You may remember back in September we announced the launch of the first AdWords Train & Gain challenge. Today we’re very excited to announce our 15 finalists from around the world and the overall grand prize winner.

Train & Gain was a four week program full of tips and advice to help you get the most from AdWords. Thousands of you took up the challenge and impressed us with the fantastic results you achieved in such a short time.

We have just finished judging all of your entries and are delighted to share our overall winner with you...

Dan Hulse and Elliot Trotter from Terra Organics in Washington, USA, have won a trip to Sydney, Australia to meet with AdWords experts in our Sydney office and attend the YouTube Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House in March 2011. Congratulations Dan and Elliot, we can’t wait to see you in Sydney!

In addition to taking the required steps each week during the competition, Terra Organics demonstrated through their case study submission (and video!) how the Train & Gain challenge impacted their AdWords account and overall business:

“We started using Google AdWords for our small Organic Produce Home Delivery Service about a year ago. While we saw some great gains, we knew we weren't using it to its full potential and weren't sure how best to budget our ads for the most efficiency. Google's Train & Gain helped us to refine our AdWords knowledge and get more out of our dollar. We learned how to maximize our Cost Per Click, use better (and negative) keywords and track our progress using Google Analytics.

Since starting the Train & Gain program, we've already seen dramatic improvements in the consistency of performance with our advertisements. We're able to work within our budget to get better results and turn more people onto our local farm CSA (community supported agriculture) and produce boxes.

In order to track just how much Google's Train & Gain impacted us, we videotaped our progress week by week and put together a YouTube video so you could gain a better understanding of who we are and how Train and Gain helped us.”

Check out the video Dan and Elliot created as part of their submission:

Huge congratulations also go to our other regional winners. Each of these finalists has won an Android phone.

Winners from Americas:

Adrian Rodriguez, Fright Night Scream Park, California, USA

Elliot Trotter, Terra Organics, Washington, USA (overall winner)

Ivan Hsieh, EMlab P&K, California, USA

Judy Weiss, Valstar Printers, Minnesota, USA

Shane Dorney, Dorney Security, Texas, USA

Winners from Europe, Middle East & Africa:

David Morgan, Easy Read, Oxford, UK

Debby Appleby, SCL Water, Devon, UK

Emily Allan, Peppermint Pix, KZN, South Africa

Pierre Hun, Utility Exchange Online, Derby, UK

Ross Berntsen, Fire Personnel, Kent, UK

Winners from Japan and Asia-Pacific:

Biplab Kumar, NK Realtors, Kolkata, India

Jason Xa, Benjamin’s Crafts, Inglewood, Australia

Rattana Areerob, Phuket Villa Rentals, Phuket, Thailand

Raymond Mellick, Temporary Tattoos Guru, Collingwood, Australia

Tapas Ranjan Behera, The Navadoya Club, Orissa, India

If you didn’t take part in Train & Gain this time around and would like to find out more about improving your AdWords account check out the AdWords Small Business Center today.

Congratulations again to all of our winners and thanks to everyone who took part in Train & Gain.

Posted by Faustina Clifford, AdWords Train & Gain team.

Thomas Cook AG offers everything from holiday packages, last minute holidays and city trips to car rental and cruises via their website thomascook.de. The last minute and holiday package parts of the site are powered by the Internet Booking Engine of TravelTainment GmbH, which is part of the Amadeus Leisure Group.

Booking made easy: improving the last step in the booking process
Looking at the conversion funnel in their web analytics reports, Thomas Cook identified that a relatively large percentage of their visitors were reaching their booking page but were not completing a booking. They understood that improving this last step in the conversion process could dramatically increase their conversion rate and approached their partner TravelTainment to work together on optimizing this page. Their hypothesis was that a shorter and (visually) less complex booking page would lead to a higher percentage of visitors completing a booking.

The decision was made to run an A/B test in which the original page (A) was tested against an alternative (B). In the design of the alternative page Thomas Cook and TravelTainment focused on reducing the length of the page:

The layout of the booking form was improved

Before


After

The option to enter a voucher code was made expandable

Before

After



The (optional) car rental section was redesigned with less detail

Before

After




Payment option details were hidden and are only expanded when a payment option is selected

Before

After



The size of the call-to-action button at the bottom of the page was increased

Before

After


Improved booking page improves Conversion Rate by 33%
The changes listed above resulted in an alternative page that was around 40% shorter than the original. Over a period of almost 3 weeks half of the visitors to the booking page saw the original page (A), the other half saw the newly created alternative page (B). The alternative page had a 33% higher conversion rate than the original


What can you do?

Optimise your booking / checkout process to increase your conversion rate
To convert more visitors into buyers, regularly check your Web Analytics data to find out where a large percentage of visitors are leaving the conversion funnel of your website. Diagnose what the issues with the pages you have identified are, and start creating and testing possible alternatives. As a general guideline, try to keep an eye on the following when thinking about optimizing you booking / checkout pages:

• Try to keep your booking or checkout process as easy as possible to complete
• Offer your visitors the option to order as a guest without creating an account
• Avoid visual distractions
• Show the steps in the process
• Show payment options early on in the process
• Reduce the number of form fields (preferably, only include required fields)
• Show examples when needed (for instance: date of birth (23.08.1976))
• Clearly highlight errors when visitors forget to fill in a form field or use a wrong format
• Offer assistance (show a phone number so visitors can contact you with questions)
• Show visitors that their data will be secure
• Try to get visitors to sign up for your newsletter after they completed the purchase / booking

As Thomas Cook and TravelTainment have shown in this case study, a simple A/B test with a tool like Google Website Optimiser can have a huge effect on your conversion rate!


(This case study was previously posted on the German Conversion Room blog)

Posted by Jos Meijerhof, Google Conversion Team