Read the full article at The Results People blog.

Read the full story at TheResultsPeople.com…

So what happened here? Did JC Penny actually think that a 1st place ranking for every vaguely relevant retail-related keyword term under the sun was worth risking search results purgatory? Did Google really sit back and do nothing while a major advertiser made a mockery of its coveted 200+ point algorithm during the ultra competitive and highly lucrative holiday shopping season? It’s hard to say because anything is possible in the increasingly aggressive organic search space, but one thing is certain; there is more to the story than meets the eye.

In this situation JC Penny categorically denies involvement in any black hat link building schemes. Google too denies doing anything untoward, stating in no uncertain terms that it does not give preferential treatment to high rolling advertisers, adding that its algorithm had started to catch on to JC Penny when a major change was made in February to how it valued links. It is here where the real controversy begins, and it’s a two-parter: Just what did Google change in February that would suddenly detect such a scheme? And what if JC Penny really didn’t do anything wrong?

Black Hat Offensive?

JC Penny’s adamant denial that it in no way engaged in any paid link scheme highlights a concern that legitimate SEOs have repeatedly expressed; black hat techniques can be reverse engineered and used by competitors as a weapon. Currently there is no way to protect against a vicious competitor paying for links in another site’s name. SEOs have long asked that Google just ignore these types of links, usually low relevance and low quality in nature. A no-penalty-no-reward approach by search engines would level the playing field making paid link schemes a useless link building method and ensuring that such links could never be used with malicious intent.

Did Google finally do just that? Did it finally decide to ignore paid links? Or was the February shift something more far reaching?

Google’s Trust in Paid Links

When Google’s Matt Cutts stated in the NYT article that corrective action against JC Penny was happening naturally in the algorithm itself due to a shift in “how we trust links” he may have let the cat out of the bag. Google announced an algorithmic change in January that was intended to lower the value of scraper site content in search results, but the change noted in the NYT article is something different; the JC Penny debacle was about paid links not scraper sites. Google’s February 14 release of a site blocking Chrome extension that would eliminate sites chosen by individual users from its search results may offer another clue as the announcement of the extension includes this statement, “We’ve been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms…”

In recent weeks Google has released an algorithm change targeting scraper sites, admitted that it has changed the way it “trusts” links, and in a related-yet-unrelated move, unveiled a Chrome extension designed to allow users to filter entire domains out of their search results when they query Google in Chrome. These three clues lead to some obvious conclusions. It seems that Google is waging war on low quality, low relevance and unnatural links in a variety of content types across the web, something that if true would have impacts on everything from paid links and link exchange networks to poorly orchestrated article marketing and excessive content syndication.

What’s Next for Link Building

Link building is a necessary evil in the algorithmically driven Google-verse but the once simple idea of “one link equals one vote” for a site has spawned a whole business of gaming the system with unearned links. Link building has become as much a gamble as a strategy and increasingly there are more grey and black hat areas than there are legitimate white hat techniques. Even areas once considered safely white hat have faded to grey as the algorithm has been adjusted to compensate for a proliferation of useless, duplicate or irrelevant content on the web. It seems that Google is finally taking notice of the many ways that links are being built by design rather than naturally and doing something about it.
How this will change the way link building strategies are developed and implemented remains to be seen.

Thanks to the NYT JC Penny exposé SEOs can forget about search engine purgatory and start worrying about past link building efforts coming back to haunt. When Google advises Webmasters to “Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings” it now means business: The road to Google hell may be paved in poor quality unnatural links and it seems like efforts to eliminate the impact of those links in search results is just beginning.

About the author
Tina Wilson is a Director of Resource Development at Mediative

Chris set the stage by describing two main situations for direct marketing:
1. Unlimited Budget: Set target ROI/CPA and maximize order volume or revenue
2. Limited Budget: Spend entire budget at best possible ROI/CPA

In both cases, there is a need to determine the “true” ROI. This can be particularly challenging in a situation where, for example, the sale started online but finished offline. Chris breaks it down with possible solutions and their effect on ROI metrics. See his presentation for the details.

Kyle Grant was up next, and focused on using analytics to tell a story. The story elements include where you are now, where you’re going, and how fast everyone else is moving in relation to you. Analysis should reveal the linkages between analytics data and its significance to (impacts on) the business.

Kyle explained how using analytics can move us from hindsight, to insight, to foresight. Next, he discussed defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and avoiding data paralysis. He then went on with some examples and charts demonstrating results of an actual paid search campaign.

Very importantly for marketers, Kyle also discussed a simple formula for calculating the opportunity and justifying the cost of online advertising.

If you would like help assessing the opportunity gap in your own online paid search marketing, contact Tanya Harvey for a free consultation. Be sure to include your URL.

About the author
Karl Hourigan is a Digital Marketing Strategist at Mediative.

Gord Hotchkiss has spoken and written on many occasions about internet speed and what this means for organizations trying to adapt to a rapidly changing competitive landscape. The question regarding internet speed is how fast are you willing to move to adapt to the changing online landscape, but the question also has to be asked; how fast are you willing to fail?

To determine the most effective marketing mix online, at some point a failure must be encountered. The question regarding optimization of paid search campaigns may come down to complacency. If everything is working well, ROAS is good, CTR is good, Quality Scores are good, then why mess with a good thing? Well, the quickest way to being overtaken by your competition is to stand still, and yet the problem is that when we optimize, we risk failure.

Not too fast, not too slow
Starting to optimize conservatively can lead to long, drawn out failures which can do longer-term damage, and yet going to the other extreme can lead to some very large disasters. It is more about balancing speed and risk with optimization testing. When starting testing it is important to define the scope of the test and determine what the acceptable rate of failure would be (i.e. negative impact to the bottom line) versus time needed to realize statistically relevant information. For example, when testing new ad copy or a new landing page, it is important to measure the volume of traffic you will direct to the landing page compared to the amount of potential loss of business due to that change. The margin of error associated with the test can also come down to the size of the change. The more significant the change, the faster you will see results (positive or negative).

Test markets
As with traditional marketing, definition of the test market will help to control the scope of the testing as well as the amount of volume exposed to the test. Limiting the scope of the test to selected ad groups or specific campaigns, or leveraging geo-targeting to isolate markets exposed to the test, can assist in balancing quick results and risk. The selection of test markets will also assist in providing a comparative bench mark for the test; although it is less of an issue with A/B testing.

Avoid the knee-jerk reaction. Testing and seeing results quickly is great, but ensure the statistical relevancy of those results is accurate. Before declaring a test a success, determine exactly what degree of data is required to see an effect from the test. Remember Statistics 101: what size of result is required to determine a 90 or 95% confidence interval with the test? The confidence intervals are going to be directly impacted by the amount of data; the more data, the smaller the interval required for statistical relevancy. There are two ways to increase the amount of data: time or scope. Increasing the duration of a test will assist in driving towards statistical relevancy or increasing the scope of impacted ad groups/campaigns will increase the amount of data.

Where do you want to go?
Testing in marketing is 70% science and 30% art. Even the most lackluster creative developer can design a highly successful campaign with enough iterations and testing. Before implementing a test, start with a hypothesis. I know, its high school science all over again, but without an idea of what the expected outcome of your testing could be, it’s going to be like going flying without a destination; you’re going to end up somewhere, just maybe not where you would like.

Knowing what works is only valuable if you know why something didn’t work and therefore failure is the only real way to drive success. Failure is only really a bad thing when nobody learns from it, which is why when implementing a testing framework, recording specifics about how each change affected the campaign’s performance is imperative to a successful testing strategy. Each test should be followed up with a detailed analysis as to how the test impacted the results. What was it about the test that caused the specific result?

The key to a successful optimization and testing program is designing successive tests and constantly challenging the status quo. Just remember you’re going to fail once in a while, but you can learn a lot from failure and take what you learn to help you succeed that much more next time.

At the recent B2B Marketing Summit in San Francisco, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin of MECLABS, made some great points about optimizing the sales funnel, and in particular he shared what he referred to as 3 principles that apply to the whole process, including landing pages.

Increase the specificity of your message

• If you want to describe your product or service as “award-winning”, be specific – which award? Quantitative statements will get better results than vague qualitative statements. As Dr. McGlaughlin put it, clarity trumps persuasion.

Increase Continuity

• If your ad promised a $49 offer, make sure there’s a $49 offer on the landing page. Sounds obvious, right? It is, but still the continuity of the message from an ad to a landing page is broken all the time. You have to keep the person engaged and moving towards an inevitable conclusiond promised a $49 offer, make sure there’s a $49 offer on the landing page. Sounds obvious, right? It is, but still the continuity of the message from an ad to a landing page is broken all the time. You have to keep the person engaged and moving towards an inevitable conclusion.

Increase Relevance

• Understand your audience to understand what’s important to them about what you’re offering. If you can understand their priorities and design the experience from ad to conversion to meet their priorities, you’ll be well on your way to significantly improving your results.

An even simpler way to stress test your landing pages, ask yourself, if someone arrives at this page, does it answer three critical questions: where am I, what can I do here, and why should I do it? If you can’t answer all three questions, you can bet your visitor won’t be able to either.

Determining the most effective structure comes down to really understanding what the goals of your campaign are and how you will need to market to someone from initial awareness right through to the end purchase. Of course, it all depends on what you are marketing and the duration of the purchase decision cycle.

PPC Campaign Positioning

Each campaign should be positioned at a unique point in the purchase decision process; whether that campaign be:

• Awareness focused campaign aimed at filling the top of the sales funnel
• Influencing campaign to guide the prospective customer through to purchase or
• Closing campaign aimed at generating the conversion

The marketing messaging associated with the campaigns should mirror the stages in the purchase decision process from ad copy through to landing pages and offers. Regardless of the position in the purchase process, the customer should be prompted to take some form of action on a landing page.

PPC Campaign Structure

The structure of the paid search campaign will closely align to the associated metrics with each campaign. It would be unreasonable to expect that a campaign targeted at the early awareness stage of the purchase decision cycle would generate a direct conversion (sale), but starting the education and branding conversations are more reasonable goals. A soft call-to-action such as the download of an educational whitepaper would be appropriate in the early awareness phase. It is also important to remember that the amount of information asked for on the landing page form is in alignment to the value of the offer. The contact information for a prospect is valuable to them and therefore the more information requested, the more valuable the offer must be. Awareness campaigns may consist of broad terminology associated with the products or services, pains-based terminology, and even direct or indirect competitor’s terminology.

Understanding how individual keywords are positioned at each stage of the purchase decision cycle will assist in defining the overall campaign structure. As stated, the goal is to create a seamless communication message guiding the prospect from the awareness phase through to conversion.

Maximizing Visibility

As with many other forms of advertising, visibility and frequency is key to effective marketing messages. Focusing all efforts at only a particular point of the purchase decision process would lead to high acquisition and high attrition or low acquisition and low conversions. We all know that the vast majority of conversions require multiple clicks (especially in high value B2B sales) and ensuring effective frequency of ads is important to remaining top of mind while providing reinforcing messages through the subsequent stages of the purchase decision cycle.

Defining the message and the offers that are most applicable at each stage of the purchase process will ensure that ads maintain a high CTR, while landing pages are effective at providing more conversion-focused offers such as demos or free trials. Should the sale involve an offline sales force, it is important to create a paid search campaign aimed at satisfying the informational requirements (IQ Needs) of the prospective client, while allowing the sales force do the relationship development (EQ Needs).

Controlling PPC Costs

Leveraging your campaign structure to control costs is about understanding how each campaign affects the other and ultimately leads to conversion. A keen understanding of the prospect’s path to conversion becomes necessary to developing the campaign structure. Knowing the value of each conversion or lead at the corresponding stage of the purchase decision cycle will assist in bidding strategies as well as determining the appropriate budgeting requirements for each campaign. Several Bid Management tools are developing cross channel tracking technologies to assist advertisers with the determination of the value of associated campaigns. Multiple campaign attribution models are becoming more and more necessary as marketers attempt to become more intelligent about how to better balance visibility each stage of the purchase decision process.

As previously stated, frequency is important to paid search campaigns and therefore it is important to define the tactics to maximize that frequency. Most advertisers are in a deficit situation with regards to available budget versus available keyword search volume inventory. Leveraging day parting and geo-targeting can be effective tactics to concentrate the limited budgets into a smaller subset of the target to maximize frequency and coverage of the purchase decision cycle.

To learn more about effective PPC campaign management, attend our free webinar on September 30, at 11:00am PST (2:00pm EST). We’ll be talking with Maria Pergolino from Marketo about a successful PPC campaign that increased qualified opportunities by 300%.

Paid search campaigns can be an effective way to drive traffic to your web site, and if your campaign is optimized with effective landing pages, enticing ad copy, and an offer that can’t be refused, you can see an ROI that many other mediums can’t match (or effectively measure, come to that). There is a science and an art to creating effective landing pages and ad copy, but after testing different ideas and analyzing the results, it’s always gratifying to see the strategy come together to produce more qualified leads. Ultimately you want to see the one metric that trumps all others in measuring marketing success: increased revenue.

For marketing automation software vendor Marketo, they knew from their analytics that paid search brought in a high percentage of new traffic they weren’t getting from organic search results alone. They decided to scale up their PPC campaign. To scale up, a complete audit of the existing account, from keywords to landing pages, was necessary to determine where opportunities to expand visibility effectively existed.

Results didn’t happen right away, but sticking with the strategy and making sure all aspects of the campaign were aligned, netted a 300% increase in qualified opportunities coming into their sales funnel. It also resulted in maintained cost per acquisition and better quality leads.

Don’t you love it when a plan comes together? If you’d like to learn more about how Marketo did it, be sure to attend our webinar on September 30, at 11amPST.

How Marketo Used PPC to Get 300% More Qualified Opportunities
Register Now for the webinar.

Read and download the case study.

Times change (quickly) and this industry evolves (rapidly) and now search query data is available from a variety of handy sources. Let us count the ways:

1. AdWords Search Query Performance report: the traditional method of running a Search Query Performance report from the AdWords report center still exists. It provides some advantages, such as being able to see ad group and campaign status. There are still some ‘x other unique queries’ results, but much less than in the past.

2. Within AdWords Keyword data in UI: Recent enhancements to the AdWords user interface include the ability to generate an ‘on the fly’ report on search terms. From the ‘Keywords’ tab, you can select the ‘See search terms’ button to go to a report on search terms. This shows all the search terms used (with the exception of those that are lumped under ‘other unique queries’ in the Search Query Performance report), with indications as to which ones are currently being bid on. The nice thing here is that you can instantly add keywords or even add negative keywords directly from this report. And you can also download the report in CSV format.

3. Google Analytics AdWords data: With the new AdWords reporting enhancements to Google Analytics, it is easy to get a look at actual search terms being used. Simply go to ‘Traffic Sources’>’AdWords beta’>’Keywords’ and then use the second dimension box to select ‘Matched Search Query’. Here you get a nice side-by-side listing of keywords you are bidding on along with matched terms. The additional advantage, of course, is that you get all that juicy post-click behavioural data, such as bounce rate, goal completions, and – if you have Ecommerce tracking set up – revenue.

So there are 3 ways that I know of to investigate AdWords search query data and use it to improve performance of your keyword advertising. Maybe there’s others I’ve missed? If you have any other favorite ways to view AdWords search query data, let us know!