I recently wrote a post about my 2007 revamp of my PPC campaigns and the focus was on landing pages. I feel like I’m hammering home the topic, but I came across another quality article from Chief Marketer that has relevance for the small business marketer. The focus of the article is on the topic of landing page testing and how a study showed this was a big ROI winner for marketers.

“On the one hand, this didn’t surprise us, because landing-page tests have ranked as the highest-impact tests in other online media for years. In fact, a December 2006 MarketingSherpa study of the world’s heaviest online advertisers revealed that 56% had budgeted significantly for landing-page A/B tests in 2007.”

Anne Holland, president of MarketingSherpa, does a nice job of presenting the topic and offering a couple of examples. What really got my attention was her comments on running tests when your web or IT group can’t help you. This is a huge issue for small business marketers. She writes:

“My suggestion: Try a few campaigns using supercheap, alternative Web page applications. What are these? You can find blogging software, online survey form software, and landing-page testing software from a variety of providers online that cost less than $50 a month. With a little ingenuity, all of these can be set up to look very much like a page on your own Website as you might want it to appear for e-mail clickthroughs.”

As I’ve said before, I’m not a web developer. I know enough to be dangerous, but I’m not an expert. I have the opportunity right now to beta test Google AdWords’ new Website Optimization tool and the biggest obstacle is getting the three sets of code set up on our website. Our website is rather complex and although Google does a nice job of laying out the instructions, the installation has had some challenges. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a full web team to work with??? Well, I don’t have that and many others do not either. Does this leave me disadvantaged? I don’t believe so. Anne’s suggestions are one route and there is always more than one way to test.

I’m going to look into Anne’s suggestion and compare her idea with Google’s new Website Optimization tool. So far Google’s tool looks incredible, but if I can’t get the code working, I won’t be able to use it. I hope to review the tool on this blog along with Anne’s suggestion as well.

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