I am rolling a couple of sessions into one here because there was a lot of repetition between the two sessions. It was refreshing to see that these activities are being performed on sem campaigns. Its high time that these subjects feature in a search engine strategies conference over bid management. These guys were all saying and doing the right stuff in my opinion. A/B split testing on ads and then moving to multivariate testing of the elements within an ad. The same approach was applied to landing pages. The biggest difference I see between our American comrades and Australian search experts such as yours truly is that the traffic volumes that they are able to work with. In the US you are able to get a representative data sample in a much shorter time frame which means that they are able to test more rapidly than we are. Some of the stats quoted in the case studies were iffy. One lady claimed a 25% conversion rate on one of her landing pages. Those stats are meaningless unless they are analysed in full context. What was the conversion event? If it was a free software download, that’s believable but if was a financial transaction that would be impressive. All in all these sessions were ok to watched but they lacked the juicy substance I was expecting to find.The biggest issue wit testing in my experience is the practicality of it all. Ads to a degree are easy to test because as a search engine marketer I can control all the elements. Landing pages on the other hand have many stakeholders, marketing departments, brand managers and web designers are usually in control of landing pages and the search marketer usually has little say over what the landing page looks like. Hats off to those search marketing agencies out there that have really managed to influence change over internal management teams.All in all I am pleased that the search engine marketing world has moved on from bid management and looking into the marketing message. This is great for the industry. Please keep it up SES.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 9:28 am and is filed under SEM Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.