Test of the Month: The Best Growth Tactics We Launched This June

This blog post was originally published by Ladder Digital on the Ladder Growth Marketing Blog.

Following the incredible success of last month’s Test of the Month post, I’m excited to announce our Test of the Month winners for June.

As a quick refresher, Test of the Month is an opportunity for Ladder team members to share their innovative, impactful, and clever marketing experiments from the previous month with each other, and with you.

Each test will be graded on three criteria:

• Innovation — Has this type of test never been done before? Did it require creative thinking to implement? Is it in an area we don’t cover often enough?
• Impact — Is this test likely to make a large impact? Did it perform better than expected? Does this test set the client up for a big strategic win?
• Use of data — Did you have a strong hypothesis for this test based on sound data? Did you do any interesting analysis in order to find the inspiration or justification for this test?

While we always love seeing positive results, we’ve also seen more than 50% of our tests fail. Therefore, we’re looking for more than just results; Test of the Month is really about recognizing creativity and risk-taking.

With that being said, I’m pleased to announce that our Test of the Month winners are…

Third Place: Facebook Ads Crypto Audience Targeting

Growth Strategist Morgan Schofield created and launched Facebook ads for a Swiss crypto company. Morgan notes that crypto segment audiences have converted well for other crypto clients, so he hypothesized that testing a crypto investor audience would improve the conversion rate for sign-ups and pre-sale form fills for his current client.

Morgan’s goal was to validate this new audience segment, and after a week of testing and ad spend of $298.44 USD, Morgan’s Facebook ads achieved:

• A cost per acquisition (CPA) of $8.74 USD.
• 34 email form fills and 11 new pre-sale signups — a conversion rate of 5.5%

With a great CPA and conversion rate, Morgan was able to validate a new audience and creative segment that we can scale and develop an additional strategy for in upcoming tests.

Find This Tactic In The Ladder Playbook: Industry Audience Targeting

Targeting people who work for companies in the right industry can be a great way to segment your traffic. Be sure to test multiple audiences as performance can be very different depending on how they’re bucketed by the advertising platform. This tactic works particularly well in B2B advertising.

Second Place: Pricing Page Conversion Rate Optimization

Growth Analyst Filip Pabisek’s growth test focused on optimizing a pricing page for a company that provides a mobile walkie-talkie app for teams and businesses.

After analyzing his client’s current pricing page, Filip noticed that previous landing page didn’t show enough value to potential customers.

“By looking at the business plan and its pricing we came up with a hypothesis that users don’t see a value for paying twice as much for the Business plan than for the Pro version, he said. “The goal is to show benefits and value proposition of the business plan more prominently.”

Here are a few modifications Filip made to the pricing page:

• Highlighted the orange button on the Business plan.
• Added the ”best for companies…” badge on the top of the Business plan.
• Found what people are looking for on heatmaps in the FAQ section, and answered their questions in the features section of the Business plan. (Note: The previous version almost didn’t have any essential features for the business option, which led people to try to find more information about the Business plan in other sections of their website).
• Listed more features on Business plan (previously business version had fewer features than the Pro plan).

After one week of testing, the new variation had a 2.34% conversion rate, compared to a 1.85% conversion rate for the control variant–a 25.14% increase!

However, Filip notes that it’s still early to make a definitive conclusion, but he aims to continue running this campaign for at least 3 more weeks to get statistically significant results.

Find This Tactic In The Ladder Playbook: Smart Default Plan

By making the option you want people to take the default plan, you can encourage the behavior you want users to exhibit, increasing revenue. Studies have shown that people are less likely to opt-in AND less likely to opt-out, thus “presumed-consent” is a more effective way to direct behavior.

First Place: Google AdWords Ads Targeting Men Multivitamin Keywords

This month’s Test of the Month winner is Growth Analyst Samy Ouedraogo. Samy’s growth test involves testing new keywords for a company that sells a vitamin and supplement dispenser.

Before this test, Samy’s client launched Google Adwords campaigns primarily focusing on keywords related to liquid vitamins and bariatrics (a branch of medicine that focuses on the causes, prevention, and treatment of obesity).

However, Samy hypothesized that adding new keyword ideas based on competitor and keyword research would be a good way to reach new audiences and increase paid traffic.

“After looking through the client’s account history, the female vitamin market was already targeted but not the male one,” Samy notes. “Keywords such as ‘best multivitamin for men’ have between 500 and 20K searches per month and under $3.00 suggested bid. To note that many of the long tail queries also add a specific age (e.g. best multivitamin for men over 50).” Therefore, Samy estimated, AdWords ads with strong headlines should earn at least a 5% CTR.

As a result of Samy’s test, his client was able to secure the top AdWords position against behemoths like Amazon, bodybuilding.com, and CVS.com.

Better yet, Samy’s top two ads had a CTR of about 2.2%. The average CTR for AdWords search ads in the Health and Medical industry is 1.79%, according to Wordstream. This means Samy’s top two ads had a 22.91% higher CTR than the industry average!

Find This Tactic In The Ladder Playbook: Gender Exclusion Audience

If your ads perform poorly with a gender, removing it from your target audience can better optimize your ad spending. Look at your ad’s analytics to determine how it’s performing with each gender and decide if excluding a poorly performing one would positively impact ad performance.