Recently in Search & Display Advertising Category

A few minutes ago I finished reading a post by Josh Gordon on The Lunch Pail (operated by interactive agency Knotice). The post is all about the debate over behavioral targeting and data privacy and the recent actions from consumer groups to try and get legislation enacted to limit it. In responding to this post I stated something which I often bring up in conversations - marketing should be behavioral for the customer's sake.

I recently got involved in a couple of discussions on the Site Point Forums about how useful Paid Search (PPC) is in advertising a web business and if it should be trusted at all given click fraud and some of the other concerns that continue to come up. Having worked with search for years and seeing tremendous returns, the answer for me was obvious - of course you should use search. However, in discussing the issue more, I've realized it's really not that simple of a question - search marketing can have great results but it also has requirements to work. So if you aren't running a fortune 500 company with a search agency or web team, should you even bother trying? And if you do decide to get into the mix, what do you need to do?

If you've never worked with landing pages before you may be wondering, what's the big deal? Why bother? Well simply put, you need a landing page because your website has too much going on. Landing pages are what allows a visitor to have direction when they make it to your site. They give your marketing campaign, paid and otherwise, continuity and purpose. Without them visitors end up confused and wandering without direction... without them your visitors wander.

Since landing page are generally covered with the idea of selling something, I've crafted this post around a category which rarely gets attention from the landing page community --the forum world -- as a way of showing how they truly are necessary for everyone.

It should go without saying but when you have a campaign with anything specific to it, be it a specific offer, product or creative feel the landing page customers end up on needs to relate back to what the campaign says. Why do I mention this? Because despite the obviousness of the point companies still fall flat right and left. Understandably it can be difficult if not downright impossible to match up tens of thousands of keywords, hundreds or thousands of banner, email and affiliate offers with a relevant page but if you want to capture sales it's not really a matter of difficulty it just has to happen.

A few days ago my CNN alerts triggered over an article entitled "McCain campaign pulls ads from some anti-Obama Web sites". The short version; McCain's campaign was using Google to advertise on a number of content sites presumably through AdWords Content Network. A few of the sites ads were appearing on were extremely anti-Obama in nature and some appear to have gotten downright mean. The article included a brief response from the McCain camp in which they stated they had not targeted the sites, had removed them from their buy and had removed thousands others. For an online marketer it's obvious what happened but that day in a couple of conversations it's clear that the average American has yet to learn about content matching. So what should you do? Avoid the possible backlash and pay a higher price for only direct-selection ads or take the risk and grow your campaign?