Classic Misuse of Dynamic Keyword Insertion

From a search on Google for the keyword "ball cancer" (in the Sponsored Results column):

Next time I'm looking to buy cancer balls, I'll know where to go for the best deal!

How does this happen? How could Google be showing me an ad for something so far from what I was searching for (resources about testicular cancer), let alone something this vendor almost certainly does not have for sale? It's not Google's fault, unless you want to blame them for offering a powerful feature that's too easily misused. That feature is Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). I won't go into all the details of how it works (but here's a great post about it), but the quick explanation is that DKI allows you to automatically insert into an ad whatever keyword in the list of keywords associated with the ad most closely matches the keyword searched for.

Used in highly-targeted situations, DKI can be a powerful and effective tool for increasing both click-through rate (CTR) and conversions. You are reflecting back to the searcher exactly what she was looking for.

The oddball result that was shown above came up because the advertiser simply created a very generic "one size fits all" ad and then dumped a huge amount of (probably broad match) keywords into it. This is the laziest form of pay-per-click advertising. 

So the Nextag.com example above is funny, but is there any real harm done?

First, I doubt there is any such product as "cancer balls" (at least, I hope not). A click through on the ad takes you to a page of various products that have both "cancer" and "balls" somewhere in their description, but what is the likelihood that any of these are what someone searching for "ball cancer" is looking for?

Second, this is a waste of the advertiser's money in so many ways, as well as a complete misunderstanding of the value of pay-per-click advertising. Inevitably the advertiser is paying for a lot of clicks from people who have no possibility of becoming a converted customer. Pay-per-click is one of the most efficient and cost-effective forms of advertising ever invented, but only because it allows you to narrowly target a niche market of people who are already actively looking for what you have to offer. What Nextag.com has done is the equivalent of throwing spaghetti against the wall to see how much sticks. In the case of both spaghetti and real customers, the answer is: not much.

Last, this kind of advertising can result in a negative backlash against your brand. Consumers will learn quickly that they can't trust your ads to take them to what they actually want.

By the way, if you've spent any amount of time watching pay-per-click ads, you've probably spotted the all-time worst offender of slinging out these kinds of meaningless ads. I won't embarrass them here publicly, but if you're taking aim at a certain big box discount retailer, you probably just hit the _____. ;-)

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For intelligent internet marketing, check out Virante (http://www.virante.com)

Business Blogger Beware

Bloggeris a great, easy to use site for creating a personal blog. However, if you are planning to build a blog for business purposes, it is probably not your best choice, even to start out on. I just learned that Google does not allow Blogger sites to 301 redirect. What this means is that if you are successful in building up good page rank and back links to your Blogger site, and then later decide to move it to another domain, you will lose all of the SEO "juice" you had built up on the Blogger site.

For this reason and others, we're planning to move http://virante.blogspot.com off of Blogger very soon, before we've put any more effort into building it up.
in reference to: Blogger: Dashboard (view on Google Sidewiki)

Google's Sidewiki: The Only Thing to Fear Is...Not Much?

Proving once again that it is the Santa Claus of the Internet, Google last week announced yet another free toy: Google Sidewiki. Sidewiki is an addition to the Google Toolbar (so far only for Firefox and Internet Explorer) that allows anyone to leave comments and links on any web page anywhere on the Internet. The comments appear in a left-hand slide out that can be opened and shut either from the toolbar or by a small handle icon that appears on pages when you have the toolbar active. This video shows it in action:

This morning Sean Carton of ClikZ ruminated over the possibilities and pitfalls of Sidewiki for businesses and marketers. On the fear side, Carton asserts that this is one more giant leap toward complete loss of control by marketers over their message. That has certainly been true for some time now; do something that pisses off consumers and it will be all over social media, blogs, forums, and product review sites. Sidewiki significantly ups the ante, however, in that now those comments can appear right on your own web site, and there is nothing you can do to stop or block them. (Actually, that's not completely true. One commentor on Carton's post said that he had successfully used an SSL certificate to block Sidewiki. This has some backfire potential, however, as a Sidewiki user visiting a site so blocked may have suspicions about what the site is trying to hide.)

Two things occur to me that are not brought up in Carton's post:

1. It is not yet clear how widespread Sidewiki usage will be. How many people will actually bother to install it (and have to take on the Google Toolbar if they don't already have it)? And among those who do install it, how many will form the habit of using it and checking it regularly? I'm a Google toy addict who installed Sidewiki the moment I heard about it, but even I forget about it most of the time I'm surfing.
2. Marketers who have already gotten over the fact that you can't hide anymore--and better yet have embraced the idea--should welcome whatever community does end up using Sidewiki with open arms, viewing this as one more channel for valuable listening and interaction. Google has put in place some safeguards to try to minimize spamming and abuse (comments can be voted up and down, and there is an easy link to report abuse), but it remains to be seen how effective they will be.

Finally, here's an example of a Sidewiki post I just did. Recently my family enjoyed a wonderful weekend on Bald Head Island off the coast of North Carolina. While there I capture a number of videos of the island's gorgeous sights with my iPhone and uploaded them to YouTube. I was able to embed one of these YouTube videos (of pelicans flying over the surf) as a Sidewiki at the home page of BaldHeadIsland.com, the web site of the island's prime vacation home developer. If you have Sidewiki installed, go to BaldHeadIsland.com and view my brief video.

In fact, I love Bald Head Island and its scenic beauty so much, I'll even share my video with you if you don't want to install Sidewiki. Here you go:

Google AdWords: Exact Isn't Always....Well...Exact

If you've been using Google's AdWords and/or Analytics products for any length of time, you must be aware that the numbers don't always add up. In fact, they don't add up at a sometimes alarming frequency. That is to say, the reported numbers either don't match up to what you know must be reality, or they are not consistent. Needless to say, this realization can be a little disconcerting, considering the amount and level of detail Google provides.

I ran across yet another curious example of this the other day. One of the features in the new AdWords interface about which I was most excited was the in-line "see search terms" button in the keywords tab of ad groups. The button pops up a quick report that promises to show you the most frequent search entries that actually resulted in displays of your ads for selected keyword(s) or the entire group. This information was available before, but only by going several keystrokes and screens away into a formal report. The ability to pop this information up while still in my keywords list--and even add any newly-discovered keywords right from the list--seemed to me revolutionary.

My thinking was that this listing would be most valuable in discovering exact match keywords I should be bidding on. For example, let's say I have a phrase match keyword "rugby shirts" that my keywords tab shows as performing at a low but reasonable CTR. The "see search terms" report reveals that this keyword has generated lots of impressions for all kinds of related phrases ("izod rugby shirts," "boy's rugby shirts" etc.). But most interestingly, it seems to reveal that the keyword "rugby shirts" as an exact match (i.e., the person searching entered the words "rugby shirts" and only those words) generates a hugely higher CTR than the average for the phrase keyword over all. It seems to be a no-brainer that I should create an exact match for that keyword, and bid it higher as it is more productive (in terms of CTR, but not actual click-quantity, of course).

This I've been doing for over a month now, but my new-found joy was tarnished a bit recently by a couple of discoveries. First, I noticed that in some cases, the newly-created exact match didn't perform anywhere near as well as might be predicted from the "see search terms" report. I chalked this up to the occasional anomaly, and kept in mind that "past performance does not guarantee future results." But then came the second blow. Yesterday I happened to run the "see search terms" report with one of my recently-created exact matches as the only selection, just out of curiosity. In the ad group keyword list, it showed 2 clicks with 16 impressions (a CTR of 12.50%). But when I went into the "see search terms" report, the exact match row for this keyword showed 2 clicks with 3 impressions, a CTR of 66.67%! Then in the standard "other search terms" row below that, it showed 0 clicks with 13 impressions. Now together those add up to the the 2/16 numbers shown in the ad group keyword list.

OK, but here's the question: Why would the report relegate a significant percentage of the impressions for the exact match to the "other search terms" row? There is no other search term for an exact match. I put that question to an AdWords rep in a chat, and he told me he'd need to talk to someone in "technical" and get back to me. Today he responded. Seems that the report is "unreliable" for exact matches. He assured me that all of the 16 impressions were legitimately for display of the exact match, yet could not explain why the search terms report dumps 13 of them into "other search terms."

This would all be academic, were it not for the discouraging implication: the "see search terms" report can't be relied upon to consistently point out high-performing exact matches. The CTR it reports for exact matches is often (always?) going to be inflated, because a significant number of the impressions have been inexplicably peeled off into the "other search terms" row. I'm still going to use the tool for exact match discovery (many of the ones I have tried have performed very well, if not up to the level of the report), but with a much more jaundiced eye.

The more important--and jarring--lesson is that Google's reports and stats probably have far more squirmy-wormy room in them than those of us who depend upon them to do our jobs well would like to believe.

Google vs. Bing: Quo Vadis* Small Advertiser?

Fred Aun at clikz.com reports an observation that Microsoft's re-branded and overhauled search engine Bing seems to be going after "quality" rather than quantity of PPC ad displays. In a test of keyword searches, Bing consistently showed fewer (and subjectively, more relevant) ads on the front page as compared to live.com (Microsoft's previous search engine). Aun's conversations with Microsoft's Bing representatives led him to believe that this is intentional as Bing seeks to differentiate itself from Google (as a "decision engine" as opposed to just a "search engine").

Aun quotes an AdGooroo report that hails Microsoft's decision as "a boon for paid search advertisers, who have far less competition to deal with." But who's getting the boon? Apparently it's the big guys; Microsoft brags about adding Dell, Sears, Hotels.com, Marriott and Home Depot to its roster of advertisers. Fewer slots on the front page means the front page goes to those with pockets deep enough to buy their way on.

This would seem to imply that the advent and initial (relative) success of Bing** means that Google AdWords is even more important for the small advertiser. Correction: the smart small advertiser, the one who knows what he's doing (or is smart enough to hire someone who does) will be working even harder at getting Google right. Yes, it's much harder to get to the top in Google because of the number of competitors, but the good news is that Google is still the place where, like the young American child told anyone can grow up to be President, anyone willing to put in the effort and educate themselves to be better than the competition can still rise to the top.

*Quo vadis is Latin for "where are you going?"

**Microsoft's share of the search engine market increased from 0.3% to 6.5% after the introduction of Bing. It remains to be seen if this will maintain or increase, or if it is similar to Wolfram Alpha's impact ("let's look at it because it's new, but then back to Google").

Looking for help with your Internet marketing effort from people who "get Google"? At Virante, all of our PPC account representatives are AdWords Certified Professionals who specialize in small-to-medium advertising accounts. Ask us how we can help your business rise above your competition on Google. On the web at http://www.virante.com

Google Profiles and Reputation Management - Part Two

In Google Profiles and Reputation Management - Part 1, I made a case for why building a Google Profile should be a central part of establishing a positive online presence (i.e. "reputation management"). Today let's look at a second, but probably equally worthwhile, benefit of Google Profiles: free PageRank "juice" to your sites.

Possibly as an incentive to get you to create a Google Profile, Google gives you a free gift for putting links on your profile: the links are NOT no follow. This means that as profiles gain PageRank themselves (and I believe they will), they will pass along some of that ranking power to whatever you link from your Profile page.

How best to take advantage of this? Use some of the "bio" portion of the Profile to talk about your web site(s), your company, what your company does or services you provide, etc. Using the little chain link button on the bio editing window, you can make these links to relevant pages on sites you or your company control. Be sure to make the linking text relevant to the page content!

Google Profiles and Reputation Management - Part 1

A few days ago I posted some suggestions about using social media sites to "ace" the front page of Google (fill the first page of Google's search results for your name with links to sites and content that you control). Let's review the value of doing this (aside from the obvious ego stroke!):

1. Create a positive impression on potential clients and/or employers. It is very common these days that people who are considering doing business with you (or hiring you) will Google your name to see what comes up. If you are involved in the marketing or advertising fields, the impression such a presence makes is worth even more than usual.

2. Force down negative links. If you are "out there" -- either because you are well known and/or you participate actively in social media, blogs, forums, etc. on the Internet-- sooner or later someone will write something negative about you. If the attack shows up high in Google results, the only thing you can do about it is bury it by creating positive links and getting them to rank higher than the negative post.

3. Create linking "juice" that can have a positive effect on other sites you control on the web.

One relatively new tool that should not be ignored in this effort has been provided by Google itself: Google Profiles. Google Profiles allows you to create a "one stop" picture of yourself and your online connections. You can easily post as much or as little information about yourself as you like. Additionally, this web app makes it super easy to add any or all of your social web sites.

Google has a high incentive to incentivize you to create a profile. Many are predicting that Twitter and Facebook will become the first real challenges to Google's stranglehold on the search market. Facebook in particular is actively pursuing the creation of Google-killing search functionality. The advantage that sites like Facebook and Twitter are banking on is that they are able to collect very personalized data tied directly to individuals, whereas Google's search data is more aggregation and generalization. Facebook's creators believe that in the years to come people will value the ability to find information, get recommendations, etc. in the same way they've always done, by querying their friends and acquaintances. And then, of course, sites that facilitate that will be able to present ads to users that are very tightly targeted.

Google gives every sign that they think there is something to that challenge, and Google Profiles is one of its first attempts to fire back. But because they are already behind in the game, Google has to hold out some kind of carrot to get people to create these profiles. So far, the main incentives seem to be:

1. Having a one-stop "business card on the web" that gives people searching for you all the ways to contact you, as well as where to find you on the web.

2. Rewarding profile participants with Google ranking "juice" that feeds back to their linked sites.

Tomorrow I'll post about how best to optimize your Google Profile to get the biggest Google bang from #2 above.

Social Media and Reputation Management

Are you an ace? I don't mean you've shot down boucoups enemy planes in some WW I video game. I'm coining a new usage of "ace": to have all the first page references from a Google search of your name be your own links--or links about you--and have them all be positive. I'm an ace most of the time, except for when a certain D. C. lawyer with the same unusual name as me gets in the news. Of course, if your name is "John Smith," you'd better be the most famous John Smith in the world, or you're out of luck. Acing Google's first page is a worthy goal for any company name, trademark, or brand identity as well.

The popularity of a number of social media sites has made them valuable real estate to claim if you are concerned about what people see when they search for your name online. This may be one of the most overlooked benefits of having a widespread social web presence. Most marketers just concentrate on the possible contacts/prospects to be gained. But the tremendous "Google juice" many social media sites have can result in high rankings for your name or brand.

Obviously, the first step is to claim a profile for your name/brand on as many social media sites as you can. A great one-stop tool to accomplish this is knowem.com. But just having a profile is not enough; you need to begin to regularly post content to these sites. After doing this for a while, you should begin to see many of these site filling in the first page of Google for your name or brand. For my name, my personal blog comes up #1, followed by FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Amazon. I also created a Google Profile, which shows up at the bottom of the first page for my name.

Optimizing Body Text for Google

From thekeywordacademy.com: Before we can talk about how to optimize the body text of the page you’re working on, we should probably define what body text is. To put it simply, body text is the text that you can see on a web page. Everything you can see on this post would be considered to be body text.

The technical explanation of what body text is would be everything that appears between the opening body tag, , and the closing body tag, , in the code for the page.

Bloggers don’t really need to worry about the technical explanation - you can think of body text as a combination of your post title and the main body of your post, or as the text that appears on your blog’s homepage.

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