- How do you determine the best price for your product or service?
- How do you know what kind of sales or purchase incentives perform the best?
- Which type of guarantee will generate more revenue?
- Is it possible to find which target demographic generates the most sales?
- How do you know if you have the best headlines for your ads and landing pages?
The answer is pay-per-click (PPC) TESTING, TESTING and more TESTING (including a healthy use of artificial intelligence).
Of course, there are a variety of ways to test pricing, sales incentives, guarantees, demographics and headlines and other marketing factors. Focus groups was how it was done in the past (think Mad Men). You could also survey prospects for their response on various marketing factors. And of course, changing the marketing variables on your own website is a productive way to learn about customer behavior.
But there’s nothing better than finding out what people think when they’re making current purchase decisions as opposed to hypothetical decisions. Especially, when the data is being derived from the exact same time period. (As opposed to seeing the response from website changes at different times of the year or different years).
You can certainly set up different landing pages that are focused on different sets of messaging, with different headlines, and different offers, and monitor organic performance metrics over time, such as “visitors,” and “sales,” and compare them over many months to see which perform the best and then continually optimize their performance. However, you can accomplish the same much faster using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
- Write different PPC ads using the messages you want to test. Which ads get more visitors to click on them?
- Write PPC ads using different combinations of headlines? Which headlines get clicked on the most?
- Write different offers on your landing pages for your product or service, which are in harmony with your PPC ads. Which landing page offers convert the most visitors to sales?
Let the real-world interaction with prospects inform the best marketing opportunities for your products or services.
As an added bonus, with your testing results in hand, you can use this information to refine your long-term SEO strategy. Obviously, you want to keep the winners and get rid of the losers. But don’t stop there. After that, the game evolves into establishing new tests to beat the current “winner” (more technically referred to as the “control” item).
In essence, you’re trading money for time, so that you can generate higher performance and more profits.
For a more comprehensive representation of testing or more specifically “split-testing” as it’s more formally known, visit Split-Testing: What is it? Where to Start?
Avid hiker, bicyclist, motorcyclist and long-time advertising pro. Founder of Skyworks Marketing, Nonprofit Fire and Our Ventura TV (cable TV). One career highlight was working on a small team that built a business from nothing to over $100 Million in 3 years. Skyworks Marketing provides lead generation and video advertising services. We create custom marketing funnels that provide the highest-quality leads and sales.