Jason Puckett

The Top 4 Advertisers in Texas

AdBasis is conducting a study on the top digital advertising communities in the United States and the next chapter turns to the Lone Star State. Everything’s bigger in Texas, and that includes the emphasis these companies are putting on their digital ad strategy. The AdBasis team investigated over 400 companies in industries like eCommerce, hospitality, retail and SaaS.

We ran over 3,000 product related searches from IP addresses in Texas and outside of Texas. Some of the top performers will surprise you and here they are:

1. HostGator

Web hosting is pretty boring and the space is saturated with competition. If you’re not GoDaddy, how is a company supposed stand out in their quest to acquire over 9 million customers? Well, just ask HostGator.

Competitive Displacement

When Google is determining ad placement during their auction process, ad relevance and bid amount are the two qualifying factors. Google’s metric for determining this placement is called Quality Score. AdWords Quality Score is much more focused on relevance than bid, yet somehow HostGator’s ads are catching our eye when we search “Rackspace” (one of their biggest in-state competitors). How are they doing it?

The proper use of extensions and excellent ranking for ad placement. HostGator is using their great Quality Score and eye-grabbing ad structure to steal clicks from people searching for their competition. Which ad would you click?

YouTube Reminders

Immediately after we left the HostGator site, we decided to take a journey to YouTube to watch some Anchorman outtakes, and look at who followed us.

Focus on Mobile Made the Difference

Not surprisingly, within a few days of strategically storing our cookies throughout the Texas based business landscape, we began to see a few of these companies hitting us with ads on Facebook. The main differentiator in what HostGator does is their focus on mobile. Not only did we see their Facebook retargeting ad on our desktop, we saw their ad on the big screen of our iPhone 6 Plus and loved it. We were reminded that this blue alligator wants us to move forward with our purchase.

Depth of Competitiveness

For the 10 product-category searches we ran for the hosting space, HostGator was placed in the top five for four of them.

2. Motel 6

Since 1986, Motel 6’s slogan “We’ll Leave the Light on for You” has been getting stuck in peoples’ heads via radio, TV and print. We have yet to see or hear any Tom Bodett during our digital research process, but the hope still lives on. Despite the lack of kitschy 90’s slogans, Motel 6 is still running strong through the progressive use of Google’s search ad features.

Mobile Funnel

Motel 6 is buying up both branded keywords and non- branded keywords and serving ads to mobile users across the country. We masked our IP address and ran searches on both mobile and desktop from three different states across the nation.

We found that Motel 6 is one of the few location-based businesses headquartered in Texas that is taking advantage of “Click to Call” buttons on their search ads.

AdBasis analyzed $2M of our clients’ search ad spend and found that if an ad had the ‘Click to Call’ extension enabled, 69% of the received clicks were to the call button.

Utilizing Click to Call

It is shocking to see the number of location-based businesses that do not take advantage of this ad extension. Utilizing this button in your search ads is a directly trackable lead generation tool. Google’s Mobile Search ads now have a button that appears on the right-hand side with an image of a telephone that simply says “Call”. It reduces the steps necessary to retain lead information and talk to your customers directly.

There is absolutely no reason why a business that revolves around customer conversations shouldn’t capitalize on this feature. Many major restaurant chains, pizza joints, and take-out food service businesses were left off the list for this reason. Thank you Motel 6 for making everyone look bad and landing the number two spot on our list.

Facebook Retargeting

Once we abandoned our cart on Motel6.com, we visited Facebook and Motel 6 was sure to follow us. The creative they used in their Facebook retargeting ads could definitely use a makeover, but it was a fundamentally sound placement that reminded us we need to make this purchase.

3. Hotels.com

Hotels.com is a business who’s revenue streams are dependent on having a strong conversion funnel. They are a web-only hotel booking engine that owns 84 web properties, lists over 350,000 hotels and operates in 34 languages. Owned by Expedia, Hotels.com is a fine example of how a web-only business can be profitably operated and should be looked at by imitators as an example to go by. Their digital ad presence is no exception.

SEM & Organic Content: Aligned and Lookin’ Fine

Hotels.com relies on a strong paid acquisition strategy and organic content engine to show reliability and increase the size of their digital funnel. Their content team pumps out SEO friendly (but also very high-quality) content for readers to consume.

Starting in 2004, twice per year, Hotels.com publishes what is known as the “Hotel Price Index”. This report shows changes in hotel market prices, compares changes in destination prices and reveals any notable industry price swings of the previous six months. Thought leadership at its finest.

This price index is definitely relevant to their paid acquisition funnel by contributing to “perceived reliability”. This marketing term refers to how reliable a user would potentially perceive Hotels.com’s brand and their associated data. Their brand, content, domain & quality of search ad make hotel booking decisions easy for a new user.

Parent Company Strength

When looking at the above search result, we see Expedia’s dominance and the vastness of their digital assets. Expedia (parent company of Hotels.com) is taking up the other top ad placement for this product-category search result. So no matter what the user chooses from this screen shot, Expedia is getting the revenue. Nice.

Great Use of Creative Design

Hotels.com is fundamentally sound, they are utilizing all technology and ad platforms possible to remind customers that have abandoned carts to move forward with their purchases. We used Hotels.com to look at San Fransisco hotel prices, and look what followed us to Facebook.

The ad looks great and it was placed in our Newsfeed so we were sure to see it. The photo choice is on-point and the call to action stands out. It’s rare to see an enterprise brand using humor, price dependence and removing the thought of buyer’s remorse all in two short lines of ad copy.

4. ReachLocal

It’s quite rare to see marketing agencies drink their own Kool-Aid but ReachLocal is definitely on board with practicing what they preach. While not Headquartered in TX, the majority of their marketing team is stationed in the Dallas area and needs to be recognized as one of the best B2B advertising teams in the state. Their use of advertisements to promote their high-end content is why they made the list.

Using Facebook for Their B2B Content Funnel

AdBasis knows that Facebook is generally not the best channel for B2B marketers to acquire new customers but it can provide huge assists during the conversion process.

If you are a B2B marketer and you are investing in content, using Facebook to promote that content is majorly beneficial. Page Post Link Ads are the most common of all the Facebook Ads types. Ideal to promote your external website or blog content. Page Post Link ads feature a big image that’s great to catch user attention and appear in the users’ newsfeed. Both ad copy and link description are testable, so optimization is an achievable goal. ReachLocal is doing a great job using these ad types to maximize both engagement and the reach of the content they have worked so hard to write. When we left their homepage, we were served a Newsfeed ad for their ebook and the ad looked great.

Check, Check, Check, Done.

Not only is their approach for promoting content fundamentally sound, so are the other aspects of their paid acquisition funnel.

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