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No Time for Negativity, Only Negative Keywords

Wednesday, December 26th, 2012

What actually is a negative keyword? Google definition –> “A negative keyword is a kind of keyword that prevents your ads from showing on irrelevant search queries.” They are used to make sure your ad does not show when someone is searching using one of your negative keywords in a particular query. 

Adding negative keywords is one of the quickest ways to improve results to your search engine marketing accounts. Negative keywords can can save you money, and help your PPC campaign perform better and more efficiently. Essentially by strategically implementing negative keywords, you allow yourself to have stronger bids on higher converting, more expensive and relevant keywords without worrying if an ad will show up on a search query that is not part of your strategy.

Top 3 Reasons Negative Keywords are Important:

-       Pursue high volume driving keywords with less risk.

-       Filter out ads that can harm the business.

-       Stronger more efficiently targeted campaigns.

How to get the right negative keywords:

1)      Download an AdWords Search Query Report into Excel. Summarized at the AdGroup level, pull data from at least the last month or last two months.

2)      Format data as a table.

 #2 Image Example

3)      Filter your Broad and Phrase match search queries that had at least 1 conversion and delete from the table.

4)      Reset filters and now filter down to Exact Match queries and copy and paste the terms to a new worksheet. Repeat for Broad and Phrase match as well.

5)      Now for each new worksheet (exact, and phrase/broad) delimit the terms by a space. 

 #5 Image Example

6)      Then move all individual terms into one column, adding column headers for your phrase/broad match lists (search term, and count), be sure to add a character to the count column down the list.

#6 Image Example

7)      With the list of search term, and count. Format as a pivot table and sort the count field from largest to smallest.

#7 Image Example

8)      Now, with the exact worksheet, be sure to have delimited the terms with a space and move all individual terms to one column and remove duplicates.

#8 Image Example

9)      Now with the phrase/broad pivot table on the 3rd column create a =VLOOKUP(A2,exact!A:A,1,FALSE) to match phrase/broads with any exact terms. Then filter match to “#N/A”

 #9 Image Example

This practice will lead you to see search terms that are costing you money that are not converting, while also taking into account any exact term in your keyword list by filtering them out. With this, you now can make educated decisions with knowledge of the business and goals of the business in mind to find negative keywords that will best help you.   

Good Luck, Happy Holidays, and Happy Searching! 

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Google Webmaster Tools – Event Data Highlighter

Tuesday, December 18th, 2012

On Wednesday, December 12, 2012 Google announced a new feature for Webmasters called the Data Highlighter.

The Data Highlighter is one way by which a webmaster can identify to Google the structured data on your website. Google will then provide enhanced search results (rich snippets) to users of the Google search engine.  

In case you don’t know what structured data or rich snippets are, here is a summary:

In 2011, in conjunction with schema.org, Bing, Google, and Yahoo provided a shared collection of standard data sets (or schemas) to schema.org that webmasters could use to markup certain sets of structured data on their website. Structured data is often stored in databases and formatted into HTML. Some examples include: product name, price, quantity, or event name, description, or location. Each search engine integrated schemas into their browser and search results. However, each search engine uses and displays them differently. The display of the structured data in search results is known as rich snippets. Below are examples of how Google search results are displaying rich snippets (star rating, reviews, price, track name, track duration, etc.):

Google Search Results Rich Snippets

You quickly get the idea how rich snippets stand out differently than standard results and could differentiate you from your competitors.

Getting back to the Data Highlighter – currently, the Data Highlighter only supports the Event schema and only in the English language. In the months ahead, Google will update the Data Highlighter to support more languages and additional data types.

The original way to markup structured data was by wrapping specific html tags around the data points. With the Data Highlighter, there is no code change required. An authorized user of your Google Webmaster Tools account simply highlights and tags each data point using their mouse. 

Google Webmaster Tools Highlight Tool

Additionally, if Google recognizes a consistent structure across multiple pages, Data Highlighter will learn that format and automatically suggest additional tags.

Once completed, you review and publish if correct.

It is important to keep in mind that while this Google tool does and will potentially make marking up structured data easier, it will only work within Google search results. You will still be required to markup structured data in the traditional sense to identify it for other search engines.

For more information about the Highlighter Tool and available schemas, view the following:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/12/introducing-data-highlighter-for-event.html

http://schema.org/

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Google+ Local Reviews – What To Do When They Disappear

Tuesday, November 13th, 2012

As many are aware, the use of search with local intent is a rapidly growing segment of Google’s business. In turn, maintaining relevancy in local search results is more important to business owners by the day. Recently, Josef Severson taught us how to get competitive on local search, and while he touched on it briefly, Google+ reviews are having a significant impact on businesses. It is my goal to provide best practices to business owners, as well as an explanation in the event of disappearing reviews.

Listed as the seventh overall ranking factor according to David Mihm, the quantity of native Google Places reviews (with text) plays a huge role in competitive local search. As this became better known, Google saw the quality of their reviews diminish due to illegitimacy. Some industries were more prone than others, but the fact remains: countless businesses have been affected by Google’s effort to combat spam. Businesses have seen their reviews begin to vanish since the switch to Google+ Local, yet the issue persists today.

For businesses looking for some help with their missing reviews, be aware that there is no official guidance and getting a hard answer from Google is a lost cause from the start. However, via the support forums, there is unofficial knowledge on the matter. I will attempt to consolidate the information available.

According to Ex Google Community Manager Vanessa Schneider, there may be a few immediate reasons for the lost reviews:

  • If any of the missing reviews came from third-party websites, these are no longer displayed. Below reviews from Google users, there may be links to other “Reviews around the web.”
  • Any “spammy behavior” is likely to be caught by a filter and will not show on your listing. Google cannot disclose what exactly contributes to these filters, but one factor she does mention is that any review with a URL in the text will be automatically filtered.
  • Any violation of the content policy guidelines will be filtered.
  • If there is a duplicate entry of your local listing, your reviews may be attributed to the incorrect one.
  • If you have moved, your reviews will not carry over.
  • If the user does not have their Google+ profile set to publish their reviews publicly, they will not be displayed.

You’re probably thinking that your issues do not relate to any of these items listed. The general consensus, according to Nyagoslav Zhekov, is that there are likely to be two issues at the core.

  • “There is another listing that Google considers the reviews are meant to be on (this is not necessarily a duplicate of the same business).”
  • “The review was marked as illegitimate for whatever reason.”

To determine which of these two may relate to your own case, first check for duplicate listings of your business. Log into your Places account and see if there is a current or deleted duplicate. Be absolutely certain that only one Google account has ever created a listing, or else this may be where you find a duplicate. If you do find a duplicate, use this support form to request that they be merged:

http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1386120&page=ts.cs

Once determining that there are no duplicates of your listing, your concerns will be related to content marked as spam. What constitutes this filter, nobody is certain about, but there are some general ideas based on people’s experience:

  • Repetition of terms is suspected as a main component of Google’s spam filter. Particularly noted is that brand terms, geographic terms, and keywords should not be excessively used. This generally means that they should not be used more than once or in close proximity to each other. If it sounds like advertising, it’s spam.
  • Frequency of incoming reviews will likely have an effect on filtration. If you had a number of reviews that seem out of the ordinary for the span of time in which they occurred, this will be suspect.
  • Solicitation or offering rewards to customers in exchange for a review is considered a practice leading to illegitimate reviews.
  • The use of repeated exclamation marks is suspect. Regarding this and writing style in general, any time a review seems to convey hype, it’s likely to be flagged.
  • Review scores may have an impact on how likely a review is to be questioned by Google’s algorithm. Some users have seen their reviews post after changing a score from 3/3 to 2/3.
  • The category of your business in Google Places probably has an effect on the likelihood of review scrutiny. Some industries generate more review spam than others.
  • If the same review is posted at multiple locations of a business, it will be removed.

As a best practice, remember that key information regarding your business is already on your Google Plus page and therefore it should not be put in the text of any reviews. If you ask a customer to leave a review for you, suggest that they describe their experience rather than your business itself. These are the reviews that seem to have the best chance of sticking to your page. Lastly, be sure to heed the warnings of the second and third items listed above, or negative consequences are sure to come.

The overarching lesson on review filtering is one we have heard several times throughout history, originally coined by Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley. Insert “spam” where you read “duck,” and you should have a pretty accurate impression of Google’s filtering method.


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Black Friday is on the Horizon!

Friday, November 2nd, 2012

Black Friday (November 23, 2012) and Cyber Monday (November 26, 2012) are the peak days for consumer spending during the calendar year. Black Friday is the brick and mortar retailer peak consumer purchasing day and Cyber Monday is the online store peak consumer purchasing day.

Why is this important for online marketing professionals?

Black Friday has been known as the “official” start of the holiday shopping season. Each year, consumer spending increases 24.3% during Black Friday. A lot of the increase in spending on Black Friday is influenced by online marketing and mobile marketing. Mobile “deal seeking” is the act of researching on a mobile device for in-store and/or online bargains, which has increased 14.3% from 2010 to 2011. Black Friday social influencing or social media marketing is also an ever-growing strategy for online marketers, and serves as a space for consumers to follow up with their product research. Social media-driven consumers accounted for 0.53% of all online sales on Black Friday. Facebook drove 75% of the 0.53% that was influenced by a medium of social media to purchase on Black Friday.

Real-Time Sales Black Friday

Cyber Monday is the biggest online shopping day of the year. Black Friday 2010 to 2011, consumer spending on Cyber Monday has increased 33%. The average order value for consumer purchasing online has increased 2.6%. Of all Cyber Monday traffic, 10.8% comes from a mobile device, which is up 6.9% year over year. Mobile sales have also seen an increase, reaching 6.6%, which is up 4.3% from 2010 to 2011. 

Real-Time Sales Cyber Monday

This is important to know when planning for a Black Friday or Cyber Monday online marketing campaign because 70% of consumers say they search online before making any online purchase, and 57% search online before making an offline purchase.

So are you ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday!?

Before your eCommerce site sees the mornings of Black Friday or Cyber Monday be prepared with these tips:

  • Make sure your home page announces the specials in a clear and direct way. Also, make sure the link from that home page banner or description directs to the most optimal landing page for a quick conversion.
  • Do you have a mobile friendly site with mobile targeted ads to that mobile friendly site?
  • Make sure the discount or offer is clear and shown all the way through to the shopping cart and checkout.
  • Double and Triple check your paid search ads to launch in the right locations, at the right time, and have the right offer stated in the ad copy.
  • If you will be doing email marketing, make sure your email capture is in a clearly viewed location, make sure that it works, and has a strong call to action.
  • If you are doing remarketing, make sure the remarketing code is on the correct page to collect the right audience you want to place for remarketing ads.
  • Are your social media campaigns scheduled and ready to launch?
  • Check your alerts and limits (budgets, day parting, etc.) for the biggest shopping weekend of the year.

Happy Searching!

Statistic Sources:

-          IBM Coremetrics: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/marketing-solutions/benchmark-reports/index-2011.html

-          DoubleClick Performics: http://www.performics.com/news-room/press-releases/doubleclick-performics-unveils-holiday–e-commerce-trend-data/469

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For e-Commerce – Google Trusted Stores

Friday, October 26th, 2012

If you, your client or your company is engaged in e-commerce, Google has an offering for you. It’s called Google Trusted Store.

Google tracks shipping and customer service metrics for sellers who sign-up. Then, Google Trusted Stores provides a badge that the seller can place on their site. The badge includes the seller’s rating for both Shipping and Service, based on the seller’s transactions along with a few other metrics that may be important for customers.

Google touts that the Trusted Store Badge can improve conversion rates and average order values by reassuring buyers of the great experience on your site.

For buyers, Google provides up to $1,000 of purchase protection free of charge if they opt-in.

The best part for sellers is it’s free, pretty simple to implement and can positively impact sales. You may even have time to implement during the holiday season.

To learn more, check out Google Trusted Stores.

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Mistakes Made in Link Building

Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

One of the many great sessions I attended last week at the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas was on the last day – last session. The topic was link building presented by Jim Boykin from Internet Marketing Ninjas. With all the new Google Panda and Penguin updates in 2012 you need to evaluate your link building strategy to ensure you are not making any of the following mistakes that can ultimately impact your rankings and quality score with Google:

  • Having too many links coming from the same C Class and IP Address Range
  • Too many links using the same non-branded keyword
  • No or few links going to internal site pages
  • Too many links from the home page of other sites
  • Too many links coming from the same website
  • Too many links from syndicated article websites
  • No links from real people (authors)
  • Links coming from other sites that are not in your “neighborhood”
  • Buying links
  • Selling links

Now run a back link report to see where your site links are coming from, and what keywords makeup the majority of the link text. Are you seeing any of the mistakes noted above?

You should also check your analytics to determine if your site has been negatively impacted by one of Google’s updates. Here are the dates to compare against your site performance stats:

  • Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012
  • Penguin 2 on May 24, 2012
  • Panda Update on September 27, 2012
  • EMD (Exact Match Domains) Update on September 28, 2012
  • Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012

Get started working on new links to your site that appear natural and are from trusted websites and authors. If you need help or lack the internal resources, we develop effective, impactful link building campaigns to both increase your brand presence and search ranking results. Read more about our link building services, or contact Lee Ann Villella at 612-392-2427 for more information.

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Luncheon with Matt Cutts from Google – PubCon 2012 Las Vegas

Thursday, October 18th, 2012

While attending PubCon 2012 Las Vegas, we got to hear Matt Cutts (the Distinguished Engineer at Google) provide an overview of what Google, from a search and webmaster perspective, rolled out over the last year.

Below are the items Matt detailed in his “the last year in more detail:”

In addition, he also announced the release of the new (and “improved” – you had to be there!) tool.

The new disavow links tool was created for Webmasters to disavow “problem” links coming to their site that can’t be cleaned up by normal means. We should state that many speakers, including Matt Cutts, stated most sites should not use this tool. It should only be used if:

  • Received a message in Webmaster Tools about “unnatural links” pointing to your site
  • Done as much as you can to remove the problematic links, but there are still some links you just can’t get removed

Before using the tool, read Google’s blog about the disavow tool.

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10 Best Practices from Google Webmaster Guidelines

Tuesday, October 9th, 2012

On October 2, 2012, Google announced updates to their Webmaster Quality Guidelines. The update consists of a reorganization and expansion of the basic quality guidelines and many more specific articles; ex. quality and technical guidelines for rich snippets.

We reviewed the Google Webmaster Guidelines and compiled a list of 10 best practices we already deploy and think you should too:

1. Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

2. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

3. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

4. Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.

5. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.

6. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

7. Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

8. Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled.

9. Submit an XML Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.

10. Mark up your content for schema.org

For additional information, review Google Webmaster Guidelines.

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Google Tag Manager: Tracking Made Easy

Monday, October 8th, 2012

Whether you are running a large e-commerce site, struggling to keep the proper tracking code snippets on the proper pages, or whether you are an agency dealing with client-side IT department backlog, the Google Tag Manager is a long awaited tool. If you are at all familiar with DART container tags, then you will be right at home with the Google Tag Manager. The Tag Manager allows you to disperse only one universal tag throughout an entire site.  This container tag will allow you to place any and all tracking code inside it, without having to actually edit anything in a CMS or site code.

Here is a sample container tag code snippet:


&lt;iframe src=”//www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-LS4V”&lt;br /&gt;height=”0″ width=”0″ style=”display:none;visibility:hidden”&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;


// <![CDATA[
(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':
new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src=
'//www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-LS4V');
// ]]>

In layman’s terms, this code snippet references any of the tracking scripts that have been placed inside this container tag, inside Google Tag Manager.  Again, this requires one single involvement from the IT team, after which all tracking code changes can be done inside the Tag Manager environment. After adding the container tag, you can add any of the available tracking code templates, or custom free-form tags.

Google Tag Manager Template Tags

You can then create rules to place certain tags on certain pages, and not on others.

Google Tag Manager Tag Placement Rules

The will be great for the following situations:

  • Adding new tracking tags, whether they be from a new channel or a new analytics tool
  • Updating your current tracking code (e.g. updating to the asynchronous version of the Google Analytics tracking code)
  • Creating tracking code customizations (e.g. cross-domain tracking)

There are several other benefits to using the Tag Manager:

  • If you have many tracking code snippets, this tag will sever these tracking scripts asynchronously, making sites that much faster
  • It will decrease code bloat on each page, which again will slightly improve page speed
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Google Analytics Retargeting With “Smart Pixel”

Friday, September 21st, 2012

At the end of July, Google Analytics announced that they were releasing a “smart pixel” update to their tracking code.  By changing just one line of code in your analtyics tracking code, you would be able to create countless retargeting lists.  Gone were the days of pasting various AdWords retargeting code snippets on your site. This alone was worth the code update. However, because this code now collects both the GA visitor data along with the doubleclick retargeting data, we search marketers now have a very powerful tool to “micro-segment” our site audience any way we choose. This new feature, allows you to slice and dice your site visitor audience using any of the data available in Google Analytics.

First, a quick refresher – here is what you need to change your Google Analytics tracking code to. The line of code in bold is the only thing that changes:

<script type="text/javascript">
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxx-y']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; 

ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://’ : ‘http://’) + ‘stats.g.doubleclick.net/dc.js’;

var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
</script>

Now here are some examples of how awesome this new feature is:

    • Let’s assume that you know that new visitors to your site don’t convert as often because they are still researching all their options, and price is a big decision making factor for new visitors, because return customers already know the speed and quality of your service. In that case, you create a custom segment list, like the one below, and retarget these people with ads explicitly talking about price, and touting your price guarantee.

 

    • Let’s assume that you are a high tech company that serves the a variety of industries, including aerospace. In that case, you create a custom segment list, like the one below, and retarget these people with ads specific the the aerospace sector. 

 

  • Let’s assume that you know that once visitors go through some sequence of pages and/or actions on your site that they are much more likely to convert because they have shown intent. In that case, you create a custom segment list, like the one below and retarget these customers with very specific ad copy. You would also be willing to page more per click for these visitors because  you know that they are more likely to convert.

 

 

As you can see, the common denominator in all the examples above, is setting up a custom segment in Google Analytics. You are no longer limited to simply retareting people based on the pages they visited on your site, even though this is an effective tactic in most cases. You can now retarget people by the actions they did, or didn’t, do on your site. And on top of that you still have all the visitor segmentation data that Google Analytics provides (e.g. location, language, mobile vs. desktop, etc.).

My recommendation is to really start digging into your visitor data. If and when you find a segment that you may want to target, create it – even if you aren’t ready to market to them yet. Create that segment and let that retargeting list grow. This way, once you are ready, you will hopefully have a large retargeting pool to advertise to.

Happy Retargeting!

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