In my last column, I looked at how beliefs can affix labels to brands, which forever after form our first brand impression. Beliefs are a heuristic shortcut we use to reduce the amount of sheer thinking we have to do to come to quick and efficient decisions. Today, I’d like to focus on emotions and their part in the forming of memories.

This is the final installment of the 4-part series on key PPC best practices (PPC Best Practices Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).

Speak Their Language

There has been constant debate as to what to use for keyword analysis with regards to long-tail versus head phrases and which yields the better results. Head phrases are the very generic and broad search queries where there is enormous search volume, but costs associated with the keywords are quite high. Torso keywords are the more-specific keywords; the 2- to 4-word search queries that still have lower search volume compared to the head phrases, but also tend to be cheaper. Long-tail keywords are the keyword phrases over 4 words where the costs tend to be minimal, but search volume is also sparse.

When doing keyword development, first look at the torso phrases and develop your keyword strategy using 2- to 4-word search queries to develop the keyword basket. Once you have the torso phrases, run the account and closely monitor the performance of the individual keywords down to your most granular KPI (ideally ROI or cost per conversion on the keyword level).

Once you know which keywords are driving highly-qualified traffic in the torso, it is then possible to look at the longer-tail keywords associated with the high converting torso phrases. Accounts with literally millions of keywords are not necessary when only a small percentage are actually working; spend where the ROI is made.

When developing your keyword basket, make sure you step into the mind of the searcher. Which keywords is your target market most likely to be using when searching for your product/service? Ensure you are not simply bidding on the marketing language you use internally, but also the language with which your market is most likely to initiate a search. (Hint: Talk to your sales department. They know the language your customers will be using.)

We recently took over a PPC campaign from a client doing it in-house and our first step was to look at the keywords. By refining the keywords based on user intention we decreased the Cost Per Click (CPC) by 23% and doubled the Click Through Rate (CTR). The conversion rate also increased substantially.

It is also possible to break out keywords by the Purchase Decision Process (PDP). By paying close attention to the keyword refinement process, it is possible to determine which keywords are being used at the beginning of the research phase, in the consideration and comparison phase and in the purchase intent phase of the PDP. By allocating these keywords into appropriate campaigns, you can then control the budgets associated with those keywords and effectively increase ROI, awareness, brand reach or whatever your PPC goals are.

Quality Score Is an Indicator, Not a Destination

There has been lots of debate around quality score and what it means to PPC advertisers. The long and short of a quality score is that it is designed to assist the customer. Google and Yahoo (with MSN just coming on board) have been using quality scoring to increase the quality of ads to improve the user experience. That being said, quality score should not be managed.

If you, as the advertiser, are looking to provide the consumer with the best experience possible (a good idea if you’re looking for conversions), then your quality score should naturally be good. A colleague of mine, Chris Davies, gave the perfect analogy for quality score: "It’s the ‘check engine’ light." If you have a poor quality score it serves as indication that it’s time to look under the hood and see what’s causing the issue. Look to your ad copy, landing pages and keywords, or reassign ad groups to adjust your quality score.

Ultimately, if you have a poor quality score and conversion rate is good and cost per conversion is good, then the few cents difference a better quality score can make is irrelevant.

Stop Measuring Cost Per Click; Start Measuring Cost Per Conversion

Ultimately, every change made to a PPC campaign should be to lower the cost per conversion. Therefore, don’t be afraid to bid aggressively on high-converting, high-quality, traffic-generating keywords and bid lower on the other 90% in your campaign if at the end of the day you are achieving the end goal.

Up to now in this series on Search and Branding, I’ve been looking exclusively at how and why we use search engines. But the idea of the series is to show how branding and search can work together. So in this column, I’d like to start from the opposite end of the spectrum: our brand relationships, from a memory retrieval perspective.

Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider August 14,  2008

After you plan your website redesign, you’ll want to ensure that the act of redesigning your website and going through the transition phase of the site redesign run as smoothly as possible.  We cannot emphasize the importance of planning your website redesign enough.  This is critical if you are thinking of maintaining your presence in the search engines.  Without planning, you can very quickly lose all of your visibility in the search engines.  Believe me, we have seen this happen over and over.  Not planning out your redesign can have an adverse impact on your online future.

So as you move into the transition phase of your redesign,  you need to be kept informed of what is taking place, what’s been acompished and what items still need to be addressed.  You’ll want to have some control over the pace at which the design is happening.  Furthermore you will want to pay attention to detail and ensure that elements of the redesign are not being overlooked or forgotten. 

This reminds me of a story from a few years ago.

Once upon a time, there was a successful Website that decided it needed a new look. Over the last few years this Website had been working with an SEO company who had helped many Search Engine visitors find their way to the Website. Unfortunately, the Website did not tell the SEO Company about its plans before putting its trust into a Design Company.

After the Website had been working with the Design Company for several months, the new look was finished and the Website quickly uploaded it to the internet. But, when the Website took a hard look at its new design it was horrified to discover that it was no longer very usable for its two distinct target audiences. To make matters even worse, the Search Engines were now having a great deal of difficulty in finding and understanding content in the new look.

Fortunately, the Website realized that its old friend the SEO Company could help out and it asked its SEO Company to see what it could do to fix the problems.

The SEO Company sprang into action. It alerted the Website to the technical issues that the new design presented and the technical fixes that could be put into place until the Website was able to get a new design up, for the Website was unable to revert to its original design.

The Website now had to find another Design Company  but this time the Website made it VERY clear to its new designers that they had to work closely with the SEO Company, making sure to follow all of its guidelines and suggestions.

The Usability experts of the SEO Company gathered together to help the Website talk to the two distinct types of visitors it was there to inform. They prepared a report for the Website, showing it the need for two very different paths one for each of its two visitor targets - and the need to have two different sets of keywords and content to appeal to each of the main visitor groups. The Usability experts also showed the Website how to make its navigation, internal linking and new internal search more user-friendly and successful.

After this, the Website, the new designers and the old SEO firm all rolled up their sleeves and set about fixing the Website.

* So, what were the SEO questions that the Website should have asked its designers in the first place?

• How will your design assist us meeting our marketing and corporate objectives? (Of course if the Design Company has not asked you what your objectives are  it will be very hard for them to answer this question.)
   

• How will the new design aid us in reaching our two main target audiences? (Or one, or three, or however main target audiences your website has.)
   

• How do you plan on ensuring that this Website will be found on the major Search Engines? (This will give you an immediate indication of the organic search savvyness of the Design Company  especially if you forward their answer to your SEO Company for review.)
   

• What SEM friendly features do your web designers offer? (Once again, your SEO Company will be able to review the answer to this and will tell you if the designer is organic search savvy or not.)
   

• Are you comfortable working with an SEO Company during the design of this Website?
   

• Do you understand that if you do not follow the suggestions and guidelines of the SEO Company you will not be paid? (OK, this is a little over the top  but after all, even SEO firms can dream.)

Well that was a story from three years ago and you know, to this day similar stories are continuing to happen all across the Web.  The key takeaways from the story are:

• Take your time with the planning stage of your redesign
• Consider SEO and if you are working with an SEO firm, bring them in at the beginning of the redesign planning stage
• Consider your target and your website users.  These are the people who are ultimately going to decide if your websie redesign is a success.  It’s one thing if a user cannot find your site in the search engines, it’s another thing if they can find your site but they do not engage with it.

Be in control of your website redesign.  Do not let your design company tell you to do this or to do that.  For that matter do not necessarily let your SEO firm tell you to do this or do that.  Educate your team on what the goals are for your site.  If you trust your SEO/online marketing team, bring them in early to provide feedback and recommendations.  Most importanlty take your time and consider the needs of your visitors/customers.

IN THE LAST FEW WEEKS, I’ve looked at how we gather information, depending on how complete the information is we already have. But it’s not just information that colors the search interaction. Like all human interactions, we are governed by our desires, our objectives and our beliefs, and this is certainly true in search.

Computing Concepts

Steven Pinker is one of the foremost proponents of a computational theory of mind. Following in the footsteps of Alan Newell, Alan Turing, Herbert Simon   and  Marvin Minsky,  Pinker argues that our "minds" lie within the patterns of information processing and functionality founds in the specialized modules of our brains. Like a software program being executed step by step, our minds break down the incredibly complex concepts we are faced with each day and feed them through these patterns. We create objectives that get us closer to our desires, and in order to get there in the most efficient way possible, we depend on a vast library of heuristic shortcuts that include our beliefs. We don’t think everything to death. We make quick decisions and create short cuts based on existing beliefs. Simon called this  bounded rationality.

Irrational Short Cuts

The challenge with these short cuts, as  Amos Tversky,  Daniel Kahneman, and more recently,  Dan Ariely, have discovered, is that they’re often quite irrational. Our beliefs are often driven by inherent patterns that have evolved over thousands of years. While they may be triggered by information at hand, the beliefs lie within, formed from a strange brew of inherent drivers, cultural influences and personal experience. In this brew, it’s almost impossible to see where one belief shaper begins and another leaves off. Our beliefs are largely formed in our vast mental sub-cortical and subterranean basement, below the hard white light of rational thought. But, once formed, beliefs are incredibly stubborn. Because we rely on beliefs to save our cognitive horsepower, we have an evolutionary interest in keeping them rigidly in place. Heuristic shortcuts don’t work very well if they’re based on ever-changing rules.

And there you have the crux of marketing. Every time we’re presented with a symbol that represents a concept, whether it be a word, a picture, a sound or a logo, it unlocks a mental concept complete with corresponding beliefs. Unless it’s a brand we’ve never heard of before (in itself a significant marketing challenge), that brand comes with corresponding belief luggage, some of it undoubtedly highly irrational. We are built to quickly categorize every new presentation of information into existing belief filing cabinets or "schemas." The contents of those filing cabinets are difficult to explore, because they exist at a subconscious level. Consultants such as  Gerald Zaltman and  Clotaire Rappaille have carved out lucrative careers by creating methods to unlock the subconscious codes that lie behind brands.

Search and Our Subconscious Baggage

So, when we interact with a search engine, it’s important to understand that this is not entering new information onto a blank canvas. Each word (or now, image) on a search page has the potential to trigger an existing concept. This is especially true for the appearance of brands on a page. Brands are neat little labels that can sum up huge bundles of beliefs.

It’s actually amazing to consider how quickly we can filter through the degree of information presented on a search page. We quickly slice away the irrelevant and the items that don’t fit within our existing belief schemas.

It’s not just the information on the page that we have to filter through. It’s all the corresponding baggage that it unlocks within us. Somehow, through the power of our subconscious mind, we can scan 4 or 5 listings, let the words we scan trigger corresponding concepts in our minds, quickly evaluate which listing is most likely to get us closer to our objective (based on beliefs, aligned with our desire) and click, all within a few seconds.

This simple act of using a search engine is actually a very impressive and intricate cognitive ballet using the power of our conscious and subconscious minds.

Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider August 7,  2008

We had a question from a client in California who wanted to know how to create a custom 404 error page in Microsoft IIS. Great question.  Why would you want to create a custom 404 error page you may ask?  Well the obvious reason is to improve the user experience for your site visitors who come across a broken link or an old page that no longer exists and has not yet beem redirected properly.

1. Create Your Custom 404 Error Page - Use a text editor or an HTML editor to create your custom page on your server.  When you create your custom error page, you may want to call it something like /404-error-page.htm or /not-found.htm. 
2. Open Internet Service Manager - From your server’s desktop, launch the Internet Services Manager (usually located at Start->Programs->Administrative Tools->Internet Services Manager)
3. Click the [+] to the left of the server name
4. Right-click on "Default Web Server" (or whatever you may have renamed it as), and click on "Properties"
5. Locate the Custom Errors Tab - Click on the Custom Errors tab (See Image below)
6. Identify the Error that you would like to edit - Click on the number of the HTTP Error you want to make the custom message for, then click "Edit Properties".  In this case, you would want to identify "404" 
7. Use the Browse button to locate the custom file you created ( i.e. /not-found.htm) and click OK. Keep clicking OK to dismiss the windows, then close the IIS window. Note: You can set any page you want to the 404 page.

The reason that you would want to create a custom 404 error page is to help direct your users to a relevant page on your site, whether it is the homepage or otherwise after they have been served up with a page not found error.  You do not want them to exit the site and never come back so by providing a custom 404 error page, you can direct them to beneficial page(s) of content. 

Here are some examples of some creative 404 error pages:
Enquiro’s Page Not Found Error Page 
CNN Page Not Found Error Page 
Sales Force Custom 404 Error Page 
Zilliant Page Not Found Error Page 
Geico Page Not Found Error Page