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.

Successful PPC campaigns start with keyword discovery, research and organization. In paid search, keyword discovery and keyword research are important since searches of the keywords you pick are what you’re paying for. Yet keyword organization—the way you choose to structure your PPC campaigns—is an often overlooked, but critical, task.

To achieve high return on investment in paid search, you’ll need to organize your account in such a way that the keywords in your keyword lists are:

• Relevant to your ad text
• Relevant to your landing pages

The only possible way to achieve these goals is to ensure the keywords in your Ad Groups are relevant to each other.

This will result in:
• Higher quality score: Keywords with higher quality scores enjoy greater exposure and a lower CPC.
• Better conversion rates: By selecting specific keywords and using relevant ad text and landing pages, your customers are more likely to find what they were looking for.

Where do you start?
You can’t possibly write different text ads and landing pages for each keyword in your account, so be creative.
Group and organize your keywords (i.e., segment your keyword list) into close-knit keyword groupings, and write targeted ad text and landing pages for each group. This is a much more realistic approach, and by making your keyword segmentation attainable you’ll be more likely to complete this time-consuming task.

What’s the magic number?
It depends entirely on how closely related the keywords in your groups are. A quick test is to put yourself in the shoes of the searcher and run through each keyword in a given group. Look at the keyword and compare it to the ad text and landing page associated with that Ad Group. Does it make sense? Would you click on that ad if you were the searcher? What would you think of that landing page after clicking on that ad?

Group by intent—analyze the search phrases for the presence of discriminating words that give clues to what they were actually looking for.

For example:

Browse
Searchers who write “asset management” or “asset management best practices” are likely looking to learn more about the topic.

Shop
Searchers who write “asset management software” or “asset management vendors” into a search engine reveal they are in the comparison shopping phase and want to learn who the contenders are.

Buy
Searchers who write “buy asset management software” reveal they are much closer to converting.
Once you have grouped your keywords according to searcher intent, you can craft customized ad text and page content to satisfy the various query types. This process is hard work, but, if done well, provides great returns. You can prioritize your work based on the keyword verticals that drive the most traffic to your site.

Not only will you be driving better qualified traffic to more useful landing pages, you will also be streamlining your bid management efforts. You can now set Ad Group-level bids with the confidence that you won’t be blowing your daily budget on general keywords (think “asset management”), and not bidding high enough on long-tail keywords that specify intent (think “asset management vendors”). If you have successfully segmented your keyword list into “Browse, Shop, Buy” themed keyword groups this will be a piece of cake.

The good news is you can apply the work you do in creating your PPC campaign structure to your SEO efforts. Having grouped and organized keyword data into Ad Groups, you can leverage those same keyword organization structures to inform content authoring, information architecture and workflow prioritization for SEO.

PPC and SEO data sharing and keyword organization results can be staggering — keywords support your search campaigns, and developing an intelligent keyword infrastructure impacts search-driven revenue.

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Larry Kim is the founder of WordStream. You can get in touch with Larry by following him on Twitter, or by reading the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog.

By Kelly Larsen, Director of Marketing, PPC Summit

Now that the holidays are upon us, most advertisers are pumping ad dollars into their campaigns in hopes of reaching more buyers. Even though we are still in an economic slump, market indicators show that sales stand to improve as more people than ever before are expected to shop online in the next two months, according to a recent Forrester Research study. This is promising for Pay Per Click (PPC) marketers as consumers are increasingly buying and researching online, but it’s important to know where consumers are REALLY spending their dollars. Today more shoppers are buying ‘customer-centric’ brands rather than ‘product-centric’ brands. Learning your customer habits, anticipating their future buying patterns and finding new ways to add value will give your online marketing strategy a boost especially during the holidays.

Here Are Some Tips To Help Drive Your Pay Per Click Sales This Holiday Season

Get Inside Your Buyers’ Heads
Wonder why visitors are bouncing away from your site or landing page and then buying from your competitor? Go beyond the numbers and start studying your customer’s buying behavior to understand what pushes them to purchase your product or service. An important thing to keep in mind is making sure your web site copy touts your product benefits—not features. This is such a simple marketing strategy but it bears repeating because so many etailers get caught up in what their product is all about that they forget why prospects buy. Prospects generally buy because of what a product or service can do for them – not because it is feature rich (ie, cheaper, bigger etc.).

Do Your Keyword Research
Make sure you are targeting the RIGHT keywords – for your current offer. One of the biggest mistakes PPC marketers make is being too general when selecting keywords. This is particularly important for etailers and merchants with wide product lines.

For example, if you run an online shoe store that caters to the whole family, don’t select keywords that drive them to your home page. Get them to the specific product pages so that they can find the item that they are searching for immediately. If you’re having a holiday special on kids’ shoes, select keywords for this; for women’s shoes, do another ad for this; etc.

In short, be specific with your keyword selection. While you may get fewer clicks, your ROI will increase because the leads are super targeted.

Create A Specific Call to Action
Many pay per click marketers waste great PPC ads because they end with a weak call to action. An example of this goes something like, “Click to learn more.”

Call to action statements should be strong, direct and specific:
> Buy Today and Save 10%
> Subscribe to Receive a FREE Gift
> Sign Up for Free Holiday Shipping

These types of call-to-action statements implore the potential customer to take a specific action.

Many retailers will offer free shipping this year in the belief that it will make them more attractive in this recessionary holiday season, but if everyone in your channel is offering it, that won’t allow you to stand out. Think about what your customers are looking for that allows you to stand out and then focus on that benefit heavily in your PPC ads.

In conclusion, pay per click marketing is simple. The basics don’t change. If you keep these three pieces of advice in mind when writing your ads, you’ll get more bang for your buck this holiday season!

P.S. We’re holding our first ever and highly anticipated AdWords Advantage Online Summit on January 12-28. Don’t miss this 3-week online training event, go to www.AdWordsAdvantage.com to learn more.

By Brian Lewis, Vice President, Engine Ready

As chaotic as the continual transformation inherent in online marketing seems, there is a comforting constant that marketers can count on: Customer purchase decisions are still, and will always be driven by the emotional desire to fulfill various needs.

Customer research behavior leading up to the purchase, though, is not so neatly predictable and is largely influenced by information accessibility, market messaging and social commentary, all of which are changing at incredible paces. And there are many reasons to expect that pace to accelerate in 2010.

As 2009 comes to a close, most marketers agree that it was a period marked by unprecedented uncertainty and fear in an atmosphere of slashed marketing budgets. All marketing initiatives were held to strict ROI accountability.

As we look forward to the prospects of a healthier 2010, here are 4 key areas that will likely impact search for 2010 – Marketing Sophistication, Insightful Measurement, Role of Social & Rich Media, and Industry Evolution.

Marketing Sophistication
Although previously considered by some search marketers as a lower priority task, landing page testing and optimization will become as routine to PPC success as rigorous keyword research. The ongoing enhancements of Google’s free and easy to use A/B and multivariate testing solution, Website Optimizer, removes all the cost and technology barriers for even the smallest organizations.

Marketers will also be able to learn more about their visitor behavior through greater access to visitor experiential tools. Armed with this information, marketers will be able to refine their landing pages based on understanding on-page visitor behavior such as eye tracking, mouse movements, page scrolling and the order of clicks on a page.

As the search engines continue to evolve into “information engines”, marketers should look for opportunities to best position their products. We can certainly expect Google to continue to increase integration of maps, product information, site page listings and site search boxes within its organic listings.

The display of PPC listings will likely expand beyond 70 text characters to include other media such as video, product demos and product images, allowing companies the opportunities to flex more marketing muscle.
Despite privacy concerns, we will continue to see the increased availability of demographic and behavioral data of search engine users, allowing marketers to more finely tune their search tactics on a more granular level.

Local search will also become more dominant. Firefox’s Geode and Google’s Location API which allow sites to request your browser location, are strong indications of the importance visitor location will play in search.

Insightful Measurement
Conversion attribution, defined as assigning the appropriate credit to all marketing sources that eventually led to a sale, has been one of the hottest topics of the year as marketers come to grips with the limitations of our current “last-click” reporting. 

The assumption that the last click was the only source responsible for the conversion can certainly lead to wrong campaign and keyword management decisions.

The good news is that we are already seeing the earliest versions of conversion attribution solutions which will give marketers a much more accurate picture of the real ROI for SEO, PPC email and other online marketing initiatives.
Much like conversion attribution, accurate measurement of call-in sales due to search listings will be another area that will quickly become a standard tool for search marketers. Most traditional web analytics do not currently have a method for tracking sales or leads received via a phone call after a visit to a website. In 2010, call tracking will become a vital internal component of analytics and provide marketers accurate measurement of call-in conversions from visitors who arrived on the site from a PPC ad, organic listing, banner ad or email.

Social Marketing, Social Networks and Rich Media
Traditional search and social media marketing will accelerate their convergence with more dramatic impacts on search marketing tactics in the upcoming year. In addition to its growing use as a micro-blogging tool, Twitter and social search sites like CrowdEye and Collecta are also now being used to search and research news, events, and product reviews.

Applications such as SocialSeek allow users to search by topic and optionally by location to receive results in the form of tweets, videos, blogs, images and events. These newer methods may provide opportunities for search marketers looking to extend their reach and better target their audience.

YouTube, which in some respects qualifies as the second largest search engine, is an area marketers will continue to focus on to seek more potential customers. The technology to understand embedded audio content is advancing rapidly and will likely be incorporated into the ranking algorithm before the close of 2010.

Throughout the upcoming year we will likely a shift from emphasizing keywords and bids, to marketing to communities of potential prospects who may seek information on your products/services through their interest-centric groups.

Industry Evolution
Perhaps the development that may transcend all others is the Yahoo & Bing partnership. Assuming anti-trust approval, the partnership will aggressively innovate in an attempt to change the search habits of about 65% of Internet users who are loyal to Google.

Expect to start seeing the impact of their alliance early in 2010 and be prepared for some major changes on both the paid and organic side of search.

And combining those changes along with the others discussed will place marketers under significant pressure to identify which tactics are right for their products, learn those new tactics, cost effectively implement, accurately measure, rapidly analyze and modify their strategies to achieve top ROI in 2010.

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Brian Lewis is Vice President at Engine Ready, Inc. A speaker at many industry conferences, and noted author, Lewis has over 20 years experience bringing businesses profitable results through digital and direct marketing. Mr. Lewis earned his B.A. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego and his M.B.A. in Finance from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, graduating both schools with honors.

By Leisa Hall, Senior Account Executive, Anvil Media

The Mistake
If you are currently managing an AdWords account, please, please, please, for all that is good in world do NOT – I repeat, DO NOT – ever run the same campaign on the Search Network and the Content Network at the same time. If you are doing this, you are likely throwing money out of the window. If you are not sure whether or not you are running on Search and Content, chances are good that you indeed are. This is frequently the case for unsuspecting advertisers because when a new campaign is created in AdWords, the default is to opt in to both networks. So if you are unsure, go right now (this very instant before you read past this paragraph) and look. We’ll talk more later about what all of this means.

How can you tell if this impacts you?
Go to your Campaign Settings and view the Network settings. Your settings should look like one and only one of the following:

• Google Search: This means your campaigns’ ads will show up on Google.com properties only (including Google’s international sites, if you are language targeting). This is a wise setting for advertisers who have tight budgets, as often Google’s properties will perform better than the Search network, but they can also carry slightly higher CPC’s.
 

• Google.com + Search Partners: Means that you are running on Google properties (as described above), but also on Google network of search partners. For example, AdWords powers ads on AOL and Ask.com, among many other sites. Opting in to Search Partners will often gain you additional visibility at slightly lower CPC’s.

 
• Content Network : Means that your ads can be shown on third party websites (not Google or Google’s Search partners) that are in Google’s Content Network. This is great for branding or generating awareness where you aren’t being actively sought. Your ads will be based on their contextual relevancy to the content of these third party sites. Your ads can be in text format (same as on Google), or you also have the option of running display ads which can be more eye catching and brand-focused.

The Strategy Behind Segmenting Your Campaigns
Why shouldn’t you run the same campaign on two different networks? Because they behave differently, are very likely to perform differently and as such should be structured differently.

When you run ads on the Google and Search Networks, your ad is displayed in response to a keyword you’ve bid on and that keyword matching to a query performed by a searcher. When you run ads on the Content Network, you ad is shown based on a context that you create with a list of keywords or based on sites that you specifically target (or a combination of the two – we’ll leave that for a future article).

 Google.com & Search Partners
When someone is performing a search, they are in theory actively seeking out the service, product or information that you offer. Your message to them should be very direct since you know, again in theory, what it is they are actively seeking.  If you sell kitchen gadgets, specifically the hottest, most coveted silicone heat-proof ergonomic turkey baster ever created, then you would include keywords such as “turkey baster”, “silicone turkey baster”, or “best turkey baster”, for example. Your ad group would be very specific to the keywords that you want to match to because these are what will drive the best return on your PPC investment. Your ad to go along with the keywords in this ad group might look something like:

You’re using your main keywords in the ad copy and making the direct sale because you know that the searcher is looking for what you sell.

Content Network
Things are different on the Content Network. When someone is browsing an article online about how to properly cook a turkey, for example, your ad may be displayed to them based on that contextual targeting. So if you’re still selling the world’s greatest turkey baster, then you may wish to have your ad placed alongside that article about how to cook a turkey because it is contextually related – someone who is reading about turkeys (or, more specifically, reading about how to cook turkeys) is likely to be interested in your product.

However, since the user is not actively seeking you out, you would need to be somewhat more explanatory in your messaging and would structure your keyword targeting differently. In this case, you would want to focus your keywords to build a context about where you want to appear. Selling your fabulous turkey baster, you know that people reading about cooking, turkeys, entertaining or Thanksgiving may be very inclined to be interested in your product. Knowing this, you need to build a keyword list to tell Google that is the type of content you wish to appear alongside. In this instance, in your ad group you would include keywords such as “cooking”, “turkey”, “entertaining” and “Thanksgiving”.

Yes, really.

Google is going to take those keywords and decipher, as a group, what kind of context they have and will map that context to content on the web – such as an article about how to properly cook a Thanksgiving turkey. Clearly, you would NEVER run the keywords “cooking”, “turkey”, “entertaining” or “Thanksgiving” on the Search Network – they are far too general and would likely be far too expensive to effectively drive conversions and ROI on your PPC spend. But if you bid on the same keywords for the Content network that you did on the Search network (“turkey baster”, “silicone turkey baster”, or “best turkey baster”), then Google would be likely to decipher “turkey basters” to be the context of those terms and look to place your ad in content about turkey basters – which, though probably targeted, would severely limit your visibility to potential customers.

On the Content Network, given that you are trying to catch the eye of the user who isn’t actually looking for you, you would write ad copy to be more attention getting and less focused on keywords. For example:

Conclusion
Since the types of keywords you will bid on with Search and Content are so different, and you set your network settings at the campaign level, this is why you always want to segment any Search campaigns from Content Network campaigns. The audience is different, the message is different, and most importantly, the keywords you should target are different.

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Leisa Hall is a Senior Account Executive at Anvil Media, a boutique search engine marketing agency based in Portland, Oregon. Leisa directs the PPC strategy for the agency whose clients include large ecommerce retailers such as Lucy Activewear and Dr. Marten’s, Fortune 1000 B2B and B2C companies, universities, and large publishers as PC World. In addition to providing agency-level strategy, Leisa is very much in the trenches on a day-to-day basis
directly managing PPC initiatives, as well as SEO and Social Media strategy.

By Mary T. O’Brien, Founder PPC Summit

For years Search Engines have been pushing contextual ads (content advertising) as a way to increase their distribution and revenue, but it seemed like advertisers just weren’t buying it. Ads on content networks have historically performed far worse than their counterparts in search campaigns causing many advertisers to just give up working with content networks at all.

Now, finally, that seems to be changing.

At our recent PPC Summit in Los Angeles, David Szetela’s “Successful Content Advertising – Why Content Ads Can be Your Ace in the Hole” session played to a full house. Of course, that is partly explained by the fact that David is a great trainer and previous attendees know that David always shares a ton of great information and is a fount of search knowledge, but it’s also because content ads are finally coming into their own and capturing their share of advertiser dollars.

In addition to the offerings by Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network and Microsoft adCenter, there are also many stand alone content networks that provide the opportunity to target your customers successfully earlier in the buying cycle, often at a cheaper price than a search campaign.

Some of the networks that you may want to check out include: Context Web (particularly their ADSDAQ self service product), Kontera, Quigo (now part of AOL) and Industry Brains (part of Marchex, and particularly good for B2B targeting). Bigger publishers/Social Networks are also getting in on the act successfully like Facebook, Linked In and Digg’s new content ads offering.

Many of these networks provide excellent Behavioral, Demographical and Geographical targeting that allow you as an advertiser to really drill down and reach your target audience. But still, this is a much more complex product than search. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can blow through a significant budget in a weekend, hence the interest in David’s session in LA. Advertiser’s now get that there is opportunity in content networks – IF you really know what you are doing.   

So what are some things to look out for?

1) Assume that buyers reading content ads are in the very start of the sales process. Actually they may not be in the sales process at all yet. Your ad needs to whet their interest and push them into the funnel. Ads need to read like headlines from the National Enquirer, obnoxious, eye-catching, jumping off the page.

2) As keywords aren’t bolded in content ads, and aren’t counted for Quality Score, you can focus less on USP’s and more on just trapping clicks.

3) These potential customers need strong incentives to click through, so offer free white papers, samples, reviews, trials etc.

4)  Study your where your competitors ads appear. You are not only competing with them you are competing with all the content on that page, so your ad needs to shout just to get attention. Use all of those words that you would never normally use in your copy like: STOP! WAIT! CLICK HERE! LOOK! REGISTER NOW! Etc.

5) Include product prices and special offers. Just make sure they are tied back to specific landing pages on your site that mention these offers so there is no disconnect for your visitors.

6) Create separate search and content campaigns.

This will allow you to:
• Optimize your ad groups and ad text specifically for content pages.
• Target different audiences.
• Use more general (earlier buying cycle) keywords to strengthen the theme of your ad group, without affecting your search performance.

7) Before you even think about attempting a contextual advertising campaign, make sure you have a comprehensive tracking solution in place. Content campaigns can really benefit from testing and tracking, even more than search campaigns.

These are just some basic steps to get you on the right track with Contextual Advertising and there are far too many to list here. David covers more than an hour of tips in his Content sessions at PPC Summit and AdWords Advantage. Overall these campaigns take a lot more tweaking to get them to perform, but the point is they CAN perform very effectively if you do them correctly.

Think “Media Buy” rather than “Search Campaign” and that will help you to focus your attention more effectively. The networks will continue to add targeting and distribution options to make this traffic more effective as time goes on. Pay attention and keep up with the changes. Sometimes a little tweak that works for your particular audience is all it takes to make a content campaign really effective. Once you get this traffic source to work for you, it can really help your budget by allowing you to capture a much lower CPA. Just as with search where you what you take away (negative keywords) really impacts results the same thing is true of content. The traffic sources you remove from your campaigns will determine your success overall.

For more info on Contextual Advertising follow David on twitter http://twitter.com/Szetela or check out his upcoming session in Chicago at the PPC Summit or online at our upcoming online AdWords Advantage event.

Pay Attention. This could be the best source of traffic you’re underutilizing and you can’t afford to do that for much longer.

By John Robbins, Account Executive, Anvil Media, Inc.

According to Business.com, on average, 13 different people within an enterprise level organization touch a purchasing decision before final approval.  Even within mid size companies, those 13 people are likely spread throughout the organization horizontally, and, even more so, vertically.  Because of this, only targeting upper level management is a short sighted and typically ineffective model for advertising for a B2B provider.   By understanding how each level of an organization searches for your solution you can effectively target multiple management levels by advertising to their needs, desires, and wants.

Middle Management

This is the level of a company where most pain points for day-to-day operations come to a head.  Because of this, these managers are likely to perform searches that are solutions based and are attempting to solve a specific problem.

How do they search?
For example, your company is offering document management software solutions and a potential customer is experiencing issues with processing document approvals efficiently.  A mid-level manager may not be familiar with industry jargon or terms and instead performs a query for “help with document approvals”.  This is a very broad query as they may not even be aware there is a software solution out there to search for. 

How do you reach them?
Unless you are using broad match, in your PPC efforts, on a term like “document approval” you would miss this impression and this initial touch opportunity.  Using the search query tools provided can help you ensure you are not missing opportunities at a broad match/very general keyword level. 

Also, these searchers are seeking education and solutions.  The messaging and landing pages for these keywords should reflect this need.  While seeking information, this level of management is less likely to provide contact information as they often do not desire or feel comfortable being the original contact point.  However, that doesn’t mean you should not track how they interact with the site.  Tracking paid visitors that used these keywords and creating specific KPI’s for them can help ensure your first impression is a good one.  While these visitors may not convert often, understanding and tracking how they interact with the site is still important and they should be given specific KPI’s that track their on-site engagement through metrics such as time on site and page/visit.
 
Upper Management

When a need for a solution to a problem reaches this level of management, it usually is receiving some significant attention by the organization.  However, the focus will be on product specific queries as they will already been given a list of 2, maybe 3, options of solutions with recommendations potentially already made.  While using jargon can be a dangerous proposition in marketing, if the search volume is there, there is no reason not to go after it as long as the messaging is not overloaded with it.  Besides jargon, more specific industry terms will also fall into this bucket as upper level management will either have, or have been given, information/research about these terms.

How do they search?
This level of manager doesn’t have the time or even the need to research solutions based keywords (as this has already been completed).  Where lower management is often seeking solutions to specific problems, upper management makes the shift to searching for the products that provide these solutions.  Instead of searching for “help with document approvals”, upper level managers will search for “document management software”.  These types of keywords are likely your current bread and butter for generating leads and this is for good reason – you are now speaking to those who are decision makers and instigate conversation with potential vendors. 

In addition to product specific keywords, these folks will also use branded searches to quickly find the site for review.  Ensuring your branded campaigns are properly optimized and the ad messaging is speaking to the big picture solution your company provides will help to ensure these final searches are effective.  For example, say an Information System Manager participated in your webcast and is the initial lead, remember they have likely passed that information on to at least 2-3 other people that will be involved with the decision and they are now searching via branded terms (either company or products).

How do you reach them?
As the goal of this keyword group is to have a high conversion rate, focusing on providing options to convert will allow the highest opportunity to produce a viable lead.  This level of management is where real lead generation begins and the conversion points should reflect this by collecting as much contact information as possible through a wide range of capture points on the site – webcasts, downloads, white papers, sign-up forms, etc. 

While this strategy focuses on tracking keywords based on management level, don’t forget about the content network.  This strategy can be augmented to target placements based on what each level of management is reading online.

Now, I am not recommending you change how your PPC accounts are organized as this method is about tracking keywords and their reach and effectiveness at driving the next touch point.  What this really comes down to is Attribution – tracking your many touch points within an organization using broad terms to reach mid-management, using product and branded terms for upper management and high level executives.  By understanding why each management level is searching for your solutions and providing a targeted message to each, you can ensure your brand is presented to each level of the decision making process.

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John Robbins is an Account Executive at Anvil Media, Inc.  John graduated from Portland State University with a BS in Marketing.  John has been working with Anvil Media in Portland since 2008.  John has extensive experience with both B2B and B2C clients, specializing in developing SEO, social media, and PPC strategy to increase client visibility and ROI.

Learn How to Develop Smart Ad Text and Landing Pages to Quickly Increase Qualified Leads.

By: Jon Rognerud, Entrepreneur.com’s SEO columnist and Founder Chaos Map

To begin, think for a moment about these real-life Pay Per Click (PPC) business scenarios:

1. A large budget, #1 position bidding, random click streams, poor keyword matching, low CTR’s, low conversions

2. A limited budget, competitive positioning, targeted clicks, phrase and exact keyword matching, high CTR’s, excellent conversions

Which one would you rather see in your results? Personally, I’d use smart bidding, ad copy development and testing strategies, and scale up from the second option. However, to succeed, a PPC manager of the latter should also spend creative time thinking about how to reach out, and into the psyche of their users and marketplace.

Start with the end goal in mind; and know who your users are. What is their persona? Audience checker is an interesting tool to help kick start your thinking. Make sure you understand the difference between an influencer and a real buyer (the person with the credit card). Also, think about how the ad and message fits within the purchasing stages; awareness, research, compare and buy. The messages will and must vary.

I ask the analytical minds out there to stretch a bit here. You need to get more creative and learn to develop connection points with your customers early on. The notion of the discovery and results of pre/post-clicks must be included in your strategy. Relevancy is super important, and throughout the user navigational experience. Most everybody has heard of and some experienced the Google Slap. I’ll share some techniques and a simple formula that can help you prepare for a better outcome, and not simply waste dollars and time doing A/B testing at will.

At the end of this post, ask yourself this question: “How much time do I spend on ad and landing page strategy”? If the answer is “10-15 minutes”, you need to start over.

The Best Ad Example – Ever?

The well documented and trusted “AIDA” (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action) formula is used by many copywriters. See how this story and example fits that structure.

You may not be familiar with Ernest Schakleton. He was a bold adventurer who took 20+ men on a virtually impossible trip to the South Pole and back in the early 1900’s. To start his campaign, and solicit his men, he allegedly wrote this ad, and placed it in a London newspaper:

“Men Wanted (headline): For hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful – honor and recognition in case of success”.

Think about the message here. Extremely direct, action oriented and with a clear benefit statement. The ‘landing page’ was his address. He supposedly received thousands of applications from this ad.

While he did not have to conform to Ad standards per se, and with short text ads constraints like Google Adwords, it’s important to know what Google offers as your canvas for creatives. You have 4 lines with an optional Geo-target to work with:

• Head: The all important headline (Draw, Create Attention, Keywords)  (25)

• Line1: A clear benefit statement (Build Interest)   (35)

• Line2: Decision statement (Click, But Why?) (35)

• Display URL: Action page (Now Do it: Click!) – keyword rich (35) • (optional) Geo Targeting: Example: California You’ll have to narrow your copy down to fit these guidelines.

Demographics

Do you know if your audience is targeted, qualified, and who they are? You must know who you are writing to, and then present them with the information.  When writing, keep this knowledge in mind, and try a more personal approach, versus a (boring) business approach. People buy from people! You might run a survey and special polls in your blog, for example – to see what needs your customers are having. Microsoft asks: What is their (commercial) intent? Get your research done, and compare messages from your competitive landscape. Use Google search, type your keywords – and review the ads, while you also add tools like Spy Fu to discover more details about them.

Setup

Just like in the movies, you start with a setup, work your plot and finish with a killer punch line. You need to do your research (Google Keyword Tool, Google Trends). Your goal must be to ensure a match of what they are looking for, what they want to hear – and not what you think.

If your CEO or VP doesn’t like the ad copy, politely explain that you are researching, and that you will be testing against many. One way to begin this process is by writing a longer paragraph, and narrowing it down from there. You will feel too constricted by editing your ad directly within the platform. Write it down on paper. For fun, try to have a customer, friend or vendor read the ad copy. At least read it out loud for yourself. Much like text on a landing page, your ad copy should be clear and make you want to take action.

Inform

Are you helping to enforce the pain established and by educating them further? Make sure that you are speaking their language, and match with keywords in the headline to begin. Continue to test and tweak, and track it. Read up on advertiser guidelines from Google and Yahoo. A simple exercise to help develop a finer ad copy edge is to listen, observe, be curious, ask questions, problem solve and make connections. These drivers along with competitive analysis, even outside of your niche – can really help!

The Sizzle

When they (scan) read through the copy or ad, make sure it’s not only personal, but do stimulate with special offers and emotional ties. Make sure to include benefits, and use questions in headline and within body. Try numbers and different symbols to make it stand out. Draw them to the most desired action.

The Most Desired Action!

The call to action should be strong, clear and direct. Think of the outcome desired, and reflect that both on the ad and the landing page. Do not introduce many options, make it easy. Action statements are: Learn more, Buy now, Click now, Download now, Free shipping (if you act now), etc. Build more landing pages and test those, keeping relevancy in focus. Do the same with the ads. Adding an extra / keyword parameter in the Display URL can help. Building out multiple, custom domains should also be tested, including sub-domains. Continue to test, don’t stop!

On the Adwords side, create smaller keyword sets in tighter buckets, and use phrase and exact matches to related landing pages with an eye on SEO page copy development. You’ll have created optimum leverage, and a nicely integrated system to test with.

Conclusion

Begin to apply these tactics to shift to a more creative side, whilst maintaining top performance across all your campaigns. Yeah, and purchase this book right now – it’s a perfect fit for your ad copy development: “Tested Advertising Methods” (J. Caples).

And, finally – in the words of Napoleon Hill, the author of Think and Grow Rich: “Whatever Your Mind Can Conceive & Believe, It Can Achieve”. These are inspiring words to start making a change in your behavior and approach for ad copy development and more.

P.S. Make sure to check the load speed of your landing pages, and always test ads and landing pages against your best performing ones. Google Adwords can do this for you at the ad level (A/B testing ads) and Google Web optimizer at the landing page level.  For more advanced users, try the Duration Calculator to find out how long to test a page when using multiple elements.

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Jon Rognerud is Entrepreneur.com’s SEO columnist, an SEO consultant and the author of The Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization, in bookstores now. He has more than 20 years experience building software and marketing projects, including creating content and application solutions at Yahoo!/Overture. His SEO company in Los Angeles provides search marketing solutions for midsize businesses, and focuses

By Elisa Gabbert, Content Development Manager, WordStream

It’s crucial to find and use negative keywords if you want to maximize the value of your pay-per-click campaigns. Setting negative keywords ensures that you don’t waste advertising budget on impressions for search queries that aren’t really relevant to your ad. Those useless impressions will quickly drag down your click-through rate and Quality Score, driving PPC costs up.

So how do you develop a list of negative keywords for your PPC campaigns? You can sit around and brainstorm for possibilities, but this is inefficient, and there’s no way you’ll dream up every negative keyword that your ad might match for.

Here are four simple ways to discover negative keywords, and some tips on how to implement them.

1. Generic negative keyword lists
Pre-assembled lists of negative keywords are available for a number of industries. For instance, if you’re selling a B2B product, you might want to include “free” as a negative, or you might want to create a list of adult terms you don’t want your ads to match on. These can be a decent way to get started on building your list. However, the downside is there in the name: these are generic negative keywords, and they may not all apply to your specific business niche. In addition, many potential negative keywords may be missing from these lists.

2. Through keyword research
 You can find negative keywords while you’re conducting regular keyword research; just keep your eyes open for keyword suggestions that aren’t relevant to your business. For example, one of the top keyword suggestions for “monitor” (as shown in the results from WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool below) is “heart monitor.” It’s a good bet that a number of those thousands of suggestions are similarly irrelevant to your computer supply business.

Start to create a list of negative keyword possibilities through your research, in much the same way as you would a list of keywords you want to target.

3. Search query reports
A third way to find negative keywords is to look at your search query reports in AdWords (or pay-per-click platform of choice). This report shows you the actual search queries that are triggering your text ads (as well as the match type, number of impressions, number of clicks, CTR and other relevant information). Accordingly it’s a good idea to comb through these regularly and eliminate any irrelevant keywords from your ad groups. This method of negative keyword discovery is more thorough than the above options, because it’s based on real data from your own PPC account.

4. Your organic search (SEO) log files or analytics
Perhaps the best method of all these four options, your own log files or analytics are an excellent source of potential negative keywords. These files keep a record of every phrase that drives a visitor from a search engine to your site. There’s one main advantage to this method of negative keyword discovery over search query reports: You can catch negative keywords before they trigger your ads. (And as a best practice, you should eliminate irrelevant keywords from your organic keyword research as well.)

Implementing Negative Keywords in Your PPC Campaigns

Those are some basic ways to expand your negative keyword research. But what do you do with the list once you’ve found them? You probably know about the various match types for keywords (broad match, phrase match and exact match). These match types also apply to negative keywords.

For example, you can use the broad match option (-heart monitor) to prevent your ad from showing for any search query that includes both “heart” and “monitor,” such as “heart rate monitor”; phrase match (-”heart monitor”) for any search query that contains “heart monitor” in that order, such as “holter heart monitor”; or exact match (-[heart monitor]) to eliminate only searches for “heart monitor” verbatim.

Experiment with these negative match options and monitor your campaign to see which is the most effective and cost-efficient for each negative keyword.

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Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream, Inc. You can get in touch with Elisa by sending her an Email at egabbert (at) WordSteam dot com, by following her on Twitter, or by reading the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog, where she is a frequent contributor.

Drive Best-in-Class Results by Integrating Your PPC with Other Online Marketing Channels

By Mary Huffman, Ionic Media

In the first two articles in this series, we reviewed a variety of online marketing vehicles:

• Pay-Per-Click search marketing (PPC)
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Display advertising (e.g., banners)
• Email (to house list)
• Mobile
• Online PR
• Blogging
• Viral /social media
• Email (to rented list)
• Affiliate marketing

Now that we have looked at each marketing vehicle individually, we would like to explore why you should and how you can effectively integrate your PPC marketing with other online media.

First: The Big Kahuna of Integration: PPC and SEO
• People regularly ask us which type of search marketing they should use to drive site traffic and the answer is, “Both.”
• Having multiple listings on the same keyword is mutually reinforcing (people believe you must be relevant!).  So, users end up clicking more than if you had only one PPC or organic listing.  The result is that you get more than your fair share of clicks
• PPC works now, you can control it, and you can always run it profitably – even if it does require cash outflow
• Organic works over the long haul, brings in targeted traffic cheaply, but is not controllable

Second: Integrate PPC with Your Brand Building Efforts
• While it is an effective online vehicle, PPC is not a demand generator so you have to drive demand with other media
• That said, PPC is great as the “catcher” of other efforts to drive demand
• Use display advertising, PR, e-mail, and offline to drive buzz and generate demand
• Ensure PPC is in place to capture all of the opportunity you have created with the other media
• A very large company (to remain nameless) ran an expensive Super Bowl ad but failed to integrate it with a search campaign.  While search volume on target keywords spiked an astonishing amount after the ad ran, the advertiser was nowhere in the search results and clever competitors ran special ad copy to capture the opportunity.  Don’t let this happen to you.

Third: Integrate PPC with Your Direct Response Efforts
• PPC is in itself a great direct response vehicle and can deliver even more value when integrated with other direct response vehicles
• The bottom line is that having multiple channels with which you touch your prospects is smart (hint: they convert better)
• When you run an e-mail or mobile campaign, be sure to have an equivalent PPC campaign in place to capture searchers driven from other media

Get the Right Tracking in Place – It Makes a Difference
• Assists are important and can be an important part of the equation showing which media is effective
• Ad serving allows you to track across PPC and display advertising (e.g., DART for Advertisers and Atlas are two ad serving systems)
• Yahoo Analytics allows you to track PPC click assists with e-mail campaigns
• Yahoo Analytics allows you to track PPC click assists to SEO clicks but not vice versa

The benefits of marketing integration are clear and, in most cases, easy to capture.

We hope this three-part series has been helpful in laying the foundation for you to explore the variety of online media that exist to help make your business succeed…and to do it smartly.  Good luck!

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Mary Kingsley Huffman is a co-founder and Executive Vice President at Ionic Media, a firm with deep experience driving bottom-line results for clients using search and online marketing. Previously, she was Director of Marketing at Overture Services where she was responsible for the acquisition marketing and communication departments, leading all advertiser acquisition efforts and customer communications. Prior to Overture, Mary was an Engagement Manager in the London office of McKinsey & Company, specializing in marketing solutions. Mary has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA from UCLA.