Here’s a conversation between me and Garrett Todd, Vitruvian‘s Director of Website Optimization, as we prepare the outline for the Website Optimizer chapter of Google AdWords For Dummies 3rd edition. Listen online or click the download link to save the interview to your computer or iPod.
On Friday, I shared my 4-stage testing protocol for AdWords ad split testing in this 60-minute webinar.
Enjoy! Any questions or comments or disagreements or tangents, please share them in the Comments section.
Interested in being notified about upcoming Checkmate trainings, events, and free webinars? Register below.
Here are the slides and audio from today's webinar:
Ad Testing Protocol Slides (PDF)
Ad Testing Protocol Audio (MP3)
A recording of the webinar will be up in the next couple of days.
As always, questions and kudos and complaints are encouraged in the comments field of this post.
If the webinar inspires you to register for Camp Checkmate, well that was kind of the idea ;)
Testing ad copy is the only "sure-thing" strategy in marketing.
You never know how well a message will work.
You never know how an offer will resonate with your market.
You never know exactly who is typing your most important keywords.
You can take educated guesses, but until you test those ads, you never know.
And testing can move you from a position of ignorance to one of surety quicker, cheaper, and more reliably than any other strategy I know.
So no matter how brilliant or intuitive you think you are at writing appealing messages, unless you're conducting smart and rigorous tests, you'll never reach your profit potential.
Most people test mechanically, rather than thoughtfully.
"Hmmm, let's see. The first description line says, 'Wide selection of electric guitars.' Why don't I try 'Huge selection of electric guitars' and see if that does better?"
They're testing because they know they should be testing, rather than because they have unanswered significant questions about their ideal customer.
That's how I did it for years. And since I was always making slight improvements, I kept doing it that way.
For an example of the slow and idiotic way I tested when I first starting using AdWords, check out http://leadsintogold.com/genius. To save you some time, here's a short history of the evolution of my headline:
- Stop cold calling forever
- End cold calling forever
- Stop cold prospecting
- Cold calling ineffective?
- Cold calling not working?
Yeegads! Talk about walking around in circles…
I use this in Google AdWords For Dummies as an example of the power of testing, because as clueless as I was, I still quadrupled my CTR over the course of a year.
But now I know I could have accomplished that in a matter of weeks, rather than a whole year. And I could have gotten my CTR to 8-12%, rather than the 2.8% that made me so happy in 2003.
I knew enough to test. But I didn't know how to test, or how to generate ideas for testing.
Now I do, and on Friday 14 May 2010 at 1pm EDT, I'll be sharing 8 years of my mistakes and discoveries with you.
In the webinar on Friday, I'll share my four-stage testing protocol.
If you're subscribed to the Camp Checkmate pre-Camp training series, you'll recognize the stages: visionary, strategic, emotional, and tactical.
(If you aren't yet subscribed, go to http://askhowie.com/ccm-training-signup to sign up.)
In this webinar, you'll discover how to put those concepts into practice in very simple and concrete ways.
So you're testing the right things, at the right time.
I touched on this concept briefly at the end of the last week's BOPzine, the AdWords Fable.
But on Friday, I go into it in a way you can begin to implement immediately.
Here's the registration link: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/371743515
This webinar is part of the Camp Checkmate series – I developed the testing protocol to deal with the overwhelm some Camp Checkmate participants felt at suddenly having a dozen new ad ideas to test.
If you'd like to have that problem, you can register for the rest of the Camp Checkmate series, or just cut to the chase and register for Camp Checkmate Chicago – details below.
If you're on the fence about attending Camp Checkmate in Chicago on June 10-11, this would be a good week to make up your mind. If you register by Saturday, May 15 at 5:33pm Eastern Time US, you save $800 off the regular tuition.
When you decide, go here to reserve your seat at Camp: http://CampCheckmate.com.
Once upon a time there was a king who had three daughters. As he was nearing retirement age and had spent his entire reign commissioning ballads about his greatness and generosity, he had not done much succession planning, and now had become somewhat desperate.
Which daughter should he choose to rule the land after him?
He decided to set his three daughters a task – whichever of them performed it best would win his undying admiration and the chance to move into the best room in the castle after he lit out for Boca Raton.
Here was the task he set:
"In 4 weeks, bring me the sweetest peach in all the land."
Cliffhanger? Keep reading…
The AdWords Ball fall 2009 season starts October 7 at a computer and phone near you.
Read all about it: http://askhowie.com/adwords-ball
Did you miss spring training? Catch a replay of the AdWords Ball web clinic
In 17th century Europe, Porcelain vases, pots, table settings, sculptures and other chatchkes (Chinese for “knick-knacks” ;) were all the rage. Monarchs, churchmen and nobles postured for status and power in part by showing off the quality and quantity of bling they could buy, barter, or steal.
And porcelain, a hard, smooth, lustrous, non-staining earthenware product, was near the top of the “Look what I’ve got” heap. Europeans, for all their artistry and technological achievements, had no idea how to make the stuff. Every cup, bowl, and plate had to be imported from the Far East. And Portugal (and later the Dutch East India company) monopolized the trade routes, raising the prices even higher than they otherwise would have been.
Augustus the Strong, ruler of Saxony and a self-proclaimed porcelain addict, once traded 600 mercenary soldiers (“dragoons”) for 151 large vases, known ever after as the Dragoon Vases.
With everyone wanting porcelain and it being so difficult to come by in Saxony, it was only natural that lots of rich and powerful people invested in efforts by artisans, scientists, philosophers, alchemists and spies to discover the secret formula by which it was made.
The first approach, of course, was industrial espionage. Hundreds of Europeans shlepped to the Far East to try to steal the formula for porcelain.
This failed spectacularly, as no Korean or Chinese potter would reveal their secrets to anyone but a trusted apprentice of 20 years, let alone to pale, greedy foreigners with no sense of personal hygiene. Heck, it took 600 years for the art to spread from China to Korea – what did they expect?
Hundreds of years of experimentation also failed. It was not even known if the missing piece was an ingredient or a step of the recipe.
Finally, the big breakthrough came to Saxony, not in the form of a flash of inspiration, but rather a speedier way of testing.
Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus invented a large spherical burning mirror, which, when pointed at the sun, could generate a small area of over 1500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Suddenly, would-be porcelain makers could try out dozens of experiments per day, instead of just one in the labor- and time-intensive kiln. They would use tongs to position the would-be porcelain piece in the center of the focused sunlight for a few minutes, put it to the side, and try another piece.
Within a few years, Tschirnhaus and a colleague, Johann Friedrich Böttger, had solved the riddle. The missing ingredients included high heat and addition of a reduction agent. As much as anything else, it was the ability to split test quickly and inexpensively that led Tschirnhaus and Böttger to their discovery.
And that’s what I want to talk about today – your ability to achieve breakthroughs via speedy testing. Most businesses never test anything. That’s incredible, given that even modest tests reveal huge potential for improvement. Take this example, for example:
See how the difference of just one word (powerful vs. effective) led to a cost per lead reduction of 35%?
Without testing, my career as an online marketing educator would never have gotten off the ground.
Google AdWords is the ultimate source of traffic for testing.
You can test ad messages in a week or two. If your traffic stream is robust, you can tweak your landing pages and get more leads and sales in under a month. You can pay for 200 clicks, knowing in advance how much they’re going to cost you.
And using AdWords conversion tracking, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer (all zero-cost), you can perform scientifically valid and statistically powerful tests that simply wouldn’t have been possible even 7 years ago.
If you’re using AdWords and not testing for continuous improvement, you’re missing out on the very best feature of the whole program.
Here’s the thing: the money you’re losing by not testing (or not testing correctly) could be the difference between making it or not making it online. And it’s so easy to improve, once you get in the habit of always asking, “Can I do better?”
Increasing profits is often hard work – cutting costs, developing new lead sources, developing new product line and service offerings.
Getting your ads to deliver twice the traffic – or four times, or eight (these numbers are not uncommon) – is relatively easy. Especially if you haven’t tested yet: chances are, a lot of improvements are “low hanging fruit.”
And once you catch the testing bug, via ad testing, your next stop is Website Optimizer, the free Google tool that helps you improve the performance of your web pages.
Talk about highly leveraged activities – if you can double your site conversion rate, you’ve doubled your sales. And more than doubled your profits, since you’re not spending a single additional cent on Google traffic.
In AdWords Ball, the course that starts October 7, I show you how to become a testing master. How to design your online business for inevitable improvement. A never-ending process of giving yourself a raise whenever you feel like it.
If you’re spending more than $700/month on AdWords, then AdWords Ball is a no-brainer, in my humble opinion.
If I’m wrong, you get a refund – that’s how confident I am in the methods of testing and tracking that I’ve developed.
Find out more, and register, here: http://askhowie.com/adwords-ball
No giant burning mirror required…
(Not sure if AdWords Ball is the right course for you – email support AT askhowie DOT com to request a quick conversation with me about the course, your business, and whether it’s a good fit.)
Last month I did a minor overhaul of my office.
I moved the piles of illegible notes, dead AA batteries, dirty bowls, USB cables that I have way too many of and can’t bring myself to toss, and last year’s taxes out of the office and into the trash, recycling, kitchen sink, trash, and attic crawl space, respectively. I removed all the non-essentials from my desk. And I brought in a monster bookcase to hold all the stuff that almost has a home.
The question was, where should the bookcase go? Facing west or north? Both had advantages and disadvantages, but the main thing was going to be the feel of the room. The Feng of the Shui, you might say.
How do we figure out the best price for our products and services? Is it based on what our competitors are charging? What we want? What are customers are willing to pay?
What about testing to find the right price? Is that sound business practice? Sleazy opportunism? Respectful and curious marketing?
And is the goal always to maximize profit? What if that’s not the goal?
Here are my current musings on the topic:
If you listen with your eyes closed you won’t be bothered by the Japanese horror-movie non-syncing of sound and lips…
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I started shaving in 1979, at the age of 14 (see this photo of my horrendous mustache from my 9th grade graduation). Aside for a couple of years’ flirtation with beards (see this photo from a winter trip to the Florida Keys in 1991), and the "online marketing consultant Fridays" where I couldn’t be bothered, I’ve shaved pretty much every day over the past 30 years. By conservative reckoning, that’s close to 10,000 shaves.
And I still suck at it.
I cut myself. I miss patches of bristle the size of a compact disc. I get astringent aftershave up my nose and in my eyes. I produce ingrowns and razor burn on my neck by scraping too deeply in the wrong direction.
So what’s up with that?
The answer can be found in the following video, taken from the Season 5 Premiere of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. The episode, in which the Fab Five crown "Mr. Straight Guy," included a shaving competition.
The minute I started watching, my entire shaving worldview shifted. For the first time in my life, I saw shaving as an activity at which improvement was not only possible but desirable. My testosterone started pumping, and I felt the old competitive instincts flexing their muscles. "I could be good at this," I thought to myself as I watched the Straight Guys attempting to de-hairify themselves in 90 seconds. "Look at that guy’s brush technique," I excitedly exclaimed inwardly. "Way too much shoulder, not enough wrist."
The details of how to shave, as provided by Queer Eye’s Manscaping Expert Kyan Douglas, have provided valuable guidance as I go from shaving clutz to Olympic chin deforester. But the details are nothing without the twin engines of performance improvement: Intention and Attention.
As soon as I heard the words "shaving competition," I bought into the concept that I could improve my shaving ability.
Most website owners don’t even think about their landing pages, home pages, and interior pages as improvable. They just are. They just sit there. Just like I shaved without having the intention to shave better for all those years.
So here’s my call to action: you can significantly improve your website!
You can get better results by improving your headlines, header graphics, font and text size, color scheme, form design, and several dozen other elements. And let me be specific here. By better results I mean more leads and sales. More money. For exactly the same AdWords spend. For exactly the same effort.
Once that intention to improve throbs within you, you’re halfway there.
The second half – the second engine of performance improvement – is Attention.
The world is constantly giving us feedback about every detail of our existence. Most of it gets ignored. Take a second now to prove this to yourself. Pay attention to the way you’re sitting right now. Is there an adjustment you can make to be more comfortable? Notice your breathing. Is it shallow or deep? Wouldn’t a nice deep breath feel really good right now? How are your shoulders? Tense and up around your ears, or relaxed and hanging? Which would feel better?
We get feedback about the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the looks we give others, the perfumes and colognes we put on, the cars we drive, the sounds we make while we eat soup, and all the rest of it. And we pay attention to feedback that’s important to us (like did that joke we told get laughs or cold stares), or that’s so loud we can’t ignore it anymore (like an illness after years of neglecting our health).
But attention is habitual. So just having the intention to improve my shaving, or your website, or anything else, isn’t going to make it happen.
We need to create a new attention habit. To train our brains to notice the feedback that’s relevant to our attempts to improve. As I stroke up around the neck, I need to pay attention to the pressure and the angle and the sensation and the subsequent stream of blood or lack thereof. I can’t be focused on the BOPzine I have to write later today, or the thing I forgot to fax yesterday, or where we’re going on vacation in July. I need to be present with the reality of the shaving.
The simplest tool for website testing and improvement is Google’s Website Optimizer. You can find it as a tab in your AdWords account.
Optimizer is Google’s ultra-simple split testing tool. All you need to get started is a control page, a test page, and a "success" page. That is, your original landing page is the control, and some variation of the landing page is the test page. The success page is where your prospect ends up after they do the thing you want them to do.
If you want them to buy something, then the success page says something like, "Thank you for your purchase. If we have any of this item in stock, we’ll probably send one to you in a few days, when we get around to it."
If you collect leads, the success page reads, "Thank you for giving us your email address and other sensitive information, which we will now sell to the highest bidder. We’ll also start bombarding you with obnoxious and irrelevant offers until you die or cancel your email address."
Optimizer will prompt you to enter the URLs of these three pages, and then give you snippets of code to place on each. (A competent webmaster can complete the code-placement process in about 84 seconds, so don’t let them overcharge you. Heck, even I can do it in under 10 minutes, although I do require a mild sedative to complete the task.)
Here’s an embarrrassing look at one of my tests, which has proved inconclusive so far:
The original page has generated two sales out of 170 visits, and the test page has lead to three sales from 176 visits. Gee, maybe neither page is doing its job…
Before you jump into the mechanics of testing, start by setting your intention and marshalling your attention. What are you curious about? What decisions did you make when you built the site that you might want to address again?
Testing expert Richard Mouser puts it this way:
In the frenzy of getting a website built, there are always compromises. Let’s face it, no one has the time to create the perfect website first time around (if ever).
So think back to that time and remember any time you said or thought:
• OK, that’s good enough for now
• Not exactly what I had in mind, but I guess it works
• We don’t have time to do it over againListen, you did the right thing at the time. It’s better to have an imperfect website than no website at all. So don’t beat yourself up, just think about that time and write down all the things that you were not 100% satisfied with.
Browse through your website and see if that jogs your memory. Write down every idea, and carry that paper with you to capture more ideas whenever or whenever they come.
Once you set up your first test, make sure you install attention cues into your work day. Subscribe yourself to an autoresponder that reminds you to check the results every 2 days. Put action items in your calendar system. Start testing with a buddy, and encourage each other.
After you get your results and realize that split testing is the easiest and most elegant way to give yourself a pay raise, you won’t need those structured reminders, any more than I need a reminder that there’s a bar of Gearhart’s Venezuelan Dark Chocolate with Crystallized Australian Ginger in the green drawer where I keep my wallet and keys (in case a thief finds the drawer, I’m hoping the wallet and car keys will distract them from the chocolate).
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go shave for the 9,874th time:
What have you improved after a long plateau by applying Intention and Attention? Post your answer to comments.
And finally, a faux-AdWords ad from our sponsor:
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Whenever you encounter twins in a movie or novel, you know there’s trouble brewing. From the Biblical account of Esau and Jacob to the Shakepearean mishaps in "A Comedy of Errors" (where there are two sets of twins with identical names, Antipholis and Dromio, which is why so many people get stoned before watching the Bard), to the wily conniving of Hallie and Annie in The Parent Trap (or Sharon and Susan, if you’re into the 1961 Hayley Mills original), duplication has always brought in its wake confusion and opportunities for mischief.
(Now don’t get offended if you’re a twin – I’m talking about the other one, not you ;)
Google doesn’t like twins much either. Or triplets. Or octuplets.
That is to say, Google penalizes web pages that it deems to be near-exact copies of existing web pages. It won’t let them appear in search results.
You can understand why. If I have a page that ranks highly for "game show buzzer" (don’t ask ;), Google doesn’t want me making 9 more copies of the page and dominating the entire first page of search results.
So Google rewards the first page it finds with all the search engine mojo it deserves, and slaps all subsequent copies with Duplicate Content Penalty.
And that, boys and girls, is about all I know about Search Engine Optimization. And all I thought I needed to know.
Until…
Google decided to apply the very same rule to AdWords landing pages. This means, if you’re split testing landing pages to find the very best one, you may end up with Poor quality scores for all the keywords pointing to that landing page.
And the landing page will look perfect. The right title tag, the right content, the right format, everything perfect.
Except that it’s a copy of a page already indexed by Google.
If you haven’t yet made this mistake, here’s how to avoid it:
1. If you have a landing page that’s already indexed by Google (that is, it shows up on the left "organic side" of search results), test it as a destination URL in AdWords to make sure you’re getting a good quality score for your important keywords. If not, fix the title tag, header tags, content, inbound and outbound links, etc. All the basic SEO stuff we AdWords people have been forced to learn. (See Grade Grubbing with Google for details.)
2. Add the following meta tag between the <head> and </head> tags at the top of every new page you create to test against the original:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
What if you’ve already made the mistake? And your quality score is miserable, and you can’t afford clicks, and you don’t know what to do to improve that landing page any more?
Google, in their infinite benevolence, has given us mortals a chance to receive absolution for the Twin Sin. We can petition the Mountain View Olympians to remove pages from its index. Here’s how:
Go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools and sign in with your Google account. Add your site and get it verified by adding tags or a tiny HTML file to the site (so Google knows you have FTP access to it and therefore can be assumed to be the owner).
Then, from the Dashboard, select "Tools" and click the "Remove URLs" link.
Then select + New Removal Request and enter the URL of the page you want removed from the index (make sure you don’t choose a page that’s got good search engine rank right now).
The best practice is to index your best-performing landing page, since that’s the best place to send organic traffic (remember, that kind of traffic is free!).
Then add the "no index" tag to all the new landing pages you’re testing against the original. When you find a winner, change the original page to reflect the improvements. That original page is still indexed, recently updated (which Google loves), and a more effective sales tool. And then you repeat the process with your next round of split tests, always keeping the new pages off the Google radar with the "no index" tag.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, my evil twin wants to go eat some cake for breakfast.
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When I was born the doctor took one look at my face, turned me over and said, "Look, twins!"
~Rodney Dangerfield
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins, then run around the mall looking frantic.
~Steven Wright
Howie Jacobson, PhD., is the author of Google AdWords For Dummies, available on every continent (except Antarctica) wherever fine books, overpriced brownies and cheesy calendars are sold.
