Citrix Systems
556% Increase in Conversions with Landing Page Optimization from ion.
Paid search pays off in the tough-to-crack enterprise healthcare market.
“With ion’s post-click marketing services, Citrix can easily deploy online campaigns, track results and modify campaigns in real-time to optimize our spend while providing a consistent, flexible framework for click landing experiences."– Diane Kalmanowicz Director, Web Marketing,Citrix Systems, Inc.
background
With over 180,000 customer organizations, Citrix Systems is the global leader in access infrastructure software. Citrix provides secure, easy, instant access to business-critical information at any time from anywhere. Their marketing efforts require a similar level of immediacy.
synopsis
ion helps Citrix to achieve increased online conversion rates in a narrow target market with online conversion optimization, reallocating media dollars to realize greater ROI.
challenge
In 2005, Citrix launched a paid search campaign to generate leads for the company’s compliance solutions for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The search campaign directed respondents to a topic-specific minisite that resulted in a 0.5% conversion rate.
In 2006, two factors led to a shift in the campaign strategy. First, feedback from the Citrix inside sales team was that the campaign was generating poor quality leads. Next, Citrix determined that decision makers in hospital purchasing were the most qualified prospects—a much smaller subset of the healthcare industry than previously targeted.
objective
The objective of the new campaign was to target hospital-purchasing decision makers and generate qualified leads at a higher conversion rate than the original campaign with the help of landing page optimization.
solution
The challenge was that the paid keywords generating the traffic were not hospital-specific. The new campaign needed to “weed out” respondents who were not part of the target audience, and hit decision makers with messaging that was specific to their hospital’s size and needs.
ion created a message-matched set of post-click marketing conversion paths with segmentation to direct respondents down forks based on the size of their hospital.
results
Based on post-click marketing segmentation analysis—conducted in real time—Citrix immediately learned that more than 70% of respondents were not in their target audience of hospital decision makers.
Even with only 30% of the respondents in the target audience, conversion rates still soared 556%, based in large part on the directed paths, audience-specific messaging and landing page optimization.
Within 10 days of launch, the ion RTP matrix (Respondents/Traffic sources/Paths) revealed that respondents from Google were better qualified and were converting at a higher rate than respondents from other search engines in the media buy. By week three of the campaign, the budget was moved entirely to Google.
The campaign launched with A/B testing of two test paths. Immediate real-time analysis revealed that path A was performing significantly better than path B. Based on these results, path C was crafted and launched with nearly double the effectiveness of the already highly successful A path. The C path converted at a rate 756% higher than Citrix’s original campaign and segmented over 40% of respondents. This segmented traffic converted at a rate of 12%, almost 2,500% better than the original campaign.
Based on these results, paths A & B are being phased out and a D path was crafted to improve the C path results—all within three weeks of the initial launch of the campaign.
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