Search Engine Marketing Thoughts - Blogation

As loyal readers of this blog know, I constantly lecture people not to over-emphasize keyword research at the expense of all the other important aspects of SEM, such as ad copy, filtering, landing pages, and tracking. So I'm happy to introduce a new feature of Blogation that emphasizes the fine art of ad copy creation: The Blogation "Awesome AdWords Ad Text Award" series.

Today's nominee comes from Reunion.com for an ad served on the Google AdSense network whilst I was reading an email from my cousin about Facebook. Here's the text:

Unread Message (2)
Reunion.com -
Read Message (Yes) (N0)

I'm sure many of you have received annoying email spam with titles like this, intended to make you think that someone is actually trying to get in touch with you. And I'm sure that most of you at this point have caught on to this little trick. But when I got this message showing up at the top of my Gmail account, I had to do a double-take. After all, Gmail has great spam filtering so I've come to expect that any emails that actually make it to my inbox are legit.

And keep in mind that most people aren't Internet savvy enough to understand that AdSense is paid messaging. The result is that Reunion.com has effectively bypassed the Gmail spam folder with ad text that will likely trick less savvy emailers and could even fool us Internet old timers.

So kudos to the Reunion.com SEM team for great ad text. Stay tuned for more honorees in the future.