Search Engine Marketing
Bing!: Oh, so we’re setting the bar low now?
Friday, June 5th, 2009 | Internet Marketing, Internet News, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments
You know those small rock chips you get on your car as you’re hurtling down the highway? Those tiny imperfections in your car’s auto body called “dings”. They’re the ones that are annoying but too small to invest money or time in repairing, so you simply ignore them. That’s how this blogger feels about Microsoft’s newly launched “Bing!” search engine. Bing! is nothing more than a rock chip along my travels on the information superhighway – thanks for scratching my paint.
Excited by all the internet buzz of this week, I visited Bing.com only to discover that I had been Punk’d. Featuring a boring graphic of nature at Her finest, Bing! offered me a search bar, and implored me to “Explore” five choices along the left navigation: Images, Videos, Shopping, News, Maps and Travel. At the bottom of the screen they offered me a “Popular Now” section with a few topics that are certainly not popular in my search behavior.
I admit that at this point I was thoroughly unimpressed. I’m a search marketer and we always hammer home the message that our client’s landing pages have to be compelling. We implore them: “You’ve got to grab your audience’s attention and inspire them to click through your site!” “Add graphics”, we suggest, “use video technology to demonstrate your products, give your reader dynamic web copy, and above all demonstrate the value of your brand and your product above the competition.”
I cannot be excited about a page that fails to embrace these simple marketing truths. No, Google’s homepage is not the stuff search engine marketers dream of - but they were first in line and get points for originality.
I feel let down. All the hype and I get a white-letter logo with an orange dot for the “i” and an old Windows Live page with a facelift. Oh, and the social media connectivity or integration? I suppose they ran out of time or money to add these as features since they were concentrating on adding their clairvoyant flight fare finder which will tell me to hold off buying that ticket because the price is likely to drop. If the rest of the world is interested in social media, why are you showing me pictures of the mountains and calling it brand new? Besides, I had to hunt down the video tutorial to teach me how to find and use their flight and hotel planner. You know, it’s funny, I know of five other sites that offer that same “New!” feature.
I recognize that my opinion is in direct contrast with many of you Bing! luv-ahs, but I’m afraid that embracing Bing! sets a standard that we just can’t accept. I expected more from you Microsoft - and I hope the purported $80 million you’re spending on advertising this remodel can be put towards adding on some real, usable features. On behalf of search engine marketers, informed consumers, savvy Internet explorers, persons with heartbeat, and individuals across the nation who can’t stand to be hyped up and then disappointed - Bing!, since you failed to lead, or even follow, please get out of the way. Besides, I hate chipped paint.
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SEM Summer Reading List
Friday, May 8th, 2009 | Search Engine Optimization | No Comments
Don’t Make Me Think
By Steve Krug. An awesome book on website usability. It will give you an expert’s ability to judge Web design.
The Big Red Fez
By Seth Godin. Solid and practical advice for anyone with a website.
Purple Cow - Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
Another winner by marketing guru, Seth Godin.
Web Design for ROI
By Lance Loveday & Sandra Niehaus. Increase conversion rates and turn browsers into buyers and prospects into leads.
The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines
By Jill Whalen. A how to guide for writing keyword-rich marketing copy.
Happy Reading!
Yahoo Makes Important Change to Advertising TOS
Monday, January 12th, 2009 | Internet Marketing, PPC Advertising, Search Engine Marketing | 1 Comment
In mid-2008, Yahoo changed their TOS to include the following clause:
“In the U.S. only, for those advertisers not bound by an Insertion Order, we may help you optimize your account(s). Accordingly, you expressly agree that we may also: (i) create ads, (ii) add and/or remove keywords, and/or (iii) optimize your account(s). We will notify you via email of such changes made to your account(s), and can also include a spreadsheet of such changes upon your written request. If you would like any of such changes reversed, please reply to such email within 14 days of the change(s), and we will make commercially reasonable efforts to reverse the change(s) you specifically identify. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you remain responsible for all changes made to your account(s), including all click charges incurred prior to any reversions being made. It is your responsibility to monitor your account(s) and to ensure that your account settings are consistent with your business objectives.”
What does this mean for end users? It means after you spend hours creating your campaigns, adding your keywords, and deciding how much money you want to bid on each term, Yahoo has the right to “optimize” however they feel necessary. Not only can they delete some of your keywords and replace them with different ones, they can also increase and/or decrease your bids. Best of all, you are not told about the modification(s) until afterwards.
While this did happen in June of last year, businesses are just now starting to discover changes to their advertising accounts. The email you’ll receive from Yahoo will read something like this:
“Yahoo! is committed to the success of account “account name” and we believe there is an opportunity to provide you with improved performance.
To help you save time and get the most out of your campaigns, we are launching a new automatic account optimization program. It’s intended to help raise the performance of accounts that are experiencing issues like low quality scores, low lead volume or low click-through rates.
And the best part is, we will do the work for you: Our content developers will use their search advertising experience to help your marketing dollars go further.
What we will keep an eye out for:
- Search ads with low click-through rates relative to competitors
- Ad testing not in use? missing an opportunity to optimize ad copy
- Ad groups that have a quality index score of 2 or lower
How we can help:
- Create new ads for existing ad groups, enabling ad testing
- Write multiple versions of ads for any new ad groups we create, enabling the use of ad testing to help ensure that the best-performing ads are displayed more often
- Search our database for keywords that can drive more targeted traffic to your site
In short, our goal is to make sure that your account is firing on all cylinders–and do this while keeping your existing keywords and without exceeding your spending limits!
As always, you are in control of your account. If we make any optimization changes to your account through this program, we will notify you by email, and you can let us know whether the account changes are positively affecting your account. Also, you are welcome to contact your account manager to review, edit or ask us to reverse any of the changes. Finally, if you do not wish to participate in this program, you may opt out by contacting your account manager.
We’ve identified keywords and ads in your account that are significantly underperforming, and we’ve initiated the changes to the creatives that you will find attached.
We are very excited about this new program, and hope it will provide you with improved performance and a higher level of service. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.”
SEO and SEM bloggers seem to be outraged by the new TOS. One went as far as comparing it to your investment adviser buying stocks on your behalf or switching your portfolio from bonds to hedge funds. I can’t say I disagree.
I recommend contacting your account manager or marketing company and making sure that Yahoo doesn’t change your campaigns. You should determine how much money you spend, and what to spend money on. Not Yahoo.
SEM and PPC Webinar
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | Internet Marketing, PPC Advertising, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments
“SEM 101: Everything You Wanted to Know About Search Engine Marketing but Were Afraid to Ask!”
This webinar will educate you on Search Engine Marketing basics, illustrate industry trends, and demonstrate successful marketing strategies that work in almost every advertising vertical. The holiday season is approaching and this year consumers will be comparison shopping more than usual. In today’s economy, can you afford to miss this webinar?
Spring Cleaning for Your PPC Campaigns
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 | Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment
Tomorrow is the official First Day of Spring. That means blooming flowers (and pollen!), warmer weather, longer days, tax time, and of course, spring cleaning.
But spring cleaning doesn’t stop at home or even at the office if you’re advertising online. While you’re cleaning dust from the corners of your house or purging old files at the office, have you given any thought to sprucing up your PPC campaigns? We all know that search engines love fresh, optimized campaigns, and below are five easy spring cleaning tips for you to try:
1) Ad Group Review
This single step will likely take the most of your PPC spring cleaning time, but will have the fastest and most immediate impact. At our company, we regularly review our client’s ad groups and check for key factors such as relevancy, performance, and ROI.
To begin, start at the foundation of your ad group, the keywords. Locate the non-performers and pause them to make way for the shining stars who have been working so hard all winter long to get you traffic. Next, use a keyword tool to discover new words that users are searching on and add those to your ad group. Re-evaluate your max and min CPC bids; chances are you could be saving some money since the last time you set these prices.
The next step is to review your ad copy and ad headline. Ads work best when the keyword that you are using to fuel the ad is reflected somewhere in the ad - either the copy or headline, or both. Your ad groups should be focused enough to make this work, and if they are not it’s time to reorganize your ad groups and get creative. The incentives that worked six months ago may no longer work now and it might be time for upgrades! Examples: “big discount” might perform better as “deep discounts”, and that same old tired offer of 10% off of your order might perform better as “Free Shipping!” What’s better than free?
2) Impression Share*
Impression Share (IS) is a neat tool in Google which will let you know what your reach, or as Google describes it “voice” is in a particular vertical. If you saw that your normally top performing keyword has been suffering lately, take a look at the impression share. Chances are your competition is eating up the spotlight for your company. IS can be done at the campaign and ad group level in Google and you can even include your Lost IS in rank and and a value we all understand - money. The Lost IS rank will show you what percentage of impressions you lost due to low ad rank, while the Lost IS in budget terms shows you exactly what percentage of impressions you lost due to budget constraints. If your numbers are low here, go to step 1.
3) IP Exclusion / Site and Category Exclusion*
Did you know that you can block a certain IP address from viewing your ads on the search network? For that matter, you can block certain sites and even categories of sites from where your ad appears on the content network.
We’ll start with the IP exclusion. Have you ever noticed a huge spike in clicks without the conversions to back them up? Twice I’ve seen this happen and both times the culprit was a college class doing research on my client’s websites. The search engines will be able to identify the IP address (or block of IP’s) and prevent your ads from displaying on their machines. Try another, more familiar scenario: say you suspect a competitor from clicking on your ads - block their IP address and your ad won’t be served to their machines when they search for you.
Site and category exclusion are terrific tools if you are serving content ads. By running a placement report you can get a list of the domains which are serving your ads, visit these domains and see if this is a site where you want to have your ad running. If it’s not, a simple site exclusion will prevent your ad from displaying on the non-desirable site, and focus your content campaigns more effectively. Category exclusions are more broad and allow you to block your ad from displaying on certain page types (such as error and parked pages) as well as on a variety of sites which include topics like: international conflict, sexually suggestive material, juvenile material, crime and even profanity.
The bottom line is this: if you are running ads on the search and content networks, you have control over where you show up and what kind of traffic your site is getting from that ad.
4) Landing Page Review
I can’t say it enough, and search engines can’t say it enough: your landing page has got to be relevant to your ad group. Relevancy boosts your quality score which, in turn, allows you to place higher on search results pages and potentially pay less for that placement than your competitors.
Take a good long look at the page presented when a user clicks on an ad. Have you kept this page as up to date as you have kept your inventory, or do you need to sweep out a few cobwebs from the corners? Do you have keywords that are in your ad group listed on your landing page? Is your offer in text where search engine spiders can “read” it, or is it part of a graphic? For that matter, consider your graphics: do you sell a product which can really be best described in a short, concise video? So long as you’ve got the content to back it up, show your potential customer your product is better than the rest. Make your desired action: a newsletter subscription, an order button, or an information form-fill up front where it can be easily identified. Your customers have seen an entire page of ads vying for their attention, don’t waste their time now that they’ve selected you.
One last thing to consider when you are spring cleaning your landing page is your landing page load time. Google recently announced that they will be weighing landing page load time with an ad’s overall quality score. Don’t let all the videos you uploaded which showcase your products perfectly be in vain. Google will be rolling out a tool soon which will evaluate your landing page load time for you, and you can talk with your SEM manager on how to improve this time to get the best overall quality score that you can get.
5) Negative Keywords
I thought I’d end this PPC spring cleaning blog with a nice, easy tool to relieve the hard work you put in doing the previous four.
We all know that new products are being put on the market every day, and most of these products are seemingly unrelated to you and your business. Or are they? If you are a dentist advertising your services online, but you don’t do braces or veneers - those better be in your negative keyword bank or you risk paying for a visitor to your site who was never qualified in the first place. If you sell car theft prevention tools and alarms, have you considered adding the popular video game to your negative keyword bank? Look at your campaign objectively, and now turn your mind to pop culture and do some quick internet research, or pull a Search Query report in Google and see just what could be fueling your ads. Chances are you have some spring cleaning to do.
And you thought you were going to get a long Easter weekend relaxing!
* Sorry, these features are in Google only!
Adwords Update - Quality Score adds load times to metric
Friday, March 14th, 2008 | PPC Advertising, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments
Google Adwords has added the load times of the destination url to the quality score. What this means? I think there may be a rash of servers being upgraded, conversion of dynamic pages to flat html and a lot of attention to graphic load times, sequence, preloads etc.
Google’s metric does take into account the general region that the site is located in and compares it to the average of the site load time in that area. This will help to even out the difference caused by connectivity.
Load time to be incorporated in Quality Score
As we strive to continually improve the user experience, we’ll be adding a new element to Quality Score: landing page load time. Waiting a while for a page to load isn’t a positive experience and can hurt your conversion rate if users decide to abandon your site. To learn more about this change and where you’ll be able to see your load time evaluations, see our Inside AdWords blog post.
SMM - Social Media Marketing, joins the family of SEO & SEM
Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 | Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment
Social Media Marketing, the new media Web 2.0.
Social Media Marketing has been coming on strong for some time now. This is a wonderful new area of the web. The struggle I have seen with many people is understanding its business impact. As marketers it is difficult to get your head around such a viral arena. On one hand SMM brings reach because it is so prolific. The number of pages and profiles coming online make the early days of the internet pale.
Reach Dilution
My first question is how to leverage this reach for marketers when on first glance it appears to expand the reach opportunities in advertising and at the same time dilute the effectiveness of advertising. On the other the target of SMM advertising, the relevance of the audience goes up exponentially.
Demographic Targeting
I like this revolution of adverting to the original onset of Search Marketing. At first it was an educational sale and a tough one at that. The impressions of Search Engine advertising are so small compared to the cost per thousand, CPM, model it is staggering. At the same time the value delivered by SEM and the return on investment make it one of the best media buys in the industry. This is because the SEM audience is predisposed to your product or offering by nature of the search terms entered into a search engine. SEM is no longer tenuous media, in fact it has joined the ranks of mainstream and any serious marketing is obligated to this space.
The Me Too! Effect
Will SMM make the same transition? The jury is still out on that one. The flood of rapid entrants into this media makes it appear so. These entrants may have learned that SEM is now mainstream and many marketers have missed the boat because of a wait and see position. So now these same marketers are flooding into the space espousing it’s virtues.
No Silver Bullet
The truth lies somewhere in between for SMM however. It is time consuming and and arduous endeavor. But if done correctly it can rival the best that Madison Avenue has to offer in results.
Stay tuned for SMM tips and how to make your SMM program a success.
Internet Marketing Richmond - SEO - SEM - Blog - Social Networking - Banner Ads
Thursday, February 28th, 2008 | Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments
What is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing, IM, is any activity to market or proment a service product or even a message. IM can be made up of various different subsegments.
Search Engine Optimization, SEO. Enabling a web site to properly indexed by search engines.
Search Engine Marketing, SEM, also known as Paid Search, Pay Per Click.
Web PR - Blog writing, posting, press releases.
These are all campaings. Most people understand SEO as a task, skill or project. It really is a campaing that needs it’s on budget goals, planning and proper execution.
NetSearch Direct, based in Richmond Virginia provide all of these services.
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