JumpFly Blog: AdWords, Yahoo & Microsoft Advertising

Now you can reach YouTube’s 74 million U.S. users with targeted pay-per-click (PPC) video ads. This recently launched YouTube advertising interface links directly to your Google AdWords Account for billing and reporting. In order to participate in this advertising medium, businesses need to have three things:

1) A company YouTube “Channel”
2) Video ad/ads production
3) YouTube campaign development, implementation & management

The newness of this platform provides early adopters an exciting opportunity to capitalize on YouTube’s massive user population as well as the current lack of advertisers and resulting very low cost-per-clicks (CPCs).

Founded in February 2005, YouTube was purchased by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock roughly 1-½ years later. Today, YouTube is the #2 search engine and the #3 most visited website in the world. YouTube serves close to 1 billion videos every day and its users upload 13 hours of video every minute. According to HitWise, YouTube’s market share in the U.S. video sector is 73.18%.

Right now, advertisers can get started with really low CPCs before the advertising at YouTube gets competitive. I created a simple campaign for JumpFly as a test and was able to attain impressive first page results for as little as $0.15 per click. As YouTube’s growth continues and video becomes more mainstream, YouTube will likely represent a valuable advertising avenue for many advertisers who properly go after this new marketplace. Learn more about YouTube Sponsored Videos or consider having a professional PPC Management firm assist you in developing your YouTube Sponsored Video campaign.

More about Brad
JumpFly YouTube Channel

One of the running jokes around the office here at JumpFly concerns MSN and their PPC platform.  When MSN PPC is mentioned aloud, the inevitable astonished question arises - “MSN has a search engine?”  That always gets a few chuckles.

Yes, MSN does indeed have a search engine.  I’ll be the first to admit that the volume isn’t huge and the management interface for their PPC platform can be quite tedious to work with, but it can deliver some incremental traffic for your business. 

One valuable change they just made in the Microsft Avertising adCenter is that they now allow you to pause keywords or ad copy (learn how here).  Prior to this change, you had to actually delete keywords or ads to stop them from running.  This made it difficult to keep track of which keywords or ads you had tried that were not working as well as you had hoped they would.  Before this change, you had to go in and delete the keyword itself instead of just pausing it.  This would also remove any history that the keyword might have had in the account from the keyword tab screen.

The biggest advantage of all this is just the increased flexibility you now have in how you can manage your keywords and ads in adCenter.  To me, that’s the best part about this.  Sure, you will always be deleting keywords and ads that you don’t want, but it’s nice to have the flexibility to pause keywords or ads that are seasonal or might see the light of day in the future.  You might run a new sale perhaps, or revise a landing page to make it a stronger converter.  Again, it’s just nice to have more flexibility in your PPC advertising strategies than to always have to use the final axe chop.

More about Jack

Google just launched the new beta version of the Display Ad Builder Tool. This very cool new tool allows you to create and customize image, animated and Flash ads for the Google AdWords Content Network.

To access this new tool, simply go to your content campaign. You do have separate campaigns for content don’t you? Then click the “Ad Variations” tab. Next to “Create new ad:” you will find the usual selections of: Text ad, Image ad, Local business ad, Mobile ad, Click-to-play video ad and the new Display Ad Builder. You really can’t miss it since it has NEW! in large red letters right next to it.

Once inside the Display Ad Builder Tool you will find dozens of unique animated templates to use as your starting point. There are several pre-designed ad formats based on different industries like; travel, finance, automotive, ecommerce, etc. These all make excellent starting points for your new display ad, and Google promises to be releasing many more as the feature moves out of beta.

After you pick your new template you will be taken to the page that allows you to customize the ad with all of your own information. There are text fields for headlines and descriptions, and you can easily change the font colors if you wish. As you proceed, there is a button labeled “update preview” located underneath the ad, and you will want to periodically click this button to see the results of your modifications.

Tip* Depending on the template, you may need to have some custom logos and product images available. If your logo’s file size is too large, you may need to reduce it to the maximum size shown. Usually this is about 50k. If this seems too daunting of a task, simply choose one of the other templates that does not display a logo. There are plenty to choose from.

So, you have customized your new display ad. The next step is to click “Continue” located at the bottom of the page.

You are now on the preview and ad variations page. As you will see, the Display Ad Builder Tool automatically generates your new ad into several of the common sizes including medium and large rectangles, leader boards, as well as the popular skyscraper formats. Different templates are automatically converted to different sizes, so depending on the template you have chosen, you may or may not see all of the formats mentioned.

If something doesn’t look correct, you will want to click back and adjust as needed. If it looks good, click “save ad” and you now have impressive new animated display ads running in your content campaign.

Many AdSense websites do not have layouts that accommodate these display ad formats, so you will always want to have text ad versions available in your campaign. I have found that in some of the AdWords accounts that I manage, display ads perform very well with higher CTRs than the text ads. In some of my accounts they simply do not see enough volume. Give the Display Ad Builder a try and see how it works for you. You may want to monitor results using Placement Performance Reports.

Creating Google AdWords Content Network Campaigns requires a unique strategy and keyword list. Contact a qualified PPC Account Manager to discuss your content campaign.