This Week in Relevance

Welcome to the inaugural issue of This Week in Relevance brought to you by DataPop, a Los Angeles based startup seeking to execute on the vision of “right message every time.” We launched this blog because we feel very passionately about ad relevance and want to educate the community as well as ourselves on a topic that continues to grow in importance across the digital advertising world.

Know Your Searchers
Search Engine Land’s PPC Academy Column offers up some tips & tricks for ppc creative writing. Particularly interesting for those focused on relevancy, the suggestion to tailor creative to the perceived intent of the searcher:

“If they’re just looking for information, your ad should reflect that—you’ll have a quite different ad for people ready to buy and simply browsing for the best”

Looking at every keyword in your campaign as a unique target customer will help drive messaging that actually resonates.

Answering one of SEM’s Oldest Questions with Relevance
Razorfish’s Professional Ranker offers some advice to those aiming to answer one of paid search’s oldest questions: How does one achieve higher click volume, while simultaneously decreasing CPCs? The answer, of course, includes a tip of the hat to copy testing and sound keyword-ad categorization.

Managing an Efficient Content Network Campaign
While content traffic network can certainly be valuable, the insights and levers for managing campaigns differ considerably from search. PPC Hero offer some great ideas on how to structure relevant – content network specific – ad groups and filter domains & individual URLs where Google’s network algorithm is not matching your ad groups to relevant publisher content.

The Media Post’s Raw Blog with an early perspective on Twitter’s Promoted Tweets program.
For a bit more color, Twitter details their initial thoughts on “Resonance” and how it does/will impact cost for advertisers in their ad platform FAQ. Whatever you want to call it, delivering high quality ad experiences is becoming a requirement to participate and perform in key marketplaces.

Ranking Ads with Little or No Click History
Looking to pair some light reading on relevance modeling and classification algorithms with your morning espresso? If so, “Improving Ad Relevance in Sponsored Search” prepared for the 2010 WSDM conference by the Yahoo! Labs team is for you. The paper details many of the data points and formulas that influence how the Yahoo! sponsored search platform determines ad relevancy. Section 5.3, “Ranking ads with low click history” (page 365) may be of particular interest to those managing long tail campaigns and/or frequently testing new creative constructions – specifically that the relationship between query and display url or query and ad title is used when no click history is available.