The Lookout:

The Top 4 ways to improve your PPC Marketing Campaigns!

Wed, 01 May 2013 11:08:00 -0700

The Top 4 ways to improve your PPC Marketing Campaigns!
So spring is here, and that means a fresh new start for the year. You may have spent time doing the spring-cleaning around your home and office, but what about on your Pay-Per-Click Marketing Campaigns? Here are a couple of great ways to bring a fresh new outlook to your Pay-Per-Click Campaigns!

Redefine and Monitor Pay-Per-Click Goals – To improve your PPC Marketing Campaigns, you must have acknowledged that your current goals are a bit outdated and not as successful as you had hoped. Going back and redefining your goals is a great way to improve your current and future Pay-Per-Click Campaigns. Set new, more specific goals that can be easily monitored for success or failure. Being able to monitor and pinpoint specific areas requiring future improvement will help make sure your PPC goals are being met and help make adjustments as necessary.
As well, monitoring areas of your PPC Campaign will help keep your ads relevant, which is extremely important when choosing your keywords, types of displays and targets you are using in your campaigns.

Keywords – Keywords are critical in Pay-Per-Click Marketing Campaigns. Start with doing your research. Relevant, related and common keyword phrases are best for obtaining clicks. Also choose l keywords that will set you apart from the other Ads and catch the customers’ attention. Avoid broad keywords, as they will get lost in a larger number of returned websites with the same keywords, thus increasing competition to win the advertisement and be clicked.

Headline – In the Pay-Per-Click Marketing world, the headline is everything. The number one reason people click on a headline is that the reader receives a benefit from the headline. Many businesses like to talk about how good the features of their product are. Readers do not care about features. They look for benefits. What is in it for the reader? Here is an example. A feature is “Our alarm clock can be set to make loud noises at any time.” A benefit is “Never lose an appointment with our alarm clock!”.

Geo and Time Targeting – Making your Ad visible to entice the viewer to click on it is one thing, but having your Ad target a specific customer based on their geographic location at specifically selected times of the day is an even more direct way to increase Ad Clicks. Geographically targeting customers to obtain clicks focuses on customers in select regions to view the particular Ad. Using geo-targeting will help prevent money being lost on advertising that isn’t applicable to those who click on it. As for time targeted Ads, you want your Ads visible at peak viewing times. If you are advertising children’s educational toys, you won’t see many clicks during the late evenings or very early mornings, as the customers who would be interested in these products are usually asleep (or trying to get a child to sleep!). Both Geographic and Time targeted Ads need to focus on being relevant to their respective consumer base to ensure clicks.

Cyber Monday Grows 27% in 2012

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 11:49:00 -0800

Every consumer in the United States may not have participated in Cyber Monday 2012, but they sure did hear about it! Cyber Monday 2012 was predicted to generate $1.5 billion in sales in the United States. The shopping extragavanga grew by 30.3% from Cyber Monday 2011. Cyber Monday 2012 was so large and successful that IBM named it the biggest online shopping day in history.

This year, Cyber Monday beat Black Friday sales by 36%. According to IBM, Cyber Monday shoppers perfer to use PCs and laptops to do their online shopping, while 18% used their mobile devices to browse online which actually increased by 70% since Cyber Monday 2011. Cyber Monday 2012 resulted in mobile device sales of 13% which grew by 96% compared to 2011.

Of course, with such a large crowd of online shoppers, brands were pumping out larger budgets in their pay per click campaigns. However, a few small and medium business owners asked us, "how can we optimize for Cyber Monday success?".

Our campaign management team here at LookSmart responded with the following tips and strategies:

Create a whole new campaign instead of adjusting currently running campaigns. You can create one or a few brand new campaigns specifically for Cyber Monday which will keep your account cleaner and more organized.
Segment your products accordingly and use past data and statistics to determine which products you expect will do the most successful with consumers on Cyber Monday.
Offer a deal! Consumers love nothing more than getting a great deal on Cyber Monday! Create a deal, coupon code, etc. and use it in your PPC creatives to lure in consumers.
Review and revise your negatives list to ensure you aren't getting garbage traffic that will lower your return on investment. Black list any keywords and keyword phrases as required.

Keep these tips and strategies in mind not just for Cyber Monday, but any major holiday where you could offer great deals and coupons to your target audience.

Hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving holidays and don't forget to follow us on Twitter at @LookSmartSearch

3 Strategies for Optimizing Your PPC Landing Page

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 11:22:00 -0700

So our last few blog posts have primarily focused on managing pay per click ad campaigns, competitive bidding, and how to optimize your campaign to get the best CPA. So now it's time for us to focus on the final step, which is the landing page that the user is taken to, to hopefully convert.

So the user searches for the term "christmas gifts" on Google.com, they see a search ad for "Holiday Sweets & Treats ONLY $49.99", click on that ad, and are taken to the advertiser's website where they will hopefully convert by purchasing something. The landing page can either be the making or breaking point of a successful PPC campaign, so follow these three strategies in your campaign to boost your conversion rates:

1. Keep it Simple

Some campaign managers want to have colors, text, and graphics everywhere - this is messy, confusing, and has proven to be unsuccessful. When the user lands on your landing page, they shouldn't be confused; they should see anicely designed landing page with very simple, yet firm, calls-to-action.

2. Don't Attack the User

I can't tell you how many times I land on a landing page and get "attacked" by 1-3 pop up ads - PLEASE do not do this strategy. This is basically attacking the user and from own personal experience, when pop-ups begin coming, I immediately close out of the window, so avoid that potential bounce issue altogether by avoiding pop-up ads.

3. Focus on Your Call-to-Action

The call-to-action is the most important aspect of your landing page. You need to be firm, yet polite. You are basically instructing the user to provide certain information so you don't want to come off as forceful, yet the user also needs to be told what to do. So it's best to use a clear call-to-action such as "Enter Your Information Here", "Enter Your Email to Receive Your Free....", etc. You want to tell the user in a firm, yet polite manner what you need them to do.

Hopefully these landing page strategies have helped you, and don't forget to check out our blog posts at The Lookout and follow us on Twitter!

3 Strategies for Avoiding Click Fraud

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 12:10:00 -0700

What exactly is click fraud? This is one question we get ALL the time as pay per click managers. As pay per click managers, we make it our job to ensure that the budget you give us for your pay per click campaign is optimized to it's fullest potential. Meaning that we are aiming to driving as many conversions as possible choosing the proper keywords, bidding as competitively as possible, choosing the proper creatives, and keeping your CPA as close to your objectives as possible. So a fraudulent clicks are clicks that occur for reasons other than that user being interested in the product or service offered.

Any business, no matter how carefully you optimize and monitor the pay per click campaign, will have some fraudulent clicks. The key is to keep the fraudulent clicks to a minimum using the following strategies:

1. Target: Try to utilize the geographical tools as much as possible. In other words, don't target the entire United States if you are just trying to get new customers at a local hair salon in Santa Monica. Instead, target either ONLY Santa Monica for an extremely targeted campaign, or target Los Angeles.

2. Check the IP Addresses: When you look at the IP addresses that are clicking on your pay per click ads, they should ALL be different. It's a fairly obvious concept, your ad shows up for unique users EVERY time, so there should never be duplicate IP addresses and if there are, you are a victim of fraudulent clicks which means you'll have to take further action. If you happen to check the IP addresses and you find duplicates, you might want to just pause your account until you can figure out the next steps to take, this will avoid wasting your PPC budget.

3. Monitor: This is definitley the most simple strategy to help you in protecting yourself against fraudulent clicks. You should be monitoring your pay per click campaigns on a daily basis and keep an eye out for any irregular spikes in clicks. If one day you are getting around 100 clicks and then the next day you're bumped up to 400+ for no apparent reason, you're going to want to delve in deeper and check out the IP addresses these clicks are coming from.

Hopefully these strategies and tips have helped you! Don't forget to follow us on Twitter @LookSmartSearch and check back to our blog, The Lookout.

Top 5 Bid Management Tips

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:16:00 -0700

One of the most important aspects of managing a pay per click marketing campaign is optimizing the campaign to it's fullest poential to ensure you are getting the most for your budget. Bid management is one strategy in optimizing your campaign. Bid management basically involves properly managing your keyword bids so that you aren't spending too much per click, and to ensure you are spending enough per click that you're not getting poor traffic quality. Check out our top five tips for bid management below:

Don't Bid for the Top Position

So many people thikn they'll have a high conversion rate if they choose a bid on keywords, however, you'd be surprised how poor this strategy can be. The top position is NOT usually the most profitable, so stay away from paying an arm and a leg for the top position, and aim lower.

Experiment

Following the above tip about not putting out a large investment in higher bids, you can experiment with medium to low bids to see what actually works best for you. You can view your conversion rate to determine which keywords, which positions, and which ads are not only getting the most clicks, but more importantly, getting the most conversions.

Find Your Sweet Spot

This is key in bid management and this doesn't occur right away, so be patient. You need to find that perfect sweet spot between the cost, the traffic quality, and the volume. You want to keep your operating costs low, all while driving high quality traffic at an appropriate volume.

Use Data to Your Advantage

So many people adjust their bids "on a hunch" or because they "think" it will increase conversions. What you have to realize is that you have a large amount of useful data at your finger tips, so why not utilize it. Print off and analyze weekly or monthly reports and analyze the clicks and impressions versus the conversion rate to help you in determining what's working and what's not working.

Create a Schedule

So many people will obsessively check their pay per click campaign many, many times throughout the day and this can not only be completely useless, but also a very time consuming process. So instead of doing this, set up a schedule where you'll check your campaigns at a certain time each day.

Do you have a pay per click bid managment tip or strategy that you wish to share? Comment below! Don't forget to follow us on Twitter too!

3 Tips for Increasing Your ROI in Paid Social Media Advertising

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:45:00 -0700

We all know how popular social media networking has become and websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are amongst the most powerful networks in the world right now.

These social networks do provide a fantastic environment for paid advertising because they allow you to target by geography, interests, sex, age, and much more. So if you are considering taking this advertising route, have a look through the tips and strategies below to ensure you are getting the highest return on investment.

Choose the Best Platform For Your Needs

With so many available platforms, you really need to sit down and weight out the pros and cons to determine the platform that you think (based on your targeting requirements) will be the most successful in reaching your target audience. For example, if you are targeting finance professionals, LinkedIn would be your best option as compared to Facebook.

Target, Target, Target

Once again, the best aspect of social media paid advertising is the almost unlimited targeting you are open to. You can target by location, age, sex, interests, job, school, and much more. So ensure you don't leave your targeting too broad. Remember, the more narrowed your targeting is, the more likely your clicks will turn into conversions.

Call to Action

Don't leave the call to action decision up to the user. You want to ensure your ad has a very CLEAR call to action such as "Click Here", "Get it Now", etc. The user usually wants to be told exactly what to do, so if your ad leaves any questions open, that could risk losing the interest and therefore, the conversion. Ensure you provide a clear call to action for the user, which wil increase your ROI.

Don't forget to follow us on Twitter and check back to the LookSmart Blog each week for new blog posts.

5 Strategies Using Twitter to Improve Your SEO

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 13:18:00 -0700

Anyone whose anyone knows about Twitter and the concept behind the social media network. However, not everyone utilizes this tool to it's fullest potential. Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service where it's users can post up to 140 character status updates, follow other users, and interact with other users by retweeting and replying to them. However, this social network can also be used to increase your search engine optimization campaign rankings. Here are five strategies that you can begin utilizing right away to increase your SEO rankings:

Shrink Your URLs

Use a tool such as Hootsuite or TweetDeck to shorten all of your link urls. This allows you to track what content is generating the most clicks and which posts were the most successful in generating retweets and replies from other Twitter users.

Valuable Content

You only have 140 characters to make an impression on someone with your tweet so you have to ensure that you use those 140 characters as best as you can. You need to put a call to action in your tweets such as "Retweet", "Don't Forget to Retweet!", or "Please Retweet!".

Choose an SEO Friendly Username

If your website is BobsPlumbing.com and your company Twitter username is @PlumbingNRepairs - this is NOT good for your SEO rankings. You should try and find your exactly URL for your Twitter username as this will help people identify your brand better and improve your SEO rankings.

Seperate Personal From Business

I see so many people using the same Twitter account for their personal use AND business use and this just is not the best strategy to use. You should have your own personal Twitter account that you can post whatever you wish, including your opinions on certain issues. Then have a seperate Twitter account for your business where you can post valuable content related to your products and services as well as connect with your target audience.

Ensure Your Bio is Keyword-Enriched

You have 140 characters to use up in your bio and I highly suggest you utilize these to the best of your ability. Use hashtags as well (example #SocialMedia) so your profile shows up in Twitter searches. You can include a VERY brief description of your business, include your website URL, and then include as many keyword hashtags as you can fit in the bio.

Hope these tips have helped you and if you feel we are missing some, please feel free to comment below. Don't forget to "like" us on LookSmart Facebook and "follow" us on LookSmart Twitter.

Also, don't forget to check out 5 On-Page SEO Steps for Your Website and 5 Reasons Local Businesses Should Be Utilizing SEO

5 On-Page SEO Steps for Your Website

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 08:40:00 -0700

If you aren't already utilizing the powerful advertising strategy of search engine optimization, now is your chance to learn more about how you can begin a search engine optimization campaign for your website.

The first step is to complete ALL on-page search engine optimization first, and then once that is complete, you can begin the more involved steps of completely off-page tactics. Here are five steps for you to follow to complete your on-page SEO steps:

Step 1: Complete Title Tags

While some say that title tags and heading tags are no longer relevant, I'm a strong believer that they can't hurt your SEO campaign. So think of keywords and key phrases that users will be searching for in order to find your website. Use these keywords and key phrases in the title tags, meta tags, and heading tags.

Step 2: Create Meaningful Content

I'm a strong believer that just because you have an article that contains 27 of the keywords or key phrases for your website, if the article has no meaningful content, then it's completely useless to the visitor. You want to include keywords/key phrases (don't over do it though - include about 5-10 keywords/key phrases per 500 words), and use these opportunities to show off your knowledge in your field.

Step 3: Utilize Internal Linking

Linking to outside sources is a great way to improve your SEO rankings, but that is an off-page SEO tactic. One on-page strategy that most don't consider crucial is to link internally within your website. This is a great way to improve your SEO campaign. Link blog posts to other blog posts within your website. Just ensure that none of the links are broken links, as this will harm your rankings.

Step 4: Plan a Clean Navigational Structure

You want to aim to provide a clean looking website and that includes having it structured so that the visitors can easily navigate through it. You want to have a menu at the top that is simple to understand and easy to navigate. Keep your header menu as clean as possible, and any links that there isn't room for in the header, you can put in the footer menu. Don't forget to create a Google XML Sitemap - VERY important for your SEO campaign and good for navigation.

Step 5: Always Use Image Alt Tags

Many SEO professionals shrug off this task, but it's KEY. Using image alt tags is a huge issue because some visitors who have image-disablers on their browsers won't be able to view images on your web page - therefore, they depend on the image alt tags to get an idea of what the web page is discussing.

Still not convinced you should be utilizing SEO as an advertising channel for your business? Check out this blog post, 5 Reasons Local Businesses Should Be Utilizing SEO.

5 Reasons Local Businesses Should Be Utilizing SEO

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 11:15:00 -0700

It's no secret that search engine optimization is a very powerful marketing tool in today's world. These days, almost every consumer does an online search before purchasing a product, so if a consumer comes across your product or service during their search, it can put you ahead of your competition. Here are five reasons you should be utilizing SEO to reach your local customers:

1. Easy Customers

When your get your business to the top of page one on search engines such as Google.com, Yahoo.com, and Bing.com it puts you directly in front of your target audience. So if you have the time, manpower, and budget to aim at getting your website to page 1 on major search engines for specific keywords and key phrases, this can result in very easy conversions for your business.

2. Greater Brand Awareness

As a consumer, I can't tell you how terrifying it can be when you go to search for a business online that you are considering purchasing from and you can't find anything about them online. Today, if a business has nothing online that you can find using search engines, that's a big red flag to most consumers. Even if you have a Facebook page or Twitter account that shows up in the search results, it's better than nothing.

3. Low Cost

Search engine optimization is relatively low cost to actually do. Most businesses (especially small businesses) don't have the time available or manpower to not only LEARN SEO, but actually perform it on their own business website. So it's best to utilize SEO firms either locally or you can easily hire a firm online. You can easily find a firm online (more than likely a firm overseas) who will charge you anywhere from $200-$900 per month for SEO services and usually they can provide a turn around time of 3-6 months depending on the competition for your key words and key phrases.

4. Get Ahead of Your Competition

Utilizing SEO is a great way to get ahead of your local competition. For example, let's say you operate a flower shop in Santa Monica. If you can get your website to the top of page 1`on Google.com for "flowers Santa Monica", "Santa Monica flowers", "Santa Monica flower bouquets" - this automatically puts you ahead of your competition because any time a consumer searches for those key phrases, they are going to see YOUR website first.

5. Hitting Your Target Market

One of the best aspects of search engine optimization as a marketing strategy is the fact that you are targeting your audience HEAD ON. With other forms of marketing such as direct mail or social media marketing, you market, market, market, with the hopes that you reach SOME of your target audience but wtih SEO, your target audience is in essence, searching for you.

Top 5 Reasons Your Bounce Rate Is So High

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 11:03:00 -0700

Pay per click advertising is a fantastic way to drive targeted traffic to your website fast. You can target by behaviors, location, and device. You can narrow your audience down to get the most for your PPC budget as well as track all data such as clicks, timing of clicks, bounce rate, and keywords. However, there are of course many key factors you need to take into account in order to ensure your campaign will be as successful as possible. The most common issue with PPC campaigns is the bounce rate, and here are the top five reasons your bounce rates are so high:

Landing Page

Where are you sending your click-throughs? Are you sending them to an ad-heavy page, a cluttered page, or do you have a clear call to action? The user clicked on your ad for a particular reason depending on what you put in your ad, they are interested in your product/service or they want to learn more about your company. Either way, you want to direct the user to a landing page that is 100% related and connected to the original ad. For example, if you have an ad for discounted tablets, you don't want to drive the user to a page for "Work From Home Jobs". This will cause your bounce rates to spike because that's not why the user clicked on the ad. See below for an example of a poorly design landing page. Why? Too many images and graphics that draw the user away from the call-to-action. You don't want to be using too many images that are all competing for your visitor's attention.

Content

You need to ensure that where your driving your traffic, it's visually appealing to the user. The user has taken the iniative to actually click on your ad, so now you have to keep them on your website for as long as possible with the hopes of getting a new customer. If your design is poor, content is poorly written, and the information is irrelevant than the chances the user will actually remain on the page are very slim. One very common mistake among PPC campaigns is trying to have keyword-rich content for search engine optimization purposes, however, if you have too many keywords the content will no longer make sense. You also want to ensure the wording is easy to understand. For example, if you are selling electronics, don't use large jargin words as that will confuse the visitor, you want to provide them information as easily as possible.

Pop Ups

Do not have ads popping up in the users face when they click-through your ad. Doing this is not only a common spam-alert, but most users find it extremely annoying and will usually exit immediately. Your main goal should be to drive traffic to your landing page in the hopes they'll find the content relevant to them; not to spam your visitors.

Hope these tips have helped you! For more tips, strategies, and ideas on how to optimize your pay per click and display advertising campaigns, check back to LookSmart's Blog regularly.

3 Tips on How to Monetize Your Blog

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 12:47:00 -0700

So many wonder what the benefits of running a blog are, either for personal use or for business purposes. I can't stress enough how important it really is. A blog is a space for you (whether personal or business) to show off your knowledge, your skills, and find others who are interested in the same topcis. Blogs also boost your search engine optimization so your target audience can find you online.

Another great aspect about blogging is that once you build up a following, you can begin to monetize your blog. I wouldn't suggest plastering your blog with ads and pop-ups everywhere as you don't want to "spam" your visitors. Here are three tips on how you can ethically and successfully monetize your blog:

Pay Per Click Advertising

Many people assume that pay per click advertising is only a strategy for those interested in acquiring traffic to their blog, but you can actually make revenue as a publisher with pay per click ads. To do this, you would create an account as a publisher and insert the code onto your website that will generate ads. You can control where the ads will be positioned, what types of ads you want (text, image, video), and what ads you want to show or not (you can block certain ads if you wish). You can make revenue off of these ads based on either cost per view or cost per click.

Selling Advertising Space

You can advertise real estate space on your blog to others who might be interested in paying a set fee per month (or affiliate link) to advertise. For example, you could offer a header ad position on your blog to a firm whose visitors would have similiarties to yours. A great example would be if you blogged about health, fitness, and nutrition, you could off advertising space to fitness clubs, fitness wear, etc.

Paid Reviews

This is a great way to get freebies! You can offer the service of reviews and giveaways on your blog. For example, if you run a fitness website you could offer a fitness club to give away a free gym membership and in return they can either pay you for doing a review or they will also provide you with the free product/service. Word of mouth is one of the most common and successful advertising strategies so if a well-known blogger with substantial followers writes a blog discussing how happy they were with a product or service, brands consider this highly valuable and are usually willing to pay or provide you with lots of free products.

Hope these tips have helped you. Check back to LookSmart's Blog regulary for up to date articles on pay per click, advertising, and internet marketing. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter too!

3 Tips for Effective Display Advertising

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 11:55:00 -0700

3 Tips for Effective Display Advertising

Display advertising has become a very successful and popular concept amongst small and medium businesses as well as larger corporations. Hundreds of thousands of studies have been done that prove that consumers are more likely to be attracted to images, such as a display ad with your product or service on it. So here are three tips you should consider when you’re developing your display advertising campaigns.

Clutter-Free

Don’t have multiple messages in one display ad, keep it basic and easy to read. When you start adding more content and information, it gets more complicated and each piece of information has to share attention with the other pieces of information on the ad.

Call to Action

Your display ad should have a very clear call to action in it. The best way to determine just how “clear” your call to action is, is to show your ad to unbiased individuals and see what the first thought is that comes to them. Your call to action could be directing the user to “Click Here”, “Get Yours Now”, etc.

Creativity

Be creative! Once again, so many studies have been done that state that more interactive (images & video) are much more likely to not only attract the attention of the user, but actually convert the user to click on the ad. So using attractive graphics and videos are going to be more successful at attracting the consumers attention.

Have some tips for display advertising that you think should have made this article? Comment below!

LinkedIn Leak

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 16:48:00 -0700

LinkedIn Leak

It's no secret that LinknedIn experienced a large social network no-no this past week when over 6 million of it's users's passwords were leaked out. It caused a great deal of havoc and anger amongst it's over 100 million users.

Basically, what caused this to happen is the fact that LinkedIn encrypted the passwords using a SHA-1 algorithm, but didn't use the proper security techniques that would have made cracking the passwords much more difficult for potential hackers, said Paul Kocher, President & Cheif Scientist of Cryptography Research. The passwords were obscured using a cryptographic hash function, but the hashes used were not unique for each password. Therefore, once the hacker matched one hash to a password, that hash would be the same for all other identical passwords.

There is a great deal of highly sensitive information on the social network such as business deals, confidential job information, and personal conversations.

LinkedIn still doesn't know who was actually responsible for the attack. LinkedIn is just focusing on ensuring members change their passwords and choose stronger passwords for increased security measures. However, according to security researcher Marcus Carey, "If a website has been breached, it doesn't matter what encryption they're using because the attacker at that point controls a lot of the authentication. It's 'game over' once the site is compromised."

New LookSmart $50 Advertising Coupon

Mon, 28 May 2012 13:55:00 -0700

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Enter Coupon Code: match50-2012
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*Offer only good for first time advertisers.

If you need assistance – Contact their Customer Service team at 1-877-512-5665.

Facebook IPO: Not Focusing on Advertiser’s

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:39:00 -0700

Facebook IPO: Not Focusing on Advertiser's Needs

It's definitely no secret that Facebook is launching it's IPO this coming Friday, as it's been all over the news in the digital marketing industry. However, there has also been a great deal of backlash from their current advertisers, including GM who actually stopped all of their Facebook advertising. Facebook recently announced that they were going to increase the number of shares to it's public offering, which has so many analysts around the world wondering if they are going to be able to uphold their worth.

Facebook has used many different types of advertising models, some of which have been successful, others, not so much. Although Facebook has been a huge hit amongst it's users by catering to their demands, they haven't been so catering to their customers - advertisers. Facebook is a great marketing tool as companies can choose their exact target audience, however, Facebook has not yet executed a strong advertising system for businesses.

Currently, Facebook has ads on the side of the web page so when users are logged into their accounts, they see ads targeted to them along the right side of the page. This is great for businesses to get right in the face of their target audience who may be pulled in by the ad, but what if their target audience isn't actually looking or interested in the product or service? That is where the advertising system being used by Facebook is flawed. For example, with Google, users are actively searching for particular products and services and advertisers appear in those searches. So here you have the consumer searching for a particular product, and the advertiser appearing right in front of the user.

Facebook's average click-through rate (CTR) for a Facebook ad is under 0.05% which is approximately half the average CTR for banner ads across the Internet, whereas the average CTR on the Google Display Network is a bit under 0.50% - almost 10 times the CTR for Facebook ads.

What are your thoughts on the Facebook IPO launch?

3 Steps to Start a Pay Per Click Campaign

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:56:00 -0700

Today, pay per click is an extremely popular concept, especially for start-up businesses. Pay per click allows you to target your audience by geography and keywords or key phrases. This is some powerful information seeing as though if someone is searching for a term that is directly related to your business, this will put your website right at the top of their search. Therefore, giving you a great deal of power to get highly targeted leads to your website. Check out these three important steps to follow when first starting your pay per click campaign.

1) Setting a Budget: This is obviously an extremely important factor. Setting a budget for your pay per click campaign allows you to control how much you are willing to pay for each lead as well as limit your spending per day. A tip is to try and choose niche keywords and key phrases where you may need to pay slightly more per click, but you are also getting much more highly targeted traffic to your website which will have a higher chance of conversion.

2) Seek Professional Support: A management service that is dedicated and trained to provide optimized pay per click management services is trained to help businesses not only get the most return-on-investment for their daily spending, but also to manage all campaigns so that you can focus on other areas of your business.

3) Analyze and Experiment: You might think you know EXACTLY what you are doing and what results are going to be produced. However, you'll quickly learn that keywords and key phrases that you thought would work out successfully, don't and therefore, you need to analyze and test out different keywords and key phrases to see which ones are driving the most traffic and producing the highest conversion rates.

We hope this blog post has helped you in getting started in your pay per click advertising campaigns. Pay per click is a very powerful marketing tool for businesses of all sizes, however, you need to ensure your getting the best return on investment and the highest conversion rates for your money spent. If you have any questions regarding pay per click advertising, please feel free to contact us at LookSmart and one of our Account Managers would be glad to assist you.

3 Successful Pay Per Click Strategies

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 09:23:00 -0700

There are many ways to drive traffic to your website including social media marketing, search engine optimization, and email marketing. However, these methods of driving traffic take time and don’t produce immediate results. So some businesses turn to more immediate results for traffic such as pay per click advertising.

Pay per click advertising is the best digital marketing strategy to pursue if you are looking for quick traffic. The other great aspect of pay per click advertising is your ability to control your campaign 100%. Check out three proven strategies for getting the most successful results with your pay per click campaign:

1. Always Include a Call-to-Action: When you designing your ad, you can include text or image, or both. You should always have some kind of a call to action in your ad. You should be telling the visitor what to do such as “Click Here for…..”. In your call to action, explain briefly what they should expect to find when they click on your ad. If you are sending them to a landing page for a free report, tell them that.

2. Targeting: Pay per click advertising also allows you to target your audience right down to countries. If you are advertising a product or service that can be used globally, utilize the global paid advertising tool. However, if you are advertising for someone that is geographically linked, take advantage of the targeting tool by determining which countries you want your ad to appear.

3. Design a Killer Landing Page: The purpose of pay per click advertising is to drive as much targeted traffic as possible to a particular web page. So you want to make this web page look as professional, appealing, and user-friendly as possible. You don’t want your visitors landing there and not knowing what it is you are advertising. Usually a landing page that is graphic-oriented and “clean” in appearance is the most successful. You should also focus on collecting visitor emails by having a Subscription box available.

We hope you enjoyed this blog post, and for further questions on how you can utilize your pay per click advertising campaigns, contact our knowledgeable team at LookSmart.

3 Ways to Monetize Your Website or Blog

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:47:00 -0800

There are many website and blog owners out there who have a website that generates a fair amount of traffic and are not currently doing anything to monetize that traffic. Of course the main purpose of a website is to provide valuable information on a subject you are interested in so you can educate those who are also interested. However, what if you could also generate some pocket change from that traffic?

There are many different programs available to help you do such a thing. Offering up real estate space on your website is a great way to generate money off of ad impressions as well as clicks on ads. So here are three excellent and proven successful methods to generate income off of your website:

· Banner Ads: Banner ads are display (image) ads, which are usually positioned at the top of the web page. Usually you generate income for each impression as well as each click through. It can be easy to find advertisers or affiliate marketers who want to use that real estate on your website because the banner ad is displayed right in front of the user.
· Affiliate Links: This is another great way to generate some income off of your website. Affiliate links are links placed on your website that market another product or service. And if a user that was on your website, clicks on the affiliate link and ends up purchasing something you generate a certain percentage of commission from the sale. The key in affiliate advertising is to choose products and services to market which are in the same interest category as the content on your website. If a user is on your website to learn about a particular product or service, obviously you’ll want to choose an affiliate product or service that the user would be interested in.
· Text Advertising: Text advertising is another effective method of monetizing your website. This involves displaying text ads in different areas of your website real estate with the hopes that visitors will click on the text ad and you’ll generate revenue off of each click. Although it’s more difficult to get the visitor to click on the text ad compared to display advertising, you can generate more revenue through cost per click text ads.

Generating traffic to your website is not an easy, but once you get a particular amount of traffic you can begin to utilize display advertising to generate some income. Of course the mort effort you put into driving traffic to your website such as utilizing social media channels and search engine optimization techniques, you will be able to drive even more traffic to your website and therefore, generate more revenue.

The key to getting as much organic traffic as possible is to work on your search engine optimization. So you choose a specific amount of keywords and key phrases and work on getting your website to page 1 of all major search engines. By doing this you have a large amount of traffic going to your website simply because you are on the first page of results. To learn more about how you can monetize your website, check out LookSmart’s Advertising information section.

How to Get the Most out of Your Pay Per Click Campaign

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:57:00 -0800

Pay Per Click is a proven and successful online marketing strategy which allows advertisers to drive traffic to their website and publishers to monetize their website. The advertiser does not pay a fee to place an advertisement, but rather pays a certain amount of money each time their ad gets clicked.

With pay per click, you control the entire campaign and you can choose your key words, where you want to direct your traffic, as well as what type of ads you wish to display.

1) Choose the Proper Keywords: Choosing the proper keywords can attract prospective visitors to your website through major search engines, not just traffic, but actual potential buyers. If you choose the proper keywords, a user types in the search phrase and your website will appear at the top of their search results, therefore, in the direct path of the consumer. Put yourself into your target audiences minds to brainstorm potential keywords and key phrases that they may search for to find a product or service such as yours.
2) Create a Landing Page: By building a landing page to drive traffic to, it allows you to create a totally clean, customized, and fresh webpage to market a particular product or service for each keyword or key phrase. Because landing pages are so easy to create, you may even build several landing pages, one for each keyword or keyphrase.
3) Ad Variation: When you are creating your pay per click campaigns, always use variety. You can test out text ads, banner ads, and image ads to see which ones provide the most conversion for you. By producing different kinds of ad you can monitor any patterns showing which ad is being clicked, and which aren't.
4) Analyze & Report: Take advantage of LookSmart’s fantastic analysis and reporting tools to determine which ads are working, which ads are producing the highest click-through-rate, and which ads are driving the most traffic.
5) Refine: Based on these reports, you can adjust your pay per click campaign to optimize your return-on-investment. No one gets their pay per click campaign right the first time, which is why you need to take advantage of the great analytical tools available and use them to refine your campaign to boost your return on investment.

LookSmart Interviews with WebMaster Radio at SES SF

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 15:39:00 -0700

Webmaster Radio Roving Reporter, Dana Todd interviewed Benoit Vatere (VP, Distribution Network, LookSmart) at SES SF. In this brief interview Dana and Benoit discuss LookSmart's unique perspective on translating user intent into enhanced conversion rates. Benoit goes on to describe how LookSmart's Tier 1.5 initiatives equip advertisers with advanced technology and traffic quality at low PPC prices.

Check out the full, unedited interview for yourself!