What does the Wall Street Journal have to do with Google AdWords?
Plenty. For starters, the Wall Street Journal advertises for new subscriptions using Google AdWords. But that’s not what I’m going to talk about today. No, what I’m going to talk about is the WSJ’s famous direct mail letter, the one that’s been selling millions of subscriptions. They mail out 30 million copies of that letter every year. This two-page letter starts out: Dear Reader, On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students, both were personable, and – as young college graduates are – both were filled with ambitious dreams for the future. Recently, these men returned to their college for their twenty-fifth reunion… Of course it goes on to explain that one was super-successful because he read the Wall Street Journal. That letter has been selling WSJ subscriptions for 29 years –unchanged. That’s right. They have not changed that letter in 29 years! Not that people haven’t tried. Top writers have been trying to beat it ever since it was first written. And nobody’s succeeded – until just recently. That’s right, a copywriter named Mal Decker just beat it, apparently increasing the response by Twenty Percent! Mr. Decker should be mighty proud of himself. The reason this is so significant is that because of the improved performance of this letter, the WSJ now gets 20% more sales without spending a penny more on postage or printing. I can only guess, but when you subtract out expenses, this might actually double the profit they make selling their paper. The lesson is clear: In advertising, your copy – your choice of words – is king. So what does this have to do with Google AdWords? Plenty. AdWords is set up to work in a way very similar to direct mail. If you can beat your existing ad, the same way Mal Decker beat the WSJ letter, something amazing happens: You actually pay less money for your clicks – and you get more visitors to boot. The same thing, in turn, happens once visitors get to your website: The better your copy on the website, and the more traffic it converts to dollars, the more money you get, and you don’t have to spend a penny more on traffic! You can change the CTR of your ads by 50% just by changing ONE WORD. And this is NOT unusual, not a fluke. It’s actually QUITE NORMAL. That’s right – ONE word can make that much difference. My AdWords Toolkit even shows you an example of how simply reversing the order of two lines increased the response by 2000%! Reposted from BtoB Journal Story posted: January 20, 2011 - 12:16 pm EDT
New York—Social networks, while growing exponentially in terms of participants, are receiving only modest advertising revenue compared with other media, according to a report by professional services company Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.Deloitte predicted that social networks this year will surpass 1 billion unique members and deliver more than 2 trillion ads. However, according to the company, ad revenue of about $5 billion represents less than 1% of global ad spending. In addition, rates measured by cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) will remain low, and subscriber growth rates may soon stagnate. The company said that extracting useful insights from user data was imposing a drag on CPMs, and that “the billions of stated 'likes' may not all necessarily signal an intent to purchase.” Deloitte added that social networks may generate better revenue as payment platforms, or as a “blended e-commerce department store model,” charging commissions on online sales. reposted from MarketingProfs
The price you bid is almost never the price you actually pay. You almost always pay less. First, it’s a little bit like Ebay. You pay 1 cent above the position below you, not the maximum that you bid. But there’s an even more important secret that is the key to getting lower and lower prices, even while other bidders are jumping into the game: Your Clickthrough Rate (CTR) is MORE important than how much you bid. The Clickthrough Rate is the percentage of people searching who actually click. If 100 people search, your ad shows up 100 times, and one person clicks through, that’s a 1% clickthrough rate. So let’s say I’ve got a 1% CTR and I’m paying $1.00 for position #2. Let’s say you’ve got a 2% CTR. If you play your cards right, you may only have to pay 51 cents to get position #2 and knock me down to position #3. That means that you were 2 times as relevant, and you got to pay 1/2 as much! The rules can be very simple, but the implications are huge. When you achieve high click-thru rates, you can pull your bid prices down, down, down and yet stay at the same position on the page, while your traffic goes up. The difference can be quite amazing. Here’s an example of two ads – they are ALMOST IDENTICAL but one got nearly TWENTY TIMES the CTR as the other: Headline: Popular Ethernet Terms Ad: 3 Page Guide – Free PDF Download Complex Words – Simple Definitions Link: www.bb-elec.comPopular Ethernet Terms 2 Clicks – CTR 0.1% Headline: Popular Ethernet TermsAd: Complex Words – Simple Definitions3 Page Guide – Free PDF Download Complex Words – Simple Definitions 3 Page Guide – Free PDF Download Link: www.bb-elec.com 39 Clicks – CTR 3.6% Notice what happened: All I did was reverse two lines – and the clickthrough rate jumped from 0.1% to 3.6%! That means that the ad on the bottom received more than TWENTY TIMES as much traffic – and I could pull down my bid prices and get that for the same amount of money as I was paying before.Just think how much money we’d be leaving on the table if we didn’t discover this! Beat your best, and you can get more and more traffic for less. Before I go, there’s one other thing I need to tell you: This is precisely the thing that gets people all tangled up over keywords that Google suddenly labels ‘inactive.’ While Google may tell you simply to bid more, the major reason that keywords get made ‘inactive’ is this: The message in the ad doesn’t match what the person wanted when they typed in the keyword! How do you fix this problem? By organizing your keywords into narrow themes and by testing different ads that match people’s searches – like I described above. Then watch as people’s clicks vote on the words that actually sell. This is an absolutely foolproof method of getting your ad placed higher on the page, and my Definitive Guide shows you dozens of variations on this method that you can use right away. There is ONE central idea, one key concept that Google wants you to understand.
If you have this right, Google will literally reward you by giving you lower prices on clicks, and your customers will reward you by buying what you have to sell. If you DON’T have this right, you’ll pay way too much for clicks, your competitors will eat you up, and your whole Google experience will be very, very unpleasant. The one thing that matters on Google is relevance. You might think of this as “message-to-market match.” This will make complete sense once you understand a bit of Google’s history. Google started in 1998, after the “big boys” in the search engine game like Yahoo and AltaVista were already well-established. At the time, few people would have bet that Google would overtake them all – but in less than five years they did exactly that. What’s even more remarkable is they did so without a bunch of hype and loud marketing. They literally built a better mousetrap and the world beat a path to their door. So what happened? Google’s mission in life was to build a search engine that would give people exactly what they were searching for, as fast as possible. If you were searching for “California butterflies” they wanted to give you the very best and most popular California butterfly websites on the very first page of results. They developed an amazing mathematical formula for figuring out who visited websites and why, and using that information in their search engine. So … when they began to sell Pay Per Click advertising, they were extremely concerned that advertisers should also put out messages that were highly relevant. Google rewards you for being relevant, and they let people who are searching vote for you. If your ad gets clicked on, it’s relevant. If it doesn’t, it’s not. It’s that simple. The higher your clickthrough rate – i.e., the more folks who see your ad and click on it – the less you have to pay for the position you want. But if you write lousy ads, Google will make you pay more to get your ads to show at all. So this creates a “Darwinian” effect, a deliberate natural selection that weeds out bad advertisers and rewards good ones. What’s good for Google’s customers is good for Google and good for you. When all the dust has settled, what really matters is that your ads and your content be relevant to the keywords you’re bidding on. Your message must match what the person is thinking. So … what were they really thinking when they typed in “California butterflies?” That is the question! Figure that out and put it in front of them, and you’ll win at Google. Write an ad that matches exactly what they’re searching for and you’ll beat your competitors by a country mile. A Valuable Little Piece of Customer Psychology for You: Here’s a little mental trick to help you write Google ads. Imagine that you are not you. You are your customer. You’re not the dude with the cool solution. You’re the guy or gal with some stupid problem. You’ve got an itch and you want to scratch it. And you’re not in front of your computer. You’re sitting in front of their computer. What do you type into the search bar on Google? And what do you hope will come up? Answer that question and you’ll be successful marketing online. Tomorrow’s installment is called: Four Ways to Eliminate Friction at Your Landing Page"Go to this website, click that link, call this number, fill out that form," writes Lary Stucker at FreshClicks.
"Anytime you ask people to do something, you are creating a point of friction," he warns. "Your audience will not continue unless the reward is greater than the friction they are experiencing." If you want to improve the performance of your landing pages, Stucker argues, you must remove as many points of friction as possible. Case in point: When Stucker examined an online fill-in form for free trial software offered at his own company's website, he found: The instructions were too complex. Visitors who clicked through their email offers to download the software had to wade through instructions for a four-step process. Information was presented in the wrong order. Before discussing the offer that brought visitors to the site, the landing page asked for an email address. "The actual links to the free trial downloads [were] much lower on the page," he notes. The landing page offered multiple versions of the product. "You want someone to make the decision about which version they need after they have decided they want to download it," he advises. Showing multiple versions and system requirements made choosing this product look more complicated then it needed to be. Once his company redesigned the form, however, the "average email subscriber rate jumped by more than 300 percent," Stucker reports. Here's what the new form offered:
reposted from Fox News site.
The fight for Internet privacy just took a little step forward on Facebook. The social-networking giant is suspending a controversial new feature that gave app developers access to people's phone numbers and home addresses, according to an announcement made on their developer blog. The decision came just days after a new policy was announced granting access to the personal data -- and a public backlash over privacy concerns ensued. “Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data,” Facebook wrote on its developer blog. “We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so. We’ll be working to launch these updates as soon as possible, and will be temporarily disabling this feature until those changes are ready. We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks.” Friday’s original announcement sparked protest when Internet security firm Sophos blogged about the new feature, which freely gave your phone number and home address to app developers. Sophos wrote that the policy “could herald a new level of danger” for Facebook members. Those changes will now roll out “in the next few weeks” so the company can make sure its user permission controls are in place and everything is clear for the user. Facebook maintains that privacy is a priority and that developers would only gain access to their contact information if they explicitly granted permission. “Facebook should slow users down and convey the dangers of permitting access to contact info more clearly by making this request a separate step with a bold warning, rather than a quiet, uniform addition to the list of permissions users are familiar with,” wrote Inside Facebook writer Josh Constine in a blog post. “This would reduce the threat without forcing Facebook to adopt an unscalable system.” he added. The reversal is the latest in a series of controversial steps by the social-networking company, which has been criticized for confusing settings and constant policy changes -- and according to Sophos has been "pushing the boundaries of privacy for a long time." "People are willing to accept the constant evolution of technology, but are not always willing to accept others' ideas of how their privacy should evolve along with it," said Sophos senior security analyst Chester Wisniewski in a follow-up post. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/01/18/facebook-unshares-personal-data/#ixzz1BVJCyaXj “Do-not-track” legislation will not End Marketing As We Know It. This sounds bold but this is actually an easy prediction to make. Either this legislation will not pass, or it will be so watered-down that it won’t make much of a difference in terms of how marketing operates day-to-day. I don’t mean to sound blasé about this. The legislation as currently proposed is pretty awful and I agree with industry pundits who are working to squash it. I’m just convinced that it’s not going to pass as written. Or at all. Either way the impact will be very muted.
Facebook’s “UnEmail” will not kill Gmail. I actually don’t think the Facebook “messaging” system will change much of anything. I think it will continue to be what it is today – a cool way to interact with certain friends about certain kinds of topics within a confined space. It won’t replace email (that’s not the point) and it also won’t have a substantial impact on current email habits. Email will evolve – we’ve seen that with changes to the interfaces at Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo! – and I see a slow change in habits happening over the next five to 10 years. But the current uses of email for business and commerce are going to continue for at least another 12 to 24 months. Anyone who thinks they can see any farther past the horizon than that is nuts. reposted from RETURN PATH While browsing a website this week, I clicked a link that seemed interesting. However, the site had changed file structure since the link was created, and the page was no longer valid. So, up popped their “Page Not Found (404 Error)” page.
Now, not only was I disappointed that I couldn’t see what I clicked on, but now I was also a little insulted and put-off. That’s the error page above. The idiot wearing the short-sleeved, orange, Hawaiian shirt at the Black Tie event is supposed to be me. The site visitor. “Ever feel like you’re in the wrong place?” states the caption. Wow! An interesting way to treat a guest to your site. I wasn’t digging around their bathroom’s medicine cabinet and got busted for snooping. I clicked on one of the main links on their site! Why are they making me feel like I did something wrong? I know this sounds like a bit of a rant … But, the lesson is, the way your company handles your websites error page can say a lot about your company. Some take time to make the error page fun, trying to make the best of the situation. After all, it’s a bummer for the visitor when something goes wrong, and it means something is broken with the site. When trying to make a site as sticky as possible and something is broken or confusing, anything less than “Oh my gosh, so sorry … How can we help you find what you were looking for?” is not enough. How are you supporting your web visitors when they encounter an error? Call To Action
If your company doesn't send welcome or confirmation emails to new subscribers, you could be missing out on some remarkable opportunities.
"Jill LeMaire, director of Epsilon's strategic and analytic consulting group, says that [its welcome emails] have an average open rate of 50%-60%," writes Sherry Chiger at Chief Marketer. "What's more, subscribers who receive a welcome email increase their long-term engagement with a brand by 33% until they decide to stop engaging." To help you make the most of your welcome campaign, Chiger offers recommendations like these: Send your welcome message immediately. The longer you wait, the more email piles into a new subscriber's inbox and the less likely he is to open your message. "Sending the welcome within 10 minutes of the subscriber's signing up is ideal," says Chiger. Remember your manners. Don't forget to thank the subscriber, and to ask if she would add you to her whitelist. "Subscribers are most likely to add your brand to their inbox address book or favorites list when they are ... enthused about receiving your emails," she notes. Include a link to your preference center. Explain that additional information enables you to send more relevant content. "[J]ust be sure you then follow up on your promises by targeting your emails to their preferences," she advises. Consider a series of welcome messages. Not many companies send more than one welcome email, but those that do can see twice the lift in welcome-program response, Chiger reports. She suggests numbering your emails so recipients will know this is the first of, say, four messages to watch out for. |
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