ion LiveBall Landing Page Case Studies

Adler Media

2012-03-16T15:53:00Z

Lifting average conversion rates to 24% with message-matched landing pages.

Learning what potential students want even before they call.

“LiveBall allows our boutique agency to outperform larger shops. We do more with less.”
Cisco Adler
President, Adler Media Group

background

Adler Media Group is an online marketing agency based in North Carolina. They specialize in landing page strategy, pay-per-click management, and graphic design.

challenge

Adler Media Group President Cisco Adler recognized that his agency needed a way to quickly build landing pages. They were building websites, but wanted a more robust solution to offer landing page services to all of their clients. Landing page production

was slowing the Adler team down, and the added production costs were often too much for their smaller clients. To offer landing pages as part of their services, the Adler Media Group needed the ability to quickly make high-quality landing pages that were cost-effective.

solution

Adler Media Group discovered that with LiveBall they could do a lot more for their clients.

With LiveBall, the Adler Media Group could quickly build sophisticated landing pages without code or developers in a fifth of the time it took previously took them. Thanks to the time that they are saving, they are able to leverage LiveBall to produce remarkable results for more clients.

increased speed and scalability

The Adler Media Group also assists Belmont Abbey College with their email marketing and landing page development. Before LiveBall, their email marketing campaigns simply linked to a page on the college’s website, and the tracking and profiling was limited.

Now, with LiveBall, the Adler Media Group can quickly and easily create campaign or event-specific landing pages. In their email marketing efforts, the college links to specific landing pages and then segments prospective students based on what’s most important to them in a college experience. LiveBall has also made it possible for the college to track the actions of web visitors throughout their landing experiences, which gives the admissions department a much better idea of what potential students want before they even get the student on the phone.

Linking to a specific landing page instead of linking to the college’s website lifted average conversion rates to 24%.

what’s next

Another perk of using LiveBall is console-wide reporting, which gives Adler Media greater insight into trends across their entire client base. This allows them to leverage overall trends, and often results in an earlier success rate for new clients.

“Thanks to the broad picture that LiveBall provides across our client base, I can look at a new client’s business model and have a fairly sound strategy right off the bat”, Adler said.

Adler has recently noticed that microsites are performing much better for clients with slightly more complex products, so they are looking forward to testing more microsites across their client base.

Anvil

2012-03-16T15:51:00Z

From Zero to Mobile with LiveBall

“Replicating and easily tweaking pages with LiveBall saves us a ton of time. It probably takes a quarter of the time that it would usually take to individually build out all of those pages.”
Kim Toomey
Senior Account Executive, Anvil Media, Inc.

Mobile-optimized example from Insight Schoolbackground

Anvil Media is a search engine marketing agency that specializes in search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) management, mobile and social media marketing services. Anvil doesn’t have full-time developers on staff, so before they started using LiveBall, they simply didn’t have the resources to build landing pages for their clients. In order for Anvil to test its conversion optimization suggestions, it had to place the burden of building landing pages on clients.

Thanks to LiveBall, Anvil’s account team is now able to quickly create and test landing pages on a large and ever-expanding scale – without placing any burden on clients – for some pretty remarkable results.

Take, for instance, the story of how Anvil was able to leverage LiveBall’s scalability to take its client, Insight Schools, from one landing page to multiple pages and a mobile landing page campaign.

From one to many

Insight Schools is a public online high school available in eight states. Anvil manages a PPC program for Insight Schools which includes a very large and wide variation of keywords ranging from “online high school” to “high school diploma.” Insight Schools initially had a low quality score for some keywords because it was directing traffic from the broad range of keywords to one generic landing page.

Using LiveBall’s templates, Anvil quickly built five different landing pages based on five different keyword themes. Then, instead of making eight different state-specific versions for each of the five keyword-themed pages, Anvil used LiveBall’s dynamic content substitution tool to automatically change the page copy and logos for each state. Creating and managing 5 pages instead of 40 not only saved Anvil production time and made test management easier, but it also had some pretty remarkable results.

One month after launching the keyword specific landing pages, Insight School’s quality score improved by 22% and its average cost-per-click decreased. For Anvil, LiveBall meant that it was able to deliver faster results to its client.

From many to mobile

Excited by what it was able to accomplish, Anvil was inspired to test another concept utilizing LiveBall: mobile landing pages. Insight Schools was a perfect client with which to try mobile, because its target audience consists primarily of teenagers with smartphones.

Using LiveBall’s mobile templates, Anvil created a mobile landing page with two calls to action: a click to call button and a request for more information inquiry form. As with their previous landing page, Anvil used LiveBall’s dynamic content substitution feature in the mobile landing page to swap out copy and logos for each state accordingly. Once the page was completed, Anvil paired LiveBall’s mobile landing page with Google AdWords mobile-only campaigns.

The result

The conversion rate for the mobile campaign was 40% higher than traditional non-mobile online ads and the cost-per-conversion was 51% lower. The mobile campaign quickly became one of Insight School’s lowest cost-per-conversion campaigns.

what’s next?

Anvil plans to create and test more LiveBall mobile landing pages for additional clients. LiveBall was a key enabler, helping take Anvil from not being able to create landing pages themselves, to creating mobile pages. Anvil plans to keep expanding its reach and success with LiveBall in the future as well.

Axway

2012-03-16T15:49:45Z

Landing page testing results in 291% increase in ROI.

Using LiveBall to manage and test Axway’s PPC landing page program has helped Anvil save Axway over $100,000 per year, increasing their ROI by 291% (including services costs). Axway has seen a significant improvement in the number of leads and in the cost-per-lead since this program started.
Nick Herinckx
Senior Account Executive, Anvil Media, Inc.

background

Anvil Media is a search engine marketing agency that specializes in search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) management, mobile and social media marketing services. Anvil Media’s client, Axway, creates software solutions and offers related services that enable business-critical transactions, such as managed file transfers, business operations monitoring, secure email, and identity validation solutions just to name a few. Their technology increases the speed and reliability of business interactions by optimizing the way information is moved, managed and protected.

the challenge

In order to free up part of their budget for additional campaigns in new verticals, Axway needed to lower the cost-per-lead of their PPC campaigns. Axway was using landing pages created in-house, but they weren’t testing and only used one basic layout. Since Anvil Media was already testing ads and keywords, they decided to shift their focus onto testing PPC landing pages in an effort to lower their cost-per-lead and ultimately improve conversion rates.

the solution

Anvil turned to LiveBall to quickly create, launch and test hundreds of targeted landing pages without relying on Axway’s IT resources. Their plan was to create custom landing pages for each ad group in Axway’s top PPC campaigns and conduct real-time, multivariate testing to find the best combination of colors, call-to-actions, headlines and trust elements.

making it happen

The Anvil team began by creating one multi-page landing experience that served as their “master template”. Then, instead of having to manually rebuild these pages over and over again for each ad group, they used LiveBall’s “copy from existing creative” feature to duplicate their entire first landing experience. All Anvil had to do was customize the headlines and overall messaging on the duplicate page to match the appropriate ad group. Using LiveBall’s campaign-wide script feature, Anvil was able to ensure that the proper Google Analytics and Google AdWords tracking codes were automatically added to all of the pages in this campaign.

To improve relevancy and improve message match, the Anvil team took advantage of LiveBall’s dynamic content substitution feature, automatically inserting the searched keyword into the page copy.

Additionally, confirmation emails (with whitepaper and case studies attached) were automatically triggered and sent as soon as someone filled out a lead generation form. Using LiveBall’s flexible integration features, Anvil was able to ensure that all of the lead data collected by LiveBall was automatically and seamlessly exported into Axway’s sales system.

Within two months, the Anvil team was ready to launch 330 targeted, granular landing pages for all of Axway’s ad groups.

testing

Using LiveBall’s code-free testing tools, the Anvil team started A/B testing different headline formats. As the pages began to receive a high volume of traffic, multivariate testing was utilized for the same tests.

The Anvil team liked how the MVT interface made it possible to edit page elements right within the creative, saving them from creating or duplicating landing pages for new tests. Once the multivariate tests were set up, Anvil chose to let LiveBall automatically optimize to the winning combination. This timesaving feature allowed the Anvil team to easily set up and manage hundreds of custom landing page tests.

results

During the tests, the Anvil team didn’t make significant changes to the AdWords account so that they could isolate, as best as possible, the effect that the landing pages had — and they had great results. Conversions increased by 17% with the exact same media spend!

Thus far, using LiveBall to manage and test Axway’s PPC landing page program has helped Anvil saved Axway over $100,000 per year, increasing their ROI by 291% (including services costs). Axway has seen a significant improvement in the number of leads and in the cost-per-lead since this program started.

what’s next?

With results like this, Axway wants to keep testing! Axway and Anvil are both excited to continue to test and optimize to bigger and better success.

Closed Loop Marketing

2012-03-16T15:38:34Z

Multivariate testing and A/B testing with LiveBall doubles conversion rates.

LiveBall enables a continual cycle of innovation that allows our clients to maximize the return on their online marketing – I see it as a direct source of competitive advantage for them.
Lance Loveday
CEO, Closed Loop Marketing
Author, Web Design for ROI

background

Closed Loop Marketing specializes in making websites more profitable. Founded in 2001, the agency’s core services include A/B/multivariate testing, search marketing, landing page optimization, user experience optimization and user research.

the challenge

Prior to using LiveBall, Closed Loop Marketing faced a challenge many marketers are familiar with: having to rely on client IT teams to get landing pages built and deployed on their clients’ websites. The process was slow and inefficient – IT resources often weren’t readily available, and sometimes they weren’t able to produce pages to spec, introducing delays for corrections and updates. Frustrated, Closed Loop Marketing looked for better, more agile solutions to landing page optimization, and found LiveBall.

for example

Using LiveBall, Closed Loop Marketing has helped its client, Blurb, increase site registrations from their pay-per-click (PPC) and display ad traffic segments.

Blurb helps customers create their own bookstore-quality books. Its business model is e-commerce with a twist: First, customers register and create their custom book with one of Blurb’s free book-making tools. Next, they upload the finished book to Blurb’s site. Finally, they order printed copies of their book from Blurb’s site. They can also make their book available in Blurb’s online store for others to order.

Closed Loop Marketing had been managing Blurb’s PPC campaigns and had grown the campaigns substantially over time, but had always been constrained to using landing pages available on Blurb’s main website. Without direct access or control over the pages for landing page testing or tweaks, Closed Loop Marketing was limited in how quickly they could test new ideas.

In 2010, when Blurb wanted to take their PPC campaigns to the next level, Closed Loop Marketing told them they’d need to focus on landing page optimization. And that meant incorporating real-time testing and a more nimble approach to page iteration.

the solution

Closed Loop Marketing selected LiveBall to help them launch and test new landing page experiences quickly and easily without having to further burden their clients’ already overtaxed web development teams.

the example with LiveBall

Closed Loop Marketing took a phased validation approach to expanding Blurb’s landing pages. First, Closed Loop Marketing created a new design template that incorporated usability and conversion best practices, and deployed the new template across the 5 highest volume products. Next, the new template was A/B tested against the old page, and each test resulted in strong conversion improvement for the new template. Armed with this test data, Closed Loop Marketing used the new template to build new pages for products and keyword groupings that previously had no separate landing pages. Closed Loop Marketing also built localized versions of the new pages for the EU, Australia, Canada and the UK. Finally, after a round of baseline testing, Closed Loop Marketing leveraged LiveBall’s dynamic elements to quickly expand the new pages into multiple tailored versions, each with a tighter focus than before. LiveBall’s platform has allowed Closed Loop Marketing to easily manage and test over 200 targeted landing experiences.

Once the major portion of the landing page expansion was complete, Closed Loop Marketing moved to the next part of their plan. Using LiveBall’s A/B and multivariate testing capabilities, they created a testing plan to try larger, more innovative changes to the template and then smaller, iterative changes to the landing page elements. With LiveBall’s no-code multivariate testing tool they have tested multiple variations of page copy, imagery, call-to-action buttons, and many other elements.

LiveBall made it possible for Closed Loop to quickly create new pages, test many individual page elements, manage hundreds of pages, and measure and report on success across each campaign.

results

With rapid, continual testing in LiveBall, Closed Loop Marketing quickly saw Blurb’s average conversion to registration rates nearly double, from 7 to 13% on average, and it continues to increase today.

Thanks to high-converting landing pages and landing page testing, Closed Loop Marketing has been able to steadily increase the registration volume and revenue from Blurb’s search marketing program while maintaining Blurb’s desired ROI. The constant cycle of innovation and optimization made possible by LiveBall has given Blurb a considerable competitive advantage: a projected annual increase in conversions that’s measured in the tens of thousands.

Closed Loop Marketing CEO Lance Loveday explains it best, “Landing page optimization is the other half of search marketing – the one people talk a lot about but don’t really act on. With LiveBall, we can do landing page optimization the right way, and the results speak for themselves.”

what’s next

Closed Loop Marketing plans to continue leveraging their deep expertise in SEM and LPO to help clients get the most out of the SEM channel. By building LiveBall into the formula, Closed Loop Marketing gets an end-to-end campaign management offering with the control they need to do their best work, and their clients get better results than competitors who take the traditional piecemeal approach to SEM.

Lab Escape

2012-03-16T15:25:32Z

Campaign landing pages & A/B testing result in a 280% conversion rate increase.

Using LiveBall’s code-free A/B testing, OpenMoves was able lower Lab Escape’s bounce rates and increase conversion rates, without an increase in PPC budget.
Amir Chitayat
President, OpenMoves

background

OpenMoves is a New York based online boutique dedicated to creating online marketing campaigns that convert, helping clients move from concept to creation with PPC, SEO, and email marketing campaigns. Lab Escape is a small software company that develops commercial data visualization tools that enable information professionals to make better decisions. Lab Escape’s goal is to bring advanced data visualization techniques into the mainstream, so companies of all sizes can take advantage of the power of data maps.

the challenge

The Lab Escape website hadn’t been updated in a number of years, and as a result it was barely generating leads from their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. Lab Escape was sending PPC traffic to their outdated homepage instead of a dedicated landing page, so while they were getting good traffic, conversion rates hovered around 0.8 - 2%. Lab Escape’s homepage and the other pages within their website didn’t have lead generation forms, imagery or targeted copy. Without tracking activity on the site, there was no way of knowing which elements were driving conversions. As OpenMoves President Amir Chitayat best described it, landing on Lab Escape’s website from a PPC ad was, “kind of like landing in the middle of Wal-Mart without knowing which aisle to take.” OpenMoves knew that in order to improve conversion rates, a strategic landing page program needed to be put in place.

the solution

Since the adoption of LiveBall in 2008, OpenMoves has used LiveBall as their firm’s dedicated landing page platform. It made perfect sense to leverage the LiveBall platform for the execution of the new lead-gen strategy. The OpenMoves team quickly created four new campaign-specific landing page experiences that were designed to help improve Lab Escape’s quality score and conversion rate for new leads. Each landing page featured a strong call to action and lead generation form designed to encourage the download of a free trial.

OpenMoves used LiveBall to track page interaction and behavior. A seamless Salesforce integration sent lead information on directly to the Lab Escape’s sales team (and into an email drip campaign) upon form submission. OpenMoves then focused on setting up A/B experiences, testing to find a winning format for Lab Escape’s PPC traffic. Single landing pages were tested against conversions paths (multi-page experiences that lead a visitor towards a conversion action). OpenMoves also tested minor tweaks to content and images on each page.

the results

Using LiveBall’s code-free A/B testing, OpenMoves was able lower Lab Escape’s bounce rates and increase conversion rates without an increase in PPC budget. LiveBall’s robust, real-time data gave OpenMoves the information they needed to optimize Lab Escape’s landing page program. The result? The winning landing experiences converted at around 4.24% – an increase of about 280% over previous benchmarks!

what’s next?

OpenMoves and Lab Escape are excited about the initial success of the campaign, but don’t plan on stopping yet. An ongoing monthly schedule has been put in place to continually review, test and further optimize for higher conversion rates.

Maggiano's

2012-03-16T15:24:19Z

Super-Charging the Power of E-mail Marketing with High-Performance Landing Pages

Because the landing page converted users at such a high rate, Maggiano’s decided to put a link to it up on their Website home page. Almost a month after the initial launch, traffic on the landing page is still converting at 65%.

background

Reap Marketing is an interactive marketing agency that supports Maggiano’s Little Italy’s digital marketing efforts.

Maggiano’s has 44 restaurants across the United States, and one international location in Saudi Arabia. The restaurant specializes in Italian-American cuisine, featuring both classic and contemporary recipes. It is owned by Brinker International, Inc.

the challenge

In April 2010, Maggiano’s launched a new private label of wine in partnership with Ruffino. After the product launch, Maggiano’s goal was to get customers into the restaurant to try the new wine. Reap Marketing set out to leverage Maggiano’s e-mail database to drive traffic into the restaurant.

the solution

Reap used Maggiano’s extensive customer database to send out an e-mail offer that linked to a landing page created with LiveBall. The offer reads, “Enter your information below to receive your coupon for a complimentary flatbread with the purchase of a glass of Ruffino Salute Amico.”

Ruffino Salute Amico is the new wine offering launched by Maggiano’s and Ruffino.

The e-mail traffic sent to the landing page began converting at an incredible 73% immediately, far above the industry average of 2 – 4% according to Fireclick and MarketingSherpa. “I think the conversion lift was a result of a perfect mix between an engaged audience, a fantastic product, a desirable offer, sharp creative design, and a highly relevant and targeted landing page created with LiveBall,” says Brice McBeth, marketing executive at Reap.

Because they were able to create a landing page converted users at such a high rate, Maggiano’s decided to put a link to it up on their Website home page. Almost a month after the initial launch, traffic on the landing page is still converting at 65%. This is likely due to its simple design, with a clear call to action.

“Because of the success with this campaign, we will continue to leverage highly-optimized landing page experiences created in LiveBall to drive guests to the restaurant for future special promotions such as private bookings. Additionally, we will use landing experiences created in LiveBall for ongoing efforts such as private bookings for corporate banquets and meetings,” says McBeth.

TEKsystems

2012-03-16T15:16:12Z

Ongoing A/B & MVT landing page testing decreases cost-per-conversion by 50%.

Ongoing A/B and MVT landing page testing has doubled TEKsystems’ conversion rate and decreased the cost-per-conversion by more than 50%! Thanks to the new pages and better conversion rate, TEKsystems ended up saving over $100,000 in media spend over the course of a year.

background

the challenge

TEKsystems’ PPC campaigns are designed to increase the number of IT professionals in the TEKsystems network to fill staffing positions. Anvil Media was already seeing great results from testing ad copy and keywords, but they wanted to continue to improve their results. The “control” landing page had several links that let visitors browse by either job or state, but lacked a strong call-to-action and lead generation focus. Anvil knew that it was time to also start testing landing pages, and they needed a way to quickly create, deploy, and test pages without tapping into TEKsystems’ development resources.

the solution

Since adopting LiveBall in September 2010, Anvil Media has relied on the platform for best-in-class landing page creation and testing for their clients. They immediately knew that LiveBall was the perfect fit for this project.

The Anvil team created a new landing page with a stronger call to action asking visitors to fill out a form to receive TEKsystems’ job alerts, which emails qualifying professionals whenever a job opening is available that closely matches their interests and expertise. Anvil then proceeded to run A/B tests on the overall landing page layout, design and navigation. Once a layout winner was found, additional multivariate experiments allowed Anvil to quickly test and deploy new copy and a winning call-to-action.

In addition, Anvil also ran tests passing geolocation details in page headlines to create more targeted experiences. For instance, a visitor to the landing page from Florida is given a localized headline —“See IT Job Openings in Florida.” Instead of having to create separate landing pages for each state or region, Anvil created one page and took advantage of LiveBall’s dynamic content substitution capabilities. Advanced rules (conditional logic that can be applied either at the page level or to any clickable action) were used to automatically swap out content in the headline depending on a visitor’s geolocation. Similarly, Anvil also tested dynamic keyword insertion, which included keywords like “big data jobs” within the landing page copy.

results

Ongoing A/B and MVT landing page testing has doubled TEKsystems’ conversion rate and decreased the cost-per-conversion by more than 50%! Thanks to the new pages and better conversion rate, TEKsystems ended up saving over $100,000 in media spend over the course of a year.

what’s next

More landing page testing! Both TEKsystems and Anvil were thrilled with the results from their initial landing page tests and have plans to increase their focus on landing page testing.