PPC Ad Writing Contest by Marketing Experiments
Our friends at Marketing Experiments are working with one of our clients on their marketing content strategy. They're inviting everyone to compete in this creative experiment.
Read about their Ad Writing Contest and then submit your best entry as a comment to their blog post.
From their post:
"The trouble with a content strategy is that it is very difficult to create content, and very difficult to predict what content will resonate with your customers.
You could spend a lot of time creating high-quality content only to find out later that another approach would have been more profitable.
To help provide clarity to their content strategy, we are going to run some PPC ads to 'take the temperature,' in a sense, of the people who are searching..."
The results of this experiment will guide their content strategy, but I'm sure we'll end up testing a few of the winners in the rest of their paid search campaigns as well.
The winner will be announced during their next web clinic on February 1st, 2012: Online Advertising Forensics: We investigate how and why a text-based PPC ad produced 47% more conversions. Click the link to sign up for this free clinic!
Join Us at the AdWords Seminar Workshop at SMX San Jose
We’re teaming up with SMX to conduct a one day intensive AdWords training course before the SMX San Jose conference starts.
If you live in the region and want a solid day of training – this is perfect. If you’re going to be at SMX San Jose; come a single day earlier and leave with a lot more knowledge about the intricacies of Google AdWords.
The event will take place on February 27th, 2012. Here’s all the details:
Even with all of the new marketing channels that have opened up over the years, AdWords is still the core of many companies interactive campaigns. If your PPC campaigns are not running efficiently, it can have a drastic impact on your bottom line.
Join Brad Geddes for a full day of AdWords education and discussion that will teach you not only the best practices, but also advanced concepts and strategies that are based upon a decade of research and testing.
What Will I Learn?
Comprehensive Keyword Research: The absolute center of every PPC campaign is keywords. Learn the effective methods to discover and research keywords. While keywords are the lifeblood of PPC, perfecting your match types usage while controlling your negative keywords can drastically increase your overall revenue.
Writing Compelling Ad Copy: You will learn how to sync your ad copy with both your keywords and buying cycle stages.
Ad Copy Testing: Testing ad copy is essential to any AdWords account’s success. You will takeaway several ideas for ads to test by the time you leave the session.
Demystifying Quality Score: Quality Score has a larger effect on your account’s visibility than any other setting inside of AdWords. Quality Score can be a challenge to increase. Receive step-by-step instructions in how to prioritize Quality Score improvement, and what actions to take to increase your Quality Scores.
Increase your Reach Through the Google Display Network: Consumers spend about 5% of their time with the search network. The rest of their time is spent on content sites. Learn how to effectively reach users beyond search with contextual ads, placements, and enhanced campaigns.
Control Your Ad Display with Location Targeting: Do you think that geographic targeting isn’t relevant to a national business? Think again! Whether you are a brick and mortar local business, or a global e-commerce site, learn how geographically targeted campaigns can create additional connections with searchers.
Increase Your Landing Page Conversions: The first impression to a potential customer is the landing page. With only a few seconds to engage the buyer this may be more important in your conversion funnel than anything else. This section of the course will not only go into best practices and usability, but how to test landing pages in a simple and effective method.
Networking Opportunities: Conferences are fantastic places to network and meet fellow practitioners of online marketing. Lunch will be provided so you can spend time getting to know your fellow attendees.
Who is Brad Geddes?
Brad Geddes is the Founder of Certified Knowledge, a company dedicated to consulting, educating, and training marketers on Internet marketing theory and best practices. Not one to hold secrets, Brad is a prominent educator in the PPC industry.
- Google Certified AdWords Trainer
- Author of “Advanced Google AdWords”
- Host of Marketing Nirvana on Webmaster Radio
- Internationally recognized speaker
- Trained more than 10,000 businesses on AdWords
- Columnist for Search Engine Land
- Founder of Certified Knowledge
- Worked with companies with budget ranges from $17 month to millions each month
- Has worked with Red Lobster, Encyclopedia Britannica, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, YellowPages.com
Past Training Video Testimonials
How to Register
If you would like to attend the Advanced AdWords Training @ SMX West you will need one of two passes for SMX:
- Workshop only pass
- All Access Pass + Workshop
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More Information:
Please Note: This is a one day event that is a partnership with SMX. This is not the same as the AdWords Seminar for Success. This is one day event that is jammed pack full of information in a short amount of time. Please come ready to learn.
Join Us at the AdWords Seminar Workshop at SMX San Jose is a post from: Certified Knowledge
Google Privacy Policy Overhaul: Reflections for Online Marketers
Google's upcoming privacy policy overhaul addresses two themes:
1. Providing users with more intuitive functionality across Google properties (Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.), and
2. Providing advertisers with more relevant targeting options across Google properties.
The key distinction here is "across Google properties."
While the most privacy-conscious users may be concerned with the changes, for advertisers there is nothing but upside. Google's updated privacy policy opens the door to more cost-effective targeting to your most responsive traffic across Google properties and devices.
Google will be able to provide advertisers with a richer picture of their users for advertisers to target with remarketing, interest category targeting, and demographic targeting. (Users can see how Google defines their individual interest & demographic buckets in their Ads Preference Manager.)
As an example use-case, let's say someone visits your website on their mobile phone and adds something to their shopping cart. They abandon their cart and leave your site, but not before you add them to a remarketing list you're building within AdWords. Assuming the user is logged into their Google profile, you'd be able to target them with your remarketing ads when they're browsing the web at home from their iPad later that night. Furthermore, you may find that users interested in certain topics are more responsive to your remarketing ads. Google's new policy will enable them to boost the accuracy of the interest category inferences for their users.
Google's updated privacy policy may leave room for them to go further than just associating more data with users logged-in to their Google account... Google states that they may store "cookies that may uniquely identify your browser or your Google Account." This language opens up the possibility that Google could in the future use your Google profile data to deliver ads even if the user has since logged out of their Google account. The cookie would persist on the computer which ties it to a Google account. Currently, less than 10% of traffic from Google searches are from logged-in Google users. A cookie-based profile link would move this number up substantially.
Expect to see more Google advertiser tools rolled out over the next few quarters that make use of the cross-property and cross-device advertising functionality promised by this policy.
MSN Rolls Out -[Negative Exact] Match Type
In November 2011, MSN began supporting exact match negatives. It was a long time coming since Google has supported the match type for years. Although MSN differs a bit from Google in other match types such as their use of broad match, exact match negatives work the same in both MSN and Google.
Using exact match negatives gives you the ability to exclude very general search terms while maintaining the high volume search traffic that comes with broad and phrase match.
Let's say an online travel supplier wants to target users searching for discounted travel arrangements, but finds that searchers looking for general terms such as "travel" or "cheap flights" aren't far enough into the buying cycle to make the clicks profitable. They can add exact match negatives like -[travel] and -[cheap flights] so their ads will still show for terms like "travel fares" or "cheap flights to Hawaii," but they won't match on the broadest queries.
Negative exact keywords can be added to your MSN just like any other keyword through the user interface, the desktop editor or through bulk sheet uploads. To add an exact match negative to a campaign or ad group, go to your campaign or ad group's settings, then click negative keywords. To add a negative exact keyword in the desktop editor, add it as a negative like you would normally but put brackets around it.
With the addition of exact match negatives, MSN has sunset the use of keyword level negatives. We recommend taking a look at your keyword list and moving any keyword level negatives to the ad group or campaign level.
The best way to discover which keywords to add as exact match negatives is by running a search query performance report found in the Reports tab. By analyzing the cost and conversion data by search query, you'll be able to identify specific queries that aren't converting yet are matching on broad keywords and add those queries as broad, phrase or exact match negatives.
In addition to the new match type, MSN has introduced a new feature in the newest version of the adCenter desktop editor. It will now inform you of any negative keyword conflicts. So if you have the keyword "free whitepaper download" and the negative keyword free, it will highlight that ads aren't showing for that keyword due to the negative keyword overlap.
Now is a great time to give some extra attention to your negative keywords in MSN to make sure you are reaching maximum traffic without wasting spend.
How to Design the Perfect Form
Almost all conversion activities end in some type of form:
- Ecommerce checkout
- Contact form
- Whitepaper download
- Newsletter subscription
- and many more
Yes, most forms are not well designed. The best traffic you can buy will not help you out if your form doesn’t work properly.
However, designing forms isn’t that difficult if you know the major problems to avoid. In this video you can learn some of the major pitfalls to avoid with your forms.
If you avoid the bad stuff, and increase the good stuff – then conversions will go up. And that’s what we all want – more conversions.
The video is recorded in HD. So feel free to increase the resolution to 720 and watch in full screen. If you are reading this in an RSS reader or email; you’ll probably have to click through to the site to see the video.
I hope you enjoy.
How to Design the Perfect Form is a post from: Certified Knowledge
