Internet Marketing Blog - WordStream

There are several ways to conduct online advertising campaigns. You can pay search engines or other Internet publishers hosting your ads each time one of your ads is clicked, every 1,000 times the ad is seen, or every time the ad prompts a more sales-related action.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sepblog/3570992970/

A while back we interviewed a handful of link-building experts (Garrett French and Ben Wills, Wiep Knol, Debra Mastaler, and Julie Joyce) on everything from what features they'd want in their ultimate link-building tool to how to brainstorm linkbait. Here, you can find all of their answers to eight key SEO link-building questions in one place.

This is a guest post by Alan Mitchell. Alan Mitchell is a Brisbane PPC consultant specializing in highly granular long-tail PPC management. Follow him on Twitter: @alanmitchell.

One question which is regularly asked when managing Google AdWords PPC campaigns is whether ads should be set to rotate or optimize.

Google's default setting is "optimize," so if you have multiple ads in one ad group, your better performing ads (generally those with a higher CTR) will be shown more often. This might seem great -- you will automatically receive the maximum number of clicks for your ads. But the more experienced PPC advertisers out there will know that clicks are not generally considered a good measure of success. Instead, conversions -- sales, leads, sign-ups, downloads and other desired outcomes -- are generally considered better measures of PPC performance.

So to aid acute PPC advertisers like Shaun Livengood from PPC Without Pity, who like to optimize ads based on conversions, Google have provided another option in AdWords called "rotate." Rotating ads allows PPC advertisers to override Google's default "optimize" setting and force all ads in an ad group to be shown equally.

Since each ad in an ad group is given the same number of impressions, data-hungry PPC advertisers are provided with a plethora of unbiased comparative ad performance data they can work with. Ad performance analysis becomes considerably easier if all ads in an ad group have the same number of impressions.

I too am extremely data-hungry and a big fan of post-click PPC analysis, so I have always tended to set ads to "rotate" to satisfy my craving of juicy PPC data.

But now I'm not too sure. Rotating ads could be detrimental to profitability.

Why?

Because by rotating ads, you are accepting a lower Quality Score and a higher average CPC in exchange for better analysis data.

Let me explain with an example.

In a post called "What's Up, Internet," writer Amelia Gray answers some of the questions that Googlers have found her blog by asking:

how long does it take to get a warrant

I think you can get one in an afternoon, if you are a police officer and you can find a judge to give you one. (It will take more time if you’re just some guy.)

what sort of rocks are there?

All kinds. Some rocks are very hard and others are so soft you can scratch them with your fingernail. Sometimes rocks float. Once I had a dream I was explaining a quartz rock to my child.

Amelia may be doing this for laughs, but she still got a good post out of it, right? I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Your keywords are content idea generators.

If you're already ranking for questions like "What's the worst high five ever," think how much better you'll rank better for those same questions if you a) include the question in the text, or better yet the title, and b) actually answer it.

Here's how to use those search queries to generate content ideas:

1. Find the keyword referrers in your Web analytics application. In Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources → Keywords.
2. You can search specifically for questions by filtering for question words like "what," "why," "how" and so on.
3. Make a list of any queries that you don't already cover extensively and might make interesting content, ranked in order of popularity.
4. Group related queries together (for example, in Amelia's case, questions about Rob Lowe).

Now you can consult your list of search query questions whenever you need ideas for Web or blog content.

A few months ago, I published an article about the Best SEO Rank Checkers. In it, I wrote a quick review of a keyword rank checking tool called Rank Tracker, by Link-Assistant.com. Of all the paid rank checkers I featured in that article, Rank Tracker was one that intrigued me the most. So recently, I decided to do some more extensive work with Rank Tracker to get a real taste for the tool's full capabilities. And I'll tell you, after using this keyword SERP tracker for the past few weeks, I'm hooked. So let's take a closer look at Rank Tracker, so I can explain my newfound enthusiasm for this tool.

Rank Tracker: Key Benefits

There are a lot of keyword SERP trackers on the market, but they have their share of issues. First, they can be agonizingly slow. Some can only run checks on groups of 10 keywords max per session and even then they time out. Second, they can be wildly innacurate. In fact, with most rank checkers I've used, after I run ranking reports in them, I've been forced to manually double check the indivual SERP listins because I didn't trust the results. But with Rank Tracker, none of those deficiencies exist. Using Rank Tracker to monitor your site placement in the SERPs, you get:

• Speed: Rank Tracker is FAST! It's one of the fastest (if not THE fastest) rank checkers I've ever used. When I run a rank check for the 200 plus keywords I target, it spits out the ranking results for Google, Bing and Yahoo in under a minute.
• Accuracy: Rank Tracker's results are always spot on. And since I'm suspicious of most rank checkers, I've done my due diligence and spot-checked many of Rank Tracker's search engine ranking results against different data centers and the results were extremely accurate.

Rank Tracker: Key Features

In addition to Rank Tracker's speed and accuracy benefits, the tool is armed with an array of very cool features:

Last week we published the Expert's Guide to Keyword Research for Social Media. This week, we're offering a similar how-to guide for the SEO copywriter.

Many keyword research guides amount to a list of tools, but this guide is all about process. You'll learn exactly when, why and how to do keyword research for blog posts, articles and other content that appears online. If you write for the web (or want to), you don't want to miss it.

For the link-building search nerd, little matches the joy of scoring a really great link. About a month ago, a post on my personal blog got a link from The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan's blog, which is ranked #12 on Technorati's Top 100 Blogs and has a Toolbar PageRank of 8.

Now, I'm pretty sure Andrew Sullivan doesn't subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter (to be fair, I don't follow him either). So how did this come about? Via domino effect: Over the course of about 15 days, I accumulated a series of inbound links, including a few quality links early on, one of which was clearly the tip-off for the Daily Dish link.

This very high-authority link (which, sadly, went up over a weekend) sent a big spike of traffic and led to a mini-long-tail of links from sites and blogs with mid-range to low authority, amounting to more than 4,700 page views in total for the post.

Here's a closer look at the data, not including links that sent five or fewer visitors.

Most of the links that followed the Daily Dish link came from new referrers, many of the sites "outside my space" (I primarily write about poetry on my blog). So they were clearly a result of the domino effect, rather than unrelated links.

Here's the narrative I impose on this data:

Our illustrious founder and VP of product development, Larry Kim, is presenting tomorrow, March 9, at SearchFest 2010, an SEMpdx event, taking place at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. (Click here for the full agenda.)

Larry will be talking about competitive intelligence:

Your marketing efforts do not exist in a vacuum. Effective competitive analysis gives you the information you need to ‘remove the blinders’ in terms of viewing your company and brands as customers do, and to highly tune your Paid Search Marketing strategies for success. This session identifies which competitive intelligence efforts enable you to determine what your competitors are doing to drive their online businesses, so that you can either emulate their PPC successes, or exploit their PPC weaknesses.

If you're in the Portland area, we highly recommend this event. (Friend of WordStream Todd Mintz is a director and founding member of SEMpdx; check out Todd's recent interview with Larry.) There are separate tracks for SEO, PPC and social media, covering everything from landing page testing to Facebook best practices.

Here are the details again:

What: Competitive Intelligence Session at SearchFest 2010

Where: Governor Hotel, 614 SW 11th Ave., Portland, OR

When: March 9, 9:30 a.m.

This is a guest post by Megan Leap. Megan is the online marketing manager at Ion Interactive. Ion sells first-rate landing page management and optimization software, has an excellent blog on post-click marketing, and are friends of WordStream. Megan will be posting periodically here, and also look for contributions from the WordStream team to their blog.

There are many ways to segment your online visitors in the three phases of online marketing.

On the pre-click side, there is keyword-based segmentation, which maximizes the relevancy of your paid clicks. On the post-conversion side, there is email list segmentation, which as most marketers know, boosts email marketing performance. 

And then, on the post-click side, there is form-based landing page segmentation, which can sometimes provide valuable data, after you sort through all the associate-level astronauts in Arizona who have a company revenue of over 1 billion. And there’s also user-directed, or post-click segmentation.

User-directed segmentation is a form of segmentation in which landing experience visitors are presented with a few simple choices to make about who they are and what they’re looking for, and the subsequent pages that the user lands on are more relevant and tailored to the visitor’s audience segment. The choices that the visitor makes are always in their self-interest and the user directs how they are segmented.

In the example below, visitors to this conversion path can segment as “physicians,” “residents,” or “students” (and “other healthcare professionals” in the bail-out link).

The subsequent pages of this conversion speak directly to the strategically chosen targets, yielding high conversions when the message gets more personal on the offer pages. Visitors who self identified as “physicians,” “residents” and “students” get more specific messaging on their offer pages.

Taking over where keyword segmentation leaves off, this kind of user-directed segmentation:

• Reveals valuable insights about your visitors: By analyzing what visitors are clicking on, you can measure what segments of your audience are (or AREN’T!) engaging with your landing experience, what segments are (or AREN’T) converting, and what sources of traffic are delivering your most qualified visitors.
• Improves the relevancy of your message and offer: The more specific your messaging gets, the more effective your overall search and PPC marketing.
• Increases conversions: Of course, by improving the relevancy of your campaigns and analyzing the segmentation choices people make, you’ll ultimately boost conversions.
• Improves lead quality: By segmenting your visitors and gaining insights into who is (and isn’t) clicking your ads, you can optimize your messages for your different sources of traffic and different audience segments, and ultimately improve your lead quality, as well.

There are many ways to segment your visitors with user-directed segmentation, including:

I'm sure many of you saw this much-shared gem: a Newsweek article from 1995 called "The Internet? Bah!" (subtitled "Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana"), in which author Clifford Stoll argues that the Internet is overrated and will never be as pervasive as the pundits claim (emphases mine):

I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Telecommuting workers, multimedia classrooms, virtual communities, online newspapers – doesn't sound so much like flying cars and robot maids now, does it? The whole thing actually reads like a gag or a hoax (the typos don't help): "Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet [sic]. Uh, sure." He complains about the mountains of "unfiltered data":

You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument.

A-ha! Stoll didn't anticipate that search engines would get exponentially better at filtering data, determining relevance and answering questions. Today, it takes a second or two to find this date – you don't even have to type the full phrase thanks to auto-suggest.

He also pooh-poohs e-commerce: