Easy Embed of Video in WordPress

I found that managing video in pages and posts a bit of a challenge until I found a plugin called Smart YouTube.  Although it has “YouTube” in the name, it works for all kinds of hosted video.  Download the zip file, extract it into a folder on your hard drive, then upload it into your plug-ins directory (/wp-content/plugins/).  In WordPress, go to Plugins and activate it.

Under Settings in your left column, click on Smart YouTube.  Select “Display videos in posts.”  Make any other adjustments you would like to appearance such as width and height, or leave the defaults, click Save.  All you have to do now is take the link from the YouTube or other hosted video, open the page or post, click on the HTML tab, paste the URL where you want it, then change http:// to httpv:// (notice the ‘v’ character).  That’s it!

Add a Print-Friendly Page Icon

You may want to give people the option to print the screen without sidebars, in which case the WP-Print plugin is for you.  Once again, download, extract, upload and activate the plugin.  Under Settings in your left column, click on Print.  Make any adjustments to the text you want shown, which printer icon you want (they give you two to choose from), click Save.  When you want to add it to a page or post, select the HTML tab and paste [print_link] wherever you want it to show up.  That’s it!

One thing I did see and adjust: when the print page is displayed it has the title, the author, the date, and then some things I didn’t want, like Category.  I opened print-posts.php and on lines 46 and 47 is where it tells what to display.  I removed everything after the author, line 47, so now it looks like this:

<p id=”BlogDate”><?php _e(‘Posted By’, ‘wp-print’); ?> <u><?php the_author(); ?></u>

Add the New Facebook Like Button

I tried a few different Facebook Like button add-ons and felt this one the best.  Once you activate it in the plugins folder, it creates its own drop-down for settings in your left column.  You then adjust whether you want it on pages, posts or both; before or after content, or both, and other settings for appearance you can play with.

Post Simultaneously to Facebook, Myspace and Twitter

Lastly, a really neat plugin called Status Updater allows you to integrate your Facebook profile or business page, Myspace profile, and Twitter profile.  Once activated, under Settings go to Status Updater.

• For Facebook, enter your login credentials,  your Facebook page URL in addition to or instead of your personal profile, and select if you want it to update your Status (at top of your page) and/or provide as a link (with title, summary and picture).
• For Myspace, enter your login credentials and your “mood.”
• For Twitter, you can change how it displays under “Default status template” (e.g. “New blog post: %POST-TITLE% %POST-URL% #marketingroi).   Enter your link shortener credentials if you want to use that also.

Lastly, be sure to enter your email address under “Log email” or you can’t save.  This is to notify you when something goes out.

Related posts:

1. How To Build a Website Using WordPress and Thesis Theme Part 1
2. How To Build a Website Using WordPress and Thesis Theme Part 2

First, you should know that Thesis introduces a new concept called “Hooks,” which really should have been called “Placements” as they tell the site where to “place” changes that you make.  Also you should know you will only edit two documents, which are in your Custom folder (/wp-content/themes/thesis_17/custom/).  Download these files and edit them with a program such as Crimson Editor.

• Functions which is really “custom_functions.php”
• CSS which is really “custom.css”

Functions are code that tell Thesis what you want it to do.  CSS allows you to make style changes to the whole site at one time.  They often work together when making changes.

The good part of this method:  changes you make will not be overwritten when Thesis updates the core system.  The bad part: it’s confusing.  I have picked up a bit of PHP by tinkering with WordPress in the past, but not enough to write my own code.  Mostly I just search online for what I’m trying to do and pick up code that others have written, test it, and see what works.  Even with my method, it is good to still learn some of what you’re doing.

A good place to start in understanding Hooks is with this tutorial.  In essence, Hooks run whatever “functions” you tell them to run, and these are placed in the Functions file.  There are two “actions” you can do to functions: “add” and “remove.”  They look like this:

add_action(‘hook_name’, ‘your_custom_function’);
remove_action(‘hook_name’, ‘your_custom_function’);

To make it even more exciting, Thesis has already added a bunch of default Hooks in order to create the default template.  If you really want to “geek out” you can see the default hooks in Launch.php (wp-content/themes/thesis_17/lib/functions/).

Moving Your Navigation Menu Below the Header Area

Sometimes you need to “remove” something they’ve already done and then “add” what you want it to do.  An example:

By default, your Navigation Menu appears above your Header, containing your site’s Title and Tagline (note the indents below to see what Hooks ‘contain’ other Hooks).   I’m not sure why they did this as I know few websites where you want that to happen…maybe it’s to force you to start learning this stuff?  If you look at this helpful web page, it shows you a diagram of what the Hooks are named and where they are on the Home page.  Here is the same helpful web page with descriptions added to assist you to understand the placements.  You will see what looks like this at the top:

In order to move the Navigation Menu below the Header you want to paste the below in your Functions file:

//move nav menu
remove_action(‘thesis_hook_before_header’, ‘thesis_nav_menu’);
add_action(‘thesis_hook_after_header’, ‘thesis_nav_menu’);

So what does this mean?

• When you put // before a line of code, it says ‘ignore these instructions to self’.
  • Also, it is proper “geek-speak” when there are multiple lines of notes-to-self to write it like this: /* text */
• Remove the default action that places the navigation menu in the Hook (position) ‘thesis_hook_before_header’
• Add an action that places the navigation menu in the Hook (position) ‘thesis_hook_after_header’

Replace Your Title and Tagline with a Clickable Image Header

Now to get rid of the Title and Tagline, and include them instead in an image file that becomes a Click-to-Home Header.  For this, you want to first design the Header…but how wide to make it?  That depends on what column layout you’ve used and how wide you made the columns.  Use this handy chart to decide the width of your Header image.  Then, place the below into your CSS file:

/* This line sets up our clickable background image based on the site title’s link */
.custom #header #logo a { display: block; height: 100px; width: 817px; background: url(‘http://www.yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/thesis_17/custom/images/yourimagefile.jpg’) no-repeat; outline: none; }
/* This line gets rid of the site title & tagline by casting them out to far left field */
.custom #header #logo, .custom #header #tagline { text-indent: -9999px; }
/* This line collapses the vertical space of the tagline so that there isn’t unnecessary white space after the header image */
.custom #header #tagline { height: 0; }
/* This line removes the padding from the header so that the background image sits close to the nav menu, the bottom border of the header, and the sides of the content */
.custom #header { padding: 0; }

So what does this mean?

• Place your image file into the folder /custom/images/ and then adjust the height and width attributes to reflect the actual size of your image.  Then change the URL of your image to reflect the actual file name.
• We don’t want to use the editable Title & Tagline fields, so we’re throwing them off into the left side of the page where no one will see them.
• Since we’re not using the Tagline, we’re collapsing extra white space after the Header image.
• We’re then removing padding from the Header so it fits tight next to the background, content and nav menu.

Replace the Functions and CSS Files on Your Server

Lastly, upload the Functions and CSS files into your Custom folder.  Use an FTP program such as the Filezilla Client.  You can obtain your FTP settings from your hosting provider.  You should see your clickable Header just above the navigation menu.

Related posts:

1. How To Build a Website Using WordPress and Thesis Theme Part 1
2. How To Build a Website Using WordPress and Thesis Theme Part 3

You may be thinking about building a new website and are unsure which way to proceed.  Although WordPress (installed to a domain – not WordPress.com) is a very functional website platform, it is only as good as the theme installed on top of it.   So why did we go with Thesis?

1. We want to allow multiple people to update the site, which WordPress does
2. The Thesis theme came recommended as the one behind ChrisBrogan.com, a very popular marketing website
3. It allows much more customization than other themes I’ve worked with and is only $87

Once you’ve installed WordPress to your domain – most hosting providers including mine, Dreamhost, offer an easy one-click install option -  upload the Thesis Theme using an FTP program such as Filezilla into your /wp-content/themes/ folder and follow the instructions how to activate it.  The next challenge is the uphill climb learning how to use it, so read this goldmine of tips to save some time!

How to Setup New Pages in WordPress

Likely the first thing you will want to do is layout the pages you want in the navigation menu (across the top), so let’s start there.  Although WordPress is a blogging platform, you don’t have to want to use the blog capabilities to create your website.  On the other hand, WordPress only allows you to add new blog posts to one page – the ‘posts page’ – and the default for this is the Home page, although that can change. I haven’t yet  figured out a way to allow posts for more than one page, but will update here if I do.

• Under Pages>Add New create the pages in the nav menu but don’t fill them in yet.
  • You can turn off the default displayed sidebar(s) when creating a page under Attributes>Template>No Sidebars.
  • You can also turn off, on individual pages, Allow Comments under Discussions.
• Under Settings>Reading you can change which page you will post new posts to (i.e. the ‘blog page’).  Here also you can change which page is the Home page.
  • I changed our posts page to be Events because I’m using an Events Calendar plugin that works in conjunction with the posts page (see Plugins below).
• Under Settings>Permalinks you should change the default setting for how your URLs (“slugs”) are displayed.  If this were a blog, I would say use the second option that includes the date, however, as we’re creating a website not a blog, I would use a custom setting: /%postname%/.  Then check that the slugs are as descriptive as possible, as they are important for search engines to know what the content of each page is about.  If they need to be revised go to Pages>Edit, mouse-over the page name, select Quick Edit, and change it there.  Page slugs should have dashes between the words.

There are three main areas you will use when editing in Thesis:  Site Options (renamed in just-released version 1.7 from Thesis Options), Design Options, and a new area added v1.7, Home Page Options.

Tips for Using Thesis Theme – Site Options:

• If you’re making a website, not a blog, you’ll want to turn off all comment ability under Comments>Pages>Disable Comments On All Pages.
• Under Navigation Menu>Pages, check off the pages that you want included in the drop-down navigation menu and drag-and-drop them into order, however, I found out that sometimes plugins can interfere with this capability.  Specifically, a plugin that I’m using to create an Events Calendar had to be disabled for drag-and-drop to work (more on that below).
• Also under Navigation Menu, you can add Categories that you assign to posts into the nav menu and you can turn off having a Home page.   If you don’t want a border around your nav menu, change 1 px to 0 px under >Nav Border Width.

Tips for Using Thesis Theme – Design Options:

• Here you can change your site’s font, background colors, link color, if you want a 1, 2 or 3 column layout (2 is recommended unless you have good reason to use 3).  You can also change how wide you want your content and sidebar columns to be.
  • You may want to use ColorPicker to select the colors you need, or else when you change the background or content colors, a small color chart will appear.
  • Another interesting tool is Color Hunter, where you can upload an image and create a color palette for your site.
• The Multimedia Box in the sidebar is pretty cool.  Here you can upload images to your /custom/rotator/ folder and it will rotate them in the sidebar.  Or, you can embed a video or add custom code.
  • Note: if you change the color of your content area’s background, you’ll want to change the Multimedia Box>Image Box Background Color to match.
• Make sure under Custom Stylesheet you check the box Use Custom Stylesheet.  You’ll need it, but more on that in my next post.

Tips for Using Thesis Theme – Home Page Options:

• Under Home Page Display you can select the number (or ‘all’) of “featured posts,” those that will be ‘normally displayed’ on the posts page in entirety, or where you cut a post with the More tag: .  Remember under Settings>Reading we can change which page they post to, but since the default is Home they called it Home Page Options.

Tips for Filling in Pages:

When editing pages (and posts), the toolbar you have to work with is fairly self-explanatory.  I just want to point out the things that are not so obvious.

• Make sure when you create links to text, using this , that you fill in the Title field and choose Open Link In New Window unless you want visitors to be able to leave your site when following links.

For these, you will switch from the Visual tab into the HTML tab.

• You need to get comfortable working in HTML for certain things. For example, if you want to highlight something on the page, you can create an “alert” which surrounds the text with a yellow box (a Thesis thing, not WordPress).  Put the following around the text:

<p class=”alert”>whatever text you want</p>

• To increase the size of your font, you can change it to a Header under your Format drop-down in the toolbar.  If you don’t see this option, you may need to toggle on your “kitchen sink” button to see more of your toolbar, which looks like this:  However, you may want to edit your HTML instead of making the text a Header, as search engines look for Headers as descriptive of what is on the page.  Font sizes can be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.  Play with it till you get what you want.

<p><font size=”3″whatever text you want</font></p>

• For the site I’m working on, we want a 2 column layout within the content area on some of the pages.  I could not find a simple way to do it within Thesis so I inserted a table.  Here is that code for your use, where 760 was the entire width of my content+sidebar areas (I removed the sidebar when creating these pages) and the line color down the middle is #26ccd1 (replace with yours).

<table border=”0″ cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”0″ width=”760″>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td width=”360″ align=”center” valign=”top”></td>
<td width=”20″></td>
<td width=”2″ bgcolor=”#26ccd1“></td>
<td width=”20″></td>
<td width=”360″ align=”center” valign=”top”></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Free WordPress Plugins

Plugins are widely available to solve nearly every problem you may have in customizing your website.  Once downloaded, you place them into the /wp-content/plugins/ folder, go to Plugins in your admin sidebar, and activate them.

• cforms – create multiple forms including multi-select boxes and insert them into any page using the icon that it adds to your toolbar: .  While not the easiest form maker to use, other plugins I looked at for this only allow the creation of a contact form. The form I need is much more involved so this was the better choice.  The help files are pretty explanatory, but a couple of tips:
  • When I tried to use the pre-defined “regular expressions” (regex for short) for phone and zip code fields that validate that they are real, I kept getting an error message when I submitted a test on the form.  I searched the support forum, googled the error code, and even posted in the support forum for help but didn’t get a response.  When I took them out, replacing them with just Phone and Zip, the form works but now anyone can put any garbage in there and it will ‘pass through.’  Bummer!
  • For multi-select fields you have to enter the following:  YourQuestion#Answer1#Answer2#etc.
  • Under Cforms>Global Settings>Database Input Tracking you can enable the ability to store responses in a database, which you can then access  under Cforms>Tracking.  Here you can view the responses to the forms on-screen or export them as a CSV and open then in Excel.
  • You can also have the system email you (and others) a copy when a form is submitted, under cforms>Form Settings>Admin Email Message Options.  Those who submit will get a confirmation in their email, editable under cforms>Form Settings>Auto Confirmation.
  • You can edit specifics of your form under Cforms>Styling>Basic CSS Editor.
    • Change the page width under .cform { width: 760px;
    • Change the width of text fields under .cform label {width:300px; AND .cform label span {width:300px;
    • Change the height of the multiselect box under .cform select.cfselectmulti    { height:5.5em;
    • Move the “(required)” text all the way to the left under span.emailreqtxt { margin:0px 5px 7px 0px; (change in red)
    • Change the font color by replacing it wherever you see color: #XXXXX or #XXX
• Exclude Pages – a wonderful WordPress plugin I went nuts looking for!  It removes page links in the sidebar, as we didn’t want the menu both across the top and down the side (on those pages that we did choose to have a sidebar).  It adds an Exclude Pages option under Pages>Edit (select Edit not Quick Edit), as a checkbox in the sidebar.
• Events Calendar – As reminder, I found that the Events Calendar interfered with my ability to drag-and-drop nav menu changes, so I simply deactivated and reactivated it.  This plugin puts a calendar in your sidebar, and when you create a new event you have option to publish to your posts page.  Therefore, I made the posts page my Events page for this particular website I’m working on.
  

There’s more to Thesis that I’ll continue in a further post.  At least I can say that the site I’m working on is moving along.    When it’s done I will post a link.

Some Good Resources

• DoubleMule
• Thesis Theme HQ
• Thesis Tutor
• Thesis Hacker
• Thesis 101

Related posts:

1. How To Build a Website Using WordPress and Thesis Theme Part 3
2. How To Build a Website Using WordPress and Thesis Theme Part 2

The first result that came up is Maybelline’s website and is titled Maybelline New York: Products: Age Rewind The Eraser Treatment Makeup.  First of all, the name is just way too long.  I found out that “Age Rewind” is the collection name and “The Eraser” the product name.  Why not just say “The Eraser” and drop “Age Rewind” for simplicity?

The Maybelline website is not optimized for phone viewing, which is important these days especially for a consumer goods company.  Instead, the site comes up as several large buttons:

• Find Your Mascara << I was looking for The Eraser, not a mascara.
• Find Out More About Great Lash BIG! << I have no idea what this is and I don’t care.
• Wallpapers & Ringtone << What, are we in high school?
• Great Lash BIG Takes NYC: Watch The Video << I don’t yet have a phone that supports video, and I still don’t care.
• Sign Up for Text Alerts << There are no compelling reasons to sign up for text alerts.

On my desktop, the website does show information about the product but some of it makes me laugh and some things I would like to see aren’t there.

• They boast a “patented Micro-Corrector Applicator.”  The bottle looks like one of those glue bottles you get from an office supply store, that you squeeze to wet a sponge on top.  You know marketing has gotten a little out of control when a sponge is now a “Micro-Corrector Applicator.”  Just call things what they are and don’t get silly about it, please.  There is some concern about the sponge getting gross, but apparently most reviewers are satisfied by the “antimicrobial fibers” in the sponge.  I still would be concerned.
• On their site, they offer a “MyColorAdvisor.”  I simply click on my skin shade (light) and eye color (hazel), and (gasp!) they suggest my best color tones as all of the light tones.  What amazing powers of insight they have!
• I wanted to know the ingredients of the makeup but this is nowhere on their site.  I went to Target to see the product in person.  Looking at the ingredient list was like reading another language.  The only thing I noticed that is natural is water, and it was the second on the list.  It’s amazing what women will put on their face.
• It’s a “breakthrough formula with active ingredients!”  I looked at what “active ingredients” there are, and found it said 7% Octinoxate, an organic compound found in some sunscreens.
• The site could be more interactive.  Something that makes more sense than MyColorAdvisor?  Please?
• Where can the product be purchased?  I found it at Target, but where else? Why don’t brands tell people where to buy their products?
• At Target this product is $8.99 on sale but $10.99 regular price.  The exact same product in a regular bottle is $6.09 on Amazon and in a pump for $2.49 – $5.98 on Amazon.  Instead of paying such a premium for packaging, I’d rather go buy some good applicator sponges.

The next search result was a review of the product by Elke Von Freudenberg, who says the sponge doesn’t cover well and is too small.  She said the product has an oily feel to it, but after setting it with a powder this goes away.  On the positive side, she likes the coverage and long-lasting results.  A few more results down, another review of the product at Frugirl said she likes the product’s coverage also, and felt it absorbed into her skin rather than sat on top.

I then looked at their Facebook page.  Despite taking time to scroll all the way to the bottom, which wasn’t difficult as it was only a month old, there is nothing said about this product.

In summary, were I in the market for The Eraser, I would have been turned off when I couldn’t access the Maybelline website on my smartphone, by the price when the same product is available for much less in different packaging, by the lack of information on the brand’s Facebook page, and lack of interactivity on their website.  The couple of reviews I did see, however, might have made me reconsider.  It would be in Maybelline’s best interest to address these Fails and send influential bloggers in the beauty space a free sample for review.

No related posts.

At Digiday Social, a case study was presented by imc2 for Secret deodorant, a brand they have been working with since 2003.  The first type of cause marketing is finding something of marketing interest that resonates with the core values of the brand.  For example, Secret’s core brand value is “empowering women” so imc2 latched on to Lindsey Van’s petition to allow women to participate in ski jumping in the 2014 Olympic Winter Games (visit LetHerJump.com to sign the petition).  The commercial, which can be seen here on YouTube, resonated with the Digiday audience and received a round of applause, to which the speaker was unabashedly flattered.  Although the YouTube video has only received 1,500+ views, the company forwarded the LetHerJump domain to their Facebook page, which was smart.  The Page has nearly 40,000 Facebook Fans, which can be marketed to repeatedly (although this should be done well, which is a whole other challenge).

As a side note, another speaker at DigiDay pointed out how the advent of social sites such as Facebook has created the opportunity to constantly market to an audience, which on the plus side can increase Lifetime Customer Value (discussed in a previous post) but on the down side makes it harder to evaluate the affects of a particular marketing campaign.

In order to effectively implement the brand-alignment kind of cause marketing, several steps need to be achieved through primary research (if you need assistance, the company I work with, C.A. Walker, does this).  First, you must know what values you would like the brand to stand for, then you can use surveying to evaluate your brand’s values currently in the mind of the target markets (if any), and whether the values you would like to have associated with the brand would be acceptable in the mind of the target(s).  You can also ask what nonprofits, if any, they donate their time to so you can determine those you may want to evaluate if their brand values are in-line with yours.  From there, you need to create opportunities to attach the brand value to a particular nonprofit objective and market it.  Lastly, you should then re-test the market post-campaign to see what lift was created in terms of brand value awareness, brand loyalty, likelihood to purchase/switch from a competitor, etc.

In the instance of the Secret campaign, although I was one of the persons clapping for the video’s message at Digiday, if they were to ask me I would tell them it did not move the needle much towards me purchasing their product (this is why it’s always good to test campaigns!).  While it had some positive lift in my understanding and appreciation of the brand’s objectives,  there are other factors at play when it comes to my decision to purchase deodorant that, if I became a Facebook Fan based on this campaign, would still not be communicated.  The campaign needs to be reinforced by standard product feature marketing, including price, whether it goes on clear, effectiveness and possibly also scent.  Ways they could swing my vote are:

1. Allow me to buy a sample size before committment of the next several months of my armpits to their product, or send me a free trial in the mail or via in-store handout.
2. Package trial-sized versions of different scents together, so I could determine which of several options I prefer.

The second type of cause marketing is the more typical “sponsorship,” expected to grow 6% over the next year to $1.61 billion, according to a recent IEG Sponsorship Report.  Much marketing discussion recently has centered on the increase in “microsponsorships,” which is the giving, by a company/brand, of a few hundred or few thousand dollars to consumers to fund pet projects.  There are pluses and minuses to the trend, specifically (numbers correspond to sources at bottom):

Pluses:

• Well-conceived programs can be priceless, both in terms of the value they provide society and the business benefits they bestow on the corporations and brands that undertake them.1
• They can be a truthful, sustaining, committed approach to improving the environment and people’s lives.1
• More marketers are latching on to this, and rightfully so, because there is more transparency in where the money is going.2
• For some marketers, microsponsorships present a much-needed icebreaker in social media.2
• Sponsorships may be more market research than marketing campaign.2
• They build databases of those consumers applying for grants or voting…so marketers can reach out to them in more meaningful ways.2
• 79% of consumers say they would be likely to switch from one brand to another (when price and quality are about equal) if the other brand is associated with a good cause.2

Minuses:

• Too often we see marketers adopt causes just for the sake of having one, which often results in a mismatch between the cause’s purpose and the marketer’s [reason for being].1
• Causes appear to be a convenient charity upon which a brand can piggyback to goose its Facebook friend count or incite some quick blogger hits.1
• Just as consumers quickly saw through the rampant green-washing of the past decade, brand beware: They’ll see through your cause-washing, too.  And even if they don’t, they’ll forget about you and what your brand stands for when you move onto the next shiny marketing idea.1
• Too often companies view cause efforts as a tax they must pay.2
• Even tiny sponsorships have to be closely associated with your brand…whatever you decide to pursue can’t be an isolated campaign.  It has to tie into a bigger program that attracts people with similar values and those have got to be clearly stated.2
• Microsponsorships make it easy to “lose control of the brand,” especially when doling out small sums to far-flung strangers.2
• One downside of these programs is that they are “just pecking away” at big problems.2
• For people to be more engaged is generally a good thing, but what are the tradeoffs if people think, “I’ve voted for this; I’ve spent half an hour online looking at these projects and signing petitions, so I’ve done my civic duty.”2
• Often microsponsorships lack focus, and it’s difficult to determine ROI.  The most successful sponsorships are long-term, sustained sponsorships. Microsponsorships fly in the face of that. It’s the equivalent of unfocused granting. You want to have an impact on a cause and be given credit for that impact.2

One of the largest and well-known microsponsorship campaigns currently is Pepsi Refresh.  In order to address the issue of hard-to-define ROI, “Pepsi is employing a battery of diagnostics, including gauging of brand-equity measures that correlate with volume. The brand has also partnered with Good, Global Giving and Do Something, third parties that are on-board to ensure quality and credibility. As for getting the word out about the brand’s impact, there are plans to profile the grant winners and highlight what they’ve accomplished with the money later this year.”2

An upcoming microsponsorship campaign by Prilosec OTC is one to keep your eyes on also.  Read Prilosec Works to Become ‘Sponsor of Everything’ for more on their efforts.

1 AdAge -  Cause Campaigns Must Benefit Brand and Greater Good

2 AdAge – Cause Effect: Brands Rush to Save World One Deed at a Time

Related posts:

1. Evaluating the ROI of Your Online Friends
2. Email Marketing Provides BEST Marketing ROI?

First off, you should watch their demo to see how Google AdWords Display Ad Builder works.  When I first log into Google AdWords, I am presented with  “create a new campaign.”  I enter a name for the campaign and then select where I would like the ad to be seen. What’s interesting here is that I can choose to target businesses if I am creating an ad for a B2B operation.  If so, I can then connect to the Google Local Business Center, if a business owner, or add addresses manually, if not.  If a B2C operation, I  can instead choose to target by demographics, male/female and age range only.

I then select the networks I want to run in and on what devices, desktops/laptops and/or mobile.  I then decide if I want to pay on a CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per acquisition), or CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis.  If I want CPA, it directs me to setup conversion tracking on the Reporting tab, meaning, I will pay only if there is a sale, signup, lead generated, or view of a specific page.  This step provides conversion tracking code that has to be added to the web page.  I then enter a budget for the campaign per day, if CPC I enter a bid limit, and start and end dates.  Lastly, I can also choose to cap frequency, meaning, the same person won’t see the ad or “ad group” more than once per day, per week or per month.

Once I have saved my options, on the next screen I can choose to create a text, image or mobile ad, or select Google AdWords Display Ad Builder.  I then enter keywords (and negative keywords) manually or upload a spreadsheet (see my blog post Free Keyword Suggestion Tools for help with this step).  Pressing the “estimate search traffic” button, I will see what Google figures my average cost per day would be, given the maximum CPC and budget entered previously.  Lastly, I can enter specific websites that I would like to show the ad (see my blog post Manage Your Advertising ROI with Google AdPlanner for help with this step).

Finally, I’m now at the step to create the display ad.  My options are: create an ad for a currently hosted YouTube video, place a 15 or 30 second video ad within video publisher content, create a click-to-play video creative, create a “roll-over showcase,” “tabbed showcase,” “scrolling showcase,” “peel effect,” or slideshow.  They also have various templates for seasonal ads or for companies that specialize in education, entertainment, financial, retail, technology and travel.  Lastly, they offer “people” ads with, what else, people in them doing things like pointing, running, hugging and dancing.  You can even select to see those ads that offer the highest click-throughs.

If you’re wondering where these ads will show up, there is information here on the Google Network, Gmail, Search Network (Google search results pages and the search results pages of Google’s search partners), Content Network, and Content Network Partners.  Also, remember you can specify locations in the earlier step.

A new development in Google AdWords Display Ad Builder you should be aware of is their recent acquisition of Teracent.  You will soon be able to setup “intelligent display advertising” to have multiple elements within the same ad that can be targeted to the recipient based on geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.  While dynamic ad serving is exciting, it will also create more work for those setting up campaigns and we will once again return to talks of multivariate testing (see my last post How To Test Landing Pages for more on this).

A couple of useful articles:

• How to link Google Analytics goals and transactions to AdWords Conversion Tracking
• How to import Google Adwords campaigns into Yahoo and MSN

Lastly, if you have website content that is new every day or can be used frequently, such as a blog, news feed, map, calculator, videos or games, you might consider creating a Google Gadget ad.  There are multiple ways to go about building a Gadget, including using their templates and wizards.  It says on their site, “To get started, all you need is a basic understanding of HTML. We will teach you all you need to know about XML to write gadgets. Later, as you write more sophisticated gadgets, you will probably want to learn some JavaScript if you’re not familiar with it already.”

If you use the tools that I have shared with you today, I’d love for you to come back and tell me your experience and how well it worked for you in achieving marketing ROI.

Related posts:

1. Increase Your Website ROI With Google AdSense and AdManager
2. Evaluating the ROI of Your Online Friends

You may have heard of A/B or A/B/n Testing (“n” refers to the number of “cells” or groups of people who will see the landing page).  In this type of test, you create minimally two differing versions of your landing pages “A” versus “B” (and “C,” “D,” and so on) to see which outperforms.  You then serve the landing pages on an equal basis to the cells, and use cookies to make sure someone sees the same page again if returning.  Typically those who use A/B tests are testing wildly different landing pages, including number of images, copy and paths.

Multivariate testing involves testing the same landing page but with different elements on the page.  Essentially, you are swapping out images, buttons and text when you are certain you’ve chosen the best design layout from your A/B tests.

It is important to consider statistical significance when testing landing pages.  You want to make sure that you have served the landing page to a large enough sample size in each cell before inferring any conclusions. The company I work with, C.A. Walker, provides a sample size calculator on its site that is helpful for this.  First, you enter the confidence level – typically 90% or 95%  – then enter your maximum allowable error – typically 5% or 10%.  If you’re not sure which to use, go with a 95% confidence and 5% error level.

Population size is a bit more tricky.  You can try searching online for a population size, e.g. “population size of [target] in [your city or nation],” and see what research surfaces that you can use.  If you are in the U.S., you can try finding your population size on the Census Bureau’s Population Estimates page.  For example, if I want to geotarget an ad to Los Angeles women, I can see from the Age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin estimates under Population Estimates that there are 9.8 million people living in LA and 4.9 million of them are female.  Plugging this into the  calculator, the sample size is 384.  Therefore, I would need to test each landing page on a minimum of 384 women in order to infer conclusions.

Another way to look at this is using Marketo’s Landing Page Version Calculator, which allows you to enter the number of expected conversions per day and your confidence level to get back either the number of test versions you can have or the length of the test you need to allow.  If I enter 100 conversions per day at a 95% confidence level and 30 days for the test, it says I can run 13 versions of a landing page to generate statistically valid results.

Google’s Website Optimizer is a free tool you can use for landing page testing.  To do so, you setup a “new experiment,” choose either A/B or multivariate testing, create and publish different versions of your test page at unique URLs, and then also create and publish a “thank you” page that users reach after they’ve completed a successful conversion.  You then add tags to your pages so Google can track.  From Google’s Adding Tags help page, “If you’re running a multivariate experiment, you’ll need to add tags to both your test page and your conversion page. If you’re running an A/B experiment, you’ll need to add tags to your original page, all test page variations, and your conversion page. You can find detailed instructions for adding all the tags in our Installation Guides for multivariate experiments and A/B experiments, as well as information about how to deal with tags in relation to shared headers and existing HTML code.”  Website Optimizer will then provide you with a report on your tests to see how well each combination or variation is performing.

If the idea of creating multiple landing pages and managing tags sounds about as much fun as a root canal, then consider your paid options.  I recently demo’d ion interactive’s LiveBall product, which does much of the work for you and is fully hosted on their site.  Their pricing starts at $1,295 a month for unlimited number of landing pages and 10,000 visitors per month, and goes down if you get more traffic than that.  For that price, they start you off with 12 landing pages complete with forms and images relevant to your industry; all you have to do is add copy.  They also include 15 templates that you can use to change the look-and-feel of your pages on the fly. The templates are designed around 1 theme for each brand, for each season, or for each client (if doing this for multiple clients) and include 1 stock image gallery for each business (or you can use your own images).

If you want them to design your landing pages for you, they offer that service for an extra monthly fee or on an ad-hoc basis.  They say some of their clients opt for the extra service for the first several months in order to build up their library and then do it themselves from there.

When you log in to their service as a client, the first thing you see is a dashboard to monitor real-time results of your landing page effectiveness.  Your landing pages are represented by bubbles on a grid:  the larger the bubble the more traffic you’ve received for that particular landing page, and the higher on the grid the better the conversion rate.  In addition, the bubble are “live” meaning you can click on them for greater detail on that campaign.

To use the LiveBall system, you first create a “portfolio,” then “campaign,” then add a “path” to the campaign that is either new – chosen from the optional “frameworks” provided – or you can choose to copy a path over from another portfolio or campaign.  A “path” is simply the series of pages that a person sees during the conversion process, which can be as simple as Page A and then the “thank you” page, or you can add intermediate pages that tries to upsell other products. I’m not sure how exactly, but was told their system also segments users to deliver robust landing paths/experiences. 

To add a page, you select from the pre-determined master pages provided, change out the nonsense text and remove areas you don’t want to use.  In addition, 3 forms are provided for you but are easily editable.

The last step is selecting the traffic source, e.g. Google, and it creates a unique URL for each traffic source for you.  Here you can also choose to “auto-optimize” your landing pages, meaning that the system will determine when the pages reach statistical significance and pull poor-performing landing pages for you.  You can also set it up to send people to another page when statistical significance is reached for that particular traffic source.

They also provide for you “advanced rules” (conditional logic) on the page or content level – 20 conditions, 15 actions.  They are useful for geotargeting – substituting content on a page based on the region coming from – or previous action,  such as adding the user’s specific search query into the page text or sending them to another page if they didn’t convert the first time they visited.

For reporting, you can view how a campaign is performing on a portfolio level, go into an individual campaign, or into individual paths.  The dashboard is dynamic, meaning you can easily switch from viewing your results as a tag table, a respondent funnel, a pie chart, or other options.  You can see other views there as well, such as which keywords are working best for you.

So that’s my primer on how to test landing pages and what some of your free versus paid options are.  Some other resources I recommend on this topic are:

• 7 Best Tips to Create Landing Pages for PPC Campaigns
• The Cost of Landing Page Optimization
• Landing Page Testing: How to test and what to test
• Autonomy’s Best Practices for Optimizing Landing Page Performance, who have their own landing page solution
• SiteSpect’s Best Practices for Site Optimization, who have their own landing pages solution

Happy ROI hunting!

No related posts.

I want to share with you the following free keyword research tools that I found to be helpful in developing keyword lists.

• iSpionage – gives you 25 free keyword results than asks you to sign up for a 7 day trial for $1 to view more.  After the 7 days, they ask for $49-$199 per month depending on the maximum daily query.  This one gave me some good suggestions to add to my blog.
• PPC Web Spy – download this Firefox add-on and then do a keyword search in Google.  In the bottom right corner of your screen there will now be the words PPC Web Spy, which you can toggle on and off.  When toggled on, all sponsored/paid search engine results will now have the button underneath “View Keywords,” which will allow you to see which terms that site is bidding on, the position of the ad on the keyword (the ad with the highest Ad Rank appears in the first position), average and maximum CPC (cost per click), which is helpful if you are doing PPC, clicks on that keyword per day and cost per day.  The limitation is 10 keywords before they want you to pay for the tool, but still it’s pretty insightful.
  • Note when downloading the free tool, it asks two or three times if you want to accept a discount  now to upgrade to the full version.  At the bottom of the pages you can bypass this.
• SEM Rush – Once registered, you can search on a domain or keyword to get a list of 11 results before they ask you to upgrade.  It provides Volume (average number of queries of this keyword in a month), CPC, Competition (competition of advertisers in AdWords for that term, the higher the number the higher the competition), and Results (The number of pages in search results for this query).  To view more results they want $20-$500 per month depending on the maximum daily query.
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool – Simply enter a keyword in their search bar after you register to  get a list of keywords terms, powered by Wordtracker, being searched on in Google, MSN and Yahoo and their daily estimates of traffic.  The keyword terms in the results are live, meaning you can click on those you feel are appropriate to delve further into those terms.  I like this tool and have used it quite a bit, but a couple of drawbacks: after a certain number of searches it will ask you to answer really simple questions (they give you the answers) in order to make sure you’re not a “bot,” and their “sign up for blog updates” thing keeps jumping from the bottom to the middle of the page.  You can scroll to get it back down at the bottom but it’s annoying.
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool - Of course Google has their own keyword tool, which provides comprehensive results for a domain or keyword term.  It gives you Competition (shaded green bar as a general guide to help you determine how competitive ad placement is for a particular keyword), Local Search and Global Search Volume (searches per month – currently October – specific to your targeted country and language as well as your selection from the Match Type menu – broad, exact, etc.).  You can also choose to add a few columns such as Estimated Ad Position and CPC, but when I tried to add one it crashed Firefox.  Lastly, from here you can also add the resulting terms directly into your AdWords account if you want to bid on them.
• Tracking Guru – Once you’ve got a good list of keywords for your site, in this tool you can create a “project” (i.e. your domain name) and enter the keywords for “keywords tracking.”  First, create a new project then click on “Rankings” and add your keywords as a list (no commas, one per line).  Lastly, click on “Live Update My Rank” and it will go through your keyword list one by one, telling you which pages on your site rank well for those terms.  However in my case, when it hit the 15th term it said “Updating Keyword Rank. Please Wait…” but did not proceed.  I sent a note to technical support letting them know of the problem.  From what it did show me, I can see I’ve got some work to do on my blog pages’ keywords!  You can also enter several competitive sites and see their rankings on your terms next to yours.

A final comment that I’d like to make is to be sure to consider negative keywords, those you want to exclude from results.  From Negative Keywords are Vital for High Search Marketing ROI, it says “From a pay-per-click perspective, negative keywords are terms that might match your ad but which you don’t want to bid on. For example, if you’re running a PPC campaign for a stationery store, you might have an ad group for the keyword ‘notebooks.’ If you’re using the broad match option to catch long-tail variations like ‘bulk reporter’s notebooks’ and ‘back to school sale notebook paper,’ you run the risk of matching for unrelated search queries like ‘notebook computers.’  To ensure that your ad doesn’t display for such irrelevant searches, you need to designate ‘computer’ as a negative keyword in addition to ‘laptop,’ ‘PC’ and other computer-related terms.”

I hope this post was helpful in developing or reworking your keyword lists.  Next week I will be talking about developing landing pages for when you use your terms for PPC advertising.

No related posts.

Undeniably, the importance of traditional advertising has diminished as we have gained greater access to what our friends think, via social media.  People naturally place more weight on their experiences and their friends’ experience with brands and products than on ads.  At the same time, our ability to block advertising is on the rise as well.  So what is a marketer to do to catch the attention of prospects and create a positive ROI on their marketing investments?

First, we have to understand why people behave the way they do when it comes to decision making.  In Advertising on the Brain it states, people “have an emotional and a physical reaction, before we engage in rational thought.”  In other words, we feel first, react second, and think last (sound like anyone you know?).  Emotions are the connection between our feelings and our actions.  In the same article it says, “It would really come in handy to have a yellow highlighter pen in your brain that says ‘This is important, remember it.’  That’s what emotions are; a yellow highlighter pen in your brain. We can’t make decisions without them because emotions are our brain’s way of signaling importance biochemically.”  Bottom line, marketers have to affect people’s emotions in order to get them to act.

Most advertising fails to elicit positive emotions, which proceeds action.  Any negative emotion felt, intentional or not, is carried over as a negative towards the brand/product.  As example, I often see in my neighborhood an ad on bus benches that states “All work and no play makes Jack a great realtor!”  Every time I see it I want to pick up the phone and tell Jack that his ad stinks and he should hire a real marketer instead of trying to do it himself! The problem here is that we all know the phrase from childhood “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” When I read Jack’s ad, I am reminded that he is a “dull boy,” and quite honestly I would never hire anyone who is “all work and no play.”  He must be burned out by now, and certainly is not one I’d entrust the purchase or sale of a home to.  Maybe he’d fall asleep in the middle of a transaction.  This was unintentional eliciting of a negative emotion, but what about intentional?

An ad on TV right now for the ASPCA with a Sarah McLachlan song playing in the background is intended to elicit a negative response, to get you to pick up the phone and donate to the organization.  The only problem is, I can’t stand it!  I have a weak spot for animals, and I will mute the TV in order to not cry.  Does it make me want to donate?  Not really.  I have enough pets that I “donate” to living in my own home, and I have trepidations about ASPCA because they are a kill-shelter.  If I had the funds to do so, I would rather donate to a no-kill shelter who I know is not taking my money to kill animals.  If I were them, I would take a different tactic to show me feel-good stories of the before and after of their animals being placed into homes successfully.  If I saw enough of those types of ads, I may change my feeling that the ASPCA kills more animals than they place, and they might actually open my wallet someday.  Or they could talk about community programs for low or no-cost spay/neuter and shots, and I’d be more inclined.  Or they could work hard to change apartment rental policies to not discriminate against pets, as they currently can’t against children without risking getting into trouble.  Anything but showing me horrible images of pathetic animals with sad eyes, that make me cringe and change the channel!

The rise of engagement advertising is simply this – marketers have to be mindful of the emotional reactions that they create, be authentic in creating positive emotional reactions, and make it easy for people to try their brand/product, thus (hopefully!) solidifying the positive emotion that makes them talk about their experience with others.  In Charting A Shift from Communications to Engagements it says, “The new marketing is about creating 360⁰ brand experiences, not messaging.  Consumers should buy into to your brand’s ideas, not just your product.  Instead of defining ‘Reasons To Believe’, you need to define ‘Reasons To Be.’ “  Brands no longer are “contained in any communication or campaign, but rather is understood through its many touchpoints.”  Create enough positive touchpoints, and you create positive ROI.

Of course, creating multiple positive touchpoints requires a creative mind. You have to be willing to risk failure, and ideally allow a minimum of three months to test any marketing/advertising ideas to see what works.  It takes using your intuition, something women seem to utilize a little better than men, which explains to me why so many more women are in the marketing field than men.  No judgment here, just observing the facts. However, as stated in Reinventing the MBA: 4 Reasons to Mix Business With Design Thinking, “An over-reliance on intuition is every bit as limited as management by the numbers.”  Really it takes both intuition and analytical thinking to create excellent engagement marketing experiences.  In addition, also stated in the same article, it takes humility and team-building skills as well as a willingness to be “always ready to praise…colleagues and friends.”

One of the ways we can utilize the principles of engagement marketing is through the use of “tryvertising.”  From Trendwatching, tryvertising  is defined as “[incorporating]…’obvious’ activities like handing out product samples, and more subtle, integrated product placements that are part of an experience or solution. It’s everything from new-style sachets containing single servings of liquid products, to hotels partnering with luxury car makers to offer high end model test drives to guests during their stay…The challenge here has always been a certain lack of relevance: there’s no guarantee samples are tried out at the right time, in the right spot, and by the right target audience.  So what about more targeted, more relevant new-style tryvertising? Product placements that become part of the landscape, part of the real world where consumers hang out and certainly don’t mind trying something as long as it makes sense to them?”  Read the rest of Trendwatching‘s introduction to tryvertising, to know how Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Mini Cooper, IKEA, Nike, Starbucks, HP and other brands are using it.

Experiential marketing is another way of saying engagement marketing.  As an aside, you may want to join the Experiential Forum, as I did, to join in the conversation about the latest-and-greatest in experiential marketing.  In The Last Campaign: How Experiences Are Becoming the New Advertising it states, “65% of U.S. consumers report a digital experience changing their perception about a brand (either positively or negatively) and 97% of that group report that the same experience ultimately influenced whether or not they went on to purchase a product from that brand. In a nutshell, experience matters. A lot.  Of course, brands that were ‘born digital’ intuitively know this. Google and Amazon are pioneering experiential brands. That’s why Amazon continues to pour money into improving its customer service rather than run traditional advertising or marketing campaigns. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said, ‘We are not great advertisers. So we start with customers, figure out what they want, and figure out how to get it to them.  Zappos…built its brand the same way, as has Facebook.”

Experience matters.  A lot.  If you have an amazing engagement campaign, but your retail staff aren’t plentiful enough, don’t know where anything is, or how to help you resolve your problem (Orchard Supply Hardware, this past weekend!), it matters.  A lot.  If your customer service reps don’t know how to handle the frustrated customer and act snotty, it matters.  A lot.  If your website makes it difficult to find what the person wants and see the price before they put the item in a digital basket, it matters.  A lot.  As marketers, we often have to step back, look at the entire process and be critical of how it works through the eyes of the customer.  It matters.  A lot.

Lastly, I want to talk about guerrilla marketing, which is also a form of experiential or engagement marketing.  The term guerrilla marketing has become a catch-all phrase for non-traditional marketing, but it really is its own form of disruptive marketing and we have opportunity as marketers to bring it into the world of digital media that we are now in.  As stated in Guerrilla Marketing Goes Tweet, “People are focused on social media; they’re walking around with their smartphones and updating their statuses and tweeting. The more we give people opportunities to do that, the more exciting it is, such as creating art at an event where people can save it to their profiles…The more we can incorporate social technology into real-life events, the more people get excited about it.”

Marketers should be on the prowl to incorporate promotion of art into their work.  After all, art creates positive emotion, which begets action.  Not to mention, it helps those who are less business and more creative-minded earn a living.  To read more about guerrilla marketing tactics that companies are now using, I recommend the blogs Guerrilla Gorilla and Guerrilla Communication Blog.  Google “guerrilla marketing” and you are sure to find much more.

I hope this post helped your thinking about creating positive emotional and experiential marketing tactics, resulting in the positive ROI you are looking for.

No related posts.

If you haven’t noticed, I’m entering a phase where I look at advertising ROI, since so much of marketing ROI hinges on measuring advertising.  I came across Google AdPlanner recently, and want to understand how it can help a marketer with their online ad planning to maximize returns.

The first thing I noticed is that as a Publisher, I can offer information that is pertinent to potential advertisers for my blog.  Clicking on the Publisher tab, I entered my site’s description, relevant categories, and what type and size advertising I accept.  I then allowed it to pull from Google Analytics my number of unique visitors, page views, total visits, average visits per visitor, and average time on the site.  At bottom of the Publisher page, it gives you the option to post a “badge” on your site.  I copied the generated code for the badge, went into my blog’s current Ads generated by the WordPress Advertising Manager plugin (see my previous post for details) and edited the Google AdSense ad.   There is a space to enter code either before or after the ad; I put it after.  I also entered a break (<br>) before the code to push it down one line.  You can see the results on my blog, under Google AdSense, the button that says Google AdPlanner. This now allows someone who may be interested in conducting advertising to view my site’s information.

Back in AdPlanner, I clicked on the tab Research.  From here, there are two tabs, Search by Site and Search by Audience.  Search by Site allows you to search on specific websites that you are interested in advertising on.  If they are in the AdPlanner system, the basics entered about the site–description, categories, what ads they accept–show up.  What is different about this page than the one generated from linking through the badge, however, is the button “Add to Media Plan.”  It won’t do anything, however, until I create a Media Plan.

Clicking on the Media Plan tab, I click Create Media Plan, and entered a name for it.  Clicking back on Research, I can now hit the “Add to Media Plan” button and it shows up as a line item on my plan.  I could keep doing this website by website, but I want to  Search by Audience.  Here I see 50 of the top websites, with the option at bottom to change the view to see as many as 250 at once.  They order by largest number of unique visitors – Yahoo shows up first on the list with 130 million unique visitors, then Facebook (110M), MSN (56M), Myspace (50M – still?!), and it goes on from there.

There are options next to Audience where at each step the sites shown are reloading to match what is entered.  The first is by Geography (down to metro and then city level).  In interest of my friend’s hair styling business as previously discussed (see two posts ago for details), I selected Venice, Santa Monica, Inglewood, Los Angeles and Marina del Rey.  Under language, I selected English and Spanish.  Under demographics, I entered the target my friend and I decided upon – women 25-54, with at minimum a high school degree, earning $25,000+.  The next, Sites Visited, is interesting as my friend wants to do styling for weddings, so I could choose to enter here that they have visited certain sites such as theknot.com.  For my purposes today, I’ll leave this alone. The next, Keywords Searched, I could enter keywords such as “wedding planning,” “wedding dress,” and so on.  Again, for my purposes today I will leave this blank.  The next, Load Audience, holds predefined audiences to help you out, such as “Affluent $100k+,” “Auto Buyers,” Baby Boomers,” and so on.  Oh good, “Bride to Be” is in there – I will keep that in mind but left this blank for now.

The resulting list of websites from my filters are shown in order of largest percentage reach.  The top 5 are: Yahoo at 76% reach,  Facebook at 62%, MSN at 35.3%, Live (which is now Bing) at 31.9%, and Amazon at 31.4%.

Under the Filter section, I can choose to rank them instead by Composition Index. If you don’t know, an Index is a way of looking the data where the result shows the number of times that a website delivers an audience, for example, the first on the list, LAmag, shows an index of 4000.  Divide 4000 by 100, and the resulting figure, 40, means that you are 40 times more likely to hit the audience that you are intending.  The next four on the list are LApublichealth.org at 3700 (who would have thought?!), themls at 3700 (the real estate directory), discoverlosangeles at 3300, and losangelesrestaurants at 3100.  IMHO (in my honest opinion), I feel that the use of indices is better than the use of percentage reach.  In the case of my friend’s hair styling business, I feel I would throw out the themls and losangelesrestaurants, including instead the next two on the list, LA411 at 3000 and losangeles at 2800.

A third way of looking at the results is to choose to Filter > Best Match, which says “Displays a balance of large and small sites.”  The top five are themls, LAmag, discoverlosangeles, ralphs, and losangeles.  IMSO (in my subjective opinion), I will go with the Composition Index results.  I am only selecting six, as my friend doesn’t have a ton of money to spend.  With my background in advertising, I know that my friend can’t spread her money too thin.  I may cut it down once I see the cost and ROI on each site, but six seems a good place to start.

Under Filters > Add Items, I can choose to also view Subdomains, Ad Placements, and whether the site is “In Google Content Network,” in addition to those items already selected for you: Domains and Accepts Advertising.  I selected Ad Placements.  This now changes my Composition Index view so I can see the indices for each of the placements, so now my top six sites are: LAmag (4400), LA411 (3700), themls – skipping, MyFoxLA.CityVoter (3700), LAlife (3400), daytrippen (3400), LAeater – skipping, and discoverlosangeles (3300).

Under Filters > Category I can further refine the results.  Here I can select Beauty & Personal Care > Beauty Magazines, Hair Care & Products, Spas & Beauty Services.  My top sites have changed again, and my top six are now Projectwedding – skipping, longhaircareforum (340), bellasugar (310), womenshealthmag (280), totalbeauty (280), fitsugar (280), and hairboutique (280).  Although my indices are now smaller figures, my friend doesn’t have a lot of money to spend so these may prove adequate as far as value – reach vs. cost.

Under filters, ad specs, I can select the type of ad she will run and the size.  From my prior experience at AOL, I know that 728×90′s (aka leaderboards) and 160×600′s (aka skyscrapers), tend to perform best.  I’ll select Flash ads since I know how to develop in Flash.  Once again, my top six sites have changed: Projectwedding – skipping, longhaircareforum (340), totalbeauty (260), elle (210), hairfinder (210), beauty.about (210), and dailymakeover (180).  I will now accept these and Add Selected to the plan I made earlier.

Clicking on the Media Plan tab, I can see now these line items and the expected impressions per day for three out of five.

From here, I can now export the plan to a CSV file or to a MediaVisor CSV.  MediaVisor is a system put out by Doubleclick that lets media planners research, plan and host ads for their advertisers.

Under Media Plan > Profile, I can also look at who this particular ad plan reaches.

Good stuff, right?  As for actually placing the media buy, AdPlanner does not yet support this ability.  I would now have to contact each of the online publications, providing my specs and filters, to find out what they would charge.   Unfortunately it also doesn’t allow you to export the filters you chose along with the media plan, so I submitted this to Google as a feature request.

Frankly, I never would have guessed those sites suggested by AdPlanner would be most beneficial to my friend’s styling business.  I hope this helps you understand how you too can benefit from using AdPlanner to plan your online advertising campaigns.

Related posts:

1. Increase Your Website ROI With Google AdSense and AdManager