Last Month in Marketing: Pro99s +50%, Dynamic Text & Oli Officially Made a Hero

Inside Unbounce Marketing for April 2014

I know we say this all the time, but April truly was a crazy month. So. much. happened.

Just kidding… Working hard to keep this short.

But just in case, here’s the TL;DR

1) The awesome Unbounce dev team turned out one of the most demanded and sought after features a landing page platform could have; Dynamic Text Replacement. Unbounce customers can now replace the keywords on their landing pages automagically (oh yes, I went there) to match those of their PPC campaigns *without* building a new landing page for each one — Look out Message Match. This unsurprisingly had a huge effect on New Trial Starts for the month, despite the email campaign under-performing. I dig into the deets below.

2) We welcomed the one and only, Brad Geddes author of Advanced Google AdWords on one of our most advanced Unwebinars ever, How To Qualify Your PPC Traffic & Increase Conversions. We’ve got some numbers to share.

3) We launched our first ebook of 2014, The Ultimate Guide to PPC Landing Pages. 50 pages packed with super actionable information so that anyone, PPC novice or vet, will jump the learning curve. And because of the snazzy Page Upload/Download feature released in February, we included a free landing page template, designed by Jen Gordon of Convert Themes. (Jen and Unbounce have been crushing on each other for some time now, so we were stoked to partner-up.)

4) Unbounce goes to HeroConf and Oli takes home the best presentation award… what?!

5) New Team Updates, too!

Here are the numbers…

 New Trial Starts (NTS)

If you recall last month’s update, we’re actually down for NTS this month. BUT (and there are 2 “buts”), we reached targets (1533) and Pro99 trial starts took off in the 2nd half of the month…Take a look:

Pro99s Jump up 50% in 2nd Half of April

DTR launched on April 14th. Comparing the 1st half of the month, to the 2nd, we see Pro99s jump almost 50%! So while our Starter plan trial starts flattened out a bit (bringing total NTS numbers down), Pro99s picked up, mad.

New Trial Starts by Plan

As you can see NTS is down overall, and while Starters were down 15%, Pro99s took a huge jump up 20% for the month.

Some thoughts: Though I’m comfortably attributing the ups & downs to the DTR launch (and pricing page changes maybe causing a bit of cannibalizing), I decided to look back at 2013… It turns out, in April of 2013 we *just* made targets, and in May, we missed the mark entirely. In fact, it wasn’t until July that we were back comfortably killing our targets. Now I’m not saying any of this is seasonal (though maybe I should dig into the 2012 vault) but if we miss targets in May, it might be time to pull out some 2013 reports for comparison. I know… the suspense is killing you.

Blog

Starting in late March, early April the blog has seen a steady decline in traffic… Dan chimes in with his thoughts below. I’m curious if any other blog owners have seen something similar?

Uniques visitors: 123,253 -11% (m/m)

“We’re looking into different theories as to why blog traffic declined over the past month and a half. Is it linked to Google’s mysterious March 24 algorithm update? Are normally reliable referral sources under-performing? Are we missing the mark with our content?

In the meantime, we’ll continue focusing on finding quality contributors and covering the topics we know resonate most with our audience, like landing page examples and design.”

~ Dan Levy, Content Strategist

New Blog Email Subscribers: 1089 -24% (m/m)

Why the decline here? Well, fewer blog visits for one, and fewer subscribers came in via the webinar landing page confirmation box this month too. We’re going to start testing some new ideas. We’ll report back on that soon!

Top 3 April Posts:

1. 12 Beautiful Landing Page Templates Designed Just For You by Corey Dilley
2. Is Too Much Choice Killing Your Conversion Rates? [Case Studies] by Stefanie Grieser
3. 7 Thank You Pages That Take Post-Conversion to the Next Level by Karon Thackston

Community

New Members: 1631, +16% (m/m)
Engagement: 7,122, +2% (m/m)
Social Traffic: 19,372 -24% (m/m)

Top 10 Lovely April Mentions

1. 34 Ways To Increase Your Blogs Email Subscribers List
2. 50 Marketing Blogs You Should Read Every Day
3. 5 Tools For Entrepreneurs to Grow Their Online Presence in No Time
4. The Secret to Writing Copy That Converts Every Time << result of Unwebinar!
5. Can Dynamic Text Replacement Change the SEM Game? << result of new feature launch!
6. 20 Tools To Help Skyrocket Your Conversions And Get More Leads For Your Business
7. The Clueless Marketer’s Guide to Building a Landing Page from Scratch
8. Brand As Publisher: Demystifying Branded Content
9. 12 Startup Blogs That Are Killing the Game
10. 10 Popular Unbounce Themes Designed for Conversion

Standout Community <3 in April

This is hands-down my favorite part of these updates… Picking the stand-out social love from the month. You likely missed them…

Marketing Happenings

Dynamic Text Replacement Launch

The email sent to announce DTR to our community of leads (click here for the full size) included a mini case study from one of the feature’s beta testers, Andrew Miller, founder of the Virginia based agency, Your Search Advisor.

We thought, that by showing the success Andrew had (in hard numbers), it would help clearly and simply demonstrate how DTR can benefit PPC Marketers. You know, rather than just telling people “you want this”, show them “this is why you should care”.

Subject Line A/B Test Gone Wrong

We ran an A/B test on the subject line which yielded pretty conclusive results…

“New! Dynamically Match Keywords on Your Landing Page”
vs.
“Just Launched! Dynamically Match Keywords on Your Landing Page”

Using “New!” resulted in a 28% higher click-rate

However, I didn’t leave MailChimp adequate time to determine the correct winner, so it sent the “Just Launched!” version to the remaining 90% of our list. Fail.

So How Did the Email Perform?

Total Recipient Segment: 44,138
Open Rate: 23.6% (list average 22.2%)
Click-Rate: 2% (list average 4.2%) << Hmm… Not so lovely
Unique Click/Open: 8.4%

I can only imagine what the click-rate would have been had the correct winner been determined in time. Lesson learned? Always leave at least 4-5 hours between your send to the test group and the send time of those remaining.

 

April Unwebinar

Brad Geddes is a powerhouse of PPC knowledge in our April 16th Unwebinar How To Qualify Your PPC Traffic & Increase Conversions

Registrants: 2,512
Attendees: 508

While registrations were about average, attendance was a little lower that we normally expect to see. Our theory? The topic was really specific (not to mention, advanced) and wasn’t relevant to as wide of an audience as we usually aim for.

 

Ebook Launched!

To celebrate the launch of Dynamic Text Replacement we wrote and launched an ebook all about PPC landing pages. The ebook, written by Trada’s Matt Hessler was aimed at a “problem aware” PPC marketer. The type of marketer who would jump at the chance to dynamically replace keywords on their landing pages.

How’d it go? Splendidly! In fact, PPC has been a tough topic for us over the years, not typically performing as well as sexy topics like landing pages, design, and optimization. But this ebook defied that trend.

In it’s 1st week, The Ultimate Guide to PPC Landing Pages was downloaded 3800 times — Only 7.5% less than our most popular ebook ever, and a whopping 40% better than our more recent, lead gen focused ebook. Not to mention, kicking ass in terms of New Trial Starts too.

Big props to our Content Strategist and Editor Extraordinaire, Dan Levy!

Oh, and remember that PPC landing page template I mentioned? We made that available for free at the very end of the ebook. That too has been super popular, and now downloaded over 300 times. Not bad, not bad at all. Big thanks to Jen Gordon for working with us on this. Not only is the LP available in .unbounce format, but PSD and HTML too!

 

Oli Takes “Best Presentation” at HeroConf!

That’s right folks, not only was this Oli’s first conference presentation ever, he won BEST PRESENTATION among 63 other speakers. And his talk was only 10 minutes(!). Pretty epic. Take a look a the slides on Slideshare.

Oli, Corey, Stef and I had a blast at the conference. Hanapin did an great job, we well definitely be back next year!!

 

 

Team Updates

Hooray for new Honey Badgers! We’re so happy to welcome the newest member of the Marketing team, joining Dan and officially forming our first ever content team! Everyone say hello to our new Content Coordinator, Amanda Durepos!

Also, don’t miss Liesl Barrell being interviewed by the Montreal Gazette about what it’s like to be a woman in the oft male dominated field of IT. Awesome 4 min video here. Nicely done, Liesl!

Looking forward to any feedback or questions — See you in the comments!

Georgiana Laudi
Director of Marketing
@ggiiaa