Image courtesy of: paidcontent.org

Pay per click (PPC) advertising can be tough. There are many moving parts to an account like keywords, ad copy and network settings –  it can be difficult to keep everything in good order.

Despite the complexity, a PPC account  like Google AdWords or Microsoft AdCenter should have one overarching goal: to increase relevant conversions on a website. Your PPC account should improve the number of transactions, leads, or sales on your website. One of the best ways to improve conversions is with conversion-focused ad copy. Here are 5 ways to do that:

1) Qualify Traffic with Headlines

After you establish a decent click thru rate or CTR (1.0% or better), start looking to qualify your traffic with a better headline. You want a headline that speaks directly to the person who will convert on your website. For instance, if you’re trying to get leads for a niche cruise ship to Alaska, you could try these headlines:

A Unique Alaskan Cruise

OR

Yacht Cruise To Alaska

These examples talk to people looking for a different experience on their Alaskan cruise, not to the first-timers looking for the cheapest cabins. Avoid generic headlines like “Alaska Cruise Specials”. That headline won’t help qualify your website traffic and will bring fewer conversions for your niche offering.

 2) Use Benefit-Focused Descriptions

What are the reasons your prospects buy from you?

Highlight those elements in your top description line. There are two description lines in AdWords, both allowing for 35 characters. However, you’ll need your 2^nd description line for a call to action. That doesn’t leave a lot of space to showcase the benefits of your product. Going back to the example of the niche cruise ship, try this:

Luxury cruise by glaciers, wildlife.

OR

5-Star dining & ship excursions.

In this instance, appealing to the lowest-common traveler won’t do. The goal is to speak to your best prospects. Using qualifying headlines and specific benefits will further cement positive feelings toward your offering before the click. That’s the visitor you want on your website – and that’s the visitor more likely to convert.

3) Implement Call To Action

The previous lines in your PPC ad qualify your traffic and further explain your offering. However, the last line should almost always be used for a “call to action” – your desired response from prospects. Don’t be shy. Tell prospects what to do:

Download colorful brochure now!

OR

Get brochure and $500 discount!

This final description line should focus on the next step in your buying cycle. Avoid using more generic language – or even benefits for this line. CTR and conversion rates will suffer when you don’t tell prospects what to do.

4) Split-Test Ads For Optimal Conversion Rates

The fact is, nobody knows which ads will do well and which ones will falter. That’s why we split test. Compose 2-3 ads in the account. Next, setup your campaign to rotate ads evenly to ensure a fair split test. You can do that under the Campaign Settings Tab > Advanced Settings. Select the Rotate ads feature.

Let things run. Allow for enough clicks (100+) to get statistical relevance and pause the lower conversion rate ads while keeping the winning ads. Repeat the process until your CTR and conversion rates are acceptable.

5) Implement Best Practices on Image/Display Ads

One of the goals of text ads in PPC is to find good ad copy for your image and display ads. After you find that perfect combination of headlines, description, call to action, and conversion rate, roll-out the winning ads to new networks.

If you’re bidding on the Display Network in Google AdWords or buying banner ads, use the best ad copy for those creatives. This helps to spread your successful ads throughout the internet and improves overall conversions in your PPC efforts.

Small Business Shamen Logo

Today we launch the official website for the Small Business Shamen Conference, April 4, 2012 at the Ice House. As we get going with a new business venture for VIA Studio I wanted to take a second and explain what the heck this thing is.

A quick overview.

The Small Business Shamen is a day of presentations and networking, centered around the changing world of small business. We feature both national and local speakers, intended to share stories, experiences and training designed to make you an more effective agent of change. Whether you own a business or want to make yourself more valuable in the workforce, this day is for you. Our keynote speaker is NY Times bestselling author, business consultant and social media guru, Chris Brogan!

Why are we promoting a conference?

As a business owner, I see the value in continuing education and professional development. I give my employees a stipend every year to spend how they see fit to attend conferences and seminars, and it’s proven infinitely valuable to VIA’s morale and knowledge base. Every time someone comes back from An Event Apart, there’s a gleam in their eyes that stays at least as long as the next soul-crushing client project (just kidding, we love our clients!).

I’m jealous.

The Shamen

That’s what this conference is all about. Jealousy. As someone who also wants to do a better job at leading my company I’ve been searching for worthwhile events. I’ve attended a few that I thought might help. Hell, I’ve even considered going back to school to pursue an MBA. At the end of the day, I’m jealous of my staff. They are amazing and I want to keep learning and growing along with them.

Unfortunately I don’t think it’s that easy anymore. The formula for success has changed. Real people running real businesses are dealing with unprecedented changes in all aspects of business, especially marketing & technology (VIA Studio’s specialty, hint hint). These days our work is not only the work of an interactive agency. We help with business process and efficiency, internal communication, and using innovations in technology and cloud computing to save our clients money and seriously impact their bottom line. We should also discuss the recession and how that affects business. Opportunity is knocking if your mind is open to change.

All this might be a hard pill to swallow from a company like VIA Studio. Not many people are going to hire us to restructure their entire organization. I’ll also be the first to admit we don’t have all the answers.

But gosh darn, I bet we can all figure it out along the way. Or at least help each other figure it out.

That’s the point of Small Business Shamen. You may be one or you might want to learn from one. Either way, come join us on April 4 and let’s get this bus moving again.

Check out the website to see what the day has to offer. It’ll be fun, informative, insightful, and educational.

~jason

PS – I want to thank all the people that are already working behind the scenes to make this happen. My staff, the speakers, the sponsors, and the others that volunteered their time on this because they also think this is a good idea and a needed experience.

It is a great pleasure to get to speak before such a curious and engaged audience.

I spoke on content management and strategy. Organizations are often at a loss as to what to do and how to implement.

Hopefully we helped clarify some processes and to stimulate some conversations!

There’s a peculiar thing people do, both inside our office and outside. Actually it occurs in all aspects of life, but we see it most at work, well, because we work a lot. It’s a common way that people phrase requests. Have you heard something like this?

• “It should just take a couple minutes to change this, right?”
• “Just change the background color.”
• “Just write a 500 word blog post.”
• “Just duplicate what you did for that other client.”

It’s always rubbed me the wrong way, and I’m responsible for doing it myself. I’ve thought this over the past few days and here’s my take.

I’m coining the phrase “Just Syndrome”.

Inserting the word “just” into requests implies that you understand the entire request, and think your request is simple. Unfortunately that’s only the case sometimes. There is complexity hidden behind the most simple things. Take the Google homepage for instance. A multi-billion dollar corporation has been born out of that one simple search field. If someone asked you to “just put a search box there” to mimic Google’s extremely complex algorithm & business model, I’m sure we’d all laugh.

This attitude is born out of an ignorance and sometimes a downright disrespect for another person’s skill set. I don’t think it’s malicious most of the time. But we should all be aware that the veneer of what we see is not always the entirety of the work or thought process that was put into it.

A programming example:
We have built probably 10 different types of calendar systems, from simple lists to robust web applications that will register you, create waiting lists and process credit card orders. In my experience most clients need at least a little customization of something that may have already been built. It’s never been as simple as “just” copying a code base and changing the design.

A design example:
Our designers are skilled at what they do, and all the ones I work with have proven themselves time and time again. They have years of experience in creating successful, award-winning designs. Color and font choices take not only a trained mind, but years of trial and error. Asking a designer to “just” change a font or a color palette is not taking into account the hours of time it probably took to reach the decision that was made.

So the next time you find yourself asking someone to “just” do something, you may have caught a case of “Just Syndrome”. My home remedy: Take a shot of bourbon, and take the time to respect the complexity that may be lying behind your request. At the very least, don’t be offended if the person rolls their eyes or doesn’t give the answer you’re looking for.

~jason

After reading Jason’s series of articles regarding Marketing for Mobile, I thought I’d add to the discussion. My favorite web geek topic as of late is Responsive Web Design. It allows you to create a mobile-ready version of your website, without needing to build separate content. With a large portion of the world now browsing the web via smart phones and post-pc tablets, it’s almost a no-brainer to offer mobile viewing experiences.

Responsive Web Design uses CSS Media Queries to define multiple layouts that are specific to a screen’s size. That allows the site’s content to be served in different ways, based on how you’re viewing it. The same site can be designed with both the desktop and mobile phone in mind.

Since Ethan Marcotte (and several other talented folks) developed a “mobile first” approach to building sites, several frameworks have emerged to assist us with responsive design. There are several best practices to consider, especially if you want to avoid unnecessary page load for slower mobile browsers. Let’s take a look at a couple.

Less Framework: Responsive Sites Made Easy

Joni Korpi’s Less Framework is a CSS grid system, but what separates it from the 960′s and 1140′s is that it’s responsive out of the box. The stylesheet generated from the  Less Framework has four layouts:

• Desktop (992 pixels)
• Tablet (768 pixels)
• Wide/Landscape Mobile (480 pixels)
• Mobile (320 pixels)

This is a good range that targets most devices and desktops. You can develop your site’s styles in the default layout, then use the included media queries to code child layouts. Each layout has a number of columns based on the Golden Ratio. Unlike most grid systems, Less doesn’t contain a complicated set of classes to define your columns. Instead, there’s a comment for each media query layout that tells you the width of each column and how many you can use. There’s also robust typography options that you can customize based on your default font size.

320 and Up: Designing both Responsive and Responsible Content

There are some drawbacks to using Less Framework. In a true mobile first approach, you would design the 320 pixel layout, then build from there. This prevents mobile devices from downloading desktop sized assets from the start. Andy Clarke and Keith Clark have developed a solution. With the advent of their 320 and Up, mobile media queries load first, just as they should for best practices.

320 and Up loads css rules in this order for a better mobile experience:

• CSS Reset
• Color Settings
• Typography Styles
• Media Queries load Assets and Layout Styles (but only as they’re needed)

The package contains five layouts, all of which are based on the vertical grid that Less Framework uses. It also includes a number of javascript extensions that help deliver more responsive images. It can be used as a standalone kit, or as an extension of the HTML5 Boilerplate.

What About My Existing Site?

How do you convert an existing site to be responsive? Here’s a series of steps I go through:

• Pick one of the above frameworks and incorporate it into my existing site’s stylesheet
• Use the Firebug extension in Firefox to determine which Layout Divs I need to alter
• Add the Divs into each Media Query (I focus on the mobile media query first)
• Adjust each Layout Div’s size to display properly in the chosen query (you can resize your browser window to test them)
• Make sure all pages in the site display properly in the mobile layout
• Copy the styles into the wide mobile and tablet queries, refining them to scale properly.

There are several other best practices to consider, and each site has it’s own set of problems to solve. Beyond altering the css to fit screen size, you should carefully consider your content as it relates to a particular device. If you’re interested in developing a better understanding of these practices, I highly recommend the book Responsive Web Design, by Ethan Marcotte. It’s a proverbial game changer.