Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is commonplace for most pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers. The idea of testing two different ad copies or landing pages is nothing new, but I bet there are many advertisers that could dive a little deeper when it comes to split testing and discover a new level of clarity for their PPC campaigns.

First, here is a quick definition of split testing as regards PPC. With split testing, two or more items are tested side-by-side to determine which performs better at a specific metric. The importance of testing is critical to optimization. If you don’t test, you cannot improve your campaign. It is as simple as that. Most advertisers will find that the first couple of tests will have the most dramatic results, but it is important to continue testing various elements of your campaign at all times.

So what can you test when it comes to PPC? The most prominent thing to test is ad copy. Testing multiple ads for every keyword you are bidding on is essential to PPC success. Testing new headlines, description lines, display URLs, and destination URLs are all important areas to test when it comes to ad copy split testing. The idea of testing multiple ad copy translates very well to the content network also. Rich media campaigns are probably on the forefront of split testing and, if they are a component of your PPC campaign, you need to make sure to test new creative all the time.

On an ad copy level, split testing should run for a minimum of one week, but running for one month is ideal. Every day has different characteristics, and each week has variances (think about pay weeks). Ads should attain a minimum of 300 clicks, but 1,000 is ideal. You need to allow for enough data to accumulate for each ad before making any decisions regarding how effective it is. You also want to let every ad gather at least 15 conversions. Each advertiser will have a different set of results. This is simply a rough guideline.

Landing page testing is another very important aspect to test when it comes to any online marketing campaign, PPC included. Testing new layouts, copy, fonts, colors, forms, and shopping carts are just a few things to consider when split testing your landing pages. Knowing how much weight your landing page has in regards to quality score and conversion rates, you should spend ample time testing out countless versions throughout your SEO campaign.

A few other things you should make sure to split test are: match type, ad position, max CPC, time of day, day of week, and month of year. Look at it this way, anything you have an option for should be tested. This also applies to testing elements. Click-through rate, conversion rate, total conversions, cost per conversion, page views per click, cost per click, and total cost are just a few outcomes that most PPC campaigns test.

Make sure you take that deep dive when it comes to split testing within your PPC campaign. It is a large ocean and even though surfing the waves may be appealing, you don’t want to miss out on what lies beneath the surface.

If you want to be more than a small business, then it’s time to stop thinking like the small business you are and start thinking like the bigger business you want to be.

The first place to start is with your online marketing campaigns.

There are a few exceptions, but search engine marketing has leveled the playing field significantly for small businesses. However, as more companies make online marketing more of a priority – the playing field is becoming slanted again. More recognizable brands and companies with larger budgets, and a larger team of people to manage multiple online search engine marketing campaigns are gaining an advantage. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for small businesses to make headway into competitive fields against this rush for a greater online presence.

All that being said, it can be done. There are still plenty of opportunities for small businesses to succeed, even against well-financed competitors. But to do so it requires some clever thinking and swift moving – two things which big businesses are generally not great at.

Be smarter than a big business

Online Marketing and SEO success is not always about achieving number one rankings. It’s easy to determine which of those businesses that come to SEO House are serious about their success. Those who “want to be #1″ are looking for a quick fix. Those that want to build visibility and improve conversions and sales are looking at the bigger picture. Rankings are a means to an end, not the end itself.

Is a #1 ranking still possible? Of course. Is it always the best idea? It depends. It depends on the phrase, the targeted traffic it draws, the conversion rates it achieves, and the amount of time and money it takes to get it there. There are a lot of great #1 rankings that can be achieved that can do great things for your company, yet many business owners focus on getting #1 rankings for specific keywords that don’t give them a good return on their investment. What’s the point?

Even if you already own the top positions, as long as you still have the small business mindset you’re going to find yourself disappointed. You can only hang on to the tops spots so long with a budget of a few thousand a year, when some upstart comes along and throws tens of thousands of dollars a month at their online marketing campaigns. Enjoy the success while you can, but don’t expect to hold onto that forever. Rankings change.

Success, like everything else is relative. A small business does not have to spend $10,000, $7,500 or even $2,500 per month in order to do well online. Most small businesses (even if they had such a budget) are not set up to handle the same kind of success as large businesses. You have to grow into that. But every small business owner investing in online marketing needs to keep their expectations in line with what can be done and what kind of success they can handle. Budget doesn’t always make or break success, but it does play a role in it. The key is to find the areas where your budget will see the most return.

Organizing Time

Whether you are a big or small business owner, obviously it is important to determine how your own time is best spent. Do you have time to do it all yourself or can you hand that responsibility to someone else? Delegating responsibility is one of the biggest differences between big and small businesses.

Most small businesses hire help as needed but when it comes to their online marketing they want to cut costs by doing it on their own. Why is the SEO marketing any different from the other jobs you hire for? Would you try to do everything yourself? And if you did, would you be able to grow your business as you want? The answer is likely “no.”

Part of thinking like a bigger business is being willing to put responsibilities into the hands of those who can handle it. Letting skilled people do the jobs they are good allows you to focus on the job you’re good at.

Move more swiftly than a big business

While small businesses can’t always hire everybody for every job, they do have one advantage over the big business that can work in their favor. That advantage is being able to adapt. Big businesses usually move too slow, but as a small business you have the luxury of being able to adapt and move fast.

You can have a big business mindset but take advantage of your small business position. Moving quickly into new areas of marketing brings huge rewards as you invest in areas your competition is overspending as well as under-performing, without having to go through layers of approval and red tape.

This is where outside consulting can come in handy. Having someone take a strategic look at your online marketing efforts and help you identify your own and your competitor’s weaknesses can really open up your eyes to new opportunities. Of course, you then have to be willing to do what it takes to invest in those opportunities.

Small businesses have to stop letting the small business mindset keep them from performing big. You don’t have to be a big business to win in the online marketing game, but you do need to get out of the “mom and pop rut.”

Be willing to take risks, but do so wisely and well-informed. And like big businesses – be willing to fail a little here and there if it teaches you how to succeed bigger later. You don’t have to spend like a big business, but you won’t go far so long as you keep thinking like a small business.

The Bing and Google deals could be significant. Depending on what Bing and Google decide to do with their Twitter firehose, internet users could potentially see SERPs that are heavily influenced by Twitter activity, which would mean that SEOs will have to deal with Twitter as a ‘ranking factor‘. Of course, nobody knows all of the details yet, which is why I thought it would be worthwhile to see what experts and observers are saying about the deals.

Adam Bunn, Head of SEO at Greenlight:

With News and Blog results being drawn from a wide range of disparate sources it’s difficult for search engines to get a consensus opinion of what’s really newsworthy, and despite the speed with which many bloggers and news websites can publish new content, it’s not always fast enough. Twitter suffers neither of these drawbacks, essentially bringing millions of bloggers under one roof where the a news story can be picked up and “re-Tweeted” thousands of times within a matter of minutes. In essence, Twitter brings search engines as close to “real time” search as they’ve ever been able to get.

There’s another facet to this though, and that’s what search engines can infer about the popularity and usefulness of other websites by looking at the frequency with which they are mentioned in Twitter tweets – information that has until now been off limits to them. This is a new spin on the old idea of link citation analysis, some variation of which forms an important part of all modern search engine algorithms, the idea being that a link is treated as a vote in favour of the site it points to. The problem with using links in this way is that as time goes on, many of the types of links search engines used to rely on have become subverted by companies looking to manipulate search results in their favour. This has left search engines fighting a constant rearguard battle in an attempt to ignore manipulative links while concealing which factors they really take into account. So, any new source of information about what real users like will be a welcome weapon in the search engines arsenals.

Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li of Altimeter Group:

Expect real time data to merge with existing search engines, as a result we should see Google Search and Bing to serve up search results based on: 1) Real time information based on what Twitter users are saying, including memes from trending topics, 2) Preference given to links and URLs that are tweeted by users with more followers or authority, 3) Geo location of tweets to influence search results. As users seek “Thai Restaurants in San Mateo” location based tweets could provide additional context. 4) Eventually results will be served up by your friends. Google has given a nod to serve up information based on your social graph (your friends) using Google Profile.

Rand Fishkin, CEO of seoMOZ:

Twitter’s new relationships with both Google & Microsoft is certainly interesting from a macro-technology industry perspective, but being deep in the world of search engine optimization and visibility, I’m drawn to thinking about the specific impact on our field. For those practicing online marketing in the search ecosphere, Twitter data making its way both directly into the search results as well as potentially into the ranking signals the engines use for analysis has an actionable takeaway. If you want your content to prosper in search engines, ignoring social media and Twitter in particular (as well as all the services that feed into and leverage it) is no longer an option. Twitter and SEO are now fundamentally tied together like never before.

Mark Pilatowski, SEO Manager at Reprise Media:

Everyone seems to be overjoyed about the possibilities and I myself am very interested to see how this all plays out. I do have one concern and that is how are Bing and Google going to deal with the issue of spam when it comes to real time search via Twitter results?

In some ways, Twitter is like the early days of the search engine. There is a lot of great information available but it is continually being overwhelmed by spam. Twitter has attempted to stay on top of the spam situation but they can only do so much and in most cases only catch it after the fact. The real time nature of Twitter means a spammer can send his/her message out all over the Twitters before anyone notices and by the time it is noticed and the spammer is removed the spammer has 1,000s more spam bots stepping in to continue the assault. Spamming Twitter is obviously profitable for some people otherwise they would not do it. Imagine how much more profitable it will be if those results end up filling up Google and Bing search results.

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch:

Now that Google and Bing are getting the firehose, it could have a big impact on search results. For the search engines, the firehose is much more valuable than any single Tweet. They can index it and sift it, looking for patterns and spikes in keywords and shared links to get a better sense of what people across the Web are paying attention to at any given moment. This data can then be folded back into regular search results, even if the top result isn’t a Tweet.

Peter Da Vanzo of SEOBook:

Go where the search engines do. Link to your content from Twitter. Publish excerpts and link-backs. Monitor real-time search trends, using Google’s Hot Trends and trend data tools, such as TweetStats. Supply content to match demand.

It will be interesting to see if real-time search, on a Google scale, produces new business models. The traffic bursts should ample reward for being seen first for popular real time queries.

The news business relies on immediacy, and they just got a whole new wave of unpaid competition.

Kevin May, Editor of Tnooz, calls the deal “The Perfect Storm of travel search“:

It is unclear as yet how Google will index and rank the stream from Twitter – but if it uses the same relevancy and linking protocols it applies at the moment to natural search, then this is a powerful change in engine’s capability.

Jared Newman of PC World asks, “Will people who hate this stuff have to see it in their searches?“:

Microsoft doesn’t say whether Twitter searches be shown outside of a dedicated section of Bing, and we don’t know how Facebook will be treated. It’s a big question mark for Google’s Twitter integration as well, though we do know that Social Search results for Google Profile users will appear mid-way down the page. I imagine both companies will want to play around with their treatment of social search results, depending on how people use and respond to them.

Ben Wood, MD at Diffiniti, Alex Hoye, CEO of Latitude, and Mark Mitchell, Head of Search at OMD Group all chime in:

We can imagine that users interested in current affairs, for example, could find the real-time search offering beneficial, but the engines need to be intelligent enough to be able to bring truly relevant results to the surface, otherwise there is potential of having a negative impact on user experience.

As search engines integrate real-time into the ranking algorithms, brands will have new opportunities, such as the potential for last-minute promotion.

The search engines have to be ruthless with their filtering of this information and provide truly worthwhile and relevant results for the user; I think this will be a major challenge for them to overcome.

If you look at the quality of results you get in Twitter search on brands like McDonald’s most of tweets are of no major note and wouldn’t really add much to the searcher’s experience.

My personal take? Wait and see. There’s a lot of reasons to be excited and/or intrigued about where Twitter’s deals with Google and Bing will take search, but speculating on the future doesn’t always help present efforts. It’s worth considering that Google and Bing already index tweets and a lot of SEOs are already making an effort with Twitter. Twitter SEO is in the early stages but in some markets, it’s safe to say that sharing your links on Twitter can be a very smart link building tactic.

But beyond this, everyone should keep in mind that Google and Bing have just signed their deals with Twitter and even if they get firehose access integrated with their main indexes tomorrow (which they’re not), it still remains to be seen how Google and Bing let your tweets influence their SERPs. Personally, I’m hesitant to buy into any broad proclamations about the extent to which Twitter’s data will influence rankings making the rounds because, well, nobody knows. So such proclamations are just conjecture at this point.

While there’s no doubt that there’s a lot of value in the Twitter data — if the wheat can effectively be separated from the chaff — it’s important not to forget that Google and Bing won’t have an incentive to dramatically change the way their SERPs are created unless they see evidence that such a change would also dramatically benefit consumers. Perceived relevance is key for both of these search engines. If either (or both) overemphasizes Twitter’s influence in the SERPs and it skews results in a manner that consumers don’t respond favorably to, use of Twitter data could quickly become a liability.

The problem with this data is that it’s difficult for search engines to get context because there, well, there isn’t much context in 140 characters. Sure, the links that get spread on Twitter are important and who spreads them can probably be mined for trust and relevance, but Google and Bing will need to experiment with models for figuring out the appropriate value to place on Twitter link love given that Twitter is so easy to spam. That’s going to take time and chances are that Twitter results culled from the firehose will primarily be relegated to dedicated real-time indexes (like Bing Twitter) for the time being.

For all of these reasons and more, I personally doubt that we’ll see any notable SERP changes on Google or Bing proper anytime soon, which means those who shift too much of their SEO attention to Twitter will probably be doing themselves a disservice. In other words, this is a good time to prepare but probably not a great time to take a plunge.

We truly live in a digital world these days. Traditional advertising budgets have practically vanished and are being replaced by online advertising budgets that are proportionally growing alongside total budgets. New digital media is erasing traditional media, and marketers are constantly looking for better ways to measure their ROI. Because of this, many digital marketers have positive outlooks as to their future careers, especially when the economy turns around and total media budgets finally begin to rise again. Harry Gold from ClickZ had a great blog this morning about measuring online success, and not just by clicks and conversions. He goes on to discuss online branding, reverse IP lookup, social and viral sharing and amazingly enough- even phone calls.

Even better is that branding dollars are moving online at an unprecedented rate. And why not? Online branding doesn’t just drive impressions. If done properly, it encourages high-value brand engagements. And these engagement open the door to a new world of measurement possibilities that go way beyond clicks and conversions. These new metrics also have far more immediacy than awareness studies and traditional brand measurement methodologies.

Today I’ll share a list of high-value brand interactions that can be measured and reported. These items are often overlooked metrics that can be shared with your clients, who are more anxious than ever to show value and ROI (define) from their advertising investments.

* Video views. Get people to watch an entertaining branded short, quick sales presentation, educational content, or even an ad.

* Newsletter and e-mail opt-in. The most overlooked and underappreciated metric of them all. Opt-in e-mails are the gift that keeps on giving. No marketer who has a big e-mail list will deny that it’s the most valuable asset he has in his online marketing arsenal.

* Material downloads. The Web can be the ultimate way to hand out flyers, coupons, white papers, anything you want to get into people hands. Yet the tendency is to make people fill out a form to get the item. Try removing the form and letting the material flow! Encourage people to download, print, and share, and measure the results.

* Page views per visit. Try landing people on an engaging page that funnels them through a messaging sequence that builds your brand and escalates sales. Measure the results and optimize on the path that gets people to the end of the sequence. Also, measure the lift in total page views of your site’s high-value product pages. Did the pages that educate consumers about your products go up?

* Reverse IP lookup. This is the most overlooked metric in business-to-business. Let’s say you drive 100 clicks from a source like Google AdWords and only 5 percent convert. Typically, marketers apply zero value to the 95 clicks that didn’t convert into a form complete or lead. Use reverse IP lookup to show them the companies that took the time to visit the site, and suddenly the value of those nonconverting clicks will go through the roof.

* Phone calls. OK, these are conversions but very often they aren’t being measured. We apply very complex technology to measure everything online, yet rarely is that level of sophistication applied to inbound calls. Try dynamically publishing the phone numbers on your site and landing pages by source and apply the incoming calls to your online campaign’s ROI. We have clients who more than double their online ROI by simply tracking the source of their incoming calls.

* Social and viral sharing. Turn one click into many impressions and more traffic. Socially enable your ads and content with strong chiclet-based calls to action. If even a fraction of your traffic engages in these activities, your efforts will pay huge dividends.

* Social connections. I’ve heard metrics putting the value of a Twitter follower or Facebook fan as low as $2 and as high as $10. I would put that value at the higher end of the spectrum. Incorporate friend and follower calls to action into your campaign and then measure their lift!

* Return visits. This is an easy one! A visit to a site is good, but a return visit is better. It shows a high level of interest, and of course many conversions happen long after the first visit. What percentage of the visitors you drove to a site come back?

* Comments, content, and opinions. Have you run a poll asking people about their tastes or opinions? Have you run testimonial content? Asked people for a story, a photo of themselves with your product, or a product review? Not only are these great high-value brand engagements, but they also create very precious content you can use in your search engine optimization and other marketing initiatives. Ask people to engage with your brand and add their content to your site. You may be surprised at how many people say yes.

* Direct sales escalation. Are you driving clicks to bricks? Measure the things that drive people into your client’s stores and into your reps’ and resellers’ arms. Actions like store locator queries and rep searches should always be measured and are clear indicators that a future purchase may be imminent.

There are many more interesting success indicators that could be measured, which I’ll list in a follow-up article. In the mean time, please feel free add in the comments section below any you think should be included.