I’m digesting this blog post today from Bazaarblog about how Office Depot increased clickthrough, conversion and sales from their Google ads simply by putting information based on customer reviews in their ads.  What a great idea!  Office Depot recently started a creative test to see how searchers would respond to messaging from product reviews on their site.  The result was a 78% increase in clickthrough rate, 23% increase in conversion and almost 200% increase in revenue from their Google ads.

Here’s a sample of one of their ads (from the Bazaarvoice case study):

Office Depot Google ad

This would be an interesting test for online retailers that test copy in Google ads.  You can bet we’ll be testing it!

I’m loving this blog post at the Get Elastic blog that comments on a You Tube case study where the guru in the video suggests that one buy button design always works the best.  Folks, please don’t be tricked into thinking that there is one button style that works on all web sites.  It simply isn’t true.

Read the commentary in the Get Elastic blog post and I think you’ll agree.  My personal experience from testing hundreds of sites proves that there’s not one “magic” buy button, page layout, or product display.  All businesses and sites are different (thus keeping me employed and working on new projects).

The video, though, does bring one point to light, and the point is that you can’t improve your results if you don’t test.  Spilt testing can reveal better design that helps you sell your products more effectively.