Posts Tagged ‘Advertising’

Google, Yahoo and Bing have made setting up pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns fairly easy and painless. Within hours you can have your ads up and running, and delivering traffic to your website for a small fee per click. Unfortunately, the ease in which a campaign can be set up often convinces business owners that they can throw up some PPC ads and the money will start pouring in. I’ve talked to many businesses that think PPC doesn’t work because they tried it once and never made any money.

It’s not that PPC doesn’t work, it’s that the campaigns were not set up and managed properly. All too often a PPC campaign is created by the business owner but left to run with little or no management, supervision or oversight. Even a properly (or professionally) set up campaign needs constant oversight.

Proper set-up and management of your PPC campaigns is vitally important to ensure you have a profitable and high ROI PPC campaign. Without effective bid management and ongoing testing of ads and landing pages the campaign will soon be nothing more than an expensive traffic delivery method. As time passes, bid clicks will rise, positioning of ads will fall, landing pages won’t be as targeted and your cost per conversion will increase. Your PPC campaign may continue to deliver both traffic and sales, but the cost of those sales may be outside of your zone of profitability.

Click here to keep learning

If you have a PPC account, as you read this you are paying for wasted clicks.  Visitors that aren’t really interested in what you offer are coming to your website and you’re paying for them.  Isn’t that frustrating to know?  The bad news is that the nature of PPC won’t enable you to ever totally eliminate this from happening.

Why?  One reason is because you can’t control searcher behavior.  You could write the perfect ad for your most targeted keyword on exact match so that it cannot be mistaken what it is you’re offering.  But, searchers that are not at all candidates for purchasing will still click through for many reasons.  Maybe they thought you were in their price range, but aren’t.  Or maybe their query failed to return the kind of results they were looking for but your ad piqued their curiosity so they clicked through in exploration mode just to make sure.

Click here to keep learning

Every year Reno puts on a rodeo event. I know this, not because I live here, but because every year approximately one person asks me, “are you going to the rodeo?”

Now granted I’m not a rodeo fan, but how is it that I don’t ever know about this event, save for the lone person asking me if I’m going? Is anybody even advertising this thing?

Ok, so I may not be the average consumer. I don’t watch commercials (thank you, TiVO!); I listen to commercial-free satellite radio or my ipod exclusively (thank you, XM and apple); I get all my news from the internet (thank you, Al Gore), rarely hitting local news sites; and I don’t get out much (thank you, blu-ray.) So it got me thinking….

Click here to keep learning

Friday I posted a snapshot of a billboard advertising an auto mall here in Reno (Fallon, actually). I wanted to solicit some comments to see if anybody else saw the same problem with this billboard as I did.

Pretty much every comment noted that the guy with the cigarette was a problem, but only Chris of Westward Strategy explained why.

…they associated the sleazy car dealer with Fallon Auto Mall and not Kietzke or “Big City Motors” as their TV ads say. If I wasn’t a local and hadn’t seen their TV spots I would think that all the guys at Fallon Auto Mall look like him.

Click here to keep learning

SEMpdx Searchfest

Ok, this one has come and gone but I wanted to provide a short debrief. I have to say that I had a fantastic time. Searchfest marked my one-year anniversary speaking at conferences. They opened the door for me at Searchfest 2007 and were kind enough to invite me back this year. Boy, am I glad they did.

I have to say that I was really surprised by the marketing power they were able secure for each session was amazing. I felt severely out gunned on both panels I was on. I was amazed at the quality of the information provided and the overall environment established by the SEMpdx team.

Click here to keep learning

SEO

• Part Two: Why Use Yahoo! Answers
• Part Three: How To Use Yahoo! Answers
• What is your robots.txt file telling your competitors about you?
• How to SEO Your Site in Less Than 120 Minutes
• 6 Reasons Why Your Awesome Site Isn’t Indexed

Copywriting Click here to keep learning

SEO

• 5 Reasons Why Rankings Are A Poor Measure Of Success
• Hey Rand, Do You Mean Siloing?
• Sometimes All you Need are a Few SEO Tweaks!
• SEO Tools: Firefox Addons for Search Engine Optimization

Copywriting Click here to keep learning

I often over hear Stoney on the telephone, describing to a prospective client, exactly what Pay-Per-Click entails. These explanations vary from one call to the next of course, depending on how familiar the person already is. Sometimes the explanation will be quick as “yes, we manage PPC accounts.” Other times the explanation goes much deeper into what are often overlooked as very basic description as to where the paid sponsored ads display in the search engine results.

Last week the Pole Position Marketing Team went to Las Vegas for Webmaster World PubCon 2007. While sitting in the Major PPC Engines: Vendor Panel presentation, there was a slide that showed screen shots of ‘ad placement’ and it suddenly occurred to me how brilliant of an idea that was. Pictures of ad placement.

Click here to keep learning

Coming from a background in training, I always appreciate a useful training tool. I found Chapter 4 “Paying to Play: Pay-Per-Click” by SitePoint Search Engine Marketing Kit, to be an excellent training/learning tool.

The chapter is laid out logically, giving a brief introduction of the entire Pay-Per-Click system and process. After the intro, you’ll find that it provides a brief look at the major players in Pay-Per-Click, being of course Google, Yahoo and MSN. The chapter defines ranking, bids and organization. Before moving on to the next subject, they even introduce (name only) some of the minor Pay-Per-Click players.

The Pay-Per-Click process is the next topic, and it covers a breakdown of terminology, including triggering, click through, landing, interaction, measurement and analysis and refinement.

Click here to keep learning

Audio feed[audio:http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/emp/blog-audio/dissatisfy-visitors.mp3]

Since creating a website that is “user friendly” is often difficult and time consuming, I thought it would be fun to explore a few ways to create a dissatisfying user experience on your website. Unlike the dozens upon dozens of things that go into creating a website that provides a positive visitor experience, one that creates an atmosphere of trust and is likely to improve conversion rates, creating a dissatisfying experience can be done fairly easily in just a few steps.

In fact, while I’m sure there are just as many things that can derail a visitor on a website, there is no need to implement more than a few. We have found that any one of the four things listed below will do the trick!

Click here to keep learning