Don’t get me wrong: boosting CTR IS a good thing, but your goal should be to optimize the total process, at each stage of the client acquisition funnel, not just to widen the mouth of a leaky funnel.  And it’s at the stage of compound benefits where testing really delivers. When you combine higher CTR with higher CPI with higher average order value, now you’re not just getting more clicks, you’re getting them more cheaply and making more money off of each one.

So let’s take a look at a typical Facebook Ad and see how this is done:

So how could this ad be improved? Frankly, this is a situation where testing an text-based image would make sense, as you could take the offer-based headline and crank up the font size and color to achieve visual prominence and quick relevancy.  This is an ad targeted to photographers, so the simple offer should be enough to grab attention.

Of course, in doing this, you’d then have to change the headline to something else, and the best bet is probably to show a specific, mind-blowing price to substantiate and concretize the 40% off claim.  So you might end up with something like this:

But if you wanted to stick with an image, the idea would be to convey that same info with the image through context and contextual clues.  In other words, why not use a 3-dimensional image of a print held by a person, in order to give a size reference and to make it clear that you’re selling photographic prints?

The current image doesn’t convey any of that, and instead just looks like your typical image of cute girls used to grab attention.  But this is an ad that is already targeted to photographers and could easily be segmented by male and female photographers.  So how about an image along the lines of this:

Now, that’s not an ideal photo as the wood-grained background is a bit too busy, but it easily demonstrates the techniques in question: dramatize the product and show relative size.  So which ad variant would work best?  I don’t know but they’re well worth testing.

And again, the testing of the ad itself is where most Facebook advertisers stop.  And the problem is that any gains one got from boosting this ad’s CTR would likely be wasted due to its post-click conversion process.

Why?  Take a look at all the clicks needed just to get to the advertised offering!

Click #1 takes you here:

So, not great, but not horrible, so far.  The click doesn’t take me directly to the page featuring the discount on prints, but there are at least too call-outs for the the 40% off discount on prints and they are reasonably high-visibility call-outs and that.  So clicking on the most prominent call-out for 40% off gets you to here:

Second Click

OK, again, this isn’t truly horrible as there is a clear continued “scent trail” for the 40% off prints offer, but why am I now 2 clicks into this and STILL not on the page to see prices?  So let’s see what’s behind click #3:

Click 3

OK. So I’m FINALLY on the page for the actual offer from the Facebook Ad and all of the pricing info is effectively bellow the fold and, even worse, all of the indications of an actual discount are WAY below the fold because the prices are listed out by size of print and the large print-size discounts don’t start until you’ve scrolled two full screen-lengths down.  Here’s what you see initially:

Do you see why this is bad? For three clicks we’ve been waiting to get to the point were we can see the price savings/discounts on prints, and now that we’ve gotten here, there doesn’t seem to be any way to access the discount — there are just prices.  It’s not until you scroll two full screen lengths down that you finally start to see the discounts:

Best guess is that a HUGE majority of the people who click the ad never got to this third page, and if they did get to it, they never scrolled down far enough to see the discounts they were looking for.  So why in the world wound’t you want to create a campaign specific landing page that takes people to this information off of the first click?

But ultimately, this isn’t about Nations PhotoLab and their Facebook advertising — it’s about you and your Facebook Advertising.  Are you just testing ad results or are you optimizing the entire process?

• write embedded links so that visitors could reliably tell where they would land after the jump
• explicitly state what would happen as a result of filling out and submitting a lead form (we’ll contact you by e-mail), along with what wound’t happen (we won’t sell your information or bother you by phone), as well
• ensure that the look and feel of the landing page, website, and check out flow all matched up with no major disconnects,
• and you’d be sure to ask for the minimum commitment necessary: don’t label the button “Buy now” when “add to cart” more accurately represents what will happen after the click.

The goal was to relieve e-commerce and website anxiety by clearly setting and meeting expectations with each click and every micro-conversion. Amazon.com was especially good at this, and we can see the extent to which they took this practice by this old screenshot of their “add to cart” button, which not only employed the “add to cart” label, but also added two other reassurances:

1. The “You can always remove it later” reassurance
2. and the “Shopping with us is Safe” guarantee/Point of Action Assurance

Of course, Amazon tested this religiously, and changed their shopping buttons a half dozen times at least in recent memory, but they continued to keep the “You can always cancel it later” parenthetical remark through 3-4 iterations.  Meaning that that reassurance continued to positively impact sales until fairly recently.

So what does all this have to do with Facebook Ads?

Because Facebook and clicking on Facebook advertising is fraught with many of the same anxieties earlier stage ecommerce faced, the same reassurances and best practices are still at play — i.e., you violate them at your own peril.

Here’s an example:

Now, a few simple questions:

What does this ad image show?  A classic, cut-it-out-of-the-paper style coupon.  And what does the headline say? “PRINT Your Coupons Here.”  So what do you think the vast majority of prospects will expect to see when they click on this ad?

Answer: they’ll expect to be taken to a page where they can print out, old-school style coupons, just like the one pictured in the ad itself.

At least, that’s why I expected.  And frankly, I was intrigued by that: what a funky and semi-cool way to combine Social Media advertising with old school marketing techniques to drive real-world sales in brick and mortar stores, right?

It also seemed an easy upsell for a premium service of sending digital coupons to your phone so as not to have to waste paper and printer ink printing them out. A nice way to collect e-mails and cell phone numbers, all in all. But that’s not what happened when I clicked on the ad.

Instead, the advertiser violated every expectation that they possibly could.  Just see for yourself on the landing page I was taken to:

So, um, where are the coupons?  Hmmm… Maybe you have to pick the categories of coupons you want first, and then they’ll show you the coupons for printing? But what’s this about “sending me” the coupons. Didn’t the ad say I could print them myself? Oh well, why not pick 5 categories and see what comes next…

So what the heck is this?  When the hell did “Free Samples” come into play? I thought I was clicking through to get printable coupons?

And who the heck is Lifescript Advantage?  What happened to Girlpon? Just who am I giving my e-mail address to?

Finally, where, Oh Where, is LifeScript Advantage’s privacy policy or any other kind of Point of Action Assurance?

Not only did these people waste a click, they pissed me off and left me decidedly more cynical about clicking on Facebook ads in general. Not good.

So here are 3 easy tips to keep you safe from this kind of advertising disaster:

1) Make sure the mechanics of your actual offer are clear

If you’re taking people to a site to see a video, make sure they know that they’re being taken off-site to “learn more” or whatever.  If they’re going to a fan page, that should be clear also.  And whatever it is you’re offering to get the click, the fulfillment of that promise should never be more than two clicks away — one click for the ad, and one click to start the video, add the item to cart, download the report, etc.  Making people click from page to page will only create massive distrust. If you’re going to ask for a “like” say so.  If you require an e-mail to use to send people the report, test mentioning that in the ad itself.  CTR might dip, but CPI will likely rise.

2) Test having your store or brand name in the ad itself

This is especially important for ads pointing to an outside landing page.  The brand match-up from ad to landing page is important, as the disconnect will spook people more than you may realize, just like I was spooked to be handed from Girlpon to lifescriptadvantage.  Beyond this, I know that Facebook also councils that you stylistic connect your Facebook Ad-specific landing pages to the overall look of Facebook and possibly have some sort of Facebook Fan Welcome message.  This is good advice, as it further reassures visitors that they are in the right place.

3) Never skimp on the Point of Action Assurances

If you’re going to ask for an e-mail, have some kind of privacy policy or statement. If you offer a guarantee, mention it. In fact, test mentioning it on the ad as well as the landing page. And if your one of the few advertisers giving something away for FREE, no strings attached, test mentioning that, too: “Instant Download –No e-mail sign-up  necessary,” or something like that.

Remember, in most cases, you don’t just want the click — you want the conversion as well.  So plan for it with well known conversion best practices.

Key Takeaways From Pubcon

I need to process everything that I’m doing. Joe Larato called this the SEO diet.  He basically went from start to finish of setting up an SEO campaign.  Although I am not an SEO expert, I do think that I could apply this to PPC.  Setup of each and every account will vary but each and every account should take X amount of hours.  After setting up the account I need to create a landing page with the client.  This will take me X amount of hours.  After this I need to check the account every day to make sure that things are converting.  Going through numbers will take approximately X number of hours.

After this you should schedule out how many hours each client takes.  You schedule out how much work you are going to do through out the whole month and times it out.  Depending on how much money you are going to charge depending on how much work you are putting into the account.

This really hit me how he broke down each account that he was working on.  He knew exactly how much time he was spending on each account.  With each and every account he said he was spending X amount of hours each week on their account.  When he signed up account he can tell them exactly what he’s going to be doing for each account.  This would help set expectation across the board.  You and your clients know how much time you are spending on their accounts each and every month.

Knowing this information will help me to set up clients and set expectations with them.  Now they will know what’s going on with their account 24/7.  They know that I will check in on their account daily and spend X amount of hours.  This will also help sell the accounts.  We are PPC experts, we know PPC better then our clients ever will.  When they know what’s going on with their account, it will help them to trust us more and give us the space that we all need.

In case you need a refresher, or an easy reference point to all our series posts this week, here are links to each of the posts:

Rockin’ Around the Holiday Keyword Research Tree – Sarah

Have Yourself A Merry Little Account Structure – Kayla

All I Want For Christmas Is For My Ads To Show! – Felicia

Oh Come, All Ye Awesome Holiday Landing Pages – Dave

Hopefully this is everything you need to know to get started on your holiday PPC planning! If you have any tips of your own to add, feel free to share them in the comments below. Thanks for reading and we wish you a happy and successful holiday season.

The Holidays are just around the corner, which means it’s time to start preparing for that influx of seasonal traffic we look forward to each year. Aside from thorough keyword research, modifying ad copy and tweaking your account structure, it is also important to ask yourself if your landing page is ready as well. Is the color scheme appropriate for a seasonal landing page? Is everything positioned correctly? Are your holiday special offers clearly indicated? These are all questions you should be asking yourself in order to achieve an optimal ROI for the upcoming holiday season.

So if you’re anything like Clark Griswold, then you’re probably thinking about going all-out. However, I’m here to tell you that sometimes simplicity is key, especially when dealing with landing pages. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t spice things up a bit, but rather, highlight the importance of striking a clean balance between spreading holiday cheer and driving conversions. For the purpose of today’s post, here are some ways to go about striking such a balance:

Start With The Basics

First, you’ll want to make sure your page incorporates all of the basic landing page best practices. I wrote a post back in August on how to perform a successful landing page audit that outlines these best practices in more detail. Before you begin making holiday changes, I would strongly recommend checking to make sure you have all of the basics covered first.

Holiday Landing Page Optimization Techniques

After you’ve optimized your page according to the general best practices, then it’s time to spice things up a bit. Here are some techniques that can help you achieve optimal conversion rates during the holidays:

Create some hype.

Although it may seem rudimentary, this step is easily overlooked. You want to be sure to promote the holidays you’re accommodating in order to create some hype around your brand. Let your customers know that you are acknowledging specific holidays for special sales and promotions. This will ultimately increase their likelihood of returning to your site on the most popular shopping days (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc).

Implement a holiday-specific color scheme.

Another quick way to gear your page up for seasonal traffic is to implement a holiday-specific color scheme. Although I’m not sure what colors represent Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Christmas is a much more concrete example. You can easily create a Christmas-like environment by including lots of red and green. Aesthetic changes like these are quick fixes that can easily adapt your website to accommodate specific holidays.

Highlight special offers and promotions explicitly.

One of the most important things you can do to help increase your conversion rate throughout the holidays is highlighting your special offers and promotions above the page-fold. The last thing you want to happen is for a potential customer bounce away from your page, simply because they couldn’t find your hidden offers. This becomes even more crucial if you intend to highlight those deals in your ad copy, so make sure they can be found easily.

Add seasonal images.

Seasonal images are another thing you should try to include on your landing pages during the holidays. These images help create an appropriate atmosphere and make shoppers feel like they landed in the right spot. A good seasonal image can induce emotion and memories of personal holiday experiences, which can ultimately cause your customers to feel more relaxed while browsing your site and making purchases.

Make it easy for customers to find what they are looking for.

During the holidays, the easiest way to help people find what they’re looking for is to implement a gift finder on your site. In the example above, you can find gift ideas by gender, age, and even personality. This way, you’re essentially removing some of the difficulty involved with gift giving by providing ideas for your shoppers to work off of. This is yet another way to achieve optimal conversion rates throughout the holiday season.

Add gift/e-gift card options.

Providing the option to purchase gift cards can also help improve your conversion rates this holiday season. Despite having a gift finder, sometimes people simply want to give recipients their own freedom to choose what they want to buy. Gift cards and e-gift cards can then act as a secondary effort to earn even more business from your customers without forcing them to decide on a specific product right then and there.

It’s never too early to begin preparing your website for the holidays. We’ve discussed a variety of ideas today for you to try out and hopefully implement on your landing pages, but this list is by no means exhaustive. In fact, I would love to hear about your own holiday landing page optimization experiences in the comments section below. Thanks for reading!

Starting this coming Monday, we’ll be posting one blog a day about how to effectively plan for and implement a varied strategy for the holiday season in your PPC accounts. This particular series is going to focus on ecommerce and ramping up sales around Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the like with some touch on B2B and lead generation-based accounts. However, keep an extra eye (maybe you found one on Halloween?) open in December for the follow-up series, specific to ending this year and starting next year as strong as possible for B2B and lead generation.

My fellow PPC Hero’s and I know you all can’t possibly be asked to wait until Monday to see what’s in store, so here’s what we’ll be covering. Sorry ahead of time for the titles, we’ve been hit with the holiday spirit hard this year:

Monday: Rockin’ Around the Keyword Research Tree – Sarah

Tuesday: Have Yourself A Merry Little Account Structure – Kayla

Wednesday: All I Want For Christmas Is For My Ads To Show! – Felicia

Thursday: Oh Come All Ye Awesome Holiday Landing Pages – Dave

Friday: Series Wrap-Up

(psst! Don’t forget to put us in 1080 for the best view!)

Check out the rest of our video blogs for more awesome videos!

In any case, optimizing your results for low search volume campaigns can be tricky, and sometimes you’re simply challenged with low search volume keywords out of necessity. But, after managing a PPC account with an overall low search volume and seeing the account become more and more successful, I can offer some tips on how to optimize an account with overall low search volume. After all, you don’t necessarily need to reach a broader audience, you just have to target the right audience, especially if your account is conversion-focused.

Broadening Your Account

How do you broaden an account when keyword expansion isn’t viable? You’ve got all relevant keywords in your account, now what? First of all, make sure you’re testing all match types of your keywords. Maybe you’re limiting your traffic by excluding too many broad terms. If you’re running your account in Bing/Yahoo, make sure you’re using explicit bidding for each keyword match type.

Second, focus on your branded campaign(s), or if you aren’t currently running a branded campaign, create one! In my low search volume account, my branded campaigns outperform my other campaigns by leaps and bounds, even with low search volume keywords in tow. These campaigns have click-through rates with percentages 10 times higher than other campaigns in the account. One of my branded campaigns has a phenomenal click-through rate – 9.6%. So, if your product/service terms aren’t performing well, focus more on your company and branded names.

Along this line, also make sure you’ve set up a campaign to grab some traffic from people searching for your competitors.  I always see a few conversions a month from my Competitors campaign.

Identifying Your KPI

In low search volume accounts, hopefully you’re measuring more key performance indicators than clicks, impressions and click-through rate because otherwise you could be in for some serious frustration. In my account, my KPI (key performance indicator) is conversions, so as long as I can increase conversions month over month my client is happy.

In order to maximize conversions with low search volumes, my advice is to really pay attention to your account spend, especially if you’re limited by your monthly budget. If your low search volume campaigns are further handicapped by limited budgets, your account’s performance is only going to get worse. This is especially important if your keyword bids are high. Google will cap you campaigns somewhat prematurely to prevent them from overspending, because at a higher cost per click you’ll spend much more quickly. While this is a good thing in terms of managing cost, it’s not great for garnering more visibility, and sometimes you’ll need to set your budgets slightly higher than you’re actual budget to get them to spend your full goal amount.

Also, don’t start off spending too aggressively at the beginning of the month, as you’ll be much better served by gradually increasing your spend over the course of the month than having to pull back to stay within your budget goal. In my experience, during the months that I’ve started off too aggressively and had to pull back, my conversions have been the lowest, even when my cost per month has been the same from month to month.

Odds and Ends

I have just a final few tips to end on. Don’t discount the Opportunities tab in AdWords. Sometimes when I think I’ve exhausted all keyword options Google will suggest some really useful terms, and I can vouch for their success once they’ve been added to my account. Just be sure to take AdWords’ suggested location (campaign, ad group) with a grain of salt. Sometimes my best keywords have been suggested for other ad groups.

Lower search and click terms only make great (and relevant) landing pages that much more important. Once you’ve found your target audience and they click on your ad, you’ll want them to convert. So, invest the time and energy into developing quality pages, and research which type of page better serves your audience (long vs. short form, educational, etc.). If you need some help with your landing pages, be sure to check out our video post on landing page optimization. Dave also wrote a very helpful post on conducting a landing page audit.

I hope this post helps you better optimize your PPC account with an overall low search volume, and stay tuned for tomorrow’s post in our How I Manage A PPC Account With/Without ___________ series from Felicia about how she manages a PPC account with a small budget!

Last week we lost one of the greatest leaders in innovation that has ever been born.  Steve Jobs was a great leader that inspired many people around the world. We’ll miss him and everything he’s done for Apple and the world.  I have always been a big fan of Jobs and love to post stories about him and things he’s doing.  In order to honor him and the life that he lived I set up a Facebook Fan page for him.

“Remembering Steve” and “Steve Jobs” were very trending topics so I decided to set up a Facebook ad to get people to the fan page.  I did this to see if I could take a trending topic and turn it into Facebook Fans and website visitors.  I originally had the website pointing to my website so that I could track the hits, later I changed it to Apples’ main site.

My Ad:

If you ever have questions about Facebook ads or trending topics or have had a similar story, please leave your comment in the comments section.

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How Important is Knowing Tracking Everything?

Now I know what you’re thinking, that’s a ton of money per click.  We’re spending thousands a day on PPC for this particular client and only getting around 100-150 clicks a day.  When you’re paying this much for a click and you want to prove to your employee or client that you’re making money, you really need to make sure that you’re tracking everything.  For this client we are tracing everything the person is doing beyond the click.  If I pay $15 per click you better believe that I’m tracking everything.  I don’t care if the person is going to the contact form, downloading a PDF, or bouncing from the page.  You need to know everything that’s happening with that person.  I even demand that I have a separate 1800 number so I can know if the person is calling.  This will help you to know everything that is happening with your account even outside the website.  Our last campaign we spend $13,000 and didn’t have 1 conversion but found out that we had over 120 calls that resulted in around 15 sales.  This made the whole campaign worth it.  Had we not set up that extra number we would have never known all those people were calling.

How Do I track It?

If you haven’t used Google Analytics, you really need to re-evaluate your life in PPC.  If you need help installing Google Analytics or getting to know anything there is to know about Analytics you should follow this link.  This will give you every article we have about it on our blog.  Install it, get to  know it, and use it everyday.  Know where your clickers are going, what they are doing, and improve your results based on what you see.  I would also say that you have a landing page with a different 1800 number.  You can’t track people calling through Google Analytics but you should be able too with any different 1800 number service.

Landing Pages are Key

The landing page you are having them go to initially are very important to your success.  If you’re paying $15 per click you shouldn’t be landing people on your front and main page.  You need to be landing them on a landing page.  I would recommend that you are always testing two landing pages at a time.  I would give each landing page around 500-1000 clicks before you write off a page.  This can take a while at $15/click.  I always try and give away something free on the page that will give people a lot of value.  A free ebook, coupon, or something else that will help them.  For example, we give away an ebook about the “top ten hosting mistakes” that will help people even if they don’t purchase your product.  Your goal should be to sell, but if you don’t sell, you should always help.  If you help someone, they will begin to trust you.  If a person trusts you, they will come back to you when they need services.

Knowing what’s going on “beyond the click” will help you to impress your client, know what’s going on with your PPC account and help you to better know what to do in the future.  If you can know a little better your metrics, you will have a little bit more of an edge above your competitors than you have before!  Would love to know what other things you have and metrics you’re tracking beyond the click.  Leave your comments below.

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