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Hashtags. Do they matter or are you unaware of them? If the latter, it’s time you caught up!
There may be terms you do not appreciate or are not willing to use, but they are unlikely to go away any more than the word “internet” is.
#fail or hash fail (meaning “That didn’t work then”) has already worked it’s way into everyday language, especially amongst those who use Twitter or see the term on social media networks. Just as OMG and LOL have.
AFAIK hashtags crept in from the IRC world. If that sentence alone leaves you cold, then you should bring in a marketing expert to get you up to speed. Because if you are not careful, you may find yourself cranking the engine on your business when everyone else has electronic ignition.
Hashtags allow you to simply categorise your content according to a simple term, such as ‘fail’, which is easily searchable upon across the Web by adding the hashtag # in front.
Let’s put this into context in marketing terms. Let’s say you are attending or organising an event. You want people to talk about the event, the speakers, the content, the networking buzz etc. You especially want people to talk about it online. You can send them all to your website (which hopefully you have a special tracking URL for to judge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns), but you also need them to talk, comment, opine, add comments etc.
This adds a whole extra dimension to any event – whether it is a live product announcement, an expo, a conference/seminar/webinar etc, or a news story.
Your choices are to set up a forum within that site, which requires moderators and extra resource, or just set up a simple back channel using Twitter. (Accept the massive amount of research that has already been done and go for the second option!)
In order to benefit from global exposure, you need to group people into one place, and the #hashtag creates a “room” where everyone interested in that topic can gather. So, I might run a really small, rural event called Fibrewalk and the hashtag for the event is #fibrewalk. If you enter that into any search engine, as well as Twitter, you can see all related content.
Suddenly, you have a whole new tool at your disposal and shortly we will discuss when and where you should be using hashtags to ‘brand’ your products and marketing efforts so that they reach the target audience more effectively.
When we work with a new client reviewing their search strategy, there is a common set of issues that are often discussed. I thought it would be useful to set these down, so that you can think through which apply to you. I have covered them as a series of basic questions to be reviewed.
Question 1. Goals and objectives
Do we have the right types of goals to review paid search effectiveness and efficiency?
You should set goals and review performance against volume (e.g. visits), quality (e.g. bounce rate, conversion % to lead or sale), cost (e.g. average cost per click and cost per conversion) and value measures (e.g. for transactional Ecommerce sites with a referral engine, Cost Per Acquisition, ROAS, Revenue per visit). If you’re not running a transactional site, you should still try to establish the value of leads since you won’t be able to estimate the returns you need otherwise.
Question 2. Performance targets
Do we have clear targets to ensure the agency meets goals of value generation and cost?
If you’re not paying by performance, then it’s essential to set targets to encourage optimisation of the account through improving quality score
Question 3. Keyphrase targeting selection and reporting
Are you investing in the right keyphrases to meet your objectives and performance targets?
Often not enough consideration is given into how to group keyphrases so that the right investments are made to drive commercial outcomes. Suitable top-level grouping of the performance of the many search terms on an account will be needed to do this. For example, can you determine the commercial contribution of these:
Using the new Multichannel Funnels in Google Analytics for search analysis can help you identify terms which assist in conversion to sale, even if they aren’t responsible for the final click.
Question 4. Always on paid search
Are we investing continuously in paid search at the levels necessary to create demand for our products and help consumers choose us?
In some companies, paid search is intermittent, often related to campaigns which may miss opportunities if the case for continuous, always-on paid search hasn’t been made.
Did you know that according to Google research on their client accounts, 89% of search traffic is incremental?
Question 5. Customer journeys
Are we directing visitors to the right landing pages on our site to meet our objectives?
Test whether it is best to route visitors direct to a category landing page, rather than the home or category page. Ask where it makes sense to create tailored landing pages to increase conversion and quality score rather than existing site pages.
As mentioned in question 3, the importance of multiple visits in driving sales should also be understood.
Question 6. Improving relevance and Quality Score
How can we improve quality score?
To improve account efficiency means improving relevance of ads based on targeting through account structure, match types and ad creative.
Since Google Quality Score is so important to managing paid search we recommend you read this latest guidance if you’re unfamiliar with it.
Question 7. Google Display Network
Are we managing the display network well enough?
The Display network (once known as the Content Network) can still be effective for demand generation and generating awareness since your ads are displayed on related pages/sites according to the keywords they contain. It’s often neglected because of poor performance when it isn’t treated separately from Google search, but it can and should be optimised.
Question 8. Remarketing
Are we using Google’s new Remarketing features?
Adwords now uses cookies from previous visitors to the site to use ads on the Content Network to remind visitors who have shown interest in a product to explore more. Define clear re-targeting rules which target those with the highest intent and potential value, for example directing to the referral engine or store locator where relevant.
Question 9. Non-Google networks
Do we pay enough attention to other search networks
In this note I have focused on Google since it’s dominant in many markets but not all – in many others Google is not the market leader. But consumers do use other search networks and particularly for brand keyphrases volume will be sufficient in other search engines. So select the top 3-5 search networks that are important in your country and apply these notes across all 3 networks.
Question 10. Testing and review
What is our optimisation process to improve ROI?
All search networks have excellent options to test targeting, offer and creative, so put time into refining the approach for all the different factors above.
So those are the ten fundamental questions to improve paid search, I hope they help you review your approach.
In August, Google announced a new feature which has been dubbed “mega sitelinks”. Although this seems to be a small change which wasn’t widely reported, we think it is important.
The reason, is that for every site of a well-known brand, the most important searches by volume are brand search terms. Sitelinks give an excellent opportunity to engage both customers and prospects by highlighting the best content.
If you’re not familiar with Sitelinks, they are the listing of extra links below the brand main site description when you search on a brand name. Before this change site links in the natural search results gave just a series of links. But this example showing the new sitelinks for ClickThrough Marketing, shows that they now take up much more of the page with 8 to 12 alternatives and include more detailed descriptions.
ClickThrough Marketing - Mega Sitelinks Example
We suggest you take a look at your sitelinks and those of your competitors and answer these questions:
Most established brands will already have sitelinks, so you can skip this question. If you’re a small business or not in the top position the change won’t help you, in fact it could push you down the search results page.
If your sitelinks are wrong or have glitches like an unsuitable title or error page, then it’s worth changing these – this can be done in Google Webmaster Tools as explained below.
Since Google’s site algorithm is automatic it does a good job of highlighting the most important and shared pages on a site – typically those within the main navigation. But also other popular or shared content.
You can’t tell Google what you DO want as a sitelink, but you can tell it what you DON’T want. This is where you go to in Google Webmaster Tools and the new Google facility.
One of the big changes is that the new site link adds a description – if you want to change this, you can through editing the meta description of the page through the CMS.
The most important description is for the home page – often this doesn’t explain the site value prop well, but this one does.
Adwords now has its own “Ad Sitelinks” above the natural listing – you may want to use these to highlight offers that are popular in your natural sitelinks – or missing! These work well for many ClickThrough clients already.
This is where people search for the brand name plus a product or service. It seems that Google may include more of these now, so you check your analytics to see whether Brand plus phrases are driving traffic for you.
You can use the Landing page report in Google Analytics to see the importance of different brand phrases in driving traffic. This graphic summarises the steps to tackle this.
Yahoo! Clues (which Paid Search Manager, Adrian Epstein, reported on last month) has just celebrated its first month in existence.
For the uninitiated, Yahoo! Clues is Yahoo!’s answer to Google Trends, providing data and charts on search activity over time for specific keywords, as well as demographic and location information on searchers.
Coincidentally, the first month of Yahoo! Clues covered the Christmas period, which provides a perfect opportunity to showcase the power of this tool in a retrospective of Christmas 2010 through the medium of Search.
In the first set of charts, the mad panic for ‘last minute gifts’ is revealed, with twice as many women as men searching on this phrase. Then, as the big day builds, both genders get romantic as they search on the keyword ‘mistletoe’. However, on Christmas Day itself it’s time to ‘cook turkey’, with more women than men searching on this term.
What about after the festive season? Well, it’s no surprise that the phrase ‘hangover’ was heavily searched on on January 1st (58% of searchers were male). Ouch! Once the fog of alcohol cleared, thoughts turned to ‘new job’ and ‘diets’, with women more likely to search on both terms.
Although this data reflects only searches within the US, Yahoo! Clues seems to be accurately depicting the changing priorities, hopes and wants of consumers as they plan their lives using Yahoo! search, which means it’s another useful resource for search marketing practitioners.
Note: We’ve slightly amended the charts above to overlay the demographic information from Yahoo! Clues over the top of the charts to conserve space – things look a little neater in the tool itself.
Paid Search Manager, Adrian Epstein, explains why Yahoo! has released its own search data mining tool, Yahoo! Clues.
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Yahoo have introduced a Google Insights interface equivalent called Yahoo Clues. It is currently in Beta but as you will see, it provides some good insight from Yahoo about search volume for phrases, as well as demographic information on people who search on terms, including age, gender and income.
What is interesting is that it opens up the possibility of comparing how audiences differ (sometimes vastly) between Google and Yahoo. As the Yahoo!/Microsoft alliance progresses it will be interesting to see how Yahoo! will continue to develop and enhance Yahoo! Clues and other tools, such as their Site Explorer, hints on which you can see in this tantalasing blog post from Yahoo! – “We are planning features that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic that you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites“.
As an example, take a look at this comparison of the top two movies in the US at the moment – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Tangled. As the results will change with time I’ve screen grabbed this below as of today. The spikes correspond to the Premiere and Opening Weekend, and show that Harry Potter has more broad appeal across the different age groups than Tangled – no surprise given the mass appeal of the books, and hence the reason why Adult book covers were introduced by Bloomsbury, the publisher of the Harry Potter books.
As a search marketing agency we will be looking into how we can apply the insights from Yahoo! Clues to our international accounts, and I encourage you to have a play!
Rob Stoubos, SEO Manager at ClickThrough, shares some important tips on writing good copy for the web.
Rob Stoubos, SEO Manager at ClickThrough, shares some important tips on writing good copy, with SEO and link building potential, for the web.
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When writing good SEO copy it is important to find a balance between incorporating your keyphrases and readability for your readership. Visitors are more likely to stay on your website, redistribute or link to copy which is useful or informative.
With this in mind, I’ve put together some key do’s and don’t’s to consider when creating content for distribution on the web:
If you are writing content yourself, follow these tips to get the best results. If you work with an SEO agency or PR agency, make sure that they are considering these factors when advising on content for your website, or for online distribution.
This month, Dr Dave Chaffey explains why true online competitor analysis requires a much broader approach, and how by segmenting sites appearing for your target keywords you can open up opportunities for additional, untapped traffic.
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I think there’s a tendency for blinkered thinking about online competitors. We naturally think of our ‘direct’ competitors from the offline world. From a search engine marketing perspective I think it’s important to look more broadly at all competitors within the search results pages (SERPs) who are competition for traffic.
So who are your competitors? Imagine the range of competitors within the search results page for a multichannel retailer. The competitors for search traffic may include:
You can use a standard ranking position tool like ‘Advanced Web Ranking’ to review your online marketplace competitors. First identify your main strategic keyphrases, then for each country you compete in, use it to compile a list of the top 10 sites in the search listings and then categorise them.
Understanding the categories of online competitors which form your online marketplace or ecosystem is essential both to compete, but also to identify opportunities. Most companies will know their own performance ranking in the SERPs, but they won’t necessarily have reviewed the other types of sites that are successful in the SERPS – it likely won’t be restricted to direct competitors.
By contacting a complementary website that also ranks for a search phrase you are targeting, you may be able to strike an advertising deal, or create a partner arrangement to extend reach and awareness of your brands. For example, if you find a review site is performing well in the SERPs there may be opportunities for advertising or remarketing through the Google Display Network if the publisher uses Google AdSense; creating an affiliate link; a sponsorship arrangement for part of the site or editorial content or tools, perhaps on their blog.
So think beyond ‘direct’ competitors when conducting your competitive intelligence audit, as it may throw up new opportunities for partnering. Perhaps this should be called a ‘co-opetition analysis’ (co-operative competition), but I don’t think that mouthful will catch on!
In his second post this month, Dave explains what the next change to the Google AdWords trademark policy will mean for brand owners, and why some etailers could benefit.
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In the first of these two posts on brand searches, we discussed how important navigation brand searches are to some businesses, and how important it is to evaluate brand and non-brand search traffic separately in your Analytics package as it makes it easier to track traffic from your major non-brand keywords.
In this second post, I want to move the focus onto the September 2010 Google Adwords ad text trademark policy change for the UK and Europe. The main change is that Google will now permit the use of competitor brand terms within the creative itself – this was previously prevented for trademarked terms Google was aware of.
It’s important to review the implications of this to your paid search account performance and to be aware of how different competitors within your market react. We believe it increases the need for use of quality brand reputation management services. If you have a range of resellers of your product or service it’s particularly important to review your strategy as the number and type of paid search competitors may increase. We saw that previous changes permitting bidding on brand terms had a very different impact in different markets previously. Although there were fears of an increased bid competition and PPC costs a relatively small bid spike occurred and most believe a similar situation will occur this time around.
Although the 2010 announcement has caused a fair stir, our view is that it’s really just an evolution in policy, you could say a “storm in a teacup”. There was arguably a more significant change in 2008 when Google permitted bidding on brand terms in these markets for the first time (reported on by Hitwise), i.e. specifying competitor brand terms as keywords to trigger ads. This was rolled out to a further 190 countries last year. The trademark bid change in 2008 saw up to 20% increase in click costs, and although this change may give a similar effect through competition, this approach has been in the US for sometime and has not generally caused bidding wars.
Talking to our paid search account management team on the practical implications, they point out a benefit in the way Google evaluates ads through quality score; the inclusion of brand terms in creative will help improve quality scores and increase ad clickthrough rates which will bring costs down for some advertisers who couldn’t previously use brand terms within the creative.
Whatever the consequences of the recent Google Trademark policy change, it’s a timely reminder to brands of the importance of paying close attention to managing the returns from crucial navigational searches.
In the first of two posts, Dr Dave Chaffey explains how many consumers still rely on navigational brand search queries to find sites, and why marketers should start to look at brand and non-brand searches in isolation.
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With the importance of navigational searches incorporating a brand name as a shortcut to company or it’s services, it’s crucial that companies pay close attention to how they’re managed. This means making sure your agency or internal paid search specialists report separately on search performance for brand search terms. It also means that you need to review the implications of any changes in policy to use of brand terms within paid search advertising and in particular Google Adwords which as you’ll know accounts for more than 90% of UK searches.
In navigational search or brand searching behaviour, searchers aim to go direct to a known company site by typing in the site or brand name. Alternatively they will type the site or brand name and append a qualifier such as a product name to the query. This shortcuts the site navigation and may make up for shortcomings in the sites own search engine or navigation.
Research by Atlas and Hitwise shows that navigational searches may account for over half of all searches and the figure is higher for well-known brands or companies who are not effective in tapping into the non-navigational searches… Certainly it’s one of the KPIs we review when auditing search marketing for a company paying particular attention to the proportion of brand search clicks for paid and natural search. I’ve seen cases where branded search can account for 80 to 90% of all clicks when insufficient attention has been paid to generic and long-tail search terms.
Of course attracting converting visitors at a lower cost is more straightforward for brand search terms, so it’s essential to separate out reporting into brand and non-brand to review performance for the more challenging non-brand terms. I’m surprised how few companies do this in top-level reports, yet it’s straightforward to setup within an analytics package, for example, a Google Analytics custom advanced segments.
In my next post I’ll be discussing how the latest change to the Google AdWords trademark policy could mean brand owners paying even more than they currently do for their navigational traffic.
Apparently, 1 in every 100 UK searches is now Sky Sports related. Yes, it is the start of the football season, and so one can no doubt understand the increase in surfing/searching activity post- World Cup, but how does this relate to the increase in female surfing habits? Or the recent news stories about BT Vision?
Let’s start with female activity online. The recently released Ofcom report shows that whilst we all now spend half our waking day consuming media, men now only spend an hour more online than women, which shows a substantial change to a few years ago when the computer and ‘all things geek’ were most definitely in the male demesne.
Could it be that there are now more females interested in sport? In which case, where is the corresponding trend in advertising etc targeting this nascent audience? After all, looking at the football this weekend and during the World Cup, there are definitely more women on the terraces….
However, there can be no doubt that BT’s recent offering of a Sky Sports package as part of its Vision bundle and the kerfuffle over under-pricing must have had some effect on the number of searches being made on Sky Sports. In fact, potentially so much so that Sky have put up a comparison chart on their site showing their offerings vs their major competitors, including BT.
There may be those in the PR industry who are gleeful that press releases about such comparison charts or the price furore, clearly show that old school PR still works (as opposed to online PR), especially if you push your message out across traditional media such as the daily papers, and then hit Twitter, Facebook etc as consumers discuss their choices. Seemingly freely, but those in the know would feel that this is good ole PR manipulation in the 21st century world at its best.
The truth is that without a few good press releases and high-priced TV ads in the first place, the majority of consumers would have been unaware of the deals on the table. The searches are a result of traditional media (e.g. the Murdoch Press) and the incumbent endeavouring to expand its telecom horizons into the online, on demand world, using the Internet for maximum effect.
A cynic would say this is a carefully orchestrated campaign that has undoubtedly signed up new Sky Sports subscribers, whoever their chosen provider, by getting good old column inches.
