, e-commerce, and real estate projects until the dot-com bust in spring 2001.  Then, started www.thebigday.com, a honeymoon registry and travel company. There I got most of my SEO/SEM experience, as the vast majority of our customers were coming to us from natural search, where we were competing with Expedia, Travelocity etc. on honeymoon travel search terms. At TheBigDay, I managed our PPC campaigns on Google, MSN, TheKnot, Yahoo/Overture etc. as well as writing our own wedding vendor self-managed ad system for www.thebigday.com.  Today, I have an SEO consulting business (www.michaelcottam.com) with a mix of large and small clients, and am a regular blogger at SEOMoz.org as well as serving as one of their Q&A team.

2) AdWords is now giving product listings more prominence.  How is that working out for advertisers?

It’s a very interesting topic, actually, with Google moving from PPC to CPA, i.e. getting paid not for traffic, but for conversions.  Certainly bound to drive more people to get involved with Google Merchant Center.  What will be really interesting is how users treat the images of the products & the psychology behind this.  Traditionally consumers have triple-thick lead blinders on when it comes to banner ads.  Will the product images attract more attention & clicks, or less?  I think it’s fascinating (baffling?) that the extensions under the product ads are still PPC though.  The news I’ve seen is saying conversion to purchase rates are better by 5-10%; however, I’d be taking this with a huge grain of salt, as I’d expect the store brand name and the type of product to have a huge effect.  Also, it’s relatively new on Google from the consumer perspective, so right now, it’s going to really get noticed….will this die back after 6 months to a year?  And what if Google intensifies the amount of image-ad placement….will that dilute the effectiveness BELOW what their traditional PPC top-3 listings deliver?

3) From the consumer perspective, it’s really bringing a lot of power, as the multiple-store results let you see both seller ratings and compare prices.

I suspect there’s a lot of money to be made in the short term by getting your product feed properly loaded ahead of your online competitors, so that certain product models that aren’t found in competitors’ feeds result in you being the only result for that product & image, sidestepping the seller ratings and comparison price screen.

If you were negotiating with a site owner for a display ad placement, what portions of a typical web page are the most desirable for getting surfers to notice your ad?

Well, typically people will tell you that you need to look at the traditional heat map and place your ads there (the tipped-over L shape), however there are two problems with this:  (1) those two areas that people’s eyes scan tend to be where the main nav and category nav reside, so that space isn’t available….and (2) if you CAN get your ad there, it’s questionable whether you’re going to get conversion as that’s where people are looking for the nav elements, not your ad.  The latter of course will depend on the kind of ad….if it looks like the rest of the nav and takes someone to the right product category on your site, you might win.  However, the best conversions I’ve seen have been off of in-text explicit recommendations, i.e. where the site is reviewing or describing the major products in a given industry and mentioning your company or site. 

But….your question was DISPLAY ad placement, so in short, I’d say get it in the middle, as left as possible, with article text wrapping around it.  The banner space at the top of the page gets universally ignored, as does box or skyscraper ads to the far right.  And we won’t even talk about below-the-fold

SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Michael Cottam is a post from: SEMpdx

Richard Zwicky will be speaking about “SEO Tools” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1)      Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I’m the Founder and President of Enquisite. What do I actually do for a living?  Well, I’ve kind of resigned myself to the fact that "I do stuff" and what that is changes constantly based on organizational needs.  Generally, I love it!  

Prior to creating Enquisite, I built a search marketing firm – Metamend, and prior to that a traditional bricks and mortar operation in the luggage and leathergoods (fashion) industry.  Fortunately, I’ve been successful each time.  For that I’m grateful to (almost ) everyone who’s participated in each of these ventures, helped me grow, and taught me a lot about business and myself along the way.

For quite a few years I made a living as a full-time SEO entrepreneur.  That ended in 2006 when Enquisite really started taking off.  I was fortunate enough to work on search campaigns across a plethora of sites, geographies and industries.  Working on a large variety of sites which ranged from  500 search referrals a day to ones with well over 1 Million search referrals per day really exposed me to a large range of the challenges that search marketers face, and I’ve used that experience, and the experiences others have taught me to guide Enquisite’s development path.       

2)      When does a business “graduate” from Google Analytics and need to consider a premium analytics solution?

I’m not sure you graduate from Google Analytics, as opposed to need to expand beyond it!  GA offers value to a lot of people, but there’s also a tremendous amount of things it just doesn’t, or outright, can’t do.  As you become more seasoned, or the sites you are dealing with become more complex, you need to add deeper, more powerful applications like CoreMetrics, Omniture, or Portland’s own WebTrends.  Of course, it you want to get serious about customer acquisition opportunities and analysis, then you need specialized applications, like our own Enquisite!  

Specialized applications are really necessary for great search marketers.  Sure, anyone can go to Google, compile a list of valuable potential links and score them, but a great search marketer uses an application like SEOmoz’s Linkscape.  You can do negative keyword research by hand, or you can use Epiar’s keyword tools.  You can do bid management via Google’s Adwords interfaces, or like the experts, you can use specialty products like Marin, Acquisio, or ClickEquations.  The same holds true for analytics.  A professional worth their salt should be using leading edge applications, like Enquisite! Then of course, you get specialized in-depth search marketing analytics, plus predictive analysis and reporting you can’t get elsewhere.  No need to drop GA, but why handicap yourself?

3)      Please give me some important analytical metrics that are too often ignored by search marketers.

I’m still shocked at how many search marketers refer to ranking reports as a meaningful metric.  How about Quality of Traffic from search, social, links, etc?  How many people engage in link building campaigns, and then monitor the rankings instead of counting the visitors?  How about putting a dollar figure to the value of a referral across all channels?  These are all meaningful metrics that people ignore, or fail to report to their clients.  Unfortunately, many of these clients don’t know to ask for this information. 

I often hear people ask about how long a tracking JavaScript takes to load, but no one ever asks how often it doesn’t load.  There’s more than one application I’ve tested that misses significant numbers of page loads, and then just samples data to fill the gaps.  Far too many people are assuming their data is good, and don’t realize how poor the data collection systems they depend on really are.  Your work is likely being undervalued because the value you’re delivering is under-reported.  

Ever watch the status bar at the bottom of your browser to see what code hangs? Now that page load times are important to your site’s score in Google, can you afford to use data collection systems which don’t load hyper fast? (this is why we use Akamai to deliver our JS).  

People always talk about quality of data, and they are right to do so.  But are you sure you are getting all the data, all the time?

SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Richard Zwicky is a post from: SEMpdx