Everything Can Be Optimized, Even This Headline
Optimizely is the world’s leading experimentation platform, a favorite of Fortune 100 companies to test and improve their digital experiences to make better decisions everyday. Their marketing team never settles for “good enough” in their drive to introduce even more companies to the transformative power of continual experimentation.
The Goal
Optimizely’s cost per lead on search was impacted by the competitiveness of their critical keywords. They challenged Metric Theory to improve cost per lead by finding ways to lower the cost of traffic while simultaneously increasing conversion rates.
The Metric Theory and Optimizely teams worked in tandem to develop a multi-tiered strategy to tackle this increasingly pervasive challenge, but the end result was enough to make them a finalist for the Drum Search Awards in 2018. The campaign came down to three primary angles of attack:
- Quality Score Improvements
- Landing Page Personalization
- Conversion Event Testing
Landing Page Testing & Personalization
To improve landing page relevance and experience, Optimizely and Metric Theory worked together to develop new landing page concepts to test, increasing conversion rates. The team also applied Optimizely’s personalization product to the landing pages, tailoring page content to the original search via symmetric messaging to increase relevancy for each user.
Quality Score Improvement
Metric Theory’s analytics and measurement team designed and deployed a Google Scripts-powered report and project planner so that both teams could track progress at macro and individual levels for this initiative. Real-time access to changes in quality score allowed them to stay nimble with updates to campaign strategy.
Conversion Event Testing
Broader, higher-funnel keywords can have ambiguous intent. Metric Theory and Optimizely tested conversion events at various depths of the funnel, from assets geared toward initial research, to more technical whitepapers, to product demos, to get the best understanding of what appealed most to each search audience.
With jumps in quality score as large as going from a 1 to a 7 in a matter of weeks, Metric Theory and Optimizely’s rapid and iterative campaign led to huge impact on the performance of key searches.
