Reid Fenlaw Crashing The SuperBowl

www.crashthesuperbowl.com

Go ahead and let off some steam before the holidays by recording a WebRoast. We know you want to!

The most important step of any PPC campaign is the client discovery and strategy phase. Creating realistic goals based on your client’s needs alongside your prior research is critical to start a PPC campaign off on the right foot.

Before even creating a PPC campaign, build a template based on your goals that you can provide to your client on a monthly basis. Some of these goals may include CPL (cost per lead), CPA (cost per acquisition), ROI (return on investment), ROAS (return on ad spend), total lead generation from form completions, or total calls generated. This will be in addition to the usual metrics of clicks, impressions, CTR, Avg. CPC, total cost, conversion rates, and other base metrics. You and I pay attention to base metrics in the optimization of a campaign. However, the client’s eye will go straight to their overall goals and ROI.

PPC campaigns are often undervalued because different forms of tracking are not always utilized. Tracking lead gen forms is a given, but what about adding a snippet of code to replace the phone number with a unique phone number for visits coming from your PPC campaign. It is true that most phone tracking services can’t track back to the keyword and you will have to pay a good chunk of change if you use a service that does. However, there are affordable ways that you can track the time of call, duration, and have your client alerted that the call came from the PPC campaign. Furthermore, you may try testing out call extensions within the AdWords interface. Google will display a phone number within your ad and forward the call to your client. These calls can be tracked back to the Ad group level at the moment.

In each weekly or monthly report, provide a summary of what you did and what you will be doing in the upcoming month to help optimize the campaign. This may include the usual addition of more negative keywords, ad review, ad testing, keyword testing, bid optimization, pausing underperforming keywords, and so on. Keep your client engaged.

Going even further, you will want to include recommendations for getting the best possible results from the PPC campaign. Landing page testing is an excellent place to start to see what converts best b/t different variables of messaging and shortened forms. Simply adding video and trust factors such as partners, secure site logos, and testimonials can go a long way.

If the client’s campaign is performing well, make sure to take a look at their impression share report. This can be a quick indicator as to whether or not you recommend opening up the budget a bit more.

Creating a collaborative effort with your clients to improve your PPC results month over month is a win-win for both of you. Share what messaging is working best and perhaps they can use this information for other channels. After a strong foundation has been established, keep them informed about opportunities within the display network, re-marketing and other areas. Also, do not forget to utilize multi-channel funneling to help show the additional value of the PPC channel.

Finally, use the annotation field within Analytics to record when you made specific changes. I find it easier than looking through the change history. There’s also Google Experiment within AdWords (beta) that I intend on testing out more as well. This allows you to set up experimental changes to bids, keywords, and Ad groups within each campaign. It’s similar to A/B testing.

I know this is a general overview; however, it hopefully has you looking forward to monthly reporting, and will provide you with some new ideas to present to your customers.

The trouble is, you don’t know what keywords to rank, baby, rank for.

Well, first things first. It is important to remember that rankings don’t mean much unless your website is receiving increased traffic that is leading to increased conversions.

With that in mind, let’s get into the two driving factors in keyword research: competition and relevance.

The short version is: the more general and competitive your keyword, the less relevant it is.

When starting an SEO campaign, you might have a few keywords in mind that you want to rank for. You might use Google’s Keyword Tool and find some very general keywords with big monthly search numbers and want to target them. The bad news is you’re not going to rank for them. The good news is you don’t need to.

Let’s use an example. Say your company sells small, portable, travel-style keyboards for laptops and tablets. Your target market is sales executives that do a lot of traveling.  In thinking about what to target, you think that the general word “keyboard” would be a good keyword because it gets a ton of search volume.

But going after one-word keywords is like buying a commercial on the Superbowl. It’s not only out of your budget, but the product is irrelevant to over 99% of the audience.

Now, of course it’d be cool to have a commercial on the Superbowl, and to rank #1 for “keyboard”, but unless you’ve got unlimited budget your resources would be much better spent going after more targeted keywords (and buying more targeted ads).

“But why isn’t ‘keyboard’ a relevant keyword?”
While it’s not completely irrelevant, think of all the things someone searching for “keyboard” could be looking for: a musical instrument, images of keyboards, history of keyboards, bulk purchases of keyboards for a library, keyboard cat, or any of a million other things.

“Well, that makes sense, but I thought you guys were SEO experts. Why can’t you get my site ranked #1 for general terms?”
You know all of those thousands of reasons why someone might search for “keyboard”? Well the thousands of sites that cater to those thousands of products had that same idea a long time ago and have been pouring time and resources into their SEO efforts for years, while your site is just getting started. To get in the top 10 of Google for that general of a keyword would be so costly that you might as well opt for the Superbowl ad instead.

“So what’s a small business to do?”
The good news is that longer-tail keywords are not only less competitive (and less costly to attain), but they are much more relevant to what you offer. Keyword phrases such as “laptop keyboard” or “travel keyboard” are much more relevant keywords which will result in drastically higher click-through rates and conversion rates, while not draining your entire marketing budget.

“Then how do we come up with a keyword list?”
That’s the fun part. Keyword research is always done with your website’s goals as the driving factor. Research includes an analysis of keyword data that is compiled to include the relevance and competition data of each keyword to target. From there an in-depth analysis is done based on the current sites ranking for those keywords to determine how difficult it will be to rank for those terms, as well as how likely users would be to convert once they arrive on your site.

“Sounds like a plan. How do we measure success?”
It has been stated before but it bears repeating. Rankings are great, but they’re just a means to the end. Rankings are valuable indicators of the success of your SEO campaign, but ultimately your campaign’s success should be measured in terms of increased visitors, leads, calls, downloads, and purchases.

So to recap, you should approach your SEO campaign as a way to achieve your website’s goals. Don’t approach SEO with an ego and get too worried about achieving high rankings for general keywords. Stay focused, stay patient, and stay profitable.

Who: Mike Belasco, seOverflow President speaking at 1:30pm
What: DM Day sponsored by The Rocky Mountain Direct Marketing Association
Where: Cable Center, University of Denver
When: September 15, 2011 from 9am to 6pm or by individual session

Other DM Day speakers include:

• Annie Boeckman, Marketing Director, IKEA
• Marc Braunstein, CEO, ShopAtHome.com
• Doug Thielen, VP Communications, Smashburger

. . . and more

REGISTER TODAY for a full day or an individual session

Congratulations to all the finalists and of course the winners.  We would especially like to congratulate three of our agency partners, Phases Design Studios, HotPress Web and Zenman Productions for making the list.  It is such an honor to be recognized in this elite group.

Of other interest, 8 out of the 10 finalists in our category were digital marketing agencies providing a variety of services including web development and online marketing.  We are very proud to be part of such a successful group of piers in a dynamic and fast growing industry.

Buy Your Ticket Today!

image courtesy of Artotem

There are pros and cons to providing testimonials to your affiliates:

Pros:
– The more you provide to your affiliates, the happier they will be
– Testimonials help sell products, making the affiliate and you more money

Affiliates love when they have all the marketing materials they can ever possibly need. Some programs offer their affiliates banners, business card templates and more and these are the programs that are often the most successful. Keep your affiliates happy so that they want to sell more of your product.

Cons:
– Duplicate content
– You won’t always know how your testimonials are being used

When it comes to duplicate content, you probably won’t have anything to worry about. The search engines only filter out duplicate content. They will most likely see your site as the original source of testimonials and keep your page in the search results as opposed to the affiliates using your testimonials.

If you are worried about duplicate content, consider creating downloadable testimonial images or gathering a list of testimonials for your affiliates to use that aren’t already on your site.

One thing you should think about before offering testimonials to your affiliates is how they plan to use them. After the Federal Trade Commission put into effect new guidelines back in 2009 concerning testimonials in ads, you should consider limiting affiliates to using testimonials only on their own websites and not in ad copy.

Testimonials are a great way to help sell your product and I’m sure your affiliates would greatly appreciate access to such a great resource. Sometimes it can be difficult to get legit testimonials as an affiliate, especially for the new marketers in your program.

Hmm… I know the Texas Governor has talked about seceding, but did not think it was realistically possible.

Is Google no longer recognizing Texas as a state? Unfortunately, the answer is no.. as a second attempt allowed me to select Texas as a state. However, it brings up an interesting question… Can Google Predict the Future?