The Pragmatic Marketer

In paid search you are in complete control of your ad wording. So you can say precisely what you want to say, to attract the most qualified visitors. As your campaign progresses, Google will tell you how each of your ads are performing, so you can change the poorly performing ones and gradually improve the overall success of your campaign.

Relevancy
In organic search, the task is a little more complex. First, you need to optimize your main content pages for specific keywords or keyword phrases, so that Google can assess whether you have “relevancy” for a particular search term.

Authority
You also need to convince Google that your content has “authority” (as evidenced by the number of relevant inbound links to your site), which further increases your chance of Google granting you an organic results listing on page one.

Currency
Thirdly, you have to demonstrate “currency”, by ensuring you update and expand your content regularly.

Yet, even if you do a great job in all these areas, you risk falling at the final hurdle if you don’t put sufficient thought into what your organic ‘ad’ looks like. Why? Because the typical searcher spends less than two seconds on each ‘ad’ on the Google search results page. And if your organic ’ad’ isn’t meaningful, it will likely get overlooked in favour of one that is.

How to Display Meaningful Organic Search Results

By carefully managing the content of your meta titles and meta descriptions, you can significantly increase the chance of Google choosing these as the page “snippet” it displays in a search results page.

As Google itself puts it:

“The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your organic result being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta descriptions for each URL.”

Example

Here are two search results that came up when I did a search for “Document Management Software”:

First, a  meaningful result:

Document Management Software System | Content Central^TM
Your Search for Document Management Software Ends Here. Experience Content Central: The All-In-One, Browser-Based Document Management Solution.
www.ademero.com

A quick check of the page source at www.adermo.com confirmed that this snippet came from very nicely constructed meta title and meta description content.

Second, a not so meaningful result:

Explorer Software News
31 Mar 2008 … Vancouver, BC - US-based Ferrell Companies, a provider of EnterpriseDocument Management Software
for construction companies, and Explorer …
www.explorer-software.com/news-detail.asp?newsID=80

Be honest, which one would you click on first?
I think this provides a clear illustration of the difference you can make by spending time crafting your Meta Title and Meta Description content to create organic results are both meaningful and compelling to your search audience.

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Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement post-click marketing strategies that generate actionable in-bound sales leads - www.funnelbuilders.com

I read a great article from Marketo recently, that dealt with the question of landing page form length. They asked the question, “Do short form convert better?” and carried out an experiment to find out. The results were quite compelling:

They used a landing page that had already been performing relatively well for them. To test their hypothesis, the only thing they changed was the form length. The three different forms they used comprised:

Form #1 – five fields
First Name
Last Name
Job Title
Company
Work Email

Form #2 – seven field
As above, plus:
Employees
Salesforce.com User?

Form #3 - nine fields
As above, plus:
Phone
Industry

Results- Shorter Forms Reduced Cost Per Conversion by up to 25%

- Short Form: Conversion rate 13.4%, cost per conversion $31.24.
- Medium Form: Conversion rate 12.0%, cost per conversion $34.94.
- Long Form: Conversion rate 10.0%, cost per conversion $41.90.

The difference in the cost per conversion between the short and long forms is $10.67, or over 25%. This means that each additional piece of information costs $1.85. Asking for a phone number (the most invasive of all the fields) costs more than $5.00.The conclusion was obvious: keep only the landing page with the short form and turn off the other versions.

Shorter is Better

I have always been a proponent of the short form, so I was pleased to see the results that Marketo observed. It’s just common sense really. If you ask someone to fill out 8, 10 or even 12 mandatory form fields (yes I’ve seen that many and more!) to access a simple piece of value added content, they are less likely to convert  than if you ask them for just three or four bits of information.

Once you have a persons name, work email, job title and company name you can pretty much guarantee getting hold of their address, phone number, web site, etc. All it takes is a little sleuthing on the web, or even easier, deploying the services  of a data cleansing and augmentation vendor to append the missing information, which could cost as little as $1.00 per record.

So, I would like to make a suggestion to all those form junkies out there. Ask for less and you will be rewarded with better conversions. It will take a little more work on the back end, but if you are able to bring in 25% or more additional conversions for the same marketing spend, the extra effort should pay for itself many times over.

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Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement post-click marketing strategies that generate actionable in-bound sales leads - www.funnelbuilders.com

In paid search campaigns the majority of organizations simply use their web site (typically their home page) as the destination for the respondent that clicks on their ad.
In most cases this is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

Think about it. The respondent is searching for something very specific, and they are sent to your home page. If it’s like most home pages it’s actually designed to serve the needs of all sorts of site visitors, with many different goals. So the responded is forced to stop, think and then click around to find content that is relevant to them. If they don’t find what they are looking for in 5-10 seconds, they will simply go back Google and check out another link.

That’s why I’m such a huge proponent of using smart post-click marketing programs to manage the visitors experience much more tightly. In many instances, these can be built around simple custom landing pages that direct respondents to content that is aligned with their search term. (In B2B, this usually equates to a conversion centric landing page, designed to generate leads by offering some value added content in exchange for some contact information.)

However, if you want to increase your conversion rates, I recommend getting a little more sophisticated, by implementing fully-fledged conversion paths.

What’s a Conversion Path?
A conversion path is a linear landing experience, specifically designed to convert incoming traffic from your online marketing campaigns. It allows you to segment and qualify your online respondents from paid search, increasing the likelihood that they will take action once they get to the conversion point.

Conversion paths help a respondent to move easily from click through to conversion, using a series of connected pages.

Start With Segmentation
A conversion path typically starts with a segmentation page, served up directly after the respondent clicks on your ad in Google. It is very simple in design, and asks the visitor a question so they can identify who they are and what they are looking for.

For example, I have a client that sells Electronic Document Management software to Banks and Credit Unions. A simple segmentation page for them might have two big buttons on it that ask the visitor: “Are you a Bank” or “Are You a Credit Union”. This is easy for the visitor to answer, so there is little to no friction and they simply click through on the correct button.

Now we know a little more about them we are able to serve up a landing page that is more relevant, with an offer that’s more closely aligned with their particular profile.

Alternatively, we can further segment the visitor by serving up a sub-segmentation page that helps us understand their profile even more precisely. For example, if they identified themselves as a credit union we might then serve up a page that asks Do you have “More Than 5000 Members” or “Less Than 5000 Members”. Using this additional insight allows us to then serve up a landing page that speaks even more closely to their own particular needs. For example, for the small credit union we might serve up a landing page that talks about our SaaS capabilities and offers a while paper on the “Benefits of SaaS Solutions for Small Credit Unions” - since market intelligence and sales history show that it’s the smaller credit unions that are attracted by the low cost and ease of implementation that SaaS solutions offer.

The key to segmentation and sub-segmentation is that each click delivers a new page that’s relevant to the respondent but also low in friction and therefore keeps them engaged. Rather than sending respondents to a web site and hoping they will randomly surf around to find the information they are looking for, a conversion path makes it easy to serve up truly relevant content to your audience.

Don’t Forget to Say Thank You
Once you’ve elicited a conversion, which in B2B is typically a registration for some value added content, don’t forget to serve up a thank you page. It serves two purposes:

1. It’s an opportunity to provide the visitor with access to site content that’s relevant to their profile, as identified by the conversion path they took. Information that, had it been included elsewhere in the path (e.g. as optional links in the landing page), would only have served to distract the visitor from the ultimate goal, which was to get them to convert on the landing page.

2. It’s where you put the Google conversion code so you an easily track conversions in Google AdWords!

Conversion paths won’t always be a good fit, especially if you can’t create a clear, simple and unequivocal segmentation of audience. But when you can, they can do wonders for your overall conversion rates.

With thanks to Anna Talerico for some of the concepts covered in this posting.

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Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement post-click marketing strategies that generate actionable in-bound sales leads - www.funnelbuilders.com