AdWords Strategy » AdWords

How to Video: Getting Started with Website Optimizer is Easy

AdWords — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:02:23 +0000

Google’s website optimizer is an amazing tool, at a great price point – free. It allows you to do A/B testing or multivariate testing of your pages to see which ones increase conversion rates.

It sounds complicated – and on the backend it is. However, it’s not that hard to get started with website optimizer and get tests up and running. Google recently did an hour and a half webinar on the Website Optimizer with a live demo of creating actual experiments so you can see how to get up and running.

If you haven’t used the optimizer yet, or you are scared to use it as it sounds too technical – then this is a great video for you to watch. It’s pretty long, so if you just want to see an actual experiment being created jump to minute 41.

If you are reading this post outside of the blog (such as in email) you may need to click through to the website to view the video.

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How to Video: Getting Started with Website Optimizer is Easy

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Using Google’s Image Ads

AdWords — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:48:41 +0000

Today I’m going to give you a secret to getting an avalanche of traffic on the Content Network, using Google’s Image Ads. I’ll begin by explaining something that’s totally core, thoroughly fundamental to hyper-effective, profitable advertising.

Every form of media and every way of selling any kind of space has its own fundamental financial metric.

Commercial real estate is leased according to dollars per square foot per year. Therefore the core metric of a retail store is sales per square foot.

The core metric of the Internet is dollars per thousand impressions.

Every Google search is an impression and that impression is what Google has to sell, period.

So even though AdWords charges you per click, it rewards you for Click Thru Rate. So if you do the math, at the end of the day you’re paying for impressions. The #1 bidder is the guy who gives Google the most $ per 1000 impressions. The #2 bidder is the second most profitable advertiser per thousand impressions.

The same is true on the Content Network. The ads that get the best coverage are the ones that get the most clicks and generate the most money per thousand impressions.

Well if you break it down one step further, each ad or ad block takes up a certain amount of space so it really comes down to:

PENNIES PER PIXEL.

Many AdSense syndicators allow Google to serve both text ads and image ads on their sites. The way Google decides which to serve is: Which makes more money per pixel – 3 text ads or one image ad?

If your 250×300 banner ad can $out-perform three text ads, your banner gets shown instead of three other advertisers’ text ads.

OK, so here’s the punchline:

***PIXEL FOR PIXEL, AN IMAGE AD CAN ALWAYS OUTPERFORM A TEXT AD.***

Why?

Simply because you can test more things.

Text ads only have text and they’re black and white. Each pixel in an image ad has 65,536 possible colors. Banner ads have color, texture, faces, patterns, animation… flavor.

My friend, that’s the Pixel Power Principle.

This is why Image Ads can get MUCH higher CTR’s than text ads – 2 to 5 times better. Again, they must, to even get served. But there is literally an endless variety of things you can test. It’s a new frontier in Google AdWords. I’ve really been enjoying the art of playing with these image ads.

Listen up: You test 30-50 banner ads with a Content-Friendly topic, and you are going to come up with one or two ads that SLAY DRAGONS and enter the fabled “Jet Stream.”

Oh, and by the way I discovered a really talented graphic designer who makes beautiful image ads for me. Her name is Laura Husmann, “The Banner Ad Queen.” Her website is www.BannerAdQueen.com.

Enjoy the science and the ART of testing cool banner ads on the Content Network.

Banner ads are soooo 2010!

Perry Marshall

Best New AdWords Features Launched Over the Past Month

AdWords — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:04:12 +0000

Google has launched several small updates over the past month. Together, there has been quite a bit of innovation. Here are my favorite changes that everyone should know about.

AdWords Editor Updated:

The newest version of the AdWords editor launched with some very nice updates. It now supports:

Ad scheduling
Advanced location targeting
Inline editing
Editing multiple campaign settings at once
YouTube promotional ads
New keyword expansion options
Set default targeting
Supports Spanish as an interface option

You can see the full release notes for the newest version here.

Product Listing Ads:

Google announced new product listing ads:

Google Ad Planner Updated

Google made some nice additions to Google ad planner. You can now see placement listings, subdomain info, and additional graphing options.

New Alerts Features

You can set up customized AdWords Alerts to help spot issues within your AdWords Account.

Sitelinks now available for AdWords Ads

If ads meet certain quality guidelines, they can now show additional links within the ad. Good stuff for branded queries, or when you are currently sending traffic to segmentation pages.

Google Analytics for Mobile Users

Many phones do not support scripts, such as Google Analytics. If you want to track additional items, you can use event tracking to track mobile usage and apps.

New Conversion Tracking Interface

The conversion tracking interface received a facelift. Among the changes is the ability to see which page conversions are occurring on.

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What’s new with Microsoft adCenter?

AdWords — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:38:10 +0000

It’s easy to get lost in a world where AdWords seems to dominate the marketplace. However, not only is adCenter a great product (with an amazing community) they also have continued to innovate. Here’s a roundup of adCenter posts that makes it easy to catch up with the new features and improvements that have come out of adCenter over the past couple months.

What’s new in adCenter?

SEM Beginner Series: Ad Copy Importance, Best Practices and Resources

The Silent Click – Increase Brand Awareness Online – adtech New York 2009. While this post is a recap of an adtech session, there are some charts in here that contain some great info on display that every marketer should read. In addition, there is a link to a full PDF report that shows more details of this information – great stuff.

Microsoft adCenter Fall 2009 Upgrade: Tutorials and What’s New in the Learning Center – adCenter desktop is a great tool for managing your adCenter account on your computer.

Microsoft adCenter Fall 2009 Upgrade: Improvements and New Features. Microsoft has an ad preview tool, the ability to set default time zones (this is great), and some other improvements.

Here’s an older post on this site that contains links, resources, and a comparison chart to help understand adCenter as it relates to AdWords.

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What’s new with Microsoft adCenter?

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Video Friday for 11/6/09. All Google’s New Videos In One Place.

AdWords — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:50:09 +0000

In an attempt to showcase all of the new videos that Google is creating to help you learn more about Google and their innovations, ere are the newest videos from Google.

The best videos for advertisers this week are:

Web Analytics Q & A With Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski Part 2 (All who use analytics)
Mobile [Ad]itude 8 with Meredith: A case study on Google Analytics for mobile apps (Good if you’re building mobile apps)
Can a a few non-safe words prevent my site from appearing in SafeSearch results? (For SEOs)
New AdWords Interface Overview (For AdWords users)
Google Commerce Search (for eCommerce Sites)
Local Business Center – Verify Your Listing (for Local Businesses)

New Videos from GoogleBusiness

New Videos from AtGoogleTalks

Authors@Google: Eugenie Harvey

New Videos from GoogleMobileBlog

Mobile [Ad]itude 8 with Meredith: A case study on Google Analytics for mobile apps

New Videos from Google

New Videos from GoogleWebmasterHelp

New Videos from GoogleDevelopers

Google Friend Connect Overview

New Videos from googleprivacy

New Videos from googleanalytics

Web Analytics Q & A With Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski Part 2

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Video Friday for 11/6/09. All Google’s New Videos In One Place.

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Should you use Google’s new translation tool for AdWords?

AdWords — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:37:03 +0000

Google announced that your can use their translator service to automatically translate an .aes (AdWords Editor File) into various languages.

Sounds nice?

I’m not so sure. The same words have different meanings in different languages and this scares me a little bit.

Andy Atkins-Krüger wrote a good piece at Search Engine Watch about translation a while ago that is worth reading again before you use the tool without a language specialist to edit the file before your keywords and ads go live.

I spoke on the same panel as Andy at SES San Jose and he definitely knows his linguists. Here’s a good comment from the piece for just English (and it gets crazier past English):

Why doesn’t translating keywords work? Because keywords are the fruit of a language, hanging on the branches of trees that grew and were nurtured in the local climate and are rooted in the local culture. As markers of someone’s intent when they search — they spring from local habits and behaviors that will vary from country to country — or even region to region.

Compare the U.S. and U.K. use of English — the same language. In the U.K., we’re in the habit of saying "holiday" when folks in the U.S. would say "vacation." For "football boots" Americans would say "soccer cleats" (Can someone please tell me what a "cleat" is? Because, as a sailor, I think that’s somewhere you fix a rope to stop it slipping). And as for baseball, well that’s just not cricket.

Here’s the full article on translation.

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Should you use Google’s new translation tool for AdWords?

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Adwords Broad Match Magic

AdWords — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:58:06 +0000

Right click here and save target as to download “Adwords Broad Match Magic – a Paradoxical Method for Carving Out Your Slice of High Volume, Ultra Competitive Keyword Markets in AdWords and Beyond!”

COURTESY NOTICE: This FREE 14 page special report contains what most AdWords marketers will perceive as a serious breakthrough. You should download and read it right away, because I plan to remove it shortly and turn it into a PAID product. (So consider yourself rewarded for being a loyal subscriber). In this report, you’ll see, for example, the technique I plan to use to brazenly enter the extremely competitive weight loss market.

BIG DEAL COURTESY NOTICE: On November 1st, or when I’ve hit 1,000 active paying members (whichever comes first), I’ll be raising the price on the Hyper Responsive Marketing Club again. (If you hadn’t noticed, I’m systematically raising it until I’m at least on par with what others are charging… I presently deliver 6 to 12 hours of high quality “look over my shoulder while I break into a competitive market” education for less than half of what others charge for only one or two hours, plus I’m not talking theory, I’ve run a real advertising agency and seen hundreds of business models, I really DO know what works)

Ignore this one at your own risk please
(And pass the PDF along if you don’t mind, as a personal favor to me)