I was fortunate enough to have the great opportunity to take part in the Seattle Search Marketing Expo held June 2-3. The event was organized by Danny Sullivan, one of the industry greats.

I think most of us left the conference wishing for a bit more ‘advanced’ content. More tactics and less conceptual/strategic knowledge… But regardless, it was an outstanding opportunity to listen to other’s perspectives, express concerns and ‘wants’ to the search engines themselves and meet the incredibly intelligent and creative people that are part of this emerging and ever-changing industry.

I attended mostly the paid track and managed to squeeze in a few organic sessions in Day 2. If I had to sum up 10 takeaways from the conference I’d have to go with…

1. With the coming of Universal Search, SEO’s MUST start thinking about how to optimize for Google News, Google Video, Google Local, Google Product Search, etc, etc. It is no longer relevant to only focus on optimizing text.
2. Social Media is here to stay, so jump onboard. The best minds in the industry strongly feel that if you aren’t embracing blogs, podcasts, social media sites, etc you will be obsolete in 5 years.
3. If you hate Google’s Quality Score, you’re not alone. This emerged as a top concern expressed in the paid sessions. There is much unhappiness by many advertisers about inflated minimum bids (though I must say I’m pro Quality Score with exception to the CTR element).
4. Automated Bid Management is not (or is?) dead? The big debate: is it ridiculous to think of bid management as only a mathematical/algorithmic task, given the qualitative factors that the search engines now factor into the equation (is dead); or do bid management tools actually free you up to focus more time on qualitative factors (is not dead)? Sorry, no conclusive winner on this one…
5. Some healthy competition is much needed in paid search. We’re all pulling for you Yahoo and MSN - but the quality of customer service and ROI just is not there yet. We’re throwing some money your way, but we’d love to throw you more if you’d make it make sense.
6. People fear Google more than ever. Google’s continuing rise to power continues to raise a lot of eyebrows and spawn conspiracy theories. Shocker.
7. Search Query reports are soon coming to Google. This was definitely one of those ‘write this down and go do it’ takeaways. If you’re using broad or phrase match this will be a useful means for refining your match types as you will now be able to determine exactly what queries are converting without having to parse log files.
8. Ask.com’s advertising platform is a viable alternative to check out. I heard several people say they’ve had some success. The fact that they were invited to participate is an indicator that they’re becoming a player.
9. Whether Matt Cutts likes it or not, buying links does work when they are relevant. Think of it as a media buy.
10. In terms of where search started and where it is going, we are still only in the 2^nd inning. This industry is changing at a rapid pace and if you’re going to stay in it be ready to be a lifelong learner and constantly adapt.

The ability to perform A/B tests on ad descriptions and landing pages in paid search is truly a beautiful (and powerful) thing. If you are not testing ad descriptions against one another for conversion and ROI, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity to gain more sales and leads for your company within your given budget.

However, a lot of times it is tempting to throw 4, 5, 6 or more different ad descriptions into the search engines’ systems and test them all at once. Yet the key to drilling down to conclusive evidence of what does and does not work in terms of driving more leads or sales to your website is testing 1 element at a time. There IS a reason why they call this A/B testing – not A/B/C/D/E/F testing!

Take this example. Say you set up 3 different ads for testing in Google AdWords:

Suppose that at the end of 2-3 weeks the 1^st ad significantly outperforms the others in terms of conversion rate. Was it the ‘5 Diamond’ designation? Was it the fact that the rate was included? Was it that it stated ‘downtown’? You really can’t know for sure because no single variable was isolated. Each ad differs too much from the others and therefore you simply can’t draw any great conclusions from this test.

Instead, what if you were set this up on a ‘testing schedule’ of sorts. For testing in Week 1-2 (assuming this is enough time to gain actionable data… but definitely run the ads for longer if needed):

(note that the only variable tested is the use of a room rate in ad description)

At the end of Week 2, say the first ad with the rate emerges as the clear ‘winner’. You can now conclude that the inclusion of rates in the ad description is a factor that contributes to more online sales.

Week 3-4? Stick with the rate in ALL descriptions now that you know it is important for sales, but move on to a new isolated variable. Say that this particular hotel has a number of honors to work with as key differentiators and now you’d like to see which resonates best with searchers:

Week 5-6? Perhaps the hotel wants to test the use of special offers such as ‘Free Breakfast’ v. ‘4^th Night Free’. Week 7-8: maybe 2 different landing pages.

By patiently remaining systematic in this approach and letting the numbers provide the proof, you’ll have solid evidence of which ad elements and landing pages produce the highest ROI for your company.

One important last word of note though! In Google AdWords, much to the conversion marketer’s chagrin, Google will by default start delivering the ad that has the highest click-through rate – not the ad with the highest conversion rate. If your goal for paid search is to drive the most leads or sales, not the most clicks, then I HIGHLY recommend that you turn off the setting that so-called ‘Optimizes’ your ad distribution.

To do so go to your Google Account and:

1. Select ‘Edit Settings’
2. Under Advanced Options select the radio button to ‘Rotate: Show ads more evenly’

Happy Testing!

With Google’s Quality Score taking on more and more importance and Yahoo and MSN now adopting similar ranking methods, some new challenges have arisen for the conversion-based marketer. But first, before I fire off, let me say that I do applaud Google for many of the elements of the Quality Score. I do believe that marketers absolutely should choose targeted keywords, should craft highly relevant ads that focus on those words and should provide a great landing page that matches the searcher’s intent. Not only does this improve the searcher’s experience, but it also makes Google look better by providing more relevant results. And in the end it results in increased conversion rates for the marketer. Win-win-win.

However, there’s that pesky click-through rate which unfortunately is one of the most weighted elements in the equation. Grrr…

See, there once was a time when click-through rate, impressions and even clicks were not primary focuses of a successful conversion-based PPC campaign. I personally have had to talk many-a-client down, who at first glance thought their PPC campaigns had gone south, when in fact they were going north. ‘My click-through rate was 1 point lower this month!’… ‘My visits dropped by 500 clicks from Google this month!’… ‘Why are my impressions so much lower?’…

Once explained, clients would easily come to the realization that despite these decreasing metrics, the key metric to look at was conversions – total conversions (ie. sales or leads), conversion rate and cost per conversion. Quite often, conversions increase at the cost of declining impressions, clicks and click-through rate. But if you’re getting more sales or more leads within your given PPC budget, isn’t this a more than fair trade-off? Yes! It definitely is IF your main focus is conversions and ROI. In fact, often we purposely sacrifice click-through rates by stating price points and even hinting towards what we are NOT in the ad description to pre-qualify visitors and in turn increase our ROI.

However, those keywords that are getting lower click-through rates due to the use of strategic, pre-qualifying ad descriptions that are written for conversion, could end up being deemed ‘poor quality’ by Google. The result often is that the advertiser is forced to pay much more per click to compete in the listings (I’ve seen minimum bid requirements up to $20 per click!). Even when that very same set of keywords combined with the pre-qualifying ad description happens to be the winning combination that produces the most conversions and highest ROI for your company!

Since when is click-through rate a measure of quality for the advertiser? In most cases, if you’re a conversion-based marketer, it isn’t. Total sales/lead volume, conversion rate and cost per conversion are the true measures of quality for the conversion-based marketer, but Google and Yahoo are both making it harder and harder to manage campaigns to ROI goals effectively.

Case in point… while working with a franchise client recently, I ran 2 ads simultaneously. Within the character limits we succinctly stated the offer, a key differentiator and last… one ad stated ‘$25K to Start’ while the other simply stated ‘Get Started Today’. The purpose of this A/B test was to determine if stating the financial pre-qualification upfront would prevent clicks from the guy who saved up $5K and is interested in a cheap starter business.

The results? The click-through rate of the ‘Get Started Today’ ad was considerably higher than the ‘$25K to Start’ ad. However, the conversion rate and ROI was much higher for the ‘$25K to Start ad’. It definitely made sense for us to stick with the pre-qualifier and get significantly more franchise leads per month within the given PPC budget.

But in the end, the click-through rate element of the ‘Quality Score’ means that while ROI is increasing for this advertiser, this is going to be counteracted somewhat as Google hits them up with higher CPC requirements to stay ranked well among other advertisers with higher CTR’s.

There is much well-warranted discussion and speculation that this all boils down to the fact that the advertiser that’s raking in more clicks at the top of the Google results, regardless of whether they are a ‘quality’ match or not, produces more revenue for Google. Turns out that Google is a conversion marketer also it seems!

But what I’d suggest to Google and Yahoo is that they look at this from a longer-term perspective. Who is going to bring you more money over time? The advertiser who is successful because they’ve adjusted their campaign to maximize conversions… therefore seen that PPC can be one of their top ROI-producing marketing channels… therefore moved more of their dollars from traditional marketing to PPC … and are sustaining and increasing this budget more and more over time?

Or the marketer who may very well be producing a large volume of clicks, impressions and a high click-through rate for their company… but quite possibly may not be impacting their company’s bottom line. Eventually, most smart corporations are going to pull back on their PPC budget regardless of the astronomical CTR, clicks and impressions they’ve managed to achieve.

In the end, isn’t conversion volume and conversion rate the best indicator of quality for most of us? The search engine users who clicked through found what they wanted and acted! The search engine user is now happy and the advertiser is even happier! Win-win.

The advertiser now loves PPC and is giving Google and Yahoo more money because of it. Win-win-win.

Don’t get me wrong. The reality is that this click-through rate element is probably not going away anytime soon, if ever. So my advice to conversion marketers out there is to capitalize on what you can control. Take full advantage of the elements of the ‘Quality Score’ that really do equate to quality:

1. Continue to bid on the most targeted keywords for your offerings.

2. Structure your campaigns so that ‘like’ keywords are grouped together according to theme/offering. In doing so, you can write better ad copy that is more targeted and relevant, rather than writing a generic description that is meant to fit all.

3. Include the keywords you’re targeting in the ad descriptions themselves.

4. Develop custom landing pages that are designed for conversion by providing highly relevant and compelling content that matches the implied intent of the keywords you’re targeting, and an obvious way to act!

5. Track conversions religiously and revise bids accordingly.

6. Continue to pre-qualify visitors via your ad description IF (despite the CPC increases) you still find that it equates to a higher ROI in the end…

Author: Amy Konefal
Closed Loop Marketing
http://www.closed-loop-marketing.com (Read the full article…)