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Goodnight and Have a Pleasant Tomorrow
I’m writing this post to formally announce my imminent and inevitable death. Or at least that’s what it feels like since I am officially leaving QualityScores today. For the better part of two years I’ve been writing ads, designing and redesigning landing pages, and throwing Arby’s sandwiches across the office at James and the occasional intern. It’s been a lot of fun, but I am sad to say that there will be no more sandwhich throwing anymore. Well… for the last year I’ve been telecommuting from Honolulu… so the sandwich thing is a metaphor anyway.
I am entering a master’s program at the Columbia University School of Journalism this August, and I’m taking the rest of the summer off to surf and move to Manhattan. I’ll still be hanging around QualityScores-ville every so often, but things at the company have been changing, and James himself is taking QualityScores in a little bit of a different direction, as he will shortly be explaining. Additionally, I’m pursuing some of my own work with my web design company more heavily, including the promotion of my new social gadgets and products sharing website www.Scordit.com, and my new site where you create your own quizzes and earn prizes at www.Quizzem.com. Of course, I’m also helping James Zolman with Click Walrus, which is a revenue and click attribution web analytics tool that is WAY AWESOME.
So good things are happening all around, and I’m excited for what’s to come for me at Columbia and with Scordit et. al., and also for a new era at QualityScores. I’m sure I’ll make an appearance at the occasional web conference here and there (or more likely at the occasional punk rock show in NYC), so maybe I’ll see you there. Until then, goodnight and have a pleasant tomorrow!
[Note from James: I personally recommend Shane for his design skills, his website creation skills, his superior and engaging writing style and most of all his ability to educate and teach. If you ever attend a conference where Shane is presenting, you should attend his session and I kid you not, you will be blown away - he is literally the best presenter I have ever encountered...I have attended at least 50+ "big name"conference sessions. Shane's presentation and speaking skills blow all of that out of the water. Shane has been independent for quite a while - building up the projects he mentions above, building out his design portfolio a little more and wrapping up ambassador projects for QualityScores. Shane is going to pursue his dreams - and I am honored to have played a tiny role in helping him along his way. We're going to miss him a lot!]
Wicked Hot Mobile Ad Platforms You Should Try
Have you been thinking about mobile advertising? If you haven’t, you probably should. Mobile advertising can be an extremely profitable part of an integrated Internet marketing or pay per click advertising campaign. Mobile has been called the world’s fastest growing ad medium, and today we’re going to run through 8 of the Hottest Mobile Ad Platforms in order to help you start off on the right (mobile) foot.
Google AdWords for Mobile
If you’re ready to trudge out onto the PPC battleground, AdWords is a logical place to start. With mobile ads integrated into its regular search and content campaign management, AdWords can be a great place for mobile advertisers to begin as well. To enable ads on mobile devices, just indicate so in your campaign settings:
Our advice: Separate your mobile campaigns from your regular search campaigns, just like you should be separating your content network and search campaigns.
Lots of people use Google on their phones, so get a piece of the advertising action by trying AdWords for mobile search!
Yahoo! Mobile Advertising
Yahoo! also has mobile advertising, although it requires a separate application to enroll. (Sorry all you who already use Yahoo! Search Marketing). The application is short and easy. This is another really great place to start your mobile ad campaigns, as Yahoo is a very large mobile search property.
Yahoo! Mobile Advertising also has a very cool demo, which you should check out:
Admob
One of Fast Company’s top 10 most innovative companies in advertising and marketing, Admob has been serving mobile ads since 2005. These guys specialize in iPhone and Android ads, and they’re really, really good. And, Admob has a pretty impressive mobile analytics beta out now:
Definitely check them out if you’re considering going mobile with your marketing.
MSN Mobile Advertising
Although their tagline indicates that its searchers are “affluent customers,” MSN Mobile is a very large mobile destination. Their ad platform serves banner ads next to their “premium content”, and also now serves ads on Windows Live Mobile search. At over 62 million page views a month from MSN Mobile users, this can be a pretty good place on which to throw your own ads.
Third Screen Media
Third Screen Media by Platform A is AOL’s mobile ad network. Not only do they have some mesmerizing javascript at the bottom of their website, but they also do ads for some large provides Verizon and Virgin Mobile, and partner with some big publishers like Mapquest, Traffic.com, and CBS Sportsline, not to mention AOL.com. Premium pubilshers aside, they have a pretty good sized publisher network, which is grouped handily by content channels for easy ad buying.
Nokia Interactive Advertising
Nokia calls mobile advertising a “medium advertisers can no longer afford to ignore.” Boasting 40% of the handset market, Nokia can really deliver your advertisements to a lot of people. While their program is geared toward huge sponsorships and banner campaigns (noteworthy clients include MTV and Hyundai) rather than PPC for search like some of the other platforms we’ve discussed, if you have a lot of mobile advertising to do, you should definitely contact Nokia Interactive Advertising. These guys acquired enpocket.com, a huge mobile ad player, somewhat recently.
Quattro
Quattro claims to be “North America’s Best Performing Mobile Ad Network,” which is, as they say, pretty awesome. From media planning to analytics to even SMS advertising, Quattro offers really extensive services for advertisers, and they are a powerful company to work with.
Millenial Media
Millenial Media is another huge player in the mobile advertising business. They boast some big publishers like Myspace Mobile, RottenTomatoes, and Fox. They have some huge reach, and are known for their MBrand and Decktrade networks.
Again, mobile advertising is growing at an almost alarming rate. Advertisers are seeing huge returns on their investment, partly because the medium is not as saturated as others. So jump in!
What other mobile ad networks are wicked hot?
Keyword Research for Mobile Search
I’ve only recently started exploring the power of mobile and search…specifically paid search – and noticed a cool tool in Google AdWords that I wanted to share!
While setting up a mobile campaign last night I thought “Wouldn’t it be great to see the mobile search volume for these keywords? I bet Google has a tool…let me go to AdWords Help and see.”
Kablam! Here was the 1st result. Google’s search technology is pretty dang good. 
And because I don’t think Google does this tool justice, I’m going to give you step by step instructions with screenshots! Woot!
1. Log into Google Adwords…set up an ad group with mobile ads – you can leave it paused if you’re not ready to start advertising on cell phones. The tool will still work.
2. Click on your keywords tab in the ad group.
3. Click on ‘Keyword Tool’. The ‘Keyword Tool’ link is above the ‘pause’ or ‘resume’ button and below the date range.
4. Start searching! Note that “Results are tailored to mobile searches”.
I found a TON of niches where I can bid around $1 per click OR MUCH LESS and sit at the number 1 mobile ad position…when I know for a fact that the regular avg cpc we see in regular search ranges from $2 to $65!
Anybody know what mobile conversions are like? Have you had success with mobile?
Going to SMX West!! Woot! :)
Hello World! 
We’re going to SMX West next week – and we’re speaking at a few awesome sessions!
Register to attend if you haven’t already, it’s going to be a blast!
The sessions we are speaking at:
Advanced Landing Page Strategies
Analyzing & Converting Paid Search Traffic
Let us know if you’ll be there! We’d love to meet one and all!
More Description Lines Showing Up In Organic Results?
Update: Barry Schwartz over at SER notes that there was a sphinn 5 days ago on the very same subject. Barry also noted his updates on the subject in 2006 and in September of 2008. I definitely try to stay on topic with ppc here at QualityScores, sometimes my curiosity gets the best of me though. Thanks to all who pinged and commented with very helpful links and related blog posts. I would still like to know if we can start making uber long descriptions in our meta tags or will it be considered spam?
——————————————-
I just started noticing this tonight…how long has this been going on? What determines when a result will have 1 or 4 description lines? Thoughts? Please see this screen shot…it’s a big file/image – please click to see the big picture:
Aaaand We’re Back! :)
We apologize for the delay in blogging we have had over the past couple months.
Thank you loyal followers for sticking around – you will not be disappointed this year! Watch for some cool stuff coming up this month and throughout 2009.
Happy New Year to all of our readers and visitors!!
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to all!!
You can expect to see more out of QualityScores in the near future – we have been swamped with work and we have a whole bunch to share.
We’ll see you next year!
The Invasion of the Text Ad Clones
How To Differentiate Your Ad In A Competitive Space
As more advertisers are jumping on the paid search bandwagon every day, the ppc marketplace is becoming increasingly emulous. In competitive markets, more and more searches bring up pages full of nearly identical sponsored ads. Here’s an example of a Google search for house painting:
Does anyone else look at this and see the exact same ad over and over again? The only ad that remotely stands out is #4, because the local “Honolulu, HI” makes it take up a little more space.
Does your ad look like this? Well don’t resign yourself to mediocrity. If you think your website is great, but your ad stands out about as well as a single zombie amongst a pack of undead, then you need to keep reading!
(Photo from the movie, Shawn of the Dead, retrieved from Wired.com)
Because of a proliferation of PPC blogs, pay per click tip guides, and “get rich off of Adwords” websites, pretty much everybody has started using the same tricks: capitalization on every word, a call to action that ends in words like “now” and “today” with an exclamation point on the second description line, dynamic keyword insertion, and as many keywords crammed into the ad as possible.
Take another look at the ads for house painters above. Seven out of the eight ads have the word “Free” in them (another common trick), and two of the ads have the exact same call to action, “Get Free Painting Estimates Today!” It might seem counterintuitive, but by employing some of the most “proven” ad copy writing techniques, chances are – these days – that you are going to look exactly the same as everyone else, severely blunting the effectiveness of your ad.
So how can you differentiate your ad in such a competitive space? It seems that by simply writing something unique, an advertiser could seriously increase click-throughs based solely on curiosity or catching the user’s eye. But before you start trying out some wild CTR-increasing gimmick, you should consider your goals. In some cases, simply generating as much traffic as possible is the only goal; however, typically the goal of a paid search ad is to eventually get the click to convert into a sale, lead, or signup. Unique ad copy alone won’t help you in these departments.
Keeping in mind that our priority is probably going to be conversions, and therefore you can’t afford to pay for clicks that have no possibility of making you money, I would like to talk about 3 things that can transform your text ad clone into most attractive ad on the page.
1. Borrow ideas from unrelated, but highly competitive industries
Some industries are more cut-throat than others. Chances are, there are many industries that are more wildly and violently competitive than the one you are advertising in. Think of an industry where competition is fierce and take a look at some of the ads. Take note of the copywriting techniques they use, and use these as a springboard for your own ad copy ideas.
We recently had a client whose ad performance was simply not doing as well as we (and the client) thought it could be doing. A search showed that our client’s ads in certain campaigns were nothing but clones of a dozen other advertisers who had entered the PPC arena in the past several months. We had a brainstorming session to figure out how we could get this client’s ads to stand out. We knew once we got the traffic to the site, we could make the conversion, but we just weren’t seeing any kind of growth in click volume no matter what we did.
So we took a look at some ads in one of the web’s most competitive industries: online dating. Even though our client was in the construction leads industry, we thought online dating ads might give us some insight into techniques we could use in our situation. While these two verticals are highly unrelated, we figured that advertisers in online dating that hadn’t already been driven out of business are likely seeing good results from their ads. And in order to stick out the competition, they would also be forced to write very enticing ad copy in order to snatch clicks from their competitors.
Here are a couple ads that caught our attention right away:
First of all, the ® symbol in the Match.com ad immediately gives it credibility and allows it to stick out. They still use the keywords “online dating,” but they clearly draw attention to themselves. Another attractive thing about this ad is the claim to fame, the “World’s Leading Dating Site.” One of the editorial rules for Google and other major search engines is that all claims in ads have to be backed up on the landing page visitors are taken to. If your business doesn’t have some kind of credibility factor like this, take the time to court some endorsements or enter some competitions. Match.com could be the world’s leading dating site in terms of members, active members, page views, profit, or any number of things. This means that other dating sites could be the “world’s leading dating site” by another criteria. Which also means that your site could be the leader of something in some quadrant of the world. Pursuing something like this can definitely be worth it.
Although we gained some insights from the Match.com ad, we found another one that gave us some material we wanted to immediately work with:
This ad was especially appealing to us for the construction leads market. All of the ads for a search for “Home Remodeling” would show up with the title “Home Remodeling” and occasionally things like “Home Remodeling Quotes.”
So we tested a new ad, based on ideas we got from this one, against our old “zombie-clone” ad. We changed the headline “Home Remodel Bids” to “Top 3 Remodel Contractors,” and guess what? On that change, our CTR shot up and our conversions consequently increased. Nobody else had a similar ad, and apparently people searching for home remodeling services liked the idea of getting bids from the top contractors (according to us) rather than just getting bids.
You don’t have to confine yourself to pay per click ads, either. Turn on your TV or log onto YouTube.com and watch some ads in another industry. Take note of the calls to action that the ads use. How do they grab people’s attention? What kind of language do they use? Of course, a commercial has a lot more words at its disposal than a paid search ad, but some of the best video ads can condense their pitch into one or two very short sentences.
While you’re at it, go to Barnes & Noble and bust out some magazines. What ads grab your attention? Of course, images can play a big part in attracting you to stop turning pages to look at an ad, but effective copy is essential to print advertising in almost every industry.
2. Write something clever rather than keyword-stuffed
What can cause two ads for the exact same product or service to be light years apart in terms of grabbing attention and invoking action? To stand out in this way, the ad needs to approach the customer from a different direction. A unique angle can give you more than just an edge on your competition. To avoid speaking in too many general terms, here are a few examples, using our same construction leads company:
Instead of:
Start Your Remodel Now
Get Quality Home Remodeling Bids
From Local Pre-Screened Contractors
We tried:
Start Your Remodel Now
Top Contractors So There’s No Delay
Shop Free Bids & Save Today!
What do you think the click through response to this ad was? Well, have you ever heard of the phrase, “through the roof?” Rhyme and cadence are a couple of things that can get your ad to stick in someone’s head. And people like the smooth feel of a rhyme. It may not work in every case, but it’s definitely worth testing.
Here’s another trick we’ve tried: alliteration.
Ready To Remodel?
Compare Custom Contractor Quotes
Click Quickly To Cut Your Costs!
How much friendlier and more clever is this than the generic ads everyone else has, like this one?
Remodeling Quotes
Find Remodeling Contractors
Get Remodel Price Quotes Today
Just a few things to think about. The point is, stop focusing on cramming keywords, and focus on making your ads appealing. Chances are, it’ll pay off.
3. Try something risky
By risky, I don’t mean stupid; I mean do something aggressive. And by aggressive, I don’t mean a call to action like “Order Right Now!” I mean write something that persuades people to click on your ad without looking desperate or the same as everyone else.
This is tricky to do. By studying competitive advertisers in other industries, as discussed in Tip #1, you might be able to find inspiration for ideas if your brainstorming hasn’t gotten you anywhere so far.
Take this example:
Cut The Crap
Expert Remodeling Contractors Are
Ready To Bid. Get A Free Quote Now!
Now there’s an ad that could get your attention. Of course, there are still editorial guidelines to be followed, and taste to be considered, but as the competitive game gets tougher, in order to outshine the rest of the text ad clones, good advertisers are going to have to test risky, aggressive ads.
And that’s the beauty of pay per click advertising. You can test everything, and nothing is permanent if you want to reverse it. If you no longer want to be one of the text ad clones, then start testing some new ads! If they don’t work, then test some other ones!
Google Sorts Gobs Of Data Really Fast, People Freak Out
The people at Google never seemed to be the bragging types. However, they must have been too excited not to boast, when they recently declared that they had sorted 1 Terabyte of data in 68 seconds.
A Terabyte (TB) is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 8,000,000,000,000 binary data bits. If these numbers are too mind-boggling to really wrap your head around, think of it this way: if each bit was a sheet of paper, with a Terabyte of data, you could stack C++ manuals all the way to the moon and back! (It would take approximately 4,384,967,400,000 sheets of standard bond paper to reach the moon from Earth)
That’s enough to make nerds and non-nerds shout “Holy crap!” in unison.
Google stated the purpose of such experiments:
Standardized experiments help us understand and compare the benefits of various technologies and also add a competitive spirit. You can think of it as an Olympic event for computations. By pushing the boundaries of these types of programs, we learn about the limitations of current technologies as well as the lessons useful in designing next generation computing platforms. This, in turn, should help everyone have faster access to higher-quality information.
So while 1TB in 68 seconds is impressive, it’s for a good purpose, too: Making people’s lives a little better by providing faster searches. Oh, and giving geeks something to impress their friends about.
Chinese Search Engine Scandal Sparks Questions
Baidu, the most widely used search engine in China, recently promised to fire staff and overhaul its operations after a scandal regarding medical listings occurred last month, according to The Guardian. Apparently, companies without medical licenses were advertising on the search engine, tricking customers into paying high rates for non-legitimate medical care. Baidu faced some severe repercussions because of this scandal.
Search Engine Land questioned why Baidu is taking so much heat for this. Google probably doesn’t validate the medical licenses of doctors who advertise on its search network. Should they be responsible if some advertisers forge their credentials?
A couple thoughts that we thought we’d throw into the mix:
1. If a television station were to air an ad for a fraudulent medical practice, could the station be sued in addition to the advertiser? Most likely, yes. Looking at court precedence, it is very likely that this could occur. But should this be so? Is the channel liable for the 3rd party messages it broadcasts? I think there will be mixed opinions on this, but I imagine that courts will rule “yes” 3 out of 4 times. Why wouldn’t this concept cross over into another medium?
2. In light of these kinds of events, will search engines start doing more due diligence on advertisers within certain verticals? Right now, almost anyone can advertise, posing as anyone. Do you think the big search engines will start to crack down on this? And how would they?
A very useful method of gauging interest when researching a business or website idea is through running test ads on pay per click networks, such as Google Adwords. Because of the ease of entry for advertisers on these types of ad platforms, it is easy to set up a test campaign for a product or industry you are looking into, and then simply sending the visitors to an existing website – a competitor even. Yes, you are paying for clicks for someone else, but you are able to gather data that you can use to help decide whether you should enter a particular marketplace.
This is a fast, relatively cheap way to research. However, if standards for validating your business, identity, and credentials tighten in the future, it may be less possible to perform such tests in the future. Then again, irresponsible advertisers can cause a lot of trouble doing these test campaigns and can even damage a competitor’s brand. Maybe it would be good to have some more regulation? What do you all think?
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