Archive for February, 2009
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
Google’s PlusBox is back in Alpha, being made available on an invitation only basis to Advertisers and seen by only 1% of users. Based on the outcome of the Alpha test, a Beta test with a larger sample size may follow. Our rep didn’t elaborate on how advertisers were chosen, but a large inventory seems to be one common trait shared by advertisers in the PlusBox results we’ve seen so far. For an example of what PlusBox looks like, go to Google and search for “luggage” Here is what you’ll see:
Ads for eBags.com and Luggage.com have the product PlusBox underneath their ads. Clicking the PlusBox to enlarge the ads provides details on 3 products from each advertiser:
Off of the top of my head, I can think of a few reasons this might be beneficial to advertisers.
Visitors that click through to the store after expanding the PlusBox are more likely to convert. After expanding the PlusBoxes for the advertisers above, I can get a good feel for what each store offers and determine whether or not that fits my needs. If I’m looking for luggage to take on a weekend camping trip, I’m probably not going to be interested in Luggage.com based on the products displayed (I wouldn’t want to take $435 Diane Von Furstenberg luggage camping). However, I see that eBags.com carries luggage priced around $55, so I wouldn’t be as upset to get this luggage a little dirty.
Also, the PlusBox allows visitors to see a variety of products without sending them to a search results page or a general brand/product category page. Let’s say that one of my clients just added a new brand to their product mix but organized the individual products into pre-existing categories (so for example, maybe my client just started carrying a few Diane Von Furstenberg luggage items but decided to arrange them according to their utility — makeup bags, overnight bags, luggage sets, etc. rather than creating a page specifically for the Diane Von Furstenberg brand). The only way to direct an ad to all products I’m carrying for this brand would be to send them to a search results page which is not ideal for a variety of reasons. In this case, PlusBox provides a solution for giving users a sneak peek at the Diane Von Furstenberg pieces my client carries.
It will be interesting to see if PlusBox will be made available to all advertisers. If so, before opting in I would want to know a few things:
How are the products displayed being selected? In the case of the general “luggage” query above, it does not seem ideal for 2 of the 3 products displayed for Luggage.com to be Diane Von Furstenberg brand bags since there are well over 50 brands available at the store (and considering that the query was for “luggage” and not “Diane Von Fursternberg luggage” or “designer luggage”). Knowing how the product snapshots are chosen might determine whether or not I would be interested in this feature.
Is there a charge to the advertiser when someone clicks the PlusBox? Hopefully not because that would nullify the above two reasons I think PlusBox might be useful.
Are PlusBox clicks available in reporting? If I were opted in to PlusBox I would want to be able to compare PlusBox clicks vs. click-throughs to my site and any resulting conversions.
PlusBox is a cool little feature and it will be interesting to see what happens next!
Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
Google’s PlusBox is back in Alpha, being made available on an invitation only basis to Advertisers and seen by only 1% of users. Based on the outcome of the Alpha test, a Beta test with a larger sample size may follow. Our rep didn’t elaborate on how advertisers were chosen, but a large inventory seems to be one common trait shared by advertisers in the PlusBox results we’ve seen so far. For an example of what PlusBox looks like, go to Google and search for “luggage” Here is what you’ll see:
Ads for eBags.com and Luggage.com have the product PlusBox underneath their ads. Clicking the PlusBox to enlarge the ads provides details on 3 products from each advertiser:
Off of the top of my head, I can think of a few reasons this might be beneficial to advertisers.
Visitors that click through to the store after expanding the PlusBox are more likely to convert. After expanding the PlusBoxes for the advertisers above, I can get a good feel for what each store offers and determine whether or not that fits my needs. If I’m looking for luggage to take on a weekend camping trip, I’m probably not going to be interested in Luggage.com based on the products displayed (I wouldn’t want to take $435 Diane Von Furstenberg luggage camping). However, I see that eBags.com carries luggage priced around $55, so I wouldn’t be as upset to get this luggage a little dirty.
Also, the PlusBox allows visitors to see a variety of products without sending them to a search results page or a general brand/product category page. Let’s say that one of my clients just added a new brand to their product mix but organized the individual products into pre-existing categories (so for example, maybe my client just started carrying a few Diane Von Furstenberg luggage items but decided to arrange them according to their utility â makeup bags, overnight bags, luggage sets, etc. rather than creating a page specifically for the Diane Von Furstenberg brand). The only way to direct an ad to all products I’m carrying for this brand would be to send them to a search results page which is not ideal for a variety of reasons. In this case, PlusBox provides a solution for giving users a sneak peek at the Diane Von Furstenberg pieces my client carries.
It will be interesting to see if PlusBox will be made available to all advertisers. If so, before opting in I would want to know a few things:
How are the products displayed being selected? In the case of the general “luggage” query above, it does not seem ideal for 2 of the 3 products displayed for Luggage.com to be Diane Von Furstenberg brand bags since there are well over 50 brands available at the store (and considering that the query was for “luggage” and not “Diane Von Fursternberg luggage” or “designer luggage”). Knowing how the product snapshots are chosen might determine whether or not I would be interested in this feature.
Is there a charge to the advertiser when someone clicks the PlusBox? Hopefully not because that would nullify the above two reasons I think PlusBox might be useful.
Are PlusBox clicks available in reporting? If I were opted in to PlusBox I would want to be able to compare PlusBox clicks vs. click-throughs to my site and any resulting conversions.
PlusBox is a cool little feature and it will be interesting to see what happens next!
Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
SEER has an ever expanding linking process. Sometimes we deviate from this process when we see certain things ranking for keywords we’re targeting. It can be frustrating not ranking well for keywords, but if the opportunity is there to get a link or a mention from a site ranking better than our client, we’ll try to land it. So, how did Yahoo Answers drive 40% of the site traffic last week?
Yahoo Answers started showing up in Google results. It’s not uncommon to find Answer sites, Mixx, Squidoo, Digg and other similar sites showing up in the top 100, but we took special notice when it came up 5th. While there is little if any link value in the nofollow link you can almost infinitely drop into Yahoo Answers, the visibility factor pulled Yahoo Answers back from our 2005 radar.
Taken from Yahoo Answers Community Guidelines:
“Yahoo! Answers is a place to gain knowledge, not customers, page views, or dates. If you have years of experience in something, have a special hobby, own your own business, or if you are a knowledge partner, it’s OK to accompany a good, on-topic answer with a link to your website, blog, or email to offer more information.”
We have some experience in this industry and I’m answering on behalf of the owner of the business. Spamming Yahoo Answers is one thing and will get your account flagged. Answering targeted questions with an informative link that provides exactly what the user is looking for is spot on.
We’ve mentioned setting up RSS feeds as a part of previous posts and it’s a huge time saver. Plop a query for my client’s product and see what people are asking. I’ll answer if I think the client has a great product/solution and could get selected as the best answer. Also mentioned is doing something. Something is always better than nothing.
So, a new product was launched last week and my client picked it up. Below is a graph from Google Trends for the highest search term.
Volume from a few answers that weren’t selected as best answer trickled in. Then very suddenly the trickle increased 2000%. Then increased another 200% from that level. At the end of the business week, Yahoo Answers drove 3x more visitors than direct traffic to the site. Total site traffic increased 300% that week. Why? Our answer was selected as best answer. Yahoo Answers was graciously placed at position 5 in Google for the term graphed above.
Right timing? Yep. Unusual circumstances? Maybe, although could we have received even more traffic if we acted sooner?
Lesson learned is that no matter how unimportant a site may seem, no matter if the links are nofollowed, if the site is showing up in rankings, working to get that link on there could be a goldmine for your client.
Posted in SEO | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
As an experienced SEO or PPC manager, there are certain performance trends you are accustomed to seeing when you’re doing your job right. With SEO, as you optimize the site and your top keywords increase rankings, site traffic should increase and conversions should increase. For PPC, over time by optimizing your bids, expanding your KW builds, optimizing your ad copy and landing pages, conversions should increase as your CPA goes down. A search firm that does not expect to see these increases in performance and strive to reach these performance goals is not doing their clients justice.
However, while we all may strive for the above scenarios and give each other high fives around the office when they happen, sometimes in the real world it just does not work out that way. In instances where you’ve put your sweat and tears into optimizing your campaigns, but performance drops or remains stagnant, how do you explain it to yourself and to your clients?
Before questioning your strategy and the changes you made in the account, take a look into Google Insights. John at SEO Boy, wrote a great article on how he uses Google’s Insights to project SEO leads and traffic.
Below are 3 examples when Google Insights, provided me with great data and “insights,” which helped to explain atypical search behavior:
Atypical Performance Trend #1 – Increasing Rankings but traffic staying flat or decreasing
I was recently working on an SEO client where we were killing in Google in terms of Rankings. We were ranked number 2 for the client’s most competitive and traffic driving term. We had also achieved top ranking on numerous other high search volume terms. Yet, month over month we were reporting search traffic remaining relatively flat since January. To help shed light on this very frustrating situation, we turned to Google Insights. Below is the Search Trend of the Top Volume Keyword:
Upon showing this trend to the client, he understood why their search volume had not increased since January 2008. The search volume that existed had fallen since we started the campaign, so flat traffic was actually a win when overall interest in the product was declining.
In situations like these, it is important to emphasize to clients that as search marketers, we don’t create search volume; instead we help our clients capture a greater percentage of the search volume that already exists.
Atypical Performance Trend #2: PPC Client Conversions dropping over time At SEER, our PPC team creates optimization plans, where every 5 to 6 weeks we set goals on how we plan to improve our campaigns. One goal we may set is to increase our conversions over time. We then outline our plan to reach this goal. Recently, I set the goal to increase conversions for a client and, week over week, I optimized the account to reach this goal. I expanded our keyword list, optimized ad copy, ensured our positions were staying competitive and, to my dismay, week over week conversions fell. Again, I looked to Google Insights for my answer. Below is the search volume trend for the top converting keyword in this campaign:
Again, like in the above example, this graph brings clarity on falling conversions.
Again search marketers do not create interest; we just help to ensure that when the interest is there, our clients are getting a bigger slice of the pie than our competitors.
Atypical Performance Trend #3: Unexplained Sky Rocketing Performance: Now, Google Insights can be a double edged sword. It can definitely help you justify stagnant or declining performance, but search marketers often have to put their egos aside when a client’s performance suddenly skyrockets and ask is it solely the result of their hard work? I wrote a blog entry a while back that explains a situation I ran into when volume and performance spiked as a result of offline industry PR.
72 Hours of SEM Heaven and Hell-How to Use PPC to Capitalize on Unexpected-Offline PR
Below is the graph of the top searched term in this scenario.
From February 2008 to March 2008, conversions increased over 200%. I would love to say my optimization efforts were the reason for this dramatic spike, but just as my efforts did not result in the decline of performance in the above examples, my efforts were not entirely the reason for this spike.
Now, I don’t want to sell myself short here, as I put my client in the right position to take advantage of this spike, but giving me all the credit is definitely not the entire picture!
As Search Marketers we often have to break out of our bubble of rankings, bids, and keywords and take a look at the world around us to help explain our numbers, both good and bad.
Google Insights can help us understand market factors that are bigger than search and simply out of our control.
@BonnieSchwartz
Posted in PPC | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
As an experienced SEO or PPC manager, there are certain performance trends you are accustomed to seeing when you’re doing your job right. With SEO, as you optimize the site and your top keywords increase rankings, site traffic should increase and conversions should increase. For PPC, over time by optimizing your bids, expanding your KW builds, optimizing your ad copy and landing pages, conversions should increase as your CPA goes down. A search firm that does not expect to see these increases in performance and strive to reach these performance goals is not doing their clients justice.
However, while we all may strive for the above scenarios and give each other high fives around the office when they happen, sometimes in the real world it just does not work out that way. In instances where you’ve put your sweat and tears into optimizing your campaigns, but performance drops or remains stagnant, how do you explain it to yourself and to your clients?
Before questioning your strategy and the changes you made in the account, take a look into Google Insights. John at SEO Boy, wrote a great article on how he uses Google’s Insights to project SEO leads and traffic.
Below are 3 examples when Google Insights, provided me with great data and “insights,” which helped to explain atypical search behavior:
Atypical Performance Trend #1 – Increasing Rankings but traffic staying flat or decreasing
I was recently working on an SEO client where we were killing in Google in terms of Rankings. We were ranked number 2 for the client’s most competitive and traffic driving term. We had also achieved top ranking on numerous other high search volume terms. Yet, month over month we were reporting search traffic remaining relatively flat since January. To help shed light on this very frustrating situation, we turned to Google Insights. Below is the Search Trend of the Top Volume Keyword:
Upon showing this trend to the client, he understood why their search volume had not increased since January 2008. The search volume that existed had fallen since we started the campaign, so flat traffic was actually a win when overall interest in the product was declining.
In situations like these, it is important to emphasize to clients that as search marketers, we don’t create search volume; instead we help our clients capture a greater percentage of the search volume that already exists.
Atypical Performance Trend #2: PPC Client Conversions dropping over time At SEER, our PPC team creates optimization plans, where every 5 to 6 weeks we set goals on how we plan to improve our campaigns. One goal we may set is to increase our conversions over time. We then outline our plan to reach this goal. Recently, I set the goal to increase conversions for a client and, week over week, I optimized the account to reach this goal. I expanded our keyword list, optimized ad copy, ensured our positions were staying competitive and, to my dismay, week over week conversions fell. Again, I looked to Google Insights for my answer. Below is the search volume trend for the top converting keyword in this campaign:
Again, like in the above example, this graph brings clarity on falling conversions.
Again search marketers do not create interest; we just help to ensure that when the interest is there, our clients are getting a bigger slice of the pie than our competitors.
Atypical Performance Trend #3: Unexplained Sky Rocketing Performance: Now, Google Insights can be a double edged sword. It can definitely help you justify stagnant or declining performance, but search marketers often have to put their egos aside when a client’s performance suddenly skyrockets and ask is it solely the result of their hard work? I wrote a blog entry a while back that explains a situation I ran into when volume and performance spiked as a result of offline industry PR.
72 Hours of SEM Heaven and Hell-How to Use PPC to Capitalize on Unexpected-Offline PR
Below is the graph of the top searched term in this scenario.
From February 2008 to March 2008, conversions increased over 200%. I would love to say my optimization efforts were the reason for this dramatic spike, but just as my efforts did not result in the decline of performance in the above examples, my efforts were not entirely the reason for this spike.
Now, I don’t want to sell myself short here, as I put my client in the right position to take advantage of this spike, but giving me all the credit is definitely not the entire picture!
As Search Marketers we often have to break out of our bubble of rankings, bids, and keywords and take a look at the world around us to help explain our numbers, both good and bad.
Google Insights can help us understand market factors that are bigger than search and simply out of our control.
@BonnieSchwartz
Posted in PPC | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Search marketing budgets are not safe, many agencies are seeing cuts in search spend, there’s one simple way to make sure your clients are not cutting budgets on something that really is working…close the holes in the lead tracking process.
Today Laura, sent out this post on Google Analytics integration with phone tracking and Liveperson. At SEER we have vetted a ton of companies that do phone tracking, we started this process about 18 months ago with Voicestar and liked many things about them (especially the API).
But I’ll tell you a story on why now more than ever every search marketing company should be doing phone tracking. Lets start with a real example:
One of our clients found that after implementing phone lead tracking that we were under reporting our results by 50%!!! In other words if we reported 100 online leads in a month, they actually had 150 that came from search! We were turning a positive ROI at 100 leads, but by finding this out we changed the entire economics of the campaign, we could change positions, we could enable keywords that we thought were NOT returning a positive ROI, just to name a few. This resulted in increased budgets and more leads because we had a more accurate view of our impact down to phone calls.
Sage Lewis wrote this story comparing 3 phone tracking services again we liked Voicestar, but their pricing is REALLY complicated and high, however their system is robust, so again, we liked it — but I really like seeing more competition in this space, Mongoose has pricing that is MUCH easier to understand.
With the post from Google analytics above it just got me thinking that if your SEO/SEM/PPC agency is experiencing tightening budgets you should have your clients implement call tracking especially for B2B clients and even for complex lead gen / and e-commerce sites.
Our client was a B2C client with a very VERY basic form for leads and they were still under reporting our leads by 50%! Can you imagine the B2B marketers out there selling complex software solutions that may have a longer sales cycle and more questions?
Why should you go through the hassle of vetting phone companies? Simple, by implementing call tracking you are helping your clients get a more accurate view of the traffic you are driving and possibly showing them a more accurate (and hopefully better) ROI. Its the right thing to do!
Be ethical! – Remember you have to take out calls from branded search if you want to be 100% on the up and up and not take credit for people calling in because they searched for the client name. Taking credit for branded search from an SEO campaign is one of the ways you can get ripped off by SEO’s.
If your client says that they don’t have the money to do this, I am thinking that in this economy they can not afford NOT to know the true value on the leads driven by their search campaigns and their true search ROI. Someone asking “how did you hear about us” on the phone is just not cutting it in this economy. Mongoose is offering a GREAT credit which basically makes the first month free, and it integrates with several popular web analytics tools. If you decided Mongoose is not right for you and you go with another solution but want to save money, you may only need to run call tracking for 3 months to see the percentage of calls to online leads ratio and apply that as an estimate of online leads going forward, allowing you to drop the provider after a while.
We are going to be playing with this soon and will update you guys with what we find.
What are you waiting for?!! Go save (or increase your budgets) by implementing call tracking!
Posted in analytics, SEO | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Search marketing budgets are not safe, many agencies are seeing cuts in search spend, there’s one simple way to make sure your clients are not cutting budgets on something that really is working…close the holes in the lead tracking process.
Today Laura, sent out this post on Google Analytics integration with phone tracking and Liveperson. At SEER we have vetted a ton of companies that do phone tracking, we started this process about 18 months ago with Voicestar and liked many things about them (especially the API).
But I’ll tell you a story on why now more than ever every search marketing company should be doing phone tracking. Lets start with a real example:
One of our clients found that after implementing phone lead tracking that we were under reporting our results by 50%!!! In other words if we reported 100 online leads in a month, they actually had 150 that came from search! We were turning a positive ROI at 100 leads, but by finding this out we changed the entire economics of the campaign, we could change positions, we could enable keywords that we thought were NOT returning a positive ROI, just to name a few. This resulted in increased budgets and more leads because we had a more accurate view of our impact down to phone calls.
Sage Lewis wrote this story comparing 3 phone tracking services again we liked Voicestar, but their pricing is REALLY complicated and high, however their system is robust, so again, we liked it â but I really like seeing more competition in this space, Mongoose has pricing that is MUCH easier to understand.
With the post from Google analytics above it just got me thinking that if your SEO/SEM/PPC agency is experiencing tightening budgets you should have your clients implement call tracking especially for B2B clients and even for complex lead gen / and e-commerce sites.
Our client was a B2C client with a very VERY basic form for leads and they were still under reporting our leads by 50%! Can you imagine the B2B marketers out there selling complex software solutions that may have a longer sales cycle and more questions?
Why should you go through the hassle of vetting phone companies? Simple, by implementing call tracking you are helping your clients get a more accurate view of the traffic you are driving and possibly showing them a more accurate (and hopefully better) ROI. Its the right thing to do!
Be ethical! – Remember you have to take out calls from branded search if you want to be 100% on the up and up and not take credit for people calling in because they searched for the client name. Taking credit for branded search from an SEO campaign is one of the ways you can get ripped off by SEO’s.
If your client says that they don’t have the money to do this, I am thinking that in this economy they can not afford NOT to know the true value on the leads driven by their search campaigns and their true search ROI. Someone asking “how did you hear about us” on the phone is just not cutting it in this economy. Mongoose is offering a GREAT credit which basically makes the first month free, and it integrates with several popular web analytics tools. If you decided Mongoose is not right for you and you go with another solution but want to save money, you may only need to run call tracking for 3 months to see the percentage of calls to online leads ratio and apply that as an estimate of online leads going forward, allowing you to drop the provider after a while.
We are going to be playing with this soon and will update you guys with what we find.
What are you waiting for?!! Go save (or increase your budgets) by implementing call tracking!
Posted in analytics, SEO | 4 Comments »
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