4 Reasons You Should Want to Do It Now

LinkedIn announced this week the opening its publishing platforms to members. Up to now, members are only able to share updates and links with their connections within their personal network. LinkedIn turned its sights on content about a year ago and only influencers selected by LinkedIn were given the opportunity to publish articles on the site. With this recent announcement, LinkedIn changes that – they’ll begin to open up their publishing platforms and offer members the ability to publish content to all 227 million LinkedIn members.

LinkedIn’s head of content products made the announcement, saying: 

“LinkedIn is opening up our publishing platform to our members, giving them a powerful new way to build their professional brand. When a member publishes a post on LinkedIn, their original content becomes part of their professional profile, is shared with their trusted network and has the ability to reach the largest group of professionals ever assembled. Now members have the ability to follow other members that are not in their network and build their own group of followers. Members can continue to share their expertise by posting photos, images, videos and their original presentations on SlideShare.”

I am an unabashed LinkedIn brand ambassador, especially for B2B brands and for networking and relationship building in general. I speak and write on this topic all the time and am passionate about the value it can deliver for brands and for individuals across many verticals. My team and I spend many hours helping our clients write and develop great profiles, understand how to use LinkedIn, for social selling, relationship building, integrate LinkedIn into our content marketing strategies and, well, you name it and we do it on LinkedIn. So I suppose it’s likely no surprise that I think this is a great move on LinkedIn’s part.

Four Reasons to Want to Invest in Publishing Content On LinkedIn

I Like ‘Em Big

My kids are huge fans of Madagascar 2 and one of our favorite songs to rock out to is Moto Moto’s “I Like ‘Em Big.” I’ll just leave that playing in your head while you read the rest of this post. Well, when it comes to big and social networks, LinkedIn’s got it covered. It’s big, it’s filled with people who are your customers and your prospective customers, and there’s no better place to add value to what you’re doing as part of your social media networking (and marketing) efforts than LinkedIn. Period.

Search

LinkedIn is a powerful factor in search results and The Google tends to trust LinkedIn more than it trusts other sites. It stands to reason that when you’re writing and sharing great content on LinkedIn, that content will be rewarded in search.

Enhanced Credibility and Reach 

As LinkedIn works to create a more intuitive interface, part of what the platform will do is to suggest your content to others who might find it relevant, based on what it knows about those users. Talk about an opportunity to broaden your own brand and the “reach” of your posts and your thinking, but also the credibility that’s imparted to you as a result.

Online Authority

The steps you take to build your reputation and your brand online – no matter what you do or sell, is important. And that’s also how little guys like me can compete against huge agencies. We understand this, we make time for it and we integrate this kind of thinking into the strategies we develop and execute for clients. It’s truly a point of differentiation that can make a world of difference because, to our way of thinking, it’s not about what you say you know how to do – whether for yourselves or for your clients – it’s what you show you know how to do that makes the difference. Writing content designed for publication on LinkedIn, getting great engagement as a result of that content, social sharing, showing up in Google results and the like – that is bound to impact your own authority in the eyes of search engines.

The Specifics

LinkedIn is starting small and will be initially offered to 25,000 English language members of LinkedIn. In the coming month, more languages will be included. How will you know if you are one of the 25,000 selected? There will be a pencil icon in the “Share an update” box on your LinkedIn homepage. I’d show you mine but I’ve not yet been granted that access. Drats. For more information on this, however, detailed instructions are available in the LinkedIn help center. If you’re interested in early access, you can register here.

Bottom Line

I don’t really think there’s any downside to creating content designed specifically for sharing on LinkedIn, in spite of the fact that I’ve heard others rumble about giving content away. There’s a tremendous business upside in being brave enough to step out on a limb and write about the things you know and when you do that on what is the largest business social network, and it becomes an archived part of your professional profile on that network, it makes a lot of sense to me.

And if you’re in the job market, either openly or quietly looking around for your next big adventure? There are so many advantages to integrating this into how you’re using LinkedIn it makes me giddy just thinking about them.

There’s probably not an “easy button” for integrating publishing on LinkedIn as part of your overall content marketing strategies – which is a good thing. Writing and publishing content is relative easy (in the big scheme of things) – getting anyone interested enough to read it is something else entirely. It also bears mentioning that if you’ve eschewed the value of LinkedIn and not actively worked to build your connection base, make friends, add value to groups, etc., you’re likely not going to get much value out of something like this. Which is only fair as well.

It still remains to be seen if people will actually write and publish articles on LinkedIn and how much value it might deliver, but it will certainly be interesting to experiment with. As anyone who does it knows, creating quality content consistently takes time and effort. Will business owners see any value here and commit additional time and resources to publish content on LinkedIn in addition to their own platforms? I’m not sure. But time (and testing) will tell.

Lastly, I think it’s super important to mention that we see this as an addendum to what you might be doing from a content standpoint, not the only thing you’re doing. Unless of course you don’t have a blog or your company doesn’t have a blog, and this might be a decent substitute and/or a short-term solution. Think about it this way: you’re in sales and your company doesn’t have a blog and you don’t have any content to share in social (nevermind a strategy) that might lead someone back to your site and/or allow you to do any kind of lead generation. You get this, your company doesn’t. By writing your OWN content, content that would add value to your clients and prospects, and publishing it on your LinkedIn profile, and then sharing THAT content in the social media space – well, it can be pretty stinking valuable. Chew on that one for a minute and let me know what you think.

What about you? Interested in giving this a test drive and seeing what kind of value it can deliver or are you on “content overload” and can’t imagine writing, creating, publishing anywhere but your own blog? I’d love to hear what you think.

What Type of Content Gets Shared the Most on Twitter?

Have you ever wondered what type of content you should be creating for Twitter? Whether it is blog posts, quotes, memes, there has to be a content type that helps your traffic and branding more than other types of content, right?

I actually had the same question, which is why I decided to analyze 1,000 Twitter users and 398,582 tweets to see if I could figure out what type of content gets shared the most.

What I learned is that all content types are not created equal. Some get shared more than others…

Here’s how each content type stacks up against the rest.

Images perform better than videos

Users on Twitter tweet images 361% more than they tweet videos.

Even more interesting is to look at the number of favorites and retweets. Images tend to get 128% more retweets than videos, but videos get favorited 49% more than images.

From a branding standpoint, it’s easier and quicker to make images, so I recommend that you focus your time on image creation over videos.

The other thing that I learned when analyzing images is that 62% were humor-based, while 38% were other types.

If you want to maximize your branding efforts, you’ll have to come up with creative ways to infuse your corporate brand with humor. For example, this would be a great image to share potentially on Twitter if your company was KitKat:

On the flip side, if KitKat just shared an image of someone eating its candy bar, that tweet wouldn’t do well.

Text performs better than images

Who would have thought that text performed better than images? Ninety-three percent of all the tweets we analyzed were text-based. In other words, they didn’t contain any images or videos.

What was even more interesting is that 65% of those text-based tweets contained a link. The link part is important because not only does that mean you can drive traffic back to your site, but it also means that tweets with links get retweeted 86% more often. Plus, if you can keep the tweet under 100 characters, you’ll also get 17% more engagement.

Although this may seem obvious, the best way to drive traffic to your website is to tweet with a link.

Focus on list-based or how-to type of content

When we were diving into the text-based tweets, we found something interesting.

We assumed that people loved reading personal tweets such as how someone’s day was going or what that person was eating for dinner. Interestingly enough, those tweets had the least number of favorites or retweets.

But what did extremely well from a retweet perspective were tweets that linked to how-to or list-based articles. On average, they received 3 times more retweets than any other type of text-based content.

If you want to tweet about something personal, tweet about luxury lifestyle because those tweets did the best. In other words, if you were to tweet about a fancy car, watch, home, or a yacht, you would get more favorites than if you were to tweet about what you ate for dinner. You still won’t get a ton of retweets compared to tweeting a how-to article, but you will get a lot of favorites.

Quotes outperform questions

When analyzing the tweets, we found that quotes tended to get 847% more retweets than questions. And although that percentage may seem big, it’s not that surprising.

What was surprising was that users who tweeted quotes had 43% more followers.

On the flip side, questions contained more replies than quotes. In general, questions had 1,050% more replies. So, if you want to create a conversation with your followers, consider asking them a question.

If you want to brand yourself through the use of quotes, you can always create image-based ones like the one below.

Through image-based quotes, not only will you get the retweets, but you will also increase the number of people who start seeing your corporate logo.

Twitter users aren’t big fans of memes

Compared to Facebook, there aren’t as many memes that get passed around on Twitter. And they make up the smallest percentage of tweets.

If you want to generate traffic or increase your branding, you should consider staying away from memes. As a business, it doesn’t make sense for you to focus your marketing efforts on memes because even if the meme does well, the quality of traffic it produces is so poor that you won’t see many conversions.

Conclusion

If you are trying to get the most traffic from Twitter, consider creating how-to or list-based content on your site. Then push it out on Twitter, and have your friends, co-workers, and family members do the same.

If you want to maximize your branding, the simplest thing you can do is create image-based quotes with your corporate logo, and then push them out on Twitter.

Go Deep: Product Listing Ad Campaigns That Just Focus On Top Sellers Get Short Changed [Study]

Is there a long tail in PLAs? Does it pay off for retailers to advertise all of their products in their Google product listing ad (PLA) campaigns? Or should they stay focused on top sellers and high margin items?

Sitting on a trove of data from large scale Google Shopping campaigns, a team at PLA management platform Adchemy decided to dig in to see if advertisers really do benefit from a long tail effect — small volume conversions across a large number of products — when they advertise their entire catalogs in PLAs.

What they found: SKUs with just one conversion in Q4 2013 accounted for 21 percent of PLA revenue.

Scott Jewett, who runs the retail consulting and content marketing efforts for Adchemy, presented the findings today at eTail West.

“Our data reveals that a significant amount of PLA revenue comes from single-conversion SKUs and that those conversions have a higher return on ad spend,” said Jewett in a statement. “Even across millions of unique SKUs, a significant chunk of them receive impressions and clicks, and those that convert just once are often more profitable than those products with multiple conversions.”

The team looked at Q4 2013 data across a sample set of customers that accounted for $6 million in spend and 1.6 million SKUs. All of the advertisers in the study advertise their entire product catalogs and use a one SKU per product target and one product target per ad group campaign structure for PLAs.

Not only did over one-fifth of all revenue come from one-time converters, the return on ad spend (ROAS) for those products was over 40 percent higher than the products that converted multiple times. Long tail SKUs also accounted for 24 percent of gross margin.

Mitigating The Risk Of Non-Converters? Are They The Real Long Tail?

Advertising an entire product catalog presents the risk of wasting a sizable amount of money on products that will never convert, or at least not at a reasonable cost-per-sale. In fact, in their research, Adchemy found that while 28,500 products had a single conversion, a whopping 470,000 (nearly half a million!) products didn’t convert at all. So it begs the question of when to cut off the tail.

Interestingly, Adchemy found that products with no conversions during the fourth quarter received just 3.3 clicks on average. In contrast, products with one conversion received 23.6 clicks.

I asked Jewett about this finding. He said they are going to do more research, but that it looks like click velocity — the time lapse between clicks — seems to be a good predictor of whether a product will convert in a PLA campaign. For example, if one product receives two clicks in two days, it seems likely that product will have a reasonable chance of converting compared to a product that receives two clicks spread out over a month, which might be a candidate for deactivation.

Jewett notes a complicating factor is that bids can impact click velocity, and low velocity may just signal that a bid is too low. If a bid increase doesn’t garner more clicks quickly, though, it may be a dud.

Advertisers often focus on their top sellers and margin producers in PLAs to avoid this kind of waste from non-converting products. Yet, in doing so, Adchemy’s research shows advertisers are limiting the revenue potential from one-off conversions that come with advertising their full catalogs.

Adchemy is continuing their analysis into click velocity, and it could have big implications if, with the right controls in place, advertisers — whether managing 100 or millions of SKUs — may be able to have their cake and eat it, too.

• SKUs with one conversion in Q4 2013 had a ROAS of 7.3 percent
• SKUS with more than one conversion in Q4 2013 had a ROAS of 4.1 percent
• 24 percent of PLA gross margin is attributed to SKUs with one conversion in the quarter

Is Twitter’s Flirtation With Agencies An Effort To Court “Normals”?

Looking for a higher profile outside its social network, Twitter is turning to advertising agencies for help, according to a post in Advertising Age today.

In the last several weeks, the trade journal reported, Twitter has been inviting agencies to pitch creative concepts for marketing Twitter’s service and building its brand. Twitter’s media spend is expected to be low and it’s looking for one-off projects rather than a long-term deal.

This move can be seen as Twitter hedging its bets and making itself more accessible to regular (not especially techie) people. Its place as the social platform for discussions about pop culture,  live events and news of the day is secure and was reaffirmed by this week’s Academy Awards bonanza. The company reported 3.3 billion Oscar-related impressions on the network, including more than 32 million for Ellen DeGeneres’ record-breaking — and briefly Twitter breaking — selfie.

But with 241 million users, Twitter is playing catch-up to Facebook’s 1 billion plus. And Twitter growth rates have been declining — the fourth quarter of 2013 was its slowest quarter ever.

Turning to more traditional ad platforms looks like an attempt to goose those numbers and convince late adopters — and dormant users — to be active on the network.

BrightEdge Uses SEO Patents As “Sword,” Sues Searchmetrics

Oh no they didn’t: BrightEdge has sued rival Searchmetrics using multiple SEO patents, which were granted last year. The concern being expressed by some today is that this could be the beginning of a wave of litigation as BrightEdge seeks to capitalize on its newly granted IP or goes after competitors that it perceives to be infringing.

The patents in question broadly pertain to various automated SEO software tools:

• 8,577,863: “Correlating web page visits and conversions with external references” Granted 11/5/2013
• 8,478,700: “Opportunity identification and forecasting for search engine optimization” Granted 7/2/2013
• 8,478,746: “Operationalizing search engine optimization” Granted 7/2/2013
• 8,135,706: “Operationalizing search engine optimization” Granted 3/13/2012

Reading the complaint (embedded below) doesn’t clarify much about the specific factual allegations of infringement other than plaintiff’s contention that infringement is happening and ongoing. The complaint asks for standard IP-related damages (i.e., monetary damages, injunctions, etc.).

It goes without saying there are lots of SEO-related software tools in the market. Doing simple keyword searches in the USPTO database or in Google Patent Search reveals thousands of documents that discuss or in some way implicate search optimization. Google itself has filed and been granted many patents on SEO-related software and inventions.

Bill Slawski has written extensively about SEO patents and only scratched the surface.

As a basic legal matter, the existence of a patent does not mean there will be a finding of liability by a judge or jury. Patent litigation is complex and can be confusing and messy. Patents canalso re-examined by the US PTO upon request with the submission or citation of alleged “prior art” (earlier, related patents).

Regardless, this will be a case to watch. We’ve asked both companies for a comment and will update if we hear back.

Postscript: We have a statement now from Searchmetrics founder and chief technology officer Marcus Tober who emailed:

I appreciate that BrightEdge understood the value of Searchmetrics SEO platform and that they see us now as a serious competitor. That’s great. I’m looking forward that much more of their customers are switching to us because we have inventions, better data and we deliver to our customers what we promise. I’m absolutely not afraid of a lawsuit because as I see it we are not infringing any patent, especially not patents that were filed after we had these features already.

Postscript 2: We now have a statement from BrightEdge CEO and founder Jim Yu:

BrightEdge filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Searchmetrics in federal court in California yesterday.  The complaint alleges that Searchmetrics’s products infringe one or more claims of U.S. Patent Numbers 8,577,863, 8,478,700, 8,478,746, and 8,135,706.  A copy of the complaint will be posted on BrightEdge’s website later today.

As company policy, we take a “no comment” approach to all inquiries regarding litigation, including this lawsuit.

You can also refer to our website and content found at: http://www.brightedge.com/patents, which includes the following:

“BrightEdge Technologies, Inc., the leader in enterprise SEO, believes that investing in R&D is critical to delivering the advanced technology that sophisticated customers and marketing professionals increasingly need to keep on top of the dynamic world of digital marketing. The Company has spent millions of dollars on research and development, and our growing patent portfolio largely reflects fundamental innovations important to our industry. During the course of our history – since the earliest days when our founders worked relentlessly around the clock late into the night over months and months to invent their first new solutions and systems to tackle the needs of large enterprises – we have invested heavily to innovate and to deliver solutions that add significant value to customers.”

Xbox One Gets Bing Web Search

Microsoft announced on the Bing Search Blog that the Xbox One now supports full web search with the latest system wide update to the Xbox One.

Microsoft said with this update they are “expanding search to include web results.” Now when you search with “Xbox Bing,” you will receive results from the Bing marketplace as well as relevant items from the web. Also when using Internet Explorer on Xbox One, you are now able to highlight text on the web page then press the menu button to engage Bing search.

Here are screen shots:

Logged Out: Yahoo To Stop Allowing Facebook & Google Sign-Ins

Looking to play the ever popular Yahoo Tourney Pick’Em during this season’s NCAA college basketball tourney? Turns out that you’ll find yourself setting up an official Yahoo account as starting with Tourney Pick’Em Google and Facebook Logins will no longer be accepted.

Yahoo is planning on removing all of the Facebook and Google login functionality in a move to heighten the overall user experience. This latest move by CEO Marissa Mayer who has been shaking up nearly everything from search to company culture to acquisitions. According to an official statement to Reuters Yahoo stated the following about the change to login process:

“(the process) will allow us to offer the best personalized experience to everyone”.

The change will start with Tourney Pick’Em but won’t stop until it has been removed from all Yahoo properties but no definite timeline is in place.

Marketing Land Summit Preview: “From Content Marketing To Media Company” By Copyblogger Media’s Brian Clark

The Marketing Land Digital Marketing Summit will give you a big picture look at the issues that will impact your marketing plans for this year and beyond. The new, day long program features keynote level, Ted-style solo presentations from industry visionaries representing search, social, content, email, display and more. The speakers we’ve invited are seasoned professionals, acknowledged thought leaders, inspiring communicators. People who will wow you with their insights and motivate you to chart new territory in your own marketing campaigns. Today’s preview:

Brian Clark – Founder & CEO, Copyblogger Media

Brian Clark is a serial entrepreneur based in Boulder, Colorado. He’s the founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media, and the host of New Rainmaker, debuting in January of 2014.

Brian built three successful service businesses using online marketing techniques before moving to a completely online business model. The result of that move — Copyblogger Media — is an innovative company that provides the advice and solutions that empower people to successfully grow their businesses through social media and online marketing.

At the Marketing Land Digital Marketing Summit, Brian’s topic is From Content Marketing to Media Company. The internet has empowered prospects to bypass advertising and sales pitches. Giving people engaging content has become the first step in 21st century marketing. That means smarter companies will adopt a media-first business strategy, regardless of their business model or market. Learn the ingredients of engaging content and the changes your organization must make to succeed with a media-first business strategy.

What mobile device can you not live without?

I can’t get work done with my MacBook Air (I replaced my iPad with it, so it’s mobile, right?), but I can’t live without my iPhone.

Can we take a peek at your phone’s home screen?

What app do you use most often for work?

Gmail, Evernote, Word. I’m pretty low maintenance.

What social media network or website do you frequent most when you’re not working?

Twitter, but I’m trying to quit. Consider this a cry for help.

What’s the first thing you check on your phone in the morning?

Email, just to make sure something didn’t break during the night.

What work challenge keeps you up at night?

I’ll come up with new ideas at night and work them through in my head when I should just go to sleep, since I can’t implement right then anyway.

What has been the most exciting work development this year?

Putting the finishing touches on our hosted online marketing platform, Rainmaker.

How many miles have you traveled this year?

Denver to Austin and Vegas and back. How many is that?

What other career would you like to try?

Handsome billionaire (h/t @badbanana).

What does your desk look like right now?

I stare at the beautiful Flatirons every once in a while to motivate me to get done and go do something outside.

What is the last business book you read?

The Psychology of Media Entertainment, 2nd Edition. Technically a textbook, but it’s a business book to me. 😉

Outside of your company’s efforts, what marketing campaign or video caught your eye recently?

I spend all day on Buzzfeed and Upworthy, regretting the decision to teach just anyone how to write headlines.

Register Today For The Marketing Land Digital Marketing Summit

Brian Clark’s From Content Marketing to Media Company is one of 12 thought-leadership talks at the Marketing Land Digital Marketing Summit. The Summit is running together with SMX West, March 11-13 in San Jose, the three-day conference devoted to all aspects of search, online and social media marketing. You can attend either the Marketing Land Digital Marketing Summit or the entire 3 day SMX West event, so don’t delay.

Who Rules the Mobile Social Media World: Men or Women? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Men are generally known to lead the space when it comes to adopting new technologies, but it is us Women who are heavily influencing future mobile technology trends.

Not really a surprise since we know that it is women who are the more social gender and use Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter to check on family, friends and favourite brands multiple times a day. Women interact with brands more often than their male counterparts and for a wider range of reasons. They consume and share news, events, things they love or hate more frequently then men – who are more likely to be visiting news and sports websites.

Alex Hillsberg from Finance Online forwarded their Infographic to me earlier today which highlights some interesting points:

• 12% more women than men use tablets for social media interactions
• On Pinterest women outnumber men by 25% which makes them vital part of the company’s $7.7B value
• Women are the biggest sharers of images and videos in the internet via Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest

7 Common Pitfalls Of Google Display Network Campaign Management

The Google Display Network has been around for a long time now, yet marketers continue to make many of the same mistakes over and over again. Here are seven common issues that can arise when running a display campaign if you don’t stay on the ball.

1. Unnecessary Pausing Of Keywords

You notice that your display campaign has suddenly started spending a lot more money and your cost-per-conversion has tripled. What’s the first thing you look at?

A lot of people would tend to go straight to the keywords (if targeting contextually) and try to pinpoint the highest spending term to either lower the bid on it or pause it. This is the wrong place to be looking.

If you notice a high surge in spend, always go to your placements tab and evaluate the domains your ads have been showing on. One keyword may well have triggered an irrelevant or new placement, but this doesn’t mean that the keyword needs to be paused.

Often, you can either exclude the placement or add a bid multiplier to it to positively or negatively impact its bid. Don’t forget to look back over a longer time period to see if there are any placements that have been underperforming for a long time — these can be excluded.

2. Not Adjusting Keyword Level Custom Bids

As part of the Enhanced Campaigns rollout last year, Google added a new feature whereby you could apply custom bids to one of your targeting methods and then use bid adjustments to further refine bids for your other combination targeting methods.

If you haven’t changed your keyword-level bids since then, you’ll notice that when you do, it won’t let you until you enable custom bids on them. If you hadn’t made the choice, AdWords will have taken your ad group level bid at the time.

Switch on custom bids at keyword level and start optimizing each keyword! Once you’ve assessed the types of placement coming in at keyword level, you’ll have a better idea of which keywords are performing well (or not).

From here, you can adjust your bids to achieve better results overall. Too often, marketers forget to regularly adjust their keyword-level bids on display campaigns. If you’re not working toward direct response, you can still be adjusting bids to try to gain maximum traffic for your budget.

3. Not Making Use Of Bid Adjustments

Related to the above point, bid adjustments often get overlooked!

You can only set your custom bid for one targeting method; if you’re doing keyword targeting, you’ll need to choose this as your custom bid as bid adjustments (by %) can’t be made in the keywords tab.

If you’re doing combination targeting, you’ll want to make regular bid adjustments based on performance to either bid a specified percentage more or less for certain placements, topics or interest categories.

Google has made things much easier for us to further refine our combination bidding, so start taking advantage of it.

4. Having A Static Strategy & Structure

When was the last time you added a new ad group to your display campaign? A while ago? Thought so! Our search campaigns evolve with time, and we’re always adding in new features — but people can forget to do the same with the GDN.

Model your display campaign on David Beckham’s strategy: change and adapt with the latest trends, or set them yourself to stay ahead of the competition!

• Make sure you’re testing out new options available to you such as in market segments and affinity categories which give you increased coverage for your campaigns but a more niche-level of targeting.
• Experiment with bid multipliers for location, device, time-of-day and age, and expand your strategies based on these results. You’ll almost certainly be looking into these different bidding strategies for your search campaigns, so don’t neglect them in your display campaigns!
• Expand your keyword lists; display ad groups have the same limits as search ones now, so you’re no longer capped at 50 keywords.

This next one takes the biscuit for the worst common mistake!

5. Only Utilizing Image Ads

Marketers often forget about text ads — at their own peril. If you’re not utilizing text ads, that means you’re not gaining full exposure on the GDN, as a significant number of sites only allow text ads to be shown.

Text ads have been shown to give great direct response, so they are definitely worth adding into your campaigns. Keep up-to-date with the latest developments in this area, too, as there are some exciting changes coming which will impact the look and feel of text ads!

6. Not Testing Ads

This is another common pitfall, and display campaigns sadly get overlooked in this area. It’s important to test:

• Different sets of image ads
• At least three text ads per ad group
• A variety of image ad sizes (including the newer half page and mobile ads)
• Different styles of image ads such as the new engagement style ads

These are just a few ideas of things to look at, but you get the idea.

For those with a particularly static display campaign, image ads can now be up to 150kb in size, so you can get some much better quality image ads in your account now compared to the 50kb limit that had been set in the past!

7. Expecting The Same Results As From Search Campaigns

Display campaigns can be short lived, if you approach them with the wrong expectations. When starting up a GDN campaign, you need to approach it with the understanding that it will not yield the same results as your search campaigns.

Clickthrough rates will be lower, conversion rates will be lower, the volume of conversions will be lower, etc. You need to launch your campaign with a goal of either raising awareness or trying to gain direct response — and if you’re looking for direct response, you’re going to need to set different goals than those of your main search campaigns.

The GDN will give you that additional reach you need whilst also offering you a lower cost-per-click in many cases compared to your main search campaigns, but you’ll need to continually experiment with all the options available to you to make it work in the right way for you. Don’t give up — keep testing new things!

To Sum Up

There are more common mistakes, but these are some of the main ones I come across when looking at display campaigns that come to the agency where I work.

Display isn’t just something you switch on and leave running, it’s something that takes a lot of fine tuning to get working the way you want it to, and with that, you need to make sure you’re giving it enough attention and budget in relation to your search campaigns. If you’re not running any GDN campaigns yet, hopefully, this will give you a few pointers ahead of getting started!