March 2010 – Feature: Build an Effective PPC Keyword Database–In Four Steps!

Properly Structured, a Keyword Database–Unlike a Mere Keyword List–Organizes More Keywords and Can Easily Identify Those Most Relevant and Valuable For Any Campaign.

By Larry Kim

Most search marketers are still building pay-per-click campaigns from keyword lists, a practice that isn’t doing their business any favors. Even if you’re a master of Excel, a spreadsheet is an inefficient and outdated way to manage keywords for PPC, leading to time and money wasted.

The keyword database is a totally different approach to PPC keyword research, and has many advantages over a keyword list:

• It’s private and proprietary, unlike lists generated by third-party tools;
• It’s easier to organize and manage than a static spreadsheet, supporting smart relationships among data sets;
• It’s easier to update, encouraging expansion over time so your campaigns can grow;
• It’s actionable, so you don’t just analyze your keywords, you take steps to get better results; and
• It’s collaborative, so multiple members of your team can work simultaneously toward a common goal.

Essentially, a keyword database is a flexible infrastructure that enables you to work with many more keywords, keep them organized and quickly determine which pockets of keywords are most relevant and valuable. It’s basically a ready-made PPC campaign structure.

Though it’s something of a paradigm shift, building a keyword database isn’t unduly difficult, and you’ll find that as your campaigns scale, it’s much faster and easier to keep things running smoothly. Here’s the basic process in four steps.

Step 1: Start Finding Your Keywords
The most important part of a keyword database is, obviously, the keywords themselves. To build a comprehensive, up-to-date database, it’s vital to look at keyword discovery as an ongoing process rather than a one-time event. Ideally, this will entail aggregating keywords from these multiple sources over time:

Public keyword tools – Web-based keyword suggestion tools are most useful when your site is relatively new or when you’re branching into new areas; they can also be helpful for competitive research. These tools, for the most part, show you the popular, high-traffic keywords related to a given topic.

Just remember that overall popularity doesn’t guarantee relevance to your audience, so you’ll need to prove out these suggestions in your campaigns.

Historical site logs - Your website’s server logs are a terrific source of keyword data, and are often underused. These logs contain a record of the real search phrases that people have used to find your site. Combining this private data with public keyword suggestions will give you a much more complete picture of the terminology your visitors and prospective customers are using.

Web analytics - This is where the “up-to-date” part comes in. The keyword reports in your analytics application provide you with a continuous stream of new keywords. Take advantage of those insights! Incorporate these new keywords into your research.

Search query reports - Likewise, stay on top of the search query reports in AdWords Editor. These tell you the actual search queries that have triggered your ads (and they may surprise you).

Pooling these sources will give you a personalized database that is highly relevant to your business–far more so than a purchased keyword list or a static spreadsheet of generic results from a keyword tool. And keeping your research up-to-date with traffic stats (the number of visitors driven to your site by each keyword) and associated goal data (sales and other conversions triggered by each keyword) will allow you to see which keywords and types of keywords really work for you–regardless of what’s most popular according to Google or Wordtracker. Those highly effective keywords are obviously the ones that are going to drive the most value in your pay-per-click campaigns.

Step 2: Group and Organize Your Keywords
Better keyword research is the first step toward more profitable PPC campaigns, but to reap the full benefits of your research, it’s crucial to group and organize those keywords based on semantic relevance. Beyond simply making your life easier, segmenting your database into small, manageable groups of closely related keywords will improve your SEM campaigns in a number of ways:

Better landing pages - It’s easier to write specific, informative web copy around tightly knit keyword groups, and your landing pages will have better chances of ranking high in the SERPS.

Better text ads - Similarly, it’s much easier to write relevant, compelling ad text around close-knit ad groups. Your keyword group structure will translate into your Google AdWords ad groups.

More clicks and conversions - More specific, relevant web pages and ads target a more qualified audience, so they’re more clickable and ultimately result in more sales.

Increased Quality Score - High click-through rates and demonstrated relevance contribute to a higher Quality Score, so you’ll pay less for better ad positions and more qualified impressions.

Especially as your campaigns scale–and as you delve into the long tail–keyword grouping becomes an indispensable tool for PPC management. So how do you actually do it? That’s an article of its own, but here are some quick tips for organizing keywords into a logical taxonomy:

Start with large, top-level groups – Top-level keyword groups for businesses are usually built around a product or service you provide–typically one word and a noun, like “coffee” or “landscaping.”

Segment your top-level groups into narrower subgroups - Second-level groups often include a modifier that specifies the offering in question (e.g., “Colombian coffee”). Continue to segment as needed so your keyword groups are small, targeted and easily manageable.

Finally, you’ll also want to make use of keyword grouping tools when you need a little help (like WordStream’s Free Keyword Grouper). This makes quick work of what would otherwise be a cumbersome manual process.

Once your database is organized into a meaningful structure, everything else you do for PPC–from incorporating new keywords to writing ads to managing bids–will be easier to manage.

Step 3: Discover Negative Keywords and Eliminate Waste
Better keyword research helps you identify opportunities–namely, pockets of related keywords that represent potential profit. But to keep your return on investment from PPC high, you also need to identify waste. Most likely, a significant percentage of your daily AdWords spend is wasted on keywords that match your ads but aren’t really relevant.

Say you’re running a paid search campaign for a computer supply store, and you have an ad set to trigger on “monitor”-related search queries. Using the broad match option is a great way to capture traffic from long-tail keywords you might not think of on your own, like “best price on flat-screen monitors.” But you definitely don’t want your ad to match for irrelevant phrases like “baby monitors” and “hall monitor”–those useless impressions will quickly drag down your click-through rate and Quality Score, driving PPC costs up.

Your budget will go a lot farther–ratcheting up ROI–if you make use of negative keywords. Here are four ways to find negative keywords:

Generic negative keyword lists - Pre-assembled lists of negative keywords are a way to get started on building a list. The downside lies in the term “generic.” Generic negative keywords may not apply to your specific niche. In addition, many potential negative keywords are likely to be missing.

Keyword research - You can find negative keywords while you’re conducting regular keyword research; just keep your eyes open for keyword suggestions that aren’t relevant to your business. For example, in WordStream’s free keyword tool, one of the top keyword suggestions for “monitor” is “heart monitor.”

Search query reports – A third way to find negative keywords is to look at your search query reports in AdWords. This report shows you the actual search queries that are triggering your PPC ads (as well as the match type, number of impressions, number of clicks, CTR and other relevant information). It’s a good idea to comb through these regularly and eliminate any irrelevant keywords from your ad groups. This method is more thorough than the above options, because it’s based on real data from your own PPC account.

Your organic log files - Your own log files are an excellent source of potential negative keywords. These files keep a record of every phrase that drives a visitor from a search engine to your site. There’s one main advantage to this method of negative keyword discovery over search query reports: You can catch negative keywords before they trigger your ads. (And as a best practice, you should eliminate irrelevant keywords from your organic keyword research as well.)

At this point you’ll have a highly organized and streamlined keyword database, which takes care of most of the work entailed in creating high-performance PPC campaigns.

Step 4: Create Strong, Targeted Text Ads
Now that you’ve segmented your database into small, clean, tightly related groups, the next step is to write text ads for each group. Because your ad groups are already highly targeted, it should be relatively easy to write strong, targeted ads.

Here are some tips for writing PPC ad copy that works:

• Include the most value-driving keywords from the group, whenever possible, in the title, text and display URL of the ad. This increases its relevance and clickability;
• Be specific – know which segment of your audience you’re targeting ahead of time. (Again, your keyword group structure should make this simple.);
• Write multiple ads for each ad group for testing purposes, between three and five ads. Google will cycle the ads and you can see which one performs best and then use that ad going forward. Pay attention to what kind of language works with your audience; and
• Be sure to include a call to action so people know what you want them to do. (You’ve heard the line “Don’t make me think,” right?)

In addition, it’s important that your ads are demonstrably relevant to their associated landing pages. Don’t write a targeted ad about a niche product and send visitors to your home page. This too affects your Quality Score.

Maintain Your Gains
Remember, one of the benefits of a keyword database is the ability to grow your campaigns without losing control of your keywords. So once your database and your campaigns are in place, keep monitoring, keep testing and keep tweaking to improve results. And keep discovering keywords! When your customers type something into a search box, they’re revealing their habits and their needs. Listen and learn from them, and put that knowledge back into your campaigns.

Larry Kim is founder and VP of marketing and products at Wordstream, a provider of keyword management solutions for PPC and SEO. He can be reached at lkim@wordstream.com.

January 2010 – Online Insights: Viewpoint

Use Display Ads To Get More Out of Search

If you’re advertising online, you’re probably paying for search clicks that don’t convert and display ads that don’t drive sales. To solve both of these problems, find a way to make your search and display ads work better together.

I’m speaking specifically of search retargeting. Here’s how it works: after users search for a term that’s relevant to your business, they arrive at your site. But many searchers leave before ever converting. Historically, these visitors would have represented wasted clicks–end of story. But with retargeting, advertisers can drop a tracking cookie on the visitor’s computer and use this cookie to follow that visitor across the Internet. Consequently, advertisers can re-ignite the conversation with these former visitors, drawing them back to the advertiser’s site to finally drive a conversion.

This process increases the possibility that a conversion from a previously lost or abandoned click will occur. It also means driving display ad spend toward users who–through their search activity–have declared themselves as being interested in the kinds of things your company sells.

In addition to the ad agencies that offer retargeting services of various kinds, a number of ad networks offer systems with similar functionality. For example, Yahoo’s Smart Ads system dynamically targets ad offers to Yahoo users based on the activities they’ve performed across the entire Yahoo network.

So, for instance, a user who lives in Los Angeles, plays poker in Yahoo games, reads about poker in Yahoo sports and searches for flights to Las Vegas, is quite likely to be more than a casual Las Vegas searcher–he or she is probably a very serious candidate for receiving ads for flights to Sin City.

Yahoo might serve this user ads with special offers on Los Angeles to Las Vegas flights and these ads might appear anywhere on the Yahoo network.

While different vendors offer different flavors of search retargeting, the common thread is clear: web users spend their lives across the entire Internet. To target them best and to make sure advertisers stay engaged with them, advertisers need to maintain conversations with them across as much of the web as possible–through display, search and the many consumer touchpoints that lie in between.

Mark Simon is vice president, industry relations at Didit, a digital ad firm specializing in search marketing and targeted display ads. He can be reached at mark.simon@didit.com.

January 2010 – Feature: Today the Home Office, Tomorrow the World

How Small Business Can Maximize Search Advertising to Get Noticed and Increase Sales

By Gill Brown

The Internet changed everything. It brought small businesses to the world with a click of a mouse. However, with this expansion came mass competition and an overwhelming amount of data. How can small businesses cut through the clutter and effectively target customers? Search advertising has proven itself to be the most cost-effective and focused approach to reaching potential customers on the Internet. While it can seem overwhelming at first, understanding a few tricks of the trade can help small businesses make their presence known in the online world.

Understanding and Maximizing SEO
SEO is an organic or unpaid method of raising the profile of a website within search engines. The theory–and, generally, the reality–is that the higher the site is in the search results rankings, the more click-throughs it will receive.

Here are some fundamentals your small business should follow to ensure that you get the most from SEO:

Get indexed – “Getting indexed” means that your site is being recognized by the search engines and that they are combing it for relevant content. Small businesses can submit a new site to the big search engines including Google, Yahoo and Bing. These sites have easy-to-follow guidelines for successful indexing.

Write for people, then for robots - It’s important to use keywords within the content of the site, but not at the price of readability. Small businesses aren’t going to convert their visitors into customers if their sites don’t make any sense. Therefore, write content for the core audience first, and then go back and consider varying copy for keyword usage throughout the site.

Keep meta data simple – While meta data was never considered the driving force behind page rank, most SEO professionals still suggest keeping meta keywords limited to 10. Appropriate meta information should focus on a company’s products, services, industry and location (if location is pertinent to purchase). Use a Google keyword traffic estimator to choose the best terms (those that enjoy high search volume, but are still related to your products and appropriate for your business).

Links - Create a web of interaction to your site via hyperlinks. Why? Links that are clicked through to your site strengthen your page rank. Use internal links on the site to refer back to different pages. It is important to phrase link copy so that the hyperlinked words are pertinent keywords (rather then utilizing copy such as click here for X). Another potentially successful technique is to use social media tactics to link back to your site via blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. However, it is very important to develop relationships and an activity history within the online communities before making a hard sell, or you run a risk of alienating potential customers and being “flamed.”

Beware the “Black Hat” – Black Hat tactics are sketchy, marginally ethical SEO techniques that are not approved by search engines and can result in a reduced page rank. Examples include keyword stuffing, meta tag stuffing, hidden words and using high-traffic but irrelevant search terms.

Understanding and Maximizing SEM
While SEO is a discipline that generates traffic via “organic” means, search engine marketing is the process of driving traffic from a search engine through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising and paid inclusion. Here are some simple, easy-to-implement best practices to help you begin to get the most out of your SEM efforts:

Reflect success metrics in ad copy - If your small business’s goal is to drive the most traffic possible to a site, you should use inclusive wording in the ad copy. However, if your goal is to drive more qualified traffic, then you should be more specific in your language. For example, say a small company serves the widget market. To drive maximum traffic to their site, they might use ad copy such as Cheapest Widgets Online! to attract a wide range of the widget market. But if the company specializes in or is running a sale on previously owned widgets, they might want to attract more qualified traffic with copy such as Best Prices on Used Widgets! to target the market that is specifically looking for used widgets.

Go local - With so many global, national, regional and even local companies turning to paid search on Google, Yahoo and Bing for traffic and customers, small businesses can significantly reduce their advertising costs by geo-targeting. Not only does this tactic target the ad to people searching for specific products and services within a specified city, state or region, but it also may result in significantly lower costs per click (CPC) than buying the same term on a national scale.

Track It - Use the native conversion tracking pixels to determine which combination of keywords, campaigns, ad creative, referrers and offers are bringing in the most business. Have the discipline to continually refine lower-converting ads to steadily improve overall results.

Landing page optimization - Although it’s not search marketing per se, but rather a “post-click” marketing practice, landing page optimization is inextricably tied to the success of your search efforts. The layout and content of a landing page will directly affect the conversion metrics of an SEM campaign.

Keep your landing pages basic. Traffic from ads should be driven to pages with an uncomplicated design and requiring a simple action–sign up, purchase, watch, share, etc. Ads linking to pages with a multitude of links–or that link to the homepage rather than one with content and copy directly related to the ad–are less likely to result in a conversion than those that only ask for only one thing.

Avoid submit. Buttons that simply state submit don’t reinforce the action or behavior that the business wants people to make. Instead, try another phrase that reflects the action you are going for. Keep all the key copy and design elements “above the fold” so that the visitor does not have to scroll down to see them.

Avoid confusion by ensuring that the content of the ad is reflected in the content of the landing page. Header-for-header, subheader-for-subheader and benefit-for-benefit, make sure that the landing page the visitor is sent to directly mirrors the ad they clicked on, or it is likely to lose them. Think of it as making sure the landing page keeps the promise made by the ad copy.

Just as With Your Financial Portfolio–Diversify
When you think of search marketing, Google, Yahoo and Bing are top of mind. But while they play a critical role in any effective search engine marketing strategy, it’s beneficial for small businesses to diversify their ad buys to drive the best conversions.

Here are some considerations when thinking about working with sources of traffic in addition to the major search engines:

Service – Small businesses often run lean and mean, without the added luxury of a dedicated staff that can spend its man hours managing Google campaigns. Small businesses should consider looking to smaller, independent search advertising networks or vertical search engines (smaller search engines that focus on a particular niche) for additional sources of traffic that provide comprehensive customer service ensuring that campaigns are up and running quickly. Some networks even offer dedicated account managers at no extra fee.

Platforms - Once a business has set up their accounts, campaigns and keywords on the big search engines, they will want to focus on selecting an independent search network or vertical search engine that has similar targeting, tracking and reporting features so as not to lose any performance fidelity transferring to the networks. Caveat: not all search ad networks are created equally, so make sure to do your due diligence to ensure that you have access to features that help drive ROI and support business goals.

Traffic – Among independent search networks and engines, there are a wide variety of players offering different volumes and qualities of traffic. Small businesses should be sure to work with networks that have aggressive traffic quality controls and partnerships in place.

It may sound daunting–and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach–but the most satisfying aspect of search engine marketing and optimization is that it can be constantly updated, changed and tested to continually improve results.

Get in the game!

Gill Brown is vice president of advertising network sales at LookSmart, a long-time provider of search marketing solutions and operators of an independent search advertising network. He can be reached at gbrown@looksmart.net.

December 2009 – Online Insights: Paid Search

Reaching Post-Holiday Shoppers: The Search Begins

The holidays may be “the most wonderful time of the year” for retailers, driving 25 to 40 percent of yearly profits in just one month, but that doesn’t mean the sales boom has to stop on December 25th. In fact, if you plan your post-holiday online marketing strategy correctly, the weeks after Christmas will bring a second boom in sales as gift-card shoppers and deal hunters flood websites in search of bargains. Over two-thirds of consumers take advantage of post-holiday sales, making these critical days in December and January a great time to clear out your remaining winter inventory and expose new buyers to your brand for the very first time.

One of the best ways to maximize post-holiday sales is to use paid search to drive traffic to your site. Google found in its 2009 holiday e-commerce study that 82 percent of Internet users find search engines “extremely or very useful” in making their purchases.

Who are Post-Holiday Shoppers?

Let’s step back and think about what consumers expect from the post-holiday shopping period. First and foremost, they want deals. Generally, people who are shopping a few days after receiving tons of gifts will be motivated only by great bargains; they don’t “need” to buy anything. Second, millions of shoppers will redeem gift cards or exchange unwanted gifts for credit to choose new items. Third, unlike the frenzy of buying for other people leading up to the holidays, in the post-holiday period, shoppers are mostly shopping for themselves—looking to pick up those items they wanted but didn’t receive, or to stock up on family essentials.

Also, think about your post-holiday goals. Of course, you want to get rid of excess winter inventory left over from the holiday season. But do you also want to promote some of your back-catalog or long-tail items? What about increasing sign-ups for your e-mail list or rewards program? Are there ways that you can capture these shoppers again and again, for example, by offering in-store credits for online purchases of over $100?

Thinking about your post-holiday marketing plan from both the consumer and the retailer perspective is a great way to get a head start on your post-holiday search marketing strategy.

SEM Tips for Boosting Post-Holiday Sales

Once you’re ready to create a post-holiday paid-search campaign, consider the following best practices to boost both sales and ROI performance:

Recalibrate your bids for non-holiday traffic. During the holidays, online merchants typically see increased traffic, conversion rates and sales, as well as higher-than-normal average order values. As a result, competition and bids for popular keywords usually increase during the run-up to the holidays. In the post-holiday period, you need to anticipate the shift downward in terms of conversion rate and average order values that results from consumers returning to their everyday habits. If you don’t, you may find yourself bidding more than you should for keywords based on ROI data from the period of holiday over-exuberance. An easy way to avoid this problem is to either look back to the period one year earlier to see how keyword prices changed as a guideline, or simply to exclude the most recent data from your bid calculations. While this means starting over, if you are using a tool which factors recent data heavily into bid calculations, you will be able to adjust your bids within just a day or two to quickly take advantage of the change in season.

Factor in costs of goods sold to make accurate bids. During post-holiday sales, consumers expect big discounts. Combined with the fact that most retailers are trying to clean out seasonal inventory, prices on many goods will hit rock-bottom levels. That means if you don’t factor in your cost of goods sold to calculate a net profit margin, you may be overpaying for some of your keyword terms. Use a paid search management application that captures your true profit margin, and then bid based on those findings. To take it a step further, consider grouping your keywords and building bids based on profit-margin targets. This will allow you to maximize your profits and deplete seasonal inventory by aggressively bidding on keywords for heavily discounted products, while still reserving a reasonable margin for the products you are introducing in the New Year.

Update your keywords and ad copy to reflect post-holiday sales. This might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s important to point out that you should bid on keywords and write ad copy that directly reflects your post-holiday promotions and discounts. Bid on keyword terms such as “After Christmas Sale” and “Post-Holiday Sale,” and include copy in your ads such as, “Sales Starts December 26th” or “Up to 75 Percent Off Starting December 26th.” Get creative with your keywords and ad copy, keeping in mind the typical consumer post-holiday behaviors discussed above. Try creative such as “Now Get the Presents You Really Want: Post-Christmas Sale” or “Gift Cards Burning a Hole in Your Pocket? Sale Starts Today.”

Watch out for stock-outs and adjust the keyword mix accordingly. In the post-holiday period, stock-outs are commonplace, especially as you clear out seasonal inventory you don’t plan to replenish. Monitor inventory levels closely to turn keywords off as soon as associated products fall below a certain inventory threshold. Sophisticated paid search management applications automate this process for you by analyzing a feed from your product catalog and inventory levels, and correspondingly adjusting or eliminating bids.

Clean up your campaigns for the new year. The shift from holiday to post-holiday is a tremendous opportunity to clean house and start fresh with search marketing. Take this opportunity to remove inactive ad copy that resulted from holiday testing, and identify ad groups that are missing creative altogether and associate new copy to them. Typically, after months of testing and optimization, your campaign structure may have grown unwieldy, and will need to be reworked. Review your ad groups with an eye toward relevance and the number of keywords per group. As a rule, you should have no more than 50 keywords per ad group. Restructure your ad groups to ensure associated copy is highly relevant. This will not only help your quality scores, but it will also make it easier to perform testing and optimization in the new year.

Just these few adjustments to your paid search marketing program can have a tremendous impact on your bottom line. One large retailer we work with followed many of these best practices last year with great results. The retailer excluded holiday-specific click and sales data when calculating bids on keywords, and used our bid-management solution to calculate and update bids daily using their most up-to-date performance data following the holidays. The retailer also tweaked keyword buys based on shopping trends and modified creative to reflect promotions. The result was a double-digit increase in post-holiday ROI year-over-year, with comparable spend on paid search. In this case, the end of the holiday season gave them a great reason to celebrate!

Matt Lawson is director of marketing at Marin Software, a leading provider of enterprise-class PPC management applications. He can be reached at mlawson@marinsoftware.com.

December 2009 – Cover Story: Creating Link Love

Link-building strategies for driving SEO success

By Ken Burke

All I really need to know about SEO link building, I learned in high school. Your site’s global link popularity and the anchor text of those inbound links are two of the most  important search engine ranking factors that you can focus on.  According to Google, “Links are an important signal in our page rank calculations, as they tend to indicate when someone has found a page to be useful.” That usefulness is amplified  when the inbound link comes from a popular site with a high page ranking or with well-established domain authority (one within your topical community that scores well on a combination of popularity, importance and trustworthiness). An effective link-building program can elevate your popularity status–and hopefully your page rank–as well.

While your primary SEO focus should always be content relevancy, developing a link-building program is almost as critical to your success. Once you’ve implemented highly targeted, keyword-relevant content on your site, you should dedicate a percentage of your weekly marketing time to building relationships and links with other topically relevant, high-quality websites.

Below are a few critical points to note when developing your link-building strategy:

Sometimes, Less is More

A few links from high-quality, topically relevant websites are worth more than many low-quality, non-relevant links. Start your discovery process with a combination of the following top link-building sources:

Business partners – Ask a select group of your business partners to mention your company somewhere on their website and provide them with the specific anchor text to use. Beware of placement on link pages that carry hundreds of links to slightly relevant or, even worse, non-relevant “partners.” This type of linking is no longer effective.

Customers - Leverage your best customers and turn them into brand advocates. Reach out to this segment to see if they would be willing to link to your website from their own personal websites, blogs or social networking pages. This may require an incentive. Or, seed them with new products which they can turn around and post reviews on.

Directories - Submitting your website to directories is the most common way to gain link exposure, but is still a valid tactic that definitely works. Just make sure you submit your website to a few (which can vary from about five to a few dozen, depending on the vertical) high-quality, relevant directories rather than auto-submitting your website to several hundred general directories.

Forums – Building links through forums can be very tricky because they are typically monitored by a live person who is watching for advertising misuse. However, it can also be one of the most valuable tactics in terms of branding and the amount of targeted visitors. A popular strategy used is signature-based link building. This is good way to build brand credibility on the forum you’re participating in, as long as you contribute regularly and provide unbiased commentary to earn the trust of the forum participants. Sponsoring a contest is another way in which you can use forums to attract extra links. Lots of forums hold contests (photo contests, essay contests, etc.) regularly. Donate a prize to the winner of one of these contests, and you might receive a link in return.

Guest blogging – A highly effective way to build deep links with the anchor text of your choice is by guest blogging (or guest writing) for other websites. In exchange for writing an original article or blog commentary, most content sites will usually allow you to add a link (or a few) to your own website. Remember that good content can have a viral life of its own and may create greater distribution with no additional work.

Relevant organizations - Industry organizations usually add links to all their members. Don’t miss out on this easy opportunity and make sure that these links do not use “no-follow” tags. Also, determine if any of your targeted organizations provide industry-related content, such as a blog, research or newsletter articles, which you can contribute and pass a link through.

Avoid Buying Links if Possible

It’s likely that these sorts of links come from poor quality, “free-for-all” websites that won’t provide any traffic and could get you banned from the search engines. While some legitimate sites such as Yahoo’s directory charge for submission and can add value to your online presence, link buying as a general practice should be avoided.

According to Google, “Buying or selling links that pass page rank violates our webmaster guidelines. Such links can hurt relevance by causing…false popularity and an unfair advantage.” However, buying links can have other benefits not related to SEO, such as general brand exposure. If you do plan on buying links, make sure that you stay in compliance with search engines’–and especially Google’s–quality guidelines. Google specifically states that paid links be disclosed through a rel=”nofollow” or other technique such as doing a redirect through a page which is robots.txt’ed out.

Optimize Anchor Text Links

Make sure that the anchor text of the inbound link reinforces the keyword(s) targeted on the specified landing page. At a minimum, use your company’s name and avoid generic anchor text links like “click here” or “read more.” A better choice: “This Chicago attorney gave me terrific advice.”

Know What Sites to Avoid

Link building is definitely a resource-intensive task. To make sure that you don’t waste critical resources and to better focus your efforts, simply avoid the following types of websites:

Pages with links inside of frames – These will not pass any page rank and can possibly steal your traffic.

Free-for-all links – These types of sites allow anyone to post unreviewed links which typically result in unrelated and “spammy” links.

Link farms – These are sites with 100 or more unrelated links on a page. (These are banned by search engines and may cause your site to be banned if you link to them).

Sites that utilize “triangular linking schemes” – “I’ll link to your website if you link to my other website.”

A site that has a network of mirror sites with the same links and content.

Sites with a page rank of zero – Perhaps the website is too new or its pages are dynamically generated. Either way, they pass no value to you.

Sites where the link page/directory isn’t linked from the homepage or site map – Search engines simply won’t find it.

Directory sites that make you search to find your site listing – Typically, your link won’t be found by search engines unless it’s on a static, non-changing page.

Pages that would like to place your link using a meta tag that instructs “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” or is referenced in the robots.txt* to be disallowed by search-engine robots – Basically, this instructs search engines not to follow any links on that page–and thus, there will be no page rank for your site.

Websites with a long load time (too many ad banners, images etc.) – The search engines won’t wait.

Websites that are poorly designed and have broken code – These sites typically have a difficult time being indexed.

Link-building strategies are key to successful SEO and should be a key focus for online retailers.

Investing time in a well-conceived linking strategy can make a measurable difference in search rankings and–ultimately–sales.

Ken Burke is chairman and founder of MarketLive, a leading provider of e-commerce platforms and services for mid-sized retailers. Contact him at ken.burke@marketlive.com.

November 2009 – Online Insights: Paid Search

Case Studies in Brand Defense

By Steve Jillings

Aggressive marketing tactics from competitors are nothing new, but successful brands are facing pirates of a new kind in the world of search engine marketing. As direct marketers move from traditional advertising to integrated advertising platforms with significant spend in both offline and online marketing, they need to be aware of pitfalls that can translate to millions in revenue lost to competitors.

Search engine marketing is one of the highest-stakes categories in interactive marketing, simply because it is one of the most prevalent and most accountable forms of online marketing. According to a recent report by Forrester Research, the interactive marketing spend will near $55 billion by 2014, with search engine marketing accounting for more than $31 billion of that total.

SEM Trademark Infringement
The search marketplace has grown rapidly, and as direct-response and other marketers grow their online presence, most will find their search space increasingly crowded with unwanted infringers. These infringers are intent on using a company’s own hard-earned brand recognition and trademark to re-direct potential customers to purchase the infringer’s product.

Here’s how it works. It’s a well-known fact that direct-to-consumer advertising drives buyers to other channels. And the number-one place TV drives them to is search. When a consumer goes online to purchase the product they saw on TV, they often start by searching for the product’s brand name on Google or another search engine. In spaces crowded with infringers, some or all of the results that appear in the paid search area of the search results page will be advertising from the competition–or, potentially worse, the brand’s own affiliates. If the infringer’s offer or ad copy is compelling to that consumer, what started as a search for a brand they saw on TV may turn into a purchase of a competing product and lost revenue for the major brand. With millions of search-engine users looking for products and services each day, this can have a tremendous cumulative negative impact on a company’s bottom line.

Click Cost Inflation
The infringer is often a known competitor, or an affiliate of a competitor, or sometimes a direct affiliate of the primary brand. If not managed carefully, even affiliates who should be finding customers elsewhere for a brand can make the situation worse by infringing and competing with that brand for its own customers.

The crowding and competitive bidding that is part of SEM trademark infringement essentially raises the click costs for all parties, in addition to preventing brands from taking full advantage of their offline marketing investments. In an environment of tightening budgets and increased pressure for ROI, click inflation makes it even more difficult for online marketers to justify their investment in search and other interactive media and demonstrate that they’re getting results.

Managing a Brand in PAID Search
The worst part is that trademark infringement is often done without the brand even knowing about it. Clever competitors and affiliates can buy your brand’s keywords in ways that make it very hard to track. They can bid for branded keywords in specific geographies (geo-targeting) or during certain times of the day (dayparting), when or where they don’t think the brand will be policing their own branded search results–if they’re policing these results at all.

Sadly, the vast majority of advertisers are not managing this issue well today. Understanding the complexity of infringement, coupled with the challenge of monitoring and managing the issue, makes it difficult to address in-house. And few search or interactive agencies are equipped with the right tools and high-level expertise needed to combat the problem.

The courts are just starting to address online trademark infringement, but there is a long way to go. Major brands like Geico, American Airlines and others have tackled the issue in the courts, but it’s rare that brands have ended up with satisfactory rulings. Just last year, Tiffany challenged eBay for using the term “Tiffany” to trigger a search. But the courts ruled in favor of eBay, determining it could continue to trigger searches using another company’s trademarked name.

Marketers don’t have to be on their own to police use of their trademarked brands online, but they need to choose their tools and partners carefully. There are tools that exist today to help with some aspects of monitoring, but few full-service solutions are readily available. Because of the lack of a turnkey solution on the market, our own company, Vantage Media, has developed a proprietary brand management suite called Brand Defender to address the issue on behalf of clients.

Fortunately, since paid search is one of the most measurable forms of advertising, the right solution can offer dramatic ROI. When managed correctly, the impact of protecting a brand online is easily quantifiable as infringers are removed from the picture. For client Auto Insurance Specialists (AIS), one of California’s largest auto insurance agencies, we developed a Brand Defender program that successfully removed 56 infringing bidders from AIS branded-search queries. These efforts translated to a more than 100-percent increase in sales volume year over year with a significant decrease in costs. For client Allied Van Lines, the world’s largest moving network, Vantage Media successfully removed more than 50 infringing bidders from Allied branded-search queries as part of a comprehensive search marketing program that led to a 600-percent increase in qualified sales lead volume.

Whether delivered by a compelling infomercial or other DR media, the sale clearly starts with that all-important first impression. The DR campaign can act as a catalyst to the online conversion, turning that impression into a purchase. But there are more and more pitfalls and traps in a complex search environment, one that demands a sophisticated approach that is nimble in response to the constantly changing search landscape. Clearly, there’s a growing need in the search engine marketplace to control the branded-bidding environment so that potential customers don’t get tripped up and lost along the path to purchase.

Steve Jillings is the CEO of Vantage Media, a leading performance search-marketing firm. He can be reached at sjillings@vantagemedia.com.

October 2009 – Cover Story: Bing: A Search Game-Changer?

By all accounts, Bing is gaining traction, a trend which will only grow as the engine is integrated as Yahoo’s search service. What are the implications for your SEO and SEM efforts and the search landscape overall?

By Mark Simon

In June of 2009, Microsoft–after many months of development–launched Bing, a search engine (or, as Microsoft prefers to refer to it, a “decision engine”) backed up by a $100-million mass-media marketing campaign designed to promote awareness. Less than two months later, Microsoft and Yahoo announced a 10-year joint partnership calling for Bing to provide search services for Yahoo.

While Google remains the dominant search engine, commanding some 65 percent of the search market in the U.S., Bing’s share is poised to grow from 8 percent to 30 percent once Yahoo switches from its own service to Bing. While this is not going to happen tomorrow (the deal must still get regulatory approval, and full integration may take up to two years), there’s little doubt that Bing should be taken seriously by any marketer engaged in conducting search campaigns, both paid and organic.

What Makes Bing Different
Like Google and other modern search engines, Bing is algorithmically driven. Multiple factors serve as inputs to all search engine algorithms in the results-selection process, including page popularity, content freshness, keyword density and other proprietary variables. Bing’s approach to algorithmic search appears to be similar to Google’s, although some anecdotal evidence suggests that Bing may weigh factors such as the presence of keywords within domains (URLs) more heavily than Google, while discounting page freshness.

Where Bing departs significantly from the other engines–including Google–is in the way it presents results on its search engine results pages (SERPs) (see screen grab). Microsoft calls Bing’s presentation “multi-threaded,” which means that, for many queries, instead of presenting a single stack of results ranked from top to bottom in order of relevance, Bing presents a categorized experience. For example, after searching Bing using the keywords “power supplies,” users–after being greeted with the usual stack of paid/sponsored results running at the top of the page and along the right rail–are shown results organized by category (”All Results,” “Videos,” “Images” and “Shopping”).

These categories are replicated in the upper left-hand corner of the page, in what Microsoft calls an “Explore Pane.” Each is context-sensitive. For example, a search for “Madonna” will produce a group of categories and an Explore Pane appropriate for a musical artist (”News,” “Songs,” “Downloads,” “Wallpaper”) whereas a search for “Xbox” will produce categories and an Explore Pane appropriate for a hardware device (”Shopping,” “Repair,” “Games,” “Accessories”). In effect, Bing combines the human-curated experience familiar to users of online directories with the algorithm-driven results of automated search engines.

Beyond categorized results, Bing also provides a set of previewing functions designed to give users a taste of what will appear after they click on a given listing. Hovering one’s mouse over an organic listing causes a floating box to appear containing a snippet of text drawn from the associated landing page. Rolling one’s mouse over a video thumbnail causes the video to begin playing in a short loop. Additionally, Bing includes a “Related Searches” feature in the left-hand area of its SERPs, designed to guide users to content they might not have initially associated with their queries, plus a “Search History” function designed to allow users to easily retrace their steps.

Organic Optimization Ramifications
While the fact that Bing’s algorithm appears to reward certain factors more heavily than Google’s is of fervid interest to SEO practitioners, there is little evidence to suggest that a marketer’s organic optimization strategy needs to be changed significantly to cater to Bing. Rather, the same methods used to obtain satisfactory organic rankings–including producing and maintaining relevant, up-to-date, accessible content, producing descriptive meta/title information and acquiring authoritative backlinks–apply both to Bing and the other engines. So the same general set of SEO best practices that work to achieve visibility in Google should work for Bing as well.

Still, several of Bing’s features may lead savvy webmasters to revise their optimization strategies and tactics. For example, because Bing’s categorized results tend to have fewer entries per category, competition for inclusion among them will be more intense. However, there are more categories per query, so the opportunity for inclusion in any one of these categories increases.

Bing’s previewing function provides both a threat and an opportunity. Because it appears that the text populating the “preview box” is drawn not from meta tag descriptors but from the actual page itself (or, in cases where this data is missing, from external sources), some webmasters may be unpleasantly surprised by the text that Bing decides to extract. For example, a merchant which has decided to put a cute, irreverent quiz on its homepage may find that Bing extracts this text in lieu of the formal mission statement contained either in its title or meta page sections. If this is the case, Bing provides a way for webmasters to disable Bing’s document previewing function by including the following string on pages on which they wish to defeat it: <meta name=”msnbot’, content=”nopreview”>

According to Microsoft, Bing is better able to extract meaningful information from Flash-based websites than its predecessor, which is a welcome development for merchants who rely on this technology. Additionally, Microsoft claims that Bing can intelligently “fill in data” from sites where information is sorely lacking:

When titles and/or meta descriptions don’t exist on an HTML page, Bing creates a best-effort caption from relevant external sources of reliable information to populate the caption with meaningful data for the searcher. Bing…can even construct captions from external, authoritative websites to help create basic captions where no publisher data exists.

It’s great that Bing is employing this kind of advanced extraction technology, but marketers must make sure no errors are being produced in the process. If an error is found, direct contact with the Bing team will be necessary to correct them.

Bing’s “multi-threaded” SERP with document preview, video preview, explore pane, related searches and search history

Lastly, Bing’s ability to provide a looping preview of video assets may be of interest to marketers using video to promote their wares, because they effectively “come alive” on Bing’s SERPs and are frequently mixed in with organic paid results.

PPC Ramifications
Most PPC marketers who have used Microsoft’s AdCenter to run campaigns through Microsoft’s pre-Bing “Live Search” properties will be able to easily move over to Bing, because AdCenter will be doing the ad serving and the task of porting campaigns between Google and AdCenter has–hopefully–become a matter of routine by now.

PPC marketers will naturally want to know about the kind of click-through rates, conversion rates and ROI/ROAS they can expect on Bing, but this kind of data remains anecdotal at this early stage of the game. An initial eye-tracking study comparing the behavior of users on Bing and Google found that Bing users tended to pay more attention to paid listings than on Google, and spent considerable time scanning Bing’s “Related Searches,” but this study used a pool of participants too small to qualify as a scientific sampling.

Microsoft has published a glowing case study involving BuyerZone.com. in which this vendor claims to have experienced conversion rates on Bing up to 35 percent higher than those experienced on other engines, but it is questionable whether this is a typical or best case. However, additional anecdotal reports of enhanced conversion rates on Bing continue to emerge.

What about Microsoft’s CashBack service, which was launched several years ago, but will now likely gain increased traction due to its prominent inclusion within Bing? According to Microsoft, which conducted a test with eBay over the 2008 holiday season, ads including the “CashBack” icon boasted impressive improvements in CTR (100 percent), conversion rates (30 percent) and order size (35 percent). These results are, of course, highly compelling, but there is no guarantee that other vendors will see these kinds of campaign improvements as a result of their participation in CashBack.

For the moment then, it appears that it may be some time before a definitive large-scale study can be performed comparing campaign performance on Bing versus Google, which means that marketers will have to make their own decisions as to whether it is worthwhile to participate in Bing’s marketplace. At the same time, the temporary paucity of authoritative performance data should not deter ambitious marketers seeking to take advantage of a marketplace which may offer bargains due to it being far less competitive than Google’s. And in light of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal, which will naturally expand both Bing’s user and advertiser bases, investing time and resources to get up to speed is a step which will likely lead to dividends in the future.

Implications For The Search Ecosystem
Bing’s launch, plus its announced role as the search technology powering Yahoo, is likely to be welcomed by marketers for several reasons. The planned consolidation of what has heretofore been three discrete search advertising systems–each with its own rules and wrinkles–into two will make it easier for marketers to conduct cross-engine campaigns, minimizing HR expenses and moving the search industry toward a process of standardization of the search engine-delivered text ad.

More importantly, Bing’s represents a credible effort by a bona fide technology powerhouse to restore some semblance of parity to a marketplace in which Google’s influence has been growing unchallenged for some time. With more robust competition, the search ecosystem is likely to continue to produce the kinds of innovations that have made it such an effective platform for advertisers in the past, so Bing’s arrival is good news for all who welcome positive change.

Mark Simon is vice president of industry relations at Didit. He can be reached at mark.simon@didit.com.

August 2009 – Online Insights: Marketing

Don’t Let Your Competitors Out-Market You

By Scott Smigler

If you have ever opened a “real-world” storefront, you are keenly aware of the many benefits of doing business online, such as broader reach and lower overhead costs. On the other hand, while online retailers have a much larger potential customer base, your competitors are abundant and they are getting more sophisticated by the minute.

With competition rising and marketshare falling, many online retailers find themselves wondering: “What are my competitors doing better than I am?”

If this sounds painfully familiar, here are five ways your competitors may be out-marketing you–plus some actionable tips to improve your online business.

They are writing better website copy addressing customer pain points
Your stronger competitors are writing better website copy that addresses the real reason their customers found them in the first place: to resolve a pain. Sure, writing lots of unique content can improve your SEO results, but it is quality, not quantity, that improves conversion rates.

Quality copy validates the pain that has driven your customer to find a product that can help them and recommends specific solutions in a credible way. This copy appears on category and product pages and also in the form of buyer guides.

Example: Let’s say that you sell shoes. You can use Google’s Keyword Tool to find variations of the word “shoes” in order to uncover specific customer needs. In browsing Google’s keyword recommendations, you may quickly learn that variations of the phrase “comfortable shoes” generate hundreds of thousands of searches each month.

Now, go back to your website. How well do you cater to individuals who are specifically motivated to find comfortable shoes? If the answer is “not well,” this could be a big opportunity. Create headlines and messaging that specifically cater to people who are looking for comfortable shoes, and produce guides such as “the 25 most comfortable shoes we’ve ever seen” or “how to identify the most comfortable shoes” and watch as your traffic, search engine rankings and conversions soar.

They are identifying strategically important keywords for SEO
Sophisticated competitors are thinking strategically about the keywords they focus their SEO efforts on, rather than blindly targeting high-volume terms or terms their competitors target. They take many factors into account such as likelihood to buy, “real” competition and derivative keywords that allow them to kill many birds with a single stone.

Example: Going back to our shoe retailer example, let’s suppose you–reacting to learning how many people are searching for variations of the phrase “comfortable shoes”–immediately focus your SEO resources on those phrases without thinking about whether your site offers a great solution for people who want to find comfortable shoes. It would take a great deal of effort to attain high rankings for all variations of “comfortable shoes,” and if you’re not committed to 1) offering the most comfortable shoes available, and 2) helping site visitors find the most comfortable shoes quickly and effectively, those SEO resources will not be properly leveraged. Both time and money will be wasted.

A more strategic approach would be to consider whether your store truly is the best option for these customers in terms of product selection, internal site marketing, messaging and overall merchandising. If the answer is “yes,” you should proceed with aggressive SEO. If the answer is “no,” you should commit to being–and marketing yourself as–the number-one source for comfortable shoes before committing scarce SEO resources to attain top rankings in search engines.

Selecting keywords strategically is similar to building a well-diversified financial portfolio. First, you must identify your time horizon and your goals. Then you must build a collection of equities (keywords) that allow you to achieve your desired return for the least amount of risk.

They are increasing conversion rates through multivariate testing
Your stronger competitors are in it for the long term and understand that running a successful online retail business requires a commitment to converting traffic into sales as efficiently as possible.

Example: All things equal, over the long term, who will win assuming both competitors sell the same products and use the same marketing techniques: Competitor A who converts two percent of site visitors into customers, or Competitor B who converts three percent of site visitors into customers?

Competitor B, of course. Having a higher conversion rate also gives you other competitive advantages in addition to greater revenue. If your site monetizes traffic more efficiently, you can afford to outbid competitors in PPC and spend more money on SEO and other marketing activities.

They are more sophisticated about managing their brand
Savvy online retailers know that there are many benefits to establishing and consistently communicating their brand. Companies with strong brands stand for something specific that makes them a distinct choice in a crowded marketplace. Companies that stand for something benefit not only from more word-of-mouth promotion, but from better word of mouth. Make sure your messaging is consistent across your entire website and at all customer touchpoints.

Example: Consider Zappos. Their brand is all about service. Many of their customers reinforce this brand message when introducing Zappos to their friends. They’re then more likely to buy, associating Zappos with a very specific concept: service.

Their e-mail marketing is timely, interesting and relevant
The most efficient way to maximize the lifetime value of your customers is to stay in touch via e-mail marketing. In fact, a 2009 Forbes study found that, next to SEO, e-mail and eNewsletters were the most effective online marketing tactics for generating conversions. The challenge, however, is staying relevant to past customers so that they continue to open your e-mails and buy from you when they have a need.

How can you make your follow-up e-mails work harder for you? First, make them timely. After a customer makes a purchase, automatically e-mail them a “thank you” including a list of related products. Second, make your e-mails interesting. If you send a weekly eNewsletter to your customer base, use humor or ensure that there’s value in the e-mail beyond a list of products. Third, make your e-mails relevant. If your site caters to multiple customer segments, tailor your e-mails according to the needs of each segment.

Bringing it together
Online retail sales are likely to double or triple in the next five years. Also, as industries mature, there is a natural consolidation that occurs whereby a smaller percentage of companies will garner a vast majority of the marketshare. In other words, there is a lot at stake, and your competitors are working very hard to position themselves as the winners in their (your) space as Internet commerce matures.

The good news is that the battle is far from over in any specific segment of online retail. You still have the opportunity to be the competitor that everyone else looks up to.

Scott Smigler is the president of Exclusive Concepts, a leading resource for online retailers seeking to convert online shoppers into loyal customers. He can be reached via e-mail at scott@exclusiveconcepts.com.

August 2009 – Feature: E-Mail, Social Media and the Ultimate Roadtrip

A conversation with Aaron Kahlow–digital marketing barnstormer

By Heather Fishel

Earlier this summer, the Online Marketing Summit Whistlestop Tour swept through 18 cities and 15 states in just two months. With its unique focus–solely on education and knowledge sharing; no booths or sales pitches allowed–the tour has become a legitimate success story and is still growing, even in a shaky economy. Aaron Kahlow, the Online Marketing Summit’s founder and chairman, is primarily responsible for its success, and makes the latest online marketing techniques accessible, bringing it all straight to the frontlines in the marketers’ hometowns.

Online Strategies spoke with Kahlow about his time on the road this summer. The conversation ranged from important online marketing lessons to the humorous and unexpected moments that sprung up along the way.

Online Strategies: What was the original inspiration for conducting a multi-city tour?

Aaron Kahlow: It really came out of the frustration that I–and others–felt with other conferences and shows that were making the tradeshow, exhibits and sponsors the main attractions and the education kind of a sideshow. I thought there was a huge need for people to really learn what the best practices are versus just hearing a quick pitch from industry leaders. I saw at many other shows, including ones where I was speaking, that we could do a better job of this. So I approached a bunch of my friends in the industry and some of the big vendors and said, “If you guys can work your sphere of influence and give us your best content, I’ll put on the show.”

OS: When you’re conceptualizing session ideas and choosing speakers, does your strategy change at all when conducting a local event, as opposed to the main OMS event you hold in San Diego, which is more national in scope?

AK: The strategy changes quite a bit when you do a regional event. I work with regional associations and do my best to leverage regional speakers who understand the area. Also, the structure of a one-day event is far different than what you would use for a national, multi-day event. You need to pay close attention to pacing and topic coverage.

OS: Logistically, planning the tour has to be a nightmare–all of the headaches regarding space reservation, accommodations, food, AV set-up…how do you do it? Is it done in-house?

AK: I have a team, and I kind of keep an eye on things and make sure the preparation’s going well. I handle most of the speaker and content selection as well as the general look and feel of each show. We outsource logistics to a few partners and have some folks that do marketing for us. So we do have a lot of outsourcing along the way to make sure we adjust with the demand as opposed to trying to do it all in-house. We have a staff of five and probably three external partners that handle the rest of the logistics.

OS: As the economy has worsened, what changes have you noticed among attendees? Has attendance dropped? Have marketers’ concerns changed?

AK: Surprisingly, attendance was up by about 37 percent, even though we had to raise our prices slightly. I think the economy benefited us for a few reasons: First, there’s a much larger emphasis on expanding one’s knowledge base these days, with marketing departments asked to do more with less. And everybody knows how competitive the job market is–any chance one has to add insight and information to their repertoire helps. Second, we’ve introduced the Online Marketing Institute, which has certification programs and has helped drive the increase in attendance. Certification is a strong resume builder and a trusted verification of people’s skill sets. Finally, I think we’ve benefited because we bring the show to people’s backyards as opposed to asking them to get on a plane and stay in a hotel, which is a hard proposition for many budgets these days.

Despite the dreary economy, we were very impressed with the energy level of the attendees. People are so eager to learn. Everyone was fired up.

OS: Looking back at this year’s tour, what were some of the common issues or concerns you heard digital marketers express?

AK: Some of the main concerns people have are prioritizing budgets. How much of the overall marketing budget should go online? Or, within online marketing, do I devote more to search? My website? Should I go to integrated social media marketing? There’s an awful lot to do and a very finite budget number.

Also, the return on investment generated by social media is a very hot topic. How can I get ROI out of Twitter if I have someone spending five hours a day tweeting? People wonder if social media is really about ROI or is perhaps more of an ego play.

Finally, integration of marketing strategies is another issue of great interest. For example, how can you efficiently integrate your e-mail marketing with your social media, website and analytics systems?

OS: Let’s turn the question around: what were a few of the lessons you might have learned as a digital marketer from this tour?

AK: It was such a privilege to spend so much time around the true thought leaders in our industry–people like Rand Fishken, Eric Peterson, Kevin Lee and Catfish ">SEO guru Ray "Catfish" Comstock. I learned valuable lessons at each stop.

To be specific and general at the same time, one of the most important lessons I took away from the tour was to be sure to focus on online marketing’s foundational elements, and not to fall prey to chasing the latest “shiny object,” which can be tempting.

What are the foundational elements? Making sure you’re website is truly user-centric and fully search-engine optimized. Leveraging a cohesive e-mail campaign strategy rather than deploying a series of one-off e-mails.

These elements are foundational for a reason: they have the highest potential impact on ROI. Once you have the foundation in place, then you can begin to think about things like social media. Look at social media as a supportive element to your online efforts and your website, not as an element unto itself.

OS: Were there any surprises you encountered along the way?

AK: What was surprising was the reemergence of e-mail as a hot-button issue. There was a greater fervor than I’ve ever seen before regarding getting e-mail done right. People’s lists are getting hit hard; they’re saturated and return on investment on e-mail is getting weaker and weaker.

In fact, this was the approach from discipline to discipline. People want to “do things right.” It’s not, “How do I implement a search campaign,” but “How do I implement a search campaign without making mistakes or suffering the pains of the learning curve?”

There’s a burning desire for quality, for content to help people leapfrog that learning curve.

OS: I imagine that one city tends to blend into the next a bit, but that some cities really stand out. Which ones really stand out in your memory and why?

AK: (Laughs) If I answer that, then I will be a marked man in 17 other cities! New York and Texas will always stand out because they are areas with a dense population of online retailers and service providers–we always are able to get truly great content, and great brands come to talk to us. I have to say this, though–Seattle really stood out to me as a sophisticated market that is clamoring for educational content. Houston had a great showing for us despite being what one might think of as a secondary market, one that doesn’t immediately come to mind as a digital marketing hub. But it is really very sophisticated, as well.

OS: How did your experience this year change your mindset as a digital marketer or your plans for next year’s tour?

AK: Despite what I alluded to before about social media not being a fundamental aspect of online marketing, it is evolving at a breakneck pace. Look at search engine marketing. It took some companies five to 10 years to jump in and then refine their efforts. It’s just the typical maturation process. But the pace is much, much faster now. Last year we were just talking about what social media is, defining it and discussing ways to begin an initial experiment with it. This year we’re already talking about set practices and how to execute at a higher level. The pace of the maturation process is so much faster and is really fascinating to me. It’s really got me thinking, “Hey, it’s not about just conceptualizing any more; it’s really time to execute.” That was a huge takeaway for me–the different timelines from concept to advanced execution.

OS: What are your future plans for the tour and for your other initiatives?

AK: A couple things are top-of-mind. We have an OMS all-star webinar and webcast series that we’re launching in early September. We’re getting the best of the best speakers from around the country to be a part of this series. It’s also integrated into the Online Marketing Institute, and credits for the certification program will be available.

We will also launch a social media integration and execution program in late September. And of course, our annual national conference is coming down the road. It’s the second week in February. Those are the big things on our plate right now.

August 2009 – Cover Story: A Hyper-Efficient Market

Transitioning from click-fraud detection to traffic-quality assessment

By Richard Sim

Online advertising–a medium where a tremendous amount of data is readily available and performance can often be measured down to the penny for a given ad–is on the verge of a revolutionary shift. Ad buying and selling is rapidly evolving toward a “hyper-efficient” marketplace driven by near-perfect information and real-time transactions.

Buyers and sellers are increasingly leveraging technology to make informed decisions to meet their particular performance requirements. Meanwhile, data storage costs are going down, database technologies and analytical tools are becoming more powerful, processing speeds are getting faster and online ad spending is growing year over year. These trends are creating a “perfect storm” for online advertising and revolutionizing the way the industry buys and sells inventory.

Armed with high-powered, data-driven systems, cutting-edge machine-learning techniques and predictive-modeling methodologies, a new class of ad sellers, marketers and solutions providers is rapidly emerging to capitalize on this new opportunity. Much like the emergence of hedge funds and the automated trading desks of Wall Street in the 1990s, the online advertising industry is experiencing a dramatic transition in which access to data and the tools to leverage that data are separating the sophisticated, efficient clearing houses from the outdated, speculative arbitragers.

One of the key enablers of the development of a truly efficient ad marketplace is the increasing use of analytics to predict user intent. Predicting user intent has historically been a core component of measuring traffic quality for the purpose of eliminating invalid or fraudulent traffic, but the focus is rapidly shifting toward optimizing the positive end of the quality spectrum to drive better ad performance.

In the Beginning, There was Click Fraud
Click fraud can be defined as the act of producing clicks or impressions that have no economic value to the advertiser due to malicious intent on the part of the clicker. A click can be fraudulent when the clicker has no intention of converting, giving the advertiser no chance to reap a return on the investment in that click. Click fraud clearly reduces marketers’ ROI, as ad spend is funneled to malicious perpetrators in lieu of facilitating the acquisition of legitimate customers.

To date, ad sellers have addressed the issue of click fraud with varying degrees of success. Each of the major search engines–including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com–has settled or has pending litigation on click-fraud-related cases brought by advertisers. Almost all ad sellers have an in-house filtering system to rid their network of fraudulent click activity. However, the amount of time, energy and resources required to keep up with the dynamic nature of online threats is an increasing burden, especially as it forces trade-offs between growing the business versus investing in cost centers.

In recent months, click fraud has re-emerged as a top concern for consumers and marketers alike. Facebook is facing widespread advertiser complaints about undeterred click fraud in its network. Microsoft recently filed a $750,000 lawsuit against a family of three for committing competitive click fraud. The FTC, in an unprecedented move, recently shut down the operations of the Pricewert/3FN ISP, known as a safe harbor for extremely malicious entities involved in online crimes such as child pornography, click fraud and spam. It’s clear that click fraud remains a serious threat to online advertising. And as ad dollars continue to shift from traditional media to online, this threat will only loom larger.

Why is click fraud such a difficult challenge for the industry to address? There are several reasons. First, click fraud, like any online threat, is highly adaptive in nature. While fraudsters commonly take the path of least resistance when targeting vulnerable networks, they do adapt as needed when options run dry. Customers have reported blacklisting IPs and user agents leveraged for malicious attacks only to find that new ones pop up within minutes.

Second, the black hat community is highly networked and collaborative, and readily shares data about vulnerabilities and successful fraud strategies. Evidence of successful fraud campaigns (such as checks received from ad networks) are commonly touted in black hat forums and websites, along with detailed reports on how these campaigns were executed. This level of collaboration and information sharing is yet to be replicated on the security and defense side. Finally, click-fraud detection is simply very difficult to accomplish. Click-fraud detection fundamentally boils down to answering the question, “What is the intent of the person who is clicking on this ad?” Clearly this is not an easy question to answer, and the answer is difficult to validate.

These challenges have created a market opportunity for companies (like mine, Anchor Intelligence) to emerge and provide enhanced protection and security for ad buyers and sellers. Anchor Intelligence’s flagship product, ClearMark for Traffic, is a click fraud detection system, which, at its core, has a sophisticated machine-learning and rules-based system designed to predict user intent. ClearMark enables search engines, networks and publishers to protect advertisers from fraudulent click activity by identifying invalid ad clicks in real time. Customers are empowered to reduce these threats by withholding payouts to the fraud’s perpetrators and evicting fraudulent publishers from their networks while preventing advertisers’ budgets from ever being negatively impacted.

The Next Generation: Traffic Quality and Predictive Analytics
As data and analytics have grown in sophistication and scale, cutting-edge marketers have realized that addressing click fraud is only the first step toward optimizing ad spend. Marketers have recognized that applying the same data and analytics toward identifying, understanding and capitalizing on the entire spectrum of traffic quality is the most lucrative opportunity available to their organizations. As a result, Anchor has recently been encouraged by our customers to leverage the predictive analytics of ClearMark to assess the entire spectrum of traffic quality, including high-value clicks.

Traffic quality is a measure of the value of a click or impression along a continuous spectrum from good (likely to convert) and bad (invalid and/or fraudulent). Traffic quality depends on a combination of interdependent factors including user characteristics, the context in which a user is interacting with an ad, the ad creative and, of course, timing. The more information that is available about each of these factors, the better the optimization potential.

Companies like ours with the ability to detect whether a user who is clicking on an ad has malicious intent can also apply this technology to predict whether the intent of a user is authentic and furthermore, if that authentic intent is relevant for the advertiser. As customers have recognized the game-changing opportunity present in applying technology to assess and optimize the entire spectrum of traffic quality, companies have begun to enhance their intent-prediction capabilities to change the way online advertising is bought and sold.

In the not-too-distant future, an advertiser will be able to make ad-purchasing decisions based on the predicted value of a given click or impression to that advertiser, as opposed to how it’s done currently–based on general prices set by disparate marketplaces. Many of today’s standard targeting frameworks are founded on the assumption that applying known characteristics about populations of users enables advertisers to improve the performance of these ads over untargeted ads. These frameworks have been successful not only because they improve ad performance, but also because they make sense. It would be hard to find anyone who would argue against the notion that males between the ages of 35 and 45 who make over $100,000 per year are more likely to buy a luxury car than the average user.

However, those obvious dimensions are unlikely to have sole predictive value when measuring expected performance. Going forward, we believe that advertisers will also be able to target inventory based on “value tiers” (groups of traffic dynamically identified based on their propensity to convert), rather than limiting themselves to standard targeting frameworks like demographic, geographic and behavioral targeting. These value tiers will incorporate standard targeting parameters in addition to a limitless number of other dimensions that have a direct impact on a particular ad event’s propensity to lead to conversion for a given advertiser. And the more access to data and analysis about both obvious and non-obvious dimensions an ad server has, the greater the expected lift it can generate.

While this concept may sound somewhat audacious, Anchor Intelligence and its customers have already begun to partner together to seize the opportunity of traffic quality assessment and targeting–improving the performance of ad inventory by leveraging intelligence about traffic quality.

For ad sellers, this has not only helped eliminate poor quality traffic from their networks, but also enabled them to capitalize on their highest quality traffic sources. Leveraging data and analysis about various dimensions such as IPs, user agents, ad placements, behavioral profiles and websites, the performance of advertising on ad networks and search engines can be improved by scoring ad events on a continuous spectrum of traffic quality. In fact, by leveraging data typically unavailable to traditional ad buyers and sellers, Anchor Intelligence has enabled search engines to enhance ad-matching decisions to improve quality scores from advertising partners and ultimately improve advertiser ROI.

Characteristics such as the ratio of the ad footprint to the content footprint on a referrer site, the types of browser plug-ins installed on a user’s machine and the ISP that provides a user’s Internet access are all data points that impact the likelihood that a given ad event for a individual advertiser will lead to a conversion, but are essentially ignored by standard targeting methods.

Not only can ad sellers leverage traffic quality intelligence, ad buyers can improve performance by supplementing standard targeting dimensions with non-obvious metrics that also impact conversion probability. As most advertisers and ad servers know, historical conversion is one of the most reliable indicators of expected performance. However, conversion data is not always readily available for marketers to leverage. We have worked with some of the largest online advertisers to optimize their bidding strategy for head, belly and long-tail keywords by building out conversion probabilities even in cases when historical conversion data does not exist.

By leveraging a machine-learning algorithm using our extensive reputation database, proprietary network intelligence and traffic-based observations to score each inbound ad click and optimize keyword bids, the performance of advertisers’ ad spend can be improved five to 10 percent in a matter of weeks.

Our company and others have just scratched the surface of leveraging predictive analytics to assess traffic quality for ad buyers and sellers, but early results are extremely promising. As search marketers around the country scrutinize advertising expenditures and opt out of low-performing and stale campaigns in an effort to maximize ROI, ad sellers and buyers can now capitalize on the traffic quality of each ad to ensure that every click or impression results in positive value for the business.

The days of media buying through personal relationships and handshakes over expensive rounds of golf are quickly disappearing. The market as a whole is embracing a shift toward a hyper-efficient marketplace. A new crop of data providers, audience-measurement companies, yield optimizers and ad exchanges have introduced new capabilities to facilitate information exchange and real-time decisioning.

Companies like BlueKai, Acxiom and Experian are offering access to their unique datasets to optimize targeting. Other audience-measurement companies like Quantcast, Compete and AudienceScience are providing detailed profiles of audience types to facilitate enhanced targeting. Yield optimizers like Pubmatic and Rubicon Project are introducing real-time decision-making capabilities at the time of an ad event to optimize publisher payouts. And finally, ad exchanges like ContextWeb and AppNexus are creating open platforms to facilitate data sharing and more efficient marketplaces.

Each of these camps promises to introduce efficiencies to the existing ad buying and selling process. Anchor Intelligence intends to leverage its technology platform, data footprint and its proprietary analytics to predict user intent and capitalize on the emergence of a hyper-efficient marketplace. For search marketers seeking to optimize their online spend in the wake of an apparent resurgence of fraudulent attacks on their ad dollars, a holistic understanding of traffic quality will enable them to not only survive these challenging conditions, but in fact thrive while their counterparts lag behind.

Richard Sim is vice president of product and marketing at Anchor Intelligence, a traffic-quality solutions provider utilized by ad networks, search engines and advertisers. Sim holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business as well as a BA in Political Economy from U.C. Berkeley. He can be reached at richard.sim@anchorintelligence.com.