credit: BusinessInsider.cm

Bing can be portrayed as a search marketer’s best friend or biggest annoyance.  Agencies, who typically charge based on percentage of media spend, hated Live/MSN search because it had relatively no search volume, which meant no media to spend, which meant no fees to charge.  It also has the hardest user interface to properly setup ad groups, took the most time to manage, and probably has the most quirks like {param} settings and a bunch of other baloney that 95% of the people don’t know how to use.

But then this rebranded search engine came out called Bing.com and was backed by $100 million in marketing–and get this–people are actually using it!  So is it time to rush over to the adCenter and open up an account?  Well, if you like making money, then you probably should.  Here’s why:

Since agencies have often shunned it for so long, there still aren’t a lot of other advertisers on Bing compared to Google and Yahoo.  This means less competition, cheaper CPCs, higher CTRs, and hopefully higher conversion rates.  Even though it only has 7-9% of the market share, you know what?  That’s still 7-9% of the BILLIONS of searches that happen every month!  If you could increase your orders by 7-9% with a 4-5% increase in PPC spend, wouldn’t you want to?  Also, since the costs per click are lower (due to the less competition) then that usually means lower costs per conversion, which means you can afford to buy more!

OK…So You’re Going to Advertise on Bing.  Now What?

Like I mentioned earlier, adCenter is the quirkiest interface to work in, so I wouldn’t go duplicating your Google account and importing it over to Microsoft.  Instead, look at your converting keywords over the last 60-90 days, and import only those.  AdCenter ad lengths are the same as Google’s so you can even import the same ads if you want.  Unless you really want to spend some time reading the help guides, I’d stay away from the param settings for now.  I’ll explain those in another post.

Finally, make sure you don’t import your Google bids into MSN, otherwise I can almost guarantee you’ll skyrocket in top position.  Use bids 30-50% lower than Google to see how you do, and adjust accordingly.

So should you advertise on Bing?  Yes. Yes you should.

I’ll be the guest speaker at Bido.com tomorrow, July 2nd at 1pm EST.  We’ll be talking about social media and domaining, an interesting crossover that you certainly don’t hear about every day. Please join us and you’ll be able to chat with me one-on-one for the hour. If you don’t already have an account:

• Log on to bido.com
• Click “Register” on top right of screen
• Once logged in, go to the page for the day’s auction.
• Click the blue “chat” tab located under the purple bar the reads “Next Auction: …”.  Then click “login to chat”.

Hope to see you there!

It’s not uncommon for me to meet people who are interested in getting started with paid search, but have no idea how to get started.  That’s usually why they come to me in the first place.   More often than not, there is one question that trumps all others right out of the gate:  How much can I afford to pay?  It’s one of the toughest questions in search marketing, and it usually comes from a conversation that goes something like this:

I can spend $500 each month on advertising on Google and other search engines. But, what do I set my bids at? Where do I start?  How do I know what I can afford to pay for a sale?

If you’re like most people who have asked themselves this question, your answer is probably similar to theirs:  Less than what I’m paying now.

I’ve determined that the easiest way to answer this question from the beginning is to start at the end and consider how much profit we want from PPC, and using that to determine how much we’re willing to pay for a sale or conversion (typically referred to as a Cost Per Acquisition, or CPA).  So grab a pencil and some paper, or open an Excel window, and prepare to think about your goals.

Things to think about:

We need to consider a few things before figuring out what a reasonable CPA is:

• How much margin is gained from each sale?
• How often does your site convert visitors to buyers?
• Is your margin the same amount regardless of product or quantity, or does it vary per transaction?

Once you have considered this information–even in just ballpark terms–then you can begin working backwards to find out what you can afford to pay per sale and then determine your ideal cost per click.

First of all, how much of your margin are you willing to reinvest into the business in the form of future PPC advertising? This answer is based solely on your objectives and intentions, so there’s no way I–or anyone else–can tell you what this number should be.  As a starting point, you may want to consider this number in terms of a percentage. This will allow you to adjust your budgets over time so it’s easy to calculate modifications when you make changes in your pricing or cost structure. As an example, let’s assumes an advertiser is willing to invest 30% of her margin into PPC advertising to determine her ideal cost per conversion.  (I keep emphasizing PPC advertising because if you consider all advertising you will have a lot more volume from higher CPAs than you intentioned, and this will lead to a lot more money spent than you planned, and leave your original goals useless.)

EXAMPLE:  A website sells a product for $299.99, with a cost of goods sold of $194. This means the sale has a margin of $105.99. If she reinvests 30% of her margin, she would have $31.80, which would be your acceptable CPA.

Ta da! Now this advertiser knows how much she’s willing to spend for this $300 sale, roughly 10% of the sale total, or $30-32.

Determining Costs per Click

Once you know how much you can afford to pay on a sale, then you need to know how often you can sell a product to someone who comes to the site. This is where your site conversion rate comes in. If you don’t know this number already, simply take the number of sales (S) you receive on your site and divide it by the number if unique visitors (UV) over a given length of time, usually a month. Multiply this number by 100 and you have your conversion rate in percentage form.  As a formula, this would look like:

Conv Rate =(S / UV) * 100

To continue our example, we’ll assume that our advertiser has made 20 sales from 1000 visitors, which would be a conversion rate of 2% [2%=(20 / 1000)*100].  After you know your site’s conversion rate and your acceptable cost per conversion/sale, then you have the information to figure out what you can afford to pay per click to get those visitors to your site. Take your conversion rate in decimal form, (the conversion number you have prior to multiplying it by 100), and multiply it by your acceptable CPA.  In our case 2% is the same as 0.02, so the formula would look like this:

0.02*$31.80=Max CPC

Our advertiser has determined that her max CPC to meet her CPA is $0.64 per click. Voila!

WAIT! Don’t set bids to be $0.64! That would be too easy. Remember that your bidded CPC is rarely the same as your actual CPC, so you can go as much as 20-40% higher than your acceptable CPC to get close to $0.64 being your actual CPC.  In this case that would make the bidded CPC somewhere around $0.75-0.80.

DOUBLE WAIT!  There’s one other problem: This method doesn’t take into account competitive factors, ad copy changes, or landing page conversion rates, which all can have huge impacts on your costs per click AND your PPC conversion rates. So what do you do then?  Well, the honest answer is you test everything.  First of all, given the products/services you sell, is $0.64-0.80 a high CPC or a low CPC?  If you’re selling insurance you’re not going to be able to play ball with the big leaguers (unless you follow my advice on how to compete with bigger advertisers), and if you’re selling buggy whips, then your ads may be crammed in position 1, which is usually a good sign that you’re over-paying.  So test, and re-test again to see which of the variables, or combination of variables, gives you the best outcome.  You can always go lower and get cheaper CPCs and CPAs, but if you want to max out what you’re willing to pay to maximize volume, then this is how to get a good start.

Site admins should start seeing a spike, possibly very significant, in the amount of RSS subscribers to their feed. It will show up in the statistics as “friendfeedagg”. NowSourcing is one of those prime examples, as you’ll see in the image below:

NowSourcing subscribers, sorted by RSS reader used.

Although this amounts to a substantial ‘bonus’  of sorts to a blog’s overall statistics, some say that very little difference is made. At some level this is true, but it does finally account what some folks use to keep up on new posts into the numbers. These numbers do make a difference, as RSS readers that have a sharing function can provide more exposure, even a potentially viral effect.

So, what can FriendFeed do for your blog? The people that subscribe to you on FriendFeed actually want to read what you have to say across the board. Not only is this simply a ‘feed’ of new posts, but it is a socialized RSS reader that allows you to connect in real time. It’s a great way to connect with your regulars, in addition to spreading the word out to those for whom your site is relevant, but hadn’t yet hit their radar.

Give it a shot. Boost your subscribers and your readership by taking advantage of this new feature.

If you aren’t already, be sure to add NowSourcing on FriendFeed.

Big news just came out from the Google Adwords blog.  Now you can import your established goals in Google Analytics over to your Adwords account.  This means that you won’t need to separate Adwords conversion code anymore.

The blog post specifies this is ideal for using the Google conversion optimizer, which gives Google control of your keyword bids in order to make sure your conversions come in at a specified CPA.  (Before this can be activated a campaign needs to have 30 conversions within a 30 day time span).  I’m not a big fan of this approach, but if you do it just make sure you take out any of your own branded names out as keywords so Google can’t charge you for those conversions.  More on this in a later post…

The only question that is not answered is the gap that comes from 1st click and last click recording. In Adwords, the conversion gets back-dated to the original date of the click (1st click), and not the date of the sale.  Google Analytics, however, marks the conversion the day it happened (last click), and not the date of the original paid visit.  This is often why reports from the two systems sometimes don’t add up.

I have some Googlers looking into this for me, and will update the post as I learn more.

The original purpose of day-parting was to let advertisers turn their ads off when they don’t want ads within a campaign to be seen. This could be due to call center hours, or perhaps a drop in the conversion rate. Here’s a better idea: Use day-parting across multiple mirrored campaigns to make sure you get exposure at different parts of the day. Let’s walk through it step-by-step:

1) Go into Google’s reporting interface and run an hourly report regardless of date for a sufficient time period at the campaign level, preferably for a single campaign. Be sure to check the boxes labeled “impression share”A sufficient time period is usually at least 30 days, but possibly up to 90, depending on your conversion volumes. Make your report screen look like this:

2) Export to Excel, and sort by hour of day. You should have 24 entries, ranging from 0-23. You need to look for a couple things:

• At what hours of the day is your impression share lowest?
• At what hours of the day is your conversion rate the highest?

Your impression share is what percentage of search queries are you getting for the keywords within the given campaign. Low numbers mean you’re losing out on opportunities. High numbers mean you show up often.

3) For example’s sake, let’s say that our busiest hours are 6:00-7:00am, 12:00-2:00pm, and 5:00-7:00pm on weekdays. For these hours we’d set our ad scheduling to look like this:

The above example is an extreme where you only run the ads during these peak times. However, if you’re using advanced day-parting also allows you to change your max bids during these different periods within a day. So if you know the 12-2 hour is where you’re going to make all your money, you can dictate that those bids automatically be raised any percentage over the Max CPC at the keyword level that you’re comfortable with. During the other hours of the day you can run the ads at a lower percentage than the max CPC, so you don’t get charged as much per click. Keep in mind that your average position will decline.

This seems pretty thorough as-is, so why use mirrored campaigns? For some really competitive keywords, you may not even last through these small peak hours to get the exposure you’re looking for. In those cases you need more than one campaign with different daily budget caps to make sure your traffic is getting spread across the times that you want, and not whenever Google thinks its best.

Expect to spend 2-3 hours of research per campaign in reports before deciding which hours are best suited for your campaign. Due to that time requirement, I’d recommend doing this on only your top 1 or 2 campaigns, and only if you see your daily budget being maxed out constantly, but can’t afford to raise it. Another good sign is when Google suggest that you should at least double your daily budget to get max exposure.

Remember, the goal is not to get more impressions or clicks for the sake of getting traffic, but instead to maximize conversions at peak times of the day. If you execute this tactic and you’re not seeing an overall increase in sales within a month or so, don’t bother with the extra management. Kill the test and go back to what you were doing originally.

Ideally, your username will make it easier for friends and family to distinguish you from a crowd of other “John Smiths.” It will also likely affect the ranking of your Facebook profile in a search, which is especially important for companies that utilize Facebook Pages. The positive is you will now have yet another method to shape your online identity. Negatives include possible exposure of private information if you’re not careful with how you do so. There are services on the web that provide overall online reputation management, and if this is a concern of yours (as it well should be), do check it out.

Facebook is, however, taking measures to prevent online squatting and a sort of online identity theft. The measures include being able to choose only one username per account and page, plus a mandatory wait period for member profiles and pages that have been created after a certain date (May 31st for Facebook Pages and June 9th for Facebook profiles). Will this stop imposters and squatters from doing their misdeeds? Likely not, but at least it seems that Facebook is starting to care about their users’ needs, for now.

Already Facebook is starting to receive lots of inquiries into issues relating to the upcoming added feature. Apparently for every step forward in user interface development, they’re taking about ten steps backwards, mostly in dealing with all of the issues they either didn’t think about beforehand, or just don’t care enough to handle. For example:

The time when usernames will become available is likely one of the most ridiculous times they could have chosen. Forget that it goes against founder Mark Zuckerberg’s religious laws, but it is also extremely inconvenient for real companies and their representitives to secure their name. The other two questions really show a great amount of inconsideration from Facebook towards their users. They’re not allowing for human error, on a user’s part or their’s.

Despite all of this, are you excited for this long-awaited feature? Check out Facebook’s username countdown page (try it in Pirate English for some fun).

P.S. Doesn’t this remind you of an older social network we all used to use during high school? …

POPrl, a popular url shortening service, has been hacked. This has rendered all links run through it to porn and other unintended sites.  Early morning yesterday, Twitterfeed, a popular RSS to Twitter service, tweeted that they were temporarily suspending Poprl from their service.  Get Satisfaction reports show that Twitterfeed has been in contact with Poprl and they have confirmed that their systems have been compromised.

The url shortener market is heating up as of late, with bit.ly recently being adopted as the default Twitter url shortener (a title previously held by TinyURL).  Bit.ly now leads the pack in url shortener usage, with TinyURL coming in second, and POPrl not even showing up on the chart (below). With this in mind, just how much is the POPrl hacking really affecting Twitter users? Only five Twitterers tweeted any concerns about shortned urls being lead to spam sites, and the folks actually posting the urls are apparently unaware that they are being redirected to a NSFW location.

image source

Will this affect POPrl’s credibilty as a service? Could potential publicity regarding this hack help or hurt them’? Or, is their traffic and usage level not high enough to even place this incident on the radar for most Internet-savvy folk?

Tweetjacking is unfortunately not an uncommon occurance. Anyone with a Twitter account and a simple knowledge of url shortening services can jack your tweet, tweaking it to lead to a completely different landing page than the original tweet had intended. The reality is that Twitter, its users, and associated services are being attacked by these pranksters, spammers, and hackers. We posted about Tweetjacking before, but that was just on a single user scale.  Seeing a system wide version is really scary.
 

I’m a PC bib: Microsofties are proud to be PCs, so their kids better be too.

Yahoo Pint Glass: Congratulations for surviving the layoffs. Have a drink

Google Dodgeball: I wouldn’t recommend playing when the goats are doing their thing

Yahoo Insta-Yodel: Whenever you need to hear the classic Willie call phrase.  Did you know if you go to Yahoo’s homepage and click on the exclamation point in the logo you’ll hear the famous Yahoo Yodel?  Try it!

Microsoft Golfbag: What better way to finish the day than a quick 9?

Yahoo Ninjas: I have no idea what a mimobot is, but I want one

Google Bike Jersey: How many programmers do you think could actually wear this skin-tight outfit?

Microsoft Binary t-shirt: It’s all Geek to me.

Google Bean Bag Chair: If this was at my desk I’d be asleep in no time.

While some of these may be pricier than a pen or a frisbee, they too can be yours to show off your search engine love!  Find something better that I missed, or have your own favorite item? Share it in the comments field.

(note: this post was written at 30,000 feet on the way in to Austin, Texas)

While most of my inspirational posts are original, it is worth noting when other hit gold.  Peter Shankman, of HARO fame, recently posted an excellent list of tips when traveling.  Peter is a true social media road warrior, and I trust that he’s been through enough bumps and bruises along the way to save us the trouble.

I highly recommend that you read the original post if you are even an occasional traveler, and let me add one to Peter’s list:

Spend some time reflecting about where you are in life.  Sometimes a change in perspective can really shed some light on areas in which you are succeeding, as well as areas that need more focus and attention.

Happy Memorial Day, dear readers, even if you are working today, try to step back and see where you measure up - compared to where you want to be.