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What We’re Reading This Week – Aug. 12

August 12, 2011 By Elaine Ellis Leave a Comment

Hi there blog readers! Hope you’re having a good week. The end of Trada’s abysmal softball team is coming to an end, so we’re in talks to start up an abysmal basketball or hockey league.

11 Google Plus Predictions from 11 Social Media Pros – We read this one with bated breath because as our Facebook poll (above) showed us, not too many people are actively involved with Google+. Tamar Weinberg has what I feel is the most accurate prediction: “I think it’s really dependent on Google+ getting those business pages ready. Once that’s made, the businesses that get started will have a leg up on their competition. If you snooze, you lose. Early adopters always see a lot of success.”

Put on these sneakers, drink this nice drink, and submit to the conversions.

More Conversions Than a Kool-Aid Cult: Using Mind Control to Boost Your Lead Gen Conversion Rate! by @annafsawyer – Our own Anna Sawyer participates in the Unbounce Conversion Fest blog contest. Please check it out – it’s funny and informative!
What today’s startups can learn from yesterday’s marketing by @bradmccarty – Lessons from companies that nailed marketing in years past.
Wordstream introduced an AdWords grader. Finally, the PPC counterpoint for Hubspot’s website grader.
Microsoft Keeps Chipping Away at Google’s Search Market Share by @mattrosoff. Always interesting to see how the competitive landscape of the search networks is changing. Even more interesting that “Microsoft’s Online group lost $2.6 billion on revenue of only $2.5 billion.”
More Conversions Than a Kool-Aid Cult: Using Mind Control to Boost Your Lead Gen Conversion Rate by Trada’s @annafsawyer. A humorous look at how to increase conversion rates
5 Strategies for Improved A/B Testing by Trada’s Chief Strategy Officer @timmayer. Tim wrote a great piece on being smart about your A/B testing. If you’re a web nerd, you’ll love it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

What We’re Reading This Week

July 29, 2011 By Elaine Ellis Leave a Comment

Hope everyone had a great week! Here at Trada, our softball team put up its 10,336 straight loss. But this week isn’t a net loss because our account manager, Dan Tisser, brought in his toaster to Trada. It’s a pleasant addition to have toast in the morning.

Now onto the weekly best online marketing articles.

Leveraging your SEO for Search Retargeting by Joanna Lord (@joannalord). An in-depth how-to article on how to use your search retargeting and SEO together.
Beware the SEO copywriting B.S. – 3 tips about these online tips. Heather Lloyd Martin provides three ways to determine how legitimate the SEO expert advice you’re reading actually is. One excellent point to remember is what works for one company might not work for you.
Paid, Earned, Owned & Shared Media – What’s Your Online Marketing Media Mix by Lee Odden (@leeodden). A 30,000 foot view of each media type. It’s important to think about each component of your content strategy.
Quality Fans & EdgeRank = Recipe for Visibility by Selena Narayanasamy (@esvienne). Selena covers in this blog post everything you need to know about Facebook’s algorithm that determines who your updates.
Mind the Bid-to-CPC Gap in Paid Search by Mark Ballard. A thorough post on what to do when your CPCs are coming in below your bids (woot!) but you know you might be leaving additional revenue behind. This post walks you step by step on when (and if) you should raise your bid.
Venture Deals by Jason Mendelson and Brad Feld – It’s not just because they invested in Trada that makes them so smart. These two know venture deals inside out and offer a refreshing and realistic take on all the ins and outs of venture financing. If you’re a startup, this is a must read. As one Amazon review said, “First off, Brad & Jason break down the entire process from soup to nuts. That’s great for first-time entrepreneurs. I wouldn’t be surprised if this book became the bible of startup incubator programs. There’s enough detail to make it feel fresh, but it’s not so dense that it’s hard to get through.”

(Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ella Thomson. We have no idea who the baby is but we think her parents should read her PPC for Beginners.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized

What We’re Reading This Week

July 22, 2011 By Elaine Ellis Leave a Comment

A weekly roundup of the best online marketing articles that caught our eye this week. As always, leave a comment or share with us on Twitter (@Trada) your favorite posts. Also, this weekend Trada is running a giving away an autographed copy of Sex on the Moon by Ben Mezrich on our Facebook page. Ben is the author of The Accidental Billionaires, the inspiration for the Oscar winning Social Network. To win a copy, just write the best PPC headline for an ad to sell Sex on the Moon on our Facebook page or in the blog comments.

Onto the articles:

How Bing’s Editors Choose Sexy Images to Seduce You Away From Google by Austin Carr (@austincarr). I love the Bing images, so this is a fun look to see how they’re picked. Also, Austin writes a lot of really interesting content about the search networks that you won’t find elsewhere, so be sure to check out his work at Fast Company.
What Are the Key Metrics for Brand Awareness Campaigns In An Automated Buying Environment? from @AdExchanger. A good look at metrics to install when running a branding campaign in an automated buying environment. Great perspective from the experts.
Maximize Social Media Traffic to Your Blog by David Cowling (@smn_australia). Some interesting tips from David on getting additional social media traffic to your blog.
Search StumbleUpon With New Explore Feature by Brent Csutoras (@brentcsutoras). I love StumbleUpon. I used to use it to bookmark all my favorite DIY projects or recipes I loved until Pinterest popped up. Anyway, StumbleUpon is making it that much easier to find the content you’re interested in phrases you’re interested in (still in beta). And if you’re not paying attention to StumbleUpon, don’t overlook them. They can be a huge driver of traffic.
360i’s Report on Social Commerce: Daily Deals – 360i is doing a summer series on social commerce, and this fourth report is about Daily Deals. The market is saturated with new daily deals and for a business, it can be hard to understand all of your options This 8-page report gives a brief introduction to all of the possibilities.
Friday Five: Social Media Lessons from Startups by Zach Cole (@ZachACole) – Edelman Digital features quick five lessons each Friday on their blog. This blog takes lessons from startups on social media marketing. Great lesson from Crowdbooster - “Speedy and transparent responses to customer inquiries can build a brand’s credibility and enhance the trust people have in it.”

Also, be sure to check out Trada’s post on how to improve your quality score.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Gumball Guess Contest Results!

February 10, 2011 By PattyBaragar Leave a Comment

Thanks to those of you who stopped by the Trada booth at MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Forum in Austin last week.

We loved meeting you and sharing how Trada, the world’s first and only crowdsourced pay-per-click marketplace, is changing how companies are running PPC on Google and Yahoo/Bing.

On February 16^th , we invite you to join us for a special B2B webinar chock-full of PPC tips for you to put to use! There is limited space, please register today!

And now…. the results of our Gumball Guessing Contest!

If you entered our gumball guessing contest, we’re sure you’re anxious to know the answer….

47 entries

(the lowest number we’ve ever had!)

highest guess: 7,239

lowest guess: 312

average guess: 1,299

How many gumballs were there? Drumroll please!

1,247 Total Gumballs!

And the crowd wins again!

Beth Cail, you win a $50 iTunes gift card for having the closest guess.

Good eye!

What have we learned? Well, that many heads really ARE better than one! We use this same concept with PPC advertising- applying the diverse thinking of a crowd of experts to revolutionize paid search.

If you have questions or would like to learn more about Trada’s PPC marketplace, please email us at sales@trada.com or talk to a person directly and call (877) 871-1835.

Interested in working the Trada Marketplace as PPC expert?

Read our top 5 reasons to join the crowd.

Near New Orleans? Need an excuse to go? Trada be at ERA’s Great Ideas Summit, March 1st and 2nd. See you there!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Scientific Method for Startups

September 29, 2010 By Michael Lavrisha Leave a Comment

Now that we know about the importance of data in any business, how do we go about deriving wisdom from data? At Trada we take the scientific method and tweak it a bit. Yes, our high school science teacher has finally gotten the last laugh.

Why take inspiration from the scientific method? It is a well design and documented process to derive conclusions from data and experiments. It’s been reviewed, refined, and used by countless scientists.

Here is a brief summary of the scientific method, in all of its Wikipedia glory:

Make a set of observations regarding the phenomenon being studied.
(Inductive Step) Form a hypothesis that might explain the observations.
Identify the implications and outcomes that must follow, if the theory is to be true.
Perform other experiments or observations to see if any of the predicted outcomes fail.
(Deductive Step) If any predicted outcomes do fail, the theory is proven false since it is true that if A implies B, then not B implies not A (logical contrapositive). It is then necessary to change the hypothesis and go back to step 3.

However, this is a bit too rigorous for our purpose. So we’ve taken some inspiration from it and modified the steps we take as follows:

Formulate a tractable question.
Determine the proper source(s) and collect relevant supporting data.
Cleanse, aggregate, and analyze the data from various perspectives
Attempt to make a conclusion/decision; if no conclusion can be made, then go back to step 3.

Instead of formulating a hypothesis, our analysis is generally driven by a question arising from anecdotal data. Given this question, we are able to determine which data is appropriate in attempting to quantitatively respond to the question.

Our process doesn’t require experimentation. Many of the answers we are seeking we can answer with the data we already have. However, our steps are general enough to accommodate an experiment if need.

We’ve also found that our process helps use to avoid some of the following pitfalls while performing willy-nilly data analysis.

• Rabbit Holes. These are the never-ending pits we can fall in to that remove us from the task at hand or make us myopic. Our method forces us to answer a specific question which forces our data analysis to be focused.

• Data Overload. We have a vast amount of data our fingertips, how can we possibly filter through it? Again, by defining a driving question, we can eliminate irrelevant data.

• Inconclusive Analysis. Often we look at charts, tables, and numbers but we never gain (conclusive) information. If the initial analysis is insufficient (which can be determined by confidence in our conclusion), then additional analysis or a different perspective of the question at hand is required.

This process is the one that we found to work best for us. It is informal but it helps have something to show for our data analysis. It may not work for you so figure out your own data analysis process! Then you can keep yourself on track, focused, and data analysis remains the joy that it always has been.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Data, data driven startups, scientific method

Trada Attending Search Engine Strategies

August 2, 2010 By Elaine Ellis Leave a Comment

Free biscotti! Say hello!

Our team at Trada will be attending and exhibiting Search Engine Strategies in San Francisco from Aug. 17 – 18. We’ll be at Booth 207. Please come and say hello.

Not only will be across from the coffee station and offering free biscotti, but you’ll be able to see demonstrations of how Trada uses a crowdsourcing model to build sophisticated paid search strategies. Also, if you’re interested in learning how to become a Trada optimizer, come by the booth to get more information.

At our booth, you’ll also be able to meet some of our Trada team members including our CEO Niel Robertson, our VP of Product Management/Marketing Bill Quinn, our VP of Sales Bill Adkins, Account Manager Dan Tisser, Marketers Tara Hallam, Anna Sawyer and myself (Elaine Ellis). Come by to meet the faces behind Trada.

Our team plans on live blogging many of the sessions, so even if you can’t attend, you’ll at least be able to pick up some key sessions from the best search engine marketers in the world.

Also, our CEO Niel Robertson will be giving a theater presentation on Tuesday, Aug. 17th at 4:30 pm. His presentation will be on “Crowdsourcing: The Pros and Cons of Leveraging the Crowd for Paid Search.“

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Search Engine Strategies

An Interview with Jeff Ma

July 14, 2010 By Elaine Ellis 19 Comments

The House Advantage

In college, Jeff Ma was apart of MIT’s famous blackjack team. This experience led to Jeff being the basis of the book Bringing Down the House and the movie 21. Jeff want on to found Citizen Sports, which was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year. To say he is brilliant at math is an understatement of epic proportions.

I was lucky enough to interview him for his first book, The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big In Business, about businesses using calculated risk-taking. What I like about this book is that while Jeff’s mathematical skills are light years ahead of mine, the book was written in a way that small business owners can understand. What’s also cool is that Trada received several shout outs in the book.

One of the first questions I asked Jeff was what are most small businesses missing when it comes to data? What Jeff said makes sense. Small businesses aren’t comfortable with data until they have the right resources/people to deal with it. But Jeff encourages small businesses to realize that they don’t have to be perfect. They just need to start collecting data because you’ll always make better decisions with a data-driven approach. In his book, he cited how at Trada, we know that a certain percentage will convert with paid-search campaigns, but business owners can be nervous about the results at first. They have to trust that the percentage will work, and not to give up if there isn’t immediate success after paying for a couple days of clicks.

While data is king, Jeff talked about situations that require judgment. He cited an example of when he was with the MIT Blackjack team in Shreveport, and they felt they were under surveillance by the casino. They had to take the information and signals they were receiving and decide whether to continue playing or leave. It was examples like these that made this book more interesting than most. According to Jeff, “Think about the opportunity costs associated with your actions and make sure your judgment is not being clouded by greed or impatience.”

Another example I really loved from The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big in Business was his experience helping the Portland Blazers with choosing college basketball players. He came up with a mathematical model to help determine college players chance of succeeding in the NBA based on their past performance and what position they would play and then his team would report back to the Blazers. The Blazers asked how they could get their rankings to reflect Jeff’s rankings. Jeff’s response was that they shouldn’t. I loved his quote, “We use analytics because they help make smart decisions. They aren’t supposed to mimic human observation; they are simply a tool to measure what human observation can’t.”

We definitely recommend this book to any business owner – big or small – to help make better data-driven decisions. We’ll be doing a drawing for a copy of Jeff’s book. All you have to do is leave a comment, and we’ll do a random drawing to pick the winner.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Jeff Ma, MIT Black Jack Team, The House Advantage

Trada Case Study: Winston Prep

June 28, 2010 By Elaine Ellis 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: Paid Search Experts, paid search marketing, Trada Case Study, Trada Review

What We're Reading This Week

June 18, 2010 By Elaine Ellis 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.

How to Measure & Analyze Long Tail Search – Patrick Altoft (@patrickaltoft) of Blogstorm writes a really detailed post on measuring and understanding what longtail search terms people use to find you. As we’ve posted on previously, the long tail is worth the effort.
9 SEO Mistakes Businesses Make With Content – Lisa Barone (@lisabarone) details the 9 SEO mistakes businesses make when generating content. If you’re going to do it, then do it right. This article will make you smarter. I know we have opportunity for improvement. Also, if you’re not subscribed to Outspoken Media, you’re missing one of the best social media/SEO blogs out there.
Likeable Media reached out to Brian Morrissey (@brianmorrissey) of AdWeek by pitching him with a targeted Facebook ad. Yes, really. I’m so jealous I didn’t think of it. Brian, return my phone calls! (Just kidding kids, for those playing at home Brian HATES being pitched via phone).
Over 100 Lessons from over 100 Events – David Berkowitz (@dberkowitz) from 360i shares 100 lessons he’s learned from speaking at public events. If you’ve pursuing public speaking opportunities, this is an excellent read on how to provide value to your audience.
Google Caffeine is Live…Now What? The Google Caffeine update to the algorithm changes SEO, and this blog post by Greg Shuey (@seocom) tells you what you need to do to be successful.
It’s Better to Beg for Forgiveness than to Ask for Permission – Former entrepreneur/current VC Mark Suster (@msuster) tells a brilliant story of how he relentlessly pursued a position in Japan. He just showed up in Japan on a Monday, and they kept him. Rather than asking for permission for the transfer, he went for it. Inspiring.

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: Agency Paid Search, Google Caffeine, Long Tail Search, SEO Mistakes, Trada Staff Members

What We're Reading This Week

June 4, 2010 By Elaine Ellis 7 Comments

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.

5 Small Business Social Media Success Stories - Erica Swallow (@ericaswallow) has five examples of small businesses using social media. It’s nice to hear of new case studies where social media is successful for small businesses. As we all know, social media is really time consuming, so it’s important for small businesses to know it’s successful.
Why Local SEO is Harder Than SEOs Think – Matt McGee (@mattmcgee) has a really good case study involving bakeries in San Francisco to show that local SEO isn’t as easy as it is made out to be.
A V&S Update: The Jon Bond Interview – John Winsor (@jtwinsor) has an interview with Jon Bond on the future of advertising.
Ad Spend Trends – Fred Wilson shares a deck from Google’s Chief Economist showing that ad spending has grown in the past decade to be 5% of all ad spend, which he says, “That is the most bullish signal about investing in the Internet that I have seen this year.”
21 Unique Location Examples from Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl and MyTown – Jason Keath (@jakrose) provides 21 case studies of the big geolocation services and how they’ve been used for marketing. Am wondering about the success rate of some of these examples given this previous article from Edelman Digital on Foursquare and Spin Magazine.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Erica Swallow, Jason Keath, John Winsor, Patty Baragar, Small Business Social Media

What We’re Reading This Week – Aug. 12

What We’re Reading This Week

What We’re Reading This Week

Gumball Guess Contest Results!

Scientific Method for Startups

Trada Attending Search Engine Strategies

An Interview with Jeff Ma

Trada Case Study: Winston Prep

What We're Reading This Week

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