Lesson #1: Numbers motivate. Never has this been more clear than this week; with the group’s dashboard syncing irregularly (the Fitbit team is on the case!), we can’t tell how we stack up against each other. Not at all coincidentally, things like walking meetings, taking the long way to lunch, etc., haven’t been as frequent.

Lesson #2: You don’t have to be an uber-athlete to be healthy. It helps, of course, but when you’re counting steps, turns out you do better walking a mile than running a mile. And if you’re the running type and figure, “Well, if I run today, I don’t have to take the stairs,” those steady Fitbit-ers who make a point of walking to lunch, taking the stairs, walking to work (or at least getting off the subway a stop early), etc., are going to do better than keep up with you — even in miles traveled.

Lesson #3: Being part of a team helps. You may remember Monica Madrigal, she of the living-room treadmill and all the #1 weekly rankings. Monica is MORE than motivated by her competitors (she and week 3 stalwart Laura Rodnitzky are going to push each other over 200K steps per week soon), but she’s just as focused on helping the San Mateo team’s cause. Case in point: when she started using her new under-desk cycle last week and was asked about what kind of astronomical goals she was trying to hit, she said simply, “I just want us to win. Just one week.”

Lesson #4: Competition breeds creativity. And no, not under the “if you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying” umbrella. I mean that we’re seeing things like jumping rope in the parking lot (really), an entire office signing up for a 5K/10K event in June, and pacing at night during Cleveland Indians games (hey, if it helps…). Now, if you ask whether or not the San Mateo team got an extra 2,000 steps one week because a certain account manager accidentally put his Fitbit in the washing machine, I will defer comment.

Lesson #5: We love recognition, even from computer software. Your Fitbit Ultra greets you with messages like “GET MOVING” and lovingly calls you “STEPGEEK” when it’s pleased with you. Your Fitbit dashboard gives you badges (for instance, you get a Hot Air Balloon badge when you hit a total of 1,000 flights of stairs) and tells you the equivalent height of the steps you’ve climbed that day (e.g. at 30 flights, you’re told you have climbed “The Tallest Sailboat Mast”). If you eavesdropped on our conversations, you would hear grown-ups telling each other, proudly, that they have climbed Godzilla. It’s like gold-star stickers for adults.

Lesson #6: Saying “It’s just my Fitbit” makes little impression on airport security officers. Save yourself some time and take it off before they raise an eyebrow.

Okay, enough words. Next week: back to the numbers!

- Hillary Read, Marketing Manager

P.S. — No blog Monday. HAPPY HOLIDAY WEEKEND, everyone!

Image credit: freelanceswitch.com

Today’s post is a guest entry from Ian Lopuch, a top online marketing executive who has had direct P&L responsibility on over $150 million of search engine marketing spend during his 7+ years in the industry. In his spare time, Lopuch is an avid domainer, web developer, and blogger at PPCIan. 

If you’re in the world of pay-per-click SEM, you’re probably aware that we live in a 24/7 industry. As long as you’re not day-parting heavily, you’re most likely managing campaigns around the clock. During the weekdays, you have all the time you need to give your campaigns proper attention and make sure everything runs smoothly. However, weekends are different.

On one hand, you could just work seven days per week and guarantee you always catch issues right away. On the other hand, you could just take weekends off and hope for the best. In my opinion, neither of these are good strategies. Strategy one is a recipe for burning out. Strategy two is a recipe for disaster. So, how do you still enjoy your weekends while making sure things run smoothly? Easy: Check out my four essential weekend campaign checks.

Weekend Check One: Do Your Ads Show Up?
The root of the worst paid-search problems is often a credit card or invoicing issue that forces your campaigns to go offline. If your campaigns are offline, you’re generating zero revenue from paid search. This is a horrible situation that could make you and your team look bad in front of your entire company or your client. The best way to avoid it? Make sure to consistently check your ads on weekends. Go to Google and Yahoo, type in your top keywords, and make sure that your ads show up. Don’t check just once; check a few times during the day. From time to time, click your own ads to make sure the landing pages are resolving properly.

Weekend Check Two: Quickly Sanity-Check Your Conversions and CPA
No matter what industry you’re in, conversions and CPA change by the day. Therefore, I don’t like to obsess too much if I notice a slightly higher CPA during the weekend. However, when conversions tank and CPA skyrockets, I know there is a major issue, and I’ll spend a few hours problem solving.

It’s for this reason that I always recommend checking your numbers on the weekends. It can be as simple as logging into your AdWords and adCenter accounts and sanity-checking the conversions and CPA. Are they in the right ballpark? Yes, you’re done. No, you need to investigate a little more. The good news: Most of the time, the answer will be “yes.” The bad news: When the answer is “no,” you will have a few hours of work that weekend. In the end, however, it’s totally worth it because you’ll be saving the day and doing a really great thing for your company or client.

Weekend Check Three: Watch Out For Affiliate URL Hijacking
Most affiliates are really great and help drive incremental conversions for your organization. However, some are not so good and make a bad name for all affiliates. What do the bad-apple affiliates do during the weekend? They like to think the big brands are taking it easy, and they start hijacking your brand keywords. (Here’s how to prevent this kind of brand hijacking!) While you’ll catch URL hijacking right away on weekdays, the affiliates think you aren’t watching on the weekends. Prove them wrong! Make sure to check your brand-name keywords during weekends. Click your own links. Make sure that your own tracking code is present.

Weekend Check Four: Watch Yahoo! Trending Now
Some businesses do well when their core terms are “Trending Now” on the Yahoo! homepage. Others perform poorly. If you have experienced poor conversion rates from traffic derived from the Yahoo! Trending Now, make sure to pay extra attention on the weekend. If a keyword starts trending in your category, check to see if your ad shows up when you click the link within Trending Now. If you show up, make that word a negative in your adCenter account. Remove the negative when the Trending Now stops. You will save your company from a lot of low-converting spend and avoid a high-CPA day.
So there you have it: four essential weekend PPC checks. I hope these help. As a PPC professional, your dedication to these weekend checks will set you ahead as superstar!

Ian Lopuch

Penguins just got a lot less adorable.

By Jonah Stein, guest author
Penguin is Google’s latest high-profile algorithm update aimed at “web spam.”  Combined with last year’s Panda update, many site owners are angry at Google for cutting off their livelihood, taking away the traffic they “earned” and giving them an aversion to black-and-white animals. (A few are reporting nightmares about orcas, zebras and badgers.)

Before I jump into specific analysis about what Penguin is and how to try to address the problem, it is important to be absolutely certain Penguin, not something else, caused your traffic to drop.

Make sure Penguin is your problem

Start with your analytics, ONLY looking at organic traffic referred by Google. If your traffic took a hit starting on April 24^th, you’re likely affected by Penguin. If the traffic started dropping on April 19^th, you were likely hit by the latest Panda update. If your traffic got hit on some other day, perhaps you were caught up in one of the 50 or so OTHER changes Google announced for April. If your problems started before then and you still haven’t figured out what is going on, why haven’t you found a reliable SEO or joined SEOBook’s community for peer-reviewed SEO advice and discussion?

OK, so your site took a dive on April 24^th, and you are absolutely certain that Penguin is to blame. Not so fast. As is generally the case with high-profile announcements of ranking changes, Google released multiple changes at the same time, which makes it very difficult to reverse-engineer what is Penguin and what is some other un-named nightmare that is stealing your traffic and affecting your livelihood. Rolling out multiple changes at once also allows Google to declare that “Penguin affected 3.1% of queries,” even if the pain experienced by site owners is far greater than that.

Evidence suggests that at the same time Google announced a crackdown on over-optimization, they also turned up the sensitivity on the over-optimized anchor text filter and changed to broad match.

The idea of over-optimized internal anchor text has been around for a long time, and if you have ever done any SERP profiling, you would already know that Google has been filtering pages that exceed a certain anchor text threshold since at least November of 2010. On April 24, Google turned down the threshold and started counting broad/phrase match instead of only filtering for exact match

Why am I so sure that traffic drops on 4/24 are not “just Penguin,” the (rightfully) skeptical SEO might ask?

1. Some sites and even keywords were pushed down less than 10 places in the SERP, while others dropped 100 or 200 spots. Google chooses very specific (and dramatic) measures like +50 or +100 for penalties, whereas normal algorithmic filters have unpredictable results but push down sites from 3-10 positions.

2. A discussion on SEORoundTable.com demonstrated that if you add “-aasdfg” (or –anything) to a query, you get results roughly the same as pre-Penguin for KWs that have dropped more than 100 spots. It appears occasionally to affect queries for KWs that dropped on a of couple spots, but not consistently.

3. In an experiment conducted on a test site that dropped 3-7 spots, we were able to restore rankings to an affected site simply by increasing the anchor text diversity to the homepage. Note that these new links were from relatively spammy sources and acquired quickly.

While this is certainly not a sustainable long-term strategy, it is clear evidence that some sites hit for anchor text over-optimization April 24 were not ONLY affected by Penguin because Matt Cutts says that Penguin is a Cron job. The penalty will be recalculated periodically and affected sites will recover ONLY after the calculation is run. If sites are able to recover rankings and traffic in between Penguin updates, it is safe to assume the cause was not Penguin.

4. Cutts went out of his way to suggest that some sites may not be penalized but actually seeing the results of Google discounting large groups of blog networks, directories, and other low-quality link sources. Matt doesn’t always tell the whole story, but there is likely some truth to what he says. He is saying Penguin is not the only change they made on the 24th.

5. Danny Sullivan reported from his interview with Matt Cutts that the 700,000 messages to publishers that Google sent out earlier this year were not about bad link networks. Nor were they all suddenly done on the same day. Rather, many sites have had both manual and algorithmic penalties attached to them over time but which were never revealed.

So what is Penguin?

In Google’s black and white worldview, Penguin penalizes sites that have incorporated manipulative linking practices designed to boost rankings in Google.  In the nuanced view of a business owner, Google is penalizing sites that did what they had to in order to compete in an ecosystem dominated by a single search engine with an algorithm that rewarded site owners for specific marketing activities – building links. Specifically, building links with anchor text that include the keywords and phrases a site for which the site wanted to rank.

Penguin is all about links; if you’ve ever done one of the following, you may have been penalized – and/or should be worried about Penguin 2.0:

- Begged, borrowed, and otherwise hustled to get people to link to your site.
- Actively participated in forums with a signature file that contained links to your sites.
- Hired a link builder.
- Bought links.
- Participated in a blog network or other linking scheme.
- Run a link exchange program.
- Registered your site in hundreds of directories.
- Participated in article marketing, particularly article submission services and article “spinning” systems.

You need to understand the differences between a natural link profile and one that has been built. You also need to recognize that Google doesn’t apply these rules the same way for all sites and that older, established, trusted brand sites can generally engage in all of the below with significantly less risk.

1. Use of keywords in anchor text: Naturally occurring links rarely, if ever, have keyword in the anchor text. If you look at the profile of sites that have never engaged in link building, you will see that the anchors are mostly the site URL, image links, and brand and brand variations, along with “click here,” “more information,” and a variety of random words and phrases. If you look at the anchor text from a link-building campaign, you will see it dominated by target keywords.

2. Use of site-wide links: Backlinks that appear in the boilerplate of a site (header, footer, left/right rails) or otherwise show up on every page stand out like a magnesium flare on a moonless night. Although high-quality niche editorial sites like SEOBook.com, SearchEngineLand.com, and PPCAssociates.com will inevitably earn blog roll entries, these are the exception, not the rule, and they generally abide by these conditions:

- They are rarely organically given to ecommerce sites, insurance, finance, online degrees, etc.
- They do not include the highest value keyword for the target page as the anchor text
- You will very, very rarely see a site-wide link organically earned that has been placed in the header, footer, or other boilerplate locations.

3. Inclusion in directories, article sites, and blog networks: These are essentially links that would never have been built if it were not for the (real or perceived) SEO benefit. If you look at the link profiles of companies who have never hired link builders, you see these are almost entirely absent.

Penguin Feels Like Revenge

Site owners are now getting hit by what seems like a Catch-22; for years Google publicly preached their (evolving) guidelines while rewarding sites that invested in building links. Some of these link-building efforts are now coming back to haunt those sites that haven’t made the transition into a brand name.

Successful SEO inevitably requires some link development. Veteran SEO consultants and site owners knew that “editorially obtained links” and “high-quality content” were the “right” thing to do, but we also know how hard it is to obtain these links – especially as Google’s campaign against paid links spread fear and uncertainty among publishers.

We saw that a combination of shoddy/spamming link sources produced results in competitive niches. We also saw that Google kept moving the goalposts, so we kept evolving tactics. Hit counters worked until Google decided they were spam. Footer links to web designers, hosting companies, and SEO agencies worked until they got discounted.  Badges worked until the Guardian exposé on how to get online advertising for free. Paid links, sponsored WordPress themes, guest books, forums, press releases, article marketing…every tactic would work for a while until Google discovered it was effective and tried to quash it.

With Penguin, sites are now being penalized for the cumulative debris of years of evolving link-building strategies using tactics that were previously successful and commonly considered necessary to survive.

How to club a Penguin

The “easy” answer is to clean up your link profile and try to get as many of these unnatural links as possible removed while getting lots of high-quality editorial links.  It’s the same advice we have been giving for a decade. If you are tired of nightmares about Google enforcers named after cute black-and-white animals, the real answer is to evaluate if your business can survive for a while without this SEO traffic and work with your team and your agency to develop a sustainable strategy that focuses on content marketing, audience, and reach instead of a cooked-books recipe for how to game search engines.

Jonah Stein has 15 years of online marketing experience and is the founder of ItsTheROI, a San Francisco Search Engine Marketing Company that specializes in ROI-driven SEO Strategy. Jonah has spoken at numerous industry conferences including Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo (SMX), SMX Advanced, SIIA On Demand, the Kelsey Groups Ultimate Search Workshop and LT Pact. He also developed panels Virtual Blight for the Web 2.0 Summit and the Web 2.0 Expo. He has written for Context Web, Search Engine Land and SEO Book.

He's psyched about his wife's website's numbers.

Last year, I wrote the posts “Metricless PPC Management” and “DKI For Small Business” about some basic efforts that I took to optimize the AdWords account of Tri-Cities Realtor Cari McGee, who is the wife of my good friend Matt McGee (search marketer extraordinaire).

My wife and I recently visited the Washington Tri-Cities over a weekend when we had dinner with Matt & Cari and saw their wonderful new house. During dinner, we did chat about AdWords, and I asked how their campaign (which I hadn’t looked at in nine months) was working for them. Cari was very happy with the activity from her website, and though she didn’t really know whether PPC, SEO, or social media had been driving potential clients to her, she was having a very good year professionally and attributed much of her success to the Internet.

Let me recap the steps that I implemented for Cari’s self-managed (well…Matt-managed) account when I took it over:

1)       Turned off the stuff that was currently running.

2)       Pulled a very large search query report.

3)       Deleted the search queries that were irrelevant. For common irrelevant words (e.g. apartments), added them as negative keywords.

4)      Added each relevant keyword to a single keyword ad group in the “Master” campaign at Modified Broad Match.

5)      Created a generic “Dynamic Keyword Insertion” ad for each ad group. Removed the DKI portion of the ad for names of competitors.

6)      Set the keyword and campaign bids at logical levels, though it was ultimately up to Matt/Cari to decide what they should be.

With no conversion mechanisms in place, this was the best I could do for them. I had no way to track which terms were going to drive them leads.

A few days after I had dinner with the McGees, I checked into the account after not seeing it for nine months. How was it performing?

The account had performed wonderfully. About 97-98% of the search queries were relevant to Cari’s business.  The modified broad match algorithm, combined with the single keyword ad group setup, performed exactly as intended.  I missed a couple important negative keywords (“Yakima,” since she didn’t work that market, and “manufactured” for “manufactured home”…I had added “mobile” in the original negative list but forgot this one). However, all the money that Cari previously wasted on people looking for apartments and rental properties now was being spent on legitimate prospects.

Barring some unexpected change in the modified broad match algorithm, I expect Cari to get 97-98% targeted traffic well into the foreseeable future.

We discuss many sophisticated paid search concepts on the PPC Associates blog. The great majority of paid search accounts will never need the level of sophisticated management that we give our clients. However, some of our basic tactics can be adapted rather easily to simpler account setups, and they can have a tremendous impact on small businesses.

I’ll never precisely know how much impact a few hours of my time has benefited and will benefit my friends…but I’ve seen the power of the PPC Associates process as it’s applied to our clients, and I’m certain it’s made a tremendous difference in Cari’s professional life.

- Todd Mintz, Senior SEM Manager

Image credit: antistatist.org

Last week Eduardo Saverin – one of the founders of Facebook – gave up his US citizenship. He was 100% legally entitled to do so. When asked why he was renouncing his citizenship, he noted: “I was born in Brazil, I was an American citizen for about 10 years. I thought of myself as a global citizen.” Of course, some commentators suspected that there was another reason Saverin suddenly decided to ‘go global’:

“Saverin, as you may have heard, has renounced his U.S. citizenship and will avoid paying capital gains taxes on windfall profits after Facebook goes public tomorrow. As the company’s co-founder, Saverin’s 4 percent share of the company is worth around $4 billion, give or take a few shekels.”

We may never know what was in Saverin’s heart, but let’s assume for the sake of discussion that his decision was motivated by a desire to save money on taxes. Is there really anything wrong with renouncing your citizenship if it might save you close to $400 million?

The Social Contract

To me, the answer is simple: it is absolutely wrong! When you become a citizen of a country, you enter into a “social contract.” And no, I don’t mean the privacy policy on Facebook, but rather a contract to which “individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority of the ruler or magistrate (or to the decision of a majority), in exchange for protection of their natural rights.”

In Saverin’s case, in exchange for taking advantage of the United States’ incredible higher education system, its protection of free expression, and encouragement of innovation, he agreed to pay the country back by paying taxes on any gains he incurred. Now this is where the difference between a legal contract and a social contract becomes a little sticky. Legally, he was entitled to renounce his citizenship prior to having to pay $400 million in capital gain taxes, but socially, when it was time for him to repay his country for all the support they provided him, he broke the contract.

Think of it like this: you go to a fancy restaurant and spend several hours dining with your spouse. The wait staff is perfectly attentive and the food is incredible. When you are finished, you ask to speak to the manager. You tell him that the food was horrible and you are going to write a scathing review on Yelp if he doesn’t give you 50% off the bill. Reluctantly, he agrees. You leave without giving the waiter a tip.

Legally, you are perfectly in the right here, but socially, you’ve violated two contracts with the restaurant: first, that you will pay for the food that you enjoyed and second, that you’ll subsidize the cost of the restaurant’s staff by leaving a tip. Imagine what would happen if every patron who came into a restaurant acted like this; most likely, the price of food would increase by more than 100% – to cover the expected 50% discount on the food and to cover the anticipated lack of a tip to the waiter – and some restaurants might even ask for pre-pay before a patron receives food (like gas stations today).

And this is basically what might happen as a result of Saverin’s “stiffing” of the US government. Already there is proposed legislation that will force ex-pats to pay up if they ‘dash and dine’ like Saverin did.

Is Man Evil or Good?

It strikes me that Saverin only came to this decision as a result of two factors: first, because he had a lot of money, and second, because he had talented lawyers and accountants on his payroll to make this happen. To put it another way, the greater your wealth or power, the easier it is (and the more likely you are) to break the social contract (you can argue about whether this is true for legal contracts as well, I suppose).

Michael Moore starts his movie Capitalism: A Love Story with images from bank security cameras of bank robberies, and ends the movie by putting up police “do not cross” yellow tape around a block on Wall Street, declaring it a “crime scene” as a result of the mortgage crisis and subsequent bailout of Wall Street banks. The contrast is somewhat obvious: rob a bank of $10,000, and you go to jail; defraud a country of billions and get bailed out.

His point is this: there’s bipolar argument today about crime – on the one hand, politicians get elected with a “tough on crime” stance, specifically when it comes to crimes like drug dealing, robbery, and murder. Philosophically, this approach could be labeled as Hobbesian in nature: man is inherently evil and we must create laws that assume the worst in man. On the other, politicians argue that we must “deregulate” big business, which will free them to “create jobs” and level the competitive playing field against other countries. This approach is more Kantian, in which it is assumed that man is inherently good and will make the right choices for society, given the opportunity to do so.

This guy saw Saverin's move coming. (Image credit: history-computer)

In fact, however, as Saverin, the big banks, oil companies, chemical companies, and countless other wealthy entities have proven, when it comes to money, the greater the wealth, the more likely it is we should assume the worst in mankind. Give anyone an army of lawyers and accountants and apparently it is impossible to resist the urge to break the social contract. It’s a very Hobbesian conclusion: man is inherently evil, but it’s only when he has the necessary resources does this evil manifest itself!

The Social Contract and Online Marketing?

Since this is an online marketing blog, wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to seamlessly steer this discussion back to actual Facebook advertising, as opposed to tax evasion schemes of former Facebook founders? Fortunately, there is! It turns out that the social contract is highly relevant to our everyday lives in online marketing. Consider these situations:

– When an agency does great work for a client, bills the client at the end of the month of   work, but the client asks for a discount based on false premises of dissatisfaction;

– When as a marketer, you are asked to promote a product or service that is perfectly legal, but which goes against your own ethical standards;

– When an agency takes on a client that they know will be unsuccessful but will pay the agency a lot of money (there’s an episode of Mad Men that covers this topic)

These are all perfectly “legal” situations, but they break the social contract. And inevitably, the bigger the client (or from the client perspective, the larger the bill), the more tempting it is to break the contract and reap a windfall. And with each incident of a broken social contract, the legalese in advertising contracts gets longer, the distrust between agency and client widens, and the marketing world becomes more Hobbesian and less Kantian. Sometimes fulfilling the social contract means optimizing to a result that benefits the greater whole and not your bottom line. Certainly that’s a rule that everyone in the online marketing world should strive to follow!

- David Rodnitzky, CEO