Do custom landing pages for adwords improve conversion?

[garethrees]

Q: Do custom landing pages for adwords improve conversion?

This is a common internet marketing technique that we could probably exploit.

[Explain how you will measure this]

Create a custom landing page for a tailored ad and measure conversion rate Measure conversion rate to /request/:id/new from the new landing page

[What do we need to do to be able to take the measurements?]

[garethrees]

Marking as new because this came up in the May 2016 Alaveteli mini-retreat.

[MyfanwyNixon]

I know there is plenty else on team FOI's mind at the moment, but I'm convinced we could easily get a lot more engagement by creating landing pages for those adwords which point towards bodies. And it might be a design job rather than a dev one.

Example:

The keyword is relevant, the ad manages expectations... and then the user lands on a page like this, almost certainly not sure what's going on. If the page templates were built, it'd be relatively easy for me to fill in some explanatory copy that guided the user towards making or following a request.

[garethrees]

Do you have a sense of what a landing page would look like?

I'd love to give this a go if we can do something fairly low-effort as a test run.

I think the most difficult thing here is deciding what the landing page should say – we can then design around that. If you have a clear picture of this, then it could be something we could squeeze in.

I'd suggest just doing a landing page for one authority and leave it running for some extended period so that we can compare the before and after.

[MyfanwyNixon]

Sounds good. (Ooh, I just noticed the MoJ/MoD mix-up in that sample ad! Fixed it.)

I don't think there are even major changes required to an authority page as it exists now: the minimum would be to add a bit of explanatory text at the top.

Or to go a little further, I think the content would go something like this:

Freedom of Information and the Ministry of Justice

Under the Freedom of Information Act, you have the right to request information from any UK public authority, including the MoJ.

WhatDoTheyKnow makes it simple to submit an FoI request, for free. Requests and responses are all published online.

WhatDoTheyKnow users have already sent xxx requests to the MoJ.

[Here you could list ten requests, chosen for their recentness or for being successful, or even for having the most page views? - not sure if that last one is actually possible :) ]

[Search requests and responses]

[See all requests]

Can't find the information you need?

Submit your own Freedom of Information request to the Ministry of Justice. Start here.

Find out more about WhatDoTheyKnow and making an FOI request

[garethrees]

In the simplest case, we could just add that text (more or less…) to the notes field:

Is that what you were thinking?

[MyfanwyNixon]

Well, it couldn't hurt and would be an easy solution!

[garethrees]

Added https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body/moj.

Did this through the console because of https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/3470:

new_notes = <<-EOF.strip_heredoc
<p>The Ministry of Justice is one of the largest government departments, employing over 70,000 people.</p>

<p>Under the Freedom of Information Act, you have the right to request information from any UK public authority, including the MoJ.</p>

<p>WhatDoTheyKnow makes it simple to submit an FoI request, for free. Requests and responses are all published online.</p>

<p><strong>Can't find the information you need?</strong></p>

<p><a href="/new/moj">Submit your own Freedom of Information request</a> to the Ministry of Justice.</p>

<p><a href="/help/about">Find out more</a> about WhatDoTheyKnow and making an FOI request.</p>
EOF

moj = PublicBody.find(10)
moj.notes = new_notes
moj.last_edit_editor = 'garethrees'
moj.last_edit_comment = <<-EOF.strip_heredoc
Added extra "landing page" text for Adwords experiment. See https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli-experiments/issues/41 for more info.
EOF
moj.save

[garethrees]

@MyfanwyNixon this has been in place for just over a month now – made any difference?

[MyfanwyNixon]

As a reminder, the only 'conversion' we currently measure via Adwords is someone making a request.

Unfortunately it's not a straightforward picture, sigh. Note that in this timeframe we also switched to 'maximise bids for conversion' which automatically bids more for those ads which have previously brought conversions - that happened around 4 Sept.

The solid line shows conversions from the month prior to the change (Aug 1-29). The dotted line shows Sep 1-29.

As you can see, there's no real notable difference until 20 September when there's a peak of 93 conversions - what could have caused that? I suppose the numbers are low enough that it'd only take one really keen new user to file multiple requests.

From experience there are sometimes vagaries in Adwords, and sometimes you appear to get more clicks for a few days after you have been in there making small adjustments - not necessarily as a result of any changes you've made, but because the system seems to reward you for tending your account.

The picture's even more confusing when you add the clicks in though:

A big dip in clicks falls on the 9 September (99 clicks compared to a steady 700-800 in the previous month), and never really recovers. It's possible that this is the result of weeding out some keywords that were bringing multiple clicks but low conversions, eg UKBA or HMRC - unfortunately I don't keep a record when I make decisions like this (often prompted by the Adwords system itself) but if it was considered important I think you could retrieve such information from Adwords itself.

[MyfanwyNixon]

Oops, I've improved that second graph so there's no overlay obscuring the lines.