Natural Search Blog » Advertising

Guerilla Marketing & Google Maps

Chris — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:51:13 +0000

My article on “Six Odd Tactics For Getting Ads Into Google Maps” posted today on Search Engine Land, and I believe many of my regular readers should find it moderately entertaining. The piece covers how some elements of guerrilla marketing have found their way into some Google Maps advertising patents, and also how some others have used creative means to get messages into Maps via “roofvertising”, “skywriting” and more.

Those familiar with Natural Search Blog may remember some of my similar past work here outlining laser graffiti ads on buildings, roofvertising, marriage proposals in Google Maps, “earth art” geoglyph ads, and sponsoring town names as an Ultimate Local SEO tactic.

It’s not surprising to see guerilla marketing tactics finding their way into Google Maps. Not only does Google itself seek to introduce disruptive technology innovations, but I expect that as Satellite and Aerial photos may get more frequently updated in such interfaces we’ll be bound to see a whole lot more efforts from people trying to get messages conveyed through the Maps interfaces.

The real question I’m left with, is if Google resells ad space on pictures of people’s rooftops and billboards, would they owe anything back to the original property owners?!?

How To Breathe Life Into A Lacklustre PPC Campaign

Ravi — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:09:05 +0000

PPC or Pay Per Click campaigns are a sure fire way of attracting traffic to your website almost instantaneously without the rigors of an SEO campaign that is required to bring your site on top of the SERPs. The most important thing to be aware of when it comes to a PPC campaign is understanding the rules to play the Adwords game.

Google’s policy of serving relevant ads in response to user queries coupled with complex factors like quality score can make Adwords a minefield for a novice or intermediate level practitioner so much so that a lot of money is coughed up to elicit a poor ROI (Return on Investment) or not the best bang for your buck in layman terms.

If you are in a position where you have set up PPC campaigns and they are not doing well, then you could use the following guidelines to fine tune their performace to achieve optimum results. Let us get cracking.

1) Relooking at Opportunities:
There is a good chance that you would have done keyword research relevant to your industry before setting up your PPC campaigns. If you are finding that your campaigns are not doing well, then you will have to do a more indepth keyword research and dig deeper to find the “money keywords” - keywords that have decent amount of traffic (ideally 1000 searches per day or more) and less competition (50,000 and below).

If your site has been in existence for some time with Analytics installed, then your Analytics account will provide you a wealth of information. You can look at the keywords that are bringing in organic traffic and you can use these as the seed keywords for your keyword research and build on the opportunities presented in your domain of business.

2) Targeting and Relevancy:
These are the two mantras you have to keep in mind when setting up a new campaign or reorgainising an existing campaign. If you have a group of keywords that are well related to each other and can be grouped into a relevant ad group targeting an underlying theme, that is the first step of achieving relevancy.

The ad copy for that ad group must reflect the same idea as the keywords themselves. When writing the ad copy, make sure you include the representative keyword in the title and include it once in the two lines that make up the ad copy description.

Always your ad must show a clear benefit and it should have a clarion call to action. If you do not ask users to take action, they probably never would. Do not waste precious ad copy space by using words like Click here.

If you are stating in your ad that your blue widget would do something, then make sure that the landing page which that ad leads to dwells at length and explains clearly that benefit. Never mislead users by staing something in the ad and having a landing page that is totally different. If you get all the above correct, then you are well on your way to improving relevancy and targeting which plays a huge part in the optimisation of the quality score.

If your current PPC campaigns are not doing well, then you must ensure the relevancy of keywords in the ad group. For example, if you are a builder and you build both industrial and residential buildings, you must have two distinct ad groups, one each for Residential Buildings and Industrial Buildings. Though they are both buildings, they are distinct types of construction and you must differentiate between them.

Try reorganising your campaign at the granular level and accord each and every distinct keyword the respect and value it deserves. Avoid lumping unrelated keywords together. You can bet that these keywords will be rejuvenated and gain a fresh lease of life and start performing really well.

3) PPC Landing Page
You have improved the targeting and relevancy of your PPC campaigns. The next important criterion is the landing page for the ads that display triggered by the keywords in your campaigns that match the searches made by users on Google.

The landing page plays a very important role in determining the quality score, a mystery component that is evaluated by the Google algorithm. Human nature is such that when something is shrouded in secrecy, the human mind tries to analyse it to the maximum possible extent.

I like to keep things simple. In my opinion, I do not worry about the quality score excessively. All that you need to do is get the targeting and relevancy spot on and the landing page near perfect. The quality score takes care of itself.

Ensure that your landing page is in total sync with the keywords and the ads that lead a user to it. Your landing page must contain the representative keyword in its title tag, meta description and h1 tag to start with.

Your copy must also include variations of the representative keyword (in other words, the other keywords contained in your ad group targeting this specific landing page) when defining the benefits of your product or service.

Sell the benefits of your product/service and keep features to a minimum. If your product/service is solving a problem, then go ahead and lay it out for the whole world to see. Users are looking for solutions to problems. When a great solution is found, a user automatically ends up a buyer.

Have clear calls to action and embed them as anchor text on the landing page. By highlighting the call to action as a clickable link, you are getting the user to focus on the blue underlined text and at the same time, you are able to gain value in terms of improving quality score for your keyword phrase by making it part of the anchor text.

The common belief is to have a tight sales funnel. I myself do not like to divert a user’s attention much when she lands on a landing page. I tend to remove the global site template from landing pages. The reason is two fold. It is possible to accurately track the user’s path from the moment they land on the landing page. The second reason is to minimise the user distraction.

You are paying for every user that lands on your optimised landing page. You want to capture their focus and lead them on through the sales funnel and this is achieved by making them take action (in our case, click the link) and take them to buy your product or sign up for your newsletter or whatever it may be on the following goal page.

But for the purposes of quality score, you would be well advised to have links on the landing page. You can have links like Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy at the bottom of the page. At the top, you can have links to Resources and any other information laden areas of your main site. From the user perspective, this also gives the user the feeling that she is not hemmed in and led like cattle to the final desired goal.

Again, if you are getting a user to fill a form, please do not make the user sweat it out. Have a form with just 3 or 4 fields where you capture their name, email address, phone number and comments. Then call them or email them to prove you are a human operating a business and take your sales process to the next level.

If you sell products and have a shopping cart, please make it a simple and intuitive process for the user to go through the sales cycle. Have a clear call to action with a button saying Add to Cart or Buy Blue Widget. Do not make the user jump through too many hoops that would result in frustration and make her leave your site.

4) Analyzing Results:
Once you have reorganised your PPC campaign, it is vital to have an eye on the results as much as you can. If it is an existing campaign, you should get a clear sign of the trends in a week or so. If it is a brand new campaign, it will take atleast 3 months to get a clear picture.

Just as in real life, even your keywords are all not created the same. You will find a few keywords that are foot soldiers. They will bring in good load of visitors but not necessarily convert. You are going to have a few lynchpin keywords (royalty kind) which can convert like crazy. These are the superstars.
You will find dummies that just do not fire up.

If you find that certain keywords are not recording any clicks over 3 months, then there are two ways to look at it. Maybe they need to be checked for better targeting and relevancy. Else, there is no demand in the market for the product or service that the keywords in question represent.

Group them into a distinct ad group and see if they fire up. Wait for another couple of months. If nothing happens, pause them. Please do not delete them. You can read my earlier post titled Taking On An Existing PPC Campaign - Things To Be Aware Of explaining the PPC account history.

5) Cutting down Costs:
This is not directly connected to the optimization of a PPC campaign but it is handy if you are not loaded with money. Adwords is Google’s revenue generating flagship. Click costs are only going up everyday. There is no way the CPCs (cost per click) are going to tank in future like the stock market. The best thing you can do is run your campaigns on Adwords for atleast 3 months.

You can easily pick out the winners at the expense of paying a “good” price as CPC even after using the above techniques for optimizing your PPC campaigns. After 3 months, start advertising on Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter with the winning keywords. You are going to pay less than what you would pay on Adwords.

If you are happy with the response from these two big networks, you can either switch off the Adwords campaigns and concentrate on improving your site’s position on the organic SERPs. You can also have the luxury of paid traffic albeit at manageable budget levels.

Ravi Venkatesan (on Twitter) is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland pay per click marketing company offering both seo and pay per click services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

Quova Awarded Patent for Improved Geotargeting

Chris — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:35:22 +0000

Quova recently announced that they were awarded a patent for various methods which improve geotargeting accuracy and capability. My understanding is that Quova has been using these methods for quite some time already, prior to receiving the patent.

Here’s Quova’s description of the innovations:

“Quova’s newly added patent describes a method for determining the geographic location of an Internet user based upon combining trace routes, user registration information, host names with textual patterns that reveal geolocation information and Internet Service Provider (ISP) service area information. These trace routes describe the pathways by which data moves through the Internet. Each node or ‘hop’ in the trace route is identified by an IP address. These interconnected nodes can be used to recreate the topology of the Internet. Each geolocation can then be assigned to these IP addresses in order to determine the location of each node, up to and including the end user’s IP address and the geolocation of that end user.”

I previously have written about Quova in my extensive article, “Geolocation: Core To The Local Space & Key to Click-Fraud Detection“. My earlier description of them reads practically as an endorsement - something I very rarely do at all. But, I think what I wrote is pretty accurate, overall. Quova is considered pretty much best-in-class of the companies providing geolocation data mapping, because of their greater variety of geo data sources, their more sophisticated mapping methods, and because they actually submit to a third-party audit for data accuracy.

As I’ve described previously, there are quite a number of providers out there which try to associate endusers’ IP addresses with geographic location coordinates, but I’ve always been a really huge skeptic of the overall error rates associated with this type of data. In the past there were estimates that geolocation error rates could be anywhere from 50% to 85%! For marketers attempting to precisely target ads and content to geographically cohesive groups, such high error rates were far too high to be acceptable from my P.O.V. five years ago.

For all geolocation data companies, error rates increase as the geotargeting level becomes more precisely granular. In other words, most of these companies likely have very high accuracy for country-level geolocation capability, lesser for regional targeting such as state or province level, less than that precision for city-level, and lowest accuracy for ZIP-code or postal-code level targeting.

I’ve also been highly skeptical in the past because there’s a low ability to actually test how accurate a given company’s data may be — most testing is based on sample sets which I’ve suspected may be highly skewed towards more accurate geolocations. Anecdotal stories of erroneous geotargeting have come up repeatedly throughout the industry, while there are few ways of calculating actual error, and geolocation data companies reiterate unverifiable claims of accuracy rates.

However, innovations such as found in this patent awarded to Quova help in improving the stature of the whole industry, and really help to reassure marketers and security administrators that the data is solid. I can critique testing methodologies for auditing the data, but I get less strident about it when I can see that the methods by which the data was arrived at are improving and are far less prone to error rates.

Since increasing amounts of advertising targeting are being based upon geotargeting, and since so much of our security screening of PPC ads’ click-through results are being based upon geolocation data as a major component of analysis, I think it behooves companies to use very high-quality data. Quova’s historically high price tags have caused some to look for cheap and easy alternatives, but people should be very careful about the methods used by those other companies. In many, many cases, the cheaper alternatives equate with far less sophisticated methodologies, which also equate with higher error rates. And, auditing undoubtedly also adds overhead to the pricetag, but using data that has zero third-party checks will open companies to greater liability.

Most of the cheap companies are using only ARIN network data which has a lower accuracy level than if it was further enhanced by data from major ISPs and network tracerouting.

Except for the simplest applications which do not involve security and fraud analysis, I think that Quova’s industry-leading patents in geolocation make it so that other geodata companies’ products cannot realistically compete in this arena.

Harnessing The Power of Social Media In Business

Ravi — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:13:14 +0000

Social media is an exciting medium offering tonnes of opportunities to you, as a business owner, to engage the masses in your marketing efforts and get great results for your efforts.

It is a double edged sword and if done right, you will glow on the winner’s podium with a great name for your product/service/company in the online space reaping rich inbound links to your site from a multitude of powerful and trusted domains. Done wrong, you could end up a social pariah in cyberspace with a bad reputation and poor record of integrity attached to your name and company’s product/service.

In real life, imagine a scenario where Mr X is at a party and he makes a sales pitch to others around him for an innovative product or scheme his company is introducing. People have come to the party to have a good time and would be put off by this approach and keep their distance from Mr. X. This is what happens when someone tries to promote their own product excessively in their online social media campaigns.

The most important step is to leverage the poweful social media sites to your advantage as you get unlimited real estate spaces for free to establish yourself. Create profiles on the major powerhouses like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace and Youtube. Users congregate at these sites and all you have to do is participate. You can be in any niche.

You can do this by having your own blog where you post quality content that is useful and does not harp on your products or services. Update your blog regularly and distribute them as feeds to your accounts on other major social media sites. Users can add these feeds and view them in their news reader of choice.

You can create articles and submit to various article directories. You can create lenses on Squidoo and hubs on Hubpages related to your niche. These are time consuming but at the end of it, you increase your virtual real estate which in turn generate traffic and brings more visitors to your site.

A big mistake that happens time and again is that people initiate these web properties and do not maintain them. Just having a Squidoo lens on its own will not help you leverage it. You have to update it regularly till you manage to push your lens into the top 100 popular lenses. Your lens can rank on Google for the search terms unique to your niche and also get lots of eyeballs on your lens because of the popularity rating on Squidoo.

The next important step is to maintain control over your web property and how users access them. Connect all your social media profiles and services and control the flow of traffic between your various web properties.

By offering unbiased quality content on your social websites, you can woo users back to your personal blog and expose them to your posts. You control the dialogue through your blog posts and allow users to place comments. You can offer newsletter subscription and contact them by email. You can lead users to your other web properties with good clean linking strategy.

You can display your Twitter account on your Web 2.0 properties and get users to follow you on Twitter. You control the communication and let your users control the method of delivery. You make yourself accessible to your users in a multitude of ways.

The third step is to converse. The social media concept is built around conversations between people in the real world who share their likes and dislikes and their personal or professional experiences in cyberspace. For a business owner, this is word of mouth and she can track these conversations and respond to them.

If the owner leads people from her social media sites to her blog, it is easy for her to know what people think of her business/products and also reply to users’ comments. But it is not so simple as people can talk about her at several other places on the web.

The business owner can track these conversations on the web using Google Alerts where she sets up alerts for her company name, products/services and specific keyword phrases. She selects the Type as Comprehensive and the option How Often can be set to As it Happens. Everytime Google encounters a mention of her name or company when spidering the web, it sends an email to her. She can alternatively recieve it via a feed.

She can also use a Twitter search using the above method. She can get a feed of all the searches made on Twitter concerned with her company and view them in real time on her newsreader.

The fourth and final step is to convert the people talking about a company or its products and services. As a business owner, you can easily see the conversations happeing in your niche and you get a clear idea of what people are talking about especially their wants. All you have to do is get to know your target customers’ minds through these conversations and convert them into customers.

The central factor in conversion is the trust you garner in the eyes of the buyer. With your wide social media presence and effective linking of all your web 2.0 properties, your potential customers get to know you better.

A few steps you can take in portraying yourself as a person of trust and integrity are:

You provide good quality content and advice in your selected niche
You do not blatantly hype your own products/services and indulge in hardsell
You respond well and unbiasedly to positive and negative comments about you/your company
You assume the mantle of a thought leader in your field by adding new dimension of thinking to existing conversations

The strongest aspect of social media is its virality, the parallel of word of mouth in the real world. If you have a good message of value to the world, it is likely to be devoured quickly and transmitted many times over increasing your exposure manifold.

It is now time for you to dig your heels in the social media arena and reap the benefits it has to offer.
This post is based on Don Crowther’s article, “How to Knock A Marketing Campaign Out Of The Park” and is documented by Andy Jenkins in his post called Create, Control, Converse, CONVERT! The True Power of Social Media

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior search marketing consultant at Netconcepts, our Auckland social media optimisation company in New Zealand. He also posts regularly to the Online Marketer blog at www.onlinemarketer.co.nz

Cleaning up the Retail Site Navigation Mess

Brian — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:03:31 +0000

Beware: If you are an online retailer that has implemented “attribute-based” or “guided navigation” schemes to make it easier for your shoppers to filter your products, stop what you’re doing, read my Search Engine Land article that published today.

The technology may be great for users and conversion rates - but you can expect a lump of coal in your stocking from Google this Christmas. Find out why, what to do next: http://searchengineland.com/080904-175800.php

Brian

NebuAd Aborts Big Brother

Chris — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:19:25 +0000

The Washington Post today reported that NebuAd has halted plans to deploy the deep-packet inspection tracking of internet users for their advertising platform. I’d earlier predicted that consumer sensitivity about NebuAd could derail their business plans, and I reported how lawmakers pressured and ISP not to share data with NebuAd.

Meanwhile, Congress is examining issues around exploiting user data for behavioral marketing and targeted advertising, and the heavy uncertainty in the air would make NebuAd’s entire business modle appear to be a very unstable foundation.

Jeffrey Chester, Executive Director for the Center for Digital Democracy, is quoted as saying:

“NebuAd… seriously underestimated the privacy concerns.”

Does this completely derail the future of behavioral marketing on the internet? Probably not. Quite a number of companies, including Google, are already using user data to some degree (such as Geolocation) in order to target content and advertising. The compelling needs for continued expansion and success of internet businesses will probably overwhelm the voice of consumer advocacy groups for a while longer.

Print Yellow Pages Usage On Decline Or Not?

Chris — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:58:11 +0000

My article on how the “Yellow Pages Usage Stats Are Likely Wrong” went up earlier at Search Engine Land, and the details I highlight in it provide some strong circumstantial evidence that this year’s earlier industry statistics stating that print YP book usage hadn’t dropped over the year previous are likely incorrect.

As I point out, those statistics were all based on telephone polling, and those polls missed having representative samples of cell phone only households, according to their published methodology. Various research groups and government agencies have been saying that this is a significant chunk of the population — anywhere from 13.6%, growing to as much as 25% by the end of this year.

When you further realize that this segment is younger, and likely earlier adopters of technology, you can see that there might be a strong reason to believe that their usage profiles probably differ significantly from the land-lined population — they’re probably using print YP less than those who were polled.

This chain of reasoning is an assumption — there’s no absolute evidence to support it. But, the lack of representative sampling in the original polling data leaves us with no alternative but to try to put the findings up against logical reasoning.

It’s hard to monitor and assess usage of offline media, so print yellow pages are not the only ones that struggle sometimes to show value proposition. Print newspapers, magazines, billboards, and others also have similar difficulties in showing how many consumers see them.

Of course, some people have pushed real hard to count offline media — Google has apparently been interested in this Eyebox device which counts when people look at wall ads or billboards.

Yellow Pages Guerilla Ad Campaign

Chris — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:27:56 +0000

I was speaking at the Search Engine Strategies (”SES”) Conference in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, and was impressed by the YellowPages.ca booth in the exhibit hall:

I’ve seen other, equally-large booths for online yellow pages companies, but this one seemed particularly attention-getting and inviting. The glowing yellow desk and the simple design made the thing very friendly-looking, and the geek in me was drawn to the near-real-time search volume graph they had playing up on one screen.

YellowPages.ca appears to continue to be functioning successfully, although it’s also likely getting impacted by the IYP industry rumblings and fears. The Yellow Pages Group parent company has apparently started launching aggressive ad campaigns to promote the use of their legacy printed yellow pages books as well as the YellowPages.ca online directory and their mobile search services. (ad campaign press release)

The ad campaign is using large yellow darts to beat the message in that consumers will be able to find exactly what they’re seeking through using the yellow pages — perhaps as a subtle dig at Google, since Google Maps searches may also include broader keyword-match results that might be unrelated to a user who is strictly seeking business listings.

The Torontoist reports on a part of the yellow dart campaign that is using some cute guerilla marketing tactics — check out the photo of a plumber’s van pierced by a giant dart, parked on a street in Toronto. The YellowPages.ca logo is prominent on the side of the dart, and the dart’s fins read “plumber found”.

I also noticed this interesting YellowPages.ca landscaping ad on an embankment alongside some commuter train tracks in Toronto. These landscaping ads strictly sported company logos as far as I could see and were apparently targeting the eyes of passengers as they passed along in the trains.

(click to enlarge)

The question remains, however - will massive ad campaigns and clever promotions be sufficient to bolster online yellow pages usage during a time when users appear to perhaps be migrating to the major search engines for business searches?

Asian & Chinese PPC & SEM - Netconcepts Marketer Allen Qu to Speak at SMX China @ Timev

Chris — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:44:32 +0000

Many of you know that Netconcepts not only operates out of Madison, Wisconsin, but we also have offices in New Zealand, and we do quite a bit of internet marketing and website design work in the still-nascent Asian and Oceanic markets.

For those interested in our work in SEO & SEM in Asia, one of Netconcepts’ marketers, Allen Qu, will be speaking at the upcoming SMX China @ Timev conference in Xiamen, China during April 18 & 19.

I had a chance to visit with Allen back in February, and I can tell you he is extremely savvy in managing our client’s PPC campaigns that are running in Chinese search engines such as Baidu and Google China. Allen will be speaking at SMX China on a panel focussed on PPC ad management, although he is also expert in natural search marketing as well.

Chinese and Asian search markets are considered to be the new frontier in terms of areas for greatest potential future revenue and search audience growth.

If you’re interested in contacting our New Zealand office from the US, their morning office hours overlap US afternoon hours on Mondays through Thursdays. Our NZ office can be phoned at: +64 9 476-4601

Do CueCats Have 9 Lives?!? Google Resurrects a Bad Idea

Chris — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:27:51 +0000

For those of us who’ve been around the internet biz for a while, there’s often a feeling of deja vu or “been there, done that!” Thus we have that sensation today when we see this article from Silicon Alley Insider which seems to gush just a bit in its praise of these cute, “new” barcodes that Google is resurrecting in some print ads that can be scanned camera phones so people can easily connect up instantaneously to associated websites.

The article fails to mention the last time this sad concept was foisted on the world. Remember the company, Digital Convergence, with their various “CueCat” devices that allowed people to do this exact same thing?

The CueCat was developed in the earlier days of the internet, way back in the dot-com craze, and it was one of the bigger dot-bombs, sucking air and falling flat almost before any of the other dot-combs bit the dust. As recently as 2006, the Wall Street Journal called the CueCat one of the worst gizmos and bad business ideas of the internet.

Of course, I might be a bit full of hubris myself if I didn’t acknowledge that sometimes it takes a few trials and errors to make an idea commercially viable. Perhaps having this functionality usable from a cellphone makes it easier to adopt, and Google is certainly one company that might be able to make something work if no one else could. Silicon Alley Insider notes that this is apparently popular in Japan, but one still can’t escape the sensation that there’s perhaps some hype machine pushing up the appearance of relative popularity, similar to the defunct version of the idea that previously was foisted upon hypnotized investors here in the states.

The question remains: as a consumer, why would I want to scan (or snap a pic of) a barcode in a news ad I’m reading to be transported on my wireless device to the website? Is a wireless device really going to show me more info than a print ad could?!? The circumstances where I’d be interested in doing this are extremely rare, I’d suspect. This new incarnation may have lower hassle factor involved than the CueCat, but the issues are still essentially the same from my perspective. Bad idea.

My old company experimented with the CueCat product way back then, and I was immediately astonished that anyone thought this would be a good or viable idea for print ads — I recall being dumbfounded in the very first meeting I was pulled into in order to begin integrating with the thing, while others around me seemed to’ve drunk the Koolaid. Within a year or two, the Digital Convergence company began circling the drain as it was destined to do, and I was called in to vet their tech and internet assets for possible acquisition at a discount.

When the Digital Convergence company went belly-up, taking with it investment dollars from a great many individuals and major corporations, the stink was so bad that the founder, J. Jovan Philyaw, changed his name to J. Hutton Pulitzer and his personal website was launched with the company and product name pretty thoroughly sanitized from it.

I’m surprised the Silicon Alley Insider doesn’t remember this whole sequence and how stunningly bad the barcode concept was, but perhaps it didn’t make as much impression on Silly Valley, since Digital Convergence was a Dallas company.