Thursday, January 28th, 2010
SEER is pleased to announce our new SEO partnership with Corcentric. This innovative company offers an accounts payable automation solution to electronically manage a company’s business transactions.
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
My SEO career started in 99 at NetMarketing (love those guys) where I managed a team of about 5 interns. Then I went to Aon for 3 years where I had no team I was responsible for to now at SEER where we have a team of 17 search professionals and 2 admins. So I’ve had two good stints where I have made / influenced hiring or firing decisions.
I guess I have a bit of a unique perspective in the search space given that in the last 6 years I have hired over 30 search professionals/interns, do the math a lot of people don’t work out, but we try really hard to build a unique company that attracts the best talent. We’ve gone from me starting this out of my 3rd floor apartment to a company that is doing well, with a bright future ahead, but I like sharing the bumps, the turbulence, with others who are growing their companies as a way of helping.
I think having gone through those trenches has given me some insights worthy of sharing, as all of us struggle to find better and better people. Personally I don’t think there’s a shortage of search professionals out there, there’s a shortage of people who strive for greatness everyday in general, and that desire is so critical in search especially.
As someone constantly hiring search professionals, I hope sharing my learning’s illustrated in this post will help you in your journey of finding the right people.
Hiring Mistake #1 – Being too positive is a negative in the hiring process
I am one of those people that tend to believe in people a little too much. This is a very bad trait in the hiring process. Overly positive people will sometimes bestow on people values that they really don’t exhibit. When it comes to interviewing my advice is:
be hard
be tough
be honest
Believing in people too much in life is good, in hiring it is bad and can easily cause you to hire wrong – which you should blame yourself for.
Being brutally honest is key, in that way when your new hires come in, they don’t have an expectation that you / your company is something you are not.
How I am working on this issue
I am far from having solved this issue, considering the last two people who accepted offers flaked out right before they started (Thank God b/c our two newest people would smoke them, but still it set us back).
#1 Fire quick
We tell interviewees about our level of intensity for performance in search, or the required attention to detail (since I have none) and we let them know that people without those traits never last more than 3-4 months here. So for their benefit let them know your deal breakers. Always remind interviewees that if they leave their current job thinking they do have those critical qualities and get to your company and show that they don’t have those qualities that they are out of a job. It’ll make them think twice about leaving their current situation, which is a good thing.
#2 Get scientific
Less gut, more data is my saying. We apply ROI and KPIs SEO, why not bring data into the hiring decisions? I was lucky to have taken a DISC profile about 5 years ago and it pretty much nailed me exactly. I then had our people who were already hired take the DISC profile. Lo and behold the vast majority fit a certain similar set of traits.
Having now looked at 15 or more DISC profiles over 5 years, not everyone fits the same criteria, but the people who have consistently worked out as superstars all into the same top left quadrant. Would I not hire someone because of this? NEVER, but if I have 3 great applicants and I am looking for another factor to differentiate, you better believe I’ll use it. Its interesting that when I have offered someone a job that didn’t fit the profile they almost never work out, maybe I should put a little more stock.
Again, for our business it has been amazing to see how many of the people who have worked out well, and were profiled long after they were hired, fit a similar criteria. There’s a ton of variability within the quadrants from person to person, but for someone who is admittedly weak at seeing people for who they really are in interviews, it’s nice to have a bit of a scientific approach to back up the gut or SEO tests we give people.
Another great by-product is seeing how people take criticism. Inevitably, the results of a disc profile (here’s mine) won’t be all roses, and some people are adamant that its got them wrong, in my experience, every single person who had major hangups with the results of the profile, did not work out here. I LOVE people who can look themselves in the mirror and say yeah, that is something I struggle with. I’m not saying the DISC is 100% accurate, just sharing my experience.
Hiring Mistake #2 – Don’t send a boys to do a man’s job (or a girl to do a woman’s job)
Sometimes it’s just wrong to hire someone at the wrong point of their career. At times you need experience and if you hire someone that’s too green there’s a potential they will never be able to fill what you need. Which again is not their fault, it is yours.
I made this mistake once, hiring someone that was actually great even though we had to let them go. The job that we needed at the time was well beyond their skill set, it was way too early in their career to manage the tasks we required of them. Now that we have more defined roles, this person would be welcomed back in a heartbeat, just in a role that fit their skill set.
How do I deal with this issue? I don’t really, and here’s why. Luckily, if you take great care of your team, give them great projects, and great clients, you will have low turnover at the top. As that happens you’ll find that you won’t need people to fill top roles, because they are very rarely (if ever) open. As your top folks move on, you’ll find that you have some superstars below them ready to pick up the slack and show you what they can do.
Hiring Mistake #3 – Experience means less than you’d think
If you are in a constantly changing industry, that is a moving target, don’t overweight experience in your hiring decisions. The fact that your industry is a moving target is a blessing, this allows you to not require people with tons of experience and instead allows you to bring on people who are HUNGRY and green who are often going to blow right by the EXPERIENCED folks.
In my industry (Search Marketing) the day to day of search is done differently by so many different companies that if you truly feel your company is at the top of its game, you’d be amazed at how many people coming in with 3-4 years experience in your industry end up being outpaced by some of your entry level people. It has happened to me, I’ve seen a HUNGRY intern beat the pants off of a 4 year SEO vet, cause they had more hustle.
Many of the new jobs of today (like search) is about tenacity, NOT tenure.
I can teach someone the same things a 3-4 year search vet (at a slow moving company) knows in 6-8 months. What I can’t teach them the tenacity, attention to detail, the desire to push harder and harder for each client, each day.
I’ll take those traits over experience any day, and you should consider that too. There are a LOT of 3-4 year SEO’s who are working in companies that don’t push them.
These are the types of companies that are thrilled with 25% increases in search traffic year over year.
So be careful with “experience”, instead go for “expertise” and in SEO they are not synonymous. Take people like: Gab Goldenberg, Garrett French, Melanie Nathan, and Rhea Drysdale – sure on paper I might have 2,3 or 4 times the years of experience, but that means NOTHING! Don’t fall to the experience trap. Here’s how I have tried to avoid it:
1 – By taking great care of me existing team. (Yes, this will become a recurring theme).
Find ways to make your company retain the best people who come in your doors. They are more likely to stay around. The longer they stay around, the less likely you are going to NEED to bring someone in with 3-4 years experience because you won’t have ridiculous voluntary turnover with your best people.
The result of this in our company is that we are always hiring entry level people (who don’t need all the SEO experience in the world) as such we get to train them in “our way” and bring them up in our way from the beginning and avoid the 3-5 years of ego experience that someone else might bring.
2 – Hire more than 1 person for a job. Ok now this is risky and requires three things:
1 – strong cash flow
2 – comfort firing fast
3 – very strong pipeline (in other words you turn down a LOT of good opportunities regularly).
I’ll tell you when you are hiring people 1-2 years out of school or interns it is a lot easier to hire two people at once for one job. In this way you can test both of them out live in your company, with the assumption that one won’t work out in 6 months.
Remember, no amount of interviewing is ever going to replace actually seeing that person working in your company.
The approach above is better than hiring one person, finding out they weren’t great, and then to also find out that your #2 candidate is now at another company and unavailable.
In the rare instance that both people turn out to be ballers, then you’ve hit the jackpot. You have two A level players, and all you need to do is go find projects to keep them busy…if your company is truly good at what they do, you should be able to pick up enough projects to keep them both busy. We recently did this with interns, we hired 3, and kept 1. The one we kept is a MONSTER! Well worth the effort. Remember the key is hiring them all around the same time, so you are only training once really, which you would have to do if you hired 1, 3, or 5 people.
Disclosure – As I was writing this I started to think of the fairness of this approach. It requires YOU to be really honest with people during the interview process. That is how you can stay on the right side of this ethically, let them know!
For interns or very entry level people, start them as contractors with definite end dates, that is always fair because they know there’s a definite end. It would be extremely unethical to hire two people for a job, and have them both quit their current jobs when you know darn well you can only hire one, and that you don’t have a sales pipeline or the cash flow to keep them both.
Hiring Mistake #4 – Going for passion – fizzling firecrackers
Today with social media and everything else out there people can come to your company with all the misguided passion in the world. They will talk about wanting to set the world on fire they use words like “Crush it” “Kill it” “Passion” they use of buzzwords that we hear from some of our favorite social media personalities and we fall in love with them the same way we love our social media rock stars, like Gary Vaynerchuk. These people fizzle out like a cheap firecracker (to paraphrase Mike “the situation” from Jersey Shore). You must avoid these people, its hard to resist them because they sound right on the surface; they always say the right things. As you interview them you can easily become mesmerized, you’ll start thinking…”YES! They get it.” But be careful.
Here’s how I avoid them:
DIG DEEP – these people are like snake charmers! Don’t accept surface answers in their interviews. Most of these people have their hands in so many things that they’ve never concentrated on one thing, focused on it, and truly “crushed it”.
“And what else” is a critical question to ask in their interviews, you have to probe deep to see if they really are a rock star with real passion or someone who has passion for something for 6 months then ends up with a new passion, leaving you with a fizzled firecracker.
Watch them on Twitter, most of them are talkin’ loud and ain’t saying nothin’! Don’t take their number of followers or any metric like that as an indication. Here’s an analysis I did on some people in my post on social media strategists who are more like chatty Cathy dolls than strategists.
Using tools to analyze them like Klout which will help you see if these people are influentials who are really up to something, or just a fizzled firecracker.
Wanting to “crush it” and “crushing it” are two VERY different things. Remember that.
Hiring mistake #5 – The personality types to keep and train and the ones to fire immediately.
Personality Type A – Swamped Sally – this is the person who whether they have 1 project or 10 projects will always work 60 hours per week. These are the people who get value from telling their friends that they are always so busy at work instead of seeking ways to be more efficient they love being able to say they are swamped whether they truly are or not. In the past I have let people like this go, but have learned (the hard way) that these folks are often very good and just need some help. Here’s what I typically do.
Make it a priority of yours to sit down with them regularly and do a little prioritization of their tasks, so expect to spend more time getting them from point A to point B – it is worth it!
The investment is worth it because you’ll lower their stress level (which should help you retain them) and you’ll also be able to train them over time to self-prioritize as they see how you prioritize their lists. Remember hiring is as much about getting things done, as it is helping people grow as individuals and porfessionals.
Don’t expect these people to be your process improvement folks, truly great leaders when they get swamped start seeking out ways to improve processes to give them time back. So following rule #2, don’t hire these people and expect something of them that is just not how they are wired.
Personality Type B – Mr. ambiguous – I think most of us are involved in search because is a very provable medium. Every day, when you wake up, you look at numbers you know when you lost and have go back to the drawing board and improve. You also know when you’ve won. Have you ever heard an athlete say, maybe we won? NO! The score is the score. Great search professionals embrace this instead of running from it.
We search professionals hate ambiguity. The game is going to be won or lost and we are all okay admitting success and failure.
How I avoid these people
1 – At the resume level these people can sometimes be found out. Their resumes typically doesn’t include numbers, facts, and cold hard statistics. These are probably not people who get a rush out of knowing that they increased some metric by 200% or decreased a cost metric by 25%. Their resumes should give you an indication.
2 – During the interview, ask questions about the impact of the things they highlighted on their resume. If someone says they increased productivity / streamlined processes I want to know how much. I want to know the impact, and to be brutally honest, if I need competitive, never die, type of person, they will seek out ways to measure themselves as the basis for their impact on their companies / clients.
Again keep in mind the ideal folks PROACTIVELY let you know their impact, you shouldn’t have to drag I out of them / inquire a ton.
Personality Type C – The Design Junkies – You can sniff these people out in interviews, they are NOT direct marketers. They are design people at heart trying to force themselves into a search job, don’t hire them or if you want to test them out, test them out as an intern / contractor only.
Real search people, when we see a web site or paid search ad we think in terms of:
Page load times
Conversions
Path to conversions
Title tags
Keywords
Linkable Assets
Keyword – Ad – landing page symbiosis
Competitors buying their brand name
Bounce Rates
They will look at the same site or ad and think:
Colors
Brand messaging
Ideas
Icons
Time on site
There are some people who I say you should hire and work with them on their traits, this is NOT one of them. I know that I want to hire people who think links, rankings, traffic, bounce rates, and conversions every time they see a site. They hate ambiguity.
I want them to see the title tag and pagerank before they see color, design, or layout. That is NOT something you can train.
Personality Type D – The overly competitive
As with so many traits having that trait is great, having too much of it is a hindrance. Competition is one of these. The overly competitive interviewees will love numbers, they will have that “go hard or go home” attitude, and all the other traits I love. However those traits can at times can take over and cause people to compete with their own co-workers or be over confident with clients. As such I can typically sniff these folks out with one question.
That question is… If you could volunteer somewhere, where you volunteer?
The best people don’t hesitate, they know exactly where they would, because they have spent time thinking about others. Thinking about if they had the time what they would do to make this world a better place, not just their wallets fatter. To me this is the best catch of them all, someone who is wicked competitive when the time calls for it, and able to dial that down at times to think about others. That is why I love the fact that SEER requires everyone to pick a charity that they would like to work with, and we’ll give them all the time (during work hours or not) and money we can to help them help the world – check out where we spend our time.
Ultimately it gets better trust me, as you build AND RETAIN your best people, you won’t be hiring as often, but you must NEVER allow your clients to work with sub par people, and allow those sub par people to represent your brand. When you make a hiring mistake, admit it, let that person go and look in the mirror and try to figure out what you missed, so you can go back and refine the process again.
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
My SEO career started in 99 at NetMarketing (love those guys) where I managed a team of about 5 interns. Then I went to Aon for 3 years where I had no team I was responsible for to now at SEER where we have a team of 17 search professionals and 2 admins. So Ive had two good stints where I have made / influenced hiring or firing decisions.
I guess I have a bit of a unique perspective in the search space given that in the last 6 years I have hired over 30 search professionals/interns, do the math a lot of people dont work out, but we try really hard to build a unique company that attracts the best talent. We’ve gone from me starting this out of my 3rd floor apartment to a company that is doing well, with a bright future ahead, but I like sharing the bumps, the turbulence, with others who are growing their companies as a way of helping.
I think having gone through those trenches has given me some insights worthy of sharing, as all of us struggle to find better and better people. Personally I dont think theres a shortage of search professionals out there, theres a shortage of people who strive for greatness everyday in general, and that desire is so critical in search especially.
As someone constantly hiring search professionals, I hope sharing my learnings illustrated in this post will help you in your journey of finding the right people.
Hiring Mistake #1 – Being too positive is a negative in the hiring process
I am one of those people that tend to believe in people a little too much. This is a very bad trait in the hiring process. Overly positive people will sometimes bestow on people values that they really dont exhibit. When it comes to interviewing my advice is:
be hard
be tough
be honest
Believing in people too much in life is good, in hiring it is bad and can easily cause you to hire wrong which you should blame yourself for.
Being brutally honest is key, in that way when your new hires come in, they dont have an expectation that you / your company is something you are not.
How I am working on this issue
I am far from having solved this issue, considering the last two people who accepted offers flaked out right before they started (Thank God b/c our two newest people would smoke them, but still it set us back).
#1 Fire quick
We tell interviewees about our level of intensity for performance in search, or the required attention to detail (since I have none) and we let them know that people without those traits never last more than 3-4 months here. So for their benefit let them know your deal breakers. Always remind interviewees that if they leave their current job thinking they do have those critical qualities and get to your company and show that they dont have those qualities that they are out of a job. Itll make them think twice about leaving their current situation, which is a good thing.
#2 Get scientific
Less gut, more data is my saying. We apply ROI and KPIs SEO, why not bring data into the hiring decisions? I was lucky to have taken a DISC profile about 5 years ago and it pretty much nailed me exactly. I then had our people who were already hired take the DISC profile. Lo and behold the vast majority fit a certain similar set of traits.
Having now looked at 15 or more DISC profiles over 5 years, not everyone fits the same criteria, but the people who have consistently worked out as superstars all into the same top left quadrant. Would I not hire someone because of this? NEVER, but if I have 3 great applicants and I am looking for another factor to differentiate, you better believe Ill use it. Its interesting that when I have offered someone a job that didnt fit the profile they almost never work out, maybe I should put a little more stock.
Again, for our business it has been amazing to see how many of the people who have worked out well, and were profiled long after they were hired, fit a similar criteria. Theres a ton of variability within the quadrants from person to person, but for someone who is admittedly weak at seeing people for who they really are in interviews, its nice to have a bit of a scientific approach to back up the gut or SEO tests we give people.
Another great by-product is seeing how people take criticism. Inevitably, the results of a disc profile (here’s mine) won’t be all roses, and some people are adamant that its got them wrong, in my experience, every single person who had major hangups with the results of the profile, did not work out here. I LOVE people who can look themselves in the mirror and say yeah, that is something I struggle with. I’m not saying the DISC is 100% accurate, just sharing my experience.
Hiring Mistake #2 – Don’t send a boys to do a man’s job (or a girl to do a womans job)
Sometimes it’s just wrong to hire someone at the wrong point of their career. At times you need experience and if you hire someone that’s too green there’s a potential they will never be able to fill what you need. Which again is not their fault, it is yours.
I made this mistake once, hiring someone that was actually great even though we had to let them go. The job that we needed at the time was well beyond their skill set, it was way too early in their career to manage the tasks we required of them. Now that we have more defined roles, this person would be welcomed back in a heartbeat, just in a role that fit their skill set.
How do I deal with this issue? I dont really, and heres why. Luckily, if you take great care of your team, give them great projects, and great clients, you will have low turnover at the top. As that happens youll find that you wont need people to fill top roles, because they are very rarely (if ever) open. As your top folks move on, youll find that you have some superstars below them ready to pick up the slack and show you what they can do.
Hiring Mistake #3 Experience means less than youd think
If you are in a constantly changing industry, that is a moving target, dont overweight experience in your hiring decisions. The fact that your industry is a moving target is a blessing, this allows you to not require people with tons of experience and instead allows you to bring on people who are HUNGRY and green who are often going to blow right by the EXPERIENCED folks.
In my industry (Search Marketing) the day to day of search is done differently by so many different companies that if you truly feel your company is at the top of its game, youd be amazed at how many people coming in with 3-4 years experience in your industry end up being outpaced by some of your entry level people. It has happened to me, I’ve seen a HUNGRY intern beat the pants off of a 4 year SEO vet, cause they had more hustle.
Many of the new jobs of today (like search) is about tenacity, NOT tenure.
I can teach someone the same things a 3-4 year search vet (at a slow moving company) knows in 6-8 months. What I cant teach them the tenacity, attention to detail, the desire to push harder and harder for each client, each day.
Ill take those traits over experience any day, and you should consider that too. There are a LOT of 3-4 year SEOs who are working in companies that dont push them.
These are the types of companies that are thrilled with 25% increases in search traffic year over year.
So be careful with experience, instead go for expertise and in SEO they are not synonymous. Take people like: Gab Goldenberg, Garrett French, Melanie Nathan, and Rhea Drysdale – sure on paper I might have 2,3 or 4 times the years of experience, but that means NOTHING! Don’t fall to the experience trap. Here’s how I have tried to avoid it:
1 By taking great care of me existing team. (Yes, this will become a recurring theme).
Find ways to make your company retain the best people who come in your doors. They are more likely to stay around. The longer they stay around, the less likely you are going to NEED to bring someone in with 3-4 years experience because you wont have ridiculous voluntary turnover with your best people.
The result of this in our company is that we are always hiring entry level people (who dont need all the SEO experience in the world) as such we get to train them in our way and bring them up in our way from the beginning and avoid the 3-5 years of ego experience that someone else might bring.
2 Hire more than 1 person for a job. Ok now this is risky and requires three things:
1 – strong cash flow
2 comfort firing fast
3 very strong pipeline (in other words you turn down a LOT of good opportunities regularly).
Ill tell you when you are hiring people 1-2 years out of school or interns it is a lot easier to hire two people at once for one job. In this way you can test both of them out live in your company, with the assumption that one wont work out in 6 months.
Remember, no amount of interviewing is ever going to replace actually seeing that person working in your company.
The approach above is better than hiring one person, finding out they werent great, and then to also find out that your #2 candidate is now at another company and unavailable.
In the rare instance that both people turn out to be ballers, then youve hit the jackpot. You have two A level players, and all you need to do is go find projects to keep them busy if your company is truly good at what they do, you should be able to pick up enough projects to keep them both busy. We recently did this with interns, we hired 3, and kept 1. The one we kept is a MONSTER! Well worth the effort. Remember the key is hiring them all around the same time, so you are only training once really, which you would have to do if you hired 1, 3, or 5 people.
Disclosure As I was writing this I started to think of the fairness of this approach. It requires YOU to be really honest with people during the interview process. That is how you can stay on the right side of this ethically, let them know!
For interns or very entry level people, start them as contractors with definite end dates, that is always fair because they know theres a definite end. It would be extremely unethical to hire two people for a job, and have them both quit their current jobs when you know darn well you can only hire one, and that you dont have a sales pipeline or the cash flow to keep them both.
Hiring Mistake #4 – Going for passion fizzling firecrackers
Today with social media and everything else out there people can come to your company with all the misguided passion in the world. They will talk about wanting to set the world on fire they use words like Crush it Kill it Passion they use of buzzwords that we hear from some of our favorite social media personalities and we fall in love with them the same way we love our social media rock stars, like Gary Vaynerchuk. These people fizzle out like a cheap firecracker (to paraphrase Mike the situation from Jersey Shore). You must avoid these people, its hard to resist them because they sound right on the surface; they always say the right things. As you interview them you can easily become mesmerized, youll start thinking
YES! They get it. But be careful.
Heres how I avoid them:
DIG DEEP these people are like snake charmers! Dont accept surface answers in their interviews. Most of these people have their hands in so many things that theyve never concentrated on one thing, focused on it, and truly crushed it.
And what else is a critical question to ask in their interviews, you have to probe deep to see if they really are a rock star with real passion or someone who has passion for something for 6 months then ends up with a new passion, leaving you with a fizzled firecracker.
Watch them on Twitter, most of them are talkin loud and aint saying nothin! Dont take their number of followers or any metric like that as an indication. Heres an analysis I did on some people in my post on social media strategists who are more like chatty Cathy dolls than strategists.
Using tools to analyze them like Klout which will help you see if these people are influentials who are really up to something, or just a fizzled firecracker.
Wanting to crush it and crushing it are two VERY different things. Remember that.
Hiring mistake #5 – The personality types to keep and train and the ones to fire immediately.
Personality Type A – Swamped Sally – this is the person who whether they have 1 project or 10 projects will always work 60 hours per week. These are the people who get value from telling their friends that they are always so busy at work instead of seeking ways to be more efficient they love being able to say they are swamped whether they truly are or not. In the past I have let people like this go, but have learned (the hard way) that these folks are often very good and just need some help. Here’s what I typically do.
Make it a priority of yours to sit down with them regularly and do a little prioritization of their tasks, so expect to spend more time getting them from point A to point B it is worth it!
The investment is worth it because youll lower their stress level (which should help you retain them) and youll also be able to train them over time to self-prioritize as they see how you prioritize their lists. Remember hiring is as much about getting things done, as it is helping people grow as individuals and porfessionals.
Dont expect these people to be your process improvement folks, truly great leaders when they get swamped start seeking out ways to improve processes to give them time back. So following rule #2, dont hire these people and expect something of them that is just not how they are wired.
Personality Type B – Mr. ambiguous I think most of us are involved in search because is a very provable medium. Every day, when you wake up, you look at numbers you know when you lost and have go back to the drawing board and improve. You also know when youve won. Have you ever heard an athlete say, maybe we won? NO! The score is the score. Great search professionals embrace this instead of running from it.
We search professionals hate ambiguity. The game is going to be won or lost and we are all okay admitting success and failure.
How I avoid these people
1 At the resume level these people can sometimes be found out. Their resumes typically doesnt include numbers, facts, and cold hard statistics. These are probably not people who get a rush out of knowing that they increased some metric by 200% or decreased a cost metric by 25%. Their resumes should give you an indication.
2 During the interview, ask questions about the impact of the things they highlighted on their resume. If someone says they increased productivity / streamlined processes I want to know how much. I want to know the impact, and to be brutally honest, if I need competitive, never die, type of person, they will seek out ways to measure themselves as the basis for their impact on their companies / clients.
Again keep in mind the ideal folks PROACTIVELY let you know their impact, you shouldnt have to drag I out of them / inquire a ton.
Personality Type C – The Design Junkies – You can sniff these people out in interviews, they are NOT direct marketers. They are design people at heart trying to force themselves into a search job, dont hire them or if you want to test them out, test them out as an intern / contractor only.
Real search people, when we see a web site or paid search ad we think in terms of:
Page load times
Conversions
Path to conversions
Title tags
Keywords
Linkable Assets
Keyword Ad landing page symbiosis
Competitors buying their brand name
Bounce Rates
They will look at the same site or ad and think:
Colors
Brand messaging
Ideas
Icons
Time on site
There are some people who I say you should hire and work with them on their traits, this is NOT one of them. I know that I want to hire people who think links, rankings, traffic, bounce rates, and conversions every time they see a site. They hate ambiguity.
I want them to see the title tag and pagerank before they see color, design, or layout. That is NOT something you can train.
Personality Type D – The overly competitive
As with so many traits having that trait is great, having too much of it is a hindrance. Competition is one of these. The overly competitive interviewees will love numbers, they will have that go hard or go home attitude, and all the other traits I love. However those traits can at times can take over and cause people to compete with their own co-workers or be over confident with clients. As such I can typically sniff these folks out with one question.
That question is If you could volunteer somewhere, where you volunteer?
The best people dont hesitate, they know exactly where they would, because they have spent time thinking about others. Thinking about if they had the time what they would do to make this world a better place, not just their wallets fatter. To me this is the best catch of them all, someone who is wicked competitive when the time calls for it, and able to dial that down at times to think about others. That is why I love the fact that SEER requires everyone to pick a charity that they would like to work with, and well give them all the time (during work hours or not) and money we can to help them help the world – check out where we spend our time.
Ultimately it gets better trust me, as you build AND RETAIN your best people, you wont be hiring as often, but you must NEVER allow your clients to work with sub par people, and allow those sub par people to represent your brand. When you make a hiring mistake, admit it, let that person go and look in the mirror and try to figure out what you missed, so you can go back and refine the process again.
Monday, January 11th, 2010
Recently in one of the accounts I manage on Yahoo, I saw a huge spike in volume.
Unlike most fraudulent clicks that will often cause a spike in your CPA as they do not result in conversions, what made this spike unique is that conversions also spiked over this same period.
Below is the graph of Clicks vs. Conversions:
Not much had changed in the account and there was no noteworthy press to speak of to explain this spike. My gut told me that the over 200% spike in clicks and the nearly 400% spike in conversions was unfortunately too good to be true.
I turned to Google Analytics to investigate my suspicion and evaluated the following:
The answer to all these questions was no.
Still not satisfied that these leads were legitimate, I reached out to my client to see if the leads looked real in their database. On the surface they actually did. The email addresses were different and the forms were filled out. It is important to note that the conversion in this case is a completed form. For this client the lead to sale turnaround time is about 2 weeks, so I told my client to let me know what the final lead to sale conversion rate was and how it compared to the website’s rate on average.
Despite the leads looking legitimate on the surface, I still felt this spike was unrealistic and I did not want to wait two weeks before we found out that all these leads were not legitimate sales prospects. I turned to Yahoo new placement tool (no longer active), which was released in September 2009, to see if it was a particular search partner that was responsible for the spike.
I found my culprit, the domain, http://www.trafficz.com/. This one placement month over month increased over 2000% (that final 0 is not a typo), not two hundred, but two thousand percent!
Moreover, all the conversions were attributed to one keyword on standard match. I immediately excluded this placement from my account, as this one word in that one placement caused the entire spike.
Two weeks have gone by and it turns out my suspicions about the leads driven by Traffickz were confirmed. Not one of the leads actually resulted in a final sale. The typical conversion rate for this site in a 2 week period is MUCH GREATER than 0%. (I am not providing the actual conversion rate here to protect the confidentiality of my client)
I believe the forms were filled out were by a computer program with fake people’s information. What makes this type of fraud so hard to detect is that program made the leads look like they were coming from different IP addresses and geographic locations. This was not your ever day click spammer. These guys were sophisticated and I can see why Yahoo’s click fraud protection system did not catch these spammers automatically.
I have reported this click fraud to Yahoo and am still waiting for an answer. I am going to push hard for a credit on this one, as we are talking thousands of dollars of SPAMMY traffic. I am confident that the people at Yahoo will see this traffic for what it is, aka fraud, and provide the account with a credit.
This experience will not force me to abandon Yahoo all together, and I am not suggesting you do either. Yahoo comprises about 17% of all traffic and is a very important supplement to Google Traffic. Yet, for clients with limited budgets I may look to Bing before Yahoo when expanding. I would tell the people at Yahoo that they should choose their search partners more wisely for their long term success.
Though you should not completely write off Yahoo, I suggest the following to protect your accounts against this new form of click fraud keep the following in mind:
Monday, January 11th, 2010
Recently in one of the accounts I manage on Yahoo, I saw a huge spike in volume.
Unlike most fraudulent clicks that will often cause a spike in your CPA as they do not result in conversions, what made this spike unique is that conversions also spiked over this same period.
Below is the graph of Clicks vs. Conversions:
Not much had changed in the account and there was no noteworthy press to speak of to explain this spike. My gut told me that the over 200% spike in clicks and the nearly 400% spike in conversions was unfortunately too good to be true.
I turned to Google Analytics to investigate my suspicion and evaluated the following:
The answer to all these questions was no.
Still not satisfied that these leads were legitimate, I reached out to my client to see if the leads looked real in their database. On the surface they actually did. The email addresses were different and the forms were filled out. It is important to note that the conversion in this case is a completed form. For this client the lead to sale turnaround time is about 2 weeks, so I told my client to let me know what the final lead to sale conversion rate was and how it compared to the websites rate on average.
Despite the leads looking legitimate on the surface, I still felt this spike was unrealistic and I did not want to wait two weeks before we found out that all these leads were not legitimate sales prospects. I turned to Yahoo new placement tool (no longer active), which was released in September 2009, to see if it was a particular search partner that was responsible for the spike.
I found my culprit, the domain, http://www.trafficz.com/. This one placement month over month increased over 2000% (that final 0 is not a typo), not two hundred, but two thousand percent!
Moreover, all the conversions were attributed to one keyword on standard match. I immediately excluded this placement from my account, as this one word in that one placement caused the entire spike.
Two weeks have gone by and it turns out my suspicions about the leads driven by Traffickz were confirmed. Not one of the leads actually resulted in a final sale. The typical conversion rate for this site in a 2 week period is MUCH GREATER than 0%. (I am not providing the actual conversion rate here to protect the confidentiality of my client)
I believe the forms were filled out were by a computer program with fake peoples information. What makes this type of fraud so hard to detect is that program made the leads look like they were coming from different IP addresses and geographic locations. This was not your ever day click spammer. These guys were sophisticated and I can see why Yahoos click fraud protection system did not catch these spammers automatically.
I have reported this click fraud to Yahoo and am still waiting for an answer. I am going to push hard for a credit on this one, as we are talking thousands of dollars of SPAMMY traffic. I am confident that the people at Yahoo will see this traffic for what it is, aka fraud, and provide the account with a credit.
This experience will not force me to abandon Yahoo all together, and I am not suggesting you do either. Yahoo comprises about 17% of all traffic and is a very important supplement to Google Traffic. Yet, for clients with limited budgets I may look to Bing before Yahoo when expanding. I would tell the people at Yahoo that they should choose their search partners more wisely for their long term success.
Though you should not completely write off Yahoo, I suggest the following to protect your accounts against this new form of click fraud keep the following in mind:
Monday, January 11th, 2010
Luckily the team at Capterra held a conference and invited me to speak at it a few months back. In this video, I am going through some keyword research strategies that apply primarily to doing keyword research for SEO for business to business (B2B) marketers. We discuss the following topics:
Check out my other in depth keyword research post using Google insights, with screen captures?
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
In the world of SEM, it seems inevitable that at one point or another, you’ll find yourself up against one of Google’s countless AdWords advertising policies. Some policies are easy to work around. For example, one of our clients sells a product called WTF. Yes, that’s right: WTF. This acronym just happens to be flagged under Google’s ‘Inappropriate Language’ editorial policy, which polices the many ‘variations of inappropriate language’. Fortunately for our client, WTF stands for ‘Wake the Freak’, so all we needed to do was shoot a quick email to our reps at Google explaining the situation and voila! – ad approved. Other situations, however, are not so simple. And sometimes it seems that even when you find a way to play by Google’s rules, trouble still finds you. Check out this blog I wrote a few months back about the mess AdWords pharmaceutical advertisers found themselves in with the FDA.
The good news is that, in many cases, advertising policies aren’t as rigid as they seem. There is usually a loophole, and with a little digging you’ll often find a way to play by the rules even if it seems like you have to bend them a little to do so.
We recently started investigating the ins and outs of another AdWords Policy – Google’s tobacco and cigarette’s policy, which clearly stipulates, ‘Don’t promote tobacco and cigarettes’. Why then, I wonder, when I search for ‘buy cigars’ do I see this:
Because there is a loophole! Google permits the advertising of cigar accessories, although they will be approved as non-family safe ads. Read more about non-family safe ads here. Basically, there are certain sites that do not allow non-family safe content. Chances are that if you’re selling cigars, you don’t want to be on these sites anyway, so no big deal there.
So, as long as we don’t use a CTA like ‘Buy Cigars Here’ in our ad copy, we’ve found a way to advertise tobacco in spite of the seemingly inflexible aforementioned tobacco policy. But Google’s tobacco advertising policy doesn’t end with the ad copy – it ends at the destination URL. In addition to not allowing the direct mention of cigar sales in ad copy, the landing page must not be focused on just selling cigars. Even though driving product-specific keywords to a product specific page is a best practice, the easiest solution would seem to be to drive all traffic to either a home page or an accessories page and let the visitor use the site search field to find what they’re looking for.
For example, let’s say that I’d like to buy an Arturo Fuente cigar for an upcoming celebration. Here is what I see when I search for ‘Arturo Fuente cigars’ on Google:
Let’s go through these a few of these ads to see where traffic is being driven (keeping in mind that I know the precise brand of cigar I want to purchase):
ThompsonCigar.com directs to the site’s home page, where the search field is displayed prominently. So I enter ‘Arturo Fuente’ and find that this store carries the brand I’m looking for:
FamousSmokeShop.com directs traffic to a Humidors & Cigar accessories page, also with an easy to spot search field where I can continue in my quest for an Arturo Fuente:
Again, I’ve found a robust collection of Arturo Fuentes. However, as a good SEM manager, I’m simply not satisfied with sending product specific keywords to a general landing page since I know that making visitors do extra work to find what they’re looking for results in lower ROI for my clients. To illustrate, consider a similar scenario, but one that is uncomplicated by advertising policies. Let’s say that I’m searching for a Francesco Clemente print. I go to Google and search for ‘Francesco Clemente prints’ and I see an ad from ArtRiver.com that seems to offer what I’m looking for, and directs me to a page where I can view and purchase Clemente prints with no extra effort required:
If the ad were to instead direct me to ArtRiver’s home page, I may have taken one look and decided that Art River didn’t have what I was searching for based on the imagery on the home page. Or maybe I would have decided that it would be easier to click the back button and select a different ad than searching through ArtRiver’s site.
Either way, it’s just not worth the chance of losing a potential customer by not delivering to them exactly what they’re looking for within one click of an ad.
This is where the tobacco policy loophole arises: Google does not allow ads to direct to a page just focused on purchasing cigars. A page selling cigars does not necessarily have to be focused on just selling cigars, though. Take the example of Tinderbox.com, which utilizes a ‘we also recommend’ section on product pages. Check out the Arturo Fuente Hemingway Classic page, which is recommending various other cigars below the Hemingway Classic:
Because this page is dedicated only to selling cigars, Tinderbox would not be able to send ads to this page. However, a potential workaround may be to display cigar accessories in the ‘we also recommend’ section rather than just cigars. This way, they are more likely to be in compliance with Google’s tobacco advertising policy because the page would not be dedicated to just selling cigars. Semantics, in this case, may make all the difference.
The moral of the story: Google’s advertising policies, while seemingly inflexible at first glance, often have plenty of loopholes. Sometimes all it takes is a little creativity!
