With the insertion of iPad, recently announcing over 1 million sold, and the growing base of smart phone users I wanted to highlight the quick resources you have available in Google Analytics to view this level of data.

Under advanced segments there is a default segment for Mobile Traffic. This includes traffic from iPad, iPhone, iPod, Android, BlackBerry, Windows, Samsung etc.

Under the visitors section on the left hand side navigation is a drop down for Mobile which includes two sections 1) Mobile Devices and 2) Mobile Carriers

Explore and learn from the data, if you’re seeing traffic and conversions you may want to investigate tapping into this market.

Why isn’t my business showing up on a local search? I have all the content I need and it still   isn’t   showing up!  If you find yourself asking this question, I would suggest taking a look at all the reviews written on your profile.  Do you have any reviews?  The truth is, reviews help to increase or decrease your location position and are one of the most important factors in moving you up or down.

The tricky part however, is getting your customers to actually write them.  How do you do that?  I recently found an article that gave some great suggestions to motivate your customer.  Below is my take on these suggestions:

Incorporate Links –Search engines make it easy for customers to write reviews.  Let your customers know that it’s easy as making one extra click to write one.  Every location profile has its own link to write a review and sites like Google and Yahoo! pull reviews from other engines. This makes it easy for a customer to write only one review and still have it show up on other sites.

Use your mailing list – You already know who your customers are.  They’ve trusted you with their information, now it’s time for you to trust them and their opinions about your business.  When you send promotions out to them, let them know that you care what they have to say.  No matter what, the reviews will help the listing position, even if it’s negative.

Follow up after order confirmation – After doing business with your customers, make sure to provide adequate information, letting them know exactly where they can go to rave about your services.  They’ll be sure to tell others of your service and products.

Offer an incentive –$5 off your next purchase or more?  Automatically entered into a drawing? Getting something extra in return will not only convince the customer to write a review, but will also convince them to return.

Keep them coming back – The incentive alone is a great way to get them back in the door.  If they know they can continually get these incentives, why not come back again?

Not only do the reviews give more content to your listing, but informs your customer on the product they want and why your location is the place to get it. Encourage your customers to do it as often as possible, as you will continue to offer great service as often as possible.

The internet and social media has made PR both simpler and more complicated at the same time. Simpler because you can get the word out to people worldwide in a matter of seconds, establish connections and communicate with the public without always relying on others to speak for you and find the proper people to help you convey your message and get it right. PR is more complicated because there are now even more channels to communicate with and a million and one tools to help you do it. How do you know which channels and tools to use? And once you’ve selected them, what’s the proper process?

Reaching out to the media is still important, even in the concept of “media” is changing. While editors, producers and reporters are still the main contacts for traditional media outlets, there is another set of contacts that you must consider—bloggers, online news editors, podcasters and web TV producers. Before you ever contact any type of media, though, you must communicate through your own channels, such as your website, social media networks and other sites where you control content and messaging. You must follow a logical sequence when posting a press release on these various channels, one that starts at the core of your online assets (i.e., your website) and branches out to other third-party sites that you control but don’t own, allowing the message to sprout and grow from the most credible source. However, you must factor in aspects that you do not control, such as time, to ensure the release is being pushed out across numerous verticals at nearly the same time. Here are the steps for publishing a press release through your online assets:

I. Press Release Distribution Service

Use a distribution service to place your release on the wire. We prefer PRLeap because it is the most SEO-friendly, however, PRWeb, PRNewswire and eNewsrelease have wider distribution and target specific traditional news sources and journalists. The service you use depends on your goals, but we strongly recommend PRLeap.

This is the first step because most distribution services require at least day of lead time. All uploaded content is run through their editorial team; it must be approved before they’ll publish it. Next day release is typically available for all services, sometimes requiring an package upgrade.

II. Website Press Room

Now you can upload to you core assets, starting with the ones closest to your company. Upload your press release into your online press room or news room. Make sure you upload the actual text of the release, not a PDF. This makes the content crawl-able, and therefore index-able, by the search engines. Include anchor text links to other pages of your website. If you have a “meet the team” page on your site, link the author of quotations back to their section on that page.

Add logos, photos, videos or any other element that will make the release more interactive and informative. Press releases don’t have to be the bland, text-heavy documents they once were. You’re not faxing this thing (if you are, stop now!); so take advantage of the new features and capabilities.

III. Facebook Note

Once your release is uploaded into your website, you can create a note in Facebook. Essentially, you’re just copying and pasting the content of your release into the notes section. Again, add anchor text links to your site and upload a relevant picture or logo. You should also tag any fans that are included in the press release. To share the note, publish it to your Fan Page’s news feed and send a message to specific fans.

IV. PitchEngine

PitchEngine is a social media press release platform, allowing you to effectively package stories and share them with media influencers around the world. Upload your release content, add SEO-friendly elements, include a custom Twitter pitch, add brief news facts, incorporate photos, videos and images, add resource links and include relevant keyword tags. The social and interactive elements of PitchEngine are helping to update press releases and bring them into the media landscape of today. Essentially, this is what your website press room should look like as well.

V. Twittter

Now that you have the content uploaded on various sites and ready for others to view, you can begin to share it with your contacts and the online community. Tweet the announcement and include a link to your website or use a service such as TwitDoc to upload a PDF versions. Be sure to use hashtag keywords and include contact info in tweet.

Reach out to specific Twitter users—reporters, bloggers, producers, other influencers—by sending custom @ or DM messages.

VI. LinkedIn and Other Third-party Sites

Use the LinkedIn’s Boxes.net app or another similar app to upload the press release to your profile, then update your status with a link. Again, reach out to specific contacts within LinkedIn to share the story. If you belong to other sites that allow you to upload files to your profile, include the press release here as well.

If you follow this sequence, your content will be represented on all the major channels and you will be ready to share it with even more contacts. After reaching out, when these reporters/bloggers/influencers go to look for more info or check the validity of your message, they will find it in a number of credible locations, thus validating your message and making it easier for them to cover the story and get the information right.

Because of how PPC ads are displayed if your ad (Heaven forbid!) is shown outside of positions 1-3 or if the search engine displays most ads to the side, try to avoid copy that wraps from line 1 to line 2. Instead test ads that have 2 stand-alone lines of copy.

For example, if you started with:

{KeyWord: Business College}
Start Your Career In Business
Management. Classes Start Soon!
www.BusinessCollege.edu

Then try testing:

{KeyWord: Business College}
Start Your Career In Business.
Request Info, Classes Start Soon!
www.BusinessCollege.edu

That way you ensure your ads will read well and be less awkward no matter where they are displayed.

Through the local business center (LBC), Google allows business owners to update their location and store details that display in the search results. When editing or creating this profile, it’s suggested you include as much information as possible, which is proven to help with rankings. Although name, phone number, and address are important, a business should go well beyond and create a profile with a personal touch. Some of that customization can be done with images, video and specific content about that location.

The tip of the week is: how to add social media and other custom related links to your maps places page and have those hyper link. While it’s not entirely obvious in the LBC interface, Google does allow quite a bit of customization to these listings. In the ‘additional details’ section, simply add the web site in the left column and the URL with the http:// in the right column. This ensures the link will hyper link in the actual live result.

Recently I suggested to a long term client that they should run a YouTube Promoted Video campaign as they already had a substantial library of videos on their channel and offered it as a way to drive traffic to the channel and perhaps get one or two conversions per month along the way. So far this month we have seen two conversions with a cost per lead of $12.00 (which is significantly less than the goal CPL).

The beauty of YouTube promoted videos is that it is based on search keywords which cost a fraction of normal Google search bids and, as it is set up from your Adwords interface, it’s very easy to manage.

YouTube Promoted Videos Results

Setting Your Campaign Up
From the web interface create a new CPC Campaign – I see no point in creating it in the Editor, unless you are creating quite a few ad groups at once, as the ad creation process needs to be done from the web interface.

There is no special targeting required as the type of ad you create will determine the placement on YouTube’s search results.

Create Your Ad Groups.
As Promoted Video campaigns seem to ignore the Quality Score you don’t need to set up too many ad groups unless your client is all over the shop when it comes to topics covered by their videos. For example, a pet store may have videos of cats, dogs, fish, bunnies, kittens, puppies, reptiles and anything else they stock. So perhaps you may like to run a specific ad for each of those, therefore you would create an ad group for each type of pet.

My clients have only one or two offerings so I run only one or two ad groups.

Set your default search bids. This involves a little bit of trial and error. One of my clients has a normal Google search bid average of around $15 (oh yes), but for YouTube I started them on 0.25c and have since bumped them up to 0.55c.

Add Your Keywords
Promoted Videos requires a departure from your normal keyword selection. Terms have to be very broad and there should be no long tail keyword phrases. For example you may have a client that offers luxury Bahama vacations, but in this case you would simply bid on the keywords bahamas, caribbean, bahama hotels etc.

Your pet store ad groups would use keywords like kitten, cat, funny cats, funny kittens, dog, puppy, puppies etc.

Remember you a catering to a different type of search user who will probably try to find the genre of videos through one or two words.

Create Your Ad
From the Ads tab in each ad group on the web interface select “New Ad” and “Display ad builder”. On the right hand side of the screen that opens you can select from a range of Categories. Choose “Audio and Video”.

YouTube Promoted Videos will be the first of four choices displayed. Click “Choose” and a new dialogue screen will open.

1. Name your ad (if you know which video you are going to use from the YouTube Channel then use it’s title)
2. Headline, Description 1 and Description 2 follow the same formatting of a standard Google text ad. I generally use the text that converts the best from my normal search campaign. Remember you can always A/B test.
3. Select your video from the YouTube Channel you are promoting (basically you need to search for it and it will show which videos are available). As you are appealing to an audience looking for a visual cue, choose a video where one of the frames selected … well, appeals (i.e. a kitten’s face rather than a kitten’s bum).
4. As mentioned in the previous point you can select from 4 frames to display in your ad. (again, face v bum)
5. You then can select whether the viewer, who clicks on the ad, watches it on the standard YouTube watch page or the Channel page that you are promoting.
6. Click Save.
7. You can then preview the ad from the Ads tab interface.

Select a YouTube Video

Promoted Videos Preview

Play around with your search bids, it’s not hard to make it to the top of the promoted video list with a 5c or 10c change in bids.

Don’t expect many conversions. A YouTube searcher typically does not set out to find information about a particular company or product. They seem to want to hear and see the stories of other people. If those stories are compelling then they may, as a bi-product, search out more information about your company. Fortunately the current low cost of Promoted Videos allows for this.

With adCenter to take center stage for account managers when the Yahoo! / Bing search merger becomes a  reality, it will be interesting to see if Microsoft will invest the money into both the web and desktop interfaces to make it competitive with AdWords.

Google is usually the first choice for running advertising campaigns due to the sheer volume of search queries they process every day. Yahoo! and Bing both deliver some good results, with Yahoo! having the ability to match Google in terms of lead volume for campaigns. However, with their advanced-standard match process and some painful trademark rules, your keyword lists are usually a fraction of your Google build outs.

The other reason why AdWords is the first choice is because it is simple, fast and comparatively transparent.  Unless Microsoft pulls a Windows 7 Dock (I’m a Mac and Windows stole my idea) on it’s adCenter interface and editor, campaigns will remain imports of our already built Google campaigns.

The adCenter web interface is not a lost cause and neither is the Desktop. After downloading the Yahoo! Desktop Editor and trying to do even the most simple task, then eventually giving up due to speed and other things, I now have new respect for adCenter’s Desktop.

Reports

The web interface offers a Search Query Report, which is an essential tool for anyone running broad match keywords. From the Reports tab in your account, select Search Query Performance.  Choose Specific Accounts, Campaigns and Ad Group for the Report Scope (if you run campaigns for multiple clients). The account that you reached the Report Center from should already be selected. Expand the Change Columns and Layout section. Here you can add and remove columns for the data you want to see (although a few core data sets can’t be removed).  Conversions are not selected as a default so if you are running a lead based campaign you should add this in to the report.

You can filter the report further but these are hard coded options rather than custom parameters like in AdWords. Once you have created the report it will display in your web browser and you then have the option to download it as a CSV or Zipped CSV. I find the web interface version of the report hard to read and there isn’t anything that you can do with the report within the interface (you can’t assign negatives or add relevant keywords to an ad group) so I just download it as a CSV.  They do have a little graph you can play around with but unless you are running only 15 keywords it is redundant.

One of the nice things about adCenter’s broad matching technology is that it doesn’t get too silly (unlike some recent search query results in Google) and I don’t end up deleting/excluding too many keywords.

Tools

In the Tools tab of the Web Interface is a download for Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, which is an addon to MS Excel. Once downloade,d this tool allows you to research keywords (traffic, demographics, categories), generate keywords (extraction, suggestions, popular) and look up pricing and vertical KPIs.

MS AdCenter's Ad Intelligence Tab

I have played around with the keyword generation through the Wizard, which allows you to create keyword lists from an Excel list that you may have and extract terms from a website or a specific vertical. The actual Wizard is fairly simple (and rather sparse) and the website extraction pulls keywords that I didn’t know were on the site but not quite relevant. Then the wizard will ask you how you would like to expand on this list, via the customer’s bidding behavior or by suggesting queries which contain the original keyword.

I chose to go with Queries that Contain Your Keyword. Because my client’s website has a case study on the home page and it mentions the word “additional” the keyword tool suggested (among many other irrelevant queries) “patrick chan joubert additional twist specific value.” Hmmm. Luckily adCenter’s broad matching algorithm doesn’t quite go that far (I wouldn’t put it past Google’s though).  In comparison to Google’s keyword tool (based on a URL) there are too many far fetched queries to be trolling through.

There is a third step to the Wizard though and that is Keyword KPIs. You have two options at this stage: 1. viewing monthly traffic or 2. monetization (including CPC, CTR, impressions and clicks). I chose the latter and was pleasantly surprised by the final Excel report that was generated.  Even though there are plenty of suggestions that are useless it still gives you an insight into which search terms generate traffic on Bing and their average CTR and CPC.

Keyword KPI's Ad Intelligence Report

The Popular Keywords button in the the main toolbar is pretty cool; it allows you to research spikes in search queries, top keyword searches (apparently in the Exotic Pets vertical monkey terms are a big hit on Bing), top keywords by domain (still figuring this out), and Top Vertical lists (I kept receiving an error every time I tried).

For the other tools you need to have a populated data sheet to run the queries. As I like to work in Excel when building out keyword lists (for concatenation) I will probably give AI a proper go in my next campaign build to see if it is really worth the effort.

So many times I have come across reports that look great: lots of juicy data, trending graphs and conditional formatting. However, what’s the high level roll-up that all that data is stating? What are the key takeaways? If you opened up the report a year from now, would it still make sense when that call or meeting explaining the report is no longer top of mind? My tip of the week is a reminder that:

1. Reports should make sense in isolation from a call or meeting
2. You should always review the data and answer the questions why, what and how

For example, Why did the CPC increase? What happened that could have impacted it? How do you plan on counter-attacking this in order to stay competitive but still reach client goals?

One extra tip:  Use a nicely formatted naming convention for reports so they are not only easy to sort your folders start getting full, but also enable you, if dated correctly, to find those old reports so you can run historical year-over-year and month-over-month comparisons.

Recently I went through a very large campaign and added new ads to all ad groups so that the copy precisely matched the landing page action item (the text on the button for a form).

Waddayaknow – it has worked. Very well. I actually find the copy that I am using a little cheesy so it was a bit of a “ok whatever” moment when I decided to do it. Out of all leads I received the next day 1/3 were from that one ad copy (the title had a keyword insert and the display URL was different for each ad group to reflect the theme of the ad group ).

It is always best to test action items on your page, whether it be words on a button, like Download Now v Download Software, and then have some ad text that correlates to these tests. It was mentioned in a meeting yesterday it would be great to be able to tie in a Google Website Optimizer test with ad text. Maybe one day (probably at the same time that I get my ad text testing platform)…

Matching Ad Text to Action Items

I bid optimize on the web interface mainly because I can quickly view the average position, average cost per click and the spend for a couple of different date ranges.

On occasion I reset an ad groups bids back to default. This usually happens when I have upped the default bid higher than most of the previous specific bids (that were higher than the old default bid).

The easiest way to do this is to select all the keywords:

Select All Keywords in an Ad Group

Choose Edit – In Table:

Edit Keywords in a Table

When you’re in the table view the default bid is shown as blank. Set the first keyword in the table to blank and then click on a little note like icon will appear when you hover over a bid field and this will populate all of your bids with that specific bid. All bid fields should go blank. Click Save.

Set Keyword Bids to the Default Bid

Note: This will only edit the keywords shown in the view. To edit all keywords at one time you need to Edit in Spreadsheet without selecting all the keywords (this will open your keywords and their parameters in a Google Docs spreadsheet). Otherwise with the Edit in Table, once you hit save the interface will take you back to the Keywords tab and you have to go to the next page and repeat the process.