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

Dental equipment manufacturer: You can target dentists, dental hygienists, and other practitioners to market your equipment. You can’t do that on Google, since you don’t know whether the person who is searching on “dentist” actually is one or is just looking for one.  People place their professions in their Facebook profile, so all job titles are fair game.

2010 was the year of growing your fan base. Brands poured in millions to invest in getting more fans. Why? They read an article, the CEO saw that the competitor has more fans, or perhaps they believe that a Facebook fan is like a email subscriber- a long-term, permission based relationship.

But in 2011, we see brands that now have millions of fans not knowing what to do next and also being unable to either measure that value.

The quickest gauge of power is engagement rate. Take the total number of likes and comments and divide that by how many fans you have. Let’s say you are averaging 100 interactions per post and you have 200,000 fans. That’s only 1 out of 2,000 fans engaging with you, which is 1/20th of a percent. This is about average for brands, but is awful overall. We see some brands consistently hitting 1 percent. Why?

They haven’t let their fan base atrophy. They protect their investment by regularly feeding fans with that they want- content, special
offers, interesting items- all the while being careful not to be overly promotional.

A fan page with one percent engagement on 50,000 fans has as much power as a page with a million fans but only 1/20th of a percent engagement. Which situation would you prefer to be in?

We have one sporting goods company as a client that has only a couple hundred thousand fans, while their competitor has a few million. Yet, our client has more likes and comments, plus more revenue, than the competitor.

Key mistakes:
- Investing blindly in building fans for the heck of it, without a corresponding nurture program.
- Running a general contest to drive traffic and fans without realizing this drives the wrong types of users and permanently polluting the fan base with folks who only wanted a free ipod, not your product.
- Not measuring traffic to the website from Facebook or enhanced placements in organic search (yes, on Google, too, because of your Facebook activity).
- looking at last click attribution as the ROI of Facebook marketing.

Where are you in your Facebook fan lifecycle? Are you still building your base or maybe looking to now nurture fans and extract value? Maybe you are cautious and want to establish a social strategy before embarking on Facebook. Regardless, consider Facebook a multiplier of fan (real world fans, not Facebook fans) emotion. Better to attract and nurture the right people rather than the masses for pure bragging rights.

The value of your fan base is not $3.60 or some arbitrary value from an article somewhere. It’s the product of your nurturing efforts and ability to engage fans.
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Dennis Yu is Managing Principal of Facebook Strategy for Webtrends. You can reach him at dennis.yu@webtrends.com. He welcomes your comments.

Did you know that on Facebook you can show ads only to people who are friends of your existing fans? This technique will yield double or triple the click through rate (CTR). But more importantly, it stimulates greater engagement and more conversions.

Influence the Influencers

In the high school cafeteria, we take note and mimic what the popular kids are doing. If you influence the influencers, the imitation flows down to the followers.  Nike, the athletic apparel company, in its infancy would give out free sneakers to gang leaders, knowing that fellow gang members would have to buy a pair to be able to fit in. Your brand can do the same.

If you are just starting your Facebook page, it’s critical to attract influential folks first. After all, it’s the reputation of these people that will draw in your subsequent fans. If you’re selling golf shirts, you’re best off getting fans who are professional golfers, who then attract the weekend warriors.  But if your Facebook page starts out with weekend warriors, then it’s not likely to attract pro golfers. Water flows only downhill, so the saying goes.

Spread Your Influence

And it’s once you have that base that the real fun of Facebook PPC begins.  The friend-of-fan connection targeting is the most effective thing we’ve seen in Facebook, available nowhere else. That fan base you’ve built up is now influence you can spread up, down, and sideways.  If Mary O’Brien is a goddess in the world of PPC and becomes a fan of your page, then you can use her endorsement among anyone who knows her.  You can have the ad copy say “XYZ software is simply amazing” and it will say “Mary O’Brien likes this” below the ad. Certainly, you should stay within the limits of what is still advertising, but not crossing into the realm of misleading.

Better Ads = Lower Costs

But did you know that all it took to get this endorsement was a user to click the like button?  And because the CTR is so much higher, your cost per click is proportionately that much lower. Facebook operates on an effective CPM bid algorithm, just like Google AdWords.   The system actually rewards you for creating ads that users engage with.

Use the Multiplier Effect

And the bigger your fan base, the stronger the “peer pressure” effect. With Rosetta Stone, a client of ours, we have only 132,000 fans.  But via friend-of-fan (FOF) targeting, we can reach 34 million people with ads that have endorsements below.  34 million out of 140 million Facebook folks in the US is 24 percent.  Imagine that you could hit nearly a quarter of the population with an ad that has one of their friends endorsing your product or service? What if that ad had 4 or 5 people shown endorsing it– how might that affect your CTR, not counting the fact that it’s taking up that much more real estate (perhaps another 2-3 lines)?

Consider how the world of advertising (yes, PPC advertising included) is becoming more crowded and expensive.  The result is brands that yell louder and louder above the escalating din. People filter out ads.  They use the recommendations of their friends to make purchase decisions.  Social recommendations are increasingly the filter people use as a substitute for taking the time to research.

What is your strategy for using influence to supercharge your conversions from Facebook?
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Dennis Yu is Vice President of Social Marketing Strategy at Webtrends.  You can reach him at dennis.yu@webtrends.com or in the nearest airport. He promises to answer all your questions, but it may take a few days for you to get an answer!

Online marketing today is not quite what it used to be. Just a couple of years ago, the combination of SEO with PPC seemed to be the final word in serious online marketing. With Social Media gaining ground in recent years, more and more channels and communities are accessible to users where they prefer to ‘hang out.’

Users are researching blogsphere & community websites for checking out reviews of products they want to buy, find solutions to their problems, or just share their views on subjects that would interest most marketers in reaching out to them. Most users feel that peer groups tend to offer a more unbiased and genuine reviews about products.

Facebook’s traffic alone is inching close to Google’s traffic and is growing at a much faster rate than Google’s traffic. Twitter’s traffic is in the vicinity of Yahoo’s & Bing’s traffic put together. Smart marketers need to put their content in front of these potential buyers, right where they hang out.

The increase of Social Media usage, as against traditional marketing channels like SEO & PPC, is also throwing up several uneasy questions –

• Is SEO losing its effectiveness, becoming obsolete or already dead?
• Will PPC become more expensive? Will it continue to serve its original purpose?
• Will companies divert part of their PPC budgets into SEO & Social Media Marketing?
• Is Social Media just a fad? Can Social Media really serve as a serious marketing vehicle? Should one have a defined and serious Social Media Marketing strategy?
• Will Social Media continue to grow at the same pace or is it reaching its saturation?
• What will happen if search engines like Google make more radical changes to their algorithms?
• Should one have a common or a complimentary marketing message across SEO, PPC & Social Media?
• How should SEO, PPC and SMM dovetail into your online marketing strategy? What role should each play? What kind of performance can one expect from each of these marketing vehicles?
• How does one decide how much budget one should allocate to each media?

Today’s marketers need to take a fresh look at their marketing strategies when they plan their media mix of SEO, PPC, Social Media and other vehicles to deliver their marketing message. Conventional promotion techniques and approaches need to be innovated to get powerful results and fight competition.

One can no longer think of SEO, PPC, and Social Media Marketing in isolation. You need to have a holistic approach in planning the media mix, keeping in mind the power as well as limitations of each media. The role of each media should be deployed in such a way that they fill gaps of the other. One needs to use each medium for what it is best suited to individually accomplish, given its distinct advantages. Ideally, SEO, PPC, and Social Media should together serve your common business goals.

Online Marketing Objectives

Before you can go about planning how each marketing medium should be used, it is important to first outline your specific short-term & long-term marketing objectives. Getting clarity on your marketing objectives is key to setting a roadmap for your resource deployment and budget allocation to SEO, PPC and Social Media. SEO usually works well to serve your long-term objectives, while PPC and Social Media Marketing can be used to achieve both short-term and long term marketing objectives.

For example, SEO can be deployed to steadily build website traffic for your main key phrases but may require considerable time and resources to get good results. However, SEO can achieve quicker results for your long-tail keywords with minimal efforts. It is also cost effective to promote ‘non-commercial’ product-relevant keywords, which may not boost instant sales on your website, but is good to get potential buyers interested in your product and may eventually convert into sales.

PPC is ideal for promoting special offers, seasonal sales, geo-targeting, new product launches, direct website sales, lead generation, website page content A|B split testing and getting traffic for your ‘head’ or competitive keyword phrases that result in conversions. Essentially, it is best to invest in PPC where time is of essence and the results can be commercially measurable.

Social media promotion can play an effective role in building customer relationships, interactivity, providing customer support services at reduced cost, get direct customer feedback on your products, your services and your website. It allows you to build communities, positively influence existing communities and steer a positive peer review of your products.  Social media also works well in affiliate development, engaging new marketing partners, hiring key people, channel development, brand image building, creating brand visibility, online reputation management, and lead the users to useful online resources, information and reference material on your website.

Of the three stages of the buying process –

a) research stage where the customer is researching on the possible products or solutions

b) when the buyer firms up his buying decision and

c) when he is ready to make the purchase

- SEO and Social media can work cheaper to serve the first two stages, while PPC can serve as a ‘go-getter’ to grab the buyer in the third stage.

In this multi-part article, I shall evaluate several of the aspects listed above. We will try to understand the unique advantages of SEO, PPC and Social Media Marketing and how each of these marketing vehicles can work in coordination to deliver maximum mileage for your marketing dollar. A well planned marketing strategy based on clearly laid out objectives not only enables you to measure the success of your campaign but also secures your investment for a long term and helps you remain ahead of the competition.

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Atul Gupta is the Co-Founder & CEO of RedAlkemi.com, a company specializing in Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing. Atul is a thought-leader in Online Marketing industry and has been working in this field since 1996. His company has helped over a thousand clients succeed in their online businesses. Atul is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and has published several articles about SEM industry.

Finding new customers is a critical objective for any business. No matter what kind of marketing a business uses to meet that objective, from business cards to web sites, success requires understanding a couple of marketing fundamentals for building an effective Search Marketing strategy.

Where are your customers?

Where do your customers look for information to help them make a purchase? If it’s a simple purchase, one with no big perceived risk, a phone book might be the only place a customer looks. If those are your customers, then your business needs a phone and a listed number. If you focus your marketing attention on giving your customers the best possible service by phone, you are on your way to successfully meeting their needs and winning their business.

For a more complex sale, there can be many touch points along the way from early consideration to final sale. Not only that, but each individual marketing medium can offer several different touch points during the course of a sale, with messaging tailored for different stages of the buying process, as well as the different people within the buying audience.

Do your customers read newspapers? Do they watch TV? Do they spend time on social networking sites, and which ones? In other words, where do they congregate and how can you be there with them?

The important thing to remember as a marketer is that you need to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. To do that, you have to understand who your customers are, where they go for information, and what they do next.

How do they decide to buy?

Buyers commonly do research online to learn more about solutions, products and vendors, as well as find information on pricing, reviews from customers, instructional videos and more. Business-to-business purchases also routinely involve several people. You might think of them as categorized into three main types: doers, buyers, and bosses.

The “doers” are the people on the frontline, and they are often where the need for a purchase is first recognized. They are the people who will likely be working with your product or service on a regular basis, and as such their influence can be keenly felt at the beginning of a purchase cycle.

The “buyers” typically enter the purchase cycle a little later on. They have different needs than the “doers” who will be using the product. The buyer wants to know about pricing, guarantees, support, and the vendor’s credibility. In other words, their job is to mitigate the risk associated with a purchase and protect the company from making a costly error.

The third type of person that can be involved in a complex sale is the “boss”. The Boss can enter the picture at any stage, and they will look at a transaction from a different perspective again.  Their considerations might include stockholders, company directors, and longer term information that other company members don’t have access to. Combine all three types of people into a purchase decision and it’s easy to see how complex a complex sale can really be.

Search is a common denominator

With all the different variable behaviors that your customers may engage in, one thing that’s clear is that online search has become a mainstream source of information for everyone. Need a part number for a piece of machinery? Google it. Want to see what people are saying about a product? Look at Twitter. Do you want to see a product demonstration? Look it up on YouTube. Need to see pictures of a product in use? Search images on Bing. The list goes on and on.

The key point for marketing is that when customers are searching online, they’ve got to be able to find you there. Depending on the nature of your business and clientele, here are three basic steps to consider in building your online search strategy:

1. Optimize your company web site to be search engine friendly.
2. Start (and maintain) a company blog. Search engines will reward your site, and new and existing customers can find a good blog a valuable source of information that will help establish your company’s reputation as a leader.
3. If your company web site is not showing up in the search engines for important search terms that are relevant to your business, consider a paid search campaign to increase your online visibility.

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Karl Hourigan is a Digital Marketing Strategist with Mediative. Mediative is one of North America’s largest integrated digital marketing companies. Their results-oriented marketing network is supported by industry thought leaders and a data-driven platform.

Internet marketers already familiar with search engine optimization and pay per click marketing know the importance of analytics, metrics, key performance indicators, and so on.  Analytics can (and should) play an important role in your social media marketing strategy.  If you’re not setting goals, tracking metrics, and analyzing performance, how can you tell if you’re succeeding?

 Setting Social Media Goals

I find it useful to break down social media goals into discrete components.  First, identify your bottom line goal, whether that is sales, cost savings, brand awareness, or some other goal.

Then, work backwards from your end goal to identify intermediate steps to achieving that goal, such as increasing web site traffic, newsletter sign ups, quote requests, or qualified leads.  Repeat as many steps as you find logical or necessary.  The step preceding increased traffic, sign ups, and leads could be achieving a certain level of social media engagement: views, posts, feedback, RTs, mentions, replies, and so on.

From Goals to Metrics

Once you’ve established your goals, you can identify corresponding metrics to track.  In the scenario explored above, your goal / metric pairings could look something like this:

Social Media Presence:  Number of Facebook “Likes”, Twitter Followers, LinkedIn group members, etc.

Social Media Engagement: Number of views, feedback, comments, posts, RTs, @ mentions, @ replies

Qualified Leads: Number of new leads from social media and web channels

Sales / Revenue: Dollar increase in sales, revenue, and profit

Analytics Tools for Social Media

While there are all sorts of tools for tracking your social media accounts, it can be difficult to get an overall picture of the effectiveness of your social media strategy without combining information from multiple tools and sources.  Remember, although your bottom line goal may be sales, revenue, or profit, there are many milestones along the path to that goal.

Following are some tools to help you track progress and trends as part of your social media strategy.

Klout

Klout is one of the top tools for measuring social media influence.  With the recent addition of analyzing Facebook as well as Twitter data, Klout lets you look at a variety of data about your social network presence in one spot, including trend data.  The free version allows you to refresh your information every six days.

Twitalyzer

A Twitter-specific tool, Twitalyzer analyzes your Twitter presence and network to present you with a wealth of information, including your impact, engagement, influence, retweet and mention ratios, and much more.  Twitalyzer also provides trend data, and comparisons and contexts, so you can see how you fit in in the Twitterverse.

Facebook Insights

Insights is Facebook’s basic analytics tool that accompanies pages.  Data includes information on monthly active users, activity, media consumption, and interaction.

Google URL Builder and Analytics

Hopefully, your website already has Google Analytics on it.  Analytics lets you track where your web visitors are coming from, how long they are staying on your site, and what they’re looking at.  Combining Analytics with the URL Builder tool (link: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578&hl=en) and referrer data, you can determine how many visitors to your site are coming from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks.  See how long these visitors stay on your site vs. other sources and how well they convert.

Constantly Monitor and Adapt Your Social Media Strategy

Social media is not a “set it and forget it” platform.  Your user base, their habits, and their preferences are constantly changing.  What works for you today may not work tomorrow.  That’s why you need to continuously monitor your social media profiles and the traffic they refer to your website.  If your current strategy isn’t effective or stops being effective, then it’s time to try new techniques.

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Jason Mikula works as a freelance search engine marketing and social media marketing consultant.  Jason has experience working with pay per click, search engine optimization, and email and web marketing.

If you were invited to a beach party, you would not show up in a tuxedo, would you? Nor would you go to a wedding wearing your swimsuit? Then why are you running your search pay per click (PPC) ads on Facebook?

If you are an experienced PPC marketer, you understand the connection between your keyword and your ad copy.  If customers are actively looking for blue widgets, then you tell them about your blue widgets! Tell the customer that you have the biggest selection, lowest prices, and friendliest service. In fact, here is a 25% off coupon!

However, on Facebook, people are not searching!  They are merely “surfing.”  Your customers are flipping channels on the new TV, to be entertained by their friends.  Like your display ads, you are interrupting them. Therefore, since you are interrupting your ads must be credible, friend-based, and engaging.

The customer on Facebook is not in the process of shopping, so coupon codes and sales are usually ineffective.  Remember, the customer is not researching, so ebooks and free articles do not catch their attention.

Your customer, on Facebook, is among friends socializing, so YOU must fit in.  Imagine your target is having dinner (virtually, of course) among a group of friends.  He does not know you.  Would you just barge into the discussion, arms wildly waving, proclaiming a sale on widgets?  Absolutely not! But what if you have a mutual friend at the table and were able to ask for an introduction?  This is friend-of-fan connection targeting in Facebook.  What if these friends were discussing their favorite TV show and you had some interesting insight about that? Maybe you are Rosetta Stone and can tell them the translation of that foreign phrase in that TV show.

Not engaging users is the fatal mistake made in Facebook advertising. Your Ads MUST BE SOCIAL, as if you are having a one-on-one conversation with a friend. To become a fan, those ads MUST lead to an engagement activity -”watch a video, take a quiz, create a badge, spin the wheel, or some other intermediate activity prior to a lead or sale.”

Facebook lets you know at what stage of relationship you are with the user: whether they are already friends with you or not (fan targeting), whether they are aware of related interests (interest targeting), and whether you have friends in common (friends of fan targeting). Would you say the exact same message to a lifelong friend as to some random stranger?  Then do not run your Google PPC ads on Facebook.  Divide your messaging not by keyword, but by stage of engagement and interest target.

Consider that keywords and interest targets are not the same thing. The term “cars” on PPC will yield ads for car dealerships, auto insurance, and auto parts.  The “interest cars” on Facebook will yield folks who like the “Pixar movie, Cars” and the “rock group Cars.” You will not find discount car insurance as an interest target on Facebook, anymore than you would wear a t-shirt that has this as a slogan across your chest.

So, please DO NOT make that fatal blunder of waltzing into a beach party with your suit and tie on; people will look at you funny!

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Dennis Yu – Chief Executive Officer, BlitzLocal

Landing page optimization can potentially be far more powerful than an increase in traffic when it comes to generating more conversions.  In order to optimize your landing page successfully, the key is to use a scientific, data-driven approach.  While you may have gut instincts about what will and won’t work, the only way to tell for sure is by carefully collecting and analyzing the data.  Following are some of the most important tools to take a look at in order to optimize your landing pages and increase conversions.

Google Analytics: The Standard in Analytics

Google’s analytics software has become a de facto standard in the web world.  It is available for free and is relatively easy to install, although, some instances, like cross-domain tracking, are a bit more complicated.  Google Analytics gives you insights into where your visitors are coming from, what pages they’re looking at, how long they’re staying on your site, and so on.

Tip: Define Your Goals and Sales Funnel in Google Analytics

While Google Analytics is already a powerful platform, the real key to using it to optimize your landing pages and maximize conversions is by defining goals.  In your Analytics profile, you can define a goal based on a specific URL visited, the amount of time spent on site, or the number of pages in a visit.  For landing page optimization, you’ll probably be using a URL visit.  You can also define a goal value in dollars, which can be helpful in calculating ROI for your website conversions.

Another optional but important step is to define a sales funnel.  This allows you to list multiple pages leading up to a conversion – for example, if you have a multipage shopping cart check out process.  This can help you determine when visitors are leaving your site and highlight pages you may need to change or simplify.

Google Website Optimizer: Scientific Testing of Landing Pages

Another Google Tool on this list? Yes – Google’s Website Optimizer is that important.  A tool that exists outside of Analytics or AdWords (though accessible through the AdWords interface), many users overlook this valuable tool.  Website Optimizer allows you to perform A/B or multivariate tests on your landing pages to determine how different configurations of text, images, headlines, and so forth impact your conversion rate.

Relatively easy to install, you just need to prepare your different page versions or configurations and drop in snippets of Javascript code.  When it has collected enough data, Website Optimizer shows which page, statistically, is most effective at generating conversions.

Click & Scroll Heatmaps: Understanding User Behavior

The overall data provided by Analytics and Website Optimizer is great, however, it leaves you wondering what is actually happening when a visitor is looking at your page.  A service like ClickTale, which ranges from about $900 to nearly $9,000 a year, is capable of recording users mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and scrolling behavior.  You can even play back movies of an individual user’s browser session. Data is also aggregated to show mouse and click heatmaps based on a large number of users.

Similar services include Mouse Eye Tracking, Crazy Egg, clickdensity, and Codynamix (open source).  Most provided a no cost option with limited functionality and a professional or enterprise solution.

Form Analytics: Why Aren’t People Filling Out My Forms?

Have you ever started signing up for a product or download, but abandoned the site, because the form was too demanding or complicated?  Form analytics gives you insight into how users are interacting with your forms and can help you improve or streamline form questions to improve your conversion rate.  Form analytic software can help identify why users are abandoning forms, browser compatibility issues, and even reveal detailed information about form abandoners.  Examples of form analytics software include ClickTale (mentioned above), Revenue Expect, and Form Alive.

Get the Most Out of the Traffic You Already Have

Why focus only on increasing traffic with advertising or SEO, when you could be getting more conversions from your existing traffic?  Landing page and conversion optimization tools allow you to carefully and scientifically analyze what is happening on your landing pages and take steps to improve them to increase the number of visitors who convert.

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Jason Mikula works as a freelance search engine marketing and social media marketing consultant.  He has experience working with pay per click, search engine optimization, and email and web marketing.

Although paid search is typically associated with quick wins and guaranteed conversions there is still an element of doing things right (the first time) from a long term sustainability approach that needs to be followed. Designing paid search programs for sustainability takes time and patience but it is well worth the effort. In doing so you are building efficiency into your program, setting yourself up to pay a lower average cost per click, and helping grow your business. Otherwise, not designing paid search for sustainability affects all paid search programs, frustrates parties involved, and fails to move the industry forward.

And finding the right instructions for designing paid search for sustainability is not hard to come by. Google makes it painfully clear how to design and manage paid search programs to ensure that you are paying the lowest possible amount for a click. And I would say that 95% of Google’s advice and policies are valid. I know that Google and the other platforms are in this business to make money, but I also know that Google and the others will reward you, over time, for doing the right things when it comes to well planned and designed paid search programs.

Paid Search Design for Sustainability

So how does one go about designing a paid search program for sustainability? First, I want to clarify that we are discussing mostly pre-click and traffic related tactics of a paid search program. Obviously, there are post-click analytics that influence pre-click actions. Also, from a systems thinking perspective, there is a broader scope of how a paid search program fits into the mix with other online marketing channels, but for now let us just focus on the task at hand - paid search design for sustainability.

1. Plan. And plan again. Based on the problem solving process P-D-C-A (plan-do-check-act) made popular by W. Edwards Deming, planning is the most important and critical step. If starting from scratch, map out your campaign structure by using something as simple as your website navigation or site-map. For more advanced planning, use mental model or affinity diagram methods. While mapping out your campaign structure,  think about what you have to offer and how it provides a solution for your customers.

2. Campaign naming. This is often over looked, but assuming you are running a paid search program on multiple platforms, you will want to name your campaigns and ad groups accordingly. This does not tie into Quality Score directly, but it does help when managing and reporting on the program performance. For example, if you are running a paid search program in Google, MSN, and Facebook and you have the same campaigns with the same name in each account, third party tools may roll-up all three campaigns into one view. Naming your campaigns and ad groups specific to the engine in which they live reduces the time wasted in guess work and work-arounds to solve the problem otherwise.

3. Develop highly targeted keyword sets. Once you have thoroughly mapped out your campaign structure, you should now have a foundation to bucket your keywords in a way that each ad group is unique. Beyond advanced match type tactics, each ad group should contain keywords highly relevant to each other. The number of keywords in an ad group is irrelevant. At a certain point you will know when enough is enough.

4. Create relevant and persuasive ad ad creative text. Text within an ad creative should in some way reflect the keywords being targeted. When possible make sure that at least one keyword (phrase) in your ad group is in the ad creative title and in the body of the ad. Three to four ad creatives is recommended unless you are multivariate testing.

5. Landing page relevancy. Technically, the landing page comes into play post-click, but it is a component of a paid search program that ties into Quality Score. Just as keywords and ad creatives are required to be relevant to each other, the landing page also is required to be relevant to the preceding components. Landing pages should be as relevant as possible to what the ad creative messaging is about.

6. Negative keywords. Use them and use them deliberately. At a minimum they should be used at the campaign level and when required they should be added at the ad group level.

7. Search Queries. This is really what it’s all about – matching your keywords to the search queries users are actually typing. If you are not analyzing search queries for keyword expansion and negative keyword implementation, you are missing out on conversion and cost reduction opportunities.

This is not an exhaustive list of paid search design for sustainability tactics, but it is a good starting point. Besides aligning your program with Quality Score requirements, following these steps has implications outside of the components of a paid search program. When you do this part right, you have more time to analyze the post-click data. You will also spend less time reorganizing mega lists of keywords from one ad group to multiple ad groups and spend more time ad creative testing. Following the Quality Score requirements and designing for sustainability also allows for more accurate bid testing.

Overall, if you do things right and design for sustainability there is less time being spent on the things that do not add value and your program has much better chance of out lasting the competition while continuing to maximize its return.

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Matt LeVeque is the Founder & President of SEM Science Consulting, LLC and Senior Member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ).

Did you know there were nearly 16 billion core searches during August 2010 in the US? According to comScore recent data reports, Google led the US core search market in August with 65.4% search market share, followed by Yahoo at 17.4% and Microsoft Bing with 11.1%.

Looking at the search market share data from 2009 compared to 2010 (chart below), the numbers show that Google has remained relatively flat over the last year. However, recent September 2010 data reveals that Google search shares are showing modest gains. Meanwhile, Yahoo continues to drop in search share, and Bing shows only slight gains in search growth year over year.

The chart below shows data for search market share (August 2010 versus 2009) in the US for: Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and AOL, provided by the Silicon Valley Insider.

(Source: Silicon Alley insider)

Search Market Share: Google and Bing Upward Movement in September 2010

• Google remained flat from August 2009 to August 2010, but in September 2010 showed modest gains 66.1% up from 65.4% in August.
• Yahoo! continues to lose ground with 16.7% in September 2010, down from 17.4% in August 2010.
• Bing has grown year over year, and continues to increase slightly to 11.2% in September from 11.1% in August 2010.

Taking a look at the latest numbers from September 2010 search share comScore data, Google gained while Yahoo took a hit and Microsoft Bing shows slight growth. The Google share gains reflect the impact of Google Instant Search (the new feature that provides results in real-time while users type their search words). And Bing has managed to slightly increase market share in spend and in clicks partially due to the Yahoo-Bing integration. The new Facebook Like social data stands to improve Bing search results and help increase Bing market reach as well. However, Bing Marketers are waiting to see any real boost in search marketing results.  Make no mistake, Google is the dominate player with nearly 66% of the market share.

The upcoming online shopping season should spur stronger search marketing ROI.  We’ll be watching the search market trends to see how they pan out during the–fast approaching–holiday shopping season!

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Kelly Larsen, Director of Marketing at PPC Summit and Landing Page Success Summit, the Web’s largest conversion conference coming up on November 3-23, 2010.