BP, the oil spill, and the urge to crucify…. somebody

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is probably the biggest ecological disaster of all time. It’s probably also the biggest corporate PR nightmare of all time.

Just last week one of my Roundtable members devoted his hot seat to strategizing a new viral marketing campaign propelled by BP outrage.

Millions of dollars will be made just by selling ways for people to vent their anger – NOT including lawsuits and finger pointing contests.

I rarely go very far off-topic in my business emails and blog posts…. but this is not off-topic. It’s everybody’s business; and not for the reasons you might think. Today I want to talk about a NON-obvious reason why this is everybody’s business.

The major news networks are covering this 24/7. As you witness footage of dying wildlife and mucked up beaches, you want to go strangle somebody.

I haven’t checked, but I bet some BP executives literally have had to hire security guards to protect themselves and their families from retaliation.

Blame and accusation is at an all-time high. Everybody who was even remotely involved in the catastrophe feels like a pariah.

Because: The #1 urge that ALL of us have is:

TO CRUCIFY SOMEBODY.

I choose the word “crucify” very deliberately. Everybody’s furious. We’re looking for scapegoat. A fall guy. Somebody to attach the blame to. A damsel to throw in the volcano.

Of course it’s totally understandable. It may take decades to clean this up. A lot of things have been permanently ruined. A lot of damage cannot be undone.

In any case, here’s what happens:

• Politicians promise to find the person responsible and make them PAY. Everyone cheers: YES! YES! YES! Make them PAY!!!
• All the companies and vendors involved vow to attach the blame to somebody else and absolve themselves of responsibility.
• All the companies, vendors and individuals who worked for BP are judged as “evil”
• Protesters urge the government to pass tougher environmental regulations so that nothing like this ever happens again.
• People Boycott local gas stations that had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Shop owners can’t buy groceries. Employees are let go.
• Competitive oil companies gloat over the fact that they are innocent and their rival gets to take the bullet
• Politicians respond to the protesters promising to pass tougher laws and nail the ‘bad guys.’
• Reporters, writers and camera crews do “investigative journalism,” chronicling the egregious irresponsibility of the oil rig crews and the failures to comply with safety regulations etc. etc. They craft dark foreboding accounts with melodramatic foreshadowing of all the sins that led up to the Gigantic Horrible Catastrophe. We’ll all be watching documentaries about this for years.
• Every failed attempt to plug the hole is interpreted as more proof of the sinister motives of everybody involved.
• Politicians do pass tougher regs – FAST. They cobble together new rules, ram them through committees and pass them into law. Now it takes 600 pages of paperwork just to unscrew a bolt on an oil rig. (It’s exactly like Sarbanes-Oxley, a US law that was passed after Enron collapsed. It’s a gigantic, humongous boondoggle, a colossal paperwork nightmare that mid- and large-sized companies have to contend with 24/7. It does almost nothing to actually improve the operation or integrity of their businesses. It just adds bureaucracy.)
• The people who do finally plug the hole (after going weeks without sleep and making themselves sick just by being there) are in a lose-lose situation because even when they’re successful everybody’s still furious at them. Recalls veterans returning from the Vietnam war and having paint and urine thrown at them when they stepped off the plane.
• Politicians who had almost nothing to do with the actual solution (other than showing up for a photo opportunity next to black seagulls and dead seals), take credit for what the slime-covered hole-pluggers actually did. And they extract more tax money via fines and levies.

Do you see how incredibly counterproductive the blame and accusation is?

Remember this:

NOBODY intentionally created this. Nobody woke up one morning and wanted to blow up an oil rig. Nobody wanted their employees and contractors to die. Not on your life. Nobody wanted to kill tourism. Nobody wanted to suffocate birds and turtles. Nobody wanted to ruin the fishing in Louisiana.

And don’t forget this: ALL of us have, at some time in our life, created a disaster that other people had to clean up.

ALL of us have created messes that we could never clean up ourselves. Other people had to expend their time and money and blood, sweat and tears to fix the mistake we made.

ALL of us have felt the blame and accusation and condemnation – the GRATING SELF HATRED – that you experience when you’ve made a major screw-up.

Some of us went bankrupt and it cost other people and vendors hundreds of thousands of dollars. We were deeply ashamed of what we had done. We wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

Some of us made mistakes in our marriages and relationships. Some of us destroyed our families. Some of us injured spouses and children very deeply.

Some of us wrecked dad’s car and didn’t have two nickels to rub together to pay for it. Dad had to cancel the family vacation just to buy a used car.

Some of us squandered a college education that our parents paid for with all their savings.

Some of us squandered a college education that we ourselves are STILL paying for. Some of us took out $100,000 of student loans and have nothing but beer cans to show for it.

SO:

Don’t fix the blame. Fix the problem.

They made a giant mess. Now they have to clean it up. The best thing we can do is assist them as they do this dirty, ugly job.

Imagine this….

Imagine the BP senior manager who was in charge when the rig blew up – a guy who’s probably desperately wanted to jump off a building for weeks now – appears before a crowd of people.

Imaging everyone telling him:

“We know you didn’t do this on purpose. We forgive you. Let’s just roll up our sleeves and solve this thing once and for all.”

Suddenly, his mind freed from condemnation, an idea appears that he never thought of. It’s simple. It’s elegant. It’s inexpensive. It WORKS. The mess begins to dissolve.

And it sets a good precedent for all of us… because all of us make mistakes and all of us have deep regrets. ALL of us need grace.

I would like to suggest that the best thing we can do is to choose to deliberately adopt a spirit of forgiveness to the people who made this huge MISTAKE. I propose that we recognize that nobody at BP or any of their vendors was out to screw up the world.

They were doing what all of us do – they got up every morning and tried to do the best they could at their job, and to make the most of what they’d been given.

I know it’s totally counter-intuitive, but the most powerful, creative, life-giving thing we can bring to this situation is to choose to be graceful instead of pouring out contempt and condemnation.

Live by grace, die with grace.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Which way do you want it?

Perry Marshall

Google Conversion Optimizer: The Controversy

Search Engine Watch posted a rant about Google Conversion Optimizer – that Google is essentially trying to rob you of your choices.

I think a healthy skepticism of Google is a good thing. Nevertheless I disagree – I think this is an inevitable step in the forward evolution of online marketing. People can wish for time to roll backward but it doesn't and it won't:

This signals a sea change in how online marketing is done. This is not an overnight phenomenon, but over the next 2-3 years, Cost Per Action bidding will gradually become a dominant way that Internet traffic is bought and sold. It's inevitable because it obeys the principle: "Sell results, not procedures."

I have personally been experimenting with Google Conversion Optimizer for a year and David Rothwell has been doing the same for 2 years. I think it's rock solid and it's ready for the light of day. We're doing a special online course on how to harness the full power of GCO and if you're spending more than $1,000 per month on traffic to generate opt-ins, actions or leads, this training will pay off handsomely.

Perry Marshall

P.S.: David Rothwell's birthday is today – May 28. Happy 51st Birthday David!

How to Place Ads on YouTube with Google AdWords: Part 1

In search volume alone, YouTube is the #2 search engine behind Google itself.  Yet even with its gigantic size, it is easy for YouTube to get passed up by online advertisers.  Many advertisers ignore the opportunity due to the convoluted process required to explicitly target YouTube with ads.  This means there is less competition for ad space on YouTube and great rewards for those who can crack the code.

In this post I hope to clear up the confusion and tell you exactly how to get your ads showing on YouTube. YouTube is both a search engine when searching for videos and a content site when watching videos.  While there are a few high-dollar ad buys available directly through YouTube, most of the ad inventory can be purchased through Google AdWords on a CPC or CPM basis.  Generally speaking, YouTube as a search engine is reached through a search targeted AdWords campaign.  YouTube as a content site is reached through a content or placement targeted AdWords campaign.

YouTube Promoted Video Ads

When you do a search on YouTube, two types of ads can show up: sponsored text ads and promoted video ads.  The sponsored text ads are brought in through YouTube's search partnership with Google.  If your campaign is opted into the search partner network it is automatically eligible to display on YouTube search results.  You can't explicitly target your text ads on the YouTube search results page -- it happens behind the scenes.

You can, however, explicitly target the YouTube search results page with a promoted video.  A promoted video is a YouTube video you pay to get people to watch. You'd probably only want to do this if there is some call to action in the video itself that will encourage viewers to visit your actual website after watching your video.

If there is a promoted video eligible for display on a YouTube search result page (i.e. if you are bidding on that query), it will always rank higher than sponsored text ads.  This is because YouTube wants to keep people on their own site.  The sponsored text ads link to external sites while the sponsored video ads link to a specific video on YouTube.

So here's how to post your promoted video ad...

1. Create a Google AdWords campaign opted into both Google Search and Google Search Partners in the campaign settings.  If you want your promoted video ad displayed on relevant video watch pages across YouTube, you must also opt into Google's content network.  You may wish to create a separate campaign for this purpose so you can use different keyword lists for YouTube search vs. YouTube content targeting.
   
   
2. Create your ad groups as you would normally, but skew the keywords toward searches that would be popular on YouTube.  You can use the YouTube keyword suggestion tool for ideas.
3. The ads themselves are what makes this a YouTube promoted video campaign.  Don't include any standard text or image ads, otherwise the network settings above will kick in and you'll indeed be targeting Google search + partners.  Include only ads of a specific format: a Display Ad Builder ad using the "YouTube Promoted Videos Template." This is found in the "Audio and Video" category of Display Ad Builder.  Once you choose this format, you'll be able to select the YouTube video you wish to promote.
   

What about getting people to your own website?  You're paying Google/YouTube to get someone to visit another page on YouTube's site.  That can't be your end goal.  Of course your video will probably mention your website and you'll probably have a link to your site in the video description -- but YouTube gives you another call to action link you need to use:  a Call-to-Action Overlay.

A call-to-action overlay resembles a sponsored text ad at the bottom of your video.  It shows up at the bottom of your video for a brief period of time during the video and then at the end of the video.  The difference from a sponsored text ad is that it doesn't say "sponsored ad," it is free for you to use, and it links to your own website.

Before posting your promoted video campaign, perform the following steps to activate your call-to-action overlay:

1. Sign in to your YouTube account
2. Click Account at the top of your dashboard.
3. Click Edit next to the video you will be promoting.
4. Fill in all required fields under Call-to-Action Overlay.
5. Click save changes when you're done making all changes to your video.

Here's some more helpful tips from Google on how to optimize your promoted video campaigns.

Avoid the Downward Quality Score Spiral

My rule (and like all rules there are exceptions) is that if your quality score is 6 or below; stop raising bids and start working on quality score.

However, I keep receiving the question: Outside of cost and position; why is quality score so important?

Here’s the answer.

First, take a look at this list of what quality score actually affects in your account:

• If your ad is eligible to be shown in the auction
• What position your ad will be displayed on the search page
• The price you pay for the click
• If products extensions will be displayed with your ad
• If sitelinks will be displayed with your ad
• If location extensions will be displayed with your ad
• If your ad is eligible to be displayed in the top spot above the natural results
• If dynamic keyword insertion will work

Not working on quality score can put a keyword into a negative spiral.

Ad rank (where your ad is displayed in the search results) is a simple formula: ad rank = QS X Max CPC.
Ads are shown in descending order of ad rank (the highest ad rank is position 1, the second highest ad rank is position 2, etc)

Let’s say your paying $2 per click with a quality score of 4. This means your ad rank is 8.

Now let’s say that your competition is bidding $1 with a quality score of 7. This means their ad rank is a 7.

At this point in time your ad appears higher in the search results.

However, with a 4 quality score your ad does not show DKI, it does not show product extension ads, in fact the ad displayed on the SERP is identical to what you see inside your account as none of the ad ‘add-ons’ will be displayed with your ad.

Your competition’s ad, with a 7 quality score, is showing extensions (this could be product or location extensions) and looks nicer on the SERP than your ad. So what happens? Your CTR goes down and theirs goes up.

This causes your quality score to drop even more.
And their quality score to rise.

Over time, their ad starts showing above your ad even through their bid is half of yours.

Then the next advertiser below you has a 7 quality score and their ad is showing product extensions….

The cycle repeats itself until your ad just stops showing because of low quality score reasons.

Spending a little time working with quality score each week might not always result in increasing all of your quality scores; but it will help keep you from falling into a downward spiral.

If you need quality score help; our new training site will have tutorials on quality score as well as a tool where you can quickly see where inside your account you should spend your time optimizing your quality scores.

Read Brad's Newest Book: Advanced Google AdWords
	Advanced Google AdWords will provide deep insight into AdWords functionality and advanced features, explaining how they work and providing tips, tactics, and hands-on tutorials that readers can immediately use on their own PPC campaigns. $175 in training & AdWords coupons inside Read testimonials from industry experts Learn more about Advanced Google AdWords
Certified Knowledge: Online AdWords Training, Tools, and Community
	Certified Knowledge is an online tools, training, and community site brought to you by Brad Geddes & bg Theory. We are currently accepting beta applications. In interested, please see more at CertifiedKnowledge.org.

Related posts:

1. What determines the ‘Keyword Quality Score’ for AdWords? Your keyword quality score, along with maximum cost per click...
2. AdWords Quality Score Ranges I’ve received a lot of feedback for extending Quality Score...
3. Google AdWords Quality Score Factors Demystified There are several different factors that affect Google AdWords Quality...

Google Conversion Optimizer: How to put AdWords on Autopilot

AdWords has a new feature called Google Conversion Optimizer which allows you to bid on conversions to opt-ins or sales rather than bidding on cost per click. It completely shifts your focus out of granular details of keywords to bigger picture. Properly set up, it can do a TON of work for you, no joke.

http://www.perrymarshall.com/google/conversion-optimizer-teletraining/

On Thursday May 27 we're doing a teleseminar with UK AdWords consultant David Rothwell. David's going to explain the pros, cons and advantages of putting entire parts of your Google account on autopilot. Google can bid on keywords, set bid prices, find new traffic sources and relieve you of tons of work.

He's going to explain what kinds of advertisers are in the best position to take advantage of this and which ones aren't. He'll explain the tradeoffs involved. In our conversation we'll show you where Pay Per Click is going. Because this is a MAJOR development and it signals a sea change in the entire industry.

Google Conversion Optimizer has been around for a couple of years now and I haven't talked about it much; it's been in Beta. But now it's time to talk because I myself have used GCO to get over 50,000 opt-ins. David presented in Maui and it was killer material.

I'm glad to say David has completely cracked the code on what makes this thing tick:

http://www.perrymarshall.com/google/conversion-optimizer-teletraining/

Perry Marshall

Inside a Marketers’ Mind: Introducing the new bg Theory site with explanations of our redesign

When we first launched bg Theory almost two years ago, we did so very quickly. In less than a week, we had a site, company infrastructure, servers, and revenue.

Since I knew WordPress very well, we used WordPress as our CMS. I took a blog template I liked and spent a day modifying the CSS and other files.

When we first launched, our offers were mostly focused on in-house training and the AdWords Seminars. Over the past two years, I’ve written a book, changed the seminars from a one day to two day product, and we’re adding a brand new AdWords training and PPC tools product.

As we added or changed each product, I just kept adding new custom pages. Our WordPress install became so convoluted that we had:

• 8 page templates
• 2 blog templates
• 3 headers
• 3 footers
• 4 sidebars

In the interest of time, as like most of you, we are overly busy – these templates were calling php includes, iFrames, etc, and just becoming more and more complex to try and keep straight, let alone update properly.

And just like many marketers, we fell into a similar trap. Our work was much better for people we worked with than ourselves.

Some simple rules of conversions that everyone should follow:

• Each page should have a primary goal.
  • A page might have more than one goal, two or three is OK – more than that overwhelms people
  • The most real estate on your pages should be dedicated to your primary goals, the second amount of page space to your secondary goals, etc
• Every page of your website is a segmentation page until someone converts.
• Information should be clear and concise.
  • Easy-to-read and digest information is more important than a gorgeous website design.
  • Easy-to-read also means that your links and content should be easy to read for those who are color blind (color blindness is more common than many people think), or need to view webpages in larger font sizes than your default
• Each page of your site should provide value for your company
  • We have some blog posts which have over 78,000 views, and many with over 10,000 views yet our blog was not well monetized
  • I’m not a hard sell person – I prefer to educate and let the revenue follow (your monetization efforts might be different – that’s OK)
  • However, our blog was not leading to many conversions (the revenue was nice; just not what it should be for our page views)
• Tracking is essential. If you can’t track something then you can’t optimize it.

When I examined our analytics to look at revenue by page and traffic source combination (this examines each page and who sent you the traffic, one without the other is useless) and made sure we had at least 500 visitors for each combination. We had some  combinations where the value was nearly $0.00 and other’s where the value was nearing $50 (and if you filter to only include at least 100 visitors minimum some combinations were nearing $100). That’s a dramatic difference across a site.

It became even worse when examining some traffic sources where their value was nearly $0.00 on some pages, and more than $20 on other pages.

That is too much of a variance. Some of your pages will be worth very little, and some of your traffic sources are worth very little.

A traffic source often shows the quality level of visitors. The pages show quality level of conversion potential. Large variances need to be examined and improved if possible (and some pages will always be low or some always high).

Define Your Company

Not enough marketers really define their primary goals.

Are you:

• An agency
• A consultant
• A full service bid management company
• A design company
• etc..

While we do consulting, speaking, in-house training, etc – our primary mission is to empower as many companies as possible with the information necessary to make their online marketing efforts successful.

Our primary goal is not to get consulting clients, or even in-house training. While those two objectives lead to revenue – it’s not scalable revenue.

Our goal is to empower as many companies as possible. Therefore, we want to highlight the ways we scale PPC learning:

• Advanced AdWords Book
• AdWords Seminars for Success
• The new project about to launch: Certified Knowledge – online, on-demand training & tools

As there are dedicated sites for Certified Knowledge and Advanced Google AdWords, this site serves as our corporate site, our blog, and our seminar promotions.  

How will you reach your audience?

Once you’ve decided what your company does, you need to determine how you will reach your audience.

This step is the coordination of your website and your marketing channels.

For instance, with the seminars, Google links directly to our seminar pages. Since Google is passing some of their credibility to us – the seminar pages do not need to offer as much credibility nor showcase different offers because someone came to the site looking for a specific offer. Therefore, we mostly focus on testimonials.

Coordinating your marketing channel with your design

If you are doing email marketing, are your  landing pages extensions of the email offer?

If you have a blog, which often pulls traffic from various sources, do you show your offers on those pages to try and monetize the traffic? Do you show some credibility items on those pages to showcase why a reader should be engaged with (or even link to) your company?

If you are doing PPC, you have extensive control of the landing page – so are you controlling the message and navigation to increase conversions?

Even for SEO, you might create certain aspects of your pages to ensure that your pages can be crawled and rank; however, traffic for traffic’s sake is useless. Traffic that converts is useful. Even your SEO focused pages should be aligned with your company’s goals.

Credibility Does Matter

There are a lot of affiliate offers in the marketing training space. As many of you have seen, there are promises of internet riches that can be accomplished with a website and a week of work. When an offer seems to good to be true…

Therefore, we need to showcase why we’re different than the other get-rich-quick schemes.

Obviously, if Google is promoting the seminars directly – than we can use some of that credibility.

I wrote a book published by Wiley/Symbex (the publishers of the dummies, hour a day, and mastering series – not some random publishing house); and while it is revenue generation – a published book is also a credibility element (in addition, the foreword is by Fred Vallaeys, the Google AdWords Evangelist).

I have more than a decade of experience, and have worked with many types of companies – so we need to highlight the experience.

Some ways in which you might be able to increase credibility include:

• BBB member
• Association membership
• VeriSign logo
• Reviews & testimonials from your users
• Industry certifications
• Partnerships

Bringing it all together – The New Site

Our new site is not quite finished yet. We will be making a few more improvements over the next couple months; and redesigning our logo sooner than later. However, the main design has changed significantly and built around the rules up top.

First off, you must know the limitations and features of your content management system. While hand coding all your HTML will give you the most control over every aspect of your site – it’s too much work for most people. Therefore, we’re still using WordPress.

Before you should start your design, list your constraints:

• Time: I did not want to spend more than two days redesigning the site
• As I’m personally putting many thousands of dollars into Certified Knowledge (and having a custom design created for the site which will go live in a few weeks); I wanted to do the bg Theory redesign cheaply
• Because of the time limit; I wanted to use the same CMS so that I did not have to import a database into a new system and have to go through the entire site to fix problems
• Because of the money limitation; I wanted to find a basic WordPress template that fit the needs and then I could recode the CSS and pages myself (with a max of two days of work).
• I wanted a different sidebar based upon where someone was in the site.
• I wanted some pages without a sidebar (which I can make happen by changing the calls inside a WordPress page).
• I only wanted one sidebar. Our previous site had two sidebars which lead to too much information on a single page – breaking the rule of a goal per page.
• As our seminar and speaking schedules are always updating, it was imperative that it was very easy to update these schedules.
• The old site had custom pages that were built off of 880px width that we did not want to find and re-code. Therefore, the new site had to be at least 880px wide (in fact, this turned out to be one of the biggest changes for the template as we had to widen everything).

I did some research, picked a theme that I liked (in fact, it’s the placeholder theme for Certified Knowledge); and started customizing.

Here’s the decisions I made along the way in choosing how to layout the custom elements of the design.

Our desktop site (we have a mobile version as well) is broken down into a handful of items that we can customize:

The header: The main links across your site

• We don’t link to all the pages of our site. We choose only a handful for very specific reasons:
  • Home: Everyone wants to see a home page navigation
  • Blog: Our main source of traffic, a nice source of credibility, and the reason many people come back to the site
  • AdWords Seminars: Our top product and top credibility source
  • PPC Tools & Training: Our newest product and one we want to start promoting
  • AdWords Book: Our lowest revenue product, but second highest credibility product
  • Speaking: This one was a choice. We could have put up our consulting or in-house training link just as easily as speaking. However, speaking is both a credibility issue and marketing opportunity.
    • As I personally have more than 600 hours of public speaking experience (and that counts speaking at a single SES or SMX session as only a few minutes – that 600 hours is actual time spent standing in front of a group and actually interacting with them); this seems a natural fit.
  • Contact: Obvious choice; make it easy for people to contact you (also why we have the phone number on every page)
  • About: Learn about why you should choose our marketing products
• We have many more pages we could have added to this navigation. However, we choose to slim down the choices that help fit our main marketing objectives: To educate as many businesses as possible about marketing. So every page is about marketing, credibility, or contacting us. So even pages such as ‘subscribe to the blog’ are not on the main navigation. If someone’s in the blog we will push this, but not when they are in other pages looking up marketing training. In pages like that; the subscribe link is a distraction.
• We wanted the phone number on every page for customer support requests
• We wanted a search box across the entire site that was highly visible as our site is often searched

I’m not a designer; I’m a coder and marketer. Therefore, the logo is not what will be there in a few weeks. It’s a placeholder logo to match the feel of the site; but something else will replace that section of the header.

The Main jQuery

This is the big blue section That links to ‘Certified Knowledge,’ ‘AdWords Seminars’, ‘Advanced Google AdWords Book’ and then has the rotating images; which are also links into those various pages.

The reason I call it jQuery as that’s the JavaScript used to power the system. If you are new to jQuery, there’s a great site, jQueryUI where you can see demos.

• The images within the jQuery are linked to actual pages. The images rotate automatically. Therefore, the images were chosen based upon what we’re trying to promote.
  • We have 4 images for Certified Knowledge – our scalable revenue.
  • We have 1 image of me, for credibility.
  • We have 2 images of our seminars; our current highest revenue and since they are supported by Google – also have credibility.
  • We have 2 images for the book; again credibility and some revenue (and since the book has coupons for the seminars and Certified Knowledge, we can also pull a higher monetization from the book sales)
  • Not all people will realize that you can click on those images to be taken to an internal page. Therefore, in most of the images we added buttons so people would realize they could be clicked.
  • Even the real estate devoted to the jQuery is in-line with our site’s conversion goals.
• Normally, I’d tell someone this is too much. You have three products – pick one that’s your primary, another one that’s your secondary, etc. However, our seminars are location based so not everyone can attend. The book is low revenue; but high credibility. Certified Knowledge is scalable revenue. Therefore, we used the links and images to showcase our various products and credibility across many pages.
• Since the seminars are well known; our main secondary objective (besides revenue) is to increase awareness of these other products.

The question then became: where do we add this big header across our website?

The jQuery appears on the main page; which makes sense as your home page should be a segmentation page that shows what you do and provides easy navigation further into your site. In the case of our site, if we were to count all the links on the homepage; which is 20; 6 are for Certified Knowledge, 4 are for the seminars, 3 are for the book, etc. So even the number of possible paths is in-line with where we want to increase our visibility

It appears on the blog pages so that these previously under-monetized pages will help create additional visibility for the products. The goal of the jQuery on these pages is to increase visibility for our training products. As it’s a blog, the revenue won’t be as high as other pages; however, this will create a lot more awareness for some of our other products. We’ll measure the analytics on these pages to see if it’s successful. If yes, then good. If no, then I’ll work on a different blog page design.

It does not appear on the AdWords Seminar pages. These pages receive a lot of traffic directly from Google’s website. Since the jQuery steals attention away from the page; we wanted the seminar pages to have as high a conversion as possible so decided not to add it to those pages.

It does appear on the other pages of the site at present. As Certified Knowledge and the book both lead to other websites, it made sense to showcase credibility on our other training methods and increase awareness, especially for the book and Certified Knowledge as they are new products. Over time, we’ll measure the effectiveness of the jQuery on these pages and either remove it or change it to be more specific to particular pages.

The Blog Sidebar

• People read blogs for information first.
• Blogs can be monetized, but it’s often a longer process.
• Blogs do increase credibility.
• The top of the sidebar is about sharing information. Make it easy to pass your content around. This is also expected on a blog site; so makes sense to highlight it.
  • Information sharing is also important for credibility. These days, people expect marketers to be on FaceBook and Twitter – therefore, while it’s another conversion type (and we are tracking all social clicks to 3rd party sites); it also helps to increase credibility for someone who is in marketing.
• The recent posts. Make it easy for people to see other content.
• Blogs we like. Blogrolls and featured links are common on sidebars, and there are sites we think deserve some link love; so we kept this to help engage the community and other blogs.
• The blog has more pages than the rest of the site combined – there are 979 posts. I was worried about our SEO efforts as we’re removing a lot of links from our homepage. Therefore, much of the sidebar is still deep links into categories to flatten out the site crawl.
• As the jQuery is on the blog pages, we decided not to feature the other training methods we have. One thing we will test is adding the upcoming seminar

 

The Page Sidebar

• This sidebar only appears on pages about training, about us, contact, etc. It does not appear on the blog pages.
  • People who are visiting non-blog pages are generally a higher conversion rate for us. They are not just blog readers (not to disparage blog readers – I’m one and the community is essential)
  • We did not want to overwhelm these visitors with a long blog sidebar about posts and categories, etc. These visitors are more interested in being trained through a non-blogging source.
• Therefore, as the seminars are the current highest source of revenue; we highlight that schedule first.
• As we offer a lot of training, and some people skip headers (our jQuery) ; we added a sidebar about ‘How do you liked to be trained’ with the options for reading, in-person, on-demand video. We will test this headline and this sidebar extensively to see what increases conversions and interest.
• Social icons. This is our worst conversion activity – leave the site to increase our social followers. However, it is a much better conversion than absolutely nothing (a visitor just leaving the site). And as social does increase credibility for our industry; we added the social icons and are tracking these clicks separate from the same icons on the blog pages.

 

The Home Page

• This is the most visited page of our site.
• The page needs to easily convey what we do and how someone can get more information on that training type
• We wanted a very clean page that removed just about everything on the page that did not increase revenue
• The page is dominated by the jQuery; which has links and features of our training abilities
• The bottom of the page showcases our top products we want visibility for (our Seminars and Certified Knowledge)
  • As many people come to our site for the blog; and this use to be highlighted on the main page, we decided to showcase the new blog posts over the book. The book is in the jQuery; so it is already being showcased to some extent.
• Buttons. Most of the images in the jQuery are buttons, but for those who scroll down further on the page, we added buttons (which often lead to higher CTRs than links) underneath these featured products. However, bloggers are more willing to hunt for information, so the links to the recent blog posts are plain links and not buttons.
• The footer. Basic information.

That’s it. A clean, sparse,, information-packed homepage. We removed a lot of information that use to be on our homepage. We’re tracking every single click on this page to see it’s effectiveness. If an individual element is not effective, then I’ll change it.

The Search Results Page

• Search is used a lot on our site; therefore, we needed to make sure there was a custom search page
• As the vast majority of our search results lead to blog pages; and almost all searches originate on the home page or blog page – we wanted to have this page look like the blog results with the jQuery on top.
• As we measure the profit potential of each page, the jQuery might be removed from this page so that the search results are highlighted without other distractions.

 

The 404 page

A 404 page is what someone sees when a page cannot be found on the website

No matter how hard you try, on a large website (ours is more than 1000 pages, so medium size) you will have people arriving at broken pages. The trick is to tracking these pages so you can clean up your URLs over time.

• One of the cardinal rules about SEO is that not found pages should return 404 results and not 200 (which means the page exists) OK results
• Therefore, the first aspect was to make sure when someone gets to a not found page is that they see a custom 404 page
• The default WordPress 404 page is not very usable. Therefore, we added a search box and some custom text to the page to make it more friendly
• We’re tracking all 404 results so we can see if it’s an internal link issue or other reason people arrive at these pages

Top Product Pages

We have a significant amount of testimonials both in written and video formats for our seminars. These pages sometimes run at greater than a 10% conversion rate. We’ve tested layouts and messages with them over the past two years, so we really did not want to mess with these pages at the moment.

Therefore, these pages do not call our sidebars or the jQuery. These pages are focused around conversions.

Some interesting stats on the event pages:

• When someone watches at least one video at the top of the page, they generally watch more than 6 minutes of information (which is testimonials and other interviews, etc that we’ve done).
• As the benefit message (in the videos) and the registration form are above the fold; but the page is very long; we have the same signup process at the bottom of the page. Adding the signup at the bottom of the page increased conversion rates. Adding the signup form in the middle of the page did not significantly impact conversions.

For the main seminar page:

• We currently have three instances where someone can click from the overview page to an individual event page. We originally had two; and after testing we found that the third even listing increased conversion rates.
• On the actual seminar pages; we have two different places where you can start the ordering process. We tested having three instances on the individual event pages; but having a third ticket box did not affect conversion rates at all.

Everything is still a work in progress

Because we’re tracking all the links clicked across the website, and can then measure which links are effective and which are not – this design is a work in progress. The new template system I set up across our website (each of these elements, sidebars, jquery, top nav links, etc) are very easy to change for an individual page or for a series of pages.

Once we do enough testing that we’re comfortable with the final concept; then we might engage an actual designer to clean up the site, images, etc.

The Page Templates

To make the site easy to change, I simply made several templates:

• Home page – self explanatory
• Blog post page without jQuery and blog sidebar
• Blog post page with jQuery and no blog sidebar
• Page with jQuery and sidebar
• Page with sidebar and no jQuery
• page with no jQuery and no sidebar
• Page with jQuery and no sidebar

This is very simple to do in WordPress. You just change the template to not call the sidebar, or to call a section of a site – and then that section will not (or will) be called.

Now every time we create a page, we can just decide which page template we want. Do we want the jQuery shown on the top of the page? If yes, then use that template. Do we want a very wide blog post with no sidebar? If yes, then we use that template.

While most of the pages and posts are based upon only 4 templates, the others exist to make it very easy to manipulate pages going forward, and we can even test some small changes to individual pages and posts by manipulating which sidebar or jQuery is being called to the page.

What’s next?

We’re not done with the site yet, we still have a handful of things to finish:

• Removing all PayPal processing and integrating another payment processor
• Keeping all conversion activity on the site for tracking (we’re using an easy-to-use simple integration for our seminar pages, but as these occur offsite we can’t see all conversions)
• Redesign the logo. I know what I can’t do – and image design is not my strength. We’ll do a redesign of the logo that matches the new color scheme and focus of the website.
• Increase the content on Leslie’s about page. Leslie’s page is in the top 50 pages viewed on the site; and yet much of her experience in event marketing, traditional media, project management, etc are not really called out.
• Add a ‘top post’ feature to the blog section to showcase some of our best content.
• Test which pages lead to each conversion type
• Change more calls to actions into buttons
• On the blog post pages, institute a jquery tab at the bottom of each post so you can choose what you want to do:
  • Leave a comment
  • See related blog posts
  • Share this information
  • Subscribe to the blog
  • Currently, the bottom of most blog posts are messy with too many options. We’ll still give the users options, but we’re going to consolidate them into an easy to navigate system.
• Others we don’t yet know as we don’t have the metrics yet

The Total Cost of the Redesign

• 2 days (define as you will for your own time)
• WordPress (the CMS) – free
• Blog template $49
• FileZilla (for FTPing) – free
• PowerPoint  for image creation (I’m really not a designer; I made every image on the site except for a few of the buttons in PowerPoint). Already owned – so free. However, I could have used GIMP which is an open source image program.
• Cool Text for button design.
• $100 – the cost we’ll pay a designer to redesign our logo (which I could have done in GIMP; but it’ll look better done professionally).

2 days and $149 is the entire cost of this redesign. A 0.05% (that’s one conversion per 2000 visitors) increase in conversion rates (for a book sale, Certified Knowledge subscription, or AdWords Seminar signup) will make the time well spent. A 1% to 2% increase in conversion rates for just a single AdWords Seminar (let alone across the entire website) will pay for the cost of a high priced designer.

I can also say a semi-techy without design skills can make a decent site with freely available web tools.

The Final Result?

I have no idea on the effectiveness – yet.

We launched this design less than two weeks ago, so we definitely do not have enough data yet to make any decisions.

While the reasons for each decision (at least I believe) are sound, design creativity only brings you so far. The metrics have to tell you if you were right or wrong and then will give you the data to make adjustments accordingly.

We are tracking everything – so we’ll know small details like the CTR of each jQuery image so that we can add and remove images based upon their effectiveness.

If it seems that we’re on the right track with conversions, then we’ll probably have someone come in and do a nice pretty design based upon what is working. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll try again with a different layout scheme.

However, I can finally say as marketers we’re finally putting our skills together for ourselves – even if it’s just small changes. If it raises conversion rates, then it’s all worthwhile.

We are only the designers and owners of the site; not necessarily the users of the site. What really matters is your opinion. What do you think of the new design?

Read Brad's Newest Book: Advanced Google AdWords
	Advanced Google AdWords will provide deep insight into AdWords functionality and advanced features, explaining how they work and providing tips, tactics, and hands-on tutorials that readers can immediately use on their own PPC campaigns. $175 in training & AdWords coupons inside Read testimonials from industry experts Learn more about Advanced Google AdWords
Certified Knowledge: Online AdWords Training, Tools, and Community
	Certified Knowledge is an online tools, training, and community site brought to you by Brad Geddes & bg Theory. We are currently accepting beta applications. In interested, please see more at CertifiedKnowledge.org.

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Are Search Queries Becoming Even More Unique? Statistics from Google

One of my favorite numbers that Google published in November, 2008 is:

“20% of the queries Google receives each day are ones we haven’t seen in at least 90 days, if at all?” – source.

That number has stood alone for for quite some time being one of the defining numbers of just how unique keyword queries can be.

I just got permission to publish a new number that Google included in a presentation they sent me:

20% of searches each day are new or haven’t been completed in the last 6 months

Now, it is possible that these queries were that unique all along; but think about that number. 1 in 5 searches conducted on Google either haven’t been done before, or at least haven’t been conducted in the last six months. That’s strengthens the usefulness of the new match type: modified broad match.

In the same presentation there is another stunning stat:

70% of queries have no exact-matched keywords

PPC marketers often talk about the usefulness of exact versus broad match, and I believe many of them. It’s not the lack of marketers using exact match as much as the large variety of search queries that occur. This stat does look at all queries and doesn’t just examine commercial queries. However, regardless of your interpretation – it’s a big number.

According to Hitwise (March 2010 stats) approximately 65% of queries are one to three words; which means roughly 35% of queries are longer than three words. According to the last stat from this Google slide:

54.5% of user queries are greater than 3 words

There is a large discrepancy between Hitwise’s 35% and Google’s 54.5% number. These numbers are based upon Google US Internal data – so I’d expect them to be accurate for Google.com. However, it is possible that Yahoo and Bing see shorter queries making Hitwise’s numbers accurate across all search properties.

If you want to see the slide, here’s an image:

Read Brad's Newest Book: Advanced Google AdWords
	Advanced Google AdWords will provide deep insight into AdWords functionality and advanced features, explaining how they work and providing tips, tactics, and hands-on tutorials that readers can immediately use on their own PPC campaigns. $175 in training & AdWords coupons inside Read testimonials from industry experts Learn more about Advanced Google AdWords
Certified Knowledge: Online AdWords Training, Tools, and Community
	Certified Knowledge is an online tools, training, and community site brought to you by Brad Geddes & bg Theory. We are currently accepting beta applications. In interested, please see more at CertifiedKnowledge.org.

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2. Quality Score is Based on Precise Match Not Exact Match I made a comment on Twitter that stirred up some...
3. Google Plus Box Coming to Financial Queries The Google Plus box has received a lot of attention...

How to Sell Cold Facts to Hard-Ass Customers

Right now I'm writing the toughest white paper I've ever written. I'm trying to convince a corporation why it's in their best interest to risk 1 million dollars on a single deal. I have to prove that it's actually not risky at all.

Even though they'd be going into a new type of business they know nothing about. Even though they're extremely conservative and they've literally got an office full of actuaries.

The gatekeeper asked me to write a proposal.

If they're intrigued, I get to talk to the head honchos. If not, I'm dead.

They're probably going to pass my paper around for 2 weeks and discuss it amongst themselves before I hear a single word back from them.

They're gonna scour the Internet and research this thing to death. And probably talk to a dozen people.

The document I'm sending them isn't called a "white paper" but that's what it is. It's a blend of HARD COLD FACTS and SEDUCTIVE PERSUASION.

Think of it as a research report that has to get somebody's juices flowing. A sales letter that has to build a lawyer-like case.

When your customers are "hard asses" about facts and details, you need a killer white paper.

That one killer white paper can melt sales resistance and pave a path for you for years.

***Now let me give you a Secret Ingredient that makes a White Paper like this super-persuasive***

In this paper I truly believe I have made an absolutely airtight case. If they hire a world-class expert to evaluate everything I said, the most pessimistic thing he can report back to them will be: "Perry IS right so far as we know. But some day he *might* turn out to be wrong."

So I go on to explain all the ways I in fact *might* be wrong, someday, somehow. I actually help them imagine all the 'alternative universes' where they could lose a million dollars. Every way I can think of.

*I'm even offering to pay the fee for them to hire an outside consultant to try and shoot holes in every single thing I've said.*

I want them to know they've covered every possible scenario? and that the chances of losing money are frankly so remote as to be trivial.

I play Devil's Advocate and show them they'll probably win even in the worst possible situation. I have to anticipate everything they might hear when they start talking to people.

This will make them comfortable. It shows them I'm telling the truth to the best of my ability.

If you MUST prove to your customer that you will obliterate his risk – if you MUST prove, with hard facts, the superiority of your solution – then "The Definitive Guide to Writing and Promoting Your White Paper" will show you exactly how to do it.

http://www.perrymarshall.com/whitepaper

Perry

Ecommerce Website Owners: Win A $35,000 Makeover!

We're very excited to announce that BigCommerce, the leading innovator in hosted ecommerce software for small business merchants (and one of our fabulous clients!), has just launched the BigCommerce $35,000 Ecommerce Makeover Contest to discover online merchants who have the potential to become the next ecommerce giant (think Amazon.com, Zappos.com) but need a little help to do it!

From now until June 15th, 2010, small online business owners can enter the contest by posting a 60-second video to YouTube with the tags "bigcommerce" and "ecommerce contest" that communicates why they should win the ecommerce makeover and other relevant information about their business.

The grand prize winner will receive all of the following amazing services and resources to help grow their business faster:

• BigCommerce Diamond Store, with two-year free subscription
• Professional store redesign & migration of the store to BigCommerce
• Two-year MailChimp email marketing subscription
• One-year Fan Appz Pro license for social media marketing
• Google AdWords Account Audit & Strategy Session* from ROI Revolution!
• Online sales and marketing program consulting from Sales Rescue Team
• Significant promotion & various PR opportunities
• Full case study posted on BigCommerce.com

Four runner-ups will receive a two-year BigCommerce Gold Store subscription, PR opportunities and a case study on BigCommerce.com.

BigCommerce invites eligible contestants to submit their videos now through June 15, 2010. Five finalists will be selected by the judges to enter the final round, at which point finalist videos will be posted on the BigCommerce web site and Facebook page where the public will have an opportunity to vote for their favorite submitted video. Public voting runs from June 29, 2010 through July 9, 2010. The grand prize winner will be announced on July 15, 2010!

To be eligible, contestants must be online merchants based in the U.S. with less than 1,000 products on their site and have been selling online for at least one year. The contest is open to both current BigCommerce clients as well as customers using other ecommerce shopping cart platforms.

More contest details and official entry guidelines can be found here. Good luck and we look forward to helping develop the next ecommerce giant!

*Don't qualify for the contest but still want to grow your online business? Learn how we can help you get the most out of your online advertising with a comprehensive AdWords account audit & strategy session!

UPDATE:
As of May 25, 2010, the contest is now open to anyone (18 years or older) in ANY country with little to no experience selling online!

The contest was previously limited to US residents only with at least one year of online selling experience.

Click here for all the details and official entry guidelines. Best of luck to all the contestants out there!

Google AdWords Remarketing Campaigns: See how we set up our own campaigns

Google remarketing campaigns allow you to serve custom ads to users who have visited your website.

My latest Search Engine Land article covers the basics of setting up a remarketing campaign and gives some examples for setting up remarketing ad groups for an ecommerce site. If you are new to remarketing, you might want to take a quick look through that article and learn the basics of how to set up a remarketing campaign as in this article we’re going to make the assumption that you have some basic knowledge of remarketing.

In this article, we will show you how we are setting them up for our new product, Certified Knowledge (note: the site is not fully live yet, but we’re planning out our marketing campaigns now so this is what it will look like once everything is publicly launched).

The Marketing Campaign’s Objectives

Certified Knowledge is a subscription based AdWords learning, PPC tool, and community site. With many subscription products it takes a few visits for someone to finally convert. Therefore, remarketing is a perfect way to serve custom ads to those who have been on the site once, but have not yet bought a subscription.

There are three main benefits of Certified Knowledge (tutorials, tools, and community); therefore, we want to make custom ads based upon what sections someone has visited within the site.

If someone entered the cart but did not buy, we want a very custom message.  For example, if a user started the purchase process but did not complete the transaction; we want to display a custom message or offer specific to the fact that they didn’t finish the purchase process.  This group of cart abandoners still have a better chance of converting than someone who has never been to our website before or looked around the site and didn’t enter the cart, so our bids for this list will be higher than for any other audience.

If someone has subscribed we don’t want to serve then an ad for the membership.

Lastly, the further into the conversion process that someone was, the longer the cookie will last based upon our settings (remarketing ads are displayed based upon a browser having a cookie that corresponds to your lists).

The Remarketing Lists

Google offers the ability to create a straightforward list (a cookie on the computer means they are in a list), or a custom combination which uses Boolean strings to combine audiences into a single list. With some of these lists, I think we could use custom combinations instead of straight lists. However, I’ve not been able to test Google’s Boolean strings yet to be confident in their use. What I’d like to do is add someone to list 1. Then, if they also make it to list 2, remove them from list 2. However, that is not currently possible.

In addition, what I don’t know is if someone is on two different lists; and you use one list as a negative list, it appears that the ad will not be displayed to that person at all. (i.e. if someone is on list a and on list b, and list a is your positive list and list b is your negative list – will the user see the ad?)

Therefore, for the initial setup of our remarketing campaigns (this may change in the future); I’m setting up several lists; and then I’ll use negative lists at the ad group level and CPC manipulation to determine which shows (i.e. if a basic list is worth $0.25 and a more advanced list is worth $1, even if someone is on both, the should see the $1 CPC ad copy for that list).

Here is a list of the remarketing lists that we created and where we put the codes across our website:

List Name	Purpose	Placed	Cookie Duration
All visitors	Reach everyone who examined in the offer	Global Footer	30 days
PPC Tools	Reach those who examined the Tools section	PPC Tools pages	60 days
AdWords Tutorials	Reach those who entered the tutorial section	AdWords Video page	60 days
PPC Community	Reach those looking for community engagement	PPC community page	60 days
Pricing	Reach price conscious shoppers	Visited price page	60 days
Shopping cart abandonment	Reach consumers who showed intent to buy but did not finish	All pages except confirmation of cart	90 days
Converted: Free email training	Free 5 email training message for sneak peak. Reach these consumers who showed high interest in system.	Thank you for subscribing email confirmation page	90 days
Converted: Subscription	If someone subscribed, want to make sure we don’t serve them ads	Thank you for subscribing page after billing info entered	360 days

 

Once the lists are created and the scripts placed on the appropriate pages, then it’s time to create the Ad Groups that reach the various audiences.

Remarketing Ad Groups

We are creating an entirely new campaign for our remarketing lists for four reasons:

• Budget. We have a much higher budget than for our placement and discovery campaigns.
• Blocked domains. We don’t want our usual blocked domain list to affect remarketing ads (at least to start)
• Geography: As this product has international appeal (and we’ll do international billing); we are going to start with a few different countries in our campaign list (and refine from there).
• Reach & Frequency: We want a different frequency caps for the ads than our other content campaigns.

Once a new campaign is setup, it’s time to map out the ad groups. The reason to create various remarketing ad groups is when you want to show different ads to different audience lists. At an ad group level, you can add both positive and negative audiences and set a different bid by audience. Therefore, we’re going to build our ad groups from the ads that we’re going to be showing.

In addition, it will be common for some users to be on multiple lists. Therefore, we’re going to use a lot of negative lists to ensure the most relevant ad is being displayed. In cases where someone is on multiple lists, we will also use bids to ensure the more specific ad is being shown (so our bids will be the lowest on general ads and highest on close-to-converting individuals).

Ad Group 1: Non-Engaged Users

This ad group is for users who visited the site but did not enter a specific section of the site. Therefore, these are the absolutely least qualified of all the visitors. This is the reason the cookie duration for this list is only 30 days, the shortest of all the lists.

The positive list: All visitor

The negative lists: All the other lists. If someone is on any other list; we don’t want them seeing our general ad; we want a more specific ad served to that user.

The ad: Showcasing all benefits.

Bid: Lowest of all the remarketing lists. These visitors went to at least the homepage, and possibly an interior page; but not one of the very specific pages that is useful for tailoring a separate ad for that user.

Ad Group 2: Price Shoppers

This ad group is for users who visited the pricing section.

The positive list: Pricing

The negative lists: All others except non-engaged users list.

The ad: Showcasing that your time is worth money, and then show how Certified Knowledge can save you time.

Bid: Second lowest of all the remarketing lists. Price conscious users can be difficult to convince. In addition, I’d rather the more specific ad (the ad groups below) be shown to consumers instead of this ad. If someone happens to be on both the non-engaged user list and the price shoppers list, they should see this ad because its bid will be higher than the non-engaged user list.

Ad Group 3: PPC Community

This ad group is for people who visited the PPC community page. I expect that most people who visit this page will also visit other pages across the site. Therefore, while this will be an ad we show, we’re going to put less importance on what I expect the stronger benefits to be: Tools & Training. However, if someone did visit this page, we’re willing to show them this ad (in addition to other ads they may see from the more specific ad groups).

The positive list: PPC community

The negative list: All others except Price Shoppers and Non-engaged users.

The ad: Showcasing the benefits of having access to an active forum, email, and news system.

Bid: Third lowest. Higher than Price Shoppers; lower than PPC Tools & AdWords Tutorials.

Ad Group 4: AdWords Tutorials

This ad group is targeting consumers who examined our tutorials. As we’re going to have many pages explaining the tutorials, this might be broken down into two lists over time: main tutorials page, all training subpages. That sectioning will help us identify those who just glanced at the tutorials versus looked at our videos and read more about the AdWords lessons.

The positive list: AdWords Tutorials

The negative list: Converted subscription, Converted email training, Shopping cart abandonment. If someone converted, or was closer to converting than just visiting the features pages, then I want them to see the more specific ad.

The ad: Showcasing what Certified Knowledge can teach you about AdWords with more than 50 lessons, and more than 100 coming by the end of the year.

Bid: Higher than PPC Community and lower than the three negative lists.

Ad Group 5: PPC Tools

This ad group is targeting consumers who examined our toolset. As we’re going to have many pages explaining the tools, this might be broken down into two lists over time: main tools page, all tool subpages. That sectioning will help us identify those who just glanced at the tools versus looked at our videos and read more about the tools.

The positive list: PPC Tools

The negative list: Converted subscription, Converted email training, Shopping cart abandonment. If someone converted, or was closer to converting than just visiting the features pages, then I want them to see the more specific ad.

The ad: Showcasing the benefits of the PPC tools we have developed which will save you time in creating ad copies, geographic keywords and keywords. They will help you bid, find quality score issues, find broken links, and help you analyze your site. While most of the ad groups will contain two or three image ads to start (by themes, each theme will have different sizes); I expect this ad group will have more test ads to see what message resonates better.

Bid: Same as the AdWords Tutorials. I expect it will become slightly higher than the tutorials over time as tutorials are one to three time views for most consumers, and many repeat views will help refresh your knowledge. The tools will be used daily, weekly, or monthly depending on what you’re trying to accomplish inside your account; and therefore, I think will be more valuable over time.

Ad Group 6: Converted Free Email Training

This ad group is for targeting those who signed up for a ‘free lessons training’ via email. Many people who sign up for free training do not have an intent to buy as they just want the free stuff. Others want a trial of what you are offering and have a high chance of converting. However, email open rates can be sporadic on free training offers. Therefore, these ads will both remind them about Certified Knowledge, but also serve as a reminder about the emails delivered to them.

The positive list: Converted Free Email Training

The negative lists: Converted subscription, Shopping Cart Abandoners

The ad: Showcase the Certified Knowledge tutorials with messages to remind them about their email subscription. I’m not sure if they will be something like: “Did you enjoy your free email training from Certified Knowledge? Learn how you can access all of our training” as that might seem a bit creepy to people that we know they have the email – or if they’ll be images more aligned with the training aspects of Certified Knowledge.

Bid: To start, a bit higher than AdWords tutorials & tools lists as these users were willing to give us a name and email address to receive the information. Overtime, the bidding for this list might change significantly up or down.

Ad Group 7: Shopping Cart Abandoners

This ad group is for targeting those who entered the shopping cart but did not convert.

The positive list: Shopping cart abandoners

The negative list: Converted subscription, Converted Free email training

I’m making an assumption here that I might change in the future. I’m considering these users more valuable than the converted free email training list as these shoppers were within a submit button of entering their credit card information and becoming customers. I think they will be more valuable than the Converted Free Email Training list – but I might be wrong; therefore, I might test this exact same ad group minus the email training list as a negative list in the future.

The ad: One ad will showcase the Certified Knowledge benefits. One will show a phone number with the benefits that talks about support for any problems. As we start to map out sign-up objections, then we will base the ads around the most common ones.

Bid: The highest of all the lists.

Are all these lists necessary?

Outside of the time to create the actual ads per ad group, setting up one list and one ad group versus seven ad groups and lists is only a few minutes of additional work. We’re using WordPress for this site’s CMS; so adding some custom code to the pages is very simple and will take less than a minute per list. I’m expecting the entire setup (outside of the ad copy creation) to take less than ten minutes. I’ve already set up some remarketing campaigns for the AdWords Seminars and it took less than a minute to setup the list and add the code to the pages for each created list.

The advantage of showing an ad to the consumer based upon their main interests in the site should significantly outweigh the work involved.

The Next Step

Once everything is in place, then remarketing success is all about ad creatives and measurement.

Remarketing has a higher potential of success than almost all other forms of marketing because the user was already involved with your website. Most marketing drives some users to your website based upon a common interest (keyword, placement, email list, etc). Remarketing engages users who have already been on your website and are somewhat familiar with your offerings. This type of campaign can be the final push that someone needs to realize how valuable your service can be to them.

Read Brad's Newest Book: Advanced Google AdWords
	Advanced Google AdWords will provide deep insight into AdWords functionality and advanced features, explaining how they work and providing tips, tactics, and hands-on tutorials that readers can immediately use on their own PPC campaigns. $175 in training & AdWords coupons inside Read testimonials from industry experts Learn more about Advanced Google AdWords
Certified Knowledge: Online AdWords Training, Tools, and Community
	Certified Knowledge is an online tools, training, and community site brought to you by Brad Geddes & bg Theory. We are currently accepting beta applications. In interested, please see more at CertifiedKnowledge.org.

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