We invited Bud Gibson to share the experiences he’s had teaching the WiderFunnel LIFT Model™ at the Easter Michigan University.

The LIFT Model

At Eastern Michigan University’s College of Business, we’ve developed a hands-on program to teach students the ins and outs of search engine marketing. Two courses are at the core of this program:

• Google AdWords and Landing Page Design
• Google Analytics and Landing Page Optimization

In both courses, students work with non-profits who have received search engine advertising grants from Google with a monthly budget of $10,000. In the AdWords course, students build out the non-profits’ pay per click search advertising accounts. In so doing, students often achieve significant increases in visitors to the non-profit’s web site, sometimes by as much as an order of magnitude. In the landing page optimization course, students help the non-profits increase their conversion rates for these visitors, sometimes by multiples of four or five. I’ll be describing one case in more detail below, and I’ve detailed a number of others here.

The non-profits we work with are similar to small businesses in several respects:

• They are often facing extreme budget pressure.
• Their marketing staff often do not have a detailed understanding of search engine advertising.
• Their landing pages are often not designed to highlight their offering’s value proposition to their visitors.

The value proposition is of course key for conversions, and we have found WiderFunnel’s LIFT model quite helpful in organizing landing page redesign around it. In search advertising, strong clues as to the value proposition the visitor is seeking reside in the key words the visitor searched on and the advertising appeals they responded to. All of this information is available in either the Google AdWords or Google Analytics interfaces or both.

Once the value proposition the visitor is seeking is understood, it is possible to develop testable hypotheses around clear, relevant statements of that value proposition that might work on the ad’s landing page as well as identifying landing page elements might be distractions from it. Finally, one can determine sources of anxiety on the landing page and how to raise the visitor’s sense of urgency to take the next step down the funnel. It is worth noting that these efforts need not all be focused on the pure goal of increasing sales or revenue, though that often is a major objective.

Take for example the Organization for Bat Conservation (OBC).The OBC essentially exists to raise awareness about the good things bats do in nature. One of the OBC’s major search advertising campaigns targets people seeking information about bats. Students engaged in a three step process:

• They identified searcher interest by analyzing keywords searchers used and the ads they responded to.
• In consultation with management, students determined the best resources on the site for this segment and set getting visitors to those resources as the goal of the landing page.
• Students developed and ran a Google Website Optimizer experiment pitting three alternative landing pages developed using LIFT Principles against the original.

As further detailed in this report, the best student designed alternative led to an improvement of over 400% against the original, and the organization has adopted the student landing page. This case illustrates the unique value proposition of our program at EMU. Students access sophisticated frameworks and technologies as they help real organizations solve real problems they face in their ongoing business operations.

About the Author
Bud Gibson is a professor of Computer Information Systems at Eastern Michigan University and the founder of MichiganInnovators.org, an educational non-profit. He has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the Wharton School. He has extensive experience business consulting in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. His current passion is developing web optimization training programs at the university level.