See Which Business Offers Resonate with Google Ads Prospects
MIT Presentation (part 5 of 8): Learn Which Business Offers Resonate with Your Google Ads Prospects.
Once you’ve brought good prospects to your website, how do you get them to take action? Learn the right ways to split-test landing page offers for Google Ads visitors. And learn how to determine test winners correctly by using statistical significance tools.
This presentation was delivered by Prometheus PPC founder, Andrew Percey, on MIT campus in Cambridge, MA, on January 24, 2019, as part of “The Startup Code 2019” marketing seminar, which he organizes and co-hosts with serial entrepreneur Kenny Goodman. The attendees were MIT alumni, faculty, grad students and other members of the MIT community.
While this presentation includes specific advice for startups, the advanced strategies & tactics described can be used by any business that is looking to refine or troubleshoot their business model and marketing plan.
Video (part 5 of 8)
PDF slides (part 5 of 8)
Links to all posts in this presentation series, including videos, slides & transcripts:
- Full Presentation: 5 Ways to Test & Optimize your Business Model with Google Ads
- Introduction: What is Google Ads and Why Use It?
- How to test & optimize your prospect targeting, messaging and sales flow:
- Method #1: Learn Your Available Prospect Volume with Google Ads
- Method #2: Learn What Your Google Ads Prospects Actually Search For
- Method #3: Learn Which Marketing Messages Engage Your Google Ads Prospects
- Method #4: Learn Which Business Offers Resonate with Your Google Ads Prospects
- Method #5: Learn How to Stand Out from Competitors in Google Ads
- Conclusion: Best Google Ads First Steps Plus Tools & Resources
- Q&A: Google Ads Questions from Startup Founders
See all “Startup Code 2019” presentations and resources
See all MIT marketing seminars
Transcript of Presentation (part 5 of 8)
Method #4: Learn Which Business Offers Resonate with Your Google Ads Prospects
The fourth way you can test and optimize with Google Ads is to learn which of your offers will resonate. It is much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic. That means once you get good people to your website, if you can get twice as many to take the next step, that’s a lot easier than trying to get twice the quality traffic coming in.
How can we do that? You want to create split tests. The page you bring them to is called the landing page. You want to create different versions of that. And I’m not talking about changing button colors and fonts and things like that. I’m talking about changing your offer, something that’s really important to the visitor, to see what’s going to work.
So if you want to test bringing prospects who are at the bottom of the sales funnel, or close to making a purchase, you can test offers like “Buy now”, “Call today to speak with an expert”, “Click here to pre-order”, “Get a custom quote”, “Request an account review”… all different things that good prospects might be very interested in doing. And this can help you learn which ones most of them actually want to do as a way to connect with your business.
If they’re instead at the top of the funnel, you can test offers like “Watch our video”, “Try our free calculator”, “Download our white paper”… they’re still in the research phase, so give them some help from your company to get them thinking more about what you can do for them down the road. “Subscribe to our blog”, “Get notified of our launch”.
Again, all very easy to test, just by putting together a few different pages and sending your Google Ads traffic to those pages. It’s very similar to the ad testing. Ideally, you want to publish two to three different pages, you want to change the high impact elements together. So if you’re testing a “Buy now offer”, make sure from the banner to the images to the call to action to any testimonials you have on there, it all pertains to buying the product now. Try to test your most meaningful offers. Is it a sale? Is it an opt in? And then measure the results.
And again, there are fantastic tools for doing this. You can see a lot of the data in Google ads, but one thing that’s important to do, that I would say a lot of clients need to be educated about, is to test to statistical significance. I think this crowd is probably more familiar with that than most. And that is making sure you’re not fooled by the data. Get enough data to make sure the decisions are accurate.
This is a little snapshot from a tool called Adalysis, which I use as part of my Google Ads agency. And it makes it very easy to see what is significant or not. In this case, once results become significant above an 80% to 90% threshold, it gets color coded, and you can very quickly visualize what’s different. In this case, the first offer actually had a higher click through rate. But the second one had a much higher conversion rate. And overall, what that meant was you’re paying considerably less for each conversion with offer B. And this is with statistical significance, you can have high confidence in these results to say this is the way we want to go to achieve this desired result.
What if you don’t yet have anything to offer? Again, you can do the same trick and offer a fake sale. You can put it behind each of those offers, whether it’s a “Buy Now” button, a “Contact us for a consultation” button, put a page like this behind that to capture their information. Because you want to do two things: don’t disappoint them – these are people who’ve already showed some interest in your company – and do get their contact info. If your initial offers don’t convert enough visitors, then what? Well again, you can try switching to better offers, based on what you learned through this testing. Or you may need to go back and reevaluate what it is that you’re actually trying to offer. Is it enough value for people today?
