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Weekly PPC Roundup – Bowl Sunday Edition!

Sunday, February 3rd, 2013

 

And, we don’t mean the Super Bowl.  At 3 o’clock, the Puppy Bowl is on.  We are waiting with bated breath to see who wins!  How about you?  Actually, we’re just hoping that the puppies aren’t napping like they usually are.

 

Enough about sports and puppies, though.  Let’s talk about what’s really important – the wild wonderful world of PPC!

 

First, from Google….

 

Make sure you’ve downloaded any legacy Impression Share data that’s important to you.  Tomorrow, February 4th, Google is retiring this, which means that you won’t be able to see or retrieve it.  New Impression Share reports do allow for some pretty cool things, though, including:  distinct search and display columns, “hour of day” segmentation, filters, charts, and rules for IS, and device segmentation.

 

New Learn with Google webinars have been announced.  Here’s the lineup for the Build Awareness topics:

 

02/12 [Multiscreen] Brand Building in a Multiscreen World
02/20 [YouTube] How to Build your Business with YouTube Video Ads
03/05 [Social] How to Use Google+ and Make Social Work for You
03/12 [Mobile] Understanding Mobile Ads Across Marketing Objectives
03/27 [Wildfire by Google] The Call for Converged Media

 

Click here to see the rest, or click here to register.

 

AdWords for video has some cool new reporting features to make your reports “more beautiful”.  Features include:

  • reach and frequency metrics in your campaign reporting interface.
  • metrics displayed by marketing goals (brand awareness, conversions, etc.)
  • geo-mapping to see where your videos are being viewed the most

 

Now, fresh out of Bing Ads……

 

The newest product update says  “if you have different types of targets associated with a campaign and an ad group, both will be considered when targeting your ad.”  Check out the chart on this page to see how your ad targeting will be affected.

 

This post includes some good resources for people who are new to Bing Ads and want to learn more about SEM in general, and Bing Ads in particular.  You can also see SMB Essentials Series, PPC for SMB Series, and SEM Beginner Series.

 

Bing Ads has a new whitepaper:  What Moves You? How Digital Marketers Can Drive Discovery, Engagement and Action in Developed & Emerging Markets.  There are a lot of interesting takeaways in the report, but you can also get an overview here.

 

And, from elsewhere in PPC land………

 

The Christmas Jump, Tablet Hump & CPC Bump: Recent Trends In Mobile Usage from Search Engine Land gives some really illuminating statistics about search behavior on tablets and other mobile devices based on data collected around the holidays over the past couple years.  Specifically, It pays to target to devices separately,  tablets will account for 1 in 4 paid search clicks by the end of 2013, and the tablet opportunity still exists.

 

Also from SEL:  The Lead Up To the Super Bowl: How Are We Searching? has Vanessa Fox breaking down how Super Bowl commercials affect online searches and behavior.  In talking about Search, Facebook, and Twitter, she says that (over the past few years) “we didn’t replace one activity with another. We mostly added these new behaviors to what we were already doing.”  What will this year bring?

 

Search Engine Journal predicts the winner of tonight’s game based on their social media followings.  Errrrr….not sure how scientific this is, but interesting nonetheless!

 

That’s it for now, folks. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

 

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Caveman Follow-Up

Wednesday, January 16th, 2013

 

A few week’s back, I wrote about a contest between two ads, one for “The Caveman Diet,” and the other for “The Paleo Caveman Diet.”


The Caveman Diet won, mostly because the major search term was “caveman diet” and if you’re calling it a caveman diet, that’s usually because you’re not yet familiar with the term “Paleo Diet” and therefore the hybridized term “Paleo Caveman Diet” could come off as confusing.


Well, what happens when you change the search terms?


I think the following contest answers that question rather well, a contest for an ad featuring the same diet for those who are searching on “the paleo diet” this time:




  • Notice that the hybridized term still doesn’t work. It either comes off as weird or condescending.
  • Notice also that the ad with the closer/exact match of search terms, as well as additional use of the terms, does better.
  • And finally, the ad that features the imperative verbs and more clearly understood call to action still wins out over the more statically worded ad.

So search terms matter. And you knew that. But search terms also indicate INTENT. Someone searching on the caveman diet might be earlier in his researching and buying process than someone searching on Paleo Diet, who probably already knows a little bit about the diet. That means that an ad for the Paleo Diet search term should speek to the intent to move past preliminary research to actual experimentation, hence the winning ad’s improved CTA: “Discover the paleo diet with us.”


In other words, don’t just vary your ads use of terms to reflect the search, vary the ads psychology to speak to the changing motivations behind those changing terms.


 

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Weekly PPC Roundup – The Stuffed Edition

Saturday, November 24th, 2012

 

After finishing Thanksgiving dinner part 3 just a little bit ago, we are *this close* to passing into a food coma for the third time in less than 24 hours. Before we do that, though, let’s take a look at the latest news in PPC from the past week!

 

First, from Google….

 

There was precious little out of Mountain View over the past week, except for an article on how to be more productive with the AdWords interface.  This is a good time of the year to review and reflect on the prior year’s successes and build on them, so this article is quite timely. Some of the highlights from AdWords:

     

  • adding a “Keyword” column so you can see the exact term that matched someone’s search to trigger your ad
  • rolling out campaign diagnostics which run in the background and look for potential errors or conflicts in your account
  • updating many other features, including faster editing, automating with scripts, and more.

 

Now, from Bing Ads….

 

This post is a good wrap up of recently added features to Bing Ads for the month of November.  There were actually a LOT of big good changes at Bing this past month, including:

     

  • ad rotation
  • impression share
  • Quality Impact score
  • landing page by match type and more.

 

Here’s a video that also talks about the most recent developments at Bing Ads.

 

PPC News from elsewhere around the web…

 

PPC makes the New York Times!  This story introduces the masses to programmatic advertising, including the DoubleClick platform.

 

Search Engine Journal has a good article about mobile paid search and how to adapt your campaigns (and establish new ones) to optimize for these kinds of searches.  Tips include: capitalizing on “call now” and other “call” calls to action, separating mobile campaigns out, creating mobile friendly landing pages, and more.

 

Speaking of landing pages, this article on diagnosing and repairing conversion rate problems has a thing or two to say about engaging visitors via landing pages and your website in general.

 

Have you ever violated AdWords policy?  Many of us have accidentally, and the canned responses can be downright confusing.  This article asks “Can Google AdWords Customer Service Be Saved?“  What do you think?

 

Finally, it’s a long weekend, you must have an extra hour.  Use that time to go get Global Search Greatness Through Keyword Analysis!  It might be worth your while.

 

That’s all for now friends, have a great weekend!

 

 

 

 

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Do Your PPC Ads Know How to Take “Yes” For An Answer?

Thursday, November 15th, 2012

 

The unfortunately salesman who keeps selling after he’s made the sale can often find he’s talked himself out of a deal. That’s called not knowing how to take yes for an answer.


And you’d think that PPC Ads would never suffer from this problem, what with the extreme length limitations placed on them and all. But you’d be wrong.


The urge to squeeze in one more deal sweetener or info-bit can actually backfire on the ad writer. Except that in PPC, you never realize that you’ve talked yourself out of a deal unless you test ad copy.


It’s optimization that lets you know when your copy wasn’t able to take yes for an answer. Just as this test did for a BoostCTR Client:




One of these ads routinely talked itself out of the click-through, while the other one doubled CTR. So which one was which?


Answer: Ad B doubled CTR while Ad A couldn’t resist talking itself out of the click.


What did Ad A do wrong?


If you’re selling them stair treads, sell them stair treads and forget about the darn rug prices! In your mind stair treads ARE rugs, but not in the customers mind. Selling past the stair treads and onto the rugs just muddies — and loses — the deal.


What did Ad B do right?


Ad B frontlined the idea of savings by putting it in the headline rather than the first line of copy. It also used better verbs (“spruce up your stairs”) and emphasized “Ship Free” by putting in at the end of the second line of copy. Finally, it used StairTreads in the URL.


But mostly, Ad B stuck to selling stair treads and didn’t talk itself out of a deal by mentioning rug prices.


As I wrote earlier, not taking yes for an answer is more common than you might think — it might even be happening to your ads…


 

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Call to Action vs. Room to Act

Thursday, August 23rd, 2012

 

As per Win of the Week, standard operating procedure, make your (educated) guess as to which ad won:




So which ad really won?


Ad B improved Click-Through Rates by 375%! And to understand why you have to understand a bit of visual psychology, as explained by Molly Bang in her brilliant book, Picture This: How Pictures Work. So let’s start by looking at two images from her book:


Now, here’s an excerpt from the text accompanying these to pictures:


“”Space Implies Time


[The picture on the left] feels frightening to me, but part of me also wonders whether these two figures aren’t just having a jolly old chat.


A threat doesn’t feel so scary when it is right next to the victim, because there is no time for the victim to move before it gets devoured — and no time for us to be scared. The deed is a done thing…


…When the attacker and the victim are spaced far apart, I as the victim have more time to be scared. There are at least two seconds now before I’ll be attacked, rather than the finest split second that I had before. We might be cornered in this picture, but there is more possibility of escape with the larger amount of space-time between the victim and the attacker.”


Applying this dynamic to the PPC ads, which sentence leaves room for action, and which feels as if “the deed is a done thing”:

  • “Fall Classes Begin Now!” Or
  • “Fall Classes Begin Soon.”

You guessed it, “Fall Classes Begin Soon” leaves time for the searcher to ACT on any information she may find; there’s still time left to enroll because classes haven’t started yet.


Another factor that helps Ad B are its more inclusive and less threatening Call-to-Action, which offers both Local and Online CNA courses and only offers to help the searcher “Find them,” rather than demanding that she “Apply Today.”


This is important because the typical school of thought for Calls-to-Action involves creating urgency: “DO IT NOW!” And there are certainly cases where urgency is good. But in your desire to create urgency, it’s important to leave time and space and opportunity for the prospect to act on that urgency. After all, the goal of a Call-to-Action is to get people to take action


 

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