Display Ads

An Interesting Approach to the Advertorial Squeeze

2 Comments Written on September 13th, 2010 by
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

Add New Negative Keywords & Placements On the Fly

1 Comment » Written on August 27th, 2010 by
Categories: Contextual Advertising, Display Ads, Google Adwords, Keyword Research, PPC Tools

The integration of the Search Query Report directly into the Keywords tab of your Search campaigns makes it super-easy to see if your keywords or match types are picking up non-converting or irrelevant searches that should really be added as negatives at an adgroup level at least, or at a campaign level if they’re “way out there”.

It should be noted that the search queries (even in the new UI option) can take a couple of days to fully populate with results, so it’s best to look a decently-sized block of time to make sure the data is valid.

To access your search queries, go into an adgroup and select the Keywords tab and the “See Search Terms” button:

Next, if you see an irrelevant or poorly converting keyword you’d like to add as a negative on-the-fly, check the checkbox next to the keyword and hit the “Add as Negative Keyword” button:

This box then pops up allowing you to choose the match type of that negative keyword (it defaults to adding the keyword as an adgroup-level negative keyword) and you can vary your negative match type depending on how surgical you want to get in avoiding a particular keyword or phrase:

Compared to the old method of cutting and pasting from the Search Query Reports to your various adgroups, this is a MUCH easier and faster way to improve your campaign’s targeting.

Cutting Display Network Placements On-the-Fly

The same approach also works for adding negative site placements to your campaign with some small differences.

To exclude placements quickly (and with all the conversion data right at your fingertips), in your content network campaign, select an adgroup, then hit the “Networks” tab.

On the Networks tab, regardless of whether you’re using Automatic or Managed placements, you’ll see a full list of domains (or URLs) where your ads are showing and how they’re converting.

If you see a dud, hit the checkbox next to the junk placement and click the “Exclude Placements” button:


On the popup box, select whether you want to exclude the domain or URL placement for your entire campaign or only this adgroup.  Because you can often kill the golden goose in another adgroup by doing a campaign-level exclusion, it’s usually best to stick to the adgroup level and evaluate each of your adgroup’s exclusion placements on a group-by-group basis.

All in all, the consolidation in the new UI is speeding things up considerably, it just takes some getting used to:)

Posted in Contextual Advertising, Display Ads, Google Adwords, Keyword Research, PPC Tools

All Your Content Impressions Are Belong to Nexus One

4 Comments Written on January 12th, 2010 by
Categories: Contextual Advertising, Display Ads, Google Adwords, Landing Pages

Adwords content advertisers might be left wondering where all their impressions disappeared to today.  That impression vacuum?  It’s Google bogarting a large portion of their content network with Nexus One display ads.

This morning, Adsense publishers were reporting a dramatic drop in Adsense clicks and revenue.

Sadly, many of the sites brandishing Nexus ads weren’t exactly tech-related…

Have a cooking site?  Google thinks the Nexus One ads are a perfect fit for your visitors.  Soccer fan site?  Here’s some Nexus One for you too.

But if you’re a content advertiser looking to advertise pots and pans on cooking sites?  Sorry, no impressions left…

Obviously, search impressions are Google’s to do with what they please, but publisher inventory is a bit different.

Given Google’s big push towards making advertisers provide a more “magazine content-style landing experience”, it’s with keen interest that we examine Google’s Nexus One landing page:

nexusonelander

10/10 Quality Score?  As we can see here, the user experience is nicely augmented here by the volumes of valuable ‘magazine-style’ content.

To be fair, Google has a nice little click-to-learn-more interface on the phone and a 3D tour to boot.  Hopefully they were just kidding about the amount of content and navigation they’ve been asking advertisers to incorporate on their landing pages at the expense of conversions.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  Chrome ads are also around, but not in anywhere near the volume of the Nexus One units.

Some have also noted the mantra of the ‘clean Google search page’ has undergone some adjustment:

nexusoneghomepage

At least Adsense pubs can take solace in knowing that the ads are good enough for Google.com, so they should be good enough for them.

Hopefully this is just a one or two day push and when they’re done perhaps Google’s advertisers can have the content network back.

Posted in Contextual Advertising, Display Ads, Google Adwords, Landing Pages

Google’s Display Ad Strategy

1 Comment » Written on October 19th, 2009 by
Categories: Display Ads

AdAge highlighted Google’s Campaign Monitor, a display ad measurement tool which has been in beta for the last year:

With Campaign Insights, Google takes data from the advertiser’s server logs to determine who was shown an ad and when. Then compares that to web searches and site visits culled from data from the millions of Google toolbars on computer desktops. Those results are compared to a comparable group that didn’t see the ad.

Then Google measures the difference between the number of brand searches and site visits between the two groups. To filter out the impact of other media or influences, such as a TV campaign, Google compares the data to the two groups’ behavior before the campaign began. The incremental difference is attributable to the display-ad campaign.

So you have to give Google your server logs, and in return you get Google massaged data. Yet another form of market transparency through opacity.

Off the start I am sure it will be fairly accurate, but 3 years from now when…

  • the market is more mature
  • Google introduces quality scores and other such levers
  • Google is trying hard to hit the quarterly numbers

…I am not sure how much it would make sense to trust Google for these kinds of measurements. Of course opinion won’t matter if Google is the only game in town. It would benefit Microsoft and Yahoo! to push hard on this front because whoever gets the data partnerships locked up first will end up with a more efficient market and higher yields…eating market-share from other ad networks.

If they are honest with the data it might be a bit of an up hill fight. Even within the search channel the idea of attribution is iffy. Andrew Goodman wrote:

Problem: 74% of purchases can only be attributed to a single click anyway. By definition, that’s the last click. Attempt to “attribute” that purchase to prior clicks or other factors? Good luck.

…

So the next revelation: when you bucket keyword queries down into distinct types, only 7% of sales can attribute significant influence to some kind of click other than the last click.

And large advertisers, growing more aware of that lack of search buying funnel, are starting to spend more on longtail search keywords while avoiding bidding wars on top keywords, as reported in the WSJ:

Sprint is buying the top ads tied to phrases consumers tend to search for when they are close to making a purchase, such as “cellphone rate plans” and specific products like “Samsung Reclaim,” rather than more generic phrases they search for at the beginning of the shopping process, like “Sprint,” “AT&T” and “cellphone.” Pricing for the more-generic terms tends to be higher, yet less for important to driving sales, Mr. McPhillips says.

Of course if lots of big advertisers follow the same strategies they may leave holes in some markets. In a recent interview, researcher Jim Jansen claimed just the opposite…that the broad keywords were cheaper and provided more bang for the buck:

In terms of classifying queries in terms of what advertisers’ payoff is, I think the most interesting finding was that the purchase queries, the last stage of the buying funnel, were the most expensive and had no higher payoff than the awareness or the very broad, relatively cheaper queries. From talking to practitioners, that is a phenomena that they have noted also… which is why a lot of people bid still on very broad terms, to snatch these potential customers at an early stage.

My  SEO experience and PPC experience has been more inline with seeing great ROI on the longtail keywords. But with SEO for some really long-tail cases the page can be set up to pull in traffic that is so niched that it becomes harder to find relevant advertisements and offers to match up against the traffic stream. And of course the issue with longtail PPC is getting much volume.

Posted in Display Ads

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