Most people who have some experience with PPC marketing will be able to tell you all about ROI, CPCs, conversion tracking and the likes. They will also tell you that adcopy is important and that it is a good idea to test adcopy variations to see which one performs the best. But as adcopy goes, that is where most marketers’ knowledge stops.

Most aspects of PPC are easily quantifiable which is why this marketing channel is so successful. You can measure exactly how much revenue your advertising spend is generating. But beneath the clarity of ROI, there a lot variables (known and unknown) at play. Variables which cannot as easily be measured.

The Cinderella of these variables is definitely ‘the adcopy’. Although search engines do try their best to assign a quality score to the adcopy, this quality score is only relevant to the advertiser because of its impact on the eventual CPC. It is nearly impossible to measure the impact of the adcopy on the psyche of the search engine user.

Forget about your portfolio of keywords, your adcopy is what users will eventually see in their search results. It is your virtual shop window and you should take great care in designing it. Unfortunately, search engines often have different ideas of what constitutes good adcopy.

For instance sometimes adcopy with a relatively low CTR proves to have an excellent conversion rate. This would be the type of adcopy preferable to an advertiser, because it reduces the amount of unqualified traffic. In a PPC model however, search engines have little incentive to reward adcopy with low CTRs. Cost per Acquisition (CPA) models should therefore gain more and more ground in the future as they align quality scores with advertisers’ goals.

Untill that happens though (Google’s CPA model is only in beta so far) don’t give up on experimenting with your adcopy. I would always focus on adcopy that converts best, and ignore quality scores initially. Once you know what it is that entices your visitors to convert, you can always try to make your adcopy more search engine friendly or create dedicated landing pages tailored to your adcopy.

By taking this approach, we managed in some cases to create adcopy with a CTR and conversion rate identical to the initial one but with an average CPC that was 30% less (and this without altering the keyword bids). Just play with the length and the phrasing of your ads without changing its meaning and you will be surprised at the impact on your CPCs.

Some people like to ignore adcopy optimization because of its unquantifiable properties but when you think of it, it is what makes search engine marketing an art rather than ‘just’ science.

Thanks to Vinny for this one, I just had to post it almost as is - a great repository of CSS goodies, not to mention the rest the site has to offer:

CSS is important. And it is being used more and more often. Cascading Style Sheets offer many advantages you don’t have in table-layouts - and first of all a strict separation between layout, or design of the page, and the information, presented on the page. Thus the design of pages can be easily changed, just replacing a css-file with another one. Isn’t it great? Well, actualy, it is.

Over the last few years web-developers have written many articles about CSS and developed many useful techniques, which can save you a lot of time - of course, if you are able to find them in time. Below you’ll find a list of techniques we , as web-architects, really couldn’t live without. They are essential and they indeed make our life easier. Let’s take a look at 53 CSS-based techniques you should always have ready to hand if you develop web-sites. - http://www.smashingmagazine.com

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/01/19/53-css-techniques-you-couldnt-live-without/

eMarketer released a report on the state of online marketing in Canada this month and it made me wonder about the state of the online economy in Clicks2customers’ home country, South Africa. Why? Because a few weeks ago Google arrived in South Africa. This probably doesn’t really impress the seasoned online marketers in more developed countries. But down here, it is a big thing. And Google seems to be very serious about the South African online market.

At first sight it doesn’t make sense though, Canada has a population roughly two thirds the size of South Africa’s, broadband penetration is 60% and 63% of its people use the internet. And yet according to eMarketer, online marketing in Canada has struggled to take off.

In comparison, according to a local study, only 1.5% of South Africa’s population has access to broadband and an additional 6.5% connect via other means. More shockingly, the projected growth in internet usage for 2007 is a paltry 3%.

So why has Google set up shop in the country? Surely they will go after the ‘traditional’ online marketing budgets for paid search and adsense but I am convinced Google is also using South Africa as an experimental playground for their mobile strategy.

Cellphone penetration in the country this year reached 70%, as high as in the US. But unlike in the US, for many South Africans a cellphone is their only gateway to the internet. This provides Google with a user base that is comfortable with the mobile experience and does not have pc-based online habits (habits that would be tough to alter in seasoned broadband users) .

Having seen a demo of Google’s Android platform, I think it has the potential to create an online revolution in our country by making iPhone-like features available to a wide (and hopefully cheaper) range of handsets. And don’t forget, economically and demographically, South Africa is often compared with other developing countries such as India and Brazil. If Google manages to crack the South African mobile market, they probably breeze into other developing countries too, giving them prime access to more than a billion mobile users.

I don’t believe Google is in South Africa for philanthropic reasons, they are here to make money. And they might just strike it big…

Picture the scene, New York June 2007, I’m attending the LinkShare Symposium. An advertiser approaches says he has heard good things aboutClicks2Customers. He wants to know whether Clicks2Customers would be interested in working as an affiliate driving paid search traffic to his site; a site that would go on to win a golden link award that night. The advertiser was a large brand and niche with large product set which would provide multiple search permutations – a perfect fit to match Clicks2Customers capabilities.  The only stumbling block would be, could I get…  would he give…  access to the display URL? I answered in the affirmative, but explained that we only ever work if we could drive traffic directly to the display URL. So no jump pages or white labels; direct traffic only. He thought about this for a few seconds and then responded “what a novel approach”; seems no one had asked him for direct access before!!

So why have we as affiliates stopped asking? My belief is that it became too hard. The display URL is the Holy Grail and increasingly agencies and internal teams have made it their sacred domain. The reason given to the business decision maker, to restrict display URL is twofold. By the agency the reason usually provided is “ownership and management of the brand” and by the internal team its “to ensure their business does not pay an affiliate for traffic that they would have captured anyway as all the affiliate isdoing is stealing impressions from the internal team”.

So display URL s became increasingly restricted to the paid search affiliate channels and the agencies and internal teams won the war without a shot being fired! Should we blame the advertisers for making what we deem as rash decisions? No I say blame the affiliate who gave up so surprisingly meekly; surprising when one looks at the profile of the top affiliates – entrepreneurs that had been pioneers in the search industry.

It’s time we stood up and challenged the agency, challenged the internal team. For too long these two parties have managed paid search campaigns with all the protection needed to succeed; yet I can guarantee that 90% of all campaigns run by agencies and internal teams are run poorly. The business has no way of benchmarking whether the current incumbent is as good as the incumbent says he is. I believe the real reason that agencies and internal teams want complete control over the display URL is that they would be found wanting by any decent paid search affiliate.

Let’s challenge the current beliefs. Let’s educate the business owners. Affiliates will drive incremental traffic to a site given the display URL. They say all we will do is take impression away from them. I question what the price is that they are paying for that traffic. Bid on broad keywords at high cost per click and you will get lots of traffic. Does this mean you are running a good campaign? – NO!! It means you know how to waste money. And when ROI is questioned, search gets blamed as being too competitive; Google gets blamed for raising minimum CPCs. I say look at the team running the campaign. My tip to the business owner is look at what percentage of traffic is captured on the broads. If it’s a high percentage than you are paying too much for the cost per click and your conversion rates will be suffer. Should a high percentage of traffic be captured on the exact match then give your team a raise. Let’s challenge the business owner to test the team with the spoils going to the victor.

So many times when I’m surfing the internet, perhaps via a Google search, I come across an ugly looking error page because the page used to exist that was indexed by the search engine. Immediately I push the back button and check out the other search results.

Surely it would have been better if they had created a prettier error page within their web-site

template to increase the chances of me staying at their website.

Websites evolve and get re-designed, URL’s change and search engines still keep the older websites URL’s indexed for a while. If a permanent redirect (301) has not been created for an older URL that is indexed in a search engine, you bound to get visitors landing upon an error page. So the choice is yours - Would it not be better create a customised 404 page which includes your branding as a safety net?

… Surely then you would not lose all your visitors trust as if you were sending them to the default ugly version that web servers generate.

I’m sure the web is full of resources on creating prettier customised 404 Error Pages.

The current trends in the search engine marketing industry resemble the history of the diamond mining industry in South Africa. In the early days, anyone with a shovel could try his luck and start digging. Very much like the boom in affiliate marketing not so very long ago. But as the shallows sands of the Northern Cape yielded lower and lower returns, the opportunists left for greener pastures. Little did they know that underneath the rock layer much richer diamonds deposits were to be found. But mining these deposits required skill, technology and professionalism.

Today, the rush of affiliate marketing is over. It is increasingly more difficult for affiliates to compete profitably with other players in the market. Not only because companies place tighter restrictions on their affiliate terms, but also because traditional advertiser companies have smelled blood and they are using their deep pockets to corrupt the efficiencies of the affiliate model.

A bold statement perhaps, but we see evidence of this almost every day. The incumbent agencies have woken up to the fact that search engine marketing is not a fad and they are leveraging their client relationships to increase their search marketing portfolios. What they lack is the understanding of a marketing model which is performance driven and they tend to massively overprice their keywords. I find that traditional agencies are more often than not wasting their clients’ money and that they find it hard to catch up with pure-play search engine marketers in this fast moving segment.

The current state will only be a transition period because online, it is hard to hide poor performance. In the end, the pioneers who learned the ropes during the affiliate diamond rush will prove invaluable to traditional marketers and their clients alike to profitably mine the potential of the online consumer base.

No one imagined back in 1998 how a tiny start-up would turn out to be a global leader in the search industry in less than a decade! Yahoo must still be feeling like fools for agreeing to put Google’s search box on its home page, giving their users a taste of what was to come. A move that would prove to have cataclysmic consequences for a once successful leader in its field. In a classic failure of foresight, they turned down an offer to buy Page & Brin’s search technology for a paltry $1.6m. And where was Microsoft?

But is Google’s search technology still that much better than any other search engine? Is it not perhaps a case of Google’s brand being so dominant & well known that users are automatically turning to it to conduct their searches? In fact, Google is so widely used that the Oxford English Dictionary has added it as a verb (“Google it” To use the Google search engine to find information on the Internet. To search for information about (a person or thing) using the Google search engine).

While Google draws 60% of searches worldwide with its closest competitor (Yahoo) at 14% the percentage of users who return to the top 3 sites places Google’s lead in a different perspective: Although Google enjoys a 79% rate of return, Yahoo  & Microsoft are not far behind at 69% & 65% respectively (Nielsen/NetRatings). Added to this, a recent University of Michigan study showed that Yahoo has surpassed Google in terms of customer satisfaction! (Google doesn’t seem too concerned about this!)

While Google enjoys 82% of search queries in Germany, both the French & German governments are planning to inject a combined $387 million into search engine research. In China, the biggest emerging online market, Google receives only 17% of queries & in Japan it trails behind Yahoo. The Japanese government is also funding local search efforts to the tune of $125 million.

The question is: “Will Google be able to sustain its position as a market leader & be the fairest search engine of all?”

Social networking, through sites like MySpace & FaceBook, has become enormously popular. In fact social networking has become more popular than online porn! (Wives & girlfriends all across the world are sleeping easier at night…) Google has been quick enough to slap down $900 million for the right to provide search & serve ads on MySpace. They clearly take note of the projected ad spend of $2 billion on social networking sites in 2010. In addition they are determined to fight Facebook by unveiling an open-standard for developers to create applications that will work on a number of social networking sites. This move will give Google access to over 100 million additional users!

And it doesn’t end there: Google is entering the world of wireless technology. Clearly their intention is to entrench their position even further in both search & online advertising. Google will be providing the software that will be installed on handsets under the open source licensing model. A move that does not sit well with companies like Microsoft, Palm or Symbian that have invested vast amounts of money in developing operating software for mobile phones.

While many market leaders have had their bubble burst, the likes of Novell, Lotus & AOL come to mind, my money is on Google. I believe they will find a way of managing to stay at the forefront of their business (& that of many others’) even if it means gobbling up smaller companies that may pose a risk, for a few pieces of silver.

Ah, copywriting. Who could imagine a better occupation than writing about some of the loveliest hotels in the world? Imagine yourself languishing in elegantly furnished hotel rooms of Victorian Grande Dames set in the lush forests of exotic islands. When I work, I picture endless white beaches that stretch out to eternity, framed by magnificent sheer cliffs and sparkling azure waters and palm trees. What could be easier than writing about luxurious international hotels whose names roll off the tongue like champagne and caviar?

Now imagine being asked to write about one hundred of these gems without using the words “elegant”, “lush”, “exotic”, “white”, magnificent”, “azure”, and “luxurious”. Not so easy anymore is it?

Thesaurus.com is a wonderful website but at the same time being a completely useless one. Take the word “beautiful” as an example. Type in the word “beautiful” and it gives you fifty synonyms of the word in the context that I need it and twenty of them are unusable. I can hardly describe a five-star hotel in New York as “nice” or “pulchritudinous” now can I? Yet I go back, time after time, with the vain hope that this time, I will find that elusive synonym that has evaded capture for my last forty attempts.
If you scroll down you find more interesting synonyms of the word, in their various contexts. In one case, the word “stacked” is an actual synonym for “beautiful”, as is “piece” and “hopped up”. None of this helps me in the least except to shorten my ever-looming deadline after my curiosity has yet again spurred my navigation ever onward.

Copywriting is a great job even when it does seem like the synonyms are winning. After all, I get to take a holiday to wherever I want to go every time that I sit down to work.

Not everyone may like former internet and securities analyst Henry Blodget but generally I find his blog refreshingly honest and independent. Recently Blodget contemplated how long Google’s phenomenal growth could last. After all, it is easier to get to the top than to stay there and Yahoo and Microsoft are showing an increasingly dogged determination to reclaim some of the market share they have lost to Google over the past years.

Despite heavy investments in other areas, Google still makes almost all of its revenue from those familiar text ads and Blodget questioned how much longer it could maintain its stellar growth as advertisers are faced with increasing CPCs and decreasing marginal returns. Both Yahoo and MSN on the other hand have still relatively low CPCs so advertiser are incentivised to migrate some of their budgets to these search engines. But the response from search engine marketers was almost unanimous: despite lower margins, Google is able to deliver traffic volumes unmatched by its rivals and therefore it is simply not an option not to advertise on Google. Our experience is similar: outside the US, Google is almost the only search engine that matters, apart from a few local companies such as Baidu in China.

In the US, Yahoo and to a lesser extent MSN can deliver additional volume to mature campaigns but Google is generally the first choice when it comes to launching campaigns. In addition to volume, Google Adwords offers ease of use. This is not to be underestimated when managing many campaigns of various sizes. Yahoo and MSN completely rebuilt their advertising system in the past year but I can’t help feeling they somewhat missed the opportunity to offer simplicity. Just compare how long it takes to have a campaign up and running on Adwords vs. Panama (or -sigh- MSN).

All this admin is unnecessary overhead which adds to the hidden cost of running a campaign and it is something which Blodget didn’t incorporate in his argument. Google Adwords is not perfect and we regularly see peculiar behaviour that indicates that behind the scenes Google engineers do make mistakes. But the company is serious about search (and even more about search advertising) and seems far more proactive and aggressive defending its market dominance that its rivals appear attacking it. So although I won’t get into a discussion about whether Google’s market valuation is justified, I do believe that the company has not lost the drive and focus that made it thefifth biggest company in the US.

I cannot recall the first time I ever heard the word “Facebook” yet the website has a curious drawing to it hoarding millions of users a day. I like to call it “intrigue”. As an overprotected schoolgirl I would throw myself into chat rooms on sites like Yahoo and correspond with random individuals across the globe. Fond memories include a janitor of a school in India trying to be my “friend” and having two cyber boyfriends, one of whom from the USA wrote all the words to the Titanic theme on pink, frilly paper and posted them to me.

Waiting for emails to arrive from across the seas became my reason for getting out of my bed in the morning. It gave me a sense that I was maybe special because “Wade” in Arizona thought I was beautiful. Consequently, reality struck (and my father’s phone bills) and I lay low on the “social networking” side of the web. Until I met www.facebook.com. I often had people asking me “Are you on Facebook?” My disgusted response: “(Snort) NO!!!”

I found it sad that people would spend hours in front of a computer, waiting for someone to slap them around the face with a trout. Yet on a cold, rainy day in miserable July, I uploaded my picture on my profile and told people how I was feeling. And that was me and life as I know it… gone. Life as I knew it was all about to change.
So I am now what you could call “a Facebook user”. I have made friends with people who pulled my pigtails at age 11, fellow school mates and ex boyfriends who cheated on me. Yet with over a couple of hundred friends on Facebook, it is quite hard to keep in contact with each one.

This is where the “intrigue” part I spoke about earlier comes in. A select few friends who offer some excitement and meaning to one’s life are regularly corresponded with. Forget picking up the phone or getting in your car to take them out for dinner. You give them flowers for their virtual garden and wink at them using an application which mimics “bodily movements”. But what happened to the old fashioned “I’ll pick you up at six, dinner’s on me” line. Chivalry is dead it would seem because nobody needs to be chivalrous anymore. Social recognition is at one’s fingertips, literally as all you need is to move the mouse and type to be a complete social butterfly.

And with Facebook, stalking seems to be an inevitable problem.
More disturbing is the false sense of security one gains from Facebook. A girl who I fell out with at 14 is now my friend on Facebook. Having not spoken for over 10 years we now post funny pictures to each other. It would seem that a mutual understanding has been (falsely) created.

Out of the many friends that people collect into their “friends” stash, how many do they converse with regularly? Maybe 10%? The other 90% smile happily and are ignored. I myself have been victim to the “hey! I borrowed that girl’s lighter when I was in the queue for the loo at such and such a club! Lets be Facebook friends!” trend. This is followed by a description of how we were in the CIA until 1969 when we left to join a commune of hippies in our “how we know each other” column. It alarms me that when I meet up with my circle of friends, the one topic which always rises to the front of the conversation is Facebook. We are on the site all the time when we are apart and now we are spending time together in reality, we can only talk about a representation of reality.
Facebook may be an incredible social networking tool, but it is keeping us from the fundamental part of being sociable: spending time with people.

Communication may be occurring through Facebook but does facial expression count for nothing anymore? The world seems to be getting smaller and smaller. I poked a relative in the UK yesterday and I didn’t get on an aeroplane and fly 2000 miles to do it. I did it in my office! Distance, time, and mutual hatred seem unimportant and irrelevant when it comes to the Facebook race.

One hopes that this will not progress to a stage where communication in the present and physical is not needed. Upon starting Facebook, a friend of mine at work waved her finger at me and said “watch out for that site, you’ll lose your entire life to it”.

Maybe I should have listened.