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Social Media for Merchants – Designing Campaigns that Sell

July 11, 2011 by ClickAssPPC

Merchant Circle recently completed a confidence index survey on small business owners. According to their results, 70% of merchants are currently promoting their businesses on Facebook and 58% are on LinkedIn. Does this mean that social media is working for advertisers? Or does this mean that small business owners are once again wrapped up in an ineffective marketing trend that will not last?

The answer is undoubtedly both. There are winners and losers on social media, and the space between them is increasingly widening. As competition grows for fans and likes, impressions become more expensive. The key to making it work is focusing on the right metrics. Figure out what your campaign goals are and stick to them. For many merchants this means sales, it make take a testing budget to find your social media niche. Facebook and LinkedIn offer great reporting features, use every piece of information you can to maximize your campaigns.

The Female 30-40 market is highly prized in social media circles. This means this tends to be a expensive demographic to target on social media sites. You should set up a campaign with a small budget and very narrow targeting options. Test ads and measure your results, start with a cost per click, cost per impression tends to be more expensive. Make sure to create multiple versions of all of your ads. You will probably see that your audience sees your ads multiple times also known as frequency on Facebook. Testing ad copy and images will give you the opportunity to test response to different messages and images. You will probably learn something from the results, and they may surprise you.

For more information on social media marketing please comment or email me. I would be happy to help you with your campaigns.

For full results on the merchant circle survey click here

Posted in Ad Frequency, Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media, Terms | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

Get More Clicks out of Your Budget

June 20, 2011 by ClickAssPPC

One of the most common mistakes I see in search accounts is any number in the Lost IS column. The Lost IS is a column that can be added to the summary when in the campaign tab. The IS report is not currently available at more detail than at a campaign level. This is a great tool for SEM professionals, because it allows them to see if they are losing impressions to budget constraints. If your account has a number in this column, it means that your account stop serving ads because you exceed you daily budget. This is the estimate of increase in traffic you could have had, had you had a higher budget. The reason this is a bad stat for search marketers, is it means that you are overpaying for clicks early in the day, and your account is shutting off.(For more information on how this works see Brad Geddes article here) Try reducing your Max CPC’s until you see that number reduce to zero, or very close to zero. Very close to zero and you are probably only missing impressions late at night and you can probably live with that. One downside with this tactic is you will probably see a rise in Lost IS due to Rank. Because you are lowering your CPC’s you are lowering your ad rank (Ad Rank=Max CPC x Quality Score) and with a lower ad rank you should you average position drop. Hopefully though, the increase in clicks will help improve overall performance and lead to higher budgets.

If you are unsure about how this strategy will impact your account, consider using the experiment feature to lower CPC’s in your account. Test the two, and see which works better for your business.

Posted in Ad Rank, Google, Impression Share, Lowering CPC, Paid Search | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

SMX Advanced is Panda-monium

June 13, 2011 by ClickAssPPC

Last week, SMX Advanced was held in Seattle. The conference can be summed up by one word, Panda-monium. The update to Google’s algorithm change, dubbed “Panda” has drastically changed the organic search landscape. By Google’s estimation, about 8% of search results were changed by Panda and the Panda 2.1 releases. On the eve of SMX Advanced, June 6th Panda 3.0 was released. It is still unknown what the fallout will be from the latest release. Google has said that they were adapting the original algorithm to better rank pages within sites targeted by the original releases.

The broader and more interesting topic coming from the Panda releases, is what does this mean for the future of content?

It is clear that the message from Google is, post, high quality, fresh content or you risk exposing your site to punishment. It is the same idea Google has been communicating to advertisers for years. It is also interesting that the Panda releases seemed to help major news outlets more than anyone. Wall Street journal, CBS online and NPR were all major winners in the panda updates. There will probably be two major impacts from this shift in traffic. For the average internet user, they will experience a faster, cleaner and more limited internet. They will find themselves on pages they recognize absorbing the content from sites they have probably been to before. On the other side of the coin, Panda has been very bad for content aggregators. Sites like eHow and Answers.com have seen SERP ranking plunge with no apparent relief. Sites like these will need to completely change their business models. So too will the advertisers who counted on their extremely niche pages to draw in ultra targeted display network impressions.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Google Announces Results of Mobile Ad Study

April 30, 2011 by ClickAssPPC

On April 27th, Google released a study on the impact of advertising on mobile phones, inside the study are some astonishing figures. Google surveyed 5,000 smart phone users and found that mobile impressions are some of the most valuable and meaningful impressions advertisers can buy.

Of all the statistics Google released, some of the most relevant were on the consumption of information while using a smart phone. Google found that smart phone users were almost always armed with their smart phones. Searchers are using their smart phones for everyday decisions, ranging from where to go to happy hour to price shopping a new television. A few of the staggering statistics:

· 70% use smart phones in retail outlet to help price items

· 95% use their smartphones to find local information

· 88% act on this local information within 24 hours

These statistics show that there is an enormous opportunity for advertisers on mobile devices. Businesses can no longer forsake smart phones as a medium of the future and need to seize the opportunity to join the growing number of mobile phone advertisers. In order for advertisers to capitalize on the mobile phone market, they first need to understand their advertising goals. What response are you looking for from the searcher? Second, marketers should research which opportunities align best with their current marketing campaigns. Some great questions that marketers should ask themselves.

· How long is my sales cycle?

· How do I measure a successful impression?

· What are my goals? (store visit, online visit, purchase, etc…)

There are currently only a few ways small marketers can get started advertising on mobile devices. A few of the companies offering easy solutions are Google, Bing, Pandora, Yelp, and Apple. If you would like to know more please contact me and look out for an upcoming “How-to” post on starting a mobile campaign through Google.

Watch the video below for a full lost of Google’s findings.

Posted in Going local, Google, Google Maps, Location, Mobile | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Google Introduces Longer Headlines

April 3, 2011 by ClickAssPPC

It’s been a few weeks now since the release of the longer display headline feature in Google. Some of the results are mixed but from what I hear, most advertisers like the feature. If you don’t know about the feature, a quick recap.
- This feature only applies ads that are shown in positions 1, 2, 3 of the results page
- Google will take the description line 1 and combine it with your headline using a hyphen
- Description line 1 must be a sentence and fit within Google’s guidelines
- Google will rotate the new format with the traditional format and test for a change in CTR

I think this is a great addition to the Google AdWords service. It allows advertisers to both draw attention to their ad and highlight a special offer in the headline. I think it’s a great way to use the headline to grab a searchers attention, then hook their interest with a compelling description line 1. I also sometimes use the headline to hook the searcher with a great offer and then use description line 1, to reinforce the searchers click decision.

Example

Query: Buy bulk widgets

Example 1:
Buy Bulk Widgets Here – 25% off Widget Purchases Today Only!
Visit the #1 Widget Shopping Site
Widgets.com

Example 2:
25% off Widget Purchases – Visit the #1 Widget Shopping Site!
Get Bulk Widget Here – 1 Day Deal
Widgets.com

Note: For advertisers who don’t like the new changes, just avoid using a complete sentence in description line 1 and you will never see an impression in the new format. If you are concerned that this feature may be negatively affecting your CTR, test identical copies of an ad, one with punctuation at the end of line one, one without. Wait for a statistically significant number of impressions and voila you will have your answer.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Google vs. The Farmers

March 2, 2011 by ClickAssPPC

Recently Google began cracking down on farmers. Not those who work the land for food, but those who farm the corners of the internet for niche content opportunities. In short, these companies have a huge team of writers who sole goal is to crank out keyword dense, high SEO value, articles. The problem is that these pages don’t necessarily help searchers find the information they are looking for. So to punish these farms Google thinks are gaming the system, Google reordered its search algorithm to punish these type of networks. The biggest loser may have been, a company that just went public under the ticker DMD, Demand Media. Their network which includes the vast eHow.com is all based around this such concept. Blekko, a upstart search engine, created a list of these vary sites and banned them. You can view that list here

Is this move away from content farms a good one for the internet? From the farmers perspective obviously they don’t like the decision. From an advertisers perspective I also think it may hurt traffic. It could be argued that a by removing unnecessary clutter from the SERP page that users will find what their looking for quicker and easier, probably allowing them to get what they need with minimal “noise.” If this is the case then more consumers will be pushed to both paid and organic listings. Good for the marketplace of advertisers and especially good for the heavyweights, those who place higher on result pages. It does hurt advertisers savvy enough to navigate the twisted maze of farm networks to advertise on specific content pages. I think that from a consumers perspective, some of these sites might offer useful information on a very niche topic, but considering most articles are written by someone who knows almost nothing about the topic they are writing on, I am going to side with Google, bad for consumers. In short I think it may be good for the internet as a whole, reduce some of the noise out there because everyone could benefit from finding what they need a little faster.

Posted in Censorship, Content Farms, Demand Media, eHow, Google | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments »

How do you say Groupon in Chinese?

March 1, 2011 by ClickAssPPC

Why do you think I am asking? Because that is right, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Groupon is gearing up to launch in Chinese markets. This fits perfectly with my last post on the popularity of going local, Groupon arguably the biggest winner of the going local revolution, is now poised to take on the largest and also the most interesting market in the world. Zhong Guo, the “middle country” as the emperors used to their kingdoms. I have spent some time studying and living in China, and the more I know the less I feel like I understand. The complexities of the Chinese social system combined with, a central government whose ideology doesn’t always align with the modern values of a market system, make this a very interesting move for Groupon.

It is an interesting dichotomy, Chinese people will haggle to the last penny from a street vendor but then turn around and pay full price for designer shirt when they easily could have purchased a good quality knock off of the same shirt. Like leaving the tags on a flat billed hat, many Chinese want to advertise how much they spent on something. Take pizza hut for example, the trashy American fast food chain is a sought after, sit down experience in China. The Chinese just don’t think about luxury, even simple luxury, the way that the west does.

Certainly if they can penetrate the social system I think they can be very, very successful, but I think this mountain maybe be a lot higher than Groupon realizes This is an evolving story and there will certainly be more too it.

Read the breaking story here

Posted in China, Going local, Groupon, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

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