Our Online Dialogue colleague and persuasion expert Dr. Dirk Franssens has for Marketingfacts wrote an article on online persuasion tips for SEA campaigns.

Apply psychological seduction techniques to SEA as well!

In 2011, approximately $37 billion was spent on SEA campaigns worldwide, and the (monetary) importance of SEA in online marketing only seems to be increasing increase. To evaluate whether all that money is being spent effectively, they look at, among other things click through rates (CTR) and to conversion rates. Despite the (economic) importance of SEA to online marketing, very little research is being done on how to use online persuasion-techniques can increase the effectiveness of SEA campaigns. In this piece, I briefly describe recent scientific research on increasing the effectiveness of your SEA campaigns. At the end, I provide 5 A/B testing tips to optimize your own SEA campaigns.

SEA campaigns are often used by online marketers because of their good targeting capabilities. You only target consumers you know, based on the search terms used, what they are looking for. This makes online marketing campaigns more relevant and therefore more (cost-)effective. SEA campaigns are therefore becoming increasingly important.

It is therefore striking that there is relatively little (scientific) research on optimizing the content of these campaigns. Bryan Eisenberg did talk about optimizing SEA campaigns at FusionMex 2012 (see this presentation and this blog on Marketingfacts). Several blogs have also been written in the Netherlands on how to set up a good SEA campaign, how to select search terms, what your bidding strategy should be, etc. The focus of this post is on deploying online persuasion techniques To further increase CTR and conversion rates.

That there are still gains to be made here shows the following example. I did a search on “airline tickets” on February 26, 2013. I saw the following 3 SEA campaigns and the descriptions used:

These three online airline ticket providers use a number of arguments to entice me to click on their campaign.

• Airfare.com bet on “authority.” After all, they say (double by the way) that they have the best customer rating (number of stars & textual).
• Cheaptickets chooses to say explicitly that they are the cheapest (without providing proof in doing so).
• And Fly Shop, well ... “now temporarily the lowest rates” implies that they do not normally have the lowest rates ....

What this example shows nicely is that when you try to entice people in an SEA campaign, one of the ways you do this is by providing persuasive arguments. And that's exactly what recent research has done!

Online persuasion and the quality of arguments

So when you want to entice people through SEA campaigns, you use arguments. After all, you have the space (2 lines of up to 35 characters) to say why people should come and buy from you. Research has already shown that the quality of the arguments is crucial here. A good predictor of the quality of an argument (buy from us!) is the “type of evidence” you use to support an argument (because we're the best!). For example, you can add statistical evidence “choose from over 10,000 products” or “over 9,000 people already use this product.” You can add expert evidence “rated best by person x,” or “tested best by organization y.” You can also add so-called “causal evidence”: “order online because it's cheaper!”, “shop securely online with iDeal”.

Above you see three online providers of electronics products. Each provider uses different arguments.

• Mauser opts for authority (“authorized distributor”) without adding evidence.
• Otto uses a statistic as proof (“large assortment”) that you should buy from them.
• And Conrad opts for causal evidence (“Buy online, because no shipping costs”). 

The question now is, which type of evidence entices the most people to click and buy?

Scientific research

This week's survey 'Search engine advertisements: The impact of advertising statements on click-through and conversion rates' appeared in the journal Marketing Letters. The question the researchers wanted answered was: what is the effect of 3 types of evidence on the CTR and conversion rate of SEA campaigns? For two Dutch retailers, four types of evidence were used in the SEA campaigns:

1. Statistical: You can choose from more than 10,000 electronic and technical products.
2. Expert evidence: order online from the multiple Home Shopping Award winner.
3. Causal evidence: order securely online with iDeal without risk.
4. Control: order your electronic products from the online electronic shop.

The results

The results of this study were somewhat surprising. Looking only at the CTR, it showed that causal evidence the lowest CTR had. Statistical evidence and expert evidence have a significantly higher CTR than causal evidence (and the control text). However, when you look at conversion, you see the opposite: there, causal evidence correct a higher conversion rate than the other variants.

This means that when you start a SEA campaign to generate more traffic to your site, you better use statistical or expert evidence. If your goal is to convert more, you're better off using causal evidence. The latter is cheaper (because lower CTR), but yields more conversion!

Involvement

One possible explanation for this result comes from the psychological literature. Dual process-theories say there are two routes to persuasion:

1. Central route: people process the arguments and evidence consciously and attentively. So people read the SEA text consciously and they evaluate the content and quality of the arguments and evidence used (as in causal evidence).
2. Peripheral route: people do not process arguments with much attention. People only superficially look at the arguments and pay attention to features such as authority or social proof. They do not read the SEA text very consciously, but judge the message based on heuristics that are easy to process (statistical evidence, expert evidence, etc.).

In addition, we know that the degree of 'involvement' (the involvement in a choice) predicts how a message is processed. People process the message centrally when involvement is high, and peripherally when involvement is lower. Thus, with central processing, you would expect people to pay particular attention to the quality of evidence. They should then be more sensitive to causal evidence. When involvement is low, then people should be more sensitive to statistical or expert evidence.

This may also explain why with causal evidence the conversion rate is higher: these people have a higher involvement and therefore have a higher willingness to buy. The opposite is true for statistical and expert evidence: these people may still be orienting and therefore have a higher CTR, but a lower conversion rate.

5 SEA conversion A/B testing tips

Because so little research has been done on the message content of an SEA campaign, and thus little data (in the form of real-world case studies) is available, here are 5 online persuasion tips you can apply when A/B testing your SEA campaign.

1. Replicate: may sound a little lame, but it is the first test I would do. I would apply the 3 types of texts from the study and try to replicate the results. You should think of this as a kind of proof of concept and to learn how to write persuasive messages. How can you best articulate the types of evidence? What is the content of the types of evidence that best suit your products and propisition?
2. Landing page: optimize your landing page. Perhaps also a headline, but not everyone has this in order. But what I really mean by this is this: go test whether the text you use in your SEA campaign should return as header on your landing page. From a consistency standpoint, you would expect that these texts/messages should be the same. Then it also matches the expectation people have when they land. For example, take another look at the three SEA campaigns of online travel providers: none of the three have their persuasive text (and thus evidence) reflected on the landing page. Whereas that's where you continue to argue and persuade!
3. Evidence content: the next step is to start varying the content of the evidence. Suppose you want to start using expert evidence because you want to generate more traffic to your site. You can then start testing with the types of statistical evidence. Which statistic is important to people? The amount of products you have, the price of a product, the number of products sold? You can do the same with the other types of evidence: create different variations and learn which ones work better.
4. Persuasion: the next step is to apply other online persuasion techniques to influence the quality of the arguments. For example, you can test whether causal evidence can be made even more persuasive by using the word “because”. When causal evidence is used, you still often see an enumeration rather than a sentence. Just look at how Conrad does it in the example above. Test if the phrase “buy online because you pay no shipping” works better than the current version. A third variation would then be “buy online because shipping is free!” (Conrad framet the benefit in terms of costs rather than revenues). Thus, there are still many persuasion techniques which you can apply (priming, anchoring, loss aversion, fear appeals, social influence, etc.). 
5. Targeting: when you've learned through A/B testing which arguments and evidence do well for you, and you know which persuasion techniques work well, it's time for the ultimate A/B test. We know that degree of involvement is a good predictor of how people will process your message (and the effect you achieve with it). Now go try to predict degree of involvement based on keyword usage. For example: when people search on “compare product” they may not be to the point where they want to buy a new phone right away. Rather, they want to compare offers and prices. Then adjust your argument and evidence accordingly by using statistical or expert evidence with these keywords. For keywords that show a higher “propensity to buy” (e.g., branded keywords) then show causal evidence.

Notice: The research described above is only a first (but a very nice) step toward online persuasion and SEA. We already know a lot about online persuasion, but still relatively little about applying these techniques to SEA campaigns. I am very curious to know if there are already people/companies/agencies doing this kind of A/B testing. If so, I would of course love to know what the results of those tests are!

Originally posted on March 7, 2013 at Marketingfacts