Search engine marketing

What is happening to cause this trend and what does it mean to marketers?  First, let’s agree that in the world of online marketing, search engine marketing is an awesome direct response vehicle, and that’s a place many marketers should look first.  Now, that being said, we also know penetration of high speed internet service and the proliferation of wireless networks are causing our eyeballs to go online more than ever before.  In fact, the young adult population is getting more content online than from any other source out there including traditional TV.  That simply means as the years go by, more and more content will be accessed and consumed online than from newspapers, TV, radio and the other traditional media sources.  Consequently, where the eyeballs go so do marketing dollars. 

The prediction that Display will out-spend Search simply tells me that marketers will focus more of their branding efforts online than via the more traditional media sources.  Online Display marketing is the equivalent to branding…branding through banner ad and rich media impressions, online video views, etc.  Search engine marketing will remain a very critical tool in the marketer’s toolbox but Display will become mature and an equally critical tool in that online marketing toolbox. 

Plus, now with the ability to do Display marketing on a cost-per-click basis in addition to the traditional cost-per-impression basis, it just means this medium will grow steadily and quickly.  As Google continues to put emphasis behind YouTube marketing, video development will become another critical element in the evolution of online marketing.

In summary, marketers investing a great deal of their dollars offline need to keep looking harder at online display marketing for their branding efforts.  As our population becomes more internet savvy, and with the proliferation of tablets and smart-phones, branding efforts will go online like never before.

• 58% of purchase decisions started with an online search compared to only 18% that started their research with social media.
• 51% of people in the study only used online search in their decision making process, while 48% used a combination of search and social media.

 What can we conclude from this powerful data? 

•  Search remains “king of the hill” when it comes to online research.  From an online marketing perspective, firms who put more effort into social media compared to search engines will not see as good results as those who invest in search engines first. 
• Social media is gaining in importance.  It has quickly become a place where shoppers can ask their friends about a certain brand or service provider.  Consequently, companies should be investing in optimizing their brand on the appropriate social networks – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

 Here are some suggestions about how to make this research data actionable for you…

1.  If you are in the B2C space, check your visibility online.  Key in some important search phrases for your business and see what comes up.  Is your firm positioned above-the-fold on the 1^st page of Google or Bing?  Are your competitors?  Also, take a look at your LinkedIn and Facebook pages.  Are you keeping things up to date?  Are you posting credible, customer-friendly content?  Are you being one of those annoying marketers constantly throwing out messages that scream “buy me, buy me, buy me?
2. If you are in the B2B space, check your visibility online just like in number #1 above.  Take a look at your LinkedIn profile.  Do you look credible on LinkedIn?  Do you present a credible competitive advantage on LinkedIn?  Are you putting our content on LinkedIn that positions you as a “thought leader”? 
3. Regardless of what space you operate in, do a search for your company’s name.  Click into your Google Places and Bing Local profiles and see what is in there.  If you have some bad reviews, you need to figure out how to deal with these and get more good reviews.  Build out these local online profiles as these are becoming more and more important, and getting much more visibility than before.

 In summary, search engines remain the most important resource for online research about your company, and the social media platforms are clearly gaining in their importance.  Get good positioning in the search engines and make sure your social media properties (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Local Profiles, etc.) are built out and populated with meaningful information for your target markets.

Having been a part of the online social and marketing space for nearly 7 years, here’s what I expect to see take shape in 2011.

Social media analytics

Following up behind 2010 will be more options and services that can help you establish the impact of your social campaigns. Be weary of straight up Social Media ROI solutions that are fast to put a dollar amount on every retweet and every Facebook ::like::. I’m all for accountability and data, but I don’t think the social space has matured enough for us to understand how A leads to Z.

In a blog I wrote several months back, I advised to stop trying to measure every social media effort. While I took a little heat from this, I stand by my words. My point then was most companies struggle enough with trying to get any meaningful social media strategy and culture going. Focusing too much on the numbers too early on is like building a moat around a brick wall – it’s not like you needed the help in stopping forward progress. Instead, in 2011, I think more of the companies that are diving in head first by hiring full time social media teams along with those that are becoming established can begin to dive into the data and put some accountability on the sweat equity.

Mobile sites/engagement

I hope to see more brands invest in a mobile strategy by going beyond just a mobile friendly site or iAd impression. It seems the infrastructure for one online platform to work in collaboration with another is being laid faster than highways in China – take for example an iPhone app that’s nothing more than a shiny interfaces for a website or network. Is adopting to a smartphone world just about smart phone compatibility of your website or is there something we’re missing – something we haven’t quite seen yet. This one is harder to pinpoint but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a game changing mobile strategy hit the seen in the months ahead.

Social Authority Optimization

With Google and Bing now using social media authority as a search engine ranking factor, we will become more obsessed with optimizing social media profiles. Let me explain…

“Social media optimization” started to make a name for itself back in 2008. The goal of “social media optimization” was to optimize your social network profiles well enough that when you search their brand or service, their social media profile showed up in the search results. This was a way to get more real estate on the first page of Google. The recent changes to Google and Bing’s algorithm is something different. This new algorithm change means Google and Bing poll your social media authority/activity as a factor in ranking your website. Think of it like this:

Rankings = site optimization + links + social media awesomeness*

What I’m calling social authority optimization** accounts for this and it think we’ll see a lot more of it in 2011

*this is a very oversimplified example – don’t take it too literally

**for the record, I think buzz words are silly – but for the sake of differentiation pardon my silliness

Privacy concerns

Facebook had its fair share of privacy uproars in 2010 and I think they’re hardly out of the woods yet. And with more web analytic platforms and services popping up (some of which track you on an eerily detailed level), and the implications of wikileaks on net neutrality, we may begin to see the kind of paranoia that keeps Winona Ryder off the web.

Local

The new local focus of Google search results is like that minor leaguer who not only got called up to the majors, but is now being asked to bat cleanup in the playoffs. The elements that rank a site in the search engines changes all the time (remember last year at this time when there was such a thing as a Yahoo search algorithm?), but with Google now integrating these local search results into their primary listings, we’re seeing one of the more significant facelifts to Google than we’ve seen in a long time. Google also just began promoting it’s shiny new Google Places iPhone app, making valuable information – like reviews – more accessible (why the Google Maps app on the iPhone still omits reviews is beyond me).

The only thing holding back the impact of this into 2011 is that it’s mostly only relevant to local businesses (location irrelevant? move along – nothing to see here).

Something/someone gets shaken up considerably

This one I’m leaving wide open, but I think we’re either going to see a new major player hit the stage and/or watch a big one leave. With Facebook prepping for a 2012 IPO, the amalgamation of social awesomeness and organic search, the significance of local, growing privacy concerns and history as our guide, I think there will be something very different about January 2012 compared to January 2011.

So with all this talk and importance on local search, it’s important to ask if local search is even relevant to your business. In short, if a search for what your business offers includes a geographic reference, then yes. If, on the other hand,  the address of your business is irrelevant, then this change wouldn’t be applicable to your search engine visibility.

“But Google already auto-generated my listing. Is there anything else I need to do? ”

Yes! Claim it, populate it and track the impact.

Google tries to use the information it finds across the web to generate and display the most relevant search results possible. It’s possible that Google found your address, verified it through other sources on the web, and created a listing for your business. If you want to know if this is the case for your business, try doing a Google search for your business name + the city you’re located in. If you don’t see a map with your address pop up, click the “maps” link at the top of the page. If you have an auto-generated listing, you would see it here.

While it’s nice to have the added visibility, these auto-generated listing often have insufficient, or even outdated information about your business. This is when it becomes important to claim and populate these listings with as much information as possible about your business.

Once you’ve had your listing claimed, Google will give you data through the Google Places interface. This data can be insightful in terms of understanding how many times your listing shows and how many times it was clicked – however it doesn’t go as far as to tell you what happens once that visitor comes to your site. With just a little extra configuration, you can track these visitors back to your site and see how they accomplish your site goals right alongside your organic and paid traffic.

Takeaways:
If location has any significance on your business, you should take local search seriously. If you’ve already been targeting SEO, you could be poised to have a favorable, immediate impact on local targeting. This isn’t the end of quest, as it’s important to have these listings optimized to ensure they show as high and as often as possible, and then add the appropriate configuration to track these visitors back to your site. After all, it’s all about getting the visitor to take the right actions. And wherever you choose to invest your time and resources ultimately needs to be held accountable.

Here’s how it works (I’ve substituted the actual names for fictional ones):

Someone is looking to have their yard professionally landscaped. Their neighbors used Pristine Lawn Service and raved at the quality and price of their work so they decide to look them up online. They go to Google and search ‘Pristine Lawn Service Richmond.’ Among all the Google search results is www.pristinelawns.biz. As a person looking for the Pristine Lawn company, this seems to be exactly what I’m looking for. I click the listing, but instead of landing on the Pristine Lawns website, I arrive at the Awesome Yards website.

And that’s it: the Awesome Yards company has captured people looking for their competitor by purchasing a variation of their domain.

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF REDIRECTS:

If the Awesome yard example above sounds like a strategy you’re interested in using for your business, then allow me to break down two common ways to exploit website redirects and the accompanying “world of hurt” you might be setting yourself up for:

One way: You buy thousands of keyword-rich domain names (web addresses) and have them redirect to your site. For example, my business is LeoneWidgets.com and I market to Richmond, VA. I could buy RichmondWidgets.com, WidgetsinRichmondVA.com, BestRichmondWidgets.com, and have them all just redirect back to my site. This would be like receiving thousands of great new links (if you don’t understand how search engines rank sites, having a link to your site is analogous to getting a vote or endorsement for your site. If the link has your keyword within it, the link (or vote), looks even better.)

Another way (The Awesome Lawn Method): You buy several domain names that will attract visitors to click on them when they display in Google. These can be competitor names, other relevant sounding domain names, etc.. Using the above example, I might buy variations of my competitors’ sites, like DansDoodads.biz, EricsThingamajigs.biz, PaulsKnicknacks.net, etc. The idea is these domains will get ranked throughout the search engines when someone searches my competitors. So, when someone thinks they are going to my competitor, they actually arrive at LeoneWidgets.com. Note: this will do nothing to rank LeoneWidgets.com higher in the search engine. Instead, I’m just taking up more real estate.

PENALTIES

The most glaring problem with both of these methods is that they are very, very easy to detect for search engines. Google, for example, is an accredited registrar (meaning you can purchase domains though Google). This provides Google access to domain ownership information so they know who owns what and what they’re doing with it. Secondly, search engines like Google and Bing are only as good as their search results. As such, they dedicate some of their most brilliant minds to finding and identifying deceptive practices. If the search engines think you are trying to get more real estate than you are fairly entitled to, they will catch you.

MONEY BETTER SPENT ELSEWHERE

Domains are cheap. But buying them in bulk as a search engine strategy can quickly add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars a year. A small price if effective, but the risk you take can easily cost you much more. If you want more rankings and more traffic your effort, time and money can be spent doing things like:

- Optimizing the website for targeted keywords and easy crawling by the search engines
- Writing valuable, resourceful content that can earn links back to your site
- Optimizing local map listings in Google and Bing

The most important takeaway from this story is that a strategy that can be considered deceptive by some probably will be deceptive in the eyes of a search engine. There are so many opportunities to get high rankings and relevant traffic using white-hat methods that it’s not worth taking the risk with grey and black hat strategies. Do it the right way and you will be rewarded.

[Let me clarify that there are technical issues that do exist in some iPhone 4 models. This has been proven as fact. What I'm more interested in is how the product has performed in terms of overall sales and customer satisfaction]

In case you missed everything that transpired regarding the launch of the iPhone 4, here’s a very quick breakdown…

• Apple releases iPhone 4. Everyone happy and excited.

• Within 24 hours, people report that touching a specific part of the phone causes bars to drop. Blogs post videos, but reports still limited.

• Within a few days, more and more people report the same issue. Frustration beginning to mount among customers.

• Apple announces software update to fix number of bars reported on phone. Not meant to be fix for “dead spot” on phone.

• Consumer reports performs its own tests and says it can no longer recommend iPhone 4 until a free fix is in place. Mainstream news now picking up story.

• Apple holds press conference 23 days after initial launch. Presents data suggesting problems and dis-satisfaction among customers isn’t nearly as widespread as is being reported online.

Apple wasn’t denying that certain problem existed. Instead, they were trying to paint a bigger picture. Something the individual reviews and blogs had failed to do. Here are some key data points Apple presented in their press conference.

• For every 100 calls made, the iPhone 4 drops less than 1 more call than its predecessor, the iPhone 3GS

• Only 1.7% of iPhone 4 users have returned their phone as opposed to the 6% return rate of the 3GS

• Percentage of users who have called Apple Care regarding their iPhone reception: .55%

The internet did a great job of sensationalizing this story and blowing reality out of proportion. As it turns out, the iPhone 4 launch was more successful than the iPhone 3GS in most respects when it comes to customer satisfaction. And in case you hadn’t been following last year, the 3GS launch was thought to be smooth and without incident.

Prior to Apple’s response, everyone was relying on the emotion and limited personal tests to draw conclusions about the phone. Beyond reporting the “dead spot” on the phone, people began to conclude that 1) everyone was having this problem, and 2) everyone wanted a replacement. The data simply says otherwise. Is it possible we fall into similar traps when it comes to our internet marketing decisions? Do you ever find yourself drawing conclusions based on emotion without having data to back up your claim? Have you ever found yourself saying:

“Our website is terrible. I doubt it generates a single lead.”
“We’re paying for all this traffic but I don’t think it’s getting us a single call.”
“I have this feeling our marketing dollars could be better spent somewhere else.”

If you’ve ever thought any of the above, or worse, acted on it, you may have done yourself a disservice. You may have redesigned a site that didn’t need to be fixed or cancelled the most profitable marketing campaign in your company’s history. On the flip-side, you may have actually been right all along. The real shame is that we don’t know for sure. We only relied on our emotion and hunches instead of logic and data. Our website and company may be worse off for it.

Let’s say Scott is responsible for all leads that come into your business. When meeting with Scott to evaluate the productivity of your internet marketing campaigns, what would you like to hear and see in his presentation?

A) “The phone does seem to ring more since we started the campaign. We still have web forms coming in regularly. I can’t tell you how many more calls we’re getting each month but it does feel like a boost compared to before. When I ask, people will tell me if they used a search engine to find us, but they can’t be specific if they originated from SEO or PPC.

or would you rather have Scott present this:

B) The following is a breakdown of the number of leads generated and whether they originated from PPC or SEO traffic. I’ve used our monthly investment to calculate the cost per individual lead so we can determine which campaign is more profitable.

The first scenario was subject to being biased by Scott’s emotions. Initial skepticism or optimism would have a significant impact on how Scott reported the change in leads coming in since they launched their SEO and PPC campaign. Had he wanted the campaigns to work, he would be more likely to say he felt a significant boost in the leads coming in. Had he been skeptical and advised against the initial investment, he would have been more inclined to say it wasn’t working. In this case, he reports a “boost,” but we have little else to go on. Biases aside we didn’t have a single numerical figure to go off of.

In the second scenario, we let the data tell the story. We’ve removed the human element and instead let the numbers dictate the result of the internet marketing campaign. SEO works, PPC works better, but both are contributing favorably. This is the same approach Steve Jobs presented in his press conference. By doing so he was able to paint a clearer picture and restore faith in the iPhone 4′s brand and future.

Using data isn’t just another way to make an argument. It’s a way to remove biases and extraneous variables and put a clear, numerical and economical value on a result. In the case of the iPhone 4, everyone jumped to conclude that it was a complete and utter failure. In reality, we were only listening to those that reported problems. We tuned out the thousands of people who reported having zero issues with their new phone. Relatively speaking, making the same mistakes with our marketing dollars can be just as costly – if not more. As we work to refine, optimize and reallocate our marketing dollars, we need to ask “why” and make sure we have the appropriate data to back up our decisions.

But as it turns out, the sentiment of “mobile is the future!” is nothing new.

Mobile access will be the third Killer App for the Internet after email and Web browsing. [Next year], it will become common to access the Internet from portable devices with a wireless modem. Untethered use will lead to many innovative Internet services under the slogan “anyone, anywhere, anytime: connected.”- Jakob Nielsen, 1998

If it’s still hard for you to envision a mobile world, imagine how crazy Jakob Nielsen must have sounded 12 years ago when he thought 1999 was going to “be the year” of mobile technology!

While his vision was a bit optimistic in terms of timing, the future he saw in his mind is becoming eerily accurate a decade later.

Over the last three years, the smartphone market has exploded; transitioning to the masses. This surge in the smartphone ecosystem is being led by Apple and Google (Android operating system). Since iPhone’s initial launch in 2007, Apple has sold 85 million iPhones and iPod touches while Google boasts activating 100,000 android devices a day. The recently launched iPhone 4 was reported to sell over 1.5 million units on launch day alone!

[Edit: reader Dan pointed out RIM's dominant market share in the smartphone market. While Comscore places their market share at just over 40% - compared to Apple's 24% and Google's 13% - usage of these devices to access online content is distributed much differently. Our own studies have found website traffic from mobile devices to be distributed as follows: RIM devices, <10%. Apple or Android device, 90%+. In some cases, RIM devices have contributed as little as 2.5% to total mobile traffic with Apple or Android devices contributing 97% of all mobile visits. If you are in the business of selling mobile handset accessories or cases, RIM can't be ignored. However when it comes to the consumption of online content and advertising, RIM suddenly becomes less relevant.]

Among many things, mobile is especially powerful for “search-on-the-go.” In other words, having access to all of the world’s (internet’s) information in your hand wherever you are. Just like a desktop computer, people use search engines to find this information. For this mobile search, Google dominates the landscape with ~97% market share. This means if someone is doing a search on their smartphone, they are likely using Google whether they are using an Apple product with Apple software, an Android powered device or any other operating system.

So what are the circumstances for someone performing a “mobile search?” According to Google, 33% of all mobile searchers performed have local intent – meaning the search is performed to find a place, product or service within a certain proximity of the person doing the search. Therefore, the other 66% could be considered searches performed on mobile devices with no relevance to location (think of someone browsing the web on a train, from their couch, etc). These people are simply electing to search on their phone instead of their computer.

Some analysts are projecting mobile ad spending for local intent searches to top $4 billion in 2015 (up from $24 million in 2009). If that’s the projected ad spending for what makes up only 33% of searches, imagine the amount of ad spending for the other 66%.

So with 1) millions of eyeballs on mobile devices, 2) an increasing number of mobile searches (with or without local intent) being performed each day and 3) Google dominating the mobile search market, does this mean you should starting pushing some online advertising dollars to mobile?

Well, that depends.

While the projected ad spending is a pretty telling sign of where things are headed, we’re not just going to dump thousands of dollars towards mobile advertising because everyone else is. We need to know and understand what it can bring us and how that compares to our current desktop targeted campaigns.

Like any other campaign, we’ll need to understand the return of each marketing dollar invested. The web analytics on your site and the data reported from your advertising platform will tell you all you need to know in regards to running a profitable campaign, i.e. did it generate a phone call, did someone make a purchase, did someone request a quote or fill out a Contract Us form…

In this example, we’ve attributed an economic value to the act of submitting a Quote Form and are comparing the performance of our mobile data to non mobile data for our Google advertising campaigns. This will allow us to quickly analyze the effectiveness of our mobile campaign for paid traffic. Similarly, we can do the same for organic, or non-paid traffic:

From this data, we can tell mobile traffic is sub-optimal compared to non-paid non-mobile traffic (All Visit segment) while also performing below what we can achieve from paid mobile traffic. We can also break this down on an individual campaign level to see how each mobile campaign stacks up to it’s desktop version in terms of performance.Here’s a different example:

This chart further breaks down the revenue per click, ROI, and Margin. From this report we see that our mobile campaigns, while not as large as our desktop campaign, have a stronger KPIs (namely revenue per click, or RPC, ROI, and Margin). So while we can’t expect to replace our desktop campaign with mobile (yet), the data speaks to the value of our mobile audience and their contributions to our site’s goals.

Going back to local relevance and local intent, we need to consider that many mobile searchers occur without the visitor ever coming to your site – meaning we won’t have the above data available (at least, not through our site’s web analytics). When someone performs a search for a local business on a smartphone, it uses a series of tools including GPS technology, map data and local business listings to display relevant businesses near your area. Here’s an example of a user with local intent searching for a self storage company on his iPhone.

The blue dot in the middle of the screen represents the searcher’s location and the red pins represent the self storage facilities nearby. One of the businesses on the map is running an online advertising campaign and has opted to show his ads to mobile devices. As a result, not only does their business show up as a red pin, but their listing is given priority when the searcher performs their search. So while Google has selected 10 self storage facilities based on the searcher’s location, it has given priority to the sponsored listing.

Clicking the blue arrow displays the following screens:

The process for the potential customer is search, select, call – and it takes place in as little as ten seconds without the searcher ever visiting the business’ website. If we’ve used a unique phone number for our PPC campaign, we would be able to calculate the number of calls generated and determine a cost per lead of our mobile PPC campaign.

Smartphone technology and usage is growing at an alarming rate and it means more eyeballs looking for your products and services. While you may or may not be convinced that mobile is becoming a serious player, we must recognize and respect the data and feedback our campaigns can provide. As long as we can calculate the return of our campaign, we can make a data-driven decision as to what is best for our business. Widespread smartphone adoption may still be in its infancy, but the data and insight is already here.

Analytics Data & PPC Optimization to Achieve Meaningful Results:
Using a Network of Tools and a Data-Driven Approach to Optimize PPC Marketing

Download the whitepaper PDF for free!

This whitepaper focuses on managing large PPC campaigns using a network of free tools. (We specifically reference tools from the Google network, however some can be substituted – namely the web analytics and PPC platform.)

While this whitepaper doesn’t serve as a play-by-play for getting a campaign up and running, it does outline the steps we find most important for managing a successful PPC campaign – from configuring web analytics, to driving relevant traffic to testing page variations. The ongoing theme used throughout the paper emphasizes using a data-driven mindset in making decisions. This is something we’ve come to live by.

Whether you own your own business or manage your company’s campaign or manage online campaigns for clients, we hope you find the information useful. I’d love to hear your feedback so feel free to leave a comment below or reach me directly at cleone (at) webstrategiesinc (dot) com.

ALSO: We encourage you to sign up for the accompanying webinar next Tuesday at 1 p.m. or 3 p.m. Sign up here!

I love baseball. Unfortunately for me, I’m a Met fan. This typically means seasons of high expectations followed by disappointment. Heart-breaking season after season aside, I can’t help but stay involved in a sport I grew up loving. Fantasy baseball has become a great way for me to do this. Not to mention it forces me to learn and stay up to date with individual players from different divisions and leagues.

I also really like search engine marketing. Specifically, pay-per-click marketing, or PPC. While it does sound nerdy to love something like search engine advertising, there’s something about the strategy, data, and freedom to experiment while receiving almost immediate results that can just perk up my day.

In my time managing countless PPC campaigns and my (much more) limited time managing fantasy baseball teams, I’ve begun to notice a lot of similarities between the two. While there’s not a perfect overlap, there are several practices and strategies I find myself applying between both my PPC campaigns and fantasy baseball teams that lead to successful results. Below are my top five strategies for managing a successful PPC or fantasy baseball team.

Key Metrics:
PPC – First thing’s first. What are the macro level goals, the micro level goals, and how do they relate? Clicks, click-through-rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), average position, conversions, cost per conversion, bounce rate, pages per visit, time on site and submissions. These metrics represent some of the many dials on the dashboard I need to pay close attention to. Generally speaking, each metric has a good and bad direction. High CTR is good, low CTR is bad. Low CPC is good, high CPC is bad. But it isn’t exactly fair to say I’ve failed because CPC is higher this week or if CTR is lower this month. There could be a bigger, more important story happening that offsets the movement of these individual dials.

Fantasy Baseball – In my league, like any other, there are key statistics identified by the league manager in the beginning of the season that our teams will compete head to head against each week. This includes hits, home runs, RBI’s, ERA, Saves, and several more. While it would be great to sweep in each category every week, the reality is that in order for your team to compete in many categories, it can be very difficult to build your team around winning EVERY category.

Principle: It’s ok to sacrifice one metric for another in order to achieve a greater result. Low CPC is good, but sometimes you need to bid more competitively to show in a spot that will earn you conversions. This could raise your CPC, but the higher conversions will offset the cost. Winning the triples category is good, but trading for the (slower) power hitter will make you more completive in more categories. Your team now has less speed, but winning the power categories could offset your weakness in the speed categories. Only judge success by the outcome of one metric if that’s the one metric for which you’re responsible. Otherwise, you must be willing to look at the bigger picture!

Competition:
PPC – In most cases, your ads won’t show by themselves (especially if you’re only showing on the search network). Research to see who your competition is and how/what they’re advertising. You are competing to earn the searchers’ click. In order for this to happen, your ad needs to be more attractive and more relevant than the others. Period.

“You are competing to earn the searchers’ click.”

Fantasy Baseball – In most leagues (including mine), your team goes head-to-head against a different team every week. This means to win this week, your guys need to beat his guys. To win the following week, your guys need to beat someone else’s guys.

Principle: Don’t live in a vacuum! Know and adjust to your competition. A PPC campaign in a can that doesn’t adjust for your market and your competitors won’t have the magic touch to set itself apart. Likewise, finding the holes and weaknesses in your competitor and modifying your roster accordingly could be the deciding factor in that week’s matchup. Know everything you can about your competition and do it better.

Let The Data Decide:
PPC – Between your PPC interface, your web analytics, and any other internal tracking you may be using, we have oodles and oodles of data that tells us which keywords, ads and landing pages work and don’t work. This doesn’t always mean we live by it, though. Often times, we’re pressured by clients or the people who are paid more than us to “include this!” and “include that!” What we end up with is a campaign full of keywords the data says should go, but we’re pressured by someone NOT looking at the data to keep them in.

Fantasy Baseball – We all have our favorite teams and our favorite players. The temptation will be to take some players with which you have some sort of association. For example, the mediocre shortstop of your favorite team, the guy who’s foul ball you caught 3 years ago, the prospect you’re been following that just got called up but will only see limited action at best. Before you know it, you prevented yourself from filling your roster with the most qualified players and instead with the players you like.

Principle: Let the data drive the decisions. Hunches can be a good starting point for PPC and deserve their fair shot, but be prepared to cut them out if they’re spending your money without producing. Likewise, sentimental favorites can add a more personal element to your fantasy baseball roster or may make you more tuned to potential outbreak seasons, but the chances are they won’t carry your team. Heck, they may not even contribute their fair share. If the data doesn’t say they’re producing, cut them loose.

Give It Some Time:
PPC – While we can literally get feedback on campaign changes the same day, there are several reasons to let your changes sit for at least a week (or two) before coming to a decision. 1) the system takes several days to recognize and understand your changes, 2) quality score is estimated by the system until it has enough data to calculate a truer quality score, 3) the longer you let a change sit, the more data you’ll have when making a decision, 4) brief irregularities in demand or competition could influence the results of your changes.

Fantasy Baseball – Like PPC, we have updated stats to check pretty much every day. Having different match ups every week along with a surplus of players may tempt us to release and sign on new players every day based on the performance in only a handful of games. The reality is players goes through slumps and streaks. Even the hottest players go 0-4 and even .125 hitters will have 4 RBI 4-4 games. In baseball, this is normal and shouldn’t (entirely) influence whether or not the player is right for your roster.

Principle: Give your changes some time. Between how a pay-per-click system operates and the human element of a baseball player, make it general practice to wait AT LEAST one week (two weeks if you can stomach it), before deciding whether or not you made the right call. (The exception being if your changes are having Godzilla-like devastation. In which case, act fast!)

Be Active:
Of all the principles that overlap between these two, this has to be the most important. Running a PPC campaign or managing a fantasy baseball team is not a passive activity (if you want to succeed, at least!). Both require you to get in the trenches and test, read, watch, compare, experiment and create. Staying active in fantasy baseball means you know when a valuable free agent is about to come off the DL, making him ripe for the picking. Staying active in PPC means targeting keywords and ads around a temporary event or occasion that’s relevant to your business. Staying active in fantasy baseball means benching the outfielder who is 3-30 against the starting pitcher he is facing that day. Staying active in PPC means adding a new set of ads based on your two week experiment’s results. Strategic moves like these often make or break the success of a campaign. But like anything organic, it requires nurturing and attention to grow and succeed.

Review:

1. You can’t always win in every category! Be willing to look at the bigger picture
2. Know what your competition is doing and do it better!
3. Let the data decide
4. Give your changes time
5. Be active

While I haven’t covered all the bases (pun intended!), I think the above 5 represent key principles anyone with a PPC campaign or fantasy baseball team should consider, nay, live by. If you don’t agree, I’d love to hear your counter argument in the comments.. If there’s anything important I may have missed or you have your own quirky analogy, I’d love to hear that too. In the meantime, here’s to many keyword homeruns and Cy Young caliber conversion rates!

SEO and PPC work well togehter in two ways: 1) brand strength and 2) branding vs. promotion.

Brand Strength: Studies have shown that when a company has 1st page placement in the Sponsored Links (PPC) and in the organic listings (SEO), it creates a synergistic approach.  See the PackandRide.com example below.  For example, PPC listings typically get about 24% of click-throughs on a SERP (search engine results page), while SEO gets the remaining 76%.  That equals 100%.  However, when 1st page placement is achieved for both SEO and PPC, the click-through rate exceeds 100% – that is, it is not 1+1=2, but rather 1+1=2+.  The theory here is that brand strength and click-throughs are heightened when the searcher sees multiple listings for the same company.

Search Engine Optimization

Branding vs. Promotion:  SEO is the best long-term branding strategy online, but what about promoting a certain product or service – or what happens when an important search phrase is so competitive that you can’t get it onto page 1.  That’s where PPC can close the gap.  Let’s say you are in the moving business.  You hear about a military post being relocated but the search phrase “military moves” isn’t one of your targeted search phrases for SEO.  So, you go after that term on the PPC side and position yourself to generate traffic from the recent announcement about moving the military base.

In summary, PPC and SEO both have their places in search engine marketing.  Used at the right times in the right places, you can achieve significant, long term brand strength online as well as have the agility to responsd to current events and opportunities to promote your products and services.