SEO Solutions
Ads that attract. And attract. And attract. Search marketing isn’t just about thousands of words and complex mathematical bids. Though those are important. Think of a keyword and bid combination giving you a ‘slot’ on the page where you can write a few words in your sponsored link.
Many people stop right there. But what’s written inside those sponsored links is just as important. We’ve seen differences of 400% between one ad and another. And no computer program we know of – yet – can write good ads.
So we turn to our copywriters – and to their creativity. We try numerous creative approaches – in fact, on one client, we average 225 new ads a month, all to keep pushing the CTR (or click through rate for those in the know) higher.
And that’s just on text ads in sponsored links. Not too many people know that search engine companies do serve graphical ads too across tens of thousands of relevant sites. Over half of the ads served by Google, for instance, are shown outside the search engine, on tens of thousands of partner sites like New York Times, AOL, Indiatimes and the like. All on the same basis – pay-for-performance. This gives you a reach far beyond any other online ad network – and a super-fine ability to target.
We test, test and… as you can imagine in a digital medium, test again. We run different creative executions every month on every brand, retaining the ones that perform better in a continual survival-of-the-fittest shootout.
What gives us the freedom to do this is that we usually don’t charge for creative – so you don’t have to worry about how many variants you need to pay for. We consider this continuous improvement our investment in your success.
In essence, you get creative that works harder – and you only pay for the response.
BIDS
What am I bid for these 150,000 words? Let’s say you had 5 or 6 words you were bidding on – and you could see how they were ‘working’ for you. It wouldn’t be too difficult for you to figure out you could raise the bids a little on the ones that were doing particularly well for you – and to lower them on those that weren’t.
Now imagine you were doing this on 10,000 keywords in parallel. Or 150,000. Or even 750,000 as we have to do on one of our clients. And the problem becomes just a wee bit more complex.
Now add to it the fact that there is no easy way to predict how an will do at any position - indeed we have some belief that many ads do better at the bottom of a page (say, position 10 on a page with 10 ads) than at position 6 or 7. So the “yield curve” as our resident mathematicians put it, is not linear.
We do a few things – we try to predict the “clickability” of a keyword in advance, using some interesting insights on how search engine result pages work. And we use pretty advanced mathematics to figure out the optimum bidding combination of bid prices across all keywords in parallel, to get the best Return On Investment.
This involves knapsack algorithms, singular value decomposition, eigenvalue computation and other terms that haven’t come close to the advertising and marketing business in a long time. If any of this excites you, and you’re a potential client, please go here. If, as it’s more likely, you’re an optimization person or just mad about mathematics and marketing, do apply for a job here.
