Red Door Interactive's president explains how to develop a creative messaging testing platform using pay-per-click search engine advertising.
One of the predominant questions in advertising is whether or not the message will appropriately affect its intended target. Ads need to drive traffic, sales, leads, brand awareness or all of the above. If the ad's messaging is off, then the results will be off.
Agencies and marketers spend months (and substantial budgets) testing, asking questions, and conducting focus groups in an effort to make sure that the money they spend on advertising will be a well-returned investment. Those agencies and marketers that decide to "wing it" and not spend the time or money to test their advertising will wait to see the results of the ad to learn whether or not their gamble paid off.
There is a happy medium available to any marketer that is willing to blend the benefits of the web with the intended reach of their offline promotions.
How to improve your odds
An area where online advertising has an advantage over its offline counterpart is in the fact that online ads can be quickly monitored and changed, where the printed word is committed once it hits the press. Pay-per-click advertising is a great way to leverage the intrinsic real-time data availability for the benefit of testing promotional messaging.
First, you need to define what it means for a test to be successful. Assuming your site has analytics or some form of tracking installed, you will need to define specific measurements within that system to use as key performance indicators. If you operate an ecommerce storefront, you may choose to use sales numbers as a metric to determine success. Or, if you are intending to drive brand awareness, you may choose to use metrics like page retention, depth of visit or time spent on pages to measure your effectiveness.
Once a measurement methodology is in place, you can start to create a testing matrix that will help you define what pay-per-click qualities you can put to use. Variables to choose from may be:
- time of the day
- time of the year
- geo-targeting
- exclusively displaying ads on search engine results pages, as opposed to adding the content-matching option (which is not unlike print advertising in how it is displaying contextually next to site content)
- specific versus general keyphrases; and more.
Setting up the matrix will require some creativity because the qualities of pay-per-click advertising do not always exactly match up with desired offline media; you will have to make certain assumptions.
It's not for everyone
Now, there are all sorts of factors to consider when deciding to use the web to test offline messaging. One of the first things to bear in mind is that the web's general demographics may be slightly different from those of where you're placing your offline advertising. In some cases, this factor alone will exclude this testing technique. However, if the demographic is not wildly different, then this may be a case to simply test different advertisement messages against each other in direct competition.
As specific as it seems these paid ads can be, you can't always control your placement. In Google, that is very true because the ads appear in a more merit-based order. However, on the other engines you can get pretty consistent placement. You want to make sure to minimize the placement variable by providing equal placement and budget to each ad being tested-- ranking does affect results. You may consider excluding Google in your test, though the sample size will generally be smaller without them (because Google generally provides more traffic).
Another issue to overcome is the search term bias. If the budget allows, start broadly with term selection and then narrow based on results. This can be challenging and resource-intensive, but realize that users will be influenced by the search terms they type. So, if only one or two key phrases are tested, then of course those key phrases will be the most successful.
Once the decision has been made to go forward with the test campaigns, the copywriters will notice that the space for copy is limited. Google's AdWords, for example, are limited line by line. However, the concept with pay-per-click test ads is to test the main message, not to test the entire body of offline copy. Some copywriters will have a difficult time with this. Focus on general messaging, yet realize that specific "hot" keywords will rise to the top. Rely on the landing pages to dazzle the users.
Managing the campaigns
Marketers are now able to more easily manage multiple campaigns within the various pay per click search engines. Therefore, one can try messaging categories -- different primary product benefits, for example -- to see which general messaging pulls the best results. This method might help to determine what headlines may provide the greatest reader interest and may be the most basic way to leverage this testing technique.
There are more complicated options to try when using pay-per-click messaging testing, as well. Getting deeper into the finite details of the copy can be difficult because of the limited space that this ad-type allows; however, one can often identify resonating key phrases or more commonly used key phrases (based on overall traffic) that users align with your product or brand.
Another option to employ is geographic segmentation. For seasonal or weather-related products, it is often clear that purchase-drivers in one region may differ from those in another region. However, it can be useful if you are buying regional offline media to try geo-targeting different messaging in a few dispersed cities in an effort to find ideal local messaging.
Land them carefully
Where users arrive after having clicked on your pay-per-click ads will be just as important as the ads themselves. This will determine how deep users go into your site, how long they spend and/or if they convert to your desired success metrics. The landing page can begin to embody the actual offline campaign. The key phrases and messaging on the page should be aligned with the tests being conducted on the engines.
Conclusion
No campaign should make its way into the world without being put through the proper rigors of testing. For some, however, testing can add a time- or budget-consuming barrier. This testing technique is an easy and effective one for agencies and marketers that want a quick and moderately inexpensive way to test market their messaging.
This method is something that will improve over time, as well. Once the pay-per-click ad testing technique has been utilized a few times, the process will become more streamlined. A testing protocol, at first, may be comprised of simple a/b testing. However, refining creative messaging by utilizing the benefits of pay-per-click search engine advertising can help to deliver maximum results from your offline advertising efforts in very little time.
Reid Carr is president of Red Door Interactive, helping clients -- such as the San Diego Convention Center, SkinMedica, Leap Wireless, Intuit and Sharp Systems of America -- to lay out business-oriented strategies for improving the success of their Internet presence .