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

By Dennis Yu, The Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal

You may have read these HitWise numbers  on how Facebook has overtaken Google as the most popular site in the United States– now at 7.07% of all visits versus Google at 7.03%.  At 400 million users and 25% of all traffic (not visits), it’s not just teenagers anymore. Did you know that Facebook serves 150 million search queries a day? Industry estimates place Google at 250 to 400 million queries per day.

Thus, “search” is not a website– it’s a function that occurs across any site or application. Think of websites as vertical bars, while applications such as search, commenting, and user participation as horizontal slices that go across these sites.  Even the concept of a “website” is being blown away– note that most users of twitter are interacting not at twitter.com, but via a 3rd party tool or within another blog. Whether it’s @anywhere or even the APIs being released by CitySearch and Foursquare, it’s clear that there’s a increasingly shared data layer underneath these websites. Think of the sewer and electrical grid that is below Manhattan.

I had a chance to sit down with Alex Schultz, who runs online marketing for Facebook– he is also in charge of Facebook’s SEO.  He mentioned the concept of “interestingness squared, boringness squared”. Let’s say you have 500 friends and each friend, on average, has 20 things they do each day that could be shown in the feed.  Thus, with no filter, you would see 10,000 items in your feed on your Facebook homepage. Impossible to sort the noise on what’s important or most relevant to you.

Facebook must choose what to show, based on the influence of each user, their track record (are they spamming others or is their stuff being actively shared and commented on), and general “karma” FriendRank-like factors.  Thus, the things that are interesting get promoted in the social graph– to quickly become viral.  And things that are boring get buried, never to be shown in activity stream.

This morning, Facebook released some insights into how their search works.  It’s worth a read if you some time, but let’s just say that they’re serving personalized search results based on proximity (of the many “Jose Gonzales” in the world, show the one that has the most mutual friends in common), popularity, and context. I’m in Boulder today, so my search for cosmetic surgery here should ideally yield a different result than someone searching from Chicago.  Google’s Caffeine and the introduction of personalized results from your friends only starts to approach what happens on Facebook.

5,000 new businesses join Facebook each day.  Google has about 570,000 advertisers on AdWords. Do the math.  Who has the deeper relationships and has 50% of visits from users that log in at least once a day? Facebook is on track to hit a billion dollars in annualized revenue, if they haven’t already.

Are you using Facebook’s self-serve ad platform yet?  For the 2.5 years, we’ve treated Facebook PPC as another paid search channel, just behind Google, while ahead of Yahoo! and Bing.  And the results for Facebook lead gen and consumer product have been phenomenal.  They will continue to be so long as the territory is still new to advertisers and agencies– and clients understand that social media, properly targeted, and integrated with other channels, is quite effective.

Google has discussed that they’re incorporating social signals into ranking factors.  An article that a couple years ago might have generated 50 links might today generate 10 links and 300 mentions on twitter and Facebook.  Facebook now opening up pages to be indexed, along with many other previously private default options, means that you should be sending stronger signals in social media to influence search results not just on Facebook, but in traditional search engines, too.

So what does this mean for your business?

1. Create and pimp out your fan page immediately. When you get to 100 users, grab your vanity url at facebook.com/username. Get customers and friends to comment and participate regularly, knowing this can generate a viral effect, plus generate links to your fan page (links between pages are votes for Google, while fanning on fan pages are votes for Google).

2. Start testing Facebook’s PPC.  Run traffic to both your fan page and site, to build up a fan base and generate a viral effect. Use proper analytics and attribution, determine the effect of the “assist” on organic search traffic and direct traffic, much like a view-through conversion.

3. Run demographically targeted ads on the Google Content Network– this is a good proxy for what will work on Facebook and MySpace self-serve, given your display creatives and demographic targets are in alignment.

4. Focus more on offers and “interestingness”. Remember what Alex Schultz said about “interestingness squared” earlier? With the rise of local, social, and mobile games– or platforms like Gowalla that effectively are video games, make sure what you are saying doesn’t sound like a shameless ad.  Make it cool, interesting, or perhaps even offer a coupon.  Is it funny or shareable in some other aspect?

5. Begin reaping the rewards for being a first-mover. The spammers were first, but your legitimate brand is still early in the game. 

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Dennis Yu is an entrepreneur and internationally recognized lecturer in search engine marketing. Areas of expertise include search marketing technical analysis and pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign development and optimization. He is co-founder and chief executive officer of BlitzLocal, a Denver area firm that provides local search solutions for enterprises of all sizes. Dennis is also a regular speaker at leading industry events like AdWords Advantage Online Summit and the upcoming PPC Summit Presents…Search & Social Media Success.

Article Posting Offered By Craig Danuloff, President ClickEquations

This article is part of a series of blog posts provided by ClickEquations that goes ‘behind the scenes’  on paid search. See the full post here.

We wanted to share this insightful article about paid seach campaigns and how important it is to organize your ad groups. Most spend too little time building ad groups primarily because goals aren’t clear.

Here are the goals of an ad group that you should follow:
•  To perfectly align questions (search queries) with answers (text ads).
•  Every query that comes into an ad group should go into ad copy that directly addresses its topics, issues, intent, and desires.
•  It not good enough for all the keywords in an ad group to be similar or narrowly focused or contextually similar or anything else.
•  If the people whose queries come into a group don’t see text ads that satisfy them, the ad group is a failure.

Rebuilding Ad Groups: Ad group reorganization doesn’t happen a lot in large part because it isn’t easy enough to reorganize within our tools. Without a clear set of organizational goals how can you know that something is wrong or how you should fix it?

There is only one legitimate way to analyze the success of an ad group: make the list of search queries the ad group has attracted. Put this list next to the text ad copy that has been shown to the people who executed those searches. If the text ads on that list are not aimed at answering the question implied in the search query on the other list, then improve your ad groups.

The Ads Are The Targets:  Here’s the basic idea – build ad groups around ads, fit in keywords that attract compatible queries, make ads the target (build a nice small target and then hit it). Build as many ad groups as you need, but make sure they are tight and focused.

Special Note: if you allow unaligned queries into your ad group, the downhill spiral begins:
•  Queries that don’t target the ad copy get impressions but not clicks
•  CTRs drop
•  Good queries are under-served by inappropriate ads
•  Quality score suffers for the keywords, target URLs
•  Money wasted, and cost rise in the future

The key is to build highly targeted text ads then construct ad groups that only bring very specific people to them.

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Craig Danuloff, President of ClickEquations, a complete, easy-to-use paid search platform for large advertiser and agencies. For more free tips, check out the ClickEquations Learn section and their paid search blog.

By Elisa Gabbert, Content Development Manager at WordStream, Inc.

If you’re still building pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns from a traditional keyword list, it’s not doing your business any favors. A spreadsheet is an inefficient, outdated way to manage keywords for search marketing, leading to wasted dollars and lost time.

A keyword database is a completely different approach to research and manage PPC keywords. Compared to a keyword list, it’s:

• Private and proprietary
• Easier to organize and manage
• Easier to update and expand
• More actionable
• Collaborative

Essentially, it’s a flexible infrastructure that enables you to work with large numbers of keywords and quickly determine which pockets of keywords have the most business value. You can then translate your database into a highly effective PPC campaign structure.

Building a keyword database isn’t difficult, and as your campaigns scale, you’ll find it much faster and easier to keep things running smoothly. Here’s the five-step process to build an effective keyword database for PPC marketing.

Step 1: Start your PPC keyword research

The most important part of a keyword database, naturally, is keywords! To build a comprehensive, up-to-date database, it’s important to look at keyword research as an ongoing process, aggregating keywords from multiple sources.

Here are four sources, both public and private, that will help you gain a complete picture of the terms you should be using in your campaigns:

• Public keyword tools: A traditional Web-based keyword suggestion tool is based on popularity; remember that overall popularity doesn’t guarantee relevance to your audience.
• Historical site logs: Your server logs are a great source of keyword data—they contain a record of the real search queries that have led people to your site.
• Web analytics: The keyword reports in your analytics provide a continuous stream of new keywords. Incorporate those new insights into your research.
• Search query reports: The search query reports in AdWords Editor are another source of real data. These tell you the actual search queries that have triggered your PPC ads.

Pooling these sources gives you a personalized database that is highly relevant to your business. Be sure to keep your research up-to-date with traffic and conversion stats to see which keywords do the most work in your PPC campaigns.

Step 2: Segment and organize your keywords
Better keyword research gets you a lot closer to more profitable PPC campaigns, but to reap the full benefits of your research, it’s crucial to organize your keywords into small, manageable groups of closely related terms. This process will improve your campaigns by enabling:

• Better landing pages: It’s easier to write targeted, high-ranking copy around close-knit keyword groups.
• Better ads: Similarly, you can quickly write relevant, compelling text ads for well-structured keyword groups (aka ad groups).
• Better click-through rates: More relevant pages and ads grab a more qualified audience, so your CTRs and conversion rates improve.
• Better Quality Scores: High CTR and relevance lead to high Quality Scores, so you pay less for better positioning.

A well-organized database structure makes everything else you do for PPC, from adding new keywords to managing bids, simpler and more effective.

Step 3: Cut out waste with negative keywords
With strong keyword research, you can identify profitable keyword opportunities. But for high ROI, it’s equally important to identify and eliminate waste. This means discovering negative keywords, or irrelevant terms that eat up pay-per-click advertising budgets without generating quality leads.

Here are a few ways to find negative keyword candidates:

• Generic negative keyword lists: These aren’t a bad way to get started, but remember that generic negative keywords may not apply to your specific niche, and many are likely missing.
• During regular keyword research: When looking for relevant keywords, also keep your eyes open for suggestions that aren’t relevant to your business.
• Search query reports: Regularly look through your search query reports in AdWords and remove irrelevant keywords from your ad groups.
• Organic log files: By using your own log files for negative keyword discovery, you can catch irrelevant keywords before they trigger your ads.

Step 4: Create strong, targeted text ads
The next step is to write text ads for each keyword/ad group. If you followed the above process, your ad groups are already highly targeted, so it should be simple to write strong, targeted ads. Here are some tips for writing effective PPC ad copy:

• Include the top traffic: driving keywords in the title, text, and display URL of the ad when possible.
• Don’t overgeneralize: address a specific segment of your audience.
• Test several ads for each ad group. Google will rotate the ads so you can see which works best.
• Always include a call to action.

In addition, to maximize Quality Score, your ads should clearly be relevant to their associated landing pages.

Step 5: Repeat as necessary to maintain gains
One of the benefits of a keyword database is the ability to expand your research without losing control. So keep monitoring, testing, and tweaking your campaigns to improve results. And keep adding keywords from your analytics! The keywords your clients use to find you are among your most valuable marketing assets.

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Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream, Inc., a provider of advanced SEO tools and pay-per-click software for search engine marketing efforts. WordStream also offers a FREE keyword analyzer tool for conducting keyword research and discovering profitable head, mid- and long-tail keywords.