A Look at Results: The Personal Message on a Landing Page is Better for Professional Services

My Client, Career Counselor Michael Reddy, was looking to get more leads for his The Right Mountain career counseling program. The program is high-end, targeted towards professionals who are changing their careers. The program encourages people to look within themselves to find out what career path would be most appropriate for them.

Results: increased lead amount by 8x while only increasing budget by 28%

Adwords: The Right Mountain already had an adwords campaign going, getting a relatively low amount of leads. The keyword list was not too bad, and was in logical groups already (around career, employment, job etc), so I simply added a few more and modified bids. The text of the ads was less than compelling, so I changed it, giving it more appeal. I also used best practices, such as making the ad aligned and changed the display URL from www.therightmountain.com to TheRightMountain.com. Also, I used Google’s geotargeting tool – moving the targeting from all of Ontario, to the area surrounding Toronto (doing a custom shape in “target customers by location” was very handy for this).

Landing Pages: I created two landing pages. One was a generic message and one was a very personal message from Michael (I think of Michael as an inspirational guy, so I was betting that users would feel the same way). Banner design was provided by Viewpoint Interactive and development by PC Tantrums.

Testing:

Concept One: During my phone interviews with career seekers, they were less interested in the generic message than the personal message. They felt that this message was compelling, it was just like anything else that you might find on the web – which I interpreted as this message having less credibility since it did not focus on the personal – and career counseling is a very personal thing! One user during testing said that he would pay anything to get unstuck – so I added that to the headline.

Concept Two: This concept tested way better than the fish concept. People liked the personal message, and Michael’s own history added a lot of credibility for these professionals. I would have not released the fish concept at all, but there was one comment along the lines of “I don’t know his daughter, so I don’t really care if she can steer a boat!” This is the risk of a personal message – although some people will find it more compelling and touching, others might find it too sentimental. I decided to use both landing pages, and let the results from Adwords tell me what my next step should be.

Adwords Results:
For one month, we got the following results:
CTR: 0.89%
Conversion Rate: 9.04%

A conversion is either filling in a Contact Us form or joining the newsletter list. In general, I was happy with the conversion rates, especially since before it was under 1%. Since we are using up our budget every day, I am not too concerned about the CTR at this point. The cost per conversion was also very reasonable.

Since the landing pages were so different, I attached different ads to them. The map listing (at the top) the “Stuck” and the  “Unsatisfied” listing was linked to the first concept, and the “Need a Career Change” and “Toronto Career Counseling” was linked to the second concept.

As you can see, as a local service, the listing on Google Maps was the most favorable from a conversion standpoint. Other than that, the first concept was both the best and worst in terms of conversions (11.8% and 0%) with the second concept and more personal message in the middle. However, overall the more personal message fared slightly better when the total number of conversions is taken into account (this data is confidential).

So, the personal message has a bit more appeal but it doesn’t kill the other message in terms of results. I always find it interesting when my landing page testing is different from my qualitative interviews and what I think myself! I would have bet that the personal message would knock the generic message out of the ballpark in terms of conversions after the phone interviews, but that just isn’t the case.   However, the ad text is likely playing a role as well – so this campaign is a good candidate for a/b testing to be sure. I will do that as a next step and post results here when I get them! Constantly iterating will make the campaign a bigger and bigger success!