Why does this all matter? Video game sales were more than $13 billion in 2012. Last year’s top selling game was Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, which sold more than 6 million copies. The Call of Duty series has created a brand that can sell based on its name alone, but for other games it can be difficult for them to establish themselves. So, let’s look at a game that had to redefine itself after suffering a serious shake up.

The majority of video game players are online. They’re in forums, writing blogs, and sharing their thoughts on Twitter. In some shape, they are talking about their experiences while playing games. In fact, many consumers are doing this for all of their products, not just games. They’re talking about how well {insert product here} works, or how horrible it is. When it comes to the actual marketing of video games and the entertainment industry in general, in the past decade we’ve seen a shift from the passive “release a trailer and press release” to a more involved, social experience. Major releases are no longer just a “release” but have become events in their own right.

A prime example of this, and the example this post will draw from is the campaign that Microsoft ran for Halo 4. Halo 4 was the first game in the series that wasn’t made by the original creators, Bungie Studios, so Microsoft needed a way to throw all of their support behind their new team. So, they released a movie. Well it started as a 5 part weekly, live-action series called “Forward Unto Dawn,” which was used to set up the Halo 4 story. They then combined the parts and released it as a full length movie.

The “Forward Unto Dawn” series got fans and even non-fans talking. I was one of those, “I don’t play Halo, but these videos have been pretty cool,” people. So, how well did this campaign fare? On release day in November, global sales for Halo 4 reached more than $200 million, and to date, it has sold more than 8 million units worldwide.

What exactly did Microsoft do right, and how can we, as marketers, apply this to our campaigns?

1. Know Your Audience

Microsoft wanted to reaffirm that their Halo franchise was still in good hands with the new studio, 343Industries. In order to do that, Microsoft used the years of data they had collected on their fan base from previous Halo games. In an interview with Direct Marketing News, group manager at Microsoft, Brian Coles, talked about how Microsoft used this data, “We’ve been able to precisely target customer segments with content and offers they care about, based on their usage history. We were able to create very relevant direct marketing communications that struck an emotional chord with our very loyal Halo customer base.”

So, when you’re in the office with your team, use all the data you have about your audience. Know what they like, dislike, what makes them feel good, what they abhor, etc.

2. Create Great Content

With your data in mind – this is the fun part – create great content. The definition of content marketing is described as “any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of content in order to acquire customers.” Basically, don’t just pitch or sell a product. Your content should be focused on selling without selling. For instance, “Forward Unto Dawn” wasn’t telling people to go out and buy Halo 4. It was giving fans and people, on the outside looking in, a way to travel into the world of Halo without going out and purchasing a Halo game.

Great content doesn’t sell a product, it sells an idea. Don’t be afraid to be original and push boundaries, there’s only so much you can do with words alone. The idea that you’re (not) selling will not only gain you consumers, but also loyal customers because they will connect with and believe in your idea.

3. Interact

You know your audience. They’ve got your content. Now all you have to do is talk with them. Nothing makes a consumer feel better than when a company they know and trust listens to them and responds. A way Microsoft interacted with its Halo fan base was by having an invite-only event for the biggest Halo fans around the world. They brought them to the small European country of Liechtenstein, which was transformed to be a replica of a planet from the Halo universe. Microsoft rewarded their most loyal fans with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it gave the fans a chance to see and meet the people who brought them their fabled Master Chief.

Social networks have the ability to give users an instantaneous connection to people and brands. This can give brands numerous ways to keep the conversation going about their products and services, whether it’s through Twitter updates and trending topics or Facebook posts, or even Q and A sessions via YouTube or with Google Hangouts. All of these avenues give opportunities to directly connect with your audience and find out what exactly they want and need.

Lessons Marketers can Learn from Video Game Advertising & Marketing

The problem is – that’s the wrong way to go about it. Okay, my title isn’t as all-encompassing as it suggested. I really just want to delve into negatives and adding them preemptively. While there is nothing wrong with omitting search queries using negatives, that is being reactive, not proactive. You can stop a great deal of the pain before it occurs. Just sit down and think about your industry for a little while, and some negatives will start to become obvious. However, many are not obvious. These are the deceptive drain on your spend that leads to unprofitability.

It is easy to find possible negatives by navigating to the Dimensions Tab and View Search terms. Some terms must be added very specifically, but some can be added broadly. Look for specific words that appear in a broad number of unprofitable queries, and add a one or two word negative. Watch out how broadly you go though, because certain terms, like the word ‘free,’ may be used differently than as a simple price term.

Click link to view document: Google Docs Negative Keyword List

To help understand how best to use the spreadsheet, it helps to start by breaking down the search users in a more general manner. Remember that every business is different, so what has worked for my accounts may not work for your clients.

Queries Tab                                                                                                                

Adult Terms: Admittedly, most plumbing, software tool, or mortgage loan officer type keywords won’t be eligible to run on most adult terms, but it never hurts to add them. Even if it only happens once per month, I would rather avoid that one time. Imagine the search ‘I got scammed by a f$^$ing remodeling company.’ Appearing on that is not likely to garner you a new lead. Appearing on any pornographically related term may reflect poorly on your company, as well.

Job-Seekers: With unemployment high, users will search for your business looking for a job. Searches would include wages, career, application, salary, job, etc. If you are trying to hire people, you’ll still likely want to segment your potential users into separate campaigns.

Reference and Research: Search engines are wonderful tools for learning information. However, informational queries rarely perform well. Searchers who are looking for how-to, guides, manuals, charts, etc., are probably not in a purchasing mindset. Targeting them with ads is far less likely to bring in immediate results. While there are strategies to cultivate them as a lead source, like email, remarketing, and multi-touch attribution models, a lot of times they are better added as negatives.

Education: Classes, learning, university, etc. are clearly terms where the user is looking to learn to do a profession or perform a skill. In a similar vain to the Reference and Research terms, they are usually best avoided.

Pricing and Quality: Is your product or service cheap? Then consider blocking luxury, hand-made, brand name, etc. Do you display prices on your website? If not, consider blocking price, cost, calculator, estimate, etc.  Consider that terms like cheap, bargain, etc. are different than pricing terms. A website that sells budget items, but does not display the prices, may use one set of negatives but not the other. Some vendors succeed best by blocking pricing terms to avoid price shoppers, but this should be tested thoroughly.

Used: Are your items used? If not, try adding the negatives used, second hand, good condition, refurbished, etc.

Do It Yourself: In the same line as the Education and Reference and Research lists, block do it yourself, diy, kits, create, and queries from additional research related terms.

Negative: Scams, awful, terrible, rip-off, etc. are rarely terms that would generate a profit from your ad. Furthermore, they would likely have a terrible CTR. I suggest adding those negatives, as well.

Automotive: I personally add car make and models, radiators, engines, etc. to certain industries in which crossover terms might occur, like air conditioning companies and home windows.

Legal: Most industries won’t work with words like law, regulations, fines, etc.

Verticals Tab

There are so many miscellaneous terms that can be added as negatives, like YouTube, Craigslist, pics, videos, etc. that would apply to most accounts. However, each industry has its own set of specific terms that will not perform. Think about where you might not want to appear before going online.

In Summary

Just remember that Pay-per-Click at its core is about adding volume while removing inefficiencies. Just keep carefully stamping out those poor performing searches. Happy hunting!

Your Search Ads Are Losing Money: Stop The Bleeding!

Truth be told, websites are easy to build. They become complicated when we actually want them to look good, function well, and convert visitors to customers – which is what most people don’t realize. Sites are more than just a pretty face, they serve a higher purpose.

This will be my 6th year as a professional (11th year in practice), and I’m still shocked by the lack of knowledge on this subject. That brings me to the topic of this blog post: the Anatomy of an Effective Website Design. A lot of blood, sweat and tears go into making a good website – good being the operative word. If you’re planning to build/redesign/what-have-you, consider all these elements. It’s an undertaking that requires full commitment – unlike my diet.

This will solely focus on the design aspect, since the other parts (development, content, social, etc.) can’t be explained appropriately in the same blog post.

Color Scheme

Colors are powerful elements in your design. They can convey tone and affect how your users feel about your website. They also can contribute to hierarchy and/or make your website feel clean or cluttered. The rule of thumb is to limit your design to 2 or 3 different colors, not including black and white. Your first color will direct hierarchy, second color is for calls to action, and a third – if absolutely necessary – is for subtle highlights.

Effective Typography

Typography is more than just type-face and readability. It also contributes to the flow and style of your website. For example, serif fonts (fonts with ligatures, like Times New Roman) have a classic look that’s often associate with royalty or formalness. Similar to colors, you want to limit yourself to 1 or 2 font families: one for headlines and one for body copy.

Graphics

Graphics include any imagery that should be used to enhance your content. Don’t simply add graphics just because they’re pretty or because you need to fill a space. Every part of your website is valuable real estate! Also, keep your graphics consistent. If you’re using illustrations, keep the style consistent throughout the website.

Layout (UE/UI)

Simply put, this is how your website is laid out. This is very important because it affects how your visitors use your website. For example, how will putting your navigation right below your header instead of in the sidebar affect your users? My rule of thumb is to go with what works and then test, test, test! Just because it works for the time being doesn’t mean you can’t make it better. If moving an element to the left side tests better than when it was on the right side, MOVE IT! Love your data!

Calls to Action

Your website serves a higher purpose, and no I’m not referring to religious callings. Whether you are selling products/services or simply want more readers, “calls to action (CTAs)” are arguably the most important parts of your site. We believe that there should always be a CTA visible, regardless of where a visitor is on the page. For example, there should be one in the header, another in the footer, and one in the middle of the page. This may sound like overkill, but all CTAs do not have to look the same or even be the same. You can have a phone number in one area and a form in another. Do what works for your site!

Anatomy of An Effective Website Design

Step 1: Research Potential Blogs/Decide on Ingredients

There are niches for every single thing you can think of on the Internet. If it exists, it’s on the Internet. So, when finding a potential blog to post on, don’t limit yourself to the same industry that your client is in. Get creative. For example, if you have a financial client, don’t just look at finance blogs. Everybody wants to save money. Look at travel sites, college blogs, etc. When building a taco, you want to formulate a plan. What kind of shell to use? What kind of meat to use? What veggies do I want to use? When searching for blogs, ask yourself these types of questions. What’s the domain authority? How many Twitter followers does the blog have? Once you’ve decided on ingredients/potential blog, time for step 2.

Step 2: Pitch Ideas to Bloggers/Know Your Guest

Now that you found your blogs, don’t get to writing just yet. You should first find out how your potential host feels about your guest post ideas. It’s like cooking some awesome tacos – perhaps the greatest tacos ever – taking them to a dinner party, and then finding out that some of the guests are allergic to one of the toppings in the taco. They’ll never get to experience the epicness of your tacos because you didn’t run your taco plans by the dinner host. Don’t let your epic tacos go uneaten.

Step 3: Write Great Content/Build the Greatest Taco Ever

Here’s the fun part. You have everything mapped out, found a blog, got the idea approved, so now it’s time to write the post. The best way to get traffic and start conversation is to have great content. Bloggers love great content. “How do I write great content?” Well, first you want to research, because we’re not all geniuses and we don’t know everything about everything. With great research comes great content. Ask experts in the category you’re writing about. This is just like creating the filling for the taco. Make sure the meat is properly cooked and seasoned. Throw in some great veggies, but don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Calamari tacos are amazing. You want all the fillings in the taco to complement each other.

Step 4: Promote Your Post/Humblebrag about Your Tacos

You’ve now created the greatest taco, but what good is it going to do if no one else gets to try it? Just like your taco, if you don’t promote your guest blog post, who will? Tweet about it, share it on Facebook, put it on Google + if you get down like that. Let the world know you just created the greatest taco – I mean blog post – ever!

Guest Blogging and Tacos

Simply put: we’ve been lied to.

If you graduate college with no work experience in your field, no matter how good your grades are, you’re not going to make much money, and you may even have to take on the dreaded unpaid internship.

The best advice I can give to current college students is to take that internship before you graduate, and are saddled with paying off your loans. For those who have already graduated, the best advice is to realize that your first few jobs are not about the money.

Sometimes it’s about learning more.

Before I worked at WrightIMC, I worked as a graphic designer and web developer for the marketing department of a gymnastics company in Dallas. I had been unhappy at my in-house job for a while. The people I worked with were great, but in terms of online marketing, there was really no one there to mentor me, and I was craving an environment where I could learn and grow.

When I was first offered an internship at WrightIMC, it was a really difficult decision for me. In order to take the job, I’d have to accept a 20 percent pay cut from what I was making at my former company, and though it was closer to my house, the money I’d be saving on gas wouldn’t make up for the loss in wages.

I fretted over it for hours, trying to crunch the numbers in my head as I pulled into the parking lot of my girlfriend’s office. I told her about the offer…and about the pay cut. I told her how, financially, we could make it work, but we’d have to eat Ramen Noodles and drink water from the sink for a while.

“Take it,” she said, to my surprise.

She knew that what I had been telling her all along was true – that this job was going to open up new opportunities for me, and that the skills I would learn at WrightIMC would be invaluable, and would give me experience I couldn’t get in the classroom.

So with her approval, I turned in my two weeks, and the first week of January, I plunged into the Search Engine Marketing Industry, where I eventually fell in love with my new passion – PPC.

Taking this job has made me qualified to grow my career in a host of directions including:

• Web Design & Development
• Conversion Rate Optimization
• Paid Search
• Search Engine Optimization
• and Account Management

Since updating my LinkedIn profile with these new skills, I get contacted at least once a month by other companies interested in hiring me, all wages I wouldn’t have dreamed of making while I still at my initial in-house position. These were skills I never learned in school, despite (almost) having a degree in Emerging Media & Communication. If I had made it about the money before, instead of about what I could learn, those opportunities would never have been available to me.

Sometimes it’s about building relationships.

Recently, I accepted a new job offer from another agency in the area. Again, the decision to move on to another company was difficult for me. I’ve built working relationships and friendships here that I know will last long after my two weeks are up.

Despite the fact that I’m leaving, I know that if I ever need a reference or even leads for future jobs, I can call my colleagues and friends at WrightIMC

The relationships you build at your first few jobs are the most important. The people you’re working for now probably know everyone who you will ever work for in your career. If you make a poor impression, it will follow you to your future interviews.

So even if you’re making a low salary (or not getting paid at all), work as if you’re making six figures. Otherwise, you might burn your bridges and end up working for peanuts for the rest of your career.

Sometimes it’s about having integrity in your work.

Long before I had even heard of WrightIMC, I had several graphic design jobs where I felt like a glorified crayon. My bosses didn’t care about my input on design and strategy; they just wanted me to be a tool they could use to make stuff in Photoshop.

There’s no integrity in jobs like that, and no matter how much money I made, I wasn’t happy. The experience became so awful that at one point that I felt like nauseous at the thought of going into work.

You have to find a job where you have a voice and your expertise is respected. No amount of money is worth giving up your pride. You may not always love your job, but you should never stay in a position you hate just to a make a few extra bucks. You’ll regret it in the end.

Sometimes it’s about your priorities.

Never accept a job that forces you to compromise your priorities just because of a higher salary. Research shows that you’re going to have about 11 jobs over your lifetime, and when your current job is gone, your priorities will still be there. Find a place that will help you accomplish your goals, and once they’re accomplished, you can make more money later.

There is no doubt in my mind that WrightIMC was the right place for me during my time in college. Not only did they offer an environment where I had endless opportunities to learn new skills, but they were also flexible with my schedule, so that I could work full time while still going to class.

Getting my education is a priority for me. It’s something that I know is going to help me build a better future for myself and for my family in the long term.

During my time at WrightIMC, I had several companies come to me and offer me a job, but all of them would’ve required putting my education on hold or slowing down on my classes. While they may have offered more money in the short term, I know that the longer I put off graduating, the harder it will be to finish. Staying with a company that supported those goals was the right decision in the long run.

The money will come.

The biggest thing you need to remember is that eventually, the money will come. My girlfriend and I survived our days of Ramen Noodles, and we’ve graduated to real food like home cooked chicken salad. We’re even planning to buy a house this year.

If you work hard to build strong working relationships, learn new skills, and show your talent, no matter what your salary is, employers will recognize that you’re a valuable asset. But first, you have to do your time with grunt work…just like everyone else.

College Students: The Biggest Lie You Ever Believed

Winner determined solely by the staff of WrightIMC and must be an attendant of Pubcon New Orleans 2013.

No limit to number of ugly website entries per contestant.

Click the Tweet button below, add your link, and enter to win! It’s that easy.

Tweet #PubConNOLA

WrightIMC Speaker Schedule:

Tony Wright

Interactive Site Review: Focus on Reputation Management
Tuesday, April 23 – Salon F, 3:10-4:25 pm

Reputation Management
Tuesday, April 23 - Salon C, 4:30-5:45 pm

Proactive Reputation Management
Thursday, April 25 – Salon B, 11:30-12:45 pm

Joe Youngblood

Link Building in a Post Google Penguin Update World
Tuesday, April 23 – Salon D, 1:50-3:05 pm

Interactive Site Review: Focus on Organic
Wednesday, April 24 – Salon F, 10:10-11:25 am

Kevin Adams

Mobile Search &  Marketing
Wednesday, April 24 – Salon A, 12:30-1:30 pm

Enter The #YoWebsiteSoUgly Pubcon NOLA Contest For A Chance To Win $100 Cash!

Meet Fatty, A.K.A Hefty, Sir Fatness, or Count Fat-cula.

You get the point. Fatty hasn’t always shared a distinct likeness to a beached whale, but he has always been a pain in my ass. Anyone who has ever owned a cat knows what I’m talking about. My relationship with my cat has shown me how a relationship that relies on inter-dependency works – and how it doesn’t. My cat probably wouldn’t be able to survive without me, just like link builders can’t survive without bloggers and other potential websites that can provide backlinks. But, cultivating a real working relationship takes time and hustling, attributes that my cat has mastered. Most days he is the master to my grasshopper.

Every night as I’m about to drift off to sleep, Fatty will knock things off my dresser in hopes of annoying me just enough to get me out of bed, but not enough to throw a pillow in his direction*. After I do so, he stares at me in his sphinxlike way as if to say, “What are we doing in here?” That’s when it hits me. If I tried to do this exact thing while building links, then I would be the one getting a pillow in the face.

Reciprocation

Don’t be a cat and expect that, just because you exist, you deserve anything for which you ask. People forgive cats their indiscretions because cats are cute and fluffy. Humans, on the other hand, lack these qualities. Don’t make the mistake of believing that someone is going to listen to you because you are meowing … er screaming in their face.

You need to go out of your way to show that you care about more than just getting a link when you are link building. That means using tools like Open Site Explorer, or my personal favorite Check My Links Chrome extension, to find broken links. Link builders need to participate and comment on articles or blogs, and ask writers for their opinions about new and interesting topics. Don’t be a Fatty and expect these websites to care about your problem when they have problems of their own.

How to Hustle: Persistence is Key

Positive persistence is key, that is. Fatty will paw at my door when he wants something, causing the door to move back and forth within its frame. It sounds like actual knocking. I can often hear it in my dreams. He does this for hours, and it is always effective. It is important to continue to build relationships in a particular niche when link building.  People won’t forget you and you will come off as genuinely interested in their work. Don’t stop commenting and participating in conversations on a blog just because you already received the link.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Cats always try to force themselves into fitting into boxes that are too small for them. Link building often requires writing a guest post, which means you’ll have to link back to your client’s blog through anchor text. Some guest bloggers link back willy-nilly and don’t once stop to make sure that what they are writing about, and what they are linking to, are actually connected. The content you are writing must have a direct relationship to your client’s business. Readers are looking for a particular insight or information when they choose to read an article, so don’t spam them by promising something insightful and instead shoving a product down their throats. We can leave that to product placement.

Pursue the Most Influential

Link building really is about building relationships, and if builders don’t change their mindset about this, then they will starve. As my family’s local “cat whisperer,” I’m the only one who understands the crazy look in Fatty’s eyes when no one else seems to get the hint that he is on the brink of starving to death (even though he has been feed 5 times that day). He comes to me because he understands that he will receive the most attention and understanding from me.

How does this relate to link building? Hone and maintain your relationships, and after establishing yourself as a positive influencer in your client’s niche, then it is time to go after the big wigs. You can outreach to these influencers and tell them how great you are. If you are guest blogging let them know where your previous work is featured and how many people commented / liked / tweeted about it. For other content promotions like infographics, dangle that infographic in front of them like a mouse on a string. Make them think they will be missing out on something great if they say no.

*No cats were harmed in the making of this blog.

What My Cat Taught Me about Link Building: An Educational Rant

Providing traditional key performance indicators, such as returns on investment, or rankings, or increases in traffic and leads are now assumed when the client engages you. The shift, I feel, is that extended, harder-to-deliver benefits, such as your availability to fulfill special requests, project guidance, business or directional insights, and most importantly, communication, are what keep the clients smiling when they write your checks. You can be doing everything right and delivering great results, but if there’s a lapse in the intangibles the client can still get wooed by a great sales pitch … and you’re left in a position of defending your value to keep the relationship.

This changes how search agencies operate, or at least it has changed how we operate. Many businesses are no longer looking for a vendor for advertising and optimization – they’re looking for a real partner. That means more frequent interaction with their internal teams, complete transparency into a business’ internal initiatives, and being able to operate autonomously to meet their goals without impeding their progress.

In order to meet those expanded strategy and planning needs, agency personnel must have several essential attributes. You must be able to adapt to internal pain-points, intermingle with different teams and personalities, conduct on-site training of best practices, and adjust to a limitless number of unique challenges and speed bumps.

As the search industry has aged (roughly 170 years in Internet time), verticals have also become much more narrow and highly competitive, with multiple agencies in almost all of them. Online competitor saturation is a real barrier for some businesses, and the difference between page 1 visibility and obscurity is in the finer details. You’ll often hear the phrase “content is king,” but the content actually needs to be seen. If a blog post falls on the Internet, does anyone read it?

In order for people to see the content, you need to know where and how to promote it. You also need for search engines to be able to see it. What users see and what search engines see are sometimes two completely different things, and those details are what separate success from mediocrity.

I’ve talked about flexibility and knowledge, and those are great, but what really ties everything together is the communication. If your only contact with a client is once a month, you’re already way behind. And, you better believe there’s at least one other agency out there courting them.

Communicate the wins, the opportunities, the troubleshooting, and the tests, and make sure the client’s team is as much a part of what you’re doing as your own team. Keep a specific cadence on standardized reports, but in-between you need to be talking about other areas of the business and giving insights. When you’re that embedded, and you’re delivering on the results, you’ve earned that partnership – and they’re not going anywhere

Digital Marketing Agencies – Today’s Non-Tangible KPIs

Invalid Click Detection

I don’t normally like to brag, but I can’t help it this time. This is simply amazing. I have an ad group that had a 640% CTR earlier today – 32 clicks and 5 impressions. I have another ad group with a better than 250% CTR. That’s right, users love my ads so much they are hitting the back button and clicking on the ad over and over again.

I called Bing support. They tell me they have two automated click-detection systems. One checks and immediately removes bad clicks. The other one does a check before the client is billed. I told them anyone should realize this is fraudulent. They said they could put in a ticket, but unless I give them my client’s weblogs, we may not get approved for reversals.

That’s what they’re supposed to say, but even an intern could see the flaw in that logic. The only way to get 5 impressions and 32 clicks is for 1 or more users to click, hit back, click, hit back – at least 7 or more times in a row. I can see the occasional impression getting a 200% click-through rate, but 640%?! That’s transparent fraud.

I’m sure the claim will be approved, but the fraud used the entire budget for that specific campaign that day. This is awful and should’ve been fixed in the last couple of years.

Spam on Search Partners

This is another form of “click fraud,” and it has forced me to opt-out all of my clients from appearing on Bing/Yahoo Search Partners. We’ve gotten many phony leads and absurdly high conversion rates on multiple clients over the past couple years.

A long-time client of mine in the financial services arena gets spam every month. It is usually an absurdly high conversion rate on a keyword that blows up in traffic out of nowhere. These are usually originated from a whole string of out-of-state IP’s on different machines. I’m sure they’re running proxies, masking IPs or whatever.

The money usually winds up being credited back after an investigation, but I have to initiate it. Somehow, Google AdWords isn’t having the same problem. I’m not getting a huge number of bogus conversions from their system. No system can stop fraud, but it can be limited better.

In the meantime, none of my clients will be running on Bing search partners.

Bidding with No Competitors

Last week I found a quirk about Bing’s bidding. Bing simply says you will pay just more than your next closest competitor for a click, which is okay. I prefer AdWords Ad Rank auction system for improving quality in SERPS, but I don’t have a real complaint about Bing’s bid process. The problem occurs when you have no competitor at all on a search, which most often occurs on a partner site or for brand terms.

If there is no competition, you will pay your Max CPC instead. I didn’t realize this, and I find it astounding. The only way to handle that, to get the best rates for a client, would be to have the search partners in a separate campaign with lower bids.

Most advertising platforms realize that having lower CPCs encourages early adoption. Advertisers want to jump in while the clicks are cheap. The competition grows from that point as bidding increases to maintain position. This is awful, and it smacks of opportunism.

Missing Geography? Ads Shown Globally

Bing Ads has a wonderful import tool that allows an advertiser to pull ads, keywords, and campaigns from another source – most commonly Google AdWords. This works great and has saved me a lot of time in the past. Unfortunately, it has a couple of quirks that don’t work well.

Annoyingly, it doesn’t remove old ads or keywords that have already been deleted out of Google, but it handles pretty much everything else. I can’t really complain about that tiny little flaw, though PPC managers need to be aware of it to keep from bidding on keywords you don’t want any longer.

However, this post is about exposing critical flaws, and you might be in for a doozy. If Bing Ads doesn’t have the exact city from Google, or can’t match it up properly, Microsoft will give the campaign no targeting at all. Logic would suggest the campaign should not run until a geographic region is input, and it should prompt you with a warning. Logic does not apply here, though. Bing Ads defaults to running the campaign globally. Microsoft recognizes the problem and will likely refund your money up to 45 days after the occurrence. That’s good news, but it should be their top priority to fix the problem.

So, Microsoft, please fix these issues post-haste. As Google rolls out its Enhanced Campaigns, advertisers are getting upset with AdWords. This is your chance to win some love back. PPC Managers, be aware of these flaws so you don’t have to deal with the repercussions until they’re remedied.

4 Critical Flaws in Bing Ads You Need to Know About

You see, what is now WrightIMC did not start in an office, living room, or boardroom. It started during random conversations that occurred every Tuesday night at Dukes Roadhouse over about a five year period. Tony and I would meet there every Tuesday for Happy Hour and talk about how much we hated working for someone else and that we needed to start our own company … someday. This is partially because Tony and I grew up with entrepreneurial fathers, who ran their own successful companies.

WrightIMC, LLC, started in one small executive office in the Bank of America in Plano. We next moved across the street into an office with Tony’s Dad, which had a bit more room. But, we knew that would be outgrown fast. So, we finally found and moved into a building in Plano, where we now occupy almost an entire floor.

We have a staff of about 30 employees, for some of whom this is their first job. We have salaries, taxes, and insurance benefits to pay. We have company socials and events, which in my last company, was pretty much unheard of.

One of the things I’m most proud of is that we started WrightIMC during the most horrible economic time period since the dot-com bust – really since the Great Depression – and are still striving and thriving today. In college, one of things they preach to you in your first business class is that 95% of new businesses will fail in the first five years. I’m very happy to be a part of that other 5%!

In these five years, we have changed many things, but one thing that has not wavered is our commitment to our clients. We strive to provide our clients with an interactive strategy that is catered specifically to them, with an ultimate objective of achieving a profitable online presence for each of them. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to, who told me they’ve been in business for years and never had, nor needed, a website. It doesn’t matter what business you are in, not being online is not being relevant in 2013.

When we get clients, we rarely ever lose them. Some clients have been with us from the beginning and we don’t even do long-term contracts. We’re thankful to them and proud of our record. And, I’d like to thank some great people in the search engine marketing world who have helped us over the years. The good folks at the Dallas Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association have been like a second family to Tony and me. And, if weren’t for people like Sean Jackson of Copyblogger and Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance, and some of their client referrals, WrightIMC would not exist. Words can’t express the gratitude I have for you all.

Make sure you pay attention and keep WrightIMC on your radar. We plan on being around a long-time. In the meantime, check out this nice write up the Dallas Business Journal published on March, 29.

DBJ Article on WrightIMC

5 Years of WrightIMC