7 AdWords Alternatives That Failed, Except For One

You know all those blog posts about increasing AdWords conversion rates 572%, getting on Product Hunt 4 times in one day, and securing VC funding by hiring a sign spinner?

This isn’t one of them.

I had hopes of writing one, but what we did instead was a freaking mess.

Well, almost.

As a newborn AdWords focused agency, we wanted to use some other PPC channels to grow our email list and clientele.

Pretty ironic, right?

Now, you may be one of the very few advertisers who have plateaued their success on AdWords and just can’t squeeze any more profit out of the largest ad network in the world.

If so, you’re about as rare as the Taylor Swift “pegacorn.”

A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Oct 31, 2014 at 4:49am PDT

For those of you who have no idea what a pegacorn is, it’s a pegasus and unicorn mix.

Yes, they are very rare indeed.

But this post isn’t about AdWords. It’s about the other avenues you can use to drive more leads, conversions, and sales to grow your business; hopefully, by an extra 572%.

The AdWords alternatives we’re going to cover today aren’t exactly search engines. In fact, they’re more like AdWords display network alternatives that get results through demographic targeting.

See, we didn’t want to use the alternatives that people have already talked about. We wanted to seek out some new ad channels that haven’t been written about that much.

Facebook was obvious, so we didn’t want to do that.

Bing Ads was obvious, so we crossed that one out.

In this post, we’re not going to just be looking at 7 AdWords alternatives, but what we did to fail, so you can learn from our mistakes.

Let’s get started.

Picking Our Lead Magnet

As with anything marketing, if your offer is crap, then no beautifully designed landing page can save you.

We knew we had to create a lead magnet that would get people excited, and if we’re smart, a lead magnet that hadn’t been created before.

Throughout my years of doing AdWords, I’ve always been asked the question: “What can we do to get more phone leads?”

Since there hasn’t been a lot written on the topic, I thought that was a brilliant idea.

So, we created a guide on how to generate more phone leads with AdWords and Conversion Rate Optimization.

It ended up being 60 pages long, with 32 different ideas on AdWords and conversion optimization.

So, once we had our guide done, we needed to create a landing page.

We studied other guide/ebook landing pages and also read up on Eric Sloan’s “8 Examples of What Not to Do On Your Ebook Landing Page“.

We eventually ended up with this masterpiece of a landing page: http://grow.klientboost.com/get-more-phone-leads/.

Finding a Partner and Upsetting a Few People

With the guide and landing page done, we knew we could make it even more successful if we found a bigger company/partner to help with the promotion.

Since the guide is about generating more phone leads, what better company than a call tracking analytics solution?

In the PPC industry, call tracking has become more and more popular in order to understand which keywords, ads, and placements are making the phone ring.

So, I did what anyone else would do, and got a little ahead of myself.

I started reaching out to all the well-known call tracking companies, at the same time.

It was a huge mistake.

Companies like CallRail, DialogTech (formerly IfByPhone), Invoca, CallTrackingMetrics, Marchex, CallSource, and Century Interactive all got an email from us with a custom made image like this:

Since we’re a small and new company, we didn’t think anyone would say yes.

But, everyone said yes.

We eventually looked at employee counts and funding numbers on CrunchBase to decide who we should partner with.

It wasn’t an easy decision, but we hit it off really well with Invoca and found out they were a nearby company based in Santa Barbara, CA. They also sport some serious clients (which we’ll talk about later).

With the guide done, the landing page done, and the partner done, it was on to the AdWords alternatives:

#1 – Reddit Ads

Reddit has a very engaged and smart community of visitors, but their ad platform is horrible.

Within it, you get to decide which subreddits you want to target (which are smaller, more niche community pages that revolve around certain topics).

For our guide, we decided to target the subreddits of /PPC and /AdWords, but quickly realized that all ad slots were filled for the next three months.

Since Reddit allows only one ad spot per subreddit, the space quickly gets crowded.

We opted for the subreddits of /Advertising and /AdOps.

The results we’re pretty bleak:

We got 43 visitors and 2 guide downloads for a total of $51.14. That’s a $25.57 CPA.

We would’ve spent more if we’d had the chance to target the subreddits that were more relevant to our guide, but it’s hard to do when Reddit doesn’t tell you which days are available or open to advertise.

Now, that doesn’t mean that Reddit ads won’t work for you.

There are some (although few) examples out there of people who’ve successfully used Reddit ads to drive sales and conversions. One who sticks out is Ryan Luedecke.

He catapulted his beef jerky business and made $2,200 in sales from a $400 investment.

The story got shared quite a bit, and after reading what he did, it became apparent that what we were doing with our guide might not ever work if we didn’t get in front of the right audience.

As I mentioned earlier, Redditors are some super clever folks. They can’t stand self-promotion. Reddit ads seem to work the best when they’re not ads at all, but actual helpful content.

We moved on to the next one:

#2 – Yahoo! Gemini Ads

Yahoo! Gemini is Yahoo!’s answer to native advertising.

We’ve had some luck with this platform for some of our clients, so we thought it would be a sure thing for us.

We got 281 visitors and 2 guide downloads for a total of $212.24. That’s a $106.12 CPA.

Within the Gemini platform, you can set your campaign around one of three goals:

• Visit my website
• Know my brand
• Download my app

We chose “Visit my website” and created an ad we wanted to run.

Then we got to choose the targeting method and opted for People interested in > Business Services > Business Services.

And just to make sure we had a little control, we threw in some keywords for people searching for:

So, what happened?

Yahoo! Gemini ads are not the most targeted ads and, just like Reddit Ads, seem to work best when they fit within the topics on the page being covered.

Obviously, the keyword intent from the Google AdWords search network isn’t the same as this platform’s.

But, with banner blindness doing nothing but increasing, native advertising like the Gemini platform is set to continue to see growth.

Here’s an example of what a Yahoo! Gemini ad looks like

The third time was the charm:

#3 – Twitter Ads

Okay, so we struck out twice, but we were only $263.38 in.

Next up was Twitter ads and, boy, we had a much better experience.

We got 297 visitors and 49 guide downloads for a total of $198.15. That’s a $4.04 CPA.

So, what happened?

What we found was that the Twitter audience was much more engaging and interested in the problem we were helping them solve.

We targeted followers of notable blogs like Unbounce, KISSmetrics, and competitor AdWords agencies. We found that most of the downloads came from other agencies, not client prospects.

So, even though we had a lower CPA, we couldn’t convert those acquisitions into customers, just maybe some new fans.

But, don’t let that stop you.

Twitter ads have been growing in popularity, and it’s a killer ad platform when you focus on leading your ads with education and value.

That’s a steady increase in interest

You’ll also find no shortage of case studies and in-depth posts on how to drive conversions with Twitter.

This is one of the better AdWords alternatives out there.

What was next?

#4 – BuySellAds

Okay, so we were beginning to see a trend as to why our guide wasn’t performing as well as we’d hoped (we’ll cover that at the end). But, that wasn’t going to stop us from continuing our experimentation.

Next up was the media buying platform of BuySellAds.

BuySellAds allows you to buy impressions on a cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) bidding basis from high-quality publisher sites that don’t want to be cheaper out from the Google AdSense network.

Since, at this point, we understood that most of our downloads came from marketing agency people, we thought the next perfect targeting would be the Search Engine Journal (SEJ).

We got 321 visitors and 2 guide downloads for a total of $240. That’s a $120 CPA.

It was far from our Twitter ads success earlier.

Here’s a look at the internal BuySellAds dashboard and the low click-through rate:

Now, the cool thing about BuySellAds is that you have a ton of options when it comes to “thought-leading” type of sites.

The downside is that you buy a high-priced, fixed number of impressions that usually work best with low friction/valuable content that gets people into your marketing funnel really early.

Most likely, those people are not in “ready-to-buy” mode.

Something to keep in mind as you’re paying via CPM is to select ad spots that are above the fold.

If not, you stand the chance of racking up your impressions with even fewer people actually seeing your ad.

#5 – StumbleUpon Ads

StumbleUpon is such a fun and awesome site for mindless swiping.

Kind of like Tinder, but for whatever topic you’re into.

The great thing about StumbleUpon ads is that you can really get some high volume visitors and, if you’re lucky, some great engagement.

We got 528 visitors and 5 guide downloads for a total of $100. That’s a $20 CPA.

But, we just didn’t see that engagement.

In fact, the average time on site from a StumbleUpon visit wasn’t even one second.

It was less than one second.

I didn’t even know Google Analytics could be that rude

Was it because our landing page was that boring or because the first impression was that bad?

Or, was it because we shouldn’t expect to use StumbleUpon ads as a conversion tool, but as more of a blog discovery tool, as this KISSmetrics article suggests.

#6 – LinkedIn

Okay, by this time, we had definitely realized that we might have picked a guide topic that was a little too niche.

But, to give it one last go, we headed over to LinkedIn and tried to target the people who would love more phone leads – sales people.

We got 22 visitors and 5 guide downloads for a total of $113.07. That’s a $22.61 CPA.

Okay, not that bad, but definitely not sustainable either.

Even though the campaign ran for only about a week, we saw decent CTRs of 0.521%, which is pretty high for LinkedIn. Still, it just didn’t make sense to keep running as the cost per click was around $7.54.

So, it was on to the best AdWords alternative of them all:

#7 – Partner Promotion

Remember that I mistakenly asked all the call tracking analytics companies to join forces with us at the same time? And that we ended up going with Invoca?

Well, not only did we create an awesome partnership that could continue to grow in the future, but Invoca sent out our 60-page guide to their entire email list.

Results?

We got 774 visitors and 343 guide downloads for a total of $0. That’s a $0 CPA.

Invoca sent almost 400 downloads to recipients who included marketing department people from companies like PayPal and Allstate Insurance. Those people got on our email lists and are still there, interacting with our emails and our blog posts.

We also secured a speaker for our #CRODay meetup that we held at our office in Costa Mesa, CA.

Who knows what the future will hold.

What We’d Do Differently Next Time

We quickly learned not to create a lead magnet that fits a narrow audience.

We could’ve created a much beefier guide on AdWords as a whole or some unknown landing page hacks that would appeal to a broader audience.

Instead, we took the route of specificity and didn’t get as many downloads as we had hoped.

Also, because we were so aggressive with so many different AdWords alternatives, we didn’t prepare to create additional unique ad copy or imagery to go with every channel.

I’m sure we could have gotten much better results through iterative testing and constant tweaking.

Conclusion

All together, we got 2266 visitors and 408 guide downloads for a total of $914.60. That’s a $2.24 CPA.

Since many people want to learn something brand new, make sure your content/guide tries to accomplish that, or paints old information in a different way.

Take these AdWords alternatives with a grain of salt and understand that each channel takes time to perfect.

Don’t test the depth of the river with two feet.

About the Author: Johnathan Dane is the founder of KlientBoost, a California based PPC agency that’s on a mission to grow companies. He’s been interviewed by Google and has a German Shorthaired Pointer named Tanner. Connect with him on Twitter.

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Mastering LinkedIn, The Personal Branding Epicenter of the Internet

LinkedIn enters into every conversation I have about personal branding.

It comes up in the daily conversations I have about content marketing and new media advertising. And whenever I’m tasked with helping people get started with social media marketing, the discussion always includes LinkedIn.

There has never been a more powerful business networking tool than LinkedIn. Everything that fuels the ascent of your personal brand lives and breathes on the network. It’s the online center for meeting people, sharing content, and creating and building business relationships.

If you’re a LinkedIn slacker, that is, you have a presence, but are not active on the network, the following facts may give you the nudge you need:

• LinkedIn has more than 350 million users from 200+ countries.
• B2B marketers rate LinkedIn the top social media for delivering B2B content and most effective for generating leads.
• 40% of LinkedIn members check in daily.

Even if you enjoy other social media more, I want you to understand LinkedIn must be a part of your media mix. To help you make the most of LinkedIn, I’m going to walk you through best practices for developing your personal brand with the many opportunities the network offers.

You need to rock your profile

You’ll shoot yourself in the foot if you rush through the process of creating a profile. More so than on other social media, your profile will be visited and read.

Because the personal brand is so central to the LinkedIn environment, you’re given a big and flexible canvas on which to paint a picture of yourself. Put some effort, thought and creativity into rocking your public profile top to bottom.

• A professional headline — Just below your name you’re given up to 120 characters to populate your “headline” field. Consider beginning with a tagline to make a first impression. Next, enter a healthy dose of keywords describing yourself and your areas of expertise. You want to be found via relevant searches. Try to showcase your strengths without being pretentious.
• Photo — Your profile is 11X more likely to be viewed if it includes a photo. Your photo should be a high quality headshot. Look into the lens to make eye contact and smile. Weirdness and creativity will not serve you well here.
• Background — LinkedIn allows you to upload a background image to serve as your “cover photo.” Choose an image that reflects well on your brand.
• Contact info — This section asks for the usual suspects, but be aware you can override some of the defaults as you like. For instance, you can edit the standard links with the name of your blog and website.
• URL — LinkedIn issues you an impossibly long and anonymous URL, but it’s easy to customize it with your name, which makes it much easier to remember and share.
• Summary — Use the summary section to tell your story as you would on an “about” page. Include keywords for search purposes, but compose your summary in a warm way aiming to answer basic questions about your skills and inspiring visitors to keep reading.
• Showcase your work — LinkedIn makes it easy to showcase your work via its integration with SlideShare. Upload the media of your choice to SlideShare and choose “Add to LinkedIn profile.”
• Experience — Populate the fields in the experience section with your work history to present your credentials as you would in a resume.
• Add media — In both the experience and education sections you can display documents, photos, links, presentations, or videos. Using a video will help make your profile stand out.
• Skills and endorsements — This section allows you to select your skills and present endorsements given to you from LinkedIn members. Listing your skills gives members a 13X boost in profile views.

A lot of people feel the endorsements section is lightweight, but I believe when the endorsements begin piling up it helps support your personal brand with a credibility boost.

• Recommendations – Written testimonials are presented here, which are even more powerful than endorsements.
• Additional information and summary elements — There’s a crazy long list of optional sections you can add to your profile: groups, certifications, publications, projects, honors, organizations and more. Publish the things you feel are credentials and/or conversation starters and order them as you like.

When you have your profile rocking the way a personal brander should, you can promote it by snagging a LinkedIn badge and placing it on your blog and website.

The name LinkedIn suggests building relationships

Far too many think of LinkedIn strictly as a place where you find a job or recruiters find you. While employment’s a big part of the LinkedIn picture, when it comes to professional development, there’s very little you can’t find on LinkedIn.

In addition to being the network for building your personal brand, LinkedIn’s an ideal place to promote your content, generate leads, find partnership opportunities, conduct research and recruit.

You accomplish all of the above by connecting with LinkedIn members. Let’s look at how it’s done.

Grow your network—Access the “people you may know” section by searching for it. (Features get moved around often.) LinkedIn does a scary good job of populating the list with, you guessed it, people you may know. Here, you’ll find their faces, titles and companies.

You can send an automatic invitation with a single click on “connect.”

If you’ve imported your email contacts list via “add connections,” LinkedIn shows you their email address and the option to send an invitation by clicking “add to network.”

Other options include:

1. Run an advanced people search.
2. Find alumni.
3. Ask for introductions to the people LinkedIn identifies as second degree connections.

Of course, in your travels across the network you’ll also come across people you’d like to connect with. Making a connection request invokes a default email message, which reads “I’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn.” You can—and should—write a more interesting greeting if you’d like to make a memorable first impression.

Join groups — One of the platform’s most useful features is LinkedIn Groups. There are millions of groups catering to all business interests. Groups generally exist to share content and ideas. They also provide another way to identify and make meaningful connections.

Use keyword searches to get started finding relevant groups. The results will give you some insights into the group’s charter and also indicate its size by member count. You may also want to examine the profiles of your connections, prospects and clients to see which groups they participate in.

You can join up to 50 groups with a free account. Some will require approval from the group’s moderator. Over time, you’ll find it more meaningful to focus on a small number of active and interesting groups, however you won’t know until you sign-up.

You also have the option to start your own groups, public or private. Creating a group is a cinch, but understand that managing a group takes a fair amount of time.

Fair warning: You’ll receive a barrage of email if you don’t tinker with your email preferences. This screen shot shows you the options for group email settings.

Deliver valuable content

Your quest to develop a strong personal brand calls for developing and sharing original content as well as curating additional content you believe serves the interests of your connections.

In recent years, through both the development of new features and the integration of services LinkedIn has added by way of acquisitions, the network has become a giant content marketing hub for individuals and companies.

Share your thoughts — As is the case with all social networks, you need to contribute to the conversation. On your LinkedIn home page, “share an update” presents a blank field in which you can write your thoughts, upload a photo, and paste a link if you choose. LinkedIn doesn’t yet offer the option to share video this way.

A pull-down menu allows you to share your update publicly, strictly with your connections, and via Twitter. Of course, if you elect to share via Twittter, your update will be limited to Twitter’s 140-characters restriction.

If you’d like to notify a LinkedIn member you’ve mentioned him or her in an update, enter @, followed by the name. The feature also works to mention companies.

Start a group discussion — You start discussions within your groups by giving your comment a title and then writing details, which you can designate as “general,” “job” or “promotion.” You cannot add media types here. In some cases, you can include links, however some group moderators discourage or prohibit it.

Link to a blog post, article, ebook, presentation, or whatever is relevant to the discussion you’re starting. Asking questions tends to be the best way to invoke a meaningful discussion. Ask a great question and you may inspire hundreds of responses from members.

Stay tuned-in because your question is likely to beget additional questions. Often, healthy debates follow and you’ll likely want to express your point of view.

Go one-on-one — In the course of your updates and discussions you’re likely to want to engage individually. LinkedIn enables you to do so via LinkedIn email. If you’re looking to nurture a “pen pal” relationship into something more, this is how it’s done.

Publish blog posts — In 2014, LinkedIn took a bold step toward becoming a content marketing hub by introducing its own publishing platform. I was offered the opportunity to join its first-round pilot and jumped in.

One of the first posts I contributed was about the platform itself and became a hit (relatively speaking). Read “I Pledge Allegiance to the New LinkedIn Publishing Platform (For Now)” to get my detailed thoughts. I’m not as bullish now as I was then, however I do believe:

1. LinkedIn has created the easiest blog publishing platform anywhere. It’s very intuitive and nice looking too.
2. Publishing a blog post—of any length—on LinkedIn is a wonderful opportunity to reach your ideal audience and support your personal brand.

The reason I’m slightly less excited about the platform today is being that it’s now open to all members, there are tons of posts published every day. As such, quality is all over the map and it’s more difficult to stand out and get the shares required to reach thousands of readers.

That said, on any given day, a great post stands the chance of getting picked up by LinkedIn’s personalized online magazine, “Pulse,” which often does find a large audience and can inspire oodles of shares and comments.

LinkedIn’s loaded with content

SlideShare

In 2012, LinkedIn acquired SlideShare, the world’s largest community for sharing presentations and other professional content. SlideShare allows you to post presentations, infographics, documents, videos, and PDFs. SlideShare boasts 60 million unique visitors a month.

I’m a big fan of SlideShare and consider it a significant element of my personal branding efforts. I publish content there often and have contributed to its blog numerous times.

In 2014, SlideShare launched a “Keynote Author” (top influencers) section giving the designation to top contributors and I’m thrilled to have been selected.

SlideShare is integrated with LinkedIn making it easy for you to present your SlideShare content on your profile page. Use the feature to showcase your portfolio or any type of content that supports your personal brand.

LinkedIn Pulse

In 2013, LinkedIn Today became Pulse (as a result of an acquisition). LinkedIn Pulse delivers professional news tailored to your interests. It’s home to the robust “LinkedINfluencers” blog, which features exclusive posts from hundreds of carefully selected industry leaders across many topics. The news aggregator is available on the LinkedIn site and via smartphone apps.

Another level of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is largely free. However, the company does offer paid services. If you join as free member, you’ll learn of the paid options soon enough. LinkedIn is very good—and aggressive — at promoting its premium services.

LinkedIn Premium accounts — You’ll do fine developing your personal brand on LinkedIn without investing in paid services, however you should be aware premium accounts are offered. The premium offering provides a number of value-added services, some of them useful to power users.

Premium accounts are available to general users and there are specific offerings for recruiters, job seekers and sales professionals.

LinkedIn analytics — The free analytics provided by LinkedIn to individual members are a far cry from deep, however they will reveal people who have viewed your profile, how you rank among your connections and some additional insights.

Some of the free analytics are note-worthy. I found it interesting LinkedIn helps you understand the demographics of your readers.

LinkedIn advertising — LinkedIn’s advertising options are many. The programs offer powerful B2B targeting features to reach the audience you choose among its nearly 350 million members.

If you’d like to learn more about expanding your reach on LinkedIn and using its targeted ad programs, I highly recommend you download The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn, authored by my friend Jason Miller of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions.

Miller’s guide is packed with tips from marketing leaders as well as insights from the LinkedIn marketing team.

LinkedIn company pages — LinkedIn company pages are a smart play for social media marketers. With their many features, company pages can help you engage followers with news and content and take advantage of lead generation opportunities. The analytics provided for company pages are more robust.

Interested in learning more? 5 LinkedIn Company Page Tips to Enhance Your Marketing is an informative post from Jason Miller on Social Media Examiner.

Personal branding

Many credit author Tom Peters for creating the term “personal branding” in The Brand Called You, an article he wrote for Fast Company magazine in 1997. In it he wrote:

“The key to any personal branding campaign is ‘word-of-mouth marketing.’ Your network of friends, colleagues, clients, and customers is the most important marketing vehicle you’ve got; what they say about you and your contributions is what the market will ultimately gauge as the value of your brand. So the big trick to building your brand is to find ways to nurture your network of colleagues — consciously.”

I suspect if Peters were to update the article today he’d say your involvement on LinkedIn is absolutely critical to your success.

About the Author: Barry Feldman operates Feldman Creative and provides clients content marketing strategies that rock and creative that rolls. Barry has recently been named a Top 40 Digital Strategist by Online Marketing Institute and one of 25 Social Media Marketing Experts You Need to Know by LinkedIn. Visit Feldman Creative and his blog, The Point.