So here I come, happy and proud of myself, part of the 13th greatest Adwords Google Challenged Team raising from this blessed continent. Me, looking back at the two-hundred-and-something-clicks that we got with our free money… Boy, was I proud or what?
All was great, and life was good until I started working with some people who know this stuff. Then I realized that my hand-picked poor 20 keywords for each of my poor little 4 campaigns would never be able to buy more than a couple of hundreds of irrelevant clicks. That is because to get relevant, we talk.. let’s say.. what about 300,000 keywords? Yeap, five zeros! For each of the 30 campaigns, what did you think? That’s about any combination of any word and phrase that human mind can relate to the guilty subject for each strategy. Of course the “20/80” rule applies, 99% of all clicks depend on not more than 10 of the greatest keywords. That’s true, more than 99.99% of the keywords are useless, but hey, the same happens when you throw a party and invite a bunch of idiots just to have an excuse to get closer to that hot chick. Plus, you never know, if she doesn’t fall for you at least you can get wasted with somebody. Properly wasted!
Another thing that astonished me is the amount of money companies shove on Advertisement’s throat, for Google’s sake! That’s because I was thinking, hey, it’s just a game, I mean seriously, it’s like playing scrabble and fishing in the same time, online! I make up some senseless words (ie. sex, secret, free), hang the bait on a website and wait for curious victims to click it. But then what? Then pray. Pray the dude will buy it. Otherwise you just wasted $100,000 (yeap, 5 zeros, again!)..
Funny (whatever that means!) is that Google gets more than a half of this cake, Yahoo less than a third, and the rest fight for the rest. Who are the rest? The rest…
But what really made me reconsider my first experience in the Adwords world is my misconception about clicks. Well, my friends, clicks are overrated! A click is not worth a dime without a big fat conversion rate. The Mighty Conversion Rate! Amen!
Conclusion: Duh!
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Tropical Vacation Ad?
What do you think this picture can promote if used in an ad?
When I put this question in the poll with the bicycles from below I wanted to learn what concepts are more appealing from a marketer stand point. What makes you click? What connects with your feelings and obsessions? I looked at the picture and I came up with the five ideas: public transportation, cotton candy, tropical vacation, jobs website, and banking savings account. I don’t know about you, but for me they all make perfect sense. Plus, one is subtle, one is strong, one is cute, one is obvious, and one is simply common. Honestly, I voted for “banking savings account”.
But interestingly, most votes (not that the poll could be representative for all universe) went to one of the oldest advertisement tricks: use the opposite to emphasize the message.
The results make me wonder whether the customers are more receptive to new poignant messages and products or they have a propensity to better assimilate familiar images and ideas. Assuming that we target the majority, the average John and Joe, if I had to choose where to use the bicycles it seems that I probably should go with the tropical vacation.
What does this mean? My friend says that the most important trait that makes people so alike is their desire to be different. Back to our marketers stand point, this is good, this is very good! It is way easier to conceive a strategy for a niche than for myriads of different cranky tastes.
Associating snowy bicycles with tropical vacations is how most of the companies think. It doesn’t make sense to change the world, let’s just give them what they know. But the big prize is in the bag of those who can change the way people see things. There is a famous example of a cloudy vision (coming from the early years of the Internet) when a former IBM top executive predicted that the maximum number of computers that would be connected to the web was five. Five?! At that time, who would have thought that computers could be used for something else but military stuff?
So, should a marketer be a step ahead today’s trends or stick with the good ol’ tricks? I guess the answer is yes!
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Big Brother Reloaded
It's no longer just the government that know everything about me. Now Acxiom and others alike know. And I bet they have more accurate information then the first guys mentioned. Not that I feel any better knowing this.
In the recent years there has been a lot of steam and chatter around the privacy issue. I am talking about marketing and advertisement here, not body parts! Even though I still think that Americans should start ensuring consumers privacy in the restrooms. The ones they have now barely cover the intimate parts of the customer and encourage peeking through the loose walls.
Back on the real topic, the privacy watchdogs flipped out again some time ago when Acxiom announced their new Relevance-X “revolutionary online advertising network” that helps advertisers better target their audience based on cookies placed on customers’ computers, cookies that contain sensitive information instead of chocolate chips as the majority of users would expect. Acxiom said that the cookie is stuffed only with gender, zip code and cluster status info. Yeah!
But customer privacy has been an issue for some time now. About 7 years ago or so Amazon has been sent to the corner for discriminatory pricing based on customer profiling. The bad boy DoubleClick has been the protagonist of some complaints when they planed to link consumers' names and addresses with Internet surfing habits. Not to mention a sound slap on the Facebook when they launched a marketing program that let companies target messages based on what their friends buy and do online.
Even the GYM triangle Google, Yahoo and Microsoft got their share of boo’s until they removed key pieces of personal information about the search requests stored in the computers.
How Acxiom keeps up with my life? They routinely mine phone books, voter lists, property records, warranty cards and other data to profile and categorize about 130 million households across the
Anyway, for those who want to take themselves more seriously here are some tips about how to keep personal information as personal as possible. My favorite: treat your laptop and phone computer like cash. Never leave them unsupervised or somebody may trade them for some booze. Or anything else your credit card can buy.
If this is not enough to get you paranoid think of this: where does your information go to every time you subscribe to a magazine, order a pizza, when you make a donation to charity, enter a sweepstakes contest, or give you phone number to a store cashier? Maybe you don’t really want to know… Reality beats the movie by far. And if you think, it used to be funny how Bruce Willis’ cab knew everything about him in The Fifth Element movie. I don’t feel like laughing now. Do you?
Orwell was right. Somebody’s always watching. Google might be indexing this page right now…
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Some AdWords Tips the Smart Girl Will Give You for Free
Let me put myself together for a second. These days I got to think in Adwords copy lines. My thoughts became short sentences, capitalized at almost every word longer than 2 characters. I am thoughtful as I’ve never been before in less than two by 35 characters. Plus some for the header. And now, as thoughtful as I feel, I need to share my learnings. In less than 100 characters, it could sound like this:
Anything to Make’em Click
Say Whatever Makes’em Happy as Long
as They Buy This Ad in. Click Me Now!
www.Adboolsheet.com
But I am excited, it’s pretty awesome to have such power to put a whole business philosophy, pricing strategy, CRM and Mission Statement in just few simple words. To be successful there are three stages to go: “Look at Me”, “Click Me Through” and “Buy Me Now”. To achieve these three goals, one has to pour his/her heart into the message as follows:
1. As a great marketer once said: don’t treat your customers like idiots but don’t forget for a second that this is what they are. In other words, no GMAT or GRE vocabulary allowed, don’t compete with Tolstoi or Hemingway, and don’t expect even the slightest effort or initiative from your visitor.
2. You have to tell your visitor what to do without them guessing that you actually tell them what to do. There is no better training than a marriage for this skill.
3. Offer everything and the moon at no charge. Or any offer it seems it cannot be beat.
4. Say the truth and truth only in order to build trust but enhance it with unbelievable stories, and count on pride and envy. “How to Be More Beautiful than Paris Hilton” or “Want to have $1 million by next Monday working just 5 minutes a day?” are lines that always work.
5. ”Curiosity killed the cat but made the marketer rich” applies today as always, so don’t be afraid to use words like “mystery”, “secret” or the three dots strategy... There is a CSI buried in anybody, ready to be dug out.
6. For God sake, don’t ever imply that the visitor has to do something! Make it look like what you offer will just fall on their lap once they click.
7. Don’t repeat words in your ad. It looks dumb if you are not able to fill up two lines without repeating yourself. Like I just did.
8. Think like the guy you want to impress. If you target an idiot then write your message like a 5th grader. Anything to make it above the fold.
9. Make friends with “free” guy and do not let yourself be seen with “buy” dude in your ads. It looks like you’d want to sell something!
10. Look at your competitors’ ads. Using the keywords that you smartly came up with, research how competition wrote their top 3 ads.
If nothing works, try the last argument:
“If You Don’t Click Here, Your Mother-in-law Will Show up at Your Door. Naked”.
I could’ve put more advice here but I didn’t want to waste all my tricks on one visit only. And nonetheless, I like the American 10 steps learning strategies for anything. I could’ve come up with some acronyms though… I’ll find something for next time!
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Heroes happened in Nashville!
I happened to be in
I am no programmer or anything as dangerous and I still had lots of fun. Watching the whole event as an outsider I came to think about what this Microsoft phenomenon is about. Everybody present there hates their products. But they are there, even though mostly for the free software. It’s very interesting Microsoft relationship with their most important customers. The conferences Microsoft organizes for any reason all over the country (and probably around the world) targeted towards IT professionals, developers, and such. They are the early adopters and the influencers; they ultimately decide who’s going to use which program. They set the trend. So they get the free software. They will get the crack somewhere on the Internet anyway...
The other thing that makes me like Microsoft is how natural and genuine they brag about their new breakthrough and breathtaking new technology that is not new at all. Their tactic of rebranding stuff that’s been around for awhile and more importantly to convince the world to buy that stuff amazes me again and again. To paraphrase one of the speakers during a Visual Studio demonstration: It’s magical, it works!
Speaking of Visual Studio, Microsoft says that the next generation of web apps will be faster and easier to develop, more efficient, and a damn-awesome user experience. My friend who’s not only a computer genius but a wise computer genius stated that what Microsoft wants is to make everybody programming without writing any code.
I don’t know much about computers, I ain’t no Master of Windows, but I think Microsoft has a marketing strategy to look up to and take notes from. Their software? Maybe the geeky speaker was right commenting his colleague demonstration: I think you just proved your code sucks?
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Welcome to my Zzlog!
I am reading about all kinds of derivates from the original blog-thing. First there was this weblog which is a kind of a blog. Kinda cool but it’s such a long word! Let’s make it short, let’s call it blog! There you are. Since then nothing stayed the same. Now there are Splogs and Flogs. A splog is a spam blog where the articles are fake, scraped from God-knows-what-other-website, the only reason for its miserable existence being to feed the hunger of the search engines. Oh, well. The other fake blog –oh, sorry, flog -is a clever marketing means. Companies pretending they are customers brag about their miracle-product. You cannot even trust a blog nowadays.
Hence, I will brand my blogs, and I will call them Zzlogs! Why? Why not??
How an AdWords campaign is born
We hid the beers but we left the documents open!Last weekend, in the Loop, I met my teammates to build the AdWords campaign that we chose to do for Ramona Design Studio.
During this session I took some pictures, to prove everybody that is not an easy thing to come up with a successful ad campaign.
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