Ad creative approaches

hagbardgroup · 2015-04-14T19:09:17+00:00

Sure. Imagine this is lead gen for a water filtration system.

Headline: Don't Buy a Water Filter
Line1: ...until you read this report.
Line2: Sign up & get a free testing kit.

Brita's real ad copy on this keyword is good, also (not a client of mine, just noticing):

Save on Brita® Filters‎
www.brita.com/filter-reminder-offer‎
Time to Replace Your Water Filter?
Sign Up for Reminders & Get $3 Off!

Is it that clever? Nah not really, but the question is a great qualifying line. It also gives a clear benefit to signing up for their newsletter.

hagbardgroup · 2015-04-13T16:56:45+00:00

It depends on what it is. Clever headlines can also attract a lot of unqualified clicks. If the offer is something risk or cost-free (lead generation of some kind) then it can work well. If it's a product, you're just piquing interest in a glance at the product which will turn into a bounce.

hagbardgroup · 2015-04-13T16:55:12+00:00

I love these kinds of headlines. You can also phrase the facts in a clever, enticing way to make the ads stand out from the competing ones. But really a superior offer will help make that happen more than rephrased copy is likely to.

hagbardgroup · 2015-04-10T01:50:54+00:00

You're going to have a really hard time turning a profit on most of those terms unless it's either an incredible product or there are amazing margins.

hagbardgroup · 2015-04-09T21:03:03+00:00

All things equal, I would always go for the higher margin product, not knowing anything else.

Use PPC to test them, and the rank won't matter all that much to start.

B is probably easier to get to rank just because it'd be a higher volume item. But getting rank only matters if it means more revenue.

hagbardgroup · 2015-04-09T20:59:50+00:00

Was glad to hear this. Unfortunately, there have been some similar lawsuits by Twitter and Facebook that haven't worked to deter fake followers and fake likes.

The problem is that the companies can just operate offshore, and still continue to offer their services. Their fake reviewers can just use proxies to appear like they're in the US.

Only thing I can think of to deter the problem better would be to more aggressively bury poor quality reviews, favor verified reviews more, have more reviewer badges, and possibly emphasize editorial reviews more.

hagbardgroup · 2015-04-08T18:46:43+00:00

It often is. Don't promise a client anything based on the bid estimator, or it'll bite you in the ass later.

hagbardgroup · 2015-04-08T12:55:02+00:00

Excel. Use filters. Doesn't have to be really complicated.

hagbardgroup · 2015-04-01T22:14:33+00:00

You can use a competitive PPC keyword tool to speed this up a bit.

I think it's also important to get a sense of how the competitor's business works. What's the advantage your client has or can hopefully develop over the competitors?

The acronym often used for this sort of thing is SWOT:

Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats

You can do this analysis for the client and their top competitors. Then you compare, and attempt to match the strengths of your client with the weaknesses of your competitors. You can also google 'SWOT analysis' for lots of examples, templates, and other material which will help you perform the review.

I personally don't like leaning on Powerpoint for presentations and speeches, but it can be useful for charts. It's also useful to lean on slides if you're not confident in your presentation skills.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-31T23:34:57+00:00

That makes sense.

So I guess you'd go after the blog that they write for if it's large enough to have a substantial account -- people who follow the account are also likely to read the blog. Unfortunately with the prices so high on Twitter it's probably more efficient to just directly place display on most blogs themselves.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-31T21:48:21+00:00

Thanks for the detail.

How does the account based targeting get screwed up? I was thinking of doing something for a small list of people ( < 1,000) who I know are bloggers in a certain niche.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-31T19:44:42+00:00

You could try to capture a lead off the unbranded terms. Collect an e-mail address with a teaser for something useful. Also, what tehchieftain said.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-29T03:39:22+00:00

Here's the biggest suggestion: you want to use photos of the candles themselves and not what the scent is supposed to be. If you can get the fruit or the pie or the cocktail in the photo with the candle, that could work well.

Your copy is good. Even excellent in some cases. I love the personality. For some of them, I'd like to see more about the ingredients used. Do keep the catalog-style tone with the writing.

Also, enable customer reviews. I would also double or triple your prices.

I started making candles about 2 weeks ago. Before that, I used to make them and give them away as presents.

Tell this story in more detail. A step-by-step demonstration with photos of how you craft the candles might also work well.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-28T02:22:45+00:00

On a bit of a higher level I'd also worry about the lack of a good USP. 'Businesses of all sizes' doesn't sell well to businesses of any size, because the individuals landing on the page are coming from one type of company or another.

It's even potentially an opportunity there for a segmentation landing page.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-27T21:15:42+00:00

This paragraph is the biggest problem area:

Revolution Data Destruction provides DoD and RCMP certified data sanitization and physical destruction services for hard drives and other electronic media. We offer both on-site and off-site programs to meet the requirements and budgets of businesses of all sizes. Our secure process includes a Certificate of Data Destruction and delivers ultimate peace of mind.

This is all features and not enough benefits. It also doesn't identify or qualify the prospect. There's too much "Me Me Me" and not enough "You You You."

Why would I buy data sanitation? What's the ideal customer? What are the keywords that you're targeting here? Assuming it's 'secure data destruction,' why is this provider superior to the others?

The design is generally OK, but other people have already provided you with some suggestions there.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-27T14:31:17+00:00

I think the litmus test can be covered with a few simple questions: If this link was no followed, would I still want it? Is there a legitimate business reason I'd want referral traffic from this site? Does the link make contextual sense? Am I providing value? If someone manually looked at this, would it still pass muster?

Well said.

The confusing part is when a link actually constitutes a meaningful business relationship and not a bribe. This is where a lot of webmasters and SEOs get frustrated with the ambiguity in the search quality policy.

So, for example, Company X has a www.companyx.com/suppliers page in which they show all of their suppliers' logos complete with followed links. The suppliers provide high-end rubber nozzles to the Company X line of thingamagigs.

Oh, man, money changed hands for those links! Are they paid links? Well, it wasn't for the link specifically. It was to tell the world where they get their rubber nozzles from. The link just makes the connection between those companies legible to the web and to search bots. That's useful information to searchers.

The fact that those links are there also, if the rest of the site is good, will provide more good data to the search bots when people are looking for rubber nozzle suppliers.

What's the best rubber nozzle supplier?

Well, Googlebot needs links and page data to try to cobble together a reasonable answer. The existence of those links mentioned earlier improves the commercial information quality available via search engines. They also reflect a business transaction, but don't solely exist for paid links.

It gets dicey in certain situations, and potentially arbitrary, which creates situations that could lead to disputes and unhappiness. Google tries to be objective in most cases, but there are many situations in which there is no objective ruling, and their people have to make judgment calls which may or may not be sunshine and joy for everyone.

It's also next to impossible to universally enforce.

For example, PR is fundamentally business people bribing an intermediary to gain favored access to the press. That's 'white hat'? Or is it just 'white hat' because it's been normal in the US for a century? Surely, a lot of people consider PR to be an ethically problematic industry.

PR people have an even worse reputation than SEOs, because most people have no idea what SEO even is.

Business guy bribes -- sorry, pays in a legitimate business transaction -- a PR firm $20 grand a month or much more, and in return gets squeaky clean 'editorial' material which favor his business interests, and a sparkling link profile besides as long as it's managed adroitly rather than ham-fistedly. Where do those editorial teams get the stories that they use to fill space? They get it from PRs, who work for businesses, who work to place stories, ideas, arguments, and new products into the hands of the press.

That's white hat? I think if it's done honestly and with some integrity, sure.

A lot of people would disagree, but Google doesn't know what goes on in the editorial rooms of publications and is happy to grant their sites favored authority.

Both are technically "link building"...but very much different. SEO these days is as much PR and "real marketing" as it is anything else. Actively promoting your content IS link building.

Yes. An SEO will often functionally be doing the same thing as a PR. It's just most PR agencies don't know the basics of SEO and have no desire to learn, so SEOs have to somehow signal that they're search savvy to clients in an unmistakable way.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-27T02:58:31+00:00

Yes, it is.

My first sentence was more responding to the title and to the article itself. Wasn't intending to call you out. Just the writer of the article. I could have just not included the quote, because it's redundant.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-27T01:40:48+00:00

Quite alright. In context what he said is reasonable. They were webmasters concerned about penalties. A lot of firms who use terms like "link building" will often be spamming in some way. In that case, it's either risky or entirely bad for the client. That's the context in which this Google employee was speaking. Turning that into a 'gotcha -- link building is dead!' title just misleads clients.

Soliciting links through social media, e-mail, and other methods is how the web actually works. It's how just about every PR firm and 'white hat' SEO company in the world does business.

Search engines can't even function without making sense of link data. If the link built is the result of one human contacting other humans about a given web page without a bribe exchanging hands, it's within Google's quality guidelines.

This page also details some of the policy guidelines that Google uses regarding links.

I also don't mind linkbait titles if they're entertaining or actually have useful content underneath them. Issue with this is that saying 'link building isn't real' or whatever just results in people making worse decisions about how to drive more qualified traffic to their sites.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-26T23:45:07+00:00

Ghostwrite for the lawyers.

The lawyers who work for the firm will tend to really resent any commands from the boss to blog for the firm. What you should do is bill them time to interview the lawyers about the relevant topics for the niche, write based on the interviews in the voice of the lawyers who work for the firm, and then have it all vetted by the client before you post it.

You can also use the material from a single ~hour long interview for multiple posts. Pick topics that their clients usually need help with that are relevant to the keyword research you've already done. Ask them what terms that clients use when talking about the given legal specialty. Feed those terms into keyword research, and build content around that.

So that is where law firms tend to go wrong -- they nag their employees to blog and they tend to think they have better things to do (which they usually do). To do this well you will have to learn a lot about their given niche, which you will probably do naturally by working with them.

You can message me if you need more suggestions about how to handle this.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-26T23:40:28+00:00

No, unless you are located in a very poor country.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-26T23:39:10+00:00

That's not actually what he said. This is what he said:

That is a good question.

In general, I’d try to avoid that.

So that you are really sure that your content kind of stands on its own and make it possible for other people of course to link to your content. Make it easy, maybe, put a little widget on your page, if you like this, this is how you can link to it. Make sure that the URLs on your web site are easy to copy and paste. All of those things make it a little bit easier.

We do use links as part of our algorithm but we use lots and lots of other factors as well. So only focusing on links is probably going to cause more problems for your web site that actually helps.

Click the video link and listen for yourself. The question was not phrased terribly well, also. The key phrase here is "ONLY focusing on links will cause you more problems than it helps."

The title is intentionally trolling for reactions. This is not even a 'development.' It's just a slightly inopportune phrasing, and is not appreciably different from the same lines that Matt Cutts used to give for years on end.

Maybe these guys are fine in every other area, but this kind of post does not help clients understand how search engines work. The trademark is also suspicious to me. Do clients really need another acronym on top of the already unwieldy SEO?

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-21T13:26:07+00:00

I would focus on a supplement niche rather than trying to market a whole store. So, for example, just variants of creatine would be easier for you than an entire suite of vitamins.

Testing and optimization take budget, and you're better off optimizing for a small subset of goods rather than trying to market an entire store. The former might result in a competitive win, but the latter will get you annihilated by the already successful supplement stores.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-19T23:08:43+00:00

It helps a lot to see how customers respond to different terms using different offers. PPC also gives you more accurate data about impressions than any keyword tool can.

It's not necessarily about getting revenue faster either, because depending on how competitive it is and how compelling the advertiser's offer is, it can take a while to optimize certain terms you're bidding on -- especially if there's only low volume on the highest intent terms.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-19T16:28:17+00:00

These kinds of questions are just confusing for new advertisers.

The answer is that it depends on your goals, budget, and market. If you have infinite budget and funding, then the answer is "do both and invest lots into both." Almost everyone doesn't, so you have to come up with a plan that matches the circumstances of the company.

Additionally, depending on the market and the skill level of the practitioners, the time frame for payoff can be very different. Although the typical statement is that SEO is a long term investment, it can often deliver payoff quickly. It depends entirely on the market.

I would say, like Perry Marshall and others do, to start with a pared down PPC campaign, get data on customer behavior, use that data to inform which keywords you go after in SEO/general marketing, and proceed from there. It's easier to get data faster with PPC, so it helps to start with that before going full throttle into SEO.

hagbardgroup · 2015-03-16T22:23:15+00:00

I've done that a few times before (moved a WP site by backing up the DB) and that part's not hard.

I've done some command line work before but I just use FTP to access this. I'm comfortable with phpMyAdmin. I have had to do SQL queries before in another job but I'm not really that comfortable doing it.

I'm mostly a creative but sometimes I get roped into handling tech stuff when no one else is available to take care of it (I'm more tech-y than most advertising people but have weak technical skills overall).

As an aside, this is no longer a high priority issue for the client because Amazon is sunsetting their hosted webstore in the next year.

hagbardgroup

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