Google requires prospective partners to pass a series of specialized tests that cover fundamental Adwords topics (including campaign development, effective PPC campaign architecture, bid management and quality score), as well as more advanced strategies like effective video advertising, display banner & interactive ad campaigns, and advanced conversion tracking. In addition to passing the tests, a successful company must have managed at least $10,000 in advertising over the past 90 days.

We’ve been using Adwords since them good ol’ days of 25¢ keyword bids, and now manage Display and Search campaigns for clients using Google, Facebook and Bing. It was great to brush up on the latest Adwords tools and techniques as we prepped for the tests — the advertising ecosystem is changing faster than ever, and we’re dedicated to ensuring our clients have quick access to expert advice and assistance.

The new site, HummelGifts.com, offers a wide range of gifts and collectible items from coffee mugs and holiday plates to calendars and housewares, each featuring a reproduction of the original M.I. Hummel artwork.

The emphasis is on the original artwork; you won’t find any porcelain figurines here (they’re on eBay, which currently lists over 6,000 Hummel figurines). The initial licensed product offering on HummelGifts.com will soon be growing substantially, as the site steps into product personalization later this year.

We built this niche-tageted ecommerce site web site on the new Magento Go hosted platform, providing customized brand development, theme design, product and catalog management, SEO and third-party integrations. We’re also working with some personalization software people to integrate a seamless online experience. As that goes live, we’ll provide updates here.

This week, we’ve launched the brand new web site for the Long Trail School in Dorset, Vermont.

With less than 200 students from grades 6-12, this school offers an academically robust curriculum on 14 acres nestled in the foothills of the Taconics. Long Trail is the first school in the state to receive accreditation by the respected International Baccalaureate program. Its academic strengths are focused, the results are impressive. This from Wikipedia:

Class sizes currently average 8-12 students, though classes with only a single student are not unheard of at Long Trail. Academic standards are high by comparison to other local schools, with test scores consistently above state and local averages. Even after offering IB courses, Long Trail continues to offer some Advanced Placement classes, many independent study opportunities and student-demanded classes.

The new site is a dramatic shift from the previous site. A visual focus on the campus serves as a metaphor for the educational community — expansive and intimate at the same time — and serves as an environment for the beautiful new collection of community portraits we commissioned from award-winning photographer Les Jorgensen. (Les’ work will be featured in an upcoming limited edition book that tells the stories of a diverse group of Long Trail students, staff and faculty.) The site’s full-screen campus imagery will change throughout the year, to reflect the natural beauty of the school throughout Vermont’s four seasons.

We’ve also included a streamlined navigation, new and improved search, and updated content in many areas. This completes the first phase in a comprehensive approach to enhance the school’s online existence; additional integrations and site improvements will be added over the coming months.

The new site was built on Long Trail’s existing WordPress platform, which allows the school to reuse a number of still-relevant digital assets and leverages the staff’s expertise in operating the back end. We customized a theme from Elegant Themes — we were impressed with their solid code base and knowledgable support team — and worked closely with the LTS team to identify user personas, streamline content, update branding and improve user experience.

As is often the case in projects of this scope, the quality of the team had a tremendous influence on the positive outcome of the new site. Their shared vision and commitment to quality helped make the design and development process as enjoyable as the end result.

There’s a light-hearted quality to the simple illustrations that highlight a wide range of life’s “crappier” moments, from painful (mountain bike face plant) to annoying (broken high heels, your golf game, poorly trained pets…), with a touch of wryness on the side (“Out of Merlot. Life is Crap.”).

Keeping wth the brand’s tagline — “Life is Crap, and Laughter is the Cure!” — every piece is designed to provoke a smile, and reminds us keep it all in perspective.

And the message resonates. Throughout the current slow economic period, the brand’s relevance and popularity has been on the rise. After a couple years of consistent growth in online and retail sales, the company knew it had outgrown its existing ecommerce web site — an old WordPress-powered front end tied to a separate third-party cart.

We redesigned the site and launched this spring on a new platform. The new site, built on the BigCommerce platform, sports an updated interface, streamlined taxonomy, support for multiple brands, fully integrated ecommerce and enhanced email capabilities. With a number of new features designed to improve user experience and make shopping easier, it’s no surprise to see user engagement take a dramatic jump:

• average time on site is up over 50%,
• average pageviews have doubled,
• and the bounce rate is down by half.

The way I see it, this has gotta be our crappiest project yet. And I couldn’t be happier.

The company is well named. Over the years, they’ve developed an immense collection of sconces, lamps, lanterns and chandeliers, drawn from originals in private collections, historic buildings, antique dealers and museums. From design to construction, every fixture has been invested with exacting attention to detail.

Their latest print ad campaign is now running in lifestyle and housing magazines, including Vermont Magazine, Old House Interiors, and New England Home. You can view the new advertising design here or on Flickr, and see their entire product selection online.

]]> http://davelindberg.com/in-print-early-american-lighting-from-authentic-designs/feed/ 0 http://davelindberg.com/optimize-adwords-for-instant-savings/ http://davelindberg.com/optimize-adwords-for-instant-savings/#comments Fri, 08 Oct 2010 20:04:23 +0000 Dave http://davelindberg.com/word/?p=261 It’s easy enough to find good information on how to improve the Quality Score of your paid search keywords. Optimizing your account according to industry best practices can improve your click rates, traffic, and conversions. But most dramatic is the speed and impact a higher QS will have on decreasing your ad costs.

The changes we recently made to a client’s Adwords campaign illustrates just how big the difference can be. Once we identified the high-value products and which keywords best expressed an intent to purchase, it was pretty straight forward to make sure that related keywords, optimized ads and relevant landing pages were all organized into easily managed ad groups.

Watch the Prices Drop

The fun part was seeing the immediate effect that improving Quality Score had on the first-page bid costs. Even though there was nothing earth-shattering in the approach, average QS for high-value broad match keywords jumped from 1/10 (lowest rating) to 7/10 (way better); while click prices dropped by 87% across the campaign.

While there’s still some room for improvement, much of that relates to landing page quality. We’ll work on that next, but won’t enjoy the immediate positive feedback we got from reorganizing the account. Google’s admission that they’re not nearly as robust when it comes to updating landing page quality falls within the standard caveat of SEO:

“Significant changes improving the relevance and quality of your landing pages should impact your keywords Quality Score over the next several months. You probably won’t see an impact within the first few days.”

Obviously, not every marketing effort provides such immediate gratification. But if it’s been a while since you’ve taken a close look at your Quality Scores, here’s an opportunity to instill some fast change.

Official Support for Broader Broadband

The politicians and executives at the front of the room spoke about broadband’s vital role in economic growth: without access, education reform is crippled, growth in tourism stumbles, and businesses simply won’t consider relocating to an area that’s lacking basic digital infrastructure.

We heard that 17 countries worldwide provide faster overall broadband speed than the US, and Vermont trails 34 states that provide greater broadband access to their citizens.

They laid out VTEL’s 4-part plan to scale reliable service throughout the state.

1. increasing the fiber network directly to tens of thousands of businesses and homes within the current VTEL service network area
2. providing direct fiber access to core educational, municipal and civic institutions throughout the state
3. building a wireless 4G/LTE network to cover all areas of the state whose current access is spotty or nonexistent
4. developing a community outreach program at the grass roots level to help communities leverage the new opportunities

Touting the unmatched level of federal investment in the state, a commitment to affordability, and the vision that Vermont will become the first rural state to connect all its citizens, all officials were unified in their support of the new program that’ll provide “full broadband to all homes in three years.”

A Different Type of Customer

But once the speeches were done and the time came for audience Q&A, another view emerged strong and clear.

One after another, questions came from Vermonters who are frustrated by being denied the opportunity to engage in our current online social transformation. Individuals, small business owners, educators and more – all united by the restricted access to the web – stood up and spoke out.

VTEL has an impressive record of customer satisfaction, but now finds itself with a large segment of its customer base who (a) didn’t make the personal choice to move their business to the company, (b) are receiving incomplete or inaccurate information from various online sources, and (c) don’t have a long-term history with the company and its historic level of customer service. Since these people are in “unserved or underserved” areas, many are slated to receive wireless network over the next 3 years.

Again and again, we heard the same basic questions:

• Will the 4G/LTE network be robust enough to handle the traffic and demand?
• How well will wireless work in Vermont’s mountainous topography?
• Where is my town on the list, and when can we expect to see service?

There’s even greater concern that the 4G solution won’t provide sufficient bandwidth to handle online video for network subscribers. This is definitely a point of friction, since 90 percent of consumer traffic will be video by 2013.

With a two-tiered solution to providing statewide broadband access, VTEL and the US Rural Utilities Service have come up with a plan which, while improving the situation for all, still has the potential to leave a large percentage of the state underserved at the project’s end.

Even though as VTEL CEO Michel Guite pointed out, “LTE stands for Long Term Evolution” and has the strongest potential for growing over time to meet the increasing network demands, the perception of those in underserved areas of Vermont seems to be one of unreliable and insufficient access for years to come.

An Unmatched Opportunity to Engage

This is much more than a technical project; without an effective effort to involve every stakeholder in a constructive and informative discussion, the company may risk seeing its long-term strategy weakened. How VTEL decides to engage with its increasingly diverse customer base will be a critical component of success.

Bernie Sanders made it clear at the meeting’s outset that a focus on transparency and accountability will be a key component throughout the life of the project. VTEL has been given an immense opportunity to create a fundamental difference in the state’s infrastructure and economy. Let’s hope their commitment to providing open online communications is up to the job.

Just a quick heads up, Senator Bernie Sanders is hosting a state-wide Town Meeting on the Broadband in Vermont initiative on Saturday, September 25 at 10:am.

This will be the first opportunity for most of us to hear VTEL President Michel Guite and Jonathan Adelstein of the USDA Rural Utilities Service discuss VTEL’s plan to bring wireless, high-speed broadband to all of Vermont.

Bernie sums it up well in his press release:

“…the potential impact of the VTel project is enormous. It will help improve our schools and hospitals, and it will allow Vermont businesses to be more economically competitive in the 21st century. It will also provide access for thousands of Vermonters who are currently cut off from valuable information and communication opportunities. Further, it will stimulate our economy by creating hundreds of new jobs during the development phase.”

The meeting takes place at Vermont Technical College’s Judd Hall in Randolph (see map). Sanders’ office has made it easy to RSVP and spread the word via Facebook.

Planning to attend? Let me know and I’ll see you there.

Last week, the USDA awarded a $116 million broadband stimulus grant to Vermontel’s Wireless Open World (WOW) initiative. And in late July, the Vermont Telecommunications Authority received an additional $33.4 million in federal dollars to extend Vermont’s existing fiber optic network. That’s a huge amount of funding granted in a very short period — a game changer by any definition of the term.

How to Please All of the People All of the Time

One hundred fourteen thousand people — almost 19% of the population — cannot access broadband in their homes. Of the 251 cities & towns in the state of Vermont, 41 have less than 10% broadband coverage. A look at the VCGI’s Broadband availability map shows that most towns are currently under-served, and if the map’s overly optimistic assessment of towns in the Mettawee Valley is consistent with their conclusions about the rest of the state, we’re in really deep trouble.

Vermontel plans to deliver broadband to the 114,000 unserved homes and businesses via WOW — that’s about a quarter of all households in the state. Through the VTA grant, Sovernet will build a 773-mile fiber optic backbone running the length of the state, connecting 342 community institutions in Rutland, Bennington, Windham, Windsor, Orange, Washington, and Caledonia Counties. Working from this newly extended backbone, it’ll cost substantially less to deliver door-to-door broadband.

In Business, Nothing Succeeds like Access

For Vermont businesses, the opportunities are looming large for those with the right carrier. The new network will operate via 4G/LTE (Long Term Evolution) wireless broadband. This is the next-generation broadband format that’s already been adopted by Verizon and AT&T; Sprint and Clearwire are betting on the similar but incompatible 4G/WiMax.

With the pending availability of highspeed data access regardless of location, innovative small businesses throughout the state can begin now to leverage the web more fully. Strategies need to be rethought. Limitations must be reexamined. Who (and where) will your customers be? How (and why) will they want to do business with you, when the entire world is a click away? Clearly, the people who start the hard work now will be the ones who create success from access.

The marketer was concerned that the site’s usability was now impaired, that revenue from organic traffic would suffer. Meanwhile, her efforts to voice these concerns were falling on ears that cherished their own creative ideas over the input from other stakeholders. Lacking a clearly defined common understanding of the website goals, people were measuring success with different rulers.

In her case, the creative team was an outsourced agency, although this scenario can play out just as easily between inhouse departments. In either case, bringing all team members to a shared set of goals is the only way to ensure that everyone is pushing in the same direction. Clearly defined KPIs have a lot of value here.

Once the site’s key metrics are defined, communicated, discussed and reviewed, every member of the team needs to be able to understand how their work has an impact on these goals. The diversity of training, background and responsibility that comprises most working ecommerce groups brings with it the potential for a variety of perspectives on how these goals should be measured. But by distributing relevant analytics data to all members of the team, and providing everyone with the tools to objectively measure the results of their own efforts against the larger site goals, you’ll see your group begin to function with greater cohesiveness.

As goals, concepts, strategies, successes and stumbles are shared across silos, the feedback loops grow successively richer and more valuable. Copywriters start identifying the elements of a consistently strong subject line. Designers can quickly test whether a hyperlink style revision works as good as it looks. In fact, given access to good analytic data, many creative teams become downright obsessive on multivariate testing.

Just as creativity is a requisite skill in any successful marketer, you’ll find keen analytical minds in your creative department. By giving everyone an opportunity to assess their work objectively, the creativity that should run rampant throughout your team is more easily focused on the bottom line.