AOL adds Local Search Feature
AOL has jumped on the local search bandwagon with it’s own introduction of a local search page.
A few tests show some very sketchy results as it seems very easy to spam AOL with a variety of techniques.
The worst feature is how AOL forces you to add a location. On 4 of my 5 browsers, I wasn’t able to access the location setting tab. On several of my computers, the firewall security features had to be disabled before I could add my location. This wasn’t a great user experience.
However, even if the features are lacking, it does show the power of local search that AOL had to launch something to try to compete with Yahoo and Google’s dominance in this area.
Related Links:
AOL Search Page
AOL Local Search Page
Computer Marketing
Computers are so prevalent today that it is hard to remember they were only invented a little over a half a century ago. It seems like every family has to have at least one computer now, and in the United States, many families own two or more. When you combine that with the over-100 million people who log onto the Internet every day in the US alone, you have quite a market for computers.
And due to the wide variety of applications and servicing that computers require, it is an incredible market indeed. Computer sales have consistently increased over the past 25 years, since the time when computers became more “user friendly”, and more useful for fulfilling tasks around the home. The computer has replaced not only the encyclopedia, but also in many cases the need for a concrete bank. With more and more people balancing their accounts, renting movies, and even ordering groceries or pizzas on their computer, the time is right for expanding your computer business.
But what is the best way to go about marketing your computer company? Well, you already know the three rules of business and real estate, “location, location, and location”. It is just as true that your computer marketing must also concentrate on location. “Where is the best place to put my advertising?” should be a question on every small business owner’s tongue.
Of course, traditional computer marketing strategy begins with the print ad in the yellow pages. The more prominent these ads are, the more likely the customers you want to will see it. Many computer companies also send out mail including information about sales and coupons.
Donating old model computers to local schools can also be a good way to market your company. All those parents on the PTA board will feel like they can trust your business when it comes time to upgrade their family computer.
Yet still, something is missing. Ironically, one of the most untapped fields when it comes to computer marketing is online, search-based advertising. In this case, location truly is king. By placing an online ad in a targeted location, you can make sure that the people in your community who are most likely to want to buy a computer or computer accessories from you see it.
In fact, computer-marketing experts agree that getting in on the ground floor with a focused online advertising system is one of the best ways to increase sales and expand your business.
The trends are clear to those who wish to see them. With an expanding market for both computers and online advertising, computer marketing on the web is a perfect match.
Google adds movie times to search
In an interesting move, Google adds movie times directly into search results. These results only show if the exact movie title is used.
On some quick tests, it appears that Google is using two different types of data to determine your local area. The first is IP targeting, which is one of the cornerstones to the Google AdWords advertising system. The second is cookie based data on locations you’ve search for (especially if you’ve used Google Local).
A search on Google Local for a particular location will set your user location so this feature is more consistent. However, if you want to switch where Google thinks you live, go back to Google Local and do a search for another location.
While this is not a move to a Google Portal that many think is coming, it is a move towards bringing more local based information into the standard search results.
Related Links:
Google Home Page
Google Local Search
Google Movie Information
Sony adds Pizza Ordering to Everquest
Sony has struck a deal with Pizza Hut to allow players to order pizza without ever leaving the widely popular Everquest world. While at first this seems like a hockey ploy on Sony’s part, however, this may be the first of some very interesting local integration.
Video game advertising has long been speculated as a way to reach the very elusive 18-25 market place. Advertisers and marketers have been trying every viral marketing technique possible to try and reach this market. This market doesn’t watch much TV, they spend most of their time online, and they are sophisticated enough to understand cookie deletion and blocking pop ups and ads.
So, instead of trying to market to them, Pizza Hut and Sony have given them a feature which allows for direct sales to this population.
It will be interesting to see how this grows, especially with Microsoft’s Xbox online applications.
Local Search receives Google Tab
Recently, Google has added a new tab to it’s home page, Local Search.
Google has always focused their home page design around the features it’s users are actually utilizing. This is a big boost for the local search arena, and shows how quickly the entire arena is evolving.
When asked, Google did not give out Local Search query numbers. They are in quite a fight with Yahoo over local search and seem to be pushing towards utilizing mapping technology to push local search over local based user generated data, which Yahoo and several other properties are now using to grow local user search bases.
This is a good move for local search, and I’m sure as this area continues to expand, Google will start throwing around some numbers of both query share and number of local businesses it’s managed to aggregate.
Contractor Marketing
Creating and building: these are the two things that draw people to contracting in the first place. But if no money flows into your company, and no new clients are calling on the phone, contracting can become a real drag. The most neglected aspect of working in the field of contracting is the marketing.
Rather than sitting around and waiting for the phone to ring with a new job, the proactive contractor will get out and make work where before there was none.
A good friend of mine found that work had gotten pretty slow for his business, so he hired himself. By keeping his crew working, and building a beautiful new house for his family, he effectively created a showcase for his services, and the product, as it progressed, became a focal point in the community. His business soon skyrocketed, with more projects than he knew what to do with.
After hiring more employees and getting down to work, things settled down, but the clients have kept flooding in ever since.
Building your own home is just one of many effective ideas for rustling up work during dry seasons. But the bottom line when it comes to contractor marketing is that you cannot sit around and wait for the phone to ring.
One neglected aspects of contractor marketing is online, search-based advertising. Basically, this is a way to attract the attention of the 100 million Americans who go online every day. By directly targeting those users who are looking to hire a contractor, a search-based contractor marketing system allows you to place you ad right where potential customers are most likely to see it.
Using the new geo-targeted technology represents the best value for your advertising buck. In fact, once you place your ads online, the software does the work for you, highlighting search terms that are likely to be entered by customers in your community, and then putting your ad directly in line with those search results.
The possibility of a huge search based customer market is not just a fantasy anymore. With modern technologies advancing the possibilities of online advertising every day, the only way to find out how sweet it can be is to start your online contractor marketing system today.
Google Launches Beta Map Site
It’s been speculated for a while that Google would soon launch a map site, well, it’s now live.
Google has choosen an AJAX based system for it’s mapping technology, which has a few effects. AJAX preloads a lot of content in the background so that once the page loads, it can be easily and quickly manipulated by a user. However, this means a lot more information must load, and there have been considerable problems with those still on dial-up attempting to utilize the map information.
This seems like a broadband solution, and may isolate many dial-up users.
In either case, it is a nice technology and a strong showing for Google in the race to have the best local search experience for it’s user.
Related Links:
Google Maps
Google
Superpages gives away Free Listings
Superpages (owned by Verizon) is one of the largest Internet Yellow Pages today. It has launched a new feature which allows local businesses to create free profiles to distribute business information.
It has long been claimed by various IYPs that it’s users are further along in the buying cycle, and that their traffic, while considerably less than most search engines, has a much higher conversion rate for a local business.
This is yet another move among many providers of local data to bring enriched local content onto their properties to serve both their users, and to start aggregating local business information. The most difficult part of serving the local search arena is the accuracy of local business information. By going to a self serve environment, Superpages.com is hoping to capture more of that market.
Related Links:
Superpages Home Page
Superpages Free Business Profile Signup Page
More News about MSN PPC
In January, during SES in which Justin and I both regularly speak, we met with the MSN PPC team. Due to certain NDAs, I’m not allowed to discuss all the advice that we gave to MSN about the PPC product and strategies for successful implementation; however, I’m allowed to give my impressions of the meeting.
First off, it can be confirmed that MSN is going to launch a product. It can also be confirmed they will offer various targeting options. I can’t go into if and how they will handle demographic, age, geographic, etc targeting - but the options will eventually be rolled into the product.
I was highly impressed with the team we met with, which included several different individuals from project managers to sales staff to programmers.
Their knowledge of PPC in general was very impressive.
They understood they were playing catch up, and joked lightheartedly about it.
They were dedicated to making a quality product that was unique in the marketplace.
They realized that they had to embrace SEMs to distribute the product.
Due to the SEM relationships, they were not overly concerned about how complex the product would be, and instead would rather give SEMs a lot of options, and then let them decide how to take advantage of the product.
I really did like the attitude. It had been a few years since I had a serious discussion with anyone from MSN, and the team’s understanding about their market share, what they needed to produce, and how to empower SEMs to help them was quite impressive.
Until there’s a finished product to actually play with, it’s difficult to tell how well the execution of the product will be. However, judging by the team’s plans, I for one will be looking forward to playing with their PPC offering.
A/B Split Testing with AdWords
There has been a lot of talk over the months about split testing ads & landing pages. Google allows this to happen pretty easily as they allow multiple ads to show in one group.
This is the setup for a very simple test to start people thinking about how to split test and measure such test results. There are, of course, much more complicated techniques to use. Most webmasters/marketers don’t have incredibly sophisticated tools, so this example is based on a low tech variation that can be run with just an excel spreadsheet.
If you think about an ad, you have 4 lines to work with. (Some consider it 3, depends on how you feel about the AdWords Display URL. Each line is both it’s own entity, and related to the whole ad - all at the same time. Each line must carry it’s own weight, and reinforce the message you’re trying to send via your ad.
Note: This test is for using 3 lines. 1 title, description line 1 & 2. If you like writing sentences (often useful if you’re in the premium position), then you’ll be testing the ad copy slightly differently depending if the sentence can be broken into halves and split tested using the below.
This is assuming we’re only testing ads, and not landing pages. It’s also assuming there is not a tag/branding line we want each ad to have (although, if you’re still trying to figure out how to brand your site and looking at tag lines for every ad - this is a technique that can help you find a line that ’speaks’ to people in your market). I’m going to ignore the display URL right now, as you should get the idea from the rest.
Turn off ‘ad optimization’ in the campaign settings, we want all the ads to receive equal exposure.
I would suggest ignoring dynamic insertion on the first trial run. This can be added later after you determine what type of copy works best for you. But for dynamic insertion to work properly, you also need to know what the ‘backup’ text needs to be as it will be shown sometimes.
Determine how many ads you can successfully test based on your volume (if you’re getting 10k impressions a day, you can test many more ads over the course of a 2 week trial than if you only get 100 impressions). At some point, you’re going to want to limit the total number of ads you’re running purely from an unwieldy amount of data standpoint.
Create 2-4 titles (T below), description line 1s (D1 below), description line 2s (D2 below), and then mix and match them. Remember, these go up exponentially, testing 3 lines is 27 ads (i.e. #t x #d1 x #d2).
Your ads will look something like this:
ad# T D1 D2
1. 1 1 1
2. 1 1 2
3. 1 2 1
4. 1 2 2
5. 2 1 1
6. 2 1 2
7. 2 2 1
8. 2 2 2
Using just 2 variations of each line, we’ve already created 8 ads, you can tell this number goes up quite quickly, a test of 4 different copies can quickly become a huge amount of work.
After you’ve hit your time frame for testing, put all your data into an excel spreadsheet. (I prefer a time frame of at least one week so I can receive visitors on every day of the week to test out the results. Often, I go for 2-3 weeks. If there is a holiday or special event in your week, then you should go another week as holidays lead to a different type of traffic. Some prefer to test by total number of impressions - it’s all preference).
If you’re using the Google conversion tracker, select ‘custom report’. Deselect ‘keywords’ as you don’t want to see every keyword. Select the AdGroup you want to test (you can also select several if you want to test how different lines work across your entire account - useful for testing ‘tag lines’) Select CTR, conversions, conversion rate, transactions, transaction rate, ad title, ad description line 1, ad description line 2.
Run reports by CTR, conversion %, total conversions, total transactions, transaction rate and by total profits (one ad could have a lower CTR but higher conversion %, thus produce a better bottom line (Forget ROI, Just give me profits). To get the number for total profits, you’ll probably have to use information from your intranet/shopping cart or use the advanced conversion tracking options and use your purchase variable in the tracking code.
Transaction rate is a useful number to use. It shows how many people were either repeat customers, or came back after visiting your page and then converted (conversions are for people who visited and purchased without leaving your site, transactions are the total number of times your page with the Google tracker & a cookie on their machine saw the "thank you" page). If you see ads with much higher transactions than conversions, you might want to find ways of converting them more quickly before they leave your site.
You’re going to download this report from Google using the CSV for excel link.
First, run these reports by all ads. This will give you a benchmark to look at for the average conversion % / bottom line of the aggregate numbers.
Then you’ll run them by title, description line 1, description line 2. In the above, you’ll have 12 reports (title 1, title 2, description line 1A, description line 1B, d2A, d2B, ads 1-6). Analyze these numbers carefully. Don’t just see which lines received the best ROI, profits, and CTR - look to see if one description seemed to work better with another description line or title line, etc.
In excel, a starting point to run such reports is to use the autosort feature. From the dropdown box choose to only show the line you want to measure. The autosum feature will then let you see exactly what that line received. For easy of use, copy that line into a different sheet along with what title/description line you were measuring(remember to paste variables only, not formulas). This will store all this data in one place for ease of analysis.
At this point in time, you should know exactly what lines gave you the best conversions, best CTR, highest bottom profit line, which are the second best, etc.
Optional step: Take the best performing ads (highest CTR, highest ROI, highest profits, highest conversion % - odds are, you won’t have 4 different ads, one ad will be the best for more than one), and if applicable, apply dynamic insertion to the title (for some ads, you’ll also be able to test dynamic insertion on lines 2 and lines 3).
Repeat the above as often as you desire. Of course, you’re going to always take the best performing ad or 3 and keep using them in the split test for benchmarking purposes.
If you want to split test landing pages, this is a good time to start.
First, remember:
1. Ads and landing pages have a relationship to each other.
2. Different ad & page combinations can lead to different conversion %s.
3. It’s possible your best ad and best page actually have a lower conversion %, but your second best ad and best page (or vice versa) produce better results.
4. Don’t assume you know what is best or what should work, let the numbers tell you the story.
If you want to test pages at the same time as ads, then once you make your ads, duplicate them exactly except for the landing page. (i.e. In the above example, you’ll have 8 ads to one landing page, and 8 identical ads leading to a different landing page) for a total of 16 ads testing two landing pages. Again, these are exponential numbers. If you’re dealing with low volume, choosing your top 3 ads and testing them with 2 landing pages might be better as you only need enough information for 6 total combinations (3 ads to landing page 1, 3 ads to landing page 2) and not 16.
When you begin to analyze the results, you are going to add another step in the reporting, landing pages. You’ll look at the overall conversion % of a landing page as a benchmark, and then compare how each ad also interacted with that landing page.
The results of such split testing can be very eye opening. At some point in time in your split testing, try making extremely similar ads with just a one word difference (a plural and a singular; two different ‘offer’ keywords; two different adjectives; etc.) At this point in time, you’re refining your ad copy and offers as much as split testing to learn more about your audience.
Split testing ads and landing pages creates additional work. This is very worthwhile time spent to get the most from your advertising dollars. Having access to toolsets can definitely speed up the process, although, it’s very possible todo all the required analysis with free Google tools and just a spreadsheet.
Hope this begins sparking the thinking process behind moving from striving from just high CTR ads to finding the best converting/profit margin ads.
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