The Official Clickable Blog

Profiting Across Search Networks: Expanding Your Reach to Yahoo Search Marketing

Hanny Hindi — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:00:00 GMT

The opportunity to make money on Google AdWords is vast, but it isn’t infinite. Over the past few weeks, I’ve described one system to maximize your revenue on AdWords. Start by finding all of the traffic available for your terms. Then, gradually modify your revenue goals until you find the point of diminishing returns where increased efficiency means decreased total revenues. But maximizing your revenues on AdWords doesn’t mean there are no more revenues to be had. The next place you should look is on Yahoo Search Marketing.

Back in February, Trace Johnson detailed the process for converting your AdWords campaigns for Yahoo Search Marketing. I won’t repeat all of the technical details here. Instead, two tips to help you find your YSM sweet spot more quickly:

1. Reduce your bids by 20%
Yahoo has significantly less traffic than Google, so you can achieve the same positions, (and often higher ones) without bidding as much. As a rule of thumb, reduce your bids by 20% when you first launch on YSM.

2. Don’t worry about a maximum daily budget
Yahoo’s relatively lower traffic also means that you probably aren’t in any danger of your ad spend spiking on a given day. In order to find the total traffic available on Yahoo (as explained in the first tutorial of this series) use Yahoo’s option to set no campaign spending limit.

When you first launch your campaigns in Google, there is no historical data to help you determine your ideal revenue goals. But by the time you move on to Yahoo, your AdWords performance is available as a benchmark. Start with those goals, reduce your bids as described above, and tweak as necessary. Next stop: Microsoft adCenter.

Clickable Pro Version 2.2 Empowers Marketers To Manage Larger and More Complex Search Campaigns Than Ever Before

Vernon Steward — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

When we first launched Clickable Pro, our flagship product, our goal was to help make search marketing simpler and more profitable for marketers who often had many other responsibilities beside PPC. Our original focus was on small and mid-size businesses, but we quickly discovered that agency and large advertisers needed a simple, intuitive solution as much as SMBs.

To better serve these customers, we have made Clickable Pro a robust tool that is both simple to use and extremely powerful. Users can still manage multiple network accounts centrally, set revenue goals, optimize their campaigns with ActEngine recommendations, and build custom reports to track performance across network. Now, with Clickable Pro Version 2.2, marketers can manage larger and more complex campaigns and data sets than ever before.

In v2.2 we have made dramatic improvements to three of our core features: Location (Geo) Targeting, Reporting, and Keyword Bulk Edit.

•         Improved Location (Geo) Targeting: Clickable's map-based solution simplifies location targeting while giving you more ways to reach your audience. You can add standard locations from a search bar or browsing tree; create custom radius targets; or exclude subsets of your targets (such as individual states or metropolitan areas within larger regions). Most importantly, we provide a consistent interface that looks and works the same way across networks, and we make sure the specifics of each network is accounted for.

•         Reporting Enhancements: Our Reporting solution allows users to quickly create out-of-the-box or customized PDF and Excel reports. Start with one of our templates, or start from scratch; add charts and graphs with drag and drop ease; and save your reports for online viewing.. Now, Clickable's reports are more powerful, with custom, reusable reporting groups, flexible data views, report filters and the ability to handle large and complex data sets.

•         Improved Keyword Bulk Edit Tool: Our Keyword Bulk Edit Tool allows you to review or manage keywords across networks in a single window. Now, the tool handles even larger data sets and introduces several interface improvements, including more flexible customization of columns.

Clickable is committed to adding more powerful functionality to manage across accounts and perform bulk operations across campaigns while providing a simple and easy to use product.

As always, Clickable is a marketer's trusted advisor, with 24-hour Customer Support via email, live chat and phone - and an extensive Community of advertisers and marketing professionals. For marketers and agencies that need extra help getting started, our Clickable Assist team delivers tiered packages of managed services to ensure immediate success.

  Please try out Clickable Pro and let us know what you think. We're always listening so we can constantly improve.

Poll: Do you advertise on social networks?

Anna Agishtein — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:04:00 GMT

Has your company ever advertised on social networks like Facebook, MySpace or others? Take our newest poll and see how other marketers have responded. We will publish the results in our December newsletter.

Poll: Online Marketers Turn To Twitter For Social Networking

Anna Agishtein — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:44:00 GMT

We recently asked a sample of customers and readers: “Which social networks are most important to your business?” Although Facebook is the largest social network with fan pages, applications, and even a pay-per-click advertising program, Twitter is not far behind in the hearts of marketers. Out of 27 respondents, 41% chose Facebook, while 30% selected Twitter. The remaining 29% were distributed across LinkedIn, MySpace, and “other.”

At Clickable, we maintain a Facebook page, though our customers and prospects tend to be more active on Twitter – at least when it comes to discussing search marketing and their experience with our products. You can follow Clickable on Twitter here.

Take our next poll!

Hyper-targeted Ads on Social Networks

Ehren Reilly — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:54:00 GMT

This article is the second in a four-part series on social network advertising.

Search engines succeed by identifying a good match between a user's query and a relevant ad, which attracts a click. Extended to display advertising on publisher sites, search engines' content networks succeed by semantically processing the content of the page and finding ads that are relevant to the "meaning" of the page. The technical term for this is contextual targeting. It is quite a challenge, and the effectiveness of a program like Google's content network is truly an impressive computational linguistic feat.

In contrast, Facebook and MySpace do not have to solve this difficult computational problem in order to target their ads effectively. This is because they know so much about their users. When users log in to their social network accounts, the networks' advertising engines have access to all of their profile data for the purposes of ad targeting. Social networks like MySpace and Facebook collect a wealth of detailed information about their users -- the very purpose of a social network profile is to serve as a repository of users' personal information. While users may use this information to connect with friends, advertisers can use this information to understand and target their audience. Both MySpace and Facebook offer self-service pay-per-click advertising platforms that allow anyone to create ad campaigns that are hyper-targeted based on the demographic and psychographic data in users' profiles.

How do different targeting options differ?
There are four predominant types of ad targeting in use today.

Keyword Targeting: Users search for keywords on a search engine, and ads are presented that match their search query.
Contextual Targeting: Ads appear on a page with other content, such as a blog post or article, and the ads are targeted to match the "contextual" content of the page.
Behavioral Targeting: Users take some action, such as visiting a Website, or searching for an airline, and they receive a browser cookie that records their action. Then, later, ads on other sites are targeted to them based on the information in that cookie. Search engines typically do not offer this type of ad, but there are many advertising services that specialize in behavioral targeting or "re-targeting" of users who have already visited your site.
Psychographic/Demographic Targeting: Users are logged into a site, usually a social network, where they have a profile containing personal information about them and their interests. Ads are targeted based on this personal information. Because there are typically many targeting options that can be used in unison, this type of targeting is often referred to as hyper-targeting.

Who Should Use Demographic/Psychographic Hyper-targeting?
When evaluating whether hyper-targeted social network ads are right for you, as with all methods of targeting, you want to ask yourself how you describe or define your target audience. Can you define your target audience in terms of a very specific demographic or psychographic profile? For example, if you are a Harley-Davidson dealership in downtown Philadelphia, you could perhaps define your core audience as men over 18 who live within 50 miles of your store and who list among their interests "motorcycles" or "motorsports" or "Harley-Davidson." In contrast, if you operate a chain of restaurants across a diverse geographical area, you might find that your customer base is too broad and diverse to make hyper-targeting worth the effort.

Narrowly targeting your audience is good for you, the advertiser, because it helps you connect with individuals who are likely to want whatever it is you're offering. But it is also good for the ad publishers, because well-targeted ads are more likely to result in clicks, and subsequent revenue for publishers. Just as Google uses "Quality Score" to reward ads that will appeal to users and draw clicks, social networks with hyper-targeting capabilities will reward you with a higher share of the available ad impressions and lower costs per click if you narrowly target your ad. Generally, the more targeted an ad is, the better pricing you'll get. This is especially true on MySpace, where the interface actually shows you price estimates based on your targeting options.

Even if you feel that your customers are not easily hyper-targeted, consider the possibility of targeting a subset of your customers. For example, an online DVD retailer might find that overall, their audience is very broad, but they might want to individually hyper-target a single ad for the DVD Yoga Pregnancy: Pre-and Post-Natal Workouts to women who were age 20-40 who indicated their parental status as "Expecting" or "Just Gave Birth" and who list "Yoga" among their interests.

Another important consideration is that hyper-targeted social network ads are much more time-intensive to manage than most search engine CPC networks, and have much less user-friendly account management interfaces. It is only worth this effort if you have found that you cannot adequately target or reach your audience through search engines. The payoff of hyper-targeting is potentially great, but the management investment is also quite significant.

Demographic Targeting on Facebook
So, if you want to set up demographically/psychographically hyper-targeted ads on Facebook, what do you do, and how do you do it well?
1.   You will need to do this via a Facebook account, so if you don't have one, create one at http://www.facebook.com. If you already have an account, log in.
2.   At the very bottom of the page, click on "Advertising."
3.   Follow the instructions to set up your advertiser account and create your first ad.
4.   When you begin the ad-setup process, you'll see a big form with lots of options. Most of this is self-explanatory, but here are some highlights and things to consider.

Unlike typical PPC ads, Facebook "text" ads include an optional image. You should always use an image, even if it's not terribly interesting. Your ad will be larger, get noticed more, and be more effective if it includes an image. If you don't have any other appropriate image, use your logo.
Description text can be up to 135 characters, which is nearly double the 70 you get on Google or Yahoo.
Ads can be hyper-targeted based on location, age, sex, birthday, education level, current and former workplaces, relationship status and sexual orientation, language, and "connections" (which people or entities they are friends with). A final option, the most useful one, is called "keywords.” These are not keywords that the user searched for, but rather words that appear somewhere in their profiles. Unlike search engine keywords, you cannot enter arbitrary keywords here. Instead, there is a large fixed set of keywords options, and Facebook will prompt you to select one of the available "keywords". Take advantage of as many of these options as you can. If any of these options seem to describe your users, use that option to target your ads.
Set a campaign name and budget, and you're all set.

Demographic Targeting on MySpace

The setup process on MySpace is very similar to Facebook, but a few other considerations apply.
You do not need a MySpace user profile to create an ad campaign. However, you will need to create a separate advertiser account at http://advertise.myspace.com.
While Facebook ads are all the same size, MySpace ads come in three different sizes. For each size, you can make an ad using text and an image, although in each case the image size will be different.
If you have banner ad creatives with images that are 728x90px (leaderboard), 300x250px (medium rectangle), or 160x600px (wide skyscraper), you can use these instead of the image and text format.
If you do not have banner ad creatives, MySpace offers a nifty Ad Builder tool to help you create one.
MySpace's equivalent of Facebook's "Keyword targeting” is called "Interests and Occupations". The interface allows you to browse through available options and choose the ones that best define your customers.

Closing Advice
Social network hyper-targeting is an awesome capability, which offers certain advertisers a very precise way to reach their target audience. Some advertisers see these capabilities and say "I've been wishing I could serve my ads only to female football fans in Massachusetts to sell these pink Patriots jerseys." But there are many more advertisers whose audiences are broad, who really don't need all this targeting granularity. So, I have two pieces of advice if you are considering a hyper-targeted social network advertising campaign:
1. Make sure this is really worth your time. For more than half of the people reading this post, it's not worth it. It's a lot of power, and a lot of settings, so don’t get involved unless this really jumps out at you as something you've been wishing you could do.
2. If you do get into the hyper-targeted social network ads, take advantage of as many of the targeting options as you can. Your ads will be cheaper and more effective.

Ehren Reilly, Clickable SEM Guru
Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

Profiting Across Search Networks: Finding the Sweet Spot Between Traffic and Efficiency

Hanny Hindi — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:00:00 GMT

Here’s a pretty basic problem: Price your offering too high, and your total sale volume will be low. Price it too low, on the other hand, and your margins will be too tight. The result in either case? A low overall return on investment. But somewhere between the extremes of overly high prices and overly narrow margins is a sweet spot that will ensure the highest total return. Here’s how to find it.

Of course, I need to qualify that claim. What follows is just one way to set your search-marketing revenue goals. That is, it concerns finding the sweet spot between high traffic (with lower margins) and high efficiency (with lower total traffic). I won’t be saying anything about how to price your products: you’re the expert there. I assume that you know what your break-even point is, and that it’s relatively fixed.

As an example, we’ll use a business that sells widgets. They each cost $3 to manufacture, and they sell for $5 a piece. Therefore, the SEM break even point would be to spend an average of $2 on PPC advertising for every sale: a “Cost Per Acquisition,” or CPA, of $2.

In the last tutorial in this series, we discussed ways to find the total traffic available for a given set of keywords. Now that you know what it is, let’s see how much of it you can capture. What would that mean? Setting your goals (using Clickable’s goal value wizard) at your break-even point. That’s as much as you can spend on advertising without losing money. Once Clickable’s ActEngine(TM) has helped you tweak your keyword lists, bids, and creatives to reach that revenue goal, you’ll know how much traffic you can get with perfect efficiency. For our purposes, we’ll assume that our advertiser sold 100 widgets in the week after they reached their goal.

Perfect efficiency means no losses, but, of course, it also means no profits. Not an ideal situation. The next step is to start widening your profit margins bit by bit. You can use any increment you wish, but 10% seems like as good a place to start as any. So, in our example, the advertiser would set their CPA goal at $1.80. They might lose traffic, (but with a goal that’s still pretty modest, they probably won’t). Once they hit that goal, they can run the campaign for a week and see how they do. Let’s assume that they stay at 100 sales, with a 20 cent margin (after fixed costs), and, therefore total profits of $20.

As our advertiser keeps widening their margins, their total profits will, initially, keep going up. But then they’ll head back down. Why? Because at a certain point, the drop in total sales will overtake the increase in profits per sale. That’s the sweet spot. Stay there, and sell, sell, sell.

Does that mean your total revenues will forever be fixed at whatever you can make at this particular price point, and with the volume you can get on this particular network? Not at all. We’ve just found the sweet spot on a single network―Google. It’s time to find profits somewhere else. A good place to start would be Yahoo...

Caterina Fake At Clickable's Interesting Cafe

Max Kalehoff — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:00:00 GMT

Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch, was our special guest at Clickable's Interesting Cafe last week. She shared wisdom on design and usability, being a female entrepreneur, leaving a product legacy, and driving innovation. Below is a short video interview we shot after her group talk. (The full 48-minute talk is here.) Our next Interesting Cafe takes place December 1, featuring Peter Semmelhack, founder, president and CEO of Bug Labs. If you're interested in joining us, send me an email at mkalehoff at clickable dot com with "interesting" in the subject. I'll alert you when registration opens up.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Tracking PPC Conversions Across Search Engines and Media

Tony Soric — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:51:00 GMT

Conversion tracking and analytics are critical to effectively managing an online marketing campaign. At the minimum, marketers should track online spending and conversion rates to determine whether their campaigns are successful.

Sounds simple enough, right?

In theory, yes - however, as SEM campaigns continue to grow in complexity and media options expand beyond banner ads and PPC text ads, marketers must understand how every component of the media mix affects their bottom-line. In order to do so, marketers need to develop customized attribution models that effectively track all aspects of their campaign.

Analytics Platforms
Your analytics package, or tracking platform is primarily responsible for keeping a running tally of your KPIs (key performance indicators) such as clicks, conversions, impressions, and time-on-site, to name a few.

Which conversion-tracking platform should I use?
Most PPC advertisers have opted for the AdWords Conversion Tracking tool (ACT) available directly through the platform, because it’s simple to install and all conversions are tracked within the AdWords interface. By simply copying and pasting a small bit of code, the advertiser sees conversion data tracked alongside their cost data in AdWords. The downside to this tracking method is that it only provides conversion data for your AdWords campaign. So essentially, you are still tracking in a silo, but even this level of tracking is far better than none at all.

The other, more robust option, is to track conversions using a third-party analytics tool that allows you to track not only AdWords PPC conversions but also organic conversions and Web referrals across multiple PPC engines. This can be a free solution like Google Analytics or a more expensive, enterprise-level package, like Omniture. Of course, (shameless plug) you may want to take advantage of CCT, Clickable's conversion tracking tool that allows you to track conversions across networks using a single snippet of tracking code.

The benefits of using a third-party tool are obvious. While Google offers a serviceable solution in the AdWords Conversion Tracker, it lacks the flexibility and options offered in third-party tools.

Calls to Action
Once you have set up your analytics solution, you need to identify your points of conversion. For some advertisers defining a conversion is simple - all their conversions take place online and consist of a new lead, sale, or newsletter signup. The conversion is logged when a user reaches the conventional "thank you” page on the site.

But sophisticated marketers have realized the importance of tracking offline conversions (inbound phone-calls) as well. While these conversions may be as - if not more - valuable than traditional online conversions they are next to impossible to track without a unique call tracking strategy.

I highly recommend using a unique, track-able phone number for your PPC landing pages. This will allow you to properly attribute sales you generated via paid search. Also, you will be able to determine which networks, ad groups, and keywords (depending on how many phone numbers you choose to deploy) are generating conversions not only online - but over the phone as well. There are a number of call tracking services available to online marketers.

Consider the following scenario:

This simplified scenario shows how CPA metrics can significantly alter a marketer’s perception of the performance of a campaign and lead to inefficiencies in account management when conversion sources are not attributed properly.

Tony Soric, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

Profiting Across Search Networks: Determining How Much Traffic is Available

Hanny Hindi — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This may be an odd way to begin a series about driving revenues outside of Google AdWords, but, here goes: it makes sense to start on Google AdWords.

Google’s market share in the PPC space isn’t simply a majority; it’s an overwhelmingly majority. As I mentioned last week, nearly two-thirds of all PPC spending happens on Google, with Yahoo at about 20 percent and Microsoft at about 10. (The other 10 percent is split between smaller search engines such as Ask.com.) That said, “10 percent market share” still corresponds to nearly one billion searches. Whatever it is in relative terms, that is still a huge number―and a huge opportunity.

And yet, you should start on Google AdWords: maximize the opportunity on the largest network, and move on from there.

Unless you’re bidding on extremely high-traffic terms, it is actually possible ― and, when you’re first launching your campaigns, desirable ― to get impressions on nearly all of the traffic for your keywords. Later, you can drop ineffective keywords. But before finding the desirable traffic, it’s important to get a sense of the total traffic.

Of course, there is one way to do this that is completely free: using the AdWords Traffic Estimator. Simply enter your keywords (start with broad match); leave the “CPC” and daily budget fields blank; and set the appropriate location targets. AdWords will generate an estimate of the Avg. CPC you would need to appear in the top three positions, the average number of clicks you would get in a day, and the corresponding daily budget you would need to capture all of the traffic.

The Traffic Estimator is quite out-of-date, however. A more valuable tool is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Enter a keyword, click “Get keyword ideas,” and the tool spits out the total search volume in the previous month.

Done―right? Not quite.

When I asked Matt Mack, Clickable Assist Account Manager, he said that the AdWords’ traffic estimation tools are extremely valuable, but that their estimates “don’t necessarily correlate to the live environment.” And the difference between the estimates and the actual numbers is significant enough to justify doing your own experiments. This means taking an aggressive approach when you launch your campaigns. You’ll maximize impressions―and, while you’re at it, improve your Quality Score.

Now that you know exactly how much traffic is available on a given search network for your terms, it’s time to determine exactly how much of that traffic you should bid on. That is, how often can you display your ads while meeting your conversion goals? We’ll consider that question next week.

Become A Clickable Certified Search Expert (Video)

Max Kalehoff — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:11:00 GMT

Our purpose at Clickable is to help businesses survive and thrive by simplifying success in online advertising. We strive to do that through our Pro search-management tool, Assist managed services, our white-label Platform and Clickable Community (which we even made our home page). Despite all these tools, a common customer request was a knowledge framework and benchmark for mastering the fundamentals of search advertising as well as our flagship Pro tool. Well, we heard you loud and clear.

That's why we're delighted to introduce Clickable Pro Certification. The program allows marketers to gain search-advertising expertise and demonstrate it to the world. The program covers fundamental best practices like geo-targeting, copywriting and bid management. It also covers core functionality of Clickable's Pro search-advertising management tool so marketers can achieve maximum productivity and effectiveness.

Importantly, Pro Certification is an organic extension of our Community, one of the richest reservoirs of content and knowledge, written in simple, easy-to-understand English. The expert content is heavily driven by our Clickable Guru search ambassadors, and is evident across our University, Blog and Forums.

Check out our tour below. Better yet, we hope you'll join our growing community of Clickable Certified Search Experts!

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Profiting Across Search Networks: Introduction

Hanny Hindi — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:00:00 GMT

One of the major advantages of using Clickable Pro is the ability to expand your search advertising across networks without adding significant complexity. Clickable’s Manage section allows you to create and manage campaigns in Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter―with a consistent and simple interface. And Clickable’s ActEngine(TM) will optimize your performance no matter where your ads appear.

That said, Google’s market share hovers at somewhere around 65%, with Yahoo and Microsoft lagging far behind. (The widely-publicized launch of Bing only drove a 1% increase in market share for Microsoft, which is now at about 9.4%.) With numbers like these, any savvy advertiser is bound to ask: is it really worth advertising anywhere other than Google? The quick answer is: Yes.

Search marketing isn’t about absolute budgets, but about maintaining a precise relationship between costs and revenues. More to the point, it’s about keeping revenues ahead of costs by a specific amount. This philosophy is built directly into Clickable Pro’s Goal Values Wizard, which allows you to set either a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) goal that the ActEngine(TM) will help you achieve. However, if you make your goals too stringent, meeting them will mean a reduction in overall sales. On the other hand, make your goals too slack, and you’ll be cutting too deeply into your margins. The trick is to find the sweet spot between efficiency and total returns.

How do you find that sweet spot? That’s the topic of next week’s tutorial. And once you’ve found it on Google, what should you do next? Move on to Yahoo, and find your sweet spot there. Then, move on to Microsoft, and repeat. Each of those networks has its quirks, which we’ll discuss in more detail over the coming weeks. At the end of the series, we’ll look ahead to the impending partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft, and what it means for you.

Of course, if you have specific questions you’d like to see addressed in this series, please let us know on our Blog or in our Forums, and we’ll be sure to cover them.

Google To Expand Content Network with DoubleClick

Andrew Bernero — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Hundreds of thousands of advertisers use PPC to grow their businesses, but display advertising also connects searchers with services that interest them. For an advertiser, display ads are critical to boosting awareness of their service. For the online publishers who create the inventory, display ads help fund investment in online content.

The numerous display formats (video, image, interactive) and the thousands of Web sites that sell display ads create complexity for advertisers trying to buy and manage display inventory. Publishers also lose out – some are left with over 80% of their inventory unsold.

So with the aim of benefiting both the advertisers and publishers, Google recently announced that it will expand its content syndication to DoubleClick publishers via the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

What is The DoubleClick Ad Exchange?
The DoubleClick Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell advertising space. By creating an open market the Ad Exchange enables ad space to be allocated more efficiently across the Web.

Google cited 3 main objectives for the expansion to DoubleClick publishers:

1.    Simplify the system for buying and selling display ads
2.    Deliver improved performance and provide its advertisers with measurable results
3.    Expand reach for all advertisers and publishers to participate

DoubleClick states that the publishers and the ad networks and agency networks will benefit from this change. Ad networks and agency networks will have access to a new API which enables them to integrate their own functionality and systems when working with the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

The sharing of these assets should be beneficial to both advertisers and publishers alike in the foreseeable future. On the publishing side, publishers can benefit by auctioning remnant inventory to Google’s large base of hundreds of thousands of online advertisers in a slumping economy to help maximize their site’s ad revenue.

On the advertiser side, advertisers can potentially reach more premium Web sites without the hassle of going through offline contracts, legal negotiations, minimum purchases and lengthy commitments. Advertisers can, for all practical purposes, discontinue buying display ads with the click of a mouse.

While Google is playing catch-up to its rival Yahoo and Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange in terms of selling display advertising, it is interesting to note that the average advertiser still cannot access most of Right Media’s assets though their Yahoo search Marketing Account. Hopefully the average AdWords advertiser will have the same potential inventory selection and basic targeting capabilities as the larger ad networks that work with DoubleClick.

Andrew Bernero, Clickable SEM Guru

Building Landing Pages That Convert: Design Basics

Penny Sudtunyarat — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:11:00 GMT

Over the past month and a half, I’ve read each of Hanny’s weekly posts about building effective landing pages. In fact, I got to read them before just about anybody else. As Clickable’s graphic designer, it’s my job (among many other things) to take the Word doc he sends along and put it into the email template you see each week. But as I read these posts, I couldn’t help feeling that something was missing. Tips about how to tell users that your offer will solve their problems? Check. Tips about how to describe your offer? Check. Tips about how to provide support? Check.

But there was one thing I didn’t see in this series about landing pages: any mention of design! I had to step in.

Graphic design is obviously a huge and complex topic, but have no fear: this isn’t going to be a primer on everything from typeface to photo crops. Just five tips that you can immediately use to make cleaner, more attractive landing pages:

1. Whitespace is your friend

The first and easiest mistake you can make in graphic design is to feel that you need to "fill up the space." You don’t. Rather than starting with a blank slate and trying to fill it up, figure out exactly what elements you need on the page, and position them in the cleanest, most attractive way possible. As in the design below, this often means surrounding particularly important elements - like phone numbers and contact forms - with a good deal of whitespace. It makes them more prominent, and draws the user's eye to places you want them to focus.

2. Avoid light type on dark backgrounds

Perhaps because it was a default option in the early days of blogging, a surprisingly large number of Web sites use light type against dark backgrounds. Whatever the reason for this trend, avoid it. If you’ve spent time following Hanny’s tips about what to write for your landing pages, you don’t want the words obscured by the background. Dark type on light backgrounds is easier to read than light type on dark, and the text on your landing page must be easy to read.

3. Clearly set out your headlines and subheaders

Some words on your pages are more important than others, and this should be clear from the design. In the example below, "Elevated Member Benefits," "Elevated Markets" and "Elevated Technology" are the high-level points the page is communicating. For users who want more details, there are bullet points below. But, the really important stuff is in larger, more prominent type, just like it should be.

4. Don't use Flash

By using Flash for all or a portion of your landing ipage, you are asking the user to wait for your message. Those with slow connections might not want to wait for it load and leave before they ever see it. Others might have Flash turned off, or never installed in the first place. The sooner everything loads, the sooner your message can be seen-and a conversion made.

5. Don’t clutter your page with too many images or icons

Use images and photos, but not too many. Graphical elements are the most prominent parts of any landing page (sorry writers!) but the effect is lost if there are too many. A logo, a photo or two, maybe a few clear icons that help communicate your points - that should about do it. Anything else will be an unnecessary distraction.

Of course, this is a very short list about a very long topic. What have you found to be the most important elements of an attractive landing page?

Building Landing Pages That Convert: The Role of Your Homepage

Hanny Hindi — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:00:00 GMT

Search the Web, flip through guides, and nearly every bit of advice about your homepage will make the same assumption: it’s the first page users will visit. Perhaps. But, then again, perhaps not.

As any site owner can attest, a significant amount of traffic starts at their homepage. Whether it's users going straight to www.apple.com, or searching for “Apple” on Google and making their way from there, the homepage is prime real estate. However, more and more frequently, users are arriving at other pages on your site first.

Users most often conduct Web searches to solve problems. So when they click on an organic search result, they may go directly to a specific product page on your site, or a page describing your services in detail. And, if they click on your paid search ad, this will take them to one of your landing pages (which should NOT be your homepage!) Either way, their first encounter with your site will happen on a page other than your homepage. Only afterwards, will users go to your homepage to dig a little deeper.

So what does this mean for homepage design? You need to start with a new assumption: your homepage isn’t necessarily the first page a user sees, but it is the page they see after your landing page.

Starting with the assumption that a homepage is the first thing a user sees leads to a few simple but effective conclusions, like these, from Heidi Cool at the Web Development Blog:

Tell them where they are: Your homepage should make clear the name of the organization and the nature of your business.
Encourage them to come in and look around: Give them a taste (but just a taste) of what you offer, so they want to learn more.
Provide clear directions to the entrance: Show them how to enter and navigate your space.

Very good advice, especially from the point of view of a user who lands on your homepage first. But what about a user from one of your landing pages? They'll want answers to questions like "who exactly are you?" but they're not really in exploration mode. Rather than going to your homepage to look around, they're trying to answer questions that will help them decide whether to convert. These could include:

How reliable is the business making me an offer?
How long have they been around?
Do their previous customers have anything positive to say?
How do they stack up against competitors?

In other words, a user who explores your homepage after seeing your landing page, but before deciding to convert, is looking to answer a fundamental question: "Can I trust you?"

I've already discussed ways to provide trustworthy support for your offering, so I won't repeat them here. I'll simply add a bullet to Heidi's list of homepage essentials above: "Give them a reason to trust you." Especially if your homepage is not the first thing a user sees, building trust is critical.

Next week, I'll join forces with Clickable Graphic Designer Penny Sudtunyarat for an introduction to "Landing Page Design Basics." Stay tuned!

Video: Fred Wilson On Why The NYC Startup Sector Is So Great (Interesting Cafe)

Max Kalehoff — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:51:00 GMT

We had a packed house last week for Clickable's Interesting Cafe, featuring Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures and author of A VC. (USV is one of Clickable's investors.) Fred's talk was on what makes the NYC startup sector so great. (Clickable is a proud NYC startup, so we were delighted with this topic.) Clickable CEO David Kidder emceed the discussion, and Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey provided commentary. Below is a video interview we did with Fred and Chris after the talk -- it does a good job summarizing the major themes. We also posted the full talk and group discussion here (57 minutes).

Interesting Cafe is hosted by the culture team at Clickable. It's a periodic gathering for our community members to share ideas and meet interesting, inspiring people. Our next Cafe features a fireside chat with Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch. We'll open up the registration on this blog later this week. If you'd like to be added to our event notification list, please send me an email (mkalehoff at clickable dot com) with "Interesting" in the subject line.

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