Having been playing around with easier ways to scale up testing on client’s ppc campaigns one of the coolest new tools comes from Performable, who offer a hosted landing page platform. Its often very time consuming and difficult to make the desired changes to a clients live site or you may not have access to add in technology like Google Website Optimiser due to IT policies or CMS complexity/access issues. There are a number of landing page solutions but many are closely integrated with an existing bid management or web analytics solution and are just not easy enough or cost effective enough to consider for many projects early in the campaign.
The platform is easy enough to setup and depending on the number of landing pages around 30-45 mins to setup a basic set of pages to start testing, the cool part is the 1-2 mins it takes to generate an alternative version to test. The new dashboard also offers a clean and clear activity summary for your campaigns with general trends on increases in visitors to your landing pages.
The only screen that you really need to check regularly is the pages dashboard that shows you number visitor numbers viewing the landing page and what are the conversion rates for each of your landing pages you are testing.
But this top level pages data does not provide the real story as you maybe testing half a dozen or more landing pages to see which leads to the most conversions, if you click one of the pages links you will be taken to a subpage that contains a lot more data and options. You can quickly disable, edit or clone landing pages that are exceeding or failing to meet your expected conversion rates, you are also given an overview for that particular page to see quickly how it may compare against known conversion rates.
The only extra feature they could add would be to view how it may compare against the campaign average or a pre-defined conversion rate required for the project to be successful. So there you have a quick overview of Performable which I used to take a clients PPC campaign conversion rates from onsite at less than 1% to over 6% using Performable landing pages, some ab testing of different versions and some time to gather data.
David-thanks for the fantastic post!
We’re adding your recommendation to our product development list.
We’d love to send you a Performable t-shirt. Can you let me know what size you wear and where to send it?
Best,
David
Thanks for the comment David, it was amazing how well the landing pages have worked on a few projects, being able to set baseline data is useful as sometimes on CPA projects you have to exceed pre-set conversion rates.
[...] like this go viral they are not prepared or able to roll out landing pages quickly the improve conversion rates for campaigns. TJ Maxx Tablet Landing [...]
[...] [...]
[...] enhanced CPC which was meant to use conversion tracking data and bids to optimise the campaign for ppc conversions. I later discovered this had much less of an impact on the campaign than I expected so maybe the [...]