If you’re already a whiz at PPC (no doubt from following the advice given right here on expertSEM!), it’s time you look to other mediums. Not that we’re saying you can forget about paid search marketing—it’s a continuous management and optimization process—but as you dig deeper, you should also widen your reach to include other outlets. One such outlet is the Google Content Network (GCN). GCN is a strong complement to existing search marketing campaigns because the audience is well-matched for your product or service. It’s also a vast and relatively untapped market, providing a huge source of additional leads. But it won’t stay that way for long—you can stay a few steps ahead of the rest by getting started on your campaign today. It won’t do to simply duplicate your AdWords campaign though; content marketing functions much differently than traditional search on both keyword- and ad copy-levels. Here are a few keyword tips to help you get started:

1. Create specific themes and stick to them.

Content Network ads are displayed on websites that are related to your product or service; however, the searchers are not looking to make a purchase. They are simply reading content (e.g., news article, blog post, how to essay, etc.) that is similar to your offering. Although they were not looking to make a purchase, the searcher is more apt to click on your ad because the theme is similar and your product pertains to it.

For your campaign you should choose a specific theme that relates to your product/service. Ad groups, keywords and ad copy should all revolve around this theme. If you stray too far from your chosen theme, your ads may display on irrelevant sites resulting in little to no chance of conversion. The crawlers simply scan website content and Content Network campaigns for similar words. To increase odds of someone clicking on your ads and becoming a conversion, you must choose a focused theme for your keywords (let’s call them “themewords”) and stick to it.

Remember when Ralphie had to write a theme on A Christmas Story? Themewords are kind of like that. Well, not really, but what a great movie!

2. Use “branded” terms.

Make sure to use “branded” terms in ad groups, but not everywhere throughout your Content Network campaign. The reasons for including brand terms in the keyword list seems obvious enough; however, there are two advantages that may not be quite so apparent—address bar traffic and sites that mention your name.

Oftentimes searchers will type a domain name directly into the address bar; however, sometimes they are wrong. Whether they misspell it or simply enter the wrong URL, they may be taken to a parked domain with various links related to your brand terms. Most parked domains are part of the Content Network. It only makes sense to have your ad on these parked domains seeing as though the searcher was assumedly looking for your site.
The other advantage to including branded terms in your themeword list is that, somewhere out there in the vast online realm, there is a good chance someone has written an article about your company or used your brand name in their site copy. Reasonably, you want your ad (with a message of your choosing) right next to that content.

Example of a parked domain with text ads.

The other advantage to including branded terms in your themeword list is that, somewhere out there in the vast online realm, there is a good chance someone has written an article about your company or used your brand name in their site copy. Reasonably, you want your ad (with a message of your choosing) right next to that content.

3. Use between 10 and 20 themewords.

First and foremost, never simply “opt in” your search campaign to the Content Network. Instead, create a separate campaign allowing you to have better control of keywords and all other campaign elements. And along the same vein, do not simply replicate your paid search keyword list.

To successfully stick to your chosen theme you should never use too many themewords within each ad group (although you may include as many ad groups as necessary). Between 10 and 20 themewords is a happy medium. However, you must ensure that these are, in fact, themewords and that they closely relate to your topic. The further you stray from the website’s subject matter the further you get from conversions. Don’t sacrifice potential customers for increased traffic.

Make sure your glass is filled with a happy medium of keywords.

4. Do not use negative-match keywords.

One measly instance of your negative-match keyword, and you can be knocked out of an entire website, even if that site—aside from the one instance—is a great fit for your offering. It is not worth it. But don’t worry about wasting money, if your themes are accurate and well organized, you can rest easy knowing that your ads won’t display on unrelated sites.

Just say no to negative-match keywords.

5. Use geo-modified themewords, if applicable.

Geo-modified themewords include a city, county, state or region that pertains to your business. If your business only operates within a certain area of the country, you can avoid superfluous ad placement and wasted ad spend if you include the name of that area in your themewords. This tactic is carried out in the same manner as traditional search marketing.

Flickr Photo by McPhloyd

These five tips themeword tips will help you get started and check out helpful info from Google. If you’d like further details on building a successful Google Content Network campaign, we’ll send you our comprehensive white paper “Google’s Untapped Network: Fundamental Tips for Using the Google Content Network.” Contact us today.

Google is releasing a new Beta Test for the Google Suggest feature.  This new Beta would allow sponsored ad links to populate in the suggestions drop-down on the Google homepage.  Google will be experimenting with a number of formats including (but not limited too) top placement, bottom placement, and title text links of various placements.

This should give you an idea of what it will look like if it gets out of beta.  Check it out below:

This really looks like a great opportunity, giving advertisers the ability to grab a searcher before they even get to the SERPs.  The bottom placement ads seem like the most viable option because it will be much less intrusive.  While top placement could easily result in accidental clicks and as a result wasted ad spend.  The best part about the Google Suggest Ads Beta, is that if you’re lucky enough to be one of the test accounts this traffic won’t cost you a penny.  If the Beta tests go well, we will hopefully be adding another viable keyword targeting option into the already robust Google Adwords arsenal.

As a small or medium sized business advertiser, bravely trying your hand at search engine marketing, you may feel somewhat comforted by Yahoo!’s new Terms and Conditions.  Your getting a warm and cozy feeling knowing that Yahoo! is going to look out for you and your business. Maybe your campaign isn’t getting as many sales as you would like, or maybe it is and your entirely comfortable with your current campaign. Either way, it doesn’t really matter.

Then all of sudden, much to your delight or dismay, Yahoo! comes sneaking into your account like a stealthy knight in shining armor to save the day. Your stealthy savior doesn’t really know much about your business or your goals, but despite that fact, they dive right in with only “your best intentions in mind” and start adding keywords, ad copy, reorganizing, hacking, slashing and “optimizing” (in a very loose sense of the term).

Afterward, you get an email saying something to the effect of “you just got served, sucker!”  In reality you did just get served–your ads just got served on new keywords and with new ad copy, not of your creation. Your campaign runs through its modest budget in no time and traffic goes through the roof, but sadly your sales remain stagnant.

According to Yahoo!’s new Terms and Conditions, this could happen to you if you happen to be running your campaign off of your credit card like the majority of smaller budget advertisers. See below taken from their Terms and Conditions:

“OPTIMIZATION. In the U.S. only, for those advertisers not bound by an Insertion Order, we may help you optimize your account(s). Accordingly, you expressly agree that we may also: (i) create ads, (ii) add and/or remove keywords, and/or (iii) optimize your account(s). We will notify you via email of such changes made to your account(s), and can also include a spreadsheet of such changes upon your written request. If you would like any of such changes reversed, please reply to such email within 14 days of the change(s), and we will make commercially reasonable efforts to reverse the change(s) you specifically identify. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you remain responsible for all changes made to your account(s), including all click charges incurred prior to any reversions being made. It is your responsibility to monitor your account(s) and to ensure that your account settings are consistent with your business objectives.”

If you’re like most businesses and enjoy making money, then optimizing your search campaign means maximizing sales and return on investment (ROI) by efficiently managing ad spend in a thoroughly targeted effort. The optimization factors most important to you are sales and revenue, conversion percentage and ROI.

If you’re a search engine like Yahoo!, then optimizing has an entirely different meaning. Yahoo! is in the business of selling you traffic, the more clicks your campaign receives, the more you spend and the more money they make.  You may notice that “getting you sales” is not a part of the previous sentence. For Yahoo!, optimization comes in the form of impressions and clicks, click through rate (CTR) and ad spend.

In case I’m not being clear, here is the disconnect:  impressions and clicks do not equal sales and revenue;  CTR does not equal conversion percentage; ad spend does not equal ROI. Optimization is solely a function of perspective and is unique to the optimizer’s goals. If you don’t happen to be in the business of putting your money in Yahoo!’s pocket, then the prospect of Yahoo! optimizing your campaign should be a frightening one.

Today, Yahoo! can stuff their pockets with your budgets. Tomorrow, this new policy has the potential to be very damaging as small- and medium-sized advertisers flee to safer waters (i.e., Google, MSN, Ask.com, etc.) as a result of failing campaigns.

So beware! Watch your campaigns closely and keep your daily budget caps tightly in check. Yahoo! reserves the right to waste your money!

STOP!!!  Stop your careless Google searching!  Think about your children’s children’s children.  You’re stepping all over the environment with your carbon footprint.  Global warming is happening like crazy and Google is feeding the fire.  Well, that’s what Harvard physicist, Alex Wissner-Gross, would like you to believe.

According to Dr. Wissner-Gross, “performing two Google searches uses up as much energy and can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea.”   Over 200 million searches are performed on Google daily, think of all the tea we could have if everyone matched Google’s blatant disregard for the well-being of future generations.  So stop searching and fire up the teakettle.

If this sounds ridiculous to you, that’s because it is.  According to a rebuttal issue by Google following the Harvard physicist’s accusations, the carbon footprint that results from a Google search is a tiny fraction of what was claimed by Wissner-Gross.  Despite his clearly faulty data, let’s humor Harvard’s best and come up with an alternative way for people to access the immense amount of information that Google has conveniently indexed for us.

After racking my brain, trying to figure out how people accessed information prior to the advent of Google, I came upon a revelation–print (you know like books and newspapers, those things that people used to use to do research).  Lets do some math to figure out how we could replicate Google’s enormous amount of information utilizing good old fashion print.

To give you a scope of the amount of information that you can access through your wasteful Google searching.  As of July 2008, Google ’s index included over one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) web pages that are instantly accessible through a Google search.  Assuming that a web page (which is often very lengthy) could even fit on a single sheet of paper, how many trees would we need to chop down and process into paper in order to make one copy of all that information?

1,000,000,000,000 indexed web pages / 8,300 sheets of paper per average tree = 120,481,928 trees used to print all of Google’s index

That is a whole lot of trees, not to mention all of the cups of tea worth of carbon emissions that would be used while processing 120 million trees.  This would create one copy of Google’s information for the whole world to share.  The line to check this book out might be a little long, not exactly a user friendly option.

To put this into perspective, there are 9,208 public libraries in the United States.  In order to create one copy of this information for each of the over nine thousand U.S. public libraries, we would need to cut down over 1.1 trillion trees.

9,208 public libraries * 120,481,928 trees per print = 1,109,397,590,361 trees to print copies for every U.S. public library

It’s difficult to really picture a number of this enormity, so consider this.  There are only an estimated 400 billion trees in existence on Earth, so we are going to be running a little short on the raw materials to fill this order.  We would need almost three times as many trees that exist on Earth to make all of Google’s indexed information available at your local public library (in the United States only, remember), not to mention that there are an additional 99,783 school libraries in the United States that would be without this information.  Heck, who needs trees anyway, when you could just hop in your car and drive down to the well-shaded public library for a quick info search.

You don’t need to go to Harvard to get your B.A. in B.S. (I got mine at the University of Northern Colorado – Go Bears!), but it sure does lend credibility when you’re spouting off ridiculous stats.  By the way, by Harvard’s count, I caused Google to emit five cups of tea worth of carbon emissions during my research for this blog.  Oops.

If your looking for a more scientifically informative look into Dr. Wissner-Gross’ B.S., I’d recommend seeing what Google has to say.  My research is by no means scientific, just a quick look at a preposterous alternative to the convenience of a Google search.

Happy Searching!

With the economy in a tailspin and seemingly only getting worse, sales of high end luxury products and services are taking a serious hit.  The economy and particularly the stock market has been in a steady decline for months and while luxury sales have declined in turn, it’s only now when we are hitting rock bottom (hopefully) that this relationship appears to be crystal clear.  I dug into this a little more and this is what I came up with, the trends are undeniably clear.

DOW Jones Industrial Average vs Luxury Sales - Last 6 Months

 The trend is even more visible in the below charts, looking at the most recent historic drops in the stock market.

DOW Jones Industrial Average vs Luxury Sales

 As Search Marketers, it may seem hopeless to try to overcome such enormous negative environmental factors, but there are still things we can do to maximize sales while maintaining adspend efficiency.  It’s our job to bring the most qualified traffic to a site and position then in a may to increase the likelyhood of conversions, but we can’t make people purchase.  During tough times conversion percentages on luxury products and services will fall, despite our best efforts.  The bad times will eventually make way to the good times again, but until that time I recommend increasing adspend efficiency where possible, bolstering traffic to the most qualified sources, adjusting your messaging to fit the environment, maintain a competitive price point and implement strategies to increase your conversion percentage.  In terms of conversion percentage, you may want to consider Multivariate Landing Page Testing as well as Ad Copy Optimization base on this metric.  These strategies should be implemented, even during good economic conditions, but it’s even more crucial now.  So get to work, and in the meantime lets keep our fingers crossed that things look up from here.

Go to Google.com and type in “thunderbirds bbq denver”.  You’ll notice up in the top two position you’ll see results for thunderbirdburgers.com.  That’s all fine and dandy, don’t you think.  Now look down in position 3 and 4 just below these favorable results and directly above the Google Local Business results for Thunderbirds.  You should see results for a blogger’s review of this restaurant on internetgatekeeper.com entitled ”I’m calling Shenanigans on Thunderbirds BBQ.” 

Now picture yourself as a very hungry person in or around downtown Denver, Colorado.  Your craving BBQ, and you remember walking past a place called Thunderbirds that claims to have great BBQ.  You go online and do a quick Google search to find out what’s on the menu and get the address before you go off to spend your hard-earned money at said restaurant. 

Upon seeing the results you check out the Thunderbirds site and maybe find the menu, then you hit the back button and see a review for the restaurant in question directly below.  Here you find not-so glowing remarks about the BBQ you were about to spend your money on.  You notice one of the commenters say that Yazoo’s has good BBQ and you decide this is your better option for dinner tonight.

Good for Yazoo’s, Bad of Thunderbirds.

No matter how large or small your business may be, it is always important to proactively protect your brand online.  If your business is having a similar problem with Online Brand Protection, I suggest you look into Online Reputation Management as soon as possible.  There are ways to solve these problems such as appeasing the reviewer or potentially even burying the negative results on the SERPs (to name a few).  Don’t let a good brand go bad!  Best of luck in your Online Brand Protecting endevors!

Google recently launched a new match type for Beta Testing called Automatic Matching.  The basis for this new matching “opt-in” is to help advertisers with limited keyword lists, that struggle to spend their allotted daily budgets, more effectively reach their daily spend caps.  The way it works is, Google will analyze your current keyword list over a period of time and determine keywords they believe are relevant and closely related to your current keyword theme to find additional traffic for your campaign.  In theory, it will work in a similar fashion to Google’s Content Network in which Google determines based on your keyword lists where you should have your ads placed within the Google Content Network.  The bidding will be determined based on your current bidding strategies and will not exceed your Ad Group Default Bid.  In the interface, you will simply see a line item that shows you an overall number of clicks, spend, etc… that the Automatic Matching generated for your campaign, much like you would see if you opted into the content network for your keyword targeting campaigns.

In certain, very limited, scenarios this could be a viable option to expand your current campaign.  For instance, if your campaign lacks a true conversion goal and you’re simply looking to drive qualified traffic to your site.  In addition, if you lack the knowhow to build properly targeted keyword lists and to execute calculated optimizations on a keyword and portfolio level, this could be a temporary solution to expand your campaign.  In the long run, if you fall into this second category, I would highly recommend hiring your SEM management out to experts that can properly implement your Search Efforts. 

The reasons for my dislike of the new Automatic Matching go to the fundamentals of optimization and keyword generation.  Never would I suggest to a client that they should blindly spend their advertising dollars without being able to properly track and act on conversion data.   In this case, you would see only an overall number that this generated.  Yes, you can check the “search query” report to find out which query strings generated your traffic, but because you are unable to bid on these keywords individually while utilizing this matching this would not be actionable data.  If you have Google Conversion Tracking you could at least see sales attributed to each query, but if you’re using other outside tracking systems this data may be lost all together.  The ability to track conversions back to specific keywords and adjust your bids accordingly is at the fundamental core of SEM optimization.  Without these keyword bid “levers” for you to pull, you lose your ability to properly optimize the performance of your Search Campaign. 

In regard to keyword generation, you as the advertiser should be the most well equipped to generate an in depth list of keywords that are the most relevant to your campaign.  Google’s team and Automatic Matching technology will likely only have a cursory knowledge of your business and will determine additional keyword targeting options based purely on traffic considerations.  In the internet marketing world where results matter and advertising spend is held accountable for measurable results, conversions and not traffic should be at the top of your SEM priority list.

Automatic Matching is still in Beta so it may never reach the general public of AdWords Advertisers.  If it does get added to the arsenal of, mostly great, Google Adwords features I would highly recommend shying away from this option.  If you’re looking for pure traffic, go for it.  If you’re looking for conversion results than this would, simply put, be a lazy and irresponsible way to allocate your SEM advertising dollars.