Adam’s Blog

“The Edge of Success” reveals all the secrets. And right now you can download a copy…absolutely free!

Inside this valuable book, you will learn:

• How to “Master” every selling moment
  
• Easy ways to generate more leads
  
• Techniques for becoming a better sales person
  
• What customers really want from you
  
• How to capitalize on your existing customers (and still have them love you)
  
• And so much more!

This book is a powerhouse of information! Information that will grow your company quickly and profitably. The same techniques and tactics in this book have been used by hundreds of companies to easily double, and even triple their current sales. The book is free, but could be worth thousands, or even millions to your bottom line!

Yes, I want to download this powerful book for FREE!

Take the time to download this free book today, and see what it can do for you and your business!

Sincerely,
Clate Mask
President, Infusionsoft

P.S. This book will only be free for a limited time. Don’t delay, download now and start filling your bank account with all that extra income!

Welcome to the first – or second depending on when you received last week’s – issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. As part of our New Year’s Resolution, we are resolving to bring you a bevvy of new content to help you climb to the top of the search engines – and stay there.

If you are looking to to further your SEO know-how, you’ll appreciate the articles we published this week. Wednesday’s article showed you how to get SEO Information from Google’s Cache. Tuesday’s item showed you which SEO strategies work, and which ones don’t. And on Monday, we gave you a first class review of Google Real-Time Search.

You’ll also want to check out Tutorialized, where you’ll find more than 100 SEO-related tutorials on topics such as choosing keywords, website promotion, and more. You can also share your expertise with the whole world by submitting your own tutorial. Best of all, it’s free.

To pay homage to the great conversations held in our forums last year, we are paying tribute to not only one of our best thread’s of last year, but also one of our best Spotlight’s.

As always, thanks for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

SUMMARY:

Point-of-sale advertising is a well-established tactic in retail stores. Now, some ecommerce sites are bringing this strategy to the digital world.

See how Expedia Inc. uses its Web reach to offer several display ad options to brands that want to target Expedia site visitors when they’re researching a trip or booking a hotel.

When shoppers visit supermarkets and large retailers, they’re bound to see in-store displays featuring certain brands. The brand hopes to stand out from the competition, and the store owner receives another revenue stream beyond transactions.

Why not apply this concept to ecommerce websites and offer online ad space to brands looking to target the same demographic?

That’s just what Doug Miller, Global VP, Media Solutions, Expedia Inc., and his team have done with several Expedia Inc. properties, including Expedia.com, Hotels.com and Hotwire.com. When Miller joined five years ago, the team began developing ad programs that made the most of the company’s reach into the consumer travel market.

To quantify this reach, Miller cites a few stats from a study his team conducted last year:

• In the U.S., about 188 million unique users visited a travel-oriented site between April 2008 and March 2009, representing approximately 85% of the total Internet population.
• About 114 million, or 61%, of those users visited an Expedia property.

“They are very few places – probably nowhere else – where you’re going to be able to reach an online travel audience in such a concentrated way,” Miller says.

The team felt brands would want an opportunity to advertise to this high-volume, highly-qualified audience at the point of sale. In response, they designed several advertising solutions that account for 10% of Expedia Inc. revenues. On-site advertising is now one of the company’s fastest growing segments.

Here are four of the team’s advertising programs:

StorePoint Ads

The team’s first program offered display ads that reached several Expedia Inc. sites.

The banners are shown:

• Adjacent to search results
• On the homepage
• On browsing pages
• On content pages for various destinations

“This is where Hawaii or Mexico or American Airlines will call out to you and say they have a special opportunity for you at the point of sale,” Miller says.

Impact

The team recently compiled research showing that display advertising on their sites improved performance for hotel brands.

For example, one national hotel chain noticed that about 7% of Expedia visitors visit the hotel’s site within 30 days of a visit to an Expedia Inc. property.

Adding display ads to Expedia.com lifted this number to 12.8% — an 82.8% increase in visits. And conversions lifted 191%, Miller says.

Expandable StorePoint Ads

The team later updated the StorePoint technology to offer marketers interactive, rich-media ads.

The Flash-based ads expand over content on the site when clicked, and retract to their normal size when visitors move away.

Once expanded, the ads can offer a range of functionality, including:

• Audio and video
• Data capture fields
• Interactive animation
• RSS feeds
• Calendar
• Slideshow
• Send to a friend

Miller has seen these ads perform very well for marketers. This year, his team worked with marketers for a San Diego location to host expandable ads emphasizing a 24-hour sale offered through Expedia.com.

The sale was planned for a Wednesday. The team created a benchmark by tracking six weeks of Wednesday sales, and noticed that on the day they advertised, there was a 159% lift in bookings over the benchmark, Miller says.

TravelAds

The team also offers marketers a bid-for-placement, sponsored listings program specifically designed for hotels.

Many hotels operate without large budgets. By bidding for sponsored listings in their specific regions, smaller hotels can buy affordable placement on Expedia for only the most relevant site visitors. These ads are sold on a cost-per-click basis.

The ads are featured at the top of search results pages on Expedia.com and Hotels.com for location-based searches bid on by marketers. These marketers can bid on specific locations and time periods, and set a maximum budget to control their spending.

Passport Ads

This year, the team launched a behaviorally-targeted ad format that reaches Web users after they’ve left an Expedia site.

For example, an Expedia.com visitor might search and browse for hotels in Venice, leave the site, and later see ads for Italian vacations elsewhere on the Web.

Many visitors to Expedia.com do not purchase directly from the site, Miller says. This program is about targeting advertising to visitors who’ve shown interest in travel information.

The team works with several ad networks and companies to make the program work across a wide range of websites – some in the comScore top 100, Miller says.

For this program, the team does not limit itself to only working with travel-oriented sites.

“It’s less about the context and more about the audience and reaching them no matter where they are on the web,” Miller says.

Doug Miller spoke at ad:tech New York 2009 in November.

USEFUL LINKS RELATED TO THIS ARTICLE:

Email 2.0: Travelocity Takes It Up a Notch — Improvements & Results
https://www.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.html?ident=29912

comScore Media Metrix Ranks Top 50 U.S. Web Properties for July 2009
http://ir.comscore.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=404321

ad:tech
http://www.ad-tech.com/

Expedia.com
http://www.expedia.com/default.asp

Hotels.com
http://www.hotels.com/

Hotwire.com
http://www.hotwire.com/

Expedia Inc.
http://www.expediainc.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=190013&p=home

SUMMARY:
Display ads that can be customized on the fly to be more relevant to the viewer are more likely to be clicked than generic ads. But customization is not always an option in every marketing plan.
You don’t have to sacrifice reach for customization any more. Find out how an advertising network is helping advertisers create localized ads that can be shown on a national scale.
National brand marketers are in a challenging position, as the power of localized marketing shows positive results. Some marketers need to reach large audiences through nationwide advertising, which makes it hard to localize the ads.
Alistair Goodman, CEO, 1020 Placecast, and his team strive to overcome this challenge–particularly for driving traffic to nearby brick-and-mortar stores. They help marketers run campaigns that are able to detect a consumer’s location and customize the ads to include localized elements.
“An advertiser can run a national campaign but actually create a large amount of local relevance,” Goodman says.
Below, we look at how 1020 Placecast’s localized campaigns work, and how they’re performing for advertisers.
> Identifying Local Targets
When building a campaign, Goodman’s team first asks marketers for a list of the physical store addresses to which they want to drive traffic. The list tells his team which regions to target and localize the advertising for.
The team also asks marketers to profile their target audience for the campaign. Then, the team examines the target regions and pools multiple sources of data to get a better idea of where exactly the target audience likely lives.
Next, given the goals of the campaign, the team can create an ad. The ad will likely have some consistent elements — such as a product image — and some interchangeable elements — such as a city name, local imagery, or the address of a nearby location.
> Location-specific Publishers
Knowing which regions they need to target, the team finds publishers that have localized content for those regions.
“We create a network of publishers that have what we call location-specific content, where we can apply our approach to targeting,” Goodman says.
These publishers might be local classified, news or events websites. Other publishers, such as travel, weather, and real estate sites, operate nationally but deliver localized content. Visitors to these sites identify themselves as either residing in or interested in certain areas.
The team works with these sites to kick start the ad-delivery for the campaigns they build. A visitor to one of the sites could identify themselves as a member of the target region by:

• Entering a departing city on a travel site
• Checking the weather of a certain city
• Accessing any type of region-specific content
• Entering a zip code
• Visiting a site that’s only relevant to one region

Once the publishers pass on that initial piece of data, Goodman’s team is able to infer the person’s location, supplement that information with their other data on that area, and deliver the most relevant ad possible.
- Mobile campaigns
Goodman’s team also works with publishers who have mobile visitors. This allows them to create campaigns for the mobile channel, and it gives them other data about a person’s location via GPS coordinates or cell tower triangulation.
> Building Local Profiles
Goodman emphasizes that his team is taking a different approach in its research. Rather than focusing on building profiles on consumer’s locations and travel habits, they are building profiles on locations.
The more information the team can gather on a specific location, the more they understand certain regions, and the better the can localize the ads.
For example, the team may discover that a site visitor is from a certain neighborhood. Neighborhoods have opaque borders and naming conventions. However, if the team had enough information to correctly determine a person’s neighborhood, its title could be used in the advertising.
> Example of Impact
Goodman’s team recently worked with Avis Rent A Car. The campaign was designed to drive people to Avis’ off-airport locations. The target audience was not frequent travelers, but people who needed a rental because their car was at the mechanic, or who needed a car for the weekend.
They were able to create a national campaign that connected ad viewers with the nearest Avis center. Ads displayed on regular websites encouraged viewers to click to see a map or book a car. Ads displayed on mobile websites encouraged viewers to click to call the nearest Avis center.
The team did A/B testing of the localized ads vs. localized ads. They saw a 50% higher clickthrough rate on the customized Web ads and an 124% higher click-to-call rate on the customized mobile ads, Goodman says.
“When you’re able to develop a relevant message, you’re able to achieve much stronger results,” Goodman says.
Alistair Goodman is speaking at ad:tech Chicago in September.
USEFUL LINKS RELATED TO THIS ARTICLE:
ad:tech
http://www.ad-tech.com/
Avis Rent A Car
http://www.avis.com/
1020 – Placecast
http://www.1020.com/