Holiday PPC – The Myth of Black Monday

September 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

In our ongoing holiday PPC series, we first provided you with 4 Easy Tips for Holiday Paid Search Campaigns. We also talked about the holiday buying cycle in the post, “For the Love of Santa. Get Your Holiday Paid Search Campaign Prepped!”

In our last post, we talked about how “Black Monday” is like the abominable snowmen of online shopping days. Black Monday didn’t use to be a myth. Back when broadband connections were abysmally slow, many waited to shop until they could enjoy their work’s high-speed connections. According to a BusinessWeek article, Cyber Monday is actually the 12th most popular shopping day. The best part was that Cyber Monday was actually conceived by the people at Shop.org to promote online shopping. I wonder if Shop.org invented Valentine’s Day too?

So if Black Monday isn’t the most popular day, what are popular online shopping days? Don’t discount the original – Black Friday – as a huge day for online shopping. Even Turkey Day gets its own moniker of Cyber Thanksgiving and is itself a popular online day. Plus, the entire week leading up to Thanksgiving is starting to affect paid search. If you’re a retailer, chances are you’ve been discounting items earlier and earlier each year and that’s affecting paid search.

While you probably suspected that the day after Christmas is a huge online shopping day, don’t discount Christmas as a day that matters. Why? Because of the significant number of gift cards given in a holiday season. According to the Google Holiday Survey, 69 percent of shoppers plan on purchasing a gift card in the holiday season. Many customers start tapping into those gift cards after receiving them.

Our account manager Dan Tisser advises companies not to spend all of your holiday paid search budget on any single day and to ensure your budget can go the extra mile til the end of the online holiday shopping season.

Trada Webinar – Is Your Holiday Paid Search Campaign Wrapped Up? from Trada Video on Vimeo.

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Happy Birthday Trada

September 15, 2010 By 2 Comments

Trada turned two today. Thankfully, we’re not really going through a possessive stage where we’re declaring everything is ours. However, we are constantly asking “why?” via, Andreas, our sexy data scientist (his words, not mine).

We’re really proud of our milestones. While we were in stealth period, we spent the first 18 months working on our product launch. Trada came out of stealth and launched on March 18, and we were full throttle from that point forward.

In addition to Google and Yahoo, we launched Bing. We also launched a full offering to support agencies.

Then we raised an additional round of funding from Google Ventures. Since Google Ventures, we’ve been up to a whole slew of new activities.

Filed Under: Trada News Tagged With:

PPC and SEO…Working Together

September 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

As we’ve talked about previously, paid search and SEO shouldn’t be exclusive of each other. Today, Trada hosted a webinar on how to maximize both PPC and SEO together.

Let’s start with PPC advertising. PPC starts working right away. The advantage of this is that companies can start collecting data right away on what keywords are leading to high-quality leads and sales. This data gives you the building blocks you need to build your SEO campaign.

SEO on the other hand won’t start showing results for at least a month, probably several months. Yet proper SEO and design is invaluable to creating a landing page that converts.

Your quality score matters immensely to your paid search campaign, and a landing page optimized for SEO will help bring your quality score up. Having the right keywords in your landing page that match your ad group that match your original paid search keywords will increase your quality score.

Components of a Quality Score
•Keyword’s CTR on Google
•Relevance of the keyword to its ad group
•Landing page quality
•Account’s historical performance
•Other relevance factors

When your quality score goes up, it’s like winning the golden ticket in the search world. Incredible things happen.

Benefits of Quality Score Increasing
Benefits of Quality Score Increasing

Finally, review and reflect upon your integrated PPC and SEO efforts constantly. Are high-converting keywords for PPC being included in your SEO efforts and vice versa. Test, test and test…again.

—

Trada is sponsoring a FREE MarketingProfs Virtual Conference on Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2010 from 12 to 4 pm ET. Sign up at MarketingProfs.

Schedule:

  • 12 to 1 pm ET: Content SEO—Best Practices and What to Avoid with Lee Odden and Jiyan Wei
  • 1:30 to 2:30 pm ET: Advanced PPC Tactics—What the Pros are Doing with Andrew Morgan and Victoria Khemani 
  • 3 pm to 4 pm ET: Critical Metrics for SEO Success with Rand Fishkin and Stephen Spencer
Filed Under: Paid Search, PPC Tips Tagged With: , ,

Brad Feld is a lowly, maligned intern with a DARK SECRET!!!

September 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Boy oh boy are we excited to release our latest Big Red Scarves video installment. Not only does this video star our very own fabulous Foundry investor, Brad Feld, but the storyline has taken a turn… for the DARK. WHAT?! You say. But Niel’s scarf business is the very definition of wholesome, just like his organic cruelty-free hand-knitted scarves!

You’ll just have to watch to find out.

And while you’re at it, become a slavish reader of Brad’s blog, Feld Thoughts. Not only is he a hamtastic actor who richly deserves a star on the Pearl Street Walk of Fame, his blog offers a keen insight into the life and mind of a venture capitalist.

Want more? Check out the earlier Big Red Scarves videos starring Brad’s Foundry Group colleague, Seth Levine, and our very own Trada CEO Niel Robertson.

Filed Under: Trada News

For the Love of Santa. Get Your Holiday Paid Search Campaign Prepped!

September 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Don’t let your holiday paid search campaign slide to the last minute. First, start with our 4 Easy Tips for Holiday Paid Search Campaigns.

With holiday paid search campaigns, it’s important to understand how the holidays affect the buying cycle, and thus, paid search.

The Buying Cycle

Let’s start with the Early Bird. Holiday paid search terms start popping up in August, and some shoppers are already entering the research stage five months before the holidays. Whoa. If you’re running a holiday paid search campaign, you’ll want to consider setting your cookies to track for more than 30 days. The early birds may have a prolonged research cycle.

Evolve your ads during the holiday season. If you start running holiday paid search keywords in August or September, you’ll want to keep your ad copy fresh and relevant. This is a great time to consider a gift with purchase that you can include in your ad copy. Everybody’s looking for a little something extra to stuff in the stocking during the holiday season. Offer early bird specials or limited-time offers. For your early birds, you may want to consider price guarantee. No one wants to see prices fall after being ahead of the game. For your Late Birds, let shoppers know guaranteed delivery days.

Break out your holiday decorations. Meaning, create holiday specific landing pages. Let them know the very last possible day they can order to get guaranteed delivery. Consider offer free shipping or discounts on the entire site. Place a countdown to Christmas.

Another important fact to keep in mind is that the days you think are most popular for online shopping days during the holiday season can be more myth than fact. Cyber Monday? It’s like the abominable snowmen of shopping days. According to BusinessWeek, it’s actually the 12th most popular online shopping day.

You can also skip reading all of this text and can watch our webinar video on holiday paid search campaigns. Consider it my gift to you.

Trada Webinar – Is Your Holiday Paid Search Campaign Wrapped Up? from Trada Video on Vimeo.

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Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom (and… Value?)

September 9, 2010 By 14 Comments

Data, data, data, data, data, data, data, data, data, (deep breath in), data, data, data, data, data, data, data, data.

Apparently, data is pretty cool. It’s been called the new oil, the new soil, the new black. The data scientist has been exposed as a [very sexy] individual who is capable of gaining super-human insights into countless numbers.

If it’s not already apparent, I’m a data scientist (and consequently a very sexy individual) and, I work at Trada, a place whose culture is data and metric-driven.

The center of our office has two 42″ televisions displaying real-time data about the Trada Marketplace. Given the high concentration of nerd, why isn’t there a XBOX 360 or PS3? Because this data helps us concretely understand what is going on in our marketplace. It’s that important.

It seems excessive to have these two hulking televisions, but the mere presence of this information opens up new conversations on a daily basis. These conversations grow from two people to four and begin to spawn deeper, more interesting questions about our Marketplace. By trying to answer these deep questions we gain the ability to derive more and more from what is otherwise an abstract set of numbers.

Our CEO, Neil Robertson (@nielr1), once showed me the following visualization on the back of a napkin (Editor’s Note: the original napkin was not used for this photo, nor were any napkins harmed in the taking of this photo):

KEY: D = Data, I = Information, K = Knowledge, W = Wisdom.

It’s a simple graphic with a profound message — as we ask more questions and dig deeper, we approach Wisdom. Raw data creates the basis for information (as it does above), but that’s not enough. From information we must derive usable knowledge. With this knowledge we can avoid past mistakes and continually improve our product. By seeking the most value, we fully develop our search to answer, or at least explain, our business questions with quantifiable evidence.

In the fast-paced world of startups, having a good grasp of your business’ central metrics allows you to discovering problems before they become out of control. Having the correct data and using the derived wisdom helps to mitigate problems quickly. Furthermore, having accessible data for employees helps to develop a stronger core understanding of the business’ model by all employees, not just analysts. The wisdom gained from our data helps us find new, novel solutions to complex problems in our business.

A data-driven culture is one that is always looking for new trends and explanations of why events occured. Startups need to foster a culture where the careful monitoring of metrics helps to develop an understanding of causal relationships within their product.

This post is the first of a series by the Trada Analytics team. We hope to focus on providing our views and thoughts on Data Analysis and Visualization, while still soliciting the wisdom of the Crowd. Please feel free to leave comments (and criticism)!

Filed Under: Paid Search Tagged With: , ,

Webinar – 9 Tips on Maximizing PPC & SEO Together

September 7, 2010 By 3 Comments

Do you favor pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or search engine optimization (SEO) when it comes to revving up traffic and conversions to your website? This webinar on Tuesday, Sept. 14 at 1 pm ET will help you understand the benefits and differences of PPC and SEO and how they can work in tandem. We’ll give you nine ways they can work together to get you the conversions you want.

Trada’s complimentary webinar will leave you with a firm understanding of how to use both to supercharge your conversions.

This webinar will be led by our account manager Dan Tisser. If you think we pick Dan to lead our webinars because of his radio voice, well that’s true. But it’s also true that Dan has an incredible knowledge of PPC and SEO, which is the main reason he’s frequently selected to do webinars.

In this webinar you’ll learn:

  • How PPC and SEO interplay to increase site traffic and conversions
  • Tips on ranking high in both SEO and PPC and why it matters
  • When and where to allocate your marketing dollars
  • Ways to provide more relevancy and earn more clicks
  • How to use both PPC and SEO to refine your messaging

As always, Trada would love to hear in the comment section if you have any suggestions on future webinar topics.

Sign up for the webinar on “9 Tips on Maximizing PPC & SEO Together.”

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Seth Levine on StockTwits TV

September 2, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Our investor from Foundry Group, Seth Levine, was interviewed on StockTwits TV yesterday. Please skip over around the 3:50 mark when he informs Howard Lindzon that StockTwits is his favorite portfolio company, as Seth must have had a hard fall on one of his bike rides. Unfortunate.

Speaking of Seth, he recently posted an excellent blog post on convertible debt as a funding method for startups that is a must read. Great discussion in the comments section.

Speaking of interviews, our CEO Niel Robertson was recently interviewed on Webmaster Radio at the Search Engine Strategies conference. You can listen to a quick 20-minute podcast.

Filed Under: Trada News Tagged With: , , , ,
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