Dwaipayan Chakraborty

Intellectual Indulgence of An Observer

Google Adwords

How Moz made $1 Million with One Landing Page & A Few Emails

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Million in revenue - Dwaipayan.comI always find myself coming back to this case study for one simple reason: If you want to sell more stuff, you have to find out what’s working for your paying customers—and find out what’s holding your non-paying customers back.

In this study, Conversion Rate Experts started by interviewing Moz’s paying customers, free-trial customers, and former customers.

The Research

They asked paying members what they liked most & how they would describe Moz to a friend.

They asked free-trial members what it would take for them to sign up for the service, what they liked the most, and how they spent their time on SEO.

They asked members who canceled, “Why? And what would bring you back?”

They also found that Rand, Moz’s founder, could energetically sell the service face to face, but his enthusiasm and detail didn’t translate over to the website’s communication very well.

The Execution

Conversion Rate Experts infused their findings into several new wireframes for the page, and asked Moz’s Twitter followers to participate in usability tests.

After reaching statistical significance on low-cost wireframes, a new page was created and resulted in nearly 52% increase in sales to the Moz Pro solution.

After, they emailed free trial subscribers offering a full-featured membership for just $1.

When about 500 members asked “What’s the catch?”, they followed up with an email the next day assuring users there were no gimmicks.

For the users who took advantage of the $1 full-featured trial, they received a series auto-responder emails to help them get the most out of their new membership.

In the end, Moz added an additional $1 Million dollars to their yearly revenue.

What I figured:

Assume nothing – Talk to customers, prospects, and former customers to get their perspective on what you’re doing and how you could do it better.

Test Everything – Moz only launched a live page after it was user tested.

Say everything that needs to be said – We tend to oversimplify our messaging, but that can lead to us leaving out vital details for key decision makers. Make it as easy as possible to become a customer.

Read The Full Case Study Here: http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/

Making Copy Action Oriented Causes 93% More People to Click “Add to Cart”

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Now that you have your website/product online and you have your Ads running too, to get targeted traffic to your website, its high time that you make sure that your paid visitor actually “PAYS” you that is they buys your product aka gets converted. In this series I will discuss a few Awesome conversion optimization ideas curated from all over the net that has actually worked for me.

L’Axelle wanted to get more people to click on their add to cart button.

This was their original homepage:

laxelle-a

This was the test:

laxelle-b

L’Axelle describes the original copy as being comfort oriented. They sell on the basis of people feeling relieved and relaxed.

The test copy is action oriented. It is about solving a problem.

The action oriented headline and copy earned a 38.3% conversion rate, 93% better than the original.

Key Findings:

-”Put an end to sweat marks” is action oriented and assures some relief for customers.

– Adding the word “end” makes it sound like they won’t get sweat marks ever again. If the headline read “Reduce Sweat Marks,” the copy might not have performed well.

What is the average industry CPC (or CPM) price paid by e-commerce companies in India and what is the average CPA as a result?

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food-velveeta-37-swscan00947Don’t mean to give a cop-out answer – but these numbers really do vary by industry and also by the age / history of the site in question and the expertise of the people driving the optimisation on the site. That said, here are a few numbers I’ve seen at different e-com businesses here in India.

CPCs on Google will range from less than 2 cents (I’ve seen consistent CPCs of Rs. 0.75 to Rs. 1.00 in a couple of companies) to around 30 cents (Rs. 15 per click). A huge factor here is the history of your site and your past and current prowess in optimisation. CPCs on Facebook will start around Rs. 8 or so and decline over time to Rs. 4 or so if you figure out how to bid better.

CPAs are a function of your conversion rate. The best consistent conversion rate I’ve seen in India is up around 16% for a large e-com business. I’ve also seen another business at around 9%. So if you combine this conversion rate with CPCs ranging from Rs. 1 to Rs. 5 for the better-run accounts, you can see CPAs and the kick-ass end of somewhere between Rs. 10 and Rs. Rs. 50 per sale. Also do note that the conversion rates from Facebook are still lower than those from Google.

Of course, this is not where the vast ecommerce numbers are. The typical CPAs for a new merchant coming in will be around Rs. 1,000+ ranging to even in one case where I saw Rs. 2,400+. (Do the math – CPC of Rs. 12 and conversion rate of 0.5% = Rs. 2,400) Median conversion rates for travel firms are around 3% and for e-com goods delivery-based firms are around 1%+. You can do the math from here on. 🙂

I’m not sure what you mean by CPM though. Do you mean the price you buy display media at? Well, you can buy undifferentiated media in bulk from a network or a platform for as little as Rs. 10 cpm (US$0.20) if you know where to look. The super-premium end of this business is around the Rs. 200+ cpm (US$ 4.00) mark when you’re buying.

Again, no copout meant – but it’s a huge range – so you should know exactly what you’re buying, where and why. Along with your ability to know where and how to negotiate – and when to close. You get lower rates in the last month of the sales team’s billing quarter, when they’re in a hurry to do their quotas – and the prices vary by as much as 100% between a similar buy in April, for instance, and in June.

What works best: PPC or SEO?

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NextSteps

It all depends.  What are your goals, budget & timeline?

SEO Pros & Cons:

  • SEO often cost less than PPC (if you are using an agency) as there is no ad spend
  • SEO is a long term strategy, don’t expect rapid gains
  • SEO can be less volatile then PPC
  • SEO can provide more long term value

SEO (done right) is about making your site is findable, navigable and readable. You want to ensure that the people looking (aka searching) for your site, content or service will find you. Getting to that point is incredibly important and can help in all aspects of your business.
PPC Pros & Cons:

  • PPC can provide rapid short term gains
  • PPC is often much more expensive due to CPC costs
  • CPC costs continue to increase as more advertisers become involved
  • PPC can provide much more focused and targeted results

I would suggest using PPC to find SEO opportunities. And there is also some solid evidence that using them together creates positive synergy.

PPC can be very seductive because you can see quick results and measure them in detail. The ROI is super easy to calculate. But the Google Tax continues to rise and competition will come, and if you’re relying on PPC too heavily you could find yourself in a difficult situation. Don’t be that frog in the boiling pot.

How do you improve Quality Score on AdWords ?

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qualityThe more PPC  I manage, the more I’ve come to believe that Quality Score is mostly a function of click thru rate (CTR) and account history.

Quality Score is mostly a click probability calculation.

If a keyword-ad combination has a high CTR, it usually receives a perfect quality score. However, it takes time to earn that perfect score because Google is performing probability calculations using an ever growing set of data. If your ad has 1,000 impressions and earns a 6% CTR (for example), that’s a good sign that your ad is a strong performer…but 1,000 impressions isn’t a large enough sample (statistically speaking) to determine if your ad is worthy of a ’10’. SO, you get a Quality Score of 7 or 8 and you wait.

After 10,000 impressions, holding a 6% CTR is a stronger signal that your ad “works”. After 50,000 impressions, the data set is probably large enough for Google to give you the exact quality score you deserve.

However, what about keywords with low search volume? What about new ads? What about a new account? There is no way to calculate quality score with any accuracy in these situations, so Google calculates the click probability of your ad-keyword combination and uses that information to determine your Quality Score.

Most likely, Google weights account history heavily when calculating click probability on all your ads. This is why it’s best to start with a brand keyword, as it will enjoy a very high CTR and help all your future ad-keyword combinations earn a higher click probability calculation.

Of course, things like tightly focused ad groups, ads and keywords and landing pages that all “match”, the use of negative keywords, etc. help Quality Score too. This is all fairly basic information that any PPC manager should have, but mostly these things are important because they boost CTR.

So, assuming that you know what you’re doing, the strongest factor for raising or lowering quality score outside of CTR would seem to be account history. This matches my experience.

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