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Event Registration (EVENT: 115323)

This event will be live on August 13, 2008 at 1:00PM EDT.

In this webinar, marketers will learn how to increase their spend on SEM to dramatically boost sales and branding, while maintaining - or even increasing - overall ROI. Wister Walcott, VP of products at Marin Software, will outline five simple and practical strategies to help you “spend more and spend better” on your paid search marketing campaigns.He’ll explain why SEM consistently delivers the highest bang for your buck - some studies show that SEM converts at twice the rate of email and banners - and show marketers how to obtain the highest ROI on paid search, even while increasing spend. In these unpredictable economic times, it pays to invest in the marketing methods that deliver the best sales results. So sign up now for this informative and insightful webcast, and learn how to get more out of your search marketing spend today.

MarketingProfs put together an excellent list of the “5 best and worst things about landing pages”. In fact, this seems to be more of a dos and don’ts list but overall it is well done. Below are a few of my favorite excerpts.

Landing Pages Can Be Matched With Advertisements essentially means in my mind must be matched with advertisements. If you are building a landing page and it is not tied to a specific ad, then it is likely a waste of time or at the least will not produce the results you want. The fact is that for every ad you run and every search term, your landing page must match that if you want it to convert to what you need it to convert.

1. Landing pages are quick and cheap. <snip> But “cheap” should be measured by CPA (cost per acquisition), not absolute dollars. If you spend twice as much time on a three-page landing path, but it generates a 5-times factor in your conversion rate on the same ad dollars, that’s a good investment.
2. Landing pages can be “matched” with advertisements.

And those are the good things!

The top 5 worst things about landing pages (and tips for how to fix them):

1. Sagging Page Syndrome (SPS), also known as “the kitchen sink.”
   Trying to cram as much as possible onto one page puts the burden on the respondent to sift through it. Unfortunately, most of the time, they’re just not that into you yet.
   If you’ve got that much to say, and it’s valuable, then break it into digestible chunks across a multi-page path, ideally in a way that lets respondents choose which chunks are most relevant to them.
2. Giving bad brand. Collectively, all of the problems above contribute to making landing pages bad branding experiences. As noted earlier, landing pages are quick and cheap—which is good—but they often look quick and cheap, which is not good. Not good at all. Because it signals quick and cheap for your brand, and unless you’re the Dollar Store, that’s not a good image to put in people’s minds.

There are a lot of good tips in the piece they were just put into a strange package in terms of the 5 worst and best things about landing pages, when in fact it is really 10 tips for optimizing your landing pages and making them more effective and thus increasing the value of your advertising dollars.

MarketingProfs.com - Printer Friendly Version

This is a fantastic piece over on Small Business Hub, by Mike Volpe. Great insight on a free resource,

Many small businesses do not know that you can get some FREE advertising on Google, using Google Local or Google Maps. Google is looking to increase the value of their local search and their mapping application, so they have a simple way for you to tell them some information about your business, and now they are infusing those results into their main search engine. This will help you show up in searches and get more traffic, leads and customers. For example, a nonprofit volunteer organization I work with called the Boston Scholars Program is now listed at the TOP of the Google search results for searches like “volunteer in boston“, “volunteer boston ma“, and “volunteer boston, ma“. See the image below.

Source: Free Advertising on Google - A How To Guide

My friend Sumantra Roy wrote a great piece published over at Web Marketing Today on the 10 most important factors to test on your landing pages. This is an excellent overview of the critical issues all advertisers must consider on Adwords or anywhere else on the web. It’s all about the landing pages and testing. If you really want to test properly, then you should check out Sumantra’s company Conversion Multiplier. Their technology is fantastic and their results are amazing. I’ve seen results from his multi-variate testing increasing conversions up to 600%. Call them and tell them Brad Nickel at ClickBrain.com sent you.

…these are all based on actual tests that we conducted for our clients.

1. Long Copy vs. Short Copy. Conventional direct marketing wisdom is that long copy always wins over short copy. Well, not always. Our tests show that while long copy wins over short copy in some cases, short copy performs better than long copy in others. …

2. Credibility Logos. Signing up with organizations like the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and Hacker Safe and displaying their logos on your site can often significantly increase your conversions. But, don’t assume that this will always be the case …

3. Security Assurance in Order Form or Shopping Cart. Test whether adding a few lines of content somewhat prominently in your order form or shopping cart page assuring visitors about the security of their financial and personal data increases conversions. This often proves to be a very important variable especially if your target audience tends to be somewhat older in age, or somewhat new to purchasing things on the Internet.

Click on over to read the rest of the piece. Source: 10 Factors to Test that Could Increase the Conversion Rate of your Landing Pages

Technorati tags: marketing, testing, multi-variate testing, split testing, copy, writing, landing page, landing pages, advertising, adwords, conversion, conversion multiplier, conversions

This is an excellent way for both to increase revenues. Whether the tools they provide will make it easy enough to manage is another story. In the end many small businesses need help with the strategy required to implement and the free $50 credit will be worthless if they do not know what they are doing from a targeting, landing page, and testing perspective.

Salesforce.com will become the first on-demand reseller of Google’s AdWord platform under a strategic alliance to help both companies win small- to mid-size ad accounts.

The alliance, first reported in the Wall Street Journal last month, will allow Salesforce.com to be a distribution channel for AdWords in 43 countries, the companies said in a statement released today. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

“This deal changes the competitive landscape,” said Jeff Kaplan, an analyst at Think Strategies. “It gives additional firepower for both companies to expand and target smaller customers who didn’t have access to these kinds of services before.” It also puts pressure on Microsoft in the ad business, he added. “Salesforce’s entire set of business applications is fair game, and this is a powerful attraction to small companies who find their way onto the platform via AdWords.”

Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords is available today in a five-user edition for a 30-day promotional price of $600 a year, including a $50 AdWords credit. The $50 AdWords promotional credit is available to new AdWords advertisers in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico only. (The list price is $1,200 per year.)

Source: Salesforce.com, Google in AdWords Alliance

Advertising age has a good piece on packaged goods manufacturers figuring out that Adwords exists and that it can have value for them. Great examples around the pet food recall category.

When panicked pet owners typed “pet food recall” into search engines during the recent contamination crisis, the paid results included affected and unaffected brands hoping to reassure consumers, plus lawyers, news outlets and even politicians trawling for plaintiffs, readers and votes.

Bounce is among the package-goods brands that are beginning to buy into search advertising.

But there was one even odder interloper — Procter & Gamble Co.’s Bounce dryer sheets. Bounce wasn’t trying to capitalize on the misfortune of sibling brands Iams and Eukanuba. It was simply running a previously scheduled ad around the word “pet” to drive pet owners to BounceEverywhere.com to show how to use dryer sheets to get hair off clothes.

Here’s the money quote though for this industry and in fact everyone marketing online that wants to do search. Its a difficult thing to manage and if you throw the IT department at it as some might suggest, it will fail. You need a strategic mind.

One problem companies have is figuring out who owns search, Mr. Blackshaw said. Agencies aren’t necessarily equipped or required to create search ads, he said, and it’s often unclear internally whether marketing or information-technology staff is best-equipped to manage search.

Source: Advertising Age - Digital - Package-Goods Marketers Finally Find Value in Search

Technorati tags: advertising, sem, search advertising, google, adwords, yahoo, msn, ask.com