Being able to share a great success you have is a nice thing, but it is even better when you have the opportunity to share your students’ successes. Over the last couple of years I have seen my students shine writing for publications such as ClickZ, speaking at conferences, generating and publishing interesting research about personas, and of course getting remarkable results for themselves or for clients. I am sure you would love to know the secret to their success?

I went back and analyzed thousands of tests and improvements we made for clients in my 10-plus years running our agency and the success that my early students had, and I was able to narrow it down to what I call the “conversion trinity.” This is also the same formula I have shared to help people find big ideas for testing and to ensure they are testing smart variables that won’t waste resources but will provide them a lift in click-through rates and conversions.

So What Is the 3 Step Formula of the Conversion Trinity?

• Relevance. Are you relevant to my wants/needs/desires (search query)? Have you maintained scent?
• Value. Do I know why you are the right solution for me? Have you explained your value proposition/offer well?
• Call to action. Is it obvious what I need to do next? Have you given me the confidence to take that action?

Every successful test or ad or landing page improvement has come from enhancing one or more of the trinity factors.

My former student Noran El-Shinnawy did a great job explaining how to use the conversion trinity with email marketing. I’ll be sharing with you how to use it to improve the ideas you test and some examples from PPC advertising.

Former student Patricia Hader had her test, which she performed as part of her MarketMotive Master Certification course work, published on WhichTestWon.com. We’ll look at this test as a great example of using the conversion trinity to improve conversion rates.

Let’s start by analyzing Patricia’s 52.8 percent boost in newsletter subscriber rate for the New York Public Library.

Here is the before page:

Let’s see how she improved the page:

How did it improve:

• Relevance. The new headline let’s people know that this is how to stay up to date with the NYPL instead of just telling them to subscribe to newsletters.
• Value. A bulleted list of what visitors would get when they subscribe was added, as well as an image and link to a sample newsletter.
• Call to action. The form was simplified to one field from three fields and a list of check boxes to choose from. Also, the point of action regarding NYPL’s privacy was simplified.

The Conversion Trinity for Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Above you have seen an example of how to improve a landing page. Now let’s look at a PPC ad and see how we can apply the conversion trinity.

Let’s analyze this before and after the PPC ad rewrite from BoostCTR that resulted in a 326 percent increase in click-through rate.

Before:

After:

• Relevance. The new ad focuses in on the need of wanting better PPC ads versus a headline that just said “boost CTR.”
• Value. The new ad includes a specific value of clients seeing a 30 percent higher CTR.
• Call to action. By adding the word “get” to the guarantee of better ad creative, the phrase was turned into a call to action.

Try a Conversion Trinity Analysis Yourself Now!

Do a search on “cheap hotels NYC” and look at a couple of the ads and landing page combinations. Using the conversion trinity, what would you suggest that these advertisers improve? Share it in the comments below.

Now try it for your top three to five terms.

Look at yours and your competitors’ ad/landing page. What could you improve based on your conversion trinity analysis? Feel free to email me what you found.

Looking for more proof that most successful improvement comes from leveraging the conversion trinity? If you look at what MarketingSherpa found as the top four page elements having a significant impact on testing, I think you will see that they are all part of the conversion trinity.

Headline and images are about relevance, body copy is about value, and form layout is about call to action.

Are you focused on using a successful formula or are you just fumbling around hoping to get lucky?

Men dread these moments: my wife’s errand was to go to the drugstore and pick up…diapers. My little guy was on his last one. I was ready to get him his Pampers when I was stymied by the store selection. The sale was nearly lost!

As I stood looking at the row of diapers, all I could see was Pampers Cruisers with Dry Max. My mission was to return with Pampers Baby Dry. No husband ever wants to return with the wrong diapers. Caution reminded me that there was some issue with these, so I called my wife and she was pretty adamant about not buying them because of a recall months earlier. I told her to search online for an update because it was all that was available and at the late hour I was shopping, there weren’t many other options.

So while I waited on the phone, my wife did a couple of searches on Google:

• Is the dry max recall issue fixed?
• Are pampers dry max safe now?

She checked out one of her favorite sites, BabyCenter, and of course hit P&G’s Pampers website. What did she find out? Zilch!

All she found was content related to the original recall in May: how some kids reacted to the Dry Max ingredient and one person asking recently about the issue with no response from Pampers. If the company did answer it somewhere it sure didn’t show up anywhere in her searches. And if I wasn’t willing to take the risk that my son wouldn’t react, I had to be willing to go driving around to try to find the Baby Dry option. Otherwise, Matthew was going to start potty training really early!

I can understand not wanting to highlight that your product was ever recalled, but if someone is searching if something is safe for their baby, trust me, that content better be found.

What would you do if you were Pampers?

Peek-a-Product

Another strange search event happened to me the other day. We wanted to buy our niece a game off her wish list, but it was selling out everywhere. So I figured I would try to search for it on Walmart.com.

So I go to the site and in its internal search engine I type in the game “hedbanz.” What do I get as a search result? A dead end.

However, if you go to Google and type in “walmart.com hedbanz” you get to the company’s product page, which tells you the item is out of stock. This wasn’t a big surprise, but it sure was a surprise to find a dead end search results page on Walmart’s website. Tell me the product is out of stock and at least offer me some alternatives.

The same thing happens when I search for old models of electronics or similar stuff. They get rid of the page, so you bounce right off the website. Why don’t they take you to an information page that can offer the visitor information about the product that may currently exist and with some possibly updated alternatives? For example, if I tell you how much I enjoyed my Sony DSC-W80, you might go to search for this outdated product but you’ll find little or no information and no guidance as to what model or models have taken over for it and why it was liked so much. The reviews would all tell you how quick the camera is, but the product description never highlighted the fast refresh rate it offered.

I know it takes work to maintain these pages, but it can be worth it. Oh, and of course Amazon maintains the page and let’s you know there is a newer version available. Do you just want to leave all the sales for Amazon?

Are you making sure your search strategy offline and online, internal and external, outlasts your customers’ memory?

Google is a money making machine; that is why it has tremendous influence in the online ecology. Google has a lot to teach the world about relevance, credibility, value & user experience. However, Google isn’t a training company; it derives more than 90% of its revenues from advertising. It’s fascinating that Google makes most of its money from advertisers (sellers) but is forced, like every media company, to think primarily about the experience of its audience (buyers).

When buyers “buy naturally,” and sellers “sell effortlessly” you have the ideal human-computer interaction. Interaction occurs in a non-linear system that delivers exactly what prospective buyers need, when they need it, so they can accomplish their goals in the manner most comfortable to them. That’s a user experience we (everyone from IAs to designers and even marketing folks) can all buy into if our interests were truly aligned. Google needs to train advertisers to do a better job while maintaining its revenues. So how is Google “training” advertisers?  With sticks, not carrots.

Quality Score: The Grand Equalizer

Theoretically at least, advertisers and searchers interests should be aligned. After all, an advertiser pays for an ad placement based on context. If Company A is advertising for widgets, when people search for widgets they should be able sell tons of widgets. That’s the theory. In practice, the user experience of paid ads is tragically broken; just go ahead and see how many paid searches send you to a home page or a generic landing page. That hurts Google‘s reputation for relevance. Google suffers when advertisers fail to deliver a good user experience. Google’s solution to this problem is Quality Score (“QS”).  QS acts like a tax for those advertisers too lazy, too structurally rigid or just too misinformed to deliver relevant answers to searchers queries.

QS is based on an algorithm that scores the value of the user experience the advertiser is creating from clicking on the ad to the target page. QS weights the value of a bid in the auction for ad placement and forces the advertisers delivering the worst user experience to pay more than those with better user experiences competing for the same query. The penalties are substantial; we’ve seen advertisers penalized more than 60% of their paid advertising budget; sometimes they weren’t even aware.

Google’s Enforcing Great Experiences

Bryan and I have been thinking a lot about Google’s Adwords program, QS and it’s consequences. It’s encouraging us to think that designers, developers, content creators and marketers may wind up on the same page someday soon.

Substantial penalties piled on top of large budgets have a way of forcing even those most entrenched in status quo to cat. You might also find it as encouraging as we do if we explain how we perceive the difference between conversion — which is mechanical — and persuasion that is based on a holistic user experience.

Conversion has only recently become the must-have piece of the pie. You could see it gaining interest when Call To Action, our second book, hit the NY Times bestseller list in 2006. In the last few years it’s become mainstream. When we started our former company in 1998 we never imagined that it would take so long. Unfortunately we’re not all on the same page yet.

The ability to achieve truly dramatic improvements in conversion rates still requires a shift in “conventional” thinking. Design teams need to understand that while the goal may be conversion, the practice must be persuasion.

Conversion is all about “the click.” We all understand the macro-level conversion, which is the business’s site objective. But it is important to realize that conversion also takes place at the micro-level — every single relevant click pulls the user deeper into the buying decision process. It’s imperative for sites to persuade prospects with each and every click.

Knowing What To Do Is Not the Same as Being Presented A Reason Why

Conversion is what the user does; it’s the “take action” part of the buying decision process. At the macro-level, the visitor converts from prospect to buyer. Helping prospects convert involves making it easier for them to buy by getting out of their way. Getting out of the way usually entails a copy, usability, or information architecture adjustment.

As we worked with clients in the early days of our business, we began to realize we could remove the obstacles to conversion, but that would only take us so far. If conversion is fundamentally about completing your linear scenarios, and people rarely go about accomplishing their goals in a linear fashion – how are you designing to address the buying process behavior of the majority of these non-linear prospects?

Consider this example: A site selling seminars, a complex selling scenario successfully funnels a majority of its traffic to a registration form, but few prospective attendees who land on that page complete the form and click through. The page rejection rate is staggering. Thinking they have a conversion problem, the company performs a variety of A/B tests on the form page with little success. Nothing they do to “fix” the conversion problem yields significantly improved results. They imagine themselves at a conversion dead-end.

In this situation, the problem isn’t always the form; assuming the seminar is a good one it’s the scenario visitors participate in before they reach the form. Perhaps prospective attendees haven’t acquired enough information or developed sufficient confidence to feel comfortable completing registering yet. Hopefully they would realize that this linear sales process is undermining their prospective attendees’ non-linear buying decision process – the  site is failing to persuade before it attempts to convert.

Persuasion is about meeting the buying needs of your audience. It’s a non-linear, multi-branched, integral part of your selling process – you present relevant information for your buyers in a way that suits you as the seller and hopefully allows you to make the case for buying from you.

Non-linear scenarios are the ones visitor segments create as they navigate your website. In this type of scenario we measure conversion differently, from where people enter to where they complete the intended scenario and whether or not they hit our key value pages.

Improving an Average Conversion Rate Produces Average Results

The goal is to focus on cumulative conversion rates for the website instead of simply an average conversion rate. This is accomplished by explicitly planning these non-linear scenarios, or persuasive design. When we dissect the buying process into its component parts for each persona, then measure those micro-conversions in the click-stream, not only can we better understand how well we are persuading but we can also segment our conversion rates by persona segment.

Persuasion is the next step in conversion rate marketing’s evolutionary chain; it’s the stage where we evolve beyond primitive relevance and weave into the user experience a compelling force that delights users. You may clear every last one of your conversion hurdles, but you will still face the question of how you move your prospects from click to click, how you orchestrate persuasive momentum.

Building persuasive, persona-based scenarios that allow prospects to “buy naturally” is the only way to achieve the dramatic results that are possible when you think beyond conversion.

From a conversion perspective, the designer now asks, “How do I build a single pipeline, or experience, that gets me the highest conversion rate?” From a persuasion perspective, the designer will ask, “How do I build multiple experiences that give me the highest conversion rates overall? It’s the difference between trying to increase your conversion rate from 2% to 4% (a 100% increase) and imagining what small percentage of all your visitors you will have to write off because they are simply “unconvertible.” Reach for only 4% or 100% of those intending to buy?

The Future of User Experience Driven by an Algorithm

The future is not about optimizing conversion, nor about maximizing conversion, it’s about spectacular user experiences that convert effortlessly from the users point-of-view. We are among the small community advocating that point-of-view for years but that future will most likely be driven not by people like us but rather by how an algorithm determines the quality of user experience. We’re feeling confident change is on the way and if it wasn’t for Google’s algorithm you might call that naïve.

Join us Thursday, August 26 at 1:30pm ET for a webinar with UIE – Produce a More Persuasive Site: Where Design & Marketing Meet.

[standing up] My name is Bryan and I am a screenshot addict.

When I fall off the wagon, it happens every so often, I pick a keyphrase and start clicking through PPC ads and their landing pages taking screenshots of the entire experience. It’s hard to imagine how often the experience from keyword to ad to landing page is broken. I fight the urge to call them, yell at them, and beg them to stop throwing away money. I don’t do it; but it’s so tempting.

After a few weeks or months pass the same advertisers, the smarter ones it turns out, drop those ads or pause them because their Quality Score is too low.  I can just hear their internal discussions as they analyze their metrics and rationally conclude that keyphrase X doesn’t convert for us.

(Maybe we should start the Internet Marketing Darwin Award for PPC ads.)

No, no, no, no, no! It’s not the keyword’s fault.

Keywords don’t fail to convert!!! It’s us who fail to convert visitors for that keyword.

Do or did you believe the keyphrase you chose is relevant to your business? If it is, then it’s  your responsibility is to show every visitor how that keyphrase is relevant to their needs. Every visitor that comes to your site is not completely unique. They have various, but mostly foreseeable,  motivations persuading them to buy and various foreseeable objections that would keep them from buying. Ask yourself:

• What is their intent in using those keywords?
• How does your PPC ad address the intent for all the keywords (and potential search queries) in your adgroup?
• What need or desire are they trying to fulfill?
• What is their goal?
• How do we align our goals to meet theirs?

PPC ads are just like tapping someone on the shoulder. PPC ads are only meant to grab attention not to convert. If you want to convert your visitor you need to work on the rest of the experience (the conversation) beyond the click.

Do you make any money when a visitor just clicks your ad? No. I don’t think anybody does.

So instead of thinking of PPC as pay-per-click start thinking of it as pay-per-conversation.

Devote some resources to optimizing your conversations.

How to Get Started Optimizing your Keyword Marketing

1. The first thing you need to do is bucket your keyphrases. Start with the first 100 or so top phrases that drive traffic to your website. For each one of those classify the terms by phase in the buying process. Does the keyphrase apply in the early, middle or late stage of the buying process?

If the term is driving traffic to your site but not really relevant to your business put it in a disqualified bucket for now.

For example: Someone is planning to buy a new television set. Early in their buying process they might use phrases like LCD tvs, best LCD tv, or LCD tv reviews. As they progress to the middle stage you might see keyphrases like compare Sharp and Sony LCDs, LCD tv 1080 dpi and then move on to specific models in the late stages like Sony KDL-52XBR6.

2. Define and realign your goals with your visitors. Would you expect every person you went out on a date with to marry you at the end of the first date? So why do we expect every keyword to convert visitors to our ultimate goal, the sale or the lead? Our job is to get them there, but based upon their buying preferences, they may not be able to move any faster than they are prepared to.

Start planning micro-goals along the way to your macro-goal (sale or lead). Someone earlier in their buying process might not be ready to commit on their first visit. Plan smaller milestones or micro-goals that may lead that person to convert at a later point in their process.

Why don’t many more early or middle stage landing pages have some easy way to capture a visitor’s email address with some kind of offer? I wish I knew.

If your web pages were sales people, how many of them would you fire or at least get trained?

Don’t pay for a keyphrase or a date if your only expectation is a full commitment at the end.  You need to romance them and show them all your best moves. (Warning – this is conversion advice and it works but I’m no dating expert, just ask my wife.)

Some examples: Maybe you can offer them a buyer’s guide download, a coupon for their first time purchase, an offer to see a webinar about how to choose the product/service they are considering or a price alert notification if this item goes on sale.

Every keyphrase should have a goal that is in alignment with the visitor’s stage in their buying process.

3. Measure your success and build confidence. Respect and support your customer’s journey along their buying process by pulling them along instead of trying to push them to commit too fast. That is the friction that is caused by your sales process colliding with, instead of aligning with, their buying process. This is what creates cognitive dissonance. What you need to build is confidence. Your visitors need confidence that you are there to support their buying process and confidence in your ability to address all their needs and wants in order to convert visitors at all stages.

Start tracking and evaluating your keyphrases and landing pages by how well they support moving visitors through the buying process.  Analyze these micro-goals and continuously optimize the experience to move further and further along so that you keep them on target. Every step closer to the macro-goal is a success, every visit that bounces is a failure.

Please let me know what is stopping you from taking these steps right now?

We want it simple!

Given a choice, human beings choose simple over complicated virtually every time.

Searching with Google is simple. You type in a few words and Google delivers the most relevant results.

So, what could be simpler than Google pay-per-click advertisements? People search for stuff, you craft a 95-character advertisement with a URL based on that search, you make a bid telling Google how much that searcher is worth to you, searchers click on your ad and go to its URL, and only then does Google get paid. That’s simple!

It’s so simple and powerful that it’s addictive.

Making things simple is hard work. Nobody does a better job of that than Google. That’s why in 2010, Google will sell well over $20 billion in PPC (define) advertisements.

Google’s PPC platform is a marvel of simplicity. The price of that simplicity is high. In reducing the inherent complexity, the opportunity to fine-tune becomes hidden, practically lost. Simplicity is a large part of what makes Google’s business model so great.

If you want it complicated, more powerful, and enhanced through the API to make your PPC efforts more efficient, that’s completely available, as long as you’re prepared to dig.

If you want it simple, then you overpay.

Thus, simplicity acts like a tax.

You could easily be paying 20 to 60 percent of your Google PPC budget to the “secret simple tax.” That was the case for one of our audit clients with a six-figure monthly PPC budget who was overpaying by over 50 percent. That’s right, millions of dollars could have been better invested if they realized that simple simply costs.

The secret simple tax affects small, medium, and large clients.

The secret simple tax affects in-house and agency clients.

The secret simple tax affects everyone who thinks of PPC as simple.

Google’s pay-per-click advertisement platform is not simple. It’s mindnumbingly complex. It’s hard and it’s humbling.

Can you handle the truth?

The truth is that Google’s PPC advertisement platform is simple to use but hard to master.

Our friends include some of the smartest, most up-to-date search marketers on the planet. We picked their brains when we started seeing quality score drastically affect our clients. We all considered ourselves smart, but our ignorance was astonishing. Every obvious question brought up at least seven less obvious follow-up questions. The complexity of the platform is profound, and when you overlay the complexity of a business’ products, services, customers, semantics, competitors, internal politics, and budgets, it makes your head hurt.

It can make you feel like a simpleton.

So, should you throw your hands up in the air, give up, and pay Google’s secret simple tax?

Heck no! Repeat after me: “We won’t pay that stinking tax no more!”

Hopefully you’re prepared to replace unconscious incompetence with conscious incompetence. Don’t worry, that’s a great thing. If you don’t understand why, then learn about the Four Stages Of Competence.

There are seven indications that you may be paying Google’s secret simple tax:

1. You favor audience reach instead of focusing on messaging relevance for every query
2. You favor audience reach instead of targeting, qualifying, and excluding searches
3. You don’t know how Google calculates your Ad Rank or the true impact of Google Quality Score
4. You favor brand messaging instead of focusing on the searcher’s buying intent
5. You organize using keywords instead of Ad Groups
6. You have many keywords but much fewer landing pages
7. You don’t constantly test ads and landing pages

There’s a lot more to say on the subject, I’ve said more here, here, and here. I won’t even start to ask what you’re measuring.

Are you willing to be wrong? Are you willing to question what you’ve been doing? Are you willing to unlearn what you think you know? Are you ready to handle the complexity of the world’s most powerful ad platform?

Or perhaps, I’m overcomplicating it all and you have everything under control.

Jeffrey, my brother and business partner, and I hope that you’re truly as smart as you think you are. We wish every one of our readers the best of luck in all their endeavors.

P.S. If you’d like to calculate your secret simple tax, download a spreadsheet here.

In my previous life, I was a social worker who helped mentally ill and chemically addicted adults on their road to recovery. I see many of the same symptoms of addictive behavior in too many pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers today. After all, there’s something terribly seductive about the simplicity of creating a PPC (define) ad; within moments your ad shows up and gets you clicks. As the high continues, you crave more, adding more keywords and new campaigns to keep increasing your dosage. However, sooner or later you realize that you have to put more and more into it to keep getting the same effects. Like every other addiction, it eventually catches up with you. The return becomes more limited; you need lots more to keep up your addiction, often times at the risk of pain.

As in all addictions, the first step to recovery is recognizing you have a problem. I often find most advertisers I speak with have a feeling something isn’t right, but they aren’t really sure what the issue is. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve performed PPC audits for clients to show them where things were failing. Nevertheless, to help people get over this addiction required us to find some simpler and faster ways to give advertisers the intervention they need to get help and recover. So, next week I’ll be offering a new workshop, PPC Addiction: The Road to Recovery, in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City.

To make sure the content would jolt attendees into recovery mode, I’ve been testing it on some former clients and friends. Let me share with you the letter one of my friends and former clients sent his agency (I changed the names to protect the guilty) after our 30 minute conversation:

I just had a long conversation with Bryan Eisenberg about some PPC audits they’ve been doing for clients. He said that a few months ago, Google really changed the game, and it’s all about Quality score, and it’s no longer just about bids. [Author note: If you don't understand this relationship, you should watch Google Chief Economist Hal Varian explain it.] And clients are contacting him to look at their accounts because they find themselves paying MUCH more for MUCH less.

So we pulled a few reports to see how our account is doing. The results are a bit frightening. Yet, they give some validation to a question that has been nagging me, “Why does PPC seem to be getting worse?”

1.) Conversion Per Month – As you recall, we stopped bidding on brand related keywords in Feb 2010 as an experiment. The PPC conversions went way down. No surprise there. Thankfully, my thesis has been proven correct as overall revenues have stayed the same. Unfortunately, PPC spending has increased without a jump in non-branded conversions!

2.) Impression Share – This shows how many impressions we’re getting for each campaign. Except in our case, our ads are hardly ever showing up. According to Bryan, this is a huge part of what changed in PPC and is directly related to Quality Score.

3.) Quality Score Distribution – We exported all the keywords and their corresponding quality scores, then totaled up the number of occurrences for each number. 7 and above is good. 6 and below is bad. 65% of our keywords are 6 and below. Ouch!

I believe Bryan has uncovered and demonstrated the reason for the numbers going down. In general, the problem – as best as I understand it and am able verbalize it – is that we’re going for “long-tail reach” with broad terms without using enough (any?) negative keywords, and this radically lowers Quality Score over time. Instead, we should be aiming for super-strong relevance using exact matches in small ad groups going to very relevant landing pages.

In addition, we looked at the ad copy, which frankly, has also been nagging at me. Our ads seem to lack keyword relevance and strong value statements. Plus, from what I can tell, very few (if any?) new variations have been tested in the past 12 months.

Joe Smith, you and I have a long history. And I like you very much. But I think I’ve let my personal feelings and faith in you get in the way from drilling deeper into this nagging PPC issue. I’ve sent several emails to you looking for your help to try and figure this out – and MAKE PPC WORK BETTER. Yet nothing your team has done has moved the needle in a positive direction.

This brings us to a fork in the road. Is your agency interested in keeping my company as a client? If yes, I need to know that you’re interested in doing everything it takes to improve Quality Score; starting with changing from broad to exact match on keywords, adding negative keywords, and re-arranging Ad Groups.

If not, then I’m afraid I’ll have to discontinue service with your agency immediately.

The first step to recovery is recognizing and admitting you have a problem. I think my friend has certainly done that. If you recognize you have a problem, you’ll be on your path to focus on improving relevance and quality and focused less on reach. Over $10 billion dollars were spent on PPC advertising last year. A portion of that came out of your pocket.

Are you satisfied you’re getting the maximum return on investment from it? Do you find it more and more challenging to continually increase your PPC effectiveness?

P.S. I have 1 Free ticket to give away in each city. If you are interested and can make it to the Boston, Philadelphia or New York event next week let me know in the comments below.

In a couple of weeks, I will be on the road again to help people optimize their Pay Per Click marketing efforts. From July 7-9th, I’ll be in Boston, Philadelphia and New York City for the Online Marketing Summit tour. Here is a description of the PPC Optimization workshop I’ll be doing:

Over $10 Billion dollars were spent on Pay-Per-Click advertising last year. A portion of that came out of your pocket. Are you satisfied you’re getting the maximum return on investment from it? Do you find it more and more challenging to continually increase your PPC effectiveness?

Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian estimates that the average AdWords advertiser sees about $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend. That means that if you have margins of less than 50% on your products, you may be losing money. Only about 2% of Google AdWords advertisers will get the type of return on investment that makes continuing worthwhile. Are you part of that elite group?

PPC management can be costly and overwhelming. Never have 95 characters seemed so simple, yet proven so challenging. In this intensive workshop, you will learn tips, tricks and processes to increase your ROI and make your PPC investments worth continuing.

You’ll learn how to increase your PPC advertising ROI by 3x while mastering:

• The 7 most common PPC mistakes to avoid
• 4 hot metrics you should be monitoring and including in your monthly reports
• A powerful 3 step process to increase Click-Through-Rates (CTR) and relevancy of your ads and landing pages
• How to boost your Quality Score rankings and lower CPC costs
• The simple technique that will make you stand out from your competitors
• A 12-Step process to optimize and improve your PPC management process

Join New York Times bestselling author, Bryan Eisenberg, and Acquisio‘s Internet Marketing Manager, Noran El-Shinnawy, in this fun, fast paced and informative workshop.

I’d love to see you there. You can register today.

Actually the answer is pretty simple. You haven’t given me sufficient reason to choose you over your competitors. Today’s customer has more choice, more knowledge, and even tabbed browsing to evaluate you and distinguish you from all of your competitors. In the few seconds they’ll invest in your website, if they can’t decide why you might be the solution to their want or need, they’ll close that tab faster than your Flash promotion can ever engage them.

I just returned from SES Toronto. One of the sessions I moderated was the PPC (define) ad and landing page clinic. A common mistake we saw: companies failing to position their value relative to their competitors.

So how do you avoid this mistake?

First, position yourself in your ads. The typical searcher is evaluating your ad compared to three to five others. Then, of course, position yourself on your landing page, but don’t forget every other page on your website. Buyers rarely see only your landing page. Give people a reason why they should choose you.

Don’t use flaccid, sugar-coated copy. If I could have a nickel for every unsubstantiated superlative I see in PPC ads and on websites, my great-great grandchildren would never have to work a day in their lives. No you aren’t amazing, the best, most innovative, number one, etc. At least not until other people say it and you can document it with facts. Two examples from the clinic come to mind. I won’t give the specifics to protect the guilty, but enough that you will get the idea.

The first example was from someone who sells used cars. Their ads sounded exactly like everyone else’s – “search from our extensive collection.” Extensive, according to whom? Is that an extensive three cars or 30,000? So, the first thing we asked the person from this website was – why should anyone buy from you? He replied that they were the biggest. The biggest what? According to? He said they had the largest inventory. That’s a great benefit for someone searching for a used car, but superlatives and hyperbole don’t help your visitors choose. Use specifics. Say something like “search from over 36,000 used vehicles in our collection.” If you could say “search from over 300 Acura TL no older than 2006″ that would be even better. Get it?

Another example was a company that sold leadership training. Their ad sounded just like Charlie Brown’s teacher: Wa wa wa wa wa wa. Every ad on the page sounded exactly the same. When I asked what they do differently and what was their goal, they responded that they were rated number one by a major publication and that their goal was to get people to come and get evaluated. I recommended they change their ad to suggest they were top ranked and that they should register to see if they qualify. They had to be sure that on the landing page they documented their number one ranking. And by telling people they may not qualify, being a bit exclusive could help their positioning.

People are bombarded with sales messages all the time. If you can’t cut through the clutter immediately to offer them something that has obvious value, they’ll be long gone to someone who can.

Nowadays, a lot of prospective customers have very short attention spans and even shorter memories, and they’re jaded.

You must make your value proposition or campaign proposition – strong, simple, quick, and clear – immediately, when prospects first hit your site. If you don’t have a strong value or campaign proposition and don’t state it clearly right upfront, you’re sending your traffic elsewhere instead of drawing them deeper into your own sales funnel.

Need help figuring out how to do that? Write down every possible reason you can find why someone should want to do business with your firm. If you want real results, involve your entire company in a high-energy brainstorming session. If you don’t find at least a few dozen reasons, either you aren’t trying very hard or you have a very boring company. Don’t be afraid to get professional help. Your survival can depend on it. Afterward, review the list and eliminate everything that is also true of your competitors. Nothing should be allowed to remain on the list that can also be claimed by a competitor. Here are some quick guidelines:

1. What is unique about your business or brand vs. your direct competitors?
2. Which of these factors are most important to your prospects?
3. Which of these factors are most difficult for your competitors to imitate?
4. Which of these factors can be most easily understood by your prospects?

Now create a memorable message out of these unique, meaningful qualities about your business or brand. And make sure it’s a message that speaks to the need your prospective customer feels, not some self-centered stuff about you.

You should also watch this video.

When we audit clients’ PPC (define) accounts, we look at their work from two aspects: the technical and the creative. While a 95-character ad shouldn’t be so challenging, common flaws appear in almost every account.

Let’s start out by examining the creative aspect.

Creating the PPC Searcher’s Journey

For visitors to convert, the five steps of the PPC searcher’s journey must be in alignment along the conversion path. I describe that five-part journey below. The model is simple, the execution challenging, and the businesses that effectively align these five parts are rare.

Intent: Behind every search is a person. That person has a want, a need, or an itch to scratch. If only we could tap directly into his mind, then we might be more relevant to his search. Imagine, if you knew the true intent of a search inquiry (query) and you could respond to that intent perfectly, then you’d convert most of the time.

Query: The searcher’s desire isn’t a keyword. The intent gets translated by a searcher into a keyword or key phrase that he hopes best expresses the need he has in their mind. Of course this process is complicated by the level of skills, intelligence, domain knowledge, language skills, and patience of the searcher. We, as marketers, must select those keyword we believe are most relevant to our business and choose the appropriate match types, negatives, and bids to maximize return on investment from these queries. Keywords are the bridge between the prospective buyer’s intent (want, desire, and/or need) and the experience you provide. Divining the searcher’s intent and responding appropriately should be the holy grail of all search marketing.

Google algorithm: Your keywords and key phrases are only the triggers for the actual search queries. Google uses a complex formula based on your campaign settings, budget, Quality Scores (define), Ad Rank (define), etc., to choose which advertisers ads will appear and in what position. It is your job to ensure all the technical settings are done properly and to continue to routinely optimize these settings. Many settings can be regulated by a rules-based system and can likely be automated or semi-automated based on criteria that you set.

Advertisement: The most important fundamental mistake we watch companies make is thinking of their Ad Groups as keyword groups. Bunching seemingly related keywords into one group and assuming that one advertisement can be relevant for the intent behind each of those keywords. Remember they are called “Ad Groups” not “keyword” groups. What does that means for you, as an advertiser? You must create ads that are truly relevant for the queries that your “keywords” will trigger the most relevant ad based on the actual query.

It helps to think of every hyperlink (PPC ads, SERPS (define), your navigation, banners, etc.) as a contract between you and your reader or prospective customer. Every time someone clicks on a hyperlink, he’s asking a question either implicitly or explicitly that he expects you to answer with precisely relevant information. Understanding and planning relevant hyperlinks and the content that corresponds to that hyperlink (UX people call this concept “scent”) is how we teach companies to maintain persuasive momentum. It is rarely good enough to use “dynamic keyword insertion” to ensure pseudo-relevance.

Relevance is always relative to buying mode. Lots of factors affect buying mode (economics, demographics, psychographics, stage of buying process, etc.). You must plan your ads to match buying mode and still optimize those ads for click-through rates and conversion. All too often advertisers limit themselves to only having one advertisement and not testing multiple versions of their ads.

Landing page: We often say, “Keywords don’t fail to convert, we do!” Why? If you believe the keyword query that you selected in your PPC settings is relevant to your business, your ad and landing page must deliver a relevant and persuasive experience that explains to your visitor how you can scratch their itch and offer him greater value than your competitors. Keep in mind: the searcher’s experience doesn’t often end on the landing page on your site, but rather continues several pages deeper toward your conversion goal. All of these pages must be in sync with the searcher’s journey in order for them to convert.

The Three-Step Paid Search Management Process

To successfully align your business goals to the PPC searcher’s journey, you must also have an effective and nimble PPC management process.

Step 1: Targeting. This step involves choosing keywords and organizing campaigns. This is where you deal with understanding the searcher’s intent and query steps in their journey. This is an ongoing process that continuously needs refinement and adjustments.

Step 2: Valuing. In this step, you leverage your understanding of the pay-per-click engine’s algorithm and set match types and bids. Most of this work can be automated or semi-automated. Every keyword has a different value for each match type. Typically an exact match (define) will converts at the highest rate but will have the smallest reach. Phrase match (define) comes next in terms of conversion but will expand the reach of your ads. Broad match (define) will have the greatest reach but lowest conversion rate. Broad match should be used as a way for you to continue to find relevant queries in the search engine and use those to create new Ad Groups, ads, and landing pages that can deliver relevant experiences.

Step 3: Satisfying. Here is where you focus on creating compelling ad copy and landing pages to match the searcher’s actual queries. Most companies spend too few of their resources on this step. When you focus your resources on satisfying a searcher’s query, you will tend to be rewarded with higher click-though rates on your ads, higher Quality Scores on your keywords, and higher conversion rates. All of this will act as multipliers on the rest of your efforts. Many companies overlook this step because they don’t take the time to understand the economics of having poor Quality Scores or haven’t come up with an effective process to scale testing and targeting effectively on their landing pages. Unfortunately, this part of the process can’t be completely done by a machine and needs human intelligence and creativity to get the best results.

Where in the search management process are you devoting most of your resources? How effectively have you aligned your PPC management process to the search visitor’s journey?