Trada Case Study: Winston Prep

June 28, 2010 By 1 Comment

Winston Preparatory School, a co-ed day school with campuses in New York City and Norwalk, Conn., is using Trada to crowdsource pay per click (PPC) marketing campaigns and reach parents for ten times less than its anticipated cost.

Winston Prep offers an individualized education for sixth through 12th grade students with learning differences such as dyslexia, nonverbal learning disabilities, expressive or receptive language disorders and attention deficit problems.

Winston Prep’s plan called for the school to extend its reach beyond its existing community. Parents of children with learning disabilities are active online, so it made sense to advertise on the web. But the costs for paid search advertisements on Google – where people bid for ad placement in an open marketplace – were high. And it didn’t make sense to employ a full-time paid search expert to bring the costs down. In addition, Winston Prep needed to make sure ads ran only in the locations near the two campuses in New York and Connecticut.

In October 2009, Winston Preparatory School launched a paid search campaign in the Trada marketplace, leveraging the skills of more than 500 certified paid search experts, known as optimizers. Trada automatically geo-targeted the campaign to New York City and Norwalk, Connecticut to ensure only prospective parents living near the schools would see the ads. Within one week, the optimizers generated thousands of keywords and hundreds of ads to generate inbound leads from parents of kids interested in attending the school. Within a month, the optimizers were able to lower the conversion cost – the price the school paid for a parent to click on an ad and fill out a form – from Winston Prep’s original target of $60 to six dollars.

“Trada brings a level of expertise to our PPC that we could never have achieved on our own – and it’s easy! Best of all, Trada’s optimizers have lowed our conversion cost to a tenth of what we had initially been willing to pay,” said Kristin Wisemiller, Director of Admissions at Winston Prep.

“Winston Prep shows how pioneering educational institutions can reach new communities using paid search and how Trada’s experts can help make the effort affordable. We’re looking forward to more schools following their great example,” said Niel Robertson, Trada founder and CEO.

Winston Preparatory Campaign Statistics
Optimizers working campaign: 18
Keywords in campaign: 12027
Ads in campaign: 58
Impressions: 859107
Clicks (visits to site): 7027
Conversions (interested parents): 715
Conversion rate: 10%
Cost per conversion: $6
Original target cost per conversion: $60

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

What We're Reading This Week

June 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

When Niel Robertson isn't doing paid search, he likes to shoot hoops

This week, we launched our agency offering! If you’re an agency, you can also check out our webinar, “Agencies: Don’t Let PPC Suck Your Margins Dry.”

Our CEO Niel Robertson (@nielr1) wrote a piece for the Huffington Post asking, “Does Crowdsourcing Threaten Your Job (Or Offer New Opportunity?)” Niel was also interviewed by John Ebbert of Adexchanger.com on how agencies are using the crowd and Trada. Trada also got a sweet mention in The Next Web article, “Internet advertising: how to stand out in the upcoming flood.” Don’t worry, we won’t let Niel’s Scottish noggin get too big. We’ll keep him in check. (Niel, I need an Earl Grey Tea. Extra hot. Pleaseandthankyouverymuch.)

Also! You can enter our competition. All you have to do is tell us your biggest online marketing problem for a chance to win a $200 gift certificate to Zappos or Moosejaw.

So what are we reading this week that we think you’re missing out on? Let’s dig in.

Also, for Friday Fun – we’ve updated our Flickr set of the most awkward pictures of our staff. I contend that we are the best looking startup staff around, bar none. Play the slideshow for your viewing pleasure.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

Trada Now Fully Supports Agencies

June 16, 2010 By 5 Comments

Let Trada Help Your Agency With Paid Search (photo courtesy of Profound Whatever/Flickr)

One piece of feedback we heard time and time again as we prepared for our market launch was that agencies were being asked by their clients to offer paid search…and it wasn’t an area that agencies necessarily cared about.

With that in mind, our team worked to make sure Trada would be easy for agencies to use, and our latest release brings that to fulfillment.

We know working on paid search campaigns with just one person or a handful of people can be equivalent to weeding an entire football field. Trada has an average of 25 experts working on each campaign to help agencies leverage sophisticated PPC strategies.

So what exactly can Trada help agencies accomplish? Well our new release helps agencies:

  • Set-up clients’ campaigns in Trada, and add new campaigns on demand
  • Review and approve ad copy and keywords created by Trada optimizers
  • Communicate directly with Trada optimizers on strategy and feedback
  • Generate customizable and exportable campaign reports for their clients

If you’re interested in learning more, check out Trada’s page for agencies. We will be also holding a free webinar on June 24 at 10 am MT on “Agencies: Stop Letting PPC Suck Your Profit Margins Dry.” Click the link to sign up!

Filed Under: Trada News

Where Are They Now? Social Media Horror Stories

June 15, 2010 By 9 Comments
Social Media Gone Awry

Just How Scary is Social Media? (Photo Courtesy of Gviciano/Flickr)

Do you ever wonder “what ever happened to….?” Maybe you’re wondering about what happened to Jennifer from Family Ties, your date to the junior prom or whatever happened to those companies where social media went horribly awry.

So let’s review. Jennifer/Tina Yothers did Celebrity Fit Boot Camp in 2008, your date to the junior prom is out of rehab and the social media companies, well, let’s check in:

Whatever happened to Kryptonite Locks?

Rewind to 2004 when you were still on MySpace. Kryptonite U bike locks were considered one of the most secure locks around. Chris Brennan proved otherwise and opened these locks by using a simple ballpoint pen. He posted this fact to Bike Forums and within a couple days it was all over blogs and mainstream news. We social media people ate out on this story for months using it as an example of what happens when you don’t listen to social media. But they were listening. My former co-worker Dave Taylor interviewed Donna Tocci, public relations manager for Kryptonite, about the myths that populated about Kryptonite and the blogosphere.

Where Are They Now?: The company, Kryptonite Locks, is still alive and kicking! From Dave’s earlier interview with Kryptonite, “We’ve also had a brand study done. Only the preliminary results are back, but they show that our brand reputation wasn’t as damaged as the blogosphere would have you believe.” They launched a blog in 2007 but took it down in November 2009 for renovation. That’s quite the renovation! When you Google “Kryptonite Locks” six years later, the Wired story is still in the top results on Google. In fact, videos of people breaking all types of locks populate their front page, yet they don’t have any video channels of their own. Yet, they most be doing something right from an SEO perspective, because they’re in top results for safe bike locks.

Whatever happened to Motrin Moms?

The fall of 2008 when NASDAQ was lurching, Motrin launched an ad on how moms who wear baby slings must be in pain and Motrin felt that pain. Twitter streams were inundated with outraged Moms who felt the ads were demeaning and insulting. The hashtag #motrinmoms became the nightmare of corporate PR. Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) has an excellent overview on his blog on exactly how big the groundswell for Motrin Moms became. This example was frequently cited as an example of how powerful and influential mom bloggers had become. Motrin ended up apologizing and took down the website.

Where Are They Now? Motrin Moms still comes up as a frequently searched term under “Motrin” but in terms of results, only the actual commercial shows up on the front page. It’s hard to look at the financial effects of a product under such a huge corporate umbrella such as Johnson & Johnson. But for the record, J&J didn’t see a significant stock price drop and in fact, their stock price rose in Dec. 2008. And according to IdeaLaunch, “Johnson & Johnson’s end-of-year 2008 OTC (over-the-counter) sales were up by 13% from the previous year.”

Motrin currently has a bigger problem in that in 2009 they disguised what ultimately should have been a pill recall.

Whatever Happened to Skittles Website Snafu?

Skittles launched a website with a twist in the spring of 2009 – the corporate site listed out all unfiltered social media mentions they received as their sole web presence. Unfortunately, rather than letting their customers and fans speak for them, the site was flooded with inappropriate and unfortunate messages. Critics hailed it as Skittles listing the conversation rather than joining the conversation, and Skittles was labeled as another company doing it wrong.

Where are they now? No one buys Skittles anymore. Ok, not even close. Skittles has tweaked the site so you can still provide social media content for Skittles. But you have to upload it, and Skittles chooses whether or not they’ll showcase your content. What’s more interesting is that they have a Facebook page with more than 5 million fans. They’ll receive up to 500 comments on their irreverent status updates, but still don’t “join the conversation.” They also recently launched a new social media program called “Mob the Rainbow“. No remnants of last year’s snafu show on the homepage after you Google “Skittles“.

Whatever Happened to Nestle’s Boycott?

In the fourth grade, my Mom stopped letting me purchase Crunch bars because she felt Nestle was causing women in third-world countries to become addicted to formula milk. I didn’t understand why my Mom wouldn’t let me enjoy the crispy goodness, but 18 years later I’ve never forgotten boycotting Nestle. The boycott is still ongoing today, and when Nestle invited mom bloggers to visit their headquarters in October 2009 while using the hashtag – #Nestlefamily – many jumped in on the hashtag with harsh criticisms of Nestle and what has now become a 30-year boycott. One Mom who did attend, provided an excellent wrapup with both sides of the story.

Where Are They Now? No doubt that social media raised new awareness for this ongoing boycott among a key demographic. But did awareness result in more boycotting? The stock price actually rose after the boycott (as most stocks did during this time period), and according to Nestle’s annual report, “The Food and Beverages business had organic growth of 3.9 percent.”  The boycott doesn’t show on its top results page even if it does warrant its own Wikipedia page.

—-

Overall, I was disappointed with the information out there on the long-term effects of social media horror stories. If we’re going to discuss how social media drives bottom-line results than we need to better understand the adverse long-term effects of these groundswells from a financial, reputation and SEO standpoint. When using the aforementioned examples as case studies, we should be clear that we don’t know or understand the long-term effects.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

What We're Reading This Week

June 11, 2010 By 1 Comment

A crazy week for Trada! RedheadWriting won our May contest for the best online marketing blog post with her post, “Copywriting 3.0: How to Bounce the Fat Kid off the See-Saw“. Our June contest is to identify the biggest online marketing problem. Leave us a comment for a chance to win a $200 gift card to Zappos or Moosejaw.

Next week we’ll be holding a webinar on June 16, “Beating Goliath with Paid Search” on how you can go head-to-head with the world’s biggest advertisers when you use PPC. Trada team members, Niel Robertson (@nielr1) and Bill Adkins (@wcadkins) had a blast at Internet Retailer.

Brad McCarty of The Next Web covered Trada in an article called, “Trada brings crowdsourcing to online advertising. My part was this quote, “To put it into perspective for you, I’ve worked in and around marketing and advertising for 15+ years.  I know some great ways to get people to pay attention to products, but the world of online advertising is still somewhat new to me.  So I need help if I’m going to get the best results.” Our future optimizer, David Boyd, wrote a post, “Trada – Crowdsourcing at it’s finest!”

Now onto our picks for the best online marketing, small business and entrepreneur articles this week.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

Silent Social Media Cues

June 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Silent Social Media Cues

Listening To Silent Social Media Cues (Photo courtesy of Joseph Gilbert/Flickr)

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to present on a ReadyTalk Webinar about social media, and one area I presented on was listening to silent social media cues.

When looking for engagement with an audience, social media marketers have a tendency to pay attention to those raising their hands. Meaning we listen to those who we can hear talking. We listen to people who blog about us, write on our Facebook page or mention us on Twitter, but we can forget about engaging with others in our classrooms so to speak. We need to do a better job of listening to silent cues that people want to engage and are paying attention to us.

Here are three easy ways to pick up on silent social media cues.

1. Favstar.fm – This service tells you who “favorites” your Tweets, which is valuable information for a corporation. Frequently, people favorite Tweets that they think are amusing or provide information they think is valuable. It’s like bookmarking but for Tweets. I’ve used it personally, but using it on the @Trada account offered great information. I found multiple people who hadn’t reached out to us or contacted us previously that were starring our Tweets. Now I can do a better job engaging with this group of people and have a better understanding of what Tweets are resonating.

2. Delicious - An oldie but a goody, this social bookmarking site also has a lot of silent cues to offer. By doing a search on Delicious, you can see who is tagging your site and blog posts, when they are tagging your sites and how they’re tagging your site. Tagging is like free association with what words you associate with a site. For Trada, we can see what keywords people associate with us. Are those tags true to form with your company? Or do you need to work on refining your messaging? Also, people who tag your site want to remember it. If I get a chance, I try to cross reference people who tag us on Delicious and find them on Twitter, so Trada can continue to engage with them.

3. StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon drives more traffic to websites than Twitter. Do you know what people say about your site on StumbleUpon? Do you know if people are reviewing your site on StumbleUpon at all? Check it out and do a search on “everyone’s favorites.” If you have the StumbleUpon toolbar, you can visit a site, click on the info button and see who else has Stumbled it. Also, a great way to identify what people think of your competitors and their content. Also, I know we’re low on Stumbles, so I’ve been working on participating in the community to better understand the type of content people Stumble.

What other tools or ideas am I missing? Do you think this information is valuable or is your time best spent on those talking to you? Also, you can check out ReadyTalk’s upcoming webinars to see if there is a topic you’d be interested about.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

Beating Goliath with Paid Search

June 8, 2010 By 1 Comment

Want to learn some amazing strategies to help your PPC campaigns? Trada is holding a free webinar on June 16, and there are spaces available!  Sign up here!

You probably can’t buy a Superbowl ad. But you can go head-to-head with the world’s biggest advertisers when you use PPC.

Sign up for Trada’s free webinar to learn how! It will be fun and instructive and it’ll be hosted by Trada’s most sartorially superior search scholar, Matt Hessler – he’s a certified PPC whiz and he is wearing ironic old man glasses and boat shoes with no socks right now.

You’ll learn:

· How to write compelling ad copy – you have 90 characters to write a better ad than Goliath.

· Don’t leave your campaign unattended! Here’s why.

· The importance of network testing: is Google the only network for you?

· How to leverage dynamic keyword insertion.

· Runtimes – how to do the research to determine when your budget should be spent.

Sign up here!

Filed Under: Trada News

What We're Reading This Week

June 4, 2010 By 7 Comments
Trada Internship

Patty Baragar Reads Up on Social Media

If you’re attending Internet Retailer next week, please say hi to our CEO Niel Robertson (@nielr1) and our VP of sales Bill Adkins (@wcadkins). Niel is the tall redhead Scottish guy, but don’t ask him to speak to hear his accent. He doesn’t have one. That’s ok, he has a lot of other things going for him.

This week we welcomed our new marketing intern Patty Baragar (@pattybaragar) to Trada. She hasn’t quit yet, so we must be doing something right! Trada was also mentioned in a MediaPost article on how “Self-Service, Automation Will Move Ad Dollars Online.“We’re also wrapping up the online voting for our contest in May for the best online marketing blog post, but the good news is that we’ve launched a fun contest in June where we ask you to tell us your biggest online marketing problems.

To the good stuff – articles on online marketing, small business and entrepreneurship.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

When Ads Become Content

June 3, 2010 By 5 Comments

Okay fine, I’ll admit I have been a bit curmudgeonly about the iPad to date. I even went as far as saying on TWiST that I thought it was going to have a great come out then sort of languish in new device category limbo. This week I finally actually played with an iPad care of Matt Cutler (@mcutler), one of my best friends and CMO at VisibleMeasures. Once I got past all the normal reactions (it’s smaller than I thought it would be, the touch interface is finicky and even a power user like Matt had to try 3-4 times on just about anything he did to get it right, great for media stuff – bad for business apps) I had an epiphany. This epiphany came from playing with the Wired Magazine iPad app .

Epiphany number one was that magazines are now dead. Whoa – not the epiphany you expected? Well the problem is that magazine formats are really just a combination of content curation and bundling strategies. If the only way you could get them was in print form in your post-box, there was nothing really to challenge them. But much like the CD, once you can unbundle the pieces and give access to them on the web, the value of the bundled format goes away. While the Wired app is extremely cool (oh you can embed video in an article) it seems to me that this is now just a web page. The fact that no one thought to embed video or voice or whatnot right into the article before seems more like an uncreative use of the Web than a creative use of the iPad. It would be incredibly easy to replicate the page flipping mechanism of the magazine format on the web if this is what people really want to do on an iPad. People are already doing this and it works much the same way. So should TechCrunch build an iPad app or just include a flipping rebundle of their website? Seems like the later would be a lot simpler for most people. Some people I am sure will argue here that when content sites were faced with the incredible growth in 3g handsets, very few successfully rewired their websites to handle the new device format (and I agree – browsing the web on my Blackberry is like sucking air through a straw). The key difference though is that the design challenge was the screen size (not in the end bandwidth or browser functionality or pointing devices or whatnot). As a content site, you had no choice but to rethink how you delivered the whole experience on a mobile phone. You don’t have that problem on an iPad. It will be interesting to see if some web-only content sites actually start to create “virtual” editions to deliver in the flipbook format. From a user’s perspective, this curation is actually valuable. When I get my copy of Wired, I do flip through it all because there is some coherency to what’s in one copy of the magazine.

Epiphany number two, which to me is much more important is that I found myself playing with the interactive ads as much as the Wired-related content. There are 3 dimension models in ads, video in ads, and all sorts of other little ideas that Wired and ad crew were clearly experimenting with. So why not do this on the web? Well the answer I think is that a) people are (e.g. interactive games) and b) when you’re “reading a magazine” you’re in a much different mindset. The ability to put someone into a mindset that is not predicated on attention-deficit is an important thing. I was focused on the magazine: that’s what I was doing. And so I actually stopped and played with the ads.

I think this is a powerful lesson and evolution to watch. What becomes interesting is how people think about content adjacency in the future of advertisements. Many of the interactive ads in Wired actually had something to do with the content they were embedded in. Much like playing with an infographic from Wired, the ad content added value to my immersive experience in the magazine.

Now let’s keep in mind that these ads are produced by people like GE and American Express. They have the budget and staff to create dedicated content for one specific edition of Wired. I spend my days working with SMBs, and they clearly don’t have the same ability. It’s hard enough to get some banner ads together to try display advertising, let alone build a 3d model as your ad content. I think all of this is changing. There are great pools of creative expertise out there (now being organized and made accessible to the masses through companies like 99designs, AdHack, AdFactory, and GenuisRocket). I encourage this evolution, and I have some ideas I will be sharing about it. For now, just contemplate the idea that ads are content. Worry about how to produce it next.

Filed Under: Advertising, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

The New PPC ‘Do: Are you ready for social media expansion?

June 2, 2010 By 3 Comments

This morning we’re lucky to have a guest post from Caleb Levell. Caleb is a Search Marketing Consultant at Hanapin Marketing and a contributor to PPC Hero. We’re big fans of PPC Hero at Trada! Check it out for daily articles on how to improve your PPC advertising.

Take a moment and picture a mullet. Yes, that’s right, the unfashionable haircut – short in the front and on the sides complemented with long hair in the back. Now, think about the online marketing industry. See the similarities?

Admittedly, the analogy is not the best, but please humor me for a second. The truth is you can approach a mullet and an online marketing campaign with the exact same mentality: Business in the front, party in the back.

Billy Ray Cyrus

Billy Ray knows.

The Business

The fundamentals of search marketing make up the business half of your mullet.  You take the front end of your haircut seriously. Proper maintenance, care, and constant consideration are essential. Waking up in the morning, you know just what to do, how to do it, and in case of a bad hair day, how to fix it.

Similarly, SEO and PPC are proven areas of success taken seriously by you and your client. The conventions are well established and evolutions in the technology from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. only make the current relation between auction and relevancy that much more dependable. PPC is as reliable as any traditional (print, radio, television) marketing campaign, and arguably easier to track, test, and recreate. Waking up in the morning, you know just what to do, how to do it, and in case of a bad PPC day, how to fix it.

The Party

So, if search marketing is all business, then the rise of social media and social advertising is the party half of my hypothetical online marketing hairdo. The back of a mullet is untamed, continuously changing, and ever-growing. To put it simply, the back of the mullet is the risk. Everyday you look in the mirror you see something different. Sometimes it’s a good look, and sometimes you second-guess ever getting a mullet haircut in the first place. However, no matter what it looks like, the back of the mullet is getting the attention from those people around you.  (Side note: I’ve never had a mullet, but boy, I sure have thought an awful lot about them).

Social advertising can be thought of in much the same way. The social media landscape is still evolving and new innovations are constantly emerging. With over 400 million people on Facebook and 100 million people on Twitter, opportunity certainly awaits, but the question remains, which clients can not only afford, but are willing to take the risk? Experimenting with social media promotions and advertisements will produce successful days, but also be prepared for stressful days when you wonder why you ever got involved with social media in the first place.

While SEO and PPC campaigns continue to show success (and are predicted to continue this success for the foreseeable future), social media is grabbing the headlines and probably the curiosity of some of your clients. Thus, it is important to keep an ear to the ground and be well versed on the latest advancements out there. Here are a few examples to get you started in the area.

Social Media Branding

Brand-specific Facebook fan pages and Twitter profiles are probably the most tried and true methods for companies utilizing social media.  Most notably, for large brand names (i.e. Coca-Cola or AXE) these pages are set up as an additional public relations resource and stand as an effort to better interact with fans of product, but more direct marketing efforts should soon follow. It is hard to not get excited about the potential for small to medium sized businesses to capitalize on this intimate consumer interaction.

Brand page Best Practices:

  1. Let people reach out to you.
  2. Listen to consumer comments and address both praises and concerns.
  3. Use a casual, friendly tone.
  4. Share and re-tweet messages you like and that relate to your brand. People will likely respond positively and appreciate your interest in their tweets.
  5. Posts and tweets need to provide value:
    1. Offer promotional deals only available on Twitter.
    2. Take people behind the scenes of your company.
    3. Post pictures of offices.
    4. Offer sneak peaks of upcoming projects and products.
    5. Don’t spam… don’t spam.
    6. Measure your success via social media monitoring, coupon codes, and track click-throughs.

Facebook Advertising

Social PPC like the Facebook Ad platform is a marketing model that should look very familiar to us in the PPC industry. Borrowing much of the logic from content match ads, Facebook employs an auction based pricing system, targeted ads, and a comparable click-through-rate. The key difference, however, is Facebook’s unique ability to target based on demographics and social information rather than the traditional contextual targeting.

TweetUp

Entrepreneurs and developers are innovatively exploring what to do with the social capital that comes from Twitter. Ad.ly, Twad.ly, and Twitter’s own in-house advertising solutions are a few that come to mind. Yet, with TweetUp launching publicly at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on May 24, it seems timely to direct you toward this fascinating start-up.

TweetUp is a mashup of Twitter and Adwords spawning from an ideology similar to Digg’s founding principles. In short, it allows TweetUp users to place bids on keywords, which consequently aides search in Twitter by pulling out the most relevant and popular tweets from the vast amount of Twitter chatter.

“People can bid on keywords or phrases, like “iPad” or “solar energy,” to push their Twitter profile or posts to the top of TweetUp’s rankings. Bids begin at 1 cent and people will pay each time their profile or a post shows up in a search” – Serial Entrepreneur and Co-Founder, Bill Gross [source]

The start-up targets both individuals looking to build a following and companies looking to promote services on certain keyword searches.

The Future of Advertising

So, are you planning to complement your search marketing campaigns with the emerging area of social advertising? Or is it still too early to make a call?

Filed Under: PPC Tips, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,
« Older Posts