In what amounts to five days of epic conversations, presentations and social media events disguised as a “technology conference,” the world (and all of Twitter) tunes in to see the Internet trends of the last year scrutinized and the trends for the next year laid out in incredible, Apple-Keynote-quality detail.

How far can testing go?

This year, MarketingExperiments will not only be tuning in, but will take part in this conversation to discover not just what works in email and landing page optimization, but what is working in social media and other areas of the Web as well. In addition to small and large business owners, how are bloggers, designers and the social media crowd testing, measuring and collecting results? What’s working, what isn’t, and what’s to come in 2010?

If there’s ever been an ongoing topic of conversation here at MarketingExperiments, it’s the ever-present question of how far we can go in testing. How do we improve and build upon the tools we have to increase ROI, discover new insights and push the boundaries of online testing to give us more accurate, more actionable results. How will social media continue to change the way we hold conversations and gain trust with our audience online? How will we measure and apply what we learn?

See you in Austin

What better way to seek out the answers to these questions than by employing SXSWi as my backdrop for a discussion on how the Internet will continue to evolve to the tune of testing and optimization, as well as hear first-hand how other marketers, bloggers, and Internet fans in general see online testing influencing the design and execution of ideas on the Web.

And if you happen to see me there, be sure to stop me and tell me your thoughts on these issues as well.  Also, ask me for one of my “split test” business cards. More on that later…

Until now, to track which campaign or particular ad was converting you had to tag your ad destination URLs with a tracking ID or parameter, then go back and reference that manually to figure out if a given ad was converting or not…Ugh.

Conversions Without Clicks

Facebook has put their own spin on conventional conversion tracking however by allowing advertisers to track conversion events that happen on their site even if the user didn’t click any of their ads, tracking on an ad impression alone.

Similar to Google’s reasoning behind implementing “View-Through” conversion tracking, under the “Post-Impression Data” heading in Facebook’s PDF ‘Conversion Tracking Guide’ they point out the motivation for this level of tracking:

“The ability to track Post-Impression…enables you to measure conversions from users who saw your ads without clicking them and so gives you insight into the true value of your ads.“

i.e. “Keep buying display ads from us even if your CTR sucks…”

It’s hard to imagine the amount of data crunching and storage they’ll have to do to be able to reference what ad you’ve simply seen and successfully tie it back to conversion pixels firing on vendor sites’ everywhere. But hey, if Google can do it, they can too.

They appear to hold onto that impression-recording data for at least a month as their new Conversion Time reports can tell you how far out the conversion was from the time a user saw an ad.

Nice Metrics You Have There

In addition to allowing advertisers to count conversions as they come in (FB says to expect roughly a 24 hour delay on conversion data), advertisers can dynamically add additional parameters to the FB tracking scripts included conversion values in dollars (”VALUE”) as well as “SKU” to let you figure out what exact product the user ultimately bought or signed up for.  Definitely a nice touch.

Configuring Facebook Conversion Tracking

If the tracking beta has been enabled in your account, you’ll see it in the sidebar of your Facebook Ads interface:

Next, select the type of action you’d like to track and give the a “tag name”, or an easily-referenced nickname.  You can also add the conversion value amount to help evaluate ROI later on:

That’s it, you end up with a small piece of javascript to insert before the ending </body> tag on your landing page:  (sorry for the tiny image)

Conversion Reporting – Apps, Fan Pages, & Events Now Included

When you run the conversion reporting, or “Conversions by Conversion Time” report, you can drill down to the account, campaign, or individual ad level, viewing how many conversions took place during given time frames and/or how long after impressions or ad clicks conversions happened.

If you’ve been using the ‘VALUE’ and ‘SKU’ parameters, you’ll be able to see revenue figures as well as particular sale or lead type data.

Conversion metrics (conversion counts, rates etc…) have also been added to the regular campaign and ad reporting, adding the big piece that’s been missing from these regular campaign reports.

Another nice touch to the new system is that if you are running ads with ‘Inline Actions’ such as “Become a Fan” or “RSVP to this Event”, you’ll automatically see “Conversion by Impression Time” and “Conversion by Conversion Time” reports including how many users responded inline by becoming a Fan of a Page or RSVPing to an Event from the ad itself.

These conversions show up in your reports associated with SKU values like “fan_page” or “rsvp_event”.

App developers can add their FB conversion tracking codes on any Facebook apps hosted on your Page the same way that you would place tracking tags in the application independently where you have control over the page code.

A Great Addition, Lots of Data to Crunch

Facebook has taken conversion tracking up a notch here, particularly with the impression-only tracking capability.  It’ll be interesting to see what kind of custom reporting can be crafted from the huge amount of data points Facebook’s allowing advertisers to empty out of their reporting.

It has been pretty difficult getting Facebook ads to convert without advanced demographic and keyword segmentation, not to mention the reams of ads you need to continually load to beat user ad-fatigue and keep them clicking.  This new Facebook Ads feature will make that job much, much easier.

More importantly, it reveals the patterns of language people use.

As you drill down through your chosen phrases, you should start to see specific patterns of language. Patterns might emerge in in form of questions, of doubts, of benefits, of price, of availability, and more. You can use these patterns to better understand your audience, and refine your campaign language to suit.

“Listen” Carefully To How People Use Language

How people say things is just as important as what they say.

Why?

Because one of the keys to a successful PPC campaign is to talk using the language of the customer. If the customer can see themselves in you, and your solutions, they are more likely to buy from you.

For example, you need to talk to a youth market differently than you would an elderly market. Language an elderly market may see as authoritative, a youth market may see as old fashioned.

It’s a generalization, but the elderly tend to respond well to voices of authority, so quoting qualified professionals is often a good idea when marketing to this group. Youth demographics tend to respond well to the voices of their peers, or people like themselves, or people who they aspire to be. To get the language right, you need to figure out exactly who you’re selling to. If your market doesn’t fit into a clear demographic, then research your competitors, particularly those who rank high on PPC for long periods of time, and see what language they use.

Focus Your Language On Customers Needs

The other important point is to address the customers needs.

For example, can you can spot what is wrong with this example of landing page text:

Our company has been trading for 26 years. We’re the world’s leading supplier of garden tools, and carry an extensive range from our chosen suppliers. Our founder, G R Holding’s motto was “Quality First!”. We’ve stuck to that motto….

Ok, cheesy – but the problem is obvious. The merchant talks a lot about themselves. They do not speak the language of the customer, nor do they speak to the customers needs.

How do we know what language the customer will respond to? One clue is the language used in the search query. Say the search query is “cheap gardening tools”. Would the language in the paragraph above appeal directly to the searcher? Not really. This visitor is motivated by price, not company longevity.

What the searcher needs to see is an ad that includes the words “cheap gardening tools”, and a landing page that features the term “cheap gardening tools” writ large. The language of the page must reaffirm the searcher has found the right place. From here, we could experiment with different layouts, perhaps showing various tools with prices in red crossed out and the discounts clearly visible. The language would orient around savings and bargains. We could add a clear call to action, moving the visitor through the sales process.

Guidelines

Whatever your demographic, these ten guidelines work well in PPC:

Repeat The Search Query – not only is this using the same language as the searcher, it also reaffirms they have found the right place. Repeat the search query in both the ad text and on the landing page.

Use “You” and “Your” – it’s not about you, it’s about them. Speak of their problems, their desires, and their needs. They don’t care about you.

Use A Crystal Clear Call To Action – use the active voice and use precise commands i.e. click here to…..

Be Factual, Not Arty – ad text and landing pages are not the places to get cryptic. Use simple, direct language. The visitor can easily click back if they become confused.

Your First Paragraph Is The Most Important – I tend to use a larger font for the first paragraph. Decide on the one thing you want to get across to the visitor if you only have a five second window of opportunity. Typically, that’s all the time you do have to encourage a visitor to read further! What is your visitors burning need? That’s your first paragraph. Remember to incorporate the word “you” or “your” whenever possible. Keep it short.

Write With The Customers Goal In Mind – this will help you to keep on track, moving logically from one concept to the next. You shouldn’t include any superfluous text or imagery that doesn’t support the customer achieving their goal.

Rewrite – copy is always improved by rewriting it. Two, three or four times…ten times, if need be. The aim is to remove the superfluous. To get across an idea quickly and effectively.

Sometimes, copy can be greatly improved by deleting the first paragraph entirely, and making the second paragraph the first. Chances are, your audience is way ahead of you. They don’t need the obvious spelled out, which often happens in first paragraphs, particularly those of first drafts.

If In Doubt, “Steal” – Ok, not steal, borrow Look at the language your competitors are using. Are there similarities between them? What goal are they addressing? Have they clearly identified their target market? How can what they’ve done be improved upon?

Don’t Use Jagon – it tends to confuse. The exception is if your target audience is very familiar with industry jargon.

Be Specific – if the benchtop you’re selling is made of granite, say granite. Avoid vague language, like “a solid, enduring benchtop material”. Search engine activity tends to be specific, as opposed to vague, because people are forced to formulate a search query. That’s not to say all search phrases are specific – your target keywords should give you a clue about how specific the needs of your audience are.

If the price of two systems are equal, would you rather have full ownership and control of your business and be able to customize a system on your website to fit your specific business needs or would you rather give your content to some other company (pray they don’t go out of business) and be permanently beholden to some proprietary system? Your content is your own. Don’t give it up without a fight.

So what if it was actually cheaper to own your system instead of using a service? Is the choice easier now?

Let’s go a step further..

When I migrated a client off of a membership service onto his own server his list of complaints from the service was very long. So long, that it prompted him to call me for help. He wanted minor tweaks. Not huge, complex, bazillion hours of coding type of stuff. Just a few changes here and there.

His response, after an average phone wait of 1 hour, was that they only make universal systems, not customizations for a specific client (full disclosure: being a programmer, I’m usually on board with this). I looked around for different solutions and realized that I could duplicate everything his current provider was doing, and this time, it wouldn’t suck.

He now has his full membership website in his own name (as a developer, I want everything I create to be in my client’s name) and has complete control over all of his content and how to present it to his members. All of those little tweaks he wanted on the former site, were now fast and easy to accomplish with the new site.

Here’s the really cool part…..

It’s Wordpress.

Ok, Wordpress plus a few plugins.

That’s incredible when, for the cost of a single month of the former service, you can build a full membership site. On top of that, you can now customize the experience for your membership with more design and configuration of the basic model. You get your cake and can eat it too.

So, seriously, why would you give your content and control to someone else?

Toff Ward
OpenSourceMarketer

Do what YOU want and get PAID for it!

“I feel like eating Cheetos with my grilled cheese & turkey sandwich, but I have none ”

This presents a huge challenge to the modern marketer. We all see social media and the real-time web as a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. But with these new media awash in so much “pointless babble,” finding success with social media marketing is akin to trying to find that rainbow against a psychedelic sky of endlessly flashing colors.

So before our next free web clinic – Social Media Marketing in 4 Steps: A methodology to move from sporadic to strategic use based on research with 2,317 marketers – on which MarketingSherpa Research Director Sergio Balegno will share actionable insights from research on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogging, we thought we’d post this simple (and simply blunt) question to marketers:

How do you use social media to make money?

From the obvious (”cultivate relationships”) to the iconoclastic (”you don’t”), marketers had many interesting takes on this question (what else would you expect from a group that has to think out of the box for a living?). Here are our favorite tips, techniques and insights:

Win real fans
I have a brand called Mocks (socks for mobile phones) which I started to heavily promote on Facebook last year. Basically, over three months I gained 12000 fans and doubled online sales.

I use social media as a way to increase brand awareness and engage customers so that they become fans in the “old” sense of the word. This then means that they buy more and tell their friends.

New way of thinking for a direct response pro
We have really embraced social media in the past year to raise our profile in our own industry (medical marketing). Until recently, because we come from direct response backgrounds, we focused all of our marketing efforts solely on targeted prospects, with little regard for the larger industry.

Our strategy has been to leverage the publication-quality content we were already producing for magazines and our newsletter base. Therefore, we are getting a lot of bang for little additional effort, leading to more and better client inquiries.

Long-term relationships over short-term profits
Social networking isn’t always about an instantaneous transformation into dollars. It is about a long-term continuous relationship with the customer. You stay on their mind even when they aren’t actively seeking your product.

Virtual Tupperware party
Direct selling on a social network is difficult. The best way to sell is to replicate the offline world to a certain extent by signing up online agents. The same people who would host a cosmetics party or a Tupperware party are natural networkers who will have large social networks on all of the primary platforms.

The possibility exists to build a platform that they can invite their friends to at specific times and, in effect, host online sales parties. Obvious inducements include discounts on branded goods and free prizes, but the key may be to create a uniform space for the agents that they can build into a profile for themselves.

Even without a platform, they could simply become discount agents for their friends. Somebody who all their friends know can get good deals on specific products or services.

For the agent, it is not abusing their relationships on the social network platforms. For the most part, their friends already know them as somebody who hosts sales parties and they will either be ignored or valued but are unlikely to be criticized for the entrepreneurial efforts among their friends.

A straightforward sale
E-commerce websites (especially B2C) are the ones who can reap maximum benefits out of social media. The best examples are Dell and Zappos. Dell has reportedly made $3.5 million in 2009 from Twitter promotions.

These retailers post updates about various product offers in Twitter, Facebook and other social media. And they also give additional promotions to followers. Timely promotions to a well-targeted market segment will spur an increase in conversion rates and hence an increase in revenue.

One emerging trend is Facebook and Twitter commerce. Retailers are trying to build applications around Facebook and Twitter to port their entire commerce platform.

Find out what customers want
By gaining a relationship or connecting with your customers and getting feedback, you can take the ideas they offer and put them into practice. For small businesses this is easier because most changes will be simple and not too costly. Larger business might need to run suggestions through a spreadsheet to find the most popular ideas before taking action.

Also, by doing this you pull in your customers and let them know they are being heard and that you’re really looking to make them happy. A great example of this type of mentality is Domino’s. They listened and then took action.

Track lead generation
When it comes to quantifying social media and social networking efforts into an actual dollar value, the best way I’ve discovered is to use a simple tracking system. This consists of a spreadsheet and/or entry into my CRM that shows: lead to customer and what channel they came through, whether this be blog, social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), or referral.

Present real value
Social media must be presented as a value proposition. It’s got nothing to do with befriending people and tweeting, but everything to do with brand value and lead generation.

Lead generation
If you are currently advertising for customers, you can now “advertise” for FREE by posting a sample, giveaway, or contest on Twitter and linking to your website. Ask for pertinent details that are important to qualifying your potential customers…and drive them to your site.

Social media is about awareness, not revenue
We use it to drive business and increase our profile, nothing more. But do we make money from it? No, we make the money from the services that we provide to our clients. Our social media strategy could be the best in the world but if we cannot deliver then it is pointless. So yes, it drives traffic, increases awareness, and generates leads, but it does not make money.

As we confront this brave new world, let’s remember that there is nothing particularly new about it…

Personally, social media has been around forever. We have always had teenage hangouts, chambers of commerce, the restaurant breakfast/coffee club, the local newspaper and specialized magazines. The difference today is that our social media has more two-way interaction, is worldwide, and can be instant.

Social media is not a novel concept, we’ve just thrown a bunch of technology into the mix. And there are great benefits – speed, cost, and reach among them. But don’t get so caught up in the technology that you overlook what is really transpiring – a conversation.

Because, in the end, people don’t buy from social media platforms (or websites or email messages or even companies) – people buy from people.

The business you’re advertising via PPC needs to work on the web.

What are some examples of businesses that work well, and those that don’t?

Items that don’t sell so well include items that are easy, and cheap, to source locally, very heavy items that can’t be shipped easily, and items that need to be seen or tried on for size and fit. Having said that, people can and do sell such items over the net, but the rule of thumb when selecting a good product for selling on the web is to look for some barrier to purchase that the web smooths out.

For example, some people order pills, like Viagra, over the internet, because the internet smooths out the embarrassment factor some people may feel if they go into a store to buy it.

People order items from other countries where the item may be cheaper. The web smooths out the price difference.

Some people order because they live far away from the shops, and want something delivered. The internet smooths out the distance problem.

People will buy something they can’t get easily at their local store, like niche items. The internet smooths out the availability problem.

Select an item or service that smooths out problems such as those mentioned above. All business is about solving problems. Real problems, as opposed to imagined ones. Ask yourself if you’re solving an actual problem people have, or an imagined problem you’d like them to have.

Connect With People

Secondly, you need to connect with people.

It’s easy to get lost in the numbers of PPC, but we must remember that each click represents a living, breathing human being. That person has needs, wants and problems to solve. That person is likely to have objections to buying that need to be overcome.

Is your landing page solving a genuine problem for people? Is it speaking their language? Is it reassuring them that you can solve their problem?

The visitors have all the power. They can back-click. They don’t have to spend any time on a page that doesn’t speak to them, using their words, and addressing their specific problem.

If your landing pages aren’t converting as well as you’d like, make sure you’re solving a real problem for someone. Picture that person in your head. Who are they? How old are they? How do they speak? Why did they click thru on your advertisement?

Of course, there is a lot of guesswork involved, but it’s a good exercise to remind ourselves that maths is only one half of PPC. The other half is about people and language.

How Do You Figure Out The Language?

Testing.

Test various web pages using different text. Phrase the solution in different ways. Do you get better results if you empathize with a persons problem? Do you get better results if you re-state the problem? Do you get better results if you weave the problem into a story? Do you get better results if you focus on benefits? Do you get better results if you focus on negating risks?

Check out keyword research tools, like Google’s related searches. As you search, Google will present you with related queries. These queries give you a unique insight into the minds of searches. Look for patterns, particularly patterns related to commercial activity.

Collecting Feedback

You can also collect information from your visitors, of course. Via web analytics and your Google AdWords data aggregate feedback can be collected without asking for permission. You can further augment this feedback…

• many competitive research tools show you where competitors are consistently finding value
• there are many multivariate tools to choose from
• specialized tools like CrazyEgg & ClickTale help record how users interact with your page
• feedback services like UserTesting and Feedback Army allow you to buy reviews from end users for next to nothing
• Services like 4Q and Kampyle allow you to easily embed feedback forms in your web pages

Want More Visitor Information?

Sell something that requires building significant trust? These days, people are loathe to give out personal information, especially to people they don’t know, so it’s a good idea to give them an incentive to do so.

Can you give them something of value? An e-book, perhaps. A free white paper or report. Even better if you can couple it with an auto-responder which helps you gain repeat exposure and test different sales strategies.

Giving people something to read is a useful tool in the sales process. If you tell a convincing story about why your solution is best, and frame the story to lead to your solution, you get people closer to your cash register. Remember, only impulsive people, or those with a very strong, time-sensitive need, buy on the first look. Most people will consider, research, and comparison shop. Having something of yours they can take away increases the chances they’ll return.

Finally, review trust aspects of your landing page.

Why should the visitor give you their credit card number? Are you giving them enough reassurance that you can be trusted to deliver? Cover all the basics – secure payment process, contact details, a clear returns policy, and guarantees.

Also make sure your spelling is purfect

Like our colleagues at MarketingExperiments, we at MarketingSherpa believe that nothing provides the better insights into the “right” approach than a good test. A marketer’s personal bias, best guess, gut instinct or assumptions aren’t enough. In fact, they’re often wrong. You have to be willing to let your audience SHOW you what motivates them.

Today in Munich, MarketingSherpa is hosting its second Germany Email Marketing Summit, which features a Case Study that demonstrates the power of testing to determine customer motivation. VNR.de, a publisher of lifestyle and professional advice from experts in their fields, is sharing the results of a list-cleansing/subscriber reactivation campaign they recently conducted.

Winning back “inactive” subscribers

The campaign targeted “inactive” members of their list, which they defined as subscribers that had not opened or clicked an email in 120 days. They wanted to either reactivate those subscribers, or else determine that they were truly inactive and remove them from the list. So they set up a four-message reactivation campaign to encourage a response.

Each message took a different approach to the reactivation effort:

- The first was a survey about email preferences
- The second was a request for subscribers to update their personal information
- The third was a contest to win a book
- The fourth repeated the request to update personal information

What is more appealing than FREE?

Going into the campaign, the team believed the contest offer would have the best response. After all, people like getting free stuff, right?

Maybe not: The contest offer had the weakest open rate and clickthrough rates of the four messages. Its open rate was 60% lower than the best-performing email – the survey about email preferences. And the contest offer’s CTR was 82% lower than the best-performing email.

The good news is that the reactivation campaign was a success overall. They reactivated 9% of the inactive subscribers they targeted – and they won a MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Award for it.

They also learned important lessons about what motivates their subscribers. Their conclusion: “People seem to be most interested when we are interested in them.”

Final lesson: Assumptions are no match for results data. So get testing!

Sean Donahue is the editor of MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing Case Studies, benchmark data, and how-to information read by hundreds of thousands of advertising, marketing, and PR professionals every week.

As I try to be informative and give back to the Twittersphere, one of my email-related tweets was picked up by a Florida marketing agency that services several metros nationwide. With our Email Optimization clinic series underway, I was more than happy to provide an analysis of a broad-spectrum campaign that they had planned. Luann, their president, was as excited as I was about making a Twitter connection.

With Luann’s permission, I wanted to share my thoughts and recommendations with our readers. Here is an edited copy of the email response that I sent to her:

Hi Luann,

(click image to zoom)

Here are a few thoughts based on the email message creative I got from Noele, along with the requisite assumptions I’ve made. I hope they will be helpful.

There are two important caveats:

1. I don’t believe in best practices. Everything I recommend is normally tested until I find out what really works for the particular product and customer segment.
2. I want to be as helpful as possible, so I am not pulling any punches; the comments below are not a reflection on your company’s competence or reputation—just how they are communicated via this email message.

The fundamentals: Optimizing thought sequences

In optimization, our objective is not to create better design or copy. Our objective is to affect different thought sequences, and design and copy are our tools. A useful way to examine the thought sequences we need to address is through three simple questions that arise in the mind of the email recipient immediately, whether consciously or unconsciously:

1. Who is sending me this email?
2. What is it asking me to do?
3. Why should I do it?

Our job is to answer these questions as directly and quickly as possible using copy, graphical elements, and layout of the email.

Without specific information about your list, I am going to assume (based on email content) that it contains a large segment that has never done business with your company and perhaps has never heard of it.

Communicating Efficiently: Make it an easy read

The body of the email appears singularly focused on its graphic design and a clever visual way to represent what you do. I suspect that your target customers would prefer a plain-English explanation instead.

They would also likely appreciate it being summarized into a strong, benefits-focused headline, supported with several key reasons why they should use your company’s services, rather than your competitors’.

How it appeared in my Outlook preview pane. (click image to zoom)

I am making an assumption about your target customer segment(s), but from my experience—especially with B2B—black text on a white background works best most of the time. There’s rarely a better way to communicate with busy professionals.

Relying primarily on text, rather than images, will likely work better for you because in default Outlook setup with a preview pane, most people will see blank white boxes instead of your message—and promptly delete it. Alt text helps, but not as much as well-formatted HTML text. You need to make sure that your email degrades gracefully: it needs to read acceptably with images turned off and in plain text.

Communicating Value: Make it clear why you are the best choice

Again, there is no real headline here. The question “Is your business missing something?” is so generic that I can’t imagine it being compelling at all. You can have a successful question-format headline, but it needs to point to a specific problem that you know your customer has.

A great way further to support your value proposition is by telling the reader what your customers say about you. It’s more powerful than anything you say yourself.

There is another challenge with communicating value: you are offering a range of very different services. Sent to a large enough list, this will get you calls, but I would invest some time into 1) trying to segment your list and offer only the most relevant services to each segment, and 2) if you can’t segment or still end up with a large “general” segment, help your reader understand which service is right for them.

Communicating Action: Make it clear what to do next

You don’t want to leave this up to the recipients to figure out. That’s what we call “unsupervised thinking.” You need to do most of the work for them—or you won’t get the click.

There is no clear next step. Here’s what I can picture a recipient thinking: “It looks like you just want me to sign up for the newsletter. It’s the biggest CTA (call to action). But I don’t know who you are. I really don’t care about getting latest news postings on your website. If we already have a relationship, why am I getting this generic email?”

In the end, you are not giving the reader a specific reason to contact you. This goes back to building the problem, explaining why you are the best solution, and telling the reader what they’ll get by clicking where you want them to click.

If this is an email to an unsegmented list, I suggest two options to test:

1. Have only one CTA (you can repeat it at the top and at the bottom, but ultimately you should be asking them to do one thing). The job of this email will be to build enough confidence/interest in your company to get a click. Then you can provide options (if relevant) on the landing page.
2. Have several distinct offers, making very clear which one applies to which customer segment or specific problem it’s solving (even if you can’t segment the list, you should know what the key segments are). Then the job of this email is to help the reader quickly decide which offer is most relevant, and click on the corresponding CTA.

I hope these insights will be helpful, and I look forward to hearing about the results you were able to achieve with them.

Sincerely,

Boris Grinkot

To see more email optimization ideas, you can listen to the replay of our last live web clinic, where the MarketingExperiments team offered testing ideas for audience-submitted email marketing messages.

* I’m not counting 2007—come on!

Smart phones.

As handset costs are driven down, more people are switching to smart phones, such as iPhones & BlackBerrys. Internet usage on mobile phones is increasing, and may well displace much PC and laptop usage.

There are already phones on the market using 1 gigahertz chips, says Andy Rubin, who works on Google’s Android platform. Soon we’ll have mobile phones with 2Ghz processors, which is more than in a lot of laptops,” he predicts, pointing out that a PC is no longer necessary to access emails, to quickly check the net or to update your Facebook page

Google even goes so far as predicting the desktop will be irrelevant within three years:

In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant,” sais John Herlihy, Googles vice president of Global Ad Operations. “In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs. Mobile makes the world’s information universally accessible. Because there’s more information and because it will be hard to sift through it all, that’s why search will become more and more important. This will create new opportunities for new entrepreneurs to create new business models – ubiquity first, revenue later.”

Marketing-speak perhaps, but we do live in interesting times when it comes to new opportunities in search. Google bought mobile advertising network, AdMob, last November for $750m, so expect much integration and new features this year.

Usage patterns are also changing. Because smartphones were more expensive, they tended to be used mainly for business. Now, usage patterns are becoming increasingly consumer oriented. If more people do adopt smart phone usage, what does this mean for PPC advertisers?

A modified approach is needed.

Think Ergonomics

The biggest change will be in terms of ergonomics.

Factors such as small screen real-estate, lack of keyboard, and different modes of interaction will mean whole new search and interface paradigms will be adopted for mobile. Expect a lot more voice commands, and point and click driven functionality. People probably aren’t going to be doing a whole of typing, such as form filling, and they aren’t going to be reading long screeds of text.

Optimize Landing Pages For Mobile

Create pages specifically for mobile users.

Think old-school. Think small and resource-light. Don’t assume Flash or other fancy graphical scripting capabilities. Pages should be short and lean, and code should be optimized and basic.

Avoid making the user scroll too much.

Mobile usage tends to be search dominant.

Make your call to action crystal clear, and easy to tap with a finger. Include your phone number, so people can tap it to call you. Google are also rolling out a click-to-call feature (again) which displays a phone number next to your mobile ads.

Bullet point lists work well on mobiles. Dense text – not so much.

Here are a few helpful tools for testing landing pages on mobile devices:

Testiphone: web browser based simulator for quickly testing your iPhone web applications.

Opera Mini’s Simulator: live demo of Opera Mini 5 beta that functions as it would when installed on a handset.

Run Through Google’s Help Files & Data Options

Google is pushing mobile advertising and will be encouraging existing PPC advertisers to migrate their activities. Check out their official tips.

Also sign up to their Official Mobile blog. Not strictly Adwords related, but may provide insights into their broader global strategy, which is, of course, driven by Adwords.

Another useful source is Mobile Marking Watch, a blog that covers the mobile marketing community.

Google is also now splitting out stats for mobile devices. Here’s how to find them.

Adjust Bid Prices

Just as you bid differently on the content network, you should also adjust bids focused on mobile advertising. The bid competition still isn’t as fierce as on the search network, so you should be able to adjust your prices down.

Think Local, Think Navigation

People on the move tend to be thinking local. In terms of commerce, they want to know where to find restaurants, shops, and attractions. Consider navigational based search activity. Consider geo-targeting. Consider adding geo-specific variables, such as town and city names.

Other marketers are happy to jump at any social media marketing opportunity. To them, Facebook is one big opportunity that they’re just trying to find the right tactics to embrace (of course, it might help to wipe the dollar signs out of their eyes first).

Whatever works

I’m a pragmatist. I’ll leave my personal biases at the door any day in favor of solid metrics combined with scientific experimentation that shows what really works.

Social media measurement dreamers like myself may have a new champion. Omniture (recently acquired by Adobe for $1.8 billion) will announce an expansion of its partnership with Facebook in a keynote address today at Omniture Summit 2010.

Omniture is going to expand its existing search management solution, and its SearchCenter Plus customers will now be able to manage and compare their spend on search engines and on Facebook in a single tool. Online Marketing Suite 2.0 will include Facebook social media optimization, integrating Facebook ad management with Omniture® SearchCenter®.

This unified reporting will help marketers more efficiently understand and respond to ad ROI (and perhaps move from tactical to strategic use of social media marketing).

What gets measured gets done (better)

Omniture’s powerful analytics and testing tools have provided users with reliable reporting and experimental implementation. (Disclosure: MarketingExperiments provides Omniture SiteCatalyst® and Test&Target® consulting and integration services alongside its own optimization and experimental design expertise.)

Detailed demographic and engagement data provided by Facebook’s login-required environment will further help advertisers position their message in front of the right audience. On the practical side of optimization, the ability to use this data is critical to experimental design (understanding performance on segment level), and the automation already provided by Omniture SearchCenter will help roll out tests on Facebook placement faster in the same convenient interface with search ad management.

Will Facebook become more attractive to major marketers?

This is an important step by Facebook to become a more mainstream publisher, opening it up to Omniture’s substantial customer portfolio of major B2B and B2C brands. Tighter Omniture integration brings additional legitimacy to Facebook as a marketing channel, whose power as a social media network has been as business-ambiguous for major ad spenders as it has been popular for tween marketers.

For optimization professionals, this also signals a significant opportunity to gain greater insights and deliver more relevant messages to target customers.

How do you use social to make money? Respond to the discussion in our LinkedIn group or drop us an email. We’ll feature the best tips, techniques, and practices in a future blog post, so make sure to include any info (Twitter handle, website) that you’d like to promote.