Creative Thinking: New Capability in Covario Marketing Action Platform Drives Performance Improvements

Covario has been doing a lot of work to understand how creative testing is driving improvements in paid search performance.  In the last release of the Covario Marketing Action Plaform, we added a new Creative Analysis solution to help our agency customers test creative concepts at scale. Testing creative is a notoriously difficult process given the data and process issues involved, however we believe that performance (ROI or CPA) can be improved by 10-15% through improved creative alignment with landing page content.

Let me discuss the process and data difficulties involved.

It is difficult enough to test creative on CTRs (where you can use search engine only data), it is quite another problem to test creative impact on CPA.  First, a testing methodology must be developed – we usually see 3-4 concepts tried (concepts like “buy now,” “free shipping,” “reliability,” “official site,” “brand name,” etc).  For most of our customers, this must be done weekly, across campaigns in 10+ county/language groups, and 1-2 new campaigns. This leads to 30-80 different testing concepts weekly, 120-320 monthly, and 1,440 to 3,840 annually.  Global rebranding campaigns have been known to test 600-1000 creative concepts in 30+ countries in a single week.

The challenge is getting the data from the on page behavior – conversion, CPA. There are two ways to do this:

1.       Use your own tag on the landing page (which many bid systems do – but it is simply not possible with advertisers that are global and have sites with 100K pages and more – which most global brand advertisers have.  This is common in retail, but rare in brand advertisers or B2B markets.

2.       Leverage the existing web analytics tags that are already there – and code the url with unique tracking codes that are unique not only to keyword, adgroup, and search engine – but creative as well.

We use the latter with our clients since tagging our clients’ sites with yet another tag is difficult to negotiate with IT. With the unique tag, you can track performance all the way through to the landing page and optimize creative against the landing page experience.  If you are selling laptops, don’t run creative that says “free shipping” and send people to a landing page that is not the purchase page.  Or market “long battery life” in the creative and have the landing page say nothing about this feature.

Is the value worth the hassle?  The below is an example from a telephony company with whom we work.  Their site is driving traffic to landing pages that allow users to select a carrier through with they can purchase the telephone equipment.  We tested many different creative concepts, but the major driver was using not just the manufacturer brand name, but also the name of the wireless system from partner wireless carriers. If the creative had both the equipment manufacturers name and the wireless carrier name – we had a winner.

We ran this test with three carriers – one of which (#3) did not allow us to use their name in the creative.  Results are below:

CTRs for Carrier 3 are 34.91% below the average for the entire campaign – while they are 15.27% and 22.91% above for the carriers allows us to use their name in the creative. CPC is the highest for carrier #3.

Most importantly, when the visitor gets to the landing page, Carrier #3 is listed there – but since the visitors with a predisposition toward that brand are “qualified out” since their name was not in the creative, even the CPA is 9.02% below the average for the campaign.

There is a 20% variance in the CPA between the carriers using optimized creative, and those that do not.  That is significant in a highly competitive market.  We are rolling out aggressive creative testing for our customers using Covario for paid search agency work – and we recommend all of our customers build creative testing into their campaign setup and design plans.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #1: Creative optimization can drive 10-15% improvements in overall performance for PPC campaigns.  With the costs/frictions of doing creative testing reduced – creative testing and analysis has to become part of the campaign process.  We recommend that 3-4 creative concepts be tested with every campaign/adgroup – with smaller adgroup sizes used to tightly target the creative around the keyword groups. Though testing should ALWAYS be done, we recommend testing concepts that include “OFFICIAL SITE” in the creative – 5 times out of 10, this drives improved performance.

Bookmark this post: