Lee Kantor (Atlanta Business RadioX), Dawn Ely (Corporate Conversations Host & President of Palladium Chief Legal Officers) & Christian Griffith (VP Digital Strategy, Freebairn & Co.)
Lee Kantor (Atlanta Business RadioX), Dawn Ely (Corporate Conversations Host & President of Palladium Chief Legal Officers) & Stacy Williams (Prominent Placement))
If you weren’t able to tune in to hear the livestream of “Corporate Conversations” last Tuesday, here’s an audio clip of just my portion of the show, and here’s a longer clip including the first half with Christian Griffith of Freebairn & Company.
In an earlier post, I discussed how to use Google Website Optimizer for A/B testing, and now I’m going to briefly touch on conducting multivariate tests with Google Website Optimizer. As with A/B testing, Google’s tool takes away much of the grunt work. Before you get started, consider these tips to help your test run smoothly – choose a page with high traffic, start off small by testing only a few elements, and pick a high volume type of conversion. Also, as I mentioned in my last post, the more variations you have, the longer it’ll take to declare a winner.
To begin, you’ll need the following:
- The URL of the page you’d like to test
- Identify the sections of that page you’d like to test
- The URL of the conversion/success page
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Earlier this week, Google launched Google+ Pages for businesses and brands worldwide. While some people were disappointed by the lack of exciting new features and customization options of the Google+ Pages, the impact of +1s in AdWords gives businesses a good reason to get their Google+ Page up and running.
Google announced: “This week we introduced Google+ Pages, a new way to get closer to your customers online. At that time we announced that you’d be able to link your Page to your AdWords campaigns, so that all your +1s — from your Page, your website, ads and search results get tallied together and appear as a single total. We’re happy to announce that starting today, and rolling out to all advertisers globally over the rest of the week, we’re making this functionality available with a new AdWords feature called Social Extensions.
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Google is nothing if not experimental. This can be a rather large and particularly uncomfortable pill to swallow – especially for search marketers. Normally those of us at SEM agencies love testing. User testing, A/B testing…you name it, we test it. And many of the brightest minds in the field write endless articles on the benefits of testing and experimenting.
But when Google begins rolling out new changes, we tend to collectively hold our breath.
Earlier last week Google announced a new way forward to improve user relevancy and transparency. Read more…
The AdWords Display Network functions much differently than the Search Network. Yes, an advertiser can still use keywords to target web users, but they function in a less clearly defined manner. For display, Google takes an ad group’s keyword list and matches the subject of the page opted into the display network with the theme of the ad group established by its set of keywords. This means that individual keywords do not act alone as they do in the search network, and that no keyword-level data is available to measure the effectiveness of a particular keyword. So, instead of optimizing the keywords ads are running for, an advertiser has to resort to other targeting strategies. Thankfully, AdWords has a number of targeting options and allows an advertiser to narrow down where ads appear by layering these different options.
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At first glance, one might think landing page A/B testing and multivariate testing are long and involved processes. However, Google Website Optimizer takes much of the pain and manual work out of the picture and simplifies the process. Today I’m going to talk specifically about A/B testing, and I’ll discuss multivariate testing in an upcoming post.
To begin an A/B test, you need the original landing page URL, the variation landing page (or pages) URL and the conversion page URL. Keep in mind, the more variations you have, the longer it’ll take to declare a winner. When you set up the experiment in Google Website Optimizer, Google will give you different tracking scripts to include on each page of the test. A set of control and tracking scripts will need to be implemented on the original landing page, and a tracking script needs to be implemented on each page variation. Lastly, you also add tracking script to the conversion page. Once all of the tracking scripts are in place, Google validates the pages. Next you can preview the versions of the pages you’re testing and launch the test. Voila – your A/B test is ready! Read more…
Categories: Google, Online Marketing, Paid Search, SEM, SEM General, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Usability, User Experience Tags: landing page testing, landing pages, usability
I’m asking this as a personal question about your search habits – this isn’t a blog post on how to actually conduct an online search. Stop and think about it for a second. Step back a bit and think about how you use search on a personal basis on the weekends and at night when you’re not working. And this isn’t a rhetorical question – really think about it. You might learn something.
My search habits have evolved quite a bit during the five years I’ve been a search marketer. I used to pride myself on the number of ways I could conduct a search on the same topic and find all sorts of different results. I’d show off to my family – “Look honey. Here’s a BETTER way to search for a condo at the beach.” And then I’d launch into a tutorial of how to conduct searches and get the most relevant results. I’d explain about relevancy to the search query, ramble on about backlinks and how sites get ranked organically, and pontificate on the differences between paid and organic results. My family and friends were astounded by my abilities – or at least I think they were.
Now, however, I must admit I’ve become a lazy searcher. Read more…
Ad Extensions in Google AdWords are an immensely helpful tool that provides more useful, relevant ads to your target audience searching for information on Google.
Whereas paid sitelinks extensions allow you to display additional URLs leading to specific and related content deep within your sitemap, location extensions lets you include your business address and phone within your ads.
Of course, this feature is especially useful for advertisers with a local business presence who want to generate brand awareness to users already close enough to visit their location, as well as users who are browsing for related businesses in their area.
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We’ve written before about why advertisers should typically run pay-per-click ads on keywords that are already ranking high organically. Still not convinced? Want to test your own results? Our friend and colleague Brad Geddes has published an excellent article entitled Paid vs. ‘Free’ Clicks: When to Buy a Keyword that Organically Ranks #1.
The article outlines specific steps for testing whether or not you should buy particular keywords. It will allow you to compare profitability for a keyword when you’re ranking #1 organically only vs. when you’re running PPC at the same time as ranking #1 organically. The test can also address any cannibalization concerns you may have.
Finally, landing pages are discussed, giving you a way to test the conversion rate of SEO landing pages (which are typically regular pages on the site) against specific PPC landing pages. Most of the time, it makes sense to use PPC for all organic keywords, and to build custom PPC landing pages…but not always, and here are instructions for how you can test this.
The first step in driving more web traffic and leads from search engines is to rank high and take up a lot of real estate on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Google has just made that easier in both the organic and paid results with its recently enhanced sitelinks. That has just gotten easier on Google thanks to its recently enhanced “sitelinks,” both on the organic and paid sides. Below, we define sitelinks and provide examples, impacts, and tips for how to make sitelinks work for your business.
Organic Sitelinks
When a site is ranked #1 organically on Google (usually for its own brand name), Google now may display up to 12 sitelinks below the main listing. These are links to other important pages in the site, with the URL listed as well as a very brief snippet of a description. Here’s how it looks for one of our longtime clients:
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