Landing Page Optimization: A Tutorial from XTEND

Why is landing page optimization still important? Get ready for landing page
optimization bootcamp!

It is very simple – more revenue! Take a look at the example below to understand
the magnitude:

A $10K a month media buy generating 50K monthly landing page
visitors converting at 3% will generate revenue of $52,500 (based on a $35 Life
Time Value). Let’s assume a 20% improvement which will increase the conversion
rate to 3.6%, and will increase revenue generated from the media buy to $63,000.
A $10,500 monthly revenue lift over one year will lift total revenue to $126,000!

Before coming to XTEND, I worked at Amadesa (a website testing company),
and in many optimization projects we frequently experienced revenue boosts
ranging from 15% to over 100% with the majority of improvements in the 20-60%
range. So if we want to be optimistic with this example, and assume a 40% lift we
could generate an additional $252,000 a year! That isn’t small potatoes…

Walk Before You Run

Landing page optimization can be complex but once you get the hang of it the
results start becoming addictive. Like anything in life you need to walk before you
run, and practice makes perfect. Landing page optimization or any page or flow
optimization can be confusing as there are many variables to take into
consideration:

1. Should one start with split testing or multivariate testing?
2. What page elements should I test?
3. How many versions of each page element should one test?
4. Do I have enough traffic to reach statistical significance?
5. Should tests be segmented by media source, geography, day of the
   week etc?
6. Do I need to use a new technology or service provider for testing? If so
   which one?

If an organization does not have experience testing, it is recommend to start with a
simple split test or A/B test of the main element on a landing page such as the
layout’s (template) unique selling point (USP) or pictures. It is very important to
test the main elements as they will most likely have the highest impact on the
conversion rate. Make sure each element version in a test is visibly different from
each other, if the changes aren’t bold enough and the versions are only subtly
different then most likely the results will not be significant.

Once you get the handle of split testing you should use more advanced
methodologies such as multivariate (MVT) and traffic segmentation. These

techniques will enable you to test hundreds of combinations of landing pages
as well as traffic sources and other sub segments such as Geography, Browser
type, time of day etc.

Success Will Come

Persistency pays off. Make sure you persist, as it can take a few tests until you get
the handle of what page elements are the most impacting. Also, guiding your
creative team to design and write ideas outside of the box might take some practice.

Remember that you are testing, therefore it is important to experiment outside
stringent brand guidelines as you never know what will make a user respond and
take action.

Test in Waves…

As traffic is usually limited and testing many page elements can be a daunting task,
I recommend testing in waves. Your first wave of testing might be only for the
page layout (template) and your second wave can be for the main graphic and
USP. Your third wave might still be for the main graphic or image but this time you
will test bolder images. In each wave you should strive to learn something, and
even if you don’t gain a lift in conversion rate you can still learn. If your conversion
rate dropped you learned that the tested elements do have impact, therefore you
should continue to test these elements but make sure to create versions that are
different. If the tested elements had no impact (the conversion rate didn’t change)
you should test different elements in your subsequent waves. Basically each wave
provides an opportunity to build on the results and conclusions of your previous
waves until you’ve reached satisfactory results.

The single most important aspect
of optimization is patience and persistence – it will most likely take you a few tests
to see first successes but as shown in the above example it pays off big time.

Useful Links
Tips and tricks from optimization experts:

1. Google Website Optimizer FAQ’s
2. Jonathan Mendez – Founder of Omniture Test and Target one of the first
   Optimization Platforms.
3. Tim Ash – Author of the “Landing Page Optimization” book
4. Bryan Eisenberg of future now

Web site optimization platforms:

1. Amadesa – A complete platform for website optimization and personalization
2. Omniture – From analytics to optimization a complete suite of online
   marketing technologies
3. SiteSpect – None Java script based A/B and Multivariate testing platform
4. Google Website Optimizer – Google’s free website testing and
   optimization tool.

Tools:

1. Website Optimization ROI Calculator
2. Traffic Estimators

Consultancies

1. Conversion Rate Experts – international conversion consulting company.
   Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants.
2. Widemile – Multivariate testing for agencies.
3. Maxymiser – UK based Optimization Company.

Dov Yarkoni is the VP of Business Development and Sales at XTEND

We thank Dov Yarkoni for this post. It originally appeared on the
Xtend Blog on October 19, 2009

Unleash the Beast – Part 3

This is the last in a 3-part series on analyzing online media quality. It’s a doozy,
but an in-depth look. If you missed the other installments, here’s Part 1 and
here’s Part 2.

The Sophisticated Approach
The sophisticated advertiser distinguishes between media sources and offers
a different CPA for each of them. Let’s take a simple example, an advertiser that
sets CPA at 3 levels:

• $5 for regular traffic
• $2 rate for incentivized traffic
• $6 premium rate for SEM traffic.

In this example, all the traffic sources will run this offer, and the ROI will be

positive for all the sources.

In this way, 5 different levels can bring the advertiser up to $300,000 profit from
160,000 users.
Let’s summarize the profit for each advertiser:

This model works not only in theory. In my experience working with advertisers at
Adsmarket, I’ve seen many empiric example of how advertisers dramatically
increased their revenue and their profit by handling and monitoring the traffic
sources better. This brings me to two major conclusions:

1. There is no “Bad Traffic”. You need to find the right payout for each source
   in order to take advantage of its full capacity and potential, “Unleashing the
   Beast”.
2. By monitoring and optimizing media sources the advertiser can increase
   profit by hundreds of percents, “Controlling the Beast”.

Feel free to contact me at Yuval.bATadsmarket.com to learn more about these tools
and about traffic source optimization in general.

Unleash the Beast – Part 2

This is Part 2 in a 3-part series on analyzing online media quality. It’s a doozy,
but an in-depth look.
Did you miss Part 1? Click here.

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced the 2 Qs Formula for revenue and profit:

Revenue = Quality*Quantity

Profit = Quality*Quantity – Price*Quantity = Quantity*(Quality – Price)

Let’s take a numeric example:
Let us suppose in a certain market the following table represent each media source
quality (in life time user’s value), capacity (the number of users they can generate)
and the minimum CPA they want in order to run.

This is only an example, in different markets the order of the media sources may be
different depend on the criteria of the users and the type of the product or service
you provide. However, there are several assumptions that are almost always true

(but not always):

• Targeted traffic has less capacity but higher value.
• The best traffic, quality wise, is the most expensive one.

So, let’s take three approaches to the market described in the table above.

The Unsophisticated Approach
An unsophisticated advertiser can’t distinguish between the different media sources,
he sees all the traffic he gets as a one and tries to set one CPA that will fit all. The
traffic he gets is all the traffic that requires a minimum payout that is smaller than the
CPA.

Here is the sensitivity analysis of this advertiser:

Media = all the media that the Minimum CPA (i) required is smaller the CPA the advertisers offers.
Example – for 3$ CPA only the Pops and the incentivized traffic will agree to work.

Total traffic = the sum of capacity of all media



Revenue = the sum of the capacity of media times quality

(Average Quality = Revenue/ Total traffic
Cost = Total traffic x CPA
Profit = Revenue – Cost)

As you can see, the maximum profit for the unsophisticated advertiser is by setting $3 CPA
he gets 100K users with profit of $80K. He is only uses 62.5% of the capacity of the media
and losing all the high quality traffic.

Stay with me here…

You can also see that the average quality is a logarithmic function of the CPA:

*The “X” axis is the price and the “Y” axis is the quality

The green line is the “Break even” line when Price = Quality.
For CPA higher than $5 – Price > Quality and the advertiser loses money.

The Semi-Sophisticated Approach

The semi-sophisticated advertiser usually sets one CPA to all media sources but he
adds restrictions that don’t permit low quality traffic to run. Let’s take for example
advertisers who don’t allow incentivized traffic to run their offers. In this case, their
sensitivity analysis will look like this:

In our example, by not allowing incentivized traffic, the advertiser get more profit

than the unsophisticated one ($100,000 instead of $80,000) but uses only 43.75%
from the traffic available.

Go to Part 3…

The Science of Performance, Explained

Yuval Ben-Harush here, Advertiser Relations at your service! Many advertisers ask for our consultancy – “How can we make our offers more attractive and how can we bring more users to our offers?” The first question I ask them is: Who are your customers? The users? – Wrong! Your customers are the publishers! If you will keep in mind that your offers need to be attractive to the publishers, and take the right actions, they can drive unbelievable volumes of users to your offers.

There are two important parameters that you control as a saavy advertiser that influence the attractiveness of your offers to the publishers:

The first one is the most obvious one and the most easy to control: The Payouts (for CPA offers)! Your payouts need to be competitive (compared to other advertisers from the same category for the same countries) and must be profitable for the publishers, meaning, the cost of media will be lower than the total revenue.

Total revenue = CPA * Total number of conversions

Total cost of media = CPC * clicks (or CPM * impressions)

α = the ROI the publisher expects

As you can see in the Total Payout formula above, the second parameter that the publisher takes into consideration is the number of conversions per the traffic he sent. Since the advertiser is usually responsible for the creatives, including landing pages and banners, you have the power to influence the conversion rate for the publisher.

To explain the idea better, let’s take an example:

“Sylvester” is a publisher who wants to run a movie selling campaign in the US. In Adsmarket there are two companies who have such campaigns – Rambo LTD and Rocky INC. Rambo LTD offer $10 CPA per movie sale and Rocky INC offer $5 CPA per movie sale. At first glance, it looks like Rambo LTD offer, $10 payout, is more attractive for Sylvester; however, after testing both of the offers, Sylvester found out that out of 200 users (200 clicks)  sent by him to Rambo LTD there were 2 sales (1% conversion rate). Out of the same amount of users sent to the Rocky INC offer there were 6 sales (3% conversion rate).  The total incomes from Rambo LTD and Rocky INC are $20 and $30 respectively. Surely, Sylvester will prefer Rocky INC offer because, per 200 clicks, the revenue is higher. If the cost of media is for example $12 per 100 clicks (CPC) the conversion rate makes the different from a profitable and non-profitable campaign (see the table below).

In order to compare performances of different campaigns with different amounts of traffic, publishers usually measure the profit per 100 clicks (EPC) or per 1000 impressions (eCPM).

In our example, Rambo LTD’s EPC was $10 and Rocky INC’s EPC was $15.

The EPC and eCPM functions elaborate the conversion rates and the CPAs.  Bottom line, the publisher looks for the following as proof of a worthy campaign:

How can this work to your advantage as an advertiser? By changing and adjusting the Payouts (CPA) and the conversion rates you can influence the publishers EPC and eCPM.  Improving these values makes your offer more attractive  and by that, encourages them to send more users to your offers.

In my next articles we will discuss ways to improve the conversion rate of a landing page and what is the right way to change and optimize the payouts.

Adsmarket is gearing up for eComXPO – July 8-9, 2009

This week is eComXpo, a virtual e-commerce and affiliate marketing exhibition. It’s
virtual in that the only setting up we have to do at our booth is to pick out some
business-casual-clad virtual e-booth e-visitors and place them at our e-brochure
stand. Boy, are they having fun! All joking aside, this exhibition is great for affiliatesshani
for a number of reasons. One, affiliates can freely roam the exhibition in peace
without being aggressively pummeled by salespeople, and two, can listen to the
informative and sometimes bottomline-changing lectures in their pajamas. Also,
because it’s all online already, you can leave the event already partnered with the
people you meet so you are ready to start working and earning money the next day!

We are “sending” many Adsmarket reps to eComXpo, and I am happy to introduce them below.

At the show they might be very busy, so now is a good time to start
the conversation rolling along! Click each person’s name to send them a howdy email or set up an e-meeting!

Gabi Cohen, VP of Media “The affiliate industry is never boring! It’s a constantly changing world that requires Adsmarket, as an affiliate network, to stay tuned in and up to date with every trend. This, plus the sophistication and creativity of each of our affiliates, is why I love doing what I do every day.”	Shani Porat, Team Leader, Advertiser Relations “Affiliate marketing is exciting and dynamic, and because it enables you to reach your target audience, it’s a very practical and effective solution for online marketers.”
Idan Shulian, Affiliate Business Development “What’s great about my job? I get to make my Publisher LOADED!”	Liat Arbesman, Business Development Team Leader, Media “I love my job and the opportunity to meet people and do networking worldwide. The events are the best part, you actually, finally, meet the people you do business with every day!”
Uzi Arbiv, Sales and Business Development “The affiliate business is a great industry to work in for the people I work with, the total lack of routine, and learning something new every day.”	Barak Reznik, Director of Sales “For our advertisers and affiliates, generating results is a 24 hour a day job, so a virtual exhibition is the perfect solution to 3am downtime!”
Joel Lagerlove, Affiliate Business Development “It all happens here!”	Hani Rozner, Publisher Business Development Manager “I love going to exhibitions mainly because you get to meet new people personally and are exposed to many new opportunities.”
Maor Sadra, Director of Sales “Affiliate marketing always assures a “win/win” solution for everyone, and my job allows me to find creative solutions for advertisers from around the world.”	Martin Fuchs, Regional Sales and Business Development Manager “I enjoy networking on virtual expos because they allow me to reach potential clients without traveling and wearing a suit. In addition, I have had great experiences finding new clients on eCom and look forward making new business contacts and providing them added value with Adsmarket!”

Making a pool out of a puddle: advice for Advertisers

Maor Sadra here with a tip for Advertisers:

Advertisers measure their return on investment (ROI) by calculating how much money they spent to generate a new lead/sale and comparing it to the lifetime value of the user. In today’s online advertising world, everything can be tracked and measured to measure ROI, so why do so many Advertisers limit their use of marketing tools and splash around in the same tiny puddle they are used to?!

Why not dig in deeper and create yourself a nice pool?

I used to work at a place where almost 80% of the online media budget went to Email Marketing. Over time, this limited our abilities to increase sales, as while Email Marketing is a highly effective method, you can easily saturate a market and even damage your brand name.
So while results were great in the short run, we soon got stuck with no ability to grow as we were recycling the same media again and again… and making our little puddle quite muddy.

To solve this problem, we began expanding our reach into different channels: PPC, Banners and Lead Generation, and found that our ROI was not the same for every channel, even when using the same CPA rates. We needed to adjust the target CPA by channel, thus working on 8 markets x 4 channels = 32 different CPA targets.
As complex as this sounded, using a pool of marketing tools and not just one helped the company expand, appeal to new users that were entirely unaware of the brand, and reach a steady positive ROI overall.

Today, I run across too many advertisers which refuse to run on specific media types, since they’ve tested it using the same target CPA they have for their best performing media type. One thing I always ask is: “Why limit your reach when you can simply adjust your rates to compensate for your ROI targets?”
With the variety of marketing tools available online today: Banners, Email, SEO, PPC, Behavioral Targeting, Social Media and more… the potential is as limitless as the combinations! After you multiply these different channels by the amount of countries Advertisers sometimes cover and the amount of different media companies Advertisers work with, you realize you should be working with hundreds of different CPA targets!

With that said, my tip for the day, and every day, is: Test Everything! Measure your ROI by channel and re-adjust your rates to allow a steady positive ROI. A major side effect of this approach is that in the long run, the more channels you run on, the more affiliates will run your offers. One of my favorite parts of affiliate marketing is that what works for the advertiser, works for the affiliates!

So, when it comes to choosing an online ad strategy, why splash around in that dirty little puddle when you could be lounging in your pool (complete with waterfall), drinking a Jamaican Smile with a paper umbrella sticking out of it?

King of the Obvious – A Tip for More Conversions

My name is Maor Sadra, Director of Sales at Adsmarket. This is my first (of many) blog posts to the Adsmarket blog. I welcome any comments you have!

I’ve been working in online advertising for the past 7 years, and while I always think that I know enough to get around in this dynamic industry, I always find that sometimes it’s good to listen to the people around me who may come up with the best “King of the Obvious” solution.

“King of the Obvious” is a term set by one of my former managers. This manager had a lot of experience in online advertising, but no technical experience whatsoever and needed some help with certain accounts.
Being young (oh, the hunger of youth!), tech-oriented and motivated to show that my technical skills can bridge any issue, I took on projects with Advertisers which included some programming.

One sunny day I received a spec for a new campaign that we were going to launch. My mind started all the geeky wheels in motion and I brain-stormed with myself the entire day trying to figure out how to setup this campaign.
If you’ve ever banged your head on the table trying to figure out how to solve something, you know exactly how I felt that day. And as you probably know, the banging doesn’t help.

After a long day of misery, I told my manager: “I can’t find any way of doing it…”.
He didn’t react at first, just looked at me strangely and asked: “Why are you thinking of the longest route from A to B when A is only 1 centimeter away from B?”
I was amazed. It was just like in Star Wars: Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke is trying to… okay, whoa, I’m showing my geek colors a little too much. Let’s just say that because I was overthinking it, I had turned a simple solution into a very complex riddle that I was unable to solve.

When I asked my manager, “Why didn’t I see that?!” he explained: “Sometimes you need to take a step back to become King of the Obvious.”

When I think of this case, I always remember a gem of advice for conversion funnels from Jared M. Spool about how a small change in a web form helped an eCommerce company increase their revenues by $300,000,000 in the first year. It’s explained in this famous article that after a few weeks of learning the user flow of the site, a small repositioning of the “proceed to checkout” button made such a huge improvement in the conversion funnel that it completely changed the user experience and led to many many more conversions.
The change itself? Allowing users to proceed to checkout without creating an account with the eCommerce site. We can all agree that allowing users to create an account would be helpful in the long term, allowing them make their purchase faster; however, let’s look at it from the customer’s perspective. When you go to a store and you want to buy a phone, or anything for that matter, do you want to enter a long term relationship with the store clerk, or do you want to select it, pay for it and go on with your life?

My tip for the day is: When you build your landing page, sometime you think of all the information you want from your users when asking them to sign up. Take a step back, become the King and think – what information does the customer want to give me, and do I really NEED all this other information? A clear, short registration form is the key to success with user retention.

King of the Obvious. Think about it.

Cheers,
Maor Sadra (maor.s@adsmarket.com)
Director of Sales

We left our cards in San Francisco

Okay, that was a cheesy title.  I wonder how many other affiliate networks will name their ad:tech blog posts the same way?

Our team just got back from ad:tech San Francisco, and after a 4 day whirlwind of meetings and parties, Ben Weinstock, our Director of Publisher Relations, and Liat Arbesman, one of our Publisher Recruiters, had this to say about the world-famous affiliate marketing exhibition:

“My personal feeling was that despite the atmosphere of economic recession, or perhaps because of it, meetings and conversation were much more profound and thorough.  People are looking into how to enhance quality traffic and make sure they get the highest return on their buy.  After all at the end of the day it’s all about ROI. 

Another amazing thing is that most of the stronger players in the social media field come from the Bay Area, which made it a great opportunity for me to me to meet all of them in 72 hours.”                

-           Ben Weinstock

“The conference was great! Our purpose was to meet as many of our clients and to find new potential affiliates and publishers that are interested in international campaigns to monetize their traffic. All the big players were there!

One cool thing they did was set up an area called the Affiliate Garden on the second floor which was a good place to mix. On the first day for example, they did a happy hour with free drinks.  It was a good way to start the parties.  There were so many parties, it was hard to choose where to go!

And the Twitter Monitor was really cool – I got constant updates about the conference on the monitor all weekend.

Great show, I wish I had had one more day to catch all the parties I missed!”

-          Liat Arbesman

All in all, it was a great conference! 

We are going to be at a bunch more coming up: eComExpo from July 8-9, Affiliate Summit East from August 9-11, and ad:tech London from September 22-23.