On Sunday, February 24th, Nina Hale sat with Cyndy Brucato on KSTP’s Greater MSP Business Segment to talk about Integrated Search Marketing. With ninety-one percent of people who use the Internet utilizing search engines to find things they need, it is no wonder why it is incredibly important to be able to be found on search engines. Nina explains the importance of a balanced marketing plan that includes a healthy budget attributed to digital marketing, the important factors to getting you those rankings, and the crucial element of having an authentic site.
Blog Archive
Archive for the ‘SEM’ Category
Nina Hale Talks With KSTP About Integrated Search Marketing
Tuesday, March 12th, 2013Google PLA – Product Listing Ads
Friday, February 15th, 2013For years Google’s shopping solutions had been free. This October, Google changed that with a pay to play solution. Google Product Listing Ads allow you to include product information in ads and show in their own area on Google’s SERP as well as within Google Shopping. From what we are seeing, this has been a successful change.
For many of our clients that take part in Google PLA, it has been a positive experience. Results have been profitable and we are seeing relatively good scale. In addition, Google has made an effort to simplify the process by including many features within AdWords related to PLA. Google also looks to be supporting this channel now and into the future. The offering has rolled out to a number of countries and is expanding to more. They are also making an investment in other technology that may help improve the product overall by acquiring Channel Intelligence.
If your business has not tested Google PLA, create a testing budget and try it out. It is relatively easy to implement once you have a product feed created and Google gives you step by step instructions on getting your products live and incorporating them into your other marketing efforts.
Google PLAs met with some initial resistance, but have made a number of advertisers very happy. This may change in the future, but based on Google’s efforts, it looks like mostly for the best. With its ease of use, control and typically good results, it should be something you evaluate for yourself.
No Time for Negativity, Only Negative Keywords
Wednesday, December 26th, 2012What 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.
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.
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.
7) With the list of search term, and count. Format as a pivot table and sort the count field from largest to smallest.
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.
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”
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!
Why the Google AdWords Partner Certification matters
Saturday, November 24th, 2012At this agency, we make a big deal out of being a Certified Google AdWords partner. The bar is set pretty low these days to become a certified partner, but when I first got in, you needed to manage at least $100,000 over a 90-day period, pass the certification tests, and have at least two people within the agency who were certified. These restrictions have loosened a bit now though.
Although I’ve been managing Google AdWords accounts since 2003, and founded my agency in 2005, I first became a certified agency about 7 years ago. I was incredibly excited when I passed the $100k threshhold, and have been proud of our ongoing growth ever since. (note that from $100k per 90 days when I was first certified, the latest amount is $3.2 Million in 90 days). Now we have 13 people currently working for us who are certified (it shows 16 but a few of those are employees who went to grad school or moved and haven’t disconnected themselves yet). Plus we’re one of the only Certified Women Owned Businesses (WBENC) who specialized in SEO and SEM.
To become certified in Google AdWords you need to pass at least two tests: the Search Fundamentals, and one other test depending on the certification. This can be Advanced Search, Reporting, or Display. There is also Google Analytics Certification, which is different. We have 19 people certified in Google Analytics.
Why you should hire a Google AdWords Certified Partner:
- It shows that the agency stresses training and mastery of the entire suite of sophisticated tools that Google AdWords is comprised of.
- It gives a clear picture of the people within the agency who are managing PPC programs, and whether it actually is a specialty for the agency. But I’ve found recently that some agencies are cheating – they’re having some people take the exams for other people, or are taking them all as a group. You should still ask to get a list of who within the agency manages PPC on a regular basis, if they’re internal or outsourced contractors, and also if they’re certified.
If you’re looking for a SEM agency or someone to manage paid search or Google AdWords only, consider searching for and questioning the status of a Google Certified partner.
Cheers -
Nina
Coming in for a LANDING page!
Friday, November 16th, 2012Whether managing just one search engine marketing account or many, one thing that is certainly always recommended are custom landing pages.
A landing page or lead capture page is where one is directed once they have clicked on a search ad.
Custom landing pages are always recommended and you should do whatever you can to make them available. The reasons they are so important starts with goals and conversions. Custom landing pages convert better than website pages, messaging can be more direct and controlled than website pages, they help out your paid ads by boosting quality score, and they are easier to test and optimize than a website page. The landing page will usually display sales copy that is an extension of what has been written or read in the ad copy. Depending on the goal, most marketing professionals choose to use a website homepage, ‘contact us’ page, product detail page, email capture page, pretty much whatever is available to then without going that extra step of developing a custom landing page. Most common reasons a client or search manager will go the direction of using the website vs. a landing page for search ads usually are not enough resources (developers), not enough money in the budget, not enough time, not enough communication and strategy.
With that in mind, below I have included 12 landing page recommendations for your enjoyment!
LANDING PAGE RECOMMENDATIONS:
1) Deliver relevance
If visitors to your landing pages have clicked through from your ad, then they will have a specific goal in mind, so you need to convince them that your landing page is relevant to the goal. Give the visitor clear headlines to show that a page is relevant and encourage them to scan down the page. Make relevant messages easy to read. This means nice clear, large fonts.
2) Make sure your page is logical
Your landing page should tie up with the ad that sent customers there in the first place, so if you have enticed visitors to your site in with an ad for a specific product then they should be seeing a picture of the product together with a clear call to action, rather than a generic category page.
3) Give detail for decision making
You need to give customers enough detail on the landing page so that they can make an informed decision about whether to purchase the product / service or not.
4) Assist users with their purchase or sign-up
The next step the visitor needs to take to sign up or purchase should be made clear to them on the landing page. Every extra step taken to complete a transaction will reduce the response. If they have to go to another page to complete a purchase, then include multiple calls to action to leave them in no doubt where to click. If a multiple pages is necessary, draw people in with easier questions upfront.
5) Keep the number of steps and effort in mind
Content should fit on one page that doesn’t require any scrolling, but a longer page may be necessary to be able to contain all the information. Provide just enough information, while ensuring that information and calls to action are placed above the fold.
6) Images
Graphics should be consistent with the campaign and appealing to users.
7) Consider menu options
Removing menu options can increase conversion rates since users have a smaller choice of where to click. One option is to limit the menu to top level options only.
8) Consider ‘flow’ in design
For landing pages, a controlled, fixed design will often work best and is most common.
9) SEO and Analytics
If your PPC strategy is linked to an offline campaign then make sure it matches the brand that people will search for in response to your ads. Set up tracking, and conversion code for optimization.
10) Provide options
You may have created the perfect landing page, but some people will still not respond, so give them options. Provide a clear phone number, email form or live chat option in case they prefer to purchase in this way, and links.
11) Review Review Review
Landing pages should be tested frequently to see if improvements can be made to increase conversion rates. The only way to be sure of what works for your audience and your market is to conduct structured tests such as usability studies, A/B testing or MVT testing.
12) Take down old landing pages
Some landing pages are used for short term campaigns, and links to these should be removed so customers don’t see out of date offers. Using a custom 404 error page is a good way to manage this problem.
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Holidays are coming up, make sure your landing pages are good to go!
Happy Searching!
Paid Search Strategy for Your Brand – Marketing in Sync
Wednesday, November 7th, 2012
In a previous career in the travel industry, I was driving down the highway, and saw one of our beautiful, large billboards, directing people to learn more about a dream vacation at “turquoisewaters.com/goherenow”. It made me smile – until I remembered that we were not using the same landing page in paid search – just “turquoisewaters.com”.
The offline marketing team had not informed the paid search team that they were running ads directing people to “turquoisewaters.com/goherenow”. And why would they? What could a highway billboard ever have in common with paid search? A ton!
A piece of “hate mail” made me realize the problem was greater than I had originally imagined. A man had seen the billboard while driving, and when in front of a computer, had typed in “turquoisewaters.com/goherenow” into the Google search bar. He printed the resulting Google search page, and made large circles and exclamation points to show how it had frustrated him to not find the page. He, like lots of others, used the Search Engine search bar rather than the browser bar.
This communication mishap necessitated a change to our overall marketing communication plan. Going forward, all internal marketing teams would notify the paid search team upon creation of fancy/fun/short (redirected) landing page URLs for magazine, TV, newspaper and highway banner advertising. We created paid search campaigns (desktop and mobile) for these kind of promotion pages with the URLs as keywords (“turquoisewaters.com/goherenow” and variations). Lesson learned – all of marketing must work in sync to help your customers get to the “turquoise waters”.
Here are some additional tips to maximize the effectiveness of paid search for your brand.
Run your brand names in paid search
I am often asked, “Should we turn off our brand names in paid search, and see what happens to organic?” While organic results may likely see a boost, there are a few good reasons and tactics for running brand names in paid search.
- If you are a large brand and you have competitors bidding on your brand names, you must own that space. Run paid search ads to make sure your brand appears before the competitors.
- Page one of the search results for your brand name is your real estate – own it! This also coincides with the reasoning for having branded social media pages and profiles. When a consumer searches your brand, all your social channels should appear, selling your brand value with robust content marketing.
- Typically, the ROI on your brand is a pretty sure investment. Although organic is free, branded paid search is still a low cost investment, especially when you add in the competitors who may be stealing clicks.
Optimize the brand campaign
Instead of pausing your brand names, take them to the next level.
- If your brand is large and diverse, people will be searching for keyword variations such as “brand + product”. You may have product campaigns and brand campaigns, but within your brand campaign, create ad groups that include these broad match modified combinations. This allows for you to also create keyword optimized ad copy that reaches specific product landing pages, creating brand awareness and product recognition.
- You could also create a landing page that sells your value proposition with the product. Every large brand should have a “Why Buy Us Over Them” value prop page. Large brands typically have value props not just by brand, but also by product. Why buy one of your specific products over the others, is an equally important message, and could help your paid search campaigns.
Monitor and manage your brand with a trademark program like BrandVerity & AdGooRoo
Just typing in your name and seeing what comes up, does not work anymore with browser, engine and paid search program geo targeting and localization settings. You will not always see all the ads. Use a program that monitors these searches in all geo targets and sends you alerts on your defined infringements. Many times, a competitor or an affiliate will be selling themselves as your brand. I have also seen entire websites and landing pages created to appear as the brand. That said, it’s also good to monitor organic results. What previous brand names did your company own? Retain and attain those URLs, bid on those keywords, and own that real estate.
Mind your reach and frequency settings
Another important display & remarketing tactic is reach and frequency settings. Keep your frequency of display ads at a reasonable measure (the number of times one person will see your ad). Brand awareness is great, but too much brand awareness can cause people to want your brand to go away “I wish they would go away and stop bugging me!” It has been recommended to set the frequency to max 20 impressions per month per person. However, I alter this depending on the brand, how aggressive the display or remarketing campaign may need to be in shorter periods of time and display campaign targeting.
Competitive research
Know what your competitors are doing in your markets. You may have a campaign that once did great and suddenly takes a nose dive. Look at what the competitors are doing in those markets. Then, create ads and pages about your value propositions. In a competitive environment you want to sell that “why us, not them”.
A brand has their own online real estate, and they should be the top buyer and seller in this digital market. Be aware of everything going on with your brand in the online as well as offline channels. It’s your brand, own it! All marketing teams and tactics should embrace the ideas of synthesis, sync, cohesion, synergy and conjunction.
Do you have any additional branding tactics that have been successful?
Black Friday is on the Horizon!
Friday, November 2nd, 2012Black 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.
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.
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
Zombie, Dead, & Dying SEM Tactics: A Halloween Special
Wednesday, October 31st, 2012Happy Halloween everyone! Traditionally Halloween was a time to remember the dearly departed, so in the spirit of All Hallows’ Eve we take this post to honor past SEO and SEM tactics. Join us on a trip down memory lane through the graveyard of search engine marketing techniques of yore.
- Meta Keywords
- Ah meta keywords. Once stuffing you with a vast number of keyword variables was a mighty SEO tactic. Now, although long since useful, you still linger giving false hope to SEO newbies.
- Google Places
- The world of localization has been rapidly changing, leaving a slew of dead tools and tactics in the wake. Most recently Google+ Local killed and replaced Google Places. This was (and in some cases still is) a confusing take-over. For more clarification about just what happened to the beloved Google Places, check out Josef’s localization articles.
- PageRank
- Once, long ago, PageRank was an acceptable and measurable SEO goal. However Google killed this goal with increasingly personalized search results. We’ll miss you PageRank.
- Link Farms
- Hello link farms. In the Wild West days of SEO you were the perfect solution to getting more “link juice” to help pages move up in ranks. Although never a sound SEO tactic, after Panda and Penguin Google updates you officially died. Well, not died per se – we all know you lurk in the outer reaches of the Internet waiting to lure out of touch SEO tacticians.
- Wonder Wheel
- Wonder Wheel! When still alive you were one of Google’s SEO tools, helping us identify additional related keywords for ad groups in Google AdWords. Although only alive from 2009-2011 you continue to haunt us on Google AdWords Exams. What unfinished business could you possibly have?!
- Custom Targeting
- Once an option in Google AdWords for targeting ads, you have since been survived by radius targeting, zip code targeting, and metro targeting.
- Google+
- Okay. So Google+ isn’t officially dead (yet). Consider this an anticipatory addition.
The graveyard of SEM tactics is rife with old techniques that no longer work, tools that have since been replaced, and networks that nobody uses. We remember you fondly. Rest in peace.
Google Tag Manager: Tracking Made Easy
Monday, October 8th, 2012Whether 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:
<iframe src=”//www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-LS4V”<br />height=”0″ width=”0″ style=”display:none;visibility:hidden”></iframe>
// <![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.
You can then create rules to place certain tags on certain pages, and not on others.
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
Google Analytics Retargeting With “Smart Pixel”
Friday, September 21st, 2012At 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!