Well themed Adgroups should contain keywords that users with the same interests, query the search engines with. These Adgroups should also be in synch with the theme of the landing page.

Landing pages should be designed in conjunction with the ads – as a basic rule: If the ad is targeted to the user, and the landing page reflects what is written in the ad, the landing page will be targeted to the user.

A good ad describes the product or service, the benefit of the product or service, and an action the user should take once they have clicked on the ad. An effective landing page will backup the same statements made in the ad:

• This is what you searched for.
• This is what we are offering.
• What you searched for and what we’re offering are the same thing.
• What we’re offering is superior and you should get it now for these reasons.
• Here’s the action you take.
• These five statements should be backed up, shown, and/or explained on a landing page in succinct and simple language.

The landing page should describe the same product, benefit, and action that’s featured in the ad. There should be no surprises and no distractions, like irrelevant links, images, or offers. All of this information should be conveyed without too much text. Visitors typically decide what’s on a page and whether they should abandon it by looking at images and scanning short sound bites of text.

If the page contains a form keep the requested data fields to an absolute minimum as your response will be in direct proportion to the amount of data you are requesting, the less data requested the greater the response.

Landing pages should be kept simple. You already know what a visitor is looking for so it’s not necessary to show them a bunch of other things.

In terms of landing page content here we overview our 4 top considerations

Copy
Repeat search engine user’s query in the landing page’s text and headings. Don’t be unoriginal - dare to make it more descriptive.

Images
Offer pictures of what you’re selling. Show visual samples which don’t fall into the trap of offering mere decoration, if the image doesn’t inform re the offer don’t include it.

Layout
Use bullet points with concise sentences using simple language.

Calls to action
Use buttons and objects that users expect to see, that let them know what they need to do next. Don’t make a visitor have to think too much, or have to make too many decisions. Keep the message single minded.

Our objective was to drive qualified traffic to Value Added Promotions (VAP) website,
using AdWords.

Many of the key products VAP markets where highly competitive within Google
AdWords with cost per click (CPC) rates hovering around the $10 level.

At this CPC level, if we held our current conversion rate of 21%, the Return on
Investment was well in the red.

To make the campaign effective we had to hit a CPC level of $1.75.

Our approach
We tested the hypothesis that it would be better to be number 1 on page 2 of search
results than number 4-8 on page 1, which happens to be 9 th place.

We knew from previous testing that over 80% of page one AdWord responses are
taken by spots 1-3.

The results
We found that the top AdWord spot on page 2 could be attained at a CPC 400%
cheaper than any of the top 3 spots on page 1. Critically though, the click levels
remained respectable at circa 30% of those achieved by the number 1 spot, on page 1.

And the news gets better as the conversion rate of the clickers from position 9 where
over 5% better than those from position 1 on page 1.

Essentially it would seem position 9 generates a more committed prospect.

In all, Google has agreed to make at least 15 purchases of companies or technologies in the past year. Google usually doesn’t release financial terms of small deals, but the big ones are substantial: US$1.65 billion for YouTube and US$3.1 billion for DoubleClick (the latter deal is pending a federal investigation). A little bit more than a year ago, Google spent US$1 billion for a 5 percent stake in AOL.

The past year’s purchases, which we have summarised here (link to hosted page with table below), have helped Google shore up gaps in its product line, develop a better office application suite capable of competing with Microsoft Office, and build on its massive success in online advertising. Microsoft has made 13 acquisitions in the same time frame, including a US$6 billion deal during May for aQuantive, a digital marketing and advertising company.

As consumers are becoming more experienced with online channels, their expectations are changing. We have seen trust and relevance becoming significant influencers on levels of engagement and response. From this we have identified 5 key foundations to developing sustainable online dialogue:

1. Privacy - The price of entry for communicating online.
2. Permission - Asking permission counts in terms of establishing brand equity and maintaining an ongoing dialog.
3. Frequency management - Overcoming online clutter and overload.
4. Relevance - Lack of relevance is the top reason to “opt-out”.
5. Personalization - Knowing how much is enough will be the key to positive ROI.

Focus on your core advocates
Now is not the time to be spending valuable dollars on marginal customers, to avoid this segment your customer base on lifetime value, then overlay recency of last purchase. This should be your primary segment for all activity.

Never pay CPM rates for media buys
The prevalence of excess on line ad inventory is destined to increase significantly over the coming months. Exploit this and negotiate hard, refuse all CPM rates and hold out for CPC and CPA deals. Negotiate for their performance buys as most media publishers will be striving to meet pre-crisis targets. Hold off on your schedules and wait for the pressure to be applied, resist the bluff that you will miss bookings as there will be less competition for the spots you wish to buy.

CPC search campaigns
Are your campaigns truly optimised? Are your landing pages performing? Challenge your search agency to propose 5 new tests to validate that your campaigns are fully optimised, and let the conversion funnel be the judge.

Single minded
Avoid the temptation of doubling up messages within your email communications. Focused single minded communications will deliver significantly greater ROI over any multi stranded message.

Recycle
If your on line Christmas campaign worked last year, dust it off and re use it this year. We are using a Christmas campaign developed for a retail client, for the 5th year in 2008, as we’ve seen no decrease in ROI over the last 4 years.

Solution: Broaden our approach and target a large number of less popular keywords.
These words are typically less expensive and, taken as a group, will generate significant volumes of traffic.

Execution: Our client runs a ski resort. The keyword “ski vacation” currently receives over 60,000 searches per month. That’s a good number, but it costs $5.01 per click for the top ranking position. Instead of competing head-to-head for that keyword, we choose to bid for top ranking positions on affiliated words which could be acquired at bid rates within our target PPC. Keywords/phrases we selected included “ski trip” (4,771 monthly searches at $0.57 per click for the top spot) and “ski lodge” (4,244 monthly searches at $0.55 per click for the top spot).

By targeting a number of these less popular keywords, we generated the same traffic levels as if we had targeted “ski vacation,” but at a significantly reduced cost, whilst not compromising the quality of the “qualified” clicks generated.

A hard bounce is an email message that has been returned to the sender and is permanently undeliverable. Causes include invalid addresses (domain name doesn’t exist, typos, changed address, etc.) or the email recipient’s mail server has blocked your server. Servers will also interpret bounces differently, meaning a soft bounce on one server may be classified as a hard bounce on another.

The issues include:

Here are some quick tips you can take if you have a significant Lotus Notes subscriber base:

Such services are already live in experimental pockets across the continent, which is following Asia’s lead. Since October residents of Caen, France, have been able to use their mobile phones to pay for groceries and parking. This season, football fans in the Netherlands can gain entry to their favorite stadium and buy refreshments with their Nokias. In Hanau, Germany, commuters now use cell phones as bus tickets. Last month Motorola launched the M-Wallet, interactive mobile-phone software that replaces physical credit cards with tiny phone screen icons. Execs at Vodafone Group, the world’s largest mobile operator, and Sony Ericsson say that they, too, have plans to incorporate payment devices into their European handsets.

Powering this compact revolution is Near Field Communication (NFC), a short-range wireless chip that can be used to transfer all sorts of data-from credit-card details to bus schedules-and can be implanted into mobile phones. When a user touches their phone to an NFC pay point-basically a wireless reader that works by contact, as opposed to Bluetooth, which works over longer distances-credit is automatically transferred. Sony and Philips, which collaborated to produce NFC, have signed up nearly 80 leading banking, computing and telecom companies, including Visa, MasterCard, Nokia and Samsung.

These firms have financial incentives to see the venture succeed. When using a phone to swipe for a cappuccino becomes faster than cash, credit-card companies stand to bank more transactions. In Europe, personal payments made by card could soar from 6 to 14 percent by 2015 with NFC, according to MasterCard research-that’s 18 billion additional transactions for card companies to cash in on. Contactless payment would cut retail transaction time by 63 percent compared with cash, according to American Express.
Will Australians take to the NFC feature? They will if the Asian market is any guide. Since the launch of its credit-card handset in 2004, Japanese network operator NTT DoCoMo has sold 10 million of the phones.

Industry executives dismiss the most obvious concern. Security, they argue, is actually better on a mobile than in a traditional wallet. The whole device can be shut down remotely, and all transactions are PIN-protected. But there are other concerns. Do you want to load all your bank and credit-card details onto your mobile providers’ Web site? Could hackers intercept transactions and steal money? And what happens if you lose your phone or it runs out of batteries? Success may ride on how well the industry answers these concerns, and whether users feel secure entrusting their lives to their mobiles.

1. The final file size of the html should be less than 20k.
2. Maximum email width 750 pixels (median 6500) Recommended Depth 800 (though can go deeper if need be)
3. HTML should be produced to the HTML 4.01 Transitional specification.
4. The Body tag should not contain any attributes other than ways to control the margin, as this tag is removed in Hotmail and limited in other clients.
5. Background images should not be used in tables where the mailing list contains large numbers of Lotus Notes users, or should be included in a way that will degrade suitably. It should also not be used due to Outlook 2007 stripping background images out.
6. Executable file attachments should not be sent and JavaScript or client side VB Script should be avoided.
7. Image files should be placed on a server and their path exposed in the mailing html.
8. Style sheets should be included as a code block within the html and below the tag, or passed as inline parameters to HTML selectors. It is best to use custom style classes, as style parameters will cascade to all selectors within the document including those added at the server.
9. If printing is a concern the maximum width should be 468 pixels. This is equal to 6.5 inches, leaving an inch margin on each side for printing on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper.
10. Avoid designs that implement a flush left and/or top alignment. Web-based email clients such as Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL Mail put a 10-20 pixel margin on the left and top of the email message. This offsets the email from any window borders, ruining a flush design. The one pixel border technique works well as a general design container (using the pencil tool with a square one pixel brush).