Leigh Hanney - 5/7 - sem samurai

iPad News: AdWords to Offer New Targeting Options for iPad

January 28, 2010 By Leigh Hanney 3 Comments

You heard it here first, Google AdWords will allow advertisers to independently target the Apple iPad in AdWords!

Ok – so I made that up… completely fabricated… but it’s made me think.

On the 21st of January, Google AdWords blog announced that they’ve now release new targeting options for mobile ads. It’s a good read so go take a look.

I’m going to cover mobile PPC advertising in later posts, but the thing that caught my eye is this image that they posted…

In the ‘Devices’ section above you’ll note how Google now allow advertisers to target specific devices: – Android, iPhone/iPod Touch and Palm WebOS. This is actually huge for certain markets as it will allow precision targeting for platform specific applications.

Anyway, with the launch of the iPad today I thought, hmmm will the iPad just be another addition to the ‘apple’ targeting? eg. iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad, or will it be a device category in it’s own right?

My gut feel, and if what Steve Jobs has said is true, iPad may well open up a whole new level of possibilities for many different market segments. Surely then if this is the case, the iPad will indeed be an individually targeted device within AdWords because ultimately there are going to be products, services and applications that users will be more likely to interact with on a tablet type device than they would on an iPhone. Time will tell.

Filed Under: Advanced AdWords Tactics, Random Stuff, Search News Tagged With: iPad, Mobile PPC, Targeting Mobile Devices

Adwords: Dynamic Keyword Insertion Fail

January 17, 2010 By Leigh Hanney 5 Comments

OK – Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) in AdWords , Yahoo, AdCenter – and how easy it is to get it wrong…

For those of you who don’t know, DKI is when you can add in the search query (keyword in you list that triggered the impression), dynamically into the ad text.

It can be a good time saver if used well, and with a well structured account. However it can also come out the other end royally screwy, so be warned.

Now, we’ve all seen PPC ads that suck, like these ones, yes?

dki-children

And I was going to go on about how crappy they were ‘selling children’, wholesale even from ebay – nice …

…but then I remembered the ad I wrote using DKI 12 months ago…

retailmenot-selling-children

So – it’s easy to do, even for the best of us, so be careful. DKI should only be used if you’re sure that you’re ads are going to make sense.

Google AdWords Ad Preview Tool is good for this

Best thing you can do is make certain that your adgroups are themed and structured correctly in the first place. DKI may then work quite well.

That said however, if you’ve got the structure right, and nice small ad groups, then you shouldn’t technically need dynamic Keyword insertion, but rather be able to focus on the best possible Headline / ad text for that group.

Anyway – bit of a laugh.

Filed Under: AdWords 101 Tagged With: DKI, Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Top Commentators Widget – Get your link!

January 10, 2010 By Leigh Hanney 2 Comments

Well, it looks like the ‘Top Commentators’ links at the bottom of these pages has been reset for 2010!’

So it’s a ‘free for all’ now if you want to get your ‘do follow’ link from the ‘sem samurai’!

But please make the comments worthy and relevant otherwise I’ll kick your virtual ass!

Naturally, spam, and shite will be be ‘cleansed’

…funny comments get bonus points.

Filed Under: Random Stuff Tagged With: top commentators widget

Advertising in Gmail and targeting the Gmail ‘Funbox’

December 15, 2009 By Leigh Hanney 4 Comments

A little nugget here regarding targeting your Google Content Network ads to Gmail, (thanks to Perry Marshall for the tip!).

This video briefly shows you not only how to placement target gmail (mail.google.com), but also explains how to get into the ‘funbox’, that little space above your messages. (screen shot below). Good luck

Google’s Search Based Keyword Tool

December 14, 2009 By Leigh Hanney Leave a Comment

New video from Google UK. Quick overview of the Search based keyword tool (sktool) www.google.com/sktool/

I’ll cover the search based keyword tool in more detail in a later post, but if you know nothing about it then this video works as a good intro…

If you’re looking for the standard Google Keyword tool, then it can be found here - Google Keyword Tool (External) or from within the ‘Opportunities > Tools’ tab in AdWords

Filed Under: AdWords 101, Keyword Research Tagged With: google keyword tool, Keywords, sktool

StumbleUpon Sponsored Links for $0.05 CPC!

December 10, 2009 By Leigh Hanney 1 Comment

This is going to be a short and sweet post but may be interesting to some peeps.

I’ll call it the ‘Did you know?’ post…

So, did you know that you can buy clicks from StumbleUpon for $0.05 a click? (USD). Traffic quality is my main concern as I’ve not been overly impressed.

But If you’ve a spare $1,000 lying around, and a boss that only looks at ‘visits’ or ‘visitors’ metrics, then go for it! I’m sure an extra 20,000 visits to your site will look good on paper if nothing else

Here’s the link

Filed Under: Online Traffic Sources Tagged With: Other Traffic Sources, StumbleUpon

Google’s Wonder(ful) Wheel

December 10, 2009 By Leigh Hanney 1 Comment

OK so I posted on how good Google’s wonder wheel can be for the Google Content Network (GCN – if you like acronyms!). Anyway I thought I should elaborate a bit further…

The Wonder Wheel is great for broad or fragmented product categories like apparel, so perfectly matched for the example I chose, where you’ve got a great deal of variety for your target categories.

However, If you are planning to go after categories that are dominated by a handful of brands, the results may be a little more limited.

Mobile Phones are a good example of this.
wonder-wheel
The wonder wheel (GWW) approach in the case of ‘Mobile phones’ really doesn’t help us that much in defining our GCN ad groups and themes, as it tends to get a little confused.

So, while the GWW is an awesome tool, it doesn’t always help specifically to the content network. Sometime you are better off building your GCN campaigns using good old logic and common sense. (you know… that learned brain thingy of yours?!)

Don’t forget though, it is really good way to build out tons of secondary groups around broad product themes. Eg. Jackets, dresses, shoes, watches, etc. And this applies to Search Targeted (more so in a way) as well as content network targeted.

I love the Google Content Network… there I said it!

Filed Under: Google Content Network Tagged With: Google Content Network

Using Google’s Wonder Wheel to build better Content Network targeted campaigns

November 16, 2009 By Leigh Hanney 3 Comments

I’ve written a number of posts on content network optimization and the reoccurring message in all of them is to make sure you are creating themed ad groups.

I recently explained how Google create concepts when analyzing the content network and then group these concepts into categories, so when building out AdGroups for the content network, the goal is to great themes that Google can then easily match to the content categories they have defined.

Easy huh?

Well it’s actually easier than you think… Meet the ‘Wonder Wheel’ a free tool Google have added as part of their Search Options features.

Essentially, the Wonder Wheel gives us a graphical representation of the search we have performed, in relation to the other related searches. In effect, it actually build out our themes for us.

So let’s go back a step and I’ll first show you where to find the wonder wheel.

- Go to google.com and conduct a search. Let’s search for ‘jackets’

google-jackets-1

- Just below the search box, above the search results, you will see the link ‘show options’. Click on this.

- Down the left hand column we now have a whole list of options available. Select ‘Wonder Wheel’ below ‘Standard View’ (Fourth group of links down) and the wonder wheel appears to the right.

google-jackets-wonder-wheel

Now what we have is a graphical representation of the searches or themes that google believe are most relevant to the initial query, in this case ‘jackets’.

Clicking on ‘leather jackets’ on the wheel will then expand that topic to create another set of themed search queries.

google-wonder-wheel

…do you see where I’m going with this?

In order to then translate this to your content network ad group creation, follow each branch of the wheel for each search query, and build out your themes.

The most important thing to remember here is to create an ad group for each spoke of the wheel, and not one ad group that includes all the spokes.

Golden rule for the content network is to build tightly themed ad groups (and lot’s of them) with 1-4 key words.

Here’s an eample of how I’d do this with ‘jackets’

Ad Group 1:
- jacket
- jackets

Ad Group 2:
-   leather jacket
-   leather jackets
-   leather jackets online
-   leather jacket sale

Ad Group 3:
-   designer leather jacket
-   designer leather jackets
-   designer leather jackets online
-   designer leather jacket sale

Ad Group 4:
-   mens jackets
-   men’s jackets online
-   mens jackets sale

Ad Group 5:
-   discount jackets
-   discount jackets online
-   discount jacket
-   discount jacket sale

And keep gong. Don’t be surprised if you end up with 100 (or 500).

Next step is to write the ads – Just do 1 ad per ad group initially. Theme will not be an issue as each ad group is pretty tight.

Remember, Headline for impact, and strong call to action.

Once your ads are live and you begin to collect data, you can optimize as per normal.

Filed Under: AdWords 101, Google Content Network Tagged With: Content Network Optimization, Google Content Network, Wonder Wheel

RetailMeNot.com Cleans up at the SmartCompany Web Awards

November 3, 2009 By Leigh Hanney 3 Comments

It’s great to see our achievements at Stateless Systems be recognized this year in the 2009 SmartCompany Web Awards.

Hats off to Guy and Bevan for building such a company. And more importantly, hiring such awesome people!

Fantastic effort by the whole team who continue to build cool stuff and are just all round great people to work with.

Stay tuned for more exiting stuff from Stateless soon.

Links below to the various awards

Best Search Strategy – RetailMeNot.com

Best Social Media – RetailMeNot.com

Best Site Under 20 Staff – RetailMeNot.com

And my favorite quote is from the award announcement for ‘Best Search Strategy’

…But co-founder Guy King says RetailMeNot has achieved search marketing success by ignoring practically every other method tried by rival websites.

“SEO is bullshit. Our philosophy is to focus on pages that are as useful as possible to as many people as possible. Basically this is due to our belief that Google is smarter than we are, so we’re better off spending our time building good products rather than abusing the system.”

“Out strategy is really just going against traditional strategies. One of the key metrics of a good website is time on site, but we are trying to get that figure down as much as possible. We want people to find what they’re after as quickly as possible.”

So to sum it up – Be unique & add value - SEO success is yours.

Filed Under: Random Stuff Tagged With: RetailMeNot