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.
You may not know it but Tesco is the number 2 supermarket in Korea. And Korea is the land of super dooper Internet connectivity that puts Britain’s 2-20Mbps to shame. On top of that the Koreans have mastered everything mobile and tend to lead the way in mobile apps and services.
Shopping at rush hour in any city in the world is a faff. And carrying the bags back home – even worse. So, what has Tesco done? They have created a shop where there are simply life-size replicas of all the products and you scan them with your smartphone to add them to your virtual shopping basket. Which is then delivered to you at home.
This video highlights the experiment.
Tesco takes QR codes to new shopping levels
Whilst QR codes are still a novelty here, where smartphone ownership is considerably lower than older style phones, there are increasing numbers of uses being found for them around the world. Animated tattoos, QR codes on headstones, people wearing ties with QR codes for business contact details or to show a promotional video, in magazines, and on every product and space imaginable.
Now, start to imagine your expensive print brochure – 2D, static and with just a link to your website – coming alive with the use of QR codes. User manuals, videos of your products being used, customer testimonials on your site or Youtube, podcasts, business contact details, the latest news on your blog, even a webinar held only the previous day. All of this becomes possible with QR codes.
Tesco’s solution in Korea to the rush hour shopping problem, maximising the use of underground tunnels to capture new customers, is just a start. Any business can make use of QR codes in a fun and innovative manner, to cut production costs for marketing collateral, to attract attention to promotional material, to reach new customers.
Even adding one to your business card can mean you can easily share your business details when you are networking and know that your details are now securely held in the phone of your new contact, not lost deep inside a pocket.
All it needs is a little imagination and a QR generator such as Kaywa
Today, Google announced a new service to help speed up the delivery speed of web pages, which as we know is one of the criteria applied in the SEO algorithm for SERPs. The Page Speed Service works by “applying web best practices” to your pages. Other services such as CloudFlare also offer similar solutions to speed up page downloads.
In order to use the Google Page Speed Service, you are required to point your DNS to Google so that they can grab your content, apply the best practice formula to your site, and serve it up more quickly.
This raises an issue, or three, about security, privacy and Google’s access to your company’s data, and that of users who visit your site. The previous mod_pagespeed which was an Apache module which could be applied to your site by you and helped to optimise code for faster speeds. It did not, however, hold on to your data or serve it from a Google server. Whilst Google servers very rarely fall over and are unlikely to, just the issue of having your data under Google’s data centre roof must be a cause for concern for businesses.
Optimising pages so that they load more quickly is important not just for search engine results, but also to avoid upsetting your site visitors whose time is precious. You have at most 7 seconds to capture their attention and if even 50% of that is wasted on page load, you are unnecessarily losing potential customers.
One simple action that can be taken with static sites (i.e. those not dynamically created from databases etc) is to strip out all of the spaces in the code before uploading the page to the server. Many years ago we created a tool to do just this and could make savings in download speed anywhere from 15-80% by doing so. Another method for optimising your pages for download is to limit javascripts, and simplify the CSS so that the code is sleek rather than bloated.
Pictures should be rendered for the web not for print, and third party scripts can slow things down if their server is slow to respond, so use these judiciously. The Google +1 button has just been speeded up for precisely this reason, because Google was having to advise putting it at the bottom of pages rather than the top to speed up page load times.
You should also check that your hosting company has the optimal set-up as far as connectivity to the internet so that their servers can respond as quickly as possible to requests for your content.
So, there are simple ways to optimise your pages for download time. Handing the keys to your website to Google? Hmmm….
In my post last month I talked about the increasing need to focus on social media optimisation (SMO). Part of this activity is finding ways to make your content more shareable.
Research suggests that sharing amongst friends, families and other “tribes” is becoming more important.
ShareThis and Starcom MediaVest recently released a study. The study focuses on ShareThis’ database of sharing activity for it’s widget in March 2011.
Social sharing now produces an estimated 10 percent of all Internet traffic and 31 percent of referral traffic to sites from search and social. Search is around twice as big.
It’s a big sample; 7 billion shares, 300 million users across the top 1,000 publishers. So remember – it’s more typical of new sites than most businesses selling products and services online.
The details of what is clicked when shared shared shows that Facebook accounts for 38 percent email and Twitter are both second with 17 percent each:
So what are the implications for non publishing businesses?
1. If you don’t have blog, customer magazine or similar “content hub”, then you will be missing out on introducing others to your brand via the network of people who know you already.
2. Having a defined content strategy to define the right content to engage and how to promote is needed to underpin your content hub.
3. Since sharing signals are now used by Google and Bing for ranking as I explained in my previous column, so you are also missing out on the potential ranking boost.
4. Email sharing is still important and often more personal, so don’t exclude this!
5. Encouraging sharing of other product and service content is also important.
6. You can encourage sharing after purchase too.
7. There are many free tools like AddThis.com and ShareThis.com which make it easy to integrate sharing on your site. Paid solutions to consider include Gigya and Janrain.
8. Many of these tools provide “social sign-on” which integrate with a users social network account to make it easier to share.
It seems that Google + has a raft of other uses for serious networkers. For instance, many people looking to make contacts look through LinkedIn profiles and Twitter followers of authoritative or influential people to find new contacts. Facebook Friends can often also be searched in the same manner.
Google+ offers the same facility. So, find one person on Google+ who works at Google (or AN Other Company) and you can suddenly track down more people from their circles. Because the public profiles often give more than just name of company, you can also find their Twitter accounts, Flickr profile etc.
For some, this may mean that a re-assessment of their privacy settings is required. Just because someone has added you to their circle, it does not mean that you wish to know them. And you have no control over whether they make the members of their circles public or not, meaning that your public profile could become very public, and there does not seem to be any way in which you can make some of your profile information public to certain people and not to others.
This is all about being social but all of a sudden, one can feel that your ability to keep information about yourself private, or not 100% in the public domain, is being eroded.
When posting, you can choose which circle(s) see the post and can also disable resharing by clicking on the arrow at the top right of the post.
Navigate your stream using [j] for down and [k] for up.
Upgrade your broadband connection! If you are in a hangout with 10 people all on webcams, and someone decides to start pulling in Youtube content, your connection may do more than just stutter!
Social media optimisation or SMO isn’t a new term or a new approach, far from it.
The term SMO was first coined in 2006 when the search engine marketer Danny Sullivan first used it.
With many companies now having different forms of social media marketing in place, SMO is a logical next step to improve the effectiveness of social media marketing.
So what is SMO and what is it’s purpose?
People have different views on what SMO involves depending on whether their background is more in SEO or social media marketing.
I recently asked readers of the Smart Insights blog about this and there was a split between those who felt it had the narrow aim of “using social media marketing to support SEO goals” (31%) and a broader aim “analysis and improvement of all social media marketing activities to results” (40%).
I think this all this is shows that you have to decide for your organisation the main emphasis of SMO activity. The Wikipedia entry for SMO is quite apt where it describe it as:
“The methodization of social media activity with the intent of attracting unique visitors to website content”.
This suggests that the core of SMO is having a rigorous approach of test, learn, refine is the main benefit of this approach – not just experimenting, but being systematic. We need to use social media to help people find our content, participate in conversations about it and then share it.
So my definition is:
A systematic approach to improving content effectiveness in attracting visitors and leads and engaging existing audiences through testing techniques to increase the visibility, participation and shareability of content.
SMO activities – The 5 rules of SMO
So what does SMO involve? I think it’s useful here to look at the 5 new rules of SMO developed by Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy New York. These are:
1. Create shareable content. This is fundamental to social media marketing, so in SMO it’s about determining the content that your audience prefers to share across different social media platforms. In Rohit’s original post, this activity was about encouraging links: the two go together.
2. Make sharing easy. This is the embedding of buttons and other widgets to encourage sharing, recommending or bookmarking within your site and blog. SMO analyses the best placements, formats and messages to do this.
3. Reward engagement. It’s commonplace now to reward “Liking” or “Tweeting” through a promotional or content offer, so this can look at the best offers to do this. Rohit also says this should look at a longer-term of encouraging deeper engagement and conversations.
4. Proactively share content. This covers the process and format for sharing beyond your central hub. This can include syndicating articles to other partners or platforms like Slideshare or Scribd. Some also create their own widgets for embedding or sharing on other sites (atomization).
5. Encourage the “mashup”. Rohit says that this is encouraging folks to take and remix your content, so it becomes user generated content. This activity can effectively be built into campaigns.
What else should you test as part of SMO?
I think these rules are really useful for reviewing your approach to integrating social media marketing into a website, but I think there’s more to it.
So, what’s not included in the 5 rules. Well other options which we’re looking to test and refine through analytics and AB/multivariate testing include:
1. Which sharing activities and types of promotions lead to business results, leads, sales or changes in brand preference?
2. Determining how social media can support SEO activities now we know it’s a ranking signal and through encouraging backlinks.
3. Preferences of different audiences using different social media platforms to share different type of content and offers.
4. Optimum frequency for initiating sharing.
5. Best methods for identifying influencers and seeding content.
6. Approaches to integrate sharing of content through different social platforms, web, mobile and email channels.
It had to happen: finally, social media has found an abbreviation everyone seems to be happy about – so-me. It may take a little time to reach beyond the circles of hard core Twitter folk and social media addicts, but it is likely to become the simple term that is used to sum up what has been, until now, referred to as (an undefinable and ever-changing) “Web 2.0″.
So-Me is changing by the day as new tools, apps and software become available for each of us to be social online. The adoption by large corporates of Facebook (about 3 years behind consumers!) and the inclusion of facebook.com/xyz on TV ads means that it is time to look to the next big thing.
All of these apps start at the edge and are adopted by consumers long before big business become aware of the potential to reach new target audiences. In fact, what does seem to be coming clear is that business needs to shake up its act a little in the speed of adoption – whether of Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or any of the other hot properties that consumers love.
The recent past has seen business banning the use of such ‘tools’ during work time in the mistaken belief that staff would waste time on them. Time has shown that in actual fact, this is the hang out of the vast majority of a company’s target audience! Adoption has become essential. Keeping up with developments – ever more important.
One such tool that is handy for any company wishing to make it really simple to reach out to consumers, wherever they prefer to ‘hang out’ is fullyfollow.me.
Interestingly, Chris Pirillo (who is of course *the* so-me expert above all experts) feels that it is still a simple task to follow any individual across whichever social networks they choose to use, but for many who may be new to the game, or mired in the complexity and intricacy of the myriad social networks now available, following even 5 people can become almost impossible.
Especially if you are unsure whether they are most active on Twitter, or Tumblr, or Digg, or Reddit, or Facebook or…or…or…! Fullyfollow.me is a simple app to use that will allow you to point your audience to the best ways to connect with you, so give it a go today.
Here’s a quick tip for those who collect business cards from events. And a neat idea from a networking event I was at this week.
Firstly, are you on LinkedIn? If not, get an account set up for both yourself and your business. (You will be reminded again at the end of the article!)
LinkedIn is a must for any person serious about doing business, whatever sector you are in, and it is rare these days to not be able to find a business associate on that network.
During conferences and networking events, you will undoubtedly be handed business cards for future contacts. On your return from such events, take 5 minutes to sit down, with those business cards, and look up those contacts on LinkedIn. And connect.
Personalise the message to that person and remind them of your conversation, any action points agreed (eg please send me your price list), and where you met. It is much easier to do this straight after an event than months later. And it will help to begin to build a potentially productive relationship with that person, quickly and easily.
The second idea is courtesy of someone who is trying to save the planet by limiting the number of printed cards and who had had the bright idea of putting a QR code on the back of the card for those of us with QR readers on our Smartphones.
I am using Scan on the iPhone which worked perfectly, simply by pointing the camera at the QR code. The details are saved to my phone; however, I have not discovered (yet) how to easily add these to my address book….but at least I have them accessible.
This is the QR code for this blog 
Simply point a smartphone running a QR scanner at this and you can see what happens!
And try this:
So, check out QR codes for your business cards, which makes them look far more funky than adding URLs for every social network you are on, as well as your three different telephone numbers, email, addresses, websites etc. And, set up your LinkedIn account.
OK, this is Part 2 of the weekend’s social media update. Part 1 is about Klout and Google’s +1 and and….
Empire Avenue. You *must* have heard of it by now. I am pretty amazed that it fell under our radar for over a year, but we are one of the first UK Internet marketing agencies to actually pick it up.
For brands, companies, agencies and individuals (CEOs etc), this is a great tool. There will shortly be an Empire Avenue “book” from Clickthrough Marketing for our clients to show how you can best leverage this for your social media strategy – both with your social media marketing agency and in-house to maximise those tweets, Facebook likes, Twebevents, Instagr.am to best advantage for your business.
Empire Avenue capitalises on the value of your brand and company by listing you on the Empire Avenue stock exchange. If you ever wondered what value your social media strategy had, wonder no more. Your share price and scores will reflect the value for all to see. And you will reach an ever-increasing global audience with your products, content and brand image.
Next….has to be Apple’s Developer Conference today – WWDC. Rumours of iCloud etc as well as major iOS developments, may yet put the jitters into other global players such as Google and Microsoft today. There are only a few hours remaining before Steve Jobs does his, “….one more thing”. Switch off from Apple’s announcements today at your peril. They will undoubtedly be social, mobile, and take a substantial market share over the coming months/years. Because that is what Apple do. Just because you do not have an iPhone/iPad/iPod/Mac, does not mean that a growing number of your customers don’t.
Meanwhile, we are seeing a massive growth in the number of events held in cyberspace. Today’s take a look/see is twebevents. And today’s example of the off the wall things you can do with a phone and a broadband connection is #twicket
Clickthrough Marketing has social media consultants who are willing and able to think out of the box. And keep you up to date with social media strategy, and ahead of your competitors. Because we are already doing it.
