My first SMX was a blast. In between all the Google/Bing jokes, Charlie Sheen-isms, strained wi-fi, and blue Liftinis (no, I didn’t make it past the first sip), was a great event with some top class attendees. Here are my three key takeaways from this year’s conference:
1. Gaming Google
Right or wrong, I don’t spend too much time thinking about how to game Google. It was only during SMX that I realized I’ve learned more black hat tricks from conferences than anywhere else. With the recent Farmer/Panda Update, there was lots of talk around dubious practices: Link Farms, Like Farms (the new Link Farms), White Hat Cloaking (“The Klingons never showed up with good intent”), and more. However, the one that stood out for me most in this conference was an example given in the “Google Instant: 6 Months Later” session.
One of Avi Wilenski’s clients found that their brand was getting tarnished by the negative search suggestions that were appearing in Google Suggest. Avi — who like many, couldn’t get through to anyone at Google to address the issue — took the matter into his own hands and crowdsource-spammed the results (since Suggest is based upon the most popular keyword-related searches).
Spamming the search engine with positive searches effectively pushed the negative suggestions out of the suggest box. Needless to say, the Google rep sitting on the panel didn’t look very amused about this.
2. YouTube PPC
When it comes to YouTube, most of my focus has been around how to organically optimize video to appear in the blended search results. But I was reminded at SMX to support video SEO efforts through simple promotional efforts, including:
- Utilizing Promoted Videos — The equivalent of using PPC within YouTube, and can be linked to your Adwords account.
- Adding Caption Call-to-Actions within videos to take the viewer back to your site.
The aimClear crew did a fab job sharing how to win on YouTube.
3. Learning Outside of the Classroom
More and more, I’m finding that a lot of the learnings I gain from conferences come not from the sessions themselves but from meeting and speaking with other attendees: geeking out, sharing ideas and experiences, not re-creating the wheel, and discovering time and again, that we tend to face very similar challenges. So remember to mingle, go to the after-hour events, and get social.
For the full low-down of the sessions, check out Search Engine Land’s SMX Blog Recap from the event.
Conference season has begun, and with it comes my very first time attending SMX West, in San Jose. With over 60 different sessions on the books, the schedule is jam-packed with lots of search and social marketing goodness, with a first-class speaker line up including: Matt Cutts, Tristan Walker, Danny Sullivan, Marty Weintraub, and more.
Damn you SMX for having so many good things going on at once. So after much umm-ing and ahh-ing, these are the sessions that I’m planning on attending, plus one mandatory session which I somehow managed to get on the panel of. I’m sure these will provide plenty of food for thought for upcoming blog posts.
Tuesday 8th March
- Social Signals and Search
- Google Instant 6 Months Later
- Getting Lift In Search: How Large Advertisers are Budgeting for 2011
- YouTube Ads for Fun and Profit
Wednesday 8th March
- Don’t be a Twitter Spammer
- Ratings, Reviews and Reputation: Their Growing Impact on Search
- New Tools and Techniques for YouTube Success
- E-commerce and Retail Search Marketing Tactics
Thursday 10th March
- SEO Myths, Mistakes and the Madness of Crowds
- Hot Topics in Paid Search
- Ask the Search Engines
- Ask the SEOs
What sessions are you attending? …I’d be happy to swap notes!
PPC-ers will be familiar with “golden” keywords – those handful of keywords that not only drive the most volume of searches and traffic to your pages, but also convert well on the back-end. If you’re smart, you’ll hold those keywords in the highest regard, and allocate the appropriate level of attention and budget to them.
So it should come as no surprise that at some point in time, other marketing teams will want a piece of that golden keyword action to support their promotional campaigns; be it for a short-term sales promotion, a big event, exhibition, or something else. This is particularly common when those golden words include the more general category keywords (EG: general category keywords could include words such as desktop computer, color printer, pc software, digital camera etc.).
However, when someone does a general category search it is very difficult to know their true intent. They could be looking to buy, but then again they could be looking to learn, troubleshoot a problem, research manufacturers, find reviews, or any multitude of tasks.
This is why it often makes sense to take these types of searchers to an overall hub page for that category, where there are different (but clear) call-to-actions related to the “learn”, “buy” and “use” stages of the buying cycle.
I’ve been approached on more than one occasion about changing my golden keywords to support short-term promotions. My advice is to do so with caution as you often end up excluding a lot of potential visitors. As always, if in doubt, test.
A few years ago I carried out a test by moving one such word to support a sales promotion. The adcopy changed to tout the discounts on offer, and the landing page was changed from the category hub page to a new one-off promo page, where the main call-to-action was sales and discount-related.
What I saw should’ve been no surprise: Click-through rates on the ads took the biggest nose dive (from 2% down to 0.5%), consequently causing click traffic for that keyword to go down by over 60% that month. Post click we were able to address the needs of those people who were ready to buy, but most visitors were not yet at that stage and consequently bounced off the page (or as Avinash would say: They came, they puked, they left). Not good at all.
My key takeaway from this is to always take the longer term view. Remember to put yourselves in the searcher’s shoes and match keywords and pages to target their needs. If intent isn’t immediately clear, then give them options. Don’t try to force them into something, just because it suits your needs for that particular month. And if in doubt, always test.
Most of my social media efforts to date have been spent on social media activities focused on what’s going on outside of the company. And in some ways you would expect that because social media marketing is very much about finding ways to listen, talk to and support your customers.
But for social media to be a true success, companies also need to spend time taking a good look at themselves to see whether they are ready to succeed in the social media space. The view that “Social media is 1% of 100 people’s job, not just 100% of 1” really rings true for me and makes complete sense when trying to scale activities across an organization.
The question is, how do you organize for this, particularly in larger enterprise companies? And how do you effectively manage social media as more and more people within different departments catch on to this social media maelstrom, and set forth on experimenting and participating, sometimes with little more than their enthusiasm behind them.
This is why I started looking more into something called a Social Media Center of Excellence (SM CoE); a concept I believe was pioneered by those savvy folks at Intel. Admittedly the name, “Social Media Center of Excellence” does sound a little pretentious, but I have no better alternative to offer up, and since it seems to be a well recognized term in the industry, I’ll leave it be… for now!
Anyway, it is more the thinking behind the SM CoE that is important. It basically brings together a group of cross-functional representatives from key departments (EG: Marketing, Marketing Communications, Web, PR, Customer Service etc.) who act as a focal point (hub) to all of the different departments (spokes) within the company. It seems from research carried out by Altimeter Group, that this “hub and spoke” approach is becoming quite popular amongst enterprise companies.
Personally, I think the SM CoE is a great way to get buy-in from key representatives of different departments so that they feel (and are) a part of the decisions and process, rather than just being dictated to. And as they build up a common understanding, they are perfectly placed to be the social media spokespeople within their own groups.
When I started up our company’s SM CoE earlier this year, I had four main objectives in mind (keeping in mind that we don’t have a full-time Community Manager, let alone a Social Media department):
- Align social media goals, social media policies and measures
- Foster better communication between all key contributors
- Better coordinate company-wide social media efforts
- Increase social media education by providing a forum to openly discuss ideas and insights
It’s still early days, but so far the SM CoE has been a positive step forward in improving communication and understanding in general, and also serves as a good reminder that social media needs to be about inclusion, not exclusion, if we are to succeed.
A belated Happy New Year everyone! Continuing with tradition, I wanted to share with you the top books on my reading list for 2011 — in particular, the top three social media marketing books:
1. Terms of Engagement for Social Media Marketing [Richard Axelrod]
Social media… We know all about that, right? But how do you go about changing traditional organizations enough for social media to really succeed? And how do you get those skeptics and, most importantly, the people who hold the purse strings to really take it seriously? You know, to get things like budget… and resources.
Some key lessons I’ve learned over the past year is that social media requires involvement and inclusion, and needs the backing of the right people. This is why I’m eager to read more from Richard Axelrod [best name, ever] about new ways of leading and changing organizations.
2. Open Leadership [Charlene Li]
Ok, I’m kind of embarrassed that I haven’t read this one yet. Originally, I was waiting for it to come out in iBooks and then it did (but I forgot to check until now!).
Along the similar theme to “Terms of Engagement”, Charlene Li’s follow-up to Groundswell also asks companies to take a closer look at themselves when it comes to social media. The book’s theme is how to use social media to be open while still maintaining control.
3. Engage [Brian Solis]
Contrary to what the title suggests, this book is not about weddings [boom boom!] , but about applying social media to succeed in business. It covers how to create effective strategies, actual examples and success measures. It even includes a foreword by Ashton Kutcher [groan]. Despite this, I’ve heard good things!
Does anyone else have any good book recommendations? And for those who have read these books, what did you think?
Last week I attended a really interesting webinar where David Szetela talked about increasing conversions through PPC re-marketing. If you haven’t already (and you should), you can see it here.
I love listening to Dave because when I do, it always spurs me into action (the first time I heard him speak was at SearchFest, on the topic of PPC Sitelinks). So I really shouldn’t have been surprised that he provided yet another lightbulb moment for me, but this time on the subject of re-marketing.
What’s funny is that the concept behind it is so straightforward, and not at all new. If someone doesn’t convert the first time, then you go back and try to get them to buy again and again, tailoring your message each time. Direct marketers (the smart ones, at least!) have been doing it for decades. This is why in the first ten minutes of listening to the webinar, I literally felt like slapping myself.
With PPC re-marketing you can identify different visitor scenarios. As an example, maybe the visitor just came to your site but didn’t really take any action. Or maybe they abandoned their cart part way through the shopping process. Maybe the person did go onto buy, but you feel like there are cross-sell opportunities to be had.
PPC re-marketing lets you arrange these different scenarios into lists so that you can then tailor your ad messaging across the Google network to these different groups of people, to help re-assure and convince them to take that final purchasing step. It’s like a direct marketer’s dream. It’s direct marketing on steroids.
As with the PPC Sitelinks tests I carried out, I’ll definitely be putting re-marketing into action on the E-commerce side and will report back on findings in a later post.
If you are already using re-marketing, I would love to hear your thoughts on it and how it has worked out for you.
It’s December and what a scary thought. Another year (not to mention, decade) has suddenly passed by and already it’s time to embark on next year’s plans. With 2010 soon to be behind us, I’m taking a look back on my key learnings for the year.
1. Change, Change, Change
Search marketing has always been about change, and 2010 was no exception.
We saw alliances (Bing-Yahoo, Yahoo-Google, Bing-Facebook); fall-outs (Google-China); evolution (Google Instant, Instant Previews, Reviews); and of course, the Death of SEO… again.
Expect 2011 to be no different from years before. As always, we need to be ready to do what we do best: adapt and flourish with change.
2. Always be Prepared for “What Ifs”
Sometimes money gets taken away, other times budget is up for grabs. The key is being prepared to demonstrate on an ongoing basis what search is contributing (linked as closely to ROI and Key Performance Indicators [KPIs] as possible) and what opportunities are being missed as a result of not investing.
Gap analysis played a key role for me in 2010. In fact, it helped to increase my annual media budget by 45%. So don’t underestimate the value of gap analysis to secure additional budget and answer those awkward “what if” questions.
Gap analysis will continue to play an important part of my 2011 strategy, but not just in terms of increasing PPC media. Perhaps more importantly, it will be used to help build up the SEO function and the Search Marketing Organization as a whole.
3. Don’t Operate Within a Bubble
As important as it is to keep up with search marketing developments and techniques, sometimes in business, knowledge on its own is not enough. It is just as important to make sure you don’t operate within a bubble. You need to continuously sell search marketing to key people within your organization to help keep it top of mind, remembering to tailor your approach depending on different people’s interests and what they are measured on.
A couple of weeks ago, Google launched Google Instant Previews for organic search results. What this means is that searchers can now preview your landing page within the Search Engine Results Page (by clicking on a magnifying glass next to your natural result), prior to actually clicking through to your site.
Google Instant Previews Example
Although it’s still early days, and time/data will help us to take informed actions, here’s a few things that search marketers should consider:
1. Get Your Preferred Landing Pages In Order
First and foremost, Google Instant Previews makes it even more important to match and optimize your keywords to your prefered landing page. The page preview now tries to address searcher expectations up front, so it’s important to make sure that the landing page presented is the most relevent for the searcher’s query.
2. Make Sure Your Pages Preview Right
Have you checked what your preview pages look like in the SERP for your top keywords? If not, then you should as you don’t know what you don’t know. Do your pages preview fully? How do your pages look and scale?
A word of warning: If your page is built entirely in Flash (or has Flash components) then they will not appear within Google Instant Preview. Some videos are also appearing as black squares. Camp Google say they’re on the case, but as of this moment, your preview might be looking like an empty page… or a black hole, which could harm your click-throughs.
3. Try and Optimize Your Page for Call-Outs
As you would expect, the page body copy that appears within Google Instant Previews is too small to read, even for those lucky people with 20/20 vision. So sometimes, you’ll see a call-out box appear on the preview which enlarges a section of copy that Google deems to be the most relevent area on the page (as you can see in the highlighted boxes in the example above).
I’m not exactly sure how Google determines which area to highlight, but it seems to be a sentence on the page which includes keywords that match exactly to the search query… at least from the tests that I’ve done. Saying that, there have been instances where no call-out was showing, even when the keywords on the page matched the query. So if anyone out there knows the answer, please enlighten us!
4. Make Use of Relevant Images and Headlines
Because text is so small, what catches your eye most in Google Instant Previews (other than the call-outs), are a main image and the page headline, so make sure these are relevant. However, try not to clutter up the page with too many images. Keep it clean and instantly relatable to your target keywords. This will help the preview pop a bit more and help to build that relevancy bridge.
PPC Reseller Programs can be a real pain to get right. There are so many factors to take into account, multiplied by tens/hundreds/thousands of resellers, all with different web capability levels, spanning many different geographies and languages. The task can seem very daunting to even the most seasoned marketer. Where do you even begin?
In a previous post about How to Achieve Success in PPC Reseller Programs, I touched on some key issues to consider. One of these was the issue of keyword bidding and collaboration. But how exactly do you achieve successful collaboration? And what are the steps you need to take in order to get there? My friends over at Covario helped to shed some light on this topic for me.
1. Determine Budget
If your search marketing budget is already far stretched, the next best place to look for funds is from your company’s Co-Op budget (company marketing dollars that most larger corporations use to support co-operative marketing activities with key resellers). How is the current budget being allocated? And what is the proven return on those activities?
In a prior life, I worked in channel marketing. An ongoing challenge was how to effectively utilize the Co-Op budget and not have it just disappear into a black hole somewhere, with no results to show for it. This is what makes PPC Reseller Programs an ideal Co-Op activity as it delivers rich metrics that can be directly attributed to revenue.
2. Define Program Scope
The next step is to decide whether your PPC Reseller Program will include all of your resellers, or just a select few. It’s important to define up front what your criteria for participation will be (EG: business value to your company, product selection, stock on hand etc.) and what capabilities are needed in order to take part (EG: robust website analytics, e-commerce).
3. Divide Ownership of Keywords
Although day-parting keywords is an option, perhaps the cleanest way to execute (particularly within global programs) is to just decide upon which keywords belong to who. Remember that resellers are just that — they are there to sell. So a good approach is to group your keywords according to intent and split them out that way, with Learn and Support-related keywords being owned by your organization, and Buy-related keywords (which sit further down the funnel) belonging to the resellers.
4. Agree on Adcopy and Landing Pages
It’s a fact of life that resellers will carry a range of products, including those of your competitors. This is why it’s important to agree up front on what adcopy is used and what landing page they will send searchers to.
Make it as easy as possible for the resellers by providing them with adcopy and content for dedicated landing pages/microsites focused just on your products. This way you get to control the messaging. If you can find a way to automatically populate the content onto their pages, then even better.
Once the content is in place, make sure that analytics are set up on the pages so you can track success of the campaign down to online sales. It is always wise to run a pilot prior to full roll out to ensure that analytics are tracking correctly. Continue to monitor PPC activity and performance, and set up regular review meetings to discuss results and ways to further improve the program.
5. Reward Through Re-imbursement
So all of this is very nice from the corporate perspective — you are telling your resellers what keywords they can have, what adcopy and content they have to use, and analytics that need to be set up on their pages in order to track success. So far, it all seems a bit one-sided. What’s in it for them? And how do you get them to *want* to participate? The answer, or course, comes down to money.
The great thing about PPC is the cost-per-click aspect. Through a re-imbursement based approach you can use your Co-Op funds to contribute a percentage towards the click costs. So for example, for every $1 a reseller spends on a keyword click, you can re-imburse them 25c, or 50c, or whatever makes sense. To ensure costs don’t spiral out of control, it’s important to apply a cap on the total Co-Op contribution.
From your contribution, resellers are receiving monetary support to off-set some of the cost from a campaign that will provide them with measurable return, that can be directly linked to sales. What this means is more revenue for the reseller; and that is the ultimate reward.
Since first learning about PPC Sitelinks earlier this year, I’ve become a BIG fan.
There are so many ways that you can use sitelinks to improve the targeting of those broader search terms and get people to where they want to be a lot quicker. For me, using sitelinks over the past six months has driven twice as many clicks at a fraction of the cost, compared to just using one bog-standard link. And post click, the conversions have been a lot higher too.
But the question is: How do you decide what sublinks to use? There are so many approaches and options to choose from, yet Google will only display four sublinks at a time (granted you can load in up to 10 and over time Google will display the best performing). But what if you want to know up front which sublinks will drive the best results? The answer — as always — is to test.
For searches in the US, I wanted to find out which would do better: A product focus (using product categories as sublinks) vs. targeting intent (using learn/buy/use related sublinks). What better way to find out than through an A/B test.
Prior to the test, my thoughts were that targeting intent would trump a basic product approach hands down. Boy, was I wrong. Results showed that the product focus outperformed the intent focus on the front-end, and then went on to crush it on the back-end with:
- 5% more clicks
- 8% better engagement on the site (measured by a weighted quality score)
- 30% higher conversion
Now I’m not saying that these results ring true for everyone, not by any means. I guess my point is, there are theories out there as to what works and what doesn’t, and sometimes it can be dangerous to generalize.
I was convinced the intent approach was best, but simplicity won in the end. It just goes to show that nothing is certain until you test and tailor your approach specifically for your own business.
SEM Booty Blog 