Almost everyone is aware that mobile usage has been on the upswing for the past few years, and more and more search activities are being conducted via smartphones. Since consumers are going to handheld devices to find products and services, it behooves companies to target the mobile market and focus on the unique opportunities to be found there.

Enter Pure Oxygen, a real pioneer in the field of mobile ad optimization. The firm provides consumer brands and marketers independent analysis, tools, and strategy to improve results across mobile web, search, social, sms, apps, and more.

They have created a tool for checking out webpages on mobile devices, the Mobile Site Analyzer, currently in beta, which checks content for optimal delivery on multiple platforms including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Pure Oxygen also provides consultation services for more sophisticated analysis of mobile friendliness, and they help increase conversion rates and ROI derived from mobile channels.

There’s a surprising number of companies which are ignoring mobile optimization and ad targeting — apparently expecting their regular internet marketing via SEO and PPC advertising to automatically distribute their marketing message via mobile as well. This is a very poor assumption, since traditional internet media does not automatically translate onto mobile platforms, and there’s a plethora of mobile-specific channels which would fail to be exploited under this lack of strategy. For instance, mobile apps can be a terrific source of referrals and promotion, but they must be properly engineered and could be offered through iPhone app store, Android/Verizon app store, and Amazon’s appstore.

I recently pointed out how Google is treating mobile-friendly sites differently than sites without mobile optimization, and this has significant implications for websites’ performance as mobile usage continues to grow. For many local companies desiring to appear and rank in local search results, the need for mobile optimization borders upon necessity — it could well be, ahem, “oxygen” to them!

Anyway, congrats to Brian on the launch of Pure Oxygen Mobile! I think this new venture is targeting a great niche, and will provide just what many companies need.

If you have an existing PPC campaign and it is performing decently, you can still increase its scope and hence improve its performance by targeting more keywords in the niche you are running your campaigns in.

You have to be logged into your Adwords account. The Opportunities tab in the Adwords interface is a great way to find out the keywords you are not targeting in your campaigns. The keyword ideas for each active campaign is listed and you can download them and analyze them in detail.

If your campaigns are targeted primarily to the US market, the Opportunities interface throws up keyword ideas which you can use straightaway. You can simply click the Preview button beside a campaign name and add suggested keywords straight into your live campaign.

For those outside the US, the best way to get a list of new keywords would be to click on the Keyword tools under the Tools section on the left column. Choose your location and language of choice and export the listed keywords as a CSV file and examine them manually.

You can compare them with the keywords in your existing campaign and after filtering the duplicates (along with keyword match type), you can manually add them into the relevant campaign.

A screenshot of the Keyword Tool screen is produced below.

For example, if I am running a campaign for Auckland seo here in New Zealand, in the box titled Word or Phrase, I would key in auckland seo. There is an option for choosing the location and language, traffic estimation and filtering keywords using boolean operators as in

The keyword tool results for the search term auckland seo returns the following results.

A few things to keep in mind when you add new keyword opportunities to your campaign:

• In the event that your PPC campaigns have been running for some time, if you look at the campaign’s performance over the past 4 to 6 months, look at keywords that have not recorded a single impression in that period. You could pause them before actually adding new keywords to your campaign.
• By pausing poor performing keywords, you can improve the CTR of your existing campaigns.
• Please remember that Google maintains a history of all changes made to your campaigns since their date of inception. If you delete the poorly performing keywords, in future, you may want to reinstate them. Deletion of keywords and subsequent inclusion does not enable them to start on a clean slate. They will still maintain their account history.

In conclusion, the keyword opportunities interface clearly shows where you are leaving money on the table in your PPC campaigns and you may very well take cognizance of this and improve the scope of your keyword targeting.

On a different note, Google has been tightening the noose on affiliate marketers on the Adwords network. Many Adwords accounts have been banned over the last month with no specific reasons given. This could be due to the recent FTC rules pertaining to affiliate marketing.

Some affiliate marketers feel that promoting shady products or products with names like Google Cash or Google Money Tree may be the reason for their accounts being banned though they had promoted such products in the distant past.

This is a clear warning for every advertiser that Google does maintain track of all Adwords activities. Your actions today can bit back in future even though you may be ignorant of the consequences of your current actions.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland ppc service provider offering both seo and ppc services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

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.

The actual conversion process involves testing a landing page leading to a signup or filling in of a form or a thankyou page in the event of a successful sale of a product. With Website Optimizer, you can set up experiments that involve Multivariate testing or A/B testing to track which version of the landing page is pulling in the desired results.

The top ranking of a client’s website on the Google SERPs is often used to justify the success of a SEO firm’s efforts. Clients are also obsessed with their site rankings especially in the face of their competitors flying high on the SERPs which is a pretty natural human reaction. But rankings are not the ultimate way of judging the success of a website. Conversion of visitors into customers or visitors taking the necessary action is an ideal way to measure the success of a site’s SEO or PPC efforts.

The testing I did for a client involved switching between an original landing page and a completely new landing page in a PPC campaign. This is an example of A/B testing which is simpler version of testing with Website Optimiser. It is ideal to start with this test if you have lower traffic volume and gain faster results. The conversion in my experiment involved filling in a form.

Multivariate testing involves using the same landing page with changes to headings, call to action, placement of menu items, logos etc forming the variation of the original page. In effect, you are testing between variations of the same page to see which one results in the user taking the desired action and hence achieving the optimum measure of conversion.

When setting up the A/B experiment, fix the original landing page and a new landing page without any room for doubts as you will switch the traffic between these two pages. Then the conversion page is the page with the form that needs to be filled. It is handy to have a printout of the Website Optimizer help section for reference.

Steps to follow when setting up the experiment:
1) Choose your original landing page (let us denote it as OLP)

2) Create a totally different landing page (this is an A/B test) (denoted by DLP)

3) Choose your conversion page (denoted by CP)

4) Now comes the crucial part of installing the tags. These are pieces of javascript code that need to be installed on the different pages.
a) The control script is installed only on the original landing page, placed just after the head tag.
b) The tracking script is installed immediately before the closing body tag on all the three pages namely, OLP, DLP and CP.

5) Website Optimizer’s validation tool will check for errors in the installed tags. It does this in two ways. You can provide the URLs to your original and variation landing pages and the conversion page. If these pages are externally visible, Website Optimiser will access them and point out errors if any.

Alternatively, if Website Optimizer cannot access the pages on your live site, you can save and upload the HTML source files for your landing pages and conversion pages and allow Website Optimizer to validate them.

Once Website Optimizer validates the installed tags, it is time to start your experiment. Make one final check of your experiment settings. Once the experiment is started, you will not be able to change the experiment parameters. You would do well to ensure that the settings are as you intended them to be.

6) The last but not the least step is the % of traffic you wish to switch between your original landing page and the new landing page. I started off diverting 75% of the traffic to the new landing page and retaining the original landing page 25% of the time. Google advises to have a 100% switch in order to run the experiment faster and hence obtain results faster. It is entirely up to you to make the final decision.

After the activation of the experiment, when you click on Website Optimizer, you can see the name of the experiment (the naming is part of the guided process that Website Optimizer leads you through when setting up the experiment) and the Status column says – Running Collecting Data. There are links below it to edit settings and view the report. (screenshot attached below)

The View Report setting allows you to compare the performance of the original landing page and the new landing page. It shows how well or how badly the newer version is performing against the original. In the early days of my experiment, I saw a yellow colured bar which showed that testing was inconclusive.

There are three other columns namely Chance to beat original, Observed Improvement and Conversion/Visitors. As my experiment progressed, the new combination worked better and finally in 15 days, the green colored bar indicated that the new combination is a clear winner.

The Website Optimizer documentation says that if the Chance to bear Original column exceeds 95%, then you can safely assume that your new combination is a winner.

In my experiment, I had to install the script tags on a site run by WordPress. A great Website Optimizer WordPress plugin created by Filippo Toso makes it a breeze to install the tags.

NOTE:
The switching of the original landing page and the new landing page is applicable to all forms of traffic, be it organic or pay per click.

For example, if the original landing page forms part of your website and your new landing page is created specifically to target a PPC campaign and therefore not visible to users landing on your site through an organic search listing, remember that the original landing page will be switched to show the new landing page according to the traffic percentage value that you set in your experiment.

Again, depending on the complexity of your experiment, it can take more or less time for Website Optimizer to judge the winning combination.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland seo consultancy offering top quality organic search and paid search services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

There are a variety of factors that are contributing to the client’s poor performance in paid search. If you are taking over the client’s existing campaign, there are positives and negatives which you have to be aware of. This post will discuss these at length in no particular order.

1) Figures Speak For Themselves:
The biggest advantage obviously is the amount of data available to analyse the patterns arising from performance of the keywords over a period of time. The longer the campaign has run, the better the trends available (if the business is affected by seasonal trends as in travel).

It is fairly natural to expect that the campaigns are linked to Google Analytics and goals have been setup. Adwords conversion code has been installed. All this data is invaluable in charting out a new path to improve the conversions and ROI of the campaigns.

2) Account History:
This is a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of PPC campaigns in general. If a keyword has performed poorly, say over the past 3 months, it can be a case of poor targeting and poor relevance to the ad group of which it is a part. Most often, DKI – Dynamic Keyword Insertion is the major culprit.

Its performance can be improved by shifting it to an ad group that improves its targeting and relevance by way of including it in the ad copy and also mentioning it in the landing page copy. If this does not see an improvement in the future performance of that keyword, then the market demand for that phrase also needs to be probed.

Just deleting the keyword and reactivating it hoping that it starts off with a fresh slate is the worst thing that can be done. The Pay Per Click Account History is a vital factor that has to be borne in mind as this has a major impact on the quality score as well.

Avoid deleting a keyword as far as possible. Give it all the opportunuties to perform well as specified in preceding paragraphs. If it does not work, then pause it for a while (in case it is affected by seasonal factors) and then revive it. If all efforts fail, then bite the bullet and delete it.

3) Avoid making wholesale changes:
If DKI is a reason for poor performance of the various ad groups in different campaigns, the first step would be to rearrange the keywords by moving them into new tightly knit ad groups that target a particular keyword and its variations with apt ad copy and landing page. This can be done using a cool and nifty tool like the Google Adwords Editor.

Do not change the ad copy and the landing page of every ad group in sight as it is going to be hard to measure the results. Make changes incrementally one step at a time and give the new changes some time to sink in. The Adwords quality score depends on a multitude of factors. Measure the results over a period of time. You will find that most of the changes respond positively in the new setup.

There can be instances where certain keywords have such a poor history of performance that they can take more time than normal to ignite. Give them a chance to do so.

4) Testing landing pages with Google Website Optimizer:
Instead of reworking the existing landing pages right from the word go, you can create alternative landing pages and test the effectiveness using the Googel Website Optimizer tool.

It allows you to split test different versions of a landing page (using Javascript) and gives you a good idea of which version converts better (users taking the desired action). Given a higher CTR, the quality score will impact the average CPC (cost per click) price. This multivariate testing is extremely useful in giving you an idea what the users are looking for in the particular industry in focus.

Please remember that each industry is a beast in itself. The rules of engagement are different as each industry has its unique inherent vagaries. As a PPC specialist, you can enhance the CTR , improve the quality score of keywords and campaigns and reduce the click costs. But visitors converting into customers depends a lot on the smoothness of the sales funnel itself.

Giving fewer choices to visitors when it comes to taking action leads to reduction in distractions and enhances the conversion process.

5) Expand the scope of the business:
A thorough keyword research using the Google keyword tool throws up the market demand and supply. Have a close look at the keywords targeted.

Many a time, there will be huge potential in the form of untapped market niches. This is a great opportunity to expand the client’s market scope and get her additional business for previously hitherto untargeted areas. This means targeting new keywords and creating new ad groups and landing pages all in sync with each other in terms of targeting and relevance.

These are starting off with a flourish with no blemishes in the past clouding them. This can boost the CTR (click through rate) and conversions and increase the ROI. The overall performance of the entire campaign is also improved.

6) Keyword match:
In my experience, I have come across industries where the generic broad match keyword phrases outperform the more specific targeted keywords in phrase and exact form. Negative keywords help cut down wasted clicks by filtering out unrelated intent of searches.

If some of the phrase and exact match keywords do not perform, it is wise to include the broad match terms for those keywords. Also, adding a geographical modifier to the keyword improves the targeting further. For example, a broad term like Auckland online florists is itself very targeted though it is still a broad match.

7) Reach out to a wider audience:
Sometimes, business owners can be fixated with local business needs. Small to medium ticket products can be sold to a wider audience. If it is a service, then the scope definitely is within the local area. But if the same service is quite unique that customers from neighbourbing towns or cities can afford to travel, then it would be worthwhile widening the geo targeting of the client campaigns.

If you have gut feeling that something will work (especially if the business owner feels that way), keep emotions in check and bypass it for the time being. Test it and check it out to make sure it works.

In conclusion, tread with care in the early days of managing an inherited PPC campaign. It pays to be conservative at the start. Gradually, grow your wings and try newer approaches. Test, rinse and repeat. Anything that works can be found only by testing.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland PPC company offering both search engine optimisation and search engine marketing services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

Organic search is still the biggest driver of search traffic at a whopping 88%. Unlike paid search where results are measurable accurately and instantly, the organic SEO process is a long term strategy with measurable results becoming clearer over time. Yet, the big question in every online marketer’s mind is – Which results do users trust more on search engines – the organic or paid results?

Evgenii Prussakov is a renowned affiliate marketing specialist and he delves into the minds of the average Joe/Jane online consumers by asking 107 questions in his book titled “Online Shopping Through Consumers Eyes: A Study Of Online Users’ Responses To 107 QUestions” (found on Amazon).

The topics are wide ranging covering areas of general online advertising, B2C marketing, website usability and modern day online consumer behavior. This research provides a wealth of information to online marketers doing affiliate marketing, web analytics, SEO and web design.

The graphic below summarises the query which this post endeavors to answer.

I will discuss a few of the questions and their responses which make really interesting reading. The questions and their answers are as follows:

The main question is about users trusting either natural results or sponsored results more on search engines. This question is preceded by another basic questions which reads:

Q: Do people know the difference between natural results and sponsored ads in search engines?

A: 18% say No and 82% say Yes

Now to the main question again:

Q: Do users have more trust in natural results than sponsored results?

A: Definitely not – 1.75%
Probably not – 6.55%
Maybe – 19.65%
Probably so – 36.68%
Definitely – 35.37%

Clearly, the results show that over 71% of the shoppers trust organic results over sponsored results. A majority state that they know the difference between natural and paid results and they trust the natural results more.

The results prove that organic SEO efforts lead to more traffic which in turn is more likely to trust your site and buy from your site. A result for your site (especially in the top 3) on page 1 of the SERPs delivers results big time. It would be well worth your time and effort to work hard and get your site ranked in the top pages of the SERPs.

Evgenii does not study factors related to the user’s intention to shop online. He questions people who have shopped online and gleans their experience while going through the different stages of pre-purchase research, making the purchase and post-purchase interaction with the online business.

Some of the other unrelated questions deal with the situation of the customer clearing her web cookies, the amount of emails she has to process on a daily basis etc. These are of considerable interest to online marketers though. A good video on which this post is based can be informative.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland SEO firm specialising in organic search and paid search services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

This year’s talk was around the core theme of the “conversation economy” and how marketing, branding, and business in general is being shaped by and around conversations. Not surprising, there was a fair amount of talk around social media. Of course, my portion was to focus on natural search as part of this conversation, which thanks to blended search, crosses over and intersects all marketing channels. While my view on natural search hasn’t changed much over the years, preparing my presentation for the conference helped me frame it up with the exact message phrasing that I’ve been looking for – “just in time conversation.”

Just In Time Conversation

This description is excellent for natural search, and those who have been doing SEO for any amount of time have probably recognized this viewpoint. Natural search provides the opportunity to reach out and connect with a website’s target audience at the ideal time…when they are seeking what the site has to offer.

Of course you would think that presenting to some of the whose-who of brands would make this messaging old news. However, even today, this still couldn’t be further from the truth. A lot of brands have made great strides online, but there is still a lot of ground on the natural search marketing front to be gained.

In prepping for the conference, I had a chance to preview a list of some of the represented brands and took that as an opportunity to see how well they were doing already regarding SEO. To protect the guilty, I won’t call out any of these brands here. Many of the fundamentals that you’d expect these brands to have already addressed, many of which would be evident even through a 60-Second Website Audit, actually hadn’t been addressed: canonicalization, duplicate title tags, keyword cannibalization, generic anchor text, etc. Beyond some of the more technical issues, many of these sites could benefit greatly just through thin slicing natural search optimization tactics.

I can only hope that the presentation helped to start more of these big brands down the natural search marketing path. I certainly did what I could in the 45 minutes I was given to illustrate the point.

Natural Search Users, Please Stand Up

Early in the presentation, I invited the attendees to participate in a little poll by having them stand up based on their own personal interaction with various marketing vehicles. Specifically, I asked them to stand up if:

Within the last week, you…

• Used a phonebook?
• Acted on a billboard ad?
• Acted on a magazine ad?
• Acted on a radio ad?
• Acted on a TV ad?
• Used a search engine?
• Clicked on a paid search result?
• Clicked on a natural search result?

As you might imagine (and can see below), out of 300 plus attendees, the numbers grew gradually, from 2-3 for phonebook usage (which I was actually amazed that the number was that high), up to nearly everyone in the audience when I reached the “Used a search engine?” part of the poll. Presenting in-the-round also meant that it was very easy for all of the attendees to see how much search engine usage has become a part of their and everyone’s everyday life. Not surprising, those who clicked on a natural search result compared to a paid search result was far greater.

This of course was the first step…now to get marketers to question why they continue to put a disproportionate amount of their online spend toward paid search versus natural search, even when their own usage of search engines contradicts that logic. But just like natural search takes time, it takes time to turn this kind of thinking right side up.

For many companies, natural search marketing may itself be one of the most important just in time conversations they have this year, after all, it’s now July and the 2009 holiday season is just around the corner.

Behavioral ad targeting is nothing new on the internet, and I easily recall it being offered in one form or another as far back as about 1999. In fact, 24/7 Real Media currently offers behavioral targeting through their ad network as just one case in point. So what’s new with this incarnation is the way in which NebuAd collects data to base the targeting upon. NebuAd’s innovative twist on behavior targeting is based upon monitoring individuals’ internet browsing habits through their ISP, essentially seeing all the sites and pages that a user visits.

Other online behavioral targeting models are likely based upon ad networks cookieing users on all the sites where the ad network runs ads. This may leave a lot to be desired, since users are likely visiting a great many sites outside of the ad network, leaving them a little in the dark as to what the users may be up to currently — if a user only visited one or two ad network sites, there could be insufficient context to really make any sort of behavioral assumptions. NebuAd’s data collection method may provide them with the ability to more accurately target ads for far more site visitors.

NebuAd has already partnered with a few ISPs like CenturyTel to get access to their subscribers’ surfing data. NebuAd uses a sort of network appliance hardware to sniff out the sites/pages that users are requesting through their ISP’s network operating centers.

The few weak links I see in NebuAd’s approach are (1) the sensitivity associated with online privacy, (2) their dependence upon persuading sufficient numbers of major ISPs to cooperate with them, and (3) users coming in from ISPs which are not data partners of NebuAd, making them harder to profile.

On the privacy issue, NebuAd claims they do not generate a database that could be leaked or subpoenaed, since they encrypt user-identifiable data like IP addresses in a one-way hash. It all sounds good, but as consumers we just have to trust them that this is all handled well, and it only takes one server to be misconfigured and IP data starts getting logged.

The subpoena bit is just PR-spin, too, since a government agency or lawyer can still hit them with a subpoena to fish for anything that might accidentally be there.

Just a few years ago, DoubleClick bought Abacus Direct, intending to mashup online browsing with offline purchase habits in order to enable greater behavioral targeting. There was such intense public outcry over privacy concerns that DoubleClick felt compelled to halt the integration of the Abacus data. So, it nearly doesn’t matter if NebuAd does safeguard privacy well enough — if people are creeped out by having ads appear which seem to know what they’re up to, they might lash out at the advertiser, the ad network, and maybe even their ISPs.

On the second issue, will NebuAd get enough ISPs to partner up with them? They’re apparently already partnered with a number of ISPs, thought they won’t say who. This makes one suspect that perhaps those ISPs could be keeping the behavioral profiling a secret from their subscribers — something that would appear to run against the NebuAd pro-privacy stance.

NebuAd says that they require ISPs to allow users to opt-out of the profiling, but ISPs frequently bury subscribers under reams of privacy terms and conditions fineprint to the point where few subscribers can actually figure out what’s done with their data.

Many users are browsing the internet from work or school, and I suspect that corporate and educational networking departments will be unlikely to participate by providing NebuAd with their users’ data. So, there could be a substantial number of users that NebuAd will be unable to profile and target.

Still, all things considered, NebuAd may have built a very compelling business proposition — they could be positioning themselves to eventually be acquired — they’d make a very attractive advertising component if coupled with various other targeting technologies like geotargeting, demographic targeting, keyword targeting, contextual advertising, etc.

He posts an interesting graph from the Kelsey Group that estimates some fantastic growth figures for ad-sponsored directory assistance usage over the next few years.

Although I don’t really question any of the points Gregg made, I do think there’s some caveat to voice search: it’s still very prone to error, and there are some significant issues with making usable interfaces with voice/audio systems and introducing advertising into them as well. All of us have very low tolerance of phone tree navigations when we try to call company help lines, and this could easily transfer to low tolerance of audio ads. We have a fairly high tolerance of visual ads which don’t obscure info we’re trying to access on webpages, but using audio interstitials could very easily result in reducing user acceptance of some ad-propelled directory assistance, or if a user has too many experiences where they encounter errors while using them.

So, there’s likely a very thin dividing line across how long one is willing to listen to an audio ad before it becomes unacceptable, and users who encounter problems while using voice search might not ever come back again.

The sort of folx working on these applications are undoubtedly working hard to find that happy medium in monetizing while improving quality, and the ones who get it right will likely win out in this marketplace.

I previously wrote a brief critique on Goog-411 service, if you’re interested in just one example of common issues in voice search.  People with accents or even mild speech impediments have great difficulty in using voice search systems, and voice search has trouble recognizing all sorts of unusual words/names even from people with clear, unaccented voices.

But over time, I’ve heard other experts stating that their research shows that having ad presence for brands along with natural search ranking appears to enhance overall click through rates in a synergistic manner. And, with greater experience, I’ve seen a number of cases when companies really should be buying their own brand name keywords for ads!

I see that George Michie over at the Rimm-Kaufman Group criticized a recent Microsoft study claiming that some advertisers are wasting money by buying their own brands in paid search ads — and I think George was right to criticize this. Read on and I’ll elaborate…

I’ve seen a lot of cases where companies frequently don’t rank well for some of their brand-name combinations. Sure, one can argue that if their natural search optimization were done better, they might rank at the very top of the SERPs for those combos. But, I see cases where quite a few companies have products that are more typically purchased through particular department stores, resellers, or other distributors, and those other companies may have so much better search rankings that the original product creator is not likely to ever rank above them.

In these cases, I think that buying one’s own brand names in paid search makes a lot of sense!

For example, I love these Jhane Barnes clothes I can get at high-end department stores like Nordstroms — if you do a search for “Jhane Barnes trousers”, you get a search results page where the official Jhane Barnes site is only listed in the sixth position down:

(click to enlarge)

Now, I know that it’s likely that most of the Jhane Barnes sales likely happen in department stores, so it’s maybe not upsetting to them that they’re ranking lower than Neiman Marcus. Quite simply, Jhane Barnes (PageRank = 5) is not likely to ever outrank much more widely popular sites like Neiman Marcus (PageRank = 6) or Bluefly.com (PageRank = 6). Even if Jhane Barnes were to fix all of the SEO flubs that I see going on with their site, I’m not at all sure that they would overtake the Neiman Marcus or Bluefly pages that I see outranking them on that longer-tail search combination.

I’d bet that Jhane Barnes would make more money selling directly to consumers than selling through these distributors, though, and getting position higher on the SERPs would help with that. A paid search ad for their brand name would help insure they’d get up there. And, as a consumer, if I rapidly saw their official site when I came to this SERP, I might be inclined to click through to check their prices first, in the assumption that they might have just a slightly lower price than Neiman’s for the same item, or I might get discount offers from the later on.

Let’s look at an even more dramatic example, though. Let’s do a search for William Gibson’s newest book, “Spook Country”:

(click to enlarge)

Notice how the highest couple of links in the SERP is to the book’s pages at Amazon.com? The next is Wikipedia. The next two are, thankfully, the author’s own site. The two after that are to magazine and news sites, and so on. Now, you can buy the book through the author’s site, but it just has links off to other places like Amazon and Barnes & Noble to buy the book. But, how about the big publisher who manufactured and promoted the book?!?

Putnam Adult, the imprint of the book, is owned by the Penguin Group USA, the publisher. They’ve got their own online shop where this book could be purchased, assumably at higher profit for Penguin than if the book is bought through distributor book shops. The Penguin Group’s listing for Spook Country is all the way on the second page of the search results in Google — a place where practically no consumer is going to click to buy.

The Penguin Group USA website has a Google Toolbar PageRank of 7, but their pages are not likely to ever outrank the internet behemoths of Amazon.com (PageRank = 9) nor Wikipedia (PageRank = 9). They might even have considerable struggle with getting above The New Yorker (PageRank = 8), and The Los Angeles Times (PageRank = 8).

The best way to ensure that The Penguin Group’s page selling their own book makes it into the field of vision for online consumers would be to buy the keywords for “Spook Country” and “William Gibson” – ads in the sidebar or above the natural search results would undoubtedly drive up their direct sales, reducing how much they’d pay to the distributors.

Of course, to have me, a dyed-in-the-wool natural search expert endorse paid search may invite all sorts of criticism! I used to hear the paid search reps touting branded keywords as enhancing overall click-through, though, and I couldn’t help but be suspicious of their motives, since they have an obviously vested interest in increasing paid search purchases. However, I think that there are objectively logical reasons for using paid search placement for brand keywords, just like the examples shown above, and I think that there could indeed be a positive psychological effect on brand recognition when both natural and paid search placements appear on the same page. At very least, if you’re in both, you’re taking up more of the page’s overall real estate, reducing the space taken up by other parties.

I believe that a strong search marketing program has both paid and natural presence.

So, George Michie is right, though I don’t know that I’d go so far as to call affiliates “thieves” , since affiliates are frequently more facile, quick and efficient at targeting market niches that the bigger, product-originating companies have difficulty in catering to.