1. Get your brand name out there – the content network can help deliver a lot of impressions but it is sometimes more challenging to get a click. When writing your ads, don’t forget to put your brand name in the headline or ad itself to capitalize on all of those impressions. Even if a user doesn’t click, they may have noticed your brand name so if they see another placement in the future, they recognize it as something familiar.

2. Consider your audience – do a little research on where you are appearing within the content network, and then customize your ads for these audiences. Keep in mind you may have multiple audiences depending on the range of sites you are on. For instance, if you are selling bicycles, you may be appearing on bike enthusiast or race sites. The people seeing your ad are already in the bike mindset, so make sure you speak their language. On the flipside, if you are appearing on mail.google.com you have a much wider audience. You could appear next to an email about little Susie’s new bike, so speaking the language of a professional cyclist isn’t going to resonate. Spending a little time getting to know where you are showing up and understanding who might see your ad can improve your click-through rates.

3. Research your competitors, then be different – who you are competing with on the content network could be very different than who you are typically up against. Because the content network is based on keyword themes you may show up next to companies or brands outside of your product offering. See what others are putting in their ads and then make sure you are different. A few minutes of research could mean greater success.

4. Avoid Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) in headlines – because users aren’t necessarily searching for your brand when on the content network, DKI doesn’t work as well as it can in traditional search programs. If you do have an ad with KWI running in the content network, Google will choose a keyword from your ad group and randomly insert it, which may make your ad less relevant.

5. Place your domain name in your headline – consider testing if your domain is self-explanatory and short. For instance if you sell bicycles and your URL is NatesBikeShop.com, putting your domain name in your headline may prove to be successful. If your site is Wheels.com, you may not have as much success as your website could have many different things on it. When people read through websites, they often look for links. Because the headline of an ad is underlined, your headline or domain name could look like a link. It is something to test although there isn’t much data out there proving it works or doesn’t.

6. Call-to-action becomes even more important – try using call-to-action phrases such as ‘register now’ or ‘get a free quote’ to create a sense of urgency. Your user is passively searching; they don’t have an urgent need they are trying to fill. Give them a reason to click now rather than later but make sure you fulfill the claim you are making within the landing page. If your call to action is to register for a conference, make sure the registration form is on the landing page so the user isn’t required to click through further into the site.

7. Test multiple forms of ads – the Google Content Network allows you to use image ads and video ads in addition to traditional ad text. Try something new and see if adding a visual helps your click-through or conversion rate. Image and video ads can only run on the content network and are only allowed in certain placements, but it may be worth testing.

WebNotes - This is an invaluable part of my web research. Whether I am trying to find information for a client project, inspiration for a blog post, or track results of a PR campaign, WebNotes allows me to capture and organize information with post-it-notes and highlighters. And the best part is the report generation tool. When teamed with an automated Google Alert, we look like we spent hours searching the web and preparing the summary report!

AddressTwo – More than an address book, this is a true CRM tool. I have used a number of data bases over the years to manage my contacts, Access ( I built my own, boy was that geeky), ACT and Outlook and I find this one fits me perfectly. Web based, I can share my contacts with my entire team. We can manage contacts and projects with the built in task list. Also, I am slowly migrating from ConstantContact to the AddressTwo email tool. Although it is a little limited from a design and reporting structure, I love the ability to query the data base, identify just the right group, and deliver the appropriate message.

I also love the ability to email Addy with names of people I want to include in my data base or introduce to each other and she takes care of it. ( Yes I know she isn’t really a person, but sometimes she accomplishes more for me than a real employee, so it is hard not to think of her as a person)

Audacity - People who know me well find it incredibly funny that I earn my living as a writer, because I am not a writer. I am a talker! As a talker, I was intrigued by the idea of adding podcasts to my blog and Audacity has made that possible. With very little time invested, I have moved from novice to editing pro. I can not edit out even the slightest um, er or phone call interruption. (Though sometimes I leave them in, just because they add character).

I love the fact the weekly podcasts reduce the amount of writing I have to do, but there are other benefits as well. The programs give me an excuse to invite a friend in for a recording session and a visit. Now that I have learned to manage to technology, recording takes only a few minutes, then we have time to catch up and talk about other stuff!

These three applications were new for me in 2009. It is amazing how quickly new technology becomes a part of your life. I can’t wait to see what I discover next year!

This post was written by Lorraine Ball

Lorraine Ball twenty years in corporate America, before she came to her senses. Today, you can find her at Roundpeg, a small marketing firm, based in Carmel, Indiana. Along with an extraordinarily talented team (which includes Bonnie the dog and Clyde the cat) she shares what she knows about marketing, networking, pr, social media and business planning. Committed to contributing to a vibrant entrepreneurial economy in Central Indiana, Lorraine is focused on helping small businesses, become big businesses.

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Jason Falls

Razorfish has published a pleasantly useful report on social media called, “The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report.” You can download the report on Razorfish’s website here. It’s well worth the read.

The company’s VP and Global Social Media Lead, Shiv Singh sent a number of marketing and social media bloggers advanced copies of it last weekend in hopes we would write about it. I normally have little time to read reports or books, but most things coming out of Razorfish are pretty good and Singh has a stellar reputation, so I gave it a look see.

The report does something a lot of social media bloggers, thinkers and talkers don’t do. It whittles the focus down to a specific: Influence marketing or leveraging social connections with online influencers to market your product or services. Their analysis includes a survey of social influence which touches on the role of social media in buying decisions, how social media is becoming a place for paid and unpaid marketing efforts and talk of Facebook Connect an the resulting movement of the social graph.

More interestingly to me, though, is that Razorfish reveals in this report a new influence metric call the SIM Score, or social influence marketing measure. The score has two attributes the report calls, “critical.” First is the total share of consumer conversations the brand in question has online. The other is the degree to which customers like or dislike your brand when they talk about it online, or a sentiment score.

According to the report, “The first attribute … is a measure of reach. The second a measure of likability. The SIM Score combines the two attributes to essentially measure favorable impact of your brand.”

Essentially, the SIM score takes the net sentiment score for the brand and divides it by the net sentiment score for the industry, giving us a number. Comparing it to competitors would be relevant. I’d be interested to see other ways they might recommending using it.

There are lots of great insights to be pulled from this report. The best way for you to grasp them is to go and download it for yourself. It can be found online at http://fluent.razorfish.com/publication/?m=6540&l=1.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, good or bad, in the comments. And a nice tip of the hat to Singh and the Razorfish crew for producing some relevant content to support their brand.

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Restructuring your account does not cause you to lose your historical Quality Score information. The historical performance of your keywords, ads, and landing pages is preserved when you restructure your account. Therefore, we encourage you to restructure or optimize your client’s account structure as needed.

Let me first say that I agree with this statement. The historical Quality Score for a particular keyword does transfer when the term is moved into a new ad group.

However, keep in mind that when you move a keyword you can temporarily reset its Quality Score, therefore negatively effecting your ad position and overall performance.

Why does this temporary set back occur? AdWords needs to re-acclimate to this keyword’s new location and possibly new ad text. This means that when you do a major account re-structure, you will see a fluctuation in your performance. If you have optimized your account for the better, then your performance will begin to pick up after the restructure – but it will take a little time.

Another reason a temporary set back can occur is due to the relationship between your keyword and ad text. As your keyword builds its click-through rate, it is invariably tied to a specific ad text within your ad group. In a way, they share the Quality Score. When you move a keyword but neglect to bring the ad text with it into the new ad group, you have effectively severed that relationship.

If your keyword has performed well historically, then it will gain back its Quality Score, ad position, and performance relatively faster than a keyword that was performing poorly in another ad group, or a completely new keyword. So, what was said in the Fact of the Week is true, you won’t lose your historical Quality Score and that historical Quality Score will help you re-gain your keyword’s traction.

And this brings me to another topic on restructuring: moving a keyword that is doing poorly will not automatically help improve its performance. If you have a keyword that is relevant and has more potential if it’s in a different ad group, then move it. But if you are moving a bunch of keywords to try and reset their historical performance, that won’t work. And this is why historical performance does follow a keyword even if its moved. A bad keyword in any group is going to have a low Google AdWords Quality Score.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t restructure your account. In fact, we highly encourage you to optimize your account structure in order to enhance your account’s performance.

This is why I want to expand on this Quality Score tip. It isn’t wrong. It just doesn’t give the full picture. Restructuring your campaigns is a great to make your ad groups more focused and write better targeted ad texts. But there will be some bumps along the way.