zoltar speaks!

Originally uploaded by House Of Sims

I love the idea of using paid search marketing for testing a marketing campaign with new audiences.

Whether testing headlines, visuals, promotional offers, whatever, through Paid Search, you can do so much in so little time and with a relatively small budget. And best of all, you can learn a whole lot. Theoretically, you can keep tweaking, testing and measuring until your heart is content.

Paid search is great for A/B testing or multi-variate testing.

1. The ability to quickly and cost-efficiently launch your trials.

2. The ability to quickly try different A/B tests or more complicated multivariate tests, especially if using a tool such as Ion Interactive’s LiveBall application.

3. Measurability through metrics tools. Obviously, reasons 1 and 2 would be meaningless without the added functionality of all the metrics reports than can be generated through Google Adwords, or whatever tools your online ad network provider offers.

4. Low cost for production and media compared to more traditional channels.

These are the top reasons that I can think of. If you have any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them.

Kevin McIntosh is a marketing consultant in the Nashville, TN market. His specialties include branding, creative development and social media marketing.