I am always interested in what is actually proven to work rather than what so called experts reckon is best practice, or as they put it

“In this special publication, our second MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal, we used rigorous science to challenge certain so-called `best practices`. “

Anyway – enough waffle – here is the link :-
http://www.marketingexperiments.com/marketing-optimization/Q22010.html

Part 2…

I have been reliably informed that PropertyPal.com is now the biggest property site in Northern Ireland….

I will now (free of charge) reveal the secret to their hugely successful online marketing campaign…

As I was browsing through the code of the web site (as I sometimes do on other web sites because I am nosey like that), I was suddenly hit by the following:-

They were using the following metadata on their web site:-

<meta name="jedi-mind-trick"
content="You will bookmark this site and use it a lot." />

Now it all made sense, this must be why I regularly visit their site to check the value of my 2 bed apartment in Bangor!

Visits

Value Per Visit

There is perhaps not enough data on the report above to be 100% certain of the findings, but it indicates that position one (and you may have read this many times before) is *not* the best position to have your advert in, and position 4 (or position one at the right hand side of the search results) is probably your best bet to start with.

Position 2 also shows potential, but unless you are making a big margin, you’ll probably find position 4 works better for you, as position 2 will cost you significantly more per click.

NB – the figures above do *not* mean that you will get less clicks from an advert in position one than you will from and advert in position 4, it just means that the advert was shown a lot more often in position 4…

For anyone who wants to target Northern Ireland, here is a list of how it may be typed into a search engine:-

Google says

With product extensions you can show users the products from your site that are most relevant to their current query. You’re charged the same cost-per-click (CPC) whether a user clicks on your main text ad or any of the offers within the product extensions plusbox; however, you won’t be charged if a user simply expands the plusbox without clicking through to your site. Advertisers who implemented product extensions during our beta found that the additional product information helped improve the performance of their search campaigns. For example, Zeta interactive, who manages advertising for SonyStyle.com, reported seeing over a 10% increase in clickthrough rate (CTR) for their ads with product extensions.

Here is my short guide on how to have your Adwords campaign up and running on Bing in no time:

• Download and use the Adwords Editor software.
• Download your account.
• If you are using dynamic keyword insertion in your adverts, make sure that the capitalisation of all your keywords is correct – Bing will insert them as is unlike Google where you can modify them on the fly with {Keyword:} or {KeyWord} etc..(I think you can’t go wrong with ‘Title Case’).
• Export your account as a .csv file. (If you do want to change all your keywords to title case, then you can use the ‘Proper’ function in MS Excel e.g. “=Proper(o6)” will create a Title Case version of the keyword in Cell o6.
• Download MS Adcenter Desktop.
• Import your .csv file.
• *Make sure you manually set your ‘Geo Target’ options on each campaign*. It would be nice of these were imported automatically. It would also be nice if you could target the Republic of Ireland (This will come at some point in the not too distant future).
• Upload changes.
• Monitor.
• Adjust bids as necessary.
• Be amazed at how little traffic you get compared to Google! (This may change….)

PS – Here is an email I got recently from adCenter support about adverts in the Republic of Ireland:-

“With regards to when Bing will be running adverts natively in the Republic of Ireland, there is no finite date when this will be available. As Bing.co.uk has just come out of the beta stages, I would expect this to be in mind for the near future, but as of yet do not currently have a date I can provide you with.”

I have been using this for a month now, and can honestly say, while it is not perfect, it is an absolutely fantastic utility which saves time and effort in setting up new PPC campaigns (and allows you to easily see what is working and what is not working for your competitors, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel:-)

If you do PPC for a living, and can’t make KeyWordSpy pay for itself many times over, then you are in the wrong job! (It also is fairly useful for SEO).

It is also recommended by Howie Jacobson, so you don’t just have to take my word for it!

*Check out KeyWordSpy here*

(NB – Unless you are a *big* company, you only really need to purchase the ‘research’ option).

If you do try it out, please let me know how you got on…  Thanks.

http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021167.html