I was caught off guard this morning when I read Dave’s RedFly Marketing Blog post:

Free $100 Facebook Coupon Courtesy Of Visa

So I signed up - and you should too! It’s free and you get $100 in free Facebook ads!

Simply follow the instructions found in Dave’s post or visit the official Visa/Facebook network page and watch the intro video to find out more.

Now there isn’t a good excuse not to give Facebook Ads a shot to see if they will work for your clients or business!

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With the announcement yesterday that Google now has improved indexing for Flash websites, the SEO world may see changes in the not so distant future. According to Google Webmaster Central, the new algorithm in place can index “All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.”

While the algorithm doesn’t read .FLV files, it does read the text and links in .SWF files and adds them to the Google index.

Besides the obvious ramifications for SEO, in which building a site entirely in Flash was previously detrimental, perhaps this will lead to a future integration of the Flash indexing algorithm with the Adwords algorithm.

Google AdWords’ Landing Page Guidelines state that having relevant and original content on landing pages is vital to an acceptable landing page and good quality score (which translates into lower cost per click). At present, if you use Flash for your landing page, in order to achieve a good quality score, “you have to build an underbelly,” as Search Engine Roundtable put it. Otherwise your flash content does not help your ad copy in terms of relevance.

Could this mean that all-Flash landing pages used with Google Adwords ads will soon be readable by the Adwords algorithm? If Google can read the text in Flash, then high quality scores can possibly be achieved on Flash landing pages (once they integrate this algorithm into Adwords). This will let advertisers develop highly creative, interactive landing pages while maintaining low minimum bids/high quality scores.

It remains to be seen what will happen with Flash and the Paid Search industry, but we hope these changes come over to the PPC side quickly and efficiently.

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David Szetela, the ‘godfather’ of ppc, interviewed me yesterday for the PPC Rockstar show on webmasterradio.fm.

It’s been archived now so you can listen to the show for free here!

I’m slicing up the slide show that we discussed in the show to give more details and I will be posting a series of 5-7 minute videos on expanding and contracting your keyword list.

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AdWords announced The Retirement of the Pay-Per-Action beta because of the new Google Affiliate Network:

“The Google Affiliate Network, previously known as DoubleClick Performics Affiliate, has been in operation since 1998. Through the network, advertisers can open their ads to all publishers in the network, or select specific publishers that match their criteria. You can set a CPA for your entire campaign or establish custom payment schedules for specific publishers — such as a higher CPA for a particularly optimal placement. The Google Affiliate Network is currently a separate product from AdWords and AdSense. As with AdSense, publishers must apply and be accepted into the network.”

Google’s Affiliate Network merges two services: DoubleClick’s Performics Affiliate network and Google’s Pay Per Action network.

A few opinions that have been posted about this change:

John of PPC Hero.com fame writes about the inconvenience of the PPA/Performics integration

Aaron Wall Says The Integration Has Been A Bit Haphazard So Far

PepperJam’s CEO Kris Questions Whether Or Not The Other Affiliate Networks Stand A Chance or Could This Move Simply Lend A Hand Of Extra Credibility to the Affiliate Industry?

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Barry Schwartz noted a couple days ago and again today on Search Engine Land that the Overture Keyword Tool is finally gone for good. Barry emailed Yahoo! and they confirmed that the tool is not coming back.

The original Overture keyword tool site now redirects you to Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Now you have to get a Yahoo! Search Marketing account to get an idea about how Yahoo! will match keywords or analyze urls for keyword lists…simply make a $30 deposit and you can have access to Yahoo!’s keyword research tools.

If you’re already signed up with Yahoo!, simply go into an existing ad group or create a new adgroup to use their keyword generation and bid/traffic estimation tools.

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David Szetela, of Clix Marketing and SEW fame, interviewed me today on WebMasterRadio.fm’s PPC Rockstars show - it was an awesome experience.

I think the show will air at 4pm EST!

After it airs, I’ll post a more detailed video including the slides we talked about on the show and a walk through of some of the techniques we discussed.

The topic was “Keyword List Management”.

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Just Kidding!

We’re proud to announce a new forum that is 100% dedicated to pay per click management - assuming you already know about pay per click advertising but have questions or want to bounce ideas off other pros in the industry then you need to register and participate at….

PAY-PER-CLICKMANAGEMENT.COM!!!!!!

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Note: This error was fixed sometime during the day on June 10, 2008.

If you happen to review your MSN adCenter accounts this morning - specifically the geo-targeting of ad groups - you might be in for a BIG surprise!! You are targeting a remote, land locked African nation called Burkina Faso…here is the screen shot of what you might see in MSN:

The above can be found by clicking any specific campaign -> ad group -> ad group settings -> around the middle of the page you will see this funky geo-targeted setting.

This is not happening to all accounts but it appears to be happening to a handful of them…

Do not panic though - so far, it appears that the real geo-targeted campaign is still showing ads appropriately in the original targeted area...for example, all of my United States targeted ad groups are still displaying ads in the United States and I have not seen any clicks or impressions from Burkina Faso when running geo-targeted reports in MSN.

I called MSN and found out that this is happening to several accounts and it has been escalated to their ’senior team’ to fix the glitch. Remember, it appears your ads are still showing up in the desired place…but I would advise that you check your own ads and geotargeting to make sure it’s all right.

If you find out that you’re targeting Burkina Faso, MSN advises to not change it because they will reverse the displayed problem and are trying to alleviate any potential problems that changing it might have…like ads not displaying at all…

Run a report yourself for the past few days to make sure you have not accrued any cool clicks from Burkina Faso:

After signing into MSFT adCenter -> Reports -> Create Report -> Report type: geotargeting (all the way at the bottom of the list in the drop down) -> Custom date range -> Choose the past few days -> Click ‘create report’

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Tom Leung

Content experimentation
-testing tools
-randomly send visitors to pages and send them to the same page when they come back to see how they convert

Conversion optimization on own pages have increased conversions by tens of millions

Test several versions of page

Sometimes testing is not for you to just improve conversion rate but it’s there to make sure you

don’t kill your conversion rate - it’s ‘insurance’

Content experimentation is a process

Testing takes great laternate content, proportionate…

Google starting new promotion starting TODAY - Google Website Workout -

www.google.com/WebisteOptimizer/Workout they will do FREE optimization on companies…Google will

do ALL the work for them! Enter by June 17th!

Scott Brinker

Click is a landing experience - a click doesn’t really have a defined value in and of

itself…but the experience does have value

Clicks are not created equal

Brand is always impacted: Landings are not created equal

POLP - Plain Old Landing Pages…Think outside the “box”

Landing Pages 2.0
-More than a page
-Creative experience design
-Rich media
-Interactive widgets, applications
-Social media interfaces
-Mobile-optimized experiences
-”memory” and personalization
-Behavioral responsiveness

3 different ways to scale, optimize: Test scaling

-Increase the number of alternate page elements and layouts being tested
-A/B vs multivariate techniques
-As far as the outside world is concerned, still just one page
-Diminishing returns (”The wall”)
-Optimization by trying different variations to find the best version of the page
-Increase the number of distinct landing page “destinations”
-Long tail ads mapped to long tail landing pages
-landing page ratio (LPR) metric
-Are landing pages part of the site or part of the ad?
-Optimization by tighter message match, more exclusive niche marketing strategies
-Increase the number of pages in a specific landing destination
-Microsites and conversion paths
-Evolve beyond POLP…the box
-Behavioral expectations

Segmenting, Offering, Deepening - Multipage landing pages

Directed behavioral segmentation - geography, industry, pain point, identity, role, desire,

purchase stage, knowledge, neurolinguistics

Jonathan Mendez

This is a user controlled medium - users are controlling and defining their own experiences which

is why search works so well in terms of loyalty, satisfaction, etc.

Fact: Consumers know more about what they want then you ever will.

Location, Relevance, Content, Search as opposed to Search, Content, Relevance and Location

Robert Bergquist

Test for better returns on ad spend
-60% of advertisers are doing no testing or optimization of any kind
-Majority of those testing use only manual A/B methods

3 Key steps
-Analyze your audience
-Embrace marketing and design best practices
-Test everything - all your assumptions
….then repeat…

What drives your user behavior? Features vs Benefits, hero shot, headline, imagery, etc.

Wire frame your landing pages/templates, then test

What is the most influential element in your wire frame? Only way to tell is testing.

Test different marketing assumptions against the audience given the same adspend can have a big

positive impact on conversions

Crank up the emotions

Q&A

Is rich media something everybody can try?

No - but if you feel like it would help, it shouldn’t hurt to try it…ask yourself if it solves a problem for the user?

Rule of thumb is to not use rich media if it distracts from the conversion.

When do you use the Google Website Optimizer vs the paid testing platforms?

If you haven’t ever tested, then get your feet wet with Google’s Website Optimizer. Advanced tools do a lot more while Google has the basics down and can improve a website quite a bit…when you start hitting walls, start thinking about the advanced paid tools.

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Kevin Johnson, President, Platform & Services Division, Microsft

My favorite quote from the Keynote: “Innovate the User experience and the business model behind it.”

…lot’s of boring ‘business’ talk about paradigms and ‘elements of innovation’ ‘entrenched competitor’…Sorry readers, I don’t think I appreciate Microsoft as much as I should…they just don’t seem to be in tune with what people really want like Google is.

Microsoft identifies 3 major verticals or query intent: entertainment, commercial, referrence - horizontal would be navigational queries. MSFT’s big focus is on commercial intent - MSFT started with cash back to drive more commercially intensive queries.

One item on their agenda is that they are going to fix the brand - MSN vs Live vs…

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