• Takeaways from Hero Conf 2013 – Timothy Jensen of Overit
• My 5 Biggest Takeaways from Hero Conf 2013 – Sarah Peduzzi of Luna Metrics
• 7 Take Aways from Hero Conf 2013 – Rehan Zaidi
• The Five Biggest Moments from Hero Conf 2013 – PPC Hero Blog
• Keyword Planner, Flexible Bid Strategies Coming to AdWords Ahead of Enhanced Campaigns – Lisa Raehsler of Big Click Co. (look near the bottom of the post)
• What I Learned at Hero Conf 2013 – Robert Brady of Trafficado

I know the last one was written by me, but what other posts should I be including?

• Where did my login go? Oh there it is, that little blue link in the upper right corner. I now have to click through one extra time or bookmark the wonky AdWords login URL (I don’t really use bookmarks regularly). Not a fan.
• What is that huge slider? It would appear that Google is trying to create a page that has the entire sales pitch on it, but fits above the fold. That slider has SEVEN different panes.

Why Would They Use A Rotating Banner

It’s pretty well established in the conversion optimization community that rotating banners aren’t good. Chris Goward calls them the “Scourge of Home Page Design“. Tim Ash takes it even further and says “Rotating banners are absolutely evil and should be removed immediately.” And just for fun, here’s another post with more damning evidence.

So there are two possibilities here. First, Google knows something we don’t know. Second, and more likely, Google is running a test. Based on the conversion industry they’re betting on a long-shot, but I’m intrigued to see how it turns out.

What do you think of the new homepage?

A recent study found that 90% of multi-device consumers move between several different devices to accomplish a task. AdWords has previously been used to target mainly desktops devices, but with the advancement of new devices, such as tablets and smartphones the new enhanced campaigns will target both desktop devices and mobile devices in one campaign.

The enhanced campaigns will be optional for all advertisers, until late June, when all campaigns will automatically be upgraded.

The new enhanced campaigns have three major features:

Management of Campaign and Budget: With smartphones constantly coming down in price, it’s no wonder that nearly half of all searches are performed using smartphones, and this will only increase over the next few years. Google has taken note of this data to help advertisers target customers more relevantly. With bid adjustments, using just a single campaign, advertisers will be able manage their bids for different devices, locations and time of day.

Example: A cafe serving breakfast may want to target people nearby searching for “Breakfast” on a smartphone. With bid adjustments, advertisers have the ability to bid higher for people located nearby, and for those using smartphones. The cafe could also choose to bid lower after they stop serving breakfast.

Bid adjustments will be found in the campaigns settings tab.

Context Based Ads: People using a smartphone may be looking for something different, than if they were using a desktop computer. Context based ads allows you to show ads across different devices with the correct text, sitelink or app. This can all be achieved with just one campaign – rather than having to edit each campaign for different locations, times of day and devices.

Example: Certain companies may have both a physical store and a website. With the new enhanced campaigns, the company could show ads with click-to-call and apps downloads for people searching with a smartphone. The company could then choose to display an ad for their website for customers searching with a PC.

Ads based on context will be a type of ad selection in AdWords.

New conversion types: Before enhanced campaigns, advertisers have been unable to easily measure mobile campaigns. With the new AdWords reports, advertisers will now be able to determine how many times an ad has converted into an app download or phone call.

Example: Click-to-call phones calls of 60 seconds or more will be counted as a conversion in the new AdWords reports. This can then be used to compare against other conversions, such as sales and downloads.

This feature will be an additional column as a conversion in reporting.

Cross device tracking, a new feature from Google, will allow advertisers to see how mobile searchers drive desktop searches, downloads, purchases, etc. It will also show how desktop searchers drive mobile searches.

Will the New Enhanced Campaigns Affect your Current Campaigns?

Most likely, yes. Firstly, the new mobile changes coming to Google’s mobile search will no longer make tablet targeting optional. You will still have the option to not appear on mobile by setting mobile bids to -100% of the desktop bids.

Your upgrade path will vary depending on how you currently run your campaign:

• If you’ve yet to separate your desktop and mobile advertising, then the only thing you’ll need to do is set your mobile bid adjustment factor
• If your campaign is currently desktop-only, then it will automatically be upgraded to run on both desktop and mobile devices
• If your campaign is currently mobile-only, then it will automatically be upgraded to run on both desktop and mobile devices
• If you have made copies of the same campaign, to run on both desktop and mobile, you’ll need to merge these back together

The new enhanced campaigns should make AdWords easier to target users. The complexity of managing several different campaigns should now be easier to manage, as all changes will be made from just one campaign.

Google’s new enhanced campaigns will be available to advertisers in the next few weeks and are optional until the end of June, after that time all campaigns will automatically be upgraded.

• Email
• Phone
• Chat
• Browse Help
• AdWords Community Forum

Did you catch that? CHAT!

Maybe this has been around awhile, but it was new to me, so I decided to give them a chance. I already had a good idea what was causing the issue, so I figured it would be no big deal. After clicking I got a little window that loaded up in the lower right corner telling me where I stood in the queue:



It took a couple minutes before I got hooked up with Eric B. I had to do the typical phone routine of providing my 10-digit account ID and login email. I then had to explain the issue and wait for him to navigate to the appropriate page and validate what I was saying (this has always been a frustration for me). We ran through a couple ideas that didn’t ultimately work and he said he’d email me after he spoke with a specialist team (the normal M.O. for a phone support call).

In the end it was about the same as a phone call, but if you’re a fan of chat it’s a nice option to have.

Accredited Professional Program Is Now Free

From the body of the email I received:

Our accreditation exam has moved to a different platform that is easier to navigate. A score of 80 percent on the 100-question exam is still required to achieve Accredited Professional status, but now we offer the exam at no charge.

So there you have it folks. You can now go and get BingAds Accredited for free (unlike AdWords and their $50 fee every year).

Today I’m going to show you how we took  Tareas Plus from zero to hero with Facebook Ads.  We’d never done anything with Facebook, but we had a decent following (15K fans) so we decided to start pushing ads to people who were fans of the page and their friends.

We had $1500 total budget to work with.  I am more of a go big or go home type.  I’d rather know fast if something is going to work, and know even faster if it’s not going to work.  We were going to blow the budget in 3 days.  So we put a budget of $500/day.

We put everything into Facebook Ads… here is what the results looked like:

Um, am I reading this correctly?  Yup.  We got almost 5 million impressions.  You think that’s interesting, check out our Google Analytics numbers below:

Something pretty sweet is that we got almost 50K visits to our site.  It trickled down after the first couple days but most of the traffic stuck.  Facebook ads worked great.  $1500 investment drove over 120K uniques to our site in a couple days.  Most of the traffic and improvements in traffic are due to Facebook ads (and a killer guy like myself) behind the curtain.

Something I will say about Facebook Ads.  They don’t work for everyone.  Not all clients will have the same results as my client.  But this is the second client that I’ve had an amazing result with.  Facebook ads only work for around 5% of our clients.  They don’t work for everyone.  But I highly recommend giving them out a test!

A few quick tips to having the best Facebook ads:

• Check your targeting, only target the right people
• Check your landing page, make sure it’s working
• Check your videos, slow videos kill conversions

If you have any questions about Facebook Ads I would love to answer them.  Know that Facebook Ads do work for some people, but not for all.  Happy FacebookAdding!

Organic Landscape

I did a search for “Microsoft 70-413 exam and the SERP has only 1 ad, shown below:

Top 3 results are from Microsoft. Nothing surprising. The next 7 results on the page appear to be “competitors” that offer training or information on this test, so it would appear their SEO efforts are justified. But let’s look at the PPC landscape.

PPC Landscape

As you can see in the screenshot above, there is only 1 PPC ad (no ads below the organic results either). This particular company has two products; one is a $148 subscription to their entire library of exam prep stuff and the other is a $118 exam simulator. On a highly relevant keyword, if they only have 1 competitor, I have to believe that they could appear immediately on the first page, in PPC positions 1 or 2, for a very reasonable CPC. How might the numbers work?

Say they pay $1 CPC (remember, very little competition) and only convert 1% of clicks into a paying customer. Depending on the cost structure, they could be profitable from Day 1 and still have upsell opportunities down the road.

Summary

Don’t forget about PPC. It’s great to get all those “free” clicks from SEO, but a focused PPC effort can drive immediate, profitable traffic if done correctly. Especially if you’re in a vertical with less PPC-savvy competition.

Show BOTH sitelinks and location extension

In the words of Google:

Location extensions can now be shown alongside one-line sitelinks in text ads (on desktop and laptop computers) and will continue to show with two-line and three-line sitelinks.

Double up.

Larger maps for your location extension

Just how large? Allow this beautiful example from the AdWords blog demonstrate:

Yep, it’s nearly as big as the entire column of organic results. Now that’s what I call a land grab! So, if you haven’t already put in the time to utilize all available ad extensions in Google, I would advise you to put it on the to-do list and get it done now.

Photo credit – danperry.com

You gotta be fast…like this guy!

People will visit a Web site less often if it is slower than a close competitor by more than 250 milliseconds (a millisecond is a thousandth of a second).

One quarter of one second.

Dang!

What If You’re Using Video?

On Monday I came across this CNN post addressing the effects of slow loading on videos. How bad could it be?

• At 10 seconds, 40% of users are gone.
• For every second (after 2 seconds) 5.8% more people will bail.
• A user who experiences a failed video load is 2.32% less likely to return to that site.

This is research from UMass people. And it’s making a pretty clear point.

If The Video Doesn’t Load Quickly – Adios!

I’ve seen a lot of landing pages using video in my day. I like them and think that they can be great at converting traffic. Brian Massey is doing some really cool stuff with video and you should definitely check him out. But there are some definite take-aways here:

• If you use video it had better load fast!

Pretty simple huh? For some of you, this will mean you’ve got to do more than upload your videos to YouTube and embed them. You might need a Vimeo Pro account. You might need better servers. What you’ll surely need is someone who can test your video load time on a more “average” connection. For me, I call up my Mom. She lives in a rural part of Idaho and if she can load a video okay, you know you’ve got it right.

How are you addressing your video load times? Please share your advice in the comments.

What Does Business.com Offer

From their own media kit, here is what Business.com claims they offer:

Business.com is the only B2B online destination where millions of business decision makers go every month ACTIVELY looking to make a purchase. Facilitating billions of dollars of business purchases, Business.com connects over 10,000 advertisers with this high quality audience of motivated buyers.

Not bad I would say, but can they back it up?

The Numbers

Again, pulling from the media kit, Business.com says they have an audience that is 112% more likely to have made a B2B purchase in the last six months and their users are 86% more likely to be in senior management. Interesting stats simply because I still don’t quite understand who the heck is even going to Business.com to perform searches (and while they have a “premium partner network” I wasn’t able to determine who any of those partners actually were). They also cite their Compete numbers to show 60 million site visitors (I’m assuming that is a monthly figure) which is 6X more than the 10 million visitors that Forbes site receives. Interesting, but on a qualitative level, how does it stack up?

What Do Results Look Like?

So I went to Business.com and did a search for “salt lake internet marketing agency” since that’s where I live and what I do. Here is what I got:



So I get a web development company (who also does internet marketing), a hotel-specific internet marketing company and an ad agency as the top 3 sponsored results. Not exactly inspiring confidence, but I scanned down and saw a link to Marketing Consulting Companies in Salt Lake City and clicked there. Here is what I got:



I don’t recognize any companies on the list and it appears that these sponsored links are actually being served by Google AdWords. Again, the credibility of the results is somewhat suspect and they are using AdWords to back fill their ad inventory. Makes me wonder why I should even bother managing a separate account through them if I could just target them in AdWords. However, I decided to give them a second chance and instead used the navigation to look for PPC marketing agencies. If anyone is putting forth the effort, it should be PPC guys right?



Here you’ll see that I’m presented with the option of going to a partner site (PassionPPC), comparing price quotes for SEO Services (why is that even an option on this page) or there are more AdWords back fill ads.

Verdict

Without seeing more detailed case studies or more transparent metrics I would have a hard time selling this to any of my current clients as a worthwhile use of resources.