How well are you perfoming in the Google Challenge?

Any resemblance to your Google Challenge attempt?

(from Conversation Marketing)

You know your internet marketing campaign is screwed when:

• Your boss refers to the campaign as "a learning experience".
• You get fewer visitors than you have percentage points in your bounce rate.
• Your team looks at you blankly when you say "SEO Copywriting".
• You don't have any analytics tools in place. Just give up.
• You're proud of the fact that you grabbed the top organic search position for your own brand name.
• You think quality score is something given to meat.
• Frank, the developer down the hall who's doing your project in between his other priorities, says "Oh, THAT PROJECT" when you check on his progress.
• You get 15% clickthrough on your PPC ads, and a 10% bounce rate, but you don't sell anything.
• Your boss/client keeps forwarding you blogs posts they found from 1999 about SEO and the keywords META tag.
• "Budget? Oh, we have enough to run for about 3-4 weeks. We have to get a positive ROI by then."
• You suddenly understand what makes some folks flee the country.
• You lie to your family and tell them you're helping sell diet supplements.
• A single conversion is cause for celebration.
• No one at your company knows what a customer is worth.
• No one at your company likes your customers.
• No one at your company likes anyone else at your company.
• You haven't launched a landing page after 2 weeks, because the art department keeps moving the logo around.
• The CEO keeps going in and tweaking your Adwords campaign (I'm a CEO. I do this. I'm a horrible person.).
• Your super-secure login for your e-commerce system is 'password'.
• 24 hours after you launch the campaign, your boss is asking you how it's doing. I'm not talking about a landing page, people. I'm talking about the entirecampaign.
• You're rereading Atlas Shrugged.
• You've realized this was not a good time to go on a diet.
• You're burning through your prescription at twice the normal rate.
• Someone uses the word 'synergy' in a status meeting more than 3 times.
• You're spending more time reporting statistics than you are testing new headlines.
• You haven't tested any new headlines.
• You haven't tested anything.
• You've nodded at every single one of these.

Adwords Keyword Insertion

While preparing for the Google Challenge last week I started wondering how come so many companies manage to have tailor-made ads for each individual keyword you type in. I bet there are some complex tools out there to automate the process, but for the common guys like us Dynamic Keyword Insertion is actually an easy way to do it.

Here is how it works. Say you're selling phone chargers. Instead of having an ad showing "Great Phone Chargers" you would be better off showing "Great  Motorola Chargers" when people search for Motorola, or "Great Nokia Chargers" when people search for "Nokia" and so on. But if you were to create a single Ad Group for each different keyword/ad combination you could go nuts! 

That's where Keyword Insertion plays a role. Here is how your Ad should look like at AdWords:

Great {KeyWord:Phone Chargers}
Selection of {Keyword:Phone Chargers}
in stock. Free shipping!
www.example.com
http://www.example.com/?kw={keyword:nil}

Then you should set up your keywords as "Motorola Chargers", "Nokia Chargers" and any other brand of charger you wish. 

If someone searches for "LG Chargers" Google will automatically make your Ad look like this:

Great LG Chargers
Selection of LG Chargers
in stock. Free shipping!
www.example.com
http://www.example.com/?kw=lg%20chargers

This is quite a good way of saving work and producing more effective Ads. You can find a detailed tutorial at Google AdWords Help.

I guess the trick behind it is how to manage the "dynamic" ads relevance. The best way of dealing with it is by preparing landing pages that will react to the keywords chosen (as suggested by the URL in the example above, where the keyword is passed along to the landing page as a query). 

Anyhow, I will go ahead and convince my group to start using it! Will you?

More interesting eye-tracking stuff from Google

Check out the official google blog for more of those interesting eye-tracking studdies.

Eye tracking and Google Adwords

This eye tracking technology is just fantastic. There are lots of companies selling this service and for good reason (just look at the sponsored links when searching for eye tracking). I wish I could afford this for the Google Challenge (i.e. for optimizing the landing page)!

It is, on the other hand, quite worrying if you are using AdWords. Take a look at the video below (from Google's Official blog). It seems that nobody looks at the right column of advertisements. I bet we can catch some of it with our peripheral vision, though. But I guess the lesson here is to bid high in AdWords because you want to be on top of the organic search. That's where the gold is. 

I found yet another interesting study by Think Eyetracking suggesting that users are getting used to Google results. The image below is a heat map of eye movements on a Google result. Users are getting smarter and more efficient with time. How does it affect the internet marketers? We have less and less time to catch the user's attention. And again: bid high on AdWords! 

Any other suggestion?

Advergaming

Adverwhat? Yes, advergaming. Games sponsored by corporations.

It started long ago with some floppy-disk based games (?), and it came a long way from there.  

Advergaming can happen in a variety of ways. You can find billboards on a race track of your favorite racing game; sponsored drink machines in simulation games; brand experiences like "driving an Audi" in Grand Turismo games or impersonating Noid (80's Domino's Pizza mascot) in an adventure game.

At first one could think games target a very limited audience - mostly geeky teenagers maybe.  But the truth is that there are lots of other geeks gamers out there in other age groups. More than 30% of the online gaming audience is between 35 and 49 years old.

Although studies prove that the games audience to be more mature than you would think, Volvo has pushed it perhaps a little too far. They've launched an advergame for their new TRUCK line. You can actually drive around on their new "FH16" truck. How effective do you think the campaign is? Do you think they are actually reaching their target customers? I'm not so sure but at least it's a fun little game. :)

As I know we all have plenty of free time on our hands, you can find a list of advergames to explore here:

http://www.adverblog.com/archives/cat_advergames.htm

Where are we?

In which box does the IM class fit into?

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The new direct-link to consumers: BLOGS

This fast-paced, ever-growing new channel never fails to surprise me. The power of blogs is amazing. Any "Joe Doe" can start a blog and write about anything - me included; yet it is changing the way businesses operate and interact with consumers.

Back when I worked for Nokia we had this internal joke: "if you want something changed in a phone you have a better chance of being heard by the program manager if you blog about it". And that was almost true. The program manager used to sit and read all major gadget/phone bloggers. That's how important this new channel is. It has shortened the distance to the end-user. 

And obviously, this is not a one-way street. Learning the power of this new media many companies are using it to communicate back to consumers in a friendly and direct way (e.g. http://thenokiablog.com/; http://googleblog.blogspot.com/). Others are even hiring "professional" bloggers to do their PR. 

In sum, whatever your company is doing: keep an eye out for what bloggers are writing about!

Old but interesting article: Blogs Will Change Your Business