It was a great insight into a retail paradox; floor space is finite and precious – but customers buy more when they see products boldly displayed.

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Andrew Solmssen
Managing Director, Los Angeles
Possible Worldwide

What makes a good PPC Ad?

PPC Ads are like haiku—a very limited advertising form in which you have, for the most part, three lines to work with: a headline of 25 characters, and two lines of body copy at 35 characters each.

I LOVE THIS STUFF. I thrill to the tiny puzzle. But what makes one ad good and another one not so good, or even bad?

The real answer is “Who knows?” This is direct response at its most scientific, most quantifiable. We run this one and that one, 12 at a time, often more, just to see what generates response.

So today, I tried an experiment. I recently bought an online warranty on a printer from a company. I wanted to know if their paid ad would come up when I searched “printer warranty.”

The company I was expecting to find is the largest non-branded warranty service on the net (as opposed to HP warranties, and other companies that appear at least to be selling extended warranties on their own gear). Therefore, I was surprised that they didn’t appear when I searched. Rather, I got, among a host of other ads about printers, including three ads to discuss, only one of which was relevant:

Let’s talk creative strategy for a moment.

“Printer Warranty — Zero-Deductible Warranty” is a pretty good ad. It puts a benefit right up front (Zero Deductible). It had the word “warranty” twice in the headline, making it ever so relevant in search.

The URL it pointed to was www.protectyourbubble.com/printer, which told me that the company “Protect Your Bubble” probably has warranties for a lot of other things, because there was a “/printer” at the end of the URL. The ad drives to a free online quote. (By the way, I got the quote and discovered I would have saved $20 over the other warranty I bought… drat!). And it boasted a 4½ stars rating with 829 reviews, which of course is social media’s democratic rating, not some pundit’s. Good effective ad.

Next is the “Best local printer repair.” Which I immediately forwarded to one of our employees who has a broken printer on her desk. The key draw of the ad? Local. The key qualifier? “Repairing most office equipment. Printers, copiers, faxes, scanners.” 4 ½ stars, but only 3 reviews, so their review is less relevant. But the simplicity of the message grabbed me for exactly what I needed (even though that’s not what I was searching for).

My third ad was totally irrelevant to my search, but I didn’t like anyway! Why?

The headline, “CUSTOM WARRANTY PROGRAMS” is as dry and as dull as stale bread (a piece of which I just ate, incidentally).

The company name “monthlywarranty.com” is odd. Maybe it means “warranties as a subscription service”? Not certain.

“Solutions for Retailers & Etailers” tells me that it’s a white-boxed product I can offer my customers. But it’s passive. Doesn’t tell me to do anything.

And “Results that Double Warranty Sales!” is fair; at least it’s a benefit. But I’m not in the ad!

I would rewrite this ad to read:

Double Your Warranty Sales
www.monthlywarranty.com/sellmore

Retailers and Etailers. We’ll multiply
your warranty sales! Watch video.

I put the “/sellmore” at the end of URL because it allows me to plant a message in the address that helps clarify what I’m talking about.

I doubled down on the benefit message: “DOUBLE” in the headline became “multiply” (even bigger) in the body. I used the word “your” to make it clear what we do for you. And I added a compelling call-to-action: “Watch video.” Of course, that requires a video. But we at Manifeste have discovered that we achieve a 60% lift on ads that drive to video. If you don’t have a video destination, that’s okay. But make a strong and compelling call-to-action, and you’ll get strong and compelling response.

Guest blog by Michael Gould, CEO of Manifeste Marketing

CPC Search welcomes SearchForce to their team.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) agency, CPC Search welcomes SearchForce to their team, read what they had to say:

As a search marketing agency, one of the questions we frequently get asked is, “Do you use a 3rd party platform for bid automation?” Our answer has become second-nature: “No, we prefer to roll up our sleeves and do things the old fashioned way — manually.”

That manual approach has served Terry and the agency very well for years, but we knew that one day a platform would come along that meets all of our needs without any of the frill… you know, a search marketer’s search platform… Continue reading the rest of the post

Thanks to CPC Search for the warm welcome!

We’re happy to be working with your team and we look forward to building a strong relationship with your team.

Integrating old media and new media

Tracking phone calls through SearchForce

Some companies do everything in their power to get customers to interact with them online. After all, processing an incoming telephone call gets expensive. Even a brief inquiry by phone might cost $5, $10 or even more when a similar interaction via an online form or email would cost far less.

Yet there are situations where companies welcome phone calls – especially when the revenue from a sale can be substantial and a real-time conversation with a prospect adds way more value than the cost of the call.

But can you match an incoming phone call with the keyword that generated it? Can it be tracked as a conversion in SearchForce? Yes it can with call tracking services.

Calls, not clicks: Automatically tracking and optimizing call performance

Consider a law firm that’s generating leads for a specific type of legal service. It may be most efficient for a potential client to call an attorney at the firm who can discuss a prospect’s needs in real time.

Instead of simply putting a static phone number on their landing page, the law firm could partner with a call tracking service such as Mongoose. These services essentially mask the “real” phone number and insert a specially tracked phone number that reroutes the call.

In this way, the phone number can be used to track the specific keyword that generated the call. And the law firm can use this information to optimize keyword bidding strategies and create detailed reports on which online strategies work best.

So now, when a “conversion event” is a phone call, not a click or a signup, it can be tracked and recorded with the same precision and attributed to the source that generated the call.

All about conversion tracking II

How tracking scripts work

In part one of this series on conversion tracking, we reviewed the difference between “conversions,” “conversion events,” and “conversion tracking.” In this post, we’ll look at how conversion tracking works, specifically when using tracking scripts.

When you start to set up a conversion tracking model on your web site, you might feel overwhelmed by all the choices that are available. Different systems offer various choices, but there are basically two approaches to tracking conversions – log files and tracking scripts.

We’ll focus on tracking scripts because that’s how most third-party technologies record events.

What Is a Tracking Script?

A tracking script is simply a piece of code you put on your site to record all conversion events. While there are multiple methods and configuration parameters that can be used, most tracking scripts use browser cookies to track website activities.

Here’s how it works:

The diagram above shows a five-step scenario for how tracking conversions and user activity might work on our own searchforce.com site.

Here’s a possible sequence of events:

1.) Visitor searches for a keyword and clicks on www.searchforce.com
2.) Tracking script code installs a cookie on the user’s web browser with a unique visitor ID
3.) The click is recorded by the tracking system
4.) User fills out a form to download a whitepaper
5.) Second tracking code captures the success of an event (whitepaper download), which is also recorded by the tracking system
6.) If the same user returns to the website and performs another conversion event(signup for newsletter) and if the tracking cookie is still in the browser, then the event will be recorded and it can be linked to the initial click.

So the tracking script is simply a mechanism for placing cookies on a user’s web browser, configured to record specific conversion events as they occur.

However, the method for delivering tracking scripts and the configuration options available can vary widely from one solution to the next.

In the next post in this series, we’ll discuss the options that two publishers offer (Google and Microsoft) – and the options available on the SearchForce platform.

Part 1: Knowing the language

You may have read articles about “conversion tracking,” but it’s probably one of the most misunderstood aspects of online marketing, one that brings to mind many questions. How does it work? What technologies should you use? Why do different systems count conversions differently?

This series of posts will help you understand conversion tracking, how it works, and what options you have on our platform for measuring conversions.

Sure, this may be a refresher for many of you, but there are plenty of marketing professionals who’ve been thrust into a role of managing campaigns without truly understanding how conversion tracking works. And knowing about these issues is essential to running an effective e PPC campaign.

So let’s run down a list of terms that SEM professionals use when discussing these concepts:

Conversion events:

When you track conversions, you’re recording various events that take place when users visit your site. Those actions are called “conversion events.” Examples could be page views, sign ups, or actual sales. Some of these conversion events are worth tracking, while others are not. The decision to track a specific type of event depends on the nature of your business and your campaign optimization goals.

Conversion tracking:

If a user takes a specific action that you’ve defined as a conversion event, the platform you use should record that event. Some events may be more likely to lead to a sale, so you can assign a specific value to that event. For example, a page view might be assigned one value, while a signup might receive a higher value.

Conversion rate:

Tracking conversions can help you measure the effectiveness of various inbound sources of traffic. Comparing your total traffic against conversion events gives you your conversion rate. For example, for many paid search campaigns, a conversion rate might be calculated like this:

Conversion Event/Total clicks = Conversion rate

This represents the percentage of total clicks that generated conversion events. But whether a specific event is an actual “conversion event” depends upon how you set up your tracking system.

Where it gets confusing: Not all conversions are alike

A “conversion” may represent different actions depending upon how you measure what users do on your site. And that can get confusing because some advertising executives may only consider an actual sale to be a conversion, while others may consider intervening actions, such as filling out a form, downloading a white paper, etc. to be conversion events as well.

So there might be multiple conversion events that lead to one conversion, perhaps three different events – or even more, as shown here:

Conv. Event 1 + Conv. Event 2 + Conv. Event 3 = Conversions

And that means each person’s analysis of the conversion rate can be different. Let’s look at an example of how multiple conversion events might be tracked

• You receive 100 clicks on an airline paid search ad
• 98 visit your pricing page – so you have 98 “page views”
• 25 forms are filled in to get airline prices, which you might define as “leads”
• 3 users actually book airline tickets so you have 3 “sales”

So what’s the conversion rate? That depends on how you measure it. You could view it in a number of ways

• 98% (98 page views / 100 clicks)
• 25% (25 leads / 100 clicks)
• 3% (3 sales / 100 clicks)
• 126% (98 page views + 25 leads + 3 sales / 100 clicks)

You can see how this can get confusing. If you refer to a sum of all different types of conversions, you might not be speaking the same language as someone who is mostly concerned with the total number of actual sales.

Most search management technologies consider conversions to be the sum of all the different types of conversion events that you define. So to build a customized plan to optimize your campaign, you’ll need to make sure you know precisely what these terms mean.

So to review:

• Conversion: An action you want someone to take on your website
• Conversion tracking: The practice of tracking and assigning value to the conversion event
• Conversion events: Specific types of events you track and assign values to

In the next post in this series, we’ll discuss some of the common ways people use technology to implement conversion tracking solutions to track specific types of events.

For generations, retailers have relied on store circulars to give consumers special offers and to promote products in a way that moves inventory most efficiently.

These circulars aren’t going away anytime soon. According to a recent Nielsen report, “The Evolution

of Circulars: From Print to Digital,” retailers continue to invest more than half of their marketing budgets in circulars because consumers still use them to make purchase decisions – even before they enter the store.

Circulars reign as an effective marketing tool embedded in the consumer consciousness and shopping ritual. Nielsen research shows that the majority of shoppers, across generations, income segments and ethnic groups, still want access to paper circulars for the foreseeable future.

Nielsen predicts that this pattern is changing as more consumers gain access to mobile smartphone where offers can be delivered electronically. But the migration to electronic media is expected to be more gradual as retailers and consumers alike get more comfortable with digital media.

Interestingly, the influence of print media is still very high, even among the “millennial” generation as this chart shows.

But the added lift that retailers gain from circulars has been in gradual decline and there’s ample evidence that digital channels will continue to mature and consumers demand more offers that address their unique needs.

And you don’t need extensive reach to gain high leverage promotional opportunities. For example, while only 20 percent of store shoppers visit a grocery/drug retailer’s website, those that do spend 30 percent more when they shop at the store.

Where digital does it better

Nielsen identified six attributes for developing an edge in digital communication:

• Customized experience with a personalized interface and content that reflects specific consumer interests
• Consumer sharing, an essential social media aspect that includes sharing “likes” with friends, recipes, reviews, etc.
• High levels of engagement through location-aware features for researching and purchasing products
• Lower costs through effectively using search on Google and Yahoo!
• Specific offers tailored to specific purchase histories, demographic profiles, interests, and more
• Environmental sensitivity by eliminating waste and taking advantage of consumers’ desires to “go green.”

Using multiple digital pathways – including search, keywords, local, mobile, video, and more – will become more essential to enhancing the customer experience. And it’s likely to accelerate as technology and device adoption rates continue to climb.

In the season of sharing, we wanted to pass along an excellent post that our good friend David Rodnitzky wrote on the emerging social influence inside AdWords. We suggest you check it out and wish you all a Happy Holiday!

How Google AdWords is Becoming More Social
Written by David Rodnitzky, PPC Associates
Web source: www.jeffbullas.com

I Came to Search Insider Summit a Search Marketer. I Leave a Digital Marketer

Change is inevitable. In the online marketing world, that inevitability manifests itself almost monthly. When I arrived at the stunning, one-percent catering, St. Regis Deer Valley for the Search Insider Summit, I came to talk search. You know, things like negative keywords, dynamic keyword insertion, and broad match modified. Turns out, however, that those traditional SEM topics didn’t play much at SIS. Instead, we talked about DSPs, voice search, mobile-enabled landing pages, and the integration of social signals into display ads. To put it another way, we really didn’t talk about search. We talked about digital marketing.

This is the state of “search” today – specifically, it’s not about search. Search engine marketing agencies are dead and have been replaced by SEMs who happen to apply quantitative analysis to a multitude of online marketing channels. At a minimum, the modern search agency needs to be proficient at:

• SEM – including Google, Yahoo/MSN, and select second-tier engines;
• Performance display advertising – including GDN, retargeting, DSPs, and exchanges;
• Social – including Facebook PPC and mostly likely Twitter advertising;
• Mobile advertising
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Add to that several optional proficiencies like video, local, analytics, and SEO, and search engine marketers have a brain-hurting job these days. For the most part, I see this as a huge opportunity for agencies…continue reading the full article

See you on the YouTubes

In my last post, I briefly touched on the way advertisers are using both search and other media to create cross-channel initiatives that take advantage of the unique benefits of multiple advertising formats.

Here’s an example of how that works. Take a look at this TV spot that Toyota recently produced to promote its new Scion xB and xD vehicles.

View the video here -> Zeus Returns for ATTIK\’s New Cross Media Campaign for Scion xB and xD Release Series SHOOTonline

Notice how at the end “Zeus” lets you know that he’ll “be over on the YouTubes.”

That’s an excellent demonstration of techniques for tying online and offline media initiatives. You can easily envision myriad ways the Scion team will be tracking user behavior across all media channels, such as social, display, and search.

But tracking itself only puts your campaign into first gear. To really break the speed limit, you need identify how all these interactions influence customers through what we call the “customer experience funnel.”

This diagram shows how this works throughout various stages of the purchase decision. There are various stages – building awareness, engaging with prospects actively considering your brand, and finally, encouraging them to take action.

Optimizing ad spend through all of these channels requires isolating and attributing weights to each specific interaction by using the right technologies such as cookies and pixels.

At SearchForce, our technology features the “Pathtracker Pixel .” This ties clicks and interactions throughout the customer experience funnel. With more accurate data, you can make more informed decisions and allocate your ad spend to the highest performing channels.

So keep this customer experience funnel in mind as you explore new advertising opportunities. I plan to follow the Scion campaign to keep tabs on what Zeus is doing on the “YouTubes,” and I’ll keep you posted.