Search marketing continuity

This Thursday, I’ll have the pleasure of serving on a panel for the Ad Copy Continuity Clinic at SES Chicago, along with Tim Ash, Jonathan Mendez, and moderator Amanda Watlington. In this highly interactive session, we’ll be reviewing audience volunteered search ads and their associated landing pages, offering real-time feedback and suggestions, primarily through the lens of continuity.

In preparing, I decided to sketch out a holistic view of search marketing continuity:

The essence is that continuity is a function of expectations, implicit and explicit combined.

Search Marketing Continuity: The Core Flow

Certainly the core of search marketing continuity is the alignment of the search query, the ad copy, and the landing page. These elements have a directional flow to them: the user types the query, then sees the ad, then clicks through to the landing page.

Ultimately, continuity must follow through into the sales funnel and the extended customer experience — once good brand expectations are set, you want to live up to them.

But for now, let’s focus on the experience up to and in the landing page.

When crafting a landing page for a particular search ad, it’s important to keep both the search query and the ad copy in mind as the source from which a respondent’s expectations have been set. The exact same ad might create very different expectations depending on the keyword it was associated with.

For example, take one of our ads for landing page software and services:

Performance Landing Pages
Multiply your online marketing ROI.
Tools & services for global clients
www.ioninteractive.com

If this ad appears when someone searches for “landing page software”, it creates a different set of expectations than when someone searches for “landing page services”. Even if the exact same ad is effective for generating clicks from both of those queries, the respondent to the first clicks expecting to see content about software; the second expects to learn about services.

This is the essence of message match. (Our actual strategy for our own search marketing was detailed in a post by Justin last month.)

Landing pages themselves contain many different elements, and while it is the synthesis of all of them, taken as a whole, that impact a respondent’s net sense of continuity, for the sake of crafting or analyzing a page, we can look at the components individually:

• the written content (language, different ways of saying something)
• the image content (photos, illustrations, animations, video)
• the offer (specials, discounts, lead conversion incentives)
• the choices on the page (alternatives, navigation, escape hatches)
• the design, branding, and look-and-feel of the entire page

Traditionally, a lot of emphasis in landing page optimization is placed on testing different written content, image content, and offers — and the interplay between these elements.

Since paid search ads, at least today, are text-only, you might ask how images and design can have continuity in this context? What are the expectations? It’s subtle, but you want visual elements that reinforce and build upon the mental image established by the search query and ad copy. In our example above, “landing page software” might logically include screenshots of our software or a chart of the results or a marketer happily working on their laptop. Obviously, considerable creative license can (and should) be exercised — sometimes surprise is a great effect, as long as it ultimately pays off — but make no mistake: the visual dimension of a landing page is very much part of its continuity.

Consider continuity with choices as well. If someone clicked on an ad offering a white paper or a registration for a webinar, having few choices on the landing page makes sense — a relatively linear flow of steps to reach the white paper or webinar is logical. (Although it’s still up to you to making it compelling.) In contrast, someone responding to a more open-ended or early-in-the-funnel ad might expect more choices to help them interactively discover what’s most interesting about their intersection between their wants/needs and your company.

Design and branding are important for continuity too, but to appreciate that, we need to look beyond the core flow and consider other factors that impact a respondent’s sense of continuity.

Searcher Continuity Factors

The search query may be the first aspect of continuity that advertisers can directly identify with 100% confidence, but in the minds of users, the basis for continuity starts much earlier and is much broader:

• the search intent that motivated the user
• the previous experience has had with the company or the market
• the time and place from which the user is searching

True search intent is hard to know for certain, but it’s important to recognize that a particular search query is often an imperfect representation of that intent, and continuity is in the eye of the beholder. A user may try several different searches to find the results they’re looking for. Words and phrases can have overloaded meanings and different interpretations. Note that one way to deal with this challenge of ambiguity is to use post-click segmentation on your landing page.

Time and place — a function of geographic location — can also reveal expectations. People doing local searches (implicitly or explicitly) expect local advertisers — or a persuasive reason to consider a remote or virtual alternative. Often the circumstances of time and place (is it late at night? is it snowing?) contribute to intent. Location also inherits cultural norms, certainly applicable internationally, but even the difference between California, New York, and Texas can be significant enough to alter expectations.

However, perhaps the most significant factor outside the search query that contributes to a user’s expectations is previous experience with the company or the market. This is where design and branding are most connected to continuity in search marketing. If a user has a preconceived image of your firm — as a result of other marketing initiatives, your reputation, accepted standards in your industry, or a previous interaction with you — those are underlying expectations they bring to your ad and landing page.

For instance, a landing page for a pizzeria can have cheesy (ahem) stock photography and a somewhat clunky layout without really damaging its brand (albeit, not necessarily improving it either). However, if Apple Computer were to have such a landing page, it would be a disastrous discontinuity — because the expectation of design elegance is an established and integral part of their brand.

This isn’t just about brand standards per se — although those are certainly a part of it. Your landing page should maintain continuity with your overall brand.

Granted, there may be times when you wish to intentionally break continuity here — for the effect of surprise or to emphasize the difference of something from what preceded it — but do so carefully and be sure to pay it off.

Competitive Continuity Factors

Your search marketing doesn’t take place in a vacuum, an isolated funnel with just you and a prospect. When a user issues a search query and sees your ad, they’re also seeing it in the context of the organic results and competitor ads.

This content is largely outside of your control — although one certainly hopes to be ranking high in organic results with SEO efforts — but it nonetheless feeds into to a user’s mental picture of the search query. Everything on the search results page contributes to a user’s expectations for your ad and your landing page. Do your ad and landing page match with that picture?

Now, in this context, you may consciously decide to break continuity — at least to a certain degree. You want your ad and your landing page to stand out from the crowd. Differentiation is a powerful strategic device. However, it still must make sense. Balancing differentiation and continuity with the surrounding environment is one of the finer skills in executing exceptional search marketing.

Keep track of your competitors, where their ads are ranking, where their organic results are ranking. Click through to their landing pages to see what they present and how they present it. You don’t necessarily want to mimic them, or even acknowledge them, but if you understand that some of your respondents will visit your competitors’ landing pages before or after yours — and that will impact their expectations — you can leverage that knowledge to your advantage.

Sculpting expectations around competitors can be done on defense or offense. Is your ad at the top of the list of sponsored links, the middle, or the bottom? The higher your placement, the better your chance to set expectations that your competitors will lose points on; the lower your placement, the more opportunity you have to engage in judo marketing — leveraging expectations set by competitors against them.

For example, if your competitors are all emphasizing FREE SHIPPING and LOWEST PRICES, you have the option of emphasizing delivery time, reliability, customer service, etc., and painting them with the help of their own words as cheap and low quality. Even if you offer “complimentary shipping” as well, you have tremendous creative freedom in how you choose to incorporate that into your presentation.

Conclusion

Continuity is bigger simply having your ads match your landing pages. By understanding the entire space in which ads and landing pages are experienced in the minds of your respondents, you can take full advantage of implied continuity.