In the AdWords ad, description line 1 has traditionally contained the big benefit. The headline attracts the eye, description line 1 makes the promise, and description line 2 includes a feature and/or a call to action.

Now AdWords is experimenting with a new format for the ads that appear above the organic results: adding description line 1 to the headline.

In the AdWords blog, Google paints the difference this way:

Old:

New:

A New Description Line 1 Strategy?

If your ad consistently shows in the high-profile positions above the organic results, you need to keep an eye on the ad format for the next few weeks.

If Google includes your ad in the new format test, then you might want to rethink the way you use that first line of description. It’s now, essentially, part of the headline, and can be used to draw the eye towards your ad and away from others.

It’s impossible, of course, to give a “one size fits all” directive on the best way to do that. But in general, I’d think about using that first description line to point out the “point of difference benefit” (thanks, Dr. Glenn Livingston) between your ad and your competitors on the search results page.

So instead of “Find Exactly the Widgets You Need,” an advertiser might say, “Titanium Widgets only – No Brass.” or whatever else would make the prospect think, “This is the one.”

John Withers of The PPC Agency points out that if you want to take advantage of this new feature, make sure your description line 1 is a distinct sentence that ends with a period. Therefore, make sure your “point of difference benefit” is punctuated as a sentence, and does not run into line 2.

Request for Crowdsourced Feedback

Are you seeing this new ad format for your search results pages? If so, please share the keywords in the comments below.

Membership Has Its Privileges – Members Wanted

The Ring of Fire is my online coaching and networking club for AdWords users and professionals. It’s the first place I turn when I have questions. It’s where newbies post their ads and screen shots of the accounts and get advice from some of the highest paid AdWords consultants and managers on the planet.

The Ring includes monthly live coaching calls, a 24/7 forum, monthly interviews with experts, and most excellent networking opportunities.

The Ring costs $47 a month, which is ridiculously low for what amounts to personal coaching and consulting from me and others. Try it free for a month and see what you think…

If you run an ecommerce store that sells to consumers, you need to completely change the way you use AdWords and Bing during the holiday season.

Wanna know more?

Check out this free 40-minute webinar presented by Kristie McDonald. (Kristie is my partner and chief "Get-it-Done" Officer of The PPC Agency, and she ran her own ecommerce store selling radio controlled toys for several years. So she knows a lot of cool ways to optimize the gift-giving crowd.)

And if you're looking to outsource your AdWords campaigns because they're not performing well, or because Google has made things so darn complicated you're spending way too much time on AdWords, give us a holler and we'll see if we think we can help.

Jingle jingle!

Google loves "authority" web sites. Sites that provide valuable information and expertise, and don't just try to sell stuff.

And to show their love, Google will reward authority sites with high search engine rankings, and lower cost per click AdWords keywords.

Sound good?

If you're ready to be the authority in your industry, here are the five major characteristics of an Authority Web Site:

1. High Quality Content – good, useful stuff
2. Large Quantity of Content – lots of pages
3. High Frequency of Updates – so Google sees the site is always growing and staying current
4. User Friendly – with intuitive navigation and helpful links
5. Good Reputation – as determined by other authority sites linking to you

The easiest way to create your own Authority Web Site is by blogging. My entire askHowie site is constructed as a WordPress blog (it was free, except for some design of the header and some custom hand-holding, er, programming for special features).

If you're interested in attending a 3-part blogging webinar, which I haven't decided whether I'm going to offer or not, please reply as a comment below so I can get a sense of the amount and intensity of interest before I create the webinar.

Posted via email from askHowie

Peter Bregman is looking for case studies for his upcoming article in Harvard Business Review online.

He needs examples of small businesses that have gotten more business recently, preferably sales they took away from larger companies. He’s working on a theory of why smaller is better in this economic climate – increased trust, better relationships, higher moral, more control.

If you’d like to be featured in the article, post your story to comments. As much as you can, pinpoint the factors that led to your success.

If Peter selects your story, he’ll ask me for your email address so he can contact you directly. So your submission means you give me permission to share your email address with Peter.

Here’s a link to Peter’s page on the HBR site, so you can check him out.

I know he’s on a tight deadline, so don’t delay if you’d like to participate.

psu-google, originally uploaded by Howie Jacobson.

Here I am wearing the t-shirt sent to me by Jim Jansen’s AdWords Challenge class at Penn State. I tele-lectured for them last week, and got this cool shirt as thanks.

Hey, PSU’ers, post any AdWords questions to comments and I’ll answer them as best I can.

Two news stories for you today. One about the progress of my eBay consulting auction, the other a bit I heard on the radio related to the 50th anniversary of the Barbie Doll.

eBay For Dummies Authors

First, the eBay auction. (If you haven’t heard, I announced via this newsletter last week an experiment. I auctioned 45 minutes of phone consulting on eBay for a starting bid of $3.95, no reserve. The auction expires on Thursday, March 5, at 1:24pm EST (less than 24 hours from now).

UPDATE: The final bid was $255, well below my going rate. I’ll be discussing these results and running another experiment next week. Also, I’m planning a fundraiser for a New Orleans rebuilding project, so I have to get creative about the best way to leverage my time and intellectual property to send maximum moolah down to NOLA. More updates soon.

I know that auctions tend to have a flurry of bidding near the end, so I’m not drawing any conclusions at this point. But I did want to update everyone (and maybe generate more bids in the process ;).

So right now, the highest bid is $109.50. There have been 24 bids so far, a few from repeat bidders, but most unique.

Let me put that in perspective.

It’s about $4 less than a vintage football player bobblehead/nodder "Touch Down" bank (6" high, 4.5" wide and 3" deep). The player is wearing a black and gold uniform with the number 00. The football itself is the bank. Some flaking and missing paint.

Humbling.

Oh, and here’s another one:

My highest bid is slightly less than the top bid for Little Miss Myra, a handmade teddy bear. I quote from the auction:

"Presenting Little Miss Myra a beautiful, unique & adorable OOAK bear. Myra is fully jointed, a beautiful pink colored mohair on a darker background, antique shoe button eyes, waxed a sealed thread nose, thread mouth & claws, wears a wonderful hair bow and has antique crazy quilt paw pads.  Her head & limbs are stuffed hard & her belly/body is smushy & so very wonderful."

Currently, Little Miss Myra can be yours for $111.

Please know I mean no disrespect for the artists and fans of these particular items or genres. I’m just amusing myself by considering the opportunity cost of an AdWords consultation.

So if you think that the current high bid of $109.50 for 45 minutes on the phone with me is a bargain, you can go to eBay and put your money where your mouth is.

When Barbie was a German Sexpot

The daughter of Barbie creator Ruth Handler was interviewed on the radio last week, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the best use of plastic since nose plugs. She told the story of how Barbie came to be.

Up until Barbie, all commercially produced dolls were babies, and the girls (and occasional secretive boy) who played with them had to be content with feeding, changing, burping, and cooing. Ruth saw a need for a doll who could embody aspirations beyond motherhood, a grown-up doll who could be the main character, rather than just a crying, gurgling lump (my words, not hers).

But no toy manufacturer would consider making a doll with – gasp – breasts.

And apparently there were tooling challenges with making a plastic doll to Barbie-esque dimensions.

So while Ruth Handler tried to imagine what her Barbie would look like and how it would be manufactured, meanwhile in Germany a naughty, suggestive cartoon character named Lilli had been created in plastic as a kind of gag-sex gift for men.

Li

A reader wonders:

I created my first Adwords image / banner ad last night.  I’m curious to know what sites Google might be displaying that on so I can see how it looks.  Any idea how to figure that out? 

My reply:

You can find out that information in the Reports section. Go to the Reports tab, click Create a New Report.

On the next page, select “Placement Performance Report.” Fill in the time frame you want, choose campaigns and ad groups, add or remove any columns you like, and then create the report. (Make sure you choose “URL” rather than “Domain” if you want to see individual pages.

A reader whose entire online business consists of a $20 book on a health topic wants to know how she can compete, AdWordsily, against big pharmaceutical companies bidding on the same keywords.

My answer:She can’t. Not with AdWords.

AdWords is a lot like poker, a game in which I reached my pinnacle in 7th grade. I’m no shark, mind you, but my brief foray into the game at summer camp taught me two things:

1. Don’t play against people who are much better than you at poker strategy, unless you want to part with your entire summer’s supply of Captain Crunch and Freihofer’s cookies by June 27th.

2. Don’t play against people who are mediocre at poker but have a stash of junk food the size of a offensive lineman in their trunk, and aren’t afraid to bet it all.

In other words, both skill and prodigious amounts of stupid cash can squash an opponent.

True of poker. And true of AdWords.

With AdWords, skill can look like marketing technique: great ads, strategically-chosen positive and negative keywords, insta-blink landing pages, and so on. 

But skill in AdWords also refers to the most important metric in the whole system: visitor value. 

The Importance of Visitor Value

Whoever makes the most money from a click, on average, gets to spend the most to acquire that click. If you sell a $20 self-help book and you compete against someone selling a course of treatment that costs thousands of dollars a year (and that end-users don’t even have to pay full price for because of insurance), you just can’t make the math work for you.

What does this mean for the reader with the $20 book and no way to compete at AdWords?

Two things.

First, use AdWords to hone your marketing, not to make money from book sales. Find out what keywords, what ads, and what sales language on your site do the best.

Second (and if you saw the passion and sense of mission in her question, you’d understand completely), use the non-AdWords web to become a prominent leader in this particular health field. Seth Godin’s new book is about how to create and lead a Tribe using online tools and your own passion and personality. Sean D’Souza has been teaching me a step-by-step methodology to leverage my own expertise and personality to establish a leadership position in my field. (Hey, if you guys both happen to read this post and you haven’t connected personally yet, I highly recommend it. I’d love to eavesdrop on the conversation between two of my marketing heroes.)

Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, and all the others – learn from Dan Hollings (Twitter dhollings) how to leverage social media to grow your presence and influence among your target group. When people KLT (know like trust) you, the books will fly off the shelves. 

And if the books are truly helpful, your tribe will joyously share them with others, giving you free viral exposure.

Third (nobody expects the Spanish inquisition), build your business far beyond a $20 book. Come on, you’ve got more than that! Consulting, coaching, courses, patient advocacy, membership web site – think about how to add more value once someone has read your book. Ask your readers what they want (that’s why I survey every AdWords For Dummies reader who gives me their email address).

That’s where AdWords and poker diverge, and it’s the crux of the whole matter. Poker is about taking. Business is about giving. As John Lennon sang, “In the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

A Blatant Pitch

Hey, while I have you here, I’m offering a teleclass series for AdWords advertisers on what I call “AdWords Ball” – measuring and testing everything for quick and significant improvement. It’s easier than it looks, and in 8 weeks you’ll learn – and implement – all my techniques for increasing your sales while decreasing your spend.

The sales letter isn’t up yet, so if you’re interested, just shoot me an email – howie AT askhowie DOT com – or comment on this post and I’ll get back to you.

And if you’re one of the kids who won all my Freihofer’s in 1977, I haven’t forgotten you. I raise you a raisin nut Chunky bar.

A reader reaches out for help:

What does it mean if Google AdWords says your average position is 5.8, when in fact, it’s not? When I type in the keyword [actual keyword omitted], it doesn’t show on the first several pages of results. What’s the scoop?

My response:

First, I asked if the keyword triggered the reader’s ad anywhere – page 8 or 13 or 43 of search results. His answer: "My ad doesn’t appear at all."

Aha! Now we’ve narrowed it down to several possibilities:

1. You’ve run out of budget.

Google isn’t showing your ad because you’ve already spent your budget, or are on target to max it out because you selected the "show my ads over time" campaign setting.

2. You’re limited your ad geographically.

Are you searching from a location outside your geo-targeting?

3. You’re limiting the days of the week and/or times of the day your ads will show.

This is another campaign setting you might have forgotten about.

4. Your ad has been disapproved.

Check your ad variations tab within the ad group in question and make sure Google will allow your ad to show.

5. You’re using position preference and underbidding that position.

If you have position preference "1" chosen for that keyword and you’re not bidding enough to achieve position 1, then your ad won’t show.

6. Mercury is in retrograde.

Hey, it happens. Just this week all the printers stopped working, my packing tape dispenser developed a nervous tic, and when I squeezed my eyes really hard, the second hand on my wall clock went backwards for one second. So you never know.

The Ad Diagnostic Tool

If you still can’t figure out why you can’t find your ad, Google provides a helpful tool within AdWords. Here’s a two-minute video demo of the Ad Diagnostic tool.

I spoke this morning with Imal Wagner, my publicist, about ways to get online and offline PR for any size business.

I have to admit, when I hired Imal to sell loads of books for me, I just did what she said, showed up for interviews, and didn’t pay much attention to what she was doing and how she did it.

So this 25 minute call was my attempt to get up to speed. AdWords is great, but when the keywords are too competitive or expensive, or when you’re just starting out on a small budget, it’s nice to have ways to get traffic that just require focus, empathy and creativity, without the credit card.

In this interview, Imal shares her expertise about becoming an "A-list" blogger in your industry, pitching the media on your stories and interviews, and getting booked on radio shows.

Pay special attention to the story about the kid who was living in his parents’ basement and was trying to figure out how to pay for his education. If Imal’s methods worked for him, they can work for the rest of us as well.

Imal’s been working with high-profile clients for a long time, and today she’s opening up her practice to folks who want to learn how to do their own PR, rather than hire it out. Rather than send you to a long sales letter about her 12-week group coaching program, I invite you to email Imal (say that 5 times fast!) to set up a conversation to determine if her program is right for you.

You can reach her at imalwagner AT gmail DOT com.

Oh, and here are the links Imal mentioned about where to find radio stations:

wsradio.com – compendium of Internet Radio Shows

radio-locator.com – searchable list of every radio station in the US and Canada