Search Marketing InsiderPay Per Click, Social Media and SEO Strategies – An Internet Marketing Institute Publication

Results of our recent PPC Summit Internet Marketing Education Survey revealed:

• Respondents prefer a mix of online and in-person training
• One or two day in-person educational meetings with multiple tracks/multiple presentations won out
• Networking is an important component of in-person events for most of you
• Relevant vendors add value for 70+% of attendees
• Facebook is the most used social media site amongst those who responded, closely followed by LinkedIn, and over 80% of you are using social media
• Many of you are looking for more advanced strategies for both Pay-Per-Click and SEO

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Congratulations to Jenna, Doug and Ronald who won $60 iTunes Gift Cards for completing the survey. 

If you would like to be included in future survey, sign up for our newsletter now. 

Speaking of the newsletter, Mark from California let us know, “I run two hotels and manage my own PPC programs. I was heading towards a $250,000 spend for 2009 until I picked up a simple tip from a PPCSummit.com email newsletter: “turn off broad match.”  I checked search terms  that were triggering my keywords and found that about 35% of my clicks were not targeted and irrelevant to my adds. (The search engine supposedly had ‘“broadened” its broad match parameters.)  I believe that this “ONE TIP” will save me $80,000-$100,000 over the next year.”

By Mary O’Brien, Founder/Director, PPC Summit  

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend SES San Jose. I hadn’t been in a couple of years, and I was really curious to see what an SES conference looks like now, given the recessionary state of the marketing Industry.

The good news is – Search Engine Marketing is obviously alive and kicking with no chance of decline in the foreseeable future, so if you are thinking of learning a marketing skill to complement your resume and make your career recession proof, Pay-Per-Click, SEO and Social Media will definitely make you more marketable.

Although attendance was down a little bit the conference was still vibrant and focused as usual on the future and big picture of Search Engine Marketing. What was interesting this year was that attendees were actually paying attention, and using the conference to its best advantage. In years past when I attended SES it seemed like all anyone was focused on were the cool tchotchkys that were being given away at various booths. This year folks were actually attending sessions and networking with each other, with the intent of making themselves more interesting to future employers, or even better, going out on their own and getting clients.

Maybe it was the lack of a Google Dance that caused this shift.  In previous years it seemed like the Search Engines went out of their way to compete with each other on who could hold the biggest, craziest party, but this year, it was a much more focused event, totally in keeping with every Search Marketers need to do more with less budget.

So why does learning Search Engine Marketing make you more marketable as a marketer?

From SEMPO’s State of Search Engine Marketing Report and Survey, released in February 2009:
• The North American Search Engine Marketing industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $13.5 billion in 2008
• North American Search Engine Marketing spending is now projected to grow to $26.1 billion in 2013, up significantly from the $18.6 billion forecast in 2007.
• Pay-Per-Click captured 88.4 percent of 2008 spending, up 1% from 2007; organic SEO captured 10.6 percent
• Budgets are shifting to Pay-Per-Click. About a third of respondents said their funding for Pay-Per-Click came from a mix of new and existing marketing funds. Another third reported using entirely newly allocated budgets

Reuters also reported that while online advertising isn’t growing at the rate that print advertising is declining it IS still growing even as the economy all around us is shrinking. Basically, Search Engine Marketing is pretty recession proof. Advertising dollars are still available but they appear to be moving online, and over 85% percent of that is for Pay-Per-Click.

This is important for two reasons:
1. This will give more companies the incentive to advertise online in case their competitors beat them to the punch.
2. Those companies will need knowledgeable, talented and properly-trained people to execute a great Search Engine Marketing campaign.

When times are not so good, more businesses are willing to push budgets online. When times get better, do you think that is going to change?

The numbers from SEMPO show that nowadays a larger number of businesses get the importance of not only having a Web presence, but are working hard to maintain their visibility. Now that the economy is slow, budgets are being pulled from other sources and moved online.

What does that mean for the future of Search Engine Marketing?  Basically, as a marketer, a large percentage of your time should be focused on SEM. You should be doing it, researching it, learning it and staying current with all the nuances and changes.  You don’t necessarily have to be an expert at every part of it, but you should know who the experts are, the best tools to use and also how to get access to info when you have a question.

So even in a recession continue your Search Engine Marketing education. Go to conferences, training and seminars that can help you to learn, network and improve your marketability. You’ll meet amateur and professional Search Engine Marketers and business owners, create great peer relationships, and learn more skills. If your current company has cut their training budget, considering paying for training yourself.  That way you’ll truly make yourself recession proof along with Search Engine Marketing. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a huge expensive conference, as long as it meets your specific education needs. Go where you can learn the most about the skill that will make you the most marketable right now. This is a great time to invest some marketing dollars in yourself.

Book Review by Mary O’Brien, Founder/Director of PPC Summits

Tim does a great job in this book not only covering “What” Landing Page Optimization is but also “Why” you should do it.

His book provides you with excellent guidance for analyzing your current website and determining how to make it easier for the visitor to use and do what you need them to do.

Tim has spoken for us several times at our PPC Summits and his sessions are always very interactive and well received by attendees. In the book he has a section called “Why your site is not perfect.” In person he addresses that head on in a presentation called “Why Your Baby is Ugly.”

Both the chapter and the training session provide excellent information on how to uncover the hidden problems in your site that your users are experiencing even though you may have overlooked them. Users don’t usually navigate your site the way you expect or the way you want them to, so rather than trying to drive them down your path, watch how they navigate and build your site and landing pages to meet their needs.

The book provides an extensive focus on personas, and why users behave the way they do on the web. It also explains basic concepts such as A-B split testing, ROI, and gives some examples with marketing formulas you can apply to your sites.

Tim covers testing landing pages comprehensively from an analytics perspective. No matter how pretty your website is, unless it performs and meets the needs of your audience it is practically worthless.  Tim also tells you honestly the limitations of different testing methods so that you can decide what will work best for you.

There are some good examples of sites with poor landing pages and sites with effective pages so you can get a better idea of what works and what doesn’t.  He also provides important background about the psychology and the math of testing that most people are not even aware of. This may get a little complicated for those who are newer to search marketing, but the concepts are those that every marketer needs to grasp and practice, so it provides a good grounding in some really essential stuff.

As Tim would tell you himself there is no “one size fits all” answer when it comes to landing pages. What works for one site won’t work at all for another, so you have to test and test again until you truly create a page that resonates with your audience. Of course the proof of that is whether the page is generating sales or leads, but the book also does a great job covering the metrics that allow you to discover whether the page is successful or not.

 There are parts of the book that may come across as a little “Salesy” or promotional in nature, but anyone who knows Tim, also knows that this is a just part of his persona. He is a passionate advocate of testing and tuning landing pages to get better results, and he has built a very successful business out of that philosophy and also made lots of money for his clients in the process.

If you are looking for a quick fix, this book is not for you. But if you want a deep understanding of all issues that are critical for landing page testing success, then you should definitely read this, and give it a prominent place on your marketing bookshelf as an ongoing research tool.

by Heather Schwartz, Account Executive at Anvil Media, Inc.

It’s never too early to start getting ready for the holidays whether it’s shopping if you’re a customer or prepping your strategy if you’re a marketer.  Here are some things to start thinking about the upcoming 2009 holiday season for your online marketing efforts, specifically for Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.  First let’s look into last year’s holiday season and expectations for this year to get a good understanding of the 2009 holiday landscape.

Holiday Season 2008
According to comScore, e-shopping sales in 2008 were over $130 million, a 6% increase in sales from the 2007 holiday season, and among the top 500 internet retailer’s sales in 2008 increased 12%.  From this we can conclude that more people were shopping online in 2008 compared to 2007 and that larger retailer sales are growing at a faster rate.  In a study done by Coremetrics, department stores and gifting sites saw an increase in conversion rate over the 2008 holiday season, while luxury goods retailers saw a decrease in conversion rate.  Why you ask?  Because the department stores and gifting sites adapted to the economy, they offered early discounting, they changed their merchandising to feature value items at lower prices and they added buying incentives for customers, like free shipping.   The retailers who continue to change and adapt to their customers needs and wants (within reason) are the ones that will prosper.

2009 Holiday Forecast
In order to properly prepare for this year’s holiday season, some research needs to be done first.  Below are Coremetrics’ forecasts for the 2009 holiday season:
• Shoppers will be shopping earlier this year and buying value orientated, incentive driven items.
• Potential for increase in cost/order, because customers will be shopping in more sessions therefore clicking on more marketing programs.
• Targeted email and display ads will play a bigger role this holiday season.

So, here is your friendly reminder – get ready for the 2009 holiday season, consider offering more promotions, like free shipping and feature products that aren’t necessarily the most expensive on your site.  (Keep in mind you don’t want these promotions to negatively affect your bottom line, be smart about your offerings.)  Also if you’re already running PPC on the Search Network, consider running on the Content Network on sites that directly target your customers.  So, how should you get started for the holiday season?

PPC Ad Text for Holiday 2009
1. Look at your campaign history.  If you included holiday messaging in your campaigns last year, what types of ads had the highest CTR and conversion rates? For those top performing ads can you translate the messaging for this year?
2. Continually test ad text.  There are several options when it comes to A/B testing ad copy.  For the holidays, test what type of promotion increases CTR or conversion rate.  Test the headline on your ad, for example, one that includes pricing v. one that doesn’t.  Once you have collected enough data, pause the non-performing ad, copy the ad that performed better and slightly tweak the messaging to continue testing.
3. Competitive research.  Don’t forget to do some holiday recon, look at what your direct competitors are saying in their ad text.  What type of offers/promotions are your competitors offering?
4. Create a schedule for the launch of your new ads, paying close attention to the following dates:
      a. Black Friday, November 27th – only 28 shopping days until Christmas this year.  Last year’s holiday season was the start of the shorter time period between Black Friday and Christmas Day.  In 2007, this period was 32 days, which is over a 12% decrease in the number of shopping days from 2007 to 2009.  This decrease in the shopping period is influencing customer’s buying behaviors to start shopping earlier.
     b. Cyber Monday, November 30th – this day continues to be a bigger day each year, with more people shopping online.
     c. Christmas Day, December 25th – continues to be a big shopping day for people doing returns or exchanges, customers buying complementary goods, using their gift cards, buying additional gifts online and buying products that were forgotten.

PPC Keywords for Holiday 2009
1. What keywords performed well last holiday season?  Instead of setting bidding strategies based on last month’s performance, take some time to review last year’s performance and make decisions based on last year’s holiday season.  Was there a specific keyword category that did particularly well in terms of sales, will this be the same for this year?  Look to popular trends to help determine “top sellers” and manage budget accordingly. 

2.  Revisit your negative keyword list.  Are there any particular holiday related negative keywords you could consider adding to your campaigns?

3.  If you are bidding on holiday related keywords, keep an extra close eye on the CPA and ROI at the keyword level, often times these keywords are expensive and don’t show goal return.

PPC Landing Pages for Holiday 2009
1.  If your ad text has holiday messaging be sure this gets translated to your landing page.  Same goes for promotions.
2.  Imagery.  Update any relevant images on your landing page with holiday related imagery.
3.  Revisit the conversion funnel on your site; make sure the appropriate merchandising is holiday related for cross selling and recommendation opportunities.  Do you have any gifting options on your site?  Also, make sure your internal search engine delivers gifting related results to relevant inquiries.

In summary, today is not too early to start planning your PPC campaigns for the holiday season.  Before it’s too late, determine your key benchmarks and goals for the holidays.  Start testing different verbiage or promotions now so you have a leg up on the competition before the holidays hit, and if something is working in one medium try to translate that across all your marketing efforts if applicable.

I hope the above takeaways regarding ad text, keywords and landing pages get you excited for the 2009 Holiday Season and jumpstart your PPC strategy.

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Heather Schwartz is an Account Executive at Anvil Media, Inc.  Heather  graduated from the University of Oregon with a BS in Marketing and a minor in Communication studies.  Heather has been working with Anvil Media in Portland since 2008 specializing in B2C ecommerce clients such as lucy activewear, Tea Collection and Ellington Leather, developing SEO, Social Media and PPC campaigns to increase clients online visibility and ROI.

By Dane Christensen, Search Engine Marketing Manager at Lyris, Inc

Countless articles have been written about the importance of focusing on long-tail keywords for both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.  It’s generally agreed that long-tail keywords produce higher quality traffic at a lower cost. 

It’s a great theory.  But there is the small matter of generating the massive number of long-tail keywords needed to build a significant amount of traffic.   By its very nature, long-tail keyword traffic is scattered across a very wide landscape. 

Using the Lyris HQ demo website “Top 5 Flicks” (www.top5flicks.com) as an example, a very small list of possible long-tail keywords could be:

• ”action flick starring orlando bloom”
• ”horror movie without blood”
• ”buy romantic comedy movie”
• ”war movie about macarther in Japan”
•  “directed by martin scorsese”

When you factor in all the possible movie genres, subjects, settings, actors, directors, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc. can you imagine how many possible permutations of long-tail phrases there could be?  Oh, and then there are misspellings (yes, I spelled “macarther” wrong on purpose above) meaning that keyword phrases could easily go into the millions.  Some of those keywords will get a handful of searches each month; many of them will just get a single random search here and there.   But that’s the long-tail.  Individually, the keywords probably aren’t worth the effort of researching and plugging them in to your system.   But collectively it can account for a significant amount of high-quality traffic. 

To go after the lucrative long-tail, you must have an effective way to harness massive numbers of keywords. 

Following are five techniques that will allow you to do just that:
Website Content Mining
You know all of those websites that marketers have been working hard to optimize for years?  They can serve as a great source of valuable long-tail keywords.  But how do you scoop up the keywords that are just floating out there amongst all those websites?  Some people have created screen scraper bots—applications that scour the web extracting keywords from websites. 

But this method has been rendered obsolete by Google’s (relatively) new Search-based Keyword Tool .   Using the SK Tool, you can specify a particular website address and it will instantly produce a list of keywords found on that site.  Click on any of those words to go straight to a search results page where you can find other websites to enter into the tool.  In no time you’ll find a plethora of long-tail keywords. 

The tool also provides a way for you to organize these keywords into categories.  If you have an AdWords account you’ll also have the ability to store keyword sets so you can build lists over time.  Once you’ve got a big enough list you can easily export the list for import back into Google or any other search engine.  It’s a great tool.  And it’s completely free.

Search Engine Query Analysis
While the above method focuses on pulling keywords from content, this method involves analyzing what people are actually searching for in the search engines.   While there is undoubtedly a great deal of overlap between these two sources, analyzing what people are looking for may be a way of getting the jump on all those websites that have not yet picked up on the latest trends.

The Keyword Discovery tool in Lyris HQ mines query data from over 200 search engines world-wide, compiling nearly 38 billion searches.  When used with the Lyris HQ Search Marketing tool, researched keywords can be automatically dropped into your PPC campaigns with no export/import required.   The Keyword Discovery tool is included in the Lyris HQ fee structure, allowing Lyris HQ users the ability to easily tap into the most extensive database of keyword data on the planet.

PPC Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence tools take yet another approach to keyword research, focusing on the keywords on which PPC advertisers are bidding.   The idea here is that if companies are actually spending money on these keywords, they must be the most important keywords.  Two such “spying” tools are Keyword Spy and Spy Fu, with service fees ranging from $59 to $139 per month.

These services allow you to input the domain of your competitors’ websites, and it will return a list of all the keywords on which they are bidding.  In addition to the keywords, there is information such as how many searches are done on the keywords, how many companies are bidding on them, and what the cost is for the top bid position.   This allows you to easily focus on the least competitive keywords.

Permutation
If you want to bid on the keywords that no one else has even thought of, the tool for that job is permutation.  Permutation means assembling words together in various combinations form different sets of words.  Using the “Top 5 Flicks” example, our permutation may look like the three lists below:

List 1                List 2                   List 3  
movie              starring              keanu reeves
dvd                  featuring            russell crowe
flick                    with                   harrison ford

These three small lists can be combined into 27 (3x3x3) different keywords such as:
* movie featuring harrison ford
* dvd with russell crowe
* flick starring keanu reaves
* Etc.

Add just one more three-item list like genres (e.g. action, comedy, drama) and you’re talking about 81 long-tail phrases (e.g. “comedy flick with harrison ford”).  Adding more items to each list can grow the list to massive proportions very rapidly.

The key here is to save the energy of researching what people are bidding on, searching on, or putting on their website and just pump out the keywords programmatically.  Using this method you’re bound to generate a lot of phrases that nobody every searches on, but you’ll also catch a lot of those very low-volume searches that are missed with the previous methods–or even those that haven’t even been searched on yet.  

Unless you have unlimited time and patience, you’ll need a tool to pull this off.  The leader in the field is Boxer Software’s “The Permutator,” an installed software that cost about $50.

Web Analytics
If permutation is like casting a very wide net in order to scoop up all the stragglers, using your web analytics data is more like using a fishing pole with the perfect bait to catch exactly the right keywords.  Any respectable web analytics application has some form of keyword report that will show you what keywords visitors searched on in order to reach your site.  That is your prime list. 

Some keyword reports are more sophisticated than others.  The keyword report in Lyris HQ allows you to segment visitors and the keywords they searched on using a wide range of criteria, allowing you to focus on the highest value keywords. 

You can even take it a step further and capture the data from a search form on your own website.  This way you not only know what people searched on to reach your site, but what they are searching for after they reach your site.  Now that is targeted!

Summary
Implement all five of these techniques and you won’t miss any high-value long-tail keywords.  And you may actually find that you have no more use for the big-head keywords at all.

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Dane Christensen is the Search Engine Marketing Manager at Lyris, Inc. where he uses the company’s integrated online marketing suite to manage a six digit monthly marketing budget over seven different search engines.  He has been involved in the Internet industry as a trainer, web developer, webmaster, online marketer, web analytics specialist, product manager, and entrepreneur since 1994.

Article 2 of 3: Drive Best-in-Class Results by Integrating Your Pay Per Click (PPC) with Other Online Marketing Channels

By Mary Huffman, Executive Vice President, Ionic Media

In the first article in this series, we reviewed the workhorses of online advertising:
* Pay-Per-Click search marketing (PPC)
* Search engine optimization (SEO)
* Display advertising (e.g., banners)
* Email (to house list)

Each marketing channel has a sweet spot for the type of product or situation in which it performs best.  The same is true for the six marketing channels we are exploring in this article:
* Mobile 
* Online PR
* Blogging
* Viral /social media
* Email (to rented list)
* Affiliate marketing

In this article, we will explore relatively new media options along with tested media vehicles like email to rented lists and affiliate marketing.  At this time, the new marketing choices are riskier than the ones we reviewed last time, but there are some stand-out results that cannot be ignored (especially among the adventurers out there).

First, let’s review how the six marketing vehicles we are focusing on perform on the “Branding” vs Direct Response” two-by-two matrix.

The six marketing vehicles we are reviewing in this paper are spread out across the branding vs direct response spectrum.  Now let’s review the summary and then we can dig into the detail on each of these more newly-minted marketing vehicles.

Now let’s look at each of these marketing vehicles in more detail.

Mobile Marketing:
The mobile marketing umbrella includes a number of different marketing vehicles.  Let’s look at each one individually.

Banner/Text Ads On Phones:
* Using a mobile ad network, marketers can place display or text ads on websites viewed with phones or on content sent to mobile phones (like daily weather updates)
* Allows you to reach a young, tech savvy audience
* Also allows you to reach older audiences, though at lower volume
* High response rates currently (likely because the technology is newer)
* As mobile coupon technology improves, this will be a great way to push coupons to users who are in-store and more likely to purchase

SMS Messaging Campaigns:
* Using a mobile service provider who furnishes a short code, you can entice people to “Text sweepstakes to 22456 for a chance to win a new car.”  It is the beginning of a mobile or email communication that must be managed carefully
* Most mobile service providers have a relatively high monthly minimum cost so it is not easy to test these types of campaigns unless you go through an agency (like Ionic Media)
* While the largest population using messaging is younger, don’t count out the 30-54 year olds, as they are the fastest growing segment for mobile messaging

Mobile Search:
* Using existing search engine ad interfaces as well as those from new companies, a marketer can choose to display a paid listing within the results when mobile users make a search
* Costs little but often delivers few leads

Mobile Applications:
* This can involve either developing a custom application, or sponsoring an existing application
* The trick is aligning the brand with an application that addresses what users care about and want to do while mobile

Mobile Website:
* Note that for many of these campaigns, you need a mobile website
* Some smartphones (e.g., iPhone, G1, Blackberry Storm) can render “regular” websites pretty well
* But most phones require a scaled-down mobile site

Online PR:
* Online PR is an easy and effective way to drive more buzz about your company
* Existing press releases can be uploaded to syndication sites that drive the story across online press sites
* Each time you upload a press release, the syndication site charges a fee (up to $200 depending on the site and the package)
* This can be an effective way to drive authority for your site (lots of relatively good inbound links) which helps with organic ranking

Blogging:
* Using easy-to-install blogging software, a marketer can create an on-site or off-site blog where one or more people can chronicle their thoughts and opinions
* A good blog with lots of followers can drive organic ranking and therefore organic traffic
* To ensure good pickup, blog often and reach out to potential readers to become loyal followers
* This marketing vehicle takes a commitment to the activity.  Blogs should be updated at least once a week and better to be updated every other day or even everyday.  That takes a high level of commitment

Viral Marketing:
* Viral marketing is a catchy name for an ill-defined group of marketing tactics.  For example, all of the following would be considered viral marketing:
     * An on-line widget that lets you upload photos to turn your friends into dancing elves a la Chorus Line
     * A video of claymation bunnies frolicking in New York City to advertise the Sony Bravia television
     * An email message you send to a friend with Bob Dylan holding up cue cards that display your message and which    ends with a plug for his latest album
     * A video of preppy white boys doing a rap about throwing a tea party (to advertise Smirnoff)
     * A widget with a man dressed in a chicken suit who performs whatever action you command him to (Burger King’s Subservient Chicken)
     *  These are all wildly popular examples of viral campaigns.  There are 2,356,744 other campaigns that companies tried to make popular but did not, in the end, “go viral.”  Note: That number is approximate and might be off by a lot
     * MarketingSherpa reports that the most experienced viral marketers report that only 50% of viral campaigns break even and only 1 in 80 are home runs
     *  So, the message when you are starting a viral campaign is to be creative, turn to the experts and run 80 campaigns at a time so you can get one home run (that would work, right?).  Actually, just be thoughtful when you are planning your viral campaigns and watch your costs as most do not deliver on the hype

Email to Rented Lists
* Historically this medium has delivered poor performance to marketers
* It can be used effectively to drive awareness and action if you carefully select the list provider of the leads

* When looking for a rented list to email with your message, check for the following:
* How was the list assembled?  Did they scrape websites or did people sign up for a special offer for information one individual at a time?
* Is the list single or double opt-in?  Double opt-in is the gold standard.  If it is opt-in, what do the people think they opted in for (information from a certain vendor, information for a series of vendors in a category or a chance to win a long-past sweepstakes)?
* How old are the names on the list?  If everyone opted-in to the list within the last 30 days, you should be willing to pay more than if the list was built over 5 years ago
* How often do they mail to this list and what are the response/opt-out rates?
* Consider a co-branded email campaign with another, more established brand.  Use that brand’s email list and send a dedicated email that has an implied endorsement from that brand

Affiliate Marketing:
* Affiliate marketing includes the broad reach of affiliate networks such as Commission Junction as well as working closely with a small number of “super affiliates” who carefully drive leads and sales to your business
* Working with affiliate networks such as Commission Junction and ShareASale makes affiliate recruitment easier (as they have hundreds of thousands of members) but you have less control over the quality of the affiliates and the messages they are putting out to your target market in your name
* Creating super-affiliate relationships with a handful of sites is more work but can deliver a better end result in terms of volume and quality of leads/sales
* And the bounty is often a key driver here.  If you are willing to pay more per lead or sale, more affiliates are going to give you more attention and drive more volume

While these six marketing vehicles are not the online marketing staples from the first article in this series, there is a lot to be said for testing these media.  Each medium listed above requires either time or money to make it happen.  For any given company only two are likely to be a strong fit with the target market of that particular product.

In the last in our series on the online marketing landscape, we will be looking at how to intelligently integrate your PPC marketing with other online vehicles for maximum effect.

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Mary Kingsley Huffman is a co-founder and Executive Vice President at Ionic Media, a firm with deep experience driving bottom-line results for clients using search and online marketing. Previously, she was Director of Marketing at Overture Services where she was responsible for the acquisition marketing and communication departments, leading all advertiser acquisition efforts and customer communications. Prior to Overture, Mary was an Engagement Manager in the London office of McKinsey & Company, specializing in marketing solutions. Mary has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA from UCLA.

By Karen Waggoner, Director of Events, PPC Summit 

By now everyone with a keyboard or touch screen is aware that Yahoo and Microsoft chiseled a long sought after deal to combine their collective search forces.  This means Yahoo’s once-dominant search engine will be replaced by Microsoft’s newly branded Bing.  This certainly makes Bing, with 30% of the market, a force which cannot be ignored.

What Makes Bing Sing?
As defined by Microsoft, Bing is a decision engine, “a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, or finding a local business.”

The Bing experience is definitely different.  Beyond the slick advertising, the customized results by category and product yield a different-looking output.  It seems reasonable that queries yielding results based on product and category are almost certain to produce more impressions – as searchers do not have to view a full advertisement – and can see the information packaged under multiple categories.  Bing claims that click through rates for items in their categorized results are higher than results in the normal organic listings. The new multi-threaded SERP design renders more pages that are closely associated with the primary keywords being searched, according to Tony Yamanaka, Natural Search Specialist of Apogee Search.  This is a good thing for advertisers and affiliates.

What Makes Bing Go?
Bing features include what they call Quick Tabs.  These are broad category links based on your query nicely ordered on the left margin as secondary listings. These broad categories may be useful for those in unique niches and also as a resource tool to identify broad keyword terms.  One more user-friendly feature is the Best Match option.  One result returned with high confidence is shown at the top of the page as the best match.  Eight links are added under this listing along with an internal search form.  To encourage selection as a “best match” company names contained in the URL and title tags appear to win out.  Local Listings include mini-reviews categorized by relevant keyword, a departure from MSN and Live Search days.  A new partnership with Yellow Pages Local Listings means paid sponsors will show above normal listings, per Anthony Edwards of Apogee Search, in a recent and highly informational blog post.

Bing also has a couple of new and unique offerings, BingTweets and a Cashback program.  Cashback is offered as a bonus to consumers who purchase eligible products and pitched as a way to “avoid extra expenses with a pay-per-click (PPC) bidding process that doesn’t require constant attention.”  Talk about a slick pitch.  Microsoft claims Cashback to be, “a low-risk advertising channel based on actual sales. You can remove risk when listing your products with Bing Cashback because it’s based on a CPA model. You don’t have to invest extra time or money in undesired fees traditionally associated with PPC campaigns. This also helps you avoid click fraud and click arbitrage.”
BingTweets is a partnership that promises deeper, real-time information about trending topics on Twitter by marrying Bing search results with the latest tweets.  You can search for anything in the BingTweets search box and see Bing search results alongside the most recent related tweets.  There’s a highly useful idea that Google didn’t come up with first.

What Does Bing Bring?
The good news for entry-level advertisers is there is one-less platform to manage, a shorter learning curve and less time overall is required to be successful in search. Internet marketers simply must pay attention to the Bing algorithm and optimize accordingly.  Fortunately the optimization process seems, on the surface, to be essentially the same as Google’s. 

Bing has earned praise for how it displays relevant search results.  It is all about how users think and use search.  As Tony Yamanaka, puts it, “Bing does not have to overthrow Google to be successful; it can succeed by taking a different approach.”  And Bing is definitely singing a different tune.

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Karen Waggoner, CMP is Director of Events for Alteract Marketing LLC, the parent company of PPC Summit and AdWords Advantage Online Summit.

By Mary Huffman, Executive Vice President, Ionic Media

Article 1 of 3 Series: Drive Best-in-Class Results by Integrating Your Pay Per Click (PPC) with Other Online Marketing Channels

It is a mistake to rely solely on PPC as your go-to  marketing channel to drive the success of your business.  While effective, PPC cannot always deliver great results when your brand is unknown, your product is commoditized or you are in a crowded field, for instance.  Smart marketers understand the online marketing landscape and know which levers to pull given their market position.  This article is the first in a series of three articles which will describe the online marketing landscape and provide some tips on driving revenue with PPC and other effective marketing vehicles.

In the first two articles in the series, we will explore the following marketing channels:
*  Affiliate
*  Blogging
*  Display (e.g., banners)
*  Email (house and rented lists)
*  Mobile
*  Online PR
*  Pay per click (PPC)
*  Search engine optimization (SEO)
*  Viral/social media

Then in the final article, we will describe how to integrate your PPC marketing with other vehicles to drive better results than one vehicle alone would deliver.

Let’s first look at how each of these marketing vehicles compares to the another on driving branding goals (building awareness and interest but not necessarily trial or purchase) and driving direct response (DR) goals such as visits, downloads, sales, etc.

Email (to a house list), PPC, SEO and mobile marketing are generally the most effective DR channels.  They are best at driving traffic and sales in the most controllable way.

Online PR, blogging and viral/social media can do a lot for driving awareness and interest but are less likely to drive measurable increases in sales and revenues.  Make no mistake, though, these more brand-building marketing vehicles have an important job of raising awareness and driving interest.  Awareness and interest are the foundation of success for sales.  Without these elements, you can be left sitting in your office wondering why no one wants to buy your wonderful, ground-breaking product.  Pssst…they don’t know about it.

Display is balanced between DR and branding.  So too are affiliate marketing and email (to a rented list) marketing, although they are generally harder to make as effective as other channels.

Let’s dig in and review the strengths and weaknesses of four of the most-used channels: PPC, SEO, display and email to a house list.  Here is a handy summary chart that you can use as we review each marketing channel in more detail.

Pay-Per-Click Search Marketing (PPC)
*  Can be a laser-focused traffic and sales driver
*  Develop a keyword list that numbers in the tens of thousands (not in the tens or hundreds)
*  Write ad copy in the context of the other ad copy that may appear on the search results page
*  Ensure your landing page is relevant and meets the needs of the user (based on the user’s keyword)
*  Test everything…constantly
*  Best used for: Products/services with some inherent demand.  Your PPC results will be disappointing if no one is   searching for what you offer

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
*  As much art as science
*  The goal with SEO is to raise both the relevance of a webpage to a given keyword as well as increasing its authority. 

This translates to extensive on-site work as well as off-site link building.
*  The ROI for SEO can be in the thousands of percents – it is well worth the effort
*  Best used for: anyone with a website who wants to build traffic levels in a cost-effective way.  Note: it takes several months to begin driving traffic so you need to be in it for the long term (e.g., 12 months at least).

Display (e.g., banners, rich media, video)
*  Banners have a bad reputation for delivering few sales and being priced based on impressions
*  Look again, as banners come in many more shapes and sizes and some of them can now do tricks (e.g., expand on roll-over, peel off a page, allow for in-banner video or in-banner form completion, synchronize so two banners on a page can work in tandem to communicate a message)
*  New tracking techniques allow you to measure the “assists” from banners so you can see how many users viewed a banner several times and then later searched for the product and bought something from your site.  The assist value of banners can be very high and is easily overlooked if you do not set up the tracking correctly
*  While clickthrough rates for traditional banners remain at less than 1%, the new formats and new tracking mean that banners can be a huge activity driver if the creative and call-to-action are compelling
*  The ROI from display advertising can vary.  We have seen instances where banners were MORE effective than a PPC campaign when a product was not yet in high demand and we needed to increase awareness
*  Best used for: products/services with lower awareness or interest, and those offerings that benefit from visual explanations and/or more explanation

Email (House List)
*  Generally delivers the best ROI as recipients are familiar with your product/service and may be previous purchasers
*  Typically inexpensive since the only costs are usually creative development and actually sending the email
*  Best used for: anyone with a house list.  Do not let your house list age and wither without using it to drive additional revenue with re-sell and cross-sell efforts.  If you do not have a house list, begin building one (perhaps by using the other channels described here).  Test continuously to improve performance on metrics like bounce rate, view rate, open rate, clickthrough rate (by link) and conversion rate.

These four marketing channels (PPC, SEO, display and email to house lists) are the workhorses of online advertising.  Consider them (and more importantly, test them) carefully before you eliminate one from your marketing mix.

In the next article in this series, we will review the other online channels (mobile, online PR, blogging, email to rented lists, viral/social media and affiliate marketing).  The final article in the series will provide tips for how to integrate these various marketing vehicles effectively with PPC.  Our goal is to make the integrated marketing plan deliver more than the sum of the parts.

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Mary Kingsley Huffman is a co-founder and Executive Vice President at Ionic Media, a firm with deep experience driving bottom-line results for clients using search and online marketing. Previously, she was Director of Marketing at Overture Services where she was responsible for the acquisition marketing and communication departments, leading all advertiser acquisition efforts and customer communications. Prior to Overture, Mary was an Engagement Manager in the London office of McKinsey & Company, specializing in marketing solutions. Mary has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA from UCLA.

By Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Website Effectiveness Consulting, Apogee Search

Now more than ever, marketers are hyper-focused on getting the most out of their online advertising investments.  Here are 7 strategies to give your current paid search (Pay Per Click) campaigns a boost and get the highest quality of visitors coming to your website.  These techniques can be implemented fairly easily, and are highly effective at maximizing your campaign ROI. 

1. Trim the fat on your PPC campaign
The hard work with PPC budget reduction is that you don’t want to just lower your daily budget on the search engines, lower bids across the board, or do other sweeping things that will also cut your lead flow by the same percentage that it reduces your spend.

Some campaigns are highly optimized, making fat trimming more difficult, but most campaigns are wasting a portion of spend on audiences that will never convert. Now is the time to refine your campaign to ensure that you pay only for relevant traffic.

2. Add negative keywords
Run Google search query reports to see what actual search terms are driving your traffic (and costing you money). If you are using broad match at all, chances are there will be some irrelevant terms in there. Add these irrelevant terms as negative keywords in both Google and Yahoo!

Are you seeing a lot of lines like “108 other unique search queries?” Most analytics programs will show you a list of the search queries that brought traffic to your site, and you can supplement Google’s data with these reports.
Don’t just focus on reducing unwanted clicks, also trim out irrelevant impressions. Why do this when you are only paying for clicks? Because it will actually reduce your costs. Google has put more and more emphasis on its quality score algorithm, and one major element of a keyword’s quality score is the click-through rate. If adding negative keywords removes 20% of your impressions on a keyword (those that were so irrelevant they weren’t generating any clicks), that would increase your click-through rate by 20%. The corresponding increase in quality score should increase your average position or decrease your cost per click.

3. Refine ad copy
Stop wasting money paying for clicks from people who will never fill out a lead form. Many companies default to exciting ad copy that is focused on grabbing attention and generating clicks. In a tighter economy, ads need to be targeted to attract only relevant traffic.

Make your ads specific, and make sure they accurately represent your company. Often it makes sense to use your ads to actively qualify prospects.

4. Add dayparting
Another good way to reduce spend without reducing overall performance is to daypart–turning your ads off entirely at times of the day that don’t deliver quality traffic. Google allows you to pause campaigns at certain times, and also to selectively lower bids. Turning your campaign off entirely on the weekends might be overkill, but automatically reducing bids 50% on weekends might give you a similar number of qualified leads with less cost.

5. Test all major changes to your website
Not all site changes increase conversion rates. Some companies redesign their sites to have a better look and feel, but then see a decrease in conversion rate despite positive feedback about the design. Even landing page best practices don’t work in every instance.

There are many great testing platforms out there, and some, like Google Website Optimizer, are even free. It is relatively simple and painless to test everything but minor changes to your site.

If you launch a new landing page, A/B test it against the one you were previously using. If you are making several individual changes to a landing page, home page, or any page on your site that affects your PPC campaign, consider using a multivariate test to see which variables have the most impact and which combination is the best.

A word of warning: these tests can quickly add up to dozens of possible combinations. If you have a low lead flow, these tests can take months to accumulate statistically significant data. Be sure to limit your variants to a level that your traffic can support, and consider sticking with A/B testing if you usually see less than 100 leads a month.

6. Track past online conversions
If you are not tracking your paid search campaigns all the way through to sale, you won’t know which keywords or even which campaigns or search engines are generating the leads that are turning into sales.

This data takes a while to accumulate, since you must wait until leads make it all the way through your sales cycle. If you have a long sales cycle or low lead volume, it can be many months before you have any statistically significant data.

Work now to integrate your PPC (and SEO) data into your CRM system so you can have solid ROI numbers for each of your online campaigns—before you need those numbers.

Once you get enough data, you can start optimizing your campaign toward activities that are generating revenue rather than leads that go nowhere.

7. Keep an eye on the competition
Stay aware of what your competitors are doing, but don’t imitate them. Your strategy, analysis, and data all might be stronger than theirs. When watching competitors, get an idea of their sophistication level by looking at their tracking system and tracking syntax, keyword coverage (on both relevant and irrelevant keywords), ad copy, and landing pages.

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Alissa Ruehl is the Manager of Website Effectiveness Consulting at Apogee Search. Prior to opening this new division, she managed the paid search department at Apogee for over three years, and during that time was personally involved in the management of paid search campaigns for over 100 companies.  In Apogee’s Website Effectiveness division, Alissa has supervised and delivered successful conversion consulting engagements for dozens of companies.  She consults on goal setting and metrics, analytics installation, integration and usage, overall website usability and conversion rate, as well as design and testing of paid search landing pages.

In our last edition of Pay Per Click (PPC) Insider Tips readers had the opportunity to win a CD set of the phenomenal new book, “The Findability Formula – The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing”, compliments of PPC Summit and author Heather Lutze.

CD sets are on the way to the following fortunate winners:

1. H.  A. Eubanks of StarTex Media
2. Judith Haney of Austin Recovery
3. Kelly Horn from Klunk & Millan
4. Rebecca Mobley of 1st Organics
5. Debbie Formica of Martindale’s Natural Market