B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine

Remember Ad Testing?? Might be Time to Remind Yourself…

June 5th, 2008 Posted by: Bill Gadless

We’ve spilled a lot of ink recently over the desirability of cranking up your online marketing aggressiveness during uncertain or shrinking economic times (see for example our blog posts, “How a Website Makeover Can Help “Recession-Proof” Your Company” and “Recession, Reshmession… Don’t Let the Headlines Scare Your Company into its Own Private Downturn”).  Such aggressiveness helps offset the greater difficulty of finding and closing prospects, who can be expected to be more cautious in these times;  and it will protect your market share …and maybe increase it, if at least some of your competitors are too timid to match your aggressiveness.

Of course, it’s not a time to simply throw money at the problem;  it’s much better to first ensure that every dollar is working as hard as possible for your B2B.  And with PPC, that means… testing.  Like many others, you may have considered testing not worth the pain during the recent salad days.  But now, with every lead precious and no shortage of colleagues eager to redirect “your” ad dollars to something else, it’s time to dust off the methodology and convince yourself (and upper management) that the only remaining route to increased lead generation is an increased ad spend level.

The experts agree…
We were glad to see both of these thoughts seconded by Kevin Lee over at ClickZ, in his recent piece “Recession: PPC Threat or Opportunity?”.

On the aggressiveness point, he says this about marketers’ current choices: “Some may be crazy enough to cut their PPC search budgets, allowing competitors to swoop in and grab market share and profit.  Other marketers may have the opposite reaction and allocate both a greater share and a larger overall budget to the media famous for high conversion and effectiveness – PPC search – even as overall marketing budgets shrink.”
Doesn’t get much clearer than that!

And as to testing… Kevin suggests taking this opportunity to take a good hard look at your Ad Group structure to ensure the keywords within each group are similar enough to effectively share the same creative while incorporating the search words into the titles and descriptions;  if not, you’ll have to resort to dynamic keyword insertion, which can backfire on you.  Once you have the group structure right, it’s on to testing creative – at least two versions per group.  And don’t stop when you get some combinations that work “OK”;  you should always be trying to beat your best current creative (and landing page, and offer) …but especially in a slow economy.

The experts are also there to help.
We’ve said it a few zilllion times… PPC is a classic “long-tail” activity:  getting the first 70% or so of optimal effectiveness is easy;  getting that last 30% is pretty difficult, and requires more expertise than most marketing organizations can justify having in-house.  However, your Web marketing consultants can assist you with getting the max out of your PPC program.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy, Internet Marketing, PPC, Lead generation, Search Engine Marketing