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

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

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 John McPhee,  Senior Account Executive at Anvil Media

I think we all know by now that social media is here to stay. Yes, it’s true the sites we participate on and the tools we use will all change from time to time, but social media isn’t going anywhere. Looking at these current social media statistics is staggering.

•  4 out of 5 computer users are active in social media
• 13 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute
• Over 3.6 billion photos have been uploaded to Flickr
• 70 million photos are uploaded to Facebook daily
• 19 million tweets per day

Are Companies Monitoring Social Media Usage?

So with all of this social media activity happening, how much of it do you suppose happens at work? Are companies monitoring employee usage? My guess is social media use at work is quite high, and yes, companies are monitoring employee usage. Let’s take a look at a survey conducted by the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) and the Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA) to determine how companies are currently monitoring social media use in the workplace. Roughly 65% of companies are doing some sort of employee monitoring while at work, however, the biggest segment uses a “passive system” and will only act when an issue arises. Sounds dangerous to me.

 
From the survey, 24% of respondents said that an employee has faced disciplinary action due to their activities on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. However, the percentage of disciplinary action in the public sector (33%) was much higher than the private sector (13%).
 

With all of this activity going on at work, and companies spending time, energy and resources monitoring it, doesn’t it make sense to embrace social media and accept that employees will use it? I’m not talking about lying down and letting employees freely use it as they please, but it makes good business sense to take advantage of this medium while you can, and what better way to do that than to empower your employees to join the conversation?

Set the Stage for New Hires

So where, and when, do you start training employees in social media? How about setting some ground rules, a foundation that every employee can learn, understand and use. Creating a social media training course is one of the best ways to start molding your employees into social media marketing machines. Ideally this training would happen during the new hire orientation process. This way every employee understands from day one that social media use is accepted and encouraged, but there are guidelines that must be followed or disciplinary action will be taken, which could lead to immediate termination if the rules are broken. Employees must be held accountable for their actions, or in this case, the words they write via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, etc. 

Get the Old Dogs to Fall in Line

If you do implement social media training in the new hire process, what about your current employees, the old dogs that have been working for the company for years?  Maybe they’ve been using social media already, and are used to doing things a certain way? How do you handle this situation? It’s important to let them know that there will now be guidelines, and a training course (could be a couple hour session, doesn’t have to be extravagant) that must be taken by every employee. Let them know you appreciate what they’ve already done within social media, and you’ll continue to encourage them, but in order to protect the company they’ll need to follow specific guidelines. I would suggest you focus on things that they can say, not what they can’t. This puts a little more positivity to the guidelines.

Creating a Social Media Policy

Looking at the explosion in social media use over the past few years, you have to ask yourself “how many companies actually have a social media policy in place?” In a study conducted by Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law, 69% of companies said they didn’t have a social media policy in place.

 
That is shocking to me, especially considering the amount of social media use that happens at work. Aren’t companies concerned of the risk they are taking by not having a formal policy? The biggest reason stated for not having a policy is companies aren’t sure what to include, which 25% of respondents stated.

So you’re a company that has created an employee training program, and are looking to also create a social media policy? Where do you start? Well, that’s easy. Look at what other companies are doing and determine which route you’d like to take. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. Will it be like Dell, very short and sweet? Or will you decide to provide your employees with a full arsenal like the American Red Cross’s social media toolkit? I think the Mayo Clinic did a good job at providing information about what employees can do, versus what they can’t. Even ESPN has a policy, although I see it as a tad overbearing, prohibiting anyone from writing a personal blog containing sports. Kinda broad and all encompassing, don’t you think guys? A personal blog where you can’t write about sports…hmmm. But hey, at least they have one. Now all ESPN employees know exactly what they can, and can’t, do.

The Bottom Line

Knowing that employees are going to use social media, whether it is at work or outside, the bottom line is that all companies should create some sort of social media policy. This will protect the company in any negative situation that involves an employee, social media and some undesirable words. At the same time, I would highly suggest that companies do what they can to reap the benefits that social media can bring, especially from a trained staff. If the entire company has been trained and understands the goals, social media could be an entirely new medium to obtain new customers, or help retain current ones. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a plethora of others, can all be used to your advantage, and in a down economy, these inexpensive (most are free) tools can work wonders.

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John McPhee is a Senior Account Executive for the Portland-based SEM Agency, Anvil Media. He has expertise in all aspects of search engine and social media marketing with extensive experience in the hospitality/travel and environmentally-friendly consumer goods verticals. He has provided guidance for a number of B2B clients as well.

By Karen Waggoner, Director of Events, PPC Summit 

By now everyone with a keyboard or touch screen is aware that Yahoo and Microsoft chiseled a long sought after deal to combine their collective search forces.  This means Yahoo’s once-dominant search engine will be replaced by Microsoft’s newly branded Bing.  This certainly makes Bing, with 30% of the market, a force which cannot be ignored.

What Makes Bing Sing?
As defined by Microsoft, Bing is a decision engine, “a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, or finding a local business.”

The Bing experience is definitely different.  Beyond the slick advertising, the customized results by category and product yield a different-looking output.  It seems reasonable that queries yielding results based on product and category are almost certain to produce more impressions – as searchers do not have to view a full advertisement – and can see the information packaged under multiple categories.  Bing claims that click through rates for items in their categorized results are higher than results in the normal organic listings. The new multi-threaded SERP design renders more pages that are closely associated with the primary keywords being searched, according to Tony Yamanaka, Natural Search Specialist of Apogee Search.  This is a good thing for advertisers and affiliates.

What Makes Bing Go?
Bing features include what they call Quick Tabs.  These are broad category links based on your query nicely ordered on the left margin as secondary listings. These broad categories may be useful for those in unique niches and also as a resource tool to identify broad keyword terms.  One more user-friendly feature is the Best Match option.  One result returned with high confidence is shown at the top of the page as the best match.  Eight links are added under this listing along with an internal search form.  To encourage selection as a “best match” company names contained in the URL and title tags appear to win out.  Local Listings include mini-reviews categorized by relevant keyword, a departure from MSN and Live Search days.  A new partnership with Yellow Pages Local Listings means paid sponsors will show above normal listings, per Anthony Edwards of Apogee Search, in a recent and highly informational blog post.

Bing also has a couple of new and unique offerings, BingTweets and a Cashback program.  Cashback is offered as a bonus to consumers who purchase eligible products and pitched as a way to “avoid extra expenses with a pay-per-click (PPC) bidding process that doesn’t require constant attention.”  Talk about a slick pitch.  Microsoft claims Cashback to be, “a low-risk advertising channel based on actual sales. You can remove risk when listing your products with Bing Cashback because it’s based on a CPA model. You don’t have to invest extra time or money in undesired fees traditionally associated with PPC campaigns. This also helps you avoid click fraud and click arbitrage.”
BingTweets is a partnership that promises deeper, real-time information about trending topics on Twitter by marrying Bing search results with the latest tweets.  You can search for anything in the BingTweets search box and see Bing search results alongside the most recent related tweets.  There’s a highly useful idea that Google didn’t come up with first.

What Does Bing Bring?
The good news for entry-level advertisers is there is one-less platform to manage, a shorter learning curve and less time overall is required to be successful in search. Internet marketers simply must pay attention to the Bing algorithm and optimize accordingly.  Fortunately the optimization process seems, on the surface, to be essentially the same as Google’s. 

Bing has earned praise for how it displays relevant search results.  It is all about how users think and use search.  As Tony Yamanaka, puts it, “Bing does not have to overthrow Google to be successful; it can succeed by taking a different approach.”  And Bing is definitely singing a different tune.

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Karen Waggoner, CMP is Director of Events for Alteract Marketing LLC, the parent company of PPC Summit and AdWords Advantage Online Summit.