Online Marketing Blog

Many business owners and marketers can agree the current economy is having an impact on marketing plans, making every dollar and click matter. As part of the TopRank Account Team, I am excited to learn a new perspective to help clients increase conversions for their marketing campaigns.

Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder of Future Now Inc., along with Brett Crosby, Group Manager for Google, shared insight to identify missed conversations and how to improve your landing page and increase PPC ROI.

Pay Per Conversion, as explained by Eisenberg, is a shift from our Pay Per Click mentality. No longer focusing our efforts to just get the click, but rather transforming those clicks into a business opportunity or conversion.

This was an open discussion session where users submitted their sites to get the Google ad copy critiqued and the landing page looked over for quality and usability. Tips included:

• Keep important information towards the top of the landing page.
• Be detailed and don’t just assume your visitors know your services.
• Simpler the better.
• Put simple URLs in ads.
• Try sentence caps vs small caps.
• Image quality on landing page matters. Make it look good.
• Whitespace is good.
• Bullet points give a great way for users to scan information. Long blocks are bad.
• Should be easy and quick to digest the copy.
• Always be sure you know, and your visitors now, the target of the ad. What’s the call to action?

The vendor spotlight session covered alternatives or additives to going with PPC campaigns from companies like Google and Yahoo. They discussed how pay per call was more effective and available in more areas like TV and print than pay per click was. It also doesn’t suffer click fraud and clients like it more as it’s closer to a sale.

Tools for managing your pay per click and pay per call accounts were also discussed. Zanox offers a one stop shop for managing all your accounts including Google PPC, Yahoo PPC, click per call and more. Since it’s available worldwide, it can even help you with international accounts and search engines. Lycos spoke on how there offerings and how they can be customized for verticals and you can even become a publishing partner to use Lycos tools while running your own ad network with your own look and feel. Both companies trying to make it easier on the end user and increasing ROI.

Google Blogscoped posts an interesting explanation of the browse sites to target feature on Google AdWords that Inside AdWords announced on Friday. It provides categories of sites with an idea of the number of impressions each site gets per day. Besides  browsing sites by category, you can also target sites by describing the topic, list URLs to check for availability or similar sites.

You can also target a campaign by demographics such as income, gender or ethnicity based on comScore data.  I am curious if there are any head to head comparisons of MSN AdCenter demographic targeting and Google.

Many small and medium sized consumer products marketers strive for the biggest bang for the buck when allocating budgets. While our SEO firm specializes more in BtoB SEO, PR and blogs, there are some fundamental consumer product site promotion tactics we’ve found to be appropriate in many cases. Each is measurable to ROI and can be scaled to some degree.

1. Pay per click – Advertising on Google, Yahoo, MSN
2. Site optimization – Improving “natural” rankings on search engines
3. Optimized press releases – Announce sales, contests or special offers via press release
4. Blog marketing – Add a blog to web site to encourage search rankings, incoming links, interaction with consumers
5. Paid inclusion and shopping feeds – Submit a feed of your products to Google’s Froogle.com, Yahoo Search Submit and possibly comparison shopping sites such as shopping.com, bizrate.com or amazon.com

The Google “Inside AdWords” blog has announced the addition of “ad scheduling” or as it is more often know as, “day parting”.

“Ad scheduling can also help you improve your ROI by ensuring that your ads run when it makes the most business sense. For instance, a local business may only want to run their ads during business hours, or an online retailer may want to boost their bids during their busier-than-normal lunchtime shopping period.”

When Andrew Goodman spoke here in Minneapolis at the MIMA event this week, he mentioned the impending addition of this feature to the AdWords program, but I’m not sure how many people caught it.

Kevin Newcomb over at ClickZ also has more details including several quotes from Richard Holden, director of product management at Google.

Yes dear friends, I’ve said it. Paid search can be a pain in the rear. But no worries, search engine marketing guru Andrew Goodman of Traffick and Page Zero Media promises to shed some light on the subject in conjunction with a Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) seminar next week.

Goodman’s presentation, “IT’S NOT JUST YOU: PAY-PER-CLICK CAN BE A REAL BEAST” will cover examples of Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing challenges, SEM relations, click fraud, CPOs vs. market share growth, data privacy, auctions and more.

On the heels of MSN AdCenter’s demographic profiling aspirations, Google AdWords now offers demographic site selection with gender, age, and household income as the demographic categories available. The demographic information comes from ComScore. h/t Andy

Additional info from:

JenStar: “It will be interesting to see if advertisers find that the profiles are matching the resulting traffic from those sites. And I am sure some publishers will reverse engineer an AdWords campaign to see what demographic profile their own site is, and if it matches what they believe their traffic to be.”

Traffick: “Essentially what this means is an improved functionality for the site selection tool, only applicable to content targeting of the “site targeting” variety. It’s not a major foray into targeting search ads by demographics, then (yet).”

Hey, this is interesting. Google is testing some pay per call ads with a program called Click to Call .

“Here’s how it works: When you click the phone icon, you can enter your phone number. Once you click ‘Connect For Free,’ Google calls the number you provided. When you pick up, you hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the other party.”

You can try it yourself with a search on Google for “New York Hotels“. See screen shot below:

Pretty interesting keyword phrase match on the part of Google, since the Search Engine Strategies conference is coming up in New York at the end of the month. Or am I giving Google marketing too much credit?

I just received a review copy of the new book, Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with Adsense, AdWords and the Google APIs by Harold Davis, author of 20 books, (Googleplex Blog) and published by O’Reilly. Companion site here.

Chapters range from SEO and affiliate programs to “Profiting from Adult Sites” (hmmm) and of course whole sections on Adsense and AdWords.

It’s a bit techie, but I’ve not had a chance to go through it fully. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to post a review here when I get around to finally reading it. If you’ve already read it, feel free to post comments.

Tags: google, adwords, adsense, google advertising tools

A few things on Google today that I decided to roundup all in one post:

Possible new Google interface. Anyone else seeing this? Via PC World

David Utter from WPN posts about an offline Google AdWords Editor application that is in beta, “invite only” mode.

“AdWords Editor is Google’s free, downloadable account management application for your computer. Now you can download your AdWords account to your computer, make your changes, then upload your revised campaigns”

Localizing blog points out an interesting TV commercial (notice the reflection in the TV) for Pontiac where at the end, the viewer is invited to search for Pontiac on Google. Business Week has a great article on Google advertising which includes a quote from GM’s head of sales/marketing, Mark LaNeve: