“Google loves post-click marketing!”

That was how Tom Leung from Google began his presentation on the Post-Click Marketing: Converting Search Engine Traffic panel at Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose this past week. How could that not bring a smile to our face?

For us, that really capped a phenomenal week where “post-click marketing” clearly emerged into the mainstream. After coining that phrase in the spring of 2005, our mission for the past 3 years has been to dramatically improve the effectiveness of online marketing by focusing on fresh ideas for landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites.

We’ve brought some unconventional thinking to the world of landing pages:

• deploying multi-page landing experiences;
• advocating A/B testing for its clarity and big-picture impact instead of MVT;
• emphasizing one-click, self-segmentation by respondents;
• incorporating Flash, widgets, and social media in landing pages;

What a difference a year makes! At SES in 2007, there was a lot of skepticism about these ideas. Most people we talked to believed that multivariate testing (MVT) would be the miracle cure for landing page performance.

This year, 2008, it was a completely different ball game.

A lot of people had tried MVT and not gotten the results they expected. It was becoming clear that three things really matter in post-click marketing:

1. The freedom to rapidly create and deploy highly-targeted landing pages for specific ads — without IT or developer delays — to make sure that The Long Tail of online advertising didn’t ignominiously end in a Short Tail of generic landing pages.
2. The power to run simple but high-impact A/B tests that any front-line marketer can easily implement and understand, rather than getting bogged down in more complicated MVT that all-too-frequently devolves into “let’s throw a bunch of random words and images against the wall”.
3. The ability to segment respondents — either before the click or after the click — to deliver the right content to the right people and to optimize for each segment independently. (As Michele Hickford, our Director of Client Strategy says, “If you test for the average, you’ll get average results.”)

It also helped that we were able to show plenty of specific examples of this from Citrix, Bronto Software, CDC News, Overland Storage, the New England Journal of Medicine, Howard Johnson, American Greetings, Anthem, Millennium Bankcard — a big THANK YOU to all of our customers who let us share some of their success stories!

The bottom line: testing is important, to be sure. But it’s only successful if you test the right ideas for the right people. It’s a means, not an end. Post-click marketing > testing.

These topics kept coming up in a variety of sessions and conversations across the SES show. Many discussions about tapping into The Long Tail (or “the Mid Tail”) and segmenting respondents strategically ultimately led back to the need for segment-specific landing experiences. It was music to our ears!

Here are some excerpts and links to what other people had to say about the two panels we participated on:

• Landing Page Utopia: Expert Roundtable
• A synopsis by Ashley on the TopRank Online Marketing blog.
• An automotive-industry perspective on the session by Top Dealer SEO.
• An outline of key points by Charlene Jaszewski on the aimClear blog.
• Another perspective of “The Ideal Society of Landing” by Cal Coast Web Design.

• Post-Click Marketing: Converting Search Engine Traffic
• A summary from Susan Esparza of Bruce Clay, including this excellent remark attributed to Tom Leung of Google:

  “I’d agree about the power of A/B testing. At the end of the day, people get the best results from very small tests. Small tests make you focus. Multivariate tests can make you lose your focus.”

  Since Tom is the product manager for Google’s Website Optimizer, a free testing tool that supports both A/B and MVT, he’s surely seen thousands of examples of both kinds of tests. It’s great to hear that he’s independently come to the same conclusion we have.

After that session, I can say that post-click marketing loves Google too! ;-)

We’re incredibly jazzed that at next week’s Search Engine Strategies (SES) show in San Jose, post-click marketing and landing pages 2.0 will be all over the conference.

Landing Page Utopia: Expert Roundtable

On Tuesday, August 19 at 4PM,  we’ll be on the panel for this session that will reveal some of the best secrets of landing page professionals. We’ll talk about 3 rock-your-socks landing pages 2.0 techniques that have consistently delivered double-digit conversion rates — including some of the latest uses of widgets and social media on landing pages.

Thanks to the generosity of a number of our customers, we’ll be able to show you a wide variety of real-world examples.

Post-Click Marketing: Converting Search Engine Traffic

Wow! On Thursday, August 21 at 1:30PM will be the first time a major conference has dedicated an entire session explicitly to post-click marketing — reflecting the increasing excitement in the industry for leveraging what happens AFTER the click as part of your overall search marketing strategy.

We’re thrilled to be on the panel with Carrie Hill of Blizzard Internet Marketing, Laura Wilson of the New England Journal of Medicine, and Tom Leung of Google. For our portion of the talk, we’ll focus on two things:

1. A different (and more effective) kind of landing page optimization.
2. A thorough look at self-segmentation after the click: how and why.

Landing Pages 2.0 at Booth #529

We’ll be exhibiting on Tuesday and Wednesday as well — please do stop by, meet the team, and pick up a copy of a landing pages 2.0 document that that will expand your mind (and your conversion rate) with 8 killer techniques.

Hope we see you there!