Search Marketing InsiderPay Per Click, Social Media and SEO Strategies – An Internet Marketing Institute Publication

Often times the biggest barrier for launching campaigns targeting mobile devices is that advertisers do not know where to start or they are worried they do not have the right tools to get started. Sometimes the best solution is just to jump in and get your feet wet. If you are using Google Analytics, you can already get information on how mobile visitors are interacting with your site, so learn from that data move forward and optimize your campaigns for mobile. The below 5 frequently asked questions will help you get started and hit the ground running for launching mobile AdWords campaigns.

1. What if I do not have a designated mobile site or landing page?

You are not alone! Majority of websites lack mobile specific sites or dedicated mobile landing pages, but that should not keep you from testing mobile campaigns. Test your campaigns targeting mobile devices to see how user friendly your site is. If your site is generally functional, mobile is another opportunity to target your audience.

2. How do the mobile visitors I currently receive interact with my site?

Google Analytics has mobile specific reports that will allow you to see how mobile visitors currently interact with your site – because remember, even if you’re not specifically advertising to mobile devices, users are still likely to find you via organic search or directly navigate to you on their mobile device. The Google Analytics mobile reports are broken down by device and carrier, so advertisers can see the difference in engagement metrics for specific devices. Before you launch any mobile campaign, first take a deep dive into the analytics and see how your current mobile visitors are interacting with your site. If your bounce rates from mobile are very high, then this likely tells you that your website is not providing an optimal user experience because they are quickly leaving.

3. What keywords are people searching for on their mobile devices?

Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool allows you to understand mobile search volume for your target keywords. In the advanced settings of the Keyword Tool you have the option to select different devices under the “Show Ideas and Statistics for” section. For mobile keyword research, select the “Mobile devices with full internet browsers” to best understand keyword traffic from mobile devices.

Google Analytics is also a valuable tool to determine what current keywords are bringing traffic to your site from mobile devices. Create a custom report in Google Analytics, like the one below, for keyword data from mobile devices.

4. What types of AdWords campaigns should I test with mobile targeting?

If you are hesitant to launch mobile AdWords campaigns because of site usability concerns, try testing your branded campaign first. Since branded visitors tend to convert better than non-branded, testing a branded campaign can be a safe way to begin. If after launching your mobile campaign you determine that branded visitors are not interacting with your site in a positive way, this is an indicator that you might need to consider developing a dedicated mobile site. If branded customers can not navigate around your site, just think how customers unfamiliar with your brand will feel…

5. Ok, I’m ready to try it – now how do I create mobile AdWords campaigns?

If you are unsure where to start with AdWords mobile campaigns, Google recommends creating a mobile campaign that mirrors your existing desktop/laptop AdWords campaign. In AdWords Editor simply copy and paste your existing campaign, update the device targeting settings to mobile devices, then optimize for mobile performance (make updates to ad text, update bidding strategy, etc).  Once you have created the mobile campaign in Editor you can then go into the AdWords interface to define your targeting settings even further. For example, if you only want to target Android devices because you are promoting a product specific to users of the Android operating system, make sure to only check the Android box, as shown below.

When it comes to your PPC campaigns, testing is key and mobile campaigns are no exception to this rule. I hope the answers to these 5 frequently asked mobile questions will help in launching your new mobile campaigns. Still not sure about launching mobile AdWords campaign? Feel free to ask your questions in the comments below!

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Heather Schwartz, has been working as an Account Executive with Anvil Media, a Portland based SEM agency, since 2008 specializing in B2C ecommerce clients such as lucy activewear and non-profit clients like The Nature Conservancy, developing SEO, Social Media and PPC campaigns to increase clients’ online visibility and ROI.

Is your March Madness Bracket destroyed? Mine is. I had Ohio State walking away with a championship and VCU out in the first round! If there was any method to the “Madness”(get it?) then I would still have some hope in the office tournament.

Although you can’t predict or influence the NCAA basketball tournament you CAN influence how well you manage multiple PPC clients. Here are 8 things that I have found that help make managing multiple PPC clients easier:

• Create To Do Lists- Do you ever find yourself without a specific task and end up wandering from account to account checking on that days statistics? Do you do that multiple times a day?? If so go make a list now! I’ve found that making “to do” lists daily help focus me on important tasks, prioritize those tasks, then execute them. “Our priorities are most visible in how we use our time”, said Dallin H. Oaks. Make sure your time is being spent on your priorities!
• Focus On One Task at a Time- It takes time to shift your mind from one project to another. When you are doing that dozens of times a day it can add up to a lot of wasted time. Instead choose one task to focus on and complete it before you start or get distracted by anything else.
• Perform Audits- You may be checking on key performance indicators like cost, clicks, or conversions daily but you don’t take a deep look to make sure everything is running smoothly. To make sure there are no issues with our clients we perform scheduled audits for every client. This helps avoid any problems when things appear to be running smoothly.
• Calender Notifications- If your clients are like mine they often have explicit instructions on when and what they need for PPC. For starting and stopping projects for specific accounts I’ve found that setting calendar notifications that are sent to my email is the best way to remember these things. I use Google Calender which is connected to my Gmail account. As soon as I hear a specific date for any project I immediately add that to the calendar.
• Use a Customer Relationship Management(CRM) – We use a CRM in order to keep track of all the specific notes for the accounts. Some of the things we keep track of in there are: contact email, billing email, are they active, usernames, passwords, etc. You get the point J. We use Salesforce for our CRM but there are others out there. Wikipedia does a good comparison of them all.
• Use Client Management Interfaces- If you’ve got more than one client likely you are already doing this, but each search engine offers a client management center where you can have access to all your accounts in one place. Google has the My Client Center(MCC). YaBing has Agency Management. Facebook also has a type of client center. If you simply add your Facebook email address to any account you can then access that account from your advertising page.
• Have a Team Behind You- Often I’ll find myself in analysis paralysis from staring at the screen too long, and looking at one too many accounts in a day. It is incredibly helpful to just have someone to bounce ideas off of and get their input on a situation. Sometimes I’ll even find a solution to a clients issue when I’m explaining out loud what is going on. Having a team lets you strategize and get ideas you may not have thought of before.
• Where Does the Rubber Hit the Road?- What I mean by this is think about what really is going to help a client’s account out. Is looking at the conversion stats one more time during the day really going to help? Or is getting down and dirty with keyword bids a better use of your time? I don’t want to downplay analysis of an account, because that is absolutely necessary. But if you are analyzing accounts all day and not actually making any changes, nothing is going to improve. Where does the rubber hit the road?

By using these tips you can make sense out of the “madness” that is managing PPC. What other tips have you found useful in managing your PPC accounts? I would love to hear!

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Luke Alley is a PPC account manager and owner at www.GetFoundFirst.com, based out of Rexburg, Idaho. He is an up and coming search engine marketer and loves working in the search marketing industry. He is a happy husband and a proud dad. You can find him on Twitter at @lukealley.

When Overture and AdWords first launched over a decade ago, advertisers and consumers were shocked by how non-invasive the ads appeared to be. Under 100 characters and text only, these ads were the antithesis of the flashy and often intrusive banners many surfers dreaded. Indeed, text ads were so “un-marketing” that the FTC made Google and Yahoo place a disclaimer next to them, so that consumers understood that these were not organic results.

Text ads were a natural fit with Google’s early business philosophy of “search results first, monetization second.” If you read the original Page Rank algorithm paper written by Google’s founders, it’s easy to see why they embraced text ads over banners:

“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want.”

Flash forward to today and the reign of the minimalist text ad appears to be ending. In the last couple of years, Google has aggressively experimented with a variety of enhancements to simple text ads. The list includes:
• Map extensions
• Product extensions
• Consumer reviews
• Google Checkout logo
• Click to call phone number
• Video extensions
• Offer extensions

On top of these visual enhancements, Google is also experimenting with more characters in the headline, different colored background to ads, and more ads above organic results. All of these changes to AdWords are done for one reason – to increase revenue for Google. Let me just state up front that increasing revenue does not necessarily mean a poorer user experience for searchers. Allowing consumers to instantly see a map to a store’s location provides additional relevance, as does showing the actual products for sale (product extensions), and all of these other options.

There’s no denying, however, that Google is not making these changes out of altruism – all of these additions have two revenue-increasing impacts: first, they increase click-through rate (CTR), which increases Google revenue per thousand impressions (RPM); second, because these enhancements often only show up in the first three to five sponsored results, they increase competition (i.e., bids) on the top placements.

From an advertiser perspective, SEMs who fail to move beyond text-only ads are likely to gradually be pushed out of prime positions by competitors who take advantage of these features. While it is never a good idea to optimize ad text exclusively to CTR, if you can maintain or improve your conversion rate (CR) while also increasing CTR, you need to do so. Providing more relevancy to consumers via non-text marketing is become a must if you want to compete for coveted keywords.

My experience with non-textual enhancements suggests that not every new feature will work for all advertisers. For example, a map extension is worthless to an ecommerce retailer, whereas “offer ads” currently only make sense for “clicks to bricks” retailers. Click-to-call is great, but if you don’t have equally great customer support, you might want to think twice about this feature. And product extensions can be awesome, but make sure you have your product feed set up properly, or else an ad for “blue widgets” might end up showing images of “yellow flowers.”

The bottom line for SEMs is that text ads are still our bread and butter, but there’s no time better than the present to start preparing for a future where text alone will not suffice. AdWords has changed a lot since the days when Google’s founders ridiculed other search engines for having too many ads. Will we ever see Google search result pages filled with banners? Probably not in the traditional sense, but the days of text-only ads are over.

Image via MST.edu
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David Rodnitzky is CEO of PPC Associates, an SEM agency in San Mateo, California. If you are currently spending $25,000 or more a month on SEM, contact David at david@ppcassociates.com to learn how his agency can optimize your SEM campaigns.

Google has rolled out a lot of new stuff lately and two pay-per click platforms (adCenter and Facebook) control significantly more advertising inventory than they did when we rang in the new year in 2010. The pace of innovation and the way that the pay-per click space is evolving means it’s imperative that advertisers evolve their approach for 2011 as well. We’ll walk through five ways you should consider altering your approach in 2011:

1. Be Less Google-Centric
2. Leverage New Features (But Not ALL the New Features)
3. Think Local
4. Add Context to Your Data
5. Don’t Forget to Be a Marketer

1.    Be Less Google-Centric

The adCenter platform now has a significant amount of search traffic running through it (particularly in some verticals) and limited competition. Not only that, but the management costs of getting access to the same ~25% you used to have to wrestle with YSM and adCenter to tap into is significantly lower. The new year is a great time to start to think more seriously about leveraging adCenter more in your paid search campaigns.

And what about Facebook? The site gets more traffic than Google and offers a unique set of controls for advertisers that you can’t get on many of the sites available via Google’s content network. If you’re running content network campaigns through AdWords because your campaigns are already there, you may be leaving a lot of prospective traffic, leads and sales on the table by not leveraging Facebook PPC.

2.    Leverage New Features (But Not ALL the New Features)

AdWords in particular has been pushing out a ton of interesting new features, and as the Facebook PPC platform matures and adCenter becomes a more formidable #2 player in the paid search space you can expect a lot of new options from those platforms as well. It’s important to stay up to date with new innovations so that you can make the most of valuable features, so blogs like:

• The Official AdWords Blog
• The Google Ad Innovations Page
• The Official adCenter Blog
• The Inside Facebook Blog
• The All Facebook Blog

Can be great tools for generating more and better qualified traffic, but it’s equally important to sort the signal from the noise. While things like AdWords Campaign Experiments can be help you to get the most out of your campaigns, seemingly helpful options like the AdWords opportunities tab may be more of an opportunity for Google than for you. Understand the new tools available, but be sure to focus on the specific tools that can help you to move the needle in your campaigns and ignore the lower impact features and those that are more advantageous for the platform than your account.

3.    Think Local

Google has been focusing pretty intensely on local search and local advertising – you probably should too. Even if your business doesn’t seem local, there are likely opportunities in certain markets and you should understand the geo-targeting opportunities available to you and the impact that Google’s focus on local will have on your paid search accounts.

4.    Add Context to Your Data

Being data-driven certainly shouldn’t  be a new focus in 2011, but better understanding the context of your data should be. As online advertising evolves being able to understand data not only in relation to multiple channels, but also being able to understand PPC peer calculations will be crucial: having a solid grasp on how your keywords, dimensions, and ads are performing in relation to different time periods and the rest of your account is the only way to make genuinely informed decisions within your PPC campaigns.

5.    Don’t Forget to Be a Marketer

While understanding data is certainly important, with the increasing number of metrics available to PPC advertisers, it’s important to remember to be a marketer in the midst of all of the analysis. Successful pay-per click is still about great creative, effective headline writing, and persuasive messaging as much as it’s about strong analytical skills and effective data analysis. Understand the intersection of data and creative, as well, and focus on when to test and what to test in your ad copy, landing pages, and even account structure.

Being data-driven in 2011 will be great for your ROI, but understanding when to be driven by traditional marketing techniques and creative messaging will be even better for your bottom line.

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David Greenbaum is the CEO of BoostCTR. BoostCTR is an ad text service that guarantees improved ad performance. The platform is like Mechanical Turk for expert pay-per click copywriting: Boost makes its marketplace of high-quality copywriters available to advertisers risk-free by guaranteeing improved performance. You can learn more about how Boost CTR works here.

By Mary O’Brien, Founder/Director, PPC Summit  

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend SES San Jose. I hadn’t been in a couple of years, and I was really curious to see what an SES conference looks like now, given the recessionary state of the marketing Industry.

The good news is – Search Engine Marketing is obviously alive and kicking with no chance of decline in the foreseeable future, so if you are thinking of learning a marketing skill to complement your resume and make your career recession proof, Pay-Per-Click, SEO and Social Media will definitely make you more marketable.

Although attendance was down a little bit the conference was still vibrant and focused as usual on the future and big picture of Search Engine Marketing. What was interesting this year was that attendees were actually paying attention, and using the conference to its best advantage. In years past when I attended SES it seemed like all anyone was focused on were the cool tchotchkys that were being given away at various booths. This year folks were actually attending sessions and networking with each other, with the intent of making themselves more interesting to future employers, or even better, going out on their own and getting clients.

Maybe it was the lack of a Google Dance that caused this shift.  In previous years it seemed like the Search Engines went out of their way to compete with each other on who could hold the biggest, craziest party, but this year, it was a much more focused event, totally in keeping with every Search Marketers need to do more with less budget.

So why does learning Search Engine Marketing make you more marketable as a marketer?

From SEMPO’s State of Search Engine Marketing Report and Survey, released in February 2009:
• The North American Search Engine Marketing industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $13.5 billion in 2008
• North American Search Engine Marketing spending is now projected to grow to $26.1 billion in 2013, up significantly from the $18.6 billion forecast in 2007.
• Pay-Per-Click captured 88.4 percent of 2008 spending, up 1% from 2007; organic SEO captured 10.6 percent
• Budgets are shifting to Pay-Per-Click. About a third of respondents said their funding for Pay-Per-Click came from a mix of new and existing marketing funds. Another third reported using entirely newly allocated budgets

Reuters also reported that while online advertising isn’t growing at the rate that print advertising is declining it IS still growing even as the economy all around us is shrinking. Basically, Search Engine Marketing is pretty recession proof. Advertising dollars are still available but they appear to be moving online, and over 85% percent of that is for Pay-Per-Click.

This is important for two reasons:
1. This will give more companies the incentive to advertise online in case their competitors beat them to the punch.
2. Those companies will need knowledgeable, talented and properly-trained people to execute a great Search Engine Marketing campaign.

When times are not so good, more businesses are willing to push budgets online. When times get better, do you think that is going to change?

The numbers from SEMPO show that nowadays a larger number of businesses get the importance of not only having a Web presence, but are working hard to maintain their visibility. Now that the economy is slow, budgets are being pulled from other sources and moved online.

What does that mean for the future of Search Engine Marketing?  Basically, as a marketer, a large percentage of your time should be focused on SEM. You should be doing it, researching it, learning it and staying current with all the nuances and changes.  You don’t necessarily have to be an expert at every part of it, but you should know who the experts are, the best tools to use and also how to get access to info when you have a question.

So even in a recession continue your Search Engine Marketing education. Go to conferences, training and seminars that can help you to learn, network and improve your marketability. You’ll meet amateur and professional Search Engine Marketers and business owners, create great peer relationships, and learn more skills. If your current company has cut their training budget, considering paying for training yourself.  That way you’ll truly make yourself recession proof along with Search Engine Marketing. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a huge expensive conference, as long as it meets your specific education needs. Go where you can learn the most about the skill that will make you the most marketable right now. This is a great time to invest some marketing dollars in yourself.

By Mike Nierengarten, Online Marketing Consultant, Anvil Media Inc

The MCC

MCC’s or My Client Centers were originally created for third party agencies with multiple clients to monitor client accounts from a central location.  Google has since recognized the value an MCC can hold and has since described an MCC as “ideal for large advertisers” in the What is My Client Center section of AdWords help (but apparently not enough to change the name to something that makes sense for advertisers).

Despite Google’s endorsement, the MCC remains an underutilized tool in most search marketers’ arsenal.

The power of the MCC is that it provides an extra level (or levels) of segmentation and makes large accounts much more manageable. 

The Power of the MCC

In any pay per click (PPC) account, account structure is exceptionally important.  Segmenting keywords into well-defined ad groups and ad groups into well-defined Campaigns allows marketers to better associate ad text with keywords, thereby creating more relevant ads.  A hierarchal account structure also allows marketers to better analyze subsets of the overall account by dissecting specific sections of the account.

Three levels of structure – Campaigns, ad groups, and keywords – works well for the average PPC account, but what do you do if you are selling 10,000 unique products in 500 unrelated categories geographically targeted by region?  The answer is to create a hierarchal structure more than three levels deep.

This is precisely the power of the MCC – the ability to add more levels to the PPC account structure.

Multi-Tiered MCC’s

For large-scale advertisers who target hundreds of thousands of keywords, a regular old MCC may not be enough.  Multi-tiered MCC’s may be the best solution.  Multi-tiered MCC’s are essentially master accounts of MCC’s and provide another level of depth. 

Using multi-tiered MCC’s, marketers can control the level of segmentation, adding new levels as necessary (hence, segmenting to the nth degree).  A multi-tiered MCC for a toy store, for example, could segment specific toys by current promotion, category, age group, and country where the toy ships and, using Google AdWords reports, can easily pull statistics for each level.

Avoiding Infection

Beyond simplifying account management and analysis, MCC’s also avoid cross-infection of Quality Score (QS).  A keyword’s or an ad’s Quality Score directly impacts other keywords within an account. Because the competitive nature of paid search varies from region to region and category to category, marketers may experience a wide range of Quality Score implications. 

For example, cost-per-click (CPC) in New Delhi is much cheaper than CPC in New York.  If a marketer were to create a Campaign that targets both India and the United States, Quality Score may suffer as marketers overbid for positioning in New Delhi but underbid for positioning in New York. 

Again, MCC’s and multi-tiered MCC’s can resolve this issue.

Summary
MCC’s and multi-tiered MCC’s provide marketers the opportunity for advanced segmentation.  Advanced segmentation allows for better analysis of subsets of ads and keywords, the ability to separate accounts based on geographic region, product category, promotion, etc., and avoid cross-contamination of poor-performing keywords.

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Mike Nierengarten is an Account Executive with Anvil Media Inc. in Portland.  Mike began work with Anvil in 2008 and has managed paid search accounts for a wide range of budgets and clients including an email marketing service provider, online school, and online psychic network.  Previously, Mike worked for Direct Entertainment Marketing, a lifestyle promotions company based in Las Vegas, where he managed social media and promotions for clients such as MGM Nightlife and Harrah’s.

By Nate Sandford, Director of Search Marketing, Ionic Media and Mo Derakhshanian, PPC Manager, Ionic Media

Google has recently made significant changes to the AdWords interface, with the stated goals of improving the platform and the advertiser experience, by closely following three key principles:

1. Speed – Helping advertisers make adjustments to the accounts quicker with less time spent trying to navigate the interface
2. Clarity – Quick insight to account, campaign, ad group, and ad performance
3. Intuitiveness – Create a more logical structure for the AdWords interface.  Give advertisers the tools they need right where they need them

What more could a search marketer ask for?  Speed, Clarity, and Intuitiveness are laudable goals. Being able to quickly and clearly identify problems and opportunities, act on them immediately, and easily see the resulting changes is the dream of any search marketer.

Here at Ionic Media, we have been working with the beta version of the new interface.  We are already enjoying the new features, some of which include:
• Performance Summary Graphs
• In-line Editing
• Performance Filters
• Content Network Statistics and Placements
• Match Type Changes
• Fast Access to Search Query Reports

Let’s look at each of these in more detail:

Performance Summary Graphs
For those of us who are more visual, Google has now included performance graphs at every level of the account.   This gives you the opportunity to see trending at a glance rather than having to pull a report and charting what you need in Excel.  The performance graphs also allows you to select the metrics you want to graph and view them individually or select more than one and view them simultaneously.

In-Line Editing
Simply click on the item you would like to edit, it’s that easy! You can edit everything from bids and keywords to content placements.  The antiquated days of having to load a new page every time you need to make a simple change are long gone.

Performance Filters
The days of being able to sort only from high to low and alphabetical order are long gone.  With the new filter lists you can restrict your view to only the keywords, ads or placements that meet criteria you specify.  For example, look at just the keywords which have spent over $500 or have a click-through rate greater than 10%.  You can use multiple filters, and even filter by content network placements with conversion rates below 2% and spend greater than $100.

Content Network Statistics and Placements
If we could only use one new feature of the interface, it would be the Content Network Statistics and Placements.  As Google’s content network grows, so do your campaigns, and optimizing content placements is vital to the success of the campaign.  AdWords now allows you to optimize placements, bids, and domains all within the interface.  This is a quantum shift from the previous method of running placement reports, blocking placements and increasing placement bids, adding negative keywords, and changing ad group bids, all via Excel and AdWords Editor.   In the new interface, review your placement, exclude placements, and bid by placement all within the same view, removing the need to use multiple programs to complete the task.

Match Type Changes
This is yet another example of how campaign management is more intuitive in the new AdWords interface.   In the past, adding various match types to campaigns was not an easy task.  You had to set keyword match types using a free-form “Edit Keywords” box to set a keyword as phrase match or exact match.  Now, changing match types is as easy as clicking the keyword and selecting the new match type.

Search Query Reports
A Search Query Report can be a very helpful tool in optimizing and growing your account, but with the hassle of running and analyzing the report, these vital optimizations are sometimes overlooked.  With the new changes, the Search Query Report is no longer just another line in your report center.  Now, instead of running a search query report for an entire campaign or ad group, you can select the keywords you want to see in more detail.  Select the keywords and click “show query report” to load a report for just those keywords.  As if that is not great enough, the report is actionable now as well.  From within the report you can select a query and either add it as a keyword to your ad group, or add it as a negative keyword.

Speed, Clarity, and Intuitiveness – we think Google got it right.  Advertisers have made many suggestions over the years and it seems as if Google has been listening.  Being able to more quickly identify problems & opportunities, act on them, and clearly see the results of the changes make our jobs easier. The best part is, it’s still in beta, which means there should be even more improvements coming.

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Nate Sandford is the Director of Search Marketing at Ionic Media and has spent years managing millions of dollars in PPC campaigns. He has consulted for companies in Pay-Per-Click technology, fashion design, ecommerce retail, lead generation, publishing & literature, web analytics, and market research.  He has a BA in Marketing with an emphasis in Market Research & Statistical Analysis and a minor in Spanish from Western Washington University.

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Mo Derakhshanian is a seasoned PPC Manager with deep experience in blending traditional and search engine marketing.  Mo has direct experience managing retail, healthcare, insurance, finance, gaming and food & beverage PPC accounts.  Before joining Ionic Media, he was a manager at The Search Agency.  Mo has a B.S. in Marketing from Pepperdine, and an Associate Degree in Information Technology.

…but you may still want to try it.

At this point is there anyone in America who isn’t on Facebook? The site boasts over 200 million active users, and more than 100 million log on to Facebook at least once a day. This is obviously a very engaged audience, just what you’re looking for as a marketer.

While I was at SMX in Seattle a few weeks ago, I sat down with some of the Facebook folks who were there (a bunch of very nice, very evangelical Facebook fans) and they took me on a great tour of the Facebook interface.

It’s really easy to quickly create ads in Facebook, and very user friendly, especially for small businesses as you don’t need a lot of money to get started. You can target different audiences, different locations, set a budget, and monitor progress using the reports. You can purchase ads using a CPM or CPC model, which makes it very easy to test the same messaging as you would use in your pay-per-click campaigns.

So does it work? During last year’s Pay Per Click Summit in Los Angeles (Sept 2008), I surveyed a bunch of attendees and asked whether they had tried Facebook as an advertising vehicle. Only about 10% had, and out of that 10% maybe 3 or 4 had experienced good results. But now it’s 2009 and Facebook has re-vamped their advertising platform, and also put the ads in the upper right hand “call-to-action” portion of their pages so after SMX I asked my Twitter and Facebook followers, and discovered advertisers give it very mixed reviews.

This time maybe 20% of folks surveyed had tried Facebook Advertising and approximatley 50% were getting good results, but that’s hardly competitive with the kind of response you would get from advertisers using AdWords, where conversion rates of 20% and more are possible.

So who are the folks getting the results? Basically the same folks who get good results using Contextual Advertising. So it’s really not fair to compare Facebook to Google. In fact, they are just another large publisher (like the Wall Street Journal or ESPN.com) and you need to create, target and determine the CPA for your ads accordingly.

Contextual Ads can work extremely well for products that are impulse buys, or for branding, and the more targeted they are to the content on the page the better. Advertisers selling mortgages, insurance, entertainment, weight loss products, etc. are all doing very well with Facebook advertising, as are affiliate marketers generating leads for these types of businesses and for other products.

So can it work for your business? Just like any form of advertising you need to test it. If you are currently doing contextual advertising with something like Google Adsense or ContextWeb then it’s easy. Just set up similar campaigns targeting the same placement and demographics on Facebook and test against each other to see what works.

If you are not currently using content ads then it is very easy to set up a campaign in Facebook.  Here are some tips to get you started:

1) Most rules of pay-per-click also apply to Facebook marketing. Make sure your offer matches the landing page, and the keywords/images in your ad are consistent with the landing page also.
2) Include a call to action in your ad. Just like writing an AdWords ad, but punchier.
3) Less is more when it comes to text/copy and graphics. In fact writing like the “National Enquirer” might be totally appropriate as you only have a few minutes to catch people’s attention. Big headlines can work. This is not AdWords where folks are already looking for what you are selling. With Facebook you’re trying to get people’s interest when they are focused on something else entirely, so make your headlines snappy.
4) Consider testing a contest. I’ve heard of advertisers getting good results with them, and they may appeal more to social media users who aren’t really in buying mode.
5) Geo-target your campaigns well. If you don’t ship to Canada or the UK – don’t advertise there.
6) Try segmenting your campaigns by gender to make them more targeted
7) Use people in your graphic ads if possible. Just like on landing pages people respond to pictures of other people.

Just remember, as with Contextual Advertising, you shouldn’t try this form of advertising (or actually, any advertising at all) if you don’t have good tracking on your site. Content ads can take more tweaking to get them to perform, and you may need to test and track many variations before you find that sweet spot.

Have you tried Facebook Advertising? If you have, we’d love to hear your results. Tweet me at @ppcsummit or post a comment at www.ppcsummit.com/newsletter in response to this article. We’re also considering adding a session on Social Media Advertising at our upcoming PPC Summit in Los Angeles in September. Please let me know if you are interested in that also, and we’ll add it to the agenda.

To Your Continued Success Online,

Mary O’Brien
Chairman and Founder PPC Summit