We’ve often heard stories of businesses who tried the content network only to be met with financial losses and no way to know if sales resulted.  Google’s Content Network can still be a big bad place, but it doesn’t have to be if you follow these strategic recommendations:

Effectively target and create your ads with your audience in mind. Your audience should consist of those customers who may actually turn into customers*.   Effectively targeting your ads also includes ensuring your creative is appealing to your target market and that your offer is in-line with what your target demographic expects.

Target your content ads both contextually and by placement. Contextually targeting your ads is a great option if you want your content ads to appear alongside certain keywords or content.

If you are selling ‘I Love New York City’ merchandise, you may want your ads to appear alongside any story that discusses the closing of the famed Tavern on the Green Restaurant located in Central Park.  You would want to be careful, although, that your ads do not show up alongside any articles for Frank The Entertainer…In a Basement Affair, the show starring the guy who first gained fame from VH1’s I Love New York TV Show!

Don’t include all of your products under one umbrella. A common mistake is including too many products or keywords in one ad group.  The best optimized content campaigns are categorical and not keyword based; only add a handful of keywords into each ad group.  For starters you can use like keywords from your already well optimized search campaign.

Always be tracking. Make sure you are giving yourself enough time to see conversions come in.  Timeframe can be dependent upon your product’s buying cycle and how many clicks your ads receive.  Now that you have conversion data, make sure you are moving forward in optimizing your account only for conversions with an ideal ROI. To optimize your ads you can use tactics such as increasing bids on high-converting sites and lowering bids and/or excluding poorly performing sites.

Remember, you can’t always be tracking. There are instances where you won’t see a jump in sales just because you began a content network campaign.  Realize that the content network can also work to get customers familiar with your brand.  You won’t always be able to make an attribution from the content network ad to the conversion that comes out the other side.

The steps above are high-level, but you should work on setting up a great structure and optimize your Content Network account just as much as your search account. According to Google research, “[i]n a study of 25,000 global accounts, over half had an average Content Network CPA equal to or better than their Search Network CPA.”

*If you don’t have a good handle on who your target demographic is, a great place to start is your Yahoo account.  Yahoo has tools that will allow you to pinpoint your demographic IF you enable this feature in your Yahoo account.

According to data released by Spending Pulse yesterday, internet sales were up 15.5% during the November 1-December 24 season. Free shipping and an overall increased level of comfort with shipping online helped to spur this increase in sales. It is also important to keep in mind that there was an extra day this years Holiday Season versus the Holiday Shopping Season last year. Even after adjusting for this difference – online growth could be up anywhere between 1% and 4%.

At the conclusion of the 2008 Holiday shopping season retail sales were down 5.5%-8% so it is definitely encouraging to see the 2009 Holiday season end with a positive up tick.  What makes this increase in sales for the 2009 Holiday Season all the more exciting is that many people were given gift cards and will likely trade these in for product in the upcoming weeks.  Make sure your pay per click account and site are pushing after Christmas sales and that you still make your site appealing for those looking to make those final ‘Holiday’ purchases.

Starting the second Friday in January (the 8th) will be a series of Friday postings on the considerations one should go through to achieve success with search engine optimization. Whether you’re new to running a website, know enough to be dangerous, or are a seasoned veteran, I’m aiming to provide you with useful information that will help you achieve success with search engine optimization.

Here’s the brief game plan:

Jan 8th Determining goals and when to expect to achieve them

Jan 15th Determining and recording baselines

Jan 22nd The numbers game: choosing keywords for success

Jan 29th PPC & SEO better pair than peanut butter and jelly?

Feb 5th What the competitive landscape tells us

Feb 12th How to get the most out of your content

Feb 19th Outside looking in: what other sites say about you

Feb 26th Reviewing progress and measuring success

Mar 5th Addressing conversion issues | Website optimization

Mar 12th Am I done with SEO? The next steps

This series is roughly in order of priority from start to finish (hint: it is never finished!) but of course no two campaigns are exactly the same and the steps will differ depending on a lot of factors. No worries, many of these factors will be discussed throughout.

Feel free to bookmark this page and come back in the New Year as links to the new posts will be added on a weekly basis.

This weekend I had occasion to revisit one of my favorite movies ‘Waiting’.  While ‘Waiting’ in my opinion is a great commentary on why you should eat at home more often – Mashable just posted a great article focused on three social media lessons taken from the Restaurant world. The lessons are as follows:

Play to your strengths. Companies like Chipotle and Pizza hut have introduced iPhone apps that let you order food on them. This enhances the core strength of fast food: it’s convenient. Should Ruth’s Chris put out this sort of app? No. but Ruth’s Chris, Pizza Hut, and Chipotle all understand their strengths, and they’re using social media to play to them.

Solve old problems. Food trucks are great. Just great. But often it’s hard to know where they’re going to post up next. A couple of food trucks have found a way around this: the Tweet their locations every day. It’s a simple, elegant way to solve a problem.

Answer the big question. Madden’s Casual Gourmet frequently rotates it’s menu, so they use an email list to keep regulars updated on what’s coming up. It builds loyalty and anticipation, and it’s complete free.

– John Veron

Professionals in any new industry are often confronted with a lack of words to describe their day-to-day actions. They basically don’t have a standardized industry vocabulary to say efficiently what they’d like to say. Often they derail a conversation to explain an idea. In short, the terms haven’t been adopted or created yet.

For instance, take the term “bounce.” Ten years ago the “bounce” was mostly used to describe something a ball did. Or perhaps the term was used by a hipster searching for a bigger, better party. In our industry the term “bounce” is now used to describe…x, y, z. And that’s my point. I don’t have to define the term “bounce” to members of our community because most of us already know the meaning of the term. “Bounce” has become such a popular term with the paid search community that the single term now takes the place a small paragraph, or a 5 minute conversation. If only we had an industry vernacular committee that put all our tribal knowledge into concise standardized terms for us.

Today we’d like to offer a suggested term to the Paid Search Vernacular Committee, or PSVC, to define a series of actions that we feel deserve a single term. While we use this method as a standard practice, we know our tactic is not an industry standard practice. We’ve seen a lot of success with the tactic which is why we offer it up for discussion here. Our term is “group blocking.”

“Group blocking” involves the practice of using negative keywords—usually phrase and exact—to steer traffic to the correct ad group. Some of you are saying, “Oh yeah, I do that.” Others are saying, “Whaaaa?” So I’ll be more specific. Let’s say you have a campaign with many ad groups that are somewhat related to each other. The keywords in each ad group are close to the keywords in the other ad groups, but they are different. And, you’d like your potential visitors to trigger the correct ad. You’ve tried other options but ultimately the only way you can insure that your potential visitors trigger ad copy that is highly related to their search is to break out new ad groups. This is where “group blocking” comes into play.

Here’s an example: let’s say your ad groups are “Brand O television,” “Brand O HDTV,” “Brand O Plasma Screens,” and “Brand O LCD’s.” Now you can imagine the keywords in each ad group are going to be highly related, but in the end potential visitors need to see the correct ad.

In this scenario we would “group block” each ad group with negative keywords. For the “Brand O HDTV” ad group we’d put the main keywords in the other ad groups as negatives for the “Brand O HDTV” ad group. The list of negatives would include LCD, LCDs, television, and plasma—but not HDTV. Now “group block” the other ad groups in the same manner. This helps steer traffic to the correct ad group.

As a seasoned paid search marketer you may already be engaged in this practice and you may have a term you use to define the idea. But since I don’t know it, I would suggest that you haven’t really marketed it very well. And unless you’ve already filled out a RFC2501-B Form correctly and filed it with the PSVC then I would suggest we all start saving some words and just start “group blocking.”