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Advertisement Roundup

Since I work in marketing, advertisements catch my eye. Here are a couple of notable ones I've seen recently:

There's a noble intention in this Dell ad on Google AdWords: automated AdGroup creation and maintenance. Mechanically, it works great: the ad triggered on common searches for this SKU (like "CS70N HL10" and other replacements for the slash), the landing page was clean and featured only this product, etc. The ad text, though, really needs a personal touch.

Ads like this use replacement text, which inserts the user's query into the ad text if it fits the character limit. They probably settled on "Sku#" to save characters for the replacement, but I can't help but wonder if:

  1. It is worth it to save characters over the much more friendly "part #" or even "model #." I'd be really curious to see how those varients would test against "Sku#."
  2. The savings of automation are worth this formulaic ad text. Certainly hand crafted ads would pay for themselves for higher volume items, but where is the threshold?

Finding that threshold in situations like this through constant testing, rewrites, and tweaks is what makes online advertising exciting for me.

And now something just for fun:

Clearly, from the Bernie Madoff school of photography. "I'm so exclusive, I must be good!"

Comments? E-mail me at: "me" at this domain (adammarquis.com). Home