“It pays to illustrate the end-result of using your product. Before-and-after photographs seem to fascinate readers. In a study of 70 campaigns whose sales results were known, Gallup did not find a single before-and-after campaign that did not increase sales.”...
Image Ads
How Branded Image Ads Can Lead To Offline Sales: An Anecdote
As I walked down my hallway last night, my cat ran in front of me and darted into the laundry room, where we keep her food bowl. She looked up at me and meowed loudly as she stood over her...
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Using Image Search Ads in Google
If you’re relatively new to PPC advertising, Google’s image search ads may have flown under your radar. What are image search ads, you may be asking? Image search ads are ads that include both text and an inline image, appearing...
Google AdWords Display Ad Builder Made Even Easier
Google’s Display Network can be a great place to generate some additional traffic, leads, and branded exposure. While text ads go a long way in garnering attention, sometimes an image ad can grab searchers’ attention more quickly, especially considering the...
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Addressing the “Yeah, Sure” Response
So I couldn’t help but notice this ad on my wife’s Facebook page: You gotta admit, the bold, fluorescent green font proclaiming FREE books would grab they eyeballs of most anyone, and capture the attention of every avid reader that...
Intentionally Excluding Half Your Audience?
Imagine you’re creating a Facebook ad targeted to professional photographers. And you don’t have ready access to the data which would allow you to target by Nikon or Canon preference. Would you still be willing to design ads that call...
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Seasonal Greetings? I Should Hope So!
It’s social media, right? Meaning that social context has huge influence over what gets noticed and reacted to, right? And by “social context” I mean that you think different thoughts, and are likely to respond to different bids for your...
Images, Headlines, and Targeting — Oh My!
I once saw a video clip of British-Irish comedian, Jimmy Carr, doing a bit on “enlargement” e-mails, asking if everyone else was getting spammed by them too, or if they were somehow targeting him based on some sort of presumed...
Learning from “Controls”
In direct marketing, the ad that sets the performance baseline — the ad you’re writing against — is known as the control. Sometimes controls get beaten and replaced very quickly, and sometimes they run for decades. And learning from successful...
Facebook Ad Autopsy
When most people think of testing results for Facebook Ads, they think in terms of boosting click-throughs — getting higher response rate by using the right picture and saying the right things. But that’s an incomplete picture. Don’t get me...
Delivering on the Look After the Leap
Back when e-commerce was relatively new, one of the go-to best practices for improving usability and conversion was to consistently tell visitors what would happen next. So you would: write embedded links so that visitors could reliably tell where they...
Rocket Science? No. Scientific? Yes.
So I saw this “meh” ad on my wife’s Facebook page, and thought it would make a pretty good example of “Things to Test on Your Facebook Ads.” But before I list off everything that could probably be improved or...
