searchengineman

Pay per Click Marketing – Text Ads on the Search Engines.

Sponsored Search or PPC, also referred sometimes as Search Engine Placements (SEP). These are paid sponsored Ads which are hosted by Google, Yahoo & Bing (MSN). There are 10 positions on the page.

This advertising is primarily bid based with the ultimate placement of the Ads decided by a complex proprietary algorithm which involves over 120 factors on Google alone. 50% of those being related to “Quality Score” the Click Thru Ratio (CTR), and Relevancy.

Over 4 BILLION searches are conducted on a monthly basis on the “big three” (Google, Yahoo, and BING (MSN)). Over 95% of all searches conducted are done on the first page of the search. This means that 3.8 BILLION consumer searches end up making their buying decision with the virtual stores listed on the first page of their search. Of the 3.8 Billion 70% make their buying decision with one of the top listed websites on the first page of the search.

Advertise your product or service by selecting relevant keywords.

Advertisements are associated and linked to keywords selected by the client. Those keywords that best describe the item or service being advertised are selected. The final selection of keywords is also factored by relevancy, competition and at the account level. The client may also choose which specific locationsarea’s, even cities (referred to as GeoTargetting) or choose which times to advertise (Dayparting).

Why is pay per click advertising different from SEO.

You have control of what text appears on the first page, as opposed to SEO which may choose a page with a description text which is not seasonal or up to date.

PPC advertising is up in minutes, SEO takes weeks and months depending on the competition.

PPC ads are 5 times more likely to lead to a conversion, but will receive fewer clicks overall. It’s a quality over quantity argument.

A poorly performing keyword can easily be terminated from a PPC campaign, while
seo sculpting is different with each client, and must be carefully considered, lest one affect the entire campaign.

Perils of running your own PPC campaign & why you may want to consider an Agency.

A PPC campaign if not executed correctly can cost the novice $100 if not $1000’s of dollars in wasted clicks and Ad spend, worse the advertiser has no stated measurement (analytics) or financial goal (Roi).

Certain keyword drive so much traffic that campaign budgets can be burned thru if not carefully researched.

Corporations and small business’s often fail to recognize marketing opportunities they can exploit, by not fully exploring the keyword continuum of the market.

Certain premium keywords are extremely expensive, novice advertisers may find themselves up against players in bid wars, which they can’t possibly win. Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.

Google, Yahoo & BING’s criteria and policies are extremely frustrating to the uninitiated these policies are being updated or changed monthly. Its not fun preparing your campaign only to be thwarted by another obscure hurdle, or worse not even being aware there is a hurdle.

You can’t leave a PPC campaign on autopilot, it requires daily maintenance, methodical management. If you enjoy burning money this is a great way to do it.

Most business owners do not have the time to manage small campaigns. Larger corporations will often have to hire a person fulltime, who has the skills to effectively run a PPC campaign, or train them (Even more expensive).

What Our Company can do with your PPC campaign.

With over 250 account we manage small to large size PPC accounts. Our experience in each field and industry, has allowed our company to spot trends and opportunities for every Search Engine Marketing PPC campaigns.

We are able to make sure your website can support a PPC campaign. We will make sure your site is up to snuff, before you waste your money on bad landing pages. We are not in the business of taking your money if your landing pages or messaging is awful.

All our clients are given comprehensive reports on campaign activity, with recommendations made by our specialists on opportunities, and potential setbacks.

Corporate clients receive specialized keyword research, and special reporting as they require, Your campaigns are managed by the person on the phone, not a sales support person or a talking head, who is not right in the trenches.

Corporate clients have opportunities to exploit our companies full service packages across the board, with SEO, Social & Mobile & Analytic Tracking. All these parts are co-ordinated fully along with your PPC campaign.

If you have further questions on our corporate or business PPC management programs please call:
Maor Daniel for corporate – 905.669.1655 ext. 333
Albert Sananes for Small to Medium Size  – 905.669.1655 ext. 302.

Google has re-invented the Wheel (Again)

Last May 2009 Google released Search Options. One stand out tool is the Google Wonder Wheel. It shares a few similarities to www.quintura.com & www.visualthesaurus.com , which uses word cloud technology to organize content.

The Wonder Wheel is a new visualization tool, for semantic indexing.

Wonder Wheel takes seed words you enter and expands them semantically, while also displaying the natural organic results of that search on the right.

As far as I understand, the wheel uses personalized search. So one searchers wheel , will be slightly different to another users personalized search on Google. I have witnessed this myself noting changes over time on the wheel . The spokes of the wheel change and evolves with the natural search listings.

Kevin Bacon Wonder Wheel is not connected to everyone on the planet.

My attempt to break the wheel using “Kevin Bacon”. failed to work.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon ) Apparently he’s not as connected as the world would like to think.

Using the wheel for your PPC campaign structure

PPC campaigns can benefit using the wheel. Pay-Per Click campaign keywords are always organized into groups, by relevancy & landing page. It is now possible to get a better understanding of your overall keyword continuum (How words relate to one another). Google has made it even easier to hone and focus your target market using the wheel. The Google Wheel is extremely useful when your product might not fit into a conventional keyword search. By selecting neighboring industries, it may be possible to connect the dots like Kevin Bacon, with greater confidence.

Google Wonder Wheel My Wish List of improvements.

As a suggestion for improvements:

1. Google should allow you to export your Wheel Searches.
2. Save those searches and return later to them in wheel form to note the changes.
3. A list of total google pages indexed by wheel spoke as an option.

Google reserves the right to change your title tag & meta descriptions, to better serve relevancy for Google Search (Called Keyword in Context)

I think what Matt Cutts is saying:

That if you care about your website, your site must be optimized inside and out. Leaving no title tag or description tag unturned.  If you are being lazy by cloning your descriptions tags or using the same title to tag  all 300 pages of your site,  you’re not going to make friends at Google. If your CMS system spits out garbage meta’s or boiler plate nonsense, you’ve been warned.

Frankly I would not want Google to randomly choose me a title tag or meta description! No offence, a machine is still a machine. Bottom line, fix your pages, get a human to do it!

What should I do if Google is changing my Title Tag and SERP listings?

Say your most popular article has an important subsection that people are consistently returning to. Does that mean Google will rename my article to that section or H2 tag?  What is the threshold of this happening for a SERP listing.

My advice would be to rewrite that page or write a new page to better cater to that keyword in context.
Go with the proverbial popular flow.  Since Google is being kind enough to make your articles more relevant, it would be nice if you could track these changes to your SERPS to take advantage of this.

I’m unaware at the moment if there are any particular tools that can accurately track modified title tags, this is something to look out for.  Any Vendors out there? Feel free to plug your 2 cents on this.

One of the key factors in account management which is crucial to better cost optimization is the quality score. Quality score (also referred to as quality index) is the measure of the relevancy of your landing page and ad copy to the advertised keyword. Most major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN (Bing) employ this score in all text based advertising in their sponsored links section. This ensures searchers to not only see relevant results to their search query in the organic results, but also in the sponsored ads as well.

As it has many benefits to searchers, advertisers must also be aware of the impact it has on their campaign and specifically their budget. Each search engine has their own criteria to calculate the quality score of the advertiser and generally follow the following equation:

Maximum Bid X Quality Score (Index) = Ad Rank

Some factors which are considered for quality score are:

• Click-Through Rate (CTR)
• Relevance of the Keyword to its Ad Group
• Landing Page Quality
• Historical Performance
• Landing Page Load Time

So what does this mean to advertisers? A lower quality score means an advertiser will pay more for a click than another advertiser who bids as high but has a higher quality score. Advertisers who disregard quality score in their day to day management of their campaigns may be running a very expensive campaign which is costing them a lot more than what they can be paying if they had better quality scores. For larger accounts, this can mean a potential loss of hundreds of valuable clicks and poor market penetration.

To ensure campaigns are being managed efficiently, an advertiser should make it a habit to optimize their campaign for better quality scores. This means spending a bit more time writing better ad copy, choosing effective landing pages, and conducting more thorough keyword research. These are all basic best practices to run more effective campaigns regardless of quality scores.

For further information on quality score and how it affects your campaign, please visit the help section within your advertising platform (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft Adcenter, etc.) or speak to an account manager at Eden

A manager was once interviewed by a prestigious productivity magazine about his management of his department.
“How many people work in your office?”
to which he replied. “…about half”.

Suffer the scourge of the office parasite?
The Office Parasite comes in many forms.  Some of you work with them, some of you are managed by them.  Parasites usually exist in larger offices or firms as smaller ones can not bear to support them for long.  Camouflage is an essential survival skill and as such they can be found hiding in plain site often with their back against the wall, or carefully concealed in fancy offices & surrounded by underlings which enhances their innate abilities to escape detection.

The Parasite’s primary motivation is to generally draw a salary from the host company while working as little as possible, if he or she works at all!

All office parasites are both social and political animals; they perform the barest minimum amount of work to cover their backsides.  They take credit for others’ work, never take responsibility & sour the working environment with tantrums or emotional blackmail, going even as far as character assassination.  An infestation will always lead to a loss of productivity and sometimes can lead to the destruction of the host.  The solution to such an infestation is coming-  when Google Wave is released for the rest of the public all office parasites shall be put on notice**.

(**It should be noted this technique will not work for the Super Office Parasite which derive further protection from relatives or family members  in the host company!  Please follow this link if you’re dealing with a family parasite!)

Why the lazy guy in your office should be terrified of Google Wave.
The most interesting feature of Google Wave is the play back mode. While most of the attention has been on the real time aspects and instant nature of Google Wave, the much overlooked Play Back mode allows all subscribers to playback the entire history of a Wave at any point in time from start to present.

A single user or contributor can be isolated and studied under the microscope.  For the first time an entire office of Wave Users will have the surveillance & proof required to finally flush out the office parasite!  Once companies start integrating future workflows inside Waves, the likelihood of the parasites avoiding detection will vanish.

Google Wave the people’s surveillance tool!
I do not believe Google intended this feature to become a surveillance tool, but that is exactly what it means for participants in every Google Wave session.  This type of tracking was usually reserved for IT departments and snooping software.  I think they should rename the feature Google Surveillance Tool™!

Personally I don’t see this as a bad thing- call it safety of the herd. Your team will be able to see who pulls their weight and who is keeping the seat warm, extremely quickly. I look forward to the general release fairly soon, along with tools that measure contribution and frequency of the wave user!

I am curious if any of you in the Google Wave Beta Test community have found a way around the playback feature short of not using Google Wave.

Any of you old enough to remember the Cabbage Patch Doll Frenzy? No?
Ok how about the first iPhone rollout
(Canadians bought phones for $1000 or more even without data plans!)

Try to imagine using your iPhone without connectivity and forking money for the privilege (scary)

The newest “Gotta have it” is Google Wave.  You can get a sense the level of excitement based on  how many people want in on a chance to try the Google Wave.
https://wave.google.com/wave (Sorry you’re too late its closed for the beta test)

What on Earth is Google Wave?

In case you’ve been living under a rock here is Google Wave in less than 10 minutes

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UPDATE: Nov 12, 2009

Highly recommend reading completewaveguide.com .  All Questions, Hacks in one place.
Keep up to date with googles blog site http://www.googlewave.blogspot.com/
And I still don’t have a Google Wave invite.. (I don’t know any Google employees!)
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The most exciting feature is the real time language translation!  Suffice it to say Google Wave will evolve into a new model/channel affecting interaction online.  Of course Google will monetize and collect even more data.  (It’s amazing how much “Free” costs today).

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/surfs-up-wednesday-google-wave-update.html
On Sept 30^th Google invited 100,000 people for the beta test launch; (Developers had already been invited).   In order for new users to take advantage of Google Wave  each new user could also invite additional friends, family or colleagues to sign up as well.

If you’re waiting on the outside like me, trying to find ways to get on board Google Wave.
Here are some strategies.

Use Your Social Network to Get Invited?

Apply in a Lottery Draw System

Give your email address to spam companies.

Buy your Google Wave Invites on Ebay

Tell Google how much you hate them!