MixRank Blog

As today’s web content grows infinitely, it is imperative for you to constantly monitor ad placements, making sure your ads are only showing up on the most relevant publishers.  At MixRank, we know that with massive campaigns, having to go through thousands of publishers every day has become a daunting and cumbersome task.  So, we’ve made it easy for you to view new publishers and evaluate their relevancy to your ads.

Incorporate this 5-step process into your daily routine to make optimize ad placements.  It shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes.

1.  Export the traffic sources from your advertiser report in MixRank
2. Sort the publishers by last seen date and days seen
3. Find all of the new traffic sources: any that were last seen the previous day with a days seen of 1
4. With the data, evaluate if these new traffic sources are relevant to your ads
5. Add these publishers as negative placements if needed

Here at MixRank, we dissected some of our data and found some big brands advertising on some very odd publishers.  Based on just a few companies, we can see that online advertisers are not paying attention to placements as much as they should be.  When was the last time you added negative placements to your campaigns?

Vistaprint is an online supplier of printed and promotional material as well as marketing services to micro businesses and consumers.  Many of their ads offer custom cards or customized stationary.  So, was there a flop in Google’s matching algorithm when it showed a Vistaprint ad on roadkillcustoms.com?  Yes, Vistaprint offers custom cards, but roadkillcustoms.com has minimal relevance to stationary.  The Vistaprint.com advertiser report shows all of the publishers that Vistaprint is advertising on.  You can see that roadkillcustoms.com just displayed one of their ads yesterday!

Salesforce.com is the trusted leader in cloud computing and CRM.  There are several people in an organization who use Salesforce.com.  Usually marketers, salespeople, sales managers, project managers and account managers are actively using Salesforce to keep their tasks and customers in one central database.  However, graphic designers don’t tend to use the CRM tool at all.  So why did Salesforce’s ad show up on designverb.com yesterday?  It’s a bit of a mystery to me!  The Salesforce.com advertiser report reveals the traffic sources Salesforce targets and allows you to sort by the traffic sources that most recently showed an ad (Last Seen Date).

People Magazine is a weekly celebrity news and gossip magazine.  Based on the People.com advertiser report on MixRank, their ads aren’t showing up on thousands of publishers.  However, one of the dozens of traffic sources that was targeted was outlookindia.com, a news site for India’s current events and politics.  Even though outlookindia.com is an online magazine, the content on this site surely doesn’t correlate with the type of stories People magazine publishes.  So, would the audience be similar? Doubtful.

Don’t get caught into the same mistakes! With MixRank’s 5 step process, quickly find the irrelevant traffic sources and add them as negative placements. It takes about 10 minutes.  Don’t you have 10 minutes a day to save thousands of dollars on your campaigns?

For more tips on optimizing campaigns, follow me on Twitter or add me to your Google+ circles.

With Mother’s Day just around the corner, we decided to take a look at our data to reveal some significant insights about the holiday’s online display ads.  MixRank tracks and analyzes millions of display ads on the web.  Based on the data we’ve found, I’ve put together a few recommendations for your current and future Mother’s Day campaigns.

1.  Invest in banner ads:  Our data shows that out of 814 advertisers who run display campaigns for Mother’s Day, only 35% of them have both contextual and banner ads. Why should you care? If you’re one of the 65% of advertisers who is only running contextual display campaigns, you are missing out on potential market share.  Consider banner ads in the future for any seasonal campaigns.  Banner ads are way more customizable to match your messaging or brand.

You can identify the most compelling banner ads targeting any keyword with MixRank Professional. Below are just a few banner ads that have targeted a broad match to “mothers day cards.”  Take a look:

2.  Bid Higher on Competitive Keywords: Next up, our intelligent web crawlers have identified what keywords advertisers are targeting via broad match for their display campaigns. If you’re considering making any last minute changes to your existing Mother’s Day campaigns, we’ve uncovered what the most competitive and least competitive keywords are, even showing you the number of ads you are competing against.

Most competitive keywords for Mother’s Day ads:

Least competitive keywords for Mother’s Day ads:

Based on these keywords, our data suggests that the holiday card and greetings industry heavily invested in promoting Mother’s Day cards.  If you’re selling greeting cards, make sure you bid higher on the most competitive keywords before time runs out!

3.  Skip the keywords that no one else is bidding on: Follow the industry trends supported by our data.  If you’re one of the few advertisers who are targeting “mothers day gifts,” consider opting out next year.  Why?  Many other advertisers in the industry have chosen not to target this keyword for their display ads, most likely because it is an unprofitable keyword to target.

This wraps up just a few insights that you could draw from MixRank’s powerful data.  Interested in seeing similar keyword lists for your industry?  MixRank Enterprise offers these reports among many other customizable data sets.

Try MixRank for free.  MixRank’s search engine for ads can help you identify ad trends in your industry, uncover competitors’ ad copy, and pinpoint the most profitable publishers for your product.

Thank you for reading!  If you’d like more insight into display advertising trends, add me to your circles on Google+ or follow me on Twitter.

With Google being the premier internet search engine across virtually all demographics it stands to reason that Google+ and its new +1 buttons will have a large impact on search engine optimization (SEO).  However, Google has not hinted at this.  They have announced that +1’s influence search results for Google+ users, but the standard SEO strategies remain the same – for now.  How to Use Google+ for Marketing – Part 2 will cover how you can use Google+ to enhance your SEO.

+1 content: If anyone in your target market has a Gmail account, I can assure you that investing time in +1’ing your webpages will be well worth it.  Why? Because +1’ed content conditions search results for Google users.  Anyone who has added you into their circles will see your +1’ed webpage if it is related to their query.  It may most likely be on the first page of their search results as well.  Take a look in the example below.

When logged into Gmail:

When logged out of Gmail:

Notice the difference between these search results when I search for “marketing” on Google.  There are search results on the of first page for the term “marketing” indicating who shared the link. This creates a rapid way to appear on the top page of Google’s search results.  However, just keep in mind that this tactic only works when a) users have added you into their circles and b) users are logged into Gmail. Because there are stipulations that affect this strategy, make sure to continue to participate in the standard SEO strategies.

Benefits of +1’d Content: Once you’ve +1’ed your pages and the +1’ed link shows up on related search results for those who have added you in their circles, the link will probably have a higher click-through rate (CTR).  If the content was valuable or interesting to readers, it will more likely induce retweets and shares.  Studies have shown a positive correlation between the number of retweets and shares a link receives and its search ranking.  Therefore, as your link gains popularity on Twitter and Facebook, your organic search rank goes up for improved SEO.

Remember that Google is the industry’s largest search giant.  Just because they haven’t factored +1’s into the SEO ranking system now doesn’t mean they won’t use the data in the future.  Google can change how SEO is ranked tomorrow and everyone would need to conform.  So it probably doesn’t hurt to have your Google+ account just in case radical change pops up in the future.  In the meantime, work on building out your fan base and continuously +1’ing new content as it’s released. Acquiring a fan base is an on-going challenge with any social media platform, making Google+ no different. Refer back to my first Google+ post to learn how to gain followers on Google+.

Thanks for reading! Add me to your circles on Google+ or follow me on Twitter to learn more about online marketing.

With over 100 million active users, Google+ is an emerging social media channel that marketing gurus should justly invest time in.  Because Google+ can be used for various types of marketing, today’s discussion will focus on how Google+ can enhance your brand.  A second blog post will cover Google+’s capabilities for search engine optimization (SEO).

To get things started on Google+, here’s some things you must do:

• Segment precisely: In order to follow someone on Google+, you must place this person into one or more of your circles.  The benefit of circles advances the ability to tailor your messaging to appropriate groups, so take some time to think your categorization strategy through, or risk a messy database of contacts.  Since every business is different, I can’t define the best way to break out your circles, but a good place to start is by using the similar segments to your existing marketing campaigns. For example, you can break out circles based on your email marketing list (opted-in, unsubscribed), your search marketing campaign structure (men, women, brands), or contacts within a CRM tool (leads, opportunities, clients).  This will take some time on your part to figure out what is best for your business.  However, remember that you can and should add people into multiple circles that you see fit. Here’s an example of just a few circles you might have, depending on your business targets.

• Make a statement: When building out your profile page on Google+, add as much description as you can using keywords, links, photos and videos related to your brand.  Any recent and relevant content that was released should also be posted on Google+ before targeting the rest of the world.  This way, your profile isn’t completely empty when users click to your profile page.  With valuable content on your page, users will more likely add you to a circle they follow.  According to comScore, users spend about 3.3 minutes on Google+ compared to 7.5 hours on Facebook. This means you don’t have to spend loads of time on Google+ either.  However, you should be consistent across channels.  Any content that your company has already tweeted or publicly announced in a blog post or press release should be on Google+ as well.  Since there is no character limit on posts, make sure your content includes stimulating opinions, discussion topics, and/or information to build your brand.

• Appeal to others: Gaining popularity on Google+ is very similar to Twitter.  Therefore, try using the best practices of Twitter to build your following on Google+.  Start by linking your Google+ page on your existing blog, Facebook page, Twitter handle, Linkedin profile, and email signature.  Let it be known that you’re an avid Google+ user.  Strategically engage in content by adding thoughtful and lengthy comments in a related stream.  Inspire conversation topics within threads or reply directly to people by responding to their comments.  The beauty of Google+ is you’re not restricted to 140 characters.  Well thought out, valuable, and interesting content will always attract people! Here’s a fun post that Danny Sullivan wrote receiving over 20 +1’s and over 15 comments:

• Embrace the features: Don’t be afraid to start a hangout. Google+ hangouts allows you to conduct group video chats in which you can invite up to 9 other people to.  You can offer live video chat sessions with executives, marketing team members, or community managers.  Unlike a webcast or email in which someone can just tune out or close it altogether, hangouts require face-to-face interaction between the participants.  This could be a lucrative way to gain thought leadership in the industry, so why not test it out?  Hangouts may not work for every business type, but you’ll never know if you don’t try. 

The challenges of Google+ and how to overcome them:

• Are Google+ users relevant to my brand?  No two platforms attract the same crowd, and the oft-lauded Google+ is no exception.  Many Google+ users belong to the technology-friendly crowd.  Consider this when creating targeted messaging.  Successfully attaining early adopters to follow you could be greatly advantageous for your brand as these folks are highly influential.

• Where can I find followers?  Similar to Facebook marketers who strive for more “Likes” on their page, Google+ marketers must devise a strategy to gain followers. Your Google+ followers do not have to be unique brand new followers. Fans and followers on LinkedIn, Facebook and/or Twitter is the perfect place to find followers.  So sync your editorial calendar across all of your social media channels.  Many of your followers and fans may be the same across channels, but you don’t know which followers are devoted users to which platform.  

Unlike Twitter, which has been commonly used for networking and giving followers quick updates, Google+ is more parallel to Facebook as a social networking site in which friends can interact and share updates with each other.  Most brand marketers already participate in Twitter, LinkedIn and/or Facebook.  Therefore, leverage Google+ as another channel to get similar messaging out. There’s no need to create content specifically for Google+, but rather in conjunction to your other social media channels. If you put all of your eggs into one basket, you limit the potential reach of your message.  You can’t know for sure who is on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ at the moment you make a post, so you’ll need to cover all your bases to gain maximum exposure. For example, when a blog post comes out, post the first paragraph of the blog post on your Google+ and Facebook pages, and tweet the headline.  If you’re running a promotion, announce on Twitter that full details of the promotion can be found on your Google+ or Facebook pages. In order to reach as many audiences as possible, leverage all of your social media channels when releasing content.

How to Use Google+ for Marketing - Part 2 will cover how Google+ affects your search marketing efforts.

Thanks for reading! Follow me on Google+ or Twitter to learn more about Brand Marketing 

As new online advertising channels emerge like social and mobile, don’t get left behind. Keep up with the times and spend your budget where it makes most sense for your business. If your company does not have an unlimited marketing budget, you’ll want to make sure that any budget you do have is spent wisely on the most appropriate and effective advertising channel for your target market.

Whether you’re new to the online advertising world or have active campaigns running on social and mobile, this blog post will give you pointers on how to best take advantages of both channels. First thing you need to know, social and mobile analytics are simply not comparable. Although both could be used for branding, awareness, or increasing conversions, the click-through rates and conversion rates will rarely lend similarities. Why? Social ads are generally more top-of-the-funnel, similar to display ads. Users engage social channels to connect with their friends, peers, and interests rather than to purchase or shop around. On the other hand, mobile ads align with search in that they are closer to the actual purchase. Consumers query directly for keywords expecting related search results.

Given what we know, consider benchmarking your social ad performance against your display ad performance. For mobile ads, compare analytics to the search ads you are currently running. Below you’ll see some of the advantages and tips for both social and mobile platforms.

Social Ads:

With over 800 million active users on Facebook, it has become the number 2 most visited site after Google. If you’re one of those 800 million users, you’ve most likely seen the ads that are on Facebook on the right hand side when you log in. What has been your experience with the ads? For me, I rarely ever click through on the ads. However, I see do them, know they are there, and even read through them as I do with my news feed. So, we suggest running awareness and branding campaigns on Facebook to get your brand out to your target market. Remember to keep your social ads fresh by rotating the image periodically and you could even try including a “Like” button to help camouflage the ad similar to the example below:

Facebook is just one of the few social sites you can target ad campaigns on. Other social sites you can consider advertising on if it fits your market include Twitter and LinkedIn.

Mobile Ads:

Gartner predicts that the global smartphone and media tablet market will be more than 1B units by 2015, with 318M smartphones and 775M Media Tablets.  

The following table is from their report, Emerging Technology Analysis: Mobile Business Intelligence, 13 July 2011, ID:G00214124 by Bhavish Sood, Andreas Bitterer, James Richardson.

According to this Google study, the length of characters in mobile queries are similar to desktop queries.

Given what we know from above, mobile isn’t going away and queries haven’t changed. So, that tells us, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. If you already have successful search campaigns, you know what keywords perform well. Why not bid on the same successful keywords from your search campaigns, and use the exact same text ads? When setting this up, you’ll want to separate your mobile campaigns so you can bid higher on keywords to ensure your ad has a higher position. Since mobile handheld screens are so tiny, there is no guaranteeing that your ad is even seen if it’s position is too low.

To understand whether you should invest your online advertising efforts in Social or mobile ads, you’ll absolutely need to know and understand your target market.  Since you’re all professional marketers, it’s safe to assume you know this already. But consider this: is your target market actively on social sites or handheld devices? For example, if you’re advertising for an elderly home and your target market includes senior citizens, do you find it likely for them to be on Facebook or surfing the net on handheld mobile phones? Knowing who you’re targeting is an obvious pre-step before building any type of marketing campaign, so do your research!

Like all fields, there’s no defined ranking system to describe the best way to advertise. It all depends! However, if you know your target market and employ the data you have from previous ad campaigns, you can precisely target the right audience on social and strategically bid on mobile to make the most out of your ad spend.  Also, in case you missed last week’s purchasing events, Facebook just bought two incredibly huge mobile products: Instagram and Tagtile. I would bet on the convergence of mobile and social ads in the near future.

Thanks for reading! Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jana_fung

Just a few weeks ago, Google announced an incredible update to the Google Display Network.

1.  The Display Network Tab

First things first, over the next few weeks, Google will be rolling out a new Display Network Tab in AdWords. If you’re in the interface on a daily basis, you’ll find this news rather exciting. Display campaigns have always been managed in an interface that caters to search. Going forward, the Audiences, Topics and Networks tabs will now funnel into one place, allowing you to bid, target and optimize your display ads from a single location. Check out this screenshot of the interface provided by Google:

• Where to manage targeting for your ads, view your reports, and set bids: On the Display Network tab, you can find the Display Keywords, Placements,Topics, and Interests & Remarketing tabs, the necessary tools to manage your display campaigns.
• How to add or edit keywords for campaigns targeting search and display: If your campaign is targeting search and display, you can view display statistics on the Display Network tab. Similarly, the Keywords tab will show just search statistics. However, to add or edit keywords and bids, you must do so on the main Keywords tab.  Any changes you make to your keywords will affect both your search and display targeting.
• Where to add or edit your targeting: In the Display Network tab, there is a Change display targeting button right above the graph where you can view the different targeting methods available for your campaign. From there, click the edit link next to the method you want to add or edit.
• How to exclude a targeting method: Go to the Display Network tab, scroll down, and click the Exclusions link to where you can add exclusions to your ad group or campaign.

2.  The Revved-Up Contextual Engine

 Another update that deserves huge praise to Google is the “Revved-Up” Contextual Engine. This marvelous improvement takes targeting to the next level, using Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting. This means you can now view data on a keyword by keyword basis on the display network, combining the reach of display with the precision of search. Say “Goodbye” to the old days of monitoring contextual campaigns at the ad group level and “Hello” to a better way to target and optimize your display campaigns.

Tips for using keywords for display ads:

• Monitor your keyword performance. Pause keywords that have high costs, but very few conversions or low traffic to your site.
• Increase bids on keywords that are performing well.
• Add keywords similar to the ones that are performing well.

Keep in mind:

• Any changes made to keywords in campaigns that target both Google search and the Display Network will also apply to search traffic. Before making any changes such as pausing keywords, make sure to check search performance.

3.  The Visualization Tool for Display Targeting

If that isn’t enough to inspire you, Google also introduces a new visualization tool that shows how reach is impacted from targeting across your display campaigns. Take a look:

With this nifty venn diagram, you can see how your targeting affects your reach. Targeting types include keywords, placements, topics, interests or remarketing.

• Use-case for targeting diagram: When adding or editing your Display Network targeting, you'll see a diagram that shows how your targeting methods, like keywords and placements, interact, and what method is used to target your ads.
• Tip for advertisers with niche target markets: With a niche target market, you’ll want to get the most quality traffic and the cheapest cost. We recommend you have several targeting types, drilling down to very specific keywords, managed placements, topics and interests.
• Tip for advertisers with large product catalogs: For large retail advertisers that want the most reach, we recommend using keyword targeting and automatic placements to start. Automatic placements are sites that your ads will appear on based on the keywords you’ve chosen. Over time, you’ll need to monitor the placements. Increase bids on placements that are performing well and exclude placements that are high in cost but generating low traffic or few conversions. However, keep in mind that if you exclude too many placements, you might significantly limit your traffic.

Whether you’re new at display advertising, or have been doing this for years, we can safely say that Google’s new and improved campaign management features for display means this much-needed change was brought on by a large amount of advertisers spending a lot of money on display ads and placements. Google would not invest so much time and resources to update the AdWords platform if it wasn’t already working perfectly for display advertisers. So, what’s this all mean? More advertisers today are investing ad dollars into display advertising. If you’re not already doing the same, you're behind in the curve and you may want to start with a few campaigns. To save you time and money, try uncovering what type of ads your competitors are running with MixRank’s free intelligence tool here.

We're proud to announce that MixRank has been selected as a finalist for AdTech's Startup Spotlight in the Data & Targeting category.

We'll be presenting the product at a special session as well as exhibiting in the Innovation Alley at AdTech San Francisco, April 3 and April 4, 2012. If you're planning on attending the conference, please get in touch with us - it would be great to talk and discuss possible partnership opportunities.

Say you have a campaign that's been moderately successful for some time. Your creatives and targeting are relevant to your audience, and you're getting a steady flow of conversions profitably. But, after some time, your campaign will invariably being to saturate the market. You'll see conversion rates begin to drop and costs slowly rise, while traffic remains flat. This happens to everyone. Online marketing wouldn't be much fun if we could just throw up a single successful campaign and sit on our asses collecting checks for the rest of our dats.

How do you scale the campaign up to more traffic and stop the regression to lower profits? 

One way might be to expand your ad groups or targeting and find more keywords that will do as well as your existing ad groups.

Finding lateral keywords(keywords that describe the same term in a different way)  has been a well documented and successful strategy, especially in the early days of search marketing, when a marketer armed with a thesaurus and a good imagination could build massive campaigns.

But adding more keywords to a campaign is merely a band-aid, a short term fix that won't solve the core problem of an audience that has gotten tired of what you're selling. 

I'd like to describe a new strategy that I have used very successfully to grow new campaigns as well as breathe new life into stagnant old ones. I call this strategy scaling to lateral audiences. 

Just as lateral keywords are closely semantically related to the original keyword (i.e "meet single women" and "online dating sites"), lateral audiences are closely related based on their core attributes- their fundamental needs, desires, and problems.

In other words, if your product solves a problem for a specific group of people, thinking in terms of laterally related audiences would help you find more people like them, that also have a need for your product.

To illustrate the power of lateral audiences, we're going to walk through an example using a free MixRank account.

Just to take a random example I made up, let's pretend we're a company selling gold coins- a growing industry in this economy. This is a very competitive space with lots of advertisers, so we're going to have to get creative if we want to take some of their traffic for ourselves.

Google's Traffic Estimator shows that the keyword "buy gold coins" has a very high average CPC for position 1 of $10.10. To get this data, I set the average CPC in the Traffic Estimator to an absurdly high number like $1000 to make sure I get the absolute highest bid for this keyword.

Let's find a way to get a similar audience, one who's interested in buying gold, less expensively. All we have to do to start is initiate a search from the MixRank home page and find a relevant advertiser whose strategies we can study. Let's just search for our keyword and click on the first suggestion:

The search results will show us a few ads that are highly relevant to the keyword we searched for. I can already see one lateral audience here- several of the ads say "Buy silver coins".

It's important to be mindful of the distinction between keywords and audiences here. Lateral keywords for this theme would be phrases like "buy gold bullion" or "buy gold bars". In other words, they describe the same product in a different way. "Buy silver coins" describes a different product but targets a lateral audience that has similar fundamental desires- in this case the desire to own precious metal. This desire could further be reduced to a core drive for security, financial stability, greed, etc.

The keyword "buy silver coins" has an average CPC of $4.92. Still high, but a significant improvement in targeting the same audience.

Let's find out which core desire it is based on the current advertising strategies of the market's leaders. From the search results page, I'm going to pick what looks to be the current leader in this space, "goldine.com". I can see more data about them by clicking on that domain in the "Advertiser" column on the far right.

The Advertiser Report for goldine.com will show me their highest performing ads and traffic sources. You can also reach this report simply by typing their domain, "goldline.com" into any search box. 

Looking through their text ads, I'm noticing a common phrase that's consistent across all of their split tests: "Free Investor Kit":

They've probably tested many different positioning strategies and found that presenting gold as an investment is the strongest appeal. Here's another lateral niche audience: people who are looking to buy gold as an investment (as opposed to collectors seeking gold for numismatic purposes, etc). Google Traffic Estimator shows that the keyword "invest in gold" has a max CPC of $8.87. This high number is encouraging, because it means that this is a valuable, high converting audience.

$8.87 is a bit rich for us- if we were running a campaign targeting this theme, I would probably see my margins plummet as I get squeezed out by competitors with bigger budgets.

But remember our other, related audience of silver buyers? "buy silver coins" was significantly cheaper than "buy gold coins", so I would expect this pattern to hold across other, related keywords centered around buying silver. 

Indeed, "invest in silver" has a maximum CPC of $3.71, which is a huge 58% discount from the gold keyword, yet targeting an audience that's closely related to the original keyword, and one we can be reasonably sure will convert just as well, because they're interested in buying precious metals as an investment.

But let's keep going and see if we can cut our traffic costs even further using MixRank's database of millions of ads. 

MixRank's ad search uses sophisticated matching algorithms that go beyond simply looking for the appearance of keywords in ad copy or landing pages and identifies campaigns that are thematically relevant to the query. For a great example of this, let's search for our new keyword that we derived from the ad copy we saw goldline.com running- "investing in gold".

Our goal with these searches is to identify keywords and audiences that don't match our search query exactly, but are somehow related.

There's one result that jumps out at me immediately. 

Of course! Some people that are interested in investing in gold are part of the small, but lucrative niche audience of people stocking up for an impending economic collapse. The Ron Paul audience, if you will. Analyzing the ads of advertisers like this one will give us great insight into this market. Let's make the assumption that people anticipating an economic collapse are highly motivated to turn their paper dollars into gold, which we will be happy to sell to them.

The keyword "economic collapse", which features prominently in these ads, has a suggested max CPC of $1.02, a 90% discount on our original keyword of "buy gold coins", which cost over $10 a click.

An inexperienced marketer will suggest that "economic collapse" is a bad keyword to target, because it doesn't show intent and is not a "buying keyword", so it will not convert as well. But remember, we're getting this traffic 10 times cheaper!

Let's say you have a stagnant campaign based around the "buy gold coins" theme that's barely breaking even. If you target the "economic collapse" keyword, all you have to do is achieve 1/10th your current conversion rate from this audience to get a huge bump in traffic and profits.

"Prepare for impending economic collapse- buy gold!". The ads practically write themselves. 

No thesaurus or keyword tool will tell us that new main keyword, "economic collapse", is strongly correlated with the keyword we started with, "buy gold coins". But by using MixRank to pull relevant keywords out of ad copy and searching for thematically relevant ads matching those new keywords, we can quickly identify pockets of opportunity that advertisers without the benefit of this data will miss.

In a later post, I'll show you how to delve even deeper to identify even less expensive, high converting audiences and leveraging them for a flood of massive traffic. But following the strategy outlined above should be enough to get you started scaling your campaigns across lateral audiences very quickly.

This guest post is by Myles Younger, co-founder of Canned Banners. Canned Banners provides a platform and tools for automating and streamlining display ad design. Follow the company on Twitter at @cannedbanners.

Online advertisers, especially search marketers, understand the power of A/B testing. In search, the most successful advertisers will constantly A/B test hundreds of different ads. With the recent growth in display advertising, it's logical for online marketers to try and apply their A/B testing expertise to the world of display.

However, data-driven marketers should be careful before diving into display advertising. This post is going to explain some key differences between search ads and display ads, and offer some tips on how to keep your display ad design budget (and your sanity) under control when you're doing large-scale A/B tests.

Notes: I'm not including Facebook ads when I say "display ads." That could be a whole other blog post, and I'm not really qualified to write it. Nor am I considering landing page optimization, which is a critical factor in ad testing, but I needed to keep my focus limited.

Search ads are simple. Display ads are complex.

Before we go further, it's important to appreciate just how much more complex a display ad is versus a search ad. Here's some rough math to give you an idea of the difference in complexity:

Why is complexity important? With search ads, your creative palette is constrained to one element: text. With display ads, you could potentially test an infinite variety of elements: text, color, imagery, fonts, animation, button style, etc. So while it's almost impossible to create an "ugly" search ad, it's very, very easy to make poor choices and create an ugly display ad.

Tip #1 — Start with good designs

Even though you might need to test potentially hundreds of different ad variations, don't cut corners and launch with garbage ad creative. Finding out that Crappy Display Ad A beat Crappy Display Ad B is like learning that horse manure smells slightly better than dog poop. Don't waste your money & time.

If you think you can randomly test crappy designs and eventually iterate your way to a perfect, beautiful display ad, read the previous graphic again (and maybe study up on how exponents work); the universe won't be around long enough to perform all the necessary design iterations to hit paydirt. Launch with thoughtful, professional ad designs that you feel good about.

This doesn't mean you need to spend weeks & weeks designing your first round of ads, but don't just throw some clipart and tacky text effects into a box and call it a display ad. In general, ugly ads won't perform very well and they'll make you and/or your client look bad.

Once you've got some solid starting designs, you can go nuts with rapid iteration and experimentation.

And if you don't know why the ad below on the left is godawful, read the next tip.

Tip #2 — Hire a professional

Most people are horrible designers. If you're not confident in your design skills, hire someone to design a few templates that you can use. To get some good design ideas, browse around online and find well-designed display ads with layouts that could work well as templates.

And if you want a self-serve solution, that's what my company does (I'll leave it up to you to find our competitors and figure out why we're better).

Tip #3 — Use stock photography

At Canned Banners, we see hundreds of display ads designed by amateurs. What's the number one thing that ruins otherwise good ads? Bad frikkin' photography. Do not cut corners and make ads using blurry snapshots from your smartphone. Go to inexpensive stock photo websites like istockphoto.com, thinkstock.com or shutterstock.com and buy high-quality photos taken by professional photographers.

Extra Tip-within-a-Tip: Most stock photo websites sell subscriptions. They can be pricey, but if you're doing high-volume A/B testing, a subscription or package deal is going to be much cheaper than buying images one at a time.

Stock photo websites are also a quick source of design variations that you can test. Running a campaign for a real estate company? Use one ad template and buy 50 good real estate images (the nice house, the "for sale" sign, the happy homeowner couple, the happy agent, etc), throw them in your ads, and see which photos perform best.

That's enough tips...for now

I could keep going for several more pages, but if you've read this far, thanks! I hope these tips give you some food for thought. If you have any questions about display ad design, email me here or follow @cannedbanners on Twitter.

Cheers!
Myles

I was asked to give a talk about paid traffic sources at 500 Startups last week. The presentation is embedded below.

Although I couldn't resist diving into deep, specific, tactical stuff near the end, the three most important points I wanted to impress upon my audience were:

1. Most online ad campaigns (even those created by professionals) fail
2. The only foolproof way to succeed is to try (and fail) enough to exhaust every other option except the successful one
3. Therefore, your objective should be to fail as quickly and cheaply as possible

It's become common knowledge among the lean startup movement that you should launch quickly, iterate, pivot, etc. But I want to take this one step further as applied to traffic (and startups as a whole):

When you launch a campaign, your objective should be to make it fail.

When you launch an advertising experiment, it will most likely fail. The null hypothesis is that it fails. This is a good thing, because it creates defensible barriers to entry for your business.In other words, once you have a successful campaign, a novice with a $100 AdWords coupon won't be able to disrupt your acquisition channels.

If chances are that your campaign fails, you might as well do it quickly and painlessly.

I know it seems crazy to set a goal of losing money. But just give it a try. Because here's what happens when a campaign fails:

1. The campaign failed because it spent money without bringing in enough conversions or revenue to pay for itself.
2. If the campaign is spending money, it's generating traffic.
3. If the campaign is generating traffic, it's also generating data: click costs, conversion rates, ad copy and landing page split test results, etc.

And as any good marketer will tell you, data is everything. He who has the most data wins.

Don't aim for launching a campaign that's instantly successful/viral/profitable. That's a fool's errand, and it can only lead to disappointment.

Your only objective with a new campaign should be to collect enough data to validate or disprove your assumptions.

Then go back to the drawing board, use what you've learned to create a new campaign that fails slightly less than the last one, and try again.

Don't worry about the conversion rate or CPC with a new campaign. Just get the data, so you have a baseline you can optimize from.

If you get an additional data point about what works and what doesn't you win, no matter the result.

Pickup artists call this mindset outcome independence, defined as "The mindset of not focusing on a specific result, or growing attached to any outcome."

If you're not attached to the outcome of a split test, you'll never get demoralized by its inevitable failure. And you'll never risk giving up on a traffic source or acquisition strategy too quickly because your first few campaigns failed.

This can be an incredibly powerful mindset. Embrace failure. Never stop testing. And the successes will come in time.

The high rate of failure for most ad campaigns is the reason we started MixRank. We built our startup to catalog and analyze millions of split tests and campaigns  so you can learn from your competitors' mistakes rather than making them all over again.

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