It is impossible to discuss social media these days without the mention of Facebook. And why not, given their recent deal with Microsoft that values them at over 15 billion, Facebook is worth talking about. I clearly see the excitement from a marketing perspective. Over 40 billion users that provide an estimated 15 billion page views a month is more than a popular site, it’s a cultural phenomenon.
I have a Facebook account and it seems that in the past 3 months I have received more “requests” from other Facebook users than I did in the 12 months prior. Is that because I have been spending more time trying to figure out what exactly Facebook is good for? Probably. I have requested connections with people I used to work with and went to college with and I have accepted them in return, but other than that, what have I really accomplished? Nothing as far as I can tell. Once I make the connection and we are “friends” again but other than that, not much else happens.
Don’t get me wrong, it is fun and it is a cool place to surf around, it has a nice interface (much nicer than MySpace), but I feel that in the long run, Facebook will prove to be more valuable as a testing ground for technologies that resonate with users and ones that don’t.
By no means have I given up on Facebook and I plan to keep using it, but I am still trying to figure out if I will ever use it if for more locating old friends and colleagues and becoming “friends” again.
Last night I went to a lightly attended, (I assume due to the distraction of the best baseball team in the world beating all heck out of the CR’s), BIMA event along with two of my co-workers, where we were almost instantly pounced upon by a rep from SpiralFrog www.spiralfrog.com . This rep was very excited and proud of SpiralFrog’s offerings and was going to tell us all about it no matter what. I recognized the name and told him I had seen their logo before, but that I was unaware of their product. SpiralFrog, new to North America as of September 2007, is a downloadable, ad-supported music site that allows users to download free music legally. It operates on a rev-share model and is on a mission to save the music industry while shinning the spotlight on the true heros--advertisers. The company is headed up by Joe Mohen, who was quoted by an article in Online Media Daily (http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=67512&Nid=34366&p=338449) as saying, “[our] main competitor is piracy”. Overcoming the wide-spread use of illegal music sites is what SpiralFrog is here to do. SpiralFrog downloads are in WMA format and unfortunately are not ipod compatible--so dig up those old-school MP3 players!—but, the music is free and legal. If SpiralFrog gains momentum it could really become the new big thing in music downloading since it is likely to draw consumers from both the subscription world of Napster and Rhapsody as well as from the large pool of illegal downloaders. If SpiralFrog becomes successful in the music realm, who is to say it couldn’t work for other downloads, like movies, video games and ringtones? With SpiralFrog, advertisers will have a new and big opportunity to target the estimated age group of 18-34 year-olds and look like the cool kids while doing it. After all, who doesn’t love an advertiser that gives us free music without the risk of virus?
In a 10/25 Search Insider article: "Search and The Digital CPG Shelf", Gord Hotchkiss covers off on a research project he did with comScore and Proctor & Gamble called "The Digital Shelf" http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1835. I thought the project was pretty interesting; in a nutshell, the study was run to tie online activity to offline purchase behavior, and determine whether or not search marketing was vital for brand building and driving offline sales for a category not typically tied with search (in this case Consumer Packaged Goods).
Interestingly enough, Hotchkiss finds:
"People went online for CPG information -- in fact, to a significantly higher degree than even our most optimistic predictions. Over a 3-month period, comScore recorded over 150 million visits to CPG websites in four categories: Food Products, Personal Care Products, Baby Products and Household Products. Those are numbers no marketer should ignore. But even more significantly, search drove significant portions of that traffic, from 23% of all visits in Household Products to 60% in Baby Products... It's not just automotive or travel that drive search traffic. We search for recipes, how to get the stains out of carpets, the most eco-friendly disposable diaper and yes, even the nutritional information for potato chips. We search, a lot!"
In the article, Hotchkiss seems blown away that people are searching for these things (primarily to compare against competitors). Although a bit surprised about the Food & Household products (I actually ran a campaign for a particular food & beverage product - I too was surprised at how many people searched on the brand), I'm not as surprised about the others. I've found myself researching personal care products from time to time, and I'm at the age where many of my friends are starting to have babies; most who, in their spare time, are surfing baby sites - researching the best products, etc. to use for their little one (or soon to be).
Hotchkiss closed the article asking why these companies are not investing more branding dollars in search. I guess that’s another project to dig into ;)
Generally accepted practices in SEO have indicated that title tags are for keywords and that any extraneous, marketing-type words should be reserved for meta descriptions and your on page copy. While I would agree that this is partially true, this line of thinking may require a bit more consideration.
The reason for the needed paradigm shift is the engines ability to factor in click through rate (CTR) into their ranking algorythm. So much like the impact of CTR on your quality score in paid search, it is believed that the rate at which people click on your organic listing versus the number of times your listing is shown is an important factor in determining organic rankings. If you think about it, it makes sense. A search engines goal is to give you the most relevant results for a particular query and CTR is a potentially a good indicator of what users find to be relevant. There are some potential holes in this logic, but I'll reserve that discussion for a different post.
So how does this play into your title tag strategy? Because in order to improve CTR, you need to make your listing stand out from the other 15-20 paid and organic listings on SERPs page so that users will be enticed. Also, because title tags are the one thing that you can almost always rely on to be a a part of your organic listing, this is really your best shot to improving CTR. Now making your title tags more interesting, and thus more clickable, does not mean abandoning keywords and using straight-up marketing speak. It simply means making title tags more readable and eye catching by taking a more descriptive approach.
For example, lets assume that we have a page about how to teach your dog to sit and your target keywords are: teach dog sit and dog sit training. An old title tag might look something like this:
"How to Teach Your Dog to Sit Training a Dog to Sit"
A more enticing title tag might look like this:
"Dog Training Experts Show How to Teach Your Dog to Sit from "
You can see how the second version is more eye-catching as it creates a sense of expertise and is also more readable.
When writing title tags, be sure to accurately represent your target search terms but also find creative ways to grab a user's interest. If you can do so, your organic search rankings will thank you.
In response to a recent Online Spin article: "Shaping or Breaking Brands", the author talks about how online reviews can make or shape clients brands. Mulcahy writes:
"... According to a recent survey by Deloitte's Consumer Products Group, consumers are turning to online reviews in large numbers. And guess what, those reviews have been found to have a serious impact on purchase.
Findings show that 62% of consumers read consumer-written product reviews on the Internet. Out of that group, more than 8 in 10 say they have been directly influenced by the reviews. Influence, of course, is twofold: consumers are either influenced to buy the product they were researching, or switch to another brand."
This note brought to mind an e-commerce campaign I managed, whose majority of PPC revenue was generated through brand terms (no surprise). In digging a little further into some click path data, a decent percentage of users started out in the search engines typing the brand term (let's say in Google), then went on to type in a non-branded term across several shopping engines, *then* came back to Google on the brand term again and purchased. This wasn't just one event... it was one of many.
The analysis was exciting to see (to prove the value of brand terms- yay!) but also scary, as it showed many users were not loyal to the brand. Luckily, they had a lot of good reviews. As Deloitte's survey points out, having reviews available on your site (and on the shopping engines) can influence users to (with good reviews) positively impact your brand.
In today's MediaPost Search Insider article, "Unearthing Your Hidden SEO Guru", David Berkowitz provides some fantastic suggestions for just about any individual within an organization to help out with their Search Engine Optimization efforts. He points to the rise of "Universal" or "Blended" search which, to paraphrase Berkowitz, is the new practice of search engines pulling in data from a host of content sources. This means that anyone involved with press releases, social media channels, news articles distribution, video clip or photo submissions, etc can all contribute to his/her company's search engine ranking.
In thinking about all of these small ways to help improve and expand search rankings, the real question on my mind is how do we measure these contributions? What is the impact of that news article that is picked up by countless sites, talked about in blogs and in turn placed in the search engines? Clearly it has increased brand awareness, but how is this measured? And brand lift, for how long? What are the other indirect results of this article? When we think about this small piece coupled with video submissions, photos, blogs, press releases and more, there are a lot of moveable parts. When we can agree on the metrics and means by which to measure the sum of these parts is when we will really be onto something!
We all dream of having our servers crash because one of our articles made the front page of Digg (AKA the Digg Effect). Or launching the latest Facebook app that yields widespread acclaim and countless new friends for your profile. Unfortunately, not all businesses are in a field that Digg users care about or that would benefit from Facebook's user base. The truth is that most businesses probably fall into this category. Not to fear though, there are other options that may not be as well known, but that can be effective.
Propeller.com, Netscape's social content sharing service, offers a platform that is similar to Digg. Users can submit, vote and comment on articles. Propeller offers a wide range of categories and the users tend to be a bit more constructive than are the often harsh critics that populate the ranks of Digg. Most importantly, Propeller gets a significant amount of traffic and good content can reach the front page with less then 50-60 votes, as opposed to the hundreds and even thousands of votes required to reach the front page of Digg.
StumbleUpon also allows users to submit and comment on web content. Users can give the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" for content that they come across using browser toolbar buttons. By voting for content, Stumble gets a sense of the type of content you like and dislike and will serve up popular pages that fit your profile. In addition, Stumble will suggest other users that appreciate similar content. Again, reaching the front page of StumbleUpon will not likely take down your webserver, but it will bring qualified customers to your site.
The two keys for an effective social media strategy are to provide good, unique content and to distribute it to people that will be interested by targeting the correct channels. These are just two, semi-mainstream options to consider. As new social media site continue to emerge, businesses must focus their efforts on their proven options while continuously testing new sites becasue you never know when you might just uncover the next Digg.
When Panama first launched earlier this year, it may have not been an overnight success, but the more time I spend working inside Yahoo’s new search marketing platform, the more impressed I am.
My favorite Panama discovery to date occurred a couple months after Panama launched. While Yahoo has not yet come up with an equivalent to Google Editor, one of my favorite aspects of the AdWords platform, they do have the next best thing…the ability to convert third party campaigns. Now, when I traffic a new campaign in Google, I download the campaign from Editor and upload it to Yahoo’s converter. Yahoo converts the file into a format suitable for Panama. All I have to do is make any necessary changes and then upload the new file.
Since learning about Panama’s converter, trafficking new campaigns has been much quicker, leaving me more time to focus on optimization. I can’t wait to learn what Panama has in store next!
Every week, I read another warning from search marketers about various algorithm changes in the engines. Although these changes can have very little impact on some of our PPC campaigns, they can cause more pain in others.
Google's expanded broad match has been a big topic for a while now. Among all the algorithm changes search marketers have to deal with, issues with expanded broad matching seem to have caused the most problems, and often some of the most challenging.
Earlier this year, one of my campaigns suddenly started to decline in efficiency, as early as the end of January/early Feb (without making any drastic changes to the account). After digging into some data, I noticed that the majority of the decline was coming from rising CPC's in Adwords. When looking into it further with Google, I learned they rolled out a more "robust" expanded broad match at that time and knew right away this was effecting my ads. Sure enough, although I had very targeted creative in my campaign, certain keywords were triggering ads that did not match up with some of the specific search queries users were typing in (many of which weren't even in my keyword list).
Google's recommendation was to change all of my broad match types to either exact or phrase and add more negatives to the account. At first I was skeptical (and a bit freaked out), as I was concerned my traffic volume would significantly decrease. However, after changing match types and conducting a couple rounds of keyword research to capture all the important variations - the campaign was performing better than ever. After a couple of months, volume picked right back up to where it was before the change, with larger returns. Nowadays, I'm more aware of assessing the vertical, as well as keyword variations that "could" trigger my ads, when considering launching terms on broad match.
Another challenge - the recent algorithm change for achieving top positions above Google search results, which rolled out in August. With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, Google will now consider your maximum CPC bid (which you control) for achieving top placement - http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=72975. Before this change rolled out, I didn't expect this to effect our campaigns much. However (sigh), at the beginning of August, one of our accounts experienced some ups and downs, predominantly due to increased CPC's on a handful of our most competitive terms. Sure enough, these terms were victims of the new change; we quickly put forth a new bidding strategy for these terms in an effort to combat the issue, and the campaign is performing efficiently again.
These are just a couple of the algorithm challenges search marketers have to constantly keep up with on a day to day basis. Although these changes can be challenging and more often frustrating, it keeps us on our toes... and keeps our jobs interesting!
While most online marketers are fully aware of the advantages and disadvantages of sponsored search marketing, many are still unaware of Google’s push to become a comprehensive media outlet. Google is now offering Radio, Television and Newspaper advertising all managed through their auction based platform.
Google Audio:
Advertisers will now be able to take advantage of radio advertising with similar ease that they are able to run Pay per Click ads on the Google search network. A recent agreement with Clear Channel will make hundreds of station formats in most major radio markets available to the both large and small advertisers who wish to take advantage of the power and relative cost efficiency of radio advertising.
A few benefits that justify looking further in to Google Audio:
· Large selection of city specific and format targeting · Auction-based or fixed-cost pricing – the advertiser decides what they can and can’t afford based on their own goals · Easy-to-use, do-it-yourself Google interface · Access to quality production shops to help create commercials
This is a new project that is still playing out, but given Google’s resources, one can comfortably bet that the Audio product will give traditional media agencies a run for their money.
