5 Best Practices for Website A/B Testing. As a marketer, A/B tests and multivariate testing are a great way for your business to optimize web pages and generate more leads and conversions. They allow you to figure out which elements of your marketing are working and which ones can be improved upon. Here are 5 best practices to keep in mind when conducting A/B testing on your website: 1. Keep It Simple; Then Get More Advanced Although some people are really good at A/B testing, there is always some skill involved with testing some of your website’s more complex features.
Instead, start your A/B testing with something simple, like moving your registration form to the left of the page instead of the right. 2. Something as simple as changing the text in the bullet points on your web page can increase your conversions. 3. In order to see if a feature on a page is working effectively or not, you have to isolate it in your A/B test. 4. 5. What other lessons do you think marketers should keep in mind when doing A/B testing? Case Study: Wholesome Tummies Grows Via Facebook. Facebook Takes 31.2% of the U.S. Ad Display Market [REPORT] Facebook now claims nearly a third of all U.S. display advertising impressions with 346.4 billion in the first quarter, more than double what it garnered in the comparable quarter in 2010, according to a new report. The research, by comScore, estimates that Facebook now has 31.2% of U.S. advertising display impressions, up from 25.9% in the fourth quarter of 2010 and 15.6% in Q1 2010. At the current pace, Facebook will easily surpass 1 trillion impressions for the year.
The total number of U.S. impressions was 1.1 trillion for the first quarter. Facebook’s closest competitor is Yahoo’s network of sites, which claimed 10.1% of the market. Google, which is still relatively new to the display business, had 2.5%. The latest numbers are proof, if anyone needed it, that Facebook’s advertising business is off to a running start in 2011. This recent report also notes that AT&T was once again the biggest display advertiser on the web with 19.4 billion impressions or 1.8% of the total market. Facebook Advertising vs. Google AdWords. Do You Really Have To Build A Fan Base? Not sure about building a fan base on Facebook? Facebook advertising straight to your website is not necessarily wrong.
Maybe you aren’t prepared to invest thousands of dollars to build a fan base, or the audience-building step won’t help your business. To be sure, Fan Pages are one of Facebooks most unique and powerful opportunities, and it’s important to be open to the benefits of owning your audience. It’s like a public email list with more word of mouth power. I’d challenge you to think of how this could take your marketing processes to another level. But if audience-building isn’t for you or really does not fit your business model, there’s nothing wrong with treating Facebook advertising as a new, powerful, cheap source of website traffic. Facebooks Ads vs. The Facebook ad creation process is different from AdWords. This important difference has pro’s and con’s…. Facebook Surfers Do Convert And let’s not get carried away. Should You Advertise on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter? Are you wondering if it makes sense to advertise on your favorite social network?
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have different demographic profiles and use cases that may provide good advertising opportunities. All three platforms are also developing new and innovative ways to target advertising messages, based on the overwhelming amount of data they possess about their users. Marketers should explore the paid opportunities social networks offer with as much thought and effort as they experiment with the “earned” and “owned” aspects that these networks provide. Depending on your business objective, one platform will likely prove more useful than others. Facebook Ads Facebook’s advertising platform is by far the most developed and widely used of the three major social networks. Examples of Facebook ads.
Facebook allows users to target messages by a host of different criteria, which are determined from users’ profile information. LinkedIn Ads Examples of LinkedIn advertising. Twitter Ads. Wall Photos. How to Increase Your Click-Through Rate by 1300% Think you can guess which of the following call-to-action buttons generated 13 times more clicks than the other?
And The Winner Is... (Drumroll, Please) If you guessed the second set of calls-to-action (CTA), you're absolutely right...but it was probably a lucky guess. The truth is, the only real way to know which CTA is going to have a better click-through rate on your website is to A/B test it. Here at HubSpot, we used the first call-to-action button on our product pages for years because it performed fairly well. But recently, we made a slight update to that section of our website, and we did some A/B testing to make sure that the new pages performed as well as the older ones. The moral of this story is simple: Always be testing. 6 Important Factors to Consider When A/B Testing CTAs 1. Should your CTA be large or small? 2. CTA color can make a big difference. 3. 4. 5. 6. It's usually a good idea to give your visitors a couple of different CTA options per page.
Advertising on Facebook. Facebook to Start Placing Ads in User News Feeds in January | Digital. Facebook Engagement Ads to Attract Your Ideal Audience. Have you ever wondered how small businesses attract leads on Facebook? Or how some small businesses go from zero to 1,000 or more fans so quickly? Unless you’re a world-renowned brand, it’s almost impossible to grow a small business Facebook Page organically. Especially if you’re new to online marketing. And frankly, small businesses don’t need more casual fans. Where are they hiding? I’ll show you—and give you behind-the-scenes insights from a successful case study so you can develop your own strategy. The Solution: Facebook Engagement Ads If I mention “ad campaign” and “Facebook” in the same sentence, a lot of my clients feel instant overwhelm.
But if you have a brand, book or business, and a clear vision of who can benefit from it most, then you’ve already won half the battle—because the best way to attract the right audience to your Facebook Page is to target those people. Unlike other Facebook ads, engagement ads don’t send users to an external link or sales page outside of Facebook. 4 Ways to Convert Facebook Fans Into Super Fans. Amy Porterfield is the co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies and creator of the Facebook marketing training program, FBinfluence. You can join her on Facebook at facebook.com/AmyPorterfield or read her blog at AmyPorterfield.com. For most of us, football season means it’s time to grab our jerseys and clear our Sunday afternoons. We’re the weekend warriors. But super fans are another breed entirely. SEE ALSO: How to Increase Facebook Engagement Using Custom Page Tabs Your brand might already have plenty of weekend warriors on Facebook, but it’s the super fan you want to attract.
Moontoast’s "Anatomy of a Fan" infographic identifies different Facebook fans by their level of engagement: Potential fansEngaged fansAdvocate fansPurchasing fansSuper Fans ― the best of the best. If we look at these levels as stages, we can take a more sophisticated approach to Facebook marketing. Here are four ways to start moving your fans through the ranks. 1. To create an effective engagement ad: Adwords Strategies: How to Pick a Winning Ad. Recently, I got into an argument with a respected colleague about how to select a winning ad in Google Adwords. You would think that it’s an easy decision, since you have just about all the data you could possibly need. However, we still managed to get into an argument on whether conversion rate mattered more or less than click-through rate. Here’s how it went down… “Hey, Brennan, this ad you made that has the price of the service we’re selling in it has a really low click-though rate,” I said. “Yes it does, but the conversion rate is pretty good,” Brennan (my colleague) said.
I barked back, “Who cares about conversion rates? Don’t you realize that a high click-through rate equals a low cost-per-click? I happily wallowed in my bubble of superior knowledge for a few minutes until the jabbing spear of obvious intellectual curiosity hurt enough to pay attention to. What if conversion rate were a more important metric? Here’s why: The ad he created had a qualifier in it. The Numbers. A Skeptical Marketer's Guide to Facebook Advertising. 5 Key Metrics to Measure Success of Paid Search Campaigns. This is a guest post written by Elisa Gabbert. Elisa is the Content Development Manager at WordStream Inc., a provider of search marketing software and services.
She manages the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog and you can follow her on Twitter at @egabbert. If you manage a Google AdWords account to supplement your organic search engine optimization efforts, you know there are a ton of metrics available to track and analyze, and it can quickly get confusing and overwhelming. Since we all have limited bandwidth, it’s a good idea to narrow down the field to a short list of key metrics that really give you meaningful insight into what’s working -- and what isn’t -- in your paid search campaigns. These five metrics will give you the most bang for your buck. . #1: Quality Score Quality Score is Google’s measure of the relevance of your keywords, used to ensure that searchers see relevant ads and have a positive experience.
. #2: Click-Through Rate #3: Conversion Rate #4: Cost Per Conversion. Facebook's New Marketing Tools for Ads and Insights. With the recent changes announced at Facebook, it wasn’t going to be long until it started to introduce changes for brands, with new targeting options. And now it’s started to do just that, as it’s announced a new ad format that is focused on driving more engagement for brands, attracting ever more ad dollars to the site. The announcement was made today in conjunction with New York’s annual Advertising Week. The ad format is called a ‘Premium’ ad and it functions similarly to sponsored stories, which are generated when someone takes an action on your Page.
The ‘story’ itself is what’s shown in the ad, as opposed to any ad text or images that you decide. With a Premium ad, if a brand shares a particular piece of content on their Page, such as a video, an ad containing that content will be served to fans’ friends, expanding to show the content and which of the friends have Liked it: Up next – new Page insights The end of the Like obsession? Insights API. Facebook’s Expanded Premium Ad Unit Combines Page Post Content with Convincing Social Context. Last night Facebook made two announcements just before the start of New York Ad Week, the launch of new earned media Insights which we discussed in-depth this morning, and a new “expanded Premium ad unit” that can appear larger than typical ads on the home page.
Expanded Premium ads turn an update published by a Page to the news feed into an ad, and append social context about friends who Like that Page to the top of the unit. It thereby combines what were previously two separate ad types — Page Like Sponsored Stories and Sponsored Page Post ads — creating a taller, more compelling ad unit that includes the trusted recommendation of a friend that can be targeted to any Facebook user.
Advertisers will no longer have to choose between promoting their Page with an ad that had little of its own content, and amplifying the reach of a compelling Page post without showing social context. Facebook launched Sponsored Stories to amplify the reach of user generated mentions of brands. Facebook Introduces Expandable Ad Unit. Facebook is introducing a new type of ad that will expand if a friend "liked" the brand. The ad unit, which will be announced this week at Advertising Week in New York, is subtly different from Sponsored Stories, which rolled out in January, in two ways: it won't ever appear in the News Feed and — unlike Sponsored Stories, which merely show an interaction with a brand — it also contains an advertiser message.
It's also different from Social Ads, which tell you if a friend took an action related to the brand. Instead, the new ad unit will expand to let you comment and see other comments related to the ad. This mock-up ad for The Ides of March (no advertisers have signed on yet) shows a "like" from the user as well as the copy: The ad unit is based on the belief that ads with recommendations from friends will be more effective than standard display ads and magnify a brand's reach.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Mari Smith. How to Measure Your Social Media Lead Generation Efforts. This is a guest post by Ashley Jane Brookes of HootSuite, the social media dashboard. Follow her on Twitter @ashjbee. Social media is no longer in its infancy and is no longer an optional task for businesses and brands. Indeed, building and engaging with audiences on established social networks is now a key part of business interaction. So, as social media grows into its awkward teenage years, the next step is for these companies to understand not only how to use it, but also how to derive value from it.
There is no set-in-stone standard for social media measurement, but various guidelines for unique business cases can show how social media benefits an organization by solving problems across departments, from recruiting to promotion. So much of social media measurement is hinged on social-specific statistics that vary by individual network, i.e.: Likes, RTs, followers, etc. As evident by the funnel, the social media lead generation cycle starts with a conversation and moves down a path: Citi Analysts: Facebook Ads Are Taking Spending Away From Display, Not Search.
Back in May, we reported that Facebook now accounts for one out of three ad impressions in the U.S., and that, really, no other web property in the U.S. comes close (Yahoo was second with 10 percent). That means that Facebook served approximately 340 billion ads in the first quarter. It’s probably not a surprise, then, that advertising makes up for about 89 percent of the social network’s total revenues, which are estimated at about $1.6 billion for the first six months of 2011.
Today, on Citi’s third quarter search marketing trends call, the panelists discussed the current landscape of search advertising, among other things that Google is maintaining its dominant market share in advertising spend on search, at 80 to 81 percent of total spend. While the panelists said that they’re not seeing much demand for social search ad targeting, there is obviously a ton of interest in marketing on Facebook.
Excerpt image courtesy of Billboardom. Facebook Could Boost Ad Revenue Through New Marketing Education Partnerships With Business Lobbies. Facebook’s advertising solutions haven’t reached their full potential in part because advertisers don’t understand them well enough to achieve peak results. The system is complicated, and the concept of social advertising is new, yet outside of some webinars and .PDFs, Facebook has done little educate advertisers on how to use its Ads products. That’s about to change, as Facebook is establishing partnerships with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Federation of Independent Business, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Facebook will send representatives to local and regional offices of the two business lobbies to educate members on how best to promote themselves on the social network through its marketing and advertising products. This education could increase understanding and trust in Facebook Ads, leading more businesses to increase their Facebook marketing spend. Such adoption could help Facebook grow the advertising revenues that fuel the company.
Facebook Now Allows Advertisers to Use Tracking Tags and Promote Old Page Posts with Sponsored Stories. 6 Tips for Launching a Product on Facebook. 9 A/B Tests Mere Marketing Mortals Can Use to Increase Leads. Facebook Adds Per Post Impression Data to Page Insights Exports to Help Brands Track Their Performance. Facebook Combining $50 Ad Credits and 3 Simpler Ad Tools to Attract Small Businesses. Facebook’s Rumored Read, Listened, and Watched Buttons: A Money-Making Fit With Broad Category Ad Targeting. Facebook Reveals Social Ads Marketing Plan. How To Pay Less Per Click On Facebook Advertising. Jeffbullas.