In the last six years (from 2004 through 2009), the only form of media to have seen growth in usage is the Internet. While TV has been flat and radio and newspapers have seen double digit declines, people’s Internet usage has increased 117%, according to Forrester Research. And yet when you look at where marketing dollars are being spent, online still trails traditional media by a wide margin. Clearly online advertising is poised for continued growth and remains a great place for businesses to find new customers. Search engines
create millions of moments of relevance every day by connecting consumers who are looking for a product or service with the companies that offer those exact products or services.
While a search engine marketing (SEM) account can be created at the click of a few buttons, there are some key decisions that can make all the difference between giving up in frustration and achieving returns on your investment beyond your wildest dreams. With David’s decade of expertise, you’ve got a great guide that explains all the concepts of search marketing. It also provides tips and best practices from David’s own experiences that can add to the success of your online advertising campaigns.
I’m a frequent speaker at search marketing conferences worldwide, educating audiences of all experience levels in the art and science of SEM and Google AdWords. With new tools and reports being made available all the time, one of my main challenges is to help advertisers prioritize the myriad opportunities. Time and again I’ve seen that when advertisers take the time to learn more about how AdWords works, they perform better in the long run and they are better able to use the data AdWords provides to help identify the
opportunities and the tools best suited to achieve the results they want.
I’ve had the pleasure of participating in many panels and search marketing conferences with David. At SES New York in 2010 we did a session together on the relevance of ads, and since this topic is at the heart ofanswering the question of how to get a better ad position, it always draws a crowd and makes for lively discussions with the audience. David cuts through the myths and the hype–expertly explaining and translating complex topics like Quality Score and advertising on the Google Content Network into understandable
best practices and actionable methods for driving results.
One of my favorite things about David is the fact that he combines years of experience from the technology and publishing industries with his expertise in pay-per-click marketing. With the online-advertising industry being so young, it’s nice to have an expert with some grey hairs who knows how to use traditional marketing and who also really gets online advertising. He shares Google’s vision that advertisements, like organic results,
are information and should be relevant and useful. That’s what users expect and that’s what creates a sustainable ecosystem in which all participants, from users to advertisers to publishers, benefit. This basic belief, along with a methodical approach to using data to inform and support marketing decisions, has made David a trusted source in the industry and someone from whom I know you will learn a lot.
Best of luck with your campaigns and please let me know what you think about our program and how it’s working for you when you see me at a conference.
—Frederick Vallaeys, Product Evangelist, Google AdWordsIntroduction
My first job after grad school was working for a small magazine, book, and software company. As a programmer, it was my dream job; I was able to play with the innards of Apple II computers for most of the day, and for the rest of the day try my hand at every aspect of magazine publishing.
I found myself drawn to and fascinated by direct-mail marketing, which at that time was the primary way magazines acquired subscribers. I loved the creative aspect of it—the challenge of designing envelopes that begged to be opened, persuasive headlines that lured the reader into the letter copy, and forms designed so simply that they nearly filled themselves out.
I had studied nutritional science and flavor chemistry for nine long years of “higher education,” so the latent scientist in me loved the testing and optimization aspects of direct-mail marketing. The typical optimization sequence went like this:
Create what we felt was a winning mail package consisting of envelope, offer, and
reply form.
Do a test mailing to a small percentage of a rented mailing list.
- Calculate the response rate and project the return on investment (ROI) we could expect from a mailing to the entire list.
- Mail the control package to the majority of the list, and mail variations of the control to smaller portions of the list. Variations could include big ones such as envelope color and size, as well as smaller ones such as the number and positions of fields on the reply form.
- Judge the winning package, and start again using the winner as the control.
The average time between step 1 and step 5 was an unimaginably long five to six months. It took that long for enough responses to be mailed back to us; to calculate and analyze the data (using the first spreadsheet software, VisiCalc, on Apple IIs); and to design and print the test and control packages.
