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Dec29

Small Businesses Raise Search Spend in 2009

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Research from WebVisible shows that small business spending on search advertising has risen. This is primarily due to the effectiveness of this medium.

Average spending by small-business search advertisers was up 91% year over year and 93% quarter over quarter in Q3. The average number of keywords purchased was also up.

Worth noting is that Microsoft’s new search engine Bing also resulted in the highest click through of the top search engines. If you are not yet listed in Bing as a local business take a look at our earlier post on setting up a Bing Local Business Listing
Other research in the small business space also indicates that in addition to email marketing, search engine advertising will be increasing into 2010.

Key findings related to Search Engine ads and visitor actions include:

93.1% – Click through to a website
49.2% -Submit an email
49.0% – Print Landing Page

If you are new to search engine advertising then we would suggest you consider testing it out. Even if you have a small budget you can still run some ads and see what your results look like. In fact most companies take a small budget to try out new keywords to see what words perform the best, before they spend a lot of money on a longer term campaign.

Source: eMarketer

Possibly Related Posts:

Oct26

A/B Test Splits and How to use them

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A/B Testing

We have heard so many times that small changes can have a big impact on your bottom line. Well this is also the case with A/B Tests, because you can test different scenarios online and see which tests perform better.

A/B Testing Explained

A/B Testing involves testing two scenarios against each other in it’s most simplest form. In more advanced forms you could use multi-variate testing for more than two tests. So lets provide some examples to understand the power of A/B testing.

Some examples of where you may want to try out A/B testing is in your email, on your website and landing pages.

a) Email A/B testing could involve sending two emails with two different subject lines to half of your newsletter list. Just to see which subject lines performs better and generates more opens and clicks.

b) Website A/B testing could involve displaying one offer on your home page to some of your visitors and another offer to other visitors. Put another way, half of your visitors would see either offer 1 or offer 2.

The key takeaway from A/B Test Splits is making sure you maintain a controlled test to ensure what you are testing is really the two variables. Testing on different days of the week, or different times of the day can have an impact on your end results. And it may have nothing to do with the variables you are testing in the A/B test. Otherwise you could misread the test results and come to the wrong conclusions since the test was changed because of other factors.

What do you try and test?

You really need to decide what you want to test and try to keep it simple at first. Creating two offers or two emails can seem like doing more work at first. But if you don’t test you may not know what you are missing out on. Which could include higher clicks, more orders, be more work upfront but can also have a big impact even for small changes.

What colors you choose and where you put your call to action buttons makes a difference in getting noticed.

For ideas on where you might get the best improvements look at what others are doing.

Online Resource for learning about A/B results – ABTests.com

ABTests.com is a great place to learn and share what A/B testing has done for others. ABTests is providing an online directory highlighting success stories using A/B Testing.
A recent such case study highlights a Driving School that was able to achieve a 15% improvement on their home page.

To perform the home page testing they used Google’s Web Optimizer which is a free tool that you can use on your own website.