Are you and your company dabbling in paid search, but feel that you're far from maximizing the assets you have? Or you're thinking about investing, but don't know how to get fully up to speed in the shortest time possible? Or maybe you were into it five or six years ago but need a serious refresher course, or are an SEO, developer, or another related professional looking to diversify your skill set.
Well, you can browse the forums or sample the short presentations at the conferences, but to get as much as possible in the shortest possible space of time, nothing beats a full day of paid search training, with detail-by-detail examinations of fundamentals, new ideas, live workshop sessions, and more.
Led by me and Mona Elesseily, the Page Zero paid search training course takes place in conjunction with SES New York on March 22, 2010. What's even better - you can take 20% off the already low price if you use coupon code SESPPC20 when you sign up.
Taking Mitch up on a challenge like joining the dialogue as to how we can make marketing meaningful (and not scummy) carries only one danger with it: you can overshoot, egged on by the spirit of the exercise, and say something you really don't mean.
Back before Howie Mandel had a serious(?) career, he appeared on one of those late night comedy shows that was so late that you had to use "late" like five times in the title. This was back in the days when Howie inexplicably put a latex glove on his head and did that thing with his hand when he did standup. Anyway, Howie would appear in a sketch where everyone was sitting around after a couple of drinks, usually near an open window, describing their most edgy or daring escapades. Howie would open his mouth and overshoot the level of the group so far, with the filthiest, most perverted comment imaginable. Even the most depraved members of the group would slowly edge their way out of the room.
Then again, probably no danger of that here. If you've really built your career around Cluetrains, Whuffie, Permission, Life After the 30-Second Spot, and the like, as I have, you've probably reached the point of no return.
Anyway, to throw some fuel on the fire:
I still believe in an abstract distinction I introduced in Winning Results with Google AdWords (2nd ed.), and that is that there is something called "reasonable targeting," to be contrasted with "surplus interruption." Empirical evidence appears to suggest, as Godin has boldly argued for years, that people simply avoid messages if they get too many of them that aren't personal, anticipated, and relevant. But evidence aside, you have to believe it in your heart.
I want to live in a world - not exactly like, but similar to - Google AdWords, where relevance is rewarded and spammery is punished through a sort of "user experience tax". I also want to live in a world where we can freely experiment with a variety of forms of advertising. The "AdBusters" and "no logo" crowd take it too far, not understanding that imposing a moral code that restricts communications is a (totalitarian-style) cure that is worse than the disease.
I do not want to live in a world where:
We change the definition of permission (and other things), because we're marketers and hey, it's OK to spam people if you're a big company, right? This just creates a tragedy of the commons and degrades consumer trust over time. See Seth Godin, "Permission Marketers: Did We Blow It?" (September, 2001)
The professional association for marketers in a given nation sells me on a membership renewal, in part by telling me they'll continue lobbying to loosen up on those horrible "do not call" laws. As a consumer, I hate to be spammed on my personal phone lines. I'm supposed to feel differently as a "marketer"?
For that matter, in my renewal application for the same association, in 2010, it would have been nice if the same trade group had finally put in a checkbox for "search marketing" as a special interest, given that it is nearly half of digital marketing, and certainly more than half of the (targeted, voluntary, granular) traffic to many corporate websites. To go alongside the checkboxes for companies specializing in printing brochures, keeping databases, building websites, maintaining outbound call centers, and emailing people. Maybe next year.
Techcrunch reports on a Wall Street analyst's recent analysis of Yahoo (YHOO).
Among the more painful realities:
Only a third of Yahoo's $21b valuation derives from US assets.
Yahoo's stock-based compensation, awarded to employees and managers with low morale or who foster poor morale, is generous even by the standards of generous compensators like Google or Facebook.
A picture of Yahoo emerges as a company that manages a stable asset, not one that forges new ground. Maybe an appropriate stance for a half-century-old media giant, but a sad fate for a company many of us not long ago still considered a "cool" Internet player.
One thing that surprised me about some people's reactions to this, at least in the US, was the assumption that it was all about European companies and regulators being, well, European about things: envious, bureaucratic, anti-American, etc.
But that misses the point by a mile. The key point of comparison in the broader discussion is always Microsoft. And the biggest legal hit to Microsoft's empire came in the United States.
This week, some European companies are disgruntled with Google and some Italians are throwing a scare into Google execs by literally "jailing" them (albeit with suspended sentences) around some privacy legislation.
But when the real questions start being asked about anticompetitive behavior, they'll be asked on home turf, as they were of Microsoft. And those questions, mind you, require a titan like Bill Gates to stand there as a mere mortal and admit to the specific discussions and specific strategies used to attempt to push key competitors (like Netscape) out of business. That's the power of the US legal system, and don't think it won't happen someday with Google.
Chortling about hidebound Europeans might be comforting in North American digital circles, but that analysis is neither fair, productive, nor predictive of future outcomes. Google, inevitably, will be called on the carpet for many potential violations of antitrust. Not by the "FTC" for "misleading" disclosure of paid search links (sorry Danny, that's a dead issue). But - potentially - for doing exactly what Page and Brin warned search engines could do, in their legendary paper "The Anatomy of a Large Scale ...". Using their position as a monopolist to manipulate which major competitors get to show up, where, and how, in the mix of search results. And boosting their own properties relentlessly when others should be findable. Just for starters.
This being said, I'm never a fan of nuisance lawsuits and petty nitpicking. Time will tell if Google is inside the law in many different areas. I'll be back in a bit with some pro-Yelp thoughts, as they fight off silly conspiracy theories about "extortion" of small businesses. (Necessarily speculative, as court cases must be decided in court, where they belong.)
SES London was a smashing event, but you don't have to fly across the pond to get an early spring tuneup for your online marketing. If you're located anywhere in Southwestern Ontario, this event - Turning Clicks Into Customers - should fill the bill. And best of all, it's all taking place in a single day at a convenient venue. The Lawrence Kinlin School of Business at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, hosts an e-marketing conference next Monday, March 1, 2010.
I'll be speaking on Actionable Analytics (Beyond Lip Service). I'll be joined by keynote speaker and good friend Mitch Joel. Other dynamic speakers include Liz Gray, Alan K'Necht, and Brady Murphy. A great opportunity to learn and also network in a collegial environment. More info about the agenda here.
I've just tried out Google Buzz and I couldn't quite put my finger on why it just wasn't going to be convenient for me to use. But there was this nagging feeling.
Then I realized: services like this are premised on the notion of a single GMail account, a single Google account, or perhaps, just on a certain world view of what people use these accounts for.
Before we were supposed to somehow accept that we live in Mark Zuckerberg's "post-privacy world," the savvy among us began segregating our lives out manually. Spam-boxes, personal email accounts, business email accounts, etc. And then, for me, within the business side (which admittedly overlaps with the personal, given that life is social), it began to be a matter of practical importance to set up even more functional accounts. Skype accounts to talk with teams; Basecamp to talk with other teams. Google Talk to talk with the core group of people. Avoiding the other Google Talk account when people I barely knew began pinging me. Rafts of Google accounts to cover different functions with AdWords and Analytics.
I'm as social as the next person, as anyone who reads the blog posts or the tweets knows. Hey, I just tweeted to @craigyferg, and half-expected a reply.
Then again, I've been a bit shy about Facebook. And probably too fragmented to figure out which platform I should actually live in.
So which Google Account would I put my Buzz in? The business one? Not really, given that I'm trying to avoid distractions there. The personal one, which is for family mainly, plus being a spambox and a place to get invoices when I buy crap? Well, as one of several legacy accounts, it's a jumble, and it's linked to a large address book and a certain Picasa account, and a GTalk account I rarely use and don't want to use. And it makes me uncertain about how much to share, to whom, when, and why.
So the solution is: maybe just go back to Twitter, where the activity is more conscious and there is less integration with everything else, so I'm not tripping over all these overlapping accounts.
Twitter-killer, no. Another step towards the gradual loss of privacy and towards making unconscious decisions to overshare, probably.
It seems like a fun way to communicate for the typical person who has a single account and feels comfortable sharing in a certain way. But isn't it late to the party? Didn't we join Facebook because Facebook was "for that purpose"? When we signed up for GMail, wasn't it for another purpose?
At the end of the day, don't many of us want to put the brakes on all of this Google integration, and just have conversations for specific purposes with specific friends and teams of our choosing, rather than being stuck in this half-broadcasting, gotta-customize-and-remember-whether-you're-oversharing, world? Just askin'.
It's little wonder people are paid big sums of money to remind the layperson of what seems really obvious to the people who work in a specialized field every day... how helpful are you? Here's a test.
1. Newbies to AdWords are taught that "Quality Score is made up of a whole range of factors these days, including landing pages! Yep, those landing pages are really important. Gotta look at that."
Help the newcomer learn faster with:
(a) A reminder that CTR is what they should be worried about, if Quality Score is something they should worry about.
(b) A really convoluted explanation that has them believing that the tooth fairy creates optimal landing pages that result in high Quality Scores, for some reason now forgotten.
2. An important event page not only isn't ranking well in organic Google, it doesn't even appear to be indexed yet. Help troubleshoot the problem by:
(a) Fiddling with the XML Sitemap.
(b) Clicking the result when you find it in Google (dang, won't work this time... as it isn't in the top xxxx results).
(c) Notice that the TITLE TAG is a really long sentence that highlights a bunch of generic words and saves a few of the target keywords for somewhere in mid-paragraph. Recommend changing the title tag to more or less match the target search query.
Troubleshooting is harder than it looks, because some things are just so darn obvious it's all too easy to trip over them.
"This is not about measurement, but about organizations and their capacity to manage this changing real world of reputation. They find it hard to do this, because they're stuck in an old-world broadcast model."
The speaker: Bryan Eisenberg. The setting: a past SES London conference, at an All-Star Analytics panel.
This year's SES London is, once again, particularly heavy on Analytics all-stars. As it should be. Search marketing is accountable, performance is king, and any digital marketer can improve their lot by doing a better job with the analytics toolkit.
But some people and some companies will confuse that importance with a blind faith that the measurement gurus can solve their larger strategy problems. Even the esoteric ones. Like the above question that came before the panel, roughly speaking, asking: "Hey super smart panelists, can you tell me some metrics that will help us decide whether our social media is WORKING?"
The inside-the-box answer is: measure this, measure that, and adopt the same approach to social media as you do to other channels. If you "scored," it's "working." Of course, you can measure a lot of these types of things -- just not with Omniture. Remember, the old public relations world, where a "positive mention" in the "Washington Post" is something you can count? You don't need Jim Sterne or Steve Rubel to tell you that. Nor can these experts help your organization get really good at all the stuff it needs to do to get there.
The out-of-the-box (Bryan's) answer to the social media measurement question is: sure, we'll get around to the measurement piece -- but if you're looking to "hit targets" with your social media spend, or to measure whether "it worked," maybe your organization has given you the wrong marching orders. We don't need more statisticians in this realm: we need more companies who are willing to fundamentally transform the ways in which they communicate.
I say again: (or actually, the panelists said it last year): "Can you put a dollar value on a conversation?"
Sure, you can. But let's start with getting your organization aligned with the idea of a conversation first. The only social-media-savvy company initiatives that will typically hit short-term targets are those that are architected on a broadcast model, so they defeat one of the key purposes of public relations, which is to change perceptions. And to put specific content into the public's awareness of you. To position your organization to carry on conversations that lead to business results, throughout the organization, over time, as a matter of course. Setting up your campaigns based on thin measures of short-term success might actually spur more negative conversations than positive! Or just not get you anywhere fast. You can measure that you're not getting anywhere fast. Great.
Reputations are built over time. You'll never get there if your organization has a bias for shutting down the conversation channel early because "it isn't working." Or you're insulting members of your community by being too goal-directed in online conversations, because you've incentivized your community manager by paying them a bonus for warm leads or upsells.
Am I saying you can't or shouldn't measure PR 2.0? Of course not. But if the milieu is vastly different, then you may have a lot of trouble measuring the impact, and you should probably be measuring something very different. Something that might not even be readily available in today's Google Analytics platform. "Engagement" can't just be about spending 3:28 on a website, or deciding whether someone visited the "About Us" page... as important as those may be in the ordinary course of your marketing planning.
Or to be blunt: before going out to hunt for a next-generation tool to measure "how you're doing out there," you should be actually getting out there, and doing it. If you're not? There are a bunch of free tools like Yahoo Site Explorer, Backtweets, and Google Search itself that will tell you in a couple of nanoseconds if nobody's linking to you, and nobody's talking about you.
How are things? Trick question: it's a matter of perspective. It's a matter of how you frame things.
Hardly anyone searches for "february blahs" (you can look it up on Google Insights for Search), so full steam ahead? Not so fast. The number of people searching for "winter blahs" eclipses that by what looks to be a hundredfold.
And that's nothing. Queries for Seasonal Affective Disorder outstrip searches for winter blahs, a hundredfold, a thousandfold, who knows. :(
But then again, if you compare *that* to fun, active queries like "super bowl 2010" or "vancouver olympics," SAD isn't even on the radar.
Go team! Enjoy the rest of your week, either dreaming of spring, or making the most of winter -- whichever it is you do.
It's becoming a truism that search engine marketing as practiced by busy in-house marketing managers, and others in similar positions who may drift in and out of direct responsibility for those initiatives, need serious "brushing up" every year or so. That used to be described as "changes in the search ranking algorithms you need to keep up with." Now the issue is broader, with changes in the paid search algorithms, new search products, blended search, and more.
Much like going to the dentist, it's polite to claim that you go in for a refresh every six months, and it's polite to tell the dental people that you really do floss every day. But if it's been one, two, or three years since you took a close look, well (cough cough), we'll look the other way and point out that it's what you do next that matters most -- not how many months or years you've been away.
How silly are some of the outdated paid search theories of the past? Well, I couldn't quite believe it when I came across this old piece by myself, pre-Quality-Score, in 2004. (As an added bonus, it was published on a site by my friend Mike Grehan (then being called Mike "Merlot" Grehan) and with associate editor Christine Churchill, another great in the biz.) The piece talked about a narrow tactical debate about high CTR's and whether racking up a strong account history based on overbidding might actually get you discount prices to stay in high spots later on. The CTR history would create a "seal," insulating you from competitors for a long time, unless they bid ridiculously high.
In reality, it was a flukey and inconsistent strategy at the time, as Google already made it clear that CTR (important in the PPC ranking algorithm) was "normalized for ad position". In other words, just because CTR's are naturally higher in 1st ad position than they are in 5th won't make it impossible for you to rise up through the ranks if you spend some initial time testing the waters in 5th. You don't get undue "credit" for hanging out in 1st spot, either.
That's evolved even further, in a couple of ways. Quality-Based Bidding is now 4.5 years old and the algorithm is more opaque and more complex than Bid X CTR. A separate quality check, of your landing page and website, has been working in the system for 4 years, ever-evolving. Well, about 18 months ago, a bunch of folks over on the SEO side discovered all of this and promptly started handing out bad advice that paid search quality scores somehow depended on tweaking landing pages for keyword relevance. Not a terrible idea, but terribly misleading advice.
The second change, related to the first, is that account strategy today needs to be more comprehensive. The auction is mature, most every company that is going to show up in some industries has already showed up, and so you have to get all the moving parts right. Back in the old days, you could listen to someone at Google give you best practices like "don't use a call to action," "you must use a call to action," "capitalize the first letter of every word in your ad," and other warmed-over, highly inadequate snippets of advice.
In reality, paid search isn't a game of gimmicks. High bids, low bids -- neither are magical. Landing page testing is for conversion improvement -- not to magically improve your quality score.
How do you cut through the sea of bad advice if you're new or just returning to the space? Short of reading a 400-page book, I hope that this 40-page ebook, Google AdWords - A Brave New World - I released a few months ago is still helpful to folks getting their feet wet, not wanting recycled advice from 2004, or tips from SEO's trying to sell SEO tactics to people who really need marketing strategy. (There's no charge for this ebook, just opt-in email signup.)
To stay really up to date, though, people do need to pop into the SES conferences for a refresher. Upcoming we have SES London, SES New York, and SES Toronto, to name a few.
For those seeking full immersion in a one-day workshop environment, I'm pleased to announce that Page Zero will launch a paid search training day in conjunction with SES New York, on Monday, March 22, 2010. The full day session will be led by Mona Elesseily and myself. It's aimed at intermediate level (not advanced) digital marketers who want to dig deep and get the fundamentals bang on, and then stretch out and get introduced to a range of intermediate level ways to improve performance.
I really look forward to seeing you at one of these events, whether you're a returning visitor or newer to the game.
