Excluding placements in the Google Display Network (GDN) isn’t just a hygiene tactic—it’s a strategic lever for improving ROI and campaign efficiency.

GDN Placement Exclusions

Google’s AI-driven placement algorithms are continuously improving. Right now, though, they still lack the nuance to fully understand brand suitability or the nuanced goals of a specific campaign. That’s why the proactive exclusion strategies we detail below are important.

Start by considering the context in which your ads appear. Certain websites or app categories—such as mobile games with accidental clicks or sensationalist news sites—may technically deliver impressions, but they rarely contribute to meaningful engagement.

Looking at your placement reports clues you into patterns that you can take action on: high impressions with low conversions, unusual CTR spikes, or bounce-heavy traffic sources. These indicators often point to placements worth excluding.

Audience intent is crucial. Even on high-traffic, reputable sites, your ad might not belong if the user’s mindset doesn’t match your offer. For example, placing a B2B SaaS ad on a recipe blog won’t align with user expectations, regardless of the domain quality.

Brands with international campaigns should also consider cultural and legal sensitivities. Some domains or categories might be legally acceptable in one country but damaging in another.

GDN exclusions aren’t set-and-forget. They’re part of a feedback loop. Make it routine—monthly at minimum—to review your placements and performance metrics. Couple this with developing your own dynamic exclusion list, informed by your brand’s specific needs, vertical trends, and prior campaign data.

Background on the Google Display Network

With more than a million websites across the globe, the sheer size of the Google Display Network is one of the main reasons why display and retargeting campaigns are such strong marketing tools. Spanning myriad topics and interests, reaching a target audience based on what matters to them has never been easier.

A high-performing campaign leverages the Google Display Network by serving highly targeted ads to users somewhere across the mammoth network of websites and publishers. Odds are, if a user is seeing a display or retargeting ad, they are seeing it on a website in the GDN.

However, there are thousands of websites with which brands do not want to be associated. This is why it’s a good idea for advertisers to consider blocking or excluding certain websites for placements of their ads on the Google Display Network.

Why Exclude Some Websites on the GDN?

It may seem counterintuitive that blocking placements on some websites would lead to better campaign performance, but there are instances where blocking placements can be extremely beneficial. There are two main reasons why advertisers should exclude websites on the Google Display Network.

1. Spammy, Inappropriate, or Unrelated Websites

Considering how large the Internet is, it’s pretty clear that no matter what a person is interested in, there is likely a large community and hundreds of websites dedicated to that interest. This covers a gamut of topics from the very wholesome to the very “adult.”

Advertisers probably don’t have the luxury to consider and evaluate every single website on the GDN. That would take hours. But serving ads on a spammy, inappropriate website (or one that’s just not very related to your brand) can have unintended consequences. For example, say a butcher shop sets up a display campaign, and several of its ads are placed on websites whose audiences are passionate about the vegan lifestyle and animal rights. Not a great match.

2. Saving Money on the GDN

Besides avoiding placements because of a mismatch for relevancy or inappropriate misrepresentations of a brand, the big reason for blocking placements on the display network is to save money. When targeting is dialed in and a retargeting campaign is set up correctly, advertisers can reduce costs by eliminating irrelevant websites.

Say that a SaaS software company runs a display campaign but they don’t exclude a whole ton of websites geared towards teenaged and college-aged gamers. These placements eat away at the ad budget, and they don’t contribute meaningful conversions to the campaign.

By eliminating a whole slew of such websites, advertisers leveraging the GDN can ultimately get more out of their campaigns with lower costs if they refine where ads are being placed.

How to Block Placements on the GDN

Seasoned digital marketers may know about website exclusions, but they can be easily overlooked by less-experienced users of Google Ads.

At the most basic level, placements can be excluded by opening your campaign in Google Ads and clicking on the “Placements” tab. From there, hover the mouse over the top navigation and click on the “Exclusions” tab.

Once in this new area, exclusions can either be selected by website, YouTube channel and video, app, or by entire app categories.

It’s important to keep in mind that Google Ads’ exclusion tools don’t cover every website worth excluding from a campaign, and there are thousands it will miss.

Using an exclusion list can be a mighty weapon for any digital marketer working inside the Google Display Network — one you’ll want to come back to over and over again.

The Definitive Website Exclusion List (Free Resource!)

For years, Google Ads professionals have either had to resort to creating their own exclusion lists or borrowing lists of URLs from fellow marketers.

The team at Direct Online Marketing has created the exclusion list to end all exclusion lists.

This list is the culmination of our two decades as an agency running campaigns for clients in Google Ads. (To supplement our internal list, we also took every list of website exclusions we could find online and compiled it all in the above Google Sheet.)

At a stunning 70,000+ website URLs, this list is quite comprehensive as it covers such categories as dating, mobile, gaming, quizzes, sports, and more. And hey, it’s free!

Because this list can be found as a shareable Google Sheet, we encourage you to share this with anyone who would find it useful.

Notes About High-Cost, Low-Performing Categories

If you’ve taken a look at our list, you’ve probably noticed how we broke out several website categories.

High-Cost, Low-Performing – One of our categories addresses a large number of high-quality and reputable websites and publishers (such as The New York Times, CNN, etc.). We’d generally recommend excluding or considering blocking placements on some of these sites for direct advertisers. The placements may make sense if you’re using GDN just for brand awareness and reach. Because exclusions can be a good method of keeping ad costs down, blocking placements on high-quality websites can help stretch budgets a lot farther.

Key Takeaways About Google Ads Placement Exclusions

• Excluding placements on spammy, inappropriate, or unrelated websites helps maintain brand integrity.
• Advertisers can exclude placements directly in Google Ads so that ads reach their intended audience.
• Blocking select websites can improve ROI by reducing wasted spend on placements that don’t convert.
• Direct Online Marketing offers a comprehensive list of over 70,000 website URLs for exclusion.

Final Thoughts

Using the behemoth Google Display Network is how marketers are finding success with display and retargeting campaigns, but not every website is a good opportunity for advertising. By leveraging our comprehensive list of websites to exclude ad placements, advertisers can easily avoid the negatives of placing ads on inappropriate websites and reduce costs associated with their campaigns.

For those of you who share our vision in making this list the best it can be, we thank you and welcome any submissions.

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Partner Agency before you reach out.

This article was updated to add additional information on April 21st, 2025.

The post Google Ads Placement Exclusion List for Google Display Network (Updated 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Below you will find a nice even dozen of our favorite holiday marketing ideas for 2022. Consider these our free gifts to you in an effort to make this wonderful time of the year the most successful for your business.

Offer Some Limited Time Holiday Deals (Even If You’re In B2B)

Although Black Friday is looking less and less like the insane rugby scrum of years past, it is still “a thing” after the world of retail essentially canceled it in 2020 at the height of the global pandemic.

If there’s one thing we associate with Black Friday, it’s getting those amazing deals.

You might think this kind of strategy only makes sense with retail, but it can work for B2B marketing, too. Don’t forget that even though your office may be closed for the holidays, there are many companies that are open during the holidays because they are serving those who are traveling or taking time off. Aside from traditional consumer retail, other industries that regularly operate during holiday time periods include:

• Convenience Stores
• Emergency Healthcare
• Entertainment Venues (think movie theaters, sports arenas, etc.)
• Hospitals
• Hospitality
• Pharmacies
• Restaurants
• Travel and Transportation

For a few standout holiday marketing ideas, you could offer a discounted rate for one of the services you offer tailored to these specific industries. Or a coupon code that accomplishes the same thing. Just remember to make these offers redemptive. Instead of simply giving the deal away, offer it in exchange for completing a contact form, or gate it off with a form to capture some basic information.

If you identify these markets as high relevance for your products and services, prospective clients working during holidays will likely interested in your discounted services.

That’s what we call some “solid leads,” what about you?

Need to DOMinate Black Friday?
Watch This Webinar On-Demand.
Achieve Your Goals!

Setup A Google Performance Max Campaign

If you have an e-commerce site, there is no reason not to run Google Shopping ads. As far as holiday marketing ideas go, Google Shopping should be your bread and butter if you rely on digital channels to generate direct response sales.

However, in today’s modern digital advertising landscape, there is only one way to get your ads showing in Google Shopping… setup a Performance Max ad campaign in Google.

One of the things we’ve always liked the most about Google Shopping is that the ads are a combination of text search and visual ads. The user sees a picture of the item and also relevant information pulled from your feed by Google.

When it comes to setting up a Performance Max campaign so that your ads can be seen in Google Shopping, we are taking a more cautious approach. Instead of telling you to go all in on Performance Max, we strongly suggest running it with a “test and see” mindset.

If this is the first time you are hearing about Performance Max, or simply want to learn more about the basics of Performance Max campaigns before deciding to go all-in on them for your 2022 holiday campaigns, learn more by pressing play on the video below.

Like we said above, you should be taking a “test and see” approach to Performance Max campaigns. So, while you can still have some type of manual control over where your products are being shown, we recommend you continue to use it.

Along with that, if your feed is optimized, Google will be able to automatically pull information such as free shipping and place it in your Product Ads.

During the holiday shopping season, it is more important than ever to keep your feed as updated as possible. What do you think happens if someone clicks on an ad for a product, only to find out that you are sold out? They go somewhere else.

Don’t miss out on sales because of Google’s machine learning putting your products in front of the wrong buyers or because you have overlooked your feed management.

If you have doubts that your Performance Max campaign is ready for the holiday season – mind if we take a look with a complimentary PPC consultation?

Submit Your Product Feed For Free Clicks

At the beginning of the pandemic, we shared an important update Google made to it’s Shopping platform – online retailers could sell products for free through the platform.

Fast forward more than two years later… and those free to sell options are still available on the platform.

If you haven’t submitted your product feed to Google so that your products can be listed in free “Popular Products” search results like the one shown above – what are you waiting for?

Sure, we know these search results look awfully similar to the Google Shopping ads shown above, so how can you tell the difference?

Simple… shopping listings that are supported with advertising will always be labeled with “Sponsored” or “Ad” in the heading before the actual listing.

If you already use Google Merchant Center or Performance Max, you do not have to change a thing to receive these unpaid clicks. While the amount of impressions your products will receive for unpaid clicks will not be as high as if you were paying per click in Performance Max, this can still be a revenue generating strategy for the holiday shopping season.

Want to review your Merchant Center to see your unpaid clicks?
Learn How Here.

Change Up Your Ad Text

Customers are so used to seeing “50% Off. Order Now!” or “Great Deals!” Instead, show them what they want to see… specifically what it is you can offer them this holiday season.

So, be creative with your marketing campaigns!

If you sell gloves, use some copy that reads, “Baby, it’s Cold Outside! Warm Up with a New Pair of Gloves.”

If you sell products that are irrelevant to the cold season, no worries. You can still find ways to use the season to your advantage and inject a little “holiday spirit” in your campaigns.

Dynamic Search + Shopping = Re$ult$.
Learn How This Online Retailer
Improved Sales 115% During Busy Season.

Embrace Retargeting

When done right, retargeting can take your accounts to the next level when it comes to low-cost conversions.

This is the nice thing about retargeting: based on how your audiences are built, you can segment customers by intent.

If you have an audience for an informational page such as About Us, you know that there is some interest, but the customer is probably not ready to buy yet. You can tailor ads specifically for that audience with messaging to entice them to come back and learn more.

Along with that, if you have an audience for cart abandoners, you know there was intent to buy there – but something changed that. If you create ads that give the customer a reason to come back, you can create conversions from missed opportunities.

Learn more about our retargeting services if this isn’t already a part of your digital advertising plans for the holidays.

Lean On Email, Social, And Automation

Your messaging doesn’t need to slow down too much while you’re sipping eggnog, spinning the dreidel, lighting the candles, prepping for a fast, or ordering Chinese food with your dog.

And you don’t have to be on the stick (or at the keyboard, if you’re not a pilot) prepared to make a correction.

Most people aren’t going to be sitting in front of their computers or visiting their favorite websites for new content during the holidays. Rather, this is a perfect time to engage them where they are: on their phones, scrolling social media, and reading email.

The great news about those avenues is that you can write your social media and email marketing messages early, and then schedule them to roll out at predetermined times.

Just make sure nothing newsworthy happens that might make your subject lines or messaging seem tone-deaf.

Learn more about our social media advertising services if you may need a performance boost in these areas for the holidays.

List Holiday Sales Prominently

No one can participate in your sale if they don’t know it exists. To help boost your 2022 holiday sales, make sure your biggest promotions are front and center.

One of the best ways to do this is by incorporating your sale into your branded color design, using a holiday themed banner or other top-of-page display. This immediately makes the connection between your holiday promotions and the holiday shopping rush. Add a call to action and a link to your perfect gift products, or gift cards, and you’ll be ready to go.

Discounts should also be displayed prominently, especially around top selling products. In addition to displaying discounts on product cards and pages, special Black Friday deals, holiday specials, and gift guide call outs can be displayed both on your product pages and other holiday campaign landing pages.

Make It Easy To Convert

This is a year-round tip, but it’s especially important during the peak of the holiday shopping season.

Make sure each product on your landing page is designed with a clear purchasing path, which can be used on both desktop and mobile devices.

In the simplest instances, you can create a button that adds the product directly to the shopper’s cart. You can also display a sidebar with the current cart contents, allowing customers to see what they’ve chosen, and seamlessly check out when they’re ready.

For all your sales processes, the key is to minimize the steps it takes to purchase. The easier the conversion path, the fewer abandoned carts you’ll see all year.

Optimize Your Pages For Mobile Devices

According to Forbes, holiday spending on mobile reached $88 billion dollars last year. While the pandemic brought a lot of us in front of our bigger screens, mobile sales still increased as the calendar flipped closer to the big holidays.

Suffice it to say if your holiday landing pages aren’t optimized for mobile, you’re losing out on a huge consumer opportunity.

To optimize your seasonal landing pages for mobile:

• Make sure that the buttons are large enough to be seen and interacted with on smaller screens.
• Format holiday banners for mobile devices, keeping text size in mind.
• Don’t overload your mobile landing pages with too much text.
• Ensure that getting from products to checkout is simple, minimizing the number of “touches” between your product and cart pages.

Don’t Forget About Microsoft

Think Google is your only option when it comes to search engine advertising for your holiday marketing campaign? Think again. Microsoft can be one of those great holiday marketing ideas because it is an easy to deploy, high volume secondary platform to use to reach your target audience. Why would you want to pass up 20% of the search market?

Microsoft does not have the reach Google has, but it has an audience that has spending power. Microsoft’s search advertising solutions on Bing and across their entire network are great for reaching those that are not as tech-savvy (*cough* parents and grandparents *cough*) because they are less likely to use a browser, or a search engine, other than what Windows devices provide as the default.

Learn more about our Microsoft Ads account management services if this isn’t already a part of your digital advertising plans for the holidays.

Create A Sense Of Urgency

This is true for all product pages, all the time, but the holiday season is a fantastic time for retail sites because the urgency is already built-in!

What you can do is emphasize the timeliness of your sales on your site, reminding your customers that they need to act now if they want to surprise their special someone on time.

One of the best ways to do this is with the popular holiday countdown timer. You’ll see Amazon do this with their Cyber Monday deals, counting down the hours until each product special is gone forever—and it works.

Display your timer above the fold or along a sidebar, where your customers can easily see how much time they have left, and prepare to watch this be one of those holiday marketing ideas that will automatically push your holiday sails up!

Finally, Don’t Forget To Be Sincere

Your employees love each other, even if they fight like siblings sometimes. Your clients think you’re doing a great job, and you’re thankful for the ability to provide them with goods or services this time of year.

The holidays are also about love, acceptance, and gratitude. Don’t be afraid to show that side of yourself to the people who matter to you. We could all use a little more joy these days.

Don’t shy away from incorporating some of these timeless feelings and emotions that well up in the people who will consume the content you create for your holiday marketing strategy.

You might be surprised how far a little “I appreciate you” or “We understand what you’re going through” messaging can go in spreading more of that holiday cheer.

As the calendar year draws to a close, do you find yourself behind pace with your lead generation or sales goals? Even though the holidays are drawing close, there’s still time to meet, achieve, or exceed your goals. Contact us for a free consultation to learn how our digital marketing services can help you accomplish your best  year yet! 

The post 12 Profitable Holiday Marketing Ideas To Make This Your Best Year Yet appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Control Where Display Ads Appear

You can exercise control over what sites your display ads appear on with placements and exclusions:

• Placements — These are sites that you tell Google to place your ads on
• Exclusions — These are sites that you tell Google you don’t want your ads to touch with a 10-ft pole

This approach works well to focus display campaigns. And the general concept can be applied to any area of your marketing.

Use Inclusions and Exclusions as a General Approach

As marketers, we work hard to define the audience we want to reach. We craft detailed buyer personas. We carefully tune ad copy, imagery, and video to appeal to populations that we know are likely to be receptive to what we have to tell them (which is usually some variety of “you have a need, maybe we can satisfy it”; some people might call that an “advertisement”).

If you like, you can think of those as “inclusion” lists. The list of things that you want to include in your ads to draw people in, or the list of places you want to put your ads to get them in front of interested eyes.

Exclusion Lists

At DOM we’ve also built “exclusion” lists. An exclusion list is simply the opposite of an inclusion list—a collection of things we don’t want to include in whatever it is we’re doing. If that sounds vague and all-encompassing, that’s because it is!

The PPC Benefit from Applying Exclusions

We use exclusion lists in our Google Analytics subdomain tracking to eliminate referring domain traffic from appearing in our reports. You might want to exclude your business’s IP address from those Analytics reports, too, since your own employees visiting your website shouldn’t be included in your traffic stats.

You probably wouldn’t want your ads to appear on a site that you wouldn’t be comfortable associating your business with, and you can exclude those. That’s an example of a display exclusion that we mentioned above.

You’re advertising on YouTube to reach some sort of goal, like driving leads or ecommerce sales. We want to do everything we can to make sure the people seeing our ads, clicking our links, going to our landing pages, and filling out our forms are high quality leads. What’s a high quality lead for you? For most of us, it’s a future customer. Or a person taking whatever action you define a conversion.

Exclude Irrelevant YouTube Channels

If you’re running a campaign on YouTube, you don’t need ads for your business showing up for a population who you know wouldn’t be interested and who isn’t going to convert. Just like a bouncer at a fancy nightclub, your exclusion list can make it less likely that specific people won’t see your ad. For example, we have an exclusion list of channels we use with most of our YouTube ads, specifically to keep them out of channels watched by kids. You might want to use one of those yourself—unless, of course, you’re advertising toys or candy or whatever else kids these days are into. Pogs? Pokemon?

Great Start, But Don’t Stop There

Just as a beautiful garden needs constant attention and pruning, you have to constantly tune your lists to make sure the right ads are going to the right eyeballs. This is especially true if you’re using Google’s Display Network because you can let Google decide where to show your ads anywhere on their extremely large ad network. Sometimes Google doesn’t make the best decisions (it’s an overlapping series of algorithms, after all), so you might have to manually exclude some as they pop up. Think of your ad campaign as a tomato plant. You want more tomatoes, not more leaves.

For more help with your Google garden, get in touch today.

The post YouTube Placement Targeting Tips – Exclude Channels (And Save $) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

So you have to flip it over, with the overly inquisitive lady who’s a fixture of this drugstore eyeing you like a hawk and then you can finally print those photos of your dog in a lil cowboy hat.

Do you really always have the USB turned the wrong way around? Or is it just that things going wrong tends to stick in our memories better than things going right?

This is an example of sample bias.

Defining Sample Bias

There are many terms in this realm with overlapping meanings: sample bias, sampling bias, implicit bias. The essence of what I’m trying to say is that these terms point us to blindspots and the attendant difficulty in understanding the world. You might be interested to see this conundrum as it relates to sample bias in a census.

We’ve got one coming up in the US this year, you know.

Tempering our intuition with testing can combat sample bias. A common story that we tell ourselves about “experts” is that they gradually and imperceptibly develop a sixth sense about their field from years of lived experience. Now, this is true in a way, but the process isn’t so mysterious or impenetrable. Building expertise is often just running numerous experiments and changing your hypotheses as you get new data and test again.

And again. And again.

Sample bias leads to poor analysis and decision-making. It blinds us to the world that is right in front of us: we approach a situation without realizing the assumptions we bring to it.

Overcoming Sample Bias: Envisioning What’s Been Left Out

During World War II, the military tried to assess how to better armor its aircraft. Hundreds of planes coming back from the front were examined for damage, bullet holes mainly. This image of the plane on the right represents the data. Black areas signify more damage; white, less damage.

Where would you have recommended reinforcing the planes?

Pencils down!

Mathemagician to the Rescue

Luckily for the Allies, Abraham Wald was on the case. Wald was a mathematician who took on this very question for the US government via his post at Columbia University. (I learned about this nugget of history in WORK RULES!, Laszlo Bock’s book about why Google is consistently rated a great place to work.)

What Wald advised might seem counterintuitive: that the cockpit and tail should be reinforced. He had the clarity to realize that the data wasn’t presenting the whole picture. It only represented the planes that made it back. Those that were shot down were not being considered.

The prevalence of bullet holes in the wings, nose, and center section of the fuselage meant that those parts of the aircraft were actually more durable and less in need of protection. It was the cockpit and tail—generally unscathed on the returning planes—that were essential to protect. A single bullet hole in those vulnerable areas likely spelled disaster.

Sample Bias: A PPC Example

Let me bring sample bias a little closer to home, to us as marketers.

What I Assumed

I ran an experiment on the bidding strategy type for a client. It was a display campaign with the ultimate goal of driving brand awareness. The client had the campaign set to the maximize conversions bid strategy; I hypothesized that a viewable cost-per-thousand impressions bid strategy would drive more impressions for a lower cost. In fact, I didn’t just hypothesize it, I guaranteed it (in my head at least).

Why did I believe this so firmly? First of all, because that’s exactly how Google explains Viewable CPM—as an algorithm aimed at putting ads in front of people for less spend. Secondly, because that’s how my teammates expected the experiment would go as well.

Here’s what happened.

What I Actually Saw

1-week performance

I felt pretty good after the first week. The Viewable CPM strategy had gotten more than double the impressions of Max Conv.

2-week performance

Boy, about then I thought I was hot stuff. More than a quarter cheaper for each thousand impressions.

3-week performance

After another week, it was more of the same. I was going Mach 5.

4-week performance

The full month’s story was different. The average CPM ended almost exactly the same for each bid strategy, and Max Conv. got more than 17x the clicks in those four weeks.

I reviewed these stats with the client, and we decided to close out the experiment, returning the full budget to the Max Conv strategy.

I had to doff my cap to the wisdom of testing.

If I’d just gone with what I assumed to be true, I would have missed out on the excellent performance of Maximize Conversions bidding strategy in this case.

Sample Bias and Self-Perception

Correcting for bias in our thinking isn’t only good for PPC campaigns. It’s good for us as people.

Oh, no! FOMO

Fear of missing out—FOMO, as the kids call it—is intensified by the way we interact with social media. FOMO is that vague sense that everyone else is always doing something more exciting than we are.

Facebook and Instagram are pervaded by images of people indulging at fancy restaurants, hiking in perfectly appointed outfits, dancing the night away, starting new jobs, showing off new cars, and displaying especially good hair days.

Sometimes we take these images as the whole story. We implicitly assume that these photos are representative of the lives of those therein.

When you’ve gotten home late from work on a Friday night and pull out your phone, it can seem like everyone else is out having a great time, while you’re the lame one without the right relationship, without the right friends, without the right self.

The problem is we aren’t seeing the whole picture. FOMO is a kind of sample bias.

People usually use social media to share peak events. We don’t typically present others with:

• time spent waiting in the dentist’s office
• getting a flat tire
• anxiety about getting older

or the

• pleasant but ordinary half-hour spent reading before work
• our mother’s cancer diagnosis
• waking up and our back not hurting as much as yesterday
• having Cheerios just when you had a taste for them.

Correcting for Sample Bias in our Lives

When you are already feeling a bit down and turn to social media in your default mode of thinking, you can wind up making things worse. There is an opportunity in such moments to adjust your thoughts: to consider that sample bias may be at play. You are not getting the whole picture. And this can be consoling.

You can come to see the photos of people showing off a new car or being in an exotic locale as a respite for them amidst the misfortunes of life. You can realize that that person in the pixels is probably just as worried about missing out as you are. So why not bask in their moment in the sun, even digitally, from afar.

Keep Alert for Sample Bias and Things Will Be Better

We’re human. We bring assumptions to the table that we don’t realize. We start from a biased framework and get skewed results.

We’re human. We learn from our mistakes—and the keen-sightedness of others (my thanks to Mr. Wald). We check ourselves going forward for the many species of bias.

Ferreting Out Bias in Marketing and Life

• Are you considering the whole scope of the data? Or just a subset?
• Why is your direct traffic in Google Analytics so high?
• Are you invested in the outcome of a test going a certain way?
• Are you accurately tracking users across subdomains?
• Are you using tests to balance your gut feelings?
• Does alt text still matter?
• Are emotions pushing you to a negative conclusion that’s unwarranted?

Happy hunting for those hidden assumptions and unrepresented data! Check out how we’ve seen things that others missed for our clients.

The post Sample Bias: Personal and PPC Pitfalls appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Remarketing Similar Audiences for Search – Finally Available for All!

Three years later, Google has released another game changer with Similar Audiences for Search and Shopping. While not the same as RLSA since you are reaching people similar to audiences you have built who have not been to your site, you manage them the same way.

The similar audiences are added to ad groups as an audience, and you can choose to bid higher on those audiences or change the settings to enable you to only show to users in that audience that are searching for relevant keywords. These options are controlled by the ad group’s flexible reach settings. To bid up on the audience members, while still showing ads to those outside the audience, choose “Bid Only” as your flexible reach. To target only members of the audience, choose “Target and Bid.”

By using these audiences, Google is allowing you to connect with more qualified customers, giving you the opportunity to reach users that you might not have had a chance to reach in the past.

Dynamic Search and Shopping

There are also ways to harness similar audiences in an even more powerful manner: using Dynamic Search and Shopping.

By layering these audiences into Dynamic Search, you are creating what is functionally a Dynamic RLSA campaign, only targeting users who have not been to your site and therefore might not be as familiar with your brand.

Using these audiences in Google Shopping Campaigns allows you to bid higher on these users, meaning your products are much more likely to be seen by users that have not visited your site, leading to more brand awareness and ultimately more conversions.

Customer Match Changes

Along with similar audiences, Google also announced a global rollout of Customer Match in Shopping campaigns. While Customer Match is not exactly a new feature in AdWords, allowing companies to target their Shopping ads to specific users using email lists is something that could cause your Shopping campaigns to become even more successful.

When speaking specifically about Shopping campaigns, this might be a bigger change than Similar Audiences, mainly because you can target specific people that you know have purchased one of your products in the past, which could lead to repeat purchases.

With the simple setup, there is no reason you should not introduce Similar Audiences into your Search and Shopping campaigns, along with Customer Match into your Shopping campaigns. How are you planning on using these two new tools?

The post Supercharge Search and Shopping with Similar Audiences appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

So you’re driving people to your site but they’re not taking the action you want them to, whether that is making a purchase, filling out a form, or downloading a white paper. How can you increase the number of people converting on your site? One of the first places to start would be to test changes to your site (a process known as conversion rate optimization). Another option is retargeting ads, which is one of the easiest ways to reach people who have already been to your site.

Retargeting can be easy if you just target everyone that has been to your site, but that’s not going to harness its true power. Did you have someone put something in their cart and then abandon it? Target them with specific messaging to come back and complete their purchase. Are people viewing a lot of pages on your site, but not filling out your form? Show them ads with an offer to entice them to come back and submit their information.

You might be asking, “How do I know which people to target with what message?”

I know you’re totally expecting this, but you’re in luck! I’m about to give you four tips on how to supercharge your retargeting advertising and find the most success when it comes to remarketing ROI.

1. Use Specific Messaging

Imagine you’re looking for a new Louisville Slugger for yourself or your child. You visit their site and head straight for the Aluminum Composite bat page. You find the perfect bat, but you’re not exactly ready to purchase yet.

You then leave the site and start seeing Louisville Slugger banner ads all over the place. The only problem is that these ads are very generic and not at all what you looked at. Why do you care what kinds of catcher’s gear and wooden bats they offer? You don’t and that makes you much less likely to go back and complete your purchase.

Now imagine, after leaving the site, you start to see ads for Aluminum Composite bats. This makes you happy and also a little creeped out because you were just looking at those bats, but it also makes you more likely to go back and make the purchase because those items are at the top of your mind.

If someone has looked at a specific section of your site, there is more than like a reason. If they see retargeting ads reminding them of the pages or items they looked at, they are more likely to come back and complete an action. The more specific your ads are, the better, which leads to tip number 2!

2. Use Dynamic Retargeting Marketing

Want to have your retargeting advertising so specific that they’re showing customers the exact item they looked at? Then you definitely want to be using dynamic retargeting ads. With a simple change to your retargeting code, you can easily show users ads specifically for the product they viewed.

What makes dynamic retargeting so great is the fact that people are going to see the exact item they looked at. In the first tip, I talked about ads showing the general products they looked at such as a specific type of bat. Think of dynamic retargeting as a way to scale your retargeting. You no longer have to worry about the messaging of your ad reflecting the pages the customer looked at because they are automatically going to be served an ad for the exact item they viewed.

Now, you may be thinking “Dynamic retargeting sounds great, but my business doesn’t use e-commerce.”

You can still use dynamic retargeting! Just because you’re not selling a product on the internet doesn’t mean you don’t have data that can be dynamically pulled from your site and placed into ads. For example, if you are a college or university trying to advertise on specific programs of study, as long as you have the correct data and code on those program pages, you’ll be able to use dynamic retargeting.

3. Use More Than All Visitors

So far we’ve talked about using specific messaging and becoming even more specific with dynamic retargeting, but what’s the point if your audience isn’t segmented? There could be a big difference in both intent and demographics between different pages of your site.

Take Maker’s Mark for example. They have different sections of their site for cocktails, recipes, gifts, and more. Those pages will have overlap in their audiences, but there will also be differences. The same could be said about people who view the events page versus the rest of the site.

With that knowledge, would you want to send specific ads for a small event at the Maker’s Mark distillery to someone who is only looking for recipes and isn’t located anywhere near Loretto, KY? Probably not (but, hey—we’re always up for a test). By segmenting your audiences into highly specific groups, you’ll be able to avoid that. You can even use the same audiences with different cookie lengths to change up messaging to better reach people depending on what part of the funnel they are currently in.

One other thing you can do with highly segmented audiences is actually use those audiences as a way to exclude people who have been certain sections of your site from seeing certain retargeting ads, especially if there is overlap that you don’t want. Negative audiences work a lot like negative keywords and are very easy to implement!

4. Get Broader with Retargeting Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs)

Retargeting Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs) are great because you can target people who have already been to your site. Instead of serving them a banner ad, though, you can serve an ad in search, where they have more intent to take the action you want. Note: unlike the standard site search ads we’ve been discussing, RLSAs only use standard text ads—not display ads.

Using RLSAs to target the same keywords you are running in Search campaigns is great, but there is a way to make your RLSA campaign even more powerful . . . and it may be something you haven’t thought of.

Instead of targeting very specific keywords, target broader terms. Since we are quickly approaching football season, let’s look at the University of Louisville athletic department and how they could use RLSA to target people who have been on the site and are now looking for football tickets.

If the athletic department found that the keyword “football tickets” was too broad and did not deliver a strong enough ROI, they could build audiences based on the football tickets section of their site. Then the Cardinals could run on the “football tickets” keyword, but only to people who have been to those pages of the site. Since they are not showing to everyone searching for tickets and only to people who have at least shown some intent, those people are more likely to convert for less money spent on those more generic, top of funnel keywords.

Bonus ½ Tip!

Don’t be afraid to play with the cookie duration of your audiences. Google allows you to have cookies anywhere from 1 day to 540 days for Display and 180 days for Search.

The key is to know how long your purchase process is. If you’re selling cars, you probably want your audience membership duration to be longer than the standard 30 days. If you’re selling movie tickets or another product that is usually an impulse buy, you might want a shorter duration.

There you have it! Four-and-a-half tips to overhaul your retargeting campaigns to find even more success reaching people who have already been to your site.

Looking for more tips covering PPC, SEO, and Social Media advertising? Check out our blog post, Google Comes to Louisville Highlights, which features the event we held on on Tuesday, July 26^th, 2016 at the historic Brown Hotel!

The post Retargeting Ads: 4&1/2 Tips to Boost ROI appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Sorry to say it, but those businesses are wrong. If you are not preparing for the holiday shopping blitz now, you are falling behind.

I Don’t Even Know Where to Begin!

Don’t worry about not knowing where to begin when it comes to preparing for the holiday shopping season. That’s what this guide is here for!

There are ways to avoid this kid’s terrible (but hilarious) fate. The first is to know your target audience. For example, did you know that more than 70% of Bing’s audience is over 34 years old and a third of their audience makes over $100,000 a year?

In other words, if you are targeting a younger audience, Bing may not be a priority. Knowing your audience is such an important part of having online success and it is mind-blowing how many companies miss out on this.

The second step is figuring out where your product or service is going to have the most success. Are you an e-commerce website using Google Shopping Campaigns? Are you a b2b business? Don’t feel left out, the holidays can work in your favor, too!

Like I said above, don’t worry if you don’t know where to begin. The following 8 tips are the perfect starting point to making sure you have a successful holiday season!

Shopping

If you have an e-commerce site, there is no reason to not run Google Shopping ads. Shopping should be your bread and butter this holiday season.

One of the things I like the most about Shopping is that the ads are a combination of Search and visual ads. The user sees a picture of the item and also relevant information pulled from your feed by Google.

This brings me to the most important thing you can do when running a Google Shopping campaign: Optimize your feed! Without feed optimization, Google will not be able to show your product for the right searches. Along with that, if your feed is optimized, Google will be able to automatically pull information such as free shipping and place it in your Product Ads.

I recently wrote about the mobile-friendly changes to Google Shopping, be sure to check out my blog post for more details.

During the holiday shopping season, it is more important than ever to keep your feed as updated as possible. What do you think happens if someone clicks on an ad for a product, only to find out that you are sold out? They go somewhere else. Don’t miss out on sales because of poor feed management.

Along with feed optimization, it is important to make sure that your Shopping campaigns are completely optimized.

One trend that we have recently noticed is that bidding lower than what you think would work can actually give your campaigns a huge boost.

For example, we have drastically cut bids in one of our client’s Shopping campaigns over the last two months and we have seen the number of conversions double between August and October, with October looking like it will be the highest amount of conversions from Shopping the account has ever recorded.

Like I mentioned before, Shopping should be your bread and butter this holiday season. Make sure both the feed and campaigns are optimized to their fullest potential and you will have a great start to holiday shopping success.

Retargeting

Ever feel like some ads are following you around like some kind of creepy stalker? More than likely, you’ve been to that company’s site and they are targeting you based on the pages you went to, how long you were on the site, or even if you placed something in your cart and then did not check out.

When done right, retargeting is far from creepy. It can actually take your accounts to the next level when it comes to low-cost conversions. This is the nice thing about retargeting: based on how your audiences are built, you can segment customers by intent.

If you have an audience for an informational page such as About Us, you know that there is some interest, but the customer is probably not ready to buy yet. You can tailor ads specifically for that audience with messaging to entice them to come back and learn more.

Along with that, if you have an audience for cart abandoners, you know there was intent to buy there but something changed that. If you create ads that give the customer a reason to come back, you can create conversions from missed opportunities. Below are the two types of retargeting that you should be using this holiday season:

RLSA (Retargeting Lists for Search Ads)

This is retargeting through the Search network instead of the traditional method over the Display network (we’ll get into this below.) What’s great about RLSA is the ability to target people who have already been to your site and then deliver a different message to them, which sounds tailor-made for the holiday season, right?

People clicking on Search ads show much more intent than those that click on Display ads. If you can find a way to change the messaging in your ads for those that have already been to your site, do you think they would be more likely to convert? I do.

People love to feel like something is being personalized for them. If they put something in their cart, you have a chance to tell them why they should come back and finish their order. Don’t miss out on being able to draw them back in.

Site Retargeting

This should be your go-to on the Display Network. I’ve yet to find a good reason why a company should not be running retargeting ads. This is the easiest way to reach people who have already been to your site.

You will not find the same level of intent using Display ads as you would using RLSAs, but since they have already been to your site, they are already familiar with what you offer, making them more likely to click and convert.

Like RLSAs, tailoring the message of the ad to their level of intent is a great way to bring customers back to your site. Each step in your purchasing funnel can have a different type of message, all with the purpose of bringing the customer back to the site to convert.

Like I said earlier, some users find ads following them around to be a bit creepy. This is why it is important to put a cap on the amount of impressions a retargeting ad can make to a user in one day. We all know that people become blind to ads they have seen over and over again, so it is important to make sure you are not hammering potential customers with ads.

Like Shopping, retargeting is too important to ignore this holiday season. Reaching new customers is great and should always be an area of emphasis, but what about those that have been to your site and already have an idea about what you offer? Don’t miss out on those customers.

Bing

Think Google is your only option when it comes to search engine advertising? Think again. Bing can be a great secondary platform to use to reach your target audience. Why would you want to pass up 20% of the search market?

Bing does not have the reach Google has, but it has an audience that has spending power. Bing is great for reaching those that are not as tech-savvy (*cough* parents and grandparents *cough*) because they are less likely to use a browser other than Internet Explorer.

With Bing, you are more likely to pay less per click and have a higher click-through rate. For one of my clients in a more expensive industry, their average cost per click in AdWords is around $10 with a click-through rate of around 2%. In Bing, the average CPC is around $3 with a CTR of around 7%. That’s a huge difference! Yes, there is less traffic in Bing, but to semi-quote the modern day quasi-philosopher Rasheed Wallace “Stats Don’t Lie.”

Bing has a very exciting new option for this holiday season. You can finally use retargeting in Bing!

To use this feature, you must place Bing’s new Universal Event Tracking code on your site and build audiences in Bing’s Shared Library, much like Google. Bing’s ads even work like Google’s RLSAs. This is a great opportunity to reach customers that have visited your site but do not use Google.

Mobile Optimization

I’ve written about mobile before and I am still a Guru according to Google, so I won’t babble on in this section.

The most important thing I hope to have you walk away with from this section is to make sure mobile customers can use your site! Why make mobile specific ads if the experience on your site for a mobile user is terrible?

Even if your site is not mobile-friendly, there are ways around this. Using a landing page creation service, which we will cover below, is a great way to make sure that your user experience for mobile visitors is a good one.

If your site is mobile-friendly, make sure users know that ordering on mobile is simple and efficient. Since you can create mobile-specific ads, call that out!

The last thing to keep in mind is your ad’s position on mobile. According to Google, the top position on mobile gets 75% of clicks. While Google has been experimenting with three mobile ads, there are usually only two. If you are not in one of those positions, your ad is not going to get clicked on.

Mobile usage has been exploding over the last few years and will continue to trend in the upward direction. Make sure you are doing all you can to create a simple and efficient mobile experience for your customers.

Social Ads

Did you know people spend almost two hours a day on social media? That number represents about 28 percent of all online activity. Your customers are using social media, so why aren’t you advertising there?

Almost all of the major social networks offer some sort of advertising. Facebook’s advertising features continue to become more robust, with new features for ecommerce and mobile advertisers being released almost weekly it seems.

Just in time for the holidays, Pinterest has rolled out Buyable Pins for stores using specific ecommerce platforms. If your store uses Bigcommerce, Demandware, IBM Commerce, Magento, or Shopify, you are eligible to use Buyable Pins.

This is looked at as a game-changer for social advertising because of how easy it is for customers to buy from Pinterest pins. Instead of having to go to another site to find what they were looking at on Pinterest, customers can now buy straight from the Pinterest app. This eliminates several steps for customers, making them more likely to convert because of how simple the process is.

The biggest challenge of social advertising is knowing your audience and where they are. Obviously, the same people will be spread across many of the platforms, but there are instances where messaging should be much different.

Your messaging between Facebook and Twitter may be similar, but it should not be the same as LinkedIn. Know your audience and where they are spending most of their time.

There are so many people on social media that not using the platforms’ advertising features, especially during the holiday season, is a major mistake. You can reach new and returning customers within the apps and websites where they are spending the most time. Don’t overlook the importance of social when creating your holiday advertising strategies!

Landing Pages

You can write the most compelling ad of all time, but if your landing page experience is bad, you have almost no chance of having a high amount of conversions. It is hard enough to get customers to your site, don’t make things more difficult by having a poor landing page.

Your landing page should be specific to the product or service you are advertising for. The more tailored the landing page is, the better.

The great thing about the holiday season is that you can have some fun with landing pages. Spruce them up with some holiday theming. Also, this is the perfect time to entice users with a sale or some sort of offer that you would not use year-round.

This isn’t possible for all websites for many reasons. Maybe you don’t have the coding skills required or maybe you don’t have the most cooperative developer. Don’t worry, there are ways around this.

The easiest thing to do is use a landing page creation service such as our favorite, Unbounce. These services make creating landing pages simple for any user, regardless of technical skill. Even though these pages are being created off of your site, you can make it look like they are a part of your site.

When creating a landing page, whether on your own or through a service, the most important thing you can do is make sure that the conversion process is easy. If you are using a simple form, the less information you ask for, the better. The entire point is to get the customer into your funnel. Once they’re in, then you can ask for more information. Making the form short and to the point makes converting easy, which makes it more likely to happen.

One final suggestion for landing pages is to always, always, always test new ideas on the landing page, even if it is as simple as the color of a button. I built two exact landing pages in Unbounce for a client with the only difference being one page had a green button and one page had an orange button and split the traffic being sent to the pages 50/50 and the page with the orange button converted almost three times more than the page with the green button.

Even the smallest detail can make all the difference in a landing page. Always test and don’t be afraid to get a little outside the box with your ideas!

Ads

Now, you may be thinking, “I’ve read so much great information here, but what about ads?”

Well, this section is for you. Since I’ve covered a lot of different options for ad types, I’m going to focus on the different types of Search ads that Google offers and why you should be using them to reach your customers.

Dynamic Search Ads

If you have thousands of products on your site, Dynamic Search Ads may be for you. DSAs can act as a catch-all for products that people are searching for, without actually having to build a campaign focusing on each product you offer.

Instead of using keyword targeting, DSAs use the information within certain pages of your site to decide what is relevant to users and then shows ads with a dynamically generated headline to those users.

There is an issue with DSAs being triggered by search queries that have nothing to do with anything you offer, so negative keywords have to be used and updated almost daily for these ads to be successful. With that negative comes a positive though, as the broader search terms that are converting can be used in new campaigns to control costs by bidding.

Ad Customizers

Having a sale? You can add a countdown to your ads to give customers a sense of urgency. Want to let customers know in which of your stores they can find certain products? Yeah, you can do that too.

AdWords offers many customization options to advertisers that let them tailor ads to give customers a sense of urgency or give them information that they may need.

Instead of having separate ads that you have to pause and activate for each day of a sale, ad customizers allow you to create an ad with a countdown that is dynamically updated each time a search query triggers it.

Call-Only Ads

Are calls more important to your business than anything else? If so, these ads could be the best thing that has ever happened to you.

Instead of showing a regular text ad on mobile, the headline of these ads is replaced by your phone number and instead of taking the customer to a landing page, they call your business straight from the ad. These shouldn’t be confused with Call Extensions, which will be covered below.

Ad Extensions

While these aren’t exactly ads, they are important parts of ads that should be included almost all of the time.

The first type is Location Extensions. These allow customers to see where you are located and are very important for mobile users. If you have a physical store, these should be turned on for all ads.

The next type of ad extension is Call Extensions. These show your phone number in ads. On mobile, it is possible to call straight from an ad, much like a call only ad. The only difference is the number is showing up with a full text ad when Call Extensions are turned on.

There are other Ad Extensions, but for the holiday season, those two are the most important. They allows customers to be able to find you and also contact you easily. In the right situation, both should be active at all times.

There are many more options for ads, but those will be the most important this holiday season. The great thing about all of the options is that you can mix and match the different types in different campaigns to find exactly what works for you!

Display

The Display network can be great just because of its massive reach – over 2 million sites according to Google—but at the same time, it can do more harm than good unless you know how to control where your ads are showing up.

The one thing to always remember is that if you are using the Display Network for basic banner ads, you are more than likely not going to see many conversions. The basic ads that the Display Network can run are great for awareness and we see great results conversion-wise when combined with other tactics both on the Search and Display networks.

If you’re looking to create awareness for your product or service, this can be your bread and butter. Regular Display ads are great for creating awareness, but more than likely will not convert as much as a search or retargeting ad. Display ads can spend a lot of money in a short amount of time, so it is important to keep a close eye on your budget and bid lower than you would in a search campaign.

Gmail Sponsored Promotions

This is a new type of ad that was in beta but is now available to all advertisers through AdWords. Google released this ad type just in time for the holidays, allowing you to target people based on keywords in their email. Google says that they are not reading your email, which is probably the best joke I’ve ever heard from them. There are multiple targeting methods and ad types available to allow you to reach your target audience. With this being so new, there will not be as much competition so click costs could be lower. Jump on the bandwagon now before competition and prices go up!

If you are interested in learning more about Gmail Sponsored Promotions, be sure to check out this blog post from Shannon covering everything you need to know about the new ad type!

And there you have it! Everything you will need for a successful holiday season. I know, there is a lot of information in this blog post. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments or don’t hesitate to reach out to me on Twitter @LelandReed! Thanks for reading!

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.

The post 8 Simple Tips for Holiday Success appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

With the MLB season getting underway on April 5th, millions of baseball fans are beginning to draft in their fantasy baseball leagues. Baseball is the second most popular fantasy sport behind football and has a huge following. Unlike football, baseball has a much longer season which gives fantasy owners more time to make adjustments and build a winning team.

In the sections of the below, you will see comments from Leland Reed (LR) and Stephen Hoops (SH), who happens to be the newest member of the Direct Online Marketing team writing his first post for us! All of the following opinions belong to us and none reflect the feelings of Direct Online Marketing as a whole.

We decided that it would be a fun idea to write a blog comparing 9 of the biggest online advertising platforms to 9 players that you should pay attention to when drafting your fantasy team. You’ll have a few of the fantasy superstars and maybe a few surprises, too.

Google

With Google’s advertising platforms, you know what you are getting. It’s a product that consistently works and works well. Search, Display, Video, and Retargeting are all in Google’s wheelhouse, which makes it not only the one of the best options for online advertising, but one of the most versatile, as well.

LR: It is the superstar of PPC and that’s why for my comparison, I chose Tigers 3B Miguel Cabrera.

Cabrera has received too many accolades to list here, but one thing is for sure: he is the premier hitter in the game. He won the Triple Crown and MVP in 2012 and followed that up with another MVP in 2013. 2014 was a down year for Miggy, but there is no doubt that he is one of the biggest stars in baseball and is sure to bounce back in 2015. You can’t go wrong using your first pick in your fantasy draft on him.

SH: I chose someone who has been as consistent as it gets over the past few seasons, Pablo Sandoval. Now donning a new uniform in Boston, the “Kung Fu Panda” is a solid choice. Although only ranked #9 overall amongst other third basemen, he’s got experience in spades.

Just like Google AdWords, Sandoval has got the numbers to back up his value. With 3 World Series wins under his belt, it’s clear he’s been an integral part of multiple organizations hell-bent on success.

Bing

We constantly tell our clients that Bing Ads shouldn’t be ignored because of the results we see on there. When Bing is working right, it is great and should be considered a superstar. There are times when it doesn’t work as well, and that is why it can be compared to a superstar who is often injured.

LR: I decided to compare it to one of the best players in the game, when he is healthy: Troy Tulowitski.

Before going down due to injuries in 2014, he was by far the only candidate for NL MVP, hitting .340 with 21 home runs and 52 RBIs. He only played in 91 games, and still had one of the best years of his career. When Tulo is healthy, he is one of the best in the game and is worth a high draft pick.

SH: In sports, there is nothing quite as disappointing as seeing a player with so much talent who is plagued with constant injury. There’s no doubt that Bing has gained more traction against Google, but it’s still quite not at the same level.

Albert Pujols is one of those players who when he is healthy, he’s unstoppable. With 520 home runs and over 2,500 hits, Pujols is a lock for the Hall of Fame and will be in the discussion for one of the greatest players of all time. Assuming he is healthy during the season, Pujols could really pay off especially since he will most likely remain undrafted for quite a few rounds.

Facebook

Facebook advertising is one of the best ways for small businesses to reach their target audience, especially local. It could be said that Facebook is close to the peak of what they can do with regards to advertising, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

LR: For my player comparison, I chose Clayton Kershaw. He is definitely at the peak of his career. It is hard to find a pitcher that has had a better four-year stretch than Kershaw. He won the Cy Young in 2011, finished second in Cy Young voting in 2012, and has only won the Cy Young in back to back years, with an MVP thrown in there in 2014. He is at the top of his game right now and is working his way into the conversation for not only the best pitcher of the 2010s, but one of the best of all time.

SH: Since becoming the platform that continues to dominate the social landscape, Facebook is no longer the new kid on the block.

For me, gotta go with a hometown favorite in Andrew McCutchen. Beloved by all in the City of Bridges, the outfielder is a continual part of the Pirates’ growing levels of success.

McCutchen has been one of the hottest players in the league over the last two years, winning the NL MVP in 2013. You might want to act fast seeing as how he’s ranked #2 overall. Let’s hope his new hairdo doesn’t create any bad ju-ju.

Twitter

Twitter is our personal favorite social network and it is slowly becoming the 2^nd most popular behind Facebook. The problem with Twitter lies in its advertising programs. While you can advertise on Twitter, we feel like the network is really lagging behind others when it comes to finding out ways to reach the right audiences. It has all the potential in the world, but can’t seem to live up to expectations.

LR: That brings me to my player comparison, which is Jason Heyward.

I am slightly biased with this pick because I am a Braves fan, but any baseball fan should agree that Heyward is not living up to his potential. Remember when he did this in his first major league at bat? Heyward was supposed to be the next Chipper Jones, the face of the Braves for almost 2 decades.

It hasn’t worked out like that because of a combination of injuries and lack of progression as a hitter. Heyward was sent to St. Louis as a part of the Braves’ offseason roster changes. The change of scenery may be good for him and as a Braves fan I hope the best for him.

SH: I am so torn on Twitter. It’s one of the best platforms out there and offers levels of engagement that the others simply can’t match. Not being able to prove its worth to marketers and in turn report consistent profits to their investors, it remains to be seen whether Twitter will be a homerun in the long term.

Russell Martin is a player with so much potential but not a single team he’s played for is willing to invest for much more than a few seasons. This year he’ll be playing for his hometown Toronto Blue Jays. In reality, Martin is just a .259 hitter with some occasional pop in his bat, but recent years and catcher classes have shown that’s solid for a starting fantasy catcher. Martin won’t win or lose your league for you, but he should come through as a great choice for your line-up.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social network for professionals, where advertising for B2B companies can be great. It is the perfect network for a company looking to reach professionals and other companies.

LR: When I was trying to think of a player to compare to LinkedIn, all I could think of was the old baseball cliché, “he’s a true professional.” The first player that came to mind was Joey Votto, the perinnial All-Star 1B from the Cincinnati Reds.

Votto is not a flashy player, but he is one of the best in the league. He is solid defensively and one of the best hitters in the game. He is so good at the plate that Reds’ management actually asked him to change his hitting style so that he walks less (umm, what?)

He is a true professional who shows up and plays the game the right way. Votto is the LinkedIn of baseball. Nothing flashy or over the top, but gets the job done.

SH: Compared to the others, LinkedIn has power in users but lacks all the flashiness. Sometimes you just gotta go with a true professional who will get the job done. And at this point you’ll need to round out your outfield.

At 34-years-old, Toronto Blue Jays’ Jose Bautista has been around the block. Having played for 5 different MLB teams, he’s been a Toronto baseball staple since 2008. In just a few years, he has transformed from a role player to a professional hitter. When healthy, he is a top 5 power hitter. When you need a pro and you need it done now, this 5-time All-Star player is a safe bet.

So there you have it, the first five of our starting nine! We hope you enjoyed reading and hopefully this is helpful, not only with your fantasy teams, but with online advertising as well. Have suggestions or changes to either of our teams? Be sure to let us know about them in the comments! Stay tuned for part two!

The post If Online Ad Platforms Were Baseball Players—DOM’s Starting Lineup appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

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[Waiting]

[Waiting]

[Checks to see if the door’s closed.]

Okay, great.  All the non West Virginians skedaddled.  Now let’s talk.

The most important things in my life are family, business, and where I live: Wheeling specifically and West Virginia more broadly.  Those are listed in order, but the first two are interwoven with geography.  I convinced my Californian wife to move back to WV with me.  We decided it was the best place to raise our family (and we were right).

As for business, well you all know the story of West Virginia.  I won’t get into all of the things that make it great and all of the challenges we face here.  But in case any of those interlopers are peeking through the windows, let’s talk more specifically about Wheeling for a second and go back to the Great Depression.

Up until 1930, Wheeling was booming.  It grew just about every year, had thriving businesses, well known brands, and lots of wealth.  The Pittsburgh gentry would come down here in the summer to relax.  Then we started heading in the wrong direction.  Census stats make me tear up – we’ve lost population every single decade.  So to be able to employ people in the area and serve as a piece of an economic catalyst to reverse the negative population trends?  Well, nothing outside of family gives me greater pride.

Bringing It Back ‘Round

All of which is just a long way of saying how much I love West Virginia.  And, which brings me to the point of this post: we’re bringing Google to West Virginia on February 19th.

“But you bring Google to West Virginia every day already,” you remark, maybe.  Figuratively, you’re absolutely right.  But this time, we’re doing it literally.

On February 19th, we’ll be holding a digital breakfast featuring Michael Hose of Google.  Michael will be flying out from the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA just for this event.  We’ve held events with Google in the past where executives have spoken to our attendees.  Those events were great and the businesses and non-profits left with plans to improve their organizations through online marketing.  But this is the first time we’ve had one in person.

Won over already?

Why You Should Attend (& Why It’s a Big Deal)

• Hear directly from Google. Want to know how you can best use technology to improve your business?  Hear directly from the tech giant’s mouth.  Plus you’ll have opportunities to ask questions during and after the presentation.

• Learn tricks to help your business that day.  I promise this won’t be one of those seminars where you just get jazzed up about an idea, but don’t have any takeaways.  You’ll learn about PPC, SEO, social media, and all of the digital marketing tactics that you can actually measure.  We’ll start by giving attendees an overview of these tactics and then drill down with tips for intermediate and advanced digital marketers.  Come loaded with questions and your note taking device of choice.

• It’s short.  We thought about turning this into a longer event – a true summit.  I know how crushed I am – as well as every CMO and business owner with whom I speak.  You can get in and out of there in just two hours, although feel free to stick around as long as you need to get all your questions answered.  We aren’t going anywhere.  Well, eventually I guess, but Wheeling’s only a little over an hour away the way I drive.  Many of us here are in Motown regularly anyway.

• First time ever. Knowing what you know now, you wouldn’t miss Woodstock, would you?  And no, I’m not talking about the crappy one in 1999 put on so the young kids could (inaccurately) say they experienced a culturally transcendent concert like their parents.  I’m not saying this is on the scale of the original Woodstock, but it is the first time Google’s ever sent someone from their Mountain View, CA headquarters to share their knowledge with WV businesses.  And they’re doing it with Direct Online Marketing, just one of the perks for our agency, which is one of the top Google Partners in the United States. /humblebrag

• How do you stack up against your competition? Our certified marketers will all be standing by, ready to answer your questions.  Grab some private space and see how your potential customers see you on the web, as well as your competitors.  Those guys are real jerks, right?  You can’t lose to them

• Learn from your peers.  The room will be filled with other West Virginia organizations who are facing or have faced the same problems you have.   What have they done to overcome and find success?  Make sure you get full value from this event by networking.

• It’s free.  Here’s a little secret about event pricing: much of it is done for psychology.  What will the price point say to the potential attendee?  It should fall somewhere between what most of the target prospects can afford, what makes it seem prestigious, and what maximizes the value (or recoups the most costs) to the event promoter. So in this case, our $0 price tag means…the event is worthless?  No.  Attendees will walk away with tremendous value.  I chose the $0 price point so there’s no excuse for any business looking to grow not to come – even though that lowers the perceived value.  Heck, we’ll even give you a killer breakfast and some sweet Google and DOM swag.

Sign Up Already

You’re still here?  Why?  Click here to register or give us a call at 304.214.4850 / 800.979.3177.  Hurry – registration closes Friday, February 13th or whenever all spaces are filled, whichever comes first.

Montani Semper Liberi!

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