- Still having trouble with the Google Adwords Quality score? Check out this cool video by Matthew Bredel from ‘Inside the Marketing Mind’ that goes in depth about what the quality score is, and how you can improve it within your account.
- Writing ads with strong calls-to-action is one of those techniques every PPC advertiser should be using! In case you are new to what a call-to-action is, or are unsure of the best way to incorporate them into your PPC ads, check out this excellent post on calls-to-action at the adCenter blog.
- The Search Engine Roundtable reported last week that Yahoo! advertisers were experiencing a “phenomenon” related to long tail keywords. The gist is that competitors were finding low traffic, long tail keywords and driving large numbers of impressions to skew CTR and lower that campaign’s overall quality. This sounds convoluted and unlikely. But I suppose if someone has been the target of serious click-fraud, it could be possible.
- When it comes to making my PPC management life a little easier, I’ll take every bone thrown my direction! Yahoo recently announced a series of improvements to their search marketing interface. Sure, they are still leagues behind AdWords, but these small tweaks will make me like Yahoo just a little bit more.
- Scott Brinker has written an article about implementing social networking on niche landing pages. The idea being that “targeted audiences of Long Tail landing pages could unleash tremendous value and synergy if they could connect with each other, à la social networking.” I see where Scott is coming from with these 7 points, and yes, connecting your audience with themselves can constitute trust with your site, and eventually lead to qualified leads, but I’m worried that your audience will connect with each other and not with you (i.e. never converting). However, for the right company, this could be a great strategy.
- The evolution of video on the internet continues every day, and users are getting used to having information provided in video format. This post from PPC-Advice gives you some options on including video on your landing page. I will be testing video spots on one of my client’s landing pages soon so I’m excited to see how it turns out!
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May 22nd, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Looking forward to your testing with videos for PPC Amber. Keep us updated.
May 23rd, 2008 at 5:53 am
Amber — thanks again for the link. Greatly appreciate the PPC Hero link love!
I agree with you that social networking may not be appropriate for every company or every landing page. Other things being equal, I think we share the same core philosophy: the point of landing pages is almost always to keep people focused on a very specific goal, and you want to be very careful about distracting from that mission.
That being said, I think there are creative ways in which social networking might actually be able to help achieve that objective.
One way would be to move the social networking component to be AFTER the conversion. And to actually promote that as one of the bonus reasons a respondent should convert. The offer becomes something like, “Sign-up to download our free white paper on [topic] and network with other professionals implementing this in their company.”
In this scenario the social networking interactivity exists on the fulfillment page. It’s no longer a distraction, because you’ve already achieved the goal. But from a branding/bonding perspective, it’s a great opportunity to reinforce your firm being at the center of [topic] in the mind of the respondent, get them further engaged, etc.
I think there could be a lot of interesting variations on this theme. Frankly, I’m as curious as anyone to see all the imaginative ways marketers might start to merge direct response marketing and social media marketing.
What do you think?
May 26th, 2008 at 8:14 am
You make me blush, Amber! Great site, too. Pay-Per-Click advertising is one of the most important parts of building an online business and understanding both how it works as well as the current trends and strategies are extremely important in making it work (and preventing yourself from losing your shirt!).
As for the social marketing aspect, I think the term “social marketing” is becoming more focused on things like blogs and forums and social networks, etc. By this definition, you are right in that it is not for all niches or companies. Still, the concept of Social marketing has always been there and in its true definition, it should never be ignored by anyone. Building a good reputation with your company and your brand should never be ignored (even if you are trying to be discrete with yourself). Social marketing is not required, but I cannot think of a niche market where it could not help.
Cheers…matt