Every language has its own built-in canon of rhythms. Elizabethan English saw Shakespeare whittling out reams of up-down iambs, in convenient packages of five per line. In Chinese all great classical poems and quotable quotes come in lines of four, five or seven characters. The Japanese created the lovably infectious 5-7-5-syllable haiku structure that’s infiltrated every major language on the planet.

And which makes for great haiku Google ads, too:

We are Woot.com
Our tiny profit is lost.
Haiku ads don’t work.
www.woot.com

Poetry and rhythm in Google ads. Who’da thunk?

Saturday is Valentine’s Day. And how fitting that this new book should hit the bookshelves: “Six Word Memoirs of Love and Heartbreak – By Authors Famous & Obscure.” It’s great coffee table stuff.

And ad fodder stuff.

The premise: there’s something uncannily powerful in being able to convey your message in just six words. So the book is a full collection of six-word life summaries from a wide swath of contributors.

The notion of six-word summaries is not a Johnny-come-lately ADD Internet-generation fad, either; Hemingway swore he could tell a whole story in six words. (His finest example? “For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn.”)

Try these:

• I took him back. Bad idea.
• Hearing Springsteen song, Dad’s alive again.
• My marital advice? Marry an orphan.
• Sperm too potent. Got triplets now.
• The psychic said I’d be richer.

That six-word length is right. It clears out the muck and leaves the meat. Only the thoughts that count get left in. Some of these can be profoundly wise.

And then there’s the rhythm of it. Two lines of three words, or three lines of two words.

Try writing Google ads with these. For example:

“Didn’t realize
I’d still
be lonely.”
HealYourMarriage.net

How about for spouses of people in prison? Here’s an ad that starts with a separate headline but uses the six-word trick in lines 2 and 3:

Lonely Spouse Says:
“Our prison visitations
were surprisingly romantic.”
PrisonSpouses.org

This is a formula for the content network. It’s a classic interrupt, and a great draw for broad-interest and consumer topics:

Won Lottery.
Lost Ticket.
Now what?
RediscoverWealth.com

“will u
marry me?”
he texted.
TextMeMyLove.com

Beaten Up.
Beaten Down.
Still Smiling.
NaturallySuccessful.com

These could turn into Jet Stream ads – ads with such interest and universal appeal that they get clicked on regardless of where Google shows them, so Google shows them everywhere.

If you can master storytelling in a six words you can master it anyplace.

(A gigantic thank-you to Newsweek’s Jesse Ellison for the inspiration.)

Facebook Has a Pay-Per-Click Service.

And that’s all I’m going to say on that topic, for now.

Conversion Optimizer Could Be Kind of a Big Deal.

Every keyword in your list is going to give you a different conversion rate. That’s because of ad copy. Because of differing clickthrough rates. Because of match types. All of those factor in.

So how are you ever going to perfect bidding and such when you have all of these variables – especially if you’ve got a huge keyword list, like the gentleman I consulted with this morning who did $13,000 worth of clicks this last week?

Enter Google’s Conversion Optimizer. Google takes into account all of these issues, and automatically controls your bid prices. You set a final cost per action that you want (i.e., cost per sale, cost per optin, etc.) and Google takes it from there.

Is this letting the doberman guard the ham sandwiches? Giving Google full control over your costs and full information about what’s converting for you? Well, they already know more than you think anyway. And we’re finding more people in our circle who swear by it.

Our good friend David Rothwell at www.DavidNRothwell.com wrote up a summary of Google’s Conversion Optimizer, and you should read it.

In a word: It works.

This Ad Preview Tool Makes You Really Smart.

I’ve been playing again with Google’s Ad Preview Tool, which shows you exactly what results – both organic and paid – show up on a Google page in any location in the world you choose. Fargo, Tallahassee, Inchon, Pretoria, Tegucigalpa, Adelaide, Budapest, Novosibirsk, Tashkent, Colombo – you can see what all those local Google users are seeing in their results.

This is a big deal if you’re advertising in local markets and want to see where your ads are showing and what they look like, and whether Google rewarded you with that magic 5th line of text or not.

The Preview Tool also shows you results in any language you choose. Don’t miss the fact that there are multiple ways to slice the orange: In any one geographic location there are users from multiple language backgrounds who are searching on Google for their stuff in their own language.

Such as my friend Barak in Beijing, who has his Google results set to Hebrew. He would never have found me had I not tweaked my settings to show my language-learning ads to him (1) in mainland China and (2) among his Hebrew search results.

With Google’s Ad Preview Tool you can see the world sliced up all these different ways. Which means you can know to show where others aren’t, and tell whether your ads belong or not.

For example, I opened up the preview tool and set it to show me Spanish results in San Diego, California. I searched in Spanish for insurance and found one English ad sitting right smack at the top of the page.

Advertising in English among Spanish-only results in San Diego? Why do that?

One of three reasons: (1) The advertiser is smart, they’ve researched it and found that they get lots of clicks and excellent conversions; (2) they’re morons, and are just picking locations and languages willy-nilly; (3) Google is serving their ads there *despite* the fact that the advertiser selected only English, because the ads get clicks regardless and the metrics show that those visitors stay on the site once they’re there.

Piggybacking on ‘Slumdog’

When it’s the early worm that catches the fish, you’ve got to be perched and ready. Ignore the pun. The Monday after I saw ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ – which opened in my city to a roaring, clapping crowd in a fire-marshall-infuriating packed house on a Friday night in the middle of a January blizzard – I was in the Dallas airport watching CNN Headline News. The repeated hourly report? ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ had swept the Golden Globes the night before.

It was no accident that every ten minutes at the break the lead-off commercial was a 60-second ‘Incredible India!’ ad. Some smart cookie had planned in advance and bought up all the spots during the Entertainment segment and was capitalizing on it.

Publicity like this doesn’t take doctorate-level intelligence to go get; it just takes foresight. If your business sells India tours and you know the Oscars are coming up on the 22nd and you’ve been watching the hype that predicts an easy ‘Best Picture’ win for ‘Slumdog,’ then you know what your assignment is: Have your Google ads ready. Have your TV ads ready, if you have them. Have your billboards bought out in time. When the local theaters extend ‘Slumdog’ the extra week or two, have your employees standing outside the exit, ready with the travel brochures.

If you can be there next to the street vendor cooking the masala, all the better.

To your success,

Bryan Todd

p.s. Got a six-word memoir of your own life? Post it below!