Archived Search Marketing Blog for KoMarketing Associates

12 Good Posts on Search Marketing From Our Blog

Looking back at our first year of blog posts at KoMarketing Associates, here are 12 Posts that are worth re-mentioning in relation to how you can achieve success with Search Marketing, SEO and PPC.  We hope you agree.

• The Emergence of Facilitating The Crawl
  Thoughts on how user-generated content and new opportunities for webmasters to work with search engines have an impact on the SEO and SEM market.
• Guidelines for The Open Directory Project (DMOZ)
• SEO 101: The Importance of HTML Title Tags
  If you were to only change one thing on your web pages to help in your efforts with search engine placement and results, it would have to be your HTML Title tag. This post gives some guidelines for effective HTML Title tag creation.
• Tools We Use for Blogging
  A quick snapshot of three tools we use for Blogging - TypePad, Blogger and WordPress.
• SEO Effects of Modifying Your URL Syntax
  One of the components of SEO that can often go overlooked is the importance of maintaining web URL syntax.  Constantly changing your URL names, in order to catch the latest trend or buzz, may actually do more harm than good.
• Search Engine Optimization During Mergers and Acquisitions
  A well-planned search engine optimization strategy is critical for any company going through a merger or acquisition.
• Are Meta Description Tags Important?
  Information on how the Meta Description tag impacts SEO, Search Marketing and a user's search behavior
• Be Careful With Parked Domains
  How parking a domain on an existing website can have detrimental search-related effects in the long-term
• Quantifying Link Building
  Thoughts on the factors that justify the opportunity costs for time as it relates to an ongoing link building campaign
• Adding "Digg This" Links to Your Blog Posts
  How to add this popular feature to your blog posts in TypePad, Blogger and WordPress
• Review of Yahoo! Search Marketing’s New “Panama” Release
• Making MySpace Your Own
  Three important guidelines for building a great MySpace page
  

Yahoo!’s Conversion Tracking Measures Assists

As in soccer Yahoo! now gives credit due for search terms that even though they didn’t produce a conversion or sale they will be accounted for as an “assist”. So if your top performing search terms is producing a poor CPA (Cost Per Action/Conversion) from not scoring enough goals, you could consider assists as a new metric. This feature is part of the new upgrade of Yahoo! and is only available to accounts that have been upgraded and you must run the “Keyword Performance” report. You will notice a column labeled “Assists” that should contain a number value of how times the search term helped with the conversion process.

How does Yahoo! know this term assisted in the selling process? It’s a well-known fact from live testing that people use multiple searches to find what they are looking for. For example, say you are looking for a leather bound address book for a birthday gift and are rather new at using the search engines for shopping. A typical first search term you may enter would be “address book”. A broad search term such as this will often return limited results that specifically mention leather address books in the top results. They click on your ad which lands them to a web page that shows lots of various types of address books, later the web searcher or prospect returns to the Yahoo! search site to continue shopping around. This time they are a bit more educated and have added “leather address book” to narrow in their search.

As a smart advertiser, you are bidding on both the broad and detailed terms for "address books" and so when they search by that refined term a new ad appears that is dedicated to your line of leather address books. This time you convert the prospect into a sale. The original search gets credit for an assist and the second term gets a recorded conversion. I like this new view into search behavior and it has me thinking up ways to develop a new formula for measuring the ROI of the top terms to help refine my bidding strategy.

Update on Yahoo!'s Panama Upgrade

Following up Bob's review of Yahoo Panama, the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog posted a nice Panama FAQ that talks in detail about the Panama upgrade.  Good first steps for advertisers with questions.  Best of all, they are taking additional questions on the upgrade in the comments section of the post.

Review of Yahoo! Search Marketing’s New “Panama” Release

As a Google AdWords professional I’ve been involved in Paid Search Marketing for over 5 years. I even had to the opportunity to provide feedback to Yahoo! (which they didn’t disclose their real name) about the type of service features and advertiser would be looking for. Using these tools on a daily basis I’m always looking forward to new features or techniques they provide to speed along my day.

Yahoo Search Marketing Background
Yahoo’s purchase of Overture in 2003 signaled a serious intent to provide full service Internet Marketing using paid search, but what they didn’t do was address the advertiser’s basic needs for managing their ads. Yes, their “bid to position” is a simple model for many, but both Google and MSN’s bidding position by relevancy means a smart advertiser can obtain better ROI by top positions at lower costs. Yahoo’s search marketing platform suffered from outdated features and lacked new functionality such as:

• Regional ad targeting to display ads in defined countries or regions
• Dayparting where you can increase bid limits for peak buying times
• Ad rotation testing
• Advance reporting to allow studying which hours of the day peak sales occur or customized fields

Even MSN's new search marketing platform, released this year is beating Yahoo! in terms of features and functionality. An overhaul was long due, so for search advertisers the release of the Yahoo! Panama interface is a very welcomed development.

New Yahoo! Panama Features and Functionality
As a paid search advertiser your day can be very busy managing thousands of search terms and hundreds of ads or campaigns. Sometimes you need to react quickly to loss-revenue issues if spending spirals out of control as a result of click fraud or competitive pressures. The one thing you can’t afford is wasting time “digging” thru a website to find data about the state of your campaigns.  Ease of use and easy-to navigate functionality is key.

The first view when you log into your Yahoo! Search Marketing account is the dashboard that begins to address this. "I’m a big fan of web analytics, so even though I prefer web tracking outside of the tools Google or Yahoo provide, this doesn’t mean I don’t discount their conversion reporting." Quite the opposite, I live in their interfaces and view them as instruments for the driving the car, so having a customizable dashboard views is one of the “cool features”. Yahoo!’s new views means I can make faster turns when necessary. 

They are also incorporating a previously standalone service called "Search Optimizer" with a feature called the watch list. You can setup alerts at the campaign, ad level and even search term that provides time critical data if you’re Cost per Action is in danger. This helpful tool allows you to be more attentive of your top performing search terms, without having to spend lots of time actually doing it. And while mentioning managing costs, Yahoo! finally is on par with both Google and MSN by allowing ad campaign spending limits. Or to be more accurate they now allow multiple campaigns, which in the past they really only had one. That’s one feature I’ve been waiting on for quite some time.

Getting around the new interface is a big improvement and dare I say, even more intuitive than my long-term favorite Google! But there are still many features that I’d like to see from Yahoo!. One critical feature that is missing is the opportunity to bid on singular or plural variations of search terms. Rather odd limits of 50 negative search terms for the Advanced match (called broad in Google). Customized reports with the ability to do automatic mailings are a “would be nice to have” feature as well. Overall, the daily chore of managing a Yahoo! Search campaign will not be such a chore anymore.

Yahoo! is off to a good start with this new direction and when you combine the changes they will be making in the bidding structure, is a good time to concentrate your marketing efforts on the Yahoo! channel for the time being. Hopefully, since they have completely redesigned the system, waiting for new features will occur with more frequency than once every two years.

New AdWords Editor Tool

Google is beta testing a new tool for helping people manage large paid search campaigns. Right now this Windows 2000/XP only tool (they are working on a Macintosh and Linux version) provides some nice benefits you can’t get using the normal web interface. Now this is not a replacement for using the web portal, but rather a complementary tool. I’ve always been very pleased with the web portal for AdWords, especially when you compare it to the other services from Yahoo! or MSN AdCenter, which lack in the area of ease-of-use and functionality. So what does it offer that the web portal doesn’t? In summary, some key time saver features.

For starters, since there are no alerts as to when a search keyword goes inactive, you have to open up each ad group to find out. Not so with this AdWords Editor tool, you just list out the keywords and sort on the Status field. You can select a range and adjust the bids all at once. Now if they could allow secondary sorts this would be even better as a way to manipulate the results.

More importantly for managing large keywords portfolios, bulk-loading keywords into existing of new ad groups is necessary. Currently, of course cutting and pasting via the web portal is the way to do this, but again, this is time consuming as you have to open up (or create) each ad group. But what is really cool about the bulk load feature is you can bypass loading up by ad groups and load them by campaign and ad groups in one operation. Of course you need to previously create the new ad groups and campaigns to bulk load to them.

The AdWords Editor tool is great for the seasoned AdWords Pros who need a streamlined interface and don’t need advice as you move along. For those individuals managing large ad and keyword portfolios it’s a must have tool.

Getting a Handle on your Cost Per Action (CPA)

Not only are gas prices on the rise, but often the cost per click when bidding on search terms is increasing too. It’s better to explore for shortcuts, than complain at the pump, which holds true with Google AdWords.

There is a range of options to respond with, such as:

• New ad copy to improve the click thru rate (CTR)
• Lowering the position of your ads
• Testing new landing pages to improve the rate of conversions
• Improving the overall functionality of your website
• Exploring lower-cost, alternative search terms

If you have exhausted all of these options and yet the price for those consistently performing search terms continually rises, when is it time to give up on that term?

The answer is easy, well sort of.

It all depends on your target Cost Per Action (CPA).

In other words, if you are selling something for $100 (or targeting a cost per lead with the same value), how much are you willing to pay for that action before it ends up being a sale or lead?

Factor in the actual cost of the clicks and add a general overhead “tax” to manage the program and you have the real CPA. If your CPA is $20 (20% to 30% of sales value), then you are in the typical ballpark for the cost of selling margin. More is bad (less profitable), less is good (improved margins). That’s the simple part.

The real question is defining how much time you have before deciding your desired CPA will never cut it.

This depends very much on sales latency, how long before you close the sale, and calculating the costs of additional selling methods that are necessary for your business model, such as follow-up phone calls.

In the $100 example, your sales latency should be in a matter of hours or days, unless you have a very unique offering. Higher-ticket items (including things such as enterprise software, heavy equipment, large service contracts, etc.) increase the time to decide, increasing your cost of selling. The important aspect to consider is what are you doing to reduce the sales process. Both online and offline.

So the bottom line is if your CPA is horrible, before you cast out the Paid Search model check out your website’s natural selling ability, as well as how to improve the overall selling process for your company.

This would be especially true if you see a very crowded search engine advertising space for your target keywords. After all, it is likely that someone in a crowded field of advertisers is using paid search profitably (of course, there are plenty of people who still conduct paid search campaigns irresponsibly).

If your ability to close sales is historically good in other channels, and/or through other online advertising methods, and paid search is turning out to be too costly, then you may have an alignment problem of search terms and that is an entirely new discussion.

Or, perhaps your business model just does not translate to advertising to people looking for exactly what you have to offer, and having the ability to control those advertising costs in a moment’s notice, all while tracking your spending to the exact question (search term) someone was asking when they found your product/service…

Taking Stock of Google PPC changes

There is storm brewing in the Google AdWords space, and some even view it as a war as Google attacks the bottom line of many people’s wallets. In response to a growing problem of click arbitrage where Made for AdSense only websites (their sole business purpose is making money from AdSense) some of these folks bid on low cost keywords to get people to their website and then hope they will click on links of much higher costs keywords that they benefit directly. Google has always been about providing a relevant search experience and doesn’t like this practice, so they implemented a Quality Score program to check out your landing page. If they don’t like what they see and believe your landing page is not relevant to the search term, then your cost to bid on those terms goes up. And I mean goes up. People are complaining that some costs have gone from just .50 to $5.00. This is enough to drive many businesses out of the business.

This is one storm that even those doing the right thing might get wet. So if you see an sudden and dramatic increase in the CPC, much like your SEO effort start working on improved content, or stop bidding on those terms. Google may be taking a big hit on the customer relations front in the future and even their bottom line as people suspend bidding on high inventory terms, but it’s always been about relevancy with them.

Open letter to Google Regarding Changes to The Ad Words Program

Here's a recent thread that can be found on WebMasterWorld, where they typically do not endorse or run such posts, but the subject it's on the minds of many advertisers who work extensively with Google Adwords PPC. 

MSN AdCenter Is Annoyingly Good

So now that I’ve had clients set up with MSN AdCenter for a few weeks, I have enough experience to say what was on my mind right at the start – “this is terrible!” I am finding that the user interface and customer support for AdCenter are both lacking.

I appreciate that MSN launched with some nice features right away – geographic targeting, demographic targeting, and day-parting to name a few.

But, working with destination URLs for customized conversion tracking and seeing reliable reports in a timely fashion are two of the more annoying failures at launch.

I did finally figure out the way to append conversion tracking codes to each individual keyword with the {param1} function, but no thanks to Customer Support. In fact, when I called in to get help with this function, and a few others, I found that I knew more about the AdCenter system than the customer service rep!

So what if the service is new and it takes a lot of bodies to handle the calls? MSN had been testing the system and training reps for months in beta (U.S. and Europe) for months prior to the full release in the U.S. How could MSN allow someone to take phone calls, who not only could not answer my questions, but did not know who to refer me to?

But, as much as I am finding the system difficult to use, I have no choice but to stick with it. The B2C clients that we have using MSN AdCenter are getting some very nice conversions. That says something about the quality of the audience using MSN Search.

Unfortunately.

After all, the natural search results on MSN.com are generally terrible. I myself cannot see why anyone would use MSN for search. But, obviously consumers with money to spend are using it, so I will continue to put clients where they will make money.

I just hope that the pain ends soon, and that MSN AdCenter continues to take its lead from Google AdWords (MSN obviously admires Google’s system because things like the ad unit size, bidding system, and ad ranking methodology were taken right from Google’s playbook). So, as MSN works to crush Google (good luck), they’ll be making advertisers’ lives that much easier as they play catch up.

Yahoo Partners with eBay - The Competitive Landscape May Shift

In the news today, Yahoo and eBay, joining forces to provide collaborative services amongst two of the largest, most trafficked sites on the World Wide Web (first and fifth respectively - according to Alexa traffic data).  The search landscape is changing, as market leaders look to partner with other major content providers, integrating search technology, cross-linking ad networks, and offering collaborative services.