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.

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.

For some time, Google’s AdWords algorithm has worked similarly, penalizing accounts with less relevant and lower quality landing pages with higher priced AdWords bids.  But this algorithm is about to change.

In the next week or two, Google will launch its new AdWords algorithm that not only penalizes accounts with low quality landing pages, but rewards pages with high quality landing pages by giving them higher-ranking ad placement for lower-cost bids.

So what does this mean for page owners?  It means, as always, that page content, specifically on landing pages, must be relevant and high quality and that the keywords the page owner bids on are closely related to what’s presented on that page.  It’s an added incentive for page owners to create the best user experience on their landing pages, which Google’s search algorithm already ensures in regards to organic search.

Page owners will likely see their ad positions and keywords Quality Score fluctuate in the coming weeks as the changes take place.  This new development is yet another reason that businesses and page owners must focus on quality content.  Facebook’s new metrics, Google’s search algorithm and this latest AdWords algorithm update mean that more than ever, SEO, PPC and social efforts must be carefully aligned to produce the most relevant and engaging content.

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.

It’s hard to ignore the chorus of voices that are taking a fairly negative view of +1, especially when they claim that +1 is a gold mine for black hat search marketers.  Setting aside this notion that +1 is easy to exploit, writers in the industry don’t really envision Google taking over social media as they have with organic and paid search.  They claim that when rolled out to actual websites rather than search results, +1 would be lost in the din of competing recommendations from Facebook and Twitter or that, even worse, +1 relies on chance to have a shot at becoming successful (i.e. your friend via a Google profile searches for a similar query to you and then gets served the same organic or paid search result).

Perhaps the negativity stems from the fact that the vast majority of Google users don’t have Google profiles.  Of that small subset of users that do have Google profiles, how many of them are logged in every time they run a Google search?  Basic Facebook functionality (viewing complete profiles and connecting to people or businesses) requires a user to set up an account, whereas basic Google functionality (i.e. running a search) does not.  So, Google +1 is already limiting its scope to Internet users that frequently use Google for more than just search.

That’s not to say that there are no advantages to Google +1.  Though +1 does not affect a paid ad’s quality score, it is easy to envision an ad with a high number of +1’s getting a boost in click-through rates (that is, if Google figures out a way to keep black-hatters from gaming the system).  Furthermore, because the subset of people that are likely to use +1 are more likely to be high-powered Internet users (since they’ve bothered to amass friends via their Google profile), there must be an air of credibility attached to a site or ad that gets a good number of +1’s.

A more tangible benefit to +1 is that it appears to be a more accurate measure of actual user recommendations and social media trends.  Facebook’s Like button is an aggregate of instances where users actually clicked the “Like” button, shared a site or wrote a comment, negative or otherwise.  A recent but not-quite-scientific study pegged the accuracy of Facebook’s Like at 39%. Thus, given Google’s knack for producing high quality data about the Internet, one would hope that their +1 measure is as robust as their Keyword Tool results or Trends analysis.

In short, Google’s +1’s main benefits are its accuracy relative to Facebook’s Like and its potential for nudging people towards certain paid or organic search results.  But few people in the SEM industry think those benefits are enough to overcome the limited subset of potential +1 users, the potential for black hat shenanigans, and the fact that it’s a newcomer to the game with respect to Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social media juggernauts.

When analyzing these key facts of Paid Search, it is important to examine a sufficient timeframe for thorough analysis.  Typically, we examine a 3-month period and are careful to observe periods where there weren’t any known issues with a PPC campaign.

Campaign Structure & Budget Allocation

These two areas are usually discussed together, as the PPC campaign structure directly impacts budget allocation.  It is important to have sufficient granularity in campaigns to allow the ability to allocate budget to different areas of a campaign.  Remember that budget is set at the campaign level. One common offense we’ve observed are PPC programs that only contains two ad groups within one campaign – one for branded terms and one for non-branded.  The issue here is that areas of the program performing well cannot be allocated more budget and underperforming areas cannot have the budget reduced.

After taking this top-level view of the program, begin to work your way down to the keyword level, watching your key metrics (such as CPA or ROAS).  Pay attention to how much of the spent budget went to ad groups and keywords that did not yield conversions.  You’ll often be shocked at what this top-to-bottom analysis will uncover!

Text Ads

While examining text ads in a PPC program, pay attention both to the content of the ads as well as their structure within the program.  First, look at the content of the ads and ensure they offer relevance to the keywords found in the ad group (especially the volume drivers).  Ensuring keyword relevance will help with Quality Score (discussed below) and encourage users to click through to your site.  The next area you should examine is the structure.  Also make sure the text ads contain a call to action to help drive potential customers.  Specifically, are there multiple (at least two) ads in each ad group?  If not, the program is missing an opportunity (and need) to continuously test variations of ad copy.

Landing Pages

Driving users to a targeted landing page can be a huge boost to your PPC program.  Instead of driving all users to the home page, a PPC program should send users to category or product/service-level pages that are relevant to their query.  This places the potential customer at the information their most interested in and will improve conversion rates.  As always, make sure the conversion action (sale or lead) is apparent to the user.

Quality Score

Many of the topics discussed above, including text ads and landing pages, directly impact the relevance score, or Quality Score (in AdWords).  In their effort to serve the most relevant advertising possible (and increase the click-generated revenue), advertisers are rewarded for relevance to search queries.  The more relevance between the searcher query, the text ad, advertiser keyword and landing page, the less a click will cost (for the same position).  Examine Quality Score on a regular basis and take steps to improve it over time.  In the end, this will dramatically improve a program.  A target average Quality Score is 7 out of 10.

Bid Strategy

Bid strategy analysis focuses on CPC and average position, examining opportunities to save money (such as overbidding to achieve top positions) and/or be more aggressive with top performing keywords.  The main consideration is how keyword bid decisions impact the CPA or ROAS goals.  It is important to understand that your CPA or ROAS goal needs to drive the bid strategy for your PPC campaign.

Reporting

Reporting is a crucial part of any Paid Search program (or any digital marketing program, for that matter!).  Ensure your reporting allows any part of your marketing team to view performance from the top level (program-wide) all the way to the keyword level.  Reporting should allow for facile comparison of metrics over time as well as across campaign areas.  At Rise, we typically achieve this through the use of pivot tables, as they allow for incredible construction and filtering flexibility.

Final Thoughts

If you haven’t taken the time to do a thorough Paid Search campaign analysis, now’s a great time to start.  With this information in hand, you can work to improve the critical areas of your PPC program and improve the return on your advertising dollars!

If you’d like Rise to conduct an audit of any part of your digital marketing campaign, including Paid Search, please request an audit here.

Paid Search (PPC) Budget Allocation

Many companies, especially those without an ROI-focused strategy, tend to run PPC programs that barely tread water (in terms of profitability).  Are you using a portfolio approach to your program?  Simply, you should make sure the most profitable areas are maximized before providing budget to less efficient areas of the program.  By using this approach, you can rest assured that you’re running the most profitable program possible.

Paid Search (PPC) Bid Strategy

In terms of bid strategy, it may be time to take another look at your program.  Specifically, are you overspending for branded keywords?  Many companies want to ensure dominance for their branded keywords, and maximizing the position of branded keywords is a priority for such marketers.  However, if you consider that individuals seeking your brand are already likely to convert, you may want to test a lower target position.  Many clients achieve incredible savings by dropping their average positions by 0.5-1 places.  This is simple to test, and one all marketers should test at some point.

Match Types and Negative Keywords (PPC)

If your company sells Britney Spears posters, you want to make sure the traffic you are driving to you site is interested in purchasing said posters.  However, if you investigate your potential keywords (and better yet, your existing program), you might find some surprises.  For example, you may find the search query ‘roman spears’ is generating a lot of impressions and even clicks.  However, this traffic is highly unqualified.  Likewise, one of the most popular search queries you’ll find is for ‘britney spears topless’.  Unless your company sells this variety of poster, you’ll want to prevent this unqualified traffic as well.  In the former case, you could consider using phrase or exact match to prevent the unqualified traffic. In both cases, negative keywords can be used to prevent this wasteful spend.

Display/Banner Media Planning

If you’ve been running a display program for some time with the same cost targets (whether CPM, CPC or CPA-based), this may be a good time to renegotiate.  Take the time to review your program and look for areas where you might be able to negotiate better rates.  For example, has one of your networks achieved your target goals with little innovation or change?  If so, it might be time to challenge them a little.  Work with your networks to explore opportunities to improve volume and/or reduce cost in your display program.

Reconsider your Analytics

Many companies, large and small, are paying for analytics platforms that are unnecessary (and often quite expensive).  If you haven’t done so recently, take a close look at your analytics platform and determine if you’re using its unique capabilities or if you’re paying for a platform you simply don’t need.  If your reporting needs are fairly simple and can be achieved via Google Analytics (free) or another inexpensive platform, should you really be spending substantially more on another platform?  This may be a simple line item to remove from your marketing.

Final Thoughts

There are many ways you can look to save money in your Internet marketing program.  Make sure you take the time to review your program.  What steps are you taking to control cost?