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From SEMPO annual survey - what are companies trying to achieve with PPC and SEO

I have always been curious to find out what agencies and companies were trying to achieve through Search Engine Marketing. The answers vary whether we are talking about Paid Search , Search Engine Optimization or Social media. The SEMPO annual survey gives us an insight into online marketers in the US:


For paid search (otherwise known as Pay Per Click): 

 For Search Engine Optimization: 

For Social media:

As expected, Paid Search and SEO are mostly  driven by lead generation and products sales where Social media has a much stronger brand awareness component.

State of Search Engine Marketing report 2010 - SEMPO

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization just released it State of the Market survey for 2010. The long awaited report gives us an insight into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Paid Search trends, based on the input of 1,472 agencies and client side marketers from 68 countries. This year and for the first time, the report included a section on social media marketing. 


Some highlights from the report:


1. Econsultancy and SEMPO estimated the North American Search Engine Marketing (SEM) industry to be $14.6B in '09, up from $13.5B in '08. They estimated the market to grow by 14% in '10 to $16.6B


2. Companies continue to shift money from traditional advertising to SEM: 

3. Google continues to dominate the SEM market:

4. Companies expect to spend 43% more on SEO and 37% more on paid search in 2010


5. More than half of advertisers say that Google keywords have become more expensive

Most companies expect to spend more on social media in 2010:

Paid Search and Google guidelines for copy goods and trademarks

No later than yesterday, we received a business inquiry from a company based out of Asia. They have a number of web site which sell high quality copies of famous products to European products. This raised a number of issues we have not considered previously.


Before I start outlining the issues, let's imagine you are a start-up hungry for new business. A business opportunity like this pretty much meant we could make our first year of revenue, let alone expected earnings.


Beyond the ethical issues associated with helping companies selling fake goods, we took a closer look at what Google said about copy goods and trademark issues. We are not saying Google is the ultimate Net Supreme Court but they provided a decent set of principles.

''Advertisers are responsible for the keywords they choose to generate advertisements and the text that they choose to use in those advertisements.'' In other words, Paid Search advertisers are judged responsible for the ads they service. ' Google prohibits the sale or promotion of counterfeit goods''. The actions Google might take include disapproving or disabling ads and/or terminating advertisers. In the case of SEM agency, this pretty means the company might go bankrupt. This does not apply to Natural Search, which makes me wonder what happens to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies promoting fake goods web site. 


The most interesting part is related to trademark policy. Since last year, Google reviewed its trademark policy and now allows US advertisers to bid on branded keywords even though you might actually be a competitor to the brand being advertised. There was some controversy at the time since it was felt this was not a fair practice. More companies are going to bid for branded keywords. In Addition, if you bid on your competitor's name, your competitors might return the favor. This is bad business for advertisers. Ultimately it creates bidding war, and let's face it more media spent on Google. The only caveat was you can not use negative or pejorative terms to bid on branded keywords. This applies to the US only. Outside the US, it is still against Google principles to bid for branded keywords (unless this is your brand of course). 


To make a long story short, we declined the business opportunity on the basis of Google's fake goods principle but also trademark principle (the target market was the US). 


We lost a potentially very profitable business but feel good about our relationship with Google and more importantly about the company's integrity in general. 

PR 2.0 or the art of boosting your Search Engine Optimization through smart PR

I was talking to a BusinessWire representative this week about PR 2.0 - For those of you who are not familiar with BusinessWire, they are one the global leaders in transmitting Press Releases to journalists, analysts, regulators but also search engines. Companies of all sizes have a subscription and pay for each release distributed through Business Wire network. The fees vary from $400 to $600 for each distribution.

Why do we care?

The art of PR has changed over the last few years. PR was traditionally seen as something that only Corporates can afford. It may require robust corporate messaging and PR professionals (i.e people who are comfortable picking up the phone from journalists). More and more smaller companies have been using online PR (digg, Facebook, Twitter etc.) to generate some buzz and customer engagement vis-a-vis their brand. Social media by definition is PR.

Social media can only be earned

What we tend to forget is getting customers to talk about your brand is not easy to achieve. It's one thing creating a Facebook page or a Twitter account. It's another one to get customers excited about your product and ultimately generate this buzz on your behalf. It is even more difficult to tie this back to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. These backlinks from your more loyal brand supporters are hard to earn. Particularly if what you offer is not really sexy and /or tend to be oriented towards companies.

Alternative tools to boost SEO

Back to my discussion with BusinessWire, I have found they offer a decent set of tools to create a comprehensive list of backlinks to your web site at a reasonable cost. They recently launched a new product called Enhanced Online News (EON). EON is an online platform where companies form all sizes can submit press releases to maximize SEO coverage.

This means small and medium companies can quickly post press releases that will be distributed to the BusinessWire network for a nominal fee. To ensure strong SEO results:

1) The press release title should be short with all keywords included at the beginning of the title

2) Targeted keywords in the release should be repeated a few times in the release description (just after the title). The tool then adds targeted keyword into the meta tags of the page. This is only available for the title meta tag for now, not keyword tags yet.

3) Companies should take advantage of the free banner area at the bottom of the page to include screenshot of the company web site or even banners

What I like most about this tool is it identifies two or three quotes from the release and alternates them on top of the release, so that crawlers always find something new to look at.

More editorial tips are included on the EON portal.

To me, this seems to be a good option to create backlinks in a short period of time at a reasonable cost.

If you have had experience using that tool, I would be curious to find out whether it worked or has not worked for you.

Does Google Local Business Center influence Organic Search Results?

In a previous post about geo-targeting, we mentioned Google's latest attempt to break into local businesses. For small businesses, Google Business Center is another way to reach local customers.

Google Business Center is adding features everyday and it gradually becoming integrated into other Google products such as AdWords, Merchant Center and of course Google Map.

This is how Google Local Business Center looks like today. The example below is for a College Hunks Hauling Junks franchise in Atlanta. From a reputational standpoint, potential customers who enter this business name and location will be able to see it in Google map (under the organic search option). The little paragraph provides basic information including address and phone number.

By clicking on the map, a new window pops-up and shows the following information;

In addition to these gimmicks, businesses can offer coupon that will show up in the Google map window. By the way, you will notice that AdWords ads for this businesses come-up on both left hand side and underneath Google map.

The question that immediately came to my mind is whether this would have any impact on the Organic Search Results. Does a business registered in the Google Local Business Center is more likely to come-up in search queries? As I mentioned above, yes from a reputation standpoint (i.e. someone look for the business name). Probably not from a product standpoint. I have not seen evidence yet that this particular business came up higher in Search Engine Results Pages when a customer looks for 'junk removal Atlanta' let's say. But it certainly can't do any harm.

Writing good AdWords Copy - from Ogilvy to Google Lady

If you have been writing Ad copies online and offline for some time, you know variations in Ad copy matters. In Paid Search in particular, visitors spend no more than a few seconds looking at organic search and sponsored results. Some studies have shown most visitors look at sponsored results in clutters, which means most of them will hardly read the Ad. 


I was curious to find out what made a good Ad copy stands out for the competitors. In particular whether the good old principles of advertising still apply in the digital area. In Ogilvy's 1963 book 'confession of an advertising man', he laid out a number of tips to write effective ad copies. Let's see how many of these are still relevant today:


Tip 1 ''On the average, 5 times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy'. 
The headline remains the center price of any Google (or other Search Engine) Ad. It makes about 25% of total ad space allocation. Typically, it includes dynamic keyword insertion where search queries are added automatically to things such as the headline, display UR etc. 


Tip 2''Inject news in the headline''
What might have been true during Ogilvy's time is a hard thing to do in Paid Search, given space limitations of 25 characters. But if you can find creative ways to make your headline sounds like newsworthy, go for it. Keywords such as ''announcing'', ''new'', ''available now'' have higher click-through-rates. 


Tip 3 ''The two most powerful words are 'NEW' and 'FREE"
These words definitely attract more eyeballs. The value of adding the word 'FREE' is a bit ambiguous. Some industry observers like Google Lady recommend to stay away from any Ad copies which includes freebies. Since advertisers pay per click, you might want to stay away from freebies hunter. They will hard convert anyway. The third keyword that has great success online is 'OFFICIAL'. Its popularity is probably due to the fact there is a lot of junk on the web and potential visitors pay more attention to any credible Ads. 


Tip 4 ''Other most powerful words include:'' This is Ogilvy's list,as published in 1963. 

And here are Google Lady's favorites (February 2010): 

Once we take out all e-commerce jargon such as 'download', 'free shipping'', the two lists look awfully similar!


Tip 5 ''Include your selling promise to your selling promise'
The selling promise became our value proposition but it's pretty much the same idea than 40+ years ago.  Make your value proposition relevant, unique and differentiated. Don't forget that in an online environment, any competitor can track changes in headlines in less than 24 hours and copy it in even less. 


Tip 6 ''Headlines should not contain more than 6 to 12 words''
It's actually probably closer to 3 to 5 in Paid Search given the 25 characters space limitations. But the idea remains the same. Your Ad copy headline must telegraph your value proposition and entice potential customers to read description lines. Don't forget the objective of your headline is not to sell, but to connect with your readers. 


Tip 7 ''Do not use obscure headlines''
Obscure headlines, particularly ones with negative can be confusing to potential customers. I have always been interesting to find out how effective these Ads can be online: 

As a summary, it's interesting to see that most Ogilvy's principles are still relevant today. I would think the primary differences lie in technology progress. Some semantics might have changed slightly ''download now'' but the biggest changes are:

1. Ability to dynamically create ads with customized keyword
2. New functionalities such as geo-targeting, day-parting (change ads depending on time of the day) and demographics targeting (for Google's content network for example)
3. Stronger immediate call-to-action. Potential customers are now one click away to buy products and/or sign-up services. 

5 minutes with Obama's social media manager

Last week, I was privileged to attend a roundtable with David Plouffe. David is known as the chief campaign manager for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign in the United States. He is often credited for leveraging social media to organize a grassroots efforts, that eventually led to Obama's victory. 


There was a flurry a questions but the one I asked him was around social media. When he started putting his campaign together, as early as 2006, there was not much social media activity. For example, Twitter was not even around. Social media had also hardly been used by politicians. In that context how did he figure out his social media strategy. 

The first thing he mentioned is that he did not really. The social media campaign grew organically. He highlighted that social media pioneers were naturally gravitating towards support Obama's candidacy. It was then up to David's team to foster an environment where these supporters could express themselves. Initially David created a platform (Obama's web site primarily) where they could meet and exchange ideas. This quickly extended into other channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. David highlighted that the campaign did a good job in using genuine media such as videos (which look 'real') to give a flavour of authenticity to the campaign. What suprized him is that McCain's campaign did not make full use of social media overall even though McCain invented the concept of online fundraising in 2000. 


David was also keen to stress that 'old school' techniques such as email marketing played the most active role in fundraising. According to the Guardian (UK newspaper), the campaign ''included a massive amount of classic door-to-door campaigning, harvested 13m email addresses. During the course of the presidential race more than 1bn emails were sent and people made 4m donations online. Total online donations topped a record $500m (£307m), with the average amount $85.''


It is likely the social media of his campaign was over-stated by the media. Nevertheless, he will be remembered as one of the first campaign managers who understood the concept of fostering community. Recently David announced he was working on another series of projects for Obama. 

Do time and date matter in Search Engine Marketing?

Of course it does. Some people argue the busiest time of the day are morning hours when people get to work and check personal emails etc. Others think lunch time is actually a good time for officer workers to relax and surf the web. Another bunch of people discourage any online marketing at night when people are probably less willing to convert. Have you noticed a lot of daily auction web site such as guilt.com send daily reminder an hour or so before lunch ... As far as day of the week is concerned, it is generally accepted that Monday and Tuesdays are the busiest days of the week and activity drops over the week end.

What does this mean for us Search Marketers?

Well it depends on the industry type, target audiences, services offered etc. If you sell widgets to office workers, don't expect much activity over the week end (even though these busy execs who work the week end might offer better conversion rates). A client of us sells financial services to individuals and their click through and conversions rates are pretty much consistent throughout the week. Their offering is not time/day sensitive and since most of their ads are on Google content network (real estate and personal finance publications for the most part), theirs ads come-up evenly during the week or week end.

Another client offers professional services to (mostly) women looking to remove clutter from their home. Mots of the ads are on the search network so they only come-up when people are actively looking queries in Google. The two graphs below show that they are more likely to click on PPC ads on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Thursdays and Friday see a slowdown in click through. Activity picks-up again over the week end. One of the busiest time of the week is Sunday evening.

The second graph illustrates the bulk of the activity comes between the hours of 10am to 4pm. There is a peak during lunch time.

Google AdWords offers a tool that enable bids adjustment depending on the time of the day. By experimenting higher and lower bids, Search Marketers can increase their PPC at times that matter.

LinkedIn ads process and ROI

So today we launched our first SEM Valet ad on LinkedIn. I was curious to go through the set-up process and know how effective these could be. 


It took about 2 minutes to set-up a new ad. In one way, the process is mimicked on Ad Words where advertisers write headline (25 characters) and two lines of text (35 characters limit). The ad also includes a display and actual URL. The major difference is the inclusion of a link to my LinkedIn profile. This is how it looks like:

When it came to targeting, LinkedIn offers fewer options than Ad Words for instance. Since this is essentially a content network, there is little information available on search queries, keywords options, expected CPC etc. 


This being said, LinkedIn has a decent set of localization and demographics targeting. I chose to focus on business owners in the US and Canada. Things like seniority, business function, age, gender etc ... were not relevant to us here. LinkedIn estimated that our targeting available market was 408,471 professionals. If 5% of them are on LinkedIn every day and 0.05% of them click on the ad (this is based on banner advertising industry's average CTR), then up to 10 people would click on the ad.  I then decided to be conservative and put it in a $2 targeted CPC and $10 daily budget. In other words, my hope is to get about 5 clicks a day. 


The LinkedIn ad settings look like this:

In a week from now, I should have preliminary data on early CPC and click results. Stay tuned!  

We will experiment with Pay-Per-Click in social media (prediction #5)

Overall, Cost per Click (CPC) is on the rise. New customers’ engagement on the opposite (which we can measure as Click through rate) is relatively stable. One of the things some of us will be tempted to do in 2010 is to launch small Pay-Per-Click pilot across social media channels.

They offer lower CPC and decent targeting. Engagement levels are expected to be quite low. Mention Facebook ads to advertising executives and most of them will run away ‘’I have never given a dollar to Facebook, they have to improve their ad targeting’’.

Well, I am going to give it a try anyway, perhaps running a small ($10 a day) campaign and see how it goes. Facebook offers the ability to target ads based on customers’ demographics such as location, age, birthday, sex, education, relationship, interested in etc.). But the primary reason why I got interested in Facebook is the ability to trigger ads based on certain keywords users enter when they update their status. For more information, you can read this great article from Business Insider.

Very recently, I also discovered LinkedIn ads. What I like about the LinkedIn program is an effective targeting based on user’s industry, function, location etc. The estimated CPC seems to be a lot higher than Facebook, but still lower than Google AdWords. I wonder what sort of click-through-rates one can get. But again, only experimentation will tell.

Stay tuned as I launch small pilots for both Facebook and LinkedIn in February!

We will test new segmentation and geo-targeting models (prediction #4)

2009 already saw an extensive use of geo-targeting. Google AdWords in particular offers a wide range of options such as domain name (e.g. google.de), search term (e.g. hotel Mexico City) and IP targeting (only users located in one given area will see the ads).

This trend will accelerate this year due to a number of factors such as:

1) Higher Cost-Per-Click (CPC) that pushes advertisers to look for those long tail (and more costs effective) keywords
2) The release of SpeedPPC version 4 which makes building geo-targeting campaigns very easy. The latest software now offers multiple seeds keywords where in past it only offered dual keywords. While in the past, we might have used 'Car dealer' 'Atlanta' to create 'Car dealers Atlanta', we can now add a third element 'Georgia'.
3) The proliferation of the Google Local Business Center. Businesses can now register for free and have a presence on Google map (including offering coupons). What does this mean for their Pay-Per-click efforts? Businesses who are already using AdWords can now add their address in the ad. I will post more information as I test this new feature. Stay tuned.

In the interim, here's an example of an ad through the Google Business Center.

We will find out the impact of the Bing & Yahoo partnership (prediction #3)

The latest rumor was that a U.S. regulatory decision will come in the first quarter of 2010. If approved, and many think it will be, Yahoo! will start fading out its organic and paid search platforms and substituting Bing, country-by-country. It is widely anticipated Bing will first start rolling-out in the U.S.

It is hard to tell whether the estimated 30% market share of a combined Bing & Yahoo will disrupt Google predominance in U.S. search. It is also difficult to predict what will be the impact of this new partnership for Bing and/or Yahoo advertisers.  This being said, it would make sense to imagine all pay-per-click will be managed through a joint (revamped) Microsoft AdCenter. Advertisers might want to familiar themselves with it and stat anticipating an influx of impressions when Yahoo and Bing searches are combined.

More to come in 2010. I am looking forward to using an alternative platform to AdWords. Most advertisers are a bit reluctant to use 3 and plus providers. Making this into two large platforms might turn out to be an easier sale.

We will experiment with more AdWords ad formats (Prediction #2)

In the past few months, Google introduced several new ad formats, including Sitelinks, Product Extensions, and Product Listings.


SiteLinks

According to the Google AdWords blog: ‘’Ad Sitelinks is a new AdWords feature that allows advertisers to extend the value of existing AdWords ads by providing additional links to content deep within advertisers’ sites. Rather than sending all users to the same landing page, Ad Sitelinks will display up to 4 additional Destination URLs in search-based text ad for users to choose from. By providing users with more options, advertisers can create richer, more relevant ads that improve the value of brand terms and other targeted keywords.’’

At this point, only a handful of large advertisers have been selected to test this new feature. Hopefully it will become more widespread in 2010.

Products extension

Another Google AdWords wonder, Product extensions allow advertisers to use existing Google Merchant Center account to highlight products directly in search ads. When AdWords text ad appears, and advertisers’ Google Merchant Center account contains products that are relevant to the searcher’s query, product extensions show the images, titles, and prices of products in a plusbox under your ad.

Products Listing
A second feature for e-tailers, Product Listing Ads works with an advertiser's Google Merchant Center account to serve highly targeted ads that include richer product information directly in the ad itself - including product image, price, and merchant name. U.S. users searching on Google.com may begin to see Product Listing Ads more frequently on their shopping related queries.   

While still new formats are being tested, they are designed to improve customer experience for web users. Advertisers should test them out.

AdWords headline can go beyond 25 characters.
Another small change Google introduced earlier in 2009 is longer headline. Google AdWords restricts the Headline of text ad to 25 characters. This is a good thing; it forces advertisers to be relevant while being concise. However a few bloggers reported they have been able to stretch this to 30 + characters. Apparently Google has been experimenting with it throughout 2009. I have been unable to find any post on the Google AdWords blog but I will continue looking. Longer headlines are particularly important for Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) when longer tail searches also appear in the headline. Up to now, DKI shortened longer tail keyword in the headline. 

The use of long tail keyword searches will rise (Prediction #1)

According to Marketing Charts, Searches containing five to more than eight words in length increased significantly among US users in fall 2009. Searches with one word amounted to 18.6% of all queries during the same time period (-2.3% compared to 2008). 

It is hard to find some consolidated data for 2009 but it’s pretty obvious Internet users are getting more sophisticated at using search engines, and have learnt to make use of longer keyword.  What does this mean for Search Engine Marketers? 

Increased customer targeting and more sophisticated campaign builder tool such as SpeedPPC will help us design more granular campaigns. Campaigns that only run a hundreds keywords or less will not only become less relevant but also very expensive to maintain. As Cost-Per-Click increases year over year, less sophisticated advertisers will see their ROI decrease. 

The good news is more resources (including a revamped Google AdWords learning center) will be available for Pay-Per-Click novice advertisers to jump on the longer tail keyword bandwagon. And those who don’t have the resources to launch ten to hundred thousand keyword campaign might consider outsourcing to Search Engine Marketing agencies.