First, despite the economy that surrounds us, we’re growing.  And, as we continue to grow, continue to win business from large preeminent brands, and continue to be relied on by media and analysts as experts in our field, we needed to establish a corporate presence beyond the brand names of the products we sell. Though many know us as “BoldChat”, that is simply one of the brands we manage.

Secondly, our growth has been fueled by two types of customers – small to mid-sized entrepreneurial businesses and significant enterprise engagements.  As such, the feature sets each of these customers require has changed over time.  We needed to react and build offerings appropriate for each.

For these reasons, and others, we have enacted the following:

1. We’ve changed the name of our company to Bold Software, LLC and launched a corporate website at www.BoldSoft.com.   Our new name is descriptive at the same time it pays homage to the heritage of our flagship brand.  Bold Software has a clean aesthetic and this blog now wears its look.
2. We announced a new BoldChat product called BoldChat Premier.  This offering is our most robust chat-only product and is tailor made for businesses that intend a significant live chat operation.
3. We launched BoldCCM for enterprises that require a consolidated suite of website communication tools.  From one interface, companies can manage live chat, click to call, inbound email management, and more.  Two new suites are sold under the BoldCCM name and the Enterprise version includes a new remote control capability.

The changes we’ve made mark an important milestone for Bold Software.  As ambassadors of live chat, click to call, and other website communication technologies, we now have a corporate, brand, and product architecture that allows us to advance a mission begun more than six years ago.  We create software that empowers websites to optimize their performance and we offer it for the greatest value in the industry.

The first line on Google’s corporate site is: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Why do people use Google? The question is perhaps pedantic (though amusingly alliterative), it is important not to lose sight of the answer; people use Google to find things. Most often, they are looking for information –as Google themselves states. As such, offering Whitepapers front and center as part of your Google ads seems to fit in with the very philosophy of search – providing information and making it accessible.

Does it work? You bet. Here’s one of our ads that regularly achieves over a 4% click-through rate – a full 1% better than competing ads we’ve written not offering the download. (Note: the display link is different than the actual target landing page.)

Here are a few tips that I’ve learned the hard way through frustrating trial and error.

1. Create whitepaper ads for Ad Groups that contain obvious “information seeking” phrases – “compare”, “statistics”, etc…
2. Whitepapers are especially useful for Ad Groups of competitive keywords – but your copy needs to change.
3. Dynamic keyword insertion will drive up CTR, but could adversely affect conversion because of the possible disconnect between the search term and the actual content of the whitepaper.

One last thing – don’t forget to collect information before allowing the download. Someone who downloads a whitepaper from a PPC ad is at the beginning of the sales cycle and needs nurturing.

(image source)

A decent chunk of our marketing expenditure goes to paid click advertising and the vast majority of that spend is through Google’s AdWords system.  While many conversion types are possible on our website, the only one that matters with Google is a successful paid customer conversion. This is, in fact, the only conversion we track using the AdWords ‘conversion tracking’ feature. Over the past year or so we have systematically attempted to drop our cost per conversion by implementing and testing a variety of methodologies. We have relied most heavily on the advice from Perry Marshall and his AdWords course. Just a few of the things we’ve done include:

• Careful analysis of keyword type matching (broad vs. phrase vs. exact)
  • live chat vs. “live chat” vs. [live chat]
• Focus on CTR
• Religious split testing of ad variations
• Dynamic keyword insertion
• The use of “Official Site” in copy for our own keyword ad variations
• Negative keyword research using the Search Query Report

Suffice it to say that those of us with primary responsibility for this channel have sliced it, diced it, puréed it, filleted it, oiled it, and boiled it. We’re confident that we haven’t left many stones unturned.

The result? It’s better than when we started. It would be hard, however, to classify it as a resounding, world record breaking success. It’s, well, better than when we started.

A few weeks ago, we were contacted directly by Google. The very nice and professional young woman I spoke with offered us a special consultation and a free optimization of one of our campaigns. I took her up on it. (Note: if this kind of offer is made to you, you should verify that you are really speaking to Google – you can do so because the representative will be able to access your account and affect it directly.)

We’ve spent another couple of weeks reviewing their work and just this week, we took the experiment live. The surprising thing about the optimization is that most of the advanced techniques we’ve employed over the past year were utterly stripped away. Dynamic keyword insertion remains in a couple Ad Groups, but all keywords are broad match, many of our keywords have been deleted, no misspellings are being bid on, bids are consistent across keywords, and the ad copy is amazingly similar throughout the campaign.

We’re incredibly curious about how this will do over the course of the next few weeks and we’ll keep you posted right here on the BoldBlog. I wonder if others have utilized this service with good results.