Overview of Online Media Planning and Buying

Harry Gold, at ClickZ, wrote about the basics (and some “advanced” concepts) of planning and purchasing online media. Additionally, he notes that:

“Media planning and buying is all about independent research and being able to grasp complex advertising concepts and technologies.”

Click the following link to review how he has delineated online media buying, using the title “Research Tips for Landing a First Online Media Job.”

Defending Against Click Fraud

AnchorIntelligence.com partnered with LookSmart.com to present a report entitled, ANCHOR INTELLIGENCE REPORT: ANATOMY OF A FRAUDSTER. The following excerpt offers useful tips for monitoring and defending against click fraud for your pay-per-click campaigns:

1) Watch for significant variations in campaign performance: Look at your reports to identify sudden peaks and other anomalies in your daily traffic and costs. If you cannot determine the cause and the peaks are not associated with corresponding lifts in performance, consider stopping your campaign and/or asking your network to investigate further.

2) Prevent competitive click fraud: Do a few searches on your keywords to compile a list of relevant competitors. Then open your Command Prompt on your PC (or Terminal on your Mac) and ping each competitor’s domain (e.g. type “ping www.COMPETITORDOMAINNAME.com”) to ascertain their company IP address. You can find their entire range of IPs by using services such as www.arin.net. Be sure to check that the IPs are registered to the company directly, as opposed to the company’s hosting provider. If they are, add those IPs to your account IP exclusion lists (when available).

3) Don’t drain your own budget: If you’re concerned about clicks coming from your own employees, add your company’s IPs to your account IP exclusion lists (when available).

4) Block poor performing referrers: Assuming your analytics package provides referral and conversion information, start with your highest volume referrers and determine which sites fail to drive any conversions or other useful user sessions. If you notice that your ads/keywords are performing poorly on particular sites, reduce your bids for those publishers/channels. For high volume sites that generate zero conversions, selectively use the domain/channelblocking feature to prevent your ads from appearing on those sites in the future.

5) Monitor high dollar CPC terms closely: Keywords with high CPCs have historically been more vulnerable to click fraud attacks than those with low CPCs. So pay particular attention to these keywords and the referrers that generate disproportionately more traffic to your site through these keywords. Determine whether or not you’re seeing a positive ROI on your bids. If not, consider lowering your bids on poor-performing keywords/ads and allocating more spend to higher performing keywords/ads.

6) Geo-target your ads appropriately: If you do not sell products outside of North America, be sure to limit your geo-targeting to North America. If you do sell products abroad, monitor the performance of your international ads. If you find that your ads perform poorly in certain geographies, update your geo-targeting preferences accordingly. Keep a critical eye out for countries such as UAE, China, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. Anchor has seen relatively high volumes of fraud originating from these countries.

7) Use ad scheduling: Monitor the quality of your traffic according to time of day and day of the week. For instance, we find that humans typically use the internet during the day, while bots can run 24 hours a day. If you find that your conversion rates are higher in the mornings than late at night, you may want to daypart your bids to reduce exposure to lower-converting traffic.

8) Leverage a 3rd party traffic quality solution: Your ad network/search engine is not infallible. In order to ensure that you are not being charged for fraudulent clicks, consider using a 3rd party traffic quality solution, such as Anchor Intelligence. By providing deep insight into the quality of each click/impression as well as the factors that contribute to each click/impression score, Anchor Intelligence helps to educate you on click fraud and traffic quality. Armed with this information, you’ll be able to improve your ad spend allocation decisions and ensure you are not paying for unwanted traffic.

9) Investigate your network: Before signing up with an ad network or search engine, do some research into its policies. For instance, you should determine whether the network uses frequency caps to prevent duplicate clicks originating from the same IP from being charged to your account. Also check to ensure that they are using the IAB/ABCe International Spiders & Bots List and not charging you for clicks from these robots. Finally, peruse their Terms of Use to determine the extent to which they care about the quality of traffic you receive. For example, look for restrictions against authorizing, encouraging, or generating fraudulent clicks or impressions; editing, modifying, removing, or obscuring ads; and displaying ads on error pages or “thank you” pages.

10) Encourage your ad network(s) to also use 3rd party scoring solutions: Your ad network may not realize that you are concerned about click fraud. The more you and other advertisers ask networks to take additional steps to prevent and filter click fraud, the more likely these companies will be to proactively protect you. In particular, you should encourage your network(s) to engage the services of 3rd party traffic quality solutions providers. These 3rd parties monitor the traffic quality within and across networks, to help ensure that you see the highest possible ROI on your advertising spend while giving you confidence in the quality of your clicks.

Online Advertisement Comparison

Today, Marketing Sherpa published this chart: Every Ad Has A Purpose—A Look At Strategy vs. Online Ad Tactic.

The data for the chart was based upon a survey of “a few hundred online advertisers” regarding advertising strategies and tactics.

Some basic conclusions that can be gleaned by looking at the top and bottom rows are that:

“Users of non-standard, attention-getting ads are most likely to be marketers focused on brand awareness, while PPC search ad buyers are most likely to be focused on lead generation or direct sales.”

The bottom row lends some insight to the number of marketers that may be using the Reverse Banner Ad Tactic: 5% for “Brand Consideration/Education” and 6% for “Brand Awareness” for a potential total of 11% of marketers using PPC for the opposite of its primary purpose of lead generation and direct sales.

Following is some additional elaboration of the row descriptions:

Non-standard ads: Interstitials, floating, peel-backs

Non-Interactive Banner Ads: 1-click URL, no multimedia

Sponsorships, including co-branded content

Pop-Ups and pop-unders

Small Display Ads, such as buttons or tiles

Highly Interactive Display Advertising

Contextual Ads: Adsense, Content Match, etc.

PPC Search Ads: Google, Yahoo, MSN

Reverse Banner Ad Tactic

When considering opportunities by way of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, I’ve been asked if banner ads still “work.” In other words, are they an advertising media worth testing?

Since you and I and most everyone else instinctively ignore banner ads, the notion that they would be irrelevant is understandable.

Historically, banner ads were more effective as an ad media from 1994 until the turn of the century when their valuations crashed. Out of that wreckage emerged a model of highly-targeted, small advertisements that are displayed on search results pages (as well as content pages) with related keywords. These online classified ads have been made most famous by Google’s Adwords program, which is Google’s main source of revenue and which has fueled the big G’s rise to online planetary prominence. (Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are two of the other larger PPC programs).

However, banner ads still exist, even though the percentage of people who click on them is very small, on average, less than 1/4 of 1%.

One way to take advantage of this low click-through rate is to intentionally create banner ads with copywriting that will further diminish the likelihood that they will be clicked. One example could be advertising a high price.

The net effect would be that the banner ad is displayed for a longer period of time (if it’s on a cost per click basis as opposed to cost per impression). This can be leveraged to raise awareness about your product/service. Further, for those few that do click the ad that displays a high price, there may be a higher likelihood that they are a quality prospect.

Click this Online Advertisement Comparison to see a chart that indicates that 11% or less of marketers may be using this tactic.

In short, intentionally creating banner ad images that will not be clicked can establish greater brand awareness in the mind space of your potential customers, over time.

Regardless, like all other elements of direct response marketing, such a reverse banner ad tactic should be tested for your particular product/service and your specific buyers.

Adwords Advertiser Statistics

Aaron Wall posted a telling graph of Adwords advertiser statistics that illustrates how “Google has hundreds of thousands of advertisers, but over 80% of their United States ad revenue comes from the top 1.35% of advertisers, according to a recent study of keyword data by SEM Rush.”

Per force, any business would be biased towards their highest source of revenue. In the case of Google’s Adwords PPC program, this lends additional light to their necessity to give better PPC rankings for established Adwords accounts. (Or, stated differently, how newer Adwords advertisers get penalized by Google).

Using Pay-Per-Click Advertising for Performance Testing

1) How do you know if you are focusing your search engine optimization (SEO) strategies on the right keywords?

2) How do you know if you have the best headlines?

3) How do you determine the best offer for your product or service?

The answer is keyword research accompanied by TESTING, TESTING and more TESTING!

Of course there are a variety of ways to test keywords, to test headlines (and other copywriting points), as well as to test for the best offers.

You can certainly set up different pages that are focused on different sets of keywords, with different headlines, and different offers, and monitor key performance metrics, such as “visitors,” and “sales,” and compare them over time to see which perform the best and then continually refine their performance.

However, you can accomplish the same much faster using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

A) Write different PPC ads using your best selected keywords.  Which keywords get more visitors to click on them?

B) Write PPC ads using different combinations of headlines with the best performing keywords.  Which headlines get clicked on the most?

C) Write your best offers on your landing pages for your product or service, which are in harmony with your PPC ads.  Which landing page offers convert the most visitors to sales?  (Click the following link for #1 Copywriting Tip for more information on writing offers.)

With your testing results in hand, you can use this information to refine your long-term SEO campaign. Obviously, you want to keep the winners and get rid of the losers.  But don’t stop there.  Then the game becomes establishing new tests to beat the current “winner” (more technically referred to as the “control” item).

Of course you can accomplish all the above over time using natural traffic, but that takes much longer to be statistically significant.  For relatively small amounts of expenditures, you can test keyword effectiveness and other important factors much faster, using pay-per-click advertising, before embarking on a long and involved strategic SEO process.

In essence you’re trading money for time, so that you can generate higher performance and profits.

Comparing Old and New PPC Accounts

Here’s a useful Bryon Walker video on Perry Marshall’s site about how Google penalizes new PPC accounts.

Or, stated more accurately, how Google reduces costs and gives better PPC rankings for established Adwords accounts.