Pay Per Click Insider TipsBetter Pay-Per-Click Results Start Here – We Guarantee It!

Like AdWords, in Facebook the #1 factor governing your CPC is your Click-Through Rate (CTR).  While Facebook doesn’t reveal your ad or keyword Quality Score, you bet that it makes a huge difference. We have some ads that we bid $2 a click and end up paying 5 cents, while we have some ads bid at 20 cents, in which we’re paying 15 cents.

 Why?  CTR.  If you’re reading this, odds are that your CTR is in the 0.030% range or less–which will cause your clicks to be in the 75 cents range for US traffic.  But if you can get a 0.100% CTR, you might pay only 25 cents.  In some cases, you could hit a home run and get a 1.000% CTR and pay a penny a click for high quality traffic that converts.

Ok, so here are some principles to follow to increase your CTR:

1. Ask a question in the ad: Not only will this drive in-line likes (fans), but encourages participation. Consider asking them if they like you or the interest you’re targeting– but make sure you’re still relevant or you’ll be disapproved.
2. Write short ad copy: Sure you can use up all 135 characters in the body and 25 characters in the headline, but odds are that people won’t read it all.  This is Facebook– people are likely not conducting serious business, so make it light and easy.
3. Use a close-up face in your image: Smiling is better, as well as looking directly at you.  This is FACEbook, so use FACEs in your ads.
4. Personalize the image: If they’re a 45 year old white female in the Bible Belt, we’re not going to show an urban teenager rocking out. People usually convert better when the ad model is closer to them– the exception is dating and beauty products. Baby products can be like that, too.  Whatever the case, test it.  We know if they’re married or not on Facebook and can even guess their race– so that is something you can personalize the image with.
5. Capitalize a couple words: Saying FREE is not okay in AdWords, but we see it all the time in Facebook.  You might try it.
6. Use numbers and unusual characters: This works in regular PPC, too.  And if you make a claim– don’t say “We can help you save money on insurance.”  Don’t even say “We can save you 15% on your insurance.”  You need to be more specific– “Save 17.3% in just 3 minutes!”
7. Stimulate emotion:  ”You’ll be sorry.  That’s what you’ll say if you miss Portland Honda’s Labor Day blowout sale!”  Arouse curiosity. Message it as if it was a personal friend talking to a personal friend– “Doris, you wouldn’t believe the sale at Luckys on hotdogs this weekend.”  
8. Send users to your Facebook page: This is where custom tabs, especially a reveal tab or engagement app positively rules.
9. Follow through on the promise on the landing page: Almost nobody does right– if you see it done right, please let me know. In PPC, we know that we must tightly map the keyword to the ad to the landing page. That means if someone is looking for patio furniture, we don’t say “cheap furniture” and dump them on our home page.  But that’s what most folks do in Facebook- send everyone to exactly the same page, as opposed to differing landing pages based on what’s targeted in the interests and ads.
10. Dayparting: We run Facebook campaigns for a number of food companies.  I suppose you could promote breakfast foods at night, but why would you?  Consider how time of day may affect the messaging as well as the type of user you see.  For example, if you’re selling cold and flu medication, you might run ads between midnight and 6 am saying “If you were using X, you’d be sound asleep right now.”  By the way, dayparting is not a feature in Facebook yet, so we had to build our own.
11. Fan targeting: Once you have all these fans, you have to keep the conversation going.  The fan targeting won’t give you much volume, but I’ll bet it has the highest CTR of any ads you run.  It’s the equivalent of social retargeting.

There you have it–now go kick some CTR butt with these tips and let me know how they worked for you!

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 Dennis Yu is CEO of BlitzLocal, a firm specializing in Facebook and local advertising.

As a discipline, search engine marketing (SEM) is made up of several components, traditionally including both search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click marketing (PPC).  Internet marketing, however, is a game that is constantly changing.  With the rise of social networking and social media, it is critical that Internet marketers understand the impact of these channels on search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

Social Media as Content Distribution Channel

Previously, if a company or individual had a blog, post, or article they wanted to get noticed, they might concentrate on SEO, hoping to get better placement in the search engines and boost traffic, getting more people to notice their article.  These days, social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have become new ways of distributing, searching for, accessing, and interacting with content.

This is a trend that is not going to halt or reverse – currently, Facebook users share over 30 billion pieces of content, which includes web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, etc., each month.  Twitter has grown from about 5,000 tweets per day in 2007 to a reported 65 million tweets a day as of June, 2010; because of Twitter’s 140 character limit, many of these tweets contain embedded links to third-party websites.  While not social networks in the strictest sense, social bookmarking and content sharing sites like Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon also offer novel channels of distributing and searching for content outside of the traditional search engine.

While Google remains the most trafficked site in the United States, Facebook is already the 2^nd most trafficked, Twitter the 7^th, and LinkedIn the 17^th most trafficked in the United States; according to Alexa, Facebook is the top website in five countries.

How Does Social Media Impact Search Engine Optimization?

Twitter is now recognized as a legitimate information source and distribution channel – it is indexed by Google (tip- try typing in site:twitter.com into Google.  Over 100,000,000 pages are indexed) and the United States Library of Congress even archives all public tweets.  The social web is the future–Google knows this and, in order to stay competitive, Google has been and will continue to integrate social media assets into its search algorithm and search engine results pages.

While Facebook has long been more of a “walled garden” than Twitter, due to the higher privacy expectations of its users, you can’t afford to ignore Facebook’s impact on SEO.  There are two key things to consider when thinking about Facebook and search engine optimization: the first and most obvious is, “How does Facebook impact traditional search engines like Google and Bing?”.

But don’t ignore the second question–how do you optimize your website to appear in the search results WITHIN Facebook.  That’s right – if you haven’t noticed, when searching from within Facebook, after results from Facebook itself are displayed, “Web Results”, supplied by Bing, are also displayed.  This may not seem like a big deal right now, but you can bet that Facebook will continue to leverage its dominance in the social space to try to become a serious player in the search space.

Facebook’s Impact on Traditional Search Engines and SEO

Because this is such a new area and is continuing to develop, it is hard to gauge the direct and indirect impact Facebook and sharing content through Facebook has on SEO.  If your company has a blog or website and post links to that site on your Facebook, does this benefit your SEO?  If you integrate a “Like” button into your website, and visitors use it to share your content, does this benefit your SEO?

Directly – probably not – these links are running through Facebook and redirects, which likely eliminates any ‘link credit’ you might get.  But that said, it is nearly impossible to quantify the ‘indirect’ benefit to your search engine optimization efforts – that is, users who see your link, visit your site, bookmark it, tweet about it, email it to friends, and so on.

Key Tips About Social Media and Search Engine Optimization

• If your business doesn’t already have profiles on major social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), establish them now.  If you’re not on these services, users who search for you there won’t find you.
• Keep your profiles active – they’re not going to help drive traffic and improve your SEO standing if you’re not using these channels to distribute content.
• Don’t ONLY use social media as a distribution channel - one of the most powerful aspects of social networking is that it is bi-directional.  You’ll gain the most benefit by engaging users, not just throwing content at them.

Stay up-to-date.  The web and the technologies behind it are constantly changing.  Make sure you follow and understand developments at Google, Facebook, Twitter and how they impact your social media, SEO, and search engine marketing efforts. 

PPC Summit offers online training in areas including search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and social media marketing.

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Jason Mikula works as a freelance search engine marketing and social media marketing consultant.  He has experience working with pay per click, search engine optimization, and email and web marketing.

Google recently introduced a new keyword matching option in Google AdWords: modified broad match. As you can probably guess, modified broad match is similar to the traditional broad match option, but gives you a little more control as the advertiser. Let’s take a look at how this new option works. 

What is modified broad match?

Modified broad match is a new AdWords feature that allows pay-per-click (PPC) marketers to set keywords to a more targeted level than broad match, while still having a greater reach than phrase match or exact match keywords.

To use modified broad match, add a plus sign (+) in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. The word or words that are preceded by a (+) sign must appear in the user’s search query, exactly or in close variation. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations, acronyms, and stemmed forms.

The words that are not preceded by a plus sign may vary more significantly or not appear at all in the user’s search query, as with regular broad match.

This is potentially a very interesting and profitable opportunity for AdWords advertisers, as effective modified broad match keywords are likely to drive more traffic than phrase or exact match keywords, while attracting more qualified, targeted traffic than broad match.

What are some examples of modified broad match keywords?

Let’s start with the keyword “aromatherapy oils”—if this keyword was set to broad match, your ad might display in response to queries like “cooking oils” and “oil spill.” Not very targeted and not very good for your click-through rate, cost per click or Quality Score.

If you modify the keyword with a plus sign before “aromatherapy” (+aromatherapy oils), you’ll guarantee that only queries that include that word or close variations trigger your ad. For example, queries that trigger you ad might include:

• aromatherapy
• aromatherapeutic oils
• aromatherapy massage
• organic aromatherapy products

But your ad won’t display in response to queries like “massage oil.” As you can see, this gives you the ability to define your target audience much more closely, while still catching some interesting variants.

As another example, say your keyword is “anti wrinkle cream.” Set to broad match, your ad might show up in the results for queries like “wrinkle resistant pants” and “acne cream.” If you modify your keyword with plus signs like so (anti +wrinkle +cream), only queries with close variations of both “wrinkle” and “cream” will prompt your ad.

Hasn’t broad match always worked this way?

Originally, AdWords’ default broad match type was more restrictive than its current broad match feature. Close variations of your keyword could trigger your ad, but the field of possible queries that could trigger it was narrower. For example, the words in your keyword phrase could appear in any order, and along with any other words, but they all had to be there.

Eventually broad match became less targeted (as it is today), and many Google AdWords users complained. These advertisers felt that the change was allowing their ads to display against terms that weren’t relevant to their offerings, requiring them to develop extensive lists of negative keywords. Negative keywords are crucial for high return on investment when using broad match, but some users felt the new broad match was still too inclusive. For example, one user complained that “zebras near Chicago” showed up in his search query report for the keyword “widgets near Chicago.”

Now AdWords users can get the same control offered by the first version of broad match, but they also have the option to use today’s broader broad match.

How do I enable modified broad match?

In your AdWords account, click on the Keywords tab and select the keyword phrase you want to edit. In the Type column, click on the current match type and choose Modified Broad Match from the drop-down menu. Edit your keyword as necessary with (+) signs.

Is modified broad match is a good idea for my campaign?

Unless you are perfectly happy with your campaign performance given your current keyword settings, it’s a great idea to give modified broad match a try. If you’re mostly using phrase and exact match because you like to have more control over your keywords, you might find that modified broad match gives you a high degree of control while increasing your reach, impressions and clicks. If you’re mostly using standard broad match, you might find that enabling modified broad match on some of your keywords reduces wasteful spend on irrelevant traffic, and improves Quality Score and other key metrics.

As with any change to your AdWords campaign, be sure to keep close track of how your campaign performance evolves. Take note of how clicks, CPCs, conversion rates, and ROI change. Helpfully, Google lets you produce a performance report with information solely about your modified broad match keywords.

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Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream, a provider of PPC tools and an advanced keyword research tool to help PPC advertisers discover profitable head, mid and long-tail keywords.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We look forward to seeing you in September!

Kelly Larsen
Director of Marketing, PPC Summit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Kevin Newcomb, Editor, Internet Marketing Institute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Risk Gap

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

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

2. The Myth of the Funnel

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

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

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

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

3. The Buyer-Doer Gap

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

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

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

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

By Dennis Yu, The Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal

You may have read these HitWise numbers  on how Facebook has overtaken Google as the most popular site in the United States– now at 7.07% of all visits versus Google at 7.03%.  At 400 million users and 25% of all traffic (not visits), it’s not just teenagers anymore. Did you know that Facebook serves 150 million search queries a day? Industry estimates place Google at 250 to 400 million queries per day.

Thus, “search” is not a website– it’s a function that occurs across any site or application. Think of websites as vertical bars, while applications such as search, commenting, and user participation as horizontal slices that go across these sites.  Even the concept of a “website” is being blown away– note that most users of twitter are interacting not at twitter.com, but via a 3rd party tool or within another blog. Whether it’s @anywhere or even the APIs being released by CitySearch and Foursquare, it’s clear that there’s a increasingly shared data layer underneath these websites. Think of the sewer and electrical grid that is below Manhattan.

I had a chance to sit down with Alex Schultz, who runs online marketing for Facebook– he is also in charge of Facebook’s SEO.  He mentioned the concept of “interestingness squared, boringness squared”. Let’s say you have 500 friends and each friend, on average, has 20 things they do each day that could be shown in the feed.  Thus, with no filter, you would see 10,000 items in your feed on your Facebook homepage. Impossible to sort the noise on what’s important or most relevant to you.

Facebook must choose what to show, based on the influence of each user, their track record (are they spamming others or is their stuff being actively shared and commented on), and general “karma” FriendRank-like factors.  Thus, the things that are interesting get promoted in the social graph– to quickly become viral.  And things that are boring get buried, never to be shown in activity stream.

This morning, Facebook released some insights into how their search works.  It’s worth a read if you some time, but let’s just say that they’re serving personalized search results based on proximity (of the many “Jose Gonzales” in the world, show the one that has the most mutual friends in common), popularity, and context. I’m in Boulder today, so my search for cosmetic surgery here should ideally yield a different result than someone searching from Chicago.  Google’s Caffeine and the introduction of personalized results from your friends only starts to approach what happens on Facebook.

5,000 new businesses join Facebook each day.  Google has about 570,000 advertisers on AdWords. Do the math.  Who has the deeper relationships and has 50% of visits from users that log in at least once a day? Facebook is on track to hit a billion dollars in annualized revenue, if they haven’t already.

Are you using Facebook’s self-serve ad platform yet?  For the 2.5 years, we’ve treated Facebook PPC as another paid search channel, just behind Google, while ahead of Yahoo! and Bing.  And the results for Facebook lead gen and consumer product have been phenomenal.  They will continue to be so long as the territory is still new to advertisers and agencies– and clients understand that social media, properly targeted, and integrated with other channels, is quite effective.

Google has discussed that they’re incorporating social signals into ranking factors.  An article that a couple years ago might have generated 50 links might today generate 10 links and 300 mentions on twitter and Facebook.  Facebook now opening up pages to be indexed, along with many other previously private default options, means that you should be sending stronger signals in social media to influence search results not just on Facebook, but in traditional search engines, too.

So what does this mean for your business?

1. Create and pimp out your fan page immediately. When you get to 100 users, grab your vanity url at facebook.com/username. Get customers and friends to comment and participate regularly, knowing this can generate a viral effect, plus generate links to your fan page (links between pages are votes for Google, while fanning on fan pages are votes for Google).

2. Start testing Facebook’s PPC.  Run traffic to both your fan page and site, to build up a fan base and generate a viral effect. Use proper analytics and attribution, determine the effect of the “assist” on organic search traffic and direct traffic, much like a view-through conversion.

3. Run demographically targeted ads on the Google Content Network– this is a good proxy for what will work on Facebook and MySpace self-serve, given your display creatives and demographic targets are in alignment.

4. Focus more on offers and “interestingness”. Remember what Alex Schultz said about “interestingness squared” earlier? With the rise of local, social, and mobile games– or platforms like Gowalla that effectively are video games, make sure what you are saying doesn’t sound like a shameless ad.  Make it cool, interesting, or perhaps even offer a coupon.  Is it funny or shareable in some other aspect?

5. Begin reaping the rewards for being a first-mover. The spammers were first, but your legitimate brand is still early in the game. 

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Dennis Yu is an entrepreneur and internationally recognized lecturer in search engine marketing. Areas of expertise include search marketing technical analysis and pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign development and optimization. He is co-founder and chief executive officer of BlitzLocal, a Denver area firm that provides local search solutions for enterprises of all sizes. Dennis is also a regular speaker at leading industry events like AdWords Advantage Online Summit and the upcoming PPC Summit Presents…Search & Social Media Success.

By Brian Lewis, Vice President, Engine Ready

As chaotic as the continual transformation inherent in online marketing seems, there is a comforting constant that marketers can count on: Customer purchase decisions are still, and will always be driven by the emotional desire to fulfill various needs.

Customer research behavior leading up to the purchase, though, is not so neatly predictable and is largely influenced by information accessibility, market messaging and social commentary, all of which are changing at incredible paces. And there are many reasons to expect that pace to accelerate in 2010.

As 2009 comes to a close, most marketers agree that it was a period marked by unprecedented uncertainty and fear in an atmosphere of slashed marketing budgets. All marketing initiatives were held to strict ROI accountability.

As we look forward to the prospects of a healthier 2010, here are 4 key areas that will likely impact search for 2010 – Marketing Sophistication, Insightful Measurement, Role of Social & Rich Media, and Industry Evolution.

Marketing Sophistication
Although previously considered by some search marketers as a lower priority task, landing page testing and optimization will become as routine to PPC success as rigorous keyword research. The ongoing enhancements of Google’s free and easy to use A/B and multivariate testing solution, Website Optimizer, removes all the cost and technology barriers for even the smallest organizations.

Marketers will also be able to learn more about their visitor behavior through greater access to visitor experiential tools. Armed with this information, marketers will be able to refine their landing pages based on understanding on-page visitor behavior such as eye tracking, mouse movements, page scrolling and the order of clicks on a page.

As the search engines continue to evolve into “information engines”, marketers should look for opportunities to best position their products. We can certainly expect Google to continue to increase integration of maps, product information, site page listings and site search boxes within its organic listings.

The display of PPC listings will likely expand beyond 70 text characters to include other media such as video, product demos and product images, allowing companies the opportunities to flex more marketing muscle.
Despite privacy concerns, we will continue to see the increased availability of demographic and behavioral data of search engine users, allowing marketers to more finely tune their search tactics on a more granular level.

Local search will also become more dominant. Firefox’s Geode and Google’s Location API which allow sites to request your browser location, are strong indications of the importance visitor location will play in search.

Insightful Measurement
Conversion attribution, defined as assigning the appropriate credit to all marketing sources that eventually led to a sale, has been one of the hottest topics of the year as marketers come to grips with the limitations of our current “last-click” reporting. 

The assumption that the last click was the only source responsible for the conversion can certainly lead to wrong campaign and keyword management decisions.

The good news is that we are already seeing the earliest versions of conversion attribution solutions which will give marketers a much more accurate picture of the real ROI for SEO, PPC email and other online marketing initiatives.
Much like conversion attribution, accurate measurement of call-in sales due to search listings will be another area that will quickly become a standard tool for search marketers. Most traditional web analytics do not currently have a method for tracking sales or leads received via a phone call after a visit to a website. In 2010, call tracking will become a vital internal component of analytics and provide marketers accurate measurement of call-in conversions from visitors who arrived on the site from a PPC ad, organic listing, banner ad or email.

Social Marketing, Social Networks and Rich Media
Traditional search and social media marketing will accelerate their convergence with more dramatic impacts on search marketing tactics in the upcoming year. In addition to its growing use as a micro-blogging tool, Twitter and social search sites like CrowdEye and Collecta are also now being used to search and research news, events, and product reviews.

Applications such as SocialSeek allow users to search by topic and optionally by location to receive results in the form of tweets, videos, blogs, images and events. These newer methods may provide opportunities for search marketers looking to extend their reach and better target their audience.

YouTube, which in some respects qualifies as the second largest search engine, is an area marketers will continue to focus on to seek more potential customers. The technology to understand embedded audio content is advancing rapidly and will likely be incorporated into the ranking algorithm before the close of 2010.

Throughout the upcoming year we will likely a shift from emphasizing keywords and bids, to marketing to communities of potential prospects who may seek information on your products/services through their interest-centric groups.

Industry Evolution
Perhaps the development that may transcend all others is the Yahoo & Bing partnership. Assuming anti-trust approval, the partnership will aggressively innovate in an attempt to change the search habits of about 65% of Internet users who are loyal to Google.

Expect to start seeing the impact of their alliance early in 2010 and be prepared for some major changes on both the paid and organic side of search.

And combining those changes along with the others discussed will place marketers under significant pressure to identify which tactics are right for their products, learn those new tactics, cost effectively implement, accurately measure, rapidly analyze and modify their strategies to achieve top ROI in 2010.

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Brian Lewis is Vice President at Engine Ready, Inc. A speaker at many industry conferences, and noted author, Lewis has over 20 years experience bringing businesses profitable results through digital and direct marketing. Mr. Lewis earned his B.A. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego and his M.B.A. in Finance from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, graduating both schools with honors.

Drive Best-in-Class Results by Integrating Your PPC with Other Online Marketing Channels

By Mary Huffman, Ionic Media

In the first two articles in this series, we reviewed a variety of online marketing vehicles:

• Pay-Per-Click search marketing (PPC)
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Display advertising (e.g., banners)
• Email (to house list)
• Mobile
• Online PR
• Blogging
• Viral /social media
• Email (to rented list)
• Affiliate marketing

Now that we have looked at each marketing vehicle individually, we would like to explore why you should and how you can effectively integrate your PPC marketing with other online media.

First: The Big Kahuna of Integration: PPC and SEO
• People regularly ask us which type of search marketing they should use to drive site traffic and the answer is, “Both.”
• Having multiple listings on the same keyword is mutually reinforcing (people believe you must be relevant!).  So, users end up clicking more than if you had only one PPC or organic listing.  The result is that you get more than your fair share of clicks
• PPC works now, you can control it, and you can always run it profitably – even if it does require cash outflow
• Organic works over the long haul, brings in targeted traffic cheaply, but is not controllable

Second: Integrate PPC with Your Brand Building Efforts
• While it is an effective online vehicle, PPC is not a demand generator so you have to drive demand with other media
• That said, PPC is great as the “catcher” of other efforts to drive demand
• Use display advertising, PR, e-mail, and offline to drive buzz and generate demand
• Ensure PPC is in place to capture all of the opportunity you have created with the other media
• A very large company (to remain nameless) ran an expensive Super Bowl ad but failed to integrate it with a search campaign.  While search volume on target keywords spiked an astonishing amount after the ad ran, the advertiser was nowhere in the search results and clever competitors ran special ad copy to capture the opportunity.  Don’t let this happen to you.

Third: Integrate PPC with Your Direct Response Efforts
• PPC is in itself a great direct response vehicle and can deliver even more value when integrated with other direct response vehicles
• The bottom line is that having multiple channels with which you touch your prospects is smart (hint: they convert better)
• When you run an e-mail or mobile campaign, be sure to have an equivalent PPC campaign in place to capture searchers driven from other media

Get the Right Tracking in Place – It Makes a Difference
• Assists are important and can be an important part of the equation showing which media is effective
• Ad serving allows you to track across PPC and display advertising (e.g., DART for Advertisers and Atlas are two ad serving systems)
• Yahoo Analytics allows you to track PPC click assists with e-mail campaigns
• Yahoo Analytics allows you to track PPC click assists to SEO clicks but not vice versa

The benefits of marketing integration are clear and, in most cases, easy to capture.

We hope this three-part series has been helpful in laying the foundation for you to explore the variety of online media that exist to help make your business succeed…and to do it smartly.  Good luck!

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Mary Kingsley Huffman is a co-founder and Executive Vice President at Ionic Media, a firm with deep experience driving bottom-line results for clients using search and online marketing. Previously, she was Director of Marketing at Overture Services where she was responsible for the acquisition marketing and communication departments, leading all advertiser acquisition efforts and customer communications. Prior to Overture, Mary was an Engagement Manager in the London office of McKinsey & Company, specializing in marketing solutions. Mary has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA from UCLA.

By Heather Lutze, Founder, Findability Group

Mention the words SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) to most businesspeople and you’re sure to hear stories of frustration. Either they’ve handed their company’s web site SEO and PPC activities over to an agency and have little idea what’s going on with either, or they’ve “done it themselves” and have had lackluster results at best.

This is unfortunate, because SEO and PPC are the foundation of any good web site. Think of it like building a house. If you build the roof before you build the foundation, you really don’t have a house. Likewise, if you launch a web site or engage in fad web marketing techniques (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.) without solid SEO and PPC in place, you’re wasting both your time and money—two things that are precious in the business world.

Complicating the whole SEO and PPC experience is that many businesspeople are so determined to please Google and appear under certain ego-focused keywords that they neglect their customers and how they search for products and services. For example, suppose you have a web site that sells high-end gas grills. As such, you’re fixated on seeing your company come up under a general search with the keyword phrase “gas grills.” But that’s an informational, ego-driven keyword phrase, not a selling keyword phrase. When people are ready to buy a gas grill, they don’t search with vague keywords. Rather, they type in something like “Viking stainless steel outdoor propane grill model 5529.” Now that’s a buying keyword phrase. And face it…at the end of the day marketing is about getting customers in the door and paying your bills. It’s not about seeing your company under a general keyword and pleasing your ego.

When you stop trying to please Google and start pleasing and connecting with your customers, you will end the frustration and will start getting the results you want from your SEO and PPC campaigns. Use the following tips to make connecting with your customers and maximizing your SEO and PPC a profitable endeavor.

1 Use PPC first to fish for keywords.
Fishing for keywords is a like throwing out a big net into the ocean. The more narrow or refined the holes are in your net, the better the quality of fish you’re going to pull back. When you’re new to PPC and SEO, you don’t know which keywords will work for your web site. At this stage you need to balance the general, obvious, and informational keywords with the longer keyword phrases that will attract customers who are ready to take action. Therefore, start slowly with long keyword phrases and then shorten your phrases over time (open up the holes in your net) to let more general traffic in. Over a testing period of at least 30 to 90 days you can see a pattern of which keywords give you business and which are a waste.

The general rule of thumb is to start with approximately 500 keywords. As you see what works, you can narrow your keyword list. Also, your number of keywords depends on your industry, your company, and the length of time you’ve been testing keywords. Some companies who have years of testing and research under their belt have a finely narrowed list of only ten keywords, while others have a keyword list in the hundreds of thousands. The bottom line is that you don’t know what your company’s findability is until you start throwing out that net and tracking your PPC results. So don’t rush into a web site redesign or other web marketing activities until you have tested in PPC.

2 Apply your top performing PPC keywords to your SEO campaigns.
Take the knowledge from your test period, which again is a minimum of 30 to 90 days, and apply what you learn about top performing keywords to your SEO campaigns. The goal is that you don’t waste time and money on SEO terms that will never help you. Therefore, as you analyze your PPC information, look at which keywords are getting clicks and which ones lead to a conversion or a purchase. A conversion could be someone downloading a white paper, filling out a contact form, taking a survey, etc. It’s some activity that gets people involved in your site. A purchase, as the term implies, is when someone buys something from you. Find out how many clicks it takes for someone to say “yes” to your offer and make a buying decision. You may find that it takes three to four clicks before someone takes action.

3 Carefully group or theme your SEO keywords by page content.
The prime objective of SEO is to prove to Google (or any other search engine) that the content on your site is worthy to be placed on the front page under a particular keyword. “Worthy” means you have the content on the page in such a fashion that Google sees repetition of the keyword, either in your text or in your code. This proves to the search engine that you belong under a certain keyword.

The challenge is that many business people have a fruit salad mentality. In other words, even though each page of their site deals with a particular topic or theme (and should therefore have page specific keywords), the keywords for every page are identical. So even though one page is dedicated to bananas, one page to apples, and one page to oranges, every page has keywords that relate to all fruits. This confuses search engines because they don’t know what you really are. As a result, your site never gets found.

Rather than think “the more keywords the better,” think in terms of compartmentalizing your keywords. So if one page covers who you are as a company, that page should only have keywords about your company. Likewise, each product page should have keywords that apply to that specific product only. Those companies that clearly define who they are by keyword on a page by page basis win.

4 Submit only once to search engines.
While Google and other search engines will find some of your pages naturally, if you want to be sure they find every page of your site then you have to manually submit it to them. However, you don’t want to submit to them every day. Once they have spidered your site, you don’t need to submit it again unless you add a lot of new pages or make significant revisions. Many online submission tools sell the idea that you should submit your site every day. Such an approach only ends up frustrating Google rather than helping your company. So let the search engines know you’re there, but don’t harass them.

5 Get great inbound links to your site.
Google looks for two types of links. The first is a non-reciprocating inbound link from a reputable source, such as an industry association, the Better Business Bureau, etc. Since a link from another site is essentially an endorsement, getting a link from a reputable source—one where you don’t link back to them—is the gold standard of links. It’s not an “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch my back” sort of arrangement, and Google likes that.

The second type of link is a reciprocated link, meaning you link back and forth with the company or person. Such links are good, although the search engines don’t place as much value on them. Realize that if you’re an authority you are going to link to others, and Google expects this. However, when you have 800 reciprocating in every category under the sun, you send a red flag that your site isn’t of value. Any link you have needs to be appropriate and industry related; therefore, only link to people and partners you know and that make sense for your site.

6. Make Your Web Site Work Smarter
Only after you take the needed steps to maximize your SEO and PPC, which typically takes a year or more to fine-tune, should you redesign or relaunch your site, or engage in trendy marketing endeavors. While SEO and PPC are in-depth and intense activities for a business to undertake, they are the foundation of any good web site that effectively reaches the company’s target market and coverts prospects into paying customers. So whether you decide to tackle the project yourself or hire an agency to help you, always be aware of and stay on top of the basic tenets of SEO and PPC so you can get the results you want.

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Heather Lutze is the author of the newly released book, “The Findability Formula: The Simple and Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing” (Wiley and Sons). As a nationally recognized speaker and author, she has spent the last 10 years as CEO of Findability Group – a Search Engine Marketing firm that works with companies to attain maximum Internet exposure. Heather is also a speaker for Pay Per Click Summit, and previously spent two years training on Yahoo! Search Marketing. For more information, visit www.FindabilityGroup.com.