Archive for the 'PPC' Category
This post was guest blogged by Travis Taylor, who is trying to become Seth Godin’s intern.
The CPC is lower than Google and the targeting is more specific than a general search.
For those who haven’t created a campaign here are the steps required:
1. Choose whether the ad will send users to
2. Select demographic. Select by Country, Age, Gender, Relationship Status, Interests, Workplace, University
3. Create ad
4. Select daily budget and enter payment information
5. Receive Clicks
It is very straightforward and intuitive.
My Problems with Facebook Ads:
1. You can’t see the demographics of who clicked on your ad
2. Only one person can manage a campaign at a time
3. You can’t edit the ad once it is created
4. Navigation that makes you want to kick Zuckerburg in the face
5. You can’t delete your credit card number without adding another
6. All the text runs together in the ad/ you can’t cap all letters in the sentence
7. You can’t narrow down to a smaller audience by adding more targeting terms.
What this means:
Suppose I am trying to reach only one person, Hayden Panettiere. There are only 80 women in the US who are aged 18 and describe themselves as liberal and liking dolphins. However, when I add acting as another interest. Now the ad is targeting 3,400 people. Facebook is effectively destroying the possibility for long tail marketing, which could be one of its strongest features.
The information provided about who clicked through is also lacking. You aren’t told which keyword is more productive, which requires you to run a simultaneous campaign if you truly want to be an effective Facebook marketer.
Being able to refine a search based upon what part of the target audience is clicking through like a perfectly logical feature. It doesn’t reveal any private information but would turn Facebook from a PPC-for-idiots to one of the most direct and powerful advertising tools available.
If you are interested in creating a personal brand, spending money on Facebook might not be a bad idea (assuming they allow personal ads).
The Federal Trade Commission approved Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick today, according to VentureBeat and AP.
“After carefully reviewing the evidence, we have concluded that Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick is unlikely to substantially lessen competition,” the Federal Trade Commission said Thursday in a statement.
The five-member commission voted 4-1 in favor of the deal. Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour dissented “because I make alternate predictions about where this market is heading, and the transformative role the combined Google/DoubleClick will play if the proposed acquisition is consummated.”
However, that’s only one hurdle, because Google said it won’t close the deal before it has clearance from European regulators.
Maybe not new features, but definitely cool ones. The three new changes are:
- AdWords Geographical Targeting with Google Maps
- Google Keyword Tool
- Google Analytics Graph Comparison
You can read more at the SEOmoz blog post.
Either I’m breaking a new story, or this is old news, but Adsense appears to be letting some ads scroll.
Clicking either left or right displays a new ad. In addition, banners are showing “show more”: 
.
Update: Turns out this was something new - it’s being reported on many, many blogs now.
A lot of marketers, especially search engine advertisers, underestimate the power of the only tool that gives glimpses into its search data. That tool is none other than Google Trends. You can type just about any key into it and easily compare it to other terms to decide what keyword to use.
You can also filter by:
- region
- country
- sub-region/state
- some cities
- years, months
- languages
But the clincher, is the fact that this gives an insight into Google’s database. I’ve used Google Trends (in a non-public environment), where the actual volume of the past month was displayed on the horizontal lines. Yes, those do represent something! In short, Google Trends is a lifesaver.
According to TechCrunch, Adbrite has secured another $23 million in funding in addition to the $12 million it’s raised previously.
In October, comScore ranked AdBrite as the 26th largest ad network after MySpace. Its ads reached 71 million people that month, representing a 39 percent reach of U.S. Internet traffic.
Who uses Adbrite?
Some minor updates at Google are set to possibly reduce click fraud. This is one of the first attempts Google has made to cut such activity. Instead of the entire ad box being clickable, the title and url of the ad will be the only part clickable. I know every once and awhile, I’ll mean to click something else only to find I clicked on an ad box. It’s a minor change, but I think it will have a large impact. Thanks to Techcrunch for the heads up.
An article on TechCrunch read that Google has announced a number of changes to its Adwords product that will provide a more rounded product offering to Adwords’ advertisers.
Google has tweaked its site targeting feature to give advertisers the ability to run their campaigns not only on the front page of sites, but also on specific pages on each site. The feature now has a new (and appropriate) name: placement targeting.
Advertisers can also now choose the bidding option “that best matches their needs.” Users can now pick between CPM or CPC advertising with placement targeting dependent on the overall goals of each campaign.
While I don’t see this affecting many Adwords or Adsense users, it is a step in the right direction of hyper-targetting. I really only see this working, or having an impact, on high-volume/traffic websites.
It’s fairly well-known that Google’s sponsored results ranking factor is: Bid X Click through rate X Landing page quality. Bid and CTR are weighted much more heavily than landing page quality. Terms that are high-volume and well sought after can be $5/click or higher, so how can you compete against the “big guys” and rank above them but pay a cheaper cost per click? By optimizing you adcopy for increased click through rates (CTR).
Here is an example:
Big company pays $4/click and has a CTR of 1% with a landing page score of 10.
4 X .01 X 10 = .4
Small guy (that’s you) pays $3/click and has a CTR of 2% with a landing page score of 10.
3 X .02 X 10 = .6
Small guy’s advertisements would be shown above Big company’s advertisement, because of the higher score (.6). The reason for the increased score is the much increased CTR.
A great adcopy should have a clear and attention grabbing title, short description about the product or service, and finally it should have a call to action.
Lets take a look at some PPC advertisements. The below ads were from a random search for “food” in Google.
As you can see, some where better than others. The advertisement in the top position is more than likely paying more than it should for that position.
Once you write your adcopy and it goes live, track the results. Build up solid data (CTR, CPC, # of sales, etc) for at least 2 weeks. Then, write slightly different adcopys and try and beat those numbers. I suggest having 5 different adcopys running continually and then logging every week or so, deleting the underperforming ad, and trying a new one out.
NOTE: This post is a modified one I wrote when I was blogging for Virtual Marketing Blog.
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