Optimizing Display URLs for Trust and Relevance
IMPAQT Case Study: Financial
A top financial services provider and credit card company understood that trustworthy ads could help them yield best results. They wanted to identify which trustworthy messages helped them stand out in a competitive Search environment, and sought IMPAQT’s help to conduct this test.
QUESTION:
How could IMPAQT help this client identify and create ads that were deemed most trustworthy by searchers?
REVELATION:
The client’s existing ads contained similar ad copy and landing pages, but different Display URLs. We set out to identify which Display URLs led to the most clicks and conversions.
IMPAQT set up a four-way A/B test designed to control for variations of keyword performance, as well as keyword distribution across pages.
We chose the client’s leading brand product and used that product’s particular terms to serve the testing ad copy. All ad copy led to the same landing page and there were only slight variations between them. We tested four different variations of the Display URL:
- www.Client.com/Product
- www.Client.com/Offer
- www.Client.com
- www.getclientproduct.com
We found that the “Client.com/Product” variation provided the best results.
The IMPAQT:
The client implemented the “Client.com/Product” variation across all of its PPC ads for its leading brand product. This Display URL provided a 31% increase in clickthrough rate (CTR) (also inferred as a 23 basis points blended lift) compared to previous ads.
In addition, the client saw a 50 basis points lift for accounts over the previous ads, which translate into an additional 500 new accounts that year.
Overall, this effort showed that the display URL is directly correlated with clickthrough rate and that even g a simple change to the display URL can increase clickthrough rate.
"Our observations of the vendor's management team show them to have two refreshing attributes that are disappointingly absent from other vendors we reviewed: 1) they take an emotional stake in their company and in their clients' welfare, and 2) they're a practical group who focuses more on doing the work than on how they spin what they do."
The Forrester Wave™: US Search Marketing Agencies, Q1 2011 (January 2011)
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Optimizing Display URLs for Trust and Relevance - IMPAQT Financial Client Case Study