Yesterday I was browsing the Facebook and noticed a little message above my feed. The message stated that Facebook makes it’s money from ads and there was a link to learn how they do it. As an advertiser I was curious to see what Facebook was trying to tell users. Here is the page they showed me –

What Is Facebook Trying to Accomplish?

Facebook has hundreds of millions of users. They’re still aggressively trying to grow and that is hard to do when you’ve already achieved that kind of market penetration. To grow, they need to get those people who aren’t on Facebook (and there are more than you’d think) to join while keeping current users. And there are few misconceptions about Facebook that I believe this page is addressing to try and clean up their image.

• Ads are annoying – Okay, maybe not a misconception. But while users may not like ads, the reason is simple – “Ads help keep Facebook free”. So while they don’t want you to bail because of the ads, they do want to set the expectation correctly. You get Facebook for free, so don’t complain about the ads.
• Ads are creepy – I’ve talked to many friends who mention that ads are targeted so well it’s creepy. This leads them to believe that the advertiser has some type of secret knowledge that allows them to show such a pointed ad. This leads them to believe that Facebook gave them that secret knowledge. Facebook is trying to let people know that they have control over ads and they can stop seeing them by simply clicking the little X on the ad (a great idea in theory that doesn’t work as well in practice)
• Nobody clicks on ads – Everyone thinks that they don’t click on ads. My bet is that they do, but don’t realize/remember it. I’ve run too many campaigns on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. I know people click ads. Lots of them. And they buy stuff after they do.

So basically, Facebook is trying to educate their users on why ads are there, how ads are being served and the potential benefits (yes, I said benefits because clicking ads can be a good thing). I’d love to see how many visitors clicked through to this page. Facebook?

The team up at PurePPC.com has offered up the following tips for the do-it-yourself PPCer:

Nearly seven in 10 retailers expect their online retail sales to increase at least 15 percent this holiday season from last year, according to Shop.org’s eHoliday survey. The survey also found the average holiday shopper will do 36 percent of her shopping online, a four percent increase from last year.

Statistics like these have companies scrambling to increase their online advertising presence as they anticipate the biggest shopping season of the year.

Pay-per-click advertising, a type of online advertising that occurs mostly on search engines and directs users to the advertised company’s website, allows businesses to make their ads appear when potential customers search for specific keywords. The keywords act as triggers for the advertisements, which, when clicked, lead the user to a website related to the original search term.

Many businesses have started pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns as they have realized the potential for profits from it. However, because it is such a complex field, agencies specializing in pay-per-click management, such as Utah-based PurePPC.com, have emerged and offer pay-per-click services to companies to lighten the workload.

“Most people realize they should be doing PPC, but don’t know much about it,” said Todd Julien, president of PurePPC.com. “We run into cases like this all the time.”

So PurePPC.com offered a couple tips to these do-it-yourself types:

• Use specific messaging to differentiate the ad from others. Use two or three terms to make the phrase specific and unique.
• Have goals, a budget and conversion tracking — PPC campaigns without conversion tracking have no way of measuring success. Never spend any money without it. Consider using Google’s free code for conversion tracking.
• Monitor geographic success. Google offers a tool called The Dimensions tab that allows users to track PPC campaigns by region. If a campaign is not generating sales in a particular region, exclude it. Conversely, if a particular region generates high sales, consider creating a second campaign to target that region and language.
• Have sensible landing pages for ads. If the ad promotes women’s shoes, be sure it links to the website’s page for women’s shoes. This may seem like common sense, but surprisingly, there are many ads that don’t have logical links to the pages they advertise.
• If all else fails, use an agency. PPC is a tricky art that can be time-consuming and costly if the user doesn’t have the necessary skills and knowledge to run a campaign. Agencies specializing in PPC have the know-how and resources to drive a time and cost-efficient campaign.

“If people follow these tips, while they are basic, they can elevate their PPC campaign to the next level,” said Tim Gilson, vice president of sales for PurePPC.com. “PPC is a powerful marketing tool and with the right methods implemented, it can drive revenues for companies and give them a forerunner presence online.”

PurePPC.com provides full service pay-per-click management and consulting services to clients all over the world. Unlike other PPC agencies that dabble in multiple services, the team at PurePPC.com focuses on delivering the best results through pay-per-click marketing. PurePPC.com has managed millions of dollars in PPC spend and has saved its clients hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing costs.

Recently I’ve been reading through the book “Killer Facebook Ads“(disclosure: affiliate link) by Marty Weintraub of aimClear. The guy is probably the smartest Facebook advertiser out there. I got to hear him speak at Pubcon earlier this month and the book lets you consume the info at your own pace. But I digress…

Marty points out that a Facebook ad image needs to accomplish two major objectives:

1. Cut through the clutter/attract attention
2. Lend context to the headline or vice versa

At almost the same time I was reading about this (page 140 if you’re curious) I came across the following ad in my own Facebook account:



I acknowledge that the ad successfully accomplished objective #1 because I noticed it. No small task for an internet marketer who is more well trained at ignoring ads than most. But the ad fails so miserably on objective #2 I had to post about it. So how did if fail? Let me count the ways:

• Members of the LDS church believe in modesty – the low cut tank top is sending the wrong message
• Tattoos are discouraged by the LDS church – this girl has more ink than a printer cartridge (and that’s just what you can see)

Basically, this image produces mental friction because the copy is talking about LDS dating, yet the image is in opposition to the connotation of LDS dating. I don’t know if this was a test and maybe this image got a better CTR, but my guess is that it failed to convert traffic because the message from the ad copy didn’t align with the message of the image. Your thoughts?

In the world of PPC advertising Google is the 800 lb. gorilla. However, Yahoo has always kept a strong presence in the space due to their content network. Just the other day I was searching through some answers on Yahoo Answers and started seeing some interesting PPC ads (interesting for the wrong reasons).

Special Characters Not Rendering

One of the first things you learn in PPC is that special characters are your friend. The word “and” takes 3 characters, but an ampersand (&) only takes 1 character. Therefore you see a lot of ampersands in PPC ad text. But take a look at this:



If you look closely you’ll notice that the & symbol has been rendered as & which is the html code for an ampersand. And to compound the problem, it then truncates the ad text with an ellipsis so you don’t see the call to action on the ad. Really?

Apostrophes Too?

I thought it was just a fluke result, but kept seeing it more and more throughout Yahoo Answers. But it isn’t just ampersands that they can’t seem to get right. They can’t get apostrophes right either. Behold:



I’m sure that “Kohl’s®” appreciates their brand name being rendered with an ampersand, a pound sign and the number 39 thrown in there.

This is the kind of thing that drives a PPC manager crazy. We’re under constant pressure to increase CTR and QS, boost conversion rates and maintain high ROIs. We meticulously write ad copy that evokes emotion, enumerates benefits and contains a call to action (all in 95 characters). The last thing we need is your ad platform to screw up our ad by rendering common punctuation like ampersands and apostrophes as gibberish HTML code. So Yahoo, please, get it together!

Ads.

The bane of television, the internet and any blank surface in a high traffic area.

You’ve been taught to hate them. You’ve been led to believe that behind every ad is a sinister marketer hell-bent on selling you something you don’t need. You mute the television during commercials. You may have even paid money for a TiVo just so you could skip commercials. You ignore ads on the internet so well we had to come up with the name “banner blindness” to adequately describe it. But is this prejudice justified?

Why I Click PPC Ads

For starters, a little clarification on what PPC means. PPC is short for pay-per-click, meaning that an advertiser pays only when someone clicks their ad. Google makes billions of dollars from PPC ads. You see them on virtually every Search Engine Results Page (SERP). There are two key things to remember about PPC ads:

• Someone (company, individual, etc.) pays every time an ad is clicked
• That same someone is trying to make a profit

With these two things in mind, here is why I click PPC ads:

I Get What I Want Faster

Let’s say you’re a small business with a new website and you want to add a Verisign seal to show your customers that your site is secure. If you search “verisign certificate” you might see results like these:


Clicking on the first paid results takes me to https://www.verisign.com/ts-sem-page, a custom landing page for paid traffic (this assumption is based on the “sem” in the destination URL). This page has simplified content that is more benefit-oriented and has very clear CTAs on the right side of the page, including a free trial. I’m not overloaded with tons of options. With one click I can get a free trial. Benefits are clearly presented. I can quickly get what I want and get on with my life.

Clicking on the first organic result (which is still a verisign.com page notice) takes me to http://www.verisign.com/ssl/buy-ssl-certificates/, the SSL Certificates product page. This page has lots of options, but the copy is more feature oriented, not benefit oriented. I’m on their site, but now I have to decide which of the 4 types of certificates is right for me. Each option has a Buy, Try & Renew option. This is usually when someone hits the back button or goes to check Facebook.

I Get Better Deals

Most people have that one friend who always scores amazing deals on everything. Whether it’s pointing out a dent to the checker or a super-human ability to stare down a salesman, most prices are flexible if you know what you’re doing. The same goes for paid search ads. Advertisers paid to get your click, so when you click the back button they just lost money. Therefore they try very hard to make you an offer you can’t refuse.

Look back at our search results for “verisign certificate”. You’ll see the 2nd ad is from GoDaddy and offers an SSL certificate for $12.99. If you click the ad you’ll see them compared to Verisign, Thawte, GeoTrust and Network Solutions with that same $12.99 price highlighted in yellow and basically screaming at you how cheap that is. But what if you hadn’t clicked the ad?

If you go to GoDaddy.com and click the SSL & Security link in the top nav and select SSL Certificates you’ll see a different story on pricing:


That’s right, no more $12.99 pricing.


This is your opportunity to let a marketer’s greed work in your favor. They’re spending money to get clicks and so they have to show results, and fast! Therefore, they’re going to give you the best deal possible to hook you. If you are already on their site and are browsing the SSL Certificates page, you might buy anyway. No need to give away the farm if you don’t have to.

In summary, I hope you see that when PPC advertising is being done well it delivers better results to the user, and please, keep in mind that every click does cost someone, so please click carefully.

I thought I’d pass on a little bonus to my readers. You can save $200 on Conversion Conference East by using coupon code CCE132. Additionally, if you sign up before the 2nd of September you’ll also save $500 off the 2-day pass with the early-bird discount.

I attended Conversion Conference West last year and got a lot of valuable information out of the speakers and panelists. You can read my recap post about high-level conversion trends here and it has links to other recaps. However, I felt like I got the most value from the face-to-face discussions I had with speakers, panelists and participants. These people are passionate about conversion, user experience and just plain awesome. I definitely recommend it.

Today I’m going to be reviewing iSpionage, which says you can “Uncover competitors’ SEO & PPC keywords and strategies” as well as “Build effective PPC campaign under 20 min”. I’ve got my cup of hot cocoa (even though it’s July, I know), some Tchaikovsky playing on Spotify and I’m going to tackle this almost like a product unboxing. I’ll give you my impressions on the fly as I login and start poking around.

Getting Started

Immediately upon login in I see 3 main options: Keyword & Domain Research, Keyword Monitor and PPC Campaign Builder.

I’m a left to right kind of guy, so let’s take a look at Keyword & Domain Research.

My dad raises grass-fed beef in Idaho, so I help him with his internet marketing. One of his competitors is Alderspring.com so I threw that in the search bar to see what information they give me. I immediately zone in on the SEO Keywords tab where I see a list of keywords where they’re ranking on the 1st page. The thoroughness is impressive and I can quickly see that my competitors are making a concerted effort to rank for organic terms in addition to grass-fed beef terms. Interesting.

Next I go to the competitors tab to see if my dad is there. Yep, there he is, 16th on the list. I go ahead and click on his name and it looks like the site just ran the same report for my dad’s website, BradysBeef.com. We’ll see how accurate they are now. Hmm. Not as impressed here since it only shows 6 SEO keywords with rankings (my Google Analytics shows many terms garnering organic traffic that aren’t showing here) and at least one of the terms has an incorrect ranking (I checked it against an Incognito Chrome window and AuthorityLabs). I’ll give them a break since my dad’s site is pretty small, but it might be something for them to look into.

Keyword Monitor

Okay, moving on I went to look at the Keyword Monitor feature. Looks like I have to pick between SEO tracking and PPC tracking. I’ll go a different direction here and use a keyword for one of my larger national clients. Looks like you name the project, give it a description and then drop in your keywords. The message says it will take 24 hours to get me data, so I’ll create a couple more projects and come back to it (I do have 150 keywords after all).

Okay, it only took like 4 hours to get the data, but the SEO Rankings look accurate and the PPC keyword monitoring is interesting. With only 1 day of monitoring I can only get so much benefit, but having this data being recorded over a longer time frame would provide great historical data.

To monitor local PPC keywords it looks like you need to install a proxy on your machine so iSpionage can check your local PPC results. I was hoping to be able to set the geographic area for a campaign I’m managing in another state, but I guess I’ll hold off on that for now.

PPC Campaign Builder

I’m always a bit leery of automated PPC building tools because of how important intuition is, but I’ll give this a shake. It looks like the default Step 1 is keyword research, so I’ll throw it a bone. I get a spinner while it processes, which takes about 30 seconds or so. Looking through the research list, most keywords are good fits. A few are a little off. I selected a few and threw them in the keyword bag (not sure what that means yet, but we’ll find out).

I choose the next tab, Keyword Clean Up, and look around. I think the next step is the small “Clean >>” link (and it is) but it took me quite a bit of looking to figure that out. Maybe a bigger button there? I save the keyword list and move to the Keyword Grouping tab. This tool is formatted pretty much the same and I eventually figure out what’s going on. You select a common root word or phrase and you can pull all those over into an ad group. Once in an ad group you can then export them to the 4th tab, Campaign Builder, where you put the finishing touches on your new campaign such as bids and ad copy. After filling in the blanks you get a nice output that you could copy/paste into AdWords Editor.

It was a little rocky the first time through (upon further review, I see that like a typical guy I ignored the bright orange “Page Tutorial” button that has a video explaining how to do each step. Nice touch and I recommend you watch them before using the tool. You know, do as I say, not as I do) but I could definitely go much faster the next time through and see how this would be a nice time saver if you’re doing a lot of build out tasks.

Summary

• Keyword monitoring is accurate and easy to read
• Solid domain research
• Great way to get a fast, high-level picture of what your competitors are doing
• Campaign builder could save you a lot of time on account build out

No matter what type of business you run online, your main goal is to sell. But, many businesses online become their own worst enemy by creating conversion killers on their landing pages. Your landing page is typically the first page a visitor sees on your site, meaning it is the page that will make or break their experience. If your landing page does not sell your products, services, and brand, then it is not doing its job.

Conversion Rates

Your conversion rate, which means conversions from visitors to customers, is crucial when designing and redesigning your site. One of the ways you can measure success on your site is by analyzing conversion rate data. Everything from repeat visitor stats to completed transaction stats can help you to gauge what is working and what is not working on your site. However, before you begin to tally up the data, there are a few typical conversation rate killers you need to be aware of.

Get Rid of Clutter

First and foremost, do not clutter up your landing page with too much data. If you try to cram everything into one page, there isn’t much point in even having a website. You want the visitor to see a few key things: what you offer, why they should purchase it, and how they can make a purchase. Those three key elements are really the only things your landing page has to offer in the way of making money. Avoid pointless ads and links, as well as images, video players, and Flash animations that truly serve no purpose. While the internet allows you to add a bunch of sparkling eye candy to your site, it does not mean you need to use it.

Make Products Visible

Also, ensure that you have a clear link to your product page. Again, you started your site to sell products and services. If a customer cannot find a clear link to your product page, then your site is useless and visitors will look elsewhere. If you have products on your landing page, ensure that they have a clear and concise name labeling scheme, as well as a clear way to make a purchase. You may be using a cart system, or you may simply have a buy now option; regardless, if the customer cannot figure out how to make a purchase, they will often become frustrated and leave, thus not becoming a conversion.

Under-promise, Over-deliver

Finally, make sure you can deliver on your promises. If you advertise that you offer support, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and a visitor calls your telephone number and no one answers, chances are, they will not be back to your site, let alone be making any purchases. Always under-promise and over-deliver.

Eric Wyatt writes on internet marketing and social media, specifically on conversion rate optimization and landing page design.

Warning: This is a rant! (exclamation point added for emphasis)

Last week (April 20, 2011 at 2:45:17 PM according to the change history) I moved some ad groups from one campaign into another campaign via the AdWords Editor tool and updated it live. The ads were flagged as “Under review” and didn’t start accruing impressions immediately. That’s okay, I understand it’s a non-family product and that someone needs to do a quick glance. No big deal.

According to AdWords guidelines:

We work to review all ads in our program as quickly as possible, usually within 1 to 3 business days or sooner. Our Support team isn’t able to expedite this review process.

Therefore, I was a little concerned that the ads still weren’t approved on Friday, so I called 866-2-GOOGLE. The cheerful rep told me that it takes up to 3 days and that because it was the weekend it might take until Monday for someone to approve them. Not ideal, but fine. I will wait over the weekend.

Monday afternoon (when the mythical 3 business days would be up) I was busy and didn’t get a chance to call Google about the ads still being “Under review”. I hoped someone would have it taken care of by Tuesday. Alas, the ads were still not running Tuesday so I called AGAIN! Another cheerful rep (Tommy I believe) who told me that he would escalate it to a “specialist” (I guess you have to be a specialist to actually fix a customer issue and basic phone support is just a bunch of gatekeepers who make sure that no specialist ever wastes their time with an actual customer). He told me that I could expect an answer by tomorrow.

Hooray! The ads were approved this morning. Wednesday. Nearly a full week from when I made the change.

Am I Being Unreasonable?

Okay, I know that I’m a bit peeved by this whole process, but am I really asking too much here?

• These ads were already approved and had been running. I just moved them into a new campaign.
• The policy says 1-3 business days or sooner. Not 5 business days and a weekend. Google makes billions in profit but can’t hire enough staff to cover basic functions?
• I spoke with 2 customer service reps, neither of which had the ability to solve my problem. How many of those stupid post-call surveys do I have to complete before they figure out that I’m not happy because the rep I’m talking with never seems to be able to actually fix anything.

Come on Google!