Internet Advertising

Sarah Worsham / Mar 24, 2014

Improving Your Facebook Ads

Facebook ads can be a relatively cost effective way to increase awareness and even to generate sales. Social Media Examiner has an article — 4 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Ads — that serves as a good starting point. The article mentions 4 ways to improve your Facebook ads: 1) Meaning of Colors, 2) Language that Reflects Brand, 3) Impact with Images & 4) Effective Targeting. I think two of the most important ways to improve ads (of any kind) are missing: 1) Providing Value 2) Catchy Wording.

State Value & Benefits in Ads

I think it’s important to remember in any marketing communications or advertising that customers want to know what’s in it for them. Instead of a list of features, they want a list of benefits. While Facebook ads have a set limit of words and images, these should be used to inform the audience of the value you are offering them. It’s important that messaging reflect your brand, in terms of voice and image, but without communicating value, you are relying on what the customer knows of your brand (which may be nothing at all).

Ads Have Only an Instant to Impress

Images and color certainly have an impact on how we feel and whether something catches our eye. Once that attention is caught, even if only for a split second, it’s vital to do your best to communicate in a way that keeps the attention. Obviously putting your value/benefit out there front and center is key, but also to word your call to action and entire message in a way that’s both easy to read and catchy. The example ads for #3 in 4 Ways to Improve Your Facebook ads are great examples of having catchy messaging.

What ways have you improved your Facebook ads?

Sarah Worsham / Jan 31, 2014

Getting Your Ads More than Seen

There’s a great post over at MarketingProfs that dissects an eye-tracking study to show where on a web page ads are most likely to be seen:

Advertisers looking to boost the effectiveness of their digital display ads should be focusing on in-content units, nontraditional placements, contextually relevant creative, and above-the-fold locations, according to recent data from Infolinks. — Eye-Tracking Study: How to Beat Display Ad Blindness by Ayaz Nanji

Having your ad get seen is just half the battle — the next problem is to get someone to actually take action (click, mouseover, etc.). While there certainly is some value in getting an ad seen (if they look at it long enough to read and understand), most advertisers want people to take action and click the ads. MarketingProfs analysis of the study didn’t include any click data. The assumption is that people will be more likely to click in places they are more likely to look. Is this true?

Will these types of results lead to even more advertising that is difficult to distinguish from content? How will that impact how people interact with advertising?

Another question I have is whether there is any impact with having so many ads on the page. If you only have one ad on the left (a typical ad place), but it doesn’t look like a typical ad, will people be more likely to look? It seems like a page that’s full of advertising is going to saturate what a visitor will look at.

One of the key findings from the study is that people completely block out areas of the page that they believe have ads (especially if there are ad-looking things there). This should be an important consideration for the design of sites without ads — make sure people don’t think you have ads in ad-places if you want them to look there.

Sarah Worsham / Dec 12, 2013

Using Labels to Track Ad Testing in Google AdWords

A female Bloodhound. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

While Ad Testing is a vital part of optimizing any PPC campaign, it can be tiring to track all the changes to determine what caused improvements or problems. Many agencies track everything manually in a spreadsheet, or use a bid management platform that’s geared towards bidding, not tracking. By being methodical with labels in AdWords, and using the Segment by Label option, you can have a visual key to what ad testing is happening on each ad.

Web Analytics World has a great article showing how to set this up:

The great thing about this process is that each label has an inherent ad testing goal. For example, Ad Title, Ad Content, and Ad Display URL are most typically tied to improving CTR. Ad Landing Page is related to conversion rate (CVR). Ad Offer is a combination of CTR & CVR and is probably best measured by cost per acquisition (CPA). However, although each ad category has a “natural” tie to ad performance, your goal may be different. For example, if you are trying to improve lead quality through ad content, CTR is not a good metric for ad performance. — Tracking Ad Testing in Google AdWords by Mike Nierengarten