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Archive for July, 2008
July 31st, 2008 by Kyle Grant
This is the third installment of the 4-part series on key PPC best practices (PPC Best Practices Part 1, Part 2). So far we’ve introduced the basics in the planning and measurement involved with the setup of a PPC campaign in addition to conversion path analysis. This week we’ll get into testing, demographic targeting, and vertical engines.
Don’t Guess… Test
With a PPC campaign, testing is the campaign manager’s best friend. Testing is a constant, iterative process that must be followed to refine the effectiveness of your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns. Multivariate testing can be as complex as developing a multitude of landing pages and testing multiple aspects (such as images, titles and page copy, to name a few) or as simple as using versions of a landing page or ads in A/B tests and constantly refining the best performing versions.
The key with a testing strategy is to balance the size of the test with the size of the account. The larger the test, the longer the testing process needed to gain statistically-relevant data. No matter what the size of the test, budgeting the necessary time is as important as budgeting the media spend.
Don’t Get Punished for Bad Behavior
 Behavioral targeting has become one of the more popular buzzwords in the industry and rightly so; after all, the better we can target our market the more effective our campaigns. Several options are available to better target our online market, including geo-targeting, day-parting and demographic targeting.
For example, geo-targeting can be used to communicate more efficiently with users in a particular region and better allocate your product offering. After all, selling snow shovels in Florida wouldn’t be particularly advantageous, whereas selling air conditioners would be.
Finally, it is possible to target based on demographics. This targeting is most effective when using a content network and using site targeting based on the demographics of the audience for a particular site. However, although the information is available through such tools as MSN’s Ad Intelligence, I would stay away from disqualifying keywords because they are not in line with your target market’s demographics.
For example, according to the US Census data, most HR managers tend to be female, yet in targeting this audience I would not disqualify the keyword "Human Resources Management" because the demographics are skewed towards men. One of the marketing basics that’s literally been engrained into all marketers is to advertise where your market is and one very effective behavioral targeting mechanism is the use of vertical engines in your paid search strategy.
Get Vertical
Vertical search engines are an effective method of lowering CPC and improving the overall quality of traffic. The quality of the searches with a vertical search engine also tends to be better due to the increased propensity for buyers to use vertical search engines later in the purchase decision process. This presents an opportunity for those with more limited budgets (and those with the budget, too) to more effectively spend online and generate higher ROI.
Vertical engines also offer the ability to access a much more targeted audience which will allow you to develop custom ad copy for the particular demographic. Although the traffic on vertical engines is no where near what it is on Google, Yahoo, or MSN, it is important not to discount these engines from any paid search strategy. The ROAS that can be gained from advertising on vertical engines can far exceed what any mainstream engine can provide. The detriment to working on vertical engines are the differing revenue models ranging from CPC to fixed cost and the management nuances to be learned for each engine.
Of course there is a lot more to these best practices than the little snippets above, but those will be the subjects of future, more in-depth articles to come. For the continuation of this series, please visit PPC Best Practices Part 4.
July 31st, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
In the last two columns, I looked at how search plays a part when we’re in two information gathering states: I know what I’m looking for and where to find it; and, I know what I’m looking for but not where to find it. Today, I’ll look at what happens when we don’t know what we’re looking for or where to find it.
In the first two states, our intent is pretty well defined. We’re looking for a piece of a puzzle and we know the shape of that piece when we see it. In information foraging terms, we’ve already defined our diet. It’s just a question of which patch we look in. When we extend that to search engine usage, we have already defined our query, and it’s just a question of how we interact with the results page. In both these states, search engines work pretty well.
The Missing Puzzle Piece
But what if we have no idea what the puzzle piece looks like. We don’t know the shape, we haven’t assembled the adjacent pieces and we only have some vague idea what the finished picture should look like. This is the ultimate challenge for online search, and one that all search engines have largely failed to meet until this point. This is where we need a guide and advisor, a connector between ourselves and the universe of potential knowledge available. Because our knowledge is imperfect, we need a sage who’s knowledge is perfect, or, at least, much less imperfect than our own.
Of Disambiguation, Discovery and Berry Picking
This is where three concepts play an important role, the need to disambiguate, the thrill of discovery, and a revisit of Marcia Bates’ concept of berry picking. Let’s begin with disambiguation.
When we have no idea what we’re looking for, we don’t know how to define it. We don’t know the right query to present to the search engine. The more imperfect our knowledge, the more ambiguous our query. This is where search needs better knowledge of who we are. It needs to know through implicit signals such as our areas of interest, our past history and our social connections what it is we might be searching for. If a search engine is successful in lending more definition to our query, it stands a chance of connecting us to the right information.
The second piece is discovery. If a search engine is successful in introducing potentially relevant information to us, our interaction is quite a bit different than it is in the first two information gathering states. We spend more time in our interaction and “graze” the page more. We’re also open to more types of content. In the first state (know what we want and where to find it) we’re just looking for the fastest navigation route. In the second state (know what we want but not where to find it) we’re looking for confirmation of information scent to judge the quality of the patch. But in the third state, we could be enticed by a website, an image, a news story, a video or a product listing. We’re pretty much open to discovering anything.
And this brings us back to Bates’ theory of berry picking. Because we have no preset criteria for the type of information we’re looking for, we can change direction on the turn of a dime. In our pursuit, we fill in the definition of our prey as we go. We follow new leads, change our information gathering strategies and sometimes completely change direction. Our interactions with search turn into a serendipitous journey of discovery. It is in the third state where our patience is generally higher and our scanning pattern the broadest. Any cues on the page that trigger potential areas of interest for us, including brands or cultural references, could catch our attention and lead us down a new path.
Search Pursues Discovery
It’s this type of search that Ask’s 3D interface or Google’s Universal results set was built for. It’s also the thorny problem of disambiguation that has spawned a number of approaches, from Google’s exploration of personalization to the human assisted approaches of ChaCha and Mahalo. Even Yahoo’s Answers is a discovery tool, using the more natural approach of question and answer to lend some definition to our information quest. But even though we are defining our criteria as we go, we still seek to conserve cognitive energy. We have a little more patience in our seeking of information scent, but just a little. We still spend seconds rather than minutes looking for it, and because search is still trying to get discovery right, our sense of frustration can mount rapidly. We’re still a long way from finding a universally satisfying online source for discovery. Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider July 31, 2008
July 30th, 2008 by Jody Nimetz
Article wriiten by Jody Nimetz and Kyle Grant
While attending the SMX Advanced Tradeshow in Seattle a great question was asked and sparked an interesting debate: “Where do you invest your first marketing dollar? In SEO or PPC?”
This is a very interesting question and not an easy one to answer. The answer basically comes back to performing a gap analysis. A Gap analysis is simply a measure of where you are now and where you need to be. Looking at your campaign objectives and goals we can easily determine what your end goal is. What is it that you are looking to achieve from your online search campaigns and what’s more how important is this goal? Simply put is online search another customer touch point or a key acquisition tool driving the economic engine of your company?
Paid search has its place and so does SEO. Therefore to answer this question, we should really examine each channel’s pros and cons with respect to where to focus your marketing efforts first.
First, before any talk of where you are going to invest the money is to determine what your goals are and precisely how you are going to measure these goals. SEO and PPC are both extremely measureable marketing communication tools and it is vitally important to be able to measure ROI on both. ROI can be a sales-based metric or even a more loosely applied value-based metric based on conversions; however, both can be used to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Now with this caveat out of the way, let’s launch into the debate between Paid Search and SEO. The pros of paid search are its ability to target, very precisely, your target market with a customized communications message over which you have 100% control. This channel also allows you to choose where you are positioned on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and for what keywords you will be found for. Paid search also allows you the ability to drive the user to a precise page on the site where you are effectively able to drive the user into a conversion. (Assuming, of course, you are following all of PPC’s best practices) Paid search also allows for the ability to drive traffic almost immediately. Within several hours it is possible to set up an entire PPC campaign, launch it, and begin seeing traffic.
Sounds too good to be true? It is. The cons of paid search are the associated costs. I have run keyword targeted campaigns where the cost-per-click (CPC) can range between several cents to over $75. The major and unavoidable con of paid search is that with every visitor there is a cost and coaxing the conversion is vital or bankruptcy maybe looming on the horizon. With thinking about the costs of PPC campaigns and the fact that the conversion rate should be between 2-5%, if your landing pages are well optimized, a decision must be made as to whether PPC is an affordable option to drive positive ROI. The other unavoidable fact of PPC is that if your budget runs out, so does your traffic. Although we have conducted studies showing the positive correlation between PPC and SEO, eventually your traffic will vanish if your SEO campaign isn’t up to snuff.
So what are the pros and cons of SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often overlooked in favor of sponsored campaigns, but the fact is results from SEO are longer lasting than sponsored results. If you can gain a top ranking for a key phrase, you do not have to worry about somebody else outbidding you for this term. If you are ranking well organically then barring any major algorithm shift or drastic change to your website, you should remain in the same spot until a more relevant result with adequate quality link inventory knocks you off. Just how important is SEO/organic search? Well, you’ve probably heard about the 70% organic vs. 30% sponsored rule re: organic click through vs. sponsored click through. While the percentages may have changed, the fact of the matter is most users are more prone to click on an organic result vs. a sponsored listing. A number of times the sponsored results are often ignored or simply interpreted as “advertising” and as a result, users will click on the more trusted organic result.
There are definite benefits to using SEO:
- Organic search is cost efficient and rather inexpensive. Organic campaigns are often cheaper than sponsored campaigns. The only costs associated may be incurred as a result of outsourcing an SEO firm or training staff internally to perform search engine optimization.
- Organic listings tend to generate more click throughs as they offer unbiased product information. FACT: More people click on organic listings than sponsored listings.
- Organic results tend to be longer lasting. Unlike a sponsored campaign where a competitor can outbid you for top spot, a well-optimized site can remain in top position for weeks, months and even years. I have clients who have ranked in the top position for their main key phrases for years. In fact, I have a client who has ranked in the top spot in Google and Yahoo for a couple of very competitive key words for nearly four or five years. It easy to see how these top organic rankings help contribute to their achieving average online sales of 150-200K per month.
- Organic search can offer a better ROI. With the limited expense of using an organic campaign, the return can be great.
Personally speaking, the benefits of using organic search outweigh the cons. Having said that, strong SEO results are not always easy to obtain. SEO return is not always easy to calculate as it is with sponsored campaigns. With SEO, you are often at the mercy of the Search Engine algorithms. With a major change to the algorithm, sites that have been ranking well can suddenly drop forcing site owners to buy back that traffic through PPC efforts. Some of the issues pertaining to SEO include:
- The return from SEO/Organic search can be difficult to measure. Without sound goals, key performance indicators, and analytics to measure your success, organic search efforts can be hard to associate a dollar value with.
- Organic results take time. There is something to be said in the world of search engine marketing for being patient. Unlike a paid campaign where results are immediate, organic rankings can take some time to generate. In some cases, (due to various factors such as competitiveness of key words, online competitors with larger budgets etc) you may never achieve top organic ranking for a key phrase.
- With organic search taking longer and being harder to measure, organic search can often be a tough sell to management and decision makers in your organization. Search in general is a new media and many executives still do not think search is credible.
The benefits of SEO and organic search engine optimization do outweigh the cons, but the fact of the matter is that SEO and PPC work together quite well. The better you are at SEO, the less you may have to worry about PPC. It depends on your industry and on your business. Depending on your budget you may be in favor of a strong SEO campaign. Depending on your level of patience, a sponsored campaign may be the only way to drive traffic to your site. It’s what you do with that traffic that counts.
July 24th, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
Last week I looked at search behaviors when we knew what we were looking for and where to find it. This week we’ll look at what happens when you know what you’re looking for but you’re not sure where to find it.
Judging a Patch by its Scent
In the first instance, when you know what you’re looking for and where to find it, you have defined your patch and you have a pretty good idea what route to take to find your specific piece of information. In the second instance, you don’t know which patch you’ll find the piece of information in. This is where classic wayfinding behaviors and information scent can play a critical role in seeking information.
When you’re not sure which information patch contains the right information, you have to judge each patch by its relative scent. This pretty much guarantees you’ll visit more than one patch, which for our purposes translates to websites. You’ll try to do a preliminary assessment of scent based on what you see on the results page, but you’ll reserve most of your judgment for when you click through to the site.
Looking for Greener Grass
One of the interesting aspects of optimal foraging for food is that there are costs to move from patch to patch. You have to literally assess whether the grass is truly greener on the other side of the fence, or whether it would just be a senseless waste of effort. Most animals have a highly developed heuristic instinct about when the time is right to move on to the next patch. Eric Charnov, who reached out to me (I’m still following up with Eric to get a follow up interview for a future column) after the original information foraging column, called it the Marginal Value Theorem. In a nutshell, Charnov’s Theorem says that we decide how long to stay in a patch based on how rich the current patch is and how distant the next patch is.
One of the challenges of the Marginal Value Theorem is that we often have no way of knowing what the “richness” of the next patch might be until we commit to expending the energy to go see it. We risk the effort based on our assessment of the current patch and the hope that better patches lie ahead. And the risk lies in the fact that it takes energy to move from patch to patch. Patches are separated by distance, so we physically have to invest the energy to move from the patch we’re in to a future patch. The degree of risk lies in the distance to the next patch, our expectation of the richness of that patch and the value of the patch we’re currently in.
Patch Hopping with Search
But online, the internet is non-dimensional in the traditional sense. There is no distance, the only dimension is time. How much time are we willing to expend to find the next patch? And search gives us the ability to greatly reduce the time needed to navigate from patch to patch. We structure queries to define the “diet” we hope to find in each patch. We then can click through to see if the scent matches our definition of diet.
Remember, here time is the resource we hope to conserve, so these explorations from the search page are very quick. We can visit a number of patches in seconds. We define the diet (what we’re looking for) and start down the page visiting the most promising patches. Based on user research we’ve done at Enquiro, we typically take 10 to 12 seconds for the first click from the search results page, and spend about 15 seconds assessing the scent on the pages we visit. Because we are programmed to save effort, if we visit a few patches and come up short, we’ll use a new query to define a new collection of patches. Because we have no defined notion of which patch will be the right one, we have to use shortcuts to judge each patch quickly and efficiently. We have little patience for unpromising patches.
Of course, our level of patience also is determined by how rare the prey is we’re pursuing. If we believe it should be rather plentiful, we also believe the scent should be easy to pick up. But if our prey is elusive, we’ll be more patient in our quest to pick up its scent. These are the searches that will drive us to the second or third page of results.
We Don’t Consume Information
If we find a rich patch, we file it away for future consideration. This is another area where information foraging diverges from biological foraging. Looking for food is a zero sum game. If we don’t eat the food we find, someone else will. So when we find a rich patch, we stay put until we eat as much as we can (or until a richer patch beckons). But online, information is not really consumed. Even if we use it, it’s still there for the next visitor. There’s no risk to move on and find other information patches. This is where traditional wayfinding strategies come in. As we explore for information, we define the landscape based on the richest information patches. These become landmarks which we return to again and again. So we quickly use search to define the best patches and tag them for future reference. Then, we return to them at our leisure, knowing the information will still be there, waiting for us.
Next week, we’ll looking at the third state of information seeking, where we don’t know what we’re looking for or where to find it, and how it impacts our search behavior.
July 23rd, 2008 by Kyle Grant
Last week, I started wrote a post on some of the key PPC best practices (Go to Part 1). This is the second installment of the 4 part series.
Plan to Measure; then Measure the Plan
As you move forward with your PPC campaign, ensure you are able to effectively measure your KPIs through your analytics tracking. With several of our clients, we are using keyword-level ROI to ensure we can accurately spend the budget where we are making the highest returns. This measurement includes being able to merge data from several sources in order to accurately measure the effect of each keyword on the business.
B2B sales in the online environment are really no different than in the offline environment: The sales process is much longer than in B2C, and relationship development is a primary concern. Knowing this fact, it is important to ensure your analytics are set to measure the multitude of conversions that may occur and assign ROI values to each conversion.
Tip: Ensure your cookie duration is enabled to match the average sales cycle timeline at a minimum.
K.I.S.S Rule Applied to Conversion Path Optimization
Once you have a set of clearly defined goals and are able to effectively measure the necessary KPIs, it’s time to turn to the conversion path. The traditional thought is that the path to conversion starts on the landing page, when, in fact, it starts with the moment the user interacts with your ad on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
All of the tactics you use (including ad copy, targeting, landing page messaging and the subsequent site conversion path) must be dictated by the end goal. Every interaction or step in the conversion process should take the user in one continuous motion towards the intended conversion. Messaging and offers should maintain a consistent theme to gain the conversion and nurture the lead into a prospect for the sales department. The conversion path should provide all of the information the user needs along the way to make the decision whether to purchase or not.
Enquiro’s own research on B2B purchase decision behavior provides valuable insight as to what content to place on your site and in your conversion path. Ensure that traffic, once on the site, can convert on landing pages quickly and easily. Ask yourself several questions:
- Is the conversion path simple and intuitive?
- What is the intention of the users on this page?
- What information are they looking for (pricing, competitive comparisons, product specs, company information)?
- What goal do you want users to complete?
- Are there any distractions or unnecessary information on the pages in the conversion funnel?
- Are your calls-to-action conspicuously positioned?
- Is your offer (whitepapers, podcasts, eBooks, demos, complimentary trials, etc.) relevant to users’ needs?
Please check back next week for PPC Best Practices - Part 3 of this Series.
July 23rd, 2008 by Manoj Jasra
If you are looking for a career in web analytics and want to establish a solid foundation of skills as a part of your overall analytics training, then I recommend adding the skills below to your tool-set to help you become a very well rounded analyst before you enter the field. Taking a course on web analytics, reading a book on web analytics or subscribing to a web analytics blog are a good start, but frankly, are not good enough by themselves.
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Search Marketing: I always think of Web Analytics as a tool to help your search marketing strategy. Without an understanding of the different strategies that your business is implementing, how do you know what to measure. Paid Search, SEO, Email Marketing, Social Media, Press Releases, and Textual content are all different segments that web analytics should integrate with. Furthermore, once you know what strategies your business is implementing, it becomes important that you have a seat at the table so you can help plan for the future.
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Programming / Software Development: Having a background in software development has come in handy numerous times in my career. Understanding a programming language makes it much easier to implement web analytics as well as make it much easier to speak with IT to make implementation changes on your behalf.
Many search marketing tools (including web analytics solutions) provide APIs which come in handy to integrate data from different sources. Having programming knowledge allows you to code your own applications without having to rely on other developers.
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Office Tools, Excel/Access/PowerPoint: Microsoft office products (or similar technologies) are something you’ll use very often. Custom Functions, Charting Tools, Pivot Tables, V-Lookups are just a few components in excel you’d better get used to.
Anyone can get put together a few slides in PowerPoint, but it takes real skills to create a presentation which entices people to keep watching and listening.
I mention Access because in the past I have used Access to combine data from Analytics and Paid Search in order to understand the ROI down to the keyword level. You don’t need Access, you could use SQL Server or MySQL as well.
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Deeper Analysis: This sounds like a fairly broad topic, but it entails the ability to understand things like Multivariate Testing, Statistical Analysis, Understanding Users (usability) and behavioral targeting. Having experience in these types of skills takes you from a great analyst to Web Analytics Guru.
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Passion: This is a difficult skill to develop, it almost has to come naturally. You won’t really succeed as a Web Analyst without having a thirst to continually want to improve and learn. It has to go beyond trying to make $150,000/year, it’s having an understanding that if your business succeeds, then your team will succeed and ultimately YOU will succeed.
Original Post: Web Analytics World
July 17th, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
WE SEEK INFORMATION TO FILL gaps in our existing knowledge. The extent of that current knowledge and how we’ve structured it will play a large part in determining intent. It will help shape our knowledge requirements, our strategies for retrieval and how we will evaluate information scent. As stated in my previous two columns, we’re generally in one of three states when we turn online for information; we know what we’re looking for and where to find it; we know what we’re looking for, but not where to find it; or, we don’t know what we’re looking for or where to find it. Today, I want to explore intent in the first of these states:
We Know What We’re Looking For — and Where to Find It
In the first case, we have a solid idea of the information we’re looking for. Our mental representation has a defined structure and we have a good idea of what the missing piece looks like. For example, we’re looking for a phone number, an address or another missing detail. Because the structure of the information in our minds is almost complete, we have a similarly clear cut idea of where we’re most likely to find the information. We know the right "patch" to look in and where to find the information in the "patch." In this case, we’re looking for the simplest route from point A to point B.
Googling Google on Google
One of the ongoing anomalies in search is the number of people who go to their favorite engine to search for proper domain names. Some of the most popular queries on every engine are the URLs of their competitors. People search for Yahoo.com on Live Search, or Google.com on Yahoo. People even search for Google on Google. In looking at the query logs, the only explanation seems to be mass stupidity. But in actual fact, this is foraging playing itself out. We habitually use engines to navigate the Web, so even when we know the Web site, why should our behavior be any different? (This still doesn’t explain the searching for Google on Google. Perhaps stupidity is the right answer here.)
Let’s say you’re looking for the address of the head office for a corporation. You know it will be on their site somewhere, and you have a pretty good idea it will be somewhere within the "about us" section. Rather than go directly to the site and navigate through it, you choose to search for "Company X head office address." Or, even more likely, you just search for "Company X," knowing that the official site will come up high in the results.
Pre-Mapping the Search Results Page
In this case, before the results page even loads, you know exactly what you’re looking for and where you’re likely to find it. If you’re searching on Google, it’s likely that you’ll get an extended result in the number one organic spot with Site Links to key parts of the site. This is a great match for your expected information scent. Previous to this introduction by Google, we saw that for navigational searches where we knew the destination we were looking for, there was a higher degree of scanning of the site URL at the bottom of the result listing. Normally there’s not much interaction with this part of the listing.
In this first category, we look at search as a tool, the quickest possible route to the information we know exists. We will quickly zero in on the only relevant information on the results page, the listing for the site we’re looking for. Now, the question for marketers is, what happens when there’s both an organic and sponsored listing for the same site on the same page? Will one cannibalize the other? While we’ve never tested for this specific intent, I can speculate based on what we’ve seen in other research.
Habitual Scanning Behaviors
In one study, we split our group in half, giving one a purchase-type task and the other an information-gathering task. In both cases, we looked at scan patterns in the top sponsored and organic results. We expected to see our information-gathering group relocate their scanning down to the organic results. But this didn’t happen. What we realized is that we scan the search page out of habit. We’re not rationally optimizing our scan path based on intent. We’re following the same pattern we always do, the top to bottom, left to right, F-shaped pattern that’s common across all users. That behavior is conditioned and engrained. It’s been etched at the sub-cortical level of our brain in our basal ganglia and executes subconsciously (see Ann Graybiel’s work on this for more). But what does change is how we respond to the information scent cues on the page.
Although scanning followed the same pattern for both groups (in fact, the interaction was even higher with sponsored listings for the information-gathering group, likely because they weren’t exactly sure what they were looking for and so were in a more deliberate mode) the click patterns were significantly different. The official site that marked the successful destination in the scenario was in both the top organic and sponsored location. In the commercial task, the clicks split almost 50/50, with half happening in the sponsored listings, and half in the organic listings. But in the information-gathering group, all the clicks happened in the organic listing. Based on our preconceived idea of the information we were seeking, that particular "patch" seemed more promising.
Next column, we’ll look at intent and how it impacts search behavior when we know what we’re looking for, but not where to find it.
Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider July 17, 2008
July 15th, 2008 by Kyle Grant
Stop Thinking PPC, Start Thinking Consumer-Initiated Marketing
Over the past year, several new options (and the list keeps growing) have been made available for online advertisers to create more sophisticated online marketing campaigns. We’ve seen the implementation of display advertising through Pay Per Click (PPC) providers as well as a significant movement towards local and mobile advertising. This movement in the market represents a paradigm shift, from simply a PPC-focused strategy, to thinking about all the channels associated with consumer-initiated marketing conversations.
Several of these options include display advertisements, paid inclusion, local listings and Pay Per Action (PPA). With each of these options there are several different revenue models (and by revenue, I mean for the search engines). Therefore, it is important to ensure you have effectively allocated your budget to maintain your ROI (Return On Investment).
PPC and PPA models are the most effective for the advertiser based on the business objectives of driving users to the site and gaining conversions, whereas a CPM-based model is more effective from a branding perspective.
With each of these models it is extremely important to know what your end goal is and how to reverse-calculate to estimate what each conversion is worth, and through your conversion rate what each visitor is worth to you and consequently how much you should be paying per thousand impressions. Sadly enough, too many advertisers initiate PPC campaigns without knowing what the end goal is. A word of caution: Traffic is not an end goal!
Start with the End in Mind
What is it that your PPC campaign needs to do for the business objectives? What Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) do you have in place for the measurement of the plan? There are many metrics to measure the effectiveness of a PPC campaign versus the effectiveness of your optimization. What’s the difference? PPC campaign effectiveness is judged by its impact on the company’s bottom line, and the return on investment. Campaign optimization is measured by an increase in CTR and improved quality score.
The goals of your PPC campaign should be those conversions that speak directly to the business objectives and business model of the company. When you begin to optimize your campaigns, it will become clear how measuring the effect of the PPC campaign on the business objectives, not performance metrics, is critical to improving ROI.
Next up, I’ll dive deeper into the PPC process in PPC Best Practices Part 2 of this 4 part series.
July 15th, 2008 by Jody Nimetz
Last week I wrote a piece on planning a site redesign in the Web 2.0 World. The good folks at BtoB Magazine were good enough to include the post in the B2B posts of the week on BtoBonline.com. It just goes to show that website redesigns or the ideas of conducting one are a hot topic especially in the B2B arena. At Enquiro, we work with B2B clients every day and lately almost every one of them has either just completed a website redesign or is contemplating a site redesign in the next six to twelve months.
The great thing about SEO as it applies to website redesigns, are that the same rules apply. You still have to carefully plan out the redesign and you still have to identify the goals for your website or web properties that you would like to redesign. Remember not every site needs a redesign. Unless your site architecture is limited and the content that you have stale, you may not even require a redesign at this time. It depends on the limitations of your current site. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Is our site scalable? Can you expand the site if needed?
- Is your site Web 2.0 compatible?
- Does the content on your site address the needs of your audience?
- Is your site search engine friendly? Can the search engine spiders effectively crawl and index your site?
- If I was our customer, how would I engage with our site? Would I purchase from our company?
Let’s take a closer look at each of the points.
Is Your Site Scalable?
We know that for optimal search engine rankings you need to have unique and informative content on your site. Does your current site allow you the opportunity to easily add content to your site? If you are using a CMS, whether it be an Enterprise version or even your own proprietary content management system, can it be used to efficiently add unique content to your site? Can you add things like blogs or forums to your site to provide a richer experience for your user?
Is Your Site Ready for Web 2.0?
We’ve already discussed this previously, but you need to ask yourself if your website is ready for Web 2.0? Are you able to syndicate your content, are you optimized for blended search results (video, images, News, blogs, Flash, etc.). Again what does your audience expect to see when they arrive at your site? Are they looking for Mashups or widgets? Or are they simply looking for informative content regardless of the type of media? Regardless your site should at least be ready for Web 2.0 to address future needs. Now having said that, do not redesign your website simply for Web 2.0. Again, carefully weigh the pros and cons of your existing site and methodically determine if you should partake in a site redesign.
Does Your Content Reasonate with Your Audience?
You’ve heard it once, you’re going to hear it again… Content is King. In order to be successful online, you need to have informative content on you site that address the needs of your audience. Especially in the B2B sector as we know that sales cycles can be long with the purchase decision happening weeks or potentially months after the initial engagement with your website. You need to provide the content that visitors are looking for whether it be comparison matricies or whitepapers, or product demos. While this may not warrant an entire website redesign, it may be easier for your to create this content and share this content through the launch of an updated site.
Don’t Forget SEO - Is Your Site Search Engine Friendly?
The one thing that is consistently neglected in most site redesigns is SEO. Yet I personally do not understand why. In simplest form SEO helps make your site more search engine friendly. Having a more search engine friendly site means better rankings and improved visibility in the competitive landscape that is the search results. Improved visibility equates to more traffic and ideally more qualified traffic. More traffic generates more leads and more leads turn into more sales which improves your bottom line. Get it? It’s a simple process with an often complex means of getting there. The fact is, you need to make your site search engine friendly, that means proper URL structure, on-page optimization, effective external link inventory and clear navigation. (Of course there are a number of other items, but you get the point.)
If You Were Your Customer, How Would You Interact with Your Site?
As it is right now, and you were your own customer or propsect, how engaging is your site? Are you providing them with the information that they need to make an informed purchase decision? If they are ready to convert, have you identified clear conversions and clear convesion paths? Do you have effective landing pages? There are a number of engagement triggers that your site should feature in order to engage your visitor. Chances are that if your site does not feature any of these "triggers" then this could be another vote for a site redesign.
Preparing for a website redesign takes time, but it is time well spent. Especially in the business to business arena where qualified lead generation is so important. Whereas brochures and booklets used to comminucate your organizations solutions and benefits, your website now acts as your main maketing tool. Do not neglect it.
July 14th, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
In the last column, we looked at berry picking as an analogy for gathering information. The theory was put forward in 1989 by Marcia Bates. Then, in 1995, two researchers found even more inherent behaviors demonstrated in the way we seek information. It turns out that we may literally hunt for information.
The Genetic Case for Searching
We didn’t come equipped with a inherent strategy to pull information from a web search results page. There is no genetic coding specific to Google. But as two researchers, Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card, at Xerox’s PARC research facility really started to explore how humans navigated online environments looking for information in 1995, they found something fascinating. They found that the way we seek information online is very similar to an activity that is as old as evolution itself: the hunt for food. Pirolli and Card called this the Information Foraging theory.
The basic principle behind information foraging is not so much about gathering the maximum amount of information, but rather in how to maximize our time and efforts in the pursuit of the right information. This goes to the human knack for conserving our resources in pursuit of our objectives.
The Easiest Route to Information
We must remember that any interaction with a search engine is part of a much broader range of activity that will hopefully result in achieving a large objective that is aligned with a human drive: learning, bonding, acquiring or defending ( Nohria/Lawrence). We take these macro objectives and break them up into distinct tasks and allocate resources against those tasks based on the expected usefulness of the outcome. This is where the food gathering analogy provides some useful perspective.
We eat food to survive. Food is the fuel that powers our activities. In the stripped down logic of evolutionary survival, it doesn’t make sense to expend more energy in the pursuit of food than the food itself contains. We would starve and die. So we have become remarkably effective at finding food in the easiest way possible. The big objective of the pursuit of food and survival is broken down into discrete tasks or actions, and we instinctively determine how much time and effort to spend on each of these tasks or actions depending on how much closer it will get us to the objective: our next meal. There is a cascading series of risk/reward decisions and mental trade offs happening below the level of our rational awareness. Our evolutionary programs play themselves out subconsciously.
Born Foragers
While seeking information is a more abstract concept than finding food, Pirolli and Card argue that the same inherent skills are used, including the same trade off decisions. In evolutionary terms, our information seeking skills are an exaption of our food gathering skills. Each time we seek information, we “hunt” for it and make decisions about how much cognitive energy we want to expend in the pursuit and the optimum strategy for gathering the information. We forage for information.
This explains much of the typical behavior we see with online properties, especially search. We quickly seek and filter through information, using our heuristic guidelines and trade offs. When we look at our use of search engines, there are two important concepts put forward by Pirolli and Card that must be considered, the importance of information patches and diets.
The Right Patch and The Right Diet
As we seek information, the same as seeking food, we will spend our time where the promise of successful pursuit is the greatest, based on clues or telltale hints we encounter. We look for the best information “patch”, which is determined by information scent, the smell of informational relevance. The greater the scent, the greater the promise of an abundant information patch. Search engines give us the ability to create our own patches, somewhat like a spider spinning a web to catch prey. We see what we catch based on the scent, and if we don’t like what we see, we quickly spin another web with another query. There is almost no effort expended in the process, so we have little patience if we’re not presented with adequate scent. This is why so much time is spent scanning the top of the page. I call it the area of greatest promise, that tiny yet critical patch of real estate in the extreme upper left corner of the search page, where we expect the strongest scent. We judge the value of the whole patch based on what we see in the first few words in the first few listings on the page. If we don’t find strong scent, we start questioning the value of the patch.
But we also have to make a determination of which information we include in our diet. Remember, it makes no evolutionary sense (assuming we’re using the same mechanisms we use for foraging food) to expend energy pursing food that doesn’t return an equal or greater return on our investment. So we will quickly filter out low quality information. In fact, if we think a patch contains only low quality information, we’ll exclude it from our diet. Search has been remarkably successful in becoming the preferred “patch” for a diverse set of information needs, but it still comes up short in one particular category. It doesn’t do very well at helping us find information when we don’t have a clear idea of what we’re looking for. Search is still rather ineffective as a “discovery” engine. But despite it’s limitations in this area, we have still been increasingly conditioned to turn to search when we forage for information because of its remarkable efficiency.
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