Last Thursday, Adwords started offering remarketing options. I heard about remarketing first in Maui, during Jonathan Mizel’s presentation. A couple of big advertising companies were already offering it. It sounded interesting enough to put it high on my “must check out” list. But now it is available through Adwords, so I started using it right away.
Continue reading
You’ve probably heard this age-old piece of marketing wisdom before:
“Sell benefits, not features”
In general, this is good advice. But in the software world, it is not always the best approach. In some situations, pushing your features will sell better. I encountered a situation like that a while ago.
It all depends on your product, your target audience and your sources of website traffic.
Continue reading
In the past seven days I have been testing these headlines against each other:
Version A, emotional, benefit-oriented:
Starting right now, you will enjoy a perfectly organized DVD collection…
Movie Collector Instantly Catalogs Your DVD & Blu-Ray discs.
You’ll Save Time and Money Today.
Finally Have Total Control Over Your Movie Collection.
Version B, practical, feature-oriented:
Automatic DVD Database Software for Windows, Mac OS X & iPhone
Movie Collector Automatically Catalogs Your DVD Collection.
Just Enter Movie Titles or Scan DVD Barcodes.
Instantly Download All Movie Details and Cover Images.
Google has a new interface for the Adwords system. It is still in beta and you can try it by choosing the “New Interface (beta)” link at the top in your Adwords account.
I have been using the new UI for a week now. Here’s my first impressions:
Continue reading
Here’s a quick update on my Content Network adventures.
Up till now I have been using keyword targeting only. And I have been running Placement Reports to find “bad” sites, so that I could exclude them using site exclusions.
But now my campaigns have run for a few months, my ads are being shown on thousands of sites. There is no way I can go through and exclude the all bad ones.
I have removed the high volume bad sites which helps a bit, but there’s load’s of bad ones in the long tail too. Some of em even generating lots of clicks and thus costing me money.
(BTW: when I say “bad sites”, I mean “somewhat relevant” sites that are not performing plus sites that are simply not relevant.)
So now I am trying placement targeting. I am using the Placement Report for my keyword targeted ads to find good sites (based on relevance, number of conversions, clicks and impressions). Then I create new placement targeted ad groups to target just those sites.
Here’s my findings on both methods:
Continue reading
Let me tell you about my experience so far with Google’s Content Network.
Of course, when I started out with Adwords in 2002 I made the same mistake everyone makes: leaving the Content Network switched ON for all campaigns. Which got me lots of impressions of course, many clicks even, some (expensive) sales too.
Continue reading