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

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.

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).

As Paid Search advertising continues to grow and the industry continues to expand, its processes are becoming overly complex and complicated. With added keyword competition, seemingly endless enhancements to Google AdWords, the merger of Yahoo! Search and MSN adCenter and other platforms like Facebook Ads and Linkedin getting into the mix, it has become increasingly difficult to effectively manage the paid search suite of products in a way that consistently produce desired results.

Producing consistent ‘up-and-to-the-right’ results takes time and when you add to the mix countless blogs, tweets, diggs and sphinns you read to keep yourself updated on paid search, affiliate marketing, SEO and other channels to your list of daily responsibilities, there is less time to focus on doing things that add value and, ultimately, that the customer really cares about.

So how can you become more time efficient and take time out of processes so your daily routine becomes more balanced with the things that add value for the customer? One proven approach is performing a value added flow analysis of your processes to understand what value is and what waste is.

But how do you know what adds value? According to Ed Hay and John Guaspari in their video “Time: The Next Dimension of Quality” there are three basic questions you can ask to validate whether or not value is being added at each step of the paid search advertising process:

1. Does the customer care? If the customer doesn’t care then there is no point in proceeding with whatever it is you are doing.

2. Does the process step physically change the thing you are working on? If the thing, in this case say your Google AdWords campaign, does not physically change then everything you do up until you add or remove new keywords, ad group or text ads to the campaign is considered a form waste.

3. Is the thing you are doing completed right the first time? If you implement a task but it requires review before launching or rework afterward, you are not adding value to the process.

By asking these questions it is possible to take as much as 75% of time out of any process. Taking time out of any process adds quality to what you are doing. Beyond that, taking time out of a process allows you the ability and flexibility to add value to your clients in ways you may not have even begun to imagine. It helps you to be more responsive, innovative, build better team collaboration and be more competitive.

Value Added Flow Analysis of Paid Search

So how do you do a value added flow analysis of a paid search process? The first thing you need to do is to get rid of the old mind set of ‘this is how it’s always been done’. Because people are busy does not mean the process is efficient. If nothing is happening to the thing in the process then you are wasting time. You need to change the way you think about a process or you’ll never perform at the level that keeps you competitive and your customer satisfied. Changing the mindset is the hard part.

The easy part is actually doing a value added flow analysis. The trick to doing the value added flow analysis is that you need to it as the thing going through the process. If you do the analysis from your perspective you may have a biased view of the entire process. If you work on a team you may only truly understand your part of the process but since the thing going through the process is touched by many people it is better to do the analysis from the things point of view.

For example, say you’ve been tasked with adding a promotional campaign to your customer’s AdWords account. Think about all the steps involved to complete this one seemingly simple task. Consider everything from the initial meeting with the customer, to the internal discussions, to the layout of the campaign and its ad groups, the keyword research, the ad creative writing, the URL tagging, the bidding strategy all the way up to the launch of the campaign and ask yourself, as the thing going through the process, Does the customer care? Does the thing change? And was it done right the first time? As you do this and put time against each step in the process you may begin to see an ugly picture unfold. Typically only 10-15% of all steps in a process actually add value which translates into 1% of the time you are actually doing work that matters!

When all is said and done, all of these steps I’ve mentioned will have multiple sub-steps most of which may be necessary but do not add value to the process. The reality is, of the multiple steps there are to adding a new campaign there are only two the customer should truly care about – taking their ‘request’ for the new campaign and launching the campaign in active status. The customer cares, the account physically changes – hopefully for the better, and the launch was completed right the first time. Everything else to the customer is non-value added and takes valuable time away from doing things that matter.

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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).

On the 8^th of September 2010, Google launched its Instant Search interface, which shows results as you type, in real time. Searchers, particularly from the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) industry, have reacted sharply to the new interface. Many users find the new interface distracting, even annoying.

Google Instant is being sold as a faster and better User Interface

Matt Cutts from Google says that the change is more about rolling out a new User Interface (UI) rather than an algorithmic change. Matt attempted to allay the fears of the SEM industry by suggesting “SEO is not dead” but may change due to instant search query feedback to users, which in turn, may change their search behaviour. He believes that the searchers will diversify their queries within the scope of the original intent.

The effect of predicted query suggestions on user behavior

While Google claims that the Search Ranking Algorithm remains unchanged, the new feature will surely change search behaviour of users due to instant feedback mechanism. A lot of users are likely to select the predictive results, which fulfil their original intent, and stop typing further. Some users may get distracted from their original intent as ‘irrelevant but interesting’ results may lead to unintended searches. For example a user may digress into “home improvement loans” after typing “home improvement” instead of following his original intent of searching for “home improvement ideas.”

As more and more search users select “predicted query” suggestions, it would increase the traffic on the “head” keyword terms and lead to keyword aggregation. In essence, they would be searching more of what “other users” are searching. This usage trend would create a loop-back effect and drive out the long-tail keywords from the popular suggestions. Consequently, over a period of time, the long-tail keywords search count may diminish significantly. Where possible, Google is pushing local results for terms having local context like weather, pizza, movies, jobs etc.

The change in usage trend will throw new challenges to SEO & PPC professionals. They will need to focus their campaigns more on lead terms, creating a fiercer battleground.

How will PPC campaigns get impacted?

As per Google the AdWords impressions are counted in the following situations -

• The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
• The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
• The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.

For PPC campaign managers, this is bad news. The AdWords impressions would unnecessarily increase due to ads display even during partial typing process. Ads would sometimes be displayed for irrelevant or partial keywords. For example, search intent for “Car Insurance” displays ads for “Car Rentals” just after the user has typed the word “car.” This means that the “Car Rentals” PPC campaigns will waste impressions, reducing their CTR.

Predictive query push of popular terms will diminish the long-tail keyword opportunities for PPC managers. Pressure will mount on the “head” terms of their campaigns; pushing up their CPC costs while wasted AdWords impressions will make their CTR poor. Since the CTR is likely to be affected across the board for most users, it is not clear how Google will treat the fall in the “Quality Score” of the ad campaigns.

In any case, PPC campaigns are likely to become costlier to run and the campaign managers will need to make frequent updates in their campaigns to target newer and popular keywords to keep up with the changing trends of search users. Some website owners may even consider diverting part of their PPC funds into SEO campaigns in order to get some traction of natural traffic and mitigate their long term investment risks.

How will SEO landscape change with Google Instant?

Challenges for SEO managers will not be easy. With diminishing long-tail inventory, SEO will need to focus on popular search terms, which, by no means is a mean task. Changes in SEO will also need to be made frequently, in line with the changing keyword trends. Where relevant, optimization for local search terms will help. Due to the instant display of results, fewer users will need to scroll down the page. This means that “above the fold” results will become prime property. Clients would no longer be happy with the top-10 ranking and may demand top-4 rank instead, making the SEO’s job even harder.

Gaming the Google Instant Predictive Search System

It is important to note that the predictive search suggestions of Google Instant is not about suggesting important terms, but suggesting “popular” terms. For search terms, which do not have a high search volume (or for long-tail keywords), it is easy to “game the system” by artificially inflating search terms popularity.

Several years ago, we ran a test on WordTracker keyword research tool. At the time, WordTracker used to fetch search data from only Dogpile & MetaCrawler search engines, which had a miniscule search market share. Since it was easy to game these two ‘low traffic’ search engines, we artificially inflated a ‘test query string’ search in these search engines and discovered that the test search term indeed appeared ‘high’ in WordTracker’s keyword search count, just a few weeks later. Similarly, search terms for low-volume searches can be pushed up in the Google’s predictive suggestions. This manipulation of Google Instant was successfully tried for the term “Nathan Deal Ethics” to highlight the allegations against Nathan for corruptions.

As the dust settles down, the users will get more comfortable by evolving their own techniques of narrowing down their search queries. Perhaps over a period of time, a new usage trend may emerge. How the PPC & SEO landscape will shape up over the next one year may be difficult to predict. However, one thing seems to be clear – with one masterstroke, Google has ensured higher revenues from PPC advertisers; made SEO a lot more difficult and with increased search pattern of distracted searchers, increased their page-views (read market share.)

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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.

Last week Google launched “Instant Search.” Instant search essentially fills in words and phrases for you as you conduct a search on Google. For example, let’s say you start to type in “goo”. Before you get further, you’ll see a list of potential queries, like “Google” and “Goo Goo Dolls” and so on.

Google’s reasoning for launching this innovation, as with pretty much everything they do, is – on its face – simple: to improve user experience by helping users find what they need faster.  For search engine marketers, however, what’s good for users is not necessarily good for PPC campaigns. Will Instant Search fundamentally change PPC forever?

As I see it, there are two big impacts from Google Instant Search that SEMs need to immediately address.

1. Instant Search increases the importance of head terms. Head terms refer to generic or very popular keywords in your account. Tail terms (or “long tail”) are the much targeted keywords with few queries. A head term example might be “mortgage” whereas a tail term would be “mortgage rates in Miami Florida for bad credit.” Because Instant Search immediately starts to suggest words as a user types, it stands to reason that this feature will result in more head term keywords and less long tail keywords.

In the example I gave above, a user who typed in “mort” might immediately see a suggested query of “mortgage rates” and decide to click on these results long before they complete a much longer query like “mortgage rates in Miami Florida . . .”

From a PPC perspective, this means that volume on head terms – and therefore the importance of showing up on these terms – will increase. Another way of thinking about this is that the head terms will be taking traffic from the tail terms. Hence, if advertisers currently making money on the tail still want to get the same volume they were previously getting, they will now need to spend more of their budget on the head terms. More advertisers bidding on fewer keywords will result in higher CPCs and more money for Google.

I believe that this is pretty consistent with Google’s existing policies. Several years ago I pondered whether keywords even mattered anymore and whether Google would one day go from a keyword-based system to a “category” based system. This move to Instant Search is consistent with that prediction. Long tail keywords cost Google money; getting as many advertisers as possible to bid on fewer keywords is very profitable!

2. Instant Search increases the importance of bidding separately for Google versus the Google Search Partners Network. Many people do not realize that when you buy ads through AdWords, your ad can essentially show up in one of three places: Google search results, the Google Display Network (content sites), or on Google search partners like AOL and Ask.com. Often, the performance on Google search and Partner search sites can be very different, as the demographics of users on these sites vary.

The advent of Google Instant Search will further change the results between Google and Partner search results. Because partners like AOL and Ask do not have Instant Search functionality, you can expect to get more results on long tail queries on Google partners than on Google. If you assume that long tail queries are more valuable (since they are more targeted) than head terms, the result may well be that the relative value of partner search results vis-à-vis Google search results will increase.

While Google doesn’t currently allow you to bid only on the Partner network, you can at least set up two campaigns with one set to Google only and one to Google plus the Partner network. You could then focus on head terms in the Google only campaign, and focus on tail terms in the Google plus Partner network campaign, and adjust bids over time to reflect differences in performance.

Keep in mind that Instant Search is only days old at this point so no one really knows how this functionality will really impact AdWords campaigns. And like many Google product launches, the initial launch is usually fundamentally different than subsequent releases. So watch your AdWords campaigns closely, watch for announcements from Google, and don’t make rash changes until the metrics suggest to do so!

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David Rodnitzky is Founder of PPC Associates, a leading SEM agency in San Francisco. To learn more about full service AdWords management from PPC Associates, contact David at david@ppcassociates.com.

Google recently introduced a new keyword matching option in Google AdWords: modified broad match. As you can probably guess, modified broad match is similar to the traditional broad match option, but gives you a little more control as the advertiser. Let’s take a look at how this new option works. 

What is modified broad match?

Modified broad match is a new AdWords feature that allows pay-per-click (PPC) marketers to set keywords to a more targeted level than broad match, while still having a greater reach than phrase match or exact match keywords.

To use modified broad match, add a plus sign (+) in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. The word or words that are preceded by a (+) sign must appear in the user’s search query, exactly or in close variation. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations, acronyms, and stemmed forms.

The words that are not preceded by a plus sign may vary more significantly or not appear at all in the user’s search query, as with regular broad match.

This is potentially a very interesting and profitable opportunity for AdWords advertisers, as effective modified broad match keywords are likely to drive more traffic than phrase or exact match keywords, while attracting more qualified, targeted traffic than broad match.

What are some examples of modified broad match keywords?

Let’s start with the keyword “aromatherapy oils”—if this keyword was set to broad match, your ad might display in response to queries like “cooking oils” and “oil spill.” Not very targeted and not very good for your click-through rate, cost per click or Quality Score.

If you modify the keyword with a plus sign before “aromatherapy” (+aromatherapy oils), you’ll guarantee that only queries that include that word or close variations trigger your ad. For example, queries that trigger you ad might include:

• aromatherapy
• aromatherapeutic oils
• aromatherapy massage
• organic aromatherapy products

But your ad won’t display in response to queries like “massage oil.” As you can see, this gives you the ability to define your target audience much more closely, while still catching some interesting variants.

As another example, say your keyword is “anti wrinkle cream.” Set to broad match, your ad might show up in the results for queries like “wrinkle resistant pants” and “acne cream.” If you modify your keyword with plus signs like so (anti +wrinkle +cream), only queries with close variations of both “wrinkle” and “cream” will prompt your ad.

Hasn’t broad match always worked this way?

Originally, AdWords’ default broad match type was more restrictive than its current broad match feature. Close variations of your keyword could trigger your ad, but the field of possible queries that could trigger it was narrower. For example, the words in your keyword phrase could appear in any order, and along with any other words, but they all had to be there.

Eventually broad match became less targeted (as it is today), and many Google AdWords users complained. These advertisers felt that the change was allowing their ads to display against terms that weren’t relevant to their offerings, requiring them to develop extensive lists of negative keywords. Negative keywords are crucial for high return on investment when using broad match, but some users felt the new broad match was still too inclusive. For example, one user complained that “zebras near Chicago” showed up in his search query report for the keyword “widgets near Chicago.”

Now AdWords users can get the same control offered by the first version of broad match, but they also have the option to use today’s broader broad match.

How do I enable modified broad match?

In your AdWords account, click on the Keywords tab and select the keyword phrase you want to edit. In the Type column, click on the current match type and choose Modified Broad Match from the drop-down menu. Edit your keyword as necessary with (+) signs.

Is modified broad match is a good idea for my campaign?

Unless you are perfectly happy with your campaign performance given your current keyword settings, it’s a great idea to give modified broad match a try. If you’re mostly using phrase and exact match because you like to have more control over your keywords, you might find that modified broad match gives you a high degree of control while increasing your reach, impressions and clicks. If you’re mostly using standard broad match, you might find that enabling modified broad match on some of your keywords reduces wasteful spend on irrelevant traffic, and improves Quality Score and other key metrics.

As with any change to your AdWords campaign, be sure to keep close track of how your campaign performance evolves. Take note of how clicks, CPCs, conversion rates, and ROI change. Helpfully, Google lets you produce a performance report with information solely about your modified broad match keywords.

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Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream, a provider of PPC tools and an advanced keyword research tool to help PPC advertisers discover profitable head, mid and long-tail keywords.

As search engine marketing evolves at light speed pace, new opportunities are constantly arising–making Search Engine Marketing (SEM) that much more challenging and harder for marketers to keep up with. PPC Summit recently surveyed 3500 past PPC Summit attendees who provided valuable insight on the top areas where Search Engine Marketers feel they need more education. 

According to survey respondents, the topics that Search Marketers want to learn more about to improve their ROI are:

• Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Optimization
• Integrating Paid Search, Organic and Social Media Marketing (SMM)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

While Search Marketing and Search Engine Optimization remain strong revenue drivers for online marketers, Social Media is rapidly moving up in importance. With social media sites like Facebook (500+ million users), LinkedIn (70+ million users), Twitter (106+ million users) and YouTube (300 million accounts) all securing their justifiable placement in the marketing mix, SEM specialists have to be on top of their game in order to keep up.

ISSUE #1 – Pay Per Click Campaign Optimization: The goal in pay per click marketing is to write compelling ad copy that directs prospects to your site or landing page and then entices them to sign up or buy your product/service. Easier said than done, right?

According to the Survey Results, 82.5% of SEM respondents feel they need to focus more on PPC Campaign Strategies by: 

• Improving their Quality Score. One way to improve your Quality Score–and pay less per click– is by properly using header tags (more here).
• Utilizing Website Optimizer & Google Analytics: Paying more attention to your analytics and constantly analyzing your cost-per-customer can really help your results.
• Fine-tuning Google AdWords PPC strategies: Save time and optimize your AdWords campaigns with the AdWords Interface.

ISSUE #2 – Social Media and Search Marketing Merge: Your customers are on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and more. Incorporating these social media sites into your marketing mix is a must in today’s SEM world. Use Social Media Marketing to complement your paid search and organic marketing strategy and reach a broader audience.

More than two-thirds of Survey Respondents ranked “Integrating Social Media with Search Marketing” in their top three priorities. Here are some quick tips: 

• Incorporate Keywords. Use keywords in your account names and all SMM communications ie. SEO blog postings, Tweets, Facebook updates, etc
• Develop Quality Content. This is critical in attracting quality prospects through the Social Media Channel.
• Social Media Time Management. Streamline your communications with automation tools.

ISSUE #3 – Search Engine Optimization: We have heard from attendees–countless times–how they invested so much time and money on creating a fabulous SEO campaign, but in the end conversions were low due to poorly structured websites or landing pages.

Up to 82% of the SEMs polled told us they need help with their SEO campaigns. You can start by: 

• Creating Appropriate Site Architecture. Customers should be able to find what they are looking for on your site in a click or two. If it’s more than three clicks, then you should re-think your site structure and messaging.
• Using Tools Many SEO Experts Use. Utilize the industry leading tools like:
  • SEOMoz (http://www.seomoz.org/) – full complement of SEO tools, to check backlinks, PageRank, keyword research & density etc.
  • Google Webmaster Tools – research search queries, keywords, crawl rates, backlinks, diagnostics, internal linking, robots.txt, etc.
  • SEOTools for Firefox (http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html);
  • Wordstream (http://www.wordstream.com/seo-keyword-management) – keyword research & management.

You can learn more about these challenges and how to solve them at the upcoming
PPC Summit Presents: Search & Social Media Successconference. We built a brand new three-track curriculum based on the results from this attendee survey. On Sept. 21-22 Marketing Professionals will gather in Los Angeles to hear from an impressive line up of experts in SEM/SEO/SMM who will share their top strategies to increase search and social media marketing ROI.

We look forward to seeing you in September!

Kelly Larsen
Director of Marketing, PPC Summit

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.

***********************
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 Kelly Larsen Director of Marketing, PPC Summit 

At past PPC Summit events, attendees have shown a lot of interest in WordStream’s keyword tool so we decided to provide a more detailed look at how these tools work. We recently had the opportunity to talk with Larry Kim, Founder and VP of Product Development at WordStream, to learn about their new keyword tools. Larry walked us through how the Keyword Niche Finder and Keyword Grouper work and how you can use them to enhance your SEO and PPC results. We wanted to share some of the cool product takeaways in the following Q&A on how these tools can help you better manage the keyword development process.

1.  How do these new tools help Search Marketers do their jobs better?
We launched these free Keyword tools to offer Search Marketers a broader range of keyword development and management options. The Keyword Niche Finder is designed to help prioritize content, keyword targeting and campaign creation based on an entire “keyword universe” surrounding a topic. It helps Search Marketers find the most popular pockets of related keywords (keyword niches) rather than individual keywords. And the Keyword Grouper helps Search Marketers organize their own keyword lists and data into actionable groups and niches.

 Advantages of The Keyword Niche Finder and Keyword Grouper:
a. Identify Keyword Niches Versus Single Keywords – Many times the most popular   keyword will perform best on your site, but not always.

b. Discover In-depth Keyword Variations – The Niche Finder offers popular variations within a given keyword cluster. This helps to vary page content and anchor text – something SEOs advocate – and it helps to structure comprehensive PPC campaigns or Ad Groups.

c. Improve Campaign Structure – These tools help to create a well-organized, semantically themed campaign and Ad Group structure for paid search accounts.

2. What are keyword niches and how do they help SEO and PPC campaign performance?
Keyword niches are groupings of tightly related keywords that can be used to drive paid and organic search marketing strategies.

For SEO purposes, identifying keyword niches helps marketers prioritize SEO workflow, identify promising topics for Web content and blog posts, and ensure that a website is optimized for the most profitable keywords.

As for PPC performance, when you identify keyword niches in your vertical, it allows you to create a strong PPC account structure at inception. This will save time and money by delivering more relevant ads, which in turn generate more clicks and improve your Quality Score.

3. How does the Keyword Niche Finder work?
Let’s take a look at the Niche Finder in action. It’s interesting to compare the results of a traditional keyword tool to The Free Keyword Niche Finder, as shown below. Here are results from WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool:

 
Now let’s look at the results for the same topic using The Free Keyword Niche Finder:
 

The interesting point here is in the difference between the two results, and the way that the two tools function. The Free Keyword Tool looks at the volume of results across a variety of sources (ISPs, search engines, and toolbars). The Free Keyword Niche Finder takes the same data that The Free Keyword Tool is using and then clusters that information semantically. So what we’re seeing here is that some keywords have a longer or more substantial “tail”.

Take one of the more popular niches (“refurbished laptops – dell”) and enter that keyword into the Niche Finder:

 
Assuming we’re using Refurbished Dell Laptops as a campaign, these would make for a series of pretty tight Ad Groups, ranging from approximately 10 – 35 keywords. This allows you to write very targeted ads and create a very specific, compelling landing page for each group.

4. What is the Keyword Grouper and how does it work?
The Keyword Grouper offers similar functionality to the Keyword Niche Finder, but instead of asking for a keyword as input, it groups existing data. You can export data from your analytics or a search query report, drop it into the tool, and then The Free Keyword Grouper segments that data.

Just drop in a list of keywords, and it provides a list of results similar to what you would find with The Free Keyword Niche Finder. This is a nice way to look at either a list you already have, or to examine historical data on a client site or an existing site you may be taking over. You can then leverage the same advantages The Free Keyword Niche Finder offers.

5. How can I get these tools?
The tools are free and easy to use; all you have to do is create a free WordStream account to gain full access to both tools, the Keyword Niche Finder and the Keyword Grouper.