Now this isn’t the most exciting news of the day. Most people are pumped up for Google’s release of the Nexus One. Granted a new phone is always cool. I remember when I first touched my iPhone. It was an exciting moment.

However, nothing really gets the blood flowing like online advertising. I mean who doesn’t love the random ads on the top of your Gmail account when you’re at work. Like right now mine says something about ESPN.com. I don’t know why. I’m about as coordinated as an inebriated gazelle.

What’s my point? I’m sure I have one. The point is online advertising is sexier than a new phone. The reason for my excitement is because JPMorgan has come out with their forecasts for online advertising in 2010. And their forecast calls for mostly sunny and high percent chance it will rain money.

Online advertising is a large part of what we offer clients at BOALT. That includes display advertising, search advertising and mobile advertising. According to JPMorgan, 2009 saw a 5.2 percent decline in revenues bringing in only $7.5 billion. However, things are looking up for 2010. According to JPMorgan forecasts, 2010 should see a 10.5% bump to $8.3 billion. Which means great things for everyone.

The bump is being credited to a rising market and growing trust in the economy from both consumers and businesses. The most surprising forecast is in SMS advertising. JPMorgan expects it to grow from $2.3 billion in 2009 to $3.8 billion in 2010. That’s a large bump.

SMS advertising is often an opt-in service. Say you’re looking for sports scores and you sign up for a text back response service that will send the score to your phone. Once you receive the information there is usually a brief ad at the bottom with a phone number or link. Some people find it annoying, but turns out that people actually do click on those links.

JPMorgan is also forecasting a 13.2% growth in search advertising to $16.6 billion.

What does this mean for you? Well it means that it’s probably safe to go back in the water. So get your floaties.

Most of you have probably read or at least seen that Google is now including Twitter feeds in search results. Today Bloomberg.com has reported that Twitter has apparently made a few bucks off it. $25 million to be exact.

The money comes from search deals with both Google and Microsoft. Of the $25 million, only about $5 million will be profit because Twitter’s operating costs are estimated to be $20 million annually.

Good for Twitter. The site’s meteoric rise over the past 18 months has left many wondering how it could generate revenue.This seems to be an okay step.

The biggest winners for the deal will likely be the search engines themselves. Considering Twitter’s daily traffic and Twitter’s ability to disseminate real-time information, it seemed only a matter of time before Bing and Google got their hands on what could arguably be the most current searchable data on the web.

Google search can return thousands of sites telling me about Washington, DC but Twitter search will tell me what is happening in DC at the exact moment I’m searching. This is also a smart move considering stats for traffic to search.twitter.com has had amazing growth over the past year as compared to Google Blog search.

So for Google and Bing, who are in the search business, they need to have the latest information because that is what people want.

How do you feel about the new Twitter feed feature in Google search? Is it beneficial or something you could do without?

Pay-per-click is the most effective way to direct traffic to a particular website. BOALT has created many successful pay-per-click campaigns for our clients and from our many years working in pay-per-click we’ve learned a few things about creating a successful campaign. I’m going to share the five most important:

1. Keyword Analysis: Make a comprehensive list of keywords and phrases that best represent your product or service. This list will grow and change daily. Constantly monitor the success and failure of a particular keyword. Ad words to describe your product or service but know the keywords your customer will use to find what you’re offering.
2. Curb the Creativity: A lot of people might disagree but given the space restrictions for pay-per-click ads it is best to tailor your copywriting to more specifics and less abstract creative copy. Tell your customer what you are selling and for how much. Don’t try to wow them with creativity.
3. Place Ads Everywhere: Google provides the most successful platform for pay-per-click advertising with Google AdWords but don’t forget about Bing and Yahoo and especially LinkedIn. All target a specific taste and market. You would be doing a disservice to yourself if you focused only on one platform.
4. Negative Keywords: A comprehensive list of keywords are essential to success. But don’t forget to create a negative keyword list. That is a list of keywords or phrases that your ads won’t appear when searched. For example, if you aren’t giving away anything for free then ad free to your negative keyword list This will ensure that people looking for free things don’t click on your ad. Because when they do you won’t convert them to a sale because they’re not looking to buy. Get several hundred people looking for free stuff on your site and you’ve just wasted a large percent of your ad budget on visitors who never intended to buy anything.
5. Examine Your Stats: Each of the pay-per-click platforms from Google to Yahoo provide a plethora of statistical information about your ads. Obviously look at your clicks and conversions but don’t stop there. Look at everything and do it everyday, throughout the day. Pay-per-click campaigns must always be changing and adapting to be successful. You can’t just post some ads and forget about them. You have to stay on top of them to be successful.

Your success with pay-per-click is directly related to the amount of work you put into it. Follow these steps and put a particular focus on number five.

Bing first woke the sleeping giant and now it looks like Facebook is going to take a shot at them too with the development of a real-time search. Yesterday was a big day for Facebook. They announced the acquisition of Friend Feed and then made the announcement of their new real-time search for Facebook users. Google immediately took notice and the only thing they could do was make an announcement of their own.

On Google’s official blog yesterday they unveiled “Caffeine,” their super secret search update. On the surface very few can see the difference between the old version and the new version. The version they released is just a developer’s version and there are still a lot of features to add, so I’m sure there’s a lot to come. Right now they’re simply looking for feedback on the differences between the versions.

As for Facebook, the search is available to Facebook users right now. In reality the search seems to target Twitter. The Facebook search is very similar to the Twitter search in that it sifts through all of the public posts on Facebook. However, with their purchase of Friend Feed they may have other plans for search beyond Facebook.

At this point we can’t say much about Google, or Facebook’s plans. So right now we’re just waiting to see the next step for both of them.

Forget about the battle between Coke and Pepsi, the ongoing struggle between foreign and domestic automobiles, or the three way social media dance-off between Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. The big rivalry to define the world we live in for the next ten years, will be the war between Google and Apple.

With the resignation of Google CEO Eric Schmidt from Apple’s board this week, it seems as if the two companies have selected their pistols, are back to back and ready to pace off the duel for mobile phone/world supremacy.

Apple is the company of today. The iPhone revolutionized the mobile phone industry and with each new release (3G and 3GS), Apple has spread its wings further and further in the tech industry. It’s battle plan is simple, and very similar to the Microsoft playbook of the 80s and 90s: Build a good product and make sure all other applications need your product to run. It began with the iPod, which required iTunes to operate an iPod on your PC. iTunes updates then lead to a download of the Safari web browser, giving Apple the opening they needed to get a web browser on PCs.

Apple then burst onto the mobile scene with the iPhone and quickly added to it’s reputation as Goliath, garnered with the creation of the iPod. iPhone gave developers the ability to make their own applications, put them on the iPhone App store, and go directly to the consumers, for a fee of course, making millionaires out of basement techies for just making an app that lets you see a beer slosh around your screen as you move your phone back and forth. The one problem, to get the software development kit you need a Mac running OS X at the minimum. Good move by Apple, forcing developers like me to buy a Mac for my primary development system.

Like a great Chess master, lying in wait, Team Google has been patiently putting their pieces in place, thinking ten steps ahead, and preparing for an assault that could leave the trendy Apple staggering.

Google Mail is now an industry standard. Android is in place and “gPhone” made a few waves in the mobile ocean. The Chrome OS is set for release in 2010 and what could be the most important piece of the puzzle is beginning to see the light of day: Google Voice.

The features of Google Voice are greater than anything Apple has or could put in place in the near future. Google is allowing you to pick your own phone number, place and take calls with that number, have interactive voice-mail and SMS, call routing, conference calling; pretty much anything a person or small business could want in a phone system at the touch of a button. That’s going to lead to more people wanting better, cooler applications for Google Voice, all of which will be provided by newer versions of the Android OS. Brilliant moves.

So the line has been drawn in the sand. On one side the iconic face of the trendy with cool gadgets and UI is Apple. On the other side is Google, a company built on intelligence and functionality.

Let the best innovator win.

Let’s just get it out on the table. Contextual advertising outperform display advertising. Okay, I said it. It’s true. Everyone will agree on that, so let’s move past that. The important thing for us to remember is that display ads are far from dead or obsolete. In fact I believe there is a resurgence on the horizon as we begin to learn more and more about the unknown power of display ads.

In May, iProspect published a study outlining the effectiveness of display ads with some surprising results. What they found was that 31% of those polled clicked on banner ads when displayed. Not exactly groundbreaking but the interesting part of the study is that they found an additional 27% don’t click on the ad, but instead perform a search for the company or product on a search engine. The study goes on to state the number grows to 49% who will eventually perform a search for the product, service, or company originally seen in the display ad. That’s impressive for an ad that a lot of us thought was on its way out.

I’ve had a lot of success with display ads. Again, it doesn’t compare to the success of contextual ads but enough success to not completely give up on display ads.

We had real success with display ads in a campaign for one of our clients: Dukky. What we did was first create contextual ad campaigns in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Once we had those going strong we moved on to display ads.

The following is what you need to know to create an effective display advertising campaign. Some of these are obvious and some you’ll learn along the way:

1. Research, research, research. You have to know where to sell your ad. The content networks of Google and Yahoo are great at placing your ads on a million websites but your product may be better suited for 200 of those sites or really just 30. Once you know your product and you know your ideal customer, you’ll know the sites you need to place ads.

With Dukky we researched mostly marketing sites. We looked at sites whose core audience was company decision makers. This is an important step to get the client involved because they know their industry better than we ever will.

2. Create site tailored designs. It is important to get noticed but we’ve found that it is just as effective to blend in. Create ads that fit into web pages. You should study the website that you want to place your ad. Then base your ad concept on the concept of the site. For example, we ran an ad on Guy Kawasaki’s blog How to Change the World. We decided to run our ad with copy based on the concept of How to Change the World.

Here’s the ad:

We used the same colors that Guy Kawasaki uses on his website. It looked like it belonged on the site. The ad turned out to be very effective. We did the same thing with each ad we created. This can be time consuming when it is so much easier to create one or two great ads and run them over a gamut of websites but it’s worth it to write site specific copy and create site specific designs.

Here’s how the ad looked on the page:

3. Write short, to the point copy. Internet banner ads are like TV ads, they only have a second or two to catch the viewer’s attention. After that you’ve lost them. So your ads have to be able to sell your product in a few words or with great graphics.

Like this ad we ran for Dukky on TechCrunch:

This banner has a very strong image. It is also pretty clear and to the point but it doesn’t give away too much. You know that direct marketing is on its last leg and you know that Dukky has the solution. So click on the ad if you want to improve your direct marketing efforts. This little ad says all of that and it was catered to a tech audience who has become numb to display advertising.

4. Have a strong call-to-action. When someone sees your ad they need to know what to do. So say: click, buy, download, request, and sign up. Whatever. Just make it clear and strong. Or use “kill it.” That was our call-to-action in the ad above. It works well, I’ll vouch for that.

5. Be able to let an ad die. I know that every word of copy I submit to clients is priceless. Sure a lot of copy dies a brutal and painful death on my computer but the things I ultimately decide to pass along are like the Dead Sea Scrolls but sometimes the clients don’t like them. Sometimes my boss doesn’t like them and I’m afraid he’s going to fire me. It’s tough but you have to learn to let it go. Same goes for ads that have made it from the drawing board to realization and are online. If they aren’t performing well then you have to take them out. You can’t waste the time and the money on an ad that isn’t performing, no matter how clever you think the line or the graphic is.

6. Be open to client feedback. It is important again to recognize that your client knows his product better than you do and they can give you great insight. So bounce a lot of ideas off of them and sometimes their responses will be frustrating and you’ll be dismissive but sometimes they’ll be great ideas. Again take the bloody cleaver ad. As much as I want to take credit for that copy, I can’t. That came from a long collaboration with the client. I rambled on about how I’d been exploring a more apocalyptic idea and the client came back with that copy. We ran with it and our creative director came back with this kick-ass design. We posted it and it’s doing well. But remember to listen to the clients. I’m saying that for the record because I know some of our clients are reading this and we want them to think we always listen to them.

7. Lastly, and most importantly, you have to have a solid site and product to back up effective ads. We could work for weeks designing the perfect combination of display ads and contextual ads to drive thousands of consumers to a client’s website but if they arrive on the site and it’s impossible to navigate or the product is crap, then there’s nothing we can do to sell it. So if you are trying to start your own campaign for your business then first you need to look at your product and you need to look at your website. Once those are perfected you can focus on creating ads. If you’re having trouble getting that done, that’s when you call someone like us.

Some of the other ads we created for this campaign:

HELP US!

Since the start of my career, I have had a never ending feud with Google about their double ad serving policy.  For starters, Google’s customer service team is setup in such a way that they help first time search rookies the same way they help Google certified companies.  There should be some benefit to being a Google Adwords certified company other than just being able to showoff their logo.  I personally believe that these folks should be escalated up the ladder a bit; why else did we spend the time to take your certification.  It’s annoying that every time, I ask a question, I start at the bottom with the same canned answers.  Not to mention, that we spend in excess of a million dollars a year with Google.

Google doesn’t allow for the same company to advertise on Adwords with the same keywords.  I totally understand that.  The problem is that we work with so many different affiliates that sometimes they jump on Google trying to make an extra buck advertising our product and we get knocked off.  Affiliates advertising against us on Google is a violation of our affiliate marketing terms however tracking the affiliates down and requesting that they remove their links can take hours and sometimes days.  During that time, it’s a major loss of revenue for our company.  It’s scary that Google has that power.

I’ve been on the waitlist for an account executive at Google and I’m staill waiting – it’s been over a year.  I would think that spending a million bucks a year with them would get me a direct phone number to somebody that can make a decision at Google – hasn’t happened yet.  It’s frustrating that with current market conditions their not trying a bit harder to satisfy their customers.

If anybody has any advice on how to expedited the process of getting a Google Adwords account executive, please let me know.