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Posts Tagged ‘optimization’
5 Tips for Saving Money on Online Advertising
Monday, November 24th, 2008
1. Test your creative. Even great online media placement can produce poor results if your messaging is off. So before you go big, run split tests of different creative units to find the winner.
2. Leverage ad network pricing and tools. If you go direct to sites, you’ll get offered their premium display inventory at their premium CPM rates. Many ad networks, however, offer the inventory sites that can’t sell on their own at way better rates. Many also offer behavioral and/or contextual targeting to eliminate ad waste by limiting ad delivery to your best prospects.
3. Put CPA in the mix. Are you trying to drive sales or acquire leads? If so, cost-per-action ad networks charge only for results, so there is zero ad waste. They’re a great way to drive incremental sales or leads without risk.
4. Drive traffic to an optimized landing page. If you’re sending the people who click on your ad to your regular website, it’s an invitation to surf around and get lost. Keep this from happening by creating a landing page specifically tied to your ad campaign, and specifically designed to motivate ad clickers to take the desired action.
5. Track your results. One of the greatest advantages of the Internet medium is that it’s measurable. Use this fact to your advantage. Keep close tabs on the results each placement in your campaign generates so you can see what works and what doesn’t. Be sure to consider not just clicks, but also lead/traffic quality.
Mason Wiley is the senior vice president of hydra network.
Billions Wasted on Paid Search Every Year
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
If you manage $50,000 or more per month on paid search advertising, evidence suggests that as much as one-third of it is wasted due to sub-optimized search marketing campaigns. Does this mean you are a bad search marketer? The answer is, unquestionably, no. However, the following statistics are sobering and suggest you may want to look at how you manage and optimize your campaigns:
· Paid search advertising is getting increasingly competitive. It makes up nearly 45 percent of all global online advertising expenditures, and JPMorgan forecasts that spend to reach $30 billion in 2008.
· Keyword inflation continues to rise due to competition and the market. Industry studies show Google has surpassed 70-percent share in searches for the first time, and a likely deal between Yahoo/Google may increase Yahoo’s pay-per-click search rate by 22 percent.
· Optimized campaigns can achieve the same results at 69 percent of the cost. WebTrends clients—who previously used a combination of manual methods and bid management tools—experienced an average return on advertising spending improvement of 44 percent only 90 days after switching to WebTrends’ new automated SEM optimization solution. In the past, they essentially wasted 31 percent of their paid search spend.
What’s a retail search marketer to do? In order to continue generating positive returns, today’s search marketers must be smarter, faster and more efficient than their competitors. They must continue to experiment with new campaign variables (ad text, landing pages, geotargets and many others), build a long-tail keyword inventory and stay on top of messaging. Search engines themselves are offering more sophisticated user segmentation and targeting options, resulting in the typical paid search program now having almost limitless possibilities for testing different variables. Each new variable exponentially adds to the number of factors and mathematical performance data that must be tracked. For example:
· 10 keywords, 10 positions, 1 creative = 10^2 combinations
· 1000 keywords, 10 positions, 5 creatives = 5 x 10^4 combinations
· 1000 keywords, 10 positions, 10 creatives, 2 landing pages = 2 x 10^5 combinations
· 1000 keywords, 10 positions, 10 creatives, 2 landing pages, 3 networks = 6 x 10^5 combinations
The real problem, and underlying opportunity, with search engine marketing optimization is that today’s methods and solutions rely on a human to do most of the heavy lifting, from a/b testing, reporting consolidation and results analysis to the seemingly never-ending bid rules creation and adjustments. The expansive keyword portfolios and the sheer number of campaigns that large advertisers manage require a new way of doing things. Forward-thinking marketers will need to discover the optimal balance between what machines do best—handling the constant cycle of analysis, testing and updates across an organization’s paid search portfolios—and the insight and perspective into external industry events and business drivers that humans can bring. In the future, automated SEM optimization solutions will help strike this balance.
Alex Yoder is WebTrends’ president and CEO.
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