Red Bricks Media’s News Blog

by Beth Morgan, VP of Operations

During the Web 1.0 boom it was all about the eyeballs. Content was king, and publishers scrambled to fill the Web with information and amusement that would lure people in. Now that we’re seeing the second rise of the Web, content is still king. But it turns out that, as has been common all throughout history, people are less interested in what someone else tells them than in what they and their friends are thinking and doing. Giving people the power to produce their own content and customize their own experiences, essentially democratizing the Web, has brought over 100 million new users to the Internet in the U.S. alone.

Which brings us to the most uniquely people-powered advertising vehicle the world has ever seen: paid search.

Pay-per-click is different from every other mode of advertising out there because the publisher only makes money if someone finds the ad relevant and interesting and clicks on it. The amount that the advertiser bids for each click does figure in to how often an ad runs and where it is placed, but an even bigger factor is how tempting and clickable an ad is. The people are in control! If you as an advertiser fail to interest your target market, they will not click on your ad—and even if you’re willing to pay a small ransom on every click, the engines might choose to not run it all.

So what does this mean for advertisers? Essentially it means that you must re-adjust the way you strategically think about your paid search campaigns, because things you’ve learned about how marketing works might not be true for search. Some examples:

1) Your ad might not appear when you look for it.  With traditional pay-per-eyeball advertising—TV, print, banner ads, etc—you agree to pay a set amount to advertise at pre-determined times and places for a set length of time. If you pick up a magazine or look at a website during that time frame, you will see your ad.

With paid search, though, the engines are unlikely to run your ad with every search, especially when you first launch a campaign. They are constantly running their mix of advertisers through a massive algorithm to determine, essentially, who earns them the most money. Proven advertisers are going to be given more credit than new ones.

They’ll mix your terms in slowly, and then more and more if your ads are successful.

2) You might not WANT your ad to show up every time you look for it. Think about it: are you running ads because you want people to see your neat-o copy, or because you want to sell stuff in a cost-efficient manner? Paid search gives you great real-time data about how your ads are performing, which allows you to get rid of keywords that just aren’t working for you. You may think a certain keyword is absolutely vital to your business, but if those Empowered People don’t agree and don’t click on your ad, the price that Google charges you to keep your keyword in a high position may be more than it’s worth.

3) Decide ahead of time what you’re willing to pay.  Budgeting for traditional marketing is easy: you get X dollars to spend, you buy X dollars worth of placements, and then you look at the stats to see if it was cost-effective. Costs in paid search, though, are both variable and hard to estimate ahead of time. You could have $100,000 set aside for search, but if no one searches your terms or clicks your ads, you might end up spending only $2,000. Google can project approximate cost per clicks before you actually launch your campaign. Use this figure with your average conversion rate to project a cost per action (CPA). Does this number comply with your marginal profit and loss expectations? Realize throughout this process that projections in a market-based environment are imprecise.

4) Write the best ad for each of your market spaces.  If people are clicking on your ad, you’re hitting the right market. Because pay-per-eyeball advertising is so expensive, it is vital to examine where and when ads are running to find the places and the times that yield the best results. Day-parting is a savvy way to make sure your ads are hitting your target when they are present and paying attention.

With paid search, though, people declare themselves as potential customers not by visiting a website or listening to a radio program, but by actively searching for a term relating to your product. If they’re really interested they’ll click on your ad and visit your site. This means that unless you have conversion data that shows visitors convert differently at different times of the day (which might very well be true), day parting isn’t a vital part of search strategy. You think your customers don’t wake up before 9am? Then they won’t be searching and clicking before 9am. Once again, the people decide when your ads run.

5) Rigorous and regular ad copy testing MUST be a part of your program.  When I was traveling through Europe in college, my group would frequently be met at train stations by hordes of people from competing hostels, waving brochures and pictures to try to lure us back to their establishments. Paid search is pretty much just like that.  At the very moment a searcher declares their interest in something, they are met with dozens of contenders clamoring to satisfy that need. Since Google and Yahoo both give better placement (and often a lower price) to ads that get more clicks, it behooves every advertiser to experiment to find out what will work best. Headline, call to action, benefits statement, even display URL—the smallest things can have a big effect. You also want to track results right through to conversion—ads that produce big clicks don’t always convert the best, and that’s the ultimate goal.

So as you can see, with paid search your potential customer is in a unique position to determine when and where your ad runs and even how much it costs. It’s a dynamic and powerful system, but also far less predictable than other forms of advertising. Figure out how to please your customer better than the competitors, and you will be rewarded with a brilliantly cost-effective marketing channel.

by Scott Tieman, Marketing Strategist

I suspect that many marketers sweat the “Launch” phase more than any other. They’ve seen other marketing efforts tank after tons of planning and want to get it just right. The bad news is that like with a book, the opening chapter of a paid search campaign sets the stage for what’s to come. Mess it up and the rest isn’t worth the bother. The good news is that it’s harder to mess up than most marketers expect. This post (and subsequent ones) will help you get your campaign on the right track from the start. Today, I’ll focus on marketing objectives.

As with any performance driven marketing campaign (and, regardless of media, I hope ALL of your marketing campaigns are performance driven), the first question to ask is “What are my marketing objectives?”. They come in all shapes and sizes, but I’ll generalize them as awareness, lead generation, and sales. Awareness is primarily the realm of brand marketers vying for more mind share, lead generation the realm of acquisition marketing, and sales the realm of acquisition and retention marketing.

Whenever we accept a new paid search client, I always hear the same thing. The client wants to focus on sales & leads. Period. The biggest misconception about paid search marketing is that it is ONLY a demand capture tool. This couldn’t be further from reality; it also functions just fine for awareness and demand generation.

Take awareness as an example. Marketers, depending on category, could pay upwards of $30-100 CPM for banner ads. True, banner ads are rich media and that’s got to count for something compared with bland, short form text ads. But, HOW MUCH MORE? For simplicity, say you pay $1 per click on your text ad. Also assume your click through rate (CTR) ranges from 0.5-5% for a given keyword. Finally say your ad shows 1,000 times over the course of a month. After some fairly simple math, you are roughly paying $5-$50 CPM. Already, this is significantly lower than the range I’ve spelled out above. Don’t forget that a lower CPC would drive even more cost savings.

Let’s take it one step further. The example above (assuming the CTR I spelled out) drove 5-50 people to your site. Each new qualified person is an opportunity for further brand education, lead generation, or sales. With paid search awareness campaigns, you will rely on your website more for the heavy lifting. That’s what you want. By comparison, typical banner ads generate clicks at a rate of 0.1%. Thus, you’ve spent significantly more money to drive only 1 person to your site. With paid search campaigns, you’re getting awareness AND traffic. Now doesn’t it seem like a better investment to put your awareness budget into paid search marketing rather than banner ads? Wouldn’t you prefer that your site do the marketing rather than a skyscraper ad?

In my next post, I’ll further explore this topic of marketing objectives. There’s lots more to say. Stay tuned.

by Scott Tieman, Marketing Strategist

Most paid search campaigns evolve with time, information, and experience. Don’t expect to get the campaign absolutely right from the start. You can’t! You don’t have enough information! Paid search campaigns need to embrace trial and error to blossom. You may have all the experience in the world running paid search campaigns, but that alone will only take you so far in this business.

Generally, you can think about this evolution in terms of three distinct phases: launch, optimize, and sustain. Each phase should have its own goals, expectations, and challenges. Below, I’ve given a taste of how each phase will play out. In my upcoming posts, I will dig deeper into some specifics of each phase.

Launch Phase:

Calling the initial phase the “launch” phase is partly a misnomer. It generally includes all of the activities required to get a campaign up and running including the initial planning before the launch, the launch itself, and the campaign stabilization after the launch. Expect to spend about 1-4 months in this phase.

Optimize Phase:

You’ve gotten the campaign out the door, but now must meticulously care for it. During the “optimize” phase, you will see the greatest efficiency gains. These gains will come at the expense of trial and error. Try not to worry too much about the media budget spent on these tests. It’s not wasted at all. It’s the best money you’ve spent in the campaign so far. Expect to spend about 6-12 months in this phase.

Sustain Phase:

Congratulations! You’ve wrung out the last drop of insight; the campaign is seemingly on cruise control. Give yourself a pat on the back for a job well done then GET BACK TO WORK. The “sustain” phase is all about maintenance. Although the pace of intervention has slowed, you still need to keep your campaign fresh to maintain your performance results in the long run. In general, expect to spend the rest of the life of the campaign in this phase.

On final thought. Given the rapid change in the search landscape, your hard fought insights may become less relevant with time. Your audience may become more sophisticated or a competitor may outmaneuver you for clicks. Maybe the product landscape will change as well. Google may introduce some revolutionary new products that allows you to advertise on digital billboards, blimps, or the moon. When this happens, you may need to revisit parts of this process again. Don’t be stubborn about it. Just jump right in like you always do.

Note: This post pertains t0 the vast majority of paid search campaigns run today. There are some exceptions, most notably “blast” campaigns. These short-lived campaigns typically revolve around products with quick expiration dates like events and media. Given the daunting time constraints facing the marketer, the campaign will likely spend the most time in the “launch” phase and very little time in the “optimize” and “sustain” phases.

This article is cross-posted from Scott’s blog.

by Jacob Morgan, Search Strategist

Just came back from the Google VIP party and I must say, it was great. After attending events like these, you start believe that Google is not a search engine - it’s really a relationship management platform. Matthew Dolan, the relationship manager for the National Agency Team, was eager to speak with myself and my co-workers before we even got there. As soon as I walked in and introduced myself to someone, they immediately said, “Matt was talking about you and, he’s looking forward to meeting you.” Now that is called building and maintaining a relationship. Great job Matthew and thanks to you and Google for hosting a great event.

The event was held at Sino in San Jose, a very nice restaurant with great food and drinks. Google really made everyone there feel like a VIP.

I met a lot of smart and interesting people and engaged in an interesting discussion with David Szetela, the owner and CEO of Clix Marketing, a PPC firm based in Kentucky. Of course, David believes that PPC is better than SEO, and he did make some valid points. PPC does have greater accountability and allows for the targeting of specific landing pages per keyword - if you use dynamic landing pages that is. His argument was that SEO IS PPC, but for natural search. This rings true to a certain extent.

While PPC is restricted to specifically search engine advertising, SEO can be applied across a wide spectrum of marketing channels, such as PDF’s, videos, blogs, etc. I believe a chasm exists between the different types of SEO, and I’m not talking about black hat vs white hat. There are SEO’s who seek to “game” the system. They believe in driving traffic and in ranking in that top coveted spot on search engines and see SEO as just a rankings tool. They are the ones who spam social media sites just to get some extra links, and these are the guys who stuff keywords in their title tags to try to rank for as many search terms as they can. This is not SEO. This is spam marketing.

On the other hand, we have SEOs who believe in SEO as a marketing tool. That is, instead of worrying about traffic, they focus on conversions and on targeting the people that matter. SEO spam is equivalent to t.v. advertising - a lot of money spent and not a lot of results delivered. SEO is about delivering a consistent marketing message via multiple channels to the people that care and to the people that matter. Why was the Youtube series “you suck at photoshop,” so popular? Why do millions of people watch the CEO of Blendtec blend random products in his blenders? It’s not because of spam and it’s not because of SEO. It’s because these guys targeted the right people, and those people did the rest of the marketing. I consider myself a marketer not a spammer.

I know you are waiting for me to say that SEO is better than PPC, but I am not going to. Instead of saying that either PPC or SEO is better I will say that they work well together and can share their learnings. In order to dominate search, you have to have a solid understanding of PPC and SEO, and you need to understand how they can work together to provide an overall integrated approach to search marketing.

Thanks for the great party Google, and thank you, David, for engaging me in this lively discussion of PPC vs SEO.

This article is cross-posted from Jacob’s blog.

Red Bricks Media has appointed Dan Weiner the new Managing Director of the company’s New York office.Prior to Red Bricks Media, Weiner held product and marketing roles at Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Idealab, and Priceline.com. In his most recent role, Weiner was Vice President of Sony BMG’s Online Media Network and was responsible for deploying new ad networks across the company’s hundreds of artist and label sites and developing compelling marketing offerings around its content and artists. He also launched a range of new content delivery and community tools, including the industry-leading Musicbox video network.

CEO Ed Kim is enthusiastic about Weiner’s leadership. “Dan is the perfect person to lead our New York office. He’s a creative and experienced professional who has pioneered online tools and properties for some of the world’s top media and web companies. I am confident that Dan will lead Red Bricks Media East to provide the same innovative marketing solutions and outstanding client services that characterize our other offices.”

Weiner is equally enthusiastic about his new role at Red Bricks Media. “I’m very excited to be joining the incredible Red Bricks team and building on their success in New York and the East,” he comments. “With the rapid emergence of nontraditional digital tools and channels, Red Bricks’ unique mix of rigorous performance marketing, great design, and technical depth offers a chance to develop ground-breaking new ways for marketers to reach and engage with consumers.”

Contact Dan at dweiner [ar] redbricksmedia.com.

by Kelly Olson, VP Accounting and Finance

By now you’ve probably heard of the recent major milestones Google has achieved, including being selected as the world’s most admired brand, surpassing Microsoft as the world’s most visited website, and attaining a market capitalization larger than that of IBM. Another milestone of sorts has been Google’s ability to scare a surprisingly large number of industries including: advertising, entertainment, publishers, computer hardware and software manufacturers, and telecoms. And yes, they’ve even managed at times to make enterprising little startups like us uneasy. Each quarter the Red Bricks Media management team meets to review our business performance and refine our strategy. As part of our meeting we review our threats, and, as many other companies have done, Google has definitely made our list. So while some companies have responded by suing (e.g. Viacom) or others by seeking government intervention (ironically MSN & AT&T!); we thought we’d take a much less aggressive approach and turn the tables a little bit by speculating on what Google views as its top threats. For just as IBM dominated the 80’s and Microsoft the 90’s, so to may Google face a day when its meteoric rise plateaus.

So what causes Google CEO Eric Schmidt to lose sleep at night? What causes Sergei and Larry to toss and turn in restless slumber? Here then, without further ado, are the top 5 threats to Google’s dominance.

5. Peer Search

Is Google worried about peer search? This is where people or experts rank search results to provide more interesting and relevant results than an algorithm can yet provide. Maybe a year ago this type of search worried Google. This was when Yahoo acquired del.icio.us (that’s a pain to write by the way) and Flickr (for photos). Heralded by many as the next way to search, neither has seemed to do much to help Yahoo shore up their eroding search market share. The problem with this model is that most people don’t have the time to invest in rating their search results. We want the results to our search inquiry fast, and we want it now, and Google continues to best facilitate this motive, which is why they are probably not too concerned with peer search.

4. Other Search Engines

So does Eric Schmidt lose much sleep at night because of other search engines? Nah, probably not. Like any good executive you should never underestimate your competition, however, from their recent track record Yahoo and MSN have not done anything to show they’re going to soon be grabbing search market share back from Google (and lest we forget, Yahoo had around 31.8% of the search market at the beginning of 2006, now down to 26.8% as reported by Comscore). Perhaps Google should be most concerned with new search engines that promise to improve the search experience. One potentially exciting example is Powerset. This startup has gotten some significant investors lined up behind it and claims to dramatically improve search with their yet to be launched natural search algorithm. Still, it’s tough to see that any startups would scare Google that much. Google can always buy any of these engines that start to get too big.

3. Microsoft and Yahoo Merger

Like a couple of 800 pound gorillas courting each other, Microsoft and Yahoo have made overtures that they at some point might merge. The question is whether there is a strong business case for the merger, or if these discussions are more driven by fear of Google. If neither Yahoo nor MSN has demonstrated they are good at search, what’s to suggest that they will get it figured out together? Combine two lab technicians and you still don’t get a rocket scientist. Yet the threat of MSN suddenly getting Yahoo’s 26.8% search share, combined with the significant cash they are sitting on must make Google uneasy.

2. Content

Obviously this is a big one and is why Google purchased You Tube. But was this the best strategy for Google to get its hand on content? Recent developments such as Viacom’s lawsuit suggest the answer may be no. The issue for Google is how it will monetize the content on You Tube. The easiest strategy is to charge for downloads or through user subscriptions, but without access to proprietary content, how does Google get people to pay to see the latest amateur video? Would you pay to see someone with great dance moves perform at a junior high talent show (the most viewed video of all time on You Tube)? Certainly Google gets an amazing amount of eyeballs through the site, but monetizing these with banner ads certainly won’t contribute much to the bottom line. And, an even bigger threat to Google from content, and what should make Google even more nervous, is that someone such as Yahoo or Wikipedia will figure out how to leverage the visitors that come to their site for content to stay for search as well. And if this happens Google’s search market share could start to drop dramatically–a serious threat to their future growth.

1. Lack of Revenue Diversification and Loss of Focus

You may recognize the story of a startup company that with disruptive technology grew to a monstrous size and in the process scared the pants off its competitors, triggered lawsuits for their monopolistic behavior, developed huge cash reserves and decided to try all different types of new business endeavors to help derive a return from these assets? If you said Microsoft, of course you’re right, and if you’ve checked their stock price recently it is basically flat since 2001. Why is it flat? Because many of the endeavors outside of their core business of software have not been profitable. By focusing on too many, non-profitable strategies, will Google follow Microsoft’s path? As we saw with Web 1.0, ventures that get money for free tend to not do a good job of creating revenue from that money. And it appears from Google’s 2006 10k filing that about 99% percent of its revenue still comes from search. So while Madison Avenue, Hollywood and other industries are all running scared, Google has not made much in the way of inroads into these other verticals. The question is then, as the search market matures, will Google’s new ventures become an unprofitable distraction from their core specialty of search or will they in fact be able to diversify their business into these other arenas? The failure to convert their home run in the search space into other profitable ventures is the biggest threat faced by Google, and hopefully, given all the other executives losing sleep because of Google, has contributed to some restless nights for Google’s own management team.

by Beth Morgan, Media Director

During the Web 1.0 boom it was all about the eyeballs. Content was king, and publishers scrambled to fill the Web with information and amusement that would lure people in. Now that we’re seeing the second rise of the Web, content is still king. But it turns out that, as has been common all throughout history, people are less interested in what someone else tells them than in what they and their friends are thinking and doing. Giving people the power to produce their own content and customize their own experiences, essentially democratizing the Web, has brought over 100 million new users to the Internet in the U.S. alone.

Which brings us to the most uniquely people-powered advertising vehicle the world has ever seen: paid search.

Pay-per-click is different from every other mode of advertising out there because the publisher only makes money if someone finds the ad relevant and interesting and clicks on it. The amount that the advertiser bids for each click does figure in to how often an ad runs and where it is placed, but an even bigger factor is how tempting and clickable an ad is. The people are in control! If you as an advertiser fail to interest your target market, they will not click on your ad—and even if you’re willing to pay a small ransom on every click, the engines might choose to not run it all.

So what does this mean for advertisers? Essentially it means that you must re-adjust the way you strategically think about your paid search campaigns, because things you’ve learned about how marketing works might not be true for search. Some examples:

1) Your ad might not show up every time you look for it. With traditional pay-per-eyeball advertising—TV, print, banner ads, etc—you agree to pay a set amount to advertise at pre-determined times and places for a set length of time. If you pick up a magazine or look at a website during that time frame, you will see your ad.

With paid search, though, the engines are unlikely to run your ad with every search, especially when you first launch a campaign. They are constantly running their mix of advertisers through a massive algorithm to determine, essentially, who earns them the most money. Proven advertisers are going to be given more credit than new ones. They’ll mix your terms in slowly, and then more and more if your ads are successful.

2) You might not WANT your ad to show up every time you look for it. Think about it: are you running ads because you want people to see your neat-o copy, or because you want to sell stuff in a cost-efficient manner? Paid search gives you great real-time data about how your ads are performing, which allows you to get rid of keywords that just aren’t working for you. You may think a certain keyword is absolutely vital to your business, but if those Empowered People don’t agree and don’t click on your ad, the price that Google charges you to keep your keyword in a high position may be more than it’s worth.

3) You don’t know ahead of time what you’re going to pay. Budgeting for traditional marketing is easy: you get X dollars to spend, you buy X dollars worth of placements, and then you look at the stats to see if it was cost-effective. Costs in paid search, though, are both variable and hard to estimate ahead of time. You could have $100,000 set aside for search, but if no one searches your terms or clicks your ads, you might end up spending only $2,000. Google and Yahoo do not provide any easy way to determine what kind of cost per click you might see before you actually launch your campaign. In addition, although Yahoo provides historical search counts on keyword terms, Google (which tends to have more searches) does not, so predicting the volume of traffic is also difficult.

4) If people are clicking on your ad, you’re hitting the right market. Because pay-per-eyeball advertising is so expensive, it is vital to examine where and when ads are running to find the places and the times that yield the best results. Day-parting is a savvy way to make sure your ads are hitting your target when they are present and paying attention.

With paid search, though, people declare themselves as potential customers not by visiting a website or listening to a radio program, but by actively searching for a term relating to your product. If they’re really interested they’ll click on your ad and visit your
site. This means that unless you have conversion data that shows visitors convert differently at different times of the day (which might very well be true), day parting isn’t a vital part of search strategy. You think your customers don’t wake up before 9am? Then they won’t be searching and clicking before 9am. Once again, the people decide when your ads run.

5) Rigorous and regular ad copy testing MUST be a part of your program. When I was traveling through Europe in college, my group would frequently be met at train stations by hordes of people from competing hostels, waving brochures and pictures to try to lure us back to their establishments. Paid search is pretty much just like that. At the very moment a searcher declares their interest in something, they are met with dozens of contenders clamoring to satisfy that need. Since Google and Yahoo both give better placement (and often a lower price) to ads that get more clicks, it behooves every advertiser to experiment to find out what will work best. Headline, call to action, benefits statement, even display URL—the smallest things can have a big effect. You also want to track results right through to conversion—ads that produce big clicks don’t always convert the best, and that’s the ultimate goal.

So as you can see, with paid search your potential customer is in a unique position to determine when and where your ad runs and even how much it costs. It’s a dynamic and powerful system, but also far less predictable than other forms of advertising. Figure out how to please your customer better than the competitors, and you will be rewarded with a brilliantly cost-effective marketing channel.

by Sharon Crost, Account Director

Red Bricks Media made a splash at Search Engine Strategies (SES) in April 2007, providing thought leadership at two widely attended conference sessions, and sponsoring a local networking party during the conference week. SES is the leading conference and expo in our field that brings together thought experts and major players in the world of search. SES conferences are held throughout the world, and the New York conference generally attracts more than 7000 attendees each year.

At our first session, Beth Morgan teamed with our client Elyse Thibault from Hearst Corporation to share ideas in Big PPC for the In House track. Beth gave some best practices and examples for how to avoid “bidding against yourself” when several divisions within an enterprise need to bid on the same keyword terms. What are two of her top ideas to bring success to the entire enterprise? The first is to centralize - develop great cross-enterprise strategy, communication, and organization to see the big picture and manage the campaign effectively. The second idea is to think BIG. Scope out an
integrated plan right from the beginning of a campaign, and this will enable consistent growth within an enterprise. Elyse from Hearst attested to these ideas by giving some examples of her success working with Red Bricks Media.

At our second session, Sharon Crost presented her search marketing insights to a standing room only audience at the Advanced Advertising track. Sharon’s presentation was focused on getting more ROI from PPC campaigns. She talked about the allure of PPC, and the serious pitfalls to avoid when developing campaigns. She shared six strategies:

1. The Poor Shopper’s Effect:
* Pitfall: Paying too much for what you can get cheaply
* Strategy: Siphon expensive keyword terms to your SEO efforts. This will reduce what you have to pay for terms and increase ROI.

2. The Laryngitis Effect:
* Pitfall: Losing your market share of voice.
* Strategy: Expand your campaign universe further than your competitors

3. The Coin Toss Effect:
* Pitfall: Choosing between “head’ terms and “tail” terms (highest volume terms and lower volume terms)
* Strategy: You don’t have to choose; bid both types strategically.

4. The Rudolph Effect:
* Pitfall: Isolating PPC from the rest of the marketing mix
* Strategy: Integrate PPC to light the way for the other marketing disciplines.

5. The Beginning Golfer’s effect:
* Pitfall: Selecting the wrong performance driver (traffic, revenue, etc.)
* Strategy: Conduct testing to select the right driver

6. The New Love Effect:
* Pitfall: A click doesn’t always last forever
* Strategy: Refresh, renew and revigorate your campaigns.

On the second night of the conference, Red Bricks Media hosted a networking event for New York locals at the trendy Amalia lounge. The event attracted clients, prospects and colleagues who wanted to find out more about Red Bricks Media’s strategies and successes. Overall, it was a great exchange of ideas in a great setting.

Other big buzz at this year’s SES NYC surrounded consolidations of big players in the industry (Google acquiring Double-Click, rumors of Microsoft partnering with Yahoo or Ask), trends in local search, and the continued growth opportunity in both PPC and SEO strategies. If you are interested in more SES, the conference comes to San Jose August 20-23 and will provide continued opportunities for learning and sharing in the exciting world of search!

We’re proud to add Pearson Education, CBS5, Fujitsu, OKCupid, IndieVest, and the Oxygen network to our rapidly growing list of clients. These clients continue to add to our strengths in media and publishing as well as important markets such as technology and computing.

“We are excited to continue to win this business of the most discriminating marketers,” said Ed Kim, CEO. “Companies that are looking for more from their internet marketing agencies are taking a second look at Red Bricks Media and liking what they see.”

As a full service interactive agency, Red Bricks Media is taking on integrated online marketing campaigns that go well beyond our original roots in search marketing. Please visit our website to learn more about all of our capabilities.

by Bain Smith, Lead Copywriter

In this article we will focus on the nature of search engine advertising itself and provide pointers on how to make your ad copy stand out in the ultra-competitive environment of search engine marketing and advertising.

Back in the day when people had something to sell, they traveled door to door with their wares. Their challenge was two-fold. Before they sold anything, they first had to create “the sale before the sale”:selling a prospect on giving them the audience before they could actually sell a prospect anything. The search engine turned this traditional paradigm on its head by eliminating the “sale before the sale”. Search engine users now generate ad content voluntarily based on words they use to search, which should be a boon for business, right?

As a copywriter, the challenge is not creating the opportunity to sell anymore –that’s been done for us – but crafting a winning ad in a prohibitively competitive environment. Where in the past a sale required two sales, now a sale requires that your ad be selected from a list of ads, often selling the exact same product or service.

I have no groundbreaking wisdom to impart on how to write a search engine ad. that resonates with an audience. There are precious few characters of space to employ in a search engine ad and consequently few chances to make your copy “pop”. I will list, however, in no particular order, tips for creating an ad that only a lunatic wouldn’t click.

• Ask yourself, “What am I selling?”
– The railroad industry sold railroads, not the bigger idea of transcontinental transportation. Look at it now.
• Make it readable.
– Don’t cram too much into one ad or you’ll lose the attention
span of your audience.
• Write as if you were speaking to a friend, not a stranger.
– Strangers and prospects are friendly people, too.
• Create a compelling offer.
– If you don’t have a reason to run an offer, make one up.
– A believable reason for a special offer gives it traction and
boosts response.
• Separate your copy into small compartments of information.
– Three facts in one ad are better than one.
• Create a unique message for each of your audience segments.
– Targeted messaging boosts response and customer loyalty.
• The strongest ads tell the truth dramatically.
– If you try to be everything to everybody, you wind up meaning
nothing special to anyone.
• Craft a call to action that’s an easy next step for the
prospect to take.
– If you wrote a good ad, the call to action will click the ad
for them.
• Don’t be afraid to experiment!
– Experiments can create happy accidents, boosting response
rates.

These tips will help you get started down the road to conversion and hopefully illuminate some finer points of writing a good ad for a search engine. There’s no secret to it. It’s like juggling, without the chainsaws. Practice, create tests, learn from your results, and practice some more. Voila!