I recently had the opportunity to see Tim Ash, Landing Page Optimization Guru, speak at the Austin SEO meet-up and he was amazing. He truly is a genius when it comes to Landing Page Optimization and getting clients to buy-in the need for testing.  During his introduction, Tim explained the biggest issue in getting client’s or anyone to buy-in on landing page testing is simply due to how we see our own sites or “babies”.  See the issue, is most people see their landing pages like this:

How we see our landing pages:

How are visitor’s see our landing pages:

This perception can single handedly be the biggest obstacle in getting any landing page testing in place.  Most see their pages and current conversion rates as the optimal level, however to quote Tim Ash one last time “its your users who decide which landing page performs best”.  Actions speak loudest and testing/tracking the landing pages is a must.  Once you are able to first admit that your baby could use some work, then you are on the path to recovery.  There are a ton of tools out there that can help you analyze the on-site behavior of your users from analytics to heat-maps.  A landing page engine like Google’s website optimizer will also allow you to set-up either A/B or Multivariate testing then the tool takes control of how pages get served, tracking and reporting of performance and optimization of pages using the best combination of variables.  The point being is that your user’s won’t tell you what pages perform best unless you give them options.

Before all is done, you must first admit….MY BABY IS UGLY!!!

We have all come across ad groups with poor CTRs and thought….let’s revise the ad copy.  Yes, this is usually the remedy for poor performing ad copy however sometimes we tend to overlook our keyword lists as the culprit.  I, myself, recently came across such an instance where my CTRs were suffering and after 3 rounds of ad copy testing, nothing was increasing my poor performing ads.  After taking a deep breath and sleeping on the problem, it hit me…what if the keywords are causing the problem.  What if one of the following issues is occuring in my account:

• I have keywords that weren’t researched properly, thereby my ads are being shown to the wrong audience
• My ads are being triggered by unqualified search queries not being filtered by negative terms

This is a common problem that many of us don’t think of because its drilled into our heads that low CTRs = Bad Ads.   So I first tackled the keyword list and reviewed the terms that I was bidding on.  I took my terms and ran a search on the engines to see what types of ads were appearing.  The term I ran was “convention in tx” which the organic listings showed me nothing but types of conventions in Texas.  The type of visitor typing this in term is looking for a convention in Texas, my ad was trying to target a visitor looking to HOST a convention in Texas.  Thus the CTR on this term was extremely low, while impressions was high.  I went through my entire keyword list and made adjustments based on the same logic.  Once I finished this task, I moved onto the next task…Search Query Reports.

Running a Search Query Report is never fun, typically you have a ton of data to review and thousands of keywords to go through.  This can be overwhelming to most, that is why I have my own system of running the report and focusing on the data I need which will be in a later post.  Once I have this data in the manner that is easy to review, I simply went through my list and found that my Broad and Phrase Match Types were bringing in a ton of unqualified traffic as well.  Search Queries for “Nudist Conventions in Texas”, “Conventions in Oklahoma” and others were triggering my ads.  I immediately created a negative keyword list and a long-tail keyword list based off the data in my Search Query Report to filter out the unqualified traffic in effort to improve my CTR.

After making these two changes, I am seeing my CTR on this particular Ad Group go from .18% to .84% which is a huge improvement almost overnight.  Now that I have the right keywords triggering my ads, it is time to review the message.