The IV Company Blog

For a company to be successful there are really only two things that have to be on the to do list every single day: Building and Selling. That’s it. The right combination of these two, equals success. That why, when I’m given the opportunity to sell a product that I’m passionate about, InsideVault in this case, I know I am helping in the final outcome, even if the product isn’t perfectly polished. If I have learned something from entrepreneurship, it’s that if you are not embarrassed by some aspects of your product when you launch it… you have gone too slowly.

Startup life is different in many ways. In a startup, the sales model has to be tested continuously. A real sales director will:
• research the market
• test the market
• collect data
• analyze results
• try new approaches or perfect current ones
• Start over again

He will have to know when to pivot, and understand the patterns of the sale process. This has to be done over, and over, and over again until you reach that sweet spot. The faster you get to that point, the faster you will have a sustainable business. There’s no established process, no established accounts, no sales guide. When you sell for an established corporation…you are sliding in where someone has already fought, patched, and fixed. If you are an excellent order taker but can’t think for yourself, startup sales is not your place.

You have to think not only like a sales guy, but as an entrepreneur. You have to be eager to learn, to understand the product and understand the client, to prove yourself and especially be able to grow beyond your responsibilities. You are not only selling, you are building.

When you start out, no one cares about your product… and here is where there is a little magic about sales in a startup: you make people care, you make people feel that with your product they are better than they were before. It’s not a feature… Better is a feeling, and you have to sell that feeling. How well you sell it is as important as how good your product is. And when you make someone feel better, you know that all the time and sweat you spent to get that sale was well worth it!

As the summer is winding down, we have been preparing for quite a climactic finish to IV Summer 2012: Engineers Gone wild.  Our team is all highly educated with a PhD in Search Engine Marketology and so is our software platform.  To celebrate, we will have a BBQ to take some time to relax.  Very soon you will be seeing the world’s most powerful SEM platform on the market and you will be able to see how far we’ve come in the past few months, let alone the past year.

If you can’t get enough of SEM and want to see more than what’s on our Twitter and Facebook pages, we have good news: We have expanded our presence on the internet and can now be found on Quora and Youtube. On Youtube we will be posting short informative videos about SEM strategies.  In addition to the videos, we will also have a blog to go along with the videos and go a little more in-depth.  For our readers interested in more technical strategies to SEM, we will also have a tech blog written by our all-star programmers.

In the mean-time, read these articles to learn more about the following topics:

Display Network
Calls-to-Action
PPC Audits

If you’ve ever been to this blog, our Facebook, or our Twitter pages, you probably know how much we all love online marketing.  As I was meandering down the road the other day, I passed by a sign saying something like “Your Company Could be Here!” and trying to get people to advertise in that space.  It bragged about the low cost-per-view of the sign.  Yes, their CPM would be much lower than if you were to advertise on the internet.

Can you really accurately measure the effectiveness of a billboard, TV commerical, or sheet of paper above a toilet?  There are various things you could do to get an idea of the scope of these branding advertisements – for starters,  you could measure difference in sales or pay people to conduct marketing research to see how many people actually recall seeing your ad and asking their impression.  Unfortunately for these companies, you don’t have a video camera recording everyone’s actions after they view your billboard or commercial.  Note: This is a good thing, especially in the case of the advertisement above the toilet.

That does not compare anywhere close to online marketing, where you’re able to tell a story with what happened to the user from the moment they triggered your ad.  Targeting and data analysis is what makes the complexity of search engine marketing in particular so great.  It may be a lot easier, but where’s the fun in just setting up a billboard and hoping for the best?

If you don’t quite have the time to manage your own PPC campaign but would still like to learn more about the wonderful world of search engine marketing, send us a note and/or check us out on Facebook and Twitter!

Every time I turn on the Olympics, I get so impressed by everything they do.  No matter what sport it is – swimming, track & field, volleyball, gymnastics, rowing, and everything else – I could never imagine myself doing anything that remotely compares to the elite level of their sports.  Then I got to work and started writing ad copies.  Maybe it was just the Olympic fever kicking in, but everything just seemed so epic as I was writing headlines, descriptions, and display and destination URLs.  I imagined I was an Olympic triathlete.  Since my body isn’t in as good shape as those guys, this was my own made-up triathlon.

Instead of swimming in the cold open water, I dove right into the ad headline.  At a maximum of only 25 characters, it is the shortest of the three legs, but it can make or break you.  It’s the first thing people see and it’s easy to get behind by not following best practices and using keywords relevant to the user’s search.

Next up is the longest, but perhaps most entertaining portion of the triathlon.  For them, it’s biking through glorious mountains.  For me, it’s all about writing descriptive ad copies that tell the searchers what differentiates my product from all the other ads.   Is my brand more trusted? Do I offer a free trial? These are the types of things that would make people want to click on my ad.  Also imperative for a successful ad is to include a call-to-action.  What do you want them to do? Don’t get too excited with the CTA though.  Even it’s the middle of a triathlon, still only one exclamation mark is allowed or else you get a disqualification.

Lastly comes the display and destination URLs.  Display URL is pretty simple – include keywords somewhere, either in an extension or subdomain.  Not too many options there – just be sure to follow the editorial guidelines (Don’t get DQ’d on the last leg!).  Destination URL can take some time depending upon how many unique parameters you can insert.  The more you have, the more time this last leg will take, but it’ll be worth it.  Since quality score is determined in part by the relevance of your landing page to the ad copy and the search term, a more specific landing page can help to both lower CPC and increase conversion rate.

I’m not in any physical shape like the superhumans who swim, bike and run, but at least my fingers are getting a good workout after I finish writing and optimizing a batch of ad copies.  My left pinky is ready to take on any Olympian in a pinky war.

I’m way too tired to do anything else right now, but I have deserved a break.  Of course I’ll have to play around and test different ad copies, but right now I’m a gold medalist.

I have been looking for a new challenge for a while and in particular an early stage startup with huge potential. I was really excited to find InsideVault and I have relocated from Canada to join the company. The team is extremely talented and highly motivated. There is a good atmosphere of cooperation as we work together to build a great product. There is also a lot of openness to embrace new ideas and technologies. I am particularly pleased that the company is using the awesome language Scala. I believe that the company has a great future and I am pleased to be a part of it.

- Iceman

IV has been busy over the past year building the most advanced online marketing optimization platform.  But other than revolutionizing the world of search engine marketing, what else is new?

-We have been growing in size and the family is only getting bigger.

-Hipster has been battling an addiction to Crunch ’N Munch

-Goose is a year older

-There is an intense rivalry between Greens and Hipster that can’t quite be explained

-An IV fitness center to compete with the one across the street.  Complete with pull-ups, push-ups, and even a basketball hoop!

-Daily Facebook and Twitter updates to help your SEM Campaigns and keep you updated on office pranks, jokes, etc.

And music in the office, where Maverick rules the turntable as most valuable DJ.  Here are a few  of the different styles we have in the office:

Maverick: Wide variety of songs everyone enjoys

Goose: Music from back in his college days

Hipster: Songs to fit the mood of whatever is going on in the office.  Rebecca Black at the end of the week

JR: Classic tunes.  Nothing less than what you’d expect from such a classy guy.

Wolfman: Classics from a variety of different genres.

Merlin: Whatever those crazy kids are listening to these days

If you’d like to find out more, stay tuned with what’s new in the office by getting daily tips on our Facebook and Twitter pages to better your website’s search performance.

Search engine marketing is all about optimizing.  To optimize whatever metric you’re looking for (CPA, Conversions, Conversion Rate, etc.) it all comes down to optimizing every step of the process.  From generating as many relevant keywords as you can to breaking those keywords down into the right amount of groups so you can write granular, specific ad copies for each group.  It doesn’t stop there though: You have to optimize the landing page too.

Now you’re done, right?  You think you’ve optimized everything.  Now you have to think way back to the glory days of high school.  Think tests and statistics.  Now you have to use the metrics you got from your A/B tests and what you learned in your stats classes to come to conclusions and apply what you learned from your optimizations.  Repeat this process infinitely many times.  SEM is an ever-changing world, and best practices are never set in stone.

Anyone working in SEM has probably felt like a Bad Luck Brian at some point.  Follow IV on Facebook on Twitter for up-to-date SEM tips and, yes, memes.  In case you weren’t following before, here are some links we gave earlier for optimization:

Death to the Cliché Landing Page
Ad Testing
Common Mistakes in SEM Campaigns
10 Adwords Options to Increase Conversion

Over the past 12 months (today is our one year anniversary!), the IV team has worked diligently on building the most advanced PPC/SEM optimization platform in the market. In fact, we’re so excited with the incredible performance our early adopters have seen that we’re ready to share the technology with more advertisers. If you think you PPC/SEM has more potential, let us know (hello at insidevault dot com) and we’ll show you how IV can help you grow your profits, revenue, scale and/or any other goal(s) you use to measure your business.

And if you’re looking to design, build and/or manage technology that will positively disrupt the world of online advertising, check our careers page or send us a note at jobs at insidevault dot com and tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

If you have been following our blog, you have probably noticed that my colleagues are pretty witty at naming their blog post titles. While I can’t say that my blog title is wittier than others, I can guarantee that my obsession over coming up with a clever title has been a tiring endeavor. So, before I start rambling about things and eventually get myself lost in my own train of thought, let me say I hope you enjoy the title.

Now, let’s talk. I actually started writing this post about 2 months ago. It was going to be a masterpiece – one to print out so I can stick it to our company fridge to showcase myself. People say great things take time to complete. For instance, it took Michelangelo years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Well, there’s no transition from that actually. I just thought that was an interesting fact. Don’t expect too much out of me.

Let’s talk about IV though. When it comes to life at IV, I think my main man, Jay-Z, sums it up pretty well, “I got 99 problems, but boredom ain’t one.” OK, perhaps that’s not what he really says, but you get the idea. On most days, you get to solve all sorts of problems. On most days, this gets pretty fun. However, sometimes things get hectic and perhaps chaotic, but no one said brining justice to the world would be easy.

I realize that my blog post has no theme or transition whatsoever. However, since I am nearing the end of my entry, let’s just roll with it. There’s a quote by Alex Lowe, a climbing beast, that I love – “The best climber in the world is the one who’s having the most fun.” In this regard, I would say we are doing pretty well.

Post script – I almost forgot to mention. If you get the title, you can probably solve this puzzle. Maybe I should take you a step further – always Alt+E+S, V+E.

Puzzle: j,a,j,j,v,a,3,<,<,y,v,i,a,i,3,3,j,i,j,<,y,<,<,y,a,y,j,y,y,a,y,<,a,a,j,a,j,j,3,j,3,j,j

Solve me.

Run this groovy script to know more -

def impressions = “73:110:115:105:100:101:86:97:117:”+
“108:116:32:114:111:99:107:115:33:33:”+
“32:76:111:116:115:32:111:102:32:99:111:”+
“100:105:110:103:32:97:110:100:32:99:111:102:”+
“102:101:101:44:32:119:104:97:116:32:101:108:115:”+
“101:32:100:111:101:115:32:111:110:101:32:110:101:101:”+
“100:32:105:110:32:108:105:102:101:63″

def values = impressions.split(“:”)

def builder = new StringBuilder()
values.each {
builder.append((char)it.toInteger())
}
println builder.toString()