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OUR DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF THE HUMAN VARIABLE STRENGTHENS EVERY EQUATION. INNOVATION: How do you catch the browsing customer ’s eye? DoubleClick Performics has a track record of creating farsighted digital marketing strategies that break out of the pack. Our industr y-lead proprietar y research and intelligent technologies are delivered in a personalized ser vice package. These inventive solutions work, because we begin with the novel idea that customers are, first and foremost, human. Contact innovation@performics.com for an ingenious look. THINKING FORWARD AFFILIATE • SEARCH DM News • Essential Guide to Search June 2007 Table of Contents EDITOR’S NOTE Consumers conduct an estimated eight billion commercial searches each month. Recognizing that activity, marketers spent $9.4 billion on search marketing last year, according to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. Spend on search is set to climb to $11.5 billion this year and $13.3 billion next year. Most of that will go into Google’s pockets. The DM News Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing offers wisdom from industry experts to help with customer acquisition strategies and tactics online. Inside you will find articles on campaign optimization, local and social search, online videos, conversion and mobile search. The DM News team worked hard to produce this supplement. May it guide you well. Mickey Alam Khan, editor in chief 46 How to experience a 50 percent drop in CPA, by Brian Lewis 46 Boost ROI with the vertical advertising option, by Chrysi Philalithes 47 Paid versus natural search, by John Squire 47 Essential metrics in paid keyword campaigns, by Olivier Silvestre 48 Meeting customer needs with local search, 22 Managing natural search in large organizations, by Craig Macdonald by Robyn Rose Features 6 Search: the past, the present and the future, by Giselle Abramovich 49 Local search evolves painfully, but shows promise, by Dana Todd 23 To increase marketing ROI automate SEO, by David Terry 49 The online advertisers’ task list, by David Reeve 26 The business of search, by Tanya Lewis 28 Pay-per-click is customer analytics, by John Ellis 42 A conversation with Adam Lasnik, Google’s search evangelist, by Melissa Campanelli 24 Common SEO mistakes – and how to avoid them, by Matt McGee Search 2.0 50 Going Web 2.0, by Robert Murray 51 Four channels to bolster your search presence, by David Berkowitz 24 Natural rankings: the equalizer, by Jeanette Kocsis 54 A conversation with Danny Sullivan, by Melissa Campanelli 25 Go for the pow over the wow, by Andrew Wetzler TURE Paid Search 52 The e-mail newsletter: a key weapon in your SEO arsenal, by Loren McDonald Fundamentals 10 Using search for PR management, by Kelly Graziadei 30 Search + segmentation = profits, by Dave Pasternack 53 Using ‘searchandising’ to satisfy and keep customers, by Shaun Ryan 32 Retargeting: not letting those customers get away, by Chris Polos 53 Putting mobile search trends in context, by Anne Baker 12 Creative optimization for search success, by Ashwini Karandikar 34 Microsoft adCenter: search tools of tomorrow, by James Colburn 12 Seven steps to effective search marketing, by Wes Funk 34 The biggest threat to your PPC campaigns? Complacency, by Mary O’Brien 14 Hiring a search agency of record for your corporation, by Niki Fielding 36 Now that we have Panama, let’s talk about best practices, by Darren Kuhn 14 Best practices for SEM agencies, by Samir Patel 15 Profiting from the lull, by Lisa Wehr 16 Integrating search and e-mail marketing, by Doug Garfinkel 36 Marketing in the Google era, by Kraig Swensrud 38 Screen audience for best prospects, conversions, by Toby Gabriner 16 The game winner: using SEM in your media plan, by Bill Mungovan 38 Tell others all your long tales, by Daniel Todd 39 Good search arbitrage: buy low, sell high, add value, by Joe Chin 17 Directory submission vitals, by Jessica Bowman 18 Convert to stop click fraud, by Mark Harper 18 Click fraud 101: the basics of pervention and detection, by Jalali Hartman 39 Brands can benefit from affiliate marketing, by Janel Landis 40 PPC ads should always lead your online-sales efforts, by Tim Schaden EDITORIAL: Editor in Chief Mickey Alam Khan, Managing Editor Cara Wood, Deputy Editor Melissa Campanelli, Associate Editor Giselle Abramovich, Copy Editor Daniel McMahon, Contributing Writer Tanya Lewis, Editorial Director Julia Hood ART AND PRODUCTION: Art Director Gina Capone, Graphic Designer Robert Falcone, Production Manager Pedro Reyes, Design Director Irasema Rivera ADVERTISING: D istri ct M anagers John Roegner, Jodie Solomon, Classified & Sourc e Dir ect or y Ac count M anager , Ralph Claudio, Cir culat ion Dir ector Ronald S. Moyer, Gr oup Sales Dir ect or Steven Sottile HAYMARKET MEDIA: President/Publishing Director Lisa Kirk, Chairman/CEO William Pecover SUBSCRIPTIONS: (845) 268-3156 DM News (ISSN 0194-3588), incorporating iMarketing News 114 West 26th St., New York, NY 10001 Telephone (646) 638-6000 © 2007 Haymarket Media DM News is published weekly on Monday (48 times a year), except for the following: Jan. 1, April 30, July 2, Oct. 29 and Dec. 31. Publisher: Haymarket Media Inc., 114 West 26th St., New York, NY 10001. Periodicals postage paid at New York and additional points of entry. Reproduction of any part of DM News or its trademarked or copyrighted supplements without express permission of the publisher is prohibited. Postmaster: Send address changes to DM News, Subscription Department, PO Box 316, Congers, NY 10920-0316 USPS 496530 19 A practical guide to vertical search advertising, by Julie Mason 40 Click fraud dominates the traffic-quality debate, by Mike Bernier 19 What do you mean I have a budget?, by Steve Haar Conversion 44 Search is where it’s at, by Dave Tomlinson 45 Increasing conversion rates for BTB search marketing, by Patricia Hurst Organic 20 Extreme makeover, by Lisa Young 22 Your search engine optimization campaign, by Scott Buresh 45 A formula for keyword success, by Michael Stebbins P THERE’S NO SKUS FOR POOR SERVICE FROM YOUR ONLINE MARKETING FIRM. Business is built on relationships. A fact often ignored in the sometimes impersonal world of online business. Personal attention to client needs is our cornerstone. No selling. No hype. Technology simplifies and accelerates the process, but does not replace judgment and trust…business is defined by people. • Search Engine Marketing & SEO • Comparison Shopping Engines • Site Media • Affiliate Program Management • Creative pmdigital.com 800.254.0330 Copyright 2007 © PM Digital. All rights reserved. 06 FEATURE BY GISELLE ABRAMOVICH HGTV’s “Living with Ed” series overcame organic search campaign difficulties by reaching out to bloggers . By linking the show to green-living topics the show climbed in natural search listsings outplacing erectile dysfunction sites. hen HGTV announced the premiere of “Living with Ed,” a series related to living a “green” lifestyle in Los Angeles, starring actor Ed Begley Jr. and his wife, Rachelle Carson, the marketing plan for the show was set months in advance. HGTV wanted to generate buzz and dominate brand shelf space with the show. But HGTV realized it could not do so without using search. HGTV faced one problem: When Googling “Living with Ed,” the results were in-depth listings for how men deal with erectile dysfunction. There was not even one result linking to HGTV’s main page or the “Living with Ed” MySpace profile. “We turned to search marketing firm 360i for recommendations on how to fix this situation quickly,” said Mike Boyd, senior vice president of marketing at HGTV. “360i recommended a rapid off-site SEO strategy built on encouraging bloggers to create their own reviews and recommendations of the show. “This was designed to stimulate more relevant content and links back to HGTV’s flagship site, driving online buzz to inspire tune-in, increase site traffic and raise overall awareness for the show,” he said. The new content would result in more relevant listings in the search results, thereby pushing down erectile dysfunction results. The incremental number of links back to HGTV.com through the blog posts would catapult the official Web site to the top of the search listings as well. W Searc The past, the present and the future ESSENTIAL GUIDE FEATURE 07 360i developed a list of bloggers that wrote either about television shows or the environment. Each blog was screened to ensure it was highly regarded by other bloggers. 360i’s communications team engaged bloggers to inform them of the show. Each message was tailored to the subject matter of the specific blog, and included a link to HGTV’s “Living with Ed” site. After the show’s premiere, 360i assessed the episode guide for future programs as well as the publicity schedule for Ed Begley Jr. to determine other salient topics that were linked to the show. Some examples include hybrid cars, organic/vegan cooking and gardening. 360i reached out to influential blogs relating to those topics. Additionally, 360i reconnected with certain bloggers who expressed interest in the series to alert them to developments in upcoming episodes. “Within just a couple of weeks, HGTV.com was the top result on the search engines for searches on core terms,” Mr. Boyd said. In fact, on searches for the term “Living with Ed,” the first result for Erectile Dysfunction was on page 5 of the search results. The strong increase of blog posts and online buzz built momentum with core audiences and also protected the show’s brand online. This is not the traditional search campaign. However, search is rapidly changing and marketers need to understand that in order to do well, they need to change with it. ch Past and present Early search engines were all about answering people’s questions. Google had no advertising results on its page and organic results were used for research and purchase queries, according to Kevin Lee, executive chairman of Did-it Search Marketing, New York. Organic results were listed in a conventional auction style and users were not as Internet savvy as most are today. Slowly but surely advertising has taken more prominence as advertisers are finally realizing the importance of this measurable channel of marketing. In 2004, the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization reported that advertisers spent $4.1 billion on search. What marketers did not know is that this number would grow at an unbelievable rate in the years to follow. Search is on the rise today as marketers are increasingly adding search to the marketing mix. In fact, SEMPO reported that search spend hit $9.4 billion in 2006. Not surprisingly, the scrutiny of major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL Search and Ask.com, is increasing. One reason it is so attractive is the accuracy it offers in terms of keeping count of click through and precision in targeting. “The days of 12 percent to 18 percent inaccuracy in the technology used to manage search are over,” said Marc Steinhart, senior product marketing manager of search at DoubleClick, New York. These days search marketers are armed with campaign management tools, bid management tools, ad management tools and reporting tools allowing for more control. Search engines today are not just there to answer questions. Now, they are in the advertising business, said Mr. Lee. The Google/DoubleClick, Yahoo/RightMedia and Microsoft/aQuantive deals are evidence of this. The “ ESSENTIAL GUIDE [There] is a growing split within the engines between the way that they deal with consumers and researchers.” Kevin Lee Executive chairman, Did-it Search Marketing 8 FEATURE » DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 more search engines get involved in advertising, the more they will work to drive traffic to their paid search ads. “The result is a growing split within the engines between the way that they deal with consumers and researchers,” Mr. Lee said. Today, search results are displayed through scorebased search advertising, resulting in more relevant advertising systems. “All signs are pointing to more personalization, [Marketers] have begun to integrate PPC with offline campaigns.” Chrysi Philalithes Vice president of global marketing, Miva The Competitive Search Landscape The search networks: the networks, which display pay-per-click ads in response to user-generated queries. Examples: Google Search, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter. Pros: • High volume traffic • Reach people at the start of the buying process • Give advertisers visibility on search engines Cons: • Expensive – many advertisers are finding themselves priced out of market • High level of competition on keywords • Only reach potential customers at the point of searching consolidation and heavy emphasis on both localization and globalization,” said Chris Copeland, senior partner and managing director at Outrider North America, St. Louis. “Google is leading the way, as usual, with both its acquisition of DoubleClick and the testing of its new personalized search experience, iGoogle. Search is a global undertaking. Search engine marketing company iProspect, for example, has recently opened offices in Norway, Denmark, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands. The industry has moved from a direct response mechanism to a more strategically planned interaction point with consumers, according to Misty Locke, president/founder of Range Online Media, Fort Worth, TX. Social search, though currently in its infancy is starting to appeal to some marketers. There is a growing trend of using pay-per-click beyond acquisition, with marketers viewing PPC as an effective tool for building brand presence online. “[Marketers] have begun to integrate PPC with offline campaigns,” said Chrysi Philalithes, vice president of global marketing and communications at Miva, New York. In fact, it could be argued that search is the centerpiece of every online effort today. “Companies understand how they need to manage customers, brand reputation and their overall Web presence by harnessing search,” Mr. Rowan said. “They’re finally starting to build Web sites and online marketing campaigns from a search-centric point of view.” What to expect in the future SEMPO forecasts search spend will hit 18.6 billion in 2011. This growth would only further cement the channel’s importance. Executives predict that the rise and renaissance of cost per acquisition and behaviorally targeted media will help bring more accountability to the industry. In addition, search engines will get smarter at identifying commercial intent searches through the use of behavioral tools like Google Web History. This will help marketers futher segment an audience based on their location in the buying cycle. Another trend is the increase of graphical results. Many search leaders predict that graphics are going to become a large component of search. This should lead to a rise in conversion rates, due to the increased emotional connection and branding elements made possible with images. The industry is likely to become increasingly regulated. Organic search optimization will continue to be important for reaching research-based searchers. However, the future of search will focus a lot on relevancy and personalization. Therefore social search is likely to become a more important marketing tool – worthy of ad spend dollars. I The contextual networks: the networks that display pay-per-click ads beside related articles on content sites. Examples: Miva Core Network, Search 123, Google AdSense and Pulse 360. Pros: • Increases brand potential by reaching people where they spend the majority of their time on the Internet: on content sites • Can be lower cost of entry than the search networks • Enables advertisers to leverage of positive editorial • Compliments Search ads by reaching people at a different stage in the buying process Cons: • Requires different keyword and creative development – campaigns lifted directly from search networks won’t deliver the best results • User is interrupted from content rather than actively searching for information, lower click rates, despite higher conversion The vertical networks: the pay-per-click networks that concentrate on specific business categories or verticals. Examples: Miva Precision Network, LookSmart vertical channels Pros: • Lower volume higher value traffic • Traffic concentrated on specific verticals • Highly targets but still typically at a lower cost of entry than the search networks Cons: • Networks don’t currently cover all sectors • Lower reach limits branding potential ESSENTIAL GUIDE Search marketing with real impact. For turnkey solutions proactively managed by industry experts, call us at 978-298-1525 or e-mail SalesSMS@idearc.com. PPC Campaign Development and Management • SEO • Feed Programs searchmarketingservices whereresultsclick. SM Fundamentals FUNDAMENTALS TOC Page 10 Using search for PR management, by Kelly Graziadei, Yahoo Search Marketing espite the fact that search-engine marketing and optimization are no longer in their infancy stages, there are still many fundamental topics that direct marketers could learn from. The following articles were written by thought leaders on fundamental topics, including reputation management, hiring a search agency of record, best practices for SEM agencies, vertical search and directory submissions. D A Page 12 Ceative optimization for search success, by Ashwini Karandikar, Range Online Media Seven steps to effective search marketing, by Wes Funk, Omniture Inc. Using search for PR management BY KELLY GRAZIADEI Page 14 Hiring a search agency of record for your corporation, by Niki Fielding, Digital Brand Expressions Best practices for SEM agencies, by Samir Patel, SearchForce Inc. Page 15 Profiting from the lull, by Lisa Wehr, Oneupweb Page 16 Integrating search and e-mail marketing, by Doug Garfinkel, Epsilon The game winner: using SEM in your media plan, by Bill Mungovan, Carat Fusion Page 17 Directory submission vitals, by Jessica Bowman, Business.com Page 18 Convert to stop click fraud, by Mark Harper, GenieKnows.com Click fraud 101: the basics of prevention and detection, by Jalali Hartman, MarketingExperiments.com Page 19 A practical guide to vertical search advertising, by Julie Mason, Kellysearch.com What do you mean I have a budget?, by Steve Haar, Leapfrog Online lthough we may credit our college professors or our first marketing job, we should thank our parents for our very first publicrelations lessons. We were taught at a young age the importance of reputation management. Each time we were forced to return the gum we accidentally shoplifted from the convenience store or to ring a neighbor’s doorbell and apologize for breaking their front window with our baseball, our parents were teaching us the value of managing public opinion and steps to restoring trust. These life lessons about “telling the truth” and tackling tough issues can and should be applied to our corporate personae and brands. Of course when catastrophe strikes in the professional sphere corporations can’t just knock on the next-door neighbor’s front door and meekly say, “I’m sorry; may I have my ball back?” So, how do they begin to reach their consumers and manage their reputation in a crisis? The answer is search. As we know, offline events drive search activity. Negative press is no exception. In early February, we saw searches for “jet blue” and “jet blue news” double overnight on the heels of news stories detailing Jet Blue passengers trapped for hours on the tarmac because of inclement weather. The offline buzz drove consumers to search for the whole story. Jet Blue took advantage of the opportunity to control the conversation with their customers and responded quickly. They tackled the press headon by launching prominent paid-search listings on all Jet Blue-related search terms with a straightforward apology and their “Customer Bill of Rights.” Jet Blue is not alone in leveraging search to manage marketplace messages. Top marketers, advertising agencies and PR firms understand that they can’t pass up the opportunity to communicate with consumers who are searching for information about their clients and brands. As Kevin Lange of SMG Search said, “Paid search is a very effective tool for Kelly Graziadei delivering a timely PR Yahoo Search Marketing message in response to a current event or news story. By choosing the right keywords and targeting, you can ensure that the users most impacted by the event have easy access to your side of the story — while it’s still top-of-mind.” Hewlett-Packard and its search agency, Performics, have managed a comprehensive search strategy for years, and PR has become an increasingly important element of the overall strategy, including support for its PR efforts around product launches, events and reputation management. Many of us are focused on evergreen search campaigns, tracking engagement, ROI and trying to crack the code on measuring brand impact. In a marketing world of silos, some may not consider themselves PR professionals. Nonetheless, we must keep in mind that brand protection and reputation management is everyone’s business. Now that we’re grown up, we must be the guardians of our clients’ brands and equip them with the best tools to make, keep and restore their relationships with their valued consumers. The good news is that, although you can’t knock on your neighbor’s door, search is making it pretty easy to have a straightforward and timely dialogue with the consumer. Kelly Graziadei is senior agency development director at Yahoo Search Marketing, San Francisco, CA. Reach her at kgraz@yahoo-inc.com. 12 FUNDAMENTALS » DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 Creative optimization for search success BY ASHWINI KARANDIKAR earch is exciting. In my mind, it’s an ever-changing being, constantly in flux. As such, marketers need to stay two steps ahead of their campaign to figure out what search is going to do next. It’s important to create, manage and grow your campaigns in a systematic way. Sometimes a search campaign can stagnate, but there are several simple tactics that can keep it fresh, efficient and effective. Creative optimization is often low on the priority list when it comes to improving campaign performance, and this puzzles me. It’s an easy fix that provides noticeable Ashwini Karandikar results in a relatively short time, Range Online Media and, in addition to boosting your revenue, creative testing helps your ROI by showing you what is working and what is not working. When discussing creative optimization with clients, I find that the keyword mix is typically the first thing that comes up. The thinking is that long-tail terms are essential to improving overall campaign performance. I agree for the most part. But while tail terms are good for campaign expansion, the effectiveness of targeted terms is undeniable. In fact, a recent Hitwise study found that search terms with one to three keyword phrase terms comprise more than 70 percent of the searches. Specific keywords are clearly more important when it comes to conversions and acquisitions. After all, without brand terms your messaging loses its effectiveness. However, your campaign needs non-brand terms to increase reach and coverage. By relying only on brand terms, you risk missing out on a lot of potential customers. If they don’t know about you, how can they find your brand? Non-brand terms help build associations with new customers. When you’ve found the right mix of keywords, your next task is to correctly manage the match type. Keyword match types are a simple way to maintain ample coverage while keeping the overall costs in check. Search engines are constantly revising and amending their rules for mapping keywords, so it’s important to keep abreast and make relevant changes to your campaign. Finally, adding a geo-targeting layer to your national campaign is a great way to increase efficiency. It’s easy to test, and by increasing your specificity you get more targeted and relevant results. We have found that running mirror campaigns at the national and local levels not only increases reach but also improves conversion rates. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to put the fire back into your online-marketing strategy. By sticking to intuitive optimization and targeting techniques, your campaigns will continue to provide excellent, measurable results. S 7 steps to effective search marketing BY WES FUNK f you’re a search marketer, you have a tough job. Your Wes Funk tasks can be summed up in Omniture Inc. three categories. They ones comprise generating more response volume (sales, customers, orders, leads, traffic); obtaining response volume more cost-effectively; and making the company look good (that is, building the brand). As a result, you are always looking for insight and tools to help manage your online programs more productively. Following are seven steps to help you more effectively conduct your search marketing. I I Refine keyword bids The most successful search marketers are continuously testing multiple bids and monitoring effects. I Target ideal positions Because of its highly visible nature, managing keywords based on position or the ranking of a keyword’s listing on a search engine results page has traditionally been a very popular technique. I Optimize ad copy Ad copy is a flexible tool available to help you reach your goals. It dramatically influences volume, conversion and branding. Find opportunities to distinguish yourself. I Select the right keywords The best mix is a combination of awareness and purchase-ready keywords. I Use specialized matching options Depending on the search engine, keywords can be matched in several ways. It’s important to have a basic understanding of the most common ones, and how you can use them to your advantage. I Leverage contextual campaigns Contextual advertising touches consumers in a different mental state. Instead of being in a results-oriented “find it” mind-set, they are in a more passive, browsing mode. Instead of being the primary focus, contextual ads are at best incidental and compete with a potentially diverse gamut of equally relevant keywords. I Monitor against click fraud Click fraud has certainly been talked about to a great extent in the media, and online search companies are addressing it. However, that alone does not absolve search marketers from understanding inconsistencies in their metrics and finding a remedy for suspicious activity. These corrective measures should improve your campaign. Wes Funk is director of demand marketing at Omniture Inc., Orem, UT. Reach him at wfunk@omniture.com. Ashwini Karandikar is vice president of client services at Range Online Media, Fort Worth, TX. Reach her at ashwini@rangeonlinemedia.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE 14 FUNDAMENTALS » DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 Hiring a search agency of record for your corporation BY NIKI FIELDING inding an experienced search-marketing agency that can simultaneously optimize 10 or more of your corporate Web sites isn’t easy. When a global hospitality organization wanted an agency of record for optimization and paid search for its corporate initiatives as well as for 65 properties worldwide, it approached our agency. As a mid-size agency, DBE knew it couldn’t scale its resources for the multi-site assignment, but its in-depth knowledge of industry best practices and white-hat processes made it the ideal choice Niki Fielding for managing the agency search. Digital Brand Expressions Use the following tips to help you find the right search agency for your organization. F Best practices for SEM agencies BY SAMIR PATEL I Develop your request for information first, and use it to establish your needs and expectations. Use the RFI to educate and unify your internal stakeholders about what you are looking for, before you start reaching out to candidates. I Identify agencies that can deliver results. Visit www.sempo.org, for example, to find agencies that can meet your needs. Review their approach to SEO, paid search and their client/industry experience. And search your competitors’ names with “SEM agency,” “optimization” and other terms in the query. See which agencies have your competitors in their client list. Are those companies appearing in the natural listings for terms you would assume they would? Are they running paid search too? I Contact the agencies that look like they may be a fit. Ask the agencies your qualifying questions in order to determine suitability. I Send the RFI to agencies that passed. Review responses according to SEM best practices. Reject those with “old school” answers or tactics that would jeopardize your rankings. I Invite three or four agencies to present. Get a sense of their culture, people and work style. Make sure they bring the client service team, not just their shiny new business team. I End the request for proposal to your finalists. While they’re earch engine marketing managers at agencies manage millions of keywords across Samir Patel dozens of clients every day. SearchForce Inc. They do this using Excel spreadsheets and some basic math calculations, typically applying intuition, best practices and some Excel rules to optimize bids. Optimizing against all the variables of cost, revenue, traffic and estimated profits using Excel for such a large number of keywords and connecting with the search engines in real time is a nearly impossible task. It is equally difficult for automated algorithms to predict sudden changes in the marketplaces, such as a sudden surge in traffic because of an unexpected event. Only a well-organized process can catch this surge and remedy it quickly. Therefore, striking a balance between process and automation is essential to a successfully managed account. Let’s start with the critical SEM process. The focus should be on better understanding your client’s needs and expectations, learning more about your client’s business and establishing a regular line of communication with them. It’s important to ensure they have access to the right performance data in a format that explains performance fluctuations. On the automation side, drop the Excel sheets and consider teaming up with a search marketing management platform provider. In selecting a provider, find out if they can support bid, creative, keyword and landing-page management from one place. This will provide you with total control and immediate, comprehensive transparency into how your clients are doing against their Key Performance Indicators. The team’s focus should be on strategy, creative development and tuning and exploring new avenues to generate traffic for your customers, not on tedious Excel work. Following are other important areas SEM teams should consider: S I Establish how conservative or aggressive your client wants to be in terms of time, budget and performance metrics. I Make certain your campaigns are uniform across search engines. This will ensure that performance comparisons and data can be used to optimize across engines and eliminate the need to converrt. I Ensure your campaigns are well ordered to match your client’s products and services, connected with the right landing pages and in line with your client’s unique positioning. I Confirm campaign settings are established for budget, language, country, local and network options, such as search, content and mobile. responding check their references. Call clients listed on their Web site, too; don’t just use the clients they provide. I Have a final presentation. Ask the hard questions, negotiate the fees and ensure you are getting what you need. Once all these steps are taken you can make a confident hiring choice. Niki Fielding is president of Digital Brand Expressions, Kingston, NJ. Reach her at vfielding@digitalbrandexpressions.com. Samir Patel is founder and CEO of SearchForce Inc. Reach him at spatel@searchforce.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 « FUNDAMENTALS 15 Profiting from the lull BY LISA WEHR fter years of tracking online retailer paid advertising and natural search campaign performance, we’ve come to one obvious conclusion: Every e-commerce market segment has a busy season. Or seasons. We’ve come to another conclusion regarding online retail sales: What a retailer does during the seasonal slow times can dramatically influence how profitable they are year round. Following are a few things worth considering during the seasonal lull. A Lisa Wehr Oneupweb I Assess analytics Are marketers measuring what’s important or during industry slow seasons by experimenting. For example, a good but unaffordable promotion during peak seasons might now fit the budget. Combine this with a PPC campaign that purchases high positions on some seasonally expensive key terms, and it might jump-start sales. Slow sales times are also a good time to try adding search engines to a buy, expand the existing keyword list or look at vertical search engines. simply what’s been measured in the past? Organizations should poll internally about what data is important and adjust metrics accordingly. Also, are sites optimized for the best-selling PPC terms? If so, in the future it might not be necessary to buy the most expensive PPC positions and keywords. I Spruce up plans and internal systems It’s been months since the original marketing plan was created. Much has changed. Plans should be revisited based on what was learned last busy season. Have some priorities, capabilities or services changed? Were there internal bottlenecks that hampered overall performance and customer satisfaction? If so, now’s the time to fix them. I Experiment Marketers can build both market share and sales- I Build the brand Marketers should consider banner ads to differentiate their brand and build market awareness. Plan early, be consistent and negotiate placement so busy season positions are included. I Find an edge Lulls are a good time to analyze what the competition is doing and saying. The first instinct is to copy what works for others. Unless a marketer is in a position to undercut pricing, improve delivery times or provide an easily perceived better value, it may serve them better to look for what nobody else in their industry is doing, something the market says they would appreciate. Develop some ideas and test them. Then get ready to get busy again. Lisa Wehr is president and founder of Oneupweb, Lake Leelanau, MI. Reach her at lisa@oneupweb.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE 16 FUNDAMENTALS » DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 mails based on whether a customer was acquired through the keywords “water sports” or “gym apparel.” The key, though, is testing whether targeting these segments actually enhances consumer response. Further, an integrated marketing strategy will help marketers measure and enhance the value of a consumer beyond immediate Doug Garfinkel cost per click or cost per action. Epsilon Measuring search efficacy based solely on cost per click or cost per action means that the marketer is not able to understand how search drives the lifetime value of a customer. While a consumer may click on a keyword and not make a purchase, this person may sign up for e-mail campaigns and prove to be a highly valuable e-mail customer. In fact, to gain more of these valuable customers, place an e-mail sign-up box on every search landing page. Marketers must put a value on the various actions that can be taken on a site and through e-mail campaigns and use their analytics tool to tie this value back to a given keyword. Eliminating keywords that do not drive immediate sales may cover up a highvalue customer who interacts in other channels. Focus instead on long-term profitability per click, rather than short-term cost per click, to maximize value driven by the search channel. Doug Garfinkel is vice president of client solutions at Epsilon, Dallas. Reach him at dgarfinkel@epsilon.com. Integrating search and e-mail marketing BY DOUG GARFINKEL earch and e-mail marketing campaigns have historically been run by separate people within the marketing organization and are nearly always outsourced to different agencies. Yet under this structure, companies are missing opportunities to derive benefits from the synergies between the two marketing methods. Specifically, a marketing strategy that tightly integrates e-mail and search marketing can offer marketers the ability to hone their creative, provide better insight for segmentation and present a more complete view of a customer’s lifetime value. Marketers should remember that search marketing is not a final goal; it is a means to drive an initial purchase and, ultimately, to create a loyal customer. The search keyword leads consumers to an ad, which leads to a landing page, which leads to a purchase, which leads to a retention effort. Each piece of this path can aid another. Understanding which words drive search sales will help a marketer craft retention messages and subject lines that speak more directly to customers, while successful subject lines should be integrated into search copy. Search is true intent-based marketing, and the insights gleaned from search campaigns should be copiously applied to your retention efforts. Once a customer is acquired, tracking search campaign data and marrying them to individual customers acquired through search can provide new and valuable segmentation data that can then be employed in e-mail campaigns. For example, if you are a retailer selling outdoor apparel, it would be useful to segment future e- S The game winner: using SEM in your media plan BY BILL MUNGOVAN n the 1987 NBA Eastern Conference Finals, with the Boston Celtics down by a point and a few seconds to play, Larry Bird stole a pass and fed Dennis Johnson for the game-winning layup. Michael Jordan also made countless game-winning shots and Tiger Woods multiple tournament-winning putts. Bill Mungovan What if they had missed? Well, Carat Fusion they wouldn’t be superstars, and their competition would’ve won, right? Building a multi-million dollar media plan without search engine marketing is essentially preventing your company from being a superstar and letting your competition win. Media plans that have been built without integrated search marketing plans ignore the goal of a good media plan: to drive consumers to react to a specific message. Search inventory fluctuates with demand influencers such as television gross rating points, online display impressions, PR buzz, e- I mail and direct mail flights and countless other traditional and online marketing efforts. While SEM is used for branding and other marketing efforts, it’s still the net at the bottom of your media plan that will pull in consumer demand generated though your more expensive traditional marketing efforts. If you are working for or with a traditional agency, here are a few tips to keep in mind: I Develop an equation for mapping offline efforts (e.g., television GRPs) to search click volume. I Allocate enough budget before you seek client approval. I Map keyword bundles to your overall goals; don’t just map lower-funnel acquisition efforts. I Remember that if your client doesn’t allocate enough budget to SEM, a competitor will gladly take the increased search volume. Don’t miss the game-winning layup or that crucial putt. Integrate SEM into your media mix, and close the loop on costly traditional media plans. Bill Mungovan is director of search engine marketing at Carat Fusion. Reach him at william.mungovan@carat.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 « FUNDAMENTALS 17 Directory submission vitals BY JESSICA BOWMAN earch marketers submit to directories for two reasons: to aid search engine rankings and to increase traffic to their sites. Outside the few well-known directories (e.g., Yahoo, Business.com, DMOZ), how do you determine which of the other general directories and the thousands of business and vertical directories are worth your time and money? Here are the vital details you need to consider: S • Total links on the page (the fewer the better). • Number of clicks from the home page (the fewer the better). • The category that scores the highest across these elements is the one to choose. I Submitting your site Before submitting, read the terms of service and guidelines thorJessica Bowman oughly. They will specify items Business.com such as what can be included in the link text and whether you can be listed in multiple categories. Write your description to match the writing style used in other listings for your chosen category. When you are ready to submit your site, use a corporate credit card and generic e-mail address so that the information is tied to the company and not to an individual who may leave the position or the company. I Tracking the vital details When submitting to directories, log all information, including submitter’s name, phone number, e-mail address, name on the credit card and last four digits of the credit card number. I Evaluating a new directory If your main goal is to aid your search engine rankings, ask the following questions: • Are links search engine-friendly (not in JavaScript, not buried behind form fields, not behind no-follow tags)? • What is the directory home page Google PageRank? • What is the home page SEOmoz Page Strength? • What is the quality of the sites in the directory? (If you find only spam, it’s not worth your time.) I Selecting the right category When evaluating a large directory such as Business.com, you will often find multiple categories that could be a perfect match. When this happens, choose the most accurate category and consider: • Pagination and where you think you will be placed within the pagination (the closer to the category main page, the more value passed to your site). Jessica Bowman is director of search engine optimization at Business.com, Santa Monica, CA. Reach her at jessicabowman@business.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE 18 FUNDAMENTALS » DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 Convert to stop click fraud BY MARK HARPER Click Fraud 101: the basics of prevention and detection BY JALALI HARTMAN dvertisers pay for clicks, and publishers make commission on each click that their traffic source provides. Yet the very model of pay-per-click advertising opens itself to fraudulent activity, putting advertisers at risk of paying commissions to publishers with poor-quality and artificial traffic. As a result of click fraud, advertisers suffer decreased return on investment, and subsequently the entire industry is jeopardized. Advertisers may drop their bids or pull out of PPC-marketing programs altogether. Legitimate publishers are left with reduced commissions. And the result is that both sides of PPC networks languish. The entire industry is threatened. Detecting and preventing click fraud is the only solution to this pervasive and dynamic force that has tainted the PPC-advertising industry to the detriment of advertisers, legitimate publishers and PPC search engines. This task rests in the hands of PPC engines themselves. And while no one organization will ever be able to say they have completely eliminated click fraud from their networks, recently there have been considerable strides taken to combat click fraud, with many secondand third-tier PPC search engines dropping significant portions of their syndication networks because of some blatant fraudulent activity. Mark Harper PPC engines need to have the GenieKnows.com capacity to understand the value of their traffic and be able to distinguish high-quality traffic from poor-quality sources. The development of proprietary tools to analyze traffic data for advertisers is the best way to deliver solid ROI consistently. Nothing speaks louder than hard data that show conversions with traffic sources (a real profit based on what an advertiser spends) and the revenue this spend generates. As an example, GenieKnows.com employs a traffic-analysis team and the proprietary technology of the Genie Shield product to deliver conversion tracking, which eliminates automated clicking detects and removes paid-to-click traffic. It also analyzes click patterns based on user activity and micro-manages traffic sources on a per-URL or per-IP basis. With proactive measures in place, PPC engines are able to strengthen relationships with advertisers, optimizing their campaigns to ensure that their ROI continues to grow. Naturally, if an advertiser is making a profit on their PPC campaigns, they will certainly want to reinvest. There is a wealth of potential waiting to be realized in online advertising and within PPC advertising specifically. While billions of dollars are currently spent annually, billions more are still waiting to be invested, provided that advertisers’ spends are met with profitable conversions. A orldwide, advertisers last year spent $15 billion in payper-click advertisements. Pay-per-click helps companies of all sizes reach a national audience with a small initial investment. However, click fraud also happens. Whether it’s a competitor using the latest software to drain your advertising budget or an affiliate employing foreign “clickers” to increase monthly compensation, research indicates at least 30 percent of all clicks are fraudulent. While major search engines promise to monitor and refund fraudulent clicks, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that Google, Yahoo and others have a significant financial interest in avoiding click-fraud refunds. Experience shows it is more cost-effective for marketers to monitor PPC campaigns using basic planning and tracking methods that prevent marketers from being a potential target and help them identify fraudulent clicks when they happen. Here are seven tips to help your company minimize click fraud: W I Stick with high-traffic search engines like Yahoo, Google, Ask and MSN. Unknown engines are hungry for revenue and filter click fraud less. I Increase your keyword bank to include the most specific and relevant terms that apply to your company, product or service. High-traffic, expensive keywords are targets for click fraud. Jalali Hartman MarketingExperiments.com I Consider investing in a tracking solution to identify suspicious traffic by comparing originating domains to fraudulent ones. I Don’t bid simply to be No. 1. Marketers mistake the top page position for the best conversion or ROI. This misunderstanding usually results in nothing more than unqualified traffic. I Target regions where your services and products are available. If your market is the U.S., don’t waste clicks on merchants in India. I Track click charges frequently. This practice will make you aware of abnormal increases or decreases in traffic. Be sure to stop all advertising and contact the search engine if you believe you’re a victim of click fraud. Whether your annual PPC budget is in the thousands or millions, you’re not interested in losing financial resources to fraudulent clicks or impressions. With careful planning and tracking, it is possible to protect the integrity and the ROI of your pay-per-click campaigns. Jalali Hartman is director of strategy at MarketingExperiments.com, Atlantic Beach, FL. Reach him at j.hartman@meclabs.com. Mark Harper is vice president of strategic relations at GenieKnows.com, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Reach him at mharper@genieknows.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 « FUNDAMENTALS 19 A practical guide to vertical search advertising BY JULIE MASON ertical search engines, as deemed by e-marketing and search-engine pundits, are the “hottest trend in search.” As VSEs diversify, they become more attractive to users and advertisers alike. Here’s how to integrate VSE advertising into your next marketing campaign. V What are VSEs? Unlike general search engines like Yahoo and Google, which crawl the entire Web for content, VSEs crawl only within specific industries. While general search engines may return the most information, VSEs return the most relevant information. Plugging “combine” into a general search engine will return information about software, games and merging words together, which is fine, unless you’re a farmer searching a $250,000 piece of equipment. VSEs are more likely to know just what users want and point them, ideally, to your company, service or product. Why advertise with VSEs? The specificity and industry know-how that characterize VSEs also create a fruitful advertising opportunity. Since VSE users look for precise information or are closer to buying, they’re classified as interested consumers. Qualified leads aside, here are a few more benefits of VSE advertising: I More visibility Some VSEs are designed and run by large conglomerates. By listing with one VSE, advertisers get additional exposure in other online publications. Furthermore, some VSEs will spend money on general search engine keyword campaigns, increasing the likelihood that potential customers using those search engines will find the VSE and your products. I More targeted With VSEs, businesses can reach a specific audience that doesn’t want to fish for information on general search engines. These audiences have been casting nets too wide for too long. VSEs provide these companies a smaller net and a better knowledge of the waters. Julie Mason Kellysearch.com I More leads, less money Finding an ROI in the expensive, time consuming, keyword-heavy world of general search engine marketing is difficult. As marketing moves online, it’s easier to get lost. VSEs, however, remain small enough to offer competitive rates while building the vertical industry exposure necessary to attract potential clients. Julie Mason is general manager at Kellysearch.com. Reach her at julie.mason@reedbusiness.com. What do you mean I have a budget? BY STEVE HAAR the model around contributions per acquired customer, or other monetized event, marketing efforts are properly seen on the revenue side of the ledger where value can be more accurately acknowledged outside of marketing. I Making it happen If you work with the traditional budget- oals are good. In fact, they are fundamental. Budgets, however, are bad. They limit our imagination, Steve Haar cause us to forsake opportuniLeapfrog Online ties and ultimately drive down performance. So, how can you move beyond your search engine marketing budget? G based model, transitioning to the revenue metric can be a challenge. To be a change leader, you have go outside the search box and gain insight into ways your company makes money. You then need to set three key metrics on the way to managing by revenue: required margin per sale; close and conversion rates; and affordable CPC. These numbers can change dramatically from day to day, so manage and adjust them. Managing a search engine marketing program to these metrics requires tracking and reporting. So there are no real shortcuts here. It takes time and effort. Along with the proper inputs and tracking to the ultimate disposition of the click, you will need reporting to allow you to assess the program performance and optimize it. To implement the needed tracking and reporting, you can build in-house systems or your can implement third-party solutions. Through this process, you’ll “free up” margin, allowing you to take a risk and then optimize it. Steve Haar is director of keyword advertising at Leapfrog Online, Evanston, IL. Reach him at shaar@leapfrogonline.com. I Finding gems By focusing on the margin per customer as a metric, you have a chance to get out of your safe zone. You can play in the keywords that you know will work (this is where budget-based programs stop) and experiment with keywords, targeting and methods (we’ll touch on these later) that are unproven. This is where you will probably find the gems that are often missed by those budget-based programs. I Acknowledging value Traditionally, marketing budgets are line items on the expense side of the ledger where accountants, faced with making draconian budget cuts, can easily make decreases without sensing an inherent loss of value. By building ESSENTIAL GUIDE Organic Search ORGANIC TOC Page 20 Extreme makeover, by Lisa Young, Outrider O Page 22 Your search engine optimization campaign, by Scott Buresh, Medium Blue Managing natural search in large organizations, by Craig Macdonald, SEMDirector Inc. rganic search-engine marketing is a leading strategy marketers use to promote their products and services. Included in this section are articles by industry thought leaders about best practices for organic search, tips for keeping organic-search rankings after a Web site redesign, automating SEO with content-management systems and common mistakes in search engine optimization. I Lost optimization Page 23 To increase marketing ROI automate SEO, by David Terry, Hot Banana Software Inc. Extreme makeover: five tips for organic search rankings after a site redesign BY LISA YOUNG Page 24 Common SEO mistakes – and how to avoid them, by Matt McGee, Marchex Inc. Natural rankings: the equalizer, by Jeanette Kocsis, Harte-Hanks Inc. Page 25 Go for the pow over the wow, by Andrew Wetzler, MoreVisibility our company anticipated the launch of a new and improved corporate Web site like expectant parents. A team of “marketing doctors” worked on the project for almost a year to ensure a successful delivery. Finally, the new Web site was born, and shortly thereafter the company’s outside SEO vendor noticed a drastic dip in search-engine traffic. Unfortunately, even small, overlooked details can derail your organic search-engine results. If your company is planning a Web site redesign, don’t forget a strategy to preserve your organic search-engine positions. Here are five frequent mistakes companies make when redesigning their Web sites and solutions to keep your page rank and your organic results healthy. Y Lisa Young Outrider Search marketers swap horror stories about how optimization that they worked on for years was wiped out overnight. Make it a requirement of your design team to transfer over file names, titles, metatags, headlines and body copy when possible. I Lost content Some of your search-engine suc- cess may be based on optimized pages rich with valuable copy and relevant keywords. With a redesign, however, some content is eliminated from one version to the next. Evaluate your search-engine positions by page, and make sure that the content of your top-ranking pages is carried over to the new site, preserving the page’s title, metatags and body content if at all possible. I Orphaned pages In a redesign, inside pages I Lack of communication Often this is first mistake that creates a domino effect of errors. Web site redesign should include your IT team or developer, marketing department and search team. Leaving one in the dark could lead to a preventable train wreck later. Engage these teams early, communicate your goals and apply their best practices to your strategy. I A new domain Search algorithms favor older domains. Avoid changing your URL at all costs. Your new domain will have no history and will not have link popularity, which is essential to your organic strategy. If you must change domains, this step will save you: Set up a 301 redirect to tell the search engines that your content has permanently moved. usually move or disappear and file names can change, causing search traffic to land on dead pages with 404 errors. And just like sending notices to relatives when you move, you need to send a similar notice to the search engines through redirects. Carefully map out the content and structure of your new and old Web sites. Give your IT department a spreadsheet showing where the two match up, and ask them to plan 301 redirects from the old pages to the new. Make sure there’s a custom 404 error page to catch traffic from pages that no longer exist. Even with good planning, you can expect the changes to get sorted out in the search engines in 30 to 90 days. Lisa Young is manager of organic search at Outrider, a GroupM company, St. Louis, MO. Reach her at lisa.young@outrider.com. 22 ORGANIC SEARCH » DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 Your search engine optimization campaign: Set it and reinvent it BY SCOTT BURESH Too often, many companies begin working with a search engine optimization firm and believe that the campaign will be a one-time endeavor with a finite ending. Unfortunately, this approach often does not work in the long term. Companies deprive themselves of the benefit of data collected over time with this approach. A successful SEO campaign requires ongoing management to continue to produce results over time. It is important to find an SEO firm that will continuously monitor and improve your campaign, even after the initial steps are complete. The ideal firm should have a primary goal of bringing better results and an increasing return on your investment. From a technical perspective, search engines take into consideration the “freshness factor,” which means that sites with updated content will consistently rank higher than sites with outdated content. In addition, the major search engines do occasional wholesale algorithm shifts. These factors can change a site’s rankings overnight. Beyond the technical aspects, however, consider your needs. In time, your business may have Scott Buresh new initiatives to promote that Medium Blue your original SEO campaign did not address. What’s more, the way that people refer to your industry, your products and your services, as well as industry jargon, may all change over time. Your key phrases will need to be updated continously with these changes in mind. A good SEO firm will take care of this general maintenance and keep your rankings and traffic up. A great SEO firm will use real data to continuously improve your search marketing return on investment. This kind of vendor will carefully research which search phrases are bringing visitors most likely to take the primary point of action on your site — that is, what you want people to do that leads to a sale. This vendor will continuously refocus its efforts based on these findings. Then the firm can find additional key phrases similar to the ones already identified as valuable and add them to the campaign. New content can be added to the site to target these phrases and to increase the site’s freshness factor. Simply put, SEO is not a one-time job. All of these steps must be revisited and revised to keep a campaign fresh, which is why it is important to hire a reputable firm. By targeting your key phrase portfolio, you’ll always be ahead of the game. And your SEO firm will continue to work for you to bring you valuable results. Scott Buresh is CEO of Medium Blue, Atlanta. Reach him at sburesh@mediumblue.com. Managing natural search in large organizations BY CRAIG MACDONALD ne of the major challenges Craig Macdonald SEMDirector Inc. facing large advertisers when integrating search marketing into the marketing mix is managing natural or “organic” search rankings. Maintaining high natural search rankings on key terms is an important lead-generation mechanism. According to Marketing Sherpa research, the listings in the top three natural results garner 61 percent of the total clicks on natural listings for most searches. Managing natural rankings involves many points of contact within an organization. The IT department usually owns the Web site, and the marketing departments own the content and design. The coordination of these efforts is not trivial. Traditionally, natural search management has been outsourced to search engine optimization consultants. These consultants develop a list of key terms around which the organization’s site should be optimized, designate landing pages for searchers using those terms and develop creative text for the site that drives rankings. However, once the SEO project is done, the natural rankings begin to degrade within 45-60 days because of competitive reaction, changes in the emphasis weightings applied by the search engine algorithms or uncontrolled changes to the site by the organization itself. Managing natural rankings at scale can’t be done with consultants. To solve this problem, large advertisers have started using technologies that automate the process around managing natural search rankings. An example of such technologies is SEMDirector: Organic Insight. This system, in use at a large consumer packaged goods organization, is provided to the brand managers responsible for the site by the IT department. The platform provides information for IT and marketing departments to: O I Pinpoint changes to the site that degrade performance quickly and identify the magnitude of the performance degradation. I Monitor changes to the site in pre-production so issues that neg- atively affect natural rankings are isolated before launch. Since automating its search marketing data management process in 2006, this CPG organization has driven 4.5 million unique incremental visitors to its site, an increase of 83 percent. The company’s SEO consultants now focus on creative development rather than data gathering, auditing and reporting. Automation technology enables it to manage natural rankings efficiently and at scale. Building an automated process for identifying SEO issues is crucial for large advertisers as it is the most effective way to manage natural search rankings. Craig Macdonald is vice president of marketing and product management at SEMDirector Inc., San Diego. Reach him at cmacdonald@semdirector.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 « ORGANIC SEARCH 23 To increase marketing ROI, automate SEO with your Web content management BY DAVID TERRY I Producing quality W3C, XHTML and CSS code and main- taining consistent navigation so that spiders can find your content. I Building search engine-friendly URLs and page titles, in plain English, using your keywords. Ensuring that keywords also appear in the navigation titles and page names. I Managing appropriate keywords and phrases in the most important areas of your page, which will then enable search engines to determine the relative importance of your content. I Providing a keyword analyzer to view a page as a search engine requently regarded as a productivity tool, Web content management systems are often less than robust at generating Web pages that top the search engine rankings. The very thing that saves time, namely the template system, tends to be read by engine crawlers as predictable and neglects to anticipate subtle changes in popular search terms from end users. But a new generation of search enginge-friendly Web CMS tools promises to change that. Serious efforts are under way to enlist Web content management to simplify the SEO process. While maximizing your Web site for top search engine rankings is a nuanced process, much of your success lies in the basic blocking and tackling: title tags and URLs, targeted keywords, cross-links to related content and enabling spiders and bots to crawl deeply into your site. Taken seperately these peices are the very same elements that CMS tools are so good at managing and keeping track of. Done right, an intelligently implemented Web CMS can enable anyone in the marketing department to create a Web page optimized for search engines and targeted keywords. An SEO-friendly Web CMS will help marketers optimize their Web sites for search engines in the following ways: F would. Analyzing keyword ratings such as density and weight can help determine how well a page ranks for targeted keywords. I Automating header tags and alt-tags, robot.txt files and meta tags correctly to ensure bots are aware of how to index the pages they visit and how often they need to revisit for updated content. I Generating XHTML compliant code. Maximizing CSS to separate the visual elements from code, leaving only structure and content. By adhering to these fundamental Web CMS best practices, the pages you create will provide a reliable gateway to the keywords that search engines — and your customers — will find. David T is vice president of marketing at Hot Banana Software Inc., erry Ontario, Canada. Reach him at david@hotbanana.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE 24 ORGANIC » DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 Common SEO mistakes — and how to avoid them BY MATT MCGEE Natural rankings: the equalizer ompanies of all sizes often struggle with the most fundamental search-engine optimization tactics. Is yours one of them? Here’s a list of common SEO mistakes and specific steps to make sure you avoid them: C BY JEANNETTE KOCSIS Mark McGee Marchex Inc. Poor crawlability Search engines can’t rank a page they can’t crawl. I Fix it Eliminate complex JavaScript and DHTML navigation. Put session IDs in a cookie rather than your page URLs. Don’t use Flash for important links and content. Use a spider simulator such as Delorie to see your site as a crawler does. Learn about robots.txt formatting at Robotstxt.org. Ignoring keyword research Poor keyword research will derail nearly everything else you do to optimize your site. I Fix it Use keyword research tools such as KeywordDiscovery to learn the actual terms searchers use. Poor page titles The page title or “title tag” is the most important on-page SEO factor. I Fix it Every page title should be unique. The primary keyword should be at the beginning; put your company name at the end. Poor content A page can’t rank for “green widgets” if the search engine can’t figure out the page is about green widgets. I Fix it Develop quality content. Consider user manuals, newsletters, how-to articles, FAQs or a blog. Write naturally for humans, but use your primary keywords when appropriate. Unnatural link building Quality is more important than quantity with link building. Many webmasters try unusual tactics to increase link quantity, including reciprocal link trades, three-way trades and “link farms.” I Fix it Acquire quality links from relevant sites. Avoid schemes that get links from poor-quality, unrelated sites. Reciprocal links with relevant sites are generally fine as long as these links don’t make up a majority of your site’s inbound links. hen performing an online search on just about any given subject, a person is likely to see a variety of sources for results, including listings of Fortune 100 companies and postings of small organizations. So do search engines favor one site over another, or one company over another, when determining how to return results? The playing field is still fairly equal, though variations do exist between engines. Success hinges on relevant content and an understanding of natural search-optimization techniques. Applying best practices can help influence the result. One good practice is to consider optimization for phrases rather than single terms. For example, searching for “flowers” delivers results that include types of flowers and gardening tips. However, if the intent is to buy a flower arrangement, searching for “buy flowers online” or “buy flowers in Washington DC” returns more relevant results. A site optimized this way is more likely to appear among the top results because it targets a phrase rather than a single word, which typically means less competition and greater relevance for the searcher, making conversion or purchase more likely. Remember also to optimize for phrases used in direct mail and other offline campaigns. People may remember campaign headlines and taglines and conduct a search using these terms. Also consider leveraging social search. Increasingly, user-generated content and reviews are interspersed in search-engine results. For example, Google Co-Op results are displayed for certain categories, such as health, destinations and auto. Google Co-Op is a platform that enables people to customize their search experience by subscribing to other links or by creating their own link subscription. A search on Google for a term such as “diabetes,” for example, will include options above the natural results for narrowing the search, such as “treatment,” “symptoms,” “for patients” and “causes/risk factors.” Google is displaying these options to all Google users based on reviews from contributing editors such as the Mayo Clinic, Health on the Net Foundation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Social search will continue to develop as consumers become more aware of sites such as Del.icio.us, Digg.com and others that allow users to provide ratings and feedback and assign keywords to a site themselves through shared bookmarks. Most of these social mechanisms are free. Following some simple rules for natural search can bring a small site results just as high as a large one receives. The key is to provide relevant content and the kind of user experience that is likely to generate good reviews. Jeannette Kocsis Harte-Hanks Inc. W Matt McGee is SEO manger for Marchex Inc., Seattle, WA. Reach him at mmcgee@marchex.com. Jeannette Kocsis is vice president of digital marketing at Harte-Hanks Inc., San Antonio. Reach her at jeannette_kocsis@harte-hanks.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE ORGANIC 25 Go for pow over wow BY ANDREW WETZLER probably won’t receive much favorable feedback from the more artistic corners of the Web design community, but I think it’s important for marketers to stay extremely focused on their very specific goals for any Web site, as there is a dangerous tendency to place an emphasis on style over Andrew Wetzler substance, sizzle over steak. More Visibility Although this article is about improving on the user experience rather than the search-engine optimization crawler experience, the parallels are significant. Sites that are content driven and don’t rely too heavily on techniques like Flash to communicate a message are more favorably interpreted by the bots from the engines, while also creating a clearer path for a visitor from a conversion standpoint. When reviewing a site to weigh the pow versus the wow, there are two important questions to consider: I I What are the expectations of the typical site visitor? This is a bit of a trick question in that I believe there is often a disconnect between what searchers want and what marketers think they want. Lately I am seeing this quite frequently with real estate development Web sites. The real estate developer is caught up in the aura of the project and in setting the appropriate tone with site visitors. While these are important objectives and painting the right picture in the eyes of prospect is important, it shouldn’t come at the expense of a slow-to-load, difficult-to-navigate Web site that has little or no chance of doing well in the natural search results. I What is the primary objective of the site? This question should be the driving force in the development of the site. Is the goal to be a glossy brochure site promoting or advertising a product or service? Or is the goal to accomplish a particular objective, such as cultivating a new sales lead or consummating a sale with an interested buyer? If the answer is that an action step needs to occur, then the site should be conceived from that perspective. The site still needs to establish credibility, but a lot of fluff can often be removed that gets in the way of conversion activity. This is not to suggest that all creativity should be thrown out the window, but priorities need to be recognized and clearly communicated to the Web designer. For situations where there is not an opportunity to start from scratch, it is often possible to modify a site to increase its effectiveness. Driving qualified traffic to any Web site in a cost-effective manner is challenging. Creating a site that makes a compelling case for the visitor to take the desired action step is imperative. Andrew Wetzler is president of More Visibility, Boca Raton, FL. Reach him at awetzler@morevisibility.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE 26 FEATURE» DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 The Business An inside look at the search industry BY TANYA LEWIS hen GoTo.com introduced paid search engine advertising almost a decade ago, the idea of auctioning rank in keyword search results and attaching text advertisements was controversial. “People felt search results should be pure,” said Ellen Siminoff, president/CEO Efficient Frontier Inc. “[Other] concerns were: Could you get enough relevant advertising with search? Is it clear[ly] advertising? Will [people] click?” The answer was ‘yes’ to each of those questions. GoTo.com went public, renamed itself Overture Services and was bought by Yahoo. MarketingSherpa’s “Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007” reported paid search generated nearly $8 billion last year. EMarketer projects ad spend for paid search will surpass $10 billion in 2008. Yahoo and Google are preducted to pocket 90 percent of this year’s spend. W An industry of client service “An industry formed to help marketers navigate the complexity of search engine marketing [SEM],” Ms. Siminoff said. “We strategically think about [client] business goals, appropriate keywords, ad copy, bidding, performance, [and] return. We do everything from creative to analytics. Small marketers can test it [for a few hundred dollars]. Some clients spend tens of millions of dollars on search. It’s effective and leads to high ROI. That’s why people do it.” “ Now, the most reputable digital ad agencies offer SEO. John Rodkin, vice presdient and general manager of digital solutions for WebTrends Inc., said agency expertise and scale leads to better performance. “I spend more time buying search than any client because I buy for all clients,” he said. “We can build sophisticated software that helps ads perform better. You couldn’t justify the investment [without] a lot of clients.” David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client stregy at 360i LLC, explained that SEM agencies have “segmented” into three categories. “A handful work with major brands and are equipped to do so,” he said. “[The] middle tier, by and large, [is] better equipped for small and midsize businesses. An array of companies are going after small business and are either very small themselves or best-equipped to help mom-andpop style businesses.” Advertisers bid on keywords (cost ranges from 1 cent to $100) to get high placement in search results, and they pay per click. “You want to bridge the gap between click [cost] and result,” Ms. Siminoff said. “The search engine [determines] quality of [an] ad, [which is] usually in part based on click-through rate. You look at results and [determine] if you bid the right amount; if you got the placement wanted; and [if] it yielded the return wanted. Then you bid again.” Efficient Frontier, WebTrends and 360i offer automated services. Automation has expedited the process. Ron Belanger Yahoo Inc. “ An industry formed to help marketers navigate the complexity of search engine marketing. Ellen Siminoff Efficent Frontier Inc. ESSENTIAL GUIDE FEATURE 27 of Search “It runs 24/7/365,” Mr. Rodkin said. “It can look at keyword No. 10,000 as intensely as it looks at keyword No. 1.” Early in the industry’s history, there was some tension between SEM service providers and search engines. But as SEM providers grew, proved legitimacy and value, relationships became cooperative. “Two kernels started separate and merged,” said Ron Belanger, vice presdient of agency development at Yahoo. “The agency piece grew out of search engine optimization [SEO]. Eight or nine years ago [people were] working out of garages to get Web sites ranked better [in natural search results]. Some were legitimate. Some were spamming. [SEO] quickly legitimized. [There were also] early digital ad agencies selling banner ads, and it was easy to add keywords. SEO and paid search met probably six years ago. Now, the most reputable digital ad agencies offer SEO.” Mr. Berkowitz said paranoia was common during the early days. “Engines have been more welcoming to SEMs,” he said. “SEMs keep doing more to prove value, and engines have a lot of respect. SEMs bring a good chunk of business.” Agencies make good partners in search From Yahoo’s perspective, agencies are valuable partners. “Yahoo has historically taken a long and positive view of agencies,” Mr. Belanger said. “Most treat us less like a vendor and more like a partner. That spirit of partnership helps us scale, [and] the spirit of intimacy with clients is not lost. We see them as Marketing Tactics’ ROI Top Ratings by Marketer Type SEO: 68.7% product marketers: 69.7% lead generation marketers: House email marketing: 56.4% product marketers 64.2% lead generation marketers: Paid search marketing: 52.5% product marketers 64.1% lead generation marketers PR: 41.9% product marketers: 55.4% lead generation marketers Direct Postal Mail: 41.1% product marketers 33.3% lead generation marketers Online advertising (banners, etc): 31.2% product marketers 19.0% lead generation marketers: Source: “MarketingSherpa Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006.” 2006 on the source. You have 200. Source: “MarketingSherpa Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006.” copyright MarketingSherpa Inc. 2006 “ Engines have been more welcoming to SEMs David Berkowitz 360i LLC evangelists and resellers. We have more feet in the street thinking digital [and] advocating new marketing channels to clients. It’s more brainpower.” Google agreed. “Service providers are valuable because of their commitment to understanding our systems, educating advertisers and optimizing advertiser campaigns,” said John Diorio, senior product marketing manager at Google. Mr. Berkowitz said that agencies are also “inherently publisher agnostic,” which lends credibility. “There’s no reason an SEM will favor one engine,” he said. “If we find more effective ways to spend, our recommendations carry a lot of weight. It is good for the engines and does favor engines that keep agencies aware of what they’re doing. More and more, engines appreciate the importance of that.” SEM agencies provide both engines and clients valuable market insight. “Agencies have a broad spectrum of customers and may have access to trends across the industry,” Mr. Belanger said. “For example, if there is an increase in traffic or conversion rates across engines, that adds weight to their insight.” Though WebTrends doesn’t share specific client data with engines, Mr. Rodkin said it can provide general information, such as which types of ads clients favor and why. A “significant” number of Yahoo advertisers use agencies, which Mr. Belanger said alleviates “staffing expertise pressure” for advertisers. Engines and agencies run in the same professional circles, thus benefiting from insight, expertise, and relationships that are difficult for individual clients to get. “Generally, [SEM agencies] are better suited to train, develop, and build a staff of digital experts,” Mr. Belanger said. “If you’re spending $20 million plus a year it probably makes sense to have inhouse expertise because it’s a critical part of your business. Some of our largest clients, [such as] Amazon and Ebay, invest in search expertise. For the middle, it may make sense to outsource.” As the industry matures, Mr. Berkowitz said competition among agencies is less intense. 360i competes with fewer than 10 agencies and is likely to meet only five in head-to-head competition. He also said the agency proliferation benefits advertisers and the industry. I ESSENTIAL GUIDE 28 FEATURE » DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 Pay-per-click is customer analytics BY JOHN ELLIS ay-per-click advertising is, at its basic level, paying for ad placement in search engines. The concept is simple. When a user searches for a keyword a paid ad will appear. These ads are usually listed at the top or right side of the search engine results page and are identified as Sponsored Links, Featured Listings or Sponsored Listings. That is PPC for the basic user. Unfortunately, most PPC advertisers are basic users. PPC is much more then paid advertising. Not only is PPC the best return on investment available, but it is, or should be, at the heart of all marketing campaigns. PPC can provide customer analytics through ad testing, geo-targeting, match types and discovering SEO targets. PPC advertising provides an instant view into the mind of the customer at an extremely low-price. P tomers. For example, more customers from Region A may click on ads. However, more customers from Region B may actually convert and purchase. By combining geo-targeting with ad variations, advertisers discover which messages convert best regionally. Learn the customer’s language with exact keyword matching Often advertisers get caught up in internal jargon. Within the industry it may be an acceptable form of communication. However, it is the customer that pays the bills. To obtain accurate results from PPC, having various match types is essential. By bidding on all variations of keywords advertisers are able to see which keywords customers are typing into a search query. Google, as an example has four different keyword matching options (broad, phrase, exact, negative), each with their own advantages and disadvantages. For example Broad Match, the default setting, includes all variations of the keyword in the query. However, Exact Match is the most targeted option available. It only shows ads when the exact phrase is used. Exact Match will provide instant feedback into the language of the customer. It is not to say there is not a place for other match types. Ideally, all variations should be tested. In fact, Exact Matching will inevitably bring in fewer visitors than other forms of matching. However, Exact Matching is a great way to gather instant customer analytics. Discover highly targeted keywords for organic search rankings Search engine optimization is often compared to rocket science. Of course the advantage of rocket science is that there are always constants, SEO does not have that luxury. With PPC reporting advertisers are able to know what the customer is typing in search engines. By reviewing periodic reporting, they are able to tell which keywords bring in the most clicks and most importantly which keywords bring in the most revenue. Instead of creating search engine optimization initiatives to tackle hundreds of keywords, the top converted pay-per-click keywords are targets. Site content, link building, and various other search engine optimization techniques can push these elite keywords. Advertisers do not have to waste time trying to get rankings on keywords that do not convert. The numbers are provided; it does not matter where the competition is ranked. By following the payper-click keyword statistics advertisers are able to get instant customer analytics to use for search engine optimization efforts. With PPC, there is very little guesswork in marketing. However, the trouble arises when traditional advertisers do not understand or believe in the power of pay-per-click marketing. Many companies still see it as separate advertising model and fail to tie the relationship back to traditional off-line campaigns. By analyzing PPC reports advertisers can pull dramatic customer analytics. With that knowledge all marketing campaigns can benefit, thus eliminating traditional guesswork from traditional advertising. I John Ellis is the online marketing manager at Gaylord Entertainment/ResortQuest.com, Nashville, TN. Reach him at john.ellis@gaylordentertainment.com Ad testing Google and now Yahoo, with the new Sponsored Search, allow advertisers to run multiple ads for the same keyword. With various messages reaching potential customers, advertisers are able to see which ads attract the most visitors and more importantly which ads attract higher revenue. Ad rotation gives the advertiser great insight into the mind of the customer. For instance, do customers click more on ads that offer “Free Shipping” or “Free Item with Purchase?” Another example, do discount mentions convert better than guarantees? To get accurate measurements on ads, it is important not to let the search engines optimize the rotation of the advertiser’s ads. By default, search engines will serve the better performing ads more often. However, the problem is search engines measure “better performing” as ads with higher clickthrough rates and quality scores. By delivering all ads evenly within a given time, advertisers should be able to define which ads generated a higher conversion. With knowledge from strong ad testing, off-line campaigns can be tailored to meet those discoveries. Thus, PPC becomes a testing ground for all marketing campaigns. Solid geo-targeting statistics can help off-line campaigns PPC geo-targeting lets advertisers target ads to specific countries, regions and languages. Geo-targeting especially benefits companies with smaller budgets, by allowing product promotion strictly within the majority of customers’ region. Geo-targeting resolves any geographic uncertainty about cus- “ PPC advertising provides an instant view into the mind of the customer at an extremely low price.” John Ellis Gaylord Entertainment/ResortQuest.com ESSENTIAL GUIDE Paid Search PAID TOC Page 30 Search + segmentation = profits by Dave Pasternack, Did-it Search Marketing P Page 32 Retargeting: not letting those customers get away, by Chris Polos, Tacoda Inc. aid search, the placing of ads for products or services on search engines and content sites on the Internet, continues to be a leading technique for search-engine marketers. Sharing their expertise on this important topic, several thought leaders have offered articles here discussing best practices for running pay-per-click campaigns, using segmentation in paid-search campaigns and retargeting. dating and relationship services, peaks after 9 p.m., making this a good time to activate a campaign. Limiting your campaign’s appearance to times of day in which conversions are most likely gives you more spending power to Dave Pasternack dominate listings at Did-it Search Marketing the time when your target segment is likely to accept an offer. Geographical segmentation Beyond dayparting, segmentation, which offers the ability to determine what geographical area you’re Web traffic is originating from, lets you bid more aggressively against your target segment in particular demographic or geographical segments and serve up customized user experiences for each segment that is most relevant. Geographical segmentation provides a further benefit: Because your ads appear only in front of users from particular regions, your competitors may not even be aware that you’re dominating the search engine results page in local zones. Lower overall click volume Keep in mind that segmented strategies, because they are designed to weed out nonconverting searchers, will result in lower overall click volume, which means that it may take you longer to develop statistically valid data to run multivariate tests against. Don’t make important changes to your campaign until you’re sure that you have enough data to justify such changes. Dave Pasternack is president of Did-it Search Marketing, New York. Reach him at dave@did-it.com. Page 34 Microsoft adCenter: search tools of tomorrow, by James Colborn, Microsoft adCenter The biggest threat to your PPC campaigns? Complacency, by Mary O’Brien, PPC Summit Search + segmentation = profits BY DAVE PASTERNACK egmentation is a tried-and-true direct marketing strategy that provides great efficiencies in paid-search campaigns. The first step in executing a segmented search strategy is to gather authoritative data describing who your best customers are. It’s likely that this information can be mined from data that already exist, such as historical customer-relationship management data. These data can illuminate a variety of specific characteristics of your best customers, your “power segment,” including their location, demographics (e.g., age, gender, income) and data pertaining to behavioral or psychographic characteristics. In most cases, this type of research will yield multiple segments for each of your products or services. S Page 36 Now that we have Panama, let’s talk about best practices, by Darren Kuhn, Resolution Media Marketing in the Google era, by Kraig Swensrud, Salesforce.com Inc. Page 38 Screen audience for best prospects, conversions, by Toby Gabriner, [x+1] Tell others all your long tales, by Daniel Todd, Zango, Inc. Page 39 Good search arbitrage: buy low, sell high, add value, by Joe Chin, Guidester Inc. Brands can benefit from affiliate marketing, by Janel Landis, SendTec Inc. Page 40 PPC ads should always lead your online-sales efforts, by Tim Schaden, Fluency Media Click fraud dominates the traffic-quality debate, by Mike Bernier, SearchMarketingTools.com Next steps Once you’ve arrived at a set of segment profiles, the next step is to create a set of search campaigns using targeting mechanisms provided by the search engines. The big three, Google, Yahoo and MSN, each provide geo-targeting and dayparting capabilities for search results, but MSN is currently the leader in terms of providing demographic targeting tools. Google and Yahoo limit the applicability of such tools to their contextual networks. Use dayparting to limit the number of nonconverting clickers for your products and services. For example, if you are a firm selling high-end luxury goods, you may want to deactivate campaigns after 3:00 p.m. to limit the number of unqualified, underage searchers searching on these terms. Conversely, qualified interest in certain personal services, such as For nearly a dozen years, we’ve been building businesses and relationships. Natural and paid search, podcasting, analytics and the advanced proprietary technology to support them. All nicely integrated under one roof you can depend on. Download our white paper, Calculate Search Marketing ROI. OneUpWeb.com/dmnews INTEGRATED ONLINE MARKETING • NATURAL OPTIMIZATION • PAID SEARCH • PODCASTING • ONLINE PR 877.568.7477 • OneUpWeb.com 32 PAID SEARCH » DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 Retargeting: not letting those customers get away BY CHRIS POLOS egardless of your experience level with online advertising or however great your online presence is, odds are that your customer won’t be ready to pull the trigger and make a purchase the moment your ad appears. They might want to shop further; they might get distracted by a phone call. That’s why 98 percent of users who click on online ads don’t convert. With this in mind, how can you ensure you stay top-of-mind with your qualified customers? In a traditional consumer-marketing model, your goal would be to lead your customer target through the following steps. R I Attention Break through the advertising and search clutter by delivering a message that piques curiosity. I Interest Get their attention so they’ll take the time to explore and learn more about the product or service you’re offering. I Desire Give them a reason for wanting your products or services. Be sure to differenciate your option from the rest. I Action The trigger has been pulled; you’ve got yourself a Is there an easier way? Yes. And it’s called retargeting. Retargeting technology places a cookie on your target’s Web browser that identifies them when they land on your site. If the target does not take the desired action and then leaves the advertiser’s Web site, the retargeting service kicks in, serving display ads to them as they surf on other Chris Polos parts of the network. These ads Tacoda Inc. keep displaying until the target returns to the advertiser’s Web site and takes the desired action. It’s relentless and highly effective. By using display ad retargeting across a network of publishers, you will ensure you stay top-of-mind with those customers who have previously shown interest in what you have to offer. Retargeting services will continue to re-message your display ad to those users until they take your desired action (e.g., open their wallet or fill out an information-request form). But retargeting is only as good as the online advertising network. Without scale and reach through a diverse and large number of quality publishers, you risk not getting back in front of your core audience enough times to make the retargeting service effective. Chris Polos is vice president of account management at T acoda Inc., New Y ork. Reach him at cpolos@tacoda.com. customer. This is the most important step to your botom line. ESSENTIAL GUIDE The Leader in Innovative Online Marketing Solutions, Maximizing Revenue and Building Customer Loyalty • EMart - Email Campaign Management System — Improved delivery, click-through and conversion rates. Unsurpassed realtime sales, open and click-through tracking, managed right from your desktop. Desktopdirect: Delivers emails directly to the desktop of your most loyal customers, improving open rate, click through and sales, bypassing ISP filtering and mailbox clutter. • Search Engine Marketing — Drive new, online customers to your website with our pay-per click and search engine optimization services. • Email Change of Address & Email Append Services — Maximize the value and effectiveness of your database. • Website Development — Enhance the shopping experience for your customers including design, internal search and navigation to maximize revenue. • Consumer Research — Customized online surveys provide valuable insight, feedback and opinions from your customer base. • Online Acquisition Services — Find alternative ways to reach your target audience online: Co-Registration Network, Email List Brokerage, Banner Advertising. Let us create an Online Marketing Program to meet your sales goals. Contact Lynn Anne Badurina Phone: 201-488-5656 Ext. 222 or Email: lbadurin@mokrynski.com 401 Hackensack Ave., Hackensack, NJ 07601 • Tel: 201-488-5656 • Fax: 201-488-9225 • www.mokrynski.com Brokerage • Management • Online Services • Fundraising • Insert Media • International Analytics & Planning • List Compilation • Market Research • Space Advertising 0707 34 PAID SEARCH » DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 Microsoft adCenter: search tools of tomorrow BY JAMES COLBORN he major pillars in search engine marketing or, to be more specific, pay-per-click advertising, are well established. Customers are able to buy keywords, tailor their ads to their audiences and bid according to parameters that stretch from an ROI metric to the cost of driving traffic. But what’s next on the horizon? What should advertisers be thinking about for the future? In 2006, Microsoft introduced the Microsoft adCenter Labs, a partnership between the company’s adCenter team and Microsoft Research. The adCenter Labs – which are comprised of researchers, analysts, and developers that cultivate technologies in the areas of paid search, behavioral targeting, contextual advertising, social network analysis, and image/video mining – were created to help empower advertisers to learn more about their audiences before making decisions. In the past 12 months, the team has doubled and is working on more than 60 tools, many of which are being created specifically based on customer feedback. The main reason for this strategy is to be better informed before making online-advertising decisions. This year we saw PPC networks adopt the same model. No longer is bid price the only determinant of position. Now the effectiveness of your creative and the relevance of your landing page are taken into account. This means that advertisers need to know more about their audience to ensure they get the best performance. But beyond the norm of keyword research, what options are available? For example: How would keyword selection be undertaken if there was a tool that determined the commercial intent of the search, the keyword, when they searched? What if the advertiser could see the trends of searching patterns on keywords from the past 12 months and predict where the traffic trends were happening the next quarter? These are are just a couple of the tools that the adCenter Labs team has built to provide the search industry with tools to better arm itself in the complicated arena of search. The adCenter Labs tools, all of which have real data and are available at http://adlab.microsoft.com, are not only a demonstration of how Microsoft is thinking about the future of search, adCenter and the online industry as a whole, but also a way to solicit feedback from the online marketing community at large on which tools are either “market ready” or viable for adding to the adCenter of tomorrow. The adCenterWeb site receives thousands of visitors a day, some of whom are adCenter customers and some of whom are not. The users take advantage of these features to better decide a path or course of action to improve their use of search and how their campaigns apply to the core pillars of PPC. T The biggest threat to your PPC campaigns? Complacency BY MARY O’BRIEN reathe easy. You have those pay-per-click campaigns set up. They’re performing nicely, you’re getting a decent ROI and your client is pleased. You’re done, right? Wrong! This is where complacency sets in. Pay-per-click campaigns are like Old English Sheepdogs. If you don’t groom them often they start looking like scruffy rugs instead of Kennel Club winners. If you take your eye off the ball for a few months you can rest assured that the competitive landscape for your campaigns will have changed, the search engines will have adjusted the way they rank your ads and other distribution tactics will now be available that you are not using to your advantage. Set up a regular time to run reports. Analyze them to see which campaigns are performing well. Act on items that need adjusting. Focus on these areas to optimize your campaigns: Mary O’Brien PPC Summit B I Your product Do you have new items to add or out-of-stock items to remove? Paying for keywords for items you don’t sell anymore makes no sense. You could be promoting items you do sell. I Keywords Look at the top performers and expand on them. Look at the low performers and add negative keywords to make them more targeted. Move keywords around between ad groups to make the copy more relevant. I Ad copy T multiple versions of ad copy across all three major est search engines. Sometimes small copy change creates a lift in ROI. Ensure your keywords are in all your titles and descriptions. If you’re in a seasonal business make sure your campaigns are updated. Copy touting Christmas gifts isn’t going to work for Mother’s Day. I Landing pages Test different pages and every element on the page. Test colors, calls to action, navigation, form length, text, fonts, trust certifications. Test your display URLs. Make sure the copy on your landing pages matches the copy in your ads. I Campaign settings Have you tried dayparting, geo-targeting, demographic targeting? If you are selling locally, does it make sense for your company to expand internationally? I Distribution Expand beyond the big three search engines. Check out the contextual ad products. Try pay-per-call, mobile, image ads and pay-per-post. Successful pay-per-click advertisers are constantly testing and reworking their campaigns. Now that you’re No. 1 it’s going to take work to stay that way. Mary O’Brien is chairwoman and content creator of PPC Summit, a division of Alteract Marketing, Port T ownsend, WA. Reach her at feedback@ppcsummit.com. James Colborn is product manager at Microsoft adCenter, Redmond, WA. Reach him at jamecol@microsoft.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE 36 PAID SEARCH » DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 Now that we have Panama, let’s talk about best practices BY DARREN KUHN through rates will trend downward. To increase impressions and CTRs, advertisers should run more than one creative within each Ad Group. I Test and be patient Give W ith its release of Panama, Yahoo brings us a step closer to a more consistent, competitive and innovative search landscape. Using a platform similar to Google’s, marketers can gain insight and apply best practices across the top two search engines. Under Yahoo’s old ranking scheme, how an ad looked or where it directed the user didn’t matter as much as the pure dollars bidding up the rank. Now that there are other factors influencing the ranking, including proven relevance and better quality ads, results will continue to improve. As much as anything else, that’s supposed to be the beauty of search: It truly creates a win-win for consumers, advertisers and publishers alike. So how can marketers get the most out of Panama? Panama, marketers could associate individual keywords on Yahoo search with a unique creative. With Panama, creatives are assigned at the Ad Group level. As such, multiple keywords are associated with one creative. Therefore, marketers should develop creatives based on narrow or granular themes by using the keyword-insertion tool to customize popular keywords within an Ad Group. I Set up Ad Groups based on specific granular themes Before Panama time to normalize and auto-optimize your account before making any judgment regarding the efficacy of the new Darren Kuhn Yahoo system or making drastic Resolution Media changes to your account. We suggest waiting at least four weeks before conducting a thorough analysis. And make sure to evaluate at least seven days of data against seven days of data from the same account before conversion to Panama. This will allow you to filter out any external factors that might be causing fluctuations (e.g., weekend traffic). Marketers should also test the effect of bid position on CTR and, ultimately, ROI. Once you find the optimal position, refresh creative every so often to maintain your CTR. If you find that CTR has not improved, we suggest isolating highvolume keywords and moving them to their own Ad Group with customized creative. It is possible one or two keywords are dragging down the entire group. After about four weeks, repeat the steps. Darren Kuhn is vice president of project management and analytics at Resolution Media, Chicago. Reach him at dkuhn@resolutionmedia.com. I Run multiple creatives within each Ad Group Because multiple keywords are now associated with single creatives, some click- Marketing in the Google era BY KRAIG SWENSRUD he world of marketing has changed in the past decade, and many of the techniques that we as marketers used to produce results for our businesses are now obsolete. The Internet has caused a fundamental shift in the way we work and live, and marketers have had to develop new tactics to respond. Kraig Swensrud At Salesforce.com, we have Salesforce.com Inc. developed a number of techniques for effectively marketing in this so-called Google era. Historically, marketers focused on broadcasting their message to the mass market, buying ad spots and communicating their messages without regard to measuring responses or ROI. But marketing in the Google era requires a different mind-set. No longer is the focus on getting your message in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Now marketers need to focus on targeted messages and message relevancy. Paid-search advertising is a leading cost-effective form of marketing because it allows marketers to place highly relevant messages in front of a target audience at the exact moment they express interest in a particular product or service. Many companies begin their online advertising journey with the search marketing leader, T Google AdWords. Google AdWords allows companies of all sizes to get started quickly and with minimal investment. When a company is comfortable placing ads, the next step is to optimize Google AdWords through the following tactics: I Keyword selection Understanding which keywords generate traffic, leads and sales opportunities. I Compelling creative Developing enticing ad copy and Web site landing pages that resonate with your audience and convert visitors. I A/B split testing Testing different versions of a message to see which one results in higher click-through rates. I Geo-targeting Develop your messages and ads based on specific regional targeting. However, these tactics are useless if you can’t properly measure the results. We have integrated Google AdWords search-marketing campaigns with Salesforce CRM. This enables us to understand the source of all inbound Google AdWords leads. Once those leads are pulled from our Web site into Salesforce.com, we track them through the pipeline lifecycle, from keyword to close. By integrating Salesforce CRM with Google AdWords, we have a clear picture of ROI. We don’t have to guess what campaigns and keywords are delivering new business. We know. Kraig Swensrud is senior director of marketing products at Salesforce.com Inc., San Francisco. Reach him at kswensrud@salesforce.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE 38 PAID SEARCH» DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 Screen audience for best prospects, conversions BY TOBY GABRINER Tell others all your long tales BY DANIEL TODD edia planning has become a complex science and one that has seen growth and increased discipline over the past few years through the introduction of new technology. The technology has morphed from audience segmentation to audience profiling, but the most recent wave of technology to affect media planning is based on audience screening, which can be defined as the opportunity to purchase an actual audience online rather than impressions. Audience screening incorporates a number of different technologies including behavioral targeting, progressive optimization and the more advanced audience-profiling engines. Audience screening allows the advertiser to identify the audience represented from an impression on a network or a portal and determine if that audience member is more or less likely to act in response to an advertisement than the general audience. If the audience member is regarded as highly desirable, then the ads are exposed. If the audience member is not deemed highly desirable, then they are not exposed to the ad and the next sequential audience member is evaluated for desirability and match to the potential customer base for the advertiser. This process happens in fractions of a second and can be used to allow advertisers to reach only those most likely to convert as well as the publisher to generate a higher Toby Gabriner cost basis for their inventory. [x+1] The technology behind audience screening is not new, but it does represent the evolution of traditional behavioral targeting, which allows the publisher to identify and bucket groups of impressions together based on the audience profile and past traffic experience. Once an advertiser identifies the audience they are looking to reach, publishers can sell this inventory accurately. The problem with this model is it is not as fluid and flexible as the Web appears to be. The experiences and profiles of the audience change quickly and are reactive to the environment around them, so the past behavior of an audience is still flawed. The audience screening model actually identifies this information in real time and can be updated faster and with more detailed accuracy. Audience screening takes into account audience profile data, preferably in conjunction with industry reliable sources, such as Claritas or Simmons, and merges those data with data referring to the page where the ad is shown, the category of the site and more recent events (e.g., news). The technology for audience screening is beneficial to the publishers because it allows them to further segment their audience without the weight of customer surveys and deeper analytics packages being overloaded in their existing inventory. M ong-tail theory suggests an expansive search-referral cache exists in the unbranded keyword universe. These low demand keywords can collectively make up a market share that equals the highest-volume branded keywords. According to recent data from Hitwise, 139,091 unique terms Daniel Todd were used to search for games Zango Inc. online. The most popular search, “games,” represented 1.45 percent of all searches, and you have to get to just No. 20, “online games,” to be down to 0.21 percent of searches. These seem like massive numbers once you reach No. 490, “family feud,” which is less than 0.01 percent of all searches. The remaining 138,601 search terms represent 71 percent of the category’s search traffic. L Maintaining the long tail The challenge is effectively managing this long tail of search terms. We spend most of the day trying to improve primary branded terms that drive the highest volume of traffic. However, we ask, is this effective, or should we also be considering what exists beyond the realm of branded keywords? We understand we need to manage the long tail, but is it worth it? The long tail is key to a profitable search portfolio. Though lower in volume, many long-tail keywords meet or exceed budget goals. However, while we can identify hundreds of these words a day, if we have 25,000 keywords per campaign, limited time and 40 other campaigns to complete, we probably aren’t benefitting. What’s the answer? Meticulous ROI performance tracking and, of course, automated tools for pricing. Trying to manage and change pricing in a dynamic marketplace with hundreds of thousands of keywords is a Sisyphean task at best. Tools will help Never fear: There are numerous tools to help manage the long tail. However, we have found that many of those tools really only work on strict business rules that determine which of our keywords are exceeding target and then turns them off. We can’t turn those keywords off because they define our business. What we’re really looking for is a technology that maintains high-volume targets but then uses long-tail words to make up the difference. We need a technology that tips the scale, balances our portfolio and protects branded keywords that define our marketplace. Effective, automated technologies are out there. When searching for a solution, look for total automation and protection of the brand keywords. Do your research and challenge any company that doesn’t provide solid ROI support for whatever they’re targeting. Once you have automated your portfolio, you can reflect on the days of mind-numbing keyword management and tell your tale of the long tail to others who are bewildered by the very same challenge. Daniel T is co-founder and president of Zango Inc., Bellevue, WA. Reach odd him at dant@zango.com. Toby Gabriner is CEO of [x+1], New York. Reach him at tgabriner@xplusone.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 « PAID SEARCH 39 Good search arbitrage: Buy low, sell high, add value BY JOE CHIN efined as the practice of taking advantage of inherent price differentials in markets, arbitrage is often frowned upon as a sketchy, even duplicitous, business. While most often associated with financial institutions, investment banks and even casinos, this practice has found its way into the world of search. And its entry for the most part has not been well received. But is there such a thing as good search arbitrage? Most would answer this question with a resounding “no,” citing the multitude of sponsored-link-only sites whose sole function is to entice incoming purchased traffic into clicking forward to the next higher-bidding site. However, there do exist a few companies that provide value-added utility to their visitors and therefore both earn their premium and contribute to a more positive online experience. These sites, most of which are e-commerce concerns, deserve to be held in a more formidable light and should be commended for practicing good search arbitrage. Despite all the negative buzz, there have emerged an increasing number of sites that engage in search arbitrage and are focused on adding value to the user experience. I refer to the many shopping sites, such as Nextag or Pricegrabber, often seen next to Google results as millions type generic terms like “digital camera” into Google and realize that, as great as Google search is, it does not provide a functional shopping experience. D Ironically, the opportunity for these sites to build a sustainable — if not substantial — business based on search arbitrage starts from Google’s drop-off of shopping-minded searchers. And by drop-off I mean both the decline in utility that happens when shoppers try to use Google’s search engine as a shopping tool, which it just was not designed Joe Chin for, and the drop-off of shoppers Guidester Inc. into the warm and waiting arms of the value-added shopping arbitrageurs. In any case, there always have and will be sites that take advantage of the Google drop-off to practice their own form of value-add arbitrage. By designing sites that enhance the shopping-value proposition, with such benefits as price comparison, product data or customer reviews, these companies advance the buying cycle and gently nudge the shopper closer to the point of purchase. So the next time someone mentions search arbitrage, instead of imagining the SLO sites we all love to hate, perhaps we should remember that there are arbitrageurs who increase the overall quality of the Web while making money on your traffic, a noble goal toward which we should all aspire. Joe Chin is CEO of Guidester Inc., New Y Reach him at ork. jchin@guidester.com. Brands can benefit from affiliate marketing BY JANEL LANDIS ffiliate-marketing programs are commonly used by large and small companies as a low-risk means of obtaining new customers. However, some affiliate marketers have been plaguing search-engine marketers for years. Google will serve only one ad per display URL, and the display URL Janel Landis must match the destination. So SendTec Inc. what happens when affiliate marketers pick up your offer and start using search to drive acquisition for you? Well, if the traffic is going directly to your site and they are complying with Google’s guidelines, then their ads are competing against yours for each and every impression. Google’s position on affiliate activity has been that it is the advertiser’s decision to employ an affiliate program, so the responsibility to police affiliate activity falls on the advertiser. This raises an interesting question: With Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, parent company of Performics, should and will Google change their position on this subject? A Why is this relevant? When your ad is competing against an affiliate ad, the one with the higher quality score wins, so a bidding war begins for visibility. As a result, costs per click increase and the advertiser is the loser. Typically, affiliates who use search focus their attack on brand terms and have been known to use devious tactics to fly under the advertiser’s radar. Common tactics include mimicking the direct advertiser’s ad text, running geo-targeted campaigns in states outside of the advertiser’s locale and dayparting ads to show during non-business hours. Sounds terrible, right? The fact of the matter is that most affiliates operate great campaigns driving quality new business for advertisers. It will be interesting to see how Google handles this acquisition and what it means for advertisers, search-engine marketing agencies, Google users and Google itself. This is a great opportunity for Google to help their advertisers properly use multiple channels. While average costs per click may decline in some cases, a properly regulated program would allow all parties to win out. What can advertisers do in the meantime? Do not be afraid of affiliate programs. Enact an Affiliate Rules of Engagement that prohibits using paid search as a channel. Watch impression volume on your brand terms. If you see a decline, start investigating. Pause your brand terms in your search campaign, and see if a sponsored link that is not yours shows for your Web site. If you see an affiliate violating your rules of engagement, warn them once. Assure them one more offense will be the last. Janel Landis is director of search marketing at SendT Inc., St. Petersburg, ec FL. Reach her at jlandis@sendtec.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE 40 PAID SEARCH» DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 PPC ads should always lead your online-sales efforts BY TIM SCHADEN Click fraud dominates the traffic-quality debate BY MIKE BERNIER ll good marketers begin search-engine efforts by identifying online-business goals and vetting a set of high-volume key phrases that best match the goals. Frankly, we guess what terms we think will work. Next we usually apply our knowledge to work these terms into the structure of the Web site Tim Schaden to start driving free traffic and Fluency Media rise in the ranks of organic search listings. This often comes with an assumption that we’ll decide later whether paid search is even necessary. However, once you stop to explore the strategic differences between paid and organic search, the opposite approach begins to intrigue. First, organic optimization involves friction. Rewriting existing site copy based on the chosen key phrase set and making the required changes to site code usually involves several steps. There are IT copywriters, management and legal department approvals that make it more difficult to change if the initial effort doesn’t perform. Then you wait for search-engine spiders to find the site and post new listings. It can take weeks or months to see the results across the entire set of key phrases. Eventually the site earns several listings with titles and descriptions culled by the spiders that may or may not best represent the business value you’d hoped for. Industry knowledge indicates that a mid-sized company would do well to earn listings on the first page in major search engines for 20 to 30 terms. So performance knowledge builds at a rate of about 25 terms per month. Not too bad for “free.” Now imagine that you could be actively listed in a couple days using 200 to 3,000 terms. You can try general-industry terms, every variation of your brand message and services as well as competitor terms, without the red tape of department approvals. You also control the titles, ad descriptions and listing positions every day side by side while monitoring and reworking the strategy based on profit performance, according to a well-structured testing matrix. This allows for even more data insight. In a month you’ll have more valuable data than a year’s worth of organic search alone. At the end of a quarter you can even know the market size and costs with some degree of accuracy. Only pay-per-click delivers this immediacy, breadth, knowledge and control for each campaign it is used for. Making your organic-search investment second allows for a much more accurate and powerful “free traffic” play. Once you know what phrases, titles and ad copy resonates to the point of profit with your customers, you’ll want to use that information to empower all your marketing initiatives. A C lick fraud has long been trumpeted as a major issue for marketers working with paid search. However, the click-fraud debate has taken away from the bigger picture: overall traffic quality. Click fraud, clicking on advertisers’ ads to drive revenue to a paid-search partner or simply increase advertisers’ costs, is one of four components of poor traffic quality that plagues paid-search channels. is the mapping of a keyword search to another term. Yahoo uses normalization to map the plural instance of a term to its singular form. This use of normalization is widely accepted; however, some search engines and their partners use normalization very liberally. Let’s say Mike Bernier a search partner sees that “car SearchMarketingTools.com prices” bids are very high. That partner then normalizes all searches within its network containing “car” or “auto” to “car prices” before the search results are pulled from the search engine. This specific use of normalization will likely result in lower-quality traffic for your Web site. I Normalization Normalization I Classification Generally speaking paid search is made up of many types of traffic. Let’s focus on search and content. How is the traffic classified and why does it matter? It’s widely accepted that search traffic is more valuable then content traffic. With that said, it makes sense that search traffic demands a premium click price versus content. So, if you are a publisher you, of course want to display search ads versus content ads. The lines are pretty clear what traffic comes from an actual search and what doesn’t. But that is not always how search engines classify a partner. With search engines fighting tooth and nail for publisher traffic, sometimes a content site finds itself negotiating a nice deal to display search results. I Partner quality How a search engine selects and polices its partners goes a long way in determining traffic quality. Partner sites using liberal normalization, who may be misclassified or just do not have quality traffic, are abundant. By simply checking referrer data on a specific search campaign, poor partners can be isolated and steps can be taken to have those partners blocked. Click fraud has soaked up quite a lot of press over the past few years. But with this focus search engines have identified a significant amount of this traffic. Now the focus should be expanded to other aspects of paid search that contribute to poor click quality. Mike Bernier is vice president of business development at SearchMarketingT ools.com. Reach him at mike@redzoneglobal.com. Tim Schaden is president/CEO of Fluency Media, Ann Arbor, MI. Reach him at tim@fluencymedia.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE 42 FEATURE» DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 A conversation with Adam Lasnik, Google’s search evangelist consider Webmasters our partners and a really important part of what makes Google what it is. DMNews: Since you are out talking to these folks, what are some trends you are seeing? AL: One of the things I’ve been seeing that is really exciting is that search engine marketers and the Webmasters they work with are becoming much more involved in conversations online and offline. If we look at the history of the Web, initially a lot of Webmasters and search engine marketers were focusing purely on broadcasting. They wanted to know how they could get what they have to say out to as many people as possible. But there is a whole lot of competition out there “ BY MELISSA CAMPANELLI P erhaps the best way to lean about search engine making is to go the search leader itself — Google. This is exactly what DM News did recently. We spoke to Adam Lasnik, the first person to be a search evangelist at Google. He joined the company in 2006. Mr. Lasnik shared his take on a variety of search-related topics, including tools to improve a site’s visibility. Here are some highlights from the discussion: DMNews: Your title at Google is “search evangelist” Can you explain what that means? Adam Lasnik: I focus on Webmaster communications. The key components of that are helping to inform Webmasters, help them to understand what best practices are, what different events and aspects of Google mean to them, and to learn from Webmasters. I go out there to conferences and go online and get the feedback from them about what they would like to know about. Because I sit directly with engineers, I am able to directly take the feedback I get from webmasters and turn it into actionable items, such as new tools or refined tools, or enhanced or refined documentation. My job is really a lot of communicating and a lot of listening. We We consider Webmasters our partners and a really important part of what makes Google what it is.” Adam Lasnik Search evangelist, Google “ ESSENTIAL GUIDE FEATURE 43 now. There are multiple sites that will help you find airline flights, and tons of sites that will help you find real estate. So how do you stand out in that massive fray? So, what search engine marketers have been learning is that they really need to be not just speaking to people, but speaking with people that are on the Web. They understand that they need to be engaging with customers on those Web sites as well as reaching out to other sites around the Web such as social media sites. Participating in those conversations, answering questions and offering information has increased both awareness and interest in a lot of companies around the Web. DMNews: Any other trends? AL: Another trend that I wanted to mention is a focus on less deception and more of a user-centric focus. In the early days, sometimes we saw search engine marketers, particularly the less savvy ones, work with the Webmasters to try and, frankly, trick people and trick search engines. They would do things such as keyword stuffing, for instance, which occurs when a Web page is loaded with keywords in the content. This doesn’t serve your users, and if they see this, they might be put off or annoyed. So we’ve seen a transition from what I would frame as deceptive practices to a user-centric focus. We do have, for instance, a couple of documents in our “Help Center” called “Google Webmaster Guidelines” and “Creating a Google-Friendly Site.” The great things about these are that they are a reflection of user-friendly practices. We’ve seen a greater attention to not only the user-centric focus but also to these Google guidelines that reflect what is involved in making pages that users like and users respect. When users appreciate these pages, they are more likely to come back, to visit the site, and share these pages with their friends on soil media sites like Digg and de.licio.us. All of that drives traffic and drives conversion. DMNews: What tips can you offer SEO/SEM marketers? AL: Here is duo tip that I regularly offer to Webmasters — especially Webmasters that are also small business owners: Focus on your title tags and focus on your meta description tags. Those are both within the HTML of each document. By doing this, two things are likely to happen. It helps Google to better understand what the page is about and it helps us to more effectively list the page in our search results. By having titles that are specific, descriptive and also concise, you will not only oftentimes improve your listing within Google, but it will also encourage more people to click on it because they have an understanding of what your site is about. Similarly, the meta description tags are often, although they are not always, used to help us create what is called the snippet. That’s the couple of lines of text underneath the title on the search results that gives a little more information about that page. In general, we try to show a snippet that is surrounding what the exact search term the person searched for. But, when that is not always clear, we often fall back on that meta description. So making it in plain English, making it a few concise thoughtful descriptive phrases – that helps everyone. DMNews: Any more tips for SEO/SEM marketers? AL:The second piece of advice I often give to search engine marketers and Webmasters is to focus on brains over beauty and function over form. We often see sometimes people getting carried away with their Web designers to make a site beautiful. But what we’ve seen historically is that users are looking to land on page, get information or do an action and then get out. Although it’s nice to make it look somewhat pretty and not terribly stark – functionality and content always trumps. We encourage Webmasters to really focus on the usability and user interface. Webmasters should understand how their users currently use their Web site. What do they look at? Where do they go? What do they access on that site? We also offer a really outstanding free tool that has just been updated called Google Analytics. The function of this tool is to help Webmasters understand those key points: Who is coming to their site? What they are doing? What are they looking for? And, do they convert into sales? Whether or not the SEMs or Webmasters want to use that tool from us or want to use a third party analysis tool, that’s fine. But you don’t want to go blind. You want to understand what your users are looking for and where they go. And by catering to your users, you are naturally going to be better in Google. I ESSENTIAL GUIDE Conversion CONVERSION TOC Page 44 Search is where it’s at, by Dave Tomlinson, Rapp Collins Retail C T Page 45 Increasing conversion rates for BTB search marketing, by Patricia Hursh, SmartSearch Marketing A formula for keyword success, by Michael Stebbins, ClickTracks onversion is an important consideration in search-engine marketing. In this section, there are articles about conversion strategies, including search-relationship marketing, increasing conversion rates for business-to-business campaigns, landing-page targeting and testing, and tips for paid-keyword campaigns, all of which were written by the field’s thought leaders. which groups are distinct enough in their demographics, psychographics and behavior to target with an enhanced pay-per-click campaign. Next, write different versions of paid-search ads, appealing to each segment’s Dave Tomlinson known or implied Rapp Collins Retail attributes. Finally, create a personalized landing page for each segment, featuring content or offers focused on unique needs and desires. A key to the success of your campaign is the correct mapping of keyword clusters to customer segments. Data-modeling techniques, such as cluster analysis, can provide insight into which segments map to which products and keywords. You may want to consult a search-marketing professional to identify the appropriate keywords for your campaign as this can be a complex process. Next, associate your pay-per-click creative with each segment’s keywords. Links should route searchers to the personalized landing page that speaks to their needs. If multiple segments are mapped to the same keyword, use post-click-segmentation tactics to identify visitors and route them appropriately. Set cookies on a user’s system during the first visit and, if possible, append incoming search terms with site behavior data to serve up more relevant offers on future “non-search” site visits. The key with SRM is to start simply. Use existing channels and current customer data to improve your current pay-per-click ROI. Then start looking at other partnerships, technologies or tactics that could offer your potential customers more personalized brand interactions. Dave T omlinson is management supervisor at Rapp Collins Retail, Dallas, TX. Reach him at tomlinsond@rappcollins.com. Search is where it’s at BY DAVE TOMLINSON Page 46 How to experience 50 percent drop in CPA with the right keyword strategy, by Brian Lewis, Engine Ready Inc. Boost ROI with the vertical advertising option, by Chrysi Philalithes, Miva Page 47 Paid versus natural search: striking a balance, by John Squire, Coremetrics Inc. Essential metrics in paid keyword campaigns, by Olivier Silvestre, Visual Sciences Inc. otal search-related ad spending soared in 2006 to $9.4 billion, up from $5.7 billion in 2005, according to a study by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Association. More than 85 percent of that spending was for paid-search listings. Businesses are recognizing that search, like direct marketing, can be measured, tracked and held accountable. Enterprise marketing budgets are reflecting this heightened awareness, with search-marketing budgets beginning to encroach upon print, television, newspaper and other channels. But as more businesses begin to understand and profit from the higher ROI provided by search, it is becoming harder to maintain an edge over the competition. The next big thing on the search frontier, search-relationship marketing, moves beyond “point-of-query” tactics, such as organic optimization or paid placement/inclusion. In its most advanced form, SRM allows businesses to dramatically extend the reach of search-related ad spending, effectively “remarketing” more personalized content to Web users through a unique mix of search-marketing strategies, affiliate Web partnerships, shared cookie technologies and dynamic ad-serving tactics. So, regarding search-marketing aspects of SRM, how can marketers use existing customer data to offer more personalized content for searchers? Segmenting searchers Applying the strategies traditionally associated with direct marketing, including segmentation, targeting and personalization, will increase the conversion rates on your search-related marketing efforts. If you haven’t done so already, perform a segmentation analysis on your current customer base. Use the results to determine DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 « CONVERSION 45 Increasing conversion rates for BTB search marketing BY PATRICIA HURSH A formula for keyword success BY MICHAEL STEBBINS sk business-to-business marketers their top marketing challenges and you’ll hear “generating leads” and “improving lead quality.” One way marketers generate leads online is by running pay-per-click ad campaigns that link searchers to landing pages with registration forms. Visitors register to receive, for instance, white papers, industry research, software downloads, e-mail newsletters and webcasts. To improve conversion rates and boost registrations, marketers can also follow these tips: A I Understand visitors’ needs Identify and analyze the various types When it comes to guaranteeing keyword success, bragging rights go to marketers who assess keyword value based on Michael Stebbins multiple metrics, including visiClickTracks tor volume, revenue, conversion and metric time on site. Let’s look at the criteria and limitations of some of the most common metrics. I Volume isn’t enough As you’re putting marketing dollars into of visitors who frequent your Web site. Create a persona for each visitor type. Think about their problems and pain points and how their needs change as they move through the buying process. I Create downloadable assets Analyze what you can offer each keywords, you need to measure the volume of engaged visitors, not of all visitors. Marketers love high volume, but in the online world it has little value if there isn’t interest in your site’s content. I Revenue isn’t enough While revenue is the measurement of type of visitor. Map their specific needs to your assets. For example, if you have a compelling success story, create a downloadable case study. If you’re giving a presentation, turn it into a webcast. I Offer action options Different Patricia Hursh SmartSearch Marketing types of visitors have different needs at different times. So it’s important to offer acion options on your landing pages. Early in the buying cycle, visitors are interested in general market research. Toward the middle, they want product, service and vendor comparisons. Only later will visitors be interested in a sales presentation or price quote. your marketing, Web site and product value, it really shouldn’t be the sole indicator of keyword value. Why? • A Web analytics tool cannot account for all revenue. • A sales cycle may disassociate revenue from valuable visitors. • Neither of the above factors consider visitors who almost buy. I Look to conversions It’s a good bet that more visitors convert than buy, so by counting converted visitors per keyword we get closer to a measurement of keywords that bring engaged visitors. I Time on site is your MVP Time on site measures your Web site’s ability to successfully retain each visitor’s interest. It’s also a good indicator of the synergy between the expectations visitors had before clicking to your site and how pleased they were with what they found once they arrived. I Combining volume, ROI, conversion and time But don’t look at I Test landing pages Rigorously test, measure and improve all aspects of landing pages, including layout, images, benefit statements, triggers, and the names and descriptions associated with your conversions. Do more people want to “View Product Information” or “Take a Virtual Tour”? I Simplify registration forms An important aspect of the landing time-on-site numbers in a vacuum. Take a holistic look at metrics, including ROI, conversion and volume to ensure you have an accurate picture of the value of each keyword and you aren’t wasting pay-per-click and SEO dollars. I PPC and natural search Even savvy marketers can inadvertently page is the registration form. Test at least three versions: short, medium and complex. Test various fields and form lengths. Lead volume must be balanced with lead quality. Improving the quality of leads can be accomplished with tighter ad distribution, more precise keywords, ad copy and landing pages that pre-qualify visitors. The challenge for BTB marketers is to strike a balance and find the online registration process that delivers the most leads at an acceptable qualification level. Follow these practical steps, and your Web site conversion rate will improve. Patricia Hursh is president/founder of SmartSearch Marketing, Boulder, CO. Reach her at patricia@smartsearchmarketing.com. buy inappropriate keywords, over-promise in their ad messaging and under-deliver on their landing page. Measure PPC ad effectiveness for each keyword separately from natural search listings. A good Web analytics tool will show these metrics side by side for all measurements. It’s a sign of effective PPC advertising if your PPC ads deliver visitors with more time on site than your natural search engine listings deliver. Keyword success isn’t determined by one factor alone, so use a combination of metrics to increase your keyword success, your company’s ROI and your bragging rights. Michael Stebbins is vice president of marketing at ClickTracks, Santa Cruz, CA. Reach him at mstebbins@clicktracks.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE 46 CONVERSION » DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 How to experience a 50 percent drop in CPA with the right keyword strategy BY BRIAN LEWIS erhaps the most crucial part of any pay-per-click campaign is the implementation of a sound keyword strategy. Think of your keyword strategy as the foundation that supports all of the other elements of your pay-per-click campaigns. Many online marketers focus on building out their keyword list with every possible combination of words that might relate to their service or product. That’s a great start, of course, but to really ensure your campaigns will perform to their most profitable potential, it’s important to focus on creating the most “exact match” keywords and ensure that your ads don’t appear for terms not related to your products or services by utilizing negative keywords. P Brian Lewis Engine Ready Inc. A case study PENSRUS Corp., a leading provider of personalized and logo-branded pens, pencils and promotional products, experienced strong growth during the early and middle parts of the 2000s from its Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns. Early on, due to lack of competition in PPC, simpler bid changes and account management, it was easy for PENSRUS to manage the optimization of their campaigns in-house. However, with increasingly competitive pressures on bid prices and the added complexity of ad testing, day-parting and geo-targeting, it was becoming more difficult for PENSRUS to do an effective job of keeping its PPC campaigns profitable. PENSRUS hired Engine Ready in late 2005 to completely overhaul its existing search marketing campaigns and optimize the accounts to improve ROI. At the time, the average cost per acquisition was just under $150. One of the largest areas of opportunity that was quickly identified was improving the keyword strategy. And the most comprehensive source of information for directing Engine Ready’s keyword strategy was the Web analytics data available from the PENSRUS site activity. PENSRUS was using a marketing Web analytics application called Conversion Analyst to track click costs and online revenues by campaign source and keyword. Its search phrases report shows the exact phrases visitors searched that displayed the PENSRUS paid ad. Within 3 months after implementing exact match and negative keyword strategies, CPA dropped almost 50 percent from $150 to $80, while conversion rate increased 65 percent. Brian Lewis is vcie president of marketing for Engine Ready Inc., San Diego. Reach him at 9210brian@engineready.com. Boost ROI with the vertical advertising option BY CHRYSI PHILALITHES s the pay-per-click market continues to mature, a combination of vertical and horizontal networks have emerged. Understanding the differences and benefits of vertical advertising options can help generate a higher return on investment from online ad spend. Direct response advertisers have two main options when leveraging vertical advertising trends. A Vertical search engines The first option is advertising on a vertical search engine. These providers deal with specific business categories or verticals, such as automotive, health, employment or travel. Vertical search engines let advertisers fine-tune distribution to their target audience, as searchers are only looking for relevant products and services. Additionally, many vertical search engines offer more flexibility, such as a combination of display and PPC advertising. A drawback, however, is that ad distribution is focused on only the main vertical search engine with only a small (or non-existent) contextual network. Since search accounts for only a small percentage of users’ time spent online – as noted in a recent study by the Online Publishers’ Association which found that that 45 percent of people’s time online is spent on content sites compared to just 4.7 percent spent actually conducting searches – advertisers could miss out on potential visitors. Vertical PPC ad networks A second option is vertical PPC ad networks. Many PPC advertisers have divided their networks by vertical. This provides more targeted ad distribution. Vertical PPC ad networks tend to have more developed contextual networks than vertical search engines. This allows then to offer advertisers exposure on a wider range of content sites in the specifChrysi Philalithes Miva ic verticals they are targeting. It’s important to note that some PPC ad networks may be stronger in some verticals than others, depending on the types of Web sites they have distribution agreements with. It’s always best to run a test campaign and see how the network measures up for your specific vertical. 2 for 1 vertical ads Whether you’re advertising on a vertical search engine, vertical PPC ad network or both depends on the specific objectives of your campaign. Running ads across a vertical search engine and a vertical ad netowrk can get you closer to 100 percent online coverage for your individual vertical. Chrysi Philalithes is vice president of global marketing and communications at Miva, New Y Reach her at chrysi@miva.com. ork. ESSENTIAL GUIDE DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 « CONVERSION 47 Paid versus natural search: striking a balance BY JOHN SQUIRE Essential metrics in paid-keyword campaigns BY OLIVIER SILVESTRE etting the balance between paid search and natural search right can be a delicate operation. Get it wrong and you can waste precious marketing dollars. Get it right and you’ll reap maximum rewards in terms of conversion and sales. Keep it right and you’ll be the envy of the marketing organization. There are several common misconceptions about which tool is more effective as part of an online campaign, and here I’ll try to clear those up, while offering some solutions on striking the correct balance. The first thing to consider is John Squire that, unfortunately, there is no Coremetrics Inc. single magic bullet. Depending on the situation, on the product, on consumer behavior and on the campaign, there are reasons why paid search might be preferable to natural search at one time and vice versa. Or why a combination of the two might always be the best bet. But first, let’s clear up the myths surrounding search marketing. The first is that that you don’t need paid search if you’re already in the top 10 for natural search. Well, remember that SEO is a long-term proposition. It takes time for a site’s keyword optimization and other SEO features to begin lifting a site’s position on the search engines; and it can be a fickle mistress. Traffic is less reliable than with paid search. You also can’t control the message, timing or geographic targeting of natural search. Effectively, it is the “word of mouth” from the “spider.” Paid-search campaigns, conversely, have immediate effect. A site launched yesterday can attract traffic today with payper-click advertising. Paid search is timely and excellent for timesensitive, high-impact campaigns, and it fills in gaps left by SEO. Turning that on its head, let us look at the second common assumption: As a marketer, you do not need to bother with natural search because you can pay to get the top listings you need. Well, consider this: Numerous research studies on search-engine user behavior have found that users prefer organic listings to sponsored listings, clicking on natural listings 70 percent to 80 percent of the time. So it seems obvious that a blended approach of both paid and natural search is the way to go. But how can a marketer make conclusive decisions based on these assumptions and balance their search budget in the way that makes sense? The smart marketer will look to analysis to find the insight they need. Using Web analytics, you can easily find out how you’re doing in terms of visitors drawn from natural search. Look for a behavioral analytics solution that can help you benchmark against competitors. This gives you a clearer picture of how you should rebalance your budget to bring you up to speed with the competition. G eter Drucker, a management specialist, once said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” This nugget of wisdom also applies perfectly to today’s search-engine marketing activities. It is important to remember that measurement is relevant only if it is “actionable.” If no decision, no action or no change can be made based on your SEM metrics, then those metrics are considered to be ineffective. Metrics that can be acted upon — and therefore optimized — are effective metrics, and they are metrics you need to consider. Here are three key tips for actionable elements that make up SEM: P I Optimize landing pages This is a function of the landingpage and ad-text-copywriting mix. Based on the product a company sells or service a company provides for its clients, dedicated landing pages should be well planned and well designed for their respective and associated ad copy. The key measurement for these landing pages is the Single Access Visit ratio, or the percentage of visitors landing on these pages and leaving the site without browsing on any other Olivier Silvestre pages. If the ad copy is relevant Visual Sciences Inc. to what a company offers, and the landing page is consistent with the ad copy message, then the SAV should stay low as long as the landing page is not a final destination in itself, which is not recommended. I Optimize ad copy This is a function of ad-text copywriting and keyword purchase. Depending on what product or service a company plans to advertise, it should decide what will be featured on the landing page. As explained above, it is important that the ad copywriting be fine tuned and in line with the landing page value proposition (hence the SAV ratio). While maintaining a low SAV, the objective is to acquire as much traffic as possible at the lowest cost. Click-through rate and ROAI are the two key metrics to be aware of when optimizing ad copy. Assessing your SEM campaigns based on sales alone could lead a company to make unsuccessful onlinecampaign decisions as sales transaction is not the sole criterion. I Optimize purchased keywords When starting a new SEM campaign, an effective strategy is to purchase broad keywords or keyword phrases in broad match at low cost. Doing so helps search-engine marketers discover the keywords that people type in when they search by looking at Web analytics reports. Measurement will further help to understand which typed keywords perform the best, based on CTR and ROAI, triggering the purchase of these discovered keywords in phrase match or exact match searches and efficiency. Olivier Silvestre is director of optimization consulting at Visual Sciences Inc., San Diego. Reach him at osilvestre@visualsciences.com. John Squire is senior vice president of product strategy at Coremetrics Inc., San Mateo, CA. Reach him at jsquire@coremetrics.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE Local Search LOCAL TOC Page 48 Meeting customer needs with local search, by Robyn Rose, Superpages.com L H Page 49 Local search evolves painfully but shows promise, by Dana Todd, SiteLab International Inc. The online advertisers’ task list, by David Reeve, WebVisible Inc. ocal search, which lets consumers easily find “where information,” such as street addresses, city names, postal codes and geographic coordinates for local businesses, is a growing area in the search arena. This section includes articles about local search from thought leaders covering Internet yellow pages and obstacles and opportunities for advertisers in the space. 2005, 76 percent of Web shoppers said they used product reviews when they shopped online. Superpages.com began offering user reviews in 2005 to enhance local content surrounding service-based businesses. User reviews are an Robyn Rose extension of word-ofSuperpages.com mouth marketing and, when read by consumers, help drive a consumer’s buying decision. Personalization features provide consumers the opportunity to tailor the local site to their tastes and preferences. It simply means localizing the home page to the user’s home location or remembering their last viewed theaters, apartments and bridal shops, where localized sites can then offer movies, movers and florists, respectively, upon a return visit. Customizing the content provides the user with a more personalized experience and a reason to come back to the site. Consumers are not always motivated to personalize sites they visit. Less than 10 percent of online consumers personalized non-portal sites, according to Forrester. Registration also poses problems for collecting content. When writing reviews, a portion of reviewers do not complete the task when asked to register or login. Mass personalization enables a site to tailor results to consumers without requiring registration. Consumers are searching for more local content from online providers, and bringing together user-generated content and personalization helps meet their needs and make buying decisions easier. At the intersection of IYP and local search, traditional players are constantly evolving, adapting and innovating. Robyn Rose is vice president of marketing at Idearc Media Group’s Superpages.com, Dallas. Reach her at robyn.rose@idearc.com. Meeting customer needs with local search BY ROBYN ROSE istorically, Internet yellow pages providers have been category-based providers of local listings, while search engines return mass Web results. Today, we are at an intersection where consumers are searching for more local content, regardless of whether it’s through an IYP or search engine. According to Forrester Research, Google might dominate Internet search from both the consumer and advertising perspectives, but it’s far from being a leader in the highly fragmented localsearch market, where different players are emerging as leaders for different types of local search and at various points in the buying process. A search engine will provide results of businesses that have a Web site, whereas as an IYP will deliver results for all local small businesses with or without a Web site. Search engines have started to be more inclusive with the results they are providing, but they still lack the local sales force and the comprehensive business listings that IYPs offer. The goal is to determine how IYPs and local search providers can meet consumers’ needs. Current consumer needs fall at the intersection of IYPs and local search, and the winners in local search will find a way to adapt to those needs. But how can providers offer a locally focused site that has rich content, where the consumer experience is personalized without expecting the user to login, also provide results relevant to them? Some examples of how IYPs and online providers are starting to address those needs, include user-generated content and mass personalization. User reviews are the vehicles on Web sites such as Yelp.com and Angie’s List that enable users to comment on products, services and experiences. In DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 « LOCAL SEARCH 49 Local search evolves painfully but shows promise BY DANA TODD ocal search seems to be forever poised on the edge of greatness despite being touted as The Next Big Thing in terms of growth and spending. Kelsey Group estimates local online ad spending to hit $11.1 billion by 2011. SEMPO announced in 2006 that more than half of advertisers reported positive results with locally targeted search ads. And with the promise of mobile advertising as the local search “killer app,” we’re promised a surge in local advertiser investment. Yet both publishers and advertisers struggle with the buy as many express frustration in getting the “last mile” fully monetized and optimized. So what are the obstacles and opportunities for advertisers? L reasons to spend time and money on enhancing a local presence, such as attracting local job applicants, supporting national ad campaigns at a retail/local level and getting access to mobile queries. I SMBs are too busy to deal with PPC auctions Small to mid-size businesses are generalDana Todd ly understaffed and don’t have SiteLab International Inc. a dedicated interactive marketing staff. CPA buys would seem to be the answer. Local advertisers can pay per call or per lead. But even this approach has limitations. For one thing, most small companies don’t have adequate site tracking or lifetime-customer value tracking (or event rudimentary CRM), so they can’t properly value what to pay per action. And because more than half of local customers will “convert” offline or cross-channel, CPA vendors are leaving money on the table. All concerns aside, it appears that local search is close to hitting its stride. There is a bevy of users seeking local information, with more than 100 million queries a month having local intent, according to comScore. I Local search is underdeveloped Users are still finding local search to be a frustrating experience. For local advertisers, controlling ad spend is limited to the effectiveness of the search engines’ ability to properly target for us. Given the relatively low volume of most local campaigns, targeting is inexact and many local search ads go un-shown and un-clicked. I National/global advertisers ignore local search National brands often overlook their local opportunities, assuming that their national and global buys are sufficient. But there are many Dana Todd is co-founder and principal at SiteLab International Inc., San Diego. Reach her at dana@sitelab.com. Online advertiser’s task list BY DAVID REEVE • 16 percent contact a vendor by the e-mail address on a site. • 11 percent contact the vendor via a form on a site. I Advertise my Web site n 2006, WebVisible hired Nielsen//NetRatings for a benchmark survey examining Internet consumers’ use of search engines to find local businesses, particularly those in the service industry, such as dentists, plumbers and carpet cleaners. The insightful results explained how consumers behave today and how local businesses can position themselves to succeed online. David Reeve I’ve packaged the data below WebVisible Inc. for you as an “Online Advertiser’s Task List” for an easy cut-and-paste into your Outlook Tasks. As consumers change the way they shop, it’s vital to your business to change with them. I Having a Web site is not enough. Just like your business, you must advertise your Web site to reach consumers. There are many ways to do this, and I advise you to use them all. They include pay-perclick, banner advertisements, search-engine optimization and business-profile landing pages. • 70 percent report using search engines to find a local service. • 90 percent are happy when using engines to find local businesses. I Track my off-line conversions Many small businesses don’t make a connection between their Web site’s visitors and those that call or visit the business. The majority of consumers find your business online, then make a purchase off-line. You may not know it. It is important to connect these behaviors in order to better understand the customer’s experience. • 35 percent saved the phone number after visiting the site. Using these three simple tasks will drastically improve the way customers find you, contact you and measure the effectiveness of your advertising efforts. David Reeve is marketing manager at WebVisible Inc., Irvine, CA. Reach him at dreeve@webvisible.com. I Enable my Web site visitors to contact me Consumers use up to four different methods to contact you. Presumably, your Web site should be ready to handle these different methods in contact. How does your Web site stack up to these consumer behaviors? • 68 percent use the phone number on a site to contact a vendor. ESSENTIAL GUIDE Search 2.0 SEARCH 2.0 TOC Page 50 Going Web 2.0, by Robert Murray, iProspect earch 2.0 refers to the growing category of merging search-engine marketing and search-engine optimization with blogs, RSS feeds and social networking. In this section, there are articles by thought leaders on Web 2.0, social-media channels that bolster search presence, PPC in a Web 2.0 world, video search engines and “searchandising.” S Page 51 Four channels to bolster your search presence, by David Berkowitz, 360i LLC PPC in a Web 2.0 world, by Bryan Brickley, Searchfeed.com Going Web 2.0: actionable advice for marketers BY ROBERT MURRAY Page 52 The e-mail newsletter: a key weapon in your SEO arsenal, by Loren McDonald, J. L. Halsey Five ways to optimize for video search engines, by Gary Baker, ClipBlast Page 53 Using ‘searchandising’ to satisfy and keep customers, by Shaun Ryan, SLI Systems Putting mobile search trends in context, by Anne Baker, Action Engine all it “social networking” or “social search” or “Web 2.0.” Whatever you call it, the bottom line is that it’s all about the influence of online communities on your brands, products or services. Given the power of this medium, marketers need guidance on moving forward. To succeed in this space, there are certain rules you need to be aware of and follow carefully. Below is some advice derived from a recent study on social networks sponsored by iProspect and conducted by JupiterResearch. C Robert Murray iProspect self-promotional content; others are less strict. Before deciding on how you will participate, spend enough time on the site to gain and understanding of what is and isn’t tolerated by its community. Once you understand the code of conduct, it’s safe to proceed. I Embrace the good with the bad Somewhere I Identify the community Social-networking sites have communities of users who frequently visit them, read the latest user-generated content and perhaps add some content of their own in the form of comments, tags or rankings. To assess a site’s viability as a marketing channel, marketers should explore each social-networking site individually to gain a sense of the unique traits, temperament, likes, dislikes and culture of its community of users. Once you have a sense of the community’s profile, determine how closely it matches the profile of the prospects targeted by your other marketing efforts. I Learn the code of conduct Also unique to each site’s community is its attitude toward and tolerance of brand/product participation within their community. Some social networking sites allow the placement of display, search or contextual ads on the site; others don’t. Some allow the posting of links to commercial Web sites within their user-generated content; some don’t. Some closely monitor their site for anything that smacks of on the Internet, someone has undoubtedly posted something negative about or your brand, product or service. When this happens on a Web site that allows you to engage in a dialogue with its community, it provides a great opportunity for you to redress the issue and to make a positive impression upon that community without being at all commercial or even self-promotional. Just be sure to identify yourself as a representative of your company (honesty and transparency are key), acknowledge the criticism and respond without being defensive. Also clearly explain the steps that are being taken, or what facts exist, to remedy the object of the negative content. Finally — it should go without saying — make sure you follow through on any of the actions that you promised. Or else you’ll pay the consequences. That may include the community reacting even more negatively. These are some of the important first steps to successful social marketing. Follow them, and you’ll be off to a good start. You’ll find this new medium to be powerful indeed. Robert Murray is president of iProspect, Watertown, MA. Reach him at r.murray@iprospect.com. DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 « SEARCH 2.0 51 Four channels to bolster your search presence BY DAVID BERKOWITZ I Tagging By allowing consumers earch marketing and social media can reinforce each other’s value when planned in conjunction with each other. Here is how retailers can use four social media channels to improve their visibility in search engines. S I Blogs Search engines love blogs for several reasons: Blogs are usually frequently updated with content that’s relevant to specific topics and queries; their architecture is full of the appropriate headers and tags that are easily spidered; and blogs with any following tend to constantly have new links pointing to them. Marketers can benefit from blogging, but they can reap additional rewards by reaching out to other blogs about seasonal promotions, new site features or other content that they may host on their site. One effective strategy is to offer bloggers your own Web widgets, lightly branded applications to share video, games or other content that can be posted to blogs, social network profiles and sites. I Wikis The model for Wikipedia can be replicated on a smaller scale on retail sites, where consumers all contribute content around a certain theme. Some consumer brands are already taking part. T-Mobile and Motorola, for example, both have wikis that create communities around particular products. David Berkowitz 360i LLC to tag existing content with preferred keywords, retailers can offer descriptors or meta data to products and Web pages. And by making it easy for consumers to tag content with social-bookmarking sites, you create more inbound links. Tagging builds a folksonomy, a consumer-generated taxonomy, and reviewing consumers’ tags offers revealing research. I Video Commercials or other video assets should be embedda- ble on other Web sites to encourage links back and deeper engagement. Retailers are increasingly resembling online publishers, and there are countless ways for any retailer to offer relevant video content on thier sites. A clothing retailer can offer behind-the-scenes footage of a fashion show, or an electronics retailer can post entertaining product demos. Tying this back into blog outreach, marketers can share these videos and continue to spread the word they want to get out. These are four social media marketing strategies to consider. What all have in common is that they work best as an integrated part of any campaign, like SEM itself. David Berkowitz is director of emerging media and client strategy at 360i LLC, New Y Reach him at dberkowitz@360i.com. ork. PPC in a Web 2.0 world BY BRYAN BRICKLEY other travelers.” This will help not only drive traffic but also increase consumer engagement, a key component of Web 2.0. I Monitor topics that are being raised through reviews or forums he growth of user-generated content is changing the way brands interact and engage with customers. Successful communications in today’s Web 2.0 world are increasingly based on establishing and maintaining a two-way dialog. Building UGC elements into an online strategy is only one piece of the jigsaw, however. The key is to drive Bryan Brickley people to those pages to kickSearchfeed.com start the dialog. Forward-thinking marketers are increasingly using pay-per-click as a tool for achieving this, and it is one of the many ways that marketers are using pay-per-click beyond pure customer acquisition. So what are the tips marketers should consider when using PPC to help underpin Web 2.0 strategies? T on your site. As themes emerge, start to tactically develop PPC ads that relate directly to those themes. The aim is to leverage the hot-button topics that users themselves are defining to capture the interest of other like-minded people. Your customers, in essence, help drive your communications strategy. I Ensure ads are deep-linked, just as with any campaign. This is particularly important for UGC areas of sites that will quickly become content rich and be hard to navigate as a result. Taking the travel example again, if you are highlighting reviews of a particular hotel in your pay-per-click ads, ensure you deep-link to the page that includes reviews for that specific hotel rather than just your review landing page. I Consider ad placement by remembering that with Web 2.0 it is all about tapping into consumers’ desire to share their experiences. Reaching people when they are in that mind-set is often more effectively achieved on content sites when people are reading related articles and are therefore more likely to click through to your site to read more and to comment. As a result, the contextual networks should be at the heart of Web 2.0 PPC strategies. I Use keywords and ad creative to highlight the Web 2.0 features on your site. If you are a travel site, for example, bid on terms such as “travel blog” or “travel reviews” to capture consumer interest. Build those same elements into your ad creative as well with phrases such as “read vacation reviews” or “reviews from Bryan Brickley is general manager of Searchfeed.com in Bridgewater, NJ. Reach him at bryan.brickley@searchfeed.com. 52 SEARCH 2.0 » DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 The e-mail newsletter: a key weapon in your SEO arsenal BY LOREN MCDONALD through to a Web site version optimized with keywords in subheads or secondary titles following a colon or dash. I Review your e-mail click- ontent is still king. Optimize your online content and you are bound to see a significant increase in traffic and conversions as a result of improved organic search rankings. And if you’re a business-to-business company or invested in building a brand, a simple but often overlooked way to increase your keyword rankings is to optimize the content of your e-mail newsletter. If you follow current best practices, you’re already posting your full newsletter articles to your site, where recipients will click through to read them, along with other content, over the few days following distribution of the e-newsletter. These posted, optimized articles will continue to generate significant traffic for years as a result of organic searches. So, how to get started? Think about important keywords, phrases and crosslinks that would help with SEO and develop the newsletter content and article titles around them. Initially, this can feel a bit challenging as you try to balance using action words used to get readers to open your email or click a link and optimizing headlines that target specific keyword phrases. C through rates, Web analytics and internal search data to determine topics and keywords for future articles. keywords Optimize articles and pages specifically written around less competitive but important phrases to return a higher ranking. I Break up the newsletter Always post and optimize a complete Loren McDonald J.L. Halsey Corp. I Target second- and third-tier Web version of your newsletter, but also divide it up by placing all of the articles, tips and other content individually on the site in a resource center or similar area. I Follow SEO basics Optimize article URLs, title tags and links Consider these tips, too: I Use a teaser and optimize your titles and headlines for keywords Use motivating subject lines, titles and one to two paragraph “teasers” in the e-mail to motivate readers to click to reflect your targeted keywords. Incorporate crosslinks to related articles on your site, and link previous articles and newsletters to your freshly posted content. Loren McDonald is chief marketing officer of J.L. Halsey Corp., Menlo Park, CA. Reach him at loren.mcdonald@jlhalsey.com. Five ways to optimize for video search engines BY GARY BAKER 60-by-60, 80-by-80 or 100-by-100 pixels. • Publish date — typically the day you actually publish. • Link — spell out and include the URL where a video resides. I Register your site with video search engines If you create s the video Web rapidly emerges as the largest video-distribution platform in history, it is imperative that search engines can find your videos as easily as they can find your other Web content. Because video search is a completely different animal than traditional text search, take these Gary Baker five steps to help video search ClipBlast engines find your clips: A good metadata, any video search engine worth its salt should eventually index your content. However, you can speed things up by registering with specific video search engines. I Create a media RSS feed RSS is the preferred way for most video search engines to index and update your video content. The media RSS format uses standard fields to categorize content, virtually ensuring quality metadata. When video search engines have access to your RSS feed, they instantaneously get new video content as soon as you add it. I Have a robust library of video content Having a large library I Create quality metadata for each video you post Video-search engines use metadata to index, categorize and rank video content. The most important metadata are: • Title — accurately describe your video in 40 characters or less, using upper- and lowercase letters for optimal readability. • Description — explain exactly what users will see, emphasizing the keywords and terms for which people might search. • Categories, tags or keywords — specify any and all relevant terms for which users are likely to search. • Image — include a visually descriptive thumbnail, typically of video content, as apposed to just a clip or two, is one of the ways you can set your site apart as a serious video content provider that ranks high in search results. I Post several clips with related video content If you post more than one video on a similar topic, video search engines will leverage your other content to make “more like this” recommendations. This will help to drive up your overall viewership and bring in more traffic. Gary Baker is founder and CEO of ClipBlast, Agoura Hills, CA. Reach him at gary@clipblast.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 « SEARCH 2.0 53 Using ‘searchandising’ to satisfy and keep customers BY SHAUN RYAN ustomers have high expectations in the online world, and retailers are learning that to be successful they need every advantage to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Clever marketing tactics can drive traffic to your site and entice people to click, but tacShaun Ryan tics alone are not enough. SLI Systems Consumers expect to find what they are looking for quickly, and providing relevant search results is imperative for the success of an online business, for more reasons than you think. Savvy marketers are discovering that in addition to making it easier for people to quickly find the items they seek, a strong Web site search solution can be an excellent source of information about customers. Taking a close look at your site search data not only allows you to improve the external search but also enables you to make suggestions for additional products that might be of interest to your customers. By melding search data with merchandising techniques, also known as “searchandising,” retailers can deliver search results that are most likely to lead to sales and use customers’ search activity as a way to merchandise specific products. In addition to getting customers the items they want as quickly as possible, retailers can cross-sell and up-sell other items that will likely interest them. One company that has had great success with online searchandising using our Learning Search product is Edwin Watts Golf, a leading golf merchandise and equipment retailer. Analyzing the keywords searched on its site allowed them to better understand their customers’ thinking. In one case, Edwin Watts Golf noticed that large numbers of site visitors were searching for golf head covers. At the time neither the Web site nor the stores sold the covers. The buyers were informed of that situation, and large purchase orders were placed for the site and the stores. They ending up selling every head cover they ordered. Because Learning Search users can refine their browsing by manufacturer, category, price range and size, analytic reports indicate what visitors are looking for, what visitors are and are not finding, and category-based reporting providing insights into search behavior within specific sections of the Web site. Without question, the quality of search results and user feedback is directly related to the success or failure of an online business. Next-generation search tools allow marketers to be more targeted, deliver more appropriate results, better merchandise and promote products, increase sales and ultimately ensure an online visitor becomes a regular customer. C Putting mobile search trends in context BY ANNE BAKER e all love the concept of mobile search. For today’s busy mobile professionAnne Baker al, it is reassuring and convenAction Engine Corp. ient to have all the information the Internet can hold just a few mobile-phone clicks away. Unfortunately, the reality of mobile search is that to date it has failed to live up to consumer expectations, primarily because vendors have forgotten the key when it comes to any kind of online search: relevance. The good news is that most of the major search providers are embarking on new ways to grow beyond simple WAP-based search engines to deliver a more contextually aware mobile search experience to the consumer. Using Yahoo’s recent launch of the Yahoo Go mobile ondevice portal service and their oneSearch service as a case study, we can highlight several new trends emerging in the mobile search market that offer a positive outlook for the consumer. W I Location, location, location The new Yahoo oneSearch service is designed to take into account both the location of the phone and the context of the search request. It then presents the results in a contextually sensitive manner that is targeted to meet the requested need of the consumer. By collecting and using the information available through the phone, including GPS data, contact information and user preferences, mobile search vendors can offer an experience that is both useful and personalized to the consumer. I Advertising that adds value Advertisements in the Yahoo Go service are contextually sensitive to the consumer’s query. For example, if a consumer is searching for pizza in New York, they could conceivably find a link to call Famous Ray’s and place their order. Inserting ads where they are meaningful and relevant to what the consumer is looking for is going to be a critical design feature of any mobile-search service going forward. I Permanent branding on the phone By developing the Yahoo oneSearch service as a downloadable on-device application, the company is able to deliver much deeper search functionality than a simple mobile search Web site can offer. This makes it easy for consumers to access and use the service and keeps the Yahoo brand prominently displayed on the phones that their customers carry with them every day. It is a smart strategy to achieve premium brand awareness and to drive greater uptake from consumers. I’m sure we will see more search providers deploying their own on-device mobile search applications soon. Shaun Ryan is co-founder/CEO of SLI Systems, Cupertino, CA. Reach him at shaun.ryan@sli-systems.com. Anne Baker is vice president of marketing for Action Engine Corp., Bellevue, WA. Reach her at abaker@actionengine.com. ESSENTIAL GUIDE 54 FEATURE » DM News • Essential Guide to Search 2007 Q&A BY MELISSA CAMPANELLI A conversation with Danny Sullivan DM News: How would you describe Search 2.0? And, are we entering the world of Search 3.0? If so, how would you describe it? DS: I don’t know if there’s a Search 2.0 that corresponds to Web 2.0 [which refers to refers to a perceived second generation of webbased communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users]. Search has already had two generations: the use of on the page criteria to rank, then the dependence on links. So we’re at Search 3.0, really — depending on user data to create personalized results (as Google is doing) or new interfaces, such as Google’s Universal Search or Ask’s dramatic Ask3D. DM News: Advertisers, while thrilled by the click throughs, are worried about rising keyword prices and the incidence of click fraud. Should they be? DS: Click fraud continues to be a worry, yet we’ve come through class action lawsuits without the industry being crippled or advertisers abandoning search. My gut is advertisers worry about click fraud more than they need to, though that’s not to say there is no click fraud or that they shouldn’t be diligent. It’s just that it might be a bigger problem than they imagine. As for keyword prices, as long as search delivers a high ROI, advertisers will pay — and pay more, robbing from other ad options that don’t perform as well. DM News: What are some current and future search engine optimization and search engine marketing trends that advertisers and marketers should be aware of? DS: Vertical search is relatively new tier in the Internet search industry consisting of search engines that focus on specific businesses] is a key trend to watch. Advertisers need to watch the vertical search results, both free and paid, because that’s where there’s often unmined opportunity. And social media sites are what I’ve called “kissing cousins” to search, in that they drive discovery visits, which can be very powerful at least from traffic and branding perspective. I or a thorough understanding of the past, present, and future of search engine optimization and search engine marketing, DM News turned to none other than Danny Sullivan, widely considered the leading “search engine guru.” For over a decade, Mr. Sullivan has been helping Webmasters, marketers and everyday Web users understand how search engines work. He began covering search engines in late 1995, when he undertook a study of Web page indexing. The results were published online as “A Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engines,” a pioneering effort to answer the many questions site designers and Internet publicists had about search engines. Positive reaction led to the expansion of of the guide into Search Engine Watch, Incisive Media’s Web site for search engine marketing news and information. Mr. Sullivan served as editor-in-chief there until November 2006, becoming the organizer of the Search Engine Strategies series of conferences and exhibitions. In a controversial move late last year, he left the organization and now heads up Search Engine Land as editor-in-chief. The following are some highlights form a discussion DM News had with Mr. Sullivan earlier this month. F DM News: Please describe your new endeavors. Where are you working now? What are you focusing on? Danny Sullivan: I’ve been keeping myself very busy building up Search Engine Land (http://searchengineland.com) into what’s become a new, fresh, must-read site about search and search marketing. I’ve also just come back from our first associated conference, Search Marketing Expo Advanced [June 4 marked the kickoff of Third Door Media’s first conference in Seattle as part of a series of seven already announced through 2008 chaired by Mr. Sullivan and Chris Sherman, the former associate editor of Search Engine Watch.]. Now we’re gearing up for other shows in the SMX series, such as Local & Mobile, Social Media and our first international event in London. producing quality panels and sessions people expect from us. In addition, we’re especially putting attention to ensure there’s a great networking and conference “ Click fraud continues to be a worry, yet we’ve come through class action lawsuits without the industry being crippled or advertisers abandoning search.” Danny Sulivan Search Engine Watch ESSENTIAL GUIDE Our Clients are easier to sp r s easier spot. pot. It’s simple idea in the Search Industry that far too many overlook. Provide sound, It’s a simple idea in the Search Industry that far too many overlook. Provide sound, quality strategies that get results. Commit to taking the lead in client satisfaction quality strategies that get results. Commit to taking the lead in client satisfaction succeed. It’s the value brings to every relationship. Our goal: help you succeed. It’s the value brings to every relationship. Our goal: help you substantially and consistently outsmart, outmaneuver and outperform the competition. substantially and consistently outsmart, outmaneuver and outperform the competition. .com Recognized by the industry’s most prestigious organizations and research firms. in ndustry’s d as one of the top ranked national as one of the top ranked national Search Engine Marketing Agencies (Advertising Age, Search Engine Marketing Agencies (Advertising Age, Search Marketing Fact Pack, November 2006) Search Marketing Fact Pack, November 2006) named the company an named the company an industry leader, specifically noting that its industry leader, specifically noting that its “ability to analyze campaigns for new clients “ability to analyze campaigns for new clients and effectively integrate data serves it well.” and effectively integrate data serves it well.” (JupiterResearch Search Engine Marketing Agency (JupiterResearch Search Engine Marketing Agency Constellation, August 2006) Constellation, August 2006) recognized the agency for its recognized the agency for its “clear focus on helping clients improve their “clear focus on helping clients improve their Paid Search and SEO results.” (The Forrester Wave: Paid Search and SEO results.” (The Forrester Wave: Search Marketing Agencies, Q4 2006, Forrester Research, Inc., Search Marketing Agencies, Q4 2006, Forrester Research, Inc., November 2006) November 2006)