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!
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Google's upcoming privacy policy overhaul addresses two themes:
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.
I've managed paid search accounts here at ROI Revolution since 2005, and 99% of the time when I look at a new account there is room to improve results through ad testing. Over the years much has changed in paid search, but the need to continually test and optimize ad text has stayed constant.
YouTube has launched a new ad format out of beta: TrueView Video Ads. The basic concept is that the user has a choice whether or not to continue watching the ad. The advertisers only pays when the user watches at least 30 seconds of the ad (or to completion, whichever comes first).
Name-brand keywords are some of the best performing you can find. In competitive markets, searching for trademarked terms usually reveals a dogfight, with the rightful owner at the top of the pile. Although bidding on competitors' trademarked terms will often lead to poor quality scores (and thus a large bid surcharge), those low quality scores can be offset by the high conversion rate of these ready-to-buy visitors.
In July 2011, Microsoft adCenter rolled out a new feature allowing advertisers to target their campaigns within a 100 mile radius around a particular location.
Whether you manage paid search accounts or are an overseeing business executive, it is important to have an easily accessible way of viewing overall account performance.
Google Analytics features 3 types of custom variables: page-level, session-level, and visitor-level. The official Google Code documentation on custom variables is pretty explicit about the fact that it's best not to mix types:
If you've ever advertised on Google's Display Network (formerly called the content network), then your story probably sounds something like this: you launch a campaign with high hopes, it burns through enough cash to buy a used car, and you reel in horror at the dismal ROI it brought in and you pause it in disgust, refusing to spend another dime there ever again.
We're sometimes asked "why should I bid on my own branded keywords?" In most cases, the asker wants to know if they can save money (or improve ROI) by not bidding on their brand keywords. It's an interesting question, with a not-so-simple answer. Each click costs money, so yes, theoretically, you can save money by not bidding on your own branded searches. But with that same logic, can't you also save money by keeping it under your mattress instead of in a 401k?
