How PPC Decided the Name of this Website

I didn’t want to call my book eCommerce MasterPlan – I wanted to call it eCommerce Blueprint. But I didn’t get a very good reaction when I told people that.

The title of any book is important – it needs to be easy to remember, explain what the book contains, and be relatively concise. The name of my book was even more important because it was also going to become the name of the website, plus I’m an online marketer – so the title had to work in search (on Amazon, on Google etc). So how to solve this conundrum?I was a bit stuck for ideas – of course I could look up all the traffic volumes, and competition levels and do lots of searches on Amazon. BUT, that wouldn’t tell me anything about whether the people searching on those terms were interested in what I had to say – I didn’t have any google analytics data to look at too. So, one keyword might have lots of traffic and no competition – but is that traffic I want?

Whilst mulling all this over I went to a breakfast networking event where the subject of the day was advertising. The speaker was talking about how you need to test headlines of adverts out – and suggested using PPC ads as a quick way to test adverts you’ll use in the papers.

Bingo!

I could test my possible book title via PPC.

What I Tested

One of the best things about PPC is that you can do a lot in a short time, so I thought I should widen out my list of titles and in the end tested 11 different options.

To keep the test fair, every adtext had the same link text and body text. So the only difference was the Headline.

I also used the body text and URL to give people an idea of what the content the other side of the click would be – so to encourage the “right” traffic to click.

All of the ads were in the same Google Adwords adgroup, and the ads were set to display evenly.

The book is full of content relevant to all sizes of eCommerce business – so I kept the keywords selection very broad – much broader than would usually use, words such as “ecommerce”, “web marketing”.

I wanted the results quickly – the sooner I knew the name, the sooner I’d be able to register the domain, and start building the website. So I set a high cost per click, and a generous budget.

To check the results, I also ran the same test, at the same time, using LinkedIn ads – targeting people working in eCommerce and online marketing.

Results?

Well – you know the final result! That was decided purely on the click through rate. I needed to know which was the most appealing headline – so it was all about click throughs. Handily I got the same results from both LinkedIn and Google – so within 48 hours of deciding to do the test it had been set up, run, and I had the data I needed to name the book.

What about eCommerce Blueprint? Well, it came 5th – so I’m very glad I ran the test!