Did you get to play the stock market game when you were in school? If so, you probably learned something about how to analyze companies, pick stocks, and balance a portfolio. But I’m willing to bet that you would have learned more if you were given real money to play with and were told you could keep what was left of it after a set time. Changing the stakes would likely change your interest in the game.
Along this same line, I’m surprised at how many people will pay big bucks to learn about online advertising rather than simply giving it a try.
For example, one credit at a state run grad school appears to run around $1000 these days. In many cases, I think you could learn more about online advertising if you took $1000 of your own money and spent it on Google AdWords.
Ed’s 30-Day Fast Course on Online Advertising
What you’ll learn:
1. How to set up a Google AdWords Account
2. How to create a campaign
3. How to target specific regions
4. How to set day parts
5. How to select keywords
6. How to select negative keywords
7. How to use advanced matching options such as phrase and exact.
8. How to write ads
9. How to improve ads over time.
10. How to track conversions.
How will you be able to learn all of that in 30 days? By putting $1000 of your own money at risk. All of the information you need to learn how to do the above steps is publicly available. And now you have the incentive you’ve needed to get serious and dig in.
Here is how to do it:
Pick a product to advertise by signing up as an Amazon affiliate or at cj.com.
Then buy ads on Google AdWords to market the product you’ve selected.
Track your returns over the month.
By the end of the month, unless things go terribly wrong, some off your $1000 in spending will be offset by affiliate earnings. If you catch on quickly, you may actually turn a profit. If that happens, you’ve just added a new income stream to your household. Congratulations.
Now sit back and think about how you could apply your new-found knowledge to other industries.
To me, this is a small bet. You’re risking up to $1000 to really learn how online advertising works in the real world. That is valuable stuff.
When people first come online, they seem to bring some of their offline behaviors with them. For example, if they want to look up a business, they might turn to the online yellow pages for information.
However, as the above chart shows, behaviors change over time. People seem to be figuring out that they don’t need to turn to the yellow pages to find what they’re looking for. Instead, they can save a step by typing their query directly into search engines rather than doing a 2-step of first finding a relevant online directory, then searching.
The same thing seems to apply more generally to phone books:
Why go to an online phone book when you can search for people on Google and find out way more about a person than a online phone book provides?
Check the bottom line on both graphs. This shows how buzz worthy that specific term has been over time. Sadly for the phone book industry, in both cases biggest buzz in the past five years has been a story about print phone books that explains there are two phone books printed every year for every American.
The following quote found within a Wall Street Journal article on Facebook advertising really jumped out at me:
“I haven’t heard of anyone purchasing something off an ad on Facebook,” says Angie Tulgetske, vice president of RE/MAX Preferred Choice Properties, which resells timeshares and spends thousands of dollars a month on search ads but avoids social-networking sites. “I wouldn’t think any of my marketing dollars would be spent advantageously there.”
Rather than relying on anecdotal evidence and hunches, why not test it? It’s pretty clear that a ton of people who own or can afford to buy homes are spending a significant part of their day on Facebook.
It would have been nice to see a quote in the WSJ from someone who is seeing success with their Facebook ad spend (they do mention that FOX is spending a ton of money and they’re not stupid) but it’s clearly going to be tough to find someone willing to go on the record in front of all of their competition.
This reminds me of earlier resistance to pay per click advertising. People would say, “I never click on ads,” which somehow translated into, “no one clicks on ads” which clearly isn’t the case based on Google’s revenues.
With ad networks like this, early adopters tend to see amazing returns because the competition among advertisers is so much lower. Can you imagine how amazing it must have been for real estate agents back when they could pay ten cents a click rather than a couple dollars?
That’s where Facebook is today.
When consulting with businesses on where they should allocate their ad dollars today, my most common response is, “Start online, measure everything, and spend as much online as you can justify. Then look at other options.” It sounds like Wine Library’s Gary Vaynerchuk takes a similar approach for his own business, as he explains here:
What do you think? Are you aware of any forms of offline advertising that measurably beat what can be done online today?
Google’s policy against clicking AdSense ads on your own website continues to annoy me. This time, it was a post on the Inside AdSense blog that drew my ire:
However, we strongly advise against using your own AdSense for search box for a couple of reasons. First, it can increase the chance of accidental or invalid clicks on the ads that appear on the search results pages. Second, this will inflate the number of queries in your reports, giving you an inaccurate picture of the activity on your site.
I search the archives of this site almost daily in search of relevant links to things I’ve written about previously. I’d hate to see this site’s AdSense income wiped out due to clicking on ads served to me based on what I searched for just because they were served on my own site.
The ads site-search ads are, obviously, highly relevant to what I searched for, so clicking makes sense.
Google’s policy of discouraging clicking ads they serve against my own searches makes my site less usable for me.
As I’ve mentioned before, Google needs to come up with a setting that allows users to claim their own sites, then simply not compensate the site owner for clicks they generate themselves. This would make site owner’s own sites more valuable to themselves and benefit Google’s advertisers who would receive more traffic from site owners who could click with confidence.
Being a opportunistic lawyer has never been easier, than to the web, as Kevin O’Keefe points out on his law blog. One used to have to actually hang out at the emergency room to find injured clients. Now you can fish for them using Google by advertising or optimizing for keywords prospective clients may type into the search box.
Here’s an example of how quickly lawyers jumped onto the results following the train crash in Los Angeles last week:
O’Keefe is not impressed with this side of his industry:
It’s behavior by plaintiff’s trial lawyers chasing clients like this that results in laws taking away the rights of the people these advertising lawyers say they are trying to help. Laws passed in the name of tort reform. It’s conduct like this that gives lawyers a bad name.
Maybe these lawyers do not care about more tort reform. Maybe these lawyers don’t care how they look to the average Joe on the street. Maybe in the chase for the money, they’ve become blind to how they appear. I don’t know.
While this has some downsides, it’s probably better than lawyers pitching their services in person where vulnerable prospective clients have less choice. And it’s certainly better than relying on the size of lawyer’s ads in the Yellow Pages as a measure of competence.
via paulj
One thing I’ve learned this weekend while traveling: If a hotel reservation agent asks you how you found their property, don’t say, “I found you on Google Maps Mobile on my phone.”
They don’t have a checkbox for that.
Which makes me think that they likely don’t have check boxes for a LOT of the ways that people find their properties.
They probably advertise in their local yellow pages, just in case someone wants to rent a hotel room in their own town. They, of course, are also found on thousands of online travel sites, travel directories, and - of course - through traditional travel agencies.
The challenge I see here is that sources of business are diversifying more than ever, yet tracking hasn’t kept up. Because of this, people on the front line are put in a position of fitting new sources of business into old business assumptions. What’s missed is the glimpse into what new channels are bringing in business, which means they’ll miss out on the potential of new advertising opportunities.
And they’ll also over-spend on legacy advertising systems since their previous assumptions are inadvertently reinforcing the value of those systems.
Google AdSense is a remarkably powerful ad platform for websites that happen to write about topics that have high value ads. For example, tech, travel, legal, and personal finance sites tend to connect with high cost per click ads.
The context used for contextually based ads today is largely based on the context of the page. Other variables are used, including the location of the visitor, so two people visiting the same page from different countries or cities may see different ads. But the primary driver of which ads appear on the page is the content on the page being served to readers.
While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it does limit the effectiveness of advertising on local websites such as blogs where the topics may not align with high-cost ads.
For example, there are hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of bloggers in the United States who write about local issues and their personal lives who have developed loyal local audiences. Putting AdSense ads on their sites would earn them nearly nothing since their content would so rarely align with high cost ads.
But the real value local bloggers bring to the advertising table isn’t on a post by post basis, but on a site-wide basis in the form of a loyal local audience. It’s closer to a newspaper model where advertisers are trying to reach people living in a certain geography. There may be some difference in the ads served by section of the paper, but the main theme is that they’re after people living nearby.
CBS has been trying to work into this market with a new service that allows bloggers to embed an advertising widget that allows CBS to sell ads across local blogs, creating something similar to a local blog network. This makes a lot of sense since CBS - together with their local affiliates - have ad sales teams in place with the right network of advertisers.
This is relatively new, and my first impression is that too many of the ads have been ads for national advertisers rather than local businesses. This falls short of the potential of a true local ad network but does solve the scale problem: few local blogs have enough traffic to warrant direct ad sales efforts.
No one has really figured out this market yet, but I have a hunch that a traditional media group like the Tribune Company, CBS, or some other company that has actual human salespeople on the ground across the country will have the best shot of winning this game. While Google certainly has the technology, it’s going to take face to face meetings to really make this happen.
Jules Kivell brings up a good point about digital legacies: what happens to your online persona when you die?
Digital Ghosts Remain When Folks Pass Away
Do *you* know all of your on-line accounts? Your Linked-In, Flickr, eBay, iTunes, online banking, PayPal and Facebook accounts can keep going for a *long* time. Would a loved one be able to housekeep for you? Do you have a file saved with all your on-line accounts and passwords?
One solution to this would be to maintain a password list in a safe deposit box so a family member could manage your online life once you pass.
This made me wonder what happens to the revenue you’re generating from the grave. In a world where millions of bloggers have ads from AdSense or affiliate links on their site, it seems safe to assume that your content will continue to attract visitors and ad revenue after you’ve passed away.
Where does that revenue go? Are people passing along their AdSense and Amazon affiliate accounts in their wills? Will ad networks allow for the inheritance of publisher accounts?
I imagine, without proper planning, Google may find itself generating income from ads running on dormant sites with no one to share revenue with.
Does anyone have any experience dealing with this issue?
Jules Kivell brings up a good point about digital legacies: what happens to your online persona when you die?
Digital Ghosts Remain When Folks Pass Away
Do *you* know all of your on-line accounts? Your Linked-In, Flickr, eBay, iTunes, online banking, PayPal and Facebook accounts can keep going for a *long* time. Would a loved one be able to housekeep for you? Do you have a file saved with all your on-line accounts and passwords?
One solution to this would be to maintain a password list in a safe deposit box so a family member could manage your online life once you pass.
This made me wonder what happens to the revenue you’re generating from the grave. In a world where millions of bloggers have ads from AdSense or affiliate links on their site, it seems safe to assume that your content will continue to attract visitors and ad revenue after you’ve passed away.
Where does that revenue go? Are people passing along their AdSense and Amazon affiliate accounts in their wills? Will ad networks allow for the inheritance of publisher accounts?
I imagine, without proper planning, Google may find itself generating income from ads running on dormant sites with no one to share revenue with.
Does anyone have any experience dealing with this issue?
Recent Comments