Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conferences are the largest global conferences focusing around Search and Social Marketing, touching on topics ranging from SEO to Video Optimization to PPC Management. The conference, since its start in 1999, has been held in major cities across the world and brings together professionals from a variety of different industries. The extensive, three-day event encompasses over 70 sessions, within tracks such as SEO, Paid Search and Social Media, along with interactive workshops led by Marketers and SEO professionals from major companies.

SES recently hosted one of their conferences here in Chicago. Rise Interactive’s CEO and Founder, Jon Morris, was featured on Day 1 during the SEO track. Morris participated on a panel focusing on Metrics for SEO. He later went into more detail on the topic with his presentation entitled “SEO: How Understanding Your Analytics Gives You the Edge,” which emphasized the importance of Web Analytics when looking to generate the highest return for your interactive investment. Following the event, Morris participated in an interview hosted by WebmasterRadio.FM where he further discussed the concept and practice of Interactive Investment Management.

SES Chicago presentation: http://www.riseinteractive.com/webinars/understanding-seo-analytics/get-the-analytics-edge.pdf

SES Chicago interview: http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/search-engine-strategies-conference/2011/interactive-investment-management

Finally, after three and a half months of waiting, businesses can create Google+ pages.  If they were allowed to do so from the start, it’s possible G+ would not have lost all the momentum it started with, but that’s neither here nor there.  The point is that now businesses can interact with consumers on Google+ and the potential implications are enormous.

Impact on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

To go along with pages, Google has launched a new type of search called Direct Connect.  This allows users to go directly to a brand’s Google+ page simply by typing ‘+’ in the search bar right before the brand name.  It’s kind of like clicking the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button, except you know exactly where you’re going to land.  This means the content you share on Google+ is easier to find than the content you share on any other social network.  It also means your Google+ page is now as important as your Google Places page and probably only one tier below your website.

There’s one more reason Google+ is important to search.  The content that you share on Google+ is subject to the +1 button.  If you don’t know what the +1 button is, it’s basically Google’s version of the ‘Like’ button, but it impacts search results when you’re logged into your Google account.  Sites that are +1’d by your friends show up higher in your results than those that don’t (you’re also hypothetically more likely to click a link your friends have +1’d than one they haven’t).  If your company shares a link to your blog or your website on Google+, the +1’s that link receives will impact search results.  People can also +1 your Google+ page itself, helping that page rank higher in search results even if a Direct Connect search is not used.

Impact on Paid Search or Pay-Per-Click

Unlike Facebook, Google is not creating paid search ads within the Google+ platform (at least for now).  That means you will not be able to “buy” +1’s by displaying ads to Google+ users based on other pages they follow.  However, you can buy paid ads within Google search that direct people to your Google+ page.  It’s as simple as linking there instead of to your website.  Whether that’s an efficient use of your resources is another question, but it’s certainly within the realm of plausibility.

Paid search ads in Google also carry the same +1’s that organic search results carry.  So a paid search ad linking to a site that lots of people have +1’d is more likely to receive a higher placement among paid results, and could even influence a user’s decision about which ad to click.  Paid searchers will have to account for this in their pay-per-click strategy as the +1 grows in popularity.

Impact on Social Media

Google+ is, after all, a social platform, so how can we not discuss the social media impact of Google+ pages?  Your Google+ page is not like your Facebook page.  They may look similar, but their functionality is vastly different (and consumers use Google+ in different ways than Facebook, if they use Google+ at all—more on that below).  The biggest draw of Google+ has always been the organization of discussions and the ability to conduct multi-person video chats.  While there are other great features (and Google+ has always had great features), those are the two that brands should focus on the most as they set up their Google+ presence.

In many ways, Google+ more closely resembles Twitter than Facebook.  Some recent features such as ‘What’s Hot’ (similar to ‘Trending Topics’) help to cement those similarities.  But Google+’s advantage is the way comments are organized conversationally.  This is an opportunity for brands to communicate in a way they can’t on Twitter.  In other words, your Google+ content strategy should be similar to your Twitter strategy except that you have the ability to organize your conversations.

However, the biggest advantage of Google+ is the video features.  Not only is Google+ integrated with YouTube (did you notice the new YouTube search bar on the Google+ homepage that opens a pop-up video screen?), but you can have two, three or even ten-way communication with your customers by using the Hangout feature.  This is a brand new, exciting way for businesses to interact with consumers.  Use it to make announcements, handle customer complaints, hold contests and more.  Be creative.  Find new uses for video communication that nobody has done before.  The potential here is huge and could be what ultimately brings users to your Google+ page.

Did Google+ Become Relevant Again?

Depends who you ask.  Businesses, large and small, need to pay attention.  The question (and the reason I mentioned these implications are only potentially huge) is whether consumers will pay attention.  The momentum of users rushing to create Google+ profiles is long gone.  Can business pages stir up enough excitement to bring users back?  That’s the big question we have to ask—and the challenge your brand is now faced with.  What I do know is that, consumers or no consumers, the SEO and paid search implications now make Google+ a must for brands.

While those who crave greater Internet privacy may be breathing a sigh of relief, internet marketers everywhere are preparing for what will surely be an interesting bout of reporting.  With encrypted keyword queries, internet marketers will no longer be able to find data regarding search volumes for those terms, nor will websites receive “referrer” data indicating when users arrive at their page via specific search terms except in the case of ads.  Keyword queries that drive users to a site through ads that are displayed based on that query will still be reported, regardless of the connection security.

Before you allow panic to set in, here are a few key facts to consider about the great change:

Searches are only encrypted when users are logged into Google.com via a secure connection. How many people do this?  While Google software engineer Matt Cutts declined to give an exact number, he indicated that this number would be low, somewhere in the single-digit percentages of all Google searches.  So while the numbers reported via Google Keyword Tool will certainly be affected, they can still be used as indicative of ideal search terms for optimization, as always.

Traffic will be reported as usual.  Visits will still accurately portray the true number of organic visits, but will no longer be entirely keyword specific.

Website owners and internet marketers will be able to receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site via Google Webmaster Tools.  Therefore, keywords that drive traffic will still be reported, but in a different manner.  This may, in the end, be a positive development and spur more people to use the Webmaster Tools which have the ability to make reporting much easier.

What will be interesting to see are the types of insights on search behavior that can be pulled, following this development.  For example, will we see a marked decrease in search volumes for, “Is the government watching me?” and “Alien abductions”?  Or will we find that consumers who enjoy queso and want a good recipe also value their privacy.  This new security tweak has the potential to help marketers add to their understanding of their customer and the way they search.

To summarize, the data reported regarding keyword query volumes can still be used as indicative of both good words to select for website optimization, as well as which phrases or words drove the most traffic to a particular site.  Perhaps the greatest impact of this change will be that referral traffic will undoubtedly take a hit; internet marketers and website owners everywhere should be prepared for some fluctuation in this area in the coming months.  However, it is unlikely that this change will cause any significant tremors in the world of internet marketing.  Now we can all rest a little easier knowing Google is looking out for everyone’s interests.

Google bifurcates what it refers to as ‘interest based’ advertising into two groups: Remarketing and Interest Categories.  In this blog, we are discussing the latter of the two.  Interest Categories or Audience Targeting is a powerful targeting method because advertisers can use it to serve ads to people who have expressed, through previous search patterns, an interest in a particular category even if those people are not on a page related to the category in the Display Network.  Obviously, this affords advertisers the ability to cast a much wider net in terms of the potential universe of ads served, while still maintaining a modicum of relevance.

Interest Categories can improve campaign performance by augmenting existing campaign customization.  By promoting increased awareness of your brand and products among a subset of the Google Display Network (GDN), selected Audiences can add volume while still reaching appropriate targets.  For campaigns that already use keyword, placement or topic targeting, Interest Categories are another way to add reach and frequency to advertising efforts.   Also, interest categories allow advertisers to tailor creative and bids to specific interests groups.

Audience targeting is a simple process that is achieved through the Adwords interface.  Within a given campaign, Audiences are added to Ad Groups.  Once a campaign has been selected in the Adwords UI, select the down arrow at the end of the row of tabs and ensure that the Audiences box has been checked.  This will enable the Audience tab to appear.  Upon clicking on the Audience tab, users will select among the Ad Groups within that campaign for which they want to add an Audience target.  Over 1,000 Audiences are available from which to choose.  Audiences are broken out in a hierarchy of twenty-five high level groups or categories.  Each of these groups can be added or they can be expanded to show more granular choices.  The selection box also includes an estimate of “Global Users” that Google calculates are available within the category or Audience.  Once an Audience has been selected, you can either choose additional Audiences to increase the reach or move on to another Ad Group.

Google’s drive to continually innovate and increase relevancy of advertisements is reflected in Audience targeting.  By using the data on user patterns at Google’s disposal, advertisers employing Audience targeting have a tool that marries behavioral targeting with paid search advertising efforts.  The customization added by Audience targeting is another way for advertisers to make their campaigns efficient and effective.

Magma Mobile: Droid Analytics  1.1.8  (Paid App ($2.39)/24 hour free trial available)

Upon logging into the App, users are taken to a scrollable menu displaying all of the associated accounts by profile.  Each entry contains the profile name in bold face, the account name, and the ga ID (not to be confused with the UA ID).  If an account contains one web property or unique profile names within each web property, the interface is functional.  However, if an account has multiple web properties with similar or identical profiles within each property (e.g. a profile named “Blog” in both “Sales” and “Service” web properties of an account), there is no way to differentiate between the two profiles.  For power users of Google Analytics, the inability to distinguish among profiles by web property can be confusing.  One work-around would be to modify the profile name to indicate with which property it is associated.  Alternatively, including the property name in the App would be a wonderful improvement to Droid Analytics.  Perhaps the gaID could be substituted for the property name without adding clutter to the display.  For those who manage several accounts with numerous profiles (as you can imagine is the case at Rise Interactive), the list is overwhelming and difficult to navigate.  I would prefer a more hierarchical interface from which I could select the account I want to view, then choose among properties and finally select a profile.  For users who manage few accounts or a limited number of profiles, this may not be an issue and the interface is perfectly adequate.

After a profile has been selected, the App defaults a table containing pageviews, visits, visitors, time and pages per visit, and bounce rate.  Regardless of the orientation of your device, the display is set to landscape which is good forethought on the part of Magma Mobile.  Buttons on the bottom of the display toggle between daily, weekly, monthly and custom range time frames.  The defaults for each of these time periods are 30 days, 52 weeks and ‘Since 2005’, respectively, but the terms can be changed in the settings menu.  The data in the display can be graphed by selecting the ‘chart’ button.  I like this functionality for its ease of use and ability to render graphically trends and anomalies that may not be readily discernible in a tabular format.

A variety of ‘Top’ criteria can be accessed as well.  Available fields include keywords, source (utm_medium), search engine, referring site and goal conversions among others.  The default for the number of entries displayed is 100 and the date range defaults to month to date.  Both of the settings can be customized.

Overall, Droid Analytics achieves a great deal of what you want to see in a Google Analytics App.  It is functional, easy to use and contains most of the high level summary data that would be relevant to a user on a mobile device.  Even the color scheme is very similar to Google Analytics.  While power users may find limitations to the layout and profile selection, those who have a craving to see Google Analytics data in the palm of their hand will find Droid Analytics more than suitable.  For the $2.39 purchase price, I found it to be a good value.

MUGITEK:  mAnalytics 1.4  (Free App; Paid ‘Pro’ version available $1.13)

The start-up for mAnaltyics is slower and contains a couple more steps than Droid Analytics.  Once you have logged in and accessed your account, all available profiles are displayed.  However, the account name is not displayed with the profile.  For a user like me, the omission of at least the account name (not to mention web property) makes mAnalytics impracticable.  Without an account name attached to the profile, I cannot differentiate among all of the profiles managed by Rise Interactive that employ similar naming conventions.

Once you have selected a profile, the App prompts you to choose from several pre-configured or custom date ranges.  A table will generate with the following metrics:  Visits, Pageviews, Unique visitors,  Pages/Visit, Bounce Rate, Avg. Time on Site and % New Visits.  Four additional reports are available, including segments such as ‘Visits by country’.  Graphing elements are limited to Visits and Pageviews.  The graph is displayed as a white line on a black background with grey axes and scale, which I found somewhat difficult to see.   Overall, the interface is clean and orderly, if unremarkable.  Users who are interested in a very basic App with limited functionality (which, in fairness, is endemic to all Google Analytics Apps) may find utility in mAnaltyics.

These are just two of the Apps available for Google Analytics on the Android operating system.  While I have explored some of the others to varying degrees, I consider these two the best among the paid and free Apps.  As always, I am interested in other points of view and opinions…

Since writing this blog, I have discovered Mobile GA from Actual Metrics.  For a free App, Mobile GA is tough to beat.  The App addresses the most glaring shortcoming for a user like me who has numerous accounts, web properties and similarly named profiles.  The initial screen displays each account with an expandable menu listing the associated profile(s).  Mobile GA also includes the UA number which provides a way to differentiate among similarly named profiles!  While not as robust as some of the paid Apps in terms of available metrics and customization, Mobile GA is superior to any of the other free Apps I have tested.   Portrait orientation displays data in tabular format.  Switching to landscape orientation, the same data is displayed in graphical format.  I found this to be really neat functionality.  Sorry mAnalytics….you have been replaced by Mobile GA on my Android.

Branded terms should be an advertiser’s best converting, lowest cost and most profitable terms.  No other advertiser should be more relevant to a branded term than the advertiser for whose product or service the branded term belongs.  Visitors searching for a branded term will demonstrate a much higher click-through rate for advertisements containing that term than for any other.  Therefore, both of the primary criteria for quality score, CTR and relevancy are best satisfied by the advertiser for whom those brands belong.  A Paid search ad provides the opportunity through either well scripted content or using other tools, like keyword insertion, to present an ad that is highly correlated with the search term.  Both the display URL and the call to action are determined by the advertiser.  The cost of advertising on those terms will be lower for that advertiser than for any other.

A strategy of bidding on branded terms dovetails well with the habits of searchers on the web.  In a joint study from November 2007, comScore and Google observed that 40-60% of searchers used non-branded terms, 33-37% used branded terms and 10-25% used both branded and non-branded search terms.  Yahoo Search determined that advertisers who bid on their branded terms experienced a 7.3% increase in SERP CTR.  Not bidding on branded terms will shortchange an advertiser from displaying a Paid advertisement in a significant portion of searches where that ad could very likely appear.  Talk about lost impression share!

Bidding on branded terms provides other ancillary benefits.  Advertisers bidding on branded terms have a much greater ability to tailor their messaging than they do in SERP results.  By incorporating Paid ads with SEO results, advertisers can customize the message and experience for potential customers.  When a highly ranked SEO result is coupled with a Paid advertisement, you capture visitors’ attention in two different places and dominate the page real-estate viewed by the visitor.  New messaging and information for all your site has to offer are displayed readily in a Paid advertisement.  The result is increased effect, impact and conversion.  Look at the two following examples:

All of the ‘above the fold’ page real estate (or top half of the SERP) is dominated by Paid and SEO results for ABT.

In this example, Due Maternity capitalized on several advertising channels to completely shape the visitor’s experience.  Paid, SEO and social (Twitter and Facebook) branded results direct the visitor to company sponsored results and webpages.

Another undeniable rationale for matching PPC and SEO efforts for branded terms is to surpass the competition.  By ‘setting the table’ on the SERP with a top-ranked branded term advertisement, clients of Rise Interactive are able to control the precise content and preempt any negative press or damaging online articles.  Frequently, branded terms are bid on by competitors.  What could be worse than to have your branded term, which your marketing and public relations team work so hard to craft, get hijacked by a competitor who has successfully bid on your term?  Lastly, bidding on branded terms is advantageous when the SERP does not include any SEO results for an advertiser’s site.  In this instance, a Paid advertisement installs your branded term on the page and provides an opportunity for you to reach and potentially acquire a customer.

Optimizing your SEO and bidding on branded terms for paid search are two extremely valuable tools for interactive advertising success.  Rather than being mutually exclusive, they are a powerful combination yielding higher click-through and higher conversion rates for your online campaigns.

Recently, rumors have started circulating that Amazon will announce its own tablet product to be released later this year. Forrester believes that it will outsell the iPad in its first quarter, but we’ll just have to wait and see if this comes to fruition (http://mashable.com/2011/08/29/amazon-tablet-ipad-forrester/). The main takeaway from this news is that tablets are here to stay and are a huge, (mostly) untapped resource for advertisers everywhere.

Recently, reports have shown that nearly 15 million iPads were sold in 2010 alone, while estimates for 2011 are expecting upwards of 28 million. This means that one out of every 140 people on this planet currently own an iPad. That figure in itself is amazing, but the accessibility that this offers is almost mind-blowing. Since Google AdWords has specific controls, you could potentially advertise to every person in the US with an iPad, having an extremely tailored and focused advertising campaign in a fairly new and unexplored form of marketing.

While the success of mobile paid search advertising is still not well known or developed, the reach of this medium is too incredible to pass up.  As I’ve discussed in other blog posts, internet marketing is an extremely measureable type of advertising and can bring excellent returns to many types of businesses. With the widespread nature of mobile phones and tablets, among other devices, it will almost certainly become more important for advertisers to become active in this medium to drive a successful marketing campaign.

Even if Apple gets some new competitors this year, the message is clear: we as a society are becoming more dependent on mobile devices and hence, marketing in this realm will become only more important and profitable as time goes on.

PPCR is updated daily from the client’s search engine accounts using API links to dynamically extract results.  In addition, PPCR retroactively pulls historical data so that latent conversions and search engine updates are accounted for in the reporting interface.  In this manner, PPCR is a clear advantage over static reporting, especially for clients who use a longer conversion window.

Upon logging into PPCR, the user is taken to the report home screen.  Paid search results from the entire list of a user’s enabled search engines are presented in an easy to use format.  Reports can be trended for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly time periods via a simple drop-down menu.  Hyperlinks on the left menu allow for selection among various criteria including the specific search engine, campaign/adgroup/keyword and branded or non-branded terms.  Perhaps the most insightful report is the Comparison report.  Users can compare results from two different time periods using one of nine predefined date ranges or by inputting a custom date range.

For those who are more graphically oriented, PPCR offers a variety of graphing options to best render data in the most insightful and user-friendly manner.  Trend, historical, individual metrics and daily data can all be graphed over the time period selected by the user.

PPCR offers a full complement of relative and sum metrics that users can view to assess their advertising performance.  All performance, cost, revenue, efficiency and allocation metrics that advertisers could possibly want to examine are available for report inclusion.  Report rendering can be customized to include whichever metrics the user wants in whatever order they wish to see them appear.  Metric order and selection can be saved as a default so that the interface is always in a consistent and preferred format.

Account creation is a simple process in PPCR.  Once a new account is created, the account owner has complete control and can create and delete new sub-accounts, users and passwords.  User access can be defined to limit entitlements to the data and materials the account owner determines is appropriate.

Data can be accessed in the user interface directly, through an excel download or in a printed hard-copy.

To sign up for a free trial or to learn more, visit the PPCR website.

Marketing operations, a discipline that has been around since the late 90’s is seeing massive adoption in organizations large and small in and in both B2B and B2C oriented companies. The big challenge is understanding what the scope of this profession entails, as it can mean many things to many people.

Research firm, Sirius Decisions defines the purpose of Marketing Operations as: Being responsible for the capture and dissemination of marketing information to the enterprise, be it performance metrics, data or strategy/planning and initiatives and budgets, as well as the systems and processes that help generate this information in a systematic, predictable fashion. It drives both visibility into – and productivity for – the marketing organization, which in turn benefits the functions that work with marketing on a regular basis.

A neat and concise definition, but I think a better one comes from their Marketing Operations Strategies page:

Marketing operations is sometimes viewed as the “land of the misfit projects,” a catch-all of sorts for initiatives that have no other home. As this function evolves, its charter must become more finite in order to truly show marketing’s return on investment for the business.

People in this role basically have become the keepers of all things data, and in a majority of cases, all things involving technology. Managing SEO, email/nurturing, attribution, and Paid Search (and the business partners associated) often wind up in this group. Analytics, web and offline, often fall here too. People in Marketing Operations also become key figures in Sales Enablement and spend as much time in CRM systems as people in traditional sales functions.

As marketing has evolved into a highly measured industry where ROI is king, Marketing Operations professionals become the engine that keeps the machine moving. In the end, it is amazing it took so long for this profession to actually become one.

Understanding, analyzing, measuring and testing are all critical to the future success of any organization. Marketing, as has happened infinite times already, has evolved to a smarter more focused discipline where owning a number is no longer reserved just for sales. When the next big thing in marketing occurs I expect Marketing Operations to be leading the charge.

Old Version:

New Version:

The question to consider: should you go through all the trouble of renaming your domains to have calls to action in it?  Maybe for your micro-sites— if you’ve got them.  Otherwise, do you want to be paying for traffic to your site forever when nobody remembers that your webpage is “www.buyatyourstoreonline.com” instead of “www.yourstore.com”?  Remember that you can’t just 301 redirect your way around this.[2]

Should you rely on dynamic keyword insertion in your Display URL as a way to boost your click-throughs?  Yes—as long as you don’t mind the plus signs in your display URL when Google inserts your two or three word keywords in the ad; that certainly does not look as clean as an underscore or a dash.  Not to mention, you probably aren’t running too many keywords that are one-word, with dashes, with underscores or without spaces.  Interestingly enough, there are spaces in display URLs on Bing (where they also seem to have elevated the display URL position for ads above search results).  In my opinion, because of those spaces, display URLs on Bing don’t look real.

Bing Display:

Typically, the standard response to a change such as this is to wait and see.  I, for one, do not think that this “dramatic” increase in the relevance of the display URL will transform the ad copy writing game all that much.  Though you should always be creative with those display URLs, it is still wise to consider your headline and description text as the most important elements.  Focus on what Google will turn into your hyperlink and where you can shoehorn your top traffic driving keywords in the ad copy.  Do that and the click-throughs should most likely take care of themselves.

[1] http://robburns.net/google-adwords-management/google-adwords-display-url-important/

[2] http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdWords/thread?tid=534e69b805ba8079&hl=en