Looking at your number of followers likethesepeople as an indication of your coolness or social media prowess is a lot like picking a large stack of 500 one dollar bills over a “small” stack of 10 one hundred dollar bills. Each dollar has a different value in the same way that each twitter follower has their own value. See Kevin Rose’s recent post on how to get additional Twitter followers.
Every time you mention “I need one more follower to get to X followers” you should lose followers not gain them.
That kind of neediness shows that you know nothing about social media (if that is what it is being called this week)! Don’t fall into the trap of looking at the number of followers you have as some kind of validation that you are good at what you do / know what you are doing. Stop it. OK. Just stop it. We all get followed by fake profiles, right? Will that follower ever be able to help you? NO! Then who care that they are following you, even though they add to your numbers, right!
Who you follow, and who follows you, should be more of a function of your propensity to HELP people and their propensity to help you. Until I can ask a question and get inundated by quality answers I do not have the right followers.
The number of people who find you interesting is not nearly as important as the number of people who are willing to help you when you tweet a problem you are having.
I for one don’t just follow people who follow me, I tend to follow people who are into HELPING people, very often helping others comes in the form of a DM which I can’t see, but my litmus test is simple – links in your Twitter stream (especially in replies) shows me that you are trying to get answers out to other people or post things that your followers might find helpful.
As I mentioned in my presentation at the Affiliate Summit in Vegas (recap here), one of the easiest ways to build links is seek out people you can help, in real life, in charities, on twitter, you name it. I talked about this not groundbreaking idea in my blog post titled the three link building tactics NO one talks about the first one is just simply helping people.
Twitter can be your water cooler, heck its mine too, but I do try to cheer friends up that are having bad days, and answer questions for people who are seeking to answers on things I may know. That is how you build quality Twitter followers, stop tweeting about your number of followers and GO HELP someone.
I recently got followed by someone â yes +1 followers on my tally. You know how I got followed by him.
I did a search one day when I was bored on an area where I might know a thing or two, SEO:
And many other searches will show you tons of people like this tweet here from @brandonburke
Its only 140 characters people, so it isn’t a MAJOR time commitment to help, as a result of this tweet I got one follower and its OK to me to build my followers one at a time by helping rather than gimmicks.
Following best practices in paid search can sometimes feel mechanical. There are certain settings that apply to almost every account (such as turning off the content network on new search targeted campaigns) and I’ve often found myself implementing these best practices without really thinking about why they are being implemented in the first place. Turning off the content network on campaigns built for search may not be the best example because it is pretty obvious why you wouldn’t want to leave the content network on, unless that campaign was built specifically to run on content sites.
Another best practice I’ve found to be equally as mechanical but not necessarily quite as obvious is eliminating research stage keywords from paid search traffic. This is especially true for e-commerce accounts. One of the first things I do when building a new e-commerce campaign is to add words like reviews, how to, vs., versus, compare, etc. to my campaign negative keyword list. Upon first glance, this seems to make perfect sense. There are four steps in the buying cycle, and it doesn’t make sense to pay for traffic from consumers in the early stages of the process. Or, does it? For example, let’s say that I’m thinking of buying a new pair of Repetto ballet flats. According to the buying cycle, I’m likely to go through the following 4 steps:
1. Awareness: Maybe I read a cool article about Repetto ballet flats.
2. Interest: The article was cool. I’m interested. At this point, I start doing online research. How much, what
style, where to buy, etc.
3. Desire: I’ve checked out the Repetto home page and read some product reviews and at this point I like what I’ve learned about the brand, and I think I’d like to have a pair of Repettos.
4. Action: I decide on a store and purchase the shoes.
So, let’s say I’m in stage 2 and I’m interested in reading some reviews. I go to Google and search for some variation of “Repetto reviews”. Here is what I might see
First of all, you’ll notice that there are only two paid search ads because most of the companies running paid search campaigns for their Repettos added “reviews” as a negative keyword. The organic results provide some options for me to read some product reviews, but the two paid search ads that do appear are not well targeted to my query so I’m not likely to start there. If I saw an ad like this, though, I would be far more likely to click the ad:
Now, this is just an ad that I wrote in the iGoogle AdWords Composer Tool. But, let’s imagine that I actually had a client who sold Repettos and this was an actual product review written by a customer on their website. In this case, I’m writing a highly targeted ad (good CTR â check!) that contains actual copy from my website (good Quality Score â check!). When the customer arrives at my site by clicking the ad, they are in stage 3 of the purchase process. The only remaining stage is the actual purchase, which is a decision that can be made right on the landing page after reading some of the reviews. I’m not saying that I plan to throw the practice of eliminating research keywords from my paid search traffic out the window completely. For a brand like Repetto with a lot of search volume, it might not be entirely appropriate to include research stage traffic because I’d most likely be generating enough qualified traffic from stage 4 oriented keywords like buy Repettos. But in the case of smaller, niche brands and products without a great deal of traffic or competition (and therefore lower CPCs), the paid search account might benefit from pulling in this stage 3 traffic because it represents a branding opportunity and also increases traffic in a way that is qualified and useful to the consumer.
Matt Cutts blog published a post this week on noresults review pages. These are pages that show up when searching for “[insert product] reviews”, but the page simply says “No reviews are available. Be the first to review this product!” This definitely creates a poor user experience.
This problem was a top complaint to the Google spam team and it looks like they are being true to their word to fix it.
A client is currently going after several “[insert product] reviews” keywords. The volume on four keywords totals over 2500 searches/month. Nothing monumental, but nothing to ignore as it is relevant traffic we know our client deserves. Several sites outrank our client that don’t have any reviews for these products.
Google’s spam reporting site was linked in the post, so I decided to give it a go and see what type of impact reporting four guilty sites would have on their rankings. Reports were sent in on Monday. Nothing changed Tuesday. Nothing changed Wednesday. Thursday morning the four sites dropped an average of 60 places. Other sites that were not reported remained consistent in their rank.
The sites reported most likely had a huge bounce rate when users clicked through & found no reviews to read. Straying from the point, they all deserved to be booted out of top 30 results.
How hard is it to have reviews written about a product? Writing reviews can be outsourced through services like MechanicalTurk, written (and disclosed) by members of the company, or a “review the product you purchased” link can be inserted into a delivery confirmation or service followup email.
I can’t think of many easier ways to move a client four places within three days without making any changes to the site. Recommendations on the optimum number of reviews has not been tested. I would error on the side of caution and have more reviews if your site has only one review for a product or service. As seen here, Google is enforcing the fact that sites with actual reviews will help create a better user experience.
I literally just finished checking ad positioning for a PPC client of mine, on a new campaign we are testing around the topic of “scams.” No, we are not soliciting scams! Instead we realized that in our industry, as unfortunate as it is, there are a ton of scammers out there and therefore a ton of buzz around companies (and therefore search queries) that are frauds, scams, etc. Instead of shying away from this, we wanted to take advantage of the search volume it brings (especially as few people will advertise here). Therefore the ads we are testing highlight our differences from the scammers â Experience, Trusted Business, Money Back Guarantees, Rigorous Screen Processes, etc.
Seems simple enough, right? WRONG. DEAD WRONG.
Instead I found a terrible case of Keyword Insertion Gone Bad, and just had to rant a little! From this first example, on the query “Psychic Scams,” you’ll clearly see my case in point:
3 of the 5 ads are using Keyword Insertion â Promoting “Psychic Scams” for their company. I have a funny feeling this is probably the OPPOSITE of what they were aiming to accomplish. At this point my mind began running â this has to be a mistake, maybe just a coincidence. So, I began thinking of other industries where scams run rampant, hoping NOT to see this again (It makes us PPC marketers look, well, just BAD!). Unfortunately, I found the same sickness occur again and again:
Example 2 – Query: Gold Scams
Example 3 – Query: Car Scams
Example 4 – Query: Dating Site Scams (Are you starting to see my point here?!?)
Example 5 – Query: Psychic Fraud
Example 6 – Query: eBay Scams (Take notice to the similarities in the ad above in example 5)
I think by now you clearly see my point. I see some serious marketing dollars being wasted here!
While I am not frowning upon the use of Keyword Insertion in general, there is an absolute time and place to use it. In fact, smaller, niche ad groups tend to fair well using Keyword Insertion. When used correctly, you can certainly see a lift in your CTR and potentially in your quality score and conversion rate. However, it does require strict management and close monitoring. An article written by RedFlyMarketing (which highlights eBays horrendous use of Keyword Insertion) hits the nail on the head with the ins and outs of using “Keyword Insertion” to your advantage. Additionally, if you are going to use Keyword Insertion, cover your bases and take another step – Be sure that your negative keyword list is built out to avoid any mishaps such as the ones above (Please don’t contribute to making us PPC marketers look bad! )
At about 1:37 the Blendtech CEO Tom Dickson experiences some problems blending a RAKE! Notice someone in the crowd says GET THIS UP ON YouTube TODAY, you gotta get [XYZ's laptop now]â¦this is [not understandable but sounded like great or crazy].”
Everyone strive to NEVER be this GUY in life. NEVER! If you are you will fail.
A blender that is made to chop fruit, onions, ice, and make drinks that give us morning headaches and the CEO is willing to stick a wooden rake in it and it blends 85% of the rake before it jams, thats pretty successful, my blender has a hard time with frozen fruit.
A hater is thinking GET THIS UP ON YouTube! When they should be thinking:
This blender has devoured 85% of a rake BEFORE it jammed, I am never going to stick a rake in my blender, this is an amazing product.
How can I someday build something that is as remarkable
Instead the idea is get this up on YouTube? Really? Are you kidding me?
Well I bet no one is paying you to keynote are they?
I bet you don’t have as much fun at your job as the CEO Tom Dickson â he gets to blend Chuck Norris’s enemies at his jobâ¦I can’t get paid to do that!
Haters will produce videos of one time when this product devoured only 85% of a rake, that is NOT a failure to me, given how the product is used in the real world. It’s not that he recorded it, but it the excitement I hear in this haters voice that he got a YouTube video out of it.
Here’s my advice to everyone, build something that is so great that people pay you to speak about it, that’s remarkable, then you won’t have time to record videos of other great people’s miscues and occasional failures. Your 2 minutes and 44 seconds of fame are overâ¦Tom’s are continuing â he just keynoted at Pubcon a few months ago. Blend that!
People doing great things out there, practice for the haters, so that when someone disrupts you or thrives on your miscues you are prepared. I was pretty prepared here, every time I look at this video I don’t know how I was cool enough under pressure to not trip and stumble over my words – when I got grilled, I am not sure that Jason is hating here so much as he’s trying to ask useful questions, but I felt a twinge of “I’m going to expose you on stage” in the line of questions.
I expose people all the time, but only when they are doing something blatantly wrong or giving bad advice that will hurt someone’s SEO efforts, so I think there are times to expose people – but getting excited at the opportunity to disprove someone just for the sake of discrediting them is whack! Happy Friday!
One of my clients operates in an extremely competitive market. In this cut throat — PPC environment a situation has arisen that brings me back to an Econ — 101 concept I learned about in my undergrad years — “The Prisoner’s Dilemma”
The definition of the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” pulled from Wikipedia is below:
“In this game, regardless of what the opponent chooses, each player always receives a higher payoff (lesser sentence) by betraying…However, if the other player acts similarly, then they both betray and both get a lower payoff than they would get by staying silent…Hence a seeming dilemma.”
So here is my Prisoner’s Dilemma…
Several of my client’s competitor’s have decided to create multiple Adword’s accounts and are serving several ads for the same keywords. This practice is not new and is referred to as “double serving” in the PPC world. One competitor is mainly doing this practice to protect their brand. At one point, I noticed that about 5 of the ads on the first page for the competitor’s brand were being run by this same company.
The company was doing things like creating a landing page that sat on a different domain but clicked through to their main domain. Additionally, they were linking their ads to press releases that talked highly of them or they were linking to their listing with the Better Business Bureau.
What was the impact on my client’s performance?
On terms that contained my competitor’s name from August through November:
- CPC increased over 100%
- Avg. Position went from around 3.5 up to 7
- Conversions fell over 50%
- CPA went up over 100%
Of course other external factors may have also been in play here impacting these number, but the practice of double serving was helping to push my CPC’s up, while simultaneously pushing my position lower, which understandably led to lower conversions and a higher CPA.
I am also seeing another competitor carrying out a similar practice but on my client’s Brand name.
Through August to November:
On my brand terms:
- CPC increased over 100%
- Avg. Position remained flat
- Conversions fell 30%
- CPA went up over 47%
Again, there are definitely other external factors at play, including the environment for this industry getting increasingly more competitive, but individual competitor’s taking up 1 to 5 spots for the same keywords is not helping my performance.
When I first starting seeing the blatant double serving taking place, my initial instinct was that I had to play in this game.
Remember the prisoner’s dilemma, instead of all the “players” trying to cooperate, by playing “fair”, when one competitor defects, then we all need to defect to be better off.
My immediate thought was that I needed to protect my client’s brand by setting up duplicate accounts and “double serving” ads. After my anger cooled and I talked about the dilemma with my client and colleagues, I realized this may not be the optimal response.
Why you may ask?
Let’s go back to the prisoner dilemma again “by us all defecting then we are all worse off”
By us all defecting, we all will have to pay higher CPC’s to achieve the same position, which again increases our spend and increases our CPAs
Instead, of playing in this game, my client and I decided to play defense.
The practice of double serving is actually not allowed according to Google‘s rules (see link below), so we have been reporting instances of “double serving” to Google.
So far, reporting the violations has been working and Google has been linking the violating accounts, which effectively stops the domains from showing up for the same keywords.
However, we are not out of the woods yet…
According to the comments I have read in blogs and forums, it is very easy for violators to violate again and not be caught by Google.
In fact, my Google rep even recommended that I watch out for the violators to appear again. Also, new violators may enter the landscape.
Ultimately, as in the prisoner dilemma, the deflections still make us all worse off, because now I have to spend my time monitoring for double serving.
If we could all play fair, we all would be better off, except maybe Google who stands to make more money as we collectively drive up our CPC’s and spend to stay competitive in the market.
