Find Resolution: Resolution Media Digital Marketing Blog

Under Construction

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:19:00 +0000

We're putting together a website/blog redesign and will be under construction for a little while, but we'll be back and better than ever sooner than later!

Google “Farmer” Algorithm Announcement

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 19:52:00 +0000

By Chris Thoren, Supervisor, Content Solutions

On Thursday, February 24th, Google announced an update to its Search Algorithm. Google updates its Natural Search algorithm on a regular basis, but this particular one has more far-reaching implications. According to Google, this update affects close to 12% of site rankings for U.S.-based searches. This may not seem like a high percentage, but given the amount of searches on a daily basis (Google also claims 1 out of every 4 queries are new or unique), a shift in rankings will likely have a big impact to sites that were enjoying 1st page rankings, especially if they were above the fold.

What type of site is Google targeting? Google actually says they are targeting low quality sites, also known as content farms: “As ‘pure webspam’ has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to ‘content farms,’ which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites.” So what does this mean for site owners and webmasters?

Unique, useful content Creating content that is well-structured and (not too) optimized is all well and good, but it’s not enough anymore for people to take notice. The World Wide Web is a crowded space and the job of the Search Engine is to take a query and find the most relevant results as quickly as possible. When you think about it, that’s lot of noise to filter through. However, as users reward interesting content with Facebook Likes, tweets and re-tweets, the Search Engines pick up on these signals and may adjust their rankings accordingly. Both Google and Bing have confirmed they look at this Social graph when ranking results. The focus of the engines has always been on the end user, and so should site owners and webmasters. The premise here is simple: create content for your users, not the Search Engines.

Relevant content (complementary to your site theme) As unique, rich content is indexed, distributed, and ultimately rewarded with higher rankings (in most cases), your content strategy align with your site’s overarching theme. Note: we’re not recommending building your content around your site’s business goals and objectives; rather, structure it based on your site’s identity in an intuitive manner. As Graywolf points out, it’s not all about monetizing your content. Yes, there is a time and place for that, but your content should be well-rounded and align with the user’s search behavior. For example, if your site sells blue widgets, then your content structure should be informational (general info about blue widgets), transactional (blue widget reviews, popular widgets, etc.) and socially-focused (how to choose the best widget, top 10 mistakes when buying a widget, etc.). This will resonate with your end user no matter where they are in their search phase, along with encouraging them to share your content.
Keyword Optimization is not enough Webmasters and marketers should demand more from their content. Low quality content can be optimized and seeded with keywords, but ultimately do not provide real use for the visitor. This is essentially the content Google is aiming to eliminate from its search results. At Resolution Media, understanding query intent and understanding the true essence of why a user performs a certain query has been at the heart of our Search Behavior Analysis. This is largely because our philosophy aligns with Google’s which is that quality content that meets the needs of your user provides a better experience. It keeps users loyal to Google, and at the same time, reduces bounce rates and increases conversions.

Conclusion:

Either way, the premise still remains the same: write with your end user in mind, and not specifically for the Search Engines. It could be a slippery slope, but if you take a step back and ask, “Would I find this useful/helpful?” or “Would I want to share this with my peers?” Then you’re creating content in a meaningful way. Webmasters and marketers who have consistently been creating content in this fashion really have nothing to worry about. If you’ve been creating content for the purposes of injecting keywords in body copy, or hiring out copywriters for the sole purpose of seeding keywords, then perhaps it is time to change strategies. Demand more from the content you create, and don’t focus strictly on sheer keyword density. Resolution Media has always provided this direction to our clients and, thus, our client base hasn’t been affected like other SEOs in the industry.

For more information on the Google “Farmer” Update, visit:

For additional information, please visit our Digital Marketing Blog: www.FindResolution.com/.

A Wishlist for Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 17:22:00 +0000

By Al Kao, Natural Search Supervisor, Content Solutions

Recently Google announced a new development for Webmaster Tools: Linking Analytics to Webmaster Tools.

With this new feature, you can link your website’s Google Webmaster Tools with your Google Analytics account. This is seems like a great idea.

After all, Analytics is instrumental in assessing a website’s performance and in measuring SEO. Webmaster Tools continues to grow into as a critical tool for diagnosing SEO. So useful is Webmaster Tools for SEO that even Google produced a video and blog post about how to use Webmaster Tools like an SEO!

After playing with this new “feature,” one thing is clear: this is a positive step in the right direction for Google. Linking accounts will definitely make managing a website – and SEO – much more efficient.

Here are some of our initial observations:

First, this integration links the Analytics account with the Webmaster Tools account. Right now, there are no additional new features or new analytical tools.

Second, there are only two new links available:

Link at the top of the Webmasters Tools Dashboard (AdWords AdSense Analytics Apps)
Link to “Referring Sites” in Google Analytics from the “Links to Your Site” overview

Since this is just an initial rollout of this integration, we expect Google will continually rollout new features as time goes on, just like they continually do with Webmaster Tools.

But, while we wait for Google to rollout new features to this integration, why not make a list of features we would like to see?

Here’s our Google Webmaster Tools-Analytics Integration Wish List of Features:

Display Historical Webmaster Tools “Top Queries” data – The Top Queries data in Webmaster Tools shows impressions and average positions. This data is incredibly useful because it goes beyond “rankings”. Search “rankings” with personalized search, universal search, and local results, is, for all intents and purposes, obsolete. But right now, Webmaster Tools only shows data for about 1 month. To have this data archived along with Analytics data would be absolute pure gold.

Compare Crawl Stats with Visitor Traffic – The Crawl Stats data show how well Googlebot crawls the website based on pages crawled per day, download time, etc. Page load speed is confirmed as factor in search rankings. Visitor traffic can also be affected by page load speed. To be able to quickly compare overall visitor traffic with the Crawl Stats would paint a valuable picture of the overall performance of the website.

Compare Site Performance with Visitor Traffic – Another good high level comparison feature is compare the “Site Performance” data, under “Labs” in Webmaster Tools, with overall visitors. Just like above, it will give an overall sense of how site performance affects site traffic.

Compare Crawl Errors with Visitor Traffic (and Average Positions) – The Crawl Errors data display website errors that Googlebot encountered while crawling the website. The errors include 404-not found, 403-errors, etc. Generally, any site error is a concern. But knowing visitor traffic to those specific error pages can help illustrate how much traffic is lost and how important it is to be sure site errors are fixed as soon as possible. Along with knowing the “lost visitors” due to pages with site errors, how about the lost visibility from the “Average Position” of the pages with errors? When sites go through content and URL changes, no thought is given to natural rankings that the old pages being replaced may have. Having the average position of the replaced/obsolete pages help further illustrate the importance of fixing site/page errors as soon as possible.

Quantify & Detail Anchor Text Count – The Anchor Text data in the “Links to your site” section shows the variety of anchor text that links to your site. It is valuable information to assess how optimized your link-building is. But the current data does not show the quantity of sites that link in using a particular anchor text phrase. For SEO, this kind of detail would be tremendously valuable.

Hope that some of these items in the list are already in development at Google. Until then, wait eagerly for new announcements.

Why Mobile Friendly Is Not Mobile SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:29:00 +0000

By Bryson Meunier, Associate Director, Content Solutions
Originally appeared on Search Engine Land

My Google Reader feed went haywire with “mobile SEO” alerts when Google posted their “Making Websites Mobile Friendly” advice on the Google Webmaster Central Blog. The odd thing is, they didn’t say anything about SEO or search quality in the post, which has to do with how Google crawls and indexes mobile websites today.

SEOs and Search Engine Land readers know that search engine optimization at a very basic level is the practice of making content more visible in search engines by ensuring that a site is properly crawled and indexed, that it contains the content users want using the queries they use to search for that content, and that the content is properly marketed to those users through link building or some other method of content distribution.

What Google posted (in the above link) related entirely to crawling and indexing, and contained nothing at all about returning the proper content for the proper queries, or making that content visible to mobile users when they’re looking for it.

The distinction should be painfully clear to anyone who has searched for a mobile site on their Android or iPhone recently. The current smartphone version of Google search returns a lot of results related to Mobile, Alabama when you do a navigational search for a mobile site and the mobile site you’re looking for either: doesn’t exist, has been excluded for fear of duplicating content, or uses handheld stylesheets to render content.

I tried to find an example of a popular site that has a lot of search volume from smartphones that fits this mold, but of the 30 sites I looked at that showed up in the Google keyword tool as having high demand for their brand plus the word “mobile” (excluding software and mobile carrier queries), all sites delivered mobile sites to smartphone user agents.

No sites in this sample of 685k monthly smartphone searches for mobile sites use handheld stylesheets to render mobile content or are apparently run by webmasters who are concerned about diluting their link equity with mobile content.

If you do want to see an example of a site that has a mobile version, but is excluded from the index with robots.txt, try searching [home depot mobile site] on a smartphone.

Figure 1 [home depot mobile site] on an iPhone 4 shows criticism, a mobile site for an arena and a desktop site for mobile homes, but no home depot mobile site in the organic listings. Home Depot used to send their mobile traffic to a Digby site that was nofollowed in robots.txt. They’ve since redirected smartphones to an iPad compatible site, but the Digby site is still in Google’s index.

The Great Mobile SEO Divide
If this debate is new to you there are essentially two camps among SEOs when it comes to creating mobile content: the one URL SEO camp and the mobile URL SEO camp (which is a microcosm of the One Web vs Mobile Web debate that has been going on for years in the mobile marketing and development community).

The one URL SEO camp, represented ably in the past by Barry Schwartz, Michael Martin, Cindy Krum, Rand Fishkin et al is in favor of displaying one URL to mobile and desktop users alike, and rendering the content with handheld stylesheets for mobile users. It’s clearly easier than developing two sites, and it doesn’t create two URLs, potentially splitting the site’s link popularity and making it more difficult to rank for competitive terms.

The mobile URL SEO camp, represented ably in the past by dotMobi, Shari Thurow, Yours Truly, Matt Cutts and others maintain that there is no evidence of reduced ranking of mobile sites as a result of split link popularity; and that treating mobile sites as duplicate content in the same way that printable URLs are duplicate content is a false analogy, as no one is actively looking for printable copies of pages in search engines and search engines don’t treat mobile sites as duplicate content.

Mobile users require a mobile user experience, and without it they might get content that is confusing or irrelevant, and will convert at a lower rate.

When Google came out with their “official” stance on this through the Webmaster Central Blog (official is in quotes, as they’ve said something slightly different with regard to mobile URLs on theWebmaster Central YouTube channel last month and at Searchology 2009), this is essentially what they said:

Mobile user detection is not cloaking (Which they have said before here, here (PDF) and here).
Google currently has no way of delivering mobile content created for smartphones, but this may change in the future.
If you haven’t created mobile content, you don’t have to do anything but your content may be transcoded for certain users.
Mobile as Google defines it today primarily refers to feature phones (or “traditional” phones) that don’t have full internet browsers.
Mobile URLs are fine. The best practice when serving mobile content at mobile URLs (like m.*.com) is to use mobile browser detection and permanently redirect mobile user agents. If this is done, Google will be able to serve the right content to the right users (as they have said before in the Google SEO Starter Guide).
Mobile sitemaps are intended for feature phone content.

When Google put out this announcement my Google Reader filled up with a few sources I respect and many I’ve never heard of proclaiming that Google has officially said you don’t need mobile URLs for mobile SEO.

Of course, the post never says this, or anything about mobile SEO. What it says is that webmasters don’t need to do anything for mobile users right now, as Google will make their desktop sites mobile friendly when they think it’s appropriate.

If being crawled and returned for certain mobile users is enough for you, continue to do nothing and you will probably be “mobile friendly” in spite of yourself. But don’t call it SEO.

SEOs know that transcoders can make a site unusable, and sometimes make it impossible for search engine traffic to convert. SEOs also know that mobile users prefer mobile content, and convert at a higher level when given mobile content on a mobile device. SEOs also know that people search differently on their mobile phones than they do on their desktop computers, and transcoded or mobile formatted content may not include the queries they’re searching for or calls to action that make sense in their context.

SEOs now also know that Google uses toolbar data in its ranking algorithms, and a high bounce rate or other metrics that can be measured by the toolbar can theoretically adversely affect a web site’s ranking in search engines, including the kind that is created by serving desktop content to smartphone users. In other words, SEOs know that what Google calls “mobile friendly” in this article is not often what is best for site owners and users.

Google recognizes this, more or less, in the post, and says “However, for many websites it may still make sense for the content to be formatted differently for smartphones, and the decision to do so should be based on how you can best serve your users.” It’s noncommittal on Google’s part on mobile SEO, and leaves it up to the site owner to serve mobile content in a way that best serves the users.

For me, that way is still redirecting mobile user agents to mobile URLs with mobile-specific user experiences, as that’s what the data says they respond to best. You can make a site “mobile friendly” without following this advice, but optimization is something else entirely.

For now, webmasters can get by with either strategy, provided they don’t mind not appearing for navigational searches or any of the other search quality issues mentioned above. But given that Google is ostensibly about providing the best result for the user’s query in context, and their top priorities for 2011 are all mobile, just doing the bare minimum to satisfy the growing base of mobile users is not likely to work forever.

Goodbye FBML. Hello Iframes: A New Era for Facebook Pages

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 22:26:00 +0000

By Aaron Friedman, Coordinator, Content Solutions
Originally appeared on Digital Highrise

About a week ago, Facebook announced changes to Facebook pages. FBML (Facebook Markup Language) is being phased out and as of March 11, 2011 there will no longer be the ability to create new FBML apps for pages. Instead, Facebook is going to be relying on Iframes for its apps, which is great news. FBML was difficult to work with and making new, custom apps will rely entirely on HTML.

A couple of observations and thoughts on these changes:

Iframes mean that the content will be living on an external website. Since this is the case, in theory, we should be able to add tracking codes like Google Analytics or Omniture and get more data than we were able to before. This is a huge WIN in the integrating search and social realm.

The overall look of the Facebook Fan Page is different. It looks a lot more like a personal page than anything. Which is good to keep consistency. It also looks cleaner and more professional.

The tab section at the top is gone. This will now be replaced by images (like the ones on the personal pages). This isn’t a huge difference as they will still be available on the left side and fully customizable. But the addition of the pictures allows for more customization and creativity. There are many examples of customizing the Facebook image (more cool examples via Mashable).

Better usability for the admin of the page. Admin’s can get email notification when changes when comments or posts are made which is a nice little perk to stay up to date on happenings. I know I have already started getting these for a number of the pages I am an admin for.
And on that same note, as an admin, we can now make comments on these posts as individuals and help promote the content. Previously this showed up as the client page making a comment. Now there is the ability to switch between the two which IMHO is awesome. (I guess this starts to border on the giving full disclosure issue by the FTC).

Sounds promising. Here is an article from Hubspot giving a walkthrough on how to setup iframes, in case anyone asks. I am sure there will be many more articles on this subject to come.

The United State of Social & Mobile Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:23:00 +0000

By Bryson Meunier
Originally appeared on Search Engine Land

Raise your hand if you’ve had to choose between mobile and social for your emerging media budget this year. Budgets sometimes have a line item for social and a line for mobile, but in truth, sometimes it’s difficult to tell them apart.

Case in point: this past week Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said “My sense is that mobile devices are inherently social… [mobile devices are] already filled with your contacts and your friends, and they also have access to your location.”

We know from social networks, research firms and user search queries that users of social networks are frequently accessing them from mobile devices, and mobile users are frequently accessing social networks as part of their daily mobile routines.

Marketers may be thinking about mobile and social as separate line items that require different specialists, agencies and strategies, and to some extent they do; but their social networking efforts are going to reach mobile users and their mobile efforts will be incomplete without some sort of social component.

The blurred line between social and mobile may be obvious in the case of mobile social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, but the line applies to social networks with more reach as well.

Click here to read more.

The Two Sides of SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Kiley Peters) — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:02:00 +0000

By Bryson Meunier, Associate Director, Content Solutions

Originally Appeared on Search Engine Land

100% Organic sponsored by Bruce Clay SEO Training @SMX West

Often, when people in the industry talk about the two sides of SEO, they’re talking about black hat and white hat tactics.

Having worked as an SEO since 2003 and in Internet marketing since 2000, both with Fortune 50 and mom and pop businesses with business goals as different as night and day, I think the distinction is deeper than just black hat and white hat.

It seems the best way to illustrate this is with a description of two SEOs, in the literary tradition of Goofus and Gallant:

Two Sides Of Link Building

This SEO refers to herself as a link builder, and spends all day checking reports from the software that automatically sends out reciprocal email requests. She doesn’t necessarily care if they’re effective or annoying to millions of people because she has a paycheck coming in and, hey, this is business.
That SEO convinced a client to permanently redirect a temporarily redirected domain, and gained more than 100,000 authoritative links in the process, which allowed them to jump from page two to one, where they have ranked consistently in the top 5 on a very competitive brand-agnostic keyword for the last two years without adding the keyword to the title tag or the body copy, which conflicted with their style guidelines.

Two Sides Of EDU Links

This SEO goes out and celebrates at the end of the day because she has identified and secured links from three authoritative EDU domains in the course of the day.
That SEO has a client who works for a university who changed domains ten years ago and let the domain expire instead of redirecting it and is not having success talking to Educause about subverting their policy about not re-acquiring the expired domain in order to let the client reclaim these thousands of old links that are rightfully theirs and could be helping them compete for competitive keywords because it is a rule that they’ve made, and other university clients who find out what SEO is will want to do the same thing.

That SEO looked in vain in Google’s webmaster help center for answers on how to handle link recovery issues such as this, and found nothing. When he reached out to his company’s Google rep, she referred him to the webmaster forum, but he couldn’t post a question due to confidentiality issues.

Two Sides Of Goals and Metrics

This SEO can’t sleep because he’s anxious about whether his PR8 links that he bought will bring his toolbar PageRank score to 5/10 and allow him to report the good news to his client.
That SEO sleeps well knowing that she is meeting her goal of natural search impressions, clicks and conversions that she forecasted for the client at the beginning of the project, and implementation of recommendations is on track to help her reach her goals in the end.

Two Sides Of Allegiance

This SEO thinks Google is the enemy and writes in her blog and in social media outlets regularly about how hypocritical the search engines are.
That SEO thinks of herself as an extension of the search engine’s search quality team, and regularly reports competitors who violate the webmaster guidelines as part of the SEO process. That SEO uses search engines in life as much as anyone, and gets upset when the search results aren’t relevant. That SEO thinks having a rigorously controlled Google Webmaster certification program similar to the AdWords and Analytics programs would be a great trust signal that could help Google fix their current spam problem.

Two Sides Of Implementation

This SEO makes changes to his website all day and night without anyone knowing or caring what is done.
That SEO just got off a four hour conference call with Legal in order to explain how search engines work and why it’s going to be beneficial to the business to make the title tags more descriptive. Changes to the website will not happen for months.

Two Sides Of Process

This SEO finally goes to bed at 3am because he’s been scrolling through tweets all day. He didn’t actually make any changes to the website that he’s optimizing, and probably spent too much time tweeting back and forth with @WestchesterSEOCompany1234 about Matt Cutts’s cats, but tomorrow is another day.
That SEO has to keep a detailed project plan of what’s being done when so that all stakeholders in the SEO project will know what’s expected of them when, and SEO requirements will not delay the launch date of the web site or require additional resources that weren’t in the budget

Two Sides Of Discourse

This SEO guru focuses on bare bones implementation in the service of getting the client to the top of the search results with available resources for however long the tactics work.
That SEO guru doesn’t have a lot of time to write articles or speak, as she spends most of her day realizing her natural search goals and planning for the future, but when she does contribute to the industry it’s less on reverse engineering algorithms and more on creative ways to help her clients get more and better traffic by focusing on synergies between what SEOs and search engines need

Which Side Are You On?

Ask yourself: what kind of SEO are you, and what kind of SEO do you want to be? In my experience, it’s very easy to be “this SEO” as the majority of SEO gurus out there are trying to sell SEO services to small businesses with authority issues that don’t have resources to compete fairly or find creative ways to help clients become more visible in natural search results.

But when I’m hiring an SEO to help our company help clients take their natural search visibility to the next level, I’m weeding out “this SEO” in the interview process and looking for “that SEO” with great communication skills who focuses on business value of natural search traffic, quality of execution and attention to detail, and has a knack for creative problem solving.

I’m not suggesting that there are only two types of SEOs. I think there’s a more nuanced explanation that’s closer to the truth. However, I’m simplifying the issue to prove a point.

In these examples, “this SEO” is the one that gets covered often in this industry because the barrier to entry is lower, but it’s also the example that has very little to do with my work as an SEO and the work of others like me.

Fortunately, publications like Search Engine Land start to fill the gap with columns like Industrial Strength, and SMX caters to “that SEO” by focusing certain sessions on using natural search to drive business value.

There are also great books that cater to this audience like Vanessa Fox’s Marketing in the Age of Google and Audience, Relevance and Search: Targeting Web Audiences with Relevant Content. Unfortunately. these things are the exception to the rule, and the signal to noise ratio for someone in the SEO industry who wants to be the kind of SEO that I and others like me aspire to be is low.

If you are an SEO or you’re writing about SEO, please do your part to strengthen the signal by not assuming all SEOs are interested in what you consider to be SEO, and keep in mind that there are people out there who make a living as SEOs whose lives don’t resemble the lives of other SEOs in the slightest.

Jingle all the way…to the bank!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:26:00 +0000

By Jennifer Escotto, Account Strategist, Client Solutions

In the midst of the holiday season, search engine marketing (SEM) helps to capitalize on the surge of online traffic during the crucial six to eight week lucrative selling period. Retailers are turning to SEM to increase online visibility and help drive sales in a cost effective manner. Because of its precision targeting and ability for quick updates to ads, SEM can adapt to reflect changing promotions in real time. Planning and adapting your holiday SEM campaign is critical to having effective online advertising throughout year end.

During the year we worked on a well known online men’s clothing retailer and picked up a few tricks/best practices. We were able to increase revenue 30% and grow return on ad spend 21% YOY. Although some tips may be simple or basic they have been successful in driving results for our client. Perhaps some tricks can translate into valuable solutions for your campaigns;

Use sitelinks to reach your audience as well as hidden areas of the site
Our client’s main target audience is male, however we also wanted to acknowledge the female merchandise and clientele so we suggested testing a link for “women’s clothing.” As we know, women love to shop for anything or anyone. As luck would have it the link has had the most conversions & the client is now considering investing more in female marketing for the 2011 fiscal year.

Another sitelink test was a little known sales page that came to us by way of an email blast from the client. Rather than build an entire campaign dedicated to the sales tab, we decided to add the link to every ad. It was also a way to integrate the clients email communications with SEM so that customers saw the same message in both channels. The link resonated well with our users and has led to the 2nd highest sitelink conversion. After all, who doesn’t love a bargain?

Test different ad types, generic vs. promotional copy
Our client has two to three promotional changes per week; this was a great opportunity to test numerous ad content and formats.

Generic ads beat out mild offers (i.e. 10% off or overly specific offers); unless the promotion is stellar, keep your evergreen ads on as well.
Customers LOVE free shipping, something about not having to pay for the delivery service really speaks to shoppers. (On a personal note, I once received a package opened & wet because it was left at the back door, with no note implying so, for several days during a rainy week. Fortunately the retailer wrapped everything in plastic and I did not pay for shipping so I was moderately appeased).
Experiment with the placement of the offer. We found that including the percentage off in the header performed better than including the savings in the body of the ad. However, if you used a promotional code in the ad the CTR was significantly lower. I guess consumers did not appreciate the extra work of copying & pasting, the savings must be effortless.

Holiday SEM gets more complicated and competitive each year, but if we execute the core fundamental practices and lay down a strong foundation, holiday shopping for consumers and profits for retailers should be a click away!

Google Automated Rules Beta, Stay Tuned.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:25:00 +0000

By Elaine Strauss, Advertising Strategist, Advertising Solutions

Have you ever had to wake up early on Black Friday, when you are supposed to have the day off work to switch over your search ads to holiday creative? Why can’t your ads be set to automatically turn on and off? Google has just rolled out Automated Rules Beta, which will now allow you to automate a variety of different manual processes that were not previously feasible. Note that you must be whitelisted for this beta and it is not yet available for every account.

Google’s automated rules allow you to schedule bid, budget and status changes to a campaign, ad group, ad text or keywords when a certain criteria is met. Aside from setting holiday creative to turn on and off, you can set keyword bids to automatically increase if your quality score drops below a certain point. You can also have your campaign budget increase when your click through rate increases to a certain point, you can have certain ads pause if the click through rate drops below a certain point and you can do a variety of other automated campaign changes.

With automated rules you are able to keep track of your changes easily with the rules summary page. You can find the rules summary page on the left-hand sidebar of the AdWords online interface under “Control panel and library.” Each time one of your automated tasks is run or completed, Google will send an automated email telling you which task has been completed (note: in order to receive email notifications, you must choose the email results setting that will send you an email when your rule has run). These automated emails from AdWords-noreply@google.com will arrive with a subject line similar to “AdWords rule ‘Pause ads’ execution details.”

The only complication I have noticed so far with the automated rules is that it can get complicated and time consuming. There is no way to make bulk changes for automated rules and everything has to be done in the online AdWords interface. If you want to set certain ads to go on and certain ads to go off on a certain date, then you have to create two separate rules. One rule will turn ads off and the other rule will turn ads on. For both of these rules you will have to manually select each individual ad in the AdWords interface. Like most beta features, you cannot access Automated Rules through the AdWords desktop editor.

I would not recommend creating automated rules for all everyday tasks, given that a computer does not have the capabilities of the human brain. The quality scores and click through rates should still be looked at daily with the human eye. Preview your rules results before implementation to avoid any unintentional changes. Also do a few test rules first to make sure that they are set up correctly to ensure that all of the changes that are made to your AdWords account are the changes that you intend to make.

Reach out to your Google rep and get whitelisted for the Automated Rules Beta, sit back and relax!

Does Basic SEO Still Matter?

noreply@blogger.com (Kiley Peters) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 22:34:00 +0000

By Dave McAnally, Associate Director, Content Solutions

You’ve probably heard people tell you that ‘Google doesn’t weigh things like they used to’ anymore and that these days, it’s all about how social your digital footprint is (even though most professionals don’t actually think that). Well I don’t dispute that new technologies may change

how we need to think about basic SEO principles, however I will suggest that some of those basic principles are just as vital today as they ever were. This brings me to a quasi-case study of sorts to share. We’ve recently implemented a XML sitemap on a site that has about as close to a ceteris paribus scenario as one could reasonably expect. Thus, it makes it a great candidate to measure how much impact fully indexing a site has on its ability to drive traffic.

The background: This is a site with both high-level product content and specific retail/service location pages with highly geo-specific content. The site itself has a few quirks to it which have likely made pertinent content difficult for engines to find. It has flash elements with occasionally relevant text content, but it’s also is a controller-based CMS hierarchy (where ‘directories’ in the URL aren’t really ‘directories’ but controller parameters for how the CMS displays the content). The net result of this implementation is that there technically is only one static page on the site despite thousands of URLs being indexed. That said, it appeared Google was able to parse

through around 250 URLs (the site has unique content on multiple geo-specific locations).

What we did: So mid-October, using a series of tools to crawl and build an XML Feed, we uploaded a basic setup (no priorities or anything, just the full meal deal of around 3800 URLs). We then pointed Google to the sitemap location via Webmaster Tools and included an auto discovery line in the Robots.txt file. Then we waited….(it bears mentioning that pretty much nothing else was implemented on the site during this period nor is the fall a seasonal time for this website). Within a matter of two days, Google was reporting it was now indexing 2519 URLs.

The bulk of these new URLs we identified as pages for specific locations which presented a whole new realm of potential geo-specific queries we were now in the game with relevant content for. The Resolution Media Analytics Team developed the following chart tracking the effects on

traffic (note, this is a truncated period of time for the sake of display):

This is a chart showing the visits from natural search engines over the period of a couple months.

The dotted lines are kicking in at the approximate date the XML sitemap was deployed. Based on a series of moving averages and regression, the red dotted line indicates how traffic fluctuations for this site SHOULD have continued unabated. The black lines are our 95% confidence interval (essentially, we are 95% sure anything that happens will fall within this space. The solid black line is our actual data from web analytics. As you can see, the actual data shoots right to the top of the confidence boundary and actually trends over it for periods of time. We interpret this as indicating that an effect outside of what we would normally expect has

occurred in order for this to happen (in this case, the deployment of the XML sitemap).

The following is how this has affected the moving average of traffic on the site:

By November 9th, this site had well over 3500 URLs in both Google and Bing’s index. As you can see, we have a not-insignificant lift that falls well outside the norm of what we’ve been seeing the past few months (again I have this condensed for display purposes). Continuing as is, we do not see any seasonal spikes for this client year over year so clearly there is a change outside the norm.

Is this the end-all-be-all of SEO for this client? Certainly not! We still have many things we need to do. However, ignoring a basic tactic like this simply leaves money on the table. The important takeaway is that things that may seem trivial now can still have significant impacts on traffic. We hear that ranking signals are changing and that certain things aren’t necessary to be competitive in natural search, but this definitely shows that basic indexing tactics are still effective in driving traffic.

Mod_pagespeed - Google Makes You Fast

noreply@blogger.com (Kiley Peters) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 16:12:00 +0000

By Dave McAnally, Associate Director, Content Solutions

Originally Appeared on EatenByGiants.com

On Wednesday, Google unveiled a new Apache Filter set. It's a logical extension of Google's Firefox/Firebug Page Speed Plugin. Rather than simply pointing out all the ways your site sucks up load-times, mod_pagespeed automatically takes care of issues, thus eliminating the leg-work of going in and doing it yourself. The fundamental purpose of this tool is to make your websites pages load quicker (50% quicker if the company's findings are to be believed). This is particularly of importance to large catalog sites commanding lots of scripts, database calls, CSS and images that wreak havoc on a less-than-stellar connection's ability to render something on your screen. It's been no secret that Google is now factoring in load-time into the algorithm.

How it works:

Mod_Pagespeed is for Apache 2.2 (no previous versions are currently supported). In order to use this tool, you'll need root access to your server so shared hosting accounts are out of luck (however, GoDaddy is poised to launch the mod on their entire network of sites so their customers have that to look forward to).

The mod_pagespeed is installed and tweaked through thepagespeed.conf file. From the onset, the HTML editor's primary purpose appears to be to clean up messy HTML often rendered by sites that aggregate things from multiple sources (combing multiple Head sections into one source, adding the Head where it doesn't exist etc). In addition, a CSS and JavaScript Mod comb through scripts and CSS to send large blocks out to separate files to be cached by the browser. Beyond that, there are some basic features such as a mod that scrubs out white-space in HTML and removes HTML comments. In many instances, these minor issues build up across a site to where they become a legitimate hindrance to load times. A single resource to scrub these issues out is invaluable to a site that's been around for 10-15 years with loads of legacy lurking in the code. Beyond that, there's a suite of various speed enhancement tools with the built-in mods which you can tweak at will which you can find here.

Overall Benefits of Mod_Pagespeed:

This truly is a case of "What's Good for Google is Good For You". By reducing the noise-to-signal for spiders to access content (by eliminating scripts and CSS from the crawl) Google is also making a smoother ride for search engine spiders. This is a logical place for Google to develop web tools, given the Caffeine update and the overall interest in maintaining a fresher index. The easier it is for spiders to access content, the faster and more frequent they'll be able to do so.

The upshot for users is that these tactics actually WILL help pages load quicker. With all the ways of accessing web content (DSL, 3G, 4G, Dial-Up, Ethernet etc) accessibility cannot be ignored. Based on where mod_pagespeed carves out server-load, it will be particularly popular with catalog and aggregator sites (they likely constitute the majority of the 50% load reduction sample). Not only will this tool produce efficient pages, but it does it on the fly, eliminating the burden of an IT team to find efficiencies (obviously each install still needs to be tailored to its users' needs).

So this is truly a win/win situation. Users get a more efficient experience, and spiders can index content faster.

Search and Social – Where’s It Headed?

noreply@blogger.com (Kiley Peters) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 16:04:00 +0000

By David Levy, Director of Marketing & Business Development

As our very own Stacie Susens recently wrote, search and social are continuing to merge.

Bing’s new partnership with Facebook certainly is another step in that direction. And, as she points out, the current search results probably each have utility in their own way, depending on who you are and what you’re searching for.

However, I wanted to take a minute to think about where all of this is headed.

As the Mashable article I referenced above indicates, it won’t be long before Bing starts to place your friends’ “Like” data alongside all of its search results.

In my opinion, Facebook represents the biggest threat to Google’s search domination. This is for two reasons:

Search results are becoming increasingly personalized, and who better to personalize them than the company that knows everything about you and your friends (right now, Google mostly knows about only you).
As research suggests, 90% of people seek recommendations from other people who they know and trust before purchasing (The Nielsen Company).

Now, I still think that as people are purely researching online, social recommendations aren’t as important. For example, if you’re researching a book report topic or the definition of a word, or why climate change is happening (sorry Republicans, it is)… then Google’s probably still your best bet.

But, when it comes to transactional searches like “Toyota Camry price Chicago” or “buy diamond necklace,” you might want to see what your friends recommend rather than typing these queries into your Google search box.

In my opinion, partnerships like Bing-Facebook will continue to forge the search-social convergence. But, I also believe that Facebook will begin to become a stand-alone search engine in and of itself.

Why? It’s simple, eliminate the middle man and go right to the source.

When people want to buy, again, they want recommendations.

So, they might begin by posting the question to their friends on Facebook instead of asking their Google search box… such as “looking to buy a Toyota Camry, anyone know of a good dealership in Chicago to buy from?”

Or, “I need new running shoes for the Chicago marathon, any recommendations?”

No need for Google here. Well, maybe for driving directions, but the (in)accuracy of Google Maps is for another blog post...

This, to me, is one of the real powers of the social network… the simplicity of being able to eliminate the clutter of the typical results page and just use your friends’ recommendations to narrow down your consideration set. You’re going to seek those recommendations out anyways, Facebook just makes it easier.

On that note, does anyone know of a good place to buy a diamond necklace in Chicago? My girlfriend is beginning to wonder why I haven’t bought her that yet…

A Tale of a Social Search Engine

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 18:23:00 +0000

By Stacie Susens – Director, Client Strategy and Development

I have been seeing a lot of blogs about the recent Facebook and Bing partnership claiming that it will now make search social. Adam Ostrow from mashable.com has a good blog summarizing the partnership and what you as a searcher can expect to see. I have been keeping an eye out for this but I personally have not seen anything on my Bing search results page. Maybe I don’t have enough friends who like enough stuff…

I have also been thinking a lot about Facebook’s open graph and how this brings search to social. As a searcher AND someone who checks into Facebook daily, I realized I haven’t used Facebook to search and thought it was about time I gave it a try.

To be timely with the recent holiday, below are search results for ‘halloween costumes’ on google.com, bing.com and facebook.com. Let’s compare the results and ultimately determine if the social search engine is giving typical search engines a run for their money.

Google Search Results for ‘halloween costumes’

Google Summary:
Google is mainly, or I should say only, presenting us with listings of sites that are selling Halloween costumes. Here is a breakdown of the results:

9 paid search ads selling Halloween costumes or decorations
1 row of image shopping results of sites selling costumes
2 natural search listings for sites selling Halloween costumes

And what you can’t see below the fold: more Halloween shopping sites and news results for Halloween costumes.

Bing Search Results for ‘halloween costumes’

Bing Summary:
As we saw with Google, Bing is mainly presenting us with listings that are selling Halloween costumes. Here is a breakdown of the results (eerily familiar):

9 paid search ads selling Halloween costumes
1 natural image listings for top 2010 Halloween costumes that are also for sale
2 natural search listings for sites selling Halloween costumes

And what you can’t see below the fold: more Halloween shopping sites and a map for local listings of places selling Halloween costumes.

Facebook Search Results for ‘halloween costumes’

Below the fold: Posts by Friends

Below the fold: Web Results

Now I’m starting to see some variety in the results. Unlike Google and Bing I decided to include the below the fold screen shots because the results were completely different from the top of the page. Here is the break out of all search results:

3 Facebook pages of companies selling Halloween costumes but have a lot fans, pictures, and wall content to browse through
3 right rail text/image ads not related to Halloween
3 recent posts from friends about ‘halloween costumes’ or just ‘costumes’
3 web results from Bing – which are 3 companies selling Halloween costumes

Conclusion
At the end of the day, each of us is different and may be looking for different information. Since it’s after Halloween and I am more in the mind set to see what the fun costumes were, I preferred the Facebook results. Beyond discovering which search engine results I preferred for the query ‘halloween costumes’ other points about each of the tools caught my attention:

1. If you are ready to buy, then Google or Bing are better choices
2. Facebook needs to work on the relevancy of their ads
3. Google and Bing have prioritized paid listings over natural listings compared Facebook

Give social search a try and let me know what you think!

Fumbling at Social Media Campaigns & Metrics

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 15:45:00 +0000

By Al Kao, Natural Search Supervisor & Charlie Roraback, Paid Search Coordinator

Last installment, we discussed the importance of redefining metrics of success for social media. We concluded that “fans” and “followers” are not strong metrics to evaluate the impact of social media marketing.

In this installment we ask, how do we measure social media success and marketing impact?

To answer this question, we first need to fundamentally change the approach and thinking to social media’s position in the marketing mix.

Rethinking Approach to Social Media
The creation and execution of social media marketing initiatives leaves much to be desired in its current state. Marketers have to ask, where does social media fit into the marketing portfolio? Little thought goes into the upfront design and structuring of these initiatives.

In practice, some companies’ and agencies’ approaches to social media treat it as a replacement for several marketing tactics. Other companies and marketing agencies that service social media initiatives continue to emphasize tactics and focus on one-off initiatives.

The result is that these methods do little to improve the bottom line or build brand loyalty, nor can prove any measurable results or value.

Social media is, in fact, less about tactics and more about an overall holistic approach. Social media is not a replacement marketing tactic but rather an enhancement.

Connecting Social Media with the Marketing Portfolio
It is entirely possible to reach goals, even “lofty” goals, set for social media or for general marketing objectives.

To do so, however, requires less about the tactics employed and more about the overall approach to managing the complexities of social media and the modern consumer.

Social media is digital, thus all aspects of digital, in particular search, needs to be incorporated during planning.

Companies of all sizes now operate in a multi-market, multi-lingual and frequently multi-brand world. This world is filled with commercial and cultural nuances as well as an exponentially increasing amount of information and choices.

As digital marketers are discovering, unlocking the value of the social ecosystem and building real brand loyalty with customers is a daunting task. It requires finding new ways to address the problems stated here while and thinking outside of current models.

eMarketer reported on a study that found social media users multitask while using Facebook. They use the Internet while watching TV while checking email while searching online.

The multitasking of the user and her use of media should compel marketers to treat social media as part of the marketing portfolio.

Social Media as Catalyst for Search
As the graph above shows, the multitasking social media user also searches online.

If the social media user is engaged, she’s essentially having a conversation. When engaged in a conversation, she wants to learn more. How does she learn more? She searches for information.

Thus, social media must be viewed as a catalyst for search marketing.

Search marketing, after all, is gaining visibility for user queries. Gaining insight into searcher intent (what are they really looking for?) is what the search marketer uses to select strategic points for search query visibility.

Social media gives the search marketer insight into user query intent because of the context surrounding the social media conversation. The search marketer gains an additional layer of information to filter through all the “search noise” that is out there.

Ultimately, the search marketer is able to make better strategic decisions for search query visibility.

Coming Next: Connecting the Dots of Social Media with Search
In our next installment, we’ll discuss connecting the dots and making social media work in tandem with search marketing to achieve specific goals.

The Digital World Can Lead to Kneejerk Decisions

noreply@blogger.com (Kiley Peters) — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 19:28:00 +0000

By Dave Tan, VP of Innovation and Product Development

As many of you are probably aware, GAP recently retracted their logo redesign after four days of online backlash. While there have been many past examples of logo redesign/product overhaul backlashes, it seems that this GAP issue turned much quicker than anyone anticipated. I doubt there was enough time to even figure if sales trends or business metrics were effected before they changed their minds. A lot of this has to do with our interconnected world where information and groups can quickly band together in micro-seconds. Juxtapose that GAP example to the “New Coke” debacle, which took 77 days to change back to Coke Classic. Another recent case shines the spotlight on Sun Chips, where they were in the marketplace for 18 months without much fanfare and online activity surged in recent months pushing Frito-Lay to scrap the biodegradable packaging and revert back to the original plastic packaging.

While I am not here to discuss design sensibilities or product packaging, I am offering this idea – did any of the brands conduct digital research directly with their target consumers before and during these switches? For the Gap issue, AdAge independently polled consumers three days after the logo switch and found that only 17% were aware that the logo had changed. That seems to be a small percentage of consumers who even knew that something had changed (for the better or worse). While I am sure some brand loyalists of GAP didn’t like the logo, would it fully stop them from buying clothes there (especially since GAP logos arent even on their clothes)? Maybe.

This is why having a constant pulse of consumer sentiment is important. If GAP talked to their target consumers, ones that were in stores or subscribe to their emails to gather insights beforehand they could have used the power of communitiy and social media to adapt a change for good. But reacting quickly to sentiment offered in the social world by itself can be a kneejerk reaction. Beyond getting the viewpoints of their target and loyal consumers, I believe that our hyper connected world too easily allows for these social mob projects. All it takes is a few well-connected social folks to quickly build a force against a change that they don’t like. For consumers who are caught up in the force, it is as simple as “liking” a new facebook group that is against a logo change. All it did was cost them a muscle spasm to click “like,” which is not a good indicator of how they may really feel about the change. All of a sudden they are a part of 50,000 to 100,000 strong Facebook group that a brand sees as vehemently against the brand change because they did not like it.

Another difference I want to highlight is if the main “disagreers” aren’t brand loyalists or target consumers, why should the brand listen or cave? Let’s pretend, for example, that a majority of GAP logo dislikers were from China where GAP did not have a presense. Would it make sense to listen to them? This is why it is so important in this dynamic digital industry to be laser focused on your target consumers and their thoughts and choices. Even then, sometimes your ideal target consumers can be disagree with you. As Alexander Kjerulf notes, there are times when customers can be wrong. Brands simply need to conduct digital consumer research before, during and after changes, and as well develop thicker skin if they are going to press forward with changes.

The Wingmen of Search Relationships

noreply@blogger.com (Kiley Peters) — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 22:45:00 +0000

By Tara Nofziger, Account Strategist, Client Solutions

Keywords and human beings have more in common than some might think. For starters, they have serious relationships (whether messy and dramatic, or solid and transparent) with one another. Also similar to humans, each keyword has its own unique value and deserves to feel appreciated for the role they play within these relationships. This is not always an easy task with humans or with keywords, but doesn’t mean it’s any less important to try for. Now, before you go thinking that I’m trying to become the Dr. Phil of Search Marketing, let me explain a bit more into why I’m drawing this comparison.

When we look at the Traditional Search Funnel, it’s key to realize that users will typically begin searching on “Upper funnel” (e.g. online dating ) broad terms that are high volume and low converting. Users then gradually drill down to more specific terms as they are still in the consideration process; where they tend to complete the purchase cycle on specific “Brand” (e.g. match.com) terms that are low volume and higher converting. Knowing this, it’s important to recognize the role of each keyword in the path to conversion and give proper credit where credit is due. This means that the last click might not really deserve all the credit, considering users might have found your Brand in the first place through an upper funnel/general keyword.

In keeping with this keyword/human association (this instance is for all you sports fans), think of a General keyword as John Stockton and a Brand keyword as Karl Malone. John Stockton and Karl Malone are arguably one of the most successful tandems in NBA history, with Stockton leading the league all time in Assists and Malone delivering almost 37,000 career points. Chances are, without having played on the same team, neither Stockton nor Malone would have been as successful without attributing credit to each other. This same mentality reads true for Search.

Benefits of knowing which roles keywords play in the path to conversion include, providing valuable insight for optimizations, when defining which keywords perform and which do not , as well as helping make smarter assessments with budget allocation. More and more, Technologies are helping Search marketers better understand these relationships, shown through advances in tools such as the Search Funnel Report within Google Adwords, Exposure to Conversion Report within DoubleClick, Cross Visitation report within Omniture or the Path to Conversion report within Kenshoo. These reports are helpful as they break down different pathways, showing all the keywords that are clicked along the way, leading to a conversion.

Once these relationships are clearly understood, and the proper value is allocated to these “wingmen” (e.g. upper funnel, general keywords) marketers are better equipped to make more intelligent, data driven decisions. Again, similar to humans, if a keyword (e.g. boyfriend or girlfriend) isn’t pulling its weight and falls short of expectations, despite being optimized (e.g. working at it) then, perhaps it’s time to call it quits and remove it altogether (e.g. break-up). To the opposite effect, maybe the realization has finally set in that you’ve been overlooking that special keyword all along, and they could just be “the one.”

ACE Tests: It’s Just Day-Parting. Really Fancy Day-Parting.

noreply@blogger.com (Kiley Peters) — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 18:15:00 +0000

By Nicole Gardner, Paid Search Specialist, Advertising Solutions

You may have heard of Google’s ACE (AdWords Campaign Experiments) tool, allowing for advertisers to test creative, keywords, bids, match types and anything else that can be changed at the ad group or keyword level.

Google help link plus video.

The tool is great, but the way Google presents it can make it seem very complicated. Good news: it’s actually pretty simple. I’ve run some tests and found it much easier than expected. For example, in one account I found that lowering keyword bids by 20% also lowered the position, CTR and CPC by about 20% (not a shocker). However, in another account this same action lowered average CPC by 20% but lowered position and CTR by less than 5%!

Don’t you want to know if you can lower your CPC without sacrificing CTR? Yes? Then allow me to enlighten you.

The Basics to ACE

ACE is really just a day-parting tool. Honestly, that’s it. It sounds complicated because you have to designate some keywords “control” and other keywords “experiment” – and maybe this makes you want to throw up your hands because you never took AP Chemistry in high school. No worries – think of it this way: When you set up an ACE test in the Campaign Settings tab, you are designating ad serving.

Once you set up the test with end dates and ad serving, you have to designate the keywords/ad groups according to how you want them day-parted. Let’s use 70%/30% ad serving as an example for below.

“control and experiment” means these keywords/ad groups will show 100% of the time because they aren’t part of the test.
“control only” means these keywords/ad groups will run 70% of the time.
“experiment only” means these keywords/ad groups will run 30% of the time – only when the “control only” keywords/ad groups are off.

Keyword Testing

Say you’re testing a keyword on broad versus on phrase. If you already have the keyword on broad match, then add the keyword to the same ad group as phrase match. Set the broad match as “control only” and the phrase match as “experiment only” and all other keywords as “control and experiment.” Then go back to the campaign settings and “start running experiment.” It will run until the end date you set.

Ad Group Testing

Before you “start running experiment,” go to Editor and copy/paste the ad groups you want to test, then append “experiment” or “test” to the new ad group names. Change what you want to test – for example, change the ads to have a slightly different display url. Upload these new ad groups as paused. Then, after you set up the end dates and ad serving in the experiment, designate the new ad groups “experiment only” and the original ad groups “control only.” Everything else is “control and experiment.” Then go back to the campaign settings and “start running experiment.”

Last Points

Another confusing aspect of ACE are the buttons that appear in the Campaign Settings that say “Apply: Launch changes fully” and “Delete: Remove changes.” “Apply” means that everything you designated as “experiment only” will now run 100% of the time. “Delete” means “control only” will now run 100% of the time. Don’t touch these until you are done with your experiment. Before hitting “Delete,” download the history of the test into Excel so you can have the results of your test, otherwise you’ll lose it. Also, try to keep your control ad groups and experiment ad groups as similar as possible other than what you are testing. For example, if you are testing ad copy changes, you want to make sure the keyword bids in both ad groups are exactly the same.

Hope this helps. Start testing!

Resolution Media's Bryson Meunier Speaks at DigiDay Mobile

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 14:26:00 +0000

By Kiley Peters

On Monday, The W Hotel New York hosted DigiDay Mobile, a one-day conference discussing the changing digital landscape and specifically focusing on mobile and it's impact on digital. RM's, Bryson Meunier, Associate Director of Natural Search, sat on The Mobile Web vs Apps panel and was quoted in two articles recapping Monday's events.

According to Meunier, "If nothing else, a mobile Web presence should exist just to promote an app. If you're not using it as another way even to promote your app, you're really missing the boat.”

Please check out these two articles for more information:

RM POV: Google Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Kiley Peters) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 21:19:00 +0000

By: Dave Tan, Erica Barth, Bryson Meunier, Ryan Savaiano

On September 8th Google announced a new search enhancement, Google Instant. Google believes that users read more quickly than they type, and thus they feel this enhancement will help users find relevant information faster.

As with any change to the user’s search experience, an impact on search engine marketing (SEM) programs is expected.

How it Works

Google Instant has three key features:

• Instant results: Relevant results displayed dynamically as the user types.

• Predictive text: Predicts the remainder of the query as the user types (shown in gray text).

• Scroll to search: Arrow key scrolls through predictions and results are updated for the user instantly.

Here’s an example from Google that helps illustrates the concept.

Example 1: User types "flow"

(Click for full size image)

Example 2: User types "flowc"

(Click for full size image)

Implications for Advertisers

Expected to Change Keyword Volume and Mix - Since users will now be exposed to results before they finish typing their full queries, longer, more complex queries may receive less impressions and clicks as users see relevant results sooner. Therefore, if this shift occurs, it could have a significant impact on overall cost and ROI for paid search programs.

Quality Score Likely to be Impacted - While Google has communicated that Google Instant will not change the way Quality Score is determined, any change to the way impressions are counted will certainly impact CTR, which is one of the largest drivers of Quality Score. Thus, if impressions change for an advertiser and click volume remains constant, Quality Score will be affected by changes in CTR.

Implications for Natural/Organic Search

Not the Death of SEO –This isn’t a change to the core search ranking algorithms, but to the way it presents its search results. The fact of the matter is, though the details of how SEO is performed need to evolve in order to remain effective, SEO is still very necessary for brands who want to compete in the SERP.

Makes Search Results More Competitive – Searchers see a SERP version for every character that they type into the search bar and the results on the ever changing SERP may affect their purchasing or browsing decisions.

Could Change Keyword Targeting and Messaging– It’s likely that this will change the way users interact with search results. Two positions exist here. One states that it will make head queries more important, as results are visible for every keystroke. The other says this will increase the visibility of the long tail since users will need to refine their queries, using more long queries in order to find the content they’re really looking for.

Will Likely Not Impact Mobile Search Significantly – There are columns saying that the limited real estate on mobile SERPs will make this even more important in the mobile realm. However, according to recent figures that Google released, voice search is 25% of Android queries, and that mode will never be affected by Google Instant, as it doesn’t require typing to input a query. As for other mobile users, the Google apps that are available are generally more user friendly than browser search, so it’s possible a large percentage of mobile users would not interact with Google Instant in a mobile browser.

Resolution Media Teams Up with United Way

noreply@blogger.com (Kiley Peters) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:19:00 +0000

By Kiley Peters, Manager, Marketing Business Development

Last month, Resolution Media (RM) teamed up with United Way and headed down to the Rauner Family YMCA , on the South Side of Chicago, to help with an end of summer barbeque. About 20 RM employees filed onto a school bus (which most of us hadn’t been on since sometime near the turn of the century) and prepared to entertain as well as supervise roughly 100

elementary age children.

The Rauner Family YMCA is a beautiful facility and we were warmly greeted by both YMCA and

United Way staff. After guidance on what they needed us to help with, we all went to work. Dave Tan, (VP of Innovation and Product Development) and Nate Janitz, (Natural Search Supervisor, Content Solutions) joined forces and manned the grill. Additional RM employees helped set up an outdoor water slide for the children while others played inside until it was lunch time.

Slowly, but surely, groups of children spilled out of the YMCA doors into the sunshine. Some rushed over to the water slide while others found the grill and decided it was time to eat.

The children quickly became attached to their favorite RM employee and enjoyed the afternoon with their new found friends. As lunch was cleaned up, the grill shut down, melted ice cream cones thrown away and last turns down the waterslide taken, we all said our goodbyes, thanked the YMCA and United Way staff members and filed back onto our trusty school bus.

For as much respect as we had for the staff members of the YMCA and United Way prior to this trip, it tripled after this afternoon. We all forgot how exhausting it can be to keep up with so many children!

Thanks again to the YMCA and United Way, as well as to all of the RM employees who took time out of their day to help out!

Googley Lessons Blog Tour

noreply@blogger.com (Kiley Peters) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:39:00 +0000

By Kiley Peters

For all of those Aaron Goldman Fans out there, your time to shine has come. Aaron has just released his new book, "Everything I Know About Marketing, I Learned From Google" and he's about to embark on his first Blog Tour. To dive a little deeper into the wise insights and learnings from Mr. Goldman, check out his video at Googley Lessons...make sure you watch all the way through...

Uh Oh, Time to Talk Privacy Again

noreply@blogger.com (Kiley Peters) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:04:00 +0000

By David Levy, Director, Marketing & Business Development

In a recent Wall Street Journal interview with Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, I found a certain excerpt to be rather troubling.

A quote from Schmidt: “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Schmidt then goes on to say that because of the data Google has collected about you, it “roughly knows who you are, roughly what you care about and roughly who your friends are.”

I’m not sure how others feel about this, but that kind of thinking makes me very uncomfortable.

Now, I’ve never been one to jump on the privacy bandwagon. To date, I’ve largely felt that there’s a certain price you pay if you want to have ads and other content put in front of you that is relevant. The only way to do this is to share some level of personal information about you. There’s just no way around it.

But, to me, this is going too far.

Apologies Mr. Schmidt, but I actually do want Google to answer my questions. That’s why I Google in the first place. In fact, it could be argued that everyone who searches on Google is ultimately trying to answer a question. For example, let’s say you Google “Chicago sushi restaurant.” You’re probably trying to answer a question like “where should I take my girlfriend for dinner this Friday night?” This is Google being extremely helpful.

I do not want Google to tell me what I should be doing next.

Where are we as a society if we can’t make these kinds of decisions for ourselves? This seems a bit too “Big Brother-ish” to me. I want Google to help me make decisions… not decide for me. The fact that Google is heading down this path is scary. It means that they plan (and need) to collect and use even more personal information in order to make this happen.

Remarketing is scary enough. We’ve all had those display ads follow us wherever we go on the Web. Recently I placed an order at Zappos and now I see all of the shoes I didn’t buy being streamed through a display ad on every site I visit. Granted, this marketing tactic is tremendously successful… but, you have to admit, still a bit scary.

But, Google is going much further here. Imagine Google telling you that you should go to Jamaica on your next vacation because you’ve purchased sandals, a swim suit and some Red Stripe within the past week. These are decisions I want to make… and I want Google to help me, not decide for me. Sure, give me recommendations. Give me reviews. But I don’t want some Google voice following me around everywhere telling me what to do because it has my personal information and some click history.

As a digital marketer, I fully realize the value of personalized messaging to drive relevancy. But, there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. What do you think… is Google about to cross it?

Mobile: To Test or Not to Test?

noreply@blogger.com (Kiley Peters) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:52:00 +0000

By Jason Baron and Erin Dailer, Paid Search Coordinators, Advertising Solutions

According to recent comScore data, mobile is on track to eclipse desktop users within five years. Google also reports that with mobile’s ability to individually target more people, it will soon be bigger than TV, email and the Internet. With all of this information, our team knew that mobile was something that we most definitely wanted to test with our clients. We were in search of an answer to one particular question, “Can we really have a successful mobile campaign without having a mobile (WAP) site or landing page?” Testing mobile would produce data that could answer this question and also give us insight as to how our consumers are searching for our client’s products and services on their mobile devices. We knew it was our duty to test this new ground in order to drive growth in our client’s business as efficiently as possible.

Before implementing our mobile test, it was important to consider our client’s main goals, which include driving revenue while also meeting an efficient ROAS goal. Keeping this in mind, we knew that a separate mobile campaign had the potential to bring added efficiency to the entire account by gaining incremental revenue through a new audience. It would also give us insight into how mobile users search for products and services differently from desktop users, information which can be used to optimize these campaigns differently for maximum effect. So, our voyage into the world of mobile began by creating mirror mobile campaigns for a few existing campaigns to be tested. By targeting and tracking mobile performance separately from desktop search performance, we can see results from each segment and accurately gauge performance.

When first launching the test, we started with a top-performing brand campaign and after only a few short days we were extremely happy with our initial results. Even without a mobile WAP site, we were beginning to see conversions! After several weeks of testing, we saw consistent spikes in traffic, conversions and revenue, especially on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. It made perfect sense that people were using their mobile phones more often on the weekends when they were away from home or office computers. Our data was able to solidify this theory so that we could specifically reach target audience more effectively. Not only were consumers purchasing more often during the weekend, our data also proved that they were finding a way to purchase our product from their mobile devices through a regular website. This is a trend that we continue to see as we expand mobile testing into other campaigns within the account.

Our new mobile campaign brought results that have a strong value in determining future goals and objectives with our client. After monitoring performance over the two month testing period, it is clear that users are converting from their mobile devices. This proves the value in building out a more user-friendly mobile environment for our consumers so that we can increase conversion. We can only imagine how additional mobile campaigns will perform when we have a fully supported site available. Also, seeing that this is the first time we ventured into the mobile space with this particular client, our initial observations will serve as data that can be used as a benchmark in order to grow and expand within the mobile space. This test has been vital in driving increased brand awareness and traffic that will eventually lead to higher revenue and conversion rates.

Brand Awareness is Replacing E-Commerce

noreply@blogger.com (Kiley Peters) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:18:00 +0000

By Jeff Campbell, Vice President

Major retailers have always struggled to define the role of their website(s) since they became e-commerce capable in the late 1990s. With the majority of top U.S. retailer’s (pdf) transactions occurring in their brick & mortar (B&M) store locations, it has been difficult to pinpoint if the website is just another store in the chain or if it has greater marketing influence on B&M purchases. Even given a 10+ year runway for growth, e-commerce is still only ~4% of total retail sales. Further, studies showing anywhere from 51-87% of consumers research online before purchasing in-store (BigResearch, Nielsen, Yahoo!, Macy’s, Pier 1); the website is certainly a part of a buyer’s purchase funnel.

It is time for retailer websites to make a decision on their role within their organizations and more importantly in how they interact with the end consumer. Online marketing has come into it’s own and can roll with the big boys of TV, print, magazine, radio and more…but should it be measured in the same way? Yes, it’s time.

Unfortunately, it won’t be easy to move away from the e-commerce silo that websites, online marketing, and specifically paid search has been operating in for the past decade. But there are several solutions – all with their pros and cons – to bridge the two ends of the e-comm/branding spectrum:

Separate Brand Awareness & E-Commerce Campaigns (and budgets!)

Pros:

Allows multiple groups to “own” paid search budget & strategy
Differing strategies & goals do not conflict when separated
Copy messaging, promotions, landing pages, sources can be customized to separate goals

Cons:

Holistic reporting and measurement of your paid search campaign is difficult
Does not reflect searcher behavior: Challenge to manage keyword crossover, multi-visit attribution, match types & keyword assists across campaigns

Choose different KPIs by Product Division

Pros:

Allows sub-par online categories an opportunity to gain funding/exposure
Grants permission to the execution team to settle for lower ROI where directed

Cons:

Every product category will have keywords that convert online and others that don’t – but both will be measured by the same KPI

Break Even Online Before Supporting Offline

Pros:

Many times the top online performing groups will make up for the loss of the non-performing groups
Paid Search is a profitable (or break even) medium when judging in an online vacuum

Cons:

Many retailers may not need to break even online due to strong offline influence – and may be missing a bigger opportunity with store sales by treating online as a silo
Non-converting online categories may not be funded since they can’t break even online

Optimize to an Offline Multiplier

Pros:

Media dollars are spent on what drives sales lift and profit margins for the total company and typically will have a much greater return overall
Compare apples-to-apples with other advertising mediums that have undergone similar market hold-out testing (leading to media mix modeling)

Cons:

Requires granular online to offline testing (by merchandise group by season, at minimum)
Utilizes historic data; limits ability to react in a dynamic online atmosphere

One word of caution with these models: stick to your KPI’s (one efficiency metric and one volume metric); it’s easy to regress back to online ROI metrics. Just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean you should. And as Pete Drucker said “what gets measured gets managed.”

What is clear is that most B&M retailers are no longer treating their website as an e-commerce silo. That said, I haven’t seen them jump to the opposite end of the spectrum yet, despite the data, research and testing. For now, the above solutions (or a hybrid of these) are all progress toward the trend of online marketing and paid search moving away from e-commerce/ROI management goals for B&M retailers.

Taking Over Your Local Search Results Page

noreply@blogger.com (Kiley Peters) — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:38:00 +0000

By Megan McDonald, Natural Search Strategist

‘Chicago restaurants.’ ‘Jewelry stores 60010.’ ‘Car dealerships Cleveland, OH.’ Why is this type of search query important to your business? Because they are happening all the time. Google confirmed in a recent blog post that 1 out of every 5 searches are location related. Also, for those searching on a mobile phone, 1 in 3 searches have local intent. With local searches dominating, businesses need to be showing up to keep current customers and gain new ones.

Check out this example of businesses showing up for a local search:

You may have noticed that three dry cleaners (Lake City Cleaners, Schwatzhoff Cleaners and BC Cleaners) have taken over almost 50% of Google’s listings when there are at least 10 dry cleaners in the Evanston area. I’m sure that many business owners would like to own 2 or 3 or more listings on a non-branded and very relevant query. Now, I’m sure you are asking, why then can these three businesses dominate like this and how can I do it too?

Though all of the following suggestions may not give you total dominance for local searches, it can help you gain more local traction and can give your customers more information, no matter the platform.

This first suggestion may be obvious: optimize your own site first. If you notice on the ‘evanston dry cleaners’ search, many of the dry cleaners websites shows up first. So, make sure you optimize for keywords that are related to your business offering and make it easy for customers (and search engines) to find where your locations are. The best way to do this is to make sure that you have a unique page for each store location, per Matt Cutts’ suggestion.

The next step is to take advantage of free local programs on the big 3 search engines: Google Places, Yahoo! Local and Bing Local Listing Center. Many of these listings will show up naturally and can give searchers more information about the brands you sell, products and services, photos, reviews and more. Also, as the business owner, you can make edits and changes whenever you need to.

The last local search area to tackle: local directories. This includes Yelp, Citysearch, Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com and many, MANY more. These directories often show up for local searches (you may have noticed that Yelp and Citysearch popped up for the dry cleaner SERP) and get a large amount of traffic from search engines. The graph below from comScore shows just how much traffic some directories are getting. Yelp, for example, received over 18.9 million clicks in one month. I bet you would like to get some of those clicks going to your business listing on Yelp!

Creating listings on these types of local directories is pretty straightforward, but if you are intimidated by the number of directories available or maybe you have hundreds or thousands of stores, you can create new listings with the help of a data supplier (e.g. Universal Business Listing, Localeze). This usually includes a fee, but it can be very helpful for those businesses that don’t have the time or man power to individually post new stores.

So, go out there and get your business ready for local search: Create individual store pages on your site, set up local accounts on Google, Yahoo! and Bing, and create listings on the many available local directories. Then watch to see if your business can compete with your competitors on the local search results pages!