Post-Click Marketing Blog

Google, AdMob and Mobile Landing Pages

Justin Talerico — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:03:21 +0000

Wow, Google sure did bring credibility to the future of mobile marketing on Monday. $750 million is a big number and although the web is rife with commentary on the deal and the price, there’s little question that a big pile of chips have been pushed onto the table.

When we first introduced our mobile landing page framework as part of our LiveBall solution the market was nascent (at best). Today there are 30 million iPhones out there — most of which are on the web a lot. And that’s not even considering Android-based devices, RIM devices, etc. People use the web in their hand. And with all of that usage comes the need for optimized user experiences.

Clicking on an ad in search, SMS, an application or from an optimized website had better not link to a full, browser-size landing page. Precious few people are going to pinch their screen to zoom in and scroll around to figure out what you’re offering and how to get it. Mobile optimized ads need mobile-optimized landing pages — seemless extensions of the campaign message.

Several months ago we built sophisticated landing pages, microsites and conversion paths right into our LiveBall platform. We called it Quick Start and it’s been a huge hit. It just makes it incredibly fast and easy for non-technical people to produce high-performance landing experiences.

Click for a larger image.Well, about a month ago we began developing Quick Start for mobile — not knowing of course that our timing would be in such perfect alignment with Google’s AdMob revelation. On Monday afternoon (ET), as we were readying our press release announcing our mobile Quick Start program, Google’s news hit the wire.

Over the next few days we’ll be releasing more content to our website that shows how mobile Quick Start transforms LiveBall into a virtually instantaneous mobile marketing machine.

Mobile advertising is a fantastic opportunity for businesses to take a competitive advantage. Extending ad messaging into the pages that follow with optimized, high-performance landing experiences is now easier than ever before. Thanks big G for putting the chips on the table.

Conversion rate optimization for executives

Scott Brinker — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:26:03 +0000

PPC search advertising. Web analytics. Landing page optimization.

For many organizations, these responsibilities are still considered “in the weeds.” And that’s a ~~terrible shame~~ tremendous opportunity.

There are a lot of ~~excuses~~ reasons for that: it was a originally a small part of a company’s overall marketing mission, the tools used to be particularly crude and low-level, the implementation details required a certain level of specific training (e.g., AdWords certified), etc.

But the world has changed a lot in five years.

Online marketing is no longer an adjunct channel. For many businesses it is now the primary channel to their market. It’s unfortunate in some cases that those businesses haven’t necessarily realized it yet.

As we approach 2010 — a nice number by which to mark a significant change in an industry — it’s time for management and the executive level of organizations to embrace search, social, and post-click marketing as a bedrock of their marketing strategy and core operational capabilities.

The era of agile marketing is upon us:

test everything
test quickly and safely
quantify performance
analyze by segment
embrace microsegmentation
react faster to threats and opportunities

Landing pages — with rapid testing and behavioral segmentation features — are an incredible tool to wield in this new era.

The details of execution may still be in the weeds. But the strategic ways in which these efforts are deployed and measured needs to be integrated into a company’s leadership and management gestalt.

I wrote a bit about this last week in what the CEO needs to know about search marketing, and in a couple of days I’ll be giving a presentation at Pubcon based on the 7 levels of landing page optimization. I want to give people some concrete examples of how to elevate post-click marketing tools and techniques into higher-level strategic and tactical advantage.

Here’s a sneak preview of my presentation:

Conversion Rate Optimization for Managers

View more presentations from ioninteractive.

I’d love any questions or comments you have — and if you’re at the conference, please do come by our session on Thursday afternoon.

What the CEO needs to know about search marketing

Scott Brinker — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:43:02 +0000

If you’re at a small company, your CEO (you?) probably wears many hats. “Chief cook and bottle washer.” One of those hats may be hands-on search marketing.

However, for this discussion, let’s consider the CEO role as distinct from day-to-day operational management.

The CEO has one overarching mission: build an incredibly effective organization. It’s where the buck stops on deciding the organizational structure of the firm, its culture, its incentives, its internal checks and balances, and — as Cisco would say — its human network.

If the CEO doesn’t get that right, almost nothing else matters.

As companies grow, this quickly becomes a full-time job. But even if that responsibility is juggled with a stack of bottles to be washed, it still must be the CEO’s top priority.

Given that perspective, what does the CEO need to know about search marketing, post-click marketing, and online marketing overall?

The CEO doesn’t need to know which keywords or ads you bought, how much traffic is coming from each, how many different landing pages you’re sending them to, which rich media tactics you’re using to engage them, or what the conversion rate is for each segment on each path.

All that stuff is critically important, but not to that role.

What the CEO does need to know: how is your organization structured to excel at marketing in this brave new world?

How does your company define the different pieces of online marketing?
How do they interrelate in the specific context of your business?
Who is responsible for each of those pieces?
What will be in-house core competencies, what will be outsourced?
What are the mechanisms to optimize across multiple pieces?
How will incentives, budgets, and rewards be governed across those pieces?
How will tools and infrastructure to support this structure be adopted?
How is your online strategy decided, coordinated, and refined?
How quickly do you adapt to changes in the online marketing environment?

In the big picture, this is the single most important dimension in how competitive and successful a company will be online. Get it right, and it’s a rocketship. Get it wrong, and it’s like dragging a sack of bricks on a marathon. Ignore it, and you do so at great peril.

You know your organizational structure is not right when you run into situations like these:

It takes 4-8 weeks for IT to add a piece of tracking code to your web site.
The search marketing team has never met the web site team — except maybe at the holiday party.
Legal has to approve every landing page you publish (yet they’ve never heard of a “tweet”).
Your top-placing ads for “coffee” are schizophrenically selling “chocolate” instead:

We’ve all seen variations of these quagmires.

As an industry, it’s time to tackle these organizational barriers head-on, instead of wrestling inefficiently with a patchwork of workarounds and compromises under the radar.

Search marketing pundits have done a wonderful job of covering the tactics of search marketing in the trenches. But now there needs to be more advocacy and analysis from all of us on how organizational management and leadership must evolve in this new era.

It’s time to go from trench warfare to an Official Golden Age of Online Marketing Leadership.

Online isn’t just about new methods of marketing. It demands a new kind of governance of marketing.

And that’s what the CEO needs to focus his or her attention on.

As a timely post-script:

Gord Hotckiss of Enquiro has a column in today’s Search Insider about Selling Search to the C-Suite. He references the Search Marketing Maturity Model that I published as a way to help companies align their holistic evolution of search management, and he zooms right in on this point:

There’s another thing you’ll notice if you look at Scott’s model: moving beyond the first level is almost impossible if you don’t have some level of buy-in from management. The people managing search may have the best of intentions to move to higher levels of maturity through channel integration, more sophisticated testing and a robust post-click optimization strategy (which is Scott’s particular passion), but you can’t go there until you get the executives on your side.

If the C-Suite is knowingly or unknowingly keeping search in a tightly restricted sandbox (typical at the Ad Hoc and Engaged levels), you’ll never realize the benefits of an integrated campaign.

I’m delighted to hear that this will be one of the key topics at next month’s Search Insider Summit.

Clicks, gorillas and bananas.

Anna Talerico — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:35:15 +0000

You’ve heard me on this one before, but I have been resurrecting it lately, so I hope you enjoy this oldie but a goodie.

Let’s say a hungry gorilla is searching for a banana. And you happen to be holding a banana. And you happen to run into the gorilla in the street. What would you do? I hope—for the sake of your life—that you would give the gorilla the banana.

Think about the people searching on your keywords as gorillas. Not the docile kind of gorillas sitting in the tall green grass eating termites with Dian Fossey. The kind of gorillas that are charging through the forest beating their chests and making scary sounds. A keyword search at a search engine represents something the gorilla needs or wants. The PPC ad represents an implied promise to satisfy that need or want. And when they click on that implied promise, the page better fulfill. Right away. Don’t make them hunt around and look for it. Don’t assume they will figure it out, or find it on their own. Just give it to them. Give the gorilla the banana.

Now, in the real-world if you don’t give the metaphorical gorilla (the person searching) the banana they won’t charge you down and stomp on you. You should be so lucky. No, in the real-world, they will just turn around and leave. Because someone else (your competitor) will no doubt be right around the virtual corner ready to hand them the banana. Make your landing pages fulfill the promise that is implied in your ad. Make your landing pages all about fulfilling that promise. And make it simple & easy, because hungry gorillas don’t have all day, you know.

Pubcon = landing page llolapalooza

Scott Brinker — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:54:28 +0000

I’m looking forward to Pubcon 2009 next week — especially since I see there will be great landing page and post-click marketing sessions every single day of the conference! Now that’s my kind of event.

Tuesday, November 10, 4:15p
The Best Tactics in Landing Page Optimization
with Tim Ash, Brad Geddes, Kate Morris, and Joanna Lord

Wednesday, November 11, 11:30a
Increase Your Post-Click Conversion Performance
with George Aspland, Janet Driscoll Miller, Brian Massey

Thursday, November 12, 2:55p
Post-Click Marketing: Landing Page Optimization
with Taylor Pratt, Anna Talerico, Scott Brinker, Chris Goward

(They save the best for last!)

In addition, there will be related sessions on design and usability, lead generation tactics, e-commerce optimization, affiliate tactics, multivariate testing, conversion analytics, etc.

Pubcon definitely sounds like it will live up to its reputation of tackling these topics from multiple perspectives, with each presenter bringing a wealth of real-world experience and a desire to share advanced strategies and tactics.

If you’re going to be at the event, let us know — love the opportunity to meet our friends and fellow post-click enthusiasts face-to-face.

Landing pages must build trust

Scott Brinker — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:59:46 +0000

This morning, I tallied the results of an informal survey on search advertising sentiments, which I was conducting for a seminar at Harvard. My motivation was to dig a little deeper into people’s rationale and feelings about paying attention — or not — to PPC search ads.

It will come as no surprise that many non-marketers view advertising as “annoying” and “distracting” — too many years of gaudy banner ads and infuriating pop-ups have conditioned a lot of folks with an advertising avoidance bias. Yet search advertising does still reach people: 31.8% of the respondents acknowledged that they pay attention to search ads occasionally or frequently. And 79.5% indicate that they at least consider the ads some of the time.

But what did surprise me was two of the main reasons why people claimed they avoided the ads:

50% said they didn’t think advertisers would have anything useful for them
41% said they didn’t trust the advertisers

Here’s the chart of the complete answers to that question (the orange bars are what marketers reported, the blue bars are what non-marketers reported):

This drives home two critical issues that marketers must address in their ads — and I’d argue, even more importantly, their landing pages — trust and usefulness.

I’ve already advocated strongly for landing page usefulness, but trust is something that I kind of took for granted. Of course you’re going to want to be — and appear to be — trustworthy. That’s a given, right?

But as the results of this survey leaped out at me, it occurred to me that good, honest marketers probably don’t think enough about trust. It’s an assumed part of their worldview. And while that’s good at one level (round of applause for ethical marketing practices), it may cause some of us to not evaluate our ads and landing pages with a critical enough eye towards the appearance of trustworthiness.

Based on this study, I’d go so far to say that trust building should be the number one objective of landing pages and post-click marketing.

Factors that contribute to trust:

“message match” — consistency between what you promised in your ad and what you deliver on your landing page;
respectfulness in data collection — only ask for what you really need, what’s fair reciprocity for what you’re offering, and be up-front with your privacy policy;
careful choice of words and imagery — does your presentation come across as genuine and authentic, or does it (inadvertently) have a spammy ring of hype to it?
quality brand appearance — the visual quality and consistency of your pages signals an implication about your business quality and consistency — do your pages make you look good?
up-to-date messaging and offers — if your pages are outdated or contain expired content, that’s a very bad first impression;
zero tolerance for broken links and software errors — broken links and error messages scream “fly by night,” even if they were simply honest mistakes.

If you have other suggestions of ways to build and signal trust in landing pages, I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

The full results of the survey are available on my personal blog, Chief Marketing Technologist.

Are you optimizing your landing pages for a herd of wild horses?

Anna Talerico — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:17:12 +0000

Many online marketers I meet don’t yet differentiate between their organic and campaign traffic. But this differentiation is so critical to help you achieve your conversion goals—actually, I think it’s the most important first step you can take.

Put your web traffic into two different buckets—organic and campaign—and keep it there.

Here is your organic traffic—it comes to your from natural search, direct, viral, and inbound links that are not marketer managed. And it is truly organic. Just as you cannot control a herd of wild horses, as a marketer, you have limited control over where this organic traffic comes from and what it does when it arrives at your site. You can optimize for it, but you can’t fully control it. When you test & optimize these organic pages you should be testing for the Lowest Common Denominator (LCD). That is to say, you should be optimizing the most effective page you can for anyone & everyone who might land on it.

Campaign traffic is entirely different. Campaign traffic can be marketer controlled (in case my visual analogy isn’t 100% clear, that’s you - the marketer - sitting there controlling the 900-pound animal). Paid search, display, email, social marketing—these ads & messages are entirely in your control. You craft the ad, you place the ad and you control where the ad goes if someone clicks it (plus, you pay for it too!). What total power. You can optimize not for the lowest common denominator, but for the Ad, the Message and the Context of the click (ADC). In other words, you can optimize for specificity. You can capitalize on the ad, the message and the context and craft a corresponding experience that is highly likely to convert the traffic. You don’t have to make a campaign landing page that is right for ‘anyone and everyone’ who might land on it. You just need to make the page right for the people who click the ad.

Why you would want to do this is obvious, I hope. It’s so you can make your online marketing as effective as possible.

So, start thinking of your organic and your campaign traffic separately, and out of that will come a new way of thinking about your landing pages. Just as you have organic & campaign traffic you should have organic & campaign landing pages. Because every click has to land somewhere and it’s your job to make sure it lands in the most effective place it can.

Is one size fits all a good idea?

Anna Talerico — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:26:35 +0000

At the MarketingProfs Digital Mixer this week an attendee asked me: “Why can’t I just send all my organic & campaign traffic to the same pages in my website, and only optimize my website pages?”.

Well, despite the soapbox I sometimes stand on, I am not actually the landing page police, so if he wants to send all of his campaign & organic traffic to the same website pages he can, and he is not at risk for being arrested. But he is at risk for lower ROI than he could achieve otherwise, and that’s what I told him.

How can any one single website page be simultaneously perfect for the person who clicks on a natural search result, the person who clicks on a display banner, the person who clicks on an email, and the person who clicks on a PPC ad? That’s four different people, coming from four different contexts, clicking on four different messages. Is ‘one size fits all’ a sound marketing strategy?

How long does it take to build a landing page?

Anna Talerico — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:03:36 +0000

On Wednesday I presented “High Performance Landing Pages” with friend & client Arden Buchanan at the MarketingProfs Digital Mixer in Chicago. What I enjoyed most about the 90-minute session was that it was peppered with questions throughout and we were able to have great back & forth with session attendees throughout the presentation. It’s so much more fun to talk with an audience rather than to an audience.

While Arden was sharing a few of his 400+landing pages that he’s tested over the past couple of years, a hand shot up and you can guess the question. “Wow - that’s a lot of landing pages. How long should it take to make a landing page?”. (You can imagine the look on her face when we got to the part about American Greetings 1,000+ landing pages that they’ve made in just 9 months!).

So…How long should it take to make a landing page? Here’s the guidance we gave the session attendees.

Minutes

If you have an existing landing page, and just need a tweaked version of it, strive to have minor changes done (and live) in minutes. Think about this as replacing a button on a shirt, or mending a hole in your socks.

Hours

If you are launching a new version of a concept, it could take hours. This might involve swapping a layout, moving elements around on the page, changing imagery, rewriting copy. This is like hemming a pair of pants.

Days

If you are trying an entirely new landing page concept or strategy, then it could very well take you days to execute. You may need strategy, writing, design, art direction, production, QA, etc. Gathering up all of these elements into a cohesive landing page can take a little more time. Think about this as sewing a new dress (not all of us can sew a wearable dress, and so new landing page concepts may require some outside assistance from a tailor!).

Please note that WEEKS and MONTHS are not part of the guidance! Landing pages need to be somewhat disposable (because you are going to be using lots of them through trial and error to see what works best). You don’t want to sink weeks of time, resources & money on something that may or may not work.

Planning landing pages? Think Minutes, Hours, Days. If you can’t execute landing pages that quickly, put your attention on designing a new process, or using new tools that allow you to develop landing pages with as little friction as possible. It’s usually friction in the process that slows down landing page development.

How are landing pages like social media?

Scott Brinker — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:51:29 +0000

There’s a wonderful convergence that’s happening between search marketing and social media marketing. Now, when you go to conferences such as SMX, you’re likely to have search sessions back-to-back with social sessions.

And so it happened that at SMX East earlier this month, as I was listening to a couple of great social media panelists right after my own presentation on landing pages, it struck me: the core principles they’re championing are very similar to what we’ve been advocating with landing pages.

This led me to write 5 Social Media Lessons For Paid Search Landing Pages that was just published on Search Engine Land:

Can you apply the spirit of social media to other marketing channels?

Here are five principles of social media marketing that can energize your landing page program:

Engage in specific conversations, not generic one-size-fits-all talk.

Embrace “constant content,” continually releasing new ideas out into the world.

Harness fast feedback to learn about your audience.

Open up a dialogue by asking relevant questions — and respecting the answers.

Champion transparency and authenticity over cleverness and technology.

Read the full article here.