[Interview and Article by Kevin Newcomb, Editor, Internet Marketing Institute]

Many companies spend tens of thousands of dollars to acquire customers, but ignore what happens next. Paying attention to your landing pages — whether it’s for pay-per-click (PPC) ads, email campaigns, or banner ads — is one of the most-neglected online marketing tactics. But creating custom landing pages, then testing and optimizing them, holds a lot of potential for increasing conversions, and therefore revenue.

“People don’t fundamentally believe that conversion optimization will work. If they did, they’d jump all over it,” said Lance Loveday, CEO of Closed Loop Marketing and co-author of Web Design for ROI. “The truth is, it can have a game-changing impact on revenue and profitability.”

Most marketers have heard the buzz around landing page optimization (LPO), a part of the larger discipline of conversion optimization. Many marketers have also heard hyped-up claims of two- or three-fold jumps in conversions, and are not convinced that small changes can have a big impact on their conversion rates.

While those kinds of returns are possible, in extreme circumstances, such drastic increases are not necessary to make conversion optimization worthwhile, Loveday said.

[... Read the complete interview on PPCSummit.com > ]

Last week while at SES San Jose, I took a break from being a panel jockey and meeting meister to talk about Google AdWords campaigns with Dr. Ralph Wilson of Web Marketing Today. This interview covers what I consider to be the Top 10 steps anyone using Google AdWords should take to dramatically improve their results.

Check out the two-part video interview here:
www.wilsonweb.com/paid-search/loveday-dominate-adwords.htm.

Enjoy, and let me know your thoughts and comments.

If you are managing PPC across the three major search engines, I would guess that your budget allocation looks very similar to many of our clients’ –  ~75% to Google, ~15% to Yahoo and ~10% to MSN.

And honestly, that’s being pretty generous to the latter two, unfortunately.

Truth be told, as happy as I am with Google (no seriously… minus some frustrations, I really am), for the sake of diversification I would very much like to see our spend more evenly distributed.  Similar to investing for retirement, it is worrisome to have too many eggs in one basket.

But, alas, I don’t see any major shift in spend among these three Tier 1 engines happening anytime in the near future… if ever.  The search volume from Google, combined with the ease of their platform, the robustness of their reporting tools among other pluses leaves us pretty much addicted to Google.

But what about the 2nd tier PPC engines, comprised of platforms such as Ask.com, Business.com, 7Search and others?  Is this a source of diversification worth exploring?

Results from Tier 2 engines are mixed as you can see from PPC Hero’s recent survey that asked ‘Which second tier PPC search engine has generated the best results for you?’.  31% of advertisers have never tried a 2nd tier engine.  16% of advertisers said that none of the Tier 2 engines have ever worked well for them. But there are some bright spots like Ask.com and Business.com that are producing results for some:

Until 1/2 year ago I would have been among that 16% who had tried 2nd tier engines, but not seen good results.  Recent experience, though, lands me happily in the purple piece of the pie.  We have actually seen some great results for some of our B2B clients on Business.com and are excited about the unique features this platform provides!  If you are a B2B advertiser and you have not yet explored Business.com, now is the time to do so for a number of reasons.

Reason #1: Data Speaks.  Here are last month’s PPC results for one of our clients.  As you will note, Business.com is the 2nd highest campaign for lead volume and the cost per lead is $22 less than Google:

Reason #2:  Cool Features. Business.com has some unique features that make this a pretty sweet channel to include in your marketing mix.

For starters, you get a WHOLE 60 characters for your headline and 150 characters for your description!  Holy PPC, this is like Christmas for those of us who are used to squeezing in 95 characters total into an AdWords box!

Second, it is not a blind auction.  You can actually view the top 5 bids to help make judgments about what to bid yourself.  There are pros and cons to this, but I have to say that I personally find this to be a nice mini-vacation away from the blind auction/quality scoring black box.

But what I like best about Business.com, is the option to include ‘Multlinks’, or multiple landing pages/calls-to-action as such:

Reason #3:   New Conversion Tracking. The clincher.  For those of you who have steered away from Business.com in the past due to their lack of conversion tracking, those days are gone.  Granted in beta, you can now track your listings to conversion and ROI data:

So will Business.com work well for all B2B advertisers?  Absolutely not - among our clients, the results have been mixed thus far.  As with any channel, you’ll need to test, track, analyze and refine to determine if Business.com is a viable marketing channel for your organization.

Best of luck if you decide to diversify and venture down the Tier 2 path - Business.com or otherwise.  Feel free to share your experiences, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

I’m not a big fan of TV. But my wife and I decided to cancel our satellite TV service effective next week, so I’ve found myself watching more TV than ever recently, trying to squeeze the most out of my remaining days. I guess Cinderella was right: You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.

Anyhow, my wife and I cracked up the other night at a TV commercial that’s had me laughing ever since. The commercial involves two characters: a guy and a llama. The guy (who looks suspiciously llama-like himself) chews on a Starburst, which makes him look exactly like the llama chewing cud (or whatever llamas eat). Then you see the guy’s arm feeding the llama a Starburst, which it continues chewing. Then when the shot switches back to the guy, you see a llama’s arm (Leg? Paw? Hoof?) reach up and feed the guy a Starburst. It’s unexpected and funny, which makes it memorable. I’d argue that it’s a rare example of a TV ad that does a brilliant job of branding.

It did this by appealing to multiple senses. Most TV ads use both video and audio, thus playing to our sense of sight and sound. This ad went further by playing off the unique chewiness of Starburst candy in such a funny way. It was easy to imagine being the funny-looking guy, chewing the candy yourself (touch), savoring the flavor (taste) and inhaling the aroma (smell) with your llama-esque nose.

The essence of branding

Branding has been on my mind a lot lately because I just finished reading “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” by Martin Lindstrom. It’s a fascinating book that provides great insight into how branding really works in the minds of consumers. It also explains how most companies get branding wrong by continuing to focus on stale advertising tactics and logo design instead of engaging consumers’ senses and emotions. The author conducted research using brain scanning technology to see how consumers really react to various types of stimuli associated with brands. It’s a very compelling read that yields some eye-opening takeaways about how human beings are wired.

… Read the full article on Search Engine Land >

As an SEM practitioner, I am a self-proclaimed fan of Google AdWords.  I love the ease of their platform, I love the depth of their reporting, I love our dedicated Google agency team and I especially love the ROI that Google AdWords drives for our clients.   To be honest, Adwords management is a dream compared to the other major PPC engines.

But while there are many things to praise Google for, I’m not totally naive.  Google is a business.  A BIG business.  One that needs to continue to make money and grow in order to appease stakeholders and further secure their dominance.

As a result, Google doles out some advice to its advertisers that is questionable at times.  Not to mention, some of their account defaults make it all-too-easy to run a less-than-optimal campaign if you are a newbie to the game.  In short, not everything that Google puts out there is in the interest of the advertiser.

Here are four examples of when you should think twice about blindly following Google’s defaults and advice:

“Optimizing” Ads to CTR (Google revenue), rather than conversion (your revenue)

When setting up a Google account there is an option to ‘Optimize’ your ads or to ‘Rotate’ your ads.  Upon first thought, you might think that ‘optimize’ sure does sound nice.  And hey, it has already been chosen for you by default so why argue?  Google states that this will simply allow you to ’show better performing ads more often’.  They even explicitly state it is ‘Recommended’.

In actuality, if you are an advertiser whose primary goal is to maximize conversion (sales, leads, etc) then the ‘Optimize’ default is not for you.  Why?  Because ‘optimize’ by Google’s definition means serving the ads that have the highest click-through rate (CTR), NOT the highest conversion rate.

Why would Google push for ads that have the highest click-through rate?  Well, at least partially because ads that get more clicks produce more revenue for Google.  Google will also make the point that ads with a higher CTR are more relevant and therefore provide a better user experience.  But it’s hard to completely ignore the Google revenue incentive. (Read the full article…)