I attended the Future of Online Advertising seminar last week. Lot’s of good information that I’ll be posting about over the next week or so. Today I just want to do a quick post about the Microsoft presentation…

Now, I wasn’t expecting much from Microsoft! C’mon they’re Microsoft. But I’ll tell you the presenter (Jed Naham Director of Product Management for AdCenter), gave away some of the best information (at least from an Affiliate Marketers standpoint), of the entire conference. So what was he talking about?

The Call To action.
Now, we all know that a call to action is necessary in any type of marketing or sales process. In the IM world, a call to action can be as simple as “Click Here” or “Order Now”. What Mr. Naham showed us was that different call’s to action get different click through rates across different search segments. More then that though, a call to action that is highly effective in say an “Automotive” category, may actually under perform in a “Consumer Goods” category: Here’s a few examples (and remember these results are simply measuring click thru’s from AdCenter, the Microsoft PPC listings) :

In the Education category the call to action “Buy Now” is actually the top performer. Move over to the general “Retail” category and guess what – “Buy Now” isn’t even there. Selling “Financial Services” then make sure to use the old standby “Click Here” it out performed all other phrases.

I won’t give you the entire list (and it was pretty extensive, covering seven or eight different categories and showing both the top five and bottom five for each) however, I will give you the top “Retail” call to actions:

• Receive
• Apply now
• Shop today
• Don’t miss
• Start here

Posted by David Olsen - Owner/Editor

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