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

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.

Google makes it really easy to start running PPC campaigns on AdWords. Running a well-optimized campaign, however, is another story altogether. Without knowledge of the nuances of AdWords, a novice can end up losing a ton of money very quickly on their SEM campaigns.

Here are five things you can do immediately to your AdWords account to save you a lot of money in just a few minutes.

1. Don’t Heed Google’s “recommended settings”. Google wants to run your ads as broadly as possible. They want you to run on Google, Google’s search partners, Google Display Network, and on mobile phones. When you launch a campaign, you are opted-in to all these areas. While there is value to running on all of these different areas of the Google AdWords system, you don’t want to run them all from the same campaign – doing that usually results in getting you lots of over-priced clicks from lower-quality parts of the network (usually content and mobile) and not enough right-priced clicks on AdWords. My advice is to start by targeting Google only, or at most, Google and Search Partners. Google has comprehensive help resources that explain how to properly set your campaign settings.
2. Move away from broad match as quickly as possible. Google has four match-types – broad, broad modified, phrase, and exact. Broad match means that Google can (and often will) match your keyword to other words that are semantically similar – or that Google’s algorithm just thinks are related. For example, I have a client that bought the keyword “electronic signature” and got match on “sign language” and “e coli.” Go figure. The easiest way to avoid this sort of bad broad matching is to place all of your keywords on one of the other match types. Again, if you search Google’s help guide you’ll find detailed explanations of the various match types.
3. Add lots of negative keywords. Negative keywords are the opposite of a normal keyword. For example, if you added the negative keyword “complaint” if someone typed in “Nikon camera” and you purchased this word on broad match, your ad would show up, but if they typed in “Nikon camera complaint” you would not. The point here is to exclude words or phrases that indicate that a user does not have “purchase intent” for whatever you are selling. You can discover negative keywords by looking at your “search query” report in Google, or by just brainstorming words that are unlikely to result in conversions.
4. Set up tracking. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Google offers very easy and useful conversion tracking – anyone with basic knowledge of HTML should be able to install this on your site. Tracking will help you determine which keywords, ad text, and landing pages work for you, and which you should either bid down or exclude. Don’t bid on keywords because intuition tells you they ‘should’ work or because the boss wants to show up #1 so he can brag to his friends. Bidding should be done scientifically – gather the data from the conversion tracking and adjust bids based on actual performance.
5. Check your geographic targeting. Do you sell your product or service across the entire world, or perhaps just the U.S., or perhaps just within a five mile radius of your office? Google will default you to the U.S. and Canada (if you are based in the U.S. at any rate) when your campaign begins. If you are a local business such as a law firm or a dentist, you are unlikely to be able to fulfill requests from clients across the continent. Similarly, if you primarily sell overseas, you don’t want your ads showing up in the U.S. Adjust your geographic settings to attract the right customers. Read the help guide to learn about all the different targeting options you have in AdWords.

I admit that I wrote the headline of this article as an attempt at “link bait” – i.e., to pique peoples’ interest and hopefully get some good links/tweets from the blogosphere – but the truth is that simple optimizations like those I described above can really save you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars based on the size of your AdWords account! The difference between success and failure on Google is often one of little tweaks here and there, so start tweaking today!

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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.

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.

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).

Paid search marketers love to track everything – sales, geography, demographics, time of day – if we can measure it, we want the data! Data, however, can sometimes lead us to make wrong decisions, especially if that data is easy to misunderstand. To quote Mark Twain, “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

I’ve recently noticed an alarming trend whereby marketing partners are stretching the truth in an effort to give themselves too much credit for my conversions. The primary culprit of this “conversion land grab” is the concept of “view-through” conversions. Most people are familiar with “click-through” conversions – when someone clicks on your PPC ad and converts on your Web site, you count that user (and the keyword they rode in on) as a conversion.

A view-through, on the other hand, occurs when a user simply lands on a page where your ad was served. They never actually click on your ad, but – the theory goes – because they saw your ad, if they later convert on your site, the ad should get some credit for this conversion.

In theory, this isn’t an absolutely ridiculous metric, because we know that people respond to brand advertising on TV or billboards, and that this sort of advertising can drive sales. The problem with view-through conversions, however, is two-fold. First, most paid search advertisers don’t know the difference between a view-through and a click-through and thus don’t know how to value each. For example, did you know that your view-through conversions on Google include “views” of ads that are below the fold (require scrolling), whether a user actually scrolled below the first page or not? That’s like having a billboard facing one way on a highway but counting all the cars that go by in both directions!

Second, the reporting from many marketing partners completely muddles the distinction between a view-through and a click-through. Facebook’s reporting, for example, gives users a high level “Advertising Performance Report” but makes no mention of the fact that the conversions listed in this report are both view-through and click-through data. And Facebook’s misleading reporting pales in comparison to standard practices in the display (banner ad) space. As PPC and display ads become more and more intertwined, search marketers will need to tread cautiously into this new category.

Josh McFarland, CEO of TellApart, recently provided a scathing critique of rampant view-through counting in the display space, in particular with respect to “retargeting” (which Google AdWords calls “remarketing”):

“We all agree online advertising needs a more comprehensive metric than the click.  But the view-through (or post-impression) conversion is not it — especially for your retargeting campaigns.  In fact, if you’re being billed for view-through conversions from your current provider, you are massively overpaying for events which were going to happen anyway.”

My advice – at least for now – is simple: ignore the view-through, the multiple-conversions-per-click, and anything else that looks like an attempt by a search engine to give itself more credit. Over time, we’ll all figure out a way to give some credit to these non-click-through metrics, but until there are established standards and clearer explanations, it’s best to err on the side of caution!

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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.