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Commercial vs. Functional vs. Emotional: A Case Study on Page Title SEO Testing

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Commercial vs. Functional vs. Emotional: A Case Study on Page Title SEO Testing

The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

My dad used to tell me that the one thing you invest in for your car is the tires. I had a habit of asking the garage for the cheapest tires they had, but my dad would say “that rubber is the only thing between you and the road”. He had a point, and today I invest in those tires to get me to my destination safer.

There’s a similar trap that search marketers and SEOs can easily fall into. In our fast-paced day-to-day lives, we can often underestimate the power of copy, even though, like my tires and the road, it’s the only thing between our business and our customers. Much like my tires, if you don’t invest in it, you’re in for a bad time.

To that end, I’ve used SEO Testing to trial different copy types in product page titles, and want to share the results of that test.

The hypothesis

Customers are more likely to click organic search engine results featuring content that is commercially focused, using language like “free” or “best value”.

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Every good test starts with a hypothesis. It’s nothing more than an idea that I want to test and learn from. While there’s an outcome I expect, the data is all I really care about. That’s where SEO Testing comes in.

The test

The test itself had some simple steps. I was updating page titles across a range of mobile phone product pages, so that these would appear in the SERPs in front of our customers. To measure success, the primary KPI was CTR, observed in Google Search Console.

The test would run across all phones on the Three website for six weeks. The control CTR data was collected from the six weeks prior to updating the page titles.

Instead of simply changing page titles to commercial content, I decided to hedge my bets a little and cover the spread with some additional test parameters. If commercial copy didn’t work, what copy did connect with our customers the best?

In addition to a bucket of page titles focused on commercial content, I also added two “backup buckets” for functional and emotional copy.

I used the new SEO Testing Group Test functionality to create three groups:

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  • Commercial content page titles

  • Functional content page titles

  • Emotional content page titles

Commercial content focused on appealing to the financial aspects of a purchase decision. Functional copy stuck to the facts and just simply said what you would be finding on the page you clicked through to. Emotional took a softer and “fluffier” approach.

Here are some examples of the content we used:

  • Commercial: iPhone 12 Pro Max | Buy Now At Our Best Ever Price | Three

  • Functional: Samsung Galaxy A02s | A Powerful Entry Level Phone | Three

  • Emotional: iPhone 11 | Get The iPhone You Always Wanted | Three

The four pillars of the test: Control content, commercial focus, functional focus, and emotional focus.

Google being Google

Just as this test was ending, Google started to use their AI-power to rewrite page titles, steering away from using the provided page titles less and less. Fortunately, this test was finishing at the same time Google was rolling this functionality out, and to the best of my knowledge, the test was not impacted by the update. I was running the test in the Irish market, which had seen very few page title re-writes at the time.

Regardless, at the core of this test is consumer psychology. Even if Google never pulls in another page title that I write for the rest of my days, the reason people clicked, or didn’t click, on content during the test matters. It’s a data-based example of how your potential customers respond to the words you put on your page, and why it’s important you invest in them — just like your tires.

The results

You shouldn’t run a test and then check it every day. Just hit start and do your best to forget about it.

I ignored my own advice and regularly checked the data.

In the early stages the hypothesis held up, but after a few more days a clear trend emerged. What did I learn here? The start date of the test isn’t necessarily the date the page titles change. It takes time for Google to crawl and re-index the new content.

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After a few more days, the trends started to change completely and by the end of the six-week test period, the hypothesis failed. And that’s okay. In fact, that’s exciting, especially because contingency was baked into the test.

The results of the test: commercial +1 percent, functional +9 percent, emotional -31 percent.

Customers responded best to the simple functional copy group, evident through a 9% increase in CTR for this group. Customers also emphatically rejected copy with a softer, emotional focus, the clearest outcome of the test with a 31% reduction in CTR (which is, for me, the most interesting result).

If I had just run the commercial group, I would have been left with very few learnings thanks to a paltry 1% increase in CTR.

It’s an important side note to include that this test was being carried out after a CMS migration, which led to automated page titles being generated and pulled into Google. It was an unfortunate by-product of an otherwise successful migration that took some time to resolve. Organic CTR did drop by approximately 21% on monitored product pages for a period of time immediately after the migration, due to the automatically generated page titles appearing spammy.

Google SERP snippet for iPhone.

So, this test was more than a test, it was also a fix.

But that meant the control copy feeding into Google was automatically generated and uniform. Despite this, emotional copy led to a further 31% drop in click through rate. I was shocked by this finding. It meant that the automatically generated page titles that needed a fix and already led to a drop, were performing better than the emotional page title content.

The key takeaway

This test taught me a lot, but I want to focus on the most transferable elements instead of the vertical-specific.

Content matters. Whether it’s a landing page, a page title or a search ad, the words you choose will be read by someone at some stage, and impact their decision-making. We so often focus on sales conversion, that we forget the micro-conversions along the way that turn a searcher into a customer.

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Test everything. I could have just trusted my gut, said focus on the sales language, and been done. But instead, I opted to test a few ideas out at once to find what worked in the real world, not just what I felt or thought would work.

Check your tires. Just a friendly reminder that it’s worth checking your tires and investing in good ones.


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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.

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