Bing Wants to Be Big Search Engine on Campus

Dorm decor, fall school fashion, and search engines? Microsoft wanted to show young women that its Bing search engine is worth checking out, so when it threw down the gauntlet last week encouraging people to test its search engine against Google's, it worked with HerCampus.com to get the word out to influential collegiate women.

Bing's social marketing team, along with Waggener Edstrom has been working with HerCampus since early summertime to make the search brand more acceptable and relevant to college students. But the Bing branding that took over the site for the Bing It On challenge last week was a continuation of a more integrated effort.

"Search engines aren't sexy," and marketing a search engine to college women is "difficult," said Windsor Hanger, co-founder, president and publisher of Her Campus Media. Hanger founded the online magazine for college women during her senior year at Harvard in 2009. HerCampus has 200 campus-specific sites across the country from Amherst College to University of Washington.

This summer, Bing hosted exclusive parties for influential women on campus in New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta. "They wanted to get fun, popular, trend-setting college women to come to these search engine parties," said Hanger.

But not just anyone could come. Bing and HerCampus ensured party goers were part of the in-crowd by requiring they request an invite through Facebook Connect. Women with enough Facebook friends and Twitter followers were allowed to pass through the velvet rope. The social media connection made sense as Bing aimed to promote its new social features.

"We wanted to make sure there was exclusivity to the party, and wanted the right people - we wanted influencers," Hanger said.

In addition to the parties and a splashy site homepage take over on HerCampus last week, the site featured posts about the Bing It On challenge.

Simply go to bingiton.com, type in five random search queries (Ryan Reynolds? Fall internships? Jimmy Choo boots?), and compare the two side-by-side results windows that appear. You won't know which list is Bing's and which is Google's.

"We deliver marketing messages in an authentic way to our national and segmented audiences," said Hanger, noting that advertisers send the HerCampus copy points and its student writers help convey those messages in ways that are relevant to college-age readers.

While today's HerCampus sponsor is online shoe retailer JustFab, the Bing relationship isn't the site's only tech advertiser. In July, HerCampus held a conference for all of its writers in New York, and Intel branded the event to promote its Ultrabook technology. The processor maker has run several campaigns with the site publisher, said Hanger.

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Microsoft Bing Goes Toe-to-Toe Against Google

In its latest campaign, Microsoft is launching a blind "taste test" of sorts pitting Bing against Google. Bing It On is a side-by-side search engine comparison in which consumers conduct a search that turns up two sets of results. They then select a winner. At the end of the five rounds, they see which search engine they chose for each of the five queries.

A video posted to the Bing It On site depicts random people on the street identifying Google as their preferred search engine, then choosing Bing's search results as better and more relevant.

The search engine survey was conducted by San Diego-based Answers Research using a sampling of nearly 1,000 people, ages 18 and older from across the United States who used a major search engine in the past 30 days. The respondents were not told any company was involved.

Of the participants, 57 percent chose Bing, 30 percent chose Google and 12 percent saw no preference in the results. The survey had a margin of error of 2 percent.

"Google is such a habit, people don't think of the choice of engine they're making," said Bing Director Stephan Weitz. "People have told us they prefer Bing's results at a 2 to 1 margin. We encourage everyone to take the test for themselves to see if they agree."

Today Microsoft is launching the Bing It On sweepstakes which offers prizes including a Microsoft Surface tablet, Xbox 360 with Kinect, Windows Phones and more, just by tweeting. There will also be in-store activations in various Microsoft stores through the upcoming Windows 8 launch. Bing also has launched a tweet campaign.

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Facebook Takes Another Step to Compete in Search

Facebook announced late last week the addition of personal search history to the Activity Log, allowing users to view and delete previous searches.

The seemingly innocuous change hints at Facebook’s plans to enter the search realm, as promised by founder Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month.

“Search engines are really evolving toward giving you a set of answers,” he told the audience at TechCrunch Disrupt. “It’s not just like ‘I’ll type in something and show me some relevant stuff.’ It’s, ‘I have a specific question, answer this question for me.’ When you look at it from that perspective, Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have: ‘What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the past six months and liked?’ ‘Which of my friends and friends of friends work at this company I’m interested in … so I can talk to them about what it’s like to work there?’”

Analysts have awaited a move by Facebook into the realm of web search since the reigning leader, Google, announced its own social platform. Both are in the position to collect massive amounts of social data and employ it in personalized web searches, though each are starting at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Google has long dominated web search and only in the past year has begun personalizing search using higher intent social data with Search Plus Your World. Facebook, on the other hand, grew into the largest single source of social data and are now beginning to act on their interest to compete in web search and the lucrative ads industry (outside of their own space).

They’ve been experimenting with features within the Facebook platform that Google has already mastered on the web, like the real-time search ads API they rolled out in August. This summer also saw the launch of Facebook’s real-time bidding and retargeting capabilities.

The addition of personal search history to the Activity Log is another step forward for Facebook in their quest to steal a piece of the search marketing pie from Google and current competitors. Zuckerberg’s appearance at TC Disrupt left little to debate as to whether or not search is part of their grander plan. He told interviewers of search, “...at some point we’ll do it…. That’s one obvious thing that would be interesting for us to do in the future.”

To access personal search history, go to the Activity Log and click on “Search” in the activity sorter (the activity sorter is a dropdown menu with “All” as the default label for the button). Facebook reminds users that no one else can see their search history; this is private, between the user and Facebook. Search history looks like this:

 

The new search history feature will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

This article was originally published on Search Engine Watch.

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Google Q1 Earnings Up As Shift to Enhanced Campaigns Nears Full Transition

Google reported nearly $3.35 billion in net income on $13.97 billion in revenue, during the first quarter of the year. Excluding the Motorola Mobility business, which accounted for $1 billion in revenue, Google’s revenue from advertising and its other businesses grew almost 18 percent from the previous quarter and 20 percent year-over-year.

Paid clicks rose just 3 percent from the previous quarter, but jumped a steady 20 percent from the year prior. Average cost-per-click rates declined 4 percent on an annual and quarterly basis. Meanwhile, traffic acquisitions costs climbed 15 percent from the first quarter of 2012 to $2.96 billion but as a percentage of advertising revenues the cost remained flat from the year prior at 25 percent.

Google is nearing the end of a full-scale transition from separated advertising channels, campaigns and strategies to a more converged multi-screen platform it calls Enhanced Campaigns. More than 1.5 million campaigns have already upgraded to enhanced campaigns, and the company expects to have all of its advertisers moved over to the new platform by the end of the quarter.

“We’re slowly moving a huge advertising system and ecosystem on a dime,” says Google chief executive Larry Page on the company’s quarterly earnings call with investors.

Separate campaigns for desktop and mobile “makes arduous work for agencies and brands,” he says. “It means mobile opportunities often get missed.” Google wants to simplify advertising for its customers and enable brands to focus on their campaigns and message,” Page explains.

About 95 percent of Google’s clients are already managing campaigns across screens, adds Nikesh Arora, senior vice president and chief business officer at Google. “Our clients are hungry to advertise where consumers are,” he says.

Page also highlighted the momentum that Google is making in voice search, an area where he sees huge opportunity and expects to see a lot of innovation but not one that he worries about placing ads in anytime soon.

“The reason we’ve been successful at advertising is because we view that as another source of information,” he says.

Although much of Google’s business is built around capturing people’s time and attention, Page sees even more opportunity around improving the overall experience and effective use of technology.

“I think that computers are now a pretty big part of peoples' lives and I think that's increasing as it gets more useful,” he says. "More importantly, the usefulness of your engagement is going to increase.” More meaningful engagement can make for better business results and happier people, he adds.

Page also took a more defensive stance on Google’s ongoing investment and efforts in non-core businesses like self-driving cars.

“Companies can tend to get comfortable doing what they've always done with a few minor tweaks,” he says, but incremental steps will never be enough in the long run, especially in technology.

“The best people often want to work on the biggest bets, and there's not much competition because no one else is crazy enough to try,” he adds.

"Someday we will all be amazed that computing involved fishing around in our pockets and purses,” Page continues. "We are still at only one percent of what's possible. We are really just getting started."

Google ended the quarter with almost $50.1 billion in cash and 53,900 employees.

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Microsoft Renames AdCenter Bing Ads

Microsoft will rebrand its advertising arm as part of a deeper partnership with search firm Yahoo.

The name for the partners' collective advertising offering will be the Yahoo Bing Network, according to a Microsoft blog post.

Bing Ads will replace the Microsoft platform formerly known as adCenter. This rebranding already has been launched on the adCenter landing page.

Bing Ads, like adCenter, will be offered to businesses wishing to place advertisements in search results, or what will now be known as the Yahoo Bing Network.

The Yahoo Bing Network is comprised of 151 million unique searchers in the U.S. who are likely to spend 24 percent more than the average searcher, and likely to spend five percent more than Google searchers in the US," noted Tina Kelleher, Microsoft community manager, in the blog post.

Microsoft and Yahoo announced a 10-year search partnership in July 2009, shortly after Carol Bartz took over the chief executive post from Jerry Yang. Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft's Bing powers Yahoo search, while Yahoo heads up the search advertising strategy.

Yahoo reported in April of last year that the partnership had caused its business financial difficulties. Recently, some have questioned whether new chief executive Marissa Mayor would keep the agreement going.

This article was originally published on V3.

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What Else Are You Telling Google When You Hit the Search Button?

Paid search is an incredibly effective marketing channel because the user explicitly tells the advertiser what she is looking for. The searcher's query is matched to an advertiser's keyword, enabling that advertiser to deliver a specific response to the declared need.

However, the search query itself isn't all that Google takes into account when determining which ads to show. Every time a user performs a search, she is also sending additional information along with her query, whether she knows it or not.

Device, location, and past behavior are just a few of the secondary signals leveraged by Google to improve customer experience. Savvy marketers can further target their advertising by understanding and utilizing these signals.

Target by Device

While Google's Enhanced Campaigns update drastically changes the device targeting options available to advertisers, the searcher's device type (computer/tablet/smartphone) and operating system are still factored into ad serving. Quality Score (and thus cost-per-click charged to advertisers) is calculated separately by device for each keyword. AdWords' reporting still allows advertisers to segment all performance metrics by device.

For an advertiser leveraging app extensions to link her ad, Google ensures that the correct version of the app shows up based on the device's operating system (Android or iOS). Advertisers can also designate ad copy and extensions as "mobile preferred" in Enhanced Campaigns. Those ads will be shown in response to searches on a smartphone.

Target by Location

Google is extremely adept at determining a user's location, and advertisers can leverage this secondary signal in two ways.

If an advertiser is targeting a large area, she can find additional opportunities by segmenting this audience via AdWords location targeting. By cloning campaigns and targeting high- and low-value geographic locations separately, advertisers can allocate budget differently between these audiences and even provide customized messaging to each.

Enhanced Campaigns also offers new geo-targeting features that allow advertisers to modify keyword bids based on a searcher's location. Advertisers can even adjust bids based on a searcher's proximity to a physical location.

Target by Past Behavior

I can't count how many times I've received a panicked email from a client saying, "I've been searching all morning, and now suddenly our ads aren't showing!"

Many advertisers don't realize this is an intentional and beneficial AdWords feature that keeps low-value impressions from negatively impacting click-through rate. If a searcher repeatedly enters the same query over a short period of time without clicking on an ad, Google assumes that the ads aren't relevant, and stops showing those ads to that user for a short while.

Google has another similar and often misunderstood feature. If a searcher clicks on an ad and then quickly clicks her browser's "back" button, Google sees that as an indicator that the ad's landing page didn't provide the searcher with what she wanted. An option may appear below the ad, offering the searcher the option to block all ads from that advertiser. Once again, this feature is a benefit for advertisers, removing wasted impressions from uninterested searchers.

Google is currently beta testing Remarketing Lists for Search Ads. This feature allows advertisers to cookie visitors to their site and then leverage this cookie data to later target these visitors when they perform a search on Google. There are many ways advertisers can use this feature, such as serving specialized ads to searchers who have never visited the site or serving different ad copy to searchers who have recently visited but did not convert.

Google has access to an array of additional user information via Google Accounts, but it is utilizing caution about using this data in order to avoid privacy issues. It remains to be seen if and how Google will leverage this opportunity in the coming years. In the meantime, advertisers should ensure they understand and leverage all current secondary signals in their paid search marketing.

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What if eBay Is Right and Paid Search Is Worthless?

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By now, everyone in the search marketing industry has read either the full study recently conducted by eBay about search, or has at least seen some of the coverage of the report. For those too busy focusing on transitioning to Google's Enhanced Campaigns, the highlights are this:

EBay conducted a study that found that for its own brand terms, paid search was ineffective and a negative cost versus simply relying on organic queries alone.Further, eBay found that on generic terms, the value was questionable at best.

This research has garnered mainstream coverage in the trades, leading more than a few C-suite executives to question their own investments with Google. And for that I say, "Thanks, eBay."

Just as the idiom goes that no publicity is bad publicity, so should it go that no questioning of media value is a bad question. For years we have worked with brands to measure the influence of paid and organic search in tandem and isolation. We've measured paid and organic versus TV, social media, and all other forms of digital media. It's what you have to do in this interconnected consumer world.

So, I applaud eBay for doing the work and determining that for its brand search doesn't hold the value. But, take a moment and name the largest competitor to the following companies: Coke, Apple, Nike, Ford, and eBay. I bet the first four were much easier to answer than eBay. In fact, you could make the case that there's only one eBay and it fulfills a very unique space with minimal direct competition.

Which is one way of pointing out that while search may not work for eBay, it's also not struggling to achieve digital shelf space on Google or any other search engine. The biggest point of contention for eBay was around branded terms. Anyone in this space knows that branded terms for a well-known company with minimal competition represent a small fraction of total search investment, likely as CPCs in the pennies, not dollars. So, while eBay has started a public discussion of the value of search, it's very difficult to suggest many brands could take the same approach. One of the most underrepresented facets of paid buying, even with strong organic placement, is the competitive click share prevented by presence. Since eBay does not run the threat of this, organic can do more lifting with minimal repercussions.

It's obvious that eBay uses search in the purest form: direct response, down funnel conversion. Brand building is not part of the equation, and as such, every word has a value. And when the cost exceeds the return, it ceases to be of interest. In that, I wholeheartedly agree with eBay. While eBay has suggested it is swearing off branded keyword buys, it's still active on PLAs and with non-brand keyword buys.

Here's the thing. Search works, but only if, as a brand, you know what it's worth to you. Too often brands allow outside influences (competitors, corporate vanity of presence, top-line revenue) to shape their buying strategy. Just as damaging is taking what eBay has published as anything more than one unique company taking a curious public position around corporate buying choices. It's not dissimilar from GM's declaration of Facebook failing it.

Brands need to understand what search is worth to them. Accepting this study as gospel is no more palatable than accepting the long-standing Google view that if it's delivering, you should just keep writing checks. There's a proper brand point of investment in search for any company, just like any other media channel.

The truth is it doesn't really matter if eBay is right for anyone but eBay. Whether eBay is an anomaly or spot-on is far less important than knowing: What is your paid search value point? And are you constantly evolving your measurement to ensure you know the worth at all times?

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COMMENTSCommenting policy comments powered by Disqus ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Copeland is chief executive officer of GroupM Next, the forward-looking, media innovation unit of GroupM. Chris is responsible for curating and communicating insight-focused media solutions across established and emerging platforms. Leveraging his multi-year experience with emerging media companies, Chris is tasked with stewarding GroupM Next in partnership with agency leadership from GroupM's four media marketing and marketing service agencies (Maxus, MEC, MediaCom, and Mindshare).

Guiding the Predictive Insights, Technology, Education, Research, and Communications teams at GroupM Next, Chris is responsible for overseeing the amplification of insights into opportunities that directly benefit the business of GroupM agencies and their clients. GroupM is the world's largest media investment management group and the media holding arm of WPP.

Chris was selected to lead GroupM Next after nine years of leading the search marketing practice within GroupM. Among his accomplishments include the development and integration of the global search marketing offering for GroupM agencies, GroupM Search, which manages $1.3 billion in search billings globally and has grown to more than 1,000 search marketing strategists serving 40 countries.

 

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What to Do if Your Client's Site Goes Down

Whether from an unexpected surge in traffic, malicious hackers, or hardware issues, it's an unavoidable fact that sometimes websites go offline. When your site goes down, it can be a nightmare - especially if you're spending money on digital ads that are driving traffic to a dead site.

If you've made it through a busy season without your site going down, congrats. Either way, there isn't a better time than now to prepare a contingency plan for the next time disaster strikes.

Step 1: Catching Issues

There are several ways to flag when your site goes offline. Your IT team is probably already leveraging them - but they may not think to let you know when an issue arises. Reach out to them and ask to add relevant emails to any site alert distribution lists. This could include an e-commerce director, agency contacts, and anyone else who controls advertising spend. Make sure they're also checking mobile and tablet versions of the site if you have unique versions.

Another way to catch outages is by listening via social. If a customer comes to your site and it doesn't load, her next destination will likely be your Facebook or Twitter page. Reach out to whoever manages those and have them alert you when someone reports a problem with the site.

If you want even more reassurance, there are a number of free or low-cost programs and websites that can help monitor your site. Some ping your site every few minutes and send a text alert to your cell phone in case of a problem; others help you identify whether an issue is widespread.

Step 2: Communication

Communication with the IT team is imperative when trying to find out why the site is down and how long it will be down.

It's important not to jump into action too quickly in case the issue is only a momentary hiccup. If the outage is a minor annoyance that will be quickly fixed, there's no need to rush around pausing campaigns.

In the event of a larger issue (or if the cause of the outage is unknown), the next step is to communicate with everyone managing your advertising spend. Start off with a phone call, since it will likely be seen before an email (especially if the outage happens on a weekend).

Follow up the call with a quick email to all relevant contacts to keep the whole team informed and to maintain a "paper trail" of action taken.

Step 3: Take Action

The following criteria is used to determine when it's time to start making calls and pausing ads:

The outage is projected to be extended (more than 30 minutes).You don't know how long the site will be down.You're unable to reach the IT team to get answers and the site has been down for more than 10 minutes.

If any of the above is true, it's time to take action.

Your first step should be to call and email display media vendors and let them know about the issue. Many are able to pause remarketing, behavioral targeting, or other network buys in the event of an emergency. While this type of service often isn't specified in contracts, most companies are happy to help out - it never hurts to ask.

Next up is paid search. Start by noting which paid search campaigns in both AdWords and Bing Ads are currently paused. This step is crucial - you don't want to follow up one crisis (website outage) with another (wrong campaigns accidentally turned back on once the site is back up!).

The easiest solution is to download a bulksheet of all active campaigns, for future reference. You could also leverage AdWords Labels to mark current campaign status. Once you've completed that important step, pause all currently live campaigns.

Another option is to use paid search to address your customers about the outage. Leave core trademark keywords running and load a new ad speaking to the issue and providing a customer service phone number. Make sure all other ads are paused. Note that this is a temporary solution, as your ads may eventually get disapproved for having a landing page that doesn't load.

If you have the IT resources, don't forget to address natural search, especially if the outage will be extended. The best way to avoid a loss in organic search rankings when a site is taken down temporarily is to set up a 503 HTTP status code. Unlike a 404 status code, which tells the search engines that the page has been removed permanently, a 503 status code tells both the search engines and users that the site/page is only down temporarily. The 503 status code is also able to tell both search engines and users when the site will be republished.

Make sure you've posted about the issue through your social media channels, and respond to any messages they leave.

Step 4: Up and Running Again

When the site comes back online, test loading repeatedly for several minutes to ensure it's back for good. Then reach back out to your IT contact to confirm that the issue is resolved - often the site will work temporarily while IT tests solutions.

Once you've confirmed the issue is resolved:

Contact your display media vendors and let them know it's safe to reactivate your campaigns.Reactivate all paid search campaigns paused in the above step. Make sure you don't activate any campaigns intentionally paused before the outage!If you executed the optional paid search step above, delete the temporary ads, unpause any ads you paused, and unpause any paused Sitelinks.If the issue was due to a malicious attack, make sure to add any relevant paid search negative keywords ("hacked," etc.).Remove any 503 status codes (SEO).Post updates on social channels.Monitor the site closely for the next 24 hours to ensure the issue doesn't return.

If the outage was extended, adjust media plans to reflect any necessary changes to budget plan or performance projections.

The most important piece of advice is to put together a plan ahead of time, and communicate it to all parties that will be affected by a site outage. Then when crisis strikes you'll be ready to respond in an organized manner.

404 Error image on home page via Shutterstock.

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Where Is Search Heading? Check the Map

Nothing excites a crowd in the digital space quite like maps. Remarkably, after spending more than a decade in the search space, people are still awed by the visual evolution of a once-flat environment. Case in point - Apple announced earlier this week that the company was releasing its own 3D mapping capability and, in the process, removing Google as the default provider. This is news for two reasons. Obviously anything Apple does, especially if it has a material impact on a rival like Google, is going to be a story. Given the Android vs. iOS battle, it's only surprising that the move has taken this long.

The longer term piece is not breaking news as much as it's validation of many stories from the past year. Apple is clearly doubling down on the importance of local. On the heels of the Zagat integration and shift to the Google+ Local approach, the role local is going to play in determining brand viability and success cannot be understated. At the outset of 2012, GMS Local (a service of my company) research showed a surprising number of brands with significant local footprint under-investing in the local space.

For brands to be successful in search within a mobile-first world, there can be no greater priority than a well-curated local presence. Reviews, be it from Zagat or Yelp, will become a linchpin of business. A new onus will be put on businesses to empower in-store staff to solicit on-the-spot feedback via tablets vs. automated toll-free phone systems. Beyond reviews, the great visualization, and all other local elements, is a single item that strikes me as being the next great game-changer that people must consider when they think about search optimization in an Apple-centric world: Siri.

For years, the search industry has pontificated on what Apple search would and should look like. The answer was never going to materialize as 10 blue links, and I think we can now see that it, by and large, will not include many of the traditional elements we have come to think of as search. Apple is pushing "cards" of information off pins users have placed, or results for a given search, but that's a short-term position. Long term, the answer of discovery on Apple devices is spoken or possibly just understood based on proximity and preference.

Foursquare, a company I've long thought would look better inside Apple than as a standalone, is trying to move this way with its newest app upgrade. Search established the importance of consumer intent for brands. Now proximity and past behavior can be layered onto the equation, giving brands a greater opportunity for more relevant responses and consumer engagements. For brands to realize this they have to start asking the question of what assets are needed and how will they be organized in a Siri world?

Search has always been personal. Everyone suspects it's becoming more social, but maybe if you turn the map a different way you can see it become more about the moments that matter, and the places and brands that can help facilitate those moments.

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Why Facebook Search Will Make a Lot of Money...and Be Completely Ineffective

Inspiration for writing columns comes from many places. Sometimes it's from timely news surrounding companies or new research, and sometimes it's from something completely benign, like a horse head mask for sale on Amazon.

On Black Friday, one of the fine employees in the office posted that horse head mask on Facebook as his pick of the day for best deal online. As is the case with Facebook and inane items, a few people liked his post and a couple more commented - and suddenly it became a Facebook Sponsored Story being shared with his network. (You can tell he's a search expert by the witty pun in the copy.) In this model, Amazon is paying for the push of a horse head mask. I'm going to leave the ROI calculation of that alone for the moment.

Instead, let's think about how Facebook Search might evolve the model, generate a boatload of cash, and still be largely useless to consumers and brands.

Why Facebook Search?

Money. Next question.

Why Would Users Benefit From Facebook Search?

Think about the sheer volume of questions being asked by individuals on a daily basis to their Facebook network, and think about the potential of marrying that hand-raising with more informed responses. For example, you want guidance on the right car or diaper to buy, and your network, via association with brands, surfaces "liked" choices. Or you enter a query into the oft forgotten Facebook toolbar and it would return to you not only people and pages, but ads. There are forms of this already in play with Sponsored Stories, but the explicit association is the next step and could be beneficial to all…maybe.

What Prevents Facebook Search From Working?

There is a mindset around social search that suggests that your friends are highly influential to your decision-making. That's why you ask for their opinions in the first place. If you go to Facebook versus a comparison shopping engine for reviews, you are prioritizing your network over a network of random opinions. This is why Sponsored Stories include the friend that liked the horse head mask over a standard ad.

But, is your network better than a comparison audience? Facebook is built on the social graph of your friends. The wisdom of that crowd is skewed based on how they became "friends" in the Facebook sense. Most Facebook friends are high school, college, and work connections, which means they may not have opinions worth considering on many topics of interest to me. On a one-off basis, sure, but does knowing two of my friends like a car brand constitute an endorsement worthy of action?

Social search starts with that base, a social network. To steal a concept from Google, it's not a circle of enthusiasts around a given topic that I am searching for opinions from. Google works in no small part because it is able to algorithmically decipher what is most relevant based on my query. For Facebook Search to work it needs a much heavier dosage of interest graph or it needs to properly align with a true search engine that makes the basis of the process search, and then layers in seamlessly the social component it does so well today.

Anything else and it's a bit "cart before the horse," with brands and consumers in search of horse head masks and other queries to feel like the horse's rear instead.

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Why Your Online Marketing Department Is All Screwed Up

Most online marketing organizations are more siloed than a train ride through Kansas. Each silo - email, paid search, whatever - has a lead person that manages the people who get things done. These folks understand the technical platforms, workflows, and do the "heads-down" work necessary to get out emails, manage affiliates, run search campaigns, write for the website/blog/Facebook page, put up and manage data feeds, and so on.

In a nutshell, the current online marketing org looks like this:

At the top is the director or VP of online marketing, whose main job is to manage her lieutenants. Straightforward reporting, KPIs, and web analytics help evaluate each manager against goals and optimize each tactic.

Not every company has every silo, or every tactic, or every software platform, but the overall pattern holds true.

The good news? It works reasonably well, and has for a while now. To be honest, for about 10 years not much changed in the online marketing space. At least, not enough to warrant a major organization or strategic change.

The bad news? The nice, neat online marketing ecosystem that was pretty stable for years - complete with its analytics, roles, and responsibilities - has been blown to bits by mobile, social, and evolving user behavior and search algorithms.

Tectonic plates are shifting and the organization no longer matches the jobs that need to get done - and things are only going to get worse.

Illustrating the Problem - Search Engine Optimization

In search engine optimization (SEO), what used to be the bulk of SEO tactics are now only a small part of what is increasingly a cross-group exercise involving content marketing, social media work, API integration, and business development challenges. In fact, as many in the industry have pointed out, it's better to think in terms of "inbound marketing" as an umbrella concept that includes but is not limited to SEO.

It has become clear that search ranking algorithms are becoming so complex that the holistic methods needed to influence them are becoming near-impossible for some brands to implement. SEO recommendations now go way beyond on-page content and meta data to address the impact of social, mobile apps, local results and review sites, and the Knowledge Graph or semantic web effort to define and standardize information into machine-readable ways. These types of recommendations are beyond the ability of clients to execute.

Another Perspective - Web Analytics

The other poor silo most impacted by the changes wrought by social, mobile, and local is web analytics. The so-called "no-referrer," "no-keyword," and "dark social traffic" problems continue to grow. Brands are getting web visits that don't include much information about where they came from or what keyword they used. Visitors are coming from mobile apps, shortened URLs, and viral or social spaces that are non-media based and pass little information to the web analytics platform.

Adding to this is the common refrain that web analytics people face increasing complexity and role creep - they are being asked to do things they cannot or should not be doing: business analytics (BI/dashboards/predictive models), testing, marketing analytics, and competitive intelligence. That's in addition to traditional web analytics tasks and adds to the headaches caused by dark traffic and missing referrer data from the mobile/social/local revolution.

Putting it all together, users are finding and interacting with brands in a much wider range of digital places, and these contexts are harder to understand and influence. Meanwhile, existing roles and silos are under strain to cope with current complexity, much less get ahead of the environmental changes.

Given these two examples, let's assume the problem is real, it's accelerating, and it needs attention. Now.

Breaking Down the Problem

Essentially there are two components to be solved for:

The organizational issue related to reliance on the silo structure and tactic-driven roles.The change management issue related to dealing with the fact that emerging digital marketing tactics will continually challenge whatever organizational structure you settle on.

The Organizational Problem - Guiding Principles

First off, stop thinking silos and start thinking about keywords, content, and context. Think about whose job it is to live outside silos and think about ways of getting people to work together, to use emerging tactics, and to insure that content is optimized, keyword-focused, and wired or fed into every platform, application, and community.

In theory, the director of marketing might be expected to be doing this kind of thing, but they rarely do. They are too busy with budgeting, managing lieutenants, and getting major projects pushed through.

So the director of marketing needs help, and it needs to be from the right kind of person. But who? And what does this person do?

The Less-Screwed-Up Online Marketing Department Emerges

Call the new guy the "inbound marketing analyst" - the person who thinks of search, content, and social as a single process. In a perfect world, inbound marketing people are storytellers, content creators, and marketing manager types who understand the various silos and their platforms and love to work cross-group to make sure every keyword, campaign, post, event, and landing page is aligned, integrated, and search- and discovery-optimized.

If money is needed to "promote" content, then the inbound director works with the media team to get it done, but the focus is on holistic non-media (earned and owned) tactics that drive inbound results.

So the first step is to create an inbound analyst role - staff it up and give it resources and oversight over everything that's non-media and acquisition-minded.

The inbound analyst works with the rest of the marketing org and their various platforms in this sort of fashion:

The Second Problem - Dealing With the Pace of Change

The second and harder part of the problem to solve involves dealing with the accelerating pace of change. An inbound analyst role must be inherently evolving, and should be held accountable for knowing, understanding, and having strategies and tactics for environmental changes affecting the marketing org. This is the kind of person who has the fire and passion for knowing the latest digital trends and seeing the potential of new technology and new user behaviors.

The inbound analyst must be a change agent. They must continually bug people (in a good way) and get them interested and excited about creating that new API or doing that inbound-link-driving real-world event or live in-store performance (driving to a digital landing page and email capture of course).

How to Get There From Here

Smaller companies are already acting along these lines. They have content marketing people who do more than just write for the blog - they know about SEO, they host real-world local events, they understand analytics, and they know when to ask for paid media support.

Look for people like this in your org. If you don't have them, find them. Back in the day we used to have marketing managers who did it all - maybe we need to have them again. Groom these folks for senior roles; they will know everybody and know what tactics move the needle.

Don't Lose Your Experts

I recommend you don't pull people out of their existing silos and try to get them to do this new thing. Keep the experts where they are and find the right person who knows how to work cross-group, win friends, and influence people.

Big companies have management-training programs where high-potential people rotate through different roles to learn the business. This is the kind of person and professional development process marketing departments need to get going.

The Big Ending - Back at the Beginning

Now is the time to stop thinking SEO, media, content marketing, web analytics, and Facebook posts and start thinking holistically about inbound marketing that brings it all together.

Brands started simple - just a mark or a symbol that everyone could recognize. Then they got complex, and the job of managing them got complex along with them. Let's get back to basics and start thinking of brands and marketing tactics as integrated, simple, and holistic. Users look at brands holistically. Search engines look at brands holistically. Let's start managing them that way.

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YouTube Paid Advertising - a Beginner's Guide

Now that we have covered how to win the search game on YouTube through organic video search, video optimization, and video analytics, let's take a look at the world of paid media on this powerful video search engine.

Video viewing is up and continues to increase as people subscribe to YouTube channels and discover engaging content they enjoy. According to YouTube, over six billion hours of video are watched each month on the video search engine (up 50 percent over last year), and 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

This presents enormous opportunity for brands to promote their goods and services to a worldwide audience through video advertising on the world's second largest search engine.

YouTube has a wide variety of advertising opportunities, and to my surprise, most brands are not fully aware of the different programs available. In this column we'll take a general look at the video search engine's TrueView platform, which offers a great deal of flexibility for advertisers and viewers.

Note: There are other advertising opportunities on YouTube that are not part of TrueView; for this column we are only looking at the TrueView program which, in my opinion, provides a superior experience for brands and viewers for different reasons.

Advertising via TrueView Offers Greater Flexibility and Reach

At its core TrueView is a pay-per-view model; advertisers pay for their video ad only when a viewer chooses to watch it.

Rather than pay for impressions, which are difficult to quantify (did they really see it?), advertisers pay for actual views, which also provides a wealth of YouTube analytics data to inform advertising strategy and ad placement.

TrueView ads offer tons of brand visibility because they are viewable not only on YouTube.com but also on YouTube's mobile, connected TV, and game console properties, the Google Video network, and embedded YouTube players.

Brands can use TrueView in three different ways, depending on budget and search marketing goals: in-stream, in-search, and in-display. It's possible to use them separately but combining them together creates a much larger, more powerful online video presence and stronger advertising effort.

Where does the user interact with the brand?Pre-roll on partner's YouTube videosBefore, during, or after partner's YouTube videosOn the brand's watch/channel pageOn the brand's watch/channel pageNext to partner YouTube videos

TrueView In-Stream

TrueView in-stream ads are similar to television commercials. As the name infers, in-stream ads are part of the video stream, before (pre-roll), during (mid-roll), or after (post-roll) the ad partner's video. However, unlike a television commercial, YouTube's in-stream advertising is a video search marketing tool that reaches a brand's target audience with greater precision due to the use of select keywords, interest targeting, and video optimization. This is a tremendous asset to advertisers.

Viewers may watch the entire ad, part of it, or skip it after at least five seconds of play. The advertiser pays only when at least 30 seconds or the entire ad is viewed (whichever is shorter). TrueView in-stream ads may be any length, which offer advertisers greater leeway in terms of creative format for their message (tutorial/how-to, infomercial, entertainment, interactive, etc.).

Why use TrueView in-stream ads?

Viewers have the option of watching or skipping the ad - this helps retain viewership of the selected video and reduces fall-off.Advertisers can maximize their ad budgets by delivering the right message to the right audience.No maximum ad length restrictions. Longer ads allow greater flexibility in terms of ad message format and message delivery.

In-stream for mobile. Mobile viewing makes up more than 25 percent of YouTube's global watch time, with more than one billion views a day. Therefore, advertisers cannot afford to omit mobile-specific ad campaigns in their YouTube media mix. In addition to the TrueView in-stream ads described above (pay-per-view), mobile advertisers may also choose two other in-stream options (which are also available for desktop):

Standard in-stream. These ads are not skippable and are limited in maximum length (up to 15 seconds or up to 30 seconds). They run pre-, mid-, or post-roll. Advertisers are charged when the video loads.Select in-stream. These ads play before the partner video. They can be up to 30 seconds long and viewers have the option to skip after five seconds. However, advertisers are charged no matter how long the viewing time.

TrueView In-Search

These online ads are where organic search, YouTube analytics, and video advertising converge. Brands can target their video ads as a search result by choosing search terms that appear in YouTube. Similar to a Google AdWords campaign, in-search ads appear in a special promoted section of the search results pages on YouTube and Google, above or to the right of regular results. Advertisers pay per actual view (charged only when the viewer chooses to watch the video), not per impression.

A call-to-action overlay is available to direct viewers to the brand's website, splash page, or other digital marketing asset.

When viewers click on your ad, it takes them to your YouTube channel, where they can subscribe and watch your other videos at no charge to you, the advertiser. You are paying for that initial view and if you provide viewers with relevant, engaging video content on your brand's channel, you will greatly enhance the value of that original cost-per-view. Therefore, high-quality, relevant video ads will give advertisers a strong ROI.

TrueView In-Display

These are videos that show up on search pages alongside other YouTube videos or on the Google Display Network that match your target audience. A click-through on the video ad directs viewers to your YouTube channel. As with in-search, you pay only when a viewer chooses to watch your video. Make sure your video ads are well-optimized to boost their in-display results.

The TrueView formats allow advertisers to target their messages by search terms and interest; drive more traffic to their brands' YouTube channels or their websites; enhance their online visibility, view counts, and signal greater brand relevance to Google and YouTube; help boost search results; and make this earned media search engine into a powerful place to put advertising dollars.

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12 Hidden Pitfalls in PPC Campaign Automation

In a previous column, I discussed how limiting your exposure to "small stressors" and trial-and-error testing can lead to corporate fragility. This can be what happens when you stop testing, and cede optimization activities to black box campaign automation tools that optimize to "results" without you, the analyst, gaining an understanding of how these results are generated.

Of course, there must be a role for automation in marketing, just as there is a role for grocery stores and drive-throughs in satisfying our daily nutritional requirements. I'm not suggesting you head into the woods with a hunting knife every time your stomach rumbles, any more than I would suggest you should make 5,000 bid adjustments daily, one at a time. But just as eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day by cruising through the drive-through in your comfy SUV could shorten your life, a completely automated approach to marketing will cause your analytical abilities and corporate capabilities to atrophy. Getting the mix right is important.

Campaign automation tools can have some serious pitfalls. If you perform a postmortem on an account that had one or more campaigns running using, for example, Google AdWords' "Conversion Optimizer" (hereafter referred to as "the system"), you may notice that the following serious flaws and strategic errors have crept into the mix. Whether you were aware of it or not, the following may have been happening in these campaigns:

Look deeply into Search Query Reports, especially if you've made significant use of the broad match type. CPA and volume targets may have been achieved only superficially, by means of aggressively cannibalizing "easy pickings" conversions from other campaigns; notably, on brand terms. By "easy pickings," I mean terms that you're already optimizing for and getting low CPAs on in their own dedicated ad groups; typically high-converting phrases like your brand terms. Pulling these into another campaign doesn't actually improve your account, it just assigns credit to the "system" for hitting targets you were already hitting.Even worse, if you didn't set up the campaign structure to separate display from search, the system might have experimented wildly and wasted significant funds in the display network, making up the difference with low-hanging fruit on the search side.The system tends to get a few well-priced conversions to even things out for the weird experiments, but doesn't aggressively pursue volume. So volume could be down by 15 percent, but since you were setting and forgetting you barely noticed the overall conservatism and lack of business dynamism in comparison with more agile and engaged competitors.New conventions and tacit knowledge around keyword optimization, keyword expansion, match type, etc. were never applied as the account was outdated and coasting. You stuck to a comfortable range of so-so performance on an outdated keyword set.The system knew which keywords to negative out, right? Usually. When it felt like it. Eventually. What a horrible waste to leave it to its own devices!You don't like to sit in ad position 1 or 1.1. Yet the system had no compunction about this. The resulting overspend was gravy to the publisher. Even better, if several advertisers ran automation at once without being mindful of ad position, they collectively bid CPCs up a few notches! By contrast, if most everyone had tried to stay out of position 1 most of the time and actively managed their accounts so that they didn't have too many position 1s in their account unless the return was sky-high on those keywords, the auction would have weakened and everyone would have enjoyed lower (and fairer) CPCs and better ROI.The system never aggressively pursued "goldmine" publisher partners by using managed placements when they were discovered, but instead judiciously fed you the odd conversion from such "plum" publishers here and there, and then kept right on watering down your success with too much of the weaker spray-and-pray inventory. Gotta be fair to all the advertisers, right? The system learns a lot in theory, but doesn't hand over all the fruits of the learning to you. :(Even if there wasn't a conservative bias to the bid calibration, you might find that the account only grew in line with industry growth or growth in search queries on this keyword universe. Given that competitors were actively tinkering and experimenting and becoming strengthened via trial and error (while aiming to hit CPA targets), you might well find that your account gradually got smaller…as did your market share.Nobody tested any ad creative for the time you ran things on autopilot. You've learned nothing on that front.The system ran a lot of the conversions through a limited set of (mostly broad-matched) keywords. You never got a feel for the true relative bids for different match types, many query avenues weren't tested hard enough, and you haven't learned much about user intent - but the owner of the system has.You haven't built a comprehensive, increasingly predictable response dataset asset for your company through trial and error…but by inducing hundreds of thousands of companies to allow multiple forms of black box automation to run amok in their accounts, and using those companies as guinea pigs, Google has now built a gargantuan asset of this type…which it needn't share with you.Sorry, but you weren't allowed to set bid factors by country or region (as is now available under Enhanced Campaigns). You trusted the system to get the right bids for China, Pakistan, and Ireland…eventually. Trust? No. Verify? You must.

The good news: even if you were a victim of most of the above, you're in way better shape than a company that relies primarily on SEO search query data in its analytics reports. If you pay for clicks, you still get lots of historical query data and lots of other great segments to optimize around, even when your strategy is passive or flawed.

Feel free to chime in with some of the things you may have encountered using automated tools.

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12 PPC Resolutions for 2013

2012 be a tough year for many pay-per-click (PPC) search marketers, a class of which you may be a member. Google and Bing have added additional functionality in both ad formats and targeting, and these new capabilities are likely to make your life more complex by making it more difficult to optimally prioritize your tactics and experiments. Mobile traffic (across both smartphones and tablets) is exploding and the emerging set of hybrid tablet/laptop/notebook machines is further confusing the marketplace.

In addition, every indication is that cost-per-clicks (CPCs) across the desktop/laptop segment, as well as the mobile segment of users, are starting to rise. The last couple of years saw a stabilization of laptop and desktop CPCs. This stabilization was driven to a great extent by new ad formats in Google AdWords that asymmetrically raised Quality Scores among the more aggressive advertisers, thus reducing their billed CPC or enabling them to achieve top position at a lower bid. PPC sitelinks and other extensions were the primary drivers of the increased click-through rate (CTR) (all other things being equal) and, therefore, the drops in CPCs.

Many of you benefited from this and experienced similar or better conversion rates, thus contributing extra profit to the bottom line, or - if the keywords you were bidding on were elastic (bid price increases resulted in position change) - an increase in position with an accompanying surge in profitable volume.

Most retailers running product listing ads (PLAs) advertising had a happy holiday despite the challenges associated with managing a separate PLA management system in tandem with AdWords. Advertisers who managed PLA effectively reaped the rewards and those who didn't handed customers to their competition.

As CPCs rise, as the traffic mix becomes more "mobile," and as new Ad Extensions are rolled out across Bing and Google AdWords, you may find it helpful to heed some 2013 PPC search advertising resolutions.

Quality Score, Quality Score, Quality Score! (These only count as one resolution.) I can't overstate the importance of high Quality Score on the success of a campaign, as well as its positive impact on the staying power for your campaign as the CPCs start to rise again. Top positions are easier to attain if your Quality Score is high, because the bids required to obtain the positions are lower.Consider using different KPIs for mobile campaigns. Mobile searchers, particularly those on smartphones, have different needs from desktop and laptop users. As a business, you should consider whether or not the same success metrics you use in your main campaign apply to mobile.Separate mobile campaigns. Regardless of whether you use separate campaign objectives for mobile vs. desktop, you still may want to separate out campaigns because:The winning ad copy may differ.If you don't have dynamic landing page creation capability, you may want to specify different mobile landing pages.Conversion rates and values will differ, necessitating different bidding strategies.Separate mobile landing pages. Tablets sometimes render your website fine and are navigable even for users with fat fingers. However, as the percentage of tablet traffic grows, a tablet-specific landing page may make sense, starting with those serving as landing pages for high-volume keywords. The smartphone user experience suffers even more from sites not optimized for their form factor and resolution. Also, consider the differing needs of mobile searchers.Know when to use separate targeting. Should you use hyper-geo-targeting to refine audiences, target by device, operating system, and carrier? Depending on the size of your campaign and the materiality of some of these segments, it may make sense to either clone an entire campaign or take specific high-value, high-opportunity portions of the campaign and use separate targeting.Know your ad extensions. Ad extensions are great for driving CTR and volume, but they aren't always warranted for every ad. Match your campaign objectives against the things that each ad extension delivers best.Thou shalt not have bad ad copy. The first thing the searcher sees in a regular PPC ad is your ad copy. Even in PLA ads, one has a bit of control over how your products are merchandized and you should use this control to provide the best messaging you can.Weed those ad groups; tune match types. Most ad groups have too many keywords in them. Take a look at the similarity of those keywords and decide whether or not to treat match type traffic differently for exact vs. broader match types.Wean yourself off DKI. Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) can still be useful. However, Google recently announced some policy changes that make it clear that overuse of DKI is discouraged. Automated tools can augment, but never substitute for genuine human intelligence.Take a fresh look at landing pages. You've seen them in someone else's campaign as you surf around. Don't let your campaign suffer as well. Take a fresh look at landing pages. Start from your most popular landing pages (sometimes shared by more than one keyword) and work your way down.Look for volume first. Search your campaign analytics for opportunities to gain volume. Sometimes a high-opportunity keyword in a low position can afford a higher position with better ad copy or a better landing page.Consider adaptive design and personalization. If 2013 is a year in which a new website is being planned, consider adaptive design. Not only will adaptive design work well to tune user experience based on device, but it can also be effectively based on personalization.

Start the year off right but also be vigilant. Campaigns need TLC all year 'round. Search engine marketing (SEM) is not a "set-and-forget" advertising medium even if your campaign management software is killer.

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2 Big Wins With Enhanced AdWords Campaigns

Your AdWords campaign is now spending about $50,000 a month. Not pocket change, but still modest. Google hasn't treated you to Lobster Thermidor lately, or comped you Bublé tickets.

You ask Ricky, your overworked marketing manager: "What are we doing in the mobile channel? And weren't we going to try to get more aggressive in Europe?"

Ricky, naturally, is afraid that smartphones and Europe will impair ROI. The only way to do this properly will be to break out separate campaigns - possibly, many separate campaigns - and manage them actively.

"We're going to do those breakouts next month," announces Ricky. One month turns into two.

There are two problems with this. First, if it's a good idea to break out all these campaigns and manage them actively, then it's a good idea to do it today. The second problem is: it's not 100 percent clear that it's a good idea. Especially not the "managing them actively" part, if the newly created segments are only spending a few hundred dollars a month, and Ricky has tons of other urgent priorities.

Enhanced Campaigns: All Bad? Or Largely Good?

Could the oft-maligned Enhanced Campaigns architecture actually come to the rescue here?

Maybe so. I'll focus on a couple of great new aids in our quest to drive advertising ROI. Yes, there are drawbacks to the loss of some granularity in Enhanced Campaigns, but right now, I'm finding more wins than losses. Perhaps the silent majority will also come to see it this way.

Those benefits are: 1) ease of geo-specific bidding; and 2) heuristics, or the elimination of "endless possibility" in favor of "getting the job done better."

1. Geo-specific bidding. You don't need to be running an extensive "national local" campaign, or want to besiege people ambulating by your proverbial "pizza place in Palo Alto" to enjoy cool new geographic capabilities in the settings of Enhanced Campaigns.

First example: our client, a high-spend retail account that spends 96 percent of its budget in the United States, and 4 percent in Canada. Canada should be closer to 8 percent, but with the smaller-volume segments being hard to get working properly, the safe approach is to pause some campaigns. That's an opportunity missed.

With the current campaign architecture, we need to mirror 14 campaigns, thousands of ad groups, and 300,000+ keywords - pursuing ROI-appropriate bids - for the Canadian consumer.

Over time, we might slowly lose the "sync" of the campaigns as the Canadian ones fall out of date as compared with the U.S. campaigns, much better optimized based on much more data. We run into even more fragmentation if we break things out by device.

There could be some advantages to managing the Canadian campaigns separately - namely, bidding lower and also bidding differently based on different buying behavior (that may eventually come to light after a long wait for statistically significant data). We can also put "shipping to Canada" customization in the ad copy.

Those advantages are probably outweighed, though, by sheer amount of time required to manage the account, while keeping mirror campaigns in tip-top shape.

Enhanced Campaigns offer an elegant solution. We can take care of the "bid less" imperative by simply enabling Canada and using a bid factor across the campaigns, based on aggregate performance stats. Every subsequent action we take to optimize the vast number of segments in the core campaigns will also apply to the Canadian campaigns. The ROI will be evened out with a simple bid factor across the board.

Isn't that actually a win?

Sure, we're "blending" performance numbers and taking a predictive leap rather than painstakingly "re-"managing all the same keywords and ad tests. But assuming a reasonable correlation between one set of behaviors and another set is something we do all the time, whether we realize it or not.

In another example, a client in the tourism industry spends about 70 percent of their click budget in the U.S., and 30 percent dispersed across over 50 foreign countries. With more certainty as to bidding strategies, we'd improve ROI and volume alike. I'd like to see this international spend reach 50 percent of the total.

The country performance data we now see for this client have us more bullish than we previously were about the potential for strong performance almost everywhere. We had spent the better part of the past few years with only about 20 countries enabled. Now, we just want to exclude the odd one, and bid the rest according to performance. With Enhanced Campaigns, it's more feasible to do this within fewer campaigns - or if you really want, just a single campaign!

We're already getting calls from this client, thanking us for the new business from Sweden and Slovenia.

AdWords makes this powerful functionality accessible to any advertiser, large or small. And having a large, complex set of campaigns won't be a limitation, either. This reduces the divide between big companies with large teams and big data platforms, and the rank-and-file advertiser.

2. Heuristics. Advertisers should be making more sensible use of heuristics. They need to let go of some of the detail they claim to be seeking as a matter of "best practices," so that they can actually do better by quickly finding "good enough" approaches in areas where that's most appropriate.

When you're doing triage in a war zone, that point is obvious. Dr. Oz, with a sack full of high-antioxidant-count blackberries, isn't particularly welcome when patients are bleeding to death. But the point has wider applicability, too.

For a couple of years now, I'd been noticing a change in the tone of conference sessions devoted to AdWords. The expected level of busywork - embodied in yet more "campaign breakouts" around mobile, geography, match type, etc. - kept ramping up. The insight into marketing strategy, buying intent, and the complexity of how to juggle various KPIs, as a result, got crowded out amidst the blizzard of "best practices" tick-boxes. Many of these tiny pieces of data remain statistically insignificant for years, so you're "managing" random noise. And overzealous, ADD-addled campaign managers, paradoxically, can no longer pay attention to the way that key ad groups are functioning.

Even a $100,000 per month account is not necessarily big enough to overslice and overdice, especially if you're talking about an international account that is divided up into multiple themes and/or products. If you look at a particular campaign, within a smaller country market, on a particular device segment, etc., you're managing a large number of keywords and ads that all get to fight over $300 a month. Doesn't compute. Can't be managed accurately to KPIs, anyway.

To be sure, no country, device, or other significantly different segment is truly "the same" as (let's say) a core campaign running for computers in the U.S.

But my bet is that the heuristic approaches described in the examples above - when applied in the real world - are often going to beat the "pivot yourself into a pretzel" approach that has become fashionable of late.

Like you, I live and breathe the details. I know that sometimes "big win" means "many small wins that add up across a campaign, using systematically applied techniques."

It's also the case that many businesses are better off targeting in more granular fashion, such that managing ad copy and everything else based on metro region is getting them much better results. As long as the means to that end remains "campaign breakouts," then some advertisers will want to keep organizing their accounts that way. But not every business needs to think this way.

It's possible to pursue detail to the point of insignificance. Attempting to manage every nuance in an environment that is poorly architected to do so just might not be feasible. As Nick Fox pointed out, even well-funded advertisers have been drowning in complexity, with thousands of campaigns "pivoted across every dimension."

Time isn't unlimited or free. With Enhanced Campaigns, I suspect Google is doing the majority of campaign managers and companies - especially those managing accounts spending less than $50,000 a month - a favor.

The Complex Future

Some sharp analysts believe that this is an interregnum period entailing a slight loss of control as Google gears up to provide even more advanced bidding capabilities that transcend what we've seen so far. For now, for example, we're losing the ability to bid separately on tablets. In the future, some believe that you'll be able to bid to "screen size and velocity," and engage in other byzantine fine-tuning.

But this degree of granularity represents a sharp break from the history of advertising as a tool for influence and persuasion; possibly too sharp. It is almost certainly overkill for all but the top 0.1 percent of advertisers.

Stop obsessing over every little nugget of data. Plug key holes as well as you can, and remember that big marketing ideas (and great fundamentals) drive most businesses ahead of their competition. Spending your days chasing elusive "noise" data and obsessing over rounding errors will just hold you back from making the big breakthroughs.

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4 Ways to Disaster-Proof Your SEM Campaigns

 

Hurricane Sandy and Election Day can both be a source of education and strategic inspiration for those of us who spend most of our time thinking about SEM campaigns.

If Hurricane Sandy has taught us anything, it's that one rarely prepares sufficiently for disaster, be it hurricane, tsunami, or earthquake. Even when one does, it's easy to underestimate the disaster's impact. In real life - as in digital advertising - some damage from disaster is inevitable, regardless of the level of preparation. However, there is no longer an excuse for failing to prepare for unforeseen changes to your campaigns, because you rely on the online marketing ecosystem to deliver immediate sales, leads, and brand lift.

The U.S. presidential elections also taught us a valuable lesson in the value of online media as a tool for influence. Several industry professionals have evaluated the Obama and Romney paid and earned online media campaigns and most gave the Obama camp the nod for a better executed campaign. I saw some fascinating marketing campaign executions from both sides, which in many ways were more innovative than much of what I've seen produced by the private sector. It seems that political advertising and marketing are innovating faster than their equivalents in the traditional for-profit business sector. An especially important factor in this innovation cycle was the fact that data from search and social media ended up being used to accurately predict voting patterns, as well as to stimulate "get out the vote" community action behavior.

Let's get back to planning for unforeseen disasters that might impact your SEM and online media campaign. The kinds of surprises you should prepare for include:

Unexpected staff availability. In the event of a natural or unnatural disaster, your staff may be unable to commute to your office or even get online. This is why you need to have more than one person familiar with the ins and outs of each one of your campaigns. This is true both for your in-house team and/or your SEM agency. One reason agencies are often included as a partner in running campaigns is that agencies always build redundancy into teams so that clients are best served in the event of unavailability of staff.Unexpected staffing changes. People move on (hopefully to other gainful employment and nothing more depressing than that). Maintaining some degree of staff redundancy (in terms of people familiar with your campaigns) protects against unexpected staff changes.Human error. AdWords and Bing Ads can often let you turn back the clock and revert back to previous campaign structures, keyword mixes, or ad creative. However, human error can manifest itself in many ways throughout a campaign, from forgetting to add tracking tags to erroneous changes in ROI settings within a campaign management platform or within the AdWords/Bing Ads interface.Unexpected technology outages (on your side or on the publisher/campaign management side). Technology occasionally breaks, particularly when two, three, four, or more technologies must all communicate with each other in close to real time via an API. Think about the role your technologies play in maximizing profitability and ROI and plan for how you might have to live through a temporary glitch or outage.

Regardless of the cause of the challenge, there are some things you can do to minimize the impact of any disruption, including:

Back up your knowledge.There is a tremendous trove of knowledge in your brain about your SEM campaigns that probably isn't documented at all. Have a discussion with your team and/or superiors as to how best to take some of this valuable knowledge and document it. As long as there is a consensus on the process to capture this knowledge, there are lots of ways to incorporate it into a usable storehouse. Some of my favorites methods for doing this are:Setting up a private wiki organized by campaign.Using a project management platform like Basecamp, Asana, or any of the other many platforms out there.Using some combination of Google Docs or shared documents on the Microsoft platform.Back up your campaigns within an editor. There's no reason not to install Google's AdWords Editor and Bing's Ads Editor. These applications automatically create a copy of your campaigns on the desktop.Export and back up your campaigns with a bulk sheet. Bulk sheets are .csv files that contain the exact information within your campaigns. Just like backing up any data, it's good to date your backups and not just have one, because you may not catch a problem until several backup cycles have occurred.Show your boss what you actually do every day. Yikes, that's scary! Do you really want her to know? Yes, you do. Your transparency will be appreciated and rewarded. Resist the temptation to stay a "black box" hoarding all the knowledge to yourself.

This has been a test of the emergency campaign management planning system. We now resume our regularly scheduled programming.

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5 AdWords/adCenter Spring Cleaning Tips

When is the last time you gave your search campaign a spring cleaning? In the physical world, a spring cleaning weekend is often the result of some event (perhaps a visit from an in-law) that highlights just how badly your place needs a deep clean. Online is no different, and with the upcoming mandatory upgrade in Google AdWords to an Enhanced Campaign structure, now might be the perfect time to do a spring cleaning of your accounts, while perhaps even reorganizing things at the same time.

Another reason to go into your campaigns with a fresh look is the launch of Google's Image Extensions (now in beta). Image Extensions deliver the power of images across advertisers - not just those online retailers who have had an opportunity to experience huge increases in CTR on their PLA ads. If you aren't aware of the Google Image Extensions program, it's exactly what you would expect, but is outlined in Google's public announcement.

Regardless of what other reasons you have to dig into your AdWords account, here are some spring cleaning tips that will serve you well, even if you've already moved your Google campaigns over to the enhanced setting.

Find the 404 errors. In the early days of 404 "page not found" errors, the bad listings were easier to find because the lack of conversions on the listings would highlight the poor ROI and therefore bring attention to the errors. With the newer intelligent commerce platforms, the 404 errors of the past have been replaced with dynamic search results pages or other personalized suggestion pages that will often provide your customers with enough of an alternative that they'll struggle through your site and convert anyway. If this happens, your conversion rate will be significantly lower than it would otherwise be. Often keyword listings resulting in 404s are long tail and low volume and individually won't represent a lot of wasted budget. Collectively, however, they might waste budget and result in a poor customer experience. Some campaign management platforms can help you identify the 404 errors and flag the listings separately (rather than simply floating them to the surface based on a conversion rate report).Duplicate listings. There are many reasons to have listings that are near duplicates of each other but differ based on match type or audience targeting parameters such as geography. There are also situations where one might want to run a seasonal campaign with identical settings to the master campaign and pause this campaign in time periods outside of the seasonal period when the campaign makes sense. Doing this can be easier than swapping out creative and landing pages within a single campaign during a seasonal sale. Even under Enhanced Campaigns, one may have a campaign with a different set of ads and landing pages for mobile with a mobile bid boost to assure that the mobile ads serve on smartphones. However, duplicate keywords that are active at the same time as everything else don't make sense. Kill one of the listings and - if you want to test different ads against a keyword - do that in the same ad group.Non-standard or missing tracking. Over many years and possibly as a result of changes in analytics or campaign management platforms, tracking technologies may have shifted or the coverage provided by them may have become less than comprehensive. Check to make sure that your tracking systems are intact and functioning.Poor landing pages. You probably are cranking out new landing pages all the time for your power keywords, resulting in a situation where these highly critical keywords are associated with the best-performing landing pages. That's great and the way your campaign manifests the 80-20 rule makes it important that you focus on the keywords that can move the needle. However, there may be less important keywords that still burn budget, and improving the landing page experience for them may result in them using budget more effectively. Improvement areas may include navigation, copy, layout, or image. Don't neglect the importance of landing pages that merchandise more than one thing. If the search term use happens to be ambiguous, a landing page that is too narrowly focused can backfire.Smartphone-specific campaigns and user experience. Now is the time to decide how to handle smartphones. Do nothing and you'll see your smartphone clicks arriving alongside your desktop/laptop and tablet clicks. If this doesn't result in the best user experience, you can depress the bids against the mobile (smartphone) traffic and ignore that segment, or you can decide how to provide a user experience that also meets your needs as a marketer. Obviously every business is different in terms of each's desire for mobile traffic and the ability to monetize it. Now is the perfect time to address this issue if you haven't already.

Grab that spreadsheet and start the spring cleaning!

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5 Free Excel Add-Ins to Help Digital Marketers Decipher Big Data

Wherever a marketer turns these days she is confronted by the idea of big data. Mining this storehouse of user activity for actionable intelligence can seem a daunting task to a business without an in-house data analyst. Data captured will do no good if teams can't interpret it quickly and efficiently - it needs to be easily accessible.

Luckily you likely have a powerful analysis tool at your fingertips - Excel.

Excel has become so indispensable that 76 percent of agency media planners rely on it for their media planning, according to Chris O'Hara from NextMark. To turn your raw data into an asset, many powerful add-ins have been built to plug in to Excel.

GeoFlow for 3D geographic visualizationPowerPivot and Power View for massive data crunchingBing Ads Intelligence for rich PPC dataExcellent Analytics pulls in analytics data directly into ExcelSeoTools for Excel for robust SEO-specific tasks

All of these can help you harness the power of your data quickly and save time. As marketers, we should have a conversation around getting more from a tool we already know well (but not well enough).

GeoFlow: Big Data + Great Mapping Visualization

The Excel team just released a new free Excel add-in called GeoFlow that displays geographic data using Bing Maps to tell your story in a 3D visualization. The visualizations attract attention, are easily understood, and can even be incorporated into dashboards.

The example above maps electric power usage from Dallas Utilities from publicly available data. In digital marketing, advertisers can easily map sales and website interaction over time by geography. This sort of visualization for your data can make your reports and presentations pop.

PowerPivot: Pivot Tables on Steroids

Another key tool in Excel is PowerPivot, included with Excel 2010 and 2013. PowerPivot is pivot tables on steroids. PowerPivot can load even the largest data sets from almost any source and process this massive amount of data in seconds. After the initial learning curve, it's surprisingly lightweight.

Many businesses are putting together dashboards created from PowerView, a complement to PowerPivot.

Now, PowerPivot and GeoFlow are fantastic tools all marketers can use to help sift and visualize big data. But there are a whole set of free tools that bring search marketing or analytics directly into Excel. You don't have to leave Excel, so you can use an interface you're already familiar with.

PPC: Bing Ads Intelligence

Need keyword ideas or bid estimates by position? Bing Ads intelligence, a free add-in from Bing Ads, can give you the number of searches per search term, cost-per-click data, keyword ideas, age/gender data, and even more.

It also offers time-saving keyword research templates, like the "Search Query Insights Dashboard," which is similar in some ways to Google Trends. Nick Kastner from Red Clay Interactive echoes this point: "This awesome extension offers you seven standard keyword research templates to help you get started."

Analytics: Excellent Analytics

Spending too much time on reports? Excellent Analytics lets you pull Google Analytics data directly into Excel. There is a free, open-source version that has been downloaded tens of thousands of times by marketers looking to automate reporting. One review in the analytics app gallery highlights the time-savings: "This is a real time saver for me. What used to take me an hour now takes about 2 minutes."

SEO: SeoTools for Excel (Now With Majestic SEO Data)

Last but not least is a free set of SEO tools, fittingly called SeoTools for Excel. This donation-supported toolset adds many SEO-specific tasks to the Excel ribbon. Mitch Monsen from WhiteFireSEO says, "It has one of the most robust feature sets I've seen in an extension, and Nielsen is updating it constantly. It has mind-boggling scraping capabilities (get a proxy if you plan on using them a lot) and a ton of on-page analysis tools."

This isn't a complete list by any means. I'd love to hear your favorites in the comments section.

That said, countless late, coffee-filled nights putting together proposals have led me to this conclusion: digital marketing runs on Excel and caffeine. As the volume of data grows by the hour, take comfort in knowing "big data" can be sifted through an interface that you're already familiar with - Excel. And there are plenty of add-ins to help save you time!

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5 Reasons Search Marketers Should Watch the Regulatory Landscape

You may wonder what a recent hack of a U.S. government website, purportedly by the group "Anonymous," has to do with search engine marketing and online marketing, but bear with me as we use this as a segue into the regulatory environment, both in the U.S. and globally.

The conspiracy theorists (including some very bright and sane people) believe that this was a "False Flag" event and that an element or faction of the U.S. government actually hacked one of its own sites in order to pave the way for easy passage of Internet security reform with an emphasis on governmental control to regulate communications.

Whether or not the conspiracy theories are right could end up being a moot point. It wouldn't be surprising to see some mobile and Internet wiretapping bills proposed that gain far greater bipartisan support due to the ammunition provided by this and other hacking incidents. Not many people in Congress even understand the digital ecosystem as well as they should, so a poorly worded law could have far-reaching consequences (both intentional and unintentional).

Before we move on to our discussion of the Internet regulatory landscape, I have to mention that I find myself chuckling every time a hack is claimed by "Anonymous" or blamed on "Anonymous" because anyone can claim to be anonymous… Those of you who watch "Curb Your Enthusiasm" probably remember when Larry gets upset because Ted Danson gets to be "Faux Anonymous," which of course means the reverse is even more true when being the "Anonymous" hacker means your hack will get far more coverage in the press. So when it comes to being a hacker, everyone wants to be "Anonymous."

Anyway, the following are some reasons we, as advertisers and as consumers, should watch the regulatory landscape carefully over the next several years starting immediately:

Security concerns and the ability of law enforcement agencies to request information adds a cost burden on businesses running on the Internet. So far, the businesses most heavily hit have been bigger organizations that can absorb the costs of complying with government requests. Google, for example, gets thousands of requests a month for private information. Google even launched a transparency report page to educate consumers on the ways Google protects identity and personally identifiable information (PII) whenever possible, as well as the volume of requests Google gets of each type. Twitter has a similar page on transparency. My guess is that every email provider and social network finds itself inundated with a variety of government requests. The time will come when marketers with PII may find themselves at the receiving end of similar requests (see No. 3).Recently, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) concluded its anti-trust investigation of Google. Many pundits think that Google got off easy, but there were changes made to internal and external policies as a result of the FTC's recommendations. Google is striving for a higher level of transparency within both its paid and organic search dashboards (Webmaster Tools and AdWords), and I believe there are some changes that are being made to its API terms of service (haven't had a chance to compare, but there was definitely room for improvement there). Even the new version of Chrome - being released within a month or two (no firm date) - apparently has some changes in functionality as a result of the FTC's recommendations.Last year, the FTC announced that it is starting an investigation into data brokers who collect, store, and sell non-PII and PII data that is often appended to or matched to online cookies.Industry-led efforts may not be seen as sufficient by the regulatory agencies. For example, within display advertising, ads targeted based on the user ID of behavioral cookie data are supposed to provide notification of such. The group leading the charge here is the Digital Advertising Alliance's (DAA) Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising. However, the way in which the icons are used is varied and may confuse consumers (because clicking on the triangle (i) icon provides a different user experience depending on the partner organization and/or publisher). Another group taking a broader role is the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA).Mobile devices potentially know even more about you than desktop and laptop devices. Furthermore, TVs are becoming Internet-enabled. This opens up opportunities for abuse, and governments are prone to take action if any high-profile abuses happen.

Even internal teams at companies can't agree. Microsoft wants IE to block third-party cookies by default (or at least send the Do Not Track request), but Microsoft has lots of people in the publishing and advertising side of the organization who think that's not the appropriate setting.

As search engine marketers, the results of both of these investigations and any guidelines, policies, or sanctions that arise from regulatory intervention into our industry will have a direct or indirect impact on our strategies and tactics.

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