The Trada Blog

Webinars are a Legitimate Lead-Generation Channel: 10 Strategies to Monetize Your Webinars

January 18, 2012 By 3 Comments

You guys! This is a really exciting milestone for me, and for you!

Today I hosted my 30th webinar for Trada. (Ed. note: at press time, Ms. Sawyer is wrapping up her 33rd Trada webinar – golly gosh is she a machine.)

Webinars are a lot of work. I develop a concept, decide where it fits on the calendar, find a partner or guest (or choose to go it alone), write an abstract, put together copy for email invitations and build landing pages, design all the slides and accompanying materials, and write and design a best practices guide.

Then I moderate or host the webinar. Strive to be charming, knowledgeable, engaging, helpful, witty, centered and valuable. Remember to breathe. Don’t let my chair squeak. Don’t space out looking at the volumes of chat messages coming through in the webinar interface. Keep my cool presenting for hundreds of marketers who’re dedicating an hour of their time to hear me speak.

Finally, follow-up. With the help of an excellent intern, this has been whittled down to a frenetic half-day, but it’s still a formidable time investment. And when this is all over? I plan the next one. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Tools

Five Things I Learned in One Month at Trada that I Didn’t Learn in Four Years of College

January 16, 2012 By 4 Comments

Guest Post by Keith Jensen, Sales and Marketing Operations Intern

As I am dreading my impending graduation from CU Boulder this May, it was interesting to look back and see what I wish I would’ve learned while attending college.  I’ve only been at Trada for a little over two months, and I now know that there will always be more concepts, skills, or programs to learn before I can get to where I want to be in the real world.  Here are five main ones that hit me within seven days of my Marketing and Sales Operations Internship:

Salesforce.com
If you are involved with marketing or sales and you haven’t heard of SFDC, then I would recommend buying Salesforce.com for Dummies.  SFDC has received multiple awards over the past few years, including “Most Innovative Company” and “Best Sales Platform.” It serves as the basis for keeping all of a company’s leads, contacts, opportunities, accounts, campaigns, and everything else sales-related organized and easy to read.  A lot of companies pay above-average salaries for someone to be their SFDC Administrator, so learning everything about the site can prove to be a huge resume booster.  I had to spend hours exploring all the features and pages that exist in the back-end of the site, and knowing the basis of how it worked first would’ve made it a lot easier. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Trada News

Click Fraud Week Wrap Up

January 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Click Fraud Week has come to end. Thanks for tuning in all week! If you missed yesterday’s webinar, fear not, we have it here!

Click Fraud: Protect Yourself from Internet Crime!

Check out our other presentations on Slide Share!

Filed Under: PPC Tips

[PODCAST] Internet Ads Update Episode 7: Click Fraud – One Step to Protect Yourself

January 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We’re wrapping up Click Fraud Week here at Trada with a special episode of Internet Ads Update! In this 8-minute podcast, Matt Hessler and Anna Sawyer call in from their trip around the world (this week: swimming with Great Whites in South Africa) to give you the #1 best possible way to protect  yourself from click fraud – and it only takes ten minutes a month.

Questions? Topic ideas? Haircut suggestions for Anna and Matt? Leave them in the comments or email us at podcast@trada.com!

For the latest internet advertising news delivered straight to your iTunes…

Filed Under: Podcasts

Help! I’m a Victim of Click Fraud!

January 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Sign Up for a Click Fraud Webinar

I talk with hundreds of marketing professionals a week. One common thread that I often hear from SMB’s is that their competitors are clicking on their ads to charge them money. Or, that they aren’t getting the return possible on paid search because someone’s been paid to click on their ads. While click-fraud is a very real issue to the tune of $7 billion a year, Google’s main purpose from day one was to have the trust of its users.

In 2003 they developed the Click Quality team. This team’s sole purpose is to establish the rules for invalid clicks and to proactively try to thwart attempts at click fraud. While doing some research, I was able to find the mission statement of the Click Quality team from internal Google documents:

“Protect Google’s advertising network and provide excellent customer service to clients. We do that by:

• Vigilantly monitoring invalid clicks/impressions and removing its source
• Reviewing all client requests and responding in a timely manner
• Developing and improving systems that remove invalid clicks/impressions and properly credit clients for invalid traffic
• Educating clients and employees on invalid clicks/impressions.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: PPC Help

2012 Marketing Predictions

January 11, 2012 By 2 Comments

Well, we’ve started a new year, and what blog worth its salt would be complete without a New Year’s predictions post!? So without further ado, here are my marketing predictions for 2012.

Social media will grow throughout the organization.

Social media has predominantly been the domain of the marketing department. This year, you’ll see it extend into other parts of the organization such as sales, customer support and account management. This creates both a challenge and an opportunity for Marketing. On the one hand, you have the opportunity to “outsource” social media to tens or hundreds of individuals throughout your organization and radically amplify your marketing messages. On the other hand, with all those individuals blogging, tweeting, etc. to the world, you have the potential to lose control of your message. Get ahead of this problem by working closely with other departments to provide them with training and messaging, and leverage social media monitoring tools to keep an eye on things.

Mobile marketing will become a priority.

According to comScore, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices between September and November of last year. This marketing channel can no longer be ignored by marketing departments. At a minimum, you need to be sure your web site is mobile compatible. Beyond that, you should start testing marketing programs that let you interact with your prospects on their mobile devices, whether that’s using QR codes, click to call in your mobile ads, location based social media, etc. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Advertising, Paid Search

Don’t Try to Mess with Google: A Story of a Misguided Ploy to Have Your Cake and Eat it Too

January 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Sign up for a Click Fraud Prevention Webinar

Click fraud is the modern day equivalent of helping yourself to your neighbor’s electrical connection, albeit with less risk of death by electrical shock… for now. However, just because this sophisticated form of Internet trickery is not deadly, this does not mean that it is not malicious. Click fraud is the falsification of clicks on paid advertisements on search engines in which the creator of the fake clicks skims a portion of the advertiser’s budget for themselves. These fake clicks blow through the advertiser’s budget with the aid of an automated script or computer program that imitates a legitimate internet user clicking on an ad.

There is no story more interesting or peculiar than that of Michael Anthony Bradley, a self described computer programmer from Oak Park, CA. In the spring of 2004, Bradley approached Google engineers claiming that he had uncovered a serious security flaw in their paid search ad mechanism that left them as a proverbial sitting duck in a pond of sharks. Bradley, a sort of veteran of the paid search industry, having worked for various other PPC firms in the past, claimed that he had come across the flaw while developing technology for other companies.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Paid Search, PPC Tips

How to Survive in a Click-Fraud World

January 9, 2012 By 1 Comment

Sign Up for a Webinar with Click Fraud Tips

PPC advertisers were probably thrilled when the FBI busted a massive click-fraud cyber-ring that had scammed over $14 million in malicious clicks over the last few years.  Over 4 million computers in over 100 countries were infected with the crime ring’s malware, at least 500,000 of which were in the United States.

While it might feel good to have these crooks off the street, it is still very difficult for law enforcement to crack down on the widespread click-fraud that some estimate pilfers over $1 billion from PPC advertisers and publishers each year. Even more disconcerting is that most of these victims are probably unaware that they have been scammed.

Before you panic and pull your ads off of AdWords and AdCenter, remember there are ways to protect yourself from the Internet’s underworld. While there is no way to eliminate click-fraud, taking steps to mitigate its effects can keep PPC advertising profitable and the effect of click fraud negligible.

The following tips minimize the effect click-fraud and will help you sleep well at night.

Stick with the Major Pay-Per-Click Players

While there are other options outside of AdWords and AdCenter that might offer better prices, the giant PPC networks are the most committed to thwarting would-be click frauds. Google, for example, has protections in place to detect potential click fraud and has a process for refunding costs accrued due to click-fraud.

Watch the Data

Click fraud, especially in paid search, is sometimes possible to identify based on campaign data. If your paid search clicks increase while your conversion rates plummet, there’s a chance you’ve got a problem on your hands. As tempting as it might be to set it and forget it, success in paid search is dependent upon paying rigorous attention to the data. This is just another one of those cases.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: PPC Tips

[PODCAST] Internet Ads Update: Does Paid Search Have a 6:1 Impact on Offline Sales?

January 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A study published by RevTrax claims that paid search drives $6 in local sales for every $1 in online sales.

What can we do to more accurately measure our PPC campaigns’ impact on offline sales? Could this completely change the way we think about PPC for e-commerce?

In this 7-minute podcast, online advertising experts Matt Hessler and Anna Sawyer call in from their trip around the world (this week: an American suburb!) and offer practical advice to online retailers with a brick-and-mortar presence for tracking sales that begin with a click and conclude with an in-store purchase.

Have questions for Anna and Matt? Leave them in the comments or email us at podcast@trada.com!

For the latest internet advertising news delivered straight to your iTunes…

Filed Under: Podcasts

Marketing Tools: Crowdbooster

January 5, 2012 By 2 Comments

With celebrity rappers to major brands using Crowdbooster, it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t use it too! Crowdbooster provides the world’s first intelligent social media dashboard designed to help businesses effectively grow and manage their presence online. Crowdbooster helps you achieve an effective presence on Twitter and Facebook. They show you analytics that aren’t based on abstract scores but numbers that are connected to your business and your social media strategies: impressions, total reach, engagement, and more. Crowdbooster then gives you the tools and recommendations you need to take action and improve each one of these metrics.

 

Why you need it

1. Cut Through the Clutter

You could be following thousands (maybe even millions) of people and brands on Twitter. That’s a lot of tweets to sift through! With Crowdbooster, you can easily see conversations to help you better engage with your core customers. See who is retweeting your content, who is mentioning you, and how many impressions your tweets are making.

2. Get Stats from Social Media

Sometimes it’s hard to track your efforts in social media. Crowdbooster shows which posts were working for you. It points out who retweeted you, and the impressions made by retweets. It also gives recommendations for when to tweet for the best results, giving you multiples times in the week when your tweets will reach the most and best customers. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Tools
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