Behavioral Advertising

Google & Privacy – Maybe We Should Be More Creeped Out

2 Comments Written on May 24th, 2011 by Geordie Carswell
Categories: Behavioral Advertising, Contextual Advertising, The World Around Me

I got an email on Friday from a non-tech savvy friend that had recently asked me for advice on where to set up a new email account for her home business. I recommended gmail, pretty much just as a reflex.

Here’s the email she sent me:

“…So here’s an interesting thing with Gmail: I’ve been e-mailing back and forth about a quote for my services and one of the questions the client asked me is ‘am I covered by worker-injury insurance’. I answered that I have do indeed have private accident and disability insurance, so no need to worry about my coverage while onsite.

Now–alongside my mailbox I’m getting ads about disability insurance, and legal claims for workplace injuries. Somebody is reading my Gmail besides who I’m sending it to. What’s up with that? Is this phishing? And how do they get into my mailbox?“

Now, at first my reaction was the typical techno-geek response: “Duh, Gmail has ads and that’s why the service is free, I’m LOLZ because you think someone is reading your email”.

But then I thought about this for a second. Someone is reading it.

Maybe I’m the one the joke is on, not the non-techie person.

The Joke is On Us

Consider for a second the world of ad targeting we live in where we’re so used to Google invading our personal data and online activities that it seems laughable that someone ‘non-technical’ would assume another party is reading their email and the like.

It’s kind of sad how Google-conditioning takes over and we forget, and even laugh at, the idea that our data is private and shouldn’t be read as fodder for ad targeting.

When you stand back and look stuff like this from a non-Google-user perspective, it’s pretty striking. I used to think that one day ‘we’ll all look back and laugh at the time when our private communications were private’, but low and behold, we’re already there.

Maybe we should stop laughing.

Posted in Behavioral Advertising, Contextual Advertising, The World Around Me

Prevent Previous Buyers From Seeing Your Google Remarketing Ads

6 Comments Written on May 16th, 2011 by Geordie Carswell
Categories: Behavioral Advertising, Contextual Advertising, Display Ads, Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter

Many remarketing campaigns use discount offer banners to try and recapture visitors who abandon the shopping cart. For example they might ‘remarketing cookie’ bailout users and show them ads offering coupon codes or bundle offers – anything to get them back into a purchase.

The only danger with this however is that you might end up ticking off users who have already bought through the regular sales process at full pop.

To prevent this with buyers who come in via Adwords traffic, you can exclude “Sale” or “Lead” conversion audiences to your remarketing combinations. Google uses their usual Adwords conversion tracking code that’s likely already on your ‘thank you’ as a ‘pre-configured’ remarketing list: People who have bought or signed up already. Handy.

Add Your Converted Visitors as a Remarketing List

Here’s how to create a remarketing list for people that have already converted (assumes you have regular conversion tracking already installed):

While in the Campaigns view in the Adwords UI, open the expandable left sidebar and at the bottom of the sidebar click “Control Panel & Library”, then select “Audiences”.

Now, create “New Audience” then “Remarketing List”.

We’ll want to name this list something that is familiar like “Adwords Buyers” , and we can reuse the existing conversion tracking tags (here called “Sale”) instead of creating a new tag:

Preconfigured Adwords Conversion Tracking Tags

This will allow us to give our remarketing campaigns special instructions about how to handle people who have already converted via Adwords.

Create a Negative Audience to Suppress Previous Adwords Buyers

Now we want to update our existing remarketing adgroup or campaign to exclude these folks. I already have my Adwords-sourced site visitors in a remarketing list running inside an existing remarketing campaign.

I’m going to add them as a campaign-wide “Negative Audience” to ensure I don’t show discount offer ads to them after they’ve already purchased:

Now we’ll select our “Converted” list to the negatives:

That’s it!

Note: This example bears out the importance of creating separate Display Network campaigns for remarketing. The more granular you get in separating campaigns, the more targeted you can get in deciding who sees what ad as you grow out your remarketing efforts.

What About People Who Buy Via Microsoft Adcenter Traffic?

Google’s conversion tracking shortcut for reusing existing tags on your thank you page doesn’t work for suppressing remarketing ads against buyers from other traffic sources.

For that you’ll need to tag buyers from non-Adwords traffic via a new remarketing list and place those tags on your thank you page as well.

To create the tags for this, follow the same instructions above to navigate to your Audience lists.

Again we’ll create a new remarketing list from the “New Audience” button.

This time we need to create a new tag rather than reusing an existing one:

Now we can get the tag code to put on our thank you page:

Now we need to add these buyers are a campaign-wide negative list to our existing remarketing campaign as well (just like we did with Adwords buyers):

Done! Now both Adwords buyers and those that buy via Adcenter or other traffic sources will be excluded from seeing our special offer remarketing ads.

Final Thoughts

Now it’s true that adding just the “Adcenter Buyers” remarketing tag to the thank you page and adding that list as a campaign-wide negative audience will prevent ANY buyers from seeing remarketing ads from this campaign, this example gives you as a reader a better idea of how Google’s conversion tracking can create list shortcuts as well as helping you not to forget about buyers from other traffic sources beyond just Adwords.

This also goes to show the importance of thoroughly thinking through your remarketing campaigns, trying to visualize who will see your ads and when. Preventing people who have already bought from seeing your discount ads can save you a lot of grief.

That said, even buyers can come back for more, so you might want to think about what you could specifically market to people who have bought from you already. Maybe you could create a custom remarketing campaign that just targets the buyers’ lists with ads encouraging them to sign up for a deals newsletter or your general mailing list. Don’t waste the opportunity to keep selling!

Posted in Behavioral Advertising, Contextual Advertising, Display Ads, Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter

A Brilliant Use of Adwords For Branding

1 Comment » Written on April 1st, 2011 by Geordie Carswell
Categories: Behavioral Advertising, Geo Targeting

A forum member on Brad Geddes’ Certified Knowledge site shared this gem the other day, and I thought our blog readers would love it. It’s worth taking a couple of minutes to watch it with sound enabled:

I thought this was a fantastic example of how brands can use Adwords to drive awareness and customer engagement. The “M&M trail” (a term coined by my friend Karl at Conversion Rate Experts) they left for users to go from search-to-search is a phenomenal way to drive user behaviour.

Of course, the use of multiple domains by anyone other than big brands would be seen by Google as a collection of “bridge pages” leading back to their main site, but if you’re a decent-sized brand you can get away with things that us plebs cannot:) Ah, to be a Brand…

Have you seen similar examples of how to use Adwords to drive desired consumer behaviour? Share them in the comments!

Posted in Behavioral Advertising, Geo Targeting

10 Killer Adwords Strategies for Startups

4 Comments Written on January 17th, 2011 by Geordie Carswell
Categories: Behavioral Advertising, Business, Contextual Advertising, Display Ads, Geo Targeting, Google Adwords, Local Search

Acquisitions aside, a big part of the reason Groupon is growing as fast as it is is because of their massive Adwords push, particularly on the Google display network.

Skillfully executed Adwords display and search campaigns can help your startup:

Maximize launch buzz and get people coming back to their new beta accounts
Help tweak and test new feature ideas
Tip you off when you need to pivot
Grab investors’ attention

Here are ten quick tips in three main areas detailing how startups can use PPC to boost their success rate pre-launch, during launch, and post-launch:

– Pre-Launch –

Capturing Investor Attention

Looking to catch some eyeballs on Sand Hill Road? Carpet-bomb your display ads across specific parts of the Silicon Valley (or anywhere you like really) using tight campaign geo-targeting.

Build custom banners specifically designed to speak directly to VCs as they browse their favourite blogs, many of which participate in the Adsense (or Doubleclick) content network.

Sites will often backfill inventory at pennies on the dollar via various ad exchanges like Doubleclick’s, giving you the chance to slip sideways into premium placements as other monthly direct-buy ad campaigns reach their caps. (See the below ideas on retargeting to make sure your ads ‘follow’ your potential investors.)

Testing New Feature Ideas

Wondering if adding a new feature to your product or service will really make a difference to sales? Try running Adwords traffic to a split test pitting your typical landing page against a variant that highlights the potential new feature. Next, measure the difference in Call-to-Action clicks: Did it move the needle? If not, the new feature might not have the draw you’re hoping for.

Naming Your Product

Tim Ferriss has been a huge proponent of testing everything from potential book titles to business and product names using Adwords. I completely concur.

Try creating multiple ads with different product names you’re considering and compare the various ad click-through-rates (and/or beta registration rates) to vet the catchiness of your company, product or feature names.

You can use the Adwords ad text display URL field to mix up the naming variables (eg, %idea%.companyname.com, or companyname.com/%idea%), or better yet, test using the ad headline to grab the results more quickly.

Crafting Your Pitch

Searching for the perfect brand or product tagline? Trying to accurately align your messaging with the most common customer pain points? Ad split testing and CTR evaluation can help you find the most attractive taglines.

Additionally, bidding on specific sets of keywords that reflect different ‘types’ of customer pain points and evaluating the click through interest and traffic for each keyword theme can help you quickly determine what pain points are worth hammering on in your marketing and messaging.

Be aware however that you might find that the types of customers you thought your service would appeal to don’t really have much interest in your pitch or your beta. It pays to listen to the market. If the interest doesn’t seem to be there, retest and see if you end up with the same results. If so, it may be time to consider a pivot.

Beta & Pre-launch Email List Building

Groupon used the Adwords display network in launch city after launch city to drum up a huge email list before they even had offers in those markets. How much would it rock to have a massive list of beta testers and potential launch customers ready waiting the minute you’re ready to drop?

– During Launch –

Combine Launch Buzz with Site Targeting to Generate Expanded Visibility

Adwords is also a great way to extend the your awareness and reach during your launch. Often, sites that would editorially cover your launch announcements also running some form of Google/Doubleclick-powered display ads on their sites.

Look up your PR-hitlist of sites ahead of time using the Google placement targeting tool and create placement-targeted display ad campaigns you can use to blanket these top sites with your ads right at launch time.

Additionally, create a keyword-targeted version (using your brand keywords) of your campaigns to reach sites you hadn’t thought would cover that ended up picking up your launch.

Stalking Hesitant Visitors

Use Adwords Retargeting feature (also called “remarketing”) to cookie users who check out your site at launch time but don’t sign up. Your display ads will follow them around the Adsense and Doubleclick banner network for weeks afterward, giving you a chance to change up your banners until you find something that finally convinces them to buy or sign up.

Pissing Off Your Competitors

Want to put your competitors on notice? Use Adwords to bid on their brand name and URL using a clever or striking ad that diverts their potential visitors’ attention your way.

As an added bonus, your competitors are likely to check out your site when you launch, so using retargeting you can cookie them and follow them around the internet as well, taunting them daily:)

– Post-Launch & Beyond –

Price Testing & Funnel Optimization

Use Adwords to send specific traffic streams to new checkout flows, different registration path tests and more. Adwords search traffic comes in through a pretty silo’d channel so you can try new things without rocking the boat with existing customers (especially helpful when price testing or including new bonus concepts etc…)

Regaining Post-Signup Mindshare

Often, getting free trial signups for your new service isn’t the hard part, it’s getting people to come back and actually use their new accounts, hopefully leading to a paid conversion. Cookie your new users via Adwords retargeting and create banners designed to lure them back to log into their accounts and actually use your service.

Final Note: Build Adwords Spend Into Your Funding Plan

All of this is wonderful if you’ve got the resources to be able to pay Google for traffic. A lot of startups recognize that SEO is an important part of their user acquisition strategy, but how many bake Pay Per Click into their plan right from the start?

How does it work in practice? “Adwords was always part of our marketing plan from the beginning. Bidding on tail terms worked extremely well for us in addition to using retargeting banners. I can’t understate the importance of factoring in PPC to your launch.” – Jason Morehouse, founder of Checkfront Inc., a fast-growing online booking system.

If you’re raising funding, make sure allocate some budget for Adwords to make sure you can leverage all of these handy tactics to improve your product, snag early users, and pitch additional potential investors. SEO can seemingly take forever to move the traffic needle when you’re desperate to get traction with your launch. Adwords gives you traction right away, on-tap when you need it. Plan and budget for it, and you’ll be able to use PPC to seriously disrupt your market.

Posted in Behavioral Advertising, Business, Contextual Advertising, Display Ads, Geo Targeting, Google Adwords, Local Search

Facebook Lead Generation for Local Businesses

3 Comments Written on January 10th, 2011 by Geordie Carswell
Categories: Behavioral Advertising, Contextual Advertising, Display Ads, Facebook Ads

Whether you’re a web marketing consultant for locally-based businesses, or do the marketing for your small company yourself, you need to give Facebook a serious look as a channel for quickly generating leads. When you combine Facebook’s ability to drill deeply into any locale or language with their advanced user interest and demographic targeting, you end up with a very potent platform for reaching local customers and generating leads.

To illustrate, consider the following example.

Generating Local Business Leads During Slow Periods

Renovation contractor Jordan S. of Calgary, Alberta, Canada wanted to drive more home renovation leads during typically slower, early spring months.

When times are busier, he generates leads based on referrals and job-site advertising signage. Facebook Ads however presented a unique opportunity to drive leads via his newly-optimized landing page and lead form.

First Things First: Landing Page Optimization

Before spending significant dollars on any kind of advertising, it’s always best to optimize your landing page and lead or sale conversion flow to ensure your site visitors aren’t led to sub-optimal pages that don’t convert.

Rather than landing visitors on his site’s homepage, Calgary contractor Sage Renovations requisitioned a customized landing page that fed their main goal: Getting leads to contact them for estimates.

His landing page features minimal links to other pages on their site to ensure users are properly funneled through the lead process:

Note for Consultants: You can launch the most fantastic Facebook Ad campaign conceivable and still fail miserably if your client’s landing page stinks. Even if they’re reticent, pound it into them that they need a well-designed lander or contact page to have any noticeable success advertising on Facebook, Adwords, or any other PPC platform. If they’re not willing to invest a couple hundred dollars into a single landing page to improve their chances of success, you’re going to be hard pressed to drive any value for your services. Use this requirement as a qualifier to ensure you’re spending your time on the right clients.

Next Up: Creating a Lead Campaign with Facebook Ads

The first step in setting up a Facebook Ads campaign is creating winning ads.

Here’s some key points when it comes to creating ads for Facebook:

You need to create multiple ads to ensure you find an ad that gets the best possible click-through-rat.
Your (110×80) image is the most important part of your ad. It’s even more important than your headline.
Dark images work best at grabbing attention against Facebook’s (mostly) white user interface.
Be sure to read the Facebook punctuation and image guidelines to ensure your ads are approved.
Try using the location name you’re targeting in your ad headline and body. i.e. (“City Name” + Keyword)

To create your ads, select the green “Create an Ad” on Facebook.com/ads:

Note: When creating your ad, be particularly careful to check your Destination URL to make sure it a) works and b) lands the user on the right page.

Next, you’ll want to set up your ad targeting options:

Be VERY careful here not to just go with the default targeting options.

The Facebook ad server will give you an idea of how many users you’re reaching with the targeting options you’ve selected.

Some notes on Facebook targeting:

The more granular the better. For instance, ad performance can vary greatly between age groups, male vs. female, geographic location, relationship status and more.
Try creating multiple ads with the same image, headline, and body text, but vary the ages, gender, location, etc… Yes, you’ll have a lot of ads to manage, but you’ll be able drill your targeting in more deeply, and cut low-CTR demographics where interest happens to be low.
Try using different keywords to further increase the relevance of your ad to users who have either used those keywords in their Facebook Newsfeed or profile description. This will reduce the user pool overall, but more closely honed targeting means more qualified leads and higher ad click-through-rates.

Next, you’ll need to configure your bids:

Facebook defaults to CPC or Cost-per-Click-based bidding, which is typically the type of bid you’ll want to start with. If you’ve got a particularly strong ad click-through-rate after running for a while on CPC bids, you can switch to CPM later, reducing your ad costs.
Trying to start with CPM (impressions-only bidding) will make it tough to get your ads into rotation early on. Most other advertisers will be using CPC bids, and once Facebook’s ad server normalizes everyone’s bids across the system, you’re likely to end up without traffic.
You’ll also want to be careful here to ensure your budget is set at a level you’re comfortable with. If your ad is successful early on, you could see a TON of traffic from Facebook before you realize whether or not that traffic is actually converting to leads or sales. Often, it’s best to start with a smaller daily budget until you can get a grip on how the traffic is performing for you quality-wise.

Review Your Ads For Accuracy & Go!

With a few ad variations created, the ads will await Facebook’s reviewer approval.

Note: Facebook can be quite slow in approving new ads, occasionally taking a day or two to review your ads. This is normal, unfortunately you’ll just need to wait it out.

Evaluate, Tweak, Repeat…

The one thing about Facebook Ads is that its not a passive ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ system on which to advertise. Users quickly experience ad fatigue and your ads will be lucky to run longer than a week or so before you’ll need to come up with more creatives to refresh your presence and keep your place in the ad rotation. You’ll know it’s time to come up with fresh, tweaked ads when your CTR starts to drop precipitously.

Continually loading new ads is a particularly important requirement if you’re targeting a small, tight group of people: people that will likely be exposed to your ad multiple times (depending on the amount of competition) over a very short period of time. Find what’s getting clicks, tweak it, keep it fresh and you’ll be able to consistently generate leads for almost any local business.

Posted in Behavioral Advertising, Contextual Advertising, Display Ads, Facebook Ads

The Effect of Brand Building on Search Traffic

4 Comments Written on December 7th, 2010 by Geordie Carswell
Categories: Behavioral Advertising, Business, Marketing

Every time a site gets nuked out of Google Adwords or ends up penalized in the organic SERPs killing the business entirely, there’s the inevitable side comments that “you shouldn’t base your entire business on Google”. That’s usually followed by advice to “build a brand” that so many users will search for that Google can’t ignore your site. The only problem with that bit of advice is no one ever says exactly how you’re supposed to do that, aside from just “building a really word-of-mouth-worthy” product.

That’s a nice thing to say, but it’s not the only way. I’ve always thought that products marketed through TV infomercials were a great example of building up brand awareness completely out of the blue, and then seeing your brand-building directly reflected in Google keyword search.

Of course, doing late-night infomercials is not the only way to build brand awareness, there’s plenty of guerilla techniques for grabbing attention. That said, when you look at examples of brand search traffic that popped up absolutely out of nowhere, the power of generating your own buzz and traffic is impressive.

Here are examples of some of the top infomercial products from the past few years and the effect that their brand and product TV ads had on their brand keyword search traffic. It’s noteworthy that all of these advertisers coupled their TV ad campaigns with corresponding PPC campaigns to ensure they captured the brand clicks generated by their TV ads:

Shake Weight

The Ab Circle Pro

P90x

Magic Jack

Slap Chop

Shamwow!

*Side Note: I think we’re going to hire Vince here to be our PPCblog spokesman:)

Snuggie

*Side note: “Slanket” came out roughly at the same time as the Snuggie with an identical product, but didn’t advertise anywhere near as aggressively as Snuggie, and ended up losing the corresponding brand search traffic boost as well:

The Bumpit

The Perfect Pushup

Cash for Gold

The Biggest Brand Search Winner? P90x

Which infomercial product generated the most brand traffic out of all of these entrants? P90x. By a huge margin. (Google trends only allows you to compare up to five brands at once, but these five represent the largest of the above total list of 10):

Concluding Thoughts

Google TV Ads have made even primetime ad slots available to advertisers with budgets as low as $500. Professional ad spots can be developed by production companies in Google’s database for under $1000 for basic product ads. This is in addition to Spotrunner and other remnant TV and radio marketplaces that allow you to buy old-media placement for pennies on the dollar. This kind of offline-to-online branding exercise (even if sales aren’t directly driven by the TV ads) has never been within reach to as many advertisers as it is now.

“Yeah, but a number of those product advertisers had celebrity endorsements to drive traffic to the brand”. That may be true (RIP Ed McMahon) but even celebrity endorsements can be licensed for under $2000 a month from innovative new companies like Brand Affinity Technologies aka. “Rent-a-Celebrity-Endorsement”.

In short, don’t overlook the offline-to-online correlation, tie your PPC campaigns into larger-scope ad or brand campaigns, and take advantage of some of the revolutionary shifts in traditional media buying that make all of this possible for a fraction of the cost of yesteryear!

Posted in Behavioral Advertising, Business, Marketing

An Interesting Approach to the Advertorial Squeeze

2 Comments Written on September 13th, 2010 by Geordie Carswell
Categories: Behavioral Advertising, Business, Contextual Advertising, Conversion, Copywriting, Display Ads, Landing Pages, Marketing

This was discussed a couple of months ago in our PPCBlog private members forum, (membership tour available here), but we thought our blog readers, especially those doing lead generation and/or information marketing, might find it interesting.

Disclaimer: Normally we wouldn’t identify the specific advertiser using a particular technique, however in this case the company no longer appears to be advertising actively and the site has not been updated since March of this year and its community appears to be abandoned at this point.

The Content Ad Blend

A while back on Yahoo Answers I came across this ad, heavily meshed with the surrounding text-heavy content and served up by Yahoo’s display ad platform (so no, I’m not sure if this lander would make it through Adwords:)

“Advertorial”-style square display ads that look highly similar to the fonts, colors, and imagery of the site you’re targeting can net slightly above-average CTRs in some cases. One easy way to do this is find a placement you want to target your ads to, and replicate the look and feel as much as Google’s display ad reviewers will allow. You may have a tough time replicating site buttons, but colors, fonts and general image look-and-feel usually gets approved.

First off: This ad has a fantastic headline, and the copy (though it has its flaws) is compelling enough to pique your curiosity:

I’m not an expert on the use of publicly-licensed celebrity images, but this one got through. Any legal eagles who might be able to clarify feel free to leave a comment:)

On ad click, you’re taken to a straight-up email squeeze page, notice the one-liner to “Put your credit card away…” (nice touch).

(Click Image to Enlarge)

*Note re. Adwords: Depending on the brand strength you have, you may or may not be able to get away with squeezing visitors this hard into an email submit as Google likes to call this “info harvesting”. That said, I’ve seen brands get away with it…

After you enter your email, here’s where you’re taken:

(Click Image to Enlarge)

On the thank you page here, it’s interesting to see how they’ve done the ‘membership login’ info…pre-populating the login data so it’s just sooooo easy to go to the next step….

Here’s the “Member’s area:

Great, But Does it Convert?

No one knows for sure how this pipeline ultimately converts, and given that the site now seems to be abandoned perhaps it was a dud, although that could be due to factors other than the conversion funnel.

They’re also not capturing the credit card in the ‘free trial’ stage, but it could be that the raw number of people coming into the funnel is large enough to offset the ‘forgetful trial subscriber’ optimization.

When we were discussing this approach in the forums, Aaron brought up a good point as to the credit-card-collection-on-trial approach:

I wonder if on the inside if they had some sort of “bonus” which cost $1 and got the credit card data maybe that would help convert a lot more people, while still allowing for the huge numbers of free people upfront to sign up free?

It’s an interesting question. Simply because you didn’t get the credit card on the initial lead form doesn’t mean however that you couldn’t get it shortly afterward while they’re farther into the signup process…

Love it or hate it, the trend towards blurring content text and display ads with editorial will continue, and it’s interesting to see how some advertisers have started to take advantage of the opportunity.

Posted in Behavioral Advertising, Business, Contextual Advertising, Conversion, Copywriting, Display Ads, Landing Pages, Marketing