I conducted an ad hoc and wholly unscientific poll among a handful of my friends the other day about the possibility of advertising coming to books. It produced some strong (and predictable) negative reactions.
Hell freezing, dead bodies and metaphors about fat and slim peppered the comments I received. A minority felt ambivalent about the idea and said it was inevitable.
Google have launched a new tool that aims to help advertisers test and precisely measure the impact of changes to their AdWords campaign.
As someone who works full time at the agency founded by David Ogilvy, there are plenty of reminders of his wisdom on the walls. Even online, at least once a day I see a tweet come through with someone quoting one of his famous sayings. So I don’t disagree with him lightly, but he did have one quote about dishonesty in advertising that I wish were true - but isn’t:
Google recently updated its AdWords program to allow advertisers to analyse their competitors a little more closely.
In order to maximize conversions it is important to present your potential customers with the information or answer they are searching for. A person heads to a search engine to ask a question, our job as SEMs is to answer their question in a small ad and direct them to our or our customer’s website which will ultimately lead to a conversion.
Location-based advertising is not a new concept. Companies such as AdMob have being doing it for while now, but it seem that Google had the idea first.
News has surfaced that Google filed a US patent nearly 7 years ago for “determining and/or using location information in an ad system.”
Maybe you can have too much of a good thing. As the Internet allows advertisers to slice and dice large segments of desirable markets into thinner, more defined slices it also creates something that is much less desirable: smaller profits.
How is that you say? How is it possible to make less on my advertising spend when I am advertising directly to the group that most needs or wants my products? Well, it’s simple supply and demand. While you are targeting a much more defined market you are not going to be alone in that quest to advertiser to just the people that will buy. Remember those pesky competitors? They want those people too because their claim is that they are better than you. Now you are going to find a price war that drives up costs for advertising and makes customer acquisition costs rise which in turn hurt the bottom line. So maybe there is too much of a good thing after all.
Did you know that you can create a “Search Query Performance Report” from your Pay Per Click campaign? What is so special about this report? Let’s say that you’ve been running your ads for 15 days in a very competitive market and you’re not getting any conversions.
With this search report you can see what visitors are searching that triggers your ad. Knowing this can help you make some changes in your ad or the landing page that visitors are viewing. The position of the ad are shown with the click through rate percentage. The high percentage reading indicates the ad is a hit.
To view your search report for your Google Adwords, go to reporting and scroll down to reports. This will take you to the report center, you want to create similar for the report. Give the report a name like “restaurant consultants” and be sure to click on search query performance.
Ad.ly is an ad network for Twitter. You set your price and approve the targeted ads before they’re inserted (marked as ads) into your Twitter stream. And now, Ad.ly is adding analytics to its platform.
Can you tell the difference between these two ads?
Look closely:
Well the one on the bottom just made the founders of Teracent, very, very rich!
