Axway

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.