Archive for the ‘content network’ Category

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

I have been focusing a lot over the last few weeks on the creation and optimisation of Google AdWords placement campaigns on the content network. Before I go into the tactics and a few fresh ideas that I am currently playing with, those of you new to the blog may be asking the question…

What is a placement campaign?

A Google AdWords placement campaign allows you find pick which websites that participate in the AdSense program you want your advertisements to show on. Instead of relying on Googles contextual matching of keywords that you specify to the content of sites, the placement campaign bypasses this, and allows you to use your intelligence to find sites that you believe will provide visitors to click on your ad, and more importantly convert into sales or actions.

TEXT PLACEMENT AD

STANDARD CONTENT NETWORK AD

One of the main advantages of placement campaign ads is that they take over the whole ad block. Instead of showing your ad with four other competitors inside the ad block, the placement ads take over the WHOLE ad block. It doesn’t matter if you are using text ads or image ads, the whole bit of valuable site real estate is yours. BUT, it does come at a price (doesn’t everything).

Using Placement Campaigns

To take out the placement ad block, you must bid higher than the top content bidder for that ad block on the site. But this can be more than compensated for by thinking laterally, and placing your ads on sites that have a similar demographic to your target market. These sites are running ads from a different but demographically related niche, so you can bid against cheaper keywords, and get a lot of content traffic without going head to head with your competition.

For example, you may know from market research that the people that buy your widgets also listen to heavy metal. Sure you can run content network ads, and then pick the winners by running an AdWords Placement performance report. This is a good initial strategy to find out if these heavy metal music keywords ads are being shown, and what the average cost per click is. Once you determine where the ads are being shown, and the type of sites that are converting then you can transfer these winning domains into a placement campaign, and optimise the advertising spend on each of these sites individually. Placement campaigns allow you to change individual bids on each url, instead of bidding on keywords. This allows you to fine tune each and every site that you know converts well, making sure that you pay the maximum needed to get your ads shown on that domain.

Placement campaigns are also excellent for targeting large blocks of related content within large news and social media sites. I will give a few examples here of some ninja style tactics for finding placements. There are many more …..

1. Set up a Google alert to search for all news stories that feature your niches or product areas. Most news sites, at least here in Australia show content network ads on story pages, and these make excellent placements. Remember, that these articles can get massive surges of traffic, but they are timely, so some form of alert system is needed to make sure you maximise the effectiveness of a campaign.

2. Buy up blocks of related niche content within social media. Say for instance that there was a popular social video site that showed Adsense content ads. You could do an internal search on that site for all of your keywords, record the url’s of the results and then run placement ads on all of those URL’s within the site. These pages get thousands of visitors per day.

PLACEMENT TIPS

Here are a few other tips that are fresh on my mind:

• Use AdWords Editor for setting up placements. Make your job so much easier, and can easily template whole setups and copy them to new campaigns.
• Specify the placement url without the http:// Google doesn’t like it.
• No placements over three directories deep. Not sure why Google doesn’t allow this, as it makes targeting on social media sites a lot harder to accomplish. You can put ads on www.last.fm/group/tool but not on search.url.com/lyrics/q/james+blunt+high+lyrics because the target url has more than 2 slashes in it

Call us now to discuss your Adwords campaigns

1300 975 224

info@squareeyes.com.au