Fight welcomes the new kids on the block:
(Yes, we fixed the “Z” after this photo 
Here’s a movie of this going up:
a digital product firm
Archive for July, 2010
DirectAds Finally Works!…Sort of.
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.
After 9 days of running ads on LinkedIn’s DirectAds, we’d seen a total of one click. This despite the fact that more than 16,000 impressions had been run, the fact that we took our top-performing ad from Google’s AdWords and put it into rotation on DirectAds, and the fact that we wrote the most pragmatic ad that we could think of.
Here we had free money, and we couldn’t spend any of it.
So we did what we do here at Fight. We looked to see what we could do differently.
After a brief brainstorm, we decided to open up the audience target. We had been targeting people in Marketing job functions at medium-to-large companies and were likely to have control of a budget. Since we had to spend the money or lose it, we decided to go wider; much wider.
We blew away all of the audience targeting options; anyone at on on LinkedIn could see our ads, moving us from about 500,000 potential audience members, to over 70,000,000. Our justification for this (aside from having to spend money by July 31st) was that it’s possible that marketing professionals just don’t use LinkedIn that much (seems unlikely, but our low number of overall impressions is suggestive), and that if we reach beyond the primary network of the people that we’re directly targeting, into the secondary network of people in a company who might refer us along, and the tertiary network of influencers outside of a company, then DirectAds could still be a benefit to the Naked Campaign.
Here’s what happened:
There was an immediate uptick in both impressions and clicks. The click through rate is modest, and the bounce rate for people arriving at the Naked landing page from DirectAds is about 67%, which means that there are likely SOME visitors who have a legitimate interest in what Fight does.
And what ads are getting all of these new clicks?
Maybe it’s no surprise to you, but it’s the top performing ad from the AdWords campaign and the pragmatic ad written specifically for the LinkedIn audience.
1 billion dollars
Monday, July 26th, 2010
Your business might not have figured out how to make money using mobile devices as a way to drive sales, but Amazon has. In fact they reported that they saw more then one billion ( one plus nine zeros ) dollars in sales from it.
Amazon has seen more than $1 billion in sales from mobile devices over the last year, the company said during its second-quarter earnings announcement.
So what about all of you? Are you making Amazon purchases from your smartphone?
What the Click?!?
Friday, July 23rd, 2010
This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.
Last Friday I checked in on the performance of our AdWords ads and things seemed to be going well. There was even a gentle increase in the total number of clicks. When I checked back in on AdWords this Monday the number of daily clicks had more than doubled!
Hooray, right?
Not so fast.
Driving traffic to your site is not just an issue of quantity. Even people casting the widest nets still want to know (or SHOULD want to know) how the traffic is performing. So I went to Google Analytics to start with the Bounce Rate. The Bounce Rate tells you how many people made it past the first page of your site. It is a good first indicator that the traffic that you’re getting to your site is valuable.
And this is where the mystery began.
The traffic wasn’t there. AdWords showed 20 clicks on July 17th, and 25 on the 18th. Google Analytics? 7 and 12 visits respectively. Clearly something was wrong here.
It turns out that most of our clicks were coming from Google’s Display Network, and mostly through what shows up in the reporting as “AdSenseForMobileApps.com”, which is how Google reports ads that were displayed on mobile devices inside of apps. Sadly for us, the apps that were the biggest click generators (by far) have all been suspected of click fraud in one forum or another. Click fraud is when a site (or app in this case) generates clicks as Google AdWords would define them, but doesn’t actually send real traffic to the site that paid for the ad.
Fortunately, Google tries to keep on top of this, and there’s even a report (if you dig for it) that will show you how many clicks Google thinks were invalid and that it didn’t charge you for. They also seem pretty open to you reporting times when you think there is fraud, and crediting you back for disputed clicks.
For our campaign, however, the problem is more than a monetary one (since we’re working on free ads in the first place); they’ve destroyed our data. This issue calls into question much of the data that we’ve been gathering, since we can’t tell for certain how long we’ve been getting fake clicks. Since there’s no easy way to see what ads were served because of which keywords onto which placements, it makes it near impossible for us to determine if ads that we thought were high performing actually were, or were just lost into the honey pot.
So, what to do?
In AdWords, you can exclude sites from carrying your ads. You can even do this on an individual app or URL basis. For us, we excluded the entire AdSenseForMobileApps.com category, because not only do we have a data problem, but we also now have a trust issue. We can’t be sure what is a valid source of traffic from apps, so we’re shutting them all down. It means starting over with our data, but it may at least mean we have clean data.
It’s been a couple of days since we shut down the apps (we put a halt to it on Monday the 19th). What was the effect?
Clearly we have some work to do.
The SEO Effect
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010
This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.
One of the benefits that we factored in when we considered doing a campaign of this sort is search engine optimization. Doing the Naked Campaign meant that we could write about a lot of the things that we talk about internally in a public-facing way. Naturally that means that words that we care about would show up related to us in search engines.
There is, of course, no guarantee that we will show up high enough in any particular search to make it worth the effort from that point of view alone (and certainly there’s more to ranking high than just having particular words in your content), but the potential side effect was definitely worth factoring in.
So, is it working?
In short, yes. Since the Naked Campaign started, keywords that show up exclusively in articles related to the campaign have accounted for 20% of our organic search traffic.
Here are the phrases that have sent us traffic so far:
Adwords
madebyfight.com/naked
invalid http response code adwords
free $250 dollar google adwords
keyword suggestion tool
linkedin directads coupon
Especially interesting is the fact that the most popular keyword (AdWords) also had the lowest bounce rate at 40%. This means that 6 out of every 10 visitors from this search term went on to read further into the site, which is extraordinary for our site generally speaking, much less for search terms. This isn’t particularly surprising as our program is built around AdWords (and the lesser-searched-for DirectAds), but it is encouraging to know that the targeting appears to be effective.
Perhaps you’ve come to this page via a search? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. What caught your interest enough to click, and did you find what you expected to find?
First Stats and Ad Optimization
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.
It’s time to check in on how our ads are performing. Let’s take a look.
LinkedIn has served 8,095 impressions and delivered 0 clicks. We pay only for clicks, so this would be ok if we saw an uptick in traffic that we could attribute to LinkedIn. But we don’t. So this is a problem. The problem here is that we may not be being pragmatic enough with our ads. The closest one to speaking directly to what we do in the most straightforward sense is “We Are Fight”.
DirectAds only lets you run 10 ads as part of the same campaign and we’re using all of them, so we’re going to take the ad that seems the farthest from the mark and replace it with one is trying to be as on the mark as possible: “Marketing Strategy. We do this every day. Follow the Naked Campaign to see how.”. The ad that seems like it would be the least effective is: “Do you read these ads?”. Nowhere in the ad does it say what we do, so it can easily come off as a research panel.
Of course, DirectAds has no easy way to retire an existing ad (you can turn it off and hide it, but it still takes up one of your 10 buckets), so we’re going to have to edit the ad that we want to get rid of to have the copy for the new ad we want to put in. We’ll see how that effects the stats for the ad (we updated the ad when it had 871 impressions and no clicks), but it’s too bad their tool wasn’t a bit more capable. I’d love to have the option of turning the old ad back on if the new ad doesn’t perform.
Also, since the ads have gotten no clicks, we’ve spent none of our credit, so we’re raising our daily spend from $10 ($250/25 days) to $13.38 ($250/18 days). We’re well above the suggested CPC bid range at $5, so we’ll hold steady there and see what happens.
By contrast, AdWords is ticking along steadily, serving slightly fewer impressions but garnering 11 clicks (for a click through rate of 0.14%). It’s too early to say what ads are performing well as we’ve had clicks across 9 of the 22 ads in rotation. Of those 11 clicks, 8 of them came from Google’s Display Network, which is comprised of all of the sites that use AdSense. If you are letting AdWords manage which sites get to see your ads (as we are), then you need to have a minimum level of volume before Google will tell you what sites got how many impressions. We’re not yet to that point, but when we see where they’re going, we’ll let you know.
Of the 3 clicks that came from the SEM proper, somewhat surprisingly they came from some of the simplest, broadest terms that we’re using (we’re currently running 87 search phrases): “analytics”, “campaign”, and “AdWords”. In some senses, based on the content of our ads, this is not surprising, and Google agrees sending these terms substantially more impressions than most of the rest of them.
For AdWords, we’re going to let things sit for a while longer until more obvious trends emerge, but here are some early returns on the best performing AdWords ads sorted by CTR:
The top performer will probably jump out at you right away as it took only 13 impressions to get a click! It will be interesting to see how that one continues to perform. Worth noting is that the reason that it has received so few impressions relative to anything else, was that it originally had “Google” in the title, and was rejected for it, so it didn’t start running until very recently.
Goal Stats
DirectAds Impressions: 8,095
DirectAds Clicks: 0
AdWords Impressions: 8,013
AdWords Clicks: 11
Twitter Followers (current, all types): 255 (-1.2% since start)
RSS Followers (7 day avg): 17 (-5.6%)
Unique Visitors (30 days): 541 (+1.3%)
Comments (campaign, total): 0
The Naked Ads: Make Your Predictions
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.
In this post I thought I’d share the ads that we ran on both LinkedIn’s DirectAds and Google’s AdWords, but a couple of unexpected things happened that I thought I’d talk about first.
We were planning to kick everything off on Friday, July 9th, and let the ads run until the 31st. Our landing page wasn’t ready to go until the campaign launched, but we preloaded all of the ads into both Google and LinkedIn so that everything would be ready to go (with Google, you could schedule the date – but not the time – that the ads would start running; with LinkedIn we’d have to kick it off manually). AdWords complained that the landing page gave an “Invalid HTTP response code”, which is what happens when the page isn’t there yet. We didn’t worry much about it since the campaign wasn’t scheduled to go for a couple more days, and surely AdWords would check back in at the time the program launched.
Sadly, no. We got the landing page up and running, and when it was time for the ads to start circulating, the error status didn’t change. Now, when you have an error on an AdWords ad (usually because something requires review), Google recommends that you edit the ad to make the recommended change. Our ad didn’t need any change, but we still had to go into each one and put an extra space into them so that AdWords would recognize that a change had happened. A minor irritation, but ultimately no big deal.
But then, the really unexpected: We got kicked into a manual review. This meant that our ads would have to be looked at by actual people before launching. I’ve seen that process take weeks (rarely, but it happens), so I wasn’t thrilled that the time to use our free credit (which expires at the end of the month) as running out. In fact, it only (!) took until late Sunday to get approval, so we’re finally up and running.
But to the ads!
We plan to make adjustments to ads and keywords as we go, but here are the ads that we are starting with. If you have any predictions as to what will perform the best (or worst), toss them into the comments. We’ll update the stats as we go.
AdWords Ads:
DirectAds:
GitR 3: The Big Idea
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
Here’s another entry in the info-snacking firing line that we call “Get in the Ring”. The topic that I had 3 minutes to cover (without any prep) was: The Big Idea.
For the uninitiated, the Big Idea is what advertising companies (and, increasingly, all marketing companies) sell: The OMG moment, captured in a 30 second commercial, magazine spread, web site, or banner ad.
We’re big fans of the Big Idea, as a rule. The problem is that it is typically the end of the conversation about reaching an audience, where as we believe that it’s really just the beginning.
Anyway, here’s me taking a shot at this unexpectedly after I drew it from the 60-odd other topics that we had to blindly draw from.
Goals and Baseline for the Naked Campaign
Monday, July 12th, 2010
This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.
Goals
A key piece of information that you’ll want to know for our Naked Campaign is what our goals are (this is typically the first thing that we set up on a regular client engagement). Having goals is critical because that is what lets you know whether you have actually done good work or not (all of us at Fight have worked on award-winning projects that never actually accomplished what they should have).
Given that we’re a high-consideration good, and that windows of opportunity with the potential clients that we hope to reach are rare, our primary goal is to get people to subscribe to the ongoing content that Fight produces. This content comes primarily in the form of a blog (which you are currently reading), and our company Twitter account. So the primary goal can be stated as:
Goal #1: Increase the number of people subscribed to Fight content
As a secondary goal, if we can’t get people regularly engaged in our content, we at least want more people to have heard about Fight and know what it is that we do. That goal can be stated as:
Goal #2: Increase the number of people aware of Fight
Metrics
You may notice that for Goal #1 there is no specific amount that we’re trying to increase subscriptions by (which we would normally establish for a campaign like this). This is because this will have been the first real marketing push that we’ve done for Fight. As such, we will be looking to establish a baseline from which we can measure future campaigns. We’ll do this by both looking at what the total increases that we’ve gained through this program, and looking at the increases versus the cost to get those increases so that we can compare that with other approaches down the line.
Of course, we have a starting number of people subscribed to our RSS feed for the blog and our Twitter account, so this is what we’ll be building on.
For Twitter, as of the writing of this article, we have 176 direct followers. We are also on 16 lists which have 82 additional followers combined, for a total of 258 followers on Twitter.
We only recently started running our RSS feed through Feedburner, so it’s not clear how many people are actually following us this way, but a 7 day rolling average shows about 18 subscribers as of this writing (we use a 7 day average because Feedburner numbers vary heavily from day to day).
For Goal #2, we’re also setting a baseline, but things are a bit trickier. If we were operating from any kind of real budget, we’d do periodic surveying against our target audience to see what the uptick in awareness was, or we’d do surveys of people exposed versus not exposed to see what the lift was, but these are outside of the scope of our current budget, so we’re going to have to measure awareness by proxy.
For this goal our proxy metric will be unique site visitors during the campaign, averaged over 30 days. We could use ad impressions here, but for our purposes, they’re a pretty weak indicator of awareness, so we’ve opted to assume that if they actually click through to the site, they have a base level of awareness. Google Analytics tells us that our baseline is 534 unique visitors in the last 30 days.
So there you have it. In upcoming entries, we’ll show you the ads that we are running, the keywords we chose for AdWords, and we’ll look at some A/B testing on the landing page. And, of course, we’ll update with stats as we get them in, and let you know what changes in approach (if any) we’ve taken based on that information.
We’d love for you to jump into the conversation below. I’m guessing no small number of you have suggestions for how we should proceed, or what we should have done to begin with. Let us have it! And if you have questions about how or why we’re doing something, we’re happy to provide that info as well.
Tune in next time!
The Naked Campaign is Born
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.
With all of the considerations discussed in the previous articles in mind, we brainstormed.
We have always believed that having people experience our process is the best way to convince them to hire us, so we asked ourselves how we could incorporate this into our campaign. And then it hit us: The Naked Campaign.
We’d expose our process for what we thought about and what we did with respect to this free advertising, including the results. And we would talk about this in our advertising. We thought that by incorporating what we’re doing into the advertising itself, we could create content that more directly spoke to the people that we wanted to talk to than other ads on the page, and that the ads would do a better job of drawing people in to the project. They would click through to a landing page that described our challenge, and that linked to the parts of the story that had currently unfolded, with new parts being added as we went through the campaign to help create a story that people would want to come back and check in on. As they did that, we’d continue to update our blog with other content as well so that they could get other exposure to what Fight is all about.
At the same time, we would see if we could foster a conversation with folks who already regularly checked us out. We felt like this kind of program would be worth talking about. We’re going to expose as much as we can, so likely we’ll do something interesting, and probably we’ll screw something up, but we’ll definitely be exploring in a way that we hope invites collaboration.
The campaign officially kicks off on July 9th, but, as you can probably guess, this series of articles is already a part of the process. We hope that you’ll at least stay tuned to see how things go (the good, the bad, and the ugly) via RSS or Twitter, but, even better, we hope that you will chime in with best practices that you have used, questions about what we’re doing, what you think about the program and the like. You should leave us a comment below . So go ahead!