Archive for February 8th, 2010
On submitting text link ads at traffic exchanges
All traffic exchanges offer text ads, those text link ads that appear on the surf bar and in various places on the traffic exchange web site. There are millions of ways to come up with catchy ads that convert to sales. I’m not going to address that here. I want to go over the basics of submitting a text link ad because if you don’t do it right, the ad will drive no traffic to your site and your conversion rate is guaranteed to be zero.
A text link has two parts, the text that shows on the link and the url for the webpage that you want people to go to when they click the text link. At Soaring4Traffic, you add text ad links on the My Text Links page. The box marked Link Text is for the text that will show on the link. The box marked Link URL is for the url of the webpage that you want people to see when they click on your text link ad.
There is a limit to the number of characters that you can have in your text link. At Soaring4Traffic, and at most traffic exchanges, the character limit is 26. Remember that a space is considered a character! Anything over 26 characters will not be included in the link text, even if it cuts off a word in the middle. Make sure that what you write makes sense and doesn’t go over 26 characters. People won’t click on your link if it doesn’t make sense.
The Link URL needs to be the complete url starting with http://. Make sure that you don’t misspell the url. Better yet, copy and paste the url. Using copy and paste removes any chance for error.
When you are done, you should be shown what the text link looks like. It should be an actual link that you can click and go to the site that you want shown when the link is clicked. In Soaring4Traffic, it is the link that follows “SAMPLE:” on the My Text Links page. If everything looks the way you want it to look, go ahead and assign some impressions. The text ad link won’t get shown unless you assign impressions to it.
If your text link does NOT get added, then what you should do is look at your text again. Sometimes the traffic exchange script doesn’t like characters that aren’t a letter or a number or a space. If you have any other kind of character in your text, rewrite your text without the special character and try submitting it again.
If all else fails, contact the support desk.
Personalization of Google Results Creates a Huge Advertising Opportunity
Posted by randfish
Like 150 million or so other folks, I spent today watching the Superbowl. As a marketer, it’s hard not to pay close attention to the advertisements, and this year featured a heavy focus on sending viewers to the web. However, I was a bit surprised that we didn’t see anything like 2007’s Pontiac advertisement:
At the end of the ad, Pontiac invites viewers to "Google" their brand to learn more. This seemed a bit odd in 2007, but today, it would have been a brilliant marketing move. Here’s why:
Personalized search is now on by default. This means that every click, branded search, and expression of a "brand preference" or "brand affinity" in Google’s results is likely to result in preferential biasing towards that domain in future searches. A "Google" Pontiac message during this Superbowl wouldn’t just send users to their site, it would also mean that tens of millions of searchers would now be "personalized" towards that domain.
I’m not sure when we’ll start to see this strategy employed, but it can’t be long. Personalization (and even social search, which Google pushed out of Labs two weeks ago) make leveraging your brand, in any channel, a powerful tool for SEO.