Leveling Up PPC with Conversion Rate Optimization

Episode Description

Great ads get clicks. Great landing pages get conversions. Successful campaigns have both.

This episode of PPC Town Hall goes on a slight tangent featuring two brilliant CRO experts who share their tips and insights to help take your PPC campaigns to the next level.

This panel covers:

• When to use a dedicated landing page for your PPC campaigns
• The most common mistakes that kill conversion rate on landing pages
• Ideas to improve relevance between ads and landing pages when using Responsive Search Ads
• The right way to measure landing page performance
• Other techniques to boost conversion rate

Episode Takeaways

When to Use a Dedicated Landing Page for Your PPC Campaigns

• Tailored Experience: Utilize dedicated landing pages to create a more tailored and relevant experience that aligns closely with the PPC campaign’s promise, enhancing the likelihood of conversion.
• Control and Testing: Dedicated landing pages allow for more control over content and design, making A/B testing easier to optimize conversion rates effectively.

The Most Common Mistakes That Kill Conversion Rate on Landing Pages

• Lack of Cohesion: Failure to maintain a cohesive message and visual continuity from the ad to the landing page disrupts the user journey, decreasing trust and conversion likelihood.
• Overloading Information: Cluttering landing pages with too much information or too many choices can overwhelm visitors, leading to decision fatigue and reduced conversions.

Ideas to Improve Relevance Between Ads and Landing Pages When Using Responsive Search Ads

• Segmentation and Personalization: Create landing pages that cater to different segments of traffic dictated by the responsive search ad’s varying headlines and descriptions to match user expectations more precisely.
• Dynamic Content: Implement dynamic content on landing pages that adjusts based on the specific ad clicked, ensuring that the landing page directly addresses the user’s interests or intent signaled in the ad.

The Right Way to Measure Landing Page Performance

• Beyond Basic Metrics: Look beyond basic metrics like click-through rates to deeper analytics that measure engagement, such as time on site, interaction rates, and conversion paths.
• Holistic View: Integrate landing page performance data with overall marketing goals to assess its contribution to final sales and long-term customer value, aligning closer with business objectives.

Other Techniques to Boost Conversion Rate

• Progressive Disclosure: Use forms that reveal more fields as needed, reducing initial entry barriers and gradually collecting more information as user engagement increases.
• Psychological Triggers: Employ psychological principles like urgency, scarcity, and social proof to create compelling reasons for users to act promptly, enhancing conversion rates.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host today. And I’m also one of the co founders at Optmyzr. So today we’re going to talk about conversion rate optimization, and we have two world class experts on the topic to join us and talk about this. But why do we talk about CRO?

Well, this is a PPC show. And obviously if we’re going to be spending all this money on PPC , and we’re going to be spending time picking the right keywords and paying a lot of money to get the clicks. No matter how much we optimize for that stuff, if we’re not making sure that once people come to the landing page to the website that we’re actually converting them, then that’s all wasted money.

So this is basically the other half of PPC that simply cannot be ignored if we want to drive the biggest bang for our buck. So that’s why we decided to do an episode on CRO. We’ll introduce our two guests here in a minute, but I’m really excited about this one. So let’s get started with it.

All right. Welcome to my guests. We have Andrea Cruz and Tim Ash. How are both of you doing? Andrea, how’s it going?

Andrea Cruz López: I’m doing great. I was having this fabulous conversation with you two before the show went live. So I’m very excited about everything that’s happening. That’s right,

Frederick Vallaeys: Andrea is giving away the secrets here.

We do a little warmup, so we all get to you know, we’re lively and ready for the show. We drink some coffee together. But yeah, you’re joining us from Boston, right? And one thing we love to do, by the way, is everyone watching, tell us hello in the, in the comments on YouTube, say where you’re calling in from.

We’ll say hello back to you. And it’s also a great place to ask us questions so that we can steer the conversation in the direction that’s most useful for you. Andrea, who do you work for?

Andrea Cruz López: I work for b2b digital marketing agency. So if you have any b2b questions, I’m here for them

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. Well, thank you for joining us and then tim ash.

No stranger in the to the industry. How long you’ve been Doing PPC and cro tim

Tim Ash: Probably since Andrea was born and no, I’m just kidding. I’m an old guy. As you know, I’ve written a couple of books on landing page optimization used to run, what was called the conversion conference in Europe and the U S and ran my former agency site tuners, which was focused on CRO mostly for midsize and large companies.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I said, I remember our first meeting you, Tim, when you came to the Google offices and you were helping some of our bigger customers get their landing pages in order, right? Because like I said, they were wasting, they were spending so much time on PPC , buying these clicks and then they were like, wait, we have to have a good landing page.

What a

Tim Ash: concept, crazy talk, right?

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. And then Andrea, you and I, I think we met in Austin at Heroconf, one of the great conferences that’s out there. Yeah.

Andrea Cruz López: Yeah, the wonderful julie vacini introduce us. So julie, we love you

Frederick Vallaeys: Yes, we do PPC chat on twitter check it out if you haven’t okay, and thanks everyone for chiming in here and telling us where you’re calling in from all right.

So the, the, the other thing that’s kind of interesting here, none of us were born in the United States and Tim, I just find this sad about you, but tell us where you were born.

Tim Ash: I was born in Moscow in the USSR before it fell apart. And the evil empire became for 15 different countries.

Frederick Vallaeys: So wait, Tim Ash, that does not sound Russian.

Did you adopt a stage name?

Tim Ash: Stage name. Well, I’ll try my real name. Try saying this out loud on the first pass. Timur Aleksandrovich Astashkevich. Timur

Frederick Vallaeys: Aleksandrovich, and then I forgot.

Tim Ash: Yeah, that’s about as far as most people get. You did really well, but that’s I saved myself and everyone I met a lot of time by shortening my name to Tim Ash.

Frederick Vallaeys: Andre, you want to take a crack at his name?

Andrea Cruz López: Yeah, no, I’m not gonna do that, but I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you my full name because I, as you said, we are international today, so I was born and raised in Venezuela, so my full name is Andrea Eloisa Cruz Lopez. Andrea

Tim Ash: and Luisa Cruz Lopez.

Andrea Cruz López: There you go. See, mine is a bit easier.

Well,

Tim Ash: it’s easy because Russian, in Russian all the sounds in Spanish are phonetically a subset of Russian, so I can do the rolled R’s and nasal N’s, so it’s easier for me.

Andrea Cruz López: Yep.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice, and then I was born in probably the most boring of the three countries, Belgium. There’s always the butt of jokes and movies because it’s like one of these countries that you can offend and it’s so small, like, we’re not gonna mess with you. But yes, my full name, Frederick Robert Christian Valles, two middle names. Anyway, we’re here to talk about CROs. So the first topic that I thought we we can sort of get into is When would you use a dedicated landing page for your PPC campaigns and when would you just take your your website in general?

Like what’s really the benefit of a dedicated landing page? Either one of you can take it. I’m not going to be calling people here. Yeah,

Tim Ash: Andrea, go ahead.

Andrea Cruz López: Sure. This is a question that often comes up and I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer. In my particular case, I like to test both the side, especially if it is a new client or something that we’ve never run pain and see how people move across the website.

But look guys. I think the PPC landing page has also evolved through time. The original PPC landing page used to be the form, a small text, bullets, and that’s it. That was it. That was the traditional PPC landing page. And what we are seeing today as people become more savvy in the way they search online is they need a little bit more.

Sometimes with Google becoming broader, we really don’t know where people exactly are in the funnel. So giving people option, you might not be ready for a demo. You might not be ready for a contact us. So what else can I give you That you have at least a micro interaction with me that I know might help you come back Or that I can retarget you afterwards.

So that’s my those are my original thoughts I’m gonna leave it there to see what what you guys think

Tim Ash: well for from my perspective i’ve always had a broad definition of what a landing page is and to me it’s anywhere where Significant traffic is landing on your site on the way to important events Important economic goals.

So it could be your homepage. If you’re an e-commerce site and you have primarily a shopping feed as your main point of entry. It might be your product detail template for your product detail pages, or it could be a dedicated, you know, for a paid campaign, direct response type of landing page like you were describing, Andrea.

But to me, those are all landing pages. The question of when to use, carefully designed specific one to me is always, unless you don’t have the resources or the technical knowledge, if you’re paying for the traffic, why would you just send it to your regular site? I mean, if you can make even a couple of tweaks to your existing pages to make them better, you should, you’re paying money to get people there.

So the answer is always if you have the resources, that’s how I look at it.

Frederick Vallaeys: So then I guess the question is, how do you prioritize which pages you’re going to put the resources against? And then it’s also a question, like at bigger companies, it’s just very difficult oftentimes to change. I mean, you’re not going to change your homepage for a PPC campaign.

So by default, you then kind of have to go into using a landing page tool.

Tim Ash: Yeah, and that’s the beauty of, landing pages is you can, if you’re using another tool, you can just do it on, on the side, but there’s nothing saying you can’t duplicate your homepage, make a couple of tweaks to it and a landing page tool and send PPC homepage traffic to that either.

So that’s, that’s the beauty of having a massive

Frederick Vallaeys: effort is what you’re saying. You don’t have to design from scratch. You basically take. And so what would be some of those small tweaks that have led to millions of dollars in uplift? I’m sure you’ve got a few of those.

Tim Ash: And do you want to take that one?

Andrea Cruz López: Well, before we even go there, if you do have a very small budget, Google Optimize is a great resource just to make tweaks, test a few different things, different messaging, and you can just set it up to your paid traffic. You can even filter by specific campaigns, specific keywords, specific ad groups. So if you are in that bucket of very limited budget, That’s a free tool that you can use right there.

It’s not perfect. You cannot create a zillion experiments But it’s something you can get started with and then determine if you might need something bigger or more

Frederick Vallaeys: so Google optimizes that way you would use to do this ABC split testing the time he’s talking about.

Andrea Cruz López: Yeah Yeah, for sure You can do multiple variations of a be testing with Google optimized and you can even determine how much weight You want to give to each specific?

variation And it connects back to your Google analytics. Pretty easy tool to use.

Tim Ash: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s changed, but one thing to be careful there is there, they want to do everything algorithmically, which means you don’t get an even split of traffic across the different versions. So you have to be careful to set it manually to be just a fixed you know.

Proportionate amount of traffic to each page. Otherwise, it’s going to optimize you into some weird direction where 90 percent of your traffic is going to one page and then you never hit statistical significance.

Andrea Cruz López: Yeah, yeah. If you have a small site, it might give you issues with that, but they do allow you to assign weights.

Now, but they still tries to optimize towards your primary goal, whatever you might set that up to be.

Tim Ash: Yeah. And I personally have a problem with that with Google in general, which is like, yeah, just trust us. You don’t need any knobs to turn, you know, give us your money and we’ll spend it for you. Not a problem.

Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, at least they’re nice. Now it’s no longer just about optimized for clicks, but at least they can optimize for conversions, which on the team of what we were asking for that. And it. I think it took over a decade to add that functionality.

Tim Ash: That one feature, yeah. Well, and also note that Google no longer says, Do no evil is their motto.

Have you noticed that?

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s a whole different BBC time off session. So you brought up an interesting point, right? So in split testing, You’re you want to set the actual distribution yourself as opposed to letting Google handle it. But Andrea, you also talked about how there’s a lot of uncertainty now because with keywords no longer being exact match with the ads themselves being RSAs.

And so you don’t really know exactly what text was shown in the ad. Like how much uncertainty is there that goes to the landing page and how statistically significant is your say 30, 30, 30, How much is it based on the landing page versus some other factor of who came into that landing page?

Andrea Cruz López: Well, I think one of the biggest issues we have in the payee PC industry is that we focus too much on the keyword.

And it’s like, Oh, I am beating on marketing automation software and I want to have it Everywhere in the ad in the landing page everywhere, but we are not really communicating the message I don’t know how many pages we’ve been to and i’m sure you’ve experienced this as well You go to a page. It doesn’t say anything.

It just says we’re gonna increase your revenue by three thousand percent There’s no how there’s no why It only says we’re a marketing automation platform and that’s it. So definitely it all comes down. I am a big fan of ignoring quality score. I am a bigger fan of providing actual information on the landing page.

And sure, include your keywords here and there, but focus on the messaging. What are you telling the person? People don’t have time. If they’re watching on their phone, it will take, they will barely glance at your page. So how can we give proper information to the user?

Frederick Vallaeys: And so my, my question there is, okay, so we promised 3000 percent improvement in whatever.

Okay. So that’s interesting. Like I want to know more, but you don’t give them more. Right. So, and now we’re talking about the human brain and Tim, I want to get your opinion on this. Like what is the right level of data to give them? Because the more you start explaining, I think people, first of all do tend to be lazy.

Like, do they really want to read the full explanation or is it like, Hey, yeah, sure. I’ll hire you do the 3000 percent thing for me.

Tim Ash: Well, I think you have to make the distinction between buying a box of Tic Tacs at seven 11 or versus making a huge decision about changing your software or your business.

So the risk is going to determine the amount of diligence that you do. And certainly a B2B sale, you’re still trying to influence the human mind and that hasn’t changed, but there’s two levels of risk. There’s personal risk and corporate risk. So if it’s a big decision, there’s going to be a lot more.

Risk mitigation requests for proposal demos, all kinds of steps to make sure that the company doesn’t make a mistake when buying your product or service. So the thing to do in a business to business setting is to have role based sub sites or pages. So you’re the CFO. You want to know about the life cycle cost of running the software.

You’re the end user. You want to know the features of it and see the demo. You’re the end user. The administrator that’s going to administer the software. Well, you want to know about how to manage users easily, that sort of thing. So you really have to have role based pages for B to B.

Frederick Vallaeys: That makes total sense.

And Andrea, maybe from like a tactical perspective, say that you have these role based pages. How would you get people to the right page? Oh, that’s the fun part of about life, right? And Google being less exact. And now with people on Flock, it’s gonna be very, it’s gonna be fun. But it’s difficult, right?

Andrea Cruz López: A lot of it comes down with experience. I am personally very into search term reports for them and try to analyze where they are and try to come back to getting micro conversions, bringing them back in which market audiences are they in? Are there any affinity audience that make me put them in the right place at the right time?

When do I expect them to take the next action so I can remarket them back? Okay. So it goes a little bit of everywhere. Right. So I would, I would add to that, that there’s nothing wrong with your landing page being a role based self selector. I’m either the CFO or I’m the end user, or I’m the, you know, it manager is managing it.

Tim Ash: So that way you’re actually getting market research when they go to that page. That first click tells you the distribution of people that your ads are driving. So you go, okay, if this skews too heavily in the wrong direction, we need to do something different with audience targeting. Right. And then within each role, you have to go through the complete customer journey.

So like Andre was saying, early stage, you know, I’m not even educated about the problem versus mid stage. I’m considering different alternatives, and it’s only at the end where I actually have that direct response to call me or schedule a demo or something like that. So role based first and then within each one, the complete customer journey.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. So layer those two together nicely.

Andrea Cruz López: Hey, Fred, the other thing, just adding to Tim’s point, the other thing that has been very helpful when you need to collect a lot of information is those progressive forms. So if you use Hotspot or Marketo, they all allow you to do and and it’s a very easy way to get the first insight into who they are.

And then when they come back, you’ll get another piece and it keeps going.

Tim Ash: Yeah, I think progressive disclosure is definitely the way to go if you need to collect information, but there’s a cautionary note about collecting information at all that I look at it as an inverted kind of upside down U shape at the beginning.

Don’t ask for any information because you haven’t established a relationship. At the end, when they’re ready to transact, get out of their way and don’t ask for any information. It’s in the middle that you have the right to ask for information. So at the beginning, I say, start with a gift. They should have access to a downloadable white paper or watch a free video or some other.

Thing that doesn’t even require their email or any information at all. Give to get that’s a reciprocity is a very powerful evolutionary psychology principle. By giving someone a gift, you’re actually obligating them to give you something of greater or equal value back. That’s a really key point that most marketers misunderstand.

It’s

Frederick Vallaeys: the primal brain, right? That’s what your book is about.

Tim Ash: Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And the funny thing is like, you’re not explicitly asking them to give you something, but I think if you have a self selector page. At the very least, now they’ve actually told you what bucket they fall in. And you can now put them on an audience list so you can start remarketing towards them.

Tim Ash: Absolutely. The retargeting based on that role based self selection is critical, but another good way to do retargeting is how deep did they go into your experience? So for an e commerce company, it might be, it’s not so much that you’re Looking at high value products that have high margin for the company, but rather that you went all the way through from home page to category page, the product detail into the cart.

I want to retarget the people that abandoned the cart because they went so deep in the experience.

Frederick Vallaeys: Question here. And yeah, I don’t think this is what you just answered, but so for a lead gen landing pages, conversion will degrade as you ask for more and more information and more sensitive information, any tips or tricks for maintaining those conversion rates as you.

Ask for that next level that the consumer, the prospect may not be that comfortable giving.

Tim Ash: Yeah. Well, in my book, I would talk about the form field test on whether you should have a form on your page at all, or what fields should be on it. And that’s a two parter. Is the information absolutely necessary to complete the current transaction?

And if you can’t answer yes to both parts of that, that field should not be on your form. We have to have discipline around that. And most of us are just like getting all this nice to have information that we’re not going to do anything with anyway. Correct.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, we ask for phone number and then we never call anyone.

Right. All right. I don’t want you to call me anyway. Here is a great question. You’ve been asking great questions. So thank you. But do you think a landing page for a remarketing campaign can be shorter? Obviously the idea being that remarketing, they’ve interacted with you before. So there’s less you need to tell. And maybe then that’s to your point, like remarketing, Hey, they’re finally ready to, to make the deal here.

So let’s get out of the way. How do we keep it short and sweet?

Tim Ash: Definitely. They’ve had more exposure to your brand. They came to your site in the first place and they’ve been exposed to your retargeting ads subsequently. So yeah, there’s a higher propensity to buy. But I don’t know that that necessarily means shorter content.

They might need longer content in order to make the buying decision. So it depends on your company.

Andrea Cruz López: Yeah. Even, even social proof, going back to the example of the car abandonment, those pesky emails that you sometimes get that they say there’s only two left and you know, you cannot find that the discount ends to nine.

What can you push to make that final conversion if they are down? So down the funnel, you don’t need to tell them more than that. Most likely. Yeah, I mean, if you have some kind of abandonment recovery, whether it’s with an e commerce checkout or some other longer process, we’ve seen anywhere from 15 to 30 percent probably of the people that abandoned can be picked up with the right email sequence.

Tim Ash: So spend a lot of time getting that abandonment recovery email sequence. Nailed down. That’s there’s a lot of value in just fixing two or three emails.

Frederick Vallaeys: We can’t hear you Frederick. You’re muted technology. Well, well, I think we can read it Meanwhile, he, we can’t hear you. Okay. Yeah. And I thought you couldn’t hear me because they’re like literally tearing down my office. So I put myself on mute so that the people can actually hear the two of you. All right, fun stuff, but I’m going to have to step out of here to tell him to stop doing whatever they’re doing, but let’s see this next question.

So. Converting elements, so supporting media, calls to action, condensed menu certifications. How much of a role does all this metadata play in CRO? And Andrea, was it you who said like the landing pages of old three bullet points, image, lead gen form, that was it? Like, so it sounds like that’s different and I think a lot of these elements were like the things of That we were used to.

So how has that changed?

Andrea Cruz López: Yeah, well, again, it comes back to how much people know about your brand. If this is the first interaction they are going to have about you, they probably want to know where they can find you, they want to read about reviews and comments people have given you. Are you providing that information?

If you are a Microsoft partner, an Oracle partner, is there anything you can provide to give some credibility to your brand? So definitely it helps establishing that trust. As Tim said at the beginning, if people have never heard about you, well, we, we, we need to tell you who we are. So in a very condensed but precise manner, hey, this is, this is who we are, this is what we do.

And then as they move down the funnel, you can give them other pieces. Not everything has to be in that very first touch, just the most. Important part.

Tim Ash: Yeah. And I want to add that you should think of your landing page is imagine you’re a parachute is to crash lands into a house in the middle of the night.

Now you don’t know which room you’re in. You just need to get oriented. That’s how you should think of your website visitors. I mean, if you’re assuming that they’re going to come through your home page and all these intermediate pages and get to the to some new Action page. That’s not necessarily true.

If you’re direct landing them, say again, on a product detail page, I have this discussion with the customer today. If that’s new customers that have never heard of your brand, well, then some of those trust symbols that are on your home page need to actually be part of the product detail page template so you can have a little orientation and a little bit more trust.

Because that’s their front door. So always remember your side doors are often your front doors. And if, if you treat them that way in the right circumstances, that’s another place where landing pages can be effective. You can add that trust in places where you, you wouldn’t need it had they come through the homepage,

Frederick Vallaeys: right?

So use your analytics to figure out which side doors are actually should become your front doors.

Tim Ash: Yes, that are also front doors. Exactly.

Frederick Vallaeys: That is a great question from local works. But so it’s the balance about messaging. So every day, like, and so messaging, as far as speaking to your consumer versus messaging for the the Google bot to get your optimization and SEO ranking and quality score high.

How do you guys think about that balance?

Tim Ash: And Jay, go ahead.

Andrea Cruz López: I was thinking why you can’t have both. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t struggle with that. I’m curious to see if, if Tim disagrees cause ultimately, most likely that keyword focus that you have because of ranking and quality score, it’s also partially why they are searching for you.

So if it is the right customer, There has to be a balance between the two.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I would say, don’t think of them as separate things, right? So the way that Google thinks about ranking, it’s not about literally what is the content, semantically what is the content, it’s about how do people behave when they see this content.

And if they behave in a manner that seems like you’re helping them and you’re helping them research and helping them achieve their goal, like that’s really what Google wants. I think they also have different standards when it comes to PPC landing pages and SEO pages, right? So if somebody is looking to do research, that’s very different than if somebody is looking to just go and buy something quickly.

Tim Ash: Yeah. And I would say that there’s kind of a tail wagging the dog situation. Don’t ever let technical considerations, whether it’s SEO. Or PPC control the user experience. I mean, if you look at the evolution of Google in general, it was like keyword stuffing on page tricks, and then it was trying to get inbound links and all the link farms.

And now the reason they created largely the Chrome browser was to see what people are actually doing on your site and tracking everything through analytics. So this is the golden age when. All of the search stuff is aligned with the user experience. So make a good user experience and and don’t focus on quality score first.

Then everything will work out. That’s so that’s my advice. I love them. And even Google has evolved from Google Analytics for bounce. Right? It’s gone. It’s now called engage users and it’s all about when I think Frederick was sending us to worse. It’s about the experience. Don’t focus. Yeah, for example,

yeah, like time on site could be really good if you’re reading or consuming content.

It’s really bad if you’re trying to check out, right? So time on site is either a good metric or a bad metric depending on the context. That’s not some kind of neutral thing.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. And I stopped the destruction in my office. So I won’t have to run out again. I think

Tim Ash: I love the pandemic. Everyone’s getting more real.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, wait until my kids run into the room that’s happening in about 15 minutes. So Eric is asking a lot of great questions too. Thanks Eric. But this is for Tim. So how addictive technologies can be applied to landing page content. So I guess he’s talking about the primal brain and humans basically haven’t changed, but by the way, Tim,

Tim Ash: will humans change?

Not in any kind of short, meaningful timeframe, I would say we’ve evolved we have parts of what’s inside of us from the earliest forms of life on earth. I mean, people talk about dopamine, for example, and it’s like, Oh, that’s the three blinking dots and anticipating what someone’s instant message reply is going to be.

Well, we share that with fruit flies going back hundreds of millions of years. We share that with an insect. There’s nothing distinctly human about This stuff. Yeah, there’s some bizarre stuff that we evolved at the end, like culture and storytelling. But you have to look at the whole evolutionary arc to understand people.

That’s what my main comment on that. So you think there’s addictive technologies? Yeah, you were. There’s a lot of algorithm driven stuff that’s being used, for example, in social media to polarize us and get reactions and get us to act. You have to be really, really conscious. Of how you motivate people.

There’s basically two ways to move someone off their comfortable spot. You can use upside motivation, happy, happy talk, which is what most marketers do and fear and loss based stuff. And I think to this point, I think you should really focus on. Loss based stuff. A lot of companies say, well, that’s off brand for us.

We don’t say mean things, but if you’re not painting the picture of what life is like without your product or service and rubbing salt into the wound and all of the implications of that, you’re not going to motivate me. So just like going to work out at the gym, No pain, no gain. If you can’t create a pain in the prospect, there is no financial gain for you.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well said. No pain, no gain. Alright Melissa, she’s a fan of good riddance of bounce rate, like Andre was saying. So let’s shift to the next topic we had promised people we would talk about a little bit. We’d love to hear the stories that you have about the biggest landing page mistakes.

I’m

Tim Ash: sure you

Andrea Cruz López: do. You want to go first?

Tim Ash: Well, I have a whole chapter. You know, I have a section called your baby is ugly and I have the seven deadly sins of landing pages and what they all boiled down to. I’ll flip through a few of them, but they all boil down to this notion that, you know, we, as the company are going to tell you what’s right instead of taking people from the outside in and saying, Let’s take, let’s meet them where they are.

So not enough trust, too many distractions, you know, visually too much text on the page. One of the big ones that applies here to PPC in general, and I still see it with shocking irregularities, not keeping your promises. They didn’t just appear on your landing page. They came from your ad. So if the ad promises something, it was like, if you’re trying to sell vacuum cleaners and you say free sex in your ad, I mean, you know, that’s, well.

Actually, I’m not gonna go there. There’s probably someone who could figure out how to put those two together, but that’s not me. The point is, you have to keep your promises. You can’t just say, Well, I did my job. I drove the traffic here. Now it’s up to you to convert them. So if there’s not a clear information sent, if the main.

Promise of the ad isn’t being kept on the landing page. That’s a huge problem. And that’s also why I advocate for having dedicated landing pages, because if you just land them on a page in your site, it might be serving multiple masters and it might not be focused enough on the ad promise.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And so that, that goes to preserving the scent of the query.

And then he said the sense, right. So and in PPC generally means like, make sure your keyword is shown in the attack. So that promise is kept and then you’re saying, keep the promise from whatever you now said on the ad, the landing page. And so one thing that I’ve heard, I may have, may have heard it from you, but was basically like.

Tell people what to do in the ad and then let them do exactly that thing on the landing page. So like tell them sign up for a free ebook or register for a call or whatever it is because the ad is almost like giving humans the mission. Like what is the mission you want me to go on? If I click this ad?

Oh, cool. I can go like register for this. And then they get, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ash: So, so it was free, perfect example with the ebook. So if you get them to a page that’s got the ebook, most people will try to sell the free demo. Right. All of a sudden it’s like this bait and switch that happens instead of that whole page should be dedicated to what you get in the ebook, a beautiful cover shot of it, a detailed table of contents.

It’s 17 pages. Here’s what people say about the ebook. So you’re really selling the promise that you made. You’re going to get an ebook and you land on the page and it’s all about how great the ebook is. It’s not an attempt to get you to buy today.

Andrea Cruz López: It does remind me of something that happens on B2B all the time, and it’s very annoying. It’s when people are looking for the price of something, I just want to know the price, how much it costs. And then you land on the page, and it’s a contactless form, and it’s so painful. It’s like, just give me an estimate, because I, I need to know.

Frederick Vallaeys: I know. And then you saw you fill out the form and then you get on an exploratory call where they still don’t give you the price because they need to

Andrea Cruz López: check with somebody else to give you the price.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right? And they need to make sure that you’re worthy of even being told what the price is and that you might actually have enough money to pay for it.

You

Tim Ash: know, I’m going to disagree with you guys here. Please because again, if you’re talking about a B2B high value sale, a high risk you know, it’s like show up on our page. It’s only half a million dollars. Okay. Bye. If you don’t establish the value proposition, if you don’t tell me that you understand what my problems are, if you don’t understand that, if you can’t show to me with a calculator or some other thing that my actual cost of not doing this is, 5 million, then they have no context for that half million.

And it’s just too much. So I think leading with price on expensive items is not necessarily the best thing to do. I mean, like when I ran my agency site tuners, we had our expert website reviews. That’s the only thing we had the price for it. That was an entry level. You know, we don’t care if you do it, you know, we’ll give you lots of good advice, but here’s how much it costs.

None of the other agency services were priced. It’s not a menu in a Chinese restaurant.

Andrea Cruz López: Well, and there are things that are custom, right? Like you said, in a marketing agency, it depends how much you want to spend, how many whatever the results you are expecting, what are your challenges today? But there are different ways to tackle those.

Frederick Vallaeys: So until we want to show the link to your book here in just a second, because lots of good advice in there, but I do want to go back to the scent of the query, right? And I’ve mentioned this before, and I’m going to keep harping on it. But like, with this uncertainty that keeps being introduced, like, okay, you had an exact match keyword.

And that key exact match keyword was, Buy a dozen red roses and now Google’s like, well, you know semantically that’s kind of like the same meaning as Floral arrangements, whatever right? Okay, so that’s different now your ad which is being put together by RSA is like, well You know we have 12 different headlines and one of them is gonna be like Get your flowers delivered tomorrow and the next one is gonna be like get a 30 off Which one do they put together?

So now I don’t know on my landing page, what was shown in the ad. I don’t even really know what the user was searching for. So in this day and age of where we lost so much control, how do we preserve the sense of the query and deliver on the promise?

Tim Ash: Well, I think if you, what we’re saying is instead of exact match, we now have themes and when you get back to it, you have to create a theme page, but again, the thing you should do then is create the information sent.

On the page, so just like we’re talking about in B to B with role based self selection, you can say, Hey, do you want to figure out the best Mother’s Day gift? Or do you want to buy a dozen red roses that we delivered tomorrow for the more specific person so you can give him 34 options? No more than that, but 34 options on the page that they can process in parallel, and in a way, you’re, you’re, you’re Really kind of reconnecting them with that information sent, then you’re getting around the Nunification of it, you know, the stripping off the information that that’s being done upstream of it.

So you’re recovering the information sent,

Andrea Cruz López: I think also if you are using single keyword ad groups, this might be troublesome to you because you might say, okay, I need to create one landing page per ad group. That’s going to be so painful. The reality is, this is how I like to frame it. If all the keywords are related.

And they can go to the same page. That’s gonna be your ad group. And if all your keywords are related, then probably the experience, even if Google tweaks them a bit, but you apply the negative, the correct negative keywords, you can still have that experience and have themes as Tim is saying.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I’m just here in the background trying to keep up. Create the correct link to Tim’s book. I guess you can just go to timash. com and the links here.

Tim Ash: Well, the books at primalbrain. com, if you mean the new evolutionary psychology book, I’m looking for the old one that you were holding up. Oh, well just, just go to Amazon and look up landing page optimization.

That’s the title of it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. Or look up to mash and you’ll find it easily that way. It’s just, we’re trying to generate the link and then it’s, it’s like what we’re just talking about, like Amazon sticking all of these additional parameters on the back of it. So the link becomes too long that we can’t share it.

And we’re like, it’s still get you to the actual landing page that you need. Yeah. Sometimes technology gets in the way, right? Like things become too complicated and we lose customers and opportunities along the way. All right, let’s talk about measurements here next. All right. So we’ve talked about what needs to be on the landing page, how to sort of preserve and send to the query.

How do you measure it all? We’ve talked about Google’s Optmyzr tool. We’ve talked about Google Analytics, but like, what is your guys ideal tech stack to take everything we’ve learned and put it into practice?

Tim Ash: Yeah, Andrea, go ahead.

Andrea Cruz López: Sure. So I think the three pillars I like to use The most often that I looked on every day or, or whatever the timeframe might be.

It’s definitely Google ads because I need to know how the ads are performing the Google analytics to know where are they moving? Are they doing anything? And then the marketing automation platform. If you are not looking at what people do after they land a specific people that they have given you information and you are not putting those pieces together into the puzzle and doing something with that audience, you are really missing out.

I am used to looking at it cause I am in the B2B side. So people do something and you may take a very long time to do the next thing. So that’s why I focus a lot on it. But also what are, if you are in an e commerce site that you have a very short. sales cycle. What did they buy? Do that gets often buy with something else?

How do you match those together to determine next steps?

Tim Ash: Yeah. And I would say that it’s, it’s really important to I’m, I’m not so much concerned with the tools, but rather the metrics that you’re surfacing. What are you actually looking at on your dashboards and what’s your North star metric, your essential metrics.

And to me, the deeper you can go into the business and in the time, the better. I think the problem is on the front end, as we’re driving this traffic and seeing the efficiency of the landing page itself, we’re too focused on the tactical. You want to get to lifetime value. That’s the North star metric.

Always as close as you can do to that. So drive it through the business, find out what’s happening in bigger businesses. That means cohort analysis. Like you, you, you’d make a change on the front end. You track that all the way through for a few months or whatever it takes to understand what the real profit impact of that was over the lifetime of the customer.

And that’s the ideal that you should be shooting for whatever tools it takes to get you there.

Frederick Vallaeys: And that’s really interesting because, you know, when I think about CRO, it’s like, okay, you got them on that landing page. Like, how do you get them to have that micro conversion? And Andre, you mentioned micro conversions, right?

But Tim, you’re saying, well, you know, these micro conversions are great. They get you to the thing, but you really have to understand what is that. Lifetime value, that big thing at the end that you’re aiming for. And so I mean, it’s like in the early days of the internet, when you do a page load and you don’t look how many hits I got while a hit is just downloading an asset.

Tim Ash: So if you had a hundred images on your page, you got a hundred hits, you know, and people would measure these frontline tactical. Upstream things and that had no connection to real value, I guess, is my point. So the closer you get to real value, the better, right? And I suppose to him, you go into the C suite and have these conversations.

Frederick Vallaeys: So you have to focus on that lifetime value. What’s the contribution to the business? Yeah, that’s the language they talk about is finances. And so I think if we want I see it at the grownups table instead of the kids table off to the side. We got to stop talking about return on ad spend or a click through rates or conversion rates, even we need to start talking money because that’s what they talk in the C suite.

Hey, did you just call it the kids table that I play at? I’m so sad.

Tim Ash: I did it for many years. Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Andrea.

Andrea Cruz López: So let me laugh. But something to dope. This is something I learned from you, Fred, actually that you spoke about at the paid search association conference this year. It’s we as we are losing control on a few things and how automation is changing our lives.

We need this just to babysit the algorithm. I see that a lot of questions in the chat are about metrics and how to improve them. And something you talk about that day, and please correct me if I’m off or you can compliment, but you talk about, Using those micro conversions to help nurture the algorithm and give them value In order to tell google ad system how to optimize towards them.

I’ll let you expand if that rings a bell

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah So, I mean, I think a lot of organizations they understand the need to report lifetime value as the the thing you get from PPC But it’s challenging to get that number Right. And so really think about how do you approximate what may have been slightly better value or slightly worse value relative to one another.

And so it’s classic example would be you sell stuff and you had two customers and they both bought exactly a hundred dollars worth of stuff in traditional conversion reporting, you will report two sales. 100 each. So now the machine learning system that’s in charge of showing the right ad, setting the right bid, it’s going to say, well, they were equal.

So whether I get more of this one or more of this one, it doesn’t matter. However, when you look at the numbers, you might recognize some patterns in your business. You’re like, Oh, this person falls exactly in the demographic of who tends to buy a lot and become a repeat customer. And this one, It’s sort of an outlier right on exactly.

And now, but you don’t know how much is that repeat customer worth versus the outlier, but you don’t have to know if you can say to Google about, listen, that a hundred dollars from the good customer, let’s call it 110 just for the sake of things. And the other one, we’ll still call it a hundred. Well, now Google knows you slightly prefer.

The 110 customer, even though they bought 100 worth of stuff and the machine learning says, well, let me try to find more of those. And and so that kind of helps you steer the ship in the right direction. And so

Tim Ash: this could be based on averages. I mean, you should be going to your CFO or whoever, and having them do some analysis on this stuff.

So if you can find high value clusters, that first sale or that first conversion. Value should be skewed what you should be telling the search engines. It’s worth should be skewed in the direction of lifetime value. I

Andrea Cruz López: brought this up because it comes back to what Tim was saying. This is a way to get you started into the lifetime value conversation and how to improve the metrics across the board to have that.

Conversation of this is what we are bringing to the business. This is what the paid traffic looks like when paid traffic, it’s involved, the lifetime average value of the customer can increase. So that’s how you start getting into that habit of thinking throughout the whole way.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. So I think we all agree.

We’d like to play at the big kids table or the adults table.

Tim Ash: So the baby steps, you’re just going to the big kids table. Give that little kids table. My

Frederick Vallaeys: 2-year-old is not gonna be an adult tomorrow. Right. She’s gonna go . And actually she did walk into the room. I don’t know if anyone noticed. She was so cute.

I heard that sound. The sounds, yes. Oh, did you? Damn it. Every time. She’s cute. So Claudia’s making a good point here. And I think one that we all struggle with, right? So we’re at the kids table. We’d like to be at the, the adults table, but we face opposition. So how do we talk? To the teams that we work with in terms of setting up something more than just TCPA TRO S bidding, but how do we actually tie into the business system so that we get an inkling of what is that lifetime value and then start using it?

Tim Ash: Well, so there’s you have to, the, the short answer is you need an executive sponsor. Somebody that flies air cover and interference for you and cares about that. So for example, we had one client that was defending their branded keywords. So they’re spending a lot on pay per click on their own brand. I mean, arguably it doesn’t add a lot of value because they also rank high in SEO for those branded terms, right?

But Google still wants their taste. So if you’re going to talk to the PPC person about that, they’d say, yeah, I’d love to lower my PPC costs. Because that’s just wasted spend. And then you talk to the SEO people and they’re like, well, not so much because we want to, you know, get more credit for it.

And there’s all this turf wars going on. But if you go to the VP of marketing who sits over PPC and SEO, And you pitch the idea to them, it makes a lot of sense. So basically get some executive sponsorship at a level where their metrics and their paycheck and their bonus bonuses are incentivized by actually improving the business and what you want to do.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I

Andrea Cruz López: was going to say, I think they also sometimes bring that big company experience and where they want to go. Not today, but in the future, they are probably the right person to give you that long term perspective on how to get there.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay, so final question that I had lined up here. But what is your favorite?

Recent conversion rate boosting technique and maybe something a little bit newer, right? Like, I know again, humans haven’t changed. So how much, how many of our techniques can we change to make them bite? But the web has changed, right? What we’re able to do on the web has changed. So what is new and cool that you have done recently?

Andrea Cruz López: I’m gonna let you go team. Let me think about this one.

Tim Ash: The I think one of the biggest weaknesses that most companies have is actually this is not a technological trick, but it’s having an editorial voice. I think is a really huge overlooked advantage. Most of us are writing in this marketing, happy, happy talk and generic stuff.

You know, we have the world’s best solution for, you know, customer optimization management or something like that. That might even be on your site somewhere, Fred. No, but you don’t want language like that. What you want to do is you want to have a very passionate tribe that you want to attract culturally.

And that means that you have to. Have a point of view and have an editorial voice and have an origin myth of why your company exists. So I think the cheapest thing you can do is hire really, really good copywriters and make sure that everything coming out of your company has a distinct voice and that’s going to resonate with somebody because if otherwise we’re fire hosing people with ad impressions and they’re tuning all of them out.

So know your tribe, have a voice. That’s my advice.

Frederick Vallaeys: I love that. And if you can’t hire a good content guy to do it and just have a CEO and founder who’s like, cut the voice. Right. Which is sort of the Optmyzr play, I suppose.

Tim Ash: No, seriously, copy content. Copywriters are, are your most often the highest point of leverage for, for PPC and websites.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s true. And Andrew, I’ll let you go in a second here, but I do notice that like, So I, when I was at Google did a lot of writing and Obviously you had to bring a perspective. And then I have a perspective on many things still. And so it’s not just marketing speak and it does come from the heart, but then you hire a marketing team and all of a sudden they talking platitudes and like realities, and it’s like, let’s.

Let’s get specific, right? Like you’re saying, and let’s no, no, you’re

Tim Ash: very articulate, you know, CEO. Let’s just use you as an example. I mean, you created this company for a reason. You were passionate about something. Something wasn’t working in the online marketing ecosystem. So you went out and you overcame adversity and you found allies and and you slayed the dragon.

And now you want to bring this mission of green re greening the whole earth in this better Fred way. And that’s what Optmyzr is all about. Like, where is that? Yeah. You know, that should attract the tribe, you know, don’t let your marketing people water it down

Frederick Vallaeys: All right, and tim is another good example of you know living the mission and really caring about cro

Andrea Cruz López: And it’s

Frederick Vallaeys: laying dragons Well,

Andrea Cruz López: you know so again, I know i’ve mentioned this that I am on the b2b space something that bothers me a lot is You know that we’re always trying to get you to download a white paper You Or give us something something we can track somewhere so it bothers me big time when I see those pages that they have just one paragraph three bullets join now so it goes back to what team is saying.

We don’t know what you know about our brand We don’t know where you might come in the for the first time or the second time And with google being broader and broader in terms of match types and how they are matching people’s with queries We might not know where you are in the funnel, even if we are using exact match.

So things might be shifting, right? Especially if it’s a brand new campaign that you are just testing out. So I like to give people the option of choosing where they want to go in the funnel. But I track everything. I will give them a video if they have no idea who am I, that way they know who we are, what we do, how we do it, and how we get you there.

If you want something that is very comprehensive, we will give you a report. We will tell you how many pages you have in the report. We will tell you what the glossary of the report looks like and what information you are going to get. But give you different stuff and we will track everything we will track if you watch the video how much of it you’re watching How much you are scrolling through the page?

If you started filling the form and then you got into phone number and you said I am not doing this and you bounce back We will track that and you know We optimize towards that if everybody who is landing is watching the video and then let’s switch it up Let’s put the video higher. Let’s bring the report down and do movements like that.

That’s how you ultimately know in a way what people are actually doing in those pages and what they actually want to get from you. Yeah, and I would add one more thing to that, which is that, yeah, in terms of tools, your most powerful thing is your email. On the back end, when you do have an email from someone and assuming you are tracking what they’re doing on your site, what state of the customer journey they’re in, you’re marketing automation, having the right email sequences, just like what the abandonment recovery I mentioned earlier, the easiest thing to tweak is emails, it’s headlines, it’s a, it’s a few lines of text, but massive returns from tweaking the timing and content of email sequences.

Tim Ash: That’s the secret sauce for a lot of the clients when we had the agency. And that’s a very hard to replicate advantage too, because it can’t just be seen on the front end. They can copy your webpage. They can’t copy your email sequence very easily.

Frederick Vallaeys: So these are great tips. And, and I guess the other thing Andre is saying is you have to have a really strong process around this, right?

So you know what checklist you need to go through, but then you also need to do it and measure it and retest it and remeasure it and keep that incremental improvement going.

Andrea Cruz López: Yeah, don’t say that. Don’t forget him.

Frederick Vallaeys: No, that’s that’s right. Well, you could these days you can sort of set it and forget it. Get mediocre results.

AI has gotten pretty good. But we’re not watching this because we want to be mediocre, right? So are you watching? Do not set it and forget it. Okay, good. Well, hey, this has been a great session. I want to give each of you a minute here to talk about what you’re passionate about, how people can get a hold of you learn more.

Andrea, I’ll let you go first. I will put you full screen here. Oh god. Well, thank you everyone for joining as mentioned. I work at co marketing a b2b digital marketing agency If you have questions about b2b or anything, I might have mentioned today hit me on twitter @andreacruz92. I love talking about PPC .

Andrea Cruz López: I also do seo So if you have questions about that, i’m happy to help as well

Frederick Vallaeys: Oh my gosh, you just said a dirty word, SEO.

Tim, what about you?

Tim Ash: Well, as I mentioned, I used to run site tuners, my marketing agency for 20 years, I stepped out of that role and I’m focused mostly on keynote speaking. My new LinkedIn learning course on neuro marketing. So if you’re signed up for LinkedIn learning, check that out. And also my new book about evolutionary psychology, it’s called unleash your primal brain.

So it’s not a neuro marketing book, but whether you’re in business or you want this for personal development, if you want to understand what goes on inside your head pick up a copy of this. It’s available as an audio book for me as an ebook. So timash. com and primalbrain. com are the two places to find me.

Do you narrate the audio book? I do. I narrated myself.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, my audio book. I just find a guy with a better voice.

Tim Ash: I think your accent is charming.

Frederick Vallaeys: Oh, thank you. So yeah, for me, thanks all for watching. We do have the Optmyzr user conference happening. It’s going to be later in May. So the the link to register is right there.

It is primarily targeted at our customers, but anyone’s welcome to attend. And we’ve got a great lineup of speakers. We’re going to walk you through modern PPC management techniques in a more automated world. So with that, that conference is coming up, I’m going to take a little break. I’m actually flying to Hawaii tomorrow who first time, you know, guys, I’m nervous because I used to fly so much, but now I haven’t been on a plane in over a year and a half.

And I’m like, Do I still know where to go what to do? It’s sort of strange, but then yeah, we’ll be back after the user conference with more PPC town halls so thanks for watching subscribe. That’s how you find out for the next one andrea tim, you’ve been great guests. Thank you so much for being here And I hope to have you back on a future session and thanks.

Oh,

Tim Ash: yeah. One more quick thing. If you go to primalbrain.com/asample, you can get the sample chapter of your choice from the book. I’ll just send you the PDF. So check it out.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. And no upsell on that one, right?

Tim Ash: No upsell on that one. Just give something, maybe get something. I’m trying to practice what I preach.

There you go. All

Frederick Vallaeys: right.

Tim Ash: Take care of

Frederick Vallaeys: everyone.

Andrea Cruz López: Bye. Bye everyone.