Enter the Owl

We don’t spend a lot on retargeting (it costs very little to target our audience), but it is a major area of opportunity. And I hate lost opportunities. I decided to use some humor and found the image of a small, inquisitive-looking owl, wearing a straw hat. To that, I added a few lines that a used car salesman would throw out, provided by fellow BFMers David Dweck, Matthew Smith, and Bill Ryan. In the end, the ads appeared to work, increasing average CTRs to over 0.3%, a relatively good number for our campaign. Here are the ads that I created, which got us immediately more responses, and ultimately, more conversions.

We created a number of ads that peaked the curiosity of our audience. Many clients called in saying how entertaining it was to be followed around by an owl. That was the first time we’d received such praise for ads.

There were multiple sizes created so that we could have two different messages sometimes show up on the same page.

The free leather upgrade really got people clicking.

We made light of the fact that we were “following” people around. The “I am not following you” banner had the highest click-through-rate.

We marked current events with the ads: after the earthquake on the East Coast, we created an ad referring to it, as well as during hurricane Irene.

All of these ads sent users to this landing page. Notice the continuity in the usage of the owl.

The results

As a result of our “owl” campaign, click-through rates increased dramatically, while conversion rates remained surprisingly steady. I was sure they would drop. What did drop were the percentage of view-through conversions. This could be attributed to audience saturation or the lack of strong branding on the owl ads.

As with our previous campaign, I’ll soon need to update our current owl campaign to feature more diversity. I will test something else out and write about it here. Last time I mentioned how I was able to increase form fills on our Request a Quote page.

If you have any suggestions about what I could test out in retargeting or elsewhere on the Blue Fountain Media website, please let me know via Twitter (@alhankeser).

Last week we attended Search Engine Strategies New York, the online marketing conference and expo, and one theme that kept coming up in various contexts was the concept of real value. Different industries talk about it different way: in economics it’s “utility”, in customer relations it’s “satisfaction”, but the idea is the same: businesses and consumers alike are paying more attention to each dollar that they spend and how it benefits them.

Among consumers, that means brand loyalty is waning as people search for better deals, perhaps reevaluating and switching brands, or even going with generics. Among businesses, it means focusing more on ROI, and making sure your service providers are getting the right kind of results and giving you the metrics to back them up.

It’s a familiar concept at Blue Fountain Media; we’ve always held ourselves accountable for the success of our clients, focusing on your goals, and only recommending solutions that will yield a return on investment. We enjoy working with clients who feel the same way about their own customers. It was nice to have our strategy validated by others, like keynote speaker John Gerzema, who spoke about the erosion of trust, about the lack of permanence of institutions that used to appear untouchable, but ultimately about the opportunity that the crisis has created for smart companies. It’s a win for the consumer, and a win for businesses willing to take a step back, and make sure that they’re adding value that’s worth paying for.

Alhan and I just got back to the office after three days at the Search Engine Strategies New York Conference and Expo. We’ll be writing more about the takeaways from that experience a little later. But first I wanted to point out something I noticed this morning:

One technique to avoid unwanted clicks and the charges associated with them is to write ad copy which will “filter” unqualified users by discouraging them from clicking. Above, on our own AdWords creative, we use the filter “$5K+”, which gives users a clue about the level of our services.

Another New York firm, Avatar, has been doing the same thing (“$20,000 and up”), but now they’ve added a second filter on the same ad: “Currently NOT Hiring”.

When used properly, filters can be effective at reducing your overall pay-per-click cost. However, they can’t be your only strategy for targeting. First of all, they rely on users reading beyond the ad headline, which is sometimes a tall order. Secondly, they can lower your click-through rate, which lowers your AdWords Quality Score, which drives up your minimum cost-per-click. (Basically, if your ad shows a lot but doesn’t get clicked on, Google will see it as a low-quality ad; since they want to provide a quality experience for users, they discourage low-quality ads by making them more expensive.)

One way to reduce the number of unqualified impressions before you start filtering clicks is through negative keywords. If we’re bidding on the keyword phrase “new york web design”, but don’t want users to click our ad searching for “new york web design jobs”, we could just add “jobs” as a negative keyword.

Fortunately, we don’t have that problem; we are hiring.

Your website is getting traffic, but these visitors aren’t taking action. Is it time for a redesign? Before you scrap the whole design and start from scratch, consider if it’s only a few elements on the page that are hindering your success. And thanks to Google Website Optimizer, there’s an easy way to find out using real user behavior.

It’s a little ironic to talk about best practices when the whole point of testing is that websites are not one-size-fits-all; best practices for page layout, calls-to-action, and information architecture might not apply to your specific niche of users. Nevertheless, here are some tips for setting up experiments that should apply most of the time:

1. Don’t test too many things at once.

If you’re trying out different colored “buy” buttons, don’t try to test headline, text and product image variations at the same time. Unless your landing pages get an extremely high quantity of traffic, pick one or two variables at a time to avoid having your testing go on interminably to get a decent sample size, and then having to spend just as much time interpreting your mountains of data.

2. Get a decent sample size.

Don’t overanalyze in the first few days of testing. I’ve had variable combinations that looked like a sure bet in the first 48 hours, with a sample size of a few hundred, only to be left in the dust a few weeks later.

3. Be consistent.

While you want to do everything you can to improve your website, don’t scare users away by making changes on a landing page that will make them wonder how many designers you had working on your website if they decide to click through to the rest of your site.

If you’re already doing SEO or pay-per-click, provided it’s done correctly, you should have a steady stream of qualified visitors. You’ve already distilled an audience that is interested in what you have to offer; don’t squander this willingness to transact by leaving them to fend for themselves once they’re on your site.

This is a quick post to exemplify why most methods of marketing, especially online, simply do not match the effectiveness and longevity of search engine optimization (SEO). The important factor to remember is that it is measurable, like pay-per-click advertising and banner ads, but unlike these, the effects of SEO last far beyond the length of the campaign and cost-per-conversion plummets with SEO as time goes by.

Exhibit A:

One of our clients, PriorTax.com, was spending $1.40 per visitor through Google AdWords to bring 13,024 visitors to their website in a period of 30 days.

During the same 30 day period, Blue Fountain Media brought the website 15,382 visitors for $0.43 per visitor through search engine optimization.

These numbers do not speak for themselves; we must consider whether or not these were qualified visitors or not. It is not enough to say that we brought X amount of traffic to a website, if they got zero sales out of it.  PriorTax.com not only had more visitors through SEO than from Google AdWords, but their conversion rate was also higher. Their AdWords conversion rate was 3.38% while their organic results gave them a slight edge at 3.64%.

Conclusion: Not only did SEO bring more visitors at a lower price, but also had a higher conversion rate.

Exhibit B:

R.A.G. New York was able to take advantage of the SEO campaign that Blue Fountain Media performed long after the end of our work. Here are two screenshots from R.A.G. New York’s Analytics showing 1.) overall visitors and 2.) total conversions. Blue Fountain Media provided SEO services between April and September. Since then there has been no work done to promote the website.

It is clearly visible that the fruits of our labor truly paid off after our work was done. R.A.G. was able to take full advantage of the holiday season search frenzy and many of those same visitors came back to the website early this year. Personalized search results had a big role to play here.