Negative Keywords for your PPC ads

Negative keywords can be used to prevent your ads displaying when those keywords are contained in the user’s search query (or contained in the content, if your ads are showing on the content network).

Why would you want to do this?

1. Avoid useless traffic
2. Avoid embarrassment
3. Improve your click-thru ratio and conversion rate

You can apply negative keyword at campaign or account level. Most of the keywords you’d enter will probably be best at account level.

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Think Guerilla

Last weekend, with beautiful blue skies overhead, I went to the Prague Food Festival held in the gardens below the castle.

It seems I mistimed my visit however. The Festival’s version of crowd control was to close the gates for up to 2 hours at a time. They’d used this tactic before, last year, too. Imagine what an opportunity 200 hungry foodies standing in a line represents to build good-will (or even earn money) for an enterprising restaurant with some spare capacity.

Whenever there’s an event taking place on your turf, don’t just think you’re limited to playing by the organiser’s rules and spending money on buying a stand, stall or what have you. Some of the most memorable advertising around world sporting events has been by non-sponsors – freed from paying out vast sums to the event organisers, more budget can be directed to the creative and the media buy. We’ll be seeing the same again for the World Cup in South Africa. So-called ambush marketing is the big brands’ advertising version of guerilla marketing. If you’re a small business marketer, try thinking guerilla.

Who bought all the ads?

If you’ve noticed recently that the vast majority of the ads you’re seeing on sites that use Google’s Adsense programme for their advertising slots are for the same company? You’re probably being ‘retargeted‘ (remarketed in Google’s parlance) to.

What is retargeting?

Say you go to a website, in my case, Mydomain.com. You look around, but don’t buy anything on that visit (I was just checking my account). Shortly thereafter you’re browsing the web and you start to notice banner ads for that website. Everywhere. You’ve been retargeted. How this works, technically, is the advertiser (mydomain.com for example) has a bit of javascript code on their website that tells Google Adwords that they’d like to retarget you – putting you onto a list that forms a target-able audience in the Adwords interface. Subsequently whenever you’re on a Google ‘content network’ site (site with AdSense) you might see these ads.

Why am I seeing these same ads so often?

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iLike Ads

I like ads. Always have done. Good ones that is. As a teenager my walls were decorated with framed mini-proofs of poster campaigns that my dad worked on. There are some very effective TV and cinema campaigns that I enjoy watching, where each ad is part of a serial and I look forward to the next execution.

Are there any web ads I’d place in the same category? Web ads I’d mention to a friend ‘hey have you seen the latest Acme Widgets banner?’ Um, nope. Mostly they annoy the hell out of me, they make noises or enlarge, unbidden when I mouse over them, (hey. Wired, I’m looking at you) and worst of all are designed to hijack my attention and take me away from the content I want to read.

But the iAds that are demoed in this Stevenote (skip to 45 mins in unless you want to learn about the new features in iPhone OS 4.0), now they looked like the kind of advertising I wouldn’t mind on my phone.

Essentially they’re small ads when when clicked open in a layer over the app you were in. Then what you have could be described as a mini-app within the app, or a micro-site (depends on what paradigm you’re familiar with). Except unlike a standard micro-site there appears to be the ability to interact with the iPhone on a relatively meaningful level – like setting the wallpaper on your iPhone. I can only guess at the other possibilities.

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Political Advertising Judo

This story has a bit of everything for anyone with an eye on contemporary advertising practice: crowdsourcing, cultural in-jokes and a parody ad.

Labour invited supporters to submit ideas for poster ads, and the winner was:

For the uninitiated (non-Brits) out there, that’s David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party (Her Majesty’s Opposition Party) atop the bonnet hood of an Audi Quattro. It’s not really him, it’s just his head on the body of Gene Hunt, a character from the television series Ashes to Ashes. Hunt is a no-nonsense politically incorrect detective.

The inference is that the Conservatives want to take the country back to the 1980s, a time which is synonymous, in their collective history, with the miner’s strikes and the removal of government props for lacklustre nationalised companies.

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Your cat will love outdoor advertising

EuroAWK have a fun campaign at the moment, mashing up fake ads to create amusing, attention grabbing posters like this.

Elementary Advertising

Sometimes an opportunity comes along that’s just too good to pass up. This Czech car security company put an active or passive device in your car that makes finding it much more likely (98% success rate, and they list the cars they’ve recovered, to prove it works). They’re called Sherlog and they’ve been running ads like this all over town, coinciding with the cinema release of the Sherlock Holmes movie. I’ve no idea as to the backstory here – whether Sherlog are paying for all the ad placement costs or splitting it, but it’s a fun tie-in. The slogans are “Nothing escapes them” and “Nothing escapes us” respectively. Well done Sherlog!

Nobody seeks out vague promises

As marketers we all love to promise the earth but you need to be able deliver on what you’re offering. If you need to use weasel words and internal jargon to qualify your promises, you’re doing it wrong.

When you see an advert for flatscreen TVs offering a ‘free Blu-Ray player with selected TVs’ – what’s your thought process? Is it ‘ooh, I’m gonna get a free Blu-Ray player’ or is it ‘I bet the one I want doesn’t come with a free Blu-Ray player’. How about a sale sign that offers ‘Up to 50% off’? I guess it depends on whether you’re a glass half-full or half-empty kind of person. Maybe you get a nice surprise or maybe you’re disappointed. The one thing that word ‘selected’ doesn’t do is fill you with confidence because it immediately creates a doubt in your mind.

Customers don’t know what ‘selected’ means in that context, they don’t know what a company’s ‘primary service areas’ are. All they know is that the company wants their offer to sound good whilst leaving some wiggle room. Customers don’t care about a company’s ability to squirm out of providing something. They want what they’re promised.

Under-promise, over-deliver
That’s what we should aim for. That’s what gets customers telling their friends about us. The opposite can make people talk about us for all the wrong reasons.

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Tighten up your PPC strategy

Many small businesses love Google’s self-serve Adwords programme. Just sign up, create an ad, choose some keywords or let Google choose them for you, get traffic, pay the invoice.

Not so fast!
That’s all nice and simple but there are a few things you could be doing to make sure you’re getting the maximum juice from the squeeze.

Google is your friend. Sort of.
Google wants you to get some traffic, Google even provide you with tools to measure that traffic optimally. They even push you to do the most you can with the traffic you’re paying for, but the last thing Google are going to do is voluntarily reduce the amount of revenue they make.

It’s all about the conversions
If you’re not paying attention to the conversions (whether that is orders or leads) that you get from your Adwords spend, you need to, right now. You can track things internally if you like – assuming your content management system’s lead forms or your e-commerce platform show you all the ways someone got to your site (for extra credit, not just last-click tracking too). If that’s not possible, Adwords provides conversion tracking for you. You set up a conversion, add a bit of javascript to the conversion page (final page of checkout or contact form sent page) and you’re done. Conversions will be tracked right down to the campaign, ad group, ad variation and keyword that brought you the sale or lead. Once you know what’s working, do more of that, and less of the keywords and ad variations that are bleeding you dry.

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When a meme goes too far

On this week’s Beancast the topic of viral vs memes came up, I won’t spoil the show for you, but to sum up the host’s question, “is there too much pressure on creatives to come up with something that becomes a meme?”

It reminded me of a meme from the 90s that definitely went too far -- Tango’s ‘You know when you’ve been tangoed’

- For my non-British readers, Tango is an orange (also available in other flavours) soft drink.

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