The Official Clickable Blog

If you are new to online advertising you might not know that your ad network probably offers two different types of ad placement: search engine placement and content (contextual) advertising.  Search network ads appear beside search engine results on sites like Google, Yahoo and MSN.  Content ads appear on web sites with content that matches what you are advertising.  Google, for instance, places content ads on sites like The New York Times Online, About.com, Business.com, and the Food Network, to name a few. 

Paid search advertising and content network advertising are two very different ballgames with very different costs and performance rates. Content bids are usually much cheaper than search bids.  This is true for a couple of reasons.  There is usually more competition for search terms than there is for content; there is also a lot more content out on the web than there are search engine results pages.  With more available inventory and less competition you can expect to pay much less for a content click than a search click.  But you also get what you pay for: Internet users who click on a search ad are usually at a much different step in the buying process than someone who clicks on a content ad.  Someone who is actively searching for a term is probably much further along in the purchasing process than someone browsing the web.  This doesn’t mean you can’t get great results from a content campaign; it just needs to be managed differently than your search campaign.

Many ad networks like Google lump both search and content targeting into a single campaign by default.  The problem is that lumping both types of targeting into a single campaign doesn't allow you to set separate budgets for search and content.  This often leads to content taking up too much of your budget and it can cause search to underperform.  Most ad networks allow for separate term bids for both search and content, but this is often much more difficult to manage than having separate search and content campaigns.

An easy way fix your lumped campaign is to run identical campaigns but break them out into search and content campaigns.

Here are five simple steps to breaking out your search and content networks.  
1.    Make a copy of your campaign and name it “(original campaign name) – Content Only”.
2.    Rename your original campaign “(original campaign name) – Search Only”.  
3.    Disable the content network on the original campaign.
4.    Disable the search network on the new campaign.
5.    Set ad budgets based on your current spend levels. For instance, if your daily budget of a combined campaign is $100, and you spend 75% on search and 25% on content, set the budget of your search campaign to $75 and the budget of your content campaign to $25.

A quick note from behind the scenes at Clickable: Our ActEngine team is hard at work building new recommendations to optimize your spending for content ads, so watch for new developments in this area.

Trace, Clickable SEM Guru
 
Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

Hanny and Keith recently posted critical search marketing strategies for companies to succeed this holiday season. If you found those tips helpful, then you should definitely sign up for Keith's free Webcast, moderated by Kevin Newcomb, managing editor of the famous Search Engine Watch. Below is the description. We hope you'll join us!

How to Survive the Economic Meltdown & Succeed this Holiday Season
Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Time: 1:00pm EDT / 10:00am PDT

SIGN UP

What You'll Gain: Planning and executing a successful Holiday pay-per-click campaign is difficult enough in a booming economy. It's going to be even tougher this year. In this Webcast, you'll get some Holiday PPC campaign tips from Keith Hong, senior director of Clickable's Assist and Customer Experience group (and former head of Ask.com customer management group). He'll explain what you should already have done to prepare for success, and what you must do throughout the holiday season to adapt to volatile market and demand spikes. He'll also offer some advice on how to stay calm and ensure success amidst this economic meltdown.

As we mentioned in our introduction to writing effective ad copy, there are three primary things that a search marketing ad has to do: grab a user’s attention, describe your offering, and tell a user what to do next. The function of a headline is to grab the user’s attention.

When one of your ads appears on a search engine results page (SERP), it’s going to have a lot of competition. We’ve found that users tend to look at ads in the “Sponsored Links” section in clusters, rather than one at a time, so you’re usually competing directly with the one or two ads before and after yours. You may have to compete with ads that receive “Premium Placement” above the organic results, and, well, you’ve also got to compete with those organic results. There are all sorts of elements on the page vying for a user’s attention, and the primary tool for grabbing that attention away from everything else is your ad’s headline.

Not only is the headline especially good at grabbing attention—you shouldn’t try to make it do anything else. As Hunter Boyle recently wrote over at the Marketing Experiments Blog: “The objective of your headline is not to sell, but to connect with your reader. That split-second connection only has to compel readers to continue — not necessarily to buy right away.” In other words, use your headline to grab a user’s attention, and let the description line and “call to action” do their jobs next.

If you’ve already searched the web for tips on writing headlines, you’ve probably found a lot of information about specific words you should use in your copy (“you,” “how,” “money,” “want”) or specific formats to write in (Questions, How-To’s, Announcements). All of these are good tips, but they still don’t make it clear exactly which words you should use in your copy, or exactly which format you should write your ad in. You’ll have a much easier time doing this if you take a preliminary step: think of a user’s search as a question.

Note: This is the second in a series of posts about writing effective ad copy. Click here to read the rest of this tutorial, and to read earlier installments.

Hello! I’m Maxine Friedman, and I lead business development at Clickable. For my first post, I wanted to introduce myself, share why Clickable is a great place to work, and provide some visibility into my work on our enterprise partnerships.

I started my career in the mid-90s at Cunningham Communication, an energetic, high-tech public relations agency. Looking back, public relations was the perfect training ground for a business development path where the skills of research, industry relations and sales would be put to good use. Twelve years and a dual MBA later, including runs in marketing at both dotcoms and Fortune 500 companies, I turned my attention back to technology and the start-up world. Enter Clickable!

Why is Clickable is an exciting place to work? It has a talented and high-impact culture that you’d expect from an ambitious start-up. Second, we spend every day partnering with other companies to create value for their customers – by empowering them with tools that make search advertising simple. Every day we meet with other fascinating entrepreneurs, corporate executives and industry influencers to tackle problems and complexities around online advertising. It’s a fun, dynamic marketplace.

A core tenant of my job is connecting with the right people at larger enterprises and advancing conversation, innovation and partnership to build their businesses. While we originally set out with an online, self-service dashboard for small and midsize advertisers, Clickable’s technology also has lured advertising agencies and premium services providers that manage search advertising on behalf of small, midsize and local customers. They’re finding that Clickable is a compelling white-label platform to deliver simplicity, transparency and scalability to the management of their high-volume portfolios of smaller customers. As with our first strategic enterprise partner, LexisNexis, we’re 100 percent focused on ensuring that any company we align with provides a quality experience for their end-customer.

If you are interested in exploring a partnership with Clickable, we would love to hear from you. You can reach me in the comment section below, or via email at mfriedman at clickable dot com.  If you are in New York, you’re welcomed to stop by our new offices to meet the team and learn more about our product and technology innovations.

Happy searching!

When you select keywords for your search marketing campaigns, you’re trying to identify customers who want whatever it is that you have to offer. This is easier to understand if we think about “searchers” rather than “keywords.” Keywords can be ambiguous, but searchers aren’t. (For example, you would manage the keyword “lipstick” differently depending on whether you were targeting “searchers looking to buy Revlon lipstick” or “searchers looking for information about the television show Lipstick Jungle.”) Let’s state this idea as a general rule: every search marketer is targeting “searchers looking for me, (whether they know it or not).” Adding keywords and negative keywords, targeting by language and targeting by locations—all of these are ways of applying that general rule to your particular business. None of them is a perfect fit, but one instance almost is: “searchers looking for my brand name.” These searchers are looking for you, and they know it.

Every search marketer should build a campaign around their brand name. If you have a well-designed and informative Web site, then you’re probably doing well with organic search results already. Nonetheless, there’s no reason to neglect the “Sponsored” results.

Bidding on your brand name is easy and profitable, and a new recommendation in Clickable’s ActEngine will guide you through the process. When you see that recommendation appear for one of your accounts, there are two major benefits that you should keep in mind.

1) It’s Cheap.
The actual cost per click (CPC) that you pay for your search marketing ads depends on two factors: your bid and your Quality Score. As we’ve discussed in detail in our best practices tutorial on the topic, a Quality Score is “the measure of an ad’s relevance to a user’s search.” Few ads are more relevant to a user than one that points them to the Web site of the brand they’re searching for. Therefore, a campaign built around your brand name will be rewarded with a very high Quality Score, driving down your costs significantly. (For a detailed discussion of how Quality Score affects cost, click here.)

2) It’s the Easiest Way to Appear in the “Premium” Positions
One of the most coveted spots for a search marketing ad to appear is above the organic search results, rather than alongside them. As Ehren pointed out last week, Quality Score has always been an important factor in determining which ads appeared in those positions, and, with recent changes to Google’s algorithm, it just got more important. Because the Quality Score on your brand terms will be about as high as you’re likely to get for any term, bidding on your brand name is the best way to land a “premium” position.

Of course, there’s not much to prevent your competitors from bidding on your brand name, and you’ll want to do what you can to protect your trademarked terms. We’ll discuss how to do so in a future post.

Hanny, Clickable SEM Guru
 
Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.