The ROI Revolution Blog

Urchin Software is Retiring! Sales End March 28, 2012

February 7, 2012

The date has been officially announced for Urchin's retirement this year: March 28th, 2012.

Once purchased, Urchin licenses are permanent. Existing users should be able to continue using the product unless or until their Urchin Software installation becomes unusable due to possible incompatible operating systems updates in the future. All of the available pertinent information about how the discontinuation will affect the software's functionality is covered on the Urchin Website FAQ.

Urchin licenses and upgrades will only be sold until March 28th, 2012. After March, Google will not be "supporting" Urchin in that they will not be producing any further releases or patches. (With this announcement they did release version 7.200, available for free 30-day trial now).

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PPC Ad Writing Contest by Marketing Experiments

January 30, 2012

Our friends at Marketing Experiments are working with one of our clients on their marketing content strategy. They're inviting everyone to compete in this creative experiment.

Read about their Ad Writing Contest and then submit your best entry as a comment to their blog post.

From their post:
"The trouble with a content strategy is that it is very difficult to create content, and very difficult to predict what content will resonate with your customers.

You could spend a lot of time creating high-quality content only to find out later that another approach would have been more profitable.

To help provide clarity to their content strategy, we are going to run some PPC ads to 'take the temperature,' in a sense, of the people who are searching..."

The results of this experiment will guide their content strategy, but I'm sure we'll end up testing a few of the winners in the rest of their paid search campaigns as well.

The winner will be announced during their next web clinic on February 1st, 2012: Online Advertising Forensics: We investigate how and why a text-based PPC ad produced 47% more conversions. Click the link to sign up for this free clinic!

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Google Privacy Policy Overhaul: Reflections for Online Marketers

January 25, 2012

Google's upcoming privacy policy overhaul addresses two themes:

1. Providing users with more intuitive functionality across Google properties (Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.), and

2. Providing advertisers with more relevant targeting options across Google properties.

The key distinction here is "across Google properties."

While the most privacy-conscious users may be concerned with the changes, for advertisers there is nothing but upside. Google's updated privacy policy opens the door to more cost-effective targeting to your most responsive traffic across Google properties and devices.

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MSN Rolls Out -[Negative Exact] Match Type

January 24, 2012

In November 2011, MSN began supporting exact match negatives. It was a long time coming since Google has supported the match type for years. Although MSN differs a bit from Google in other match types such as their use of broad match, exact match negatives work the same in both MSN and Google.

Using exact match negatives gives you the ability to exclude very general search terms while maintaining the high volume search traffic that comes with broad and phrase match.

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Are Your Paid Search Ads Hurting Your Bottom Line?

January 9, 2012

I've managed paid search accounts here at ROI Revolution since 2005, and 99% of the time when I look at a new account there is room to improve results through ad testing. Over the years much has changed in paid search, but the need to continually test and optimize ad text has stayed constant.

Ask yourself if any of the following top 4 pitfalls are currently hurting your paid search performance.

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YouTube TrueView Video Ads: Only Pay For Interested Viewers

November 29, 2011

YouTube has launched a new ad format out of beta: TrueView Video Ads. The basic concept is that the user has a choice whether or not to continue watching the ad. The advertisers only pays when the user watches at least 30 seconds of the ad (or to completion, whichever comes first).

This new format is referred to as a TrueView in-stream ad. Long-form YouTube videos are eligible for the TrueView in-slate ad format. With in-slate, the user is given a choice to either watch a longer commercial video ad before the primary video begins, or see regular commercial breaks during the video.

According to Google's onesheet on TrueView (pdf), in-stream ad viewers choose to watch an ad 15-45% of the time. Some advertisers have seen 3-4x higher CTR's with TrueView than with other video ad formats.

YouTube Promoted Video Ads are being renamed "TrueView in-search" and "TrueView in-display" depending on where they show.

Such a shift in video ad delivery is sure to start affecting how video ads are composed. Advertisers need to front-end-load the "interesting" parts to entice the viewer to watch. Also, given that you only pay when someone chooses to watch the video, the proportion viewers from your ideal target audience will be higher.

Fend Off AdWords Trademark Infringement with Google's Help

September 26, 2011

Name-brand keywords are some of the best performing you can find. In competitive markets, searching for trademarked terms usually reveals a dogfight, with the rightful owner at the top of the pile. Although bidding on competitors' trademarked terms will often lead to poor quality scores (and thus a large bid surcharge), those low quality scores can be offset by the high conversion rate of these ready-to-buy visitors.

This situation is common because Google's US trademark policy only applies to trademarks in ad copy; it doesn't prohibit bidding on trademarked terms. While Burger King wouldn't appreciate a McDonald's representative standing outside their establishment holding the sign "Come to McDonald's Instead", there's no trademark law against this, trespassing notwithstanding.

What companies can't do is misrepresent themselves. It would be a trademark violation for McDonald's to put a Burger King sign outside their own establishment. Are competitors using your trademarked terms in their ads? Google can help you - but you must take the initiative.

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adCenter Launches Radius Targeting

September 8, 2011

In July 2011, Microsoft adCenter rolled out a new feature allowing advertisers to target their campaigns within a 100 mile radius around a particular location.

With "radius targeting," advertisers can select to target the area around an address, zip code or latitude/longitude coordinate, giving them extremely precise control over where their ads will be displayed. After entering a location, advertisers choose how large of a radius they want to target (from 5-100 miles) from a drop down menu. The feature, which takes only minutes to set up in the adCenter interface, increases relevancy for users and allows advertisers to be more meticulous with their ad delivery and product offerings.

There are many ways to use radius targeting to your advantage. Here are five big ones:

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