If you ever needed to explain to anyone the difference between traditional marketing and inbound marketing, including social media’s impact on marketing and advertising, here’s a handy infographic. Nice work, Voltier Digital.

This is really big, even for an infographic, so click the thumbnail to see the whole thing.

Together, WordPress and the Thesis theme transcend blog software and become a great content management system for a regular website. However, since WordPress is a blog platform first and foremost, getting your site to behave like a website instead of a blog takes a few tweaks. The most significant tweak is to display a static homepage as the front page of the site, instead of the default blog page. Here’s how to do it using Thesis 1.8:

1. Create the static homepage. In your WordPress control panel, go to Pages > Add New. Enter a title, but don’t worry about page content yet. The title can be “About Judy’s Diner” or “The Pet Emporium Homepage”, or simply “Home.” Whatever you use for a title will show up by default in the top nav. Click Publish.
2. Create a separate blog page, if your site will also include a blog. Go to Pages > Add New. Enter a title (don’t worry about blog content yet), and click Publish. Again, whether it’s “The Daily Diner Blog” or “Pet Pontification”, whatever you name your blog page can show up in the top nav.



3. Set the static homepage as the front page. In your WordPress control panel, go to Settings > Reading. Under “Front page displays”, select “A static page”. In the dropdown boxes below, specify your home page as the front page, and your new blog page as the posts page. Don’t forget to save your changes.



4. Add your new pages to the top nav. Go to Thesis > Site Options. Under “Select Menu Type”, click “Thesis nav menu”, and then under “Navigation Menu”, click “Pages”. From the dropdown list of all your published pages, click to check off each page you want to appear in the top nav menu. However (this is important and not at all intuitive), leave your new static homepage unchecked. You can click and drag the pages into the order in which you’d like them to appear. If the page title isn’t exactly what you want, you can even edit the display text in this interface.
5. Associate your static homepage with the Home button in the navigation. While you are still in the Navigation Menu section, click “Home Link” and be sure that “Show home link in nav menu” is checked off. Again, you can edit the text on your homepage button here if you like. This will place your static homepage’s “Home” button in the left-most position in the nav.

When you’re done, click the Big Ass Save Button and then check out your site! It should look something like this. Now, go enter some content on your Home page, and write a blog post or two.

What we think of as Realtime Search now has two key components: Google Realtime Search, fully launched in August 2010, and Google Instant, implemented in early September.

Google Realtime Search
Realtime Search returns not only the usual most relevant websites, but also the freshest content from news, video and social media sites, weighted by factors like recency, frequency and relevance. The realtime feed is shown at or near the top of the search results.

Google Instant
Google Instant is a drop-down suggestion box that attempts to predict queries when a searcher begins to type. Related results, both paid and organic, are instantly reconfigured as the search query is completed. Google hopes this will change searcher behavior, and that long-tail search keywords will gain importance because users will see right away that their initial search wasn’t going to work. Early analysis shows that Instant tends to distract users from their initial search and select one of the phrases in the dropdown instead.

Natural Search Implications
Realtime results add more links at the top of SERPs, pushing the traditional top 10 results further down the page. When videos, images, news and maps are included, the first natural search result links appear well below the fold. In one study by BrightEdge, this decreased SEO clickthroughs by 40%. Instead of just focusing on being #1, the ranking to aim for is directly above and below the realtime feed.

Realtime streams offer you the chance to rank well for a competitive keyword — even if that ranking is temporary — through good, fresh content. However, there is also a chance that you could lose top search positions briefly due to major news in the market or from a competitor.

The basics of organic SEO are still required, and high authority is still important, but realtime search further blurs the line between SEO and social media. Freshness is now at least as important as relevance, so social media branding and participation are more important than ever before. The more you participate in social media, the better shot you have at hitting high placement on Google SERPs that display realtime results.

In addition, the Google Instant search box is positioned at the top of the page, above realtime results and paid search results. This pushes natural search results down even further below the fold. High ranking has become even more critical in order to appear above the fold.

Paid Search Implications
With Realtime Search, PPC becomes a more controllable presence than natural search, and therefore an increased focus for many companies. However, close PPC bid management has become challenging, as ever-changing positive and negative messages in social media increase and decrease PPC clickthroughs over the course of a day. Top-level generic keywords and brand terms are beginning to behave differently in PPC campaigns. I have already observed that brand (and competitive brand) keywords are becoming more expensive.

Along with Google Instant, Google has released a new AdWords definition of paid search impression – if Google Instant is used (it is the default behavior for all searches, but it can be turned off by the user), an impression is not counted unless user stays on the page for more than 3 seconds. So you may see your number of impressions drop, which can lead to a drop in quality score and CTR.

Long-tail search phrases have traditionally been less expensive in PPC because there is less competition, and specific-keyword searchers are more likely to click and convert because they know what they’re looking for. Behaviorally, though, Google Instant probably leads to shorter queries, so volume is expected to drop on longer phrases. Google claims that Instant will help teach people to use longer keyword phrases, but if fewer people use them, it could significantly impact advertising budgets. CPCs may rise (especially on broad match, AdWords’ cash cow) due to lower inventory of short keyword phrases.

Recommendations
Optimizing for natural search alone is no longer enough. Here are some recommendations for addressing the natural and paid search implications of Google Instant. Can you think of more?

• Continue solid SEO practices based on honest representation of your brand and reputation building across the internet.
• Consider moving calls to action from meta description to title tags, as users may rely more on the first thing they see.
• Continue to incorporate long-tail terms in SEO, but don’t rely on them alone
• Track search volumes for your top 10 search phrases – if they trend down, adjust your programs to focus only on those with most potential.
• Increase PPC bids on shorter keywords and brand/competitive keywords if needed to maintain ad position
• Continue to use keywords in social media, including blog posts, Twitter, Facebook and video – to help them show up in realtime feeds.
• Talk about current/recent events in social media – provide timely information to reach a larger audience. Discover what’s trending in your industry and have something genuine to say about it.
• Actively encourage social media feedback and legitimate conversation to potentially gain more impressions in realtime search results. SEO for realtime is more about creating engagement than clicks – don’t just give your followers landing-page links to click in every tweet.
• Emphasize reputation management, because whatever people are saying right now – positive or negative – will trend to the top in natural search results.

I love infographics, so when I found this one about how Google works, I wanted to share. I had to smunch it down to fit here, but it’s worth clicking to see it in full-size glory.

Despite the minor typos (yes, I’m a compulsive editor) this is quite complete — especially given that Google is so secret-squirrel about everything. Natural search and AdWords are both included here, as are localization, universal search, and personalized search. Good work, PPC Blog!

I’ve written about competitive tools before, but my last post was more of a general tool roundup. This post addresses a huge issue with competitive search marketing tools: accuracy, or lack thereof.

There are several tools I’ve been keeping an eye on for the past year or so: SpyFu, SEMrush, and KeywordCompetitor. I check these out from time to time, because aside from the known issues with spy tools in general (including impression jacking and clickfraud), I would love to have one I could trust for competitive information. Last week I decided to dive into SpyFu and take a closer look, in hopes that it had improved over the last year or so.

The verdict is mixed. While SpyFu provides some interesting information, I still have serious concerns about the accuracy of their data. They are vague about their data collection and manipulation methodologies, and what they do share is sketchy. SpyFu’s accuracy may improve somewhat with large accounts that have more impressions to scrape, but for ordinary sites, it’s not impressive.

A quick sanity check against my client’s Adwords data showed that:

• SpyFu states that the average ad position is 3 times lower than it actually is.
• They estimate my client’s daily ad budget at 50% of actual, but quietly acknowledge a margin of error close to 100%.
• Among the Ten Best Paid Keywords, SpyFu includes a keyword that performs below 200 other keywords in their account, no matter which metrics you look at. I have no idea what SpyFu’s criteria for “best” are, and they don’t elaborate.
• The number of daily paid clicks listed in SpyFu was less than half of the real number.
• An ad spend comparison over time showed that SpyFu captured some trends in very general terms, but highs and lows were greatly exaggerated, and they were way off on dollar amounts.

All of that said, there is some value to relative analysis. If you know how much they are off on your site, you can make a general guess as to how far they’re off on your competitors’ site. While there’s no way of knowing which numbers are accurate and which aren’t, having some kind of scale to go by is better than nothing. It may also be good for sparking new ideas that you hadn’t considered, whether it’s a long-tail keyword or a different way of wording your ad copy.

Everyone is probably sick of hearing me say this, and I understand that directional information can be useful, but if my experience as a research project manager taught me nothing else, it’s this: Don’t make business decisions based on data you know to be significantly inaccurate. If you find yourself drawn to use SEM spy tools (and I’ll be the first to admit that it’s tempting), I’d suggest doing some good, solid research on findings before making any big changes, just to be sure you aren’t charging headfirst down a rat hole with your client’s cash. ROI is more important now than ever before, so there’s little room for error when it comes to your search marketing budget.

It’s disappointing, because a good competitive tool could be incredibly valuable for optimizing your SEM campaign effectiveness. But at least you know that if your competitors are using these tools, they won’t get good intelligence about you.

One of my clients is getting too big for its britches, so recently I had to split their AdWords campaigns into three separate accounts. AdWords will only allow 25 campaigns per account, and they had a lot of campaigns because they are running ads targeted to different geographic areas. In addition, they wanted to use separate accounts because they are paying for their ads with different parts of their budget and it will be easier to track this way.

Obviously, moving all those campaigns – thousands of keywords, hundreds of ads and numerous settings – would be a time-consuming nightmare to do manually, and it would be much too easy to make mistakes. The online AdWords interface does not have an import/export feature, although I seem to remember that it did at one time. You can download different parts of your campaign to a spreadsheet, such as keywords, but not the entire campaign or account. Thankfully, the AdWords Editor client makes moving stuff from one account to another possible and relatively painless. Here’s how it works:

1. Create the new account that you want to move campaigns into. AdWords requires a separate email address for each account, which is a PITA if you’re managing multiple accounts. The way I handle this is by creating a new Gmail account for each AdWords account, and then forwarding each one to a central Gmail address where I can monitor all notifications. If you’re managing several different accounts, you will probably want to set up an AdWords My Client Center – this has saved me a lot of time and effort over the past few years.
2. Back up your existing AdWords account. It’s a good idea to do this periodically anyway, just in case you make any changes before you’ve had coffee and you can’t revert. Log in to AdWords Editor, and go to File / Export Backup (AEA). You can choose to back up your entire account, or selected campaigns and ad groups. AdWords Editor then creates an .aea (AdWords Editor Archive) file with today’s date on it for easy reference. In an emergency, you can use this file to restore everything to the way it was on that date.
3. Export your campaigns to a spreadsheet. Go to File / Export Spreadsheet (CSV) and choose Export Whole Account or Export Selected Campaigns and Ad Groups. In my case I chose about a dozen campaigns that I wanted to move to their own account.
4. Log in to your new account in the AdWords Editor. Go to File / Open Account, and type in the email address and password for your new account. You will be asked to download all campaigns or selected campaigns. Select All Campaigns, even if you don’t have anything to download, and click OK.
5. Import your campaigns to the new account. Go to File / Import CSV, and select the .csv spreadsheet you downloaded in Step 3 (not the .aea file). AdWords Editor will show you an example of the way fields are mapped, but they should all be OK because you’ve just downloaded them from AdWords. Click OK to accept, and wait for your campaigns to populate.
6. Check your campaigns to be sure everything imported correctly. DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP. Your campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads should all be fine, but your settings may not be imported. I had to go in and manually add my Max CPC bids and bidding options. If you’re using managed placements and negative keywords, be sure those have also imported. Once you are satisfied with everything, pause all of your campaigns and then click the button at the top to accept your changes.
7. Upload your campaigns to AdWords. Click the Post Selected Campaigns button, and select the campaigns you want to upload (all of them, in my case).
8. Check your campaigns again in the online AdWords interface. Log in to your new account in a browser and be sure everything looks the way you expect it to. Pay special attention to financial settings like daily budget and bid values. I’ve never had a glitch with uploads, but I have missed something in the AdWords Editor that was obvious in the online interface. Once you are satisfied with all of the settings, unpause your campaigns and let them run.

Questions, feedback, comments, concerns? Don’t be afraid to comment!

When Google’s merger with Doubleclick was announced last year, we knew there were going to be some privacy concerns associated with all that data sharing. Now we’re seeing the first of those issues: Google announced yesterday that they are implementing behavioral ad targeting. They are calling it “interest-based” advertising, but make no mistake; it’s based on surfing behavior across the web, not just search history on the Google network. This program is currently in beta, and ads will appear on YouTube and other Google partner sites for now. According to this post on the Google Blog, they are doing this in the interest of “making ads more interesting.” How thoughtful of Google to do that for its users. Do they really think people surf the web looking for interesting advertising?

These ads will associate categories of interest — say sports, gardening, cars, pets — with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. We may then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads.

So…if you’re checking out the ultimate French Toast recipe, or reading an article about Civil War history, Google will “know” that you’re a hockey fan — based on past visits to hockey sites — and serve you hockey-related AdSense ads. Not a big deal for sports, but when people are sorted into political, medical, religious or other more personal pigeonholes, there are enormous concerns about what happens to this data.

According to WWW creator Tim Berners-Lee,

“People use the web in a crisis, when wondering whether they have a sexually transmitted disease, or cancer, when wondering if they are homosexual and whether to talk about it … to discuss political views. There will be a huge commercial pressure to release this data. The principle should be that it is not to be collected in the first place.”

Indeed. Contrary to friendly marketing practice, all Google users are opted-in to behavioral ad targeting by default. However, you can opt out by using a browser plugin. However, their method of blocking their own cookie constitutes questionable shenanigans at best. Google also allows users to specify their favorite categories, and which categories they don’t wish to see ads for, but doesn’t say who that data will be shared with or how it will be shared. I have opted out completely, at least until it’s more clear what happens to the data collected.

Many people in the search community believe that Google has stepped over the line, and I tend to agree – at least regarding the program in its current state. While it may result in increased ad ad revenue for Google/Doubleclick, this move raises serious privacy issues, and has been harshly criticized by several online privacy groups. There’s also a creepiness factor – if I’m researching farm equipment, finding ads based on my interest in Christian Louboutins would be somewhat unnerving. Only time will tell us whether users will tolerate Google’s behavioral targeting as-is, or demand some changes to protect their Internet privacy.

I’m about to make my first foray into Google’s Image Ads, which are contextual ads in standard IAB image ad sizes and formats. I plan to begin with static image ads and then try Flash ads from the Display Ad Builder.

I try not to run blindly into any new ventures, so I set out to find some best practices for image ads. Here’s a quick list of the 7 most important things to remember:

1. Image ads should be in a separate campaign from other search or contextual ads.  This is primarily because image ads have a higher CPC; since they take up the space of three text ads, your bid has to beat the top 3 text ads for that space – combined. Also, ads created in the Display Ad builder apparently can’t be moved to a different campaign, so be sure to put ‘em where you want ‘em to begin with.
2. As with any other contextual campaign, the keywords should describe the websites or pages where you want them to display, not the actual product or service you’re advertising. This is a small but important distinction. Use ad groups to focus on specific themes and specific audiences.
3. Images on the ads should be as eye-catching as possible to distract the user from the content, but please don’t be obnoxious or send anyone into an epileptic seizure. You know the flashing ads I’m talking about — don’t be that advertiser.
4. Text on the image ads should be targeted to conversion. The theory is that the image draws the user in and gets them to click, but the text is what enables conversions. The text should accurately describe your product, service, or the action you want them to take, and ideally it will also match your landing page text. If you can also match keywords in the URL, you may hit the relevance trifecta.
5. Don’t forget to use negative keywords for image ads. Your conversion rate will take a big hit if users think they are getting truffles when you offer chocolate lab puppies.
6. Create ads in many different sizes and formats to accommodate the widest variety of places where your ads might need to fit. Some users report a high success rate in getting 120×600 skyscrapers placed, presumably because it’s an odd-sized space to try to fit things into.
7. Your image ad should follow the rules of any successful contextual ad – connect with the user, showcase your features and benefits, describe what is offered on the landing page, and call the user to action.

Of course, all of this is easy for me to say before actually implementing the ads. I’ll have a followup post once the campaigns are up and running. Please don’t be afraid to comment if you have more to add.

This is the first in a series of posts on implementing Omniture SiteCatalyst web analytics. I’m writing this because I’ve been through this process several times now, and each time I could have used some helpful hints and tips. I will not give away any Omniture trade secrets here or post any secret code, I just want to make it easier for other people who may be asking the same questions I did. Omniture typically offers a certain number of consulting hours as part of the implementation process, but I recommend saving those for the more technical issues. There is an online knowledge base to refer to, but it actually answers my questions less than 25% of the time. Note that my examples are based on basic implementation without any advanced coding required.

Initial Omniture implementation (they call it “Fusion Engagement”) generally consists of three stages: Define, Design, and Deploy. The Define stage begins with a kickoff call with your assigned Omniture consultant. This person will  work with you throughout the implementation process, and his/her first mission is to run through a slide deck that sets expectations in terms of roles and responsibilities, initial reporting capabilities, project scope and timeline, and activities and deliverables through each stage of the process. Basic project management stuff.

The next step is to identify two key project stakeholders at your company: the business lead and the technical lead. If your company is large, you may have more people involved, and if it’s very small, the same person may fill both roles. If you work through an agency for web development, Omniture will define what you can and cannot share with the agency. The key thing to remember here is that the consultant is OK with working with several people (hey, more billable hours), but only the identified business and technical leads are assigned as contacts for support. Omniture will then cover any cookie issues and give you Admin access to SiteCatalyst.

The Omniture consultant then enters the Design phase – you don’t really need to do anything at this point. The consultant creates several deliverables, each one integral to your implementation. Once this phase is complete, you’ll have another conference call to review these items:

• The Solution Design document is a spreadsheet showing all the variables you’ll need for implementation. It may vary greatly from business to business, but essentially it should contain a variable map, a site content hierarchy page, a list of business requirements, and a map of your Report Suite architecture. If you’re the one tagging your site, you’ll be spending a lot of time with this baby.
• The Omniture Fusion Playbook is a fancy marketing name for implementation manual. It is customized for your vertical market and your company, and sort of leads you step-by-step through the implementation process. I say “sort of” because there are some very basic things they leave out, meaning n00bs like me have to spend a lot of time hunting and digging in order to make any progress. More on that in the next posts.
• The Data Collection Code arrives in two parts. The first is a JavaScript snippet that you paste on every page of your site (hence the name, Code to Paste), and the second is a standalone JavaScript file that goes on your server.

The Omniture consultant reviews all of these items with you, using another slide deck, which illustrates how each item should be used and the next steps in the implementation process. It discusses the difference between s.props (traffic variables) and eVars (e-commerce or conversion variables), and an overview of the handy browser debugger you can use while coding. There is a review of really basic stuff like how to log in and create new users, and where to find training videos, the knowledge base, and other support resources. This last part is important, because if you use your Omniture consultant as a resource, it will count against your allotted consulting hours – I learned this the hard way.

After this point, you’ve progressed through Define and Design and you’re on to the Deploy stage. You’re pretty much on your own for this part, but you have some good resources to work with. In the next post I’ll cover site structure, page naming, and basic page tagging.

I first mentioned the SEO for Firefox plugin in my post about competitive SEO tools. It already did some cool things, but it’s now been updated to include a nifty feature called SEO X-Ray.

Once you have the plugin installed and updated, a right-click on any page (or left-click, if you’re a lefty like me) in Firefox brings up the option to select it. A transparent grey layer shows on top of the selected page, with a darker grey box showing number of internal and external links to the page, plus meta title, description, and keywords. I know it’s not hard to find this info in other places, but having it all in one place is useful. Clicking the number of links brings up Yahoo Site Explorer, showing the pagerank of each page linked from, type of link (text, img, etc.), anchor text, date, and other info. There is a link to the SEObook keyword density analyzer, which I don’t put a lot of stock in for relevance per se, but I use it to find the general direction a competitor is heading with their SEO efforts. There are options to export the list of links (I couldn’t get this to work), and to run a Whois or IP search.

The dark grey info box is easily moved out of the way using click-and-drag, revealing the transparent layer below. This layer highlights all the Header tag elements on the page (H1, H2, etc.). SEO X-Ray isn’t an entire competitive analysis in one stop, but it’s a very convenient place to start.