Google Checkout Badges The Results Are In

Writen by Nick Temple

Over the last few days, I've been testing the Google Checkout badges on a series of keywords. Here's the experiment - and results.

Question: How does an AdWords ad with a Google Checkout Badge perform against an ad that does not have the badge? Theory: Since Google Checkout badges are new, I would assume that I would get a higher click-through rate on the badge with the ad as curious people click, but a lower conversion rate (hence higher cost per conversion).

Summary: I was wrong. The ad with the Google Checkout badge performed better across the board than the ad without.

Google Checkout was the hands-down winner.

Experiment: I created two identical opt-in pages, hosted on two seperate domains - one with the badges, one without. I then created two identical adds: the difference was in their Display and Link URL's - google then added the [badge] to the one with the appropriate URL. I also made sure that the campaign had optimization turned off, so taht each ad would be served equally. Both ads were served approximately 50% of the the time, so had approximately the same number of impressions (within 1%). No ads were displayed on the content network, which don't display the badges anyway.

The add with the checkout badge had a 40% higher click through than the ad without. The conversion rate was 17.5% higher with the badge in place.

This translates into more leads for less money, period.

Some notes: in addition to the badge, the domain names themselves were different, so that could have factored into the conversion. One was the product domain, the second (with the badge) was my personal domain, nicktemple.com - I would actually expect nicktemple.com to do worse than the product domain, however that probably needs to be tested seperately.

Also, the product had to do directly with Google Checkout, so these respondants may have been biased in favor of a checkout badge to begin with. Finally, the test is new, and as more more clicks are processed, the confidense level of the test will increase.

All that said … so far, the checkout badge is a clear winner, though more testing will be needed over the next few weeks in other markets to verify.

Nick Temple, the Virtual CTO, is the premier ecommerce consultant and technology specialist. His new training system, Google Checkout Secrets, reveals exactly how to implement the Google Checkout system on your website for maximum profits. Visit http://www.GoogleCheckoutSecrets.com