Maximize your ROI on search advertising and SEO services, Great tips from Omniture event

Maximize your ROI on search advertising and SEO services, Great tips from Omniture event with presentations from Omniture UK, KeyBroker and iConvert.

Here's a list of services and my tidbits about how to do things smarter for your marketing.

Important to think about account structure before you get started and get too deep into what you are doing; Use an "agency" view and apply multiple accounts for search engine, campaigns and ad-groups.

Think "merge" of CRM data, blog data, website data and design of landing pages so your landing pages apply both CPM, PPC and SEO keyword requirements. This results in a "sales-funnel" approach to how you layout and structure the use of different data on different levels.

An example of landing page levels;

• Level 1, home page - think brand, industry branch,
  category when you choose keywords
• Level 2, product area page - think products area specific
  keywords
• Level 3, individual product page - think product specific
  keywords and chosen features, benefits and advantages (F/B/A) keywords
• Level 4, Buy or call to action page - reinforce F/B/A
  keywords and provide easy action

Design of Landing pages

• Design a landing page having clearly in mind, where do you want your
  customer to end up? Applies for all levels of pages.
• Use images, color, action text
• Use 3 different designs of you landing page layout ads for the same
  campaigns, kill the two worst performing, write two new ones based on the
  number one performing, keep going, allow 6 months for analytics and follow up,
  then keep marketing

Conversion

Some facts from iConvert about conversion

• Fortune 500 companies spend about 15% of marketing budget on optimization
• A lot money on optimization but not on analyzing and measuring conversion
  rate
• Optimization still a must but testing needed

Testing, Segmenting and Targeting (TST)

The commonly used split testing (A/B) usually does not work because it only tells which one of the two alternative ads work better but the result does not tell you why? -> use multivariate testing (MVT)

MVT testing will analyze use of a specific element vs. price, product message, no phone number in ad, what logo used, etc.

Segmentation

You want to check parameters such as

• Source, from where does the customer come when arriving on your
  landing page?
• Behavior, what does the customer do once there?
• Geo tagging data, what day and part of day?

With a rolling scheme of 3 different ads, using segmentation as test criteria in the MVT testing will tell you whether the simple ad is the best (good for people who know or understand right away what they want) or the most detailed ad works better (good for people who need to be more informed before they act).

Conclusion: A project result was presented, with a 12% uptake in conversion, resulting 874% ROI on marketing cost and more than 1M £ in extra revenie.

Omniture's SiteSearch and SiteCatalyst will let you play with all these variables to SEO, PPC, CPM, TST optimize you marketing campaigns. Technically it is done by Javascripts used on website pages that will depending
on criteria used redirect traffic via Omniture and back to company website, presenting the different landing page choices.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services' needs.

Save Google Adwords dollars by using CPM instead of PPC

Here's a summer tip based on notes I took during a presentation. I hope I have correctly interpreted the information. In any case, you are welcome to comment whether something is wrong or you have better information.

Most company marketing people think about Google Adwords and pay-per-click advertising (PPC) however, using cost per thousand impressions (CPM) can be a more effective way of using Adwords in particular if you have a small marketing budget. And yes, I don't think you can expect the value of a 24 ore Swedish stamp will get you anywhere with a marketing campaign but let's look at an example.

Adwords - Site bids (CPM) vs. pay-per-click (PPC)

Two important things to remember with;

• Site bids or cost per thousand impression (CPM), your landing page is not that important
• Pay-per-click (PPC), your landing page is important, you have to design with right keywords

Example to compare cost for advertising:

You pay for 1000 impressions $0.50 per impression, if you have 10 clicks you still pay $0.50.
Continue example using $0.50 CPM average cost, with a click through rate (CTR) of 0.5% to 2-3% CTR (very good)

you can calculate the number of clicks;

1000 impressions x 0.5% = 5 clicks and with $0.50 CPM cost you will get
5/$0.50 = $0.10 cost per click

With a small marketing budget, you get more for less using site bids instead of pay-per-click advertising even though the CTR rate is lower because the conversion rate is higher.

A tip is, remove web sites with a CTR rate of less than 0.1% (not worth using Adwords sitebids on).

Contact me for sales and marketing services, http://www.lidforss.com/contactus.aspx