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

To be successful in Lead Generation, a good Marketer has to embrace, align and harmonize all the elements involved.  Together, these form the equation:

Lead Generation = (Branding + SEO + Social Media + Traditional Marketing + Customer Svc + PR + Mobile Marketing + Landing Pages)

Let’s examine each element briefly –

Branding: According to Brand Strategist, Richard Harmer, “Brands build loyal customers by consistently meeting their needs . . . it is like a reputation or gives one a certain feel or charisma that is not substitutable.”

SEO: Search Engine Optimization is simply being in the right place and time when your customer is on the prowl for your service or product.  And if you are there to help them right when they need it with a strong online presence – they will be more likely to purchase from you.

Social Media: Relationships are everything and the same can be said about developing relationships with consumers.  For instance, I believe companies should use Twitter as a customer service channel.

Traditional Marketing: There are consumers who still watch TV on a TV, see billboards on the freeway, receive direct mail and even read paper periodicals.  The only drawback to targeting this demographic is traditional advertising can be expensive and requires detailed ROI analysis.

Customer Service: Every time you lose a customer, it costs 5 – 6 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain or up-sell your existing ones. Use sales and marketing to increase your base and customer service to ensure retention.

PR: Networking Guru Hank Blank, says “Last year I sent out four press releases on Business Wire about some of my marketing engagements, speaking events, and thought leadership.  Why?  Because they help my organic SEO dramatically and provide validation material for pitching new business. And I know the value of being above the crowd.”

Mobile Marketing: Projections suggest that phone- and tablet-based Internet access will continue to increase.  Therefore, this is a mandatory channel for the savvy marketer.

Landing Pages: Many times, I have seen an ad, clicked and then was directed to a page that has nothing to do with the product/service I looked for.  Mary O’Brien admonishes marketers not to build a “bridge to nowhere.”

Lead Generation: These elements need to constantly feed each other as one integrated strategy – an IMC (Integrated Marketing Communications) plan –  to be effective.  Consumers should be able to feel the harmony and consistency in their interaction with your company.

Completing the Sales Cycle by Nurturing your Leads

It takes times for an egg to fully develop and hatch.  Think of your lead generation as an incubator.  You need to nurture and make them feel comfortable about you!

In our current economic climate, companies need to innovate and not hesitate to use highly targeted marking techniques to invigorate your life’s blood: consumer relationships.  Using the “spray and pray” approach and expecting sales to be pulled out of a hat is unsustainable.

Terms like “SEO” and “social media” are being abused by charlatans.  For instance, garnering a large presence online is a great way to establish credibility; however, you need a long-term monetization plan.

Being involved in marketing means nothing unless you are paying attention to attracting self-qualified leads to justify your marketing investment. Consumers are more savvy and selective than anytime in history.

Directing visitors to interactive landing pages and offering free whitepapers, e-books or special offers for commodities is the smart way to work in a lengthy sales cycle and consumer driven market and address the consumer’s question “What’s in it for me?”

Why the Quick Fix won’t work

Many companies still want the quick fix. Using dating as a metaphor, they liken being online for a short time to going to the singles bar. Business isn’t built from one night encounters but by fostering relationships.  Provide people with added value; closing the sale will follow.

For instance, some companies will try AdWords for a week, not get immediate gratification and move on.  Like a one night stand, lead generation doesn’t work like that and requires nurturing.  You have to be seen repeatedly, but with an appropriate frequency.

That is how your awareness spreads and your reputation grows.  When humans get to know you, you earn their trust and they become more engaged. You earn respect through demonstrating thought leadership.

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Deepak Gupta is serving as the VP of Marketing for Help My Resume, a Florida-based non-profit and is the Founder of California-based Marketing By Deepak Consulting Group. Marketing By Deepak Consulting Group partners with clients and successfully converts their marketing efforts into qualified leads.

For many of us, Pay-Per-Click marketing is perceived and utilized as a fast and sometimes cost efficient way to drive qualified visitors and conversions to an advertiser’s website. Many PPC agencies and freelancers spend their time optimizing and strategizing around improving conversions and improving ROI. However, over the years PPC has evolved not only in traditional uses, but also has established itself as a multi-faceted platform that has been used to protect company/personal reputations, defend political agendas and drive awareness to issues outside of the online world. In this article, I will discuss the other benefits of PPC and why we should consider these initiatives more often.

Reputation Management

We have seen this most recently in political jabbering amongst candidates at all levels as well as national and global level for incidents such as the BP oil spill disaster where people are leveraging PPC as a fast and efficient way to protect themselves from negative news coverage.

If you remember, BP was using PPC for reputation management because of the bad PR they were getting all over the world.  BP used text ads as a sounding board to tell the public that BP is working hard everyday to make sure they were doing everything they could to “make it right”.

Web Design Testing

How many times have you heard from a potential prospect saying “I’m not ready for PPC yet because we want to redesign the website and when were done, we’ll give you a call?” Well, traditionally that makes sense from a CEO’s perspective, but what many people fail to realize is that PPC can open the door to testing design, layout, and usability before committing thousands of dollars to something that has not been tested or seen by the public.

I have encouraged many prospects to look at PPC as a testing vehicle before shelling out the money for a complete overhaul of a website.

New Audience Testing

Imagine a typical retailer or manufacturer who is eager to test a new target audience because they have a product or service that can be distributed to a wider market. If this testing was done offline using traditional channels like TV, radio or print advertising, it would be costly and would not generate detailed analytics to pinpoint its effectiveness. Moreover, PPC can not only enable companies to do all of this testing much more affordably it also allows for much more detailed analytics beyond online perception and adoption. It also provides much better “message testing” which can then be used in any other offline strategy.

New Product Retailer Advantage

Getting an advantage on the competition is sometimes a very difficult task to accomplish. That advantage could be improving customer service, lowering prices, offering free shipping, etc… On the other hand, many retailers cannot start promoting new products until the shipments come in to make it available to their customers. Here is where PPC can be a powerful tool to get a leg up on the competition.  For example, a creative merchandising team can leverage PPC to get those products to the public before any of their competitors by offering the product as a Pre-Order item. This tactic was a huge success in the past and quickly became a merchandising “must do”.

Offline Influence and Promotion

This strategy has been mostly triggered by what we have seen on TV, listened to on the radio or read in a newspaper or magazine. It’s the holistic behavior of migrating from offline to online in order to get that personal “branded” engagement for more information. In fact, increasingly frequently TV shows and even commercials are telling their audiences to go online to get more information. This is significant for marketers because they can use PPC to leverage offline awareness from news events, upcoming trends and other offline buzz.

In conclusion:

In a nutshell, PPC has evolved itself into having many more benefits for advertisers other than just driving traffic and increasing conversions. It’s now making a name for itself in the overall marketing strategy for both offline and online initiatives. The more we start looking to PPC to increase awareness, the better we can measure its effectiveness.

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Greg Meyers is the President/Founder of iGESSO Internet Marketing, LLC and author of the Search Marketing Blog SemGeek.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We look forward to seeing you in September!

Kelly Larsen
Director of Marketing, PPC Summit

Broad match is one of the keyword matching options offered by Google AdWords. If you’re going to engage in pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, it’s important to understand how the various match types work. In this article, you’ll learn how broad match works, why it’s useful, and how best to use it in your PPC marketing campaigns.

What exactly is broad match, anyway?

Google and other search engines make decisions on which PPC ads to display in response to keyword searches based on keyword matching options, or match types. Broad match is the default option. It’s the most lenient of the options, meaning that it allows your ad to display in response to the greatest number of queries. According to Google:

If your ad group contained the keyword tennis shoes, your ad would be eligible to appear when a user’s search query contained tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with other terms. Your ads could also show for singular/plural forms, synonyms, and other relevant variations. For example, your ad might show on tennis shoe or tennis sneakers.

Basically, this option lets you pick a term related to your business, and attempts to discover other terms that are also relevant.

The importance of broad match keywords

Your keywords are automatically set to the broad match option when you upload them to your AdWords account, so you should understand the impact of this setting.

The keyword you’ve selected will now automatically be matched against a broad array of related queries. This has two interesting ramifications:

• It helps you discover new, useful broad matched keywords – Broad match provides a host of new phrases that the search engines deem relevant to your business – often long-tail keyword phrases you wouldn’t be able to come up with on your own.
• You may be matched with completely irrelevant keywords – In addition to the good stuff this option will unearth, it will match your ad text to totally irrelevant terms. The search engines’ matching algorithms don’t always work perfectly, as anyone who’s ever gotten bad results from a Google search can attest.

So broad match simultaneously adds quality phrases to your PPC keyword list while spending some of your budget on unrelated clicks that won’t convert.

For example, if your broad-match keyword is “tennis shoe”, Google might match your ad to keywords such as “women’s tennis shoes,” “converse tennis shoes,” and “discount tennis shoes.” These all seem pretty good.

Unfortunately, because of the nature of broad match, Google may also display your ads against keywords like “dress shoes,” “basketball shoes,” and “tennis racquets.” This is known as “expanded broad match,” which means that the algorithm more aggressively matches your ads against what it deems relevant variations of your keywords.

But these variations may not be all that relevant. What if:

• We only sell tennis shoes – Dress shoes and other tennis equipment aren’t keywords we want our ad to show against, in that instance.
• We only sell tennis equipment – Again, we don’t want our ad showing against dress shoes and basketball shoes.
• We only sell shoes – We don’t want our ad to show for tennis equipment and rackets. Also, we won’t want our ad text and landing page talking about tennis shoes when our ad is appearing next to dress shoes.

However, if we choose a more restrictive matching option like exact match, we may miss out on valuable variations of tennis shoes, like “shoes for tennis” or specific brand names.

So we need to find a means for implementing broad match without wasting money on irrelevant clicks.

Getting the most out of the broad matching option

The only way to utilize the expanded reach of broad match while restricting that reach to only relevant queries is to implement negative keywords within your account. Setting a negative keyword tells search engines “Don’t show my ad against this query.”

The challenge with negative keywords is much the same as the challenge with regular keyword research: How do you find all the possible keywords and variations that you don’t want your ad to show against?

Here are your options when it comes to discovering negative keyword candidates:

• Generic negative keyword lists – This is a decent way to get started, but remember that generic negative keywords may not apply to your specific niche, and many negative keywords you should be using are likely to be missing.
• Through regular keyword research – When looking for relevant keywords, you can keep your eyes open for terms that aren’t relevant to your business.
• Search query reports – You can find negative keyword candidates by scanning your search query reports in AdWords for irrelevant terms that have matched against your ads. (This can be a slow process, of course, and will need to be repeated.)
• Organic log files – It’s also a good idea to look for irrelevant keywords in your organic log files or the keyword reports in your Web analytics. This is more proactive, since it allows you to catch wasteful keywords before they trigger your PPC ads.
• A negative keyword tool – Another proactive way to find negative keywords, a negative keyword tool (like this one from WordStream) works like a traditional keyword suggestion tool but helps you find potential negatives.

Using negative keywords in concert with the broad match option helps put your ads in front of the broadest possible audience of interested users, while ensuring that you only pay for relevant traffic that is likely to convert.

The broad match modifier

Google AdWords recently introduced a new feature, called the broad match modifier, that can also help you get more out of broad match. This feature allows you to define a middle ground between phrase match and broad match – in other words, it’s more restrictive than broad match, but still allows you to discover interesting long-tail variations on your keyword.

To use the broad match modifier, add a plus symbol (+) before one or more words in your keyword – this tells Google that the specified word or words must appear in the user’s search query. For example, if you put a plus sign before “tennis” in the keyword “tennis shoe,” only queries that include the word “tennis” will trigger your ad, though you may see traffic from keywords like “tennis equipment” or “tennis gear.”

Using this feature strategically in combination with negative keywords will help you take advantage of broad match without blowing your budget on useless clicks.

Tom Demers is the Director of Marketing with WordStream Internet Marketing Software. WordStream is a manufacturer of PPC management software and keyword research and organization tools for SEO.

We’ve seen so many companies that are competent at traditional Pay Per Click (PPC) get destroyed when trying to advertise on Facebook.  Let’s cover the most common mistakes and how to solve them:

• Keywords are not interests: You have keywords on Google versus interests on Facebook. In the former, someone is actively searching for something and is expressing immediate intent. In the latter, you’re targeting WHO someone is, as opposed to WHEN they are going to buy. You’re likely hitting them weeks and months before they search, so your targeting and ad copy must be different. We’ve seen PPC companies attempt to peddle translation tools that convert search keywords into Facebook interests. You might as well make chicken salad out of chicken poop– not possible. In search you know WHEN, but not WHO– in Facebook, you know WHO, but not when.

• Ads take users away from Facebook: Users who are on Facebook don’t appreciate being yanked out of their browsing experience. So don’t send them to your website– send them to your Facebook fan page. But that also requires that you have a custom tab on your Facebook page — a landing page that is just as specific as any PPC landing page, whether sending people to a particular product page, video testimonial, store locator, or whatever. And that does take a bit of engineering effort as they are few app makers that can build FBML apps. WebTrends just bought Transpond for that very reason.

• The ad copy is too forward: Imagine you’re having a nice dinner with a friend. Then some loud salesman interrupts your meal to pitch his wares. You’ve never seen this guy before— he’s not a friend, and you aren’t exactly interested in buying his stuff right NOW, thought it’s something you might consider later. That’s what Facebook advertisers do today– they shout over the din of the other shouting advertisers, just as you see in the content networks. On Facebook, you don’t have to shout because you can microtarget and whisper quietly because…

• There isn’t multi-step engagement: Because advertisers are trying to go from impression all the way through to the sale in the same visit (yes, it works in PPC because you can target bottom of funnel terms), they fail. Instead, have one set of ads designed only to get fans from the right target audience. Then another set of ads messaging just fans. Then another set of ads for friends of fans. You wouldn’t say the same thing to someone off the street versus a friend you’ve known for a while, now would you? In Facebook PPC, you can segment your messaging by their level of engagement. And no, this concept is not available in mainstream PPC tools– those software companies are still trying to jam the round peg in the square hole.

• They aren’t refreshing ads daily: In PPC you can make some ads and they can live a long time. We have ads that are years old that continue to build good Quality Scores. We just leave those campaigns as is–set it and forget it. In Facebook, ads burn out in days. In fact, the narrower the audience, the faster the burnout. Google ads don’t burn out because it’s a different set of users searching on the keyword each day. In Facebook, you’re hitting the same inventory over and over– especially since the average user spends 7 hours a week on Facebook and consumes dozen of pages. With no frequency capping on Facebook, you better keep your ad copy fresh– not just because you want to split test, but because you don’t want to burn out by wasting inventory on the same people over and over.

• Their analytics is sending you the wrong message: If you’re measuring conversions, odds are that it’s the unspoken last click attribution. In other words, the user may have come to your site multiple times via organic, paid search, email, social, or other sources– but only that last click (likely a branded Google click) got 100% of the credit. In paid search, there is the concept of the “assist” and the “view through conversion” to give credit to other touchpoints prior to conversion. In the world of multi-channel marketing, where consumers take in multiple inputs before making a decision, you have to measure how many Facebook visits (or even impressions) resulted in an eventual conversion later. Facebook does have a conversion tracking tool and Ads API– but it’s still too buggy for mainstream users.

• They are going for exposure: True, when you have a new page, you want to get a lot of fans. If you’re a media buyer, you might even be looking for raw CPMs. But a fan is not a fan. You need to measure what those fans are worth. And there is no one size fits all– you can’t just use the ClickZ figure of $3.65 per fan and multiply by the number of fans you have. You have to measure how many of your fans eventually convert and then calculate back to an average fan value. If 5% of your fans eventually buy something and that something is worth $100, then a fan is worth $5 with full attribution. If you find the overlap is 33% between channels on average (3 visits on average between all channels prior to conversion), then your fan is worth $5 divided by 3–or $1.67.

There are no software packages that will save you from these pitfalls–you or someone in your organization must develop the targeting, ad copy, and landing tabs that reflect your unique selling proposition. In the same way that great traditional PPC has tight linkages between the keyword, ads, and landing page– on Facebook, you must have tight interests, ultra personal ad copy, and many interest-related landing tabs.

Dennis Yu is CEO of BlitzLocal, a Facebook advertising agency that has been serving brands and local resellers for 3 years. Come hear him speak at PPC Summit.

PPC Summit recently conducted a survey of leading bid management vendors and their customers.  Some common themes emerged, some of which were unexpected.  This article captures five of several messages search marketers are sending vendors.  See the full report for other expectations, challenges they’ve faced, and advice they have for their fellow marketers.

#1:  Provide Kick-Ass Support or Else

We interviewed more than 50 people and 41 organizations.  Of the 66 criteria they defined, support rated #1 by a long shot.  “Support” means a lot of things, though, not just an 800-number or Internet-based support.  And quite frankly, some vendors don’t even provide an 800-number.

Vendors better listen and prove they’re listening too, before and after the sale.  The level of support a vendor offers before a sale can foreshadow the level of service you may end up with after the sale.  Sure, some vendors have tiered customer service levels meaning if you pay them extra they’ll be at your beck and call.  With others the amount or type of support you get may depend on your spend level.  For example, you’re spending a couple of thousand dollars a month you won’t have a dedicated account manager but if you’re spending $50,000 a month you likely will.

My favorite pre-sale support story came out of Zappos from Assistant SEM Manager Tim Schaeffer.  When Schaeffer was evaluating vendors he had three companies on his short list.  He sent e-mail messages to all three at the same time and was surprised by the results.  Two of the vendors were located in the same time zone (Pacific).  The third, Kenshoo, was located in Israel which was Kenshoo.  It was midnight in Israel at the time.  Guess who responded first?  Kenshoo.  Guess who got the business?  You guessed it. 

Kenshoo responded immediately.  Both US vendors responded in about 4 hours and one of them was located a five minute drive away!  Oops.

The “support” bucket also now includes customer-requested product features.  Those companies who listen to their customers or solicit customer feedback and turn customer requests and comments into product features or feature enhancements are viewed as more “customer centric” than those who don’t.  Moreover, the customers who have witnessed their ideas transformed into product features are taking emotional equity in the vendor and its product to the point where some sound like a Windows 7 commercial:  “I’m a PPC (search marketer) and I invented [my favorite vendor’s product].”

#2:  Get the Lead Out

Vendors differ in a lot of respects but here we’re going to discuss time to market.  Some vendors have agile software release cycles ranging from about two weeks to three months while others still have annual or semi-annual “major release” cycles. 

Major release cycles are how software companies have traditionally built software:  They plan, build, test, and deploy a big software release that’s packed with all kinds of features and enhancements.  Traditional software development is a linear practice that moves a product down a line through several types of specialists who specify, build, and test the software, respectively.  Agile development involves software releases that are smaller in scope and released more frequently.   It breaks down interdepartmental fiefdoms like coding and testing, among other things, so software teams can develop better quality software faster and more collaboratively.

Among the people we interviewed the difference between traditional and agile releases meant a lot.  Companies with shorter (agile) release cycles are seen as more in tune with customer requirements and also more up to date with Google’s constant algorithmic modifications than companies with slower release cycles.

This finding also ties back to the point about turning customer ideas into product features:  When customers see product features a few weeks or a few months down the road that they personally suggested they become more loyal customers and they’re also amazed how fast their vendor of choice incorporated their idea(s).

#3:  Make Me More Effective

Almost everyone we interviewed had switched vendors at least once or dumped their agency because they believed they could do a better job in-house using the right tools and with the help of the right experts on the vendors’ account team.

“Help” comes in several forms including human assistance and machine assistance.  The human element we’ve already touched on; however, I can say the vendor account teams when they’re good are a valuable extension of the in-house search team.

Machine help is also popular among both experienced and novice search professionals.  Some systems have automated best practice engines that will suggest best practices automatically, kind of like contextual help.  The engines apply algorithms to historical history, keyword prices, the buying patterns of organizations inside or even outside your industry, and then compare the results with your current actions.

Experienced search marketers sometimes ignore the suggestions based on experience.  Seasonal keyword buys are a great example.  They nevertheless value a second pair of eyes, virtual or not, because it forces them to think about what they’re doing and why.  New search marketers like best-practice suggestions because it’s a great way to learn hands-on.

In terms of product features you may have noticed – and we point out in the report – that bid management isn’t the only thing that matters when it comes to managing search programs effectively.  Vendors tend to categorize the additional features differently but reporting and campaign management are the two major buckets with the latter including bulk uploads and editing, Quality Score management, and more.

#4:  Help Me Do Business My Way

It’s wonderful some vendors have so many features available for every imaginable vertical market.  On the other hand, who cares?   If a company sells professional services it has no need to tie inventory to paid search because it has no inventory.  The message here is twofold:  1) Make me effective in my vertical and 2) Don’t make me wade through hundreds of features just to guess which 50 actually matter.

(Actually, you can do yourself a BIG favor by prioritizing what you’re trying to accomplish.  That way, what is and is not relevant will be more obvious to you.)

Search marketers appreciate domain expertise but it’s hard to know what you’re missing if don’t know a capability exists.  One gentleman we interviewed is convinced multi-channel attribution is impossible and yet other fellow retailers are doing it with varying levels of success and sophistication.

Vertical market nuances can also play out in sales.  A search marketer who works for a national insurance agency is spending lots of money but on very few keywords so a percentage-of-spend cost model doesn’t work for him.

Help Me Improve ROI

ROI is a moving target and as you well know search marketers are under constant pressure to improve ROI.  Many search marketers are looking beyond last click attribution to multi-attribution and multichannel attribution for two main reasons:  1) Last-click attribution rarely reflects actual human behavior and 2) Paid search is being integrated into overall marketing strategies more than it has been. As a result, paid search is increasingly being compared to, contrasted with, and optimized in relation to other marketing tactics.

Retailers are a good example of a vertical market making this move.  Admittedly, it’s the larger retailers that are pushing the trend forward but as always sophistication flows downstream over time.  Smaller retailers are already paying attention because they’re hearing more buzz about it generally thanks to AdWords search funnel reports.

Not all vendors provide this capability and those who do don’t necessarily support it to the same degree.  At the present time, some search marketers are doing the functional equivalent of sticking a finger in the wind to using complex data models to attribute costs to specific actions.

It’s a growing area and people are interested so expect to see a lot more about this (and more sophisticated solutions) in the near future.

Conclusion

There are a lot of reasons to hate bid management solutions and vendors, especially if their products and/or services don’t align with your business.  If you’re unhappy with your present vendor, you’re wise to take a thoughtful approach to vendor selection starting with your objectives.  Along the way, pay attention to things like responsiveness and a willingness to ensure your success, particularly if your spend level is formidable.

The main message is don’t settle.  You don’t have to.  Most vendors offer free trials so you can take their solutions for a test drive and all of them would be more than happy to be your next business partner.  Just make sure you’re in the driver’s seat or you may end up feeling like you’ve been taken for a ride.

Lisa Morgan is CEO of Strategic Rainmakers, a management and marketing consulting firm that helps organizations meet their strategic business and marketing goals.  Its services include in-depth research, marketing consulting, content development, and strategic initiatives, among other things.  Past and present clients include vendors, service providers, event producers, publishers, and associations.

By Kevin Newcomb, Editor, Internet Marketing Institute

Business-to-business buying behavior is an enigma to many, even those who spend their lives trying to sell their products to businesses. For the average B2B marketer, understanding what makes buyers tick can mean the difference between success and failure of their business, or at the very least of their own careers.

Last month, at the B2B Search Strategy Summit  in San Francisco, B2B marketers learned a new way of looking at B2B buying behavior. In the morning keynote address, Gord Hotchkiss, president and CEO of Enquiro, shared some findings from a comprehensive business-to-business marketing research initiative known as the BuyerSphere Project.

The research grew out of Enquiro’s own curiosity, as a market research and online marketing services firm that sells to other businesses, according to Hotchkiss. Like many B2B companies, Enquiro recognized that the buying process rarely went as planned, and so decided to find out why.

Enquiro — along with thought leaders from Google, Business.com, Marketo, Covario and DemandBase — proceeded to perform more than 100 face-to-face interviews with business buyers, hundreds of eye-tracking research sessions, and a survey of more than 3,000 business buyers. The results were published last fall in a 210-page report, The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business.

The BuyerSphere Project debunks several commonly held beliefs about B2B marketing, including the idea that B2B buying is rational and emotionless, that it’s an organized and clearly thought-out process, or that the availability of information delivered online has made business buying easier.

Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Hotchkiss, who writes: 

“So this is what we have: a hunch that human decision making is more convoluted and irrational than we ever guessed, a realization that those same mechanisms are used at work just as they are at home, a limited understanding of how decisions are made when you have multiple people working within an organizational framework, and, to add an exponential dimension of complexity to everything, the explosion of information and communication opportunities presented by the internet. Our paradigm is shifting before we ever defined it. No wonder we can’t catch up.”

After digging into the buying behaviors of thousands of businesses, the Enquiro researchers were able to distill some key findings in several areas, including: 

1. The Risk Gap

The Risk Gap refers to the way the typical “Risk and Reward” process falls apart for B2B buying. The idea that our decisions are based on avoiding risk or attaining a reward is not really applicable to a B2B buying scenario, where the “reward” emotions are far outweighed by the “risk” emotions. That’s because the person making the buying decision doesn’t usually stand to personally benefit from a B2B purchase, but the penalties that might come from making a bad decision are ever-present in the buyer’s mind.

 Add to that the concepts of personal risk vs. organizational risk, or the varying degree of risk in repeat purchases vs. “blank slate” purchases, and the Risk Gap takes on even more importance. The old maxim, “99% of business buying is about covering your butt,” holds true today, which means that B2B marketers need to figure out how to use the tools they have to minimize the risk and provide buyers with a reason to trust them.

2. The Myth of the Funnel

The marketing concept of a “buying funnel” — where a buyer progresses neatly from Need to Awareness to Consideration to Purchase to Use — is a myth, according to Enquiro’s research. Buyers do pass through those areas on the way to a purchase, but it’s rarely done in a logical, rational, and linear way, according to Hotchkiss.

In the pre-Web model, geographic and resource limitations would force a business to take a disciplined approach to identifying and developing a market before it even thought of marketing and selling to that market. Face-to-face, feet-on-the-street selling was the only way.

The Internet appeared to offer a shortcut, where prospective buyers would find the business online, instead of the business having to go out and find the buyers. While this drastically broadened the number of prospects at the top of the traditional sales funnel, too often those prospects never made it to the final sale. Without the face-to-face reassurances, many potential buyers bailed out when their concerns about risk were not adequately addressed.

The BuyerSphere Project reveals the need for a new model, one that puts people back in the center of the process and combines the strengths of online and offline channels. Online and offline both need to be integrated into the process of identifying and developing a market, marketing and selling to that market, and servicing that market.

3. The Buyer-Doer Gap

 Anyone who has ever bought or sold a product for business knows that most of the time, the person who is going to use the product is not the same one that does the buying. And yet, B2B marketers often fail to address the needs of both the “doers,” who will be using the product, and the “buyers,” who hold the purse strings.

Enquiro’s research unveils a gap between buyers and doers in relation to risk assessment. It boils down to the fact that doers are looking to evaluate the product, while buyers will evaluate the vendor. For the doer, the risks revolve around whether or not the product will make the user’s life easier. For buyers, the concerns involve whether they can trust the vendor, if the vendor will be easy to work with, or if the vendor is financially secure.

A B2B marketer needs to address risk concerns from both parties, in various stages of the buying cycle. Generally, the doer will be evaluating the product early on, to see if it does what they need. Once you can convince them it will, then it’s time to convince the buyer that it’s safe to do business with you. 

These are just a few of the findings of the BuyerSphere research that Hotchkiss discussed at the B2B Search Strategy Summit last month. If you missed the B2B Search Summit, check out the upcoming PPC Summit Presents…Search Marketing and Social Media Success coming to Los Angeles in September — learn more about this comprehensive training event at www.PPCSummit.com.

By Mary O’Brien, Founder/Director, PPC Summit  

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend SES San Jose. I hadn’t been in a couple of years, and I was really curious to see what an SES conference looks like now, given the recessionary state of the marketing Industry.

The good news is – Search Engine Marketing is obviously alive and kicking with no chance of decline in the foreseeable future, so if you are thinking of learning a marketing skill to complement your resume and make your career recession proof, Pay-Per-Click, SEO and Social Media will definitely make you more marketable.

Although attendance was down a little bit the conference was still vibrant and focused as usual on the future and big picture of Search Engine Marketing. What was interesting this year was that attendees were actually paying attention, and using the conference to its best advantage. In years past when I attended SES it seemed like all anyone was focused on were the cool tchotchkys that were being given away at various booths. This year folks were actually attending sessions and networking with each other, with the intent of making themselves more interesting to future employers, or even better, going out on their own and getting clients.

Maybe it was the lack of a Google Dance that caused this shift.  In previous years it seemed like the Search Engines went out of their way to compete with each other on who could hold the biggest, craziest party, but this year, it was a much more focused event, totally in keeping with every Search Marketers need to do more with less budget.

So why does learning Search Engine Marketing make you more marketable as a marketer?

From SEMPO’s State of Search Engine Marketing Report and Survey, released in February 2009:
• The North American Search Engine Marketing industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $13.5 billion in 2008
• North American Search Engine Marketing spending is now projected to grow to $26.1 billion in 2013, up significantly from the $18.6 billion forecast in 2007.
• Pay-Per-Click captured 88.4 percent of 2008 spending, up 1% from 2007; organic SEO captured 10.6 percent
• Budgets are shifting to Pay-Per-Click. About a third of respondents said their funding for Pay-Per-Click came from a mix of new and existing marketing funds. Another third reported using entirely newly allocated budgets

Reuters also reported that while online advertising isn’t growing at the rate that print advertising is declining it IS still growing even as the economy all around us is shrinking. Basically, Search Engine Marketing is pretty recession proof. Advertising dollars are still available but they appear to be moving online, and over 85% percent of that is for Pay-Per-Click.

This is important for two reasons:
1. This will give more companies the incentive to advertise online in case their competitors beat them to the punch.
2. Those companies will need knowledgeable, talented and properly-trained people to execute a great Search Engine Marketing campaign.

When times are not so good, more businesses are willing to push budgets online. When times get better, do you think that is going to change?

The numbers from SEMPO show that nowadays a larger number of businesses get the importance of not only having a Web presence, but are working hard to maintain their visibility. Now that the economy is slow, budgets are being pulled from other sources and moved online.

What does that mean for the future of Search Engine Marketing?  Basically, as a marketer, a large percentage of your time should be focused on SEM. You should be doing it, researching it, learning it and staying current with all the nuances and changes.  You don’t necessarily have to be an expert at every part of it, but you should know who the experts are, the best tools to use and also how to get access to info when you have a question.

So even in a recession continue your Search Engine Marketing education. Go to conferences, training and seminars that can help you to learn, network and improve your marketability. You’ll meet amateur and professional Search Engine Marketers and business owners, create great peer relationships, and learn more skills. If your current company has cut their training budget, considering paying for training yourself.  That way you’ll truly make yourself recession proof along with Search Engine Marketing. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a huge expensive conference, as long as it meets your specific education needs. Go where you can learn the most about the skill that will make you the most marketable right now. This is a great time to invest some marketing dollars in yourself.

by Heather Schwartz, Account Executive at Anvil Media, Inc.

It’s never too early to start getting ready for the holidays whether it’s shopping if you’re a customer or prepping your strategy if you’re a marketer.  Here are some things to start thinking about the upcoming 2009 holiday season for your online marketing efforts, specifically for Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.  First let’s look into last year’s holiday season and expectations for this year to get a good understanding of the 2009 holiday landscape.

Holiday Season 2008
According to comScore, e-shopping sales in 2008 were over $130 million, a 6% increase in sales from the 2007 holiday season, and among the top 500 internet retailer’s sales in 2008 increased 12%.  From this we can conclude that more people were shopping online in 2008 compared to 2007 and that larger retailer sales are growing at a faster rate.  In a study done by Coremetrics, department stores and gifting sites saw an increase in conversion rate over the 2008 holiday season, while luxury goods retailers saw a decrease in conversion rate.  Why you ask?  Because the department stores and gifting sites adapted to the economy, they offered early discounting, they changed their merchandising to feature value items at lower prices and they added buying incentives for customers, like free shipping.   The retailers who continue to change and adapt to their customers needs and wants (within reason) are the ones that will prosper.

2009 Holiday Forecast
In order to properly prepare for this year’s holiday season, some research needs to be done first.  Below are Coremetrics’ forecasts for the 2009 holiday season:
• Shoppers will be shopping earlier this year and buying value orientated, incentive driven items.
• Potential for increase in cost/order, because customers will be shopping in more sessions therefore clicking on more marketing programs.
• Targeted email and display ads will play a bigger role this holiday season.

So, here is your friendly reminder – get ready for the 2009 holiday season, consider offering more promotions, like free shipping and feature products that aren’t necessarily the most expensive on your site.  (Keep in mind you don’t want these promotions to negatively affect your bottom line, be smart about your offerings.)  Also if you’re already running PPC on the Search Network, consider running on the Content Network on sites that directly target your customers.  So, how should you get started for the holiday season?

PPC Ad Text for Holiday 2009
1. Look at your campaign history.  If you included holiday messaging in your campaigns last year, what types of ads had the highest CTR and conversion rates? For those top performing ads can you translate the messaging for this year?
2. Continually test ad text.  There are several options when it comes to A/B testing ad copy.  For the holidays, test what type of promotion increases CTR or conversion rate.  Test the headline on your ad, for example, one that includes pricing v. one that doesn’t.  Once you have collected enough data, pause the non-performing ad, copy the ad that performed better and slightly tweak the messaging to continue testing.
3. Competitive research.  Don’t forget to do some holiday recon, look at what your direct competitors are saying in their ad text.  What type of offers/promotions are your competitors offering?
4. Create a schedule for the launch of your new ads, paying close attention to the following dates:
      a. Black Friday, November 27th – only 28 shopping days until Christmas this year.  Last year’s holiday season was the start of the shorter time period between Black Friday and Christmas Day.  In 2007, this period was 32 days, which is over a 12% decrease in the number of shopping days from 2007 to 2009.  This decrease in the shopping period is influencing customer’s buying behaviors to start shopping earlier.
     b. Cyber Monday, November 30th – this day continues to be a bigger day each year, with more people shopping online.
     c. Christmas Day, December 25th – continues to be a big shopping day for people doing returns or exchanges, customers buying complementary goods, using their gift cards, buying additional gifts online and buying products that were forgotten.

PPC Keywords for Holiday 2009
1. What keywords performed well last holiday season?  Instead of setting bidding strategies based on last month’s performance, take some time to review last year’s performance and make decisions based on last year’s holiday season.  Was there a specific keyword category that did particularly well in terms of sales, will this be the same for this year?  Look to popular trends to help determine “top sellers” and manage budget accordingly. 

2.  Revisit your negative keyword list.  Are there any particular holiday related negative keywords you could consider adding to your campaigns?

3.  If you are bidding on holiday related keywords, keep an extra close eye on the CPA and ROI at the keyword level, often times these keywords are expensive and don’t show goal return.

PPC Landing Pages for Holiday 2009
1.  If your ad text has holiday messaging be sure this gets translated to your landing page.  Same goes for promotions.
2.  Imagery.  Update any relevant images on your landing page with holiday related imagery.
3.  Revisit the conversion funnel on your site; make sure the appropriate merchandising is holiday related for cross selling and recommendation opportunities.  Do you have any gifting options on your site?  Also, make sure your internal search engine delivers gifting related results to relevant inquiries.

In summary, today is not too early to start planning your PPC campaigns for the holiday season.  Before it’s too late, determine your key benchmarks and goals for the holidays.  Start testing different verbiage or promotions now so you have a leg up on the competition before the holidays hit, and if something is working in one medium try to translate that across all your marketing efforts if applicable.

I hope the above takeaways regarding ad text, keywords and landing pages get you excited for the 2009 Holiday Season and jumpstart your PPC strategy.

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Heather Schwartz is an Account Executive at Anvil Media, Inc.  Heather  graduated from the University of Oregon with a BS in Marketing and a minor in Communication studies.  Heather has been working with Anvil Media in Portland since 2008 specializing in B2C ecommerce clients such as lucy activewear, Tea Collection and Ellington Leather, developing SEO, Social Media and PPC campaigns to increase clients online visibility and ROI.

By Dane Christensen, Search Engine Marketing Manager at Lyris, Inc

Countless articles have been written about the importance of focusing on long-tail keywords for both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.  It’s generally agreed that long-tail keywords produce higher quality traffic at a lower cost. 

It’s a great theory.  But there is the small matter of generating the massive number of long-tail keywords needed to build a significant amount of traffic.   By its very nature, long-tail keyword traffic is scattered across a very wide landscape. 

Using the Lyris HQ demo website “Top 5 Flicks” (www.top5flicks.com) as an example, a very small list of possible long-tail keywords could be:

• ”action flick starring orlando bloom”
• ”horror movie without blood”
• ”buy romantic comedy movie”
• ”war movie about macarther in Japan”
•  “directed by martin scorsese”

When you factor in all the possible movie genres, subjects, settings, actors, directors, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc. can you imagine how many possible permutations of long-tail phrases there could be?  Oh, and then there are misspellings (yes, I spelled “macarther” wrong on purpose above) meaning that keyword phrases could easily go into the millions.  Some of those keywords will get a handful of searches each month; many of them will just get a single random search here and there.   But that’s the long-tail.  Individually, the keywords probably aren’t worth the effort of researching and plugging them in to your system.   But collectively it can account for a significant amount of high-quality traffic. 

To go after the lucrative long-tail, you must have an effective way to harness massive numbers of keywords. 

Following are five techniques that will allow you to do just that:
Website Content Mining
You know all of those websites that marketers have been working hard to optimize for years?  They can serve as a great source of valuable long-tail keywords.  But how do you scoop up the keywords that are just floating out there amongst all those websites?  Some people have created screen scraper bots—applications that scour the web extracting keywords from websites. 

But this method has been rendered obsolete by Google’s (relatively) new Search-based Keyword Tool .   Using the SK Tool, you can specify a particular website address and it will instantly produce a list of keywords found on that site.  Click on any of those words to go straight to a search results page where you can find other websites to enter into the tool.  In no time you’ll find a plethora of long-tail keywords. 

The tool also provides a way for you to organize these keywords into categories.  If you have an AdWords account you’ll also have the ability to store keyword sets so you can build lists over time.  Once you’ve got a big enough list you can easily export the list for import back into Google or any other search engine.  It’s a great tool.  And it’s completely free.

Search Engine Query Analysis
While the above method focuses on pulling keywords from content, this method involves analyzing what people are actually searching for in the search engines.   While there is undoubtedly a great deal of overlap between these two sources, analyzing what people are looking for may be a way of getting the jump on all those websites that have not yet picked up on the latest trends.

The Keyword Discovery tool in Lyris HQ mines query data from over 200 search engines world-wide, compiling nearly 38 billion searches.  When used with the Lyris HQ Search Marketing tool, researched keywords can be automatically dropped into your PPC campaigns with no export/import required.   The Keyword Discovery tool is included in the Lyris HQ fee structure, allowing Lyris HQ users the ability to easily tap into the most extensive database of keyword data on the planet.

PPC Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence tools take yet another approach to keyword research, focusing on the keywords on which PPC advertisers are bidding.   The idea here is that if companies are actually spending money on these keywords, they must be the most important keywords.  Two such “spying” tools are Keyword Spy and Spy Fu, with service fees ranging from $59 to $139 per month.

These services allow you to input the domain of your competitors’ websites, and it will return a list of all the keywords on which they are bidding.  In addition to the keywords, there is information such as how many searches are done on the keywords, how many companies are bidding on them, and what the cost is for the top bid position.   This allows you to easily focus on the least competitive keywords.

Permutation
If you want to bid on the keywords that no one else has even thought of, the tool for that job is permutation.  Permutation means assembling words together in various combinations form different sets of words.  Using the “Top 5 Flicks” example, our permutation may look like the three lists below:

List 1                List 2                   List 3  
movie              starring              keanu reeves
dvd                  featuring            russell crowe
flick                    with                   harrison ford

These three small lists can be combined into 27 (3x3x3) different keywords such as:
* movie featuring harrison ford
* dvd with russell crowe
* flick starring keanu reaves
* Etc.

Add just one more three-item list like genres (e.g. action, comedy, drama) and you’re talking about 81 long-tail phrases (e.g. “comedy flick with harrison ford”).  Adding more items to each list can grow the list to massive proportions very rapidly.

The key here is to save the energy of researching what people are bidding on, searching on, or putting on their website and just pump out the keywords programmatically.  Using this method you’re bound to generate a lot of phrases that nobody every searches on, but you’ll also catch a lot of those very low-volume searches that are missed with the previous methods–or even those that haven’t even been searched on yet.  

Unless you have unlimited time and patience, you’ll need a tool to pull this off.  The leader in the field is Boxer Software’s “The Permutator,” an installed software that cost about $50.

Web Analytics
If permutation is like casting a very wide net in order to scoop up all the stragglers, using your web analytics data is more like using a fishing pole with the perfect bait to catch exactly the right keywords.  Any respectable web analytics application has some form of keyword report that will show you what keywords visitors searched on in order to reach your site.  That is your prime list. 

Some keyword reports are more sophisticated than others.  The keyword report in Lyris HQ allows you to segment visitors and the keywords they searched on using a wide range of criteria, allowing you to focus on the highest value keywords. 

You can even take it a step further and capture the data from a search form on your own website.  This way you not only know what people searched on to reach your site, but what they are searching for after they reach your site.  Now that is targeted!

Summary
Implement all five of these techniques and you won’t miss any high-value long-tail keywords.  And you may actually find that you have no more use for the big-head keywords at all.

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Dane Christensen is the Search Engine Marketing Manager at Lyris, Inc. where he uses the company’s integrated online marketing suite to manage a six digit monthly marketing budget over seven different search engines.  He has been involved in the Internet industry as a trainer, web developer, webmaster, online marketer, web analytics specialist, product manager, and entrepreneur since 1994.