Archive for the ‘Advertising’ Category

Scientific Advertising and Split Testing

“The key to success (maximum sales per dollar) lies in perpetual testing of all the variables”

The above quote by David Ogilvy, Chairman and Founder of Ogilvy & Mather (super successful advertising agency) lies at the heart of what is known as “scientific advertising”.

Invented by ad men of the early-mid 20th Century, and coined as a phrase by ad man extraordinaire, John Caples in his book of the same name, “Scientific Advertising” stakes its worth on refusing to make assumptions about what ads work and instead basing advertising decisions on the results of measurable testing done on previous advertising campaigns.

Back in the last century, when these pioneers were working, the Internet was not a factor, so they were mostly concerned with magazine, newspaper, billboard, radio and television advertising.

What they would do is at its heart quite simple:

Firstly, they forsook “artistic concerns” in favour of “results”. They wanted advertising that clearly and demonstrably resulted in increased sales, or more initial enquiries, or more responses to a free offer, or a healthy and profitable product launch. Fluffy concepts such as “branding” and “style” were not interesting or useful to these hard nosed ad men, They cared about “sales” and “return on investment”. This is what not only kept them in business but indeed made the best of them quite wealthy indeed.

What did they mean by “Scientific” Advertising?

Quite simply they used the word scientific to imply that their methods were rigorous, measurable and methodical. They applied a testing model to each advertising campaign in a similar way that a scientist would test any hypothesis to measure its validity. They were after empirical results and the unit they measured in was the almighty dollar.

What Does ‘Split Testing’ Mean?

Split testing, as stated by Ogilvy above, is the core methodology at the heart of scientific advertising … but what is it exactly?

It simply means that instead of running one ad, or one version of an ad, in one place (magazine, radio station etc) you split up your campaigns in various ways, in such a way that the results of the different campaigns can be gathered, measured and analyzed.

A very simple example of this is to run the same ad complete with a cut out coupon in three different magazines, and in the corner of each coupon including a serial number that identifies which of the three magazines the coupon was cut out of. Therefore, all things being even, if 65 coupons from Magazine A were returned, as compared to 370 from magazine B and only 28 from magazine C, then it is pretty clear which magazine is most worth running that advertisement in again.

Other variations on these basic themes exist, not least of which are headline variations. The reason headline variations are given a lot of prominence is because it is proven to be quite simply the single most important factor of any (written) advertisement.

To find out what relevance this has to your Adwords campaigns see

Scientific Advertising 2.0: Why Split Testing Is Back and Badder Than Ever in the Online Marketplace

Or call us now to discuss:

1300 975 224

Or email info@SquareEyes.com.au

Put simply, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is using search engines like Google, Yahoo,  and others to get the word out about your business to potential customers.

There are usually two main methods for doing this:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Pay Per Click (PPC)

1. SEO – is making sure that your website gets found by Google, basically.

More accurately, SEO means making sure your website is set up in such a way that it gets found by the search engines and appears high up on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

An important part of this includes making sure your website features content (text, video, audio, etc.) that is relevant to certain search engine queries. For example if you sell Environmental Consulting then you’d want to make sure your website has lots of articles about that subject on it. (Yes, more is usually more in this case.)

These SERP listing are essentially free, although many businesses need to hire somebody to either create website content or to “optimize” their website properly (or both).

If you don’t do proper SEO it is VERY easy for your website to disappear into the millions of web pages that exist, which will make it useless to your business.

However, SEO takes longer and despite the promise of “free traffic” tends to be more expensive in the short term.

What I’m saying is that if you need more targeted traffic now, then SEO isn’t the magic bullet you’re looking for – PPC is the magic bullet…

2. PPC – is advertising inexpensively to only those people who want what your business does or sells.

You may have noticed that on Google results pages there are ads down the right hand side of the pages.

These are called Pay Per Clicks ads and are highly effective both for internet users searching for specific goods and services, and for the business who purchase this advertising space.

Yahoo and other search engines also have PPC ads.

The reason these ads are so successful is because they are “contextual”.

This means that ads are set up only to appear when certain search keywords are entered into the search form.

For example if you were to type in “pet supplies” into Google, you would get a bunch of ads from sellers of pet supplies.

It works well for searchers (consumers) because they only see ads relevant to what they are looking for, and it works well for advertisers because businesses only pay when their ads are clicked on, so it can be a lot cheaper than traditional advertising (magazines, newspapers, TV etc) and a lot more effective too.

But having said that, the way Google have set up their PPC system, Adwords (by far the most successful and useful PPC system), is, while very effective, complicated to manage.

If you don’t know what you are doing (which many self-taught PPC advertisers do not) you can wind up paying way too much money – lots more than you need to be.

Consequently clever business managers hire PPC managers to make sure they do not spend too much to get poor results from their PPC advertising. (That’s where we come in!)

Call now to ask how we can help you to set up your PPC campaign right or fix up your existing campaign so that you spend less money for better results.

PPC management is an investment that will save you substantial amounts of money in the long term.

1300 975 224

Email: info@SquareEyes.com.au

It’s official – traditional advertising in magazines, Yellow Pages and newspapers is too expensive and ineffective.

Why spend all that precious cash on these tired, old “scatter-gun” methods when you could spend less money to show your ads only to those people who are looking for EXACTLY what you do or sell IN YOUR AREA.

A New, Better Way to Advertise Your Business

My Dad runs a small business making stained-glass windows. When the last Yellow Pages came out he got all excited because he noticed that his biggest competitor had obviously forgotten to run their Yellow Pages ad. Being on good terms with the other business owner, Dad called them up to gloat BUT it turns out that his (more successful) competitor had deliberately dropped his Yellow Pages advert because he’s getting such fantastic results out of Pay Per Click advertising. This had my non-computer savvy Dad stumped – so he called me to ask what Pay Per Click is.

“Dad,” I said “I told you about this – Pay Per Click advertising is advertising on Google, Yahoo and other search engines. You should be doing this as part of an Optimized Search Engine Campaign.”

“Err … Can you put that in plain English for me?” Dad said.

“It’s the most effective way to advertise and it’s also the cheapest!” I said.

“I like the sound of that!” Dad said, “Now send me a plain English explanation.”

What IS Search Engine Marketing? And Why Should You Care? (In Plain English)

WHY:

I’ll tell you what it is in a second but first here’s why you should care:

Because if you’re not running an inexpensive, well-managed Optimized Search Engine Marketing campaign today, then there’s a strong chance you’re missing out on much needed new business opportunities – i.e. SALES (i.e. MONEY).

WHAT:

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that works by increasing your visibility in search engine result pages (i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc.) using contextual Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.

PPC is the best way to advertise because it is contextual – you are only targeting people who you know are looking for what you sell (so you don’t waste money advertising to people who couldn’t care less about your business).

Oh and by the way, you only pay for the advertising when people click on your ads.

What is “Optimized” SEM?

Optimized SEM means that instead of throwing up one advertisement that leads to one webpage (your homepage for example), we split-test many different pay per click advertisements and many webpages to see which get you the best results.

After running these tests repeatedly, we end up with an “optimized” marketing campaign for your business, i.e. advertising that is proven to work really, really well for the cheapest price (way cheaper than advertising in magazines or newspapers).

How to Spend Less And Get More Customers

Here’s what we do to help your business grow using PPC advertising.

• We look at what service you provide or products you sell

• We determine where your customers are and “geo-target” your campaigns to only service those areas (saves you money)

• We research “keywords” that your potential customers might be typing into search engines to search for your product/service (i.e. “plumber in St Kilda”)

• We set up professional-standard PPC campaigns up for you, ensuring you only pay the lowest prices possible.

• We write different ads that are relevant to the keywords targeted (because this works best)

• We write and design different “landing pages” within your website, relevant to the keywords you are targeting (again because this works best to save you money and get the best results)

• The above ads and web pages are split-tested against other versions of ads and landing pages so we can see which work the best.

• We determine what you want your clients to do (i.e. buy a product, call you on the phone, fill in a contact form) and how we will measure this

• We install analytics so that we can track and measure what your website visitor’s do while they are looking at your website

• We analyze the results of all of your ads and of your web pages, to see what is working and what isn’t

• We drop what isn’t working and tweak what is, to see if we can get these successful ads and webpages to work even better

• And we introduce new ads and web pages as well – to see if they do even better than the existing versions

• repeat until we get you great results – more website traffic and more sales!

Get Rid of Your Advertising Problems Once and for All

Here at SquareEyes (it’s just the two of us) we are passionate about your marketing results.

We don’t take on too much work, preferring to concentrate on doing a great job for a small client base. With our help you can be spending less on advertising (than in traditional media OR on poorly managed PPC campaigns) and getting more sales or enquiries.

All you’ll need to do is quickly educate us as to what your business is about, then we will go to work running your PPC campaigns for you, always making sure not to spend more than you have authorized.

At the end of each month you will get a report from us, explaining what we have done, how much you have spent (no nasty surprises there) and what results you have been getting. There are no lock-in contracts and you are free to contact us anytime to ask questions or just check up on progress.

Don’t delay – our mission is to bring you more traffic and more sales – call us now!

1300 975 224

Email: info@SquareEyes.com.au