This week Google has announced a few new twists for marketers who use its AdWords advertising program.

One allows marketers an opportunity to re-engage visitors who clicked-through to their site but left with out converting.  The other helps marketers understand how visitors interact with the ads they have placed on Google.com prior to committing a conversion.  AdWords Remarketing and Search Funnels in brief:

AdWords Remarketing

• analogous to what other providers call retargeting
• allows an opportunity to re-engage with visitors who clicked on an ad, did not convert, and then visited another site on the Google Content Network
• multiple Remarketing campaigns can run simultaneously

Of the two announcements, this is the one that I’m the most excited to.  Just to paint the picture simply, I’ll leverage the example from the AdWords blog:

Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked your YouTube homepage ad.

You can also run a number of remarketing campaigns at the same time. For example, you could offer discount game tickets to users who’ve previously visited your tickets page, advertise VIP hospitality packages to users who clicked on your “How to get to the arena” page, and advertise a sale on team merchandise to users who previously visited your YouTube brand channel.

There’s a lot of opportunity here, and I can’t wait to do some real-world tests.

AdWords Retargeting is alive and kicking, patiently waiting for you to tinker with it in the AdWords Dashboard.

AdWords Search Funnels

• shows user interaction with AdWords advertisers ads over time
• creates relationships between views, clicks and conversions
• provides the following new reports in the AdWords dashboard: Top Conversions, Search Funnels, Assisted Conversions, First and Last Click Analysis, Time Lag, and Path Length

So, in short, Search Funnels provides a much broader view of how users are exposed to and interact with AdWords Ads overtime leading up to conversions.

Search Funnels sounded relatively tame to me until I watched the explanatory video in the post on the AdWords blog.

A lot of the data sounds good.  Maybe the person who does the Google product geek-to-human translation was on sabbatical when the video was pulled together.  Learn more about AdWords Funnels on the AdWords Blog.  Search Funnels are available in the AdWords Dashboard.

Which of these will have more impact on your future AdWords marketing activities?

There’s a lot of love about online marketing from a strategic standpoint.  Possibly the biggest differentiator between online marketing and other marketing methods is the degree to which it can be tracked.  After launching a website, social media presence, or campaign, the next logical step is to understand and optimize the performance you’re receiving.

While marketers often rely on industry best practices, past performance, and trends to optimize performance, one method of optimization seems to often get swept under the rug: A/B and/or multivariate testing.  A/B and multi-what?  Let’s start with what Wikipedia says and bring it down a notch:

A/B Testing

A/B testing, split testing, or bucket testing is a method of marketing testing by which a baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response rates.

In layman’s terms, two (or several) different versions of an ad, email, or web page are tested and measured to see which one performs best.  Pretty straightforward.  The two promotional banners below could be tested to see which encouraged more sales.

Multivariate Testing

This method is different than multivariate testing which applies statistical modeling which allows a tester to try multiple variables within the samples distributed.

Again, in (hopefully more) simple English, multivariate testing allows you to identify several items on a page, for example,  that for each, you wish to test different one or several different options.  An example would be an email where you want to test three different headlines, two alternate images, as well as three variations of the call-to-action to see which combination is the most successful.

Sounds great. Nah, I’m not interested

The goal of these testing methods is to serve the best possible option to the end-user and in doing so to optimize performance.  So, why doesn’t everyone run tests like this?

Here are three common reasons that A/B Multivariate testing isn’t done:

1. “It costs too much money”
   Unless budgets are incredibly constrained, this shouldn’t be an issue.  Testing doesn’t have to be expensive, especially with the tools available today, including free one’s like Google’s Website Optimizer (note that Website Optimizer is for just that-websites, not email, ads or other media).  And, if you’re working with an agency, they likely have tools that they’ve already licensed.  The cost is then limited to concepting the different versions and putting the test in place.
2. “We tried it once and didn’t see much of a difference between versions”
   You definitely won’t hit a home run every time.  Just because testing on one occasion revealed that between the options tested there wasn’t much of a difference, that doesn’t mean that nothing should be tested.
3. “We know better”
   Clients often simply think that they understand their offering, brand and customer so well that testing is just a waste of time and money.  While I can understand (and respect) a client’s knowledge and intimacy with their brand, what sometimes comes to light is that what performs best can defy common logic or perceived wisdom.  Sometimes the consumer just sees it differently from their side of the equation.

What you don’t know can cost you money

To put it as bluntly as possible, if you don’t test something you simply won’t know if it could have performed better.

Yes, you can run tests and find that other options offer marginable, offer only negligible gains, or offer even worse results.  But, you may also find out that there’s an option that performs significantly better, sometimes by a long shot, pushing the impact of your marketing dollars far further.

If your budget allows for it, I’d recommend testing when it makes sense.

Some final advice

First of all, you certainly don’t need to test everything.  That tagline that the new guy brought up in the marketing meeting that clearly sucked will still suck no matter how many ways you test it.

A great way to get started is to test something that will effect the return on your marketing investment.  Possibly an email that is going out that has a call-to-action to redeem an offer or sign up for a seminar, or a landing page on your website where you drive paid marketing traffic and hope for a conversion.

To find a great candidate for testing, identify something that has created some uncertainty internally.  Are you struggling with two subject lines that both state the same thing, just with a different tone?  Are you considering changing the placement or styling of a form?  Wondering if you might capture more leads if less information were required of the visitor?  Each of these situations would create a great testing opportunity.

A few A/B/Multivariate testing resources that might help you:

• Google Website Optimizer
  Google Website Optimizer is designed for testing landing pages for Google AdWords campaigns.  The tool is made available for free by Google.
• Google Website Optimizer Blog
  The blog for Website Optimizer has great ideas and results from real-world tests.
• Which Site Won
  This site is really enlightening if you’re considering testing. Marketing agency consultant Jay Baer of Convince and Convert recently tweeted about it and I wish I would have stumbled across it long ago.  The site shows results of A/B tests, and even lets you play along and see if you can pick which version performed better prior to seeing the actual results.
• Marketing Experiments
  They’ve been running tests for quite some time over at Marketing Experiments, and they provide their results in succinct, easy to understand terms.
• 15+ Free A/B Split Testing Resources
  There’s a good round-up of free resources available on the Internet for A/B testing on this Wingify blog post.  Definitely worth a read.  If you like the post, browse the other blog entries on Wingify… They’re all about testing.

Good luck!

Here’s two books which I definitely recommend:

Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results
Somehow Call to Action escaped my reading list for years. I learned about it from someone I recently interviewed. The book is based on Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s concept of Persuasion Architecture—a methodology which, at a high level, combines consumer psychology, business goals and website design with an overall goal of maximizing conversions.

Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
I’m one of those people who can’t get enough of web analytics. Written by respected blogger and Google Evangelist Avinash Kaushik, this book demystifies web analytics in an easy to read, enjoyable manner. The practice of web analytics isn’t as simple as it may appear at a glance. Avinash’s book provides new perspectives in a concise manner.

Google opened up its Website Optimizer (beta) to the public (anyone can sign-up). Website Optimizer is a fractional factorial experimentation tool (also referred to as a multivariate testing tool) which allows marketers to test various facets of the content and/or design on web page(s) their visitors view. In comparison to A/B testing, fractional factorial experimentation allows testing of a greater number of variables at one time while still providing reliable testing results.

The cost for Website Optimizer? It’s free. The catch? Depends on how you look at it, and more importantly, what your needs are. Things to consider:

1. It appears, although nothing in the documentation I read says it explicitly, that you can only run experiments on a single page (as opposed to a flow which consists of multiple pages-like a checkout process made up of 4 screens, for example).
2. I could not find any documentation that ensured me that users who were viewing a specific version of a page would see that exact same version of the page if they returned during the testing period.
3. Website Optimizer does not allow variable content to be a part of the test. You can apply Website Optimizer ‘experiments’ to variable content pages, however, the variable content itself cannot be tested against.

If you’re looking to test a single landing page which is well trafficked, or a part of a marketing campaign, Website Optimizer is definitely priced right. And, there is no doubt that multivariate testing is a more effective way to perform these types of tests. If you’re looking to perform more involved testing, you’ll likely be looking to other providers such as Offermatica, Optimost, or SiteSpect. Be warned: those tools are decidedly NOT free.

Yesterday in a press release Google announced the launch of a beta program to begin testing a new pricing model based not on clicks, but on conversions. The “Pay-Per-Action” model allows advertisers the ability to set up specific actions (or conversions) along with how much they are willing to pay for that action.

The new ads are for Google AdSense for content sites. AdSense publishers can decide if they want to participate in the program or not. Participants will be able to review details of the advertisements which will appear on their site and decide if the ads are appropriate for their site or not.

One would assume that the amount paid for an actual conversion will be far higher than what one gets for a click under the current PPC model-especially as the amount will be able to be determined by the Advertiser, setting up a affiliate-like relationship, brokered by Google.

The program introduces new challenges for those managing a web site with the ads. With PPC, the user had little control over what went on their site and only had to rely on ad copy driving a click. Now, they’ll have to consider if the web site the user will visit as a result of a click has the potential of closing the deal.

Update: Google’s Inside AdWords blog has a post specifically about the Pay-Per-Action beta.