Search Marketing Answers

Google is a great place to allocate a portion of your online advertising budget.  They’re the #1 search engine, and they do a great job at helping site owners get exposure to people who would otherwise never learn about a site.  Paid listings (Google AdWords) can help bring you high quality new business prospects.  But let’s be real - Google is in the business of making money, and if you’re not using AdWords best practices, you could very well be throwing good money out the window…

One of the ways Google makes a lion’s share of it’s revenue is that by default when you set up a Google AdWords account, there’s a default setting to include your ads in their “Content Network”.

If your account is set up this way, your ads will show up both in Google’s search results on the Google site itself, and they will be displayed in hundreds or thousands of other web sites.  You DO want your ads to show up at Google itself.  That’s the whole idea - to get your paid (sponsored) listings coming up when someone does a search.

What you most definitely do NOT want, is for your ads to show up in the Content Network.

What the Content Network is:
As you surf the web, I am sure you’ve seen many web sites where somewhere on a web page, there’s a box labeled “Ads by Google”.  In that box, you’ll see one, three or several text ads that may or may not be related to the actual content on that page.  For example - go to www.CNN.com - scroll down -  on the right side, about 3/4 of the way down, you’ll see that “Ads by Google” box.

While having an ad show up on the CNN home page might seem like a great marketing strategy, the fact is that 90% of the sites in the Content Network are essentially web sites that have nothing to do with your specific market focus, and there is no way for you to specify the type of sites you want to be on.

In my years of experience with managing both Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing accounts, I have consistently seen where clients who are in the Content Network have expended on average 50 - 80% of their ad dollars for clicks that come through that network.  From a sales conversion perspective, I have also observed that on average, Content Network generated clicks result in less than 5% of actual conversions.  So it’s literally like throwing money out the window.

If you have ever heard of AdSense, it’s Google’s program that allows anyone with a web site to display Google’s ads on their site - and that’s the “Ads by Google” box.  There are literally millions of people who have web sites with the AdSense program running - and many of those have web sites that are completely created for the sake of displaying dozens of Ads by Google.  They do this because every time someone clicks on one of those ads, that site owner gets a small slice of the AdWords click fee.

It’s a terribly inefficient place to advertise and I urge you to opt OUT of the Content Network.  Doing so will ensure a much higher quality click-rate for your ad dollars.

HOW TO OPT OUT OF THE GOOGLE CONTENT NETWORK

1. Log into your AdWords account
2. Click into the “Campaign Summary” link.
3. Click the title of an individual campaign
4. Click “Edit Campaign Settings”
5. The third section down on that page is “Networks and Bidding”
6. UnCheck the box next to “The Content Network”

Repeat this for each campaign you are running.

If you are maintaining a Yahoo Search Marketing account the same issue exists and you’ll want to take the same action, because every dollar you spend on advertising needs to be put to use in the most cost-efficient way possible.

As a member of the web site optimization and internet marketing profession, I am constantly helping clients avoid scams. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some even make me sick. Their deceptive, manipulative methods are a blight on our profession. Tonight I was on LinkedIn, where I look to answer legitimate questions regarding areas I specialize in. I saw a question entitled

Get 1 Million Real Visitors For Free!

Of course, I knew it for what it was without having to read the “question”, but of course, I love seeing the newest spin on the oldest scams… Here’s what the person who sumbitted it wrote as the details to the “question”:

The operative words here as far as I am concerned are “REAL visitors to your site”.

So just to confirm my intuition, I went to the site listed. Before I did, I made sure my McAfee SiteAdvisor browser tool was operating properly (a great free tool that shows the status of a site you’re visiting on your browser’s status bar - green is safe, yellow is questionable and red is dangerous. In this case, the site was “safe”, but only because they don’t have hidden software ready to automatically download without your knowledge…

And here’s what this site says about “how it works”:

So is this really a scam? Or should I get sued for even putting this up on my blog?

Now why would I slam this guy’s posting at LinkedIn, and why would I label it as a scam, deceptive and manipulative? After all, I have no desire to be slapped with a lawsuit for libel or slander right?

Well let’s consider the posting. It was at LinkedIn, and the category was in the Internet Marketing category. I suppose if there was a category for “Click fraud” or “Shady ways to get millions of visitors that don’t really come to your site for any other reason than to build your traffic statistics”, I wouldn’t have a problem here.

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So if all you want is to get people to show up at your web site for 15 seconds then leave, then I suppose you can if you want to. but obviously if you want people who are going to come to your site to buy your products or hire you for your services or read your blog or participate in your social network in an interactive and return-visit way, then the offer is most definitely in my opinion, deceptive and manipulative.

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 Update:  when I saw this question posted and did my research, I felt obligated to supply an “answer”, to help warn potentially unsuspecting small business owners who might see it and out of desperation, think they should participate.  I essentially said what I say here, but in a synopsis.  I also flagged the question to alert LinkedIn staff to this issue.

It’s now two hours after the original question was posted and I am happy to report that that question is “no longer available”.

Do you want to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue? How much would you spend to pay for a single display ad in a newspaper for just one day? Or for an ad in a magazine that may or may not be seen by some fraction of your prospective market? A lot more over time than it costs to use PPC if you use it wisely.

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You see them every time you do a search.

Sponsored Ads.

You know - those ads at the top of most search engine results pages and/or down the right side of those pages.

“Sponsored” meaning that someone is paying Google (AdWords) or Yahoo (Yahoo Search Marketing) or Microsoft (MSN Live) money for their ad to come up in such a prominent location on the search engine. Above millions of other listings.

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So what does it cost, and is it worth it?

Well, the cost is “Per click”. You pay the search engine company only if someone actually clicks on that link to go to your web site. And it’s on a “bid” process - whereby three, five, fifty or several hundred companies all want to be listed for a particular search phrase. Some are willing to pay more than others. Others just want to be found, even if it means their ad comes up on the 2nd page or the 3rd page. So they pay less.

In all my years of managing pay per click advertising accounts for clients, whether they be luggage retailers, artists, lawyers, jewelry makers, personal coaches.. I have seen the cost per click for being in the top results of sponsored ads range anywhere from a few cents per click all the way up to $97 per click. The more fiercely competitive the industry, the more money that is at stake to get just one customer or client, the higher the cost per click.

So in an industry like luggage, the cost could typically be anywhere from $1 per click up to $6 or $10, depending on the particular search phrase or the time of year. (Winter holidays the cost goes up of course).
For attorneys where one client can generate millions of dollars in jury awards, it’s in the $60 to $100 range usually. For a personal coach or event planner, it can be 25 cents a click up to a couple dollars or so.

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Can I afford this?

Okay - so if I advertise in the sponsored listings, and if each click through to my site costs me $1, will this cost me thousands of dollars every month? The good news is that you can set a maximum you are willing to spend on any single click, or as a total within a day or month.

Actually it’s not such a cut and dried thing.Just because someone comes to your web site doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed that they’ll buy. First, was your selection of keyword phrases and your ad copy chosen to target your ideal prospective client or customer? And once they were at your web site, is your site so compelling that more people than not actually stay long enough and feel motivated enough to convert to a sale?

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So how do I succeed with PPC advertising?

The process of creating a successful advertising campaign with PPC advertising is a vast and potentially all consuming one, and there are not specific hard and fast rules that fit every situation.

But generally, there are some pretty common factors, a little of which I have already touched on above. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive book-length answer here, I’ll instead provide a bit more clarity here, and leave it up to you to choose to find out more if you’re still intrigued by the possibility.

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AD CAMPAIGN QUALITY

Choose the absolute best keyword phrases.

Sometimes this means choosing a phrase that is searched less often than others, but where there is less competition among advertisers, and thus the cost is less to get you higher up in the positioning of your ad.

Fewer high quality phrases is sometimes better than scattershot low quality phrases

If you know of fifty possible phrases people use to search for your offerings, it may be better to only put your cost per click dollars into the higher performing or the more common phrases to one degree or another, rather than trying to spread your limited budget too thin. Alternatively, you might try and experiment for a couple months only going with less popular or less expensive phrases but more of them. Only your actual results will tell you how to proceed and what really works for your needs.

Ad Variations

Create a variety of ads, experimenting with the wording. And sometimes, changing the wording on an ad makes sense just because of the change of a season, or special promotions you run, or because of something happening in the news that relates to your products or services that your ad can speak to… Over time, you will be able to see which performs better as related to which keyword phrases.

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Google or Yahoo or MSN

I will say this but it’s just my opinion- while Yahoo has it’s place, in my experience managing countless campaigns for clients all across the country, Google’s results far outshine those at Yahoo over and over again. Yahoo is actually much better suited to display advertising. But by all means, if you have a large enough marketing budget, put some money into both - building brands is always a good thing if you can aford it. MSN of course can possibly help, simply because of the eyeballs it reaches, but when dealing with percentages, most of my clients find the most success with Google.

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How Big A Budget?

It’s also about having the ability to devote enough budget. For example, if you have less than $500 a month or $1,000 a month, or $5,000 a month, depending on the cost per click, if the daily portion gets used up early in the day, that means your ads may not be seen by the vast majority of people who might actually be your best prospects. So then you have to address that.

If your offering is geographically located, and you are trying to reach a specific market on the physical map, you’ll need to also work in geo-location techniques for more refined targeting.

Then there’s the issue of needing to be able to stay with it long enough to experiment with variations on phrases, variations on ad copy…

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It’s as much an art as a science.

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Determining success

Having the conversion code from Google or Yahoo on your site - on the confirmation page or the thank you for contacting us page is really one of the only ways to know what the ultimate cost is per conversion.

Having a site visitor trending solution such as Google Analytics on your site is also paramount to helping you refine things along the way as well. And you can tie Google Analytics in with conversion tracking for even more clarity.

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Combine PPC and Organic for Best Results

On a final note, the absolute best success comes when you have PPC ads AND you rank very high on the first page of Google or Yahoo. People conducting a search that see your ad in both the sponsored area and organic listings does a great deal to build your brand identity and motivate more people to click on either based on whether they don’t mind clicking on a sponsored ad or they only click on organic listings…

It’s definitely possible to find success with enough footwork, but also only if once someone gets to your web site they stay and are drawn into your actual product or service offerings!

GOOGLE ANALYTICS - FLAWED AND MISLEADING?

As the resident SEO and SEM expert at WebSight Design, Inc., I am responsible for managing the search engine optimization efforts for all of our over 600 web sites. At WSD, our clients range from the smallest sole proprietors to Carlos Santana, Sammy Hagar, and the band Tool. The vast majority - over 90% of our clients, either can’t afford full-on SEO work, or don’t yet understand the importance of this aspect of business marketing strategy. As we continue to help educate our clients, at the very least, we provide basic SEO services - keyword research, proper “under-the-hood” and on-page content seeding, and more recently, providing sitemap.xml files (to help Google, Yahoo, and soon MSN to better index entire web sites).

One thing that more and more clients are asking for is Google Analytics. We previously provided WebTrends site activity log crunching and reporting. WebTrends, in our experience and in the experience of many other industry professionals, is too much of a drain on precious shared-hosting server resources. In addition, server based analytics solutions typically don’t filter out non-human site activity. This can include search engine spiders and web crawlers (bots)- automated software designed to scan web pages, either for legitimate or quite often illegal purposes (such as hackers looking for vulnerabilities that can be exploited.

So like many other web hosting providers, this past year we began setting up Google Analytics (GA) in many of our client’s sites. Their code resides right on web pages, thus dramatically reducing server drain. It’s free, which our small business clients appreciate, and it’s provided by one of the most well known brand names.

While less than ideal in it’s reporting and analysis methods (a topic I will discuss in an upcoming blog post), the user interface offers what has become a quite popular experience for many small business owners. Big charts and graphs, large fonts, and bright bold colors. Everyone loves all things Google. Well, I don’t anymore - read on to learn why.

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For a few months I have been faced with a new challenge in the SEO arena - why Google Analytics is consistently showing dramatically less site traffic than WebTrends or my own web site visitor log analysis software. Upon my initial research, it was discovered that Google filters out spiders, bots and web crawlers from their statistics, in an effort to show only actual human visitor activity.

While this is a noble goal, it can not explain the vast difference I’ve seen consistently regardless of the size or scope of web site, or what the market focus of the site. For example, on one site, WebTrends was reporting over 100,000 unique visitors, while for the same period, GA showed just over 6,000!

Why am I so upset? Isn’t Google providing reliable information? Why would Google provide a flawed solution to millions of business owners?
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EXPECTED AND TRUSTED BY ADVERTISERS

Some of our clients reach market segments that big name advertisers want to reach. So they sell ad space on their sites - typically big Flash banners. Those advertisers won’t bother placing ads on web sites that don’t garner what they consider to be a large enough viewership. They want to put their marketing and advertising money where it will do the most good. So they rely heavily upon marketing metrics (statistics that show how many unique page views a site garners, or how many unique visitors, or average time spent on a page are just three such metrics guages).

Because these major corporations spend big money, they need to find a way to get reliable, trustworthy information. It’s too easy for someone to generate phony, beefed up statistics, and there are hundreds of analytics tools out on the market.

Google has done such a great job at marketing their brand (have you seen their stock charts?) that they’re the darling of the advertising and public relations industry. Everybody wants to be the next Google, or they have Google on a solutions provider pedestal. Kind of like Microsoft was in the late 80’s and 90’s.

So here we have a situation where WebTrends was reporting ten, twenty, even 100 times as many visits to our client sites as compared to Google. If GA filters out non-human activity, then it’s easy to assume GA is going to be more trustworthy when the advertisers determine whether a site is worthy of their ad spending dollars.

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RELIED UPON BY PROSPECTIVE INVESTORS

The other major area that GA can play a major role in affecting positively or negatively, is with prospective investors. As a web site garners more and more visitors, a time might come when the site owner seeks out investment money so they can grow or expand. Prospective investors rely on reliable and trustworthy market metrics to help in their “due diligence” process when deciding whether to put their money into the hands of web site owners.

For many of the same reasons as advertisers, and most especially because of how much money Google has generated in profits for early-on investors, a start-up’s prospective investors tend to view GA statistics as reliable and good enough for their decision making processes.
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BUT WHAT IF GOOGLE’S NUMBERS ARE WRONG?
Because this issue has been bugging me for a few months, I’d already done some base-line research on where the discrepancies come from, however I’m a busy guy - there’s only so many hours in the day, and oddly enough, I have a life outside of my work. Until recently, I hadn’t had enough motive to figure out the nitty gritty details, and as a result, I’ve had my intuitive and preliminary beliefs, but hadn’t had a fact based professional opinion.

That changed recently when a client came to us in a panic - they recently switched to GA, right at a time when they are seeking major investor money. So how can they go to prospective investors and say that the numbers they were seeing through WebTrends were severely inflated, and that GA doesn’t justify investor money? IF GA were truly accurate, they would need to abandon investor opportunities. Their hopes and dreams, and all the hard work they put into their venture until now would either be lost forever, or at the very least, their business growth would be put on hold indefinitely.

This prompted me to really dig. As deep as I could. Casting as wide a net as possible to find what others have experienced, to learn more about how GA works, and once and for all, either confirm my suspicions and preliminary findings, or to back off and be in the position of needing to break the bad news to our clients. And if it turned out that I was right, I would need to be willing to find another solution - one that I would have the confidence to communicate to my clients that we were providing them a truly reliable and trustworthy analytics solution.
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DOING THE HOMEWORK - AND WHAT I FOUND

The Google Analytics tracking code is a small snippet of code that is inserted into the body of an HTML page. When the HTML page is loaded, the tracking code contacts the Google Analytics server and logs a pageview for that page, as well as captures information about the visit and non-identifying information about the visitor.

If there is a disconnect between the site and Google when a page is loaded, that page view is not tracked.

If Google’s system is down, no visits during this time can be tracked. This happens from time to time. How often? Google claims it’s rare, and they also claim that even when their system is down, they’re still tracking - I don’t believe that’s 100% accurate at all.

If a site visitor has Javascript turned off, that page view is not tracked.

If you are in a different timezone than where the server is located, GA will report you visited the site at a different time, or even on a different day than you really did!

Google Analytics only records pageview requests with a status code of 200. If any of your site’s pages give a status code other than this, the page views won’t be recorded even though someone did view those pages.

Something the Google help files don’t discuss is on-page Javascript conflicts. I got hold of a live Google rep, and they confirmed that if there is other javascript on a page, a possibility exists that the code in that can conflict with Google Analytics - and an error in tracking can occur.

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SO WHAT ABOUT SOLUTIONS LIKE NetRatings, Omniture, CoreMetrics?

Everyone has a solution. They all claim to be the best, the most accurate. If they do their statistics from code directly embedded on the site or from the server’s log files, the information is based on how well they filter out the noise of bots and spiders - yet none are perfect.

If they rely on their own pool of members - people who have agreed to put that company’s code on their computer so that the company can track their web surfing - then that company will create a baseline trending system - for example - if ten thousand of their members visited site X, the company will claim that 100,000 or 10,000,000 people around the globe visited that site during the same period.

How can they claim that? Well, they claim that their members are a “fair” or “reasonable” sampling of web users from enough different consumer groups, and that statistically it’s an accurate measure.

Personally, I say Bull! Too many sites are in too many niche-focuses - too many people surf the web for different reasons at different times… Having many years ago been a crime statistician, I know too well that such extrapolation is horse-hockey.

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THE BOTTOM LINE - GOOD FOR TRENDING, BAD FOR FACT STATING

Okay - so Google Analytics isn’t perfect. No web visitor tracking solution is.

You can not say for a fact that the number of people supposedly visiting your site is really what they report.

But you can use it to get trends

If three months in a row Google or one of the other javascript or log file crunching solutions says 80% of your visitors go to a particular page or section of the site, that’s pretty much going to be accurate. If in that same three months nobody apparently went to that great FAQ page you spent fifty hours on, then maybe you don’t need to spend that extra 20 hours this month adding to the FAQ page.

In addition to having Google Analytics, it can’t hurt to have the site’s actual log files processed through a reporting solution that does a decent job at filtering out spiders and bots. There are many such solutions out on the market. I happen to use a program called WebLog Expert. The professional version filters out spiders and bots.

To what degree and how accurately Google or WebLog Expert or any analytics and site visitor tracking program filters out the noise is anyone’s guess. But if you use multiple solutions that each handles things in it’s own way, you can at least get a much better handle on general trends.