Corporate profiles on social-networking sites produced greater purchase intent and more recommendations when users could become a “fan,” and add the logo to their own profiles, than when they could not.

read full story here.

On Thursday, its analytic platform partners — Clickable, Kenshoo and Marin Software — came out of hiding.

Clickable, Kenshoo and Marin Software will respectively deliver Web-based platforms that let companies compare the performance of search and social ad campaigns side by side. The trio follows Omniture, which released news last month to build a platform that integrates the social data.

Kenshoo, Marin Software and Omniture have made their respective platforms available to a handful of partners, with plans to release full-working products at various times throughout the year. Clickable becomes the first to make available a full-working product April 12

read full story here.

You don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression. The moment you upload your new campaigns & ad groups, even if paused, Google gives you an initial quality score. If it’s below average you’ll be paying more per click until Google has enough data for your actual performance to determine your quality score.

If you don’t come out of the gate with your best foot forward, you’ll pay a premium on your first 100+ clicks. Worse, you may be tempted to give up on a keyword prematurely based on astronomical bid prices. Pay attention to the checklist below when launching new campaigns, ad groups or keywords into your AdWords account.

The good news is that all these suggestions won’t just help your initial quality score, but should actually increase the long-term quality of your AdWords campaigns.

Here’s how to get the best possible initial quality scores in Google:

Keeping up with the changes on your site can be nearly impossible. Equally challenging is keeping up with those changes in your Google Analytics reports. Yesterday Google announced a new feature called Annotations to help you remember what happened on your site, who did it, and when it happened.

Any user with Google Analytics access can write comments on the over-time graph to indicate any notes they have for that particular event. This will save a lot of time for companies where the tasks are distributed between numerous people, which means you the analyst will no longer have to spend hours figuring out why all your data has changed. Just view the annotations to see if any major updates or changes were made! In addition to this new feature, Google also released the ability to use the Custom Variables in Advanced Segments and Custom Reports, and the new Tracking Code Setup Wizard. To view more information about these you can visit the Google Analytics blog.

read full article here.

Google Shares Stats From YouTube Campaigns

YouTube has been unprofitable since Google bought it for $1.76 billion three years ago — but Chad Hurley, the company’s co-founder, recently speaking at a launch ceremony for the launch of Israeli President Shimon Peres’ personal YouTube channel revealed that the company had “two spectacular quarters.” He also confirmed the site gets more than a billion views daily, according to reports.

Googlerers supporting the advertising technology aimed at driving revenue through YouTube say the integration of DoubleClick and Google has begun to pay off. The company has begun to share statistics from ads running on YouTube in hopes that advertisers and agencies will take notice of the possibilities to generate revenue from ads running on YouTube and in videos.

Sharing stats from Harley-Davidson and Volvo ads that recently ran on YouTube, Ari Paparo, group product manager for DoubleClick Rich Media, says ads have begun to perform well. He attributes the integration of DoubleClick and Google technologies to the uptick. “It’s not about new features, but more about quality,” he says. “Today, consumers gain interest with the ad and then interact with it.”

read full article here.

via ROI Revolution

Search is from Mars, Content is from Venus

Google’s search and content networks are both great sources of profitable traffic, but they are very different from one another. And in the same way that you wouldn’t want unrelated keywords grouped together in your account, you’re going to want to keep search and content in their own distinct campaigns.

But what is it that makes them so different?

Audience:
Traffic from the search network is coming from an active group of prospects. This is exactly what makes paid search advertising so unique: you get to show your ad to a prospect at the precise moment that they are seeking your product or service (depending on your keyword list of course).

On the other hand, traffic from the content network is much more passive. You’re getting your ad served at a moment when their attention is elsewhere, focused on the content of the site they’re on.

Performance:
This variance in user behavior between search and content leads to a large difference in performance. Due to the high level of motivation found in search traffic, the search network tends to have a much higher CTR than content. However, the number of impressions available on content tends to be vastly greater than available search impressions for a given keyword theme since AdSense can be found on so many sites throughout the web, so you can still pick up plenty of clicks from content despite the low CTRs.

read full article here.

via: Marketing Pilgrim

It’s been two and a half years since Google acquired digital marketplace DoubleClick for $3.1B. Over that time, they’ve gotten approval for the deal, made it official and merged their technologies more and more closely. This week they’re announcing another step to that integration—new analytics for its ad manager and better integration with its Ad Planner.

Right now, advertisers must plan their campaigns in one tool and execute them in another, according to Ari Paparo, group product manager at Google. The new tools would integrate the ad platform better to bring planning, execution and measurement to one place.

The new analytics will be very similar to Google Analytics in layout and function:

Paparo says the new product will streamline reporting on display ad campaigns:

Think of it as something you do when drinking your morning coffee and reading the news. You come in and try to find out what happened yesterday. What performed and what didn’t perform, and where did it perform. It should be intuitive, fast and easy to use.

Once these changes are implemented, Google could build on its progress. For example, Ad Planner could add predictive algorithms to help advertisers find new audiences tailored to their offerings, with traffic estimates, demographic data and more.

What do you think? Will this help display advertisers using Google? What’s in the future for Ad Planner?

via: MediaPost

PPC Campaign Scares Up Big Profits

Holiday sales might have been slow for Halloween Express if not for pay-per-click advertising. Brad Butler, the company’s chief operating officer, has his hand in several businesses — from awards to wine — and he plans to spend about $1 million this year and get more than every penny back on the investment.

Halloween Express is online, and also has 250 seasonal retail stores. September and October are the peak period — he spends more than 90% of his Google AdWords budget during these two months.

Butler taught himself how to use AdWords. He dedicates about 35% of the overall marketing budget to AdWords, and attributes about 20% of site traffic to the campaigns. Managing about 5,000 keywords helps him to differentiate the business from larger advertisers and capture every relevant costume query possible including sexy, adult and even plus size and religious — words that big-box retailers might avoid.

“We also use negative keywords to filter out the pornography, so we don’t get all the perverts coming to our site wasting our money,” Butler says.

read full article here.

What is the Universal Conversion Code for Google Website Optimizer?

via: ROIRevolution.com

We’ve been using a piece of code for a while that makes it easier to set up multiple Google Website Optimizer experiments. These experiments could be one right after the other, or even several experiments running simultaneously. The only requirement is that you should have a single conversion point for all of your Google Website Optimizer experiments. You may be able to adapt this code to situations with multiple conversion points, but that’s likely to get rather complicated. read full article here.

Why use broad, exact and phrase match keywords

via: ROIrevolution.com

One “mistake” we consistently see when conducting AdWords account audit and strategy sessions for an advertiser, or when beginning work with a new client is that there are only broad match keywords throughout the account.

Ideally, you should bid on all three match types of every keyword you decide to include in your account.

To quickly review:

• Using broad match keywords allows your ad to show on similar phrases and relevant variations. If you are bidding on the keyword: buy flowers, your ad may show on searches such as: flowers, purchase flowers, buy daisy flowers. Read full article here.

If you want to start using data analysis to make better media planning decisions, where do you begin?