PPC Advertising on Influential Blogs and Social Media: SES Chicago 2007, Day 3

While most marketers are familiar with Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter, there are a number of new PPC advertising alternatives on influential blogs and social networking sites. This session will introduce you to some of the more innovative ways to run conversation-level ad targeting on influential and behaviorally and contextually targeted sites.

Moderator: Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR

Speakers: Todd Parsons, Co-Founder and CPO, BuzzLogic, Jay Sears, Senior Vice President Strategic Products and Business Development, ADSDAQ by ContextWeb, Jason Weisberger, COO, Federated Media.

The session begins with a lot of figures on blogs, 65 million read blogs in the US, off which 60% do it to get an opinion, 65% of online "power shoppers" read user generated reviews and spend in excess of 10 mins on them before a purchase. brand-related chats amount to a staggering 3.5 billion.

There are a couple of questions that are suggested that can help such as who is directing traffic and attention to a specific post? who is the influencer linking out to for info? What do these link patterns reveal about consumer behavior to me? The heavy users are being targeted through the social media.

The info can be utilized in useful ways such as if there's an iPhone that's criticized for not faring well with email, so a competitor such as blackberry can take advantage of the info. Stats reveal media fragmentation as page views of the top 3 portals show a decline, whereas the the growth in page views has increased to 21%. but he media spending is 50% on the big sites. If control and scale are compared there's the need of a common denominator to bring scale, the other factors are demographics, behavior, using the social nets to target.

If it's control it could mean many things pricing, reliable volume projections, content adjacency, meaning what content would accompany your ad, then it could also mean brand association ie whether or not your wanna be in a brand safe environment.

The next deliberation is about contextual, which isn't search. Those who read they don't search for you, it's closer to print advertising or banner advertising, and that those who read the blogs, they aren't in the phase of purchase rather they are searching for info. A caveat is suggested, don't run the content and while running on the search network concurrently, run a separate campaign instead. Considering the algorithms, it's advisable to keep the keywords/ad group in the range of 30-50.

There's more advice on the structure of your content campaigns. The take aways include match types are irrelevant unless they are negative, individual keyword bids too are irrelevant, but the negative keywords are essential.

You need to differentiate your ad by making it stand out, you need to Yell v/s whisper, be more aggressive eg include free shipping, etc and you need to keep testing. Then there are differences in your ad positions the magic positions for searches range from 1-3 and for content they range from 1-4. Google's placement performance reports can be quite useful, they'll show the sites where your ads have been featured coupled with keyword report metrics.

A sample strategy is suggested next, start off by setting up a separate content campaign, run a performance report, use site exclusion so as to remove poorly performing sites, the top-performers should be moved to CPC placement targeted campaign, and then rinse and repeat the process.

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