ACCM 2008: Getting More out of PPC

The second search marketing intensive session at ACCM 2008 was all about how to maximize your PPC search engine marketing efforts. The speakers were Ryan Gibson of the Rimm-Kaufman Group and Glenn Edelman, VP of marketing at The Wine Enthusiast.

Much of the initial advice covered the basics of keyword research and calculating ROI, but there was also a wealth of detail in the presentation that you don’t usually hear in a typical PPC presentation. For instance, many people know that you have to track ad performance to determine the ROI sweet spot, but how far do you usually go with it? Do you track seasonality? Do you know the differences in ad performance according to day of the week? It’s this kind of analysis that can lead you to greater ad refinement and thus a better ROI.

A lot of people treat keyword research as an event, but it’s really a process, which the presenters instilled in the audience by showing that the search volume for a keyword plus the word review has gone up dramatically over time; people are increasingly using Google for product research. Keywords and search engine user trends evolve rapidly with time, so you have to keep an eye on search trends and regularly re-evaluate not only your keywords, but also your ad performance.

The session offered other excellent advanced details such as how to budget your advertising spend after you’ve determined your most valuable keywords — “As much as is profitable!” That sounds like obvious advice until you put it into the context of a typical, strictly limited business budget. If you’re doing more conversions and making more money for every dollar you put into your PPC campaign, why wouldn’t you keep plowing money into it until you reach a point where it drops off? I think a lot of marketers overlook that simple truth.

ACCM 2008: Reputation Management in the SERPs

If you haven’t had to deal with an online reputation management issue in the SERPs (search engine results pages) yourself, you probably know someone who has. Reputation management sounds like a vague marketing term, but it’s a burgeoning new area of SEO that encompasses monitoring what people are saying about you on the Web, combating negative or inaccurate information, influencing the sites you have control and sway over, and affecting sites’ search rankings to put your best foot forward in the SERPs. Maybe a few years ago you could have argued that the only companies that needed to deal with this issue are the ones that have a significant Web presence, but in this day and age, even mostly offline businesses have to deal with negative Internet exposure.

The presenters for the “Reputation management: Protecting your brand in search engines” intensive session at ACCM 2008 were Rob Key of Converseon; and Leo Odden of TopRank Online Marketing, and they had a lot of great advice for the attendees.

The first portion of the session dealt with how to find and keep tabs on the Web’s general opinions of you. In addition to the standard Google search, the presenters covered some unique reputation tools offered as standalone products, such as Andy Beal’s Trackur service, and as part of services (such as those that Converseon offers).

The next part of the session concentrated on how to combat negative blog and forum posts, and entire sites dedicated to directing angry comments at your company. Interestingly, the primary tactic the presenters recommended was traditional SEO — knocking the “bad” sites out of the top search results by boosting specific pages (ones that you control or have influence over) above them. The presenters also encouraged attendees to discover and leverage other Web sites that they may have some pull with, such as those controlled by friendly vendors, affiliates, colleagues, or personal friends.

The session ended with an overview of businesses that do well with reputation management and the tactics they use to maintain a positive SERP impression. eBay, for instance, uses a large number of category-specific subdomains to flood the SERPs with eBay-related sites that the company controls. So a search that involves the keyword ebay will be dominated by pages on eBay subdomains. eBay also leverages its network of sites to transfer link juice when necessary. And of course there were examples of companies that don’t do well with online reputation management, including PayPal (see the Google SERPs for “paypal” and feel their pain).

Overall it was a great session, the topic being particularly interesting and unique among the typical array of search marketing sessions at retailer/cataloger conferences.

Live Blogging ACCM: Increasing Web Sales on a Shoe String Budget

I’m here at ACCM in the session “Increasing Web Sales on a Shoe String Budget”. Here’s the session description:
As the cost of doing business online continues to increase, small businesses must be strategic and creative in how they expend limited funds and resources. This session will discuss ways to maximize your conversion and average order size without breaking the bank on expensive bells and whistles. Using solid web design, studying metrics and trends, taking advantage of strategic cost effective marketing and using strategic catalog mailings are all part of the frugal marketer’s playbook.

Mike Feiman of Pooldawg is up first. Pooldawg (a Netconcepts client, btw) was founded in 2003 and sells 2100+ pool cues. Pooldawg uses Google Analytics. Number of visits doesn’t really matter, it’s all about what they do while on your site. They are focused on visit length, visit depth, bounce rates, conversion rate. Have about 3000 pages total, fully indexed by Google, each page is a potential entry page. Very important to present a consistent feel throughout the site. Pooldawg buys PPC. Don’t get caught in bidding wars. Focus on the long tail. Drop keywords that don’t perform and focus on conversion and cost per action (CPA). They buy ads on Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing. By chasing keywords they cost per conversion skyrockets. “billiards” as a search term converts poorly. Long Tail is where it’s at. Brand names + pool cues convert much better and are cheaper. They constantly evaluate keywords, trying to get them to perform by ad copy tweaks and landing page tweaks etc. and if they still don’t perform, they drop them from their PPC keyword list. Mike says: I’m willing to pay $1 a click if it’s costing me $5 a customer, but not $1 a click if it’s costing $40 a customer. People who use their internal search convert at 4x higher rate than those who do not. Signed up with Celebros and conversion jumped from 4x higher to 6x higher. Look at the results for searches coming through and if the results are poor, do something about it. Added a “Related Searches” tagging feature, thanks to Netconcepts, put them on the product page, and people use them. That creates more pages for Google to index, and they’re seeing search traffic already coming in directly to these pages. They just launched this but it’s already returning ROI. Only 10% of visitors are using the internal search. It’s really about taking advantage of their current customers rather than throwing money at getting all new customers. In terms of guerrilla marketing… Participating on message boards is hugely valuable to Pooldawg. They talk to the board leaders who then communicate to the forum users, sponsor the message boards. With blogging, they haven’t quite found their voice yet. They write articles internally and get them syndicated. One of their most popular articles is “the Anatamy of a pool cue”, get tons of traffic to that page and it converts really well, so the ROI on the hour it took to write the article was great. Before site redesign done by Netconcepts, only 30% indexation in Google. Now 100% and they rank really high. Affiliate marketing is great for low cost customer acquisition. 6-8 % of total sales. 1000 affiliates, and only 100 really drive any real revenue for Pooldawg. 49% of traffic from natural search, 9% from paid search. 85 of their Top 100 terms are in the top 5 rankings in Google, 80 of the Top 100 in Yahoo. Natural search is very cost effective. Give users engaging tools and content. Pooldawg is building a very nice library of proprietary content – over 100 articles – will be adding video too. They partner with trusted names and steer away from the shadier players in their market. Sponsor the WPBA, BCA, GenerationPool.com, AZBilliards.com – associate themselves with trusted names.

Steve Spangler, “Chief Mess Maker” (CEO) of Steve Spangler Science. Shows off his flaming wallet and how they took him to a private room at the airport. Steve is the originator of the Mentos + Diet Coke geyser experiment. Showing off some video of him on the Food Network, on the Ellen Show, on Denver’s 9News. Hilarious! Steve originally moved from public speaking for generating revenue to the website to do so. In 2005 the Mentos geyser things started to take off. How do you leverage this into a business that supports 30 employees? How do you go from an obscure backyard demo to an Internet phenomenon in less than 12 months? (i.e. get to 2 million + views on YouTube). In 2004 he wanted a redesign with some Flash but Stephan said no he wouldn’t do that but Netconcepts would create a blog instead. On June 1 2004 this amazing traffic spike happened. It was a brief mention of Instasnow and Steve Spangler Science on the blog BoingBoing. Stupid.com puts Instasnow on their stupidest products list and it gets on Good Morning America. Turned lemons (“bad press”?) into lemonade by blogging “It’s great to be stupid!” The blog is a perfect place for all sorts of great stories and testimonials like how Instasnow got a teacher out of a speeding ticket. Really important to write attention grabbing headlines on the blog: not “200 teachers engage in inquiry based science” but instead “Parents Beware: Teachers Gone Wild”. Not “Science project about pulling microscopic meteorites out of your gutter” but instead “A meteorite hit my house!” The blog post that really launched the whole Mentos geyser phenomenon, video news anchor wearing a beautiful St Johns outfit got covered with Diet Coke: “News Anchor Gets Soaked! Mentos Experiment Sets a New Record”. Where else would he put the fact that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? called Steve and wanted to put a Mentos + Diet Coke question on air: the blog! Does the blog generate sales? Measured that and the answer is yes. Steve makes the Time 100 most influential people nominees list. Is blogging really worth the effort? It is! Currently blogging 2-3 times per week, have an editor helping find stuff to blog about. #1 in Google for “science experiments”. Big spike on Cybermonday. 3,000 inbound links. 4% of total traffic is from the blog, but 12% of sales are attributable to the blog! Now Steve is looking at expanding into Twitter. Amy Africa in the audience says: “I love Twitter!” but she’s being facetious. 1.8 million views on the Steve and news anchor Mentos + Diet Coke YouTube video. What should you blog if you want to make money: best-selling products, “Did you know?” product information loaded with keywords, company events – past and present, “Behind the Scenes” information, customer testimonials.

Ironic Google Ads Juxtaposed

I’m here at the ACCM conference. It’s been a fun show so far. Amy Africa’s session was hilarious and information-packed — awesome stuff! I presented on a SEM Lab (a site clinic) this morning. I was giving a tip to one of the site owners in the audience. Their most relevant keywords are very niche and hardly searched on at all. The more popular keywords weren’t really things that they offered, although those words were likely searches for their target audience. So I suggested they target these tangentially related keywords by offering a glossary of terms on their site. Each term, such as “market segmentation”, would have a page dedicated to it with not only a definition but also additional resources and links. Even better, they could make this glossary a wiki so that site visitors could add to and edit the definitions, thus encouraging visitor participation (i.e. “consumer generated content”!) and making the definitions more credible and more link-worthy because there was consensus from all the visitors. This really does work.

I showed the audience an example of this concept in action… specifically: SEO Glossary.com, a site that we at Netconcepts developed for marketing purposes.

We simply took a 12 page glossary of SEO terms that I used to hand out at conferences and turned it into a wiki. This site is ranked #1 and #2 in Google for “seo glossary”, among stiff competition, including Aaron Wall’s SEOBook. As I was explaining this in the session, I pulled up the SEO Glossary site and my co-panelists Matt Bailey and Detlev Johnson started laughing. I couldn’t figure out why they were laughing, so I had to ask. They told me: check out the Google ads on the page. On one hand, you have “Avoid SEO Malpractice: Know the Questions to Ask Your Prospective SEO Management Firm” and on the other you have the very dodgy sounding “Guaranteed Page 1 Ranking: Guaranteed Page 1 Rankings $49.95 No Charge Until You are on Page 1″. Oh the irony! It’s almost as if the first ad is referring specifically to its neighboring ad! I took a screenshot for posterity (the one shown directly above; the red arrow I added myself for effect )

An SEO “Contest” to Free Tibet?

Sometimes we in the search community get drawn into playful SEO contests where we compete with each other to rank for some nonsense phrase like “nigritude ultramarine.” That’s all fine and good, but it’s merely ego stroking. It doesn’t make the world a better place. What could we SEOs do for the greater good? One idea is we could help the Tibetans by raising awareness of their plight. And now would be an opportune time to do it, considering that the Olympics are right around the corner. As outlined in the SEOs for Tibet post on Changes For Good, the idea in a nutshell is to get SEOs to join forces and send a bunch of “link love” to a Tibet-related site like FreeTibet.org, in order to boost its rank in Google for “olympics” — thus raising awareness and perhaps spurring on demonstrations at the Olympics by attendees. For optimal results, the Tibet-related site would need to concurrently implement some on-page SEO as well and adopt “olympics” as a keyword theme on their home page.

An interesting idea? Does it have legs?

Art of the Link Bait

If you have been around social media marketing for any amount of time, you have heard the term “link bait.” It’s a great way to gain traffic, readership, and rankings — but what actually is it?

Link bait refers to something that grabs the attention of the blogosphere and makes people want to link to it from their blogs or tell their friends about it. It really can be just about anything, however, some link bait does better than others.

Two approaches that always seem to do well are controversy and humor.

The more simple piece to write, of course, is controversy link bait. Write something that a lot of people disagree with and you’re going to be talked about. Jason Calacanis is a master of this kind of link baiting. In my opinion you have to be careful how you use this tactic, as you can burn bridges much faster than you can build them.

Humor is a different animal. When you are trying to write a funny piece of linkbait, using humor you actually have to be funny — or at least more than just mildly amusing. I saw a great piece of humor link bait recently from Jane Copland and Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz: Google Search Results Missing from OneBox. I loved the search for “things rick astley would never do.” It was rather clever and funny. Now if only Google would actually return those mock results!

Other ways to bait for links include — tools (like blog plugins and browser addons), late-breaking news and scoops, original research, and photos that you’ve Creative Commons licensed.

Avatar Importance

When you sign up for just about any social network, you have the option to upload an image that will represent you. No matter what the social site, you’ll want to associate an image with your online identify. This image is your “avatar.” It’s your online persona. It’s the way the online community will see you. With it, your profile appears more real, more tangible, more human. A good avatar will help people relate to you as a fellow human being, to take notice of you, to remember you, and to listen to what you have to say.

Sure, you could choose not to upload an image, but why would you? Then you’d be a faceless user that no one remembers or identifies with – making gaining traction in the network much more difficult.

You don’t want to blend into the woodwork and be ignored, right?

Choosing your avatar doesn’t need to be difficult. Your image can be a simple picture of your face or just of something you like or identify with. Using the same avatar on many social networks helps brand you and helps people remember who you are. When people recognize your avatar across many platforms, they are more likely to want to be your friend and vote for your story submissions.

What avatar do I use? It depends. If it’s a persona that I don’t want necessarily tied to me / my company, then I go for an illustration – something distinctive. (No I’m not going to show any of them to you here.) If the profile is one I’ve associated with my own name, then I use this headshot photo of me:

A Hack for Getting True Google Indexation Numbers?

I don’t have much faith in Google’s (or any other engine’s, for that matter) estimated number of results, and I’ve held this view for a long time. I believe it to be a wildly inaccurate number. If you think about it, why would a search engine put a lot of effort or processing power into really nailing that number, since searchers (with the notable exception of SEOs) could care less if there are 100 thousand results or 100 million results returned; they only really care what’s in the top 10. So it’s fraught with problems to use the estimated number of results as a basis for any SEO metrics. Yet SEOs use the number all the time, for things such as: indexation (a site: query), link popularity (a link: query), and keyword competition (e.g. KEI score, or Keyword Effectiveness Indicator).

If we can’t trust the estimated numbers for such metrics, then we should probably move on to find other SEO metrics that we can trust. Yet indexation remains a metric we should care about.

So how does one go about checking a site’s Google indexation levels without relying on the demonstrable inaccuracy of Google’s estimated results? Don’t expect it from Google Webmaster Central, although that would be nice. For Webmaster Central’s “Index stats” under the “Statistics” tab, you’ll only find links to Google SERPs for site:, link:, cache:, info:, and related: queries. I’d love it if the Webmaster Central team added reliable stats here that weren’t simply based on estimated results in the SERPs. If they did, it still wouldn’t provide me with trustworthy indexation numbers for sites of which I’m not a verified owner/webmaster. I’d need another solution.

At this point the only solution I can think of for getting an exact count of your indexation in Google is to query for each individual URL, then sum all results together. You’d have to write a script to hammer away at Google — via the SOAP API if you’re lucky enough to have some old keys (Google discontinued offering websearch API keys), or by scraping the Google SERPs.

Remember: to check if a page is indexed in Google, don’t use the bare URL as the query, prepend it with cache: or info:. So, to see if http://www.ifloor.com/gs/cat-8-hardwood-floors-1.html is indexed, you’d query for “cache:http://www.ifloor.com/gs/cat-8-hardwood-floors-1.html“.

Avoiding Social Media Burnout

With the amount of time needed to stay at the top of the game in social media, it is inevitable that you will eventually burn yourself out. No matter how much you enjoy being on these sites, and no matter how good of friendships you have made, after a while it becomes tedious. This happens most often to the users who have been trying to become power users, and it continues to happen to the super stars.

So what is the secret to no letting yourself burn out? Taking breaks. This might sound obvious but, if you are like me, social media can become an addiction if you let it. You enjoy the social aspect and you love the traffic benefits… and you constantly want more. You get so caught up in it; everything you do online revolves around getting to the front page of your favorite site.

There is an entire world outside of social media (believe it or not ) and you need the real one as much as you need the virtual one. It might sound crazy, but this weekend I’m going to be out in the sun WITHOUT my computer. I suggest you try it sometime. I might send a Twitter update or two from my cell phone, but don’t count on it.

What’s the Big Idea?

I was speaking with a friend recently who was sharing with me a web site idea. Quite honestly the idea wasn’t the greatest or maybe I just wasn’t that interested. Regardless, I have the same problem nearly every time someone tries to get me excited about their whizzbang new idea – they don’t know how to pitch it to me and so they don’t reel me in.

What typically happens is that the person gets lost in the weeds – caught up in the small details such as what the site will look like or what they are going to call it. That isn’t what I want to hear. You need to be able to tell me three things:

1. What the site does (Technical)
2. Who it is for (Target Market)
3. Why it’s better than what’s out there (Competition)

You can have the best idea in the world, but if you can’t answer these questions you have a problem. All the other details can be filled in after this. Sure it’s nice to have a conception of what you want your site to look like, but if you’re not a designer you shouldn’t get too caught up with this because what you envision probably isn’t web friendly or practical.

If you have an idea that has you excited enough to go out and try and find funding or someone to join your endeavor, that’s fantastic. I don’t want to be a killjoy here, but do it right or don’t do it at all.