The Trada Blog

Decoding PPC Quality Scores

March 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Here at Trada, we take Quality Score very seriously. Quality Score can make or break your success as a PPC advertiser. But it’s a complicated idea, and many are uncertain of how it works. We’ll give you the scoop on: which elements affect your campaign, which don’t, and what to do to get the best possible Quality Score.

But first- What is a Quality Score?

Quality Score: A set of factors in a paid search campaign that determines, along with bid price, the eventual ad position and click cost when an ad is clicked. Quality Score is calculated at the keyword level, and the collection of factors is given a score between 1 and 10.

Why should you care?

If you don’t structure your campaign with Quality Score in mind, you could pay too much for clicks, your competitors will rank above you, your click-through-rate (CTR) will suffer, and it will be hard to fix!

What goes into a Quality Score?

Filed Under: Paid Search, PPC Tips

Why PPC Management is an Ongoing Process

March 26, 2012 By 3 Comments

Guest post by Katie Saxon of Boom Online Marketing

Pay per click advertising is easy, you just sign up to your ad platform of choice, add a couple of keywords and you’re off, right?

Unfortunately this seems to be a common belief, many companies simply don’t appreciate that PPC has to be an ongoing process if it’s going to deliver. Here are some of the regular tasks that everyone with a pay per click account should carry out:

Budget Management

Checking budgets should be a weekly task. Review which campaigns are under spending and which are limited by budget. The best converting and most profitable campaigns should get the lion’s share of the budget so juggle your budgets accordingly.

Bid Management

Reorganising budgets across campaigns is just one side of the story when it comes to ensuring budget is spent wisely. Keyword bids also need to be considered. It’s easiest to focus on certain key areas to avoid drowning in data:

  • High spend and low converting keywords. This is particularly important for ensuring that your CPA stays at a sensible level.
  • Keywords converting above target CPA. Reduce the bids to keep your campaign affordable.
  • Well converting keywords. Are they suffering from low average positions? If so consider raising the budget to increase visibility and potentially increase conversions. [Read more...]
Filed Under: Paid Search, PPC Tips

Trada’s Weekly Roundup

March 23, 2012 By 1 Comment

Another week has gone by and spring has sprung in Boulder, Colorado! In between enjoying the beautiful weather, we found time to read some interesting articles including topics like Twitter’s Birthday, Social Media Marketing, AdWords, and more. What did you find interesting?

1. Inc. is telling you How to Build a Great Team with Imperfect People.  While it’s important to build team of smart, capable people, similarity doesn’t always help performance. It’s more important to find a team where employees compliment each other and fill in the gaps. Yes, different points of view can cause conflict, but if you hire respectful people with open minds, your team will flourish and build great ideas.

2. Spending Too Much Time On AdWords? Wordstream gives 3 Ways to Be More Efficient. We won’t give away the entire article, but points include automation, help from Google, and considering paying someone to help you out (ahem, Trada?)

3. Marketing Profs examines The Next Giant Leap for Social Media Marketing. While we’ve begun to not only notice the impact social media can have, but have also found ways to measure our social media efforts, there are still ways to incorporate social media behavior and conversations to contribute to the overall operations of a company. What do you think? Do you think we can turn social media metrics into business metrics?

4. Happy 6th Birthday to Twitter! TechCrunch reports the social media giants now has 140M active users sending 340M tweets per day. You can even see Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, sent on March 21, 2006, “just setting up my twttr.” Look how far they’ve come.

5. Lastly, MDG Advertising has put together an awesome infographic: Social VS. Search. Check it out below!

Happy Friday! Have a safe and fun weekend, go outside!

Filed Under: Social Media, Trada News

PR Strategies: 3 Ways to Get Noticed by Reporters

March 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I’ve been spending more time recently working on PR at Trada and thought I’d share some insights based on what’s worked for us here, as well as successes I’ve had working at other start-ups and PR agencies in the past.

This will be a two-part series beginning with identifying and building relationships with reporters. In the next installment I’ll give you ideas on pitching stories and getting your content placed.

So, If you’ve been vowing to spend more time focusing on your public relations programs, or have been struggling to get traction with PR, here are a few tips to get you going.

First, is traditional PR dead?
Much has been written recently asserting that traditional PR is dead. The thinking is that rather than working to get covered in a traditional news publication, spend your time creating great content in the form of videos, blogs posts, etc. that will get passed around and picked up on other blogs.

While content-driven PR should absolutely be a key component of your overall PR strategy (more on that below), my experience at Trada has been that there is still huge value in generating coverage in traditional news publications. When Trada was covered prominently in the print edition of Forbes, for example, we saw a huge spike in high-quality inbound leads. [Read more...]

Filed Under: SMB Marketing, Social Media

Choosing the Right Facebook Cover Photo To Represent Your Brand

March 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Trada's new Cover Photo and profile picture for Timeline

The new Cover Photo space is a huge opportunity for your business to connect with prospective clients. With all of the new Facebook changes, your business page will lose the left navigation that was previously present on your page. The Cover Photo now becomes the focal point of your page, making it extremely important when choosing the photo that best represents your brand. Depending on whether you are a well-known or lesser-known brand, determines which strategy you should take when choosing your photo. The following ten examples show the different strategies big brands like Volvo and Verizon took  and the approach that some lesser known companies decided to use. Hopefully these will serve as inspiration as your redesign your Facebook Page.

See our 10 unique examples of real brands and their Facebook Cover Photos. 

Interested in Facebook advertising? Learn how Trada can help!

Filed Under: Facebook

5 Tips to Improve Your Ad Copy Testing

March 19, 2012 By 1 Comment

Guest post by Rod Richmond of  Cement Marketing

Ad copy testing is really insightful when done properly. You can test all different types of ad messaging and value propositions and see what searchers respond best to.

Here are 5 tips before and after ad copy testing, which will make sure you get the most out of your tests.

Tip 1: Ads on Rotate

Make sure the campaign where your test ad group is situated, has ad delivery setting, set to ‘Rotate’. See below:Genesis

Unless each ad is showing for the same amount of time, your results could become skewed.

Tip 2: Duplicate Control Ad

I like to test 4 adcopies at a time, if possible, a control ad, and 3 experimental ad variations. The control ad has been underperforming or you already have it in the account and the 3 new ads are trialing new ad messaging. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Ad Copy

Trada’s Weekly Roundup

March 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Happy Friday! This week at Trada we read some great articles and blog posts covering everything from March Madness to St. Patrick’s Day to SXSW. Here are some of the more interesting posts.

1. Mashable reports that if the NCAA tournament were a contest of fans most tuned in to social media, Kansas would win March Madness! Now the tournament is obviously not determined by social media influence, but a research group from Schwartz MSL put together a formula to calculate the winners based on combined followers  (on Twitter and Facebook) of each school’s team, divided by the student body population. You can see the bracket here, in the meantime I would rely on your previous brackets based on talent and potential!

2. While Trada didn’t travel to Austin this week, according to PCmag, Geolocation was the big hit at SXSW Interactive.  With apps like Foursquare and just about everyone I know with a GPS device in their cars, geolocation is not a new term, however it still faces two important hurdles: battery life and privacy. More apps are coming out, trying to navigate the waters and  succeed where others have failed. The big geolocation app that received much attention was Highlight, which helps your physically find people you know or might know by leveraging Facebook. Only time will tell how popular these apps become, but would you use them?

3. Another misstep for McDonalds on Twitter: #Shamrocking. paidContent.org reports that McDonald Suffers New Hashtag Hiccup with the launch of #shamrocking, meant to promote their March St. Paddy’s special, The Shamrock Shake.  Unfortunately, tweeters are using as an obscene sex term. If you remember back to January, McDonalds also attempted to create a social movement with the hashtag #McDstories, leading to many food poisoning  jokes.

4. Everything you need to know about Pinterest, from TechCrunch. Including an infographic!

 

Happy Friday everyone! Have yourself a safe and happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Filed Under: Trada News

Getting Started with HTML & CSS for Marketers

March 15, 2012 By 2 Comments

It’s a good idea for online marketers to understand at least the basics of HTML & CSS. If you learn to do some things yourself, you’ll be less dependent on others. If you’re using templates or website-building software like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, you’ll be better equipped to create more professional-looking customized results.

Even if you never do this type of work yourself, learning about HTML & CSS for marketers can help you understand how your website works so you can converse more intelligently with your development team, whether in-house or outsourced.

What are HTML & CSS?

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the universal language of website development. It uses specific indicators to tell browsers how to separate document components into headlines or paragraphs, bold or italic, etc.

Whereas HTML is all about content structure, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) tell the browser how to visually present your document to the viewer. For marketers, learning about HTML & CSS can help marketers understand how your website delivers content to your audience. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Tools, SMB Marketing

How to Use Sitelinks to Drive Traffic to Specific Parts of the Funnel

March 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The more ways you can figure out how to qualify leads and prospects, the more profitable your business will be. Perhaps this seems obvious, but in today’s competitive online marketing environment, you need all the help you can get to draw potential buyers into your sales funnel.

Google AdWords Sitelinks can give your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising a tremendous boost, by helping you cast a wider net with each ad campaign. You can improve results  for generic campaigns as well as highly specific ones.

Sitelinks are the internal webpage links that appear under a primary search result, effectively giving you more results per query. Additional links allow viewers to quickly navigate your website, by showing shortcuts to information they want. But searchers can also see at a glance what else you have to offer – something they might want.

Expanded results make you look “bigger and better” on the page, which in itself can help influence searchers at the top or even in mid-funnel.

Sitelinks qualify leads and prospects by providing varied access points.

You can direct users to more places within your website, at no extra cost. Your cost-per-click doesn’t increase, and if someone clicks more than one of your links you’re still only charged once. [Read more...]

Filed Under: SMB Marketing

Combat Ad Fatigue! Tips for Fresh Facebook Ads

March 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Advertising on Facebook can be well worth the effort, for many types of businesses. Nonetheless, on this platform in particular, your campaigns are prone to something called “Facebook ad fatigue,” which can ruin your marketing effectiveness.

You can’t eliminate this situation, but you can definitely take steps to minimize its negative effects.

What causes ad fatigue?

Facebook users typically aren’t shopping, they’re connecting. So they’re automatically less inclined to notice your ad, let alone respond to it, producing inherently lower (sometimes considerably lower) click-through-rates (CTRs). With less CTR “wiggle room,” Facebook ad fatigue can do more damage, faster.

Unlike search marketing, where the user pool that sees your ad is constantly changing, Facebook users tend to check-in repeatedly and frequently, so they’re very likely to see your ad more times, more often, becoming “blind” to it more quickly. This is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that social media users expect novelty and therefore become bored easily with the non-new. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Facebook
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