Advice My Clients Probably Won't Read » advertising

Microsoft AdCenter Tips

admin — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 00:14:53 +0000

Omigosh! Just called Microsoft because a credit for a client hasn’t been showing up after their merger or whatever with Yahoo! and ended up spending 48 minutes (my timer was on) with this guy. If we cut out the 18 minutes of pure BS in between the useful information, it was a worthwhile call.

The gist of it: Get really specific with your ads and your keywords. Really, really specific. I could go on, but suffice it to say that it is impossible to be too specific.

Okay, I’ll go on. If you sell gifts for brides to give their bridesmaids, don’t just advertise for “bridesmaid gifts”. Use keywords like “bridesmaid sister gift” and “childhood friend bridesmaid” and so on. And be sure your ads include a call to action and, if it can appeal on an emotional level, so much the better. For example, “Make Mom Cry at Your Wedding” would be a good emotional “call to action”. Of course, Microsoft and Google rarely give you as many characters as you’d like to use in your ad, so you need to be creative here.

But, all in all, I wouldn’t say it was a waste of time. However, I do have to mention that he wanted to show me something, but that feature wasn’t available. He had to get off the phone while we were talking because he couldn’t find the feature, just as I couldn’t and, come to find out, they were updating the page. Just imagine how much of a client’s time I could have wasted trying to find out how to add new keywords to a campaign when the fricking button wasn’t anywhere at that time???

And that’s why I charge $85/hour. Because I don’t work in a business where procedures and methods haven’t changed in 20 years. I work in a business where procedures and methods change every 20 minutes!

Online Advertising – How to Measure Success

admin — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:50:34 +0000

According to Doubleclick, the average click-through rate for an online ad campaign is .10% . Yes, that’s one-tenth of one percent.

Wow, I was surprised. I’ve managed campaigns, my own or others, over the years and while .10% may be average, I certainly don’t consider it good – unless that tiny percentage translates to hundreds of visitors.

I expect a campaign to be really worthwhile if it’s getting at least 1.5% click-through and, even then, I’m going to tweak to try to get it higher. I consider it really successful if I can get it to 5% or higher.

Of course, all of this is very dependent on the phrase/keyword/brand being advertised. I’ve always felt it’s better to be a big fish in a little pond and if you read this blog regularly, you know that Yahoo! recently issued a whitepaper that said the same thing.

Be specific with your ad phrases and demographics.

To Advertise (online) or Not

admin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:56:29 +0000

I’m a big supporter of paid links but usually only for those phrases that you can’t seem to rank well for in the natural results, primarily because they are such generic terms. And even if you’re ranking #1 for some phrase, if it’s an extremely popular phrase/product, it might be worthwhile to spend a little money on a sponsored link.

What’s a “little” money? Anywhere from 50 cents per click to $2.50/click, depending on the business you’re in and your business finances. For example, if you’re a personal injury lawyer, you’ll pay a whole lot more than $2.50/click to be in the top 3 sponsored links for “personal injury lawyer”.

The nice thing about Adwords and other sponsored link programs is that you can try them out to see if they make a difference by creating a campaign that runs for as little as a week.

The bad thing about sponsored links is that you can never be absolutely sure if they are working. Someone might find your site via the ad, but what if they don’t order something until a week later and they order when they’re on someone else’s computer or they’ve cleared cookies on their pc and the site doesn’t realize you originally came their via a paid link.

But that’s where your common sense should kick in. If you run an ad for a week and you get an appreciable number of click-throughs, then look at sales for that week plus the following 2 or 3 weeks to see if the increased sales exceeded the cost of the ad. If they did, try it again. A pattern should become clear over time.

Of course, if you don’t see any additional sales, that might mean a number of things, including:

Your ad misled the customer in some way, intentionally or not;
Your ad took them to your home page and they couldn’t find the product/service you were advertising (always take them straight to the page where they can buy the product);
Your product isn’t exactly what they wanted, i.e. maybe you don’t have the color or size or whatever they need;
Your website doesn’t impress them enough for them to spend money with you.

More on this subject at a future date. Time to make a living!