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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Influence the Influencers

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

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

Spread Your Influence

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

Better Ads = Lower Costs

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

Use the Multiplier Effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what does this mean for your business?

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Kelly Larsen, Director of Marketing PPC Summit

Advertisers continue to shine a bright light on Paid Search marketing. In fact, the Internet Advertising industry was recently named the only advertising medium that is expected to grow this year, according to Zenith Optimedia.

As more and more companies leverage the search engines and Paid Search to grow their business, it’s no surprise that Internet ad spend is expected to grow 10.1% globally this year, and Paid Search boasts an even stronger 20.0% growth projection*. Paid Search has literally stomped on the other advertising mediums, and has become the fastest growing advertising channel because it delivers more targeted traffic, greater budget control, more accountability and can generate immediate revenue–of course, when done right.

If you take a look at the Search Marketing industry advertising spend in the last 12 months, you’ll see advertisers are getting more creative with their Paid Search spending. The Marketing Sherpa chart below shows recent results for a search marketing ad spend study where nearly 70% of respondents use Google search ads, 32.6% use Google contextual ads, 27.6% use Yahoo search ads and Facebook advertising is now becoming a valid option with over 3% of advertisers now using it. The industry is now being fueled with advertising through new publishers and social sites that offer display ads on a CPM basis or Pay Per Click.

Zenith Optimedia reports the search advertising increases are attributed to Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, “…a welcome competition to Google and should spur further innovation in search.” Bing is worth watching and is surprisingly competitive with Google. The report also adds that new search technologies are reducing entry costs, providing a lot of new competition for established advertisers. The competition to attract search engine users–and your potential customers, will only get more intense. Savvy Marketers will spend their ad dollars on Search to ensure higher ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend).

Staying current on industry trends and innovations is a must in order to compete in the over maximized online advertising space. Even though there are many online resources that Internet Marketers can access (BtoB Online , MarketingProfs , Search Engine Watch , iMedia Connection , eMarketer , Marketing Experiments and Search Engine Land), many of us simply don’t have the time or resources it takes to do the necessary research.

If you don’t have enough time in the day, training may be a better option. And it can also be worth its weight in gold when you learn those little nuggets that turn under performing campaigns into profits. Whether it’s online or in-person training, justifying training costs becomes easier when it means the difference between successful or failing campaigns.

We’re getting ready for upcoming Pay Per Click Summit’s in Los Angeles and Chicago where Search Marketing’s brightest and most experienced will teach cutting-edge Search Advertising techniques that focus on how to do more with less.

We hope to see you there!

Kelly Larsen
Director of Marketing, PPC Summit

*Source: Zenith Optimedia, July  2009 Ad Spend Projections.

…but you may still want to try it.

At this point is there anyone in America who isn’t on Facebook? The site boasts over 200 million active users, and more than 100 million log on to Facebook at least once a day. This is obviously a very engaged audience, just what you’re looking for as a marketer.

While I was at SMX in Seattle a few weeks ago, I sat down with some of the Facebook folks who were there (a bunch of very nice, very evangelical Facebook fans) and they took me on a great tour of the Facebook interface.

It’s really easy to quickly create ads in Facebook, and very user friendly, especially for small businesses as you don’t need a lot of money to get started. You can target different audiences, different locations, set a budget, and monitor progress using the reports. You can purchase ads using a CPM or CPC model, which makes it very easy to test the same messaging as you would use in your pay-per-click campaigns.

So does it work? During last year’s Pay Per Click Summit in Los Angeles (Sept 2008), I surveyed a bunch of attendees and asked whether they had tried Facebook as an advertising vehicle. Only about 10% had, and out of that 10% maybe 3 or 4 had experienced good results. But now it’s 2009 and Facebook has re-vamped their advertising platform, and also put the ads in the upper right hand “call-to-action” portion of their pages so after SMX I asked my Twitter and Facebook followers, and discovered advertisers give it very mixed reviews.

This time maybe 20% of folks surveyed had tried Facebook Advertising and approximatley 50% were getting good results, but that’s hardly competitive with the kind of response you would get from advertisers using AdWords, where conversion rates of 20% and more are possible.

So who are the folks getting the results? Basically the same folks who get good results using Contextual Advertising. So it’s really not fair to compare Facebook to Google. In fact, they are just another large publisher (like the Wall Street Journal or ESPN.com) and you need to create, target and determine the CPA for your ads accordingly.

Contextual Ads can work extremely well for products that are impulse buys, or for branding, and the more targeted they are to the content on the page the better. Advertisers selling mortgages, insurance, entertainment, weight loss products, etc. are all doing very well with Facebook advertising, as are affiliate marketers generating leads for these types of businesses and for other products.

So can it work for your business? Just like any form of advertising you need to test it. If you are currently doing contextual advertising with something like Google Adsense or ContextWeb then it’s easy. Just set up similar campaigns targeting the same placement and demographics on Facebook and test against each other to see what works.

If you are not currently using content ads then it is very easy to set up a campaign in Facebook.  Here are some tips to get you started:

1) Most rules of pay-per-click also apply to Facebook marketing. Make sure your offer matches the landing page, and the keywords/images in your ad are consistent with the landing page also.
2) Include a call to action in your ad. Just like writing an AdWords ad, but punchier.
3) Less is more when it comes to text/copy and graphics. In fact writing like the “National Enquirer” might be totally appropriate as you only have a few minutes to catch people’s attention. Big headlines can work. This is not AdWords where folks are already looking for what you are selling. With Facebook you’re trying to get people’s interest when they are focused on something else entirely, so make your headlines snappy.
4) Consider testing a contest. I’ve heard of advertisers getting good results with them, and they may appeal more to social media users who aren’t really in buying mode.
5) Geo-target your campaigns well. If you don’t ship to Canada or the UK – don’t advertise there.
6) Try segmenting your campaigns by gender to make them more targeted
7) Use people in your graphic ads if possible. Just like on landing pages people respond to pictures of other people.

Just remember, as with Contextual Advertising, you shouldn’t try this form of advertising (or actually, any advertising at all) if you don’t have good tracking on your site. Content ads can take more tweaking to get them to perform, and you may need to test and track many variations before you find that sweet spot.

Have you tried Facebook Advertising? If you have, we’d love to hear your results. Tweet me at @ppcsummit or post a comment at www.ppcsummit.com/newsletter in response to this article. We’re also considering adding a session on Social Media Advertising at our upcoming PPC Summit in Los Angeles in September. Please let me know if you are interested in that also, and we’ll add it to the agenda.

To Your Continued Success Online,

Mary O’Brien
Chairman and Founder PPC Summit